Digon i chi ddechrau eu bod yn gwneud y wneud faint amherwydd i chi rwy blog ac mae'n gwneud yn gwneud i chi'n gwneud. Felly, yn I do a thing called Welcome to Music Business, you're fucked. I don't know if you saw my little movie up at the top there, I've been in a bunch of bands, Public Image, Limiting, Killing Joke, Ministry, Nine Each Nails, Pinkface. I have a label, I've been to China, I made a documentary, I've just completed a successful kickstarter for my third book, which is called Band Smart. It didn't start at the clock.  It seems like two hours, but I've still got 30 minutes on the clock. So I was here four or five weeks ago, I don't know if those of you... Who was here four or five weeks ago? So you might have noticed, I've lost six or seven pounds. Thank you. It's a penile reduction surgery, and that's been terrific. It really has. Anyway, I thought, what can I do? What can I reach out? What can I talk about that will unite everybody? Right? I came up with this, the top five tips. What to do when one of your songs is used in the opening ceremony of the Olympics. As one of mine was four weeks ago.  I mean, who hasn't had a song? Okay then. All right, well, I just had a few... Here's a few tips anyway. Don't start a conversation with that, hey, an Olympic. I'm sure my mom does, but I shouldn't. If that was to you, don't start a conversation with it. Don't keep mentioning it.  Share the credit. Spread the credit around. Who's the guy who put all that music together? I've forgotten his name, but thanks to him. Be thankful. Absolutely be thankful. And stay humble. Let's just go over those again. Share the credit. Be thankful. Don't start a conversation. Don't keep mentioning it. Stay humble. Is there a problem with the lights? Is there a problem with the lights, Mr Lightman? Oh, my light isn't working. Oh, this would have been superb, wouldn't it? So there you go. Hopefully you could put that to use. I just wanted to see what that looked like, that big. It's awesome, isn't it? Will someone take a picture and post it on Twitter?  So let's get into it for real. Enough joking aside. Are there any rock stars here today? I don't mean rock star, rock stars. I mean programming Ruby UX.  Commodore. Are there any rock stars here today? That's great because Jimmy John Sandwich Shop. Looking for some rock stars. And I do that for two reasons.  And two, things are just changing all the time. Everything's participatory. Everybody's a rock star. Everybody's doing it. Everybody's a producer. Everybody's a DJ. Everybody's a rock star.  So let's have a look at formats. We looked at this last time. I like this. Formats keep changing. I think I've been lucky in my music business and entrepreneurial experience to have things just constantly change around me all the time. When I came up, when I started my label, vinyl and cassette, not all the time. And that made things difficult because we'd have a successful band, but maybe we didn't sell any cassette or we didn't sell any of the vinyl. So a band was successful, but we were holding all this inventory. Then CDs come along and then we're doing three formats.  And it just keeps on changing. What's next? Vinyl.  Yeah, bad news. As I said last time, I don't know what this chart means, but it's great, isn't it? I saw Ash tweeted last night, only in Madison. What was it? A guy? It was a good job I wasn't out with you last time. I would have just punched him in the face. Bwm.  I was trying to find a picture of a guy. So let's have a look at my theory about what happens with formats and objects in general. Things are weird and they're new. They become adopted and iconic. Then they become lame and discarded and after a variable amount of time, they become a hip memory prompt and they become an object to get. That's what's happening with vinyl. This is a coffee table at the hotel I was at in Memphis a while ago.  That's recycling right there. Punk is now a beer. Yeah, what's up with that? What's next? Cassette tapes. I love cassette tapes. I just found this online yesterday. It's a cassette tape USB drive in this huge fold out thing where you have to keep changing pens and mess things up and scribble things out.   Just so people go, oh, cassettes. I'm just looking at this now. I want to leave an order one from Amazon right now. So an object's weird new becomes adopted. Then it's iconic. It's lame and it's discarded and after a variable amount of time it becomes hip again and a memory prompt and a USB stick. So let's test our theory with Mr Robert De Niro. Unfortunately, I saw Robert in New Year's Eve last night. Has anybody seen that movie? What was he doing? Could he not have learned his lines? I mean, bad news. So at first he was weird, new, mohawk, taxi driver. He becomes adopted. Then he becomes lame and discarded. Analyzed this and this is where this was a music business class. I had questioned the value of his management team when they persuaded him to do analyze that. But no, he's not lame and discarded. He starts the Tribeca Film Festival, injects the very damaged New York City with a new energy after 9-11 and then Tribeca becomes a car. Tribeca's a car, punks a beer. No! Don't plug me in, baby. What about recording studios? New York, L.A., does anybody want to work at the hip factory? You'd say yes or no, you don't have to sparkle. Well, if you do want to work at the hip factory you've got a bit of a problem on your hands because they've turned it into penthouses. They've taken, it's like a Saturday Night Live skit. They've taken all of the people who recorded there and put all their music in the elevator. But there's only one penthouse left, so, you know, hurry. It's not about the square footage or the faucets.  Okay. It's an object, it's weird, it's new, it becomes adopted and iconic. And after a valuable amount of time it becomes a memory prompt. Does anybody go to Abbey Road Studios to record because of the equipment? It's to get an erection while you're using the microphone that Paul McCartney sang into. Is that his spit still... Or to try and avoid the microphones that Ringo Starr sang into.  Did you see the email he sent out? Just as a warning to anybody. As of October of this year he will no longer be signing anything for anybody. So do not send him fan mail.  Don't just tell people they can't write to you.  You know, why would you do that?  So what's important really with all of this? It turns out it's just vibe. And we're back to a car. Well, how weird I just looked up there and it's just apple logos. Can't see anybody, it's just like an apple. It's weird though, isn't it? I just got asked to speak at the Apple Store in Chicago. Anybody here from Chicago? You don't have to say yes or no, just sparkle. Sparkle with your phones.    It's just a shop selling electronics, and I'm going to be like, hey, make sure you get the apple logo behind me. They're going to whittle my 120 slides. Here's the four slides that we've cleared. Go get them, Marty. Let's have a look at some strategies.  Yeah, you could laugh, but people in bands don't. People in bands don't, hey, where are you going? We're going on the road. Where? Hollywood. Do you have a map?  Easy for me to say. I have four-year-old now, four-year-old and eight-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old. So most mornings I'm up between four and five. I'm getting kicked in the back, congealing vomit. Oh, across my neck. Very similar to the situations I think some of you find yourselves in tomorrow morning. But I'm up an atom of five in the morning. And when I see other people start filtering into Twitter at 10, I'm five hours ahead. At the end of the week I'm 35 hours ahead. At the end of the month I'm 140 hours ahead. Not that it's a competition.  But we kind of are in a little bit of competition.  That's another strategy. Practice for catastrophe. Oh, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but I was at the rehearsal hotel in Norway. They just have bags of money over there because of the oil and whatever else they've got going on. So I'm touring this rehearsal hotel, they called it, and it was gorgeous.  A piano, not that anybody uses pianos anymore. Keyboard stand, bass rig, two guitar rigs. It was just gorgeous. The elevators worked, there was air conditioning. This is fantastic. But is that what we need? Is that what we need to use to get better? If I owned that rehearsal space, I'd be behind the two-way mirror with a series of buttons. Once the guitarist started to get into it and the vocalist started to get into it, I'd press one of those buttons and electrocute the guitarist. I'd let them go for a little bit longer and I'd make the vocalist's microphone stop working. I'd press another button and electrocute the guitarist again. I don't know what I'd do to the drummer. Something. I'd turn the PA on and off, I'd have a hole open up in the middle, the fucking... Ah! I'd have piss raining from the ceiling. Because that's every show I've ever done. So... and a bunch of Apple laptops floating in the sky. So those are the... Those are the situations under which you practice so that when you're on stage at Lollapalooza and you've been electrocuting the... Air King! The microphone's not working and even though it's an outdoor show, there's piss raining!  Martin Atkins was right, we should buy his book. You can triumph in the face of adversity. That's what it's all about. Anybody can do it when it's easy. Triumph in the face of adversity.  Right now. But if I hadn't told you, you wouldn't have known.  Free is a new black. Just give everything away. If you're prepared to give absolutely everything away, someone's gonna buy something.  You give them one thing and a second thing, kind of if they want that.  They'll come back for more.  I think that's kind of correct. Just do good stuff, give it away and people will come back for more. It's not a problem if 20,000 people illegally download your music. It's a problem if they don't.  