Speaker 1: School of humans.
Speaker 2: Pterocarpus tinctorius is a slow growing evergreen native to the
Speaker 2: heart of southern Africa. It goes by many names padoucta, frek, barwood,
Speaker 2: and belle, and in Zambia locals call it micula. Micula
Speaker 2: is a defining feature of Zambia's landscape. It attracts pollinating bees,
Speaker 2: provides leafy greens for chips and columbus monkeys, and is
Speaker 2: a major source of shade in rural villages. And its wood,
Speaker 2: as my friend Alan Schwartz has told me, is undeniably beautiful.
Speaker 3: The thing about that janctorius is it's intensely red. It
Speaker 3: really really is bright, and that bright red color losts
Speaker 3: for a very long time.
Speaker 2: That beautiful red makes micula an attractive material for luxury furniture,
Speaker 2: cabinets and floors.
Speaker 3: It is extremely desirable in China and Vietnam. The price
Speaker 3: of it is insanely high.
Speaker 2: But the tree's desirability has been its curse.
Speaker 3: I don't think there's any left of it in the
Speaker 3: north of Nigeria or Cameroon. In the far north of Mozambique,
Speaker 3: on the border with Tanzania, there will probably no more
Speaker 3: than about two thousand cubes of standing timber, and literally
Speaker 3: within one season all of that was gone.
Speaker 2: And what's extra creepy about it is that when you
Speaker 2: cut down a micola, beads of dark red sap ooze
Speaker 2: to the surface.
Speaker 3: Mokula means the tree that bleeds, the.
Speaker 2: Tree that bleeds. For Laggers, rosewoods are like gold. In fact,
Speaker 2: the UN estimates that between two thousand and five and
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen, about thirty five percent of the place and
Speaker 2: its seized wildlife was rosewood, not ivory, not tiger bone. Rosewood. Today,
Speaker 2: Lagger's eyemacola as the next big thing. Within the past decade,
Speaker 2: they flocked to groves in Zambia. Just a few years ago,
Speaker 2: you only had to drive thirty miles outside of Zambia's
Speaker 2: capital city of Lusaka to find towering patches of mikula.
Speaker 2: Now the closest large population is more than six hundred
Speaker 2: miles away. The Zambian government has tried to stop illegal cutting.
Speaker