Their sales went up 23,000. Their sales went up 23,000%. I don't know if that works, actually. It's a free code for my second book, Welcome to Music Business. We'll post it later. Did you get it?  I've seen so much of this in the music business. Home taping is killing music and it's illegal. No, it didn't kill music. This is 1980, 1970. I don't know when this was, but music survived another 30 years after that.  That's what's killing the music business. Home sewing is killing fashion. There's a whole bunch of these. It's just a whole range of t-shirts. They're all wonderful. Use your social media with Japanese table manners. It's rude in Japan to pour your own drink, so you sit and wait for somebody else to pour yours. That's social media, isn't it? You have to sit there and be nice and pour everybody else's drink and wait for them to pour yours. You wouldn't use that as a pickup line. Oh, that was an interesting silence. Wasn't it? But you have to camouflage your message. If you're in a band, you don't go on social media. I'm in a band.  Everybody's in a band. We just released an album.  Everybody's released an album. We've got a show.  Everybody's got a show. Find out what everybody else is doing. I love this quote. My dad gave me this quote. You can make more friends in two months by being interested in other people for two years trying to get other people to be interested in you. So I use that all the time. Love that one.  Of course, these are all out of sync. The need for external validation. Success is not external. Success is like bad gas or appendicitis internal.  The top, Albert XVI of the top 100 markets in the US are east of a line from Minneapolis down to Texas. So stay east of that line. The first time I saw that map and anybody in a band I've shown that map to, they just go, oh fuck. I was out to dinner with Todd Rungren for a ridiculous sequence of confusing circumstances.  If only I'd seen this map. Just look at the data. Look at the available data and have a look at a map before you spend your life driving around the country. Because gas prices, I don't know what a gallon of gas is up here. It's like five, four eighty nine in Chicago now. What is it here, like three, twenty? Almost four. There's another reason not to go west of that line. There's nobody there. I was trapped jet lagged in a hotel room in Norway and I've got like 90 maps. Like incidences of pig swine fever. Oh yeah, that's one of the good ones.  Whatever field you want to get into, type that into YouTube.   They don't.  More than you, really.  One of my students gave me this idea. I went to class at Madison Media Institute. I teach here in town like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday sometimes.  What's that? I make my own organic blackberry jam. Get me some and I'll give you an A. Because that's how I roll. Grades for jam scandal. It's Madison Media Institute. This is great. Next week he's there with his pot of like defrosting organic homemade blackberry jam. Ah, yes.  I reach for the pot of jam. He reaches behind it. Pulls out a demo. Fuck. I'm like, think Martin, think, think, think. Take the demo. I'm thinking this is fine. I've got the jam. I'll throw that out the window on the drive back to Chicago. Problem solved. Because you know when you give somebody a demo, it's not a gift in position. When I listen to somebody else's music, which I don't have any time anyway, at least of all to listen to someone else's music that doesn't make sense because I don't know it. And then my brain starts working.  So it's not a gift. Weirdly, I don't throw it out the window on the way home. I think tomorrow I'll put it in the garbage disposal or set fire. I'm not sure. I'm going to do something heinous to this guy's demo. So the next morning I come downstairs, jam, demo, put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and I open up the jam pot. It made it like one of those noises. Thank you. Shame that isn't one of the noises on your telephone. Anyway, it makes that sound cool. That was filthy. That was absolutely... I get this like of like, just fresh. Not like store bought. It was just really aromatic and blackberry. Look at the demo. The toast pops up. Put some butter on the toast. I put the spoon into the jam and it's quite runny. It's not like a store bought jam consistency. It's quite runny. And as I spread the jam on the toast, I know.  Not only do I listen to his demo, I film myself with the CD. It's a bandit's called Colour Phase. James works at the frequency around the corner. Look at me as if I know... Yeah, a frequency around the corner. I film myself putting the CD into my car stereo and I post it on YouTube. As if he would know that I was going to destroy his demo. Which he wouldn't have. I told him. He was sitting in the lecture the first time I did this.  This whole adventure. But my point is, what's your blackberry jam scam? Right? His pot of blackberry jam. Now I'm sure he's on social media talking about blackberry jam and whatever it is you do to make... I don't know what you do to make blackberry jam. But there. That's my blackberry jam scam. Small is the new huge. Why is it bands always play the largest venue instead of the smallest? Just play the smallest. The worst thing that can happen is you sell it out and play another one. Aim low, get high. Yeah. I like that one too. Can I go on extra five minutes? Yeah. So, I like aim low, get high. It's not a bad thing to have ambition. You should have ambition. You should be looking to the clouds of Apple logos in the sky. But if you do, if you are looking up there, you'll miss your next step, which is there. I was lucky enough to be at the Great Wall of China. And it's a great analogy for this. On the one hand, you can stand to a distance amazed by one of the seven wonders of the world. I'm standing there and I got hungry because there's a Kentucky fried chicken at the Great Wall of China. I went down and I said to that guy, this is wrong on so many extra Christmas. You stand off to a distance and you look at the Great Wall of China.   You can start your own pile of bricks. Six weeks from now, you'll have a shitty, meaningless, not very focused pile of bricks. Six months from now, you'll have Great Wall of China 2 going on. And your friends will come over and go, look at this, and you can proudly say Great Wall of China 2, this quick wall.  How can we help? I like to help people with things that shouldn't be happening that are kind of insane.   That looks like it's going to happen. You made a really great plan there, buh-bye. I'm interested in the stuff that this is impossible. 3D printer? If those guys went to engineering school, they thought that it was impossible to make a 3D printer. Boom. So some of my little phrases, three is the new black, aim low, get high, get difficult sometimes. And when I saw one of them printed in a major publication, it made me cry. Sometimes I feel like I'm just banging my head against a wall. And to see it in print like that, even though it was kind of stolen, it made me cry. A great life isn't about great, huge things. It's about small things that make a big difference. And when I saw that in the Ikea catalogue, stay on top of the... Stay on top of... Was that me? Opening ceremony of the Olympics. Yeah. Almost 11 seconds. Yeah. I heard a politician say, not a politician, a political strategist said this on, I don't know, LRT, is that NPR? Is WRT the... I don't know, whatever. NPR Radio said, it doesn't matter what's happening with this or that momentum trumps everything. And I think that's true. You can try and buy momentum with money, get people to help you, take out ads and do stuff, and pretty soon you won't have any money or any momentum. If you have momentum, you could get whatever you need once you have momentum. Always be nice to everyone. Do the opposite. A great example of do the opposite. Some of my students struggle with this. You've got Avatar, $500 million new technology, and the artist. I don't know what the budget was for the artist. Black and white? What's the budget for microphones? No budget for microphones.   Brilliant. Go green. Do I care about your band? No. Do I care about the planet? Yes. Only safety comes from risk. The riskiest thing you can do in this world is to be safe.  I've had people come up to me afterwards. I can help you. Really? With which one of my problems? Fonts. We're not looking for something that's global and huge and has a massive impact around the world. We're looking for a fart in the elevator. Not at the Sheraton.   Rins repeat. Rins repeat. Rins repeat. Never mind the fonts. I've changed slide styles. Halfway through. It's a mash-up.     My friend Moldova. He made an album with the song titles printed in electronic circuitry. It's a light sensitive theremin built into his album. I talked to you about these last time I was here. Where did they go? Smell my seven inch. Scratch and sniff white vinyl. Blueberry. What's it sound like?  It's scratch and sniff blueberry. That's what it sounds like. Change the conversation. Do something interesting.  If you think that you're not, then you are. It's a lovely little Disney-esque thing. I'm thinking about doing a whole musical based on that. Never be afraid to throw blueberry muffins. Thank you.


In 2001, this distinguished professor of organizational behavior and psychology at the University of Michigan Business School did it again. His newest co-authored book, Managing the Unexpected, assuring high performance in an age of complexity, explains the concepts and strategies behind high reliability organizations. These are the organizations who must manage unexpected threats and, therefore, cannot make mistakes. Our country's wildland and prescribed fire and fire use forces, along with flight deck crews on aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems, and hospital emergency departments are among these vital organizations. Fellow organizational psychologist and University of Michigan professor Kathleen Sutcliffe co-authored this important Managing the Unexpected book. Together, Sutcliffe and Wyke are heralded for helping develop the concept of high reliability organizations. So how do we manage for the unexpected? What concepts, tools, and skills do we need, both as organizations and as individuals? In a special Managing the Unexpected workshop with prescribed fire and fire use practitioners, Wyke and Sutcliffe explained how to best apply these high reliability organizing principles. If you think that you face a reliability problem and you solve it and then you move on to something else, that's the big error.  It collapses on you day after day. It has to be redone. You don't put reliability into the bank. And so the things that we want to describe and talk about today with a variety of organizations are things that you're going to have to just keep doing, keep paying attention to over and over again. I'm going to be talking a little bit about the Columbia shuttle disaster and you remember when that episode happened, people in the headline said, uh-oh, here are echoes, keyword, echoes of Challenger. They did it again at NASA with Columbia, had the Challenger accident, had the Columbia accident, the two things parallel. You've had the same experience, man gulch, echoes of man gulch in South Canyon, same time in the afternoon, same configuration, so forth. Point is these kinds of things that we want to talk about, how you deal with the unexpected, what reliability is all about, what goes into it, has to have as a component of it continuous monitoring, continuous processing, continuously redoing it. And the worst thing you can do is to let complacency creep in, but it's going to be tempting because you're going to say, ah, we got it, we're successful, now we've got that one, let's move on to something else. That's how you get entrapped on some of these reliability issues. Think about it as challenges of understanding. If you don't understand some of this stuff, please ask. Maybe there are parts of it that are hazy for us and between us we can figure it out or we can between us say we don't need that kind of an idea and move on to those that we need. Think of it as a challenge of observation in the sense that we need to really understand how Cerro Grande came to happen. How did it turn out that way? They didn't intend it that way. How did that happen? What were the decisions along the way? Back it up. How did we get into that kind of position? And then finally, what can we do to lock in these kinds of resolves to change it, to do it slightly differently on a permanent kind of basis so we keep that capability for reliable performance. Now, I'm going to turn this over to Kathy who is going to set the stage for us on reliability issues and how we're going to handle things today. I want to just tell you a little bit. I want to kind of set the stage for where we're going today. And when you think about this work that we've done over the last few years, basically this work grew out of a series of discussions that Carl and I had and a long-term research project in which we were trying to understand how all organizations can be more reliable. And when we think about reliability, reliability is just this idea that we want to make sure that there's a lack of variance in performance. And so how can organizations over and over and over achieve high performance, especially in the face of trying conditions? We personally believe that all organizations need to be concerned with reliability. But we think that the organizations that really need to worry about reliability are organizations that are in trying conditions, that are in unpredictable environments, that are in environments in which you can't really anticipate all the surprises that can come up. So basically today we're going to be talking about that. We know that some organizations are better able than others to manage reliability and we're going to be building on those organizations today. But it's not simply through attention to safety that they do that, okay? These organizations that we're going to be talking about, I'm going to use the acronym HROs instead of always saying high reliability organizations. But these organizations that really do it well, they don't do it well only because they're concerned about safety. They do it well because they disvalue the mis-specification, the mis-estimation, and the misunderstanding of things. And that seems like it's a little awkward or complicated to say that they abhor mis-specifying, misunderstanding, and mis-estimating. And so they put a high degree of value on trying to get it right. They try to anticipate all the surprises that they might come up against. But one of the things they know is that they can't anticipate everything. And so what they do is they try to organize in a way to help them pick up on weak signals that things are not unfolding in the way that they're expecting. And so we're going to be talking about this organization. Now let me say just a few words about the kinds of organizations that we're going to be talking about. We're talking about the examples that we're drawing on, our examples of high reliability organizations. They're organizations that seem to remain productive, sometimes innovative, and relatively error-free in spite of facing very trying conditions continuously day after day after day. Now the term high reliability conveys an idea that high risk and high effectiveness can coexist. And the kinds of organizations that we're talking about are nuclear power plants, they're naval aircraft carriers. We put you in there wildland firefighting crews, hospital ER intensive care units, investment banks. These are organizations that really have to remain relatively error-free.  They're organizations that have a different set of priorities, okay? They have a different set of priorities, and they organize in such a way to have an intense commitment for alertness. And basically we call this mindfulness, this intense commitment to alertness is what we call mindfulness. And when we talk about the term mindfulness, we think that commitment to mindfulness really is a hedge against the unexpected. And so today we're going to talk about how you achieve that. So during our discussion today, we're going to be talking about these HROs. We're going to pay close attention to how they organize. And we are going to pay close attention to how they struggle for alertness. And the basic message is very simple. It's that these organizations mindfully update through a series of practices and through an infrastructure that they develop. And these practices focus on failures, on simplifications, on operations, on resilience, and on expertise. One of the things we know about high reliability organizations is that they really try to anticipate surprises, as we've said. So they do a lot of scenario building. They do have tons of plans, but at the same time, they know that plans sometimes can get them into trouble. Because plans do have drawbacks. And some of those drawbacks that I've always thought are important to think about are some of the kinds of things that here. Plans can lead to mindlessness. In fact, we talk about the idea that plans can contribute to the fallacy of predetermination. Plans contain many kinds of expectations. When you create a plan, you assume that the world's going to unfold in a particular way. Well, sometimes that leads to a fallacy of predetermination. And that is that we do think the world's going to be unfolding in a particular way. And because we are, we do believe, actually, we tend to see what we believe. Because humans are not necessarily fact seeking, as Carl was talking about earlier, that we're belief seeking. So we tend to see what we believe. And so basically, plans embody what we expect to happen. And so they influence what people see, what they choose to take for granted, what they choose to ignore, the length of time it takes for them to recognize that small problems are kind of getting out of control. So that's one drawback to plans. The other drawback to plans is that they really do restrict our attention to what we expect, and they limit our view of our capabilities. Because in a way, you can think about it as the old adage. When you have a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail. So when you have a plan, you have a tendency to see the ways that you can act in the ways that are consistent with the plan. So a heavy investment in plans is important, and HROs certainly do that. But they also recognize that they have a lot of drawbacks. And so in part, a heavy investment in plans can restrict our sensing to the kinds of expectations that are built into the plan. And it can restrict our responding to the kinds of actions that were built also into the plan. And so it restricts our actions to the things that we think we really know how to do. So to be mindful is to be concerned with plans, but also to be aware that plans sometimes are not going to work out the way that we think. And so to develop an infrastructure that's going to allow us and our organizations, our units, to be able to pick up on small signals that things aren't going wrong. Something happens. We ask you what caused that event. The overwhelming tendency of people is when they look for a cause, they pick a cause that they personally can do something about or that they know how to change. That's not necessarily the most crucial kind of cause. So when you're doing any kind of inquiry or investigative work, when you say these are the things that cause that event, ask yourself the question, did I stop there just because I can do something about that or I know what to do about that? And if I knew how to handle some of these other things, then I might put the cause somewhere else. It's a tendency, I do it, you may or may not do it. But it shows up oftentimes in investigations. And it's a good little thing to file away in the back of your head just as a mindful moment to try to say, I want to do a little bit better analysis. And I may have stumbled onto a cause that I think I can do something about. If I know how to change an organization, then I'm going to back it up until I see culture is the problem, because I know how to change culture. This is from the head of the French Secret Service, Pat Lagodek, talking about what happens when a crisis hits. And he makes the point that the ability to deal with a crisis situation is largely dependent on the structures that have been developed before the chaos arrives. The event can in some ways be considered as an abrupt and brutal audit. At a moment's notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem, and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront. This is part of a mindset we want to take to Cerro Grande tomorrow, but it's partly a mindset that you want to take back home at the same time. Because whatever the weak links are in your organization at Cerro Grande, put pressure on it, and that's where it snaps. That's where it goes haywire. Those are the places where you need more learning and stronger learning and over learning in order to seal some of those things in place. If you want a kind of principle, that if you have to do a quick read of an organization, it's hard to do better than the following. If you go into an organization under stress and you're trying to figure out how it's operating, take everybody who matters or who you're watching, see what their position was before the position they are now in. And that is how that organization, by and large, is likely to be functioning. Take the organization, take all of the people who are there, pull them down one level, the level at which they were before they got to their new position, and that's the way that organization is functioning. And it'll make sense out of it surprisingly quickly for you, and all it is, and it's not trivial, is another example of people under pressure falling back on ways of learning that they were more familiar with and that they've done for a longer period of time. You can see it at South Canyon. Remember Don Mackie was the jumper in charge because he was the first one out of the airplane. Some of the comments and some of the descriptions about Mackie later in the afternoon had him acting less like the crew chief because you remember what he was doing was spending a lot of time helping people sharpen their saws, which is more like somebody who is actually in the crew rather than the crew chief, which Blanco, who was the IC for quite a bit of that event, was also, as the afternoon went on, more likely to keep his crew of 20 people around him rather than being attentive to all of the other 40 people who he was in charge of that afternoon. Not surprising. Mackie has been cutting line longer than he's been a crew chief. Blanco has been a crew chief longer than he's been an IC. Gets under pressure, falls back on an earlier set of tendencies. How do you deal with that? We'll be talking about newer behaviors, things that are more novel to you, and the importance of practicing those beyond the point of getting them right or getting a grasp of it. A lot of you under training budget pressure basically train people until you say, oh, now they got it. Good, now we can go on to something else. That's really vulnerable, because if they just know how to do the new behavior, the moment you put pressure on them, they're going to fall back beyond that back to the earlier ways that you were trying to train them away from. One of the only safeguards you've got is over-learning, over-practicing it, doing it beyond the point of grasp. It takes time. Probably it'll take some money to do it. But if it's a behavior that really matters to you, it's one that you need to keep your eye on. So as a kind of organizing principle, something that we want to keep our eye on, keep this as a summary, if you will, of sort of what all of us are up against. It's hard enough to learn new stuff, but it's even harder to hold on to that new stuff. And so we want to build in some capability for over-learning. And we want to watch all of these different kinds of events for what people are going to fall back on when they're put under pressure. And you want to have that in mind, because you're going to have to make some statements of priority of what actions you want to be sure people reliably produce under pressure. Those are the ones where you need to focus your attention on the learning. And you're going to have to give up some stuff in the process. But that's a pretty shrewd call. And it's an important call. And it's one that can make a difference in your unit. Wyke and Sutcliffe emphasize that these same five key processes, or characteristics, surface again and again in high-reliability organizations. A preoccupation with failure. A reluctance to simplify. A sensitivity to operations. A commitment to resilience. And a deference to expertise. Kathy mentioned that in chapter four of the book, we've got several different scales by which you can audit your own organization to see how you stack up on things like how you handle failure, simplification, operations, resilience, and expertise, how you come out on mindfulness. These are a couple of the sample items that tap into how an organization copes with failure. High-reliability organizations tend to regard a close call or a near miss as a kind of failure that reveals potential danger rather than as evidence of their success and their ability to avoid danger. That's a really good item to discriminate organizations. Jesus, we just had a near miss. We really had a close call. Listen to what they say next. Shows were pretty strong, pretty successful, good shape, or boy, we are really vulnerable. We saw safety in the guise of danger, or we saw danger in the guise of safety. You can go either way, but that interpretation makes a huge difference. And when you get an organization that treats its close calls as a sign of trouble, sign of vulnerability, sign of danger, you're closer on the way to acting like the high-reliability organizations do than if you get the interpretation going the other direction. NASA around this time had a pretty strong record of dealing with near misses as a sign that they were in good shape. You can reconstruct several kinds of decisions, several ways in which they thought about their culture that illustrates that kind of a characteristic. So it's something you want to listen for in your own organization. It's paying attention to these small cues. Remember, think about any kind of a wasting disease, a disease that over a period of time gets worse and worse. Simple principle, but boy, it's a great guideline. In the early stages of a bad disease, it's hard to detect that you've got it, but it's easy to cure it if you do. Disease develops, gets worse and worse and worse. Now it's easy to spot, but it's held to cure. So as much as possible, you want to back up. You want to get early cues. That the system is unhealthy, that there's a small anomaly. Something's out of place here. How does the system treat those things? We ought to be able to get a feel for that tomorrow in Saragrande. You ought to be able to reconstruct how your own organization, when do you think you got trouble? When do you think you've got an issue that's turning into a problem that might turn into a crisis? High reliability organizations pick that stuff up early.  In one way you are, and you've got a leg up in my estimation over NASA, NASA, you'll remember, had the Challenger disaster, had all kinds of investigations and cases written up about it, not one of which have found their way into any training at any level at NASA. You don't suffer from the same kind of thing. You have cases, investigations, things went bad, you wish they hadn't gone bad, you learn some lessons or maybe you're struggling to figure out what the lesson is, but it gets pumped back into the organization. No more South Canyon, although I'm not quite sure what that means, but no more of those. And so you try to figure out some kinds of things that are there. No more Cerro Grande days, okay? We're digging into that and you're not afraid to look at that. The investigations may not be terrific and there may be a need for much more competency in how you actually write and do an investigation, but at least some of that information, some of that history is getting pumped back into the organization. What kinds of cues do you find are diagnostic for you? Are good cues of when something is more, a fire is more active than you normally would have expected or seems to be spotting with more intensity than you had anticipated or is more active at a different time of day? Maybe those are rotten cues for something that's about to escape. Maybe they're good, maybe you've got some other better ones, but this would be a great chance to pool some of those kinds of indicators that suggest to you that a system is getting into trouble. Let's look at the reluctance to simplify. This is the second characteristic. And when you're auditing your organization, you're looking for what happens by way of getting different points of view expressed so that people have different ways of getting on top of a situation or of interpreting it. So some organizations, it's pretty likely that people will take things for granted and they don't question things very much. But even when they question them, they may all come up with the same kinds of interpretations and the same kind of explanations. Think about the way of operating that says, I'll believe it when I see it. A lot of people strongly evidence-based, database and so forth, that's the way they work. It's just as often the case that the opposite is true. I'll see it when I believe it. You go into a situation expecting certain things and there they are. That's the way we work. If that's the case, then the better set of ideas, richer the set of ideas we carry into that situation, stronger position we are to see more of the things that are happening there. So in many ways, what we're trying to do today is to just seed a lot of possibilities in your head. So when you look at Sarah Grande, when you look at your own unit, more things stand out for you than might be seen otherwise. Remember, we talk about sensitivity to operations, the idea being that you wanna pay attention to what's happening here and now because you wanna forestall little things growing bigger. So you wanna pay close attention to what's going on. And I think as the person said in the back, as she said, what we try to do is really think about the scenarios, what could go on. We're really paying a close attention to what's happening today and being sensitive to operations is, as I just said, is that you put a premium on real-time information. You know how the systems work. You can make small adjustments to things that are not working correctly and then before they grow bigger. And the big issue is that they're talking all the time. What I want you to take away from this are two ideas. One is that being sensitive to what's going on here now in this mundane moment is that you can really avoid small events from growing bigger. The other thing that I want you to take away from this is that organizations are built through communication. They're maintained through effective communication. And without that, in a way, you don't have an organization. So in fact, you have to pay close attention to communication. I've heard you talking about that a lot today. So if you're thinking about operations-sensitive leadership, you want to really make it clear to people that they need to speak up. You know, knowledge is something that occurs between people. It's not something that's just up here in your head. It occurs between people. You want to encourage others to speak up. You want to speak up and ask questions. You want to check for comprehension, obviously. You want to be aware of how you react to pressure and tell others, as Carl was talking about with respect to the airline pilots and the better pilots being distinguished by the fact that at the beginning of a flight, they say, look, I know I'm bad under pressure. And so if we get into a jam, make sure you talk up. And even just don't talk when we get into a jam. You know, say something if you need to. Verbalizing your plans, reducing pressure by changing the importance of the demands and abilities. That's actually something that you might not have too much control over and then over learning new routines. So those are the kinds of things you can think about with respect to operations. The idea is that, you know, HROs do try to anticipate and prepare for surprises. But they do know that they can't anticipate everything because it's an unknowable, unpredictable and changing world and you can't foresee everything. So you want to develop your skills for resilience. And many of you may have, you may know about resilience just because we talk a lot about that word, especially lately. There's a lot of literature that's developing on resilience right now. It used to be thought that resilience was a special capability that individuals had. You either were born with resilience or you weren't. Now, in fact, we know that that's not correct and that resilience, in fact, is a process and it's a process that occurs over time. And it is a process that occurs as a consequence of people developing their competencies, developing their efficacy, the capability that you will be able to handle a situation if it comes up. And the continuous kind of learning and growing that we want to do. So when you're thinking about resilience, you want to be thinking about the kinds of things of developing generalized resources that can cope with and respond to situations that come up, okay? We're responding to change. You want to develop deep knowledge. You want to develop capabilities for swift feedback to figure out what's happening, how can we adjust what we're doing. You want to foster learning. You want to foster obviously accurate and speedy kinds of information. And you want to develop skills at recombining different resources because you won't really know. And you sometimes have to get comfortable with improvisation. Finally, I've talked to you about the fact that in high reliability organizations, you'll see it clearly this afternoon. It's something you want to watch for. A word that shows up over and over in this literature is migrating decision-making. And what they mean by that phrase is in high reliability organizations, the decisions migrate. They drift. They move to the people with the most expertise to make the decision, not necessarily to the level and the hierarchy that is officially tasked in order to do that. What is striking in the NASA Columbia disaster is the fact that expertise was not recruited on almost any of these dimensions. People say with a bit of understatement, they may say out of the Park Service or Forest Service too, that NASA is not a badge-less society. Who you are, what level you're at, that really determines everything and what you're gonna decide, which works against decisions moving around to the level of expertise. But notice, they didn't go to the people who were experts in imaging. They didn't go back to the people who had built that model to see whether the crater model could be modified in any way to help them out. They really didn't listen to the engineers who were highly worried under these conditions. They sought out, management sought out people who agreed that this was no big deal and listened to them and made their decisions on the basis of them. And they had basically lousy intelligence about the kinds of images they could have gotten. This is the essence for me of the investigation board essentially saying for this one operation, NASA behaved in a relatively mindless fashion. The quote in the report says, shuttle managers did not embrace safety conscious attitudes. Instead, their attitudes were shaped and reinforced by organization that in this instance was incapable of stepping back and gauging its biases. Bureaucracy and process trumped thoroughness and reason. Thoroughness and reason are some of the things behind how people treat failure, how they treat simplification, how they treat operations, how they treat resilience, how they treat expertise. Notice this key piece right here, this is the beauty of what you're doing this week. Stepping back, engaging your biases and then resolving to do something about at least one of them as a starting point. The final category that we've talked about is of course this deference to expertise. What we know is that especially in high tempo times, when things are really heating up, that in these HROs that they shift decisions away from the hierarchy, from formal authority, towards the person who has the capability to answer the problem. So they have what we call kind of fluid or flexible decision-making structures and they actually don't have a fixed central player who thinks that they know, he or she knows everything. And so decision-making migrates to the person that has the expertise to make the decision at hand.  One of the problems with deferring to experts is that experts are sometimes subject to what we call the fallacy of centrality. And the fallacy of centrality is this, the idea that if I don't know about it, it must not be happening. So when somebody asks the question this morning, how do you deal with people who overreact or bring stuff to the expert's attention? How do you deal with those people? I guess as the expert, I would be asking myself, am I subject to the fallacy of centrality? Do I think just because I don't know about it that it must not be happening? Experts oftentimes overestimate the likelihood that they would surely know about something if it were taking place. One example of this, and Carl's written about this quite a bit, is that in the 1950s and 1940s, pediatricians and radiologists had, they were seeing, they would see radiographs of little kids that seemed to have all these broken bones, that broken bones that were healed. And in fact, they named it the brittle bone syndrome. And because pediatricians and radiologists couldn't imagine that people would intentionally be hurting their children. And it wasn't until the 1960s when there was a social worker that was also added to a team that was kind of investigating these situations. And the social workers said, well, the social workers know how to deal with community, they know how to deal with families, they have more ideas about what goes on in families. And in fact, the battered child syndrome was discovered in 1960 as a consequence of adding that social worker. Kathy, I'm wondering, what's an HRO's general take on after somebody or an organization is screwed up in punishment? Well, I mean, they try not to punish the individual. I mean, the whole thinking, and somebody talked about the Swiss cheese model, the idea that generally there's not one single, single cause of accidents. So in many organizations, they try to not punish the individual at the sharp end of the stick. Of course, that doesn't always happen, but for example, hospitals, the hospitals that I know about, say emergency departments and intensive care units, they're trying to understand the systemic components that contribute to errors rather than punishing a single individual. Now, there are political consequences and other consequences to that, so it's sometimes difficult to implement, but I think organizations are really trying to get away from punishing individuals. That's not to say that there aren't times when there is malfeasance or there is some actual bad behavior. And I think some people have written about that, in those cases, then you, of course, you have to punish people if that is the case, but just for events that occur that were unexpected and they don't necessarily, one person wasn't the cause, they're generally trying not to punish people. I was just gonna say that the whole issue of continuous feedback, I thought was pretty important. I attended a leadership class recently, and that was something that was brought up as something that's very important to do is to provide continuous feedback to your employees, whether it's positive or negative, and not just focusing on the negative when it occurs. And I think in the US Forest Service, in my agency anyway, I don't think that we always do that in a real continuous form. I mean, there's a lot of people I talk to who don't get any feedback at all from their bosses, none. I think you have hit on something that's really critical, and that is this issue of feedback. It is the case that people don't get enough feedback, and when they do get feedback, it's oftentimes negative feedback. So this continuous feedback is crucial, and you do wanna also talk about the positive. I was talking to somebody at the break, and I was talking about the fact that there's a lot of research going on right now on positive psychology and what's called positive organizing. And people who are looking at positive psychology have developed a theory that's called the broaden and build theory. When people experience positive emotions, they are more likely to broaden and build new ways of thinking. And so experiencing positive affect is very important. We've been talking about today the importance of failure, and in your book you talk about how it's okay to be a pessimist in that regards, but yet that runs counter to organizational values where we want people to be optimistic and we want them to figure out solutions and not just bring problems. So I see that as a conflict. Just kind of a tension. Tension, yeah. How would you answer that, Carl? Part of the failure point is essentially that you want people to be wary.   It's more the, what am I taking for granted? Should I keep taking that for granted so that it isn't always just negative? It's whatever helps you stay on top of things, on top of details, on top of being more alert to what goes along. I think the big thing that worries us is just you have a success, you say, I got it, and then you move on, and then you get complacent about it, and that's what does in most of these high reliability ones. So in some ways, we and they overcorrect and you say, don't think you're having a good day or if you're having a good day, watch out in order that people just stay on their toes in general and don't get cocky or that's what we mean by the liabilities of success. You find organizations that have a series of successes, and boy, they start to tune out data, the environment changes on them, they miss the change, and then they get in deep trouble, and that's the sequence that is sort of the root sequence that we're after on high reliability organizations. And finally, before something unexpected happens, you may want to ask yourself, can I see signals of failure, and do I know how to make sense of them? How differentiated are the labels that I'm applying to a situation? When you see a situation, do you just automatically label it as, oh, well, I've seen this before without really taking the time to analyze it a little bit more deeply? Am I aware of the unfolding situation? Am I really paying attention to the context, the here and now, paying enough attention to what's going on in front of me? Do I have the skills to make do, or do we have the skills and capabilities to make do, and who knows how to do what? So those are the kinds of questions that you might want to use, either in situations where you have a failure or when you're facing some kind of unexpected situation or before something unexpected happens. So you can think about those kinds of questions. The only thing I would add is, it's a perennial difference between us. I think all stuff starts out with one person at a time. So from my standpoint, if I became more aware of the failure in my activities, some of the kinds of things that I tend to lump together and maybe should split apart, whether I spend more time thinking about the future in the past rather than the present, and how I handle bouncing back from setbacks, whether I have a tough skin or not, and what I'm good at and what I'm lousy at, if I start working on those things, it may have an effect on my immediate associates, and out of that, we may be able to build a group. So for my money, this kind of stuff works for an end of one on up. Adopting the high reliability organization principles into the wildland fire organization is no easy task. But if we are to successfully meet the wildland management and hazardous fuel challenges that face us, we must continue to improve our skills in managing the unexpected. Carl Weich and Kathleen Sutcliffe have opened an important door for us. They have shown us the tools to use, and now we must all learn how to use them.


Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. And this is your 50th weekly movement roundup. This is our 50th show. We are very happy to be with you, give the people what they want brought to you every week for the last 50 weeks by People's Dispatch, People'sDispatch.org, Prashant and Zoe, and brought to you by Globetrotter, that's me Vijay, super to be with you. Can't believe we've been with you for 50 weeks. You know what this means, because I know that you understand how the calendar works in two weeks, we have 52 weeks of shows, that's a monumental show. And I hope we remember, because we celebrate everybody's anniversary but our own, I hope we remember to do something special. So what I'm asking you to do is to remind us on social media that we're almost 52 weeks old. Could you do that for us? Could you let your friends know to be with us, not only every week, but especially when we have our 52nd week of shows. Really happy to be with you, give the people what they want. Big story on Bolivia, it's not a story about Bolivia as such, it's a story that has been imposed on Bolivia. Zoe, what's the story and what's been happening to President Luis Arce? Well, the latest that has been coming out this week is that Bolivian officials who are working as part of the coup regime of Jeanine Anyez, were actually planning to overthrow the Democratic elected government of Luis Arce in 2020. So essentially in June 2021, the Intercept came out with a groundbreaking report really, which they recovered audio messages and emails. Prashant, they received audios and email messages, essentially between members of the government that was part of Jeanine Anyez's government and with private mercenaries based in of all places, Miami. And essentially they were planning what to do after the Luis Arce ticket of the movement toward socialism won the elections in October 2020. They went to such lengths as to even suggest that hundreds of US mercenaries come to Bolivia to assassinate Luis Arce. And so this investigation, as I mentioned, came out in June 2021 through investigative journalism, through the Intercept. And this past week, the minister of government, Eduardo Castillo, announced that they had identified members of the former Bolivian coup government and also the mercenaries that were involved in this. And so what's important to point out here is that the people that they identified were actually in detention in Haiti for having participated in the assassination of Jovenel Mois. So what this tells us is not only under the watch of the US where these mercenaries collaborating with the Bolivian officials, but also carried out the assassination of Jovenel Mois. Today, just now, a couple hours ago, Eduardo del Castillo also announced that they are calling for the extradition of this official of the coup regime, Luis Fernando López, who was essentially the brains behind the entire operation and who was in coordination with these mercenaries. They're calling for his extradition from Brazil. He is one of the many members of the Janine Anya's government that fled the country following the election of Luis Arce. First, he says, let's try to kill him. Let's try to overthrow this government, betray the will of the people. He abandons this plan quite quickly, seeing the overwhelming support of the people for this government, seeing that is futile to try to, through violent means, oppose this will. He fled to Brazil to escape prosecution. As we know, Janine Anya's and other members of her government are currently in prison, serving time for not only carrying out the coup and all of the horrific violence that ensued with repression of movements, but also because of massive corruption schemes that took place under her one year of government, where she and other officials took advantage of the pandemic to profit and off the lives of the Bolivian people. It's a very important story and it's something that I think we're going to return to come back to pay attention to. There have been some really tense protests in Bolivia on all sides, taking place part of the fault line protests in Bolivia, protests in Bangladesh. Prashant followed some of this. I mean, it's quite incredible that the level of popular agitation. People have a million reasons to be agitated in Bangladesh. What are the most recent protests about? Right, Vijay. The issues basically in Bangladesh come from something which is actually very common, unfortunately still in South Asia, which is religious tensions. And the incident in this question was something that happened on October 13th, which is basically that there was this religious, say there's a religious function, a Hindu religious function, which is celebrated across South Asia, Durgapuja. And there was a rumor circulated that apparently someone had placed a copy of the Quran on a Hindu religious installation, so to speak. Now this led to this was widely circulated as Facebook video, somebody went live. There was a lot of talk about this and it caused a huge amount of mob violence, houses were burnt down, a place to worship the attack. I believe at least three people died. Later turns out, of course, that the person who placed the Quran on the installation was actually a Muslim himself. So the whole notion that the Hindus did it to insult Islam was actually a complete, completely unfounded. And, but so there has been on the one hand mob violence, on the other hand, in what is an inspiring site. Basically, we have seen protests taking place across Bangladesh, all sections of society, students, academics, you know, workers, political parties, the left especially in the forefront. Protesting against the communalization, what is called again South Asia communalization, but which is basically religious violence and religious rioting. So what you've seen is massive protests taking place against this. And this is at least a sign of hope right now because this is actually not just a problem in Bangladesh is a problem across South Asia, like I said. And in each of the main South Asian countries, the big ones Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, we have actually seen a rise in religious fundamentalism. We have seen a rise in religious organizations and political parties, which are using religion as a way to polarize society. This, of course, maybe one of the worst examples right now is India where a similar party is in power and is using and there's a lot of, say, demonizing the Muslims that are taking place right now in India. But we also see similar situations, for instance, in Pakistan, where, say, the Christian minorities are suffering off of other matter in Afghanistan where the Shia, Hazaras are under threat. So in that way, it's very inspiring to see the kind of public outpouring of anger that has taken place in Bangladesh against this mob violence, against this attempt to divide people. And so this has been a very constant theme in all these protests that, you know, Bangladesh right now also facing a crisis because there are very clearly two very strong currents in Bangladesh society. One is the current of independence, one is the current of its liberation movement, which was, you know, very clearly secular, which focused on socialism, which focused on socialist ideals, which focused on secularism, which focused on pride of a good kind in language and culture, and pride which was inclusive, which was holistic in every sense of the term. And there is definitely also a threat of, especially Islamist politics, which has sought to clearly create a divided society. And this is the same, you know, of different natures. This is the same kind of thinking that pervades various countries in South Asia right now. So that way Bangladesh is a very important country to watch out for, especially in the coming times because the government has also interestingly responded in a good way. Sheikh Hasina, the Prime Minister, has been out on the streets. She has said that her ruling party will, you know, take up rallies and protests in defense of secularism against religious violence.  Bangladesh has been in recent times very unsafe for activists of all kind, especially for that matter, atheists as well. So generally it's a very complicated situation. On the one hand, like I said, it's a positive thing that the government is responding that the ruling party and all sections of civil society have come out very strongly. On the other hand, this still remains a very volatile situation. And the fact that, you know, a couple of people, 10, 15 people were maybe able to plot something like this is actually a very dangerous time for society. So I think for Bangladesh is a whole lot of important questions to answer in the wake of this incident. You know, we could change the name of our show, give the people what they want. Today's our 50th episode, we could change it to volatile situation. The phrase you use Prashant, because, you know, if you think Bolivia is a volatile situation, so is Bangladesh. Indeed, there is no more volatile situation on the planet Earth right now, friends, than what's happening in Yemen. A country of 29 million people, it's a small country in comparison to, you know, much larger countries around the world. Also Yemen has the misfortune of being the poorest country in the Arab world. It was the poorest country in the Arab world in 2015, when the war prosecuted largely by Saudi Arabia and by the United Arab Emirates begins. It was the poorest country then, now 50% unemployment and so on, terrible situation. I want to get to the intensification of the war in a minute. But before that, I want to pay attention to what the UNICEF head Henrietta Fiori has said. UNICEF, as you know, is the UN's children's fund. And what Henrietta Fiori said is extraordinary. She recently said that being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares. Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of nightmares. In Yemen, one child dies every 10 minutes from preventable causes including malnutrition and vaccine preventable diseases. You know, there are 29 million Yemenis, I said, 20 million of them require assistance from UN agencies. 20 million out of 29 million of the 20 million, 11.3 million are children. More than half of that number are children. The fighting has just not slowed down in Yemen. Despite moderate pressure coming from various international bodies, the fighting has just not died down. In fact, it is intensified. In February this year, the Houthi militias made a push for the central part of Yemen called Marib, the city of Marib. Now, what's important about Marib, two things. Number one, it is home to one of Yemen's main oil refineries. Yemen is a poor country. There is some modest oil, but there is a oil refinery. It's a considerable asset. The Houthis are making a push for that. Second reason to go into Marib in a large force is that it is basically the last place controlled by the government of Mr. Hadi, the man backed by the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. Now, Mr. Hadi has a long history inside Yemen's political landscape. He's not a Johnny come lately. This is not like Ahmad Chalabi of Iraq. He is a person with some credibility inside Yemen. Nonetheless, he is entirely backed by Saudi Arabia and by the United Arab Emirates, United States, United Kingdom and so on. Mr. Hadi, his last stronghold for him, the last section is Marib. Right in the middle of Yemen and to some extent, the coastal areas. You see, when we look at southern Yemen, it's not in the hands of the Houthis, but it's not in the hands of Mr. Hadi either. It's controlled by various al-Qaeda factions in the main. His last stronghold is Marib and therefore in February the 21st, the Houthis made a big push to go towards Marib city. In recent period, they have been able to extend the front line quite deeply, going quite close to the city. Refugee crisis is something to behold there. I spoke to people in Sanaa. They say that the refugee situation is quite dire. In the recent period, we've seen that the southern approach to Marib has become one front line. That's where the oil is and the Houthis have made significant gains, significant gains in Sheboah and Abyan provinces. This is important because this is meant that the Houthis have cut off some of the Saudi oil lines. This is significant. There are drones flying around above Yemen's territory. Half the time, it's not clear who these drones belong to. Many have been shot down meanwhile, and this is important. Meanwhile in Baghdad, the Iranians and the Saudis have been meeting. They've been having a series of conversations about de-escalating tension. Iran's new foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdul-Han and the Saudi foreign minister, who is a person of some credibility in Saudi Arabia. He's Prince Fazal bin Farhan. They've been talking, let's hope very much that in Baghdad, some kind of reasonable accommodation is there between the Iranians and the Saudis. Hopefully this will allow for a new peace process to start for Yemen. It is inexcusable what's happening in Yemen. Just want to repeat this. Out of the 29 million people who live in that country, 11.3 million children are in dire state of near famine. That's the situation in Yemen. Mustn't forget it. You're listening to give the people what they want. You want us to bring you credible, credible news. That's what we tried to bring you. Prashant is going to take us from Yemen to Ethiopia. Credible, credible news. The best thing you have on the internet. Tell everybody about it. Share this show. We rely upon you. Prashant, what's happening in Ethiopia? Ethiopia, of course, unfortunately, it's interesting that coming after Yemen because we have another conflict, another war that has been going on for quite a while now, almost a year. And in fact, just over almost just about a year. And right now we saw the last week there was a strike by the Ethiopian government and there was a course of international condemnation, of course. Unfortunate casualties, civilian. But the Ethiopian war is right now as both people, we had people's dispatch and also a breakthrough news have been extensively covering the fact that the Ethiopian war has also been accompanied by an information war for lack of better.  We'll come to the rebel designation later, but the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which started the war last year as some kind of small group fighting against this, you know, giant government force, whereas reality is much more complex. And I think it's very essential to sort of understand the nature of this conflict nature of this battle, so that we kind of really see what's happening in one of the most important countries in Africa right now. Because until November 2020, there was no war, of course. But there was also a government which was being seen as a big change from the past decades, which is the government of Abu Ahmed at Ethiopia. And the Tigray People's Liberation Front launched a war in November 2020 without really any provocation. And it's important to know that the TPLF had been in power for decades until 2018. And, you know, they had basically run the country, and now they were restricted to one small state at Tigray in the north. So the war starts then somewhere around the middle of this year, the Ethiopian government declares a ceasefire, but the Tigray People's Liberation Front has resumed the offensive over the past few months. And this has led to a massive crisis in terms of aid. The numbers are indefinitely in the millions. The Tigray People's Liberation Front has invaded the neighboring states of Amhara and Afar. I think the number of people who require humanitarian aid is approximately around 1.7 million together in these two states. Another five, nearly close to 6 million people needing aid in Tigray alone. And with these two states, the kind of conflict that has happened basically looks to the TPLF is trying to cut off supplies from the port of Djibouti, which is the only port accessible. Into the rest of the country and actually create a more bigger crisis of that sort. So it's important to note that I think as our colleagues have been writing and pointing out on video that the TPLF has in fact denied aid to its own people, to the people, to the state it represents, to the state it controls. So there's stopped even aid there. And, you know, there have been accusations of aid trucks being confiscated by the TPLF and used for military purposes. There have been a number of such allegations in the past. There have been allegations of mass graves being found of the TPLF personnel, for instance, going door to door to door. And in some cases, they are intimidating in some cases, even executing people. So very difficult situation in Ethiopia right now because on the other hand, the United States has opted for its strategy of going with sanctions because in September, in mid September, Joe Biden authorized sanctions. Although they haven't been implemented yet. And in the first week of October, we saw the European Union also following suit and calling for sanctions. So on the one hand, the Ethiopian government is trying to engage some of these forces, but we do see that, you know, there is a, like I said, there is a bit of an information war going on there, which really posits this as a good versus evil battle. It's a group of hardy rebels fighting off this government where the reality is much, much more complex. And I think it's one of those important stories to watch because of the important strategic, you know, role that Ethiopia has because of its population, because of its, you know, so many factors. So that's where we are right now. It's a battle that'll probably take a couple of more weeks or maybe months to get resolved because the agriculture season is also coming to an end. So it remains to be seen what's going to happen. But right now things are really on the edge. Things are on the edge and I must say, you know, this is our 50th show of give the people what they want. It's one depressing story after the other war conflict and so on. We're going to turn to Guatemala where there was an appalling civil war for decades and decades. And I don't, I don't know Zoe, what was the final count 200,000 250,000 dead. I'm not sure. Meanwhile, looks like veteran military officers. I don't understand what's going on in Guatemala. What are they doing? They want money. I mean, what are they doing, Zoe? It is hard to understand because I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of crazy.  I mean, we've written about it at people's dispatch to the horrific kind of US backed leaders in that country that carried out such a tragic and horrible campaign against the people. And this was led by the Guatemalan army. And so, and, you know, a lot of these members, you know, pertaining to the upper class elites, the more white, European, descendant families. And today, you know, this week, they were out on the streets on October 19, demanding that the Congress pass a bill to give them kind of a pension and severance. I mean, not severance pay, but, you know, support for having served. It is, you know, a bonus. It's about 15,000 US dollars to members of the army that served in this war, in the civil war. And essentially, they took to the streets and it turned into a massive, a violent riot.  They, you know, effectively disrupted the proceedings of the Congress. And this is because they were originally promised by the current president of Guatemala, Alejandro Diametti, that they would receive this bonus for having participated in this war. Alejandro Diametti is, you know, far right current president of Guatemala. He's been under a lot of scrutiny over the past years from social movements who have been protesting against his support of corruption, his, you know, constant resistance to actually support the people of Guatemala denying social rights, very similar to a lot of former leaders in Guatemala and Honduras in the region. And now one of his primary bases of support, which was, you know, former members of the army are now seeing that their rights actually might be impacted. What they see is their rights, their privileges that they were promised by this president. And it's just another element of this legacy of the civil war and also just the configuration of forces within Guatemala. We, you know, two years back we were covering the case of Daniel Pasqual, who is an indigenous leader from Guatemala. And he was actually facing a defamation lawsuit from someone that did serve in the civil war. He was accused of having spoken out against him. And this person, Mendez Ruiz, is part of an organization that seeks to glorify members of the army that served in the civil war in Guatemala.  We're talking about 500,000 people to 1.5 million people displaced, indigenous communities, peasant communities, over 200,000 people murdered, yet it is the members of the army who are demanding, you know, bonuses for having, you know, carried out this horrific violence. And the indigenous people that continue to fight for memory today that are facing defamation suits from these same people. So that's the update there. It's an incredible story. And I think it's well worth we follow it. After all at one level, you know, we used to say that a soldier is a peasant with a gun. And in that civil war, peasants were being killed on both sides of the barrier and, you know, the wealthy always make off quite well. I would expect there's a reason the word wealthy has well inside it. They seem to do fine. Not the peasantry. And I think that's got to be part of the way we look at the story like that. Meanwhile, in the European Council Hall, beautiful hall, multi-colored rug in Brussels, it's a gorgeous building. 27 states of the European Union are meeting. It's Angela Merkel's last meeting. They're discussing a range of issues as they, you know, normally do. At the heart of this is the conflict over Poland and this, that and the other. The story on the side, the real story that won't be on the front page of the newspaper is that the Czech Republic and Germany, Angela Merkel at the heart of this again, you know, and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis had a private meeting because they are actually very worried about the fact that 95% of the world's magnesium comes from China, 95% of the world's magnesium. Magnesium is a core input for automobile manufacturing. Germany and the Czech Republic are the two main automobile manufacturers in Europe. They are very much in dismay about the cuts in Chinese magnesium exports. Why are Chinese magnesium exports down? There are two issues here. One issue, important issue at stake in the run up lead up to the COP26 meeting in Glasgow is that the government of Xi Jinping in China is cutting back on coal-fired energy plants. This means there's actually an energy crisis inside China. Many firms are not able to get sufficient energy because of this move towards, you know, dismantling coal-fired power plants. Well, for magnesium production, you need a lot of energy. That's one issue. Second issue is the tension between Europe and China, intensified tension. The last EU-Chinese summit was in December of 2020. It was a virtual summit. Since then, March 26, the European Union decided to sanction several high members of the Chinese government. This was met with retaliation as China then sanctioned Europeans. Europe said, well, how dare you sanction our people? War of words. Earlier this week, Charles Michel of the European Council made a statement, said that he spoke with Xi Jinping in Beijing and they have committed to holding a summit, a Europe-China summit. Xi Jinping is eager to have a European Council. That means the 27 heads of government, a European Council-China summit to talk about outstanding issues. Very important move. I'm bringing you the story for several reasons. One is because as we broadcast to you, the European Council is meeting. The other reason is on Saturday, the 23rd of October, there's a no-cold war event which is on Europe and China. With important figures such as Yanis Varoufakis speaking about the current situation between Europe and China. I think it's important to pay attention to what people like Yanis Varoufakis, Meti Mola and so on are saying. If you're interested, go to the no-cold-war.org site to take a look at it. Unlikely that the people at the European Central Bank will be tuning in. Unlikely, the head of the Bundesbank, Jan Wiedmeier, has just said he is going to retire. He was the main contestant against Yanis Varoufakis' attempt for Greece to get a good deal when Varoufakis was a finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece. Well, he is now stepped down, not sure what he has in front of him. Looks like the new government in Germany will have a clean slate, will have the ability to have their own finance minister, their own head of the Bundesbank, and perhaps likely the new European Central Bank head when Christine Lagarde steps down. Lots of things for Germany. Meanwhile, they can't build their cars. They don't have enough magnesium. They're going to have to make a deal with China. Let's see how that proceeds. I'm listening to give the people what they want coming to you from People's Dispatch and Globetrotter. That's Prashant Zoe and I, Vijay. We love coming to you. This is our 50th show. Tell everybody about it. Two more shows and it's 52. I hope you will have something special on that day. Thanks a lot, friends. See you then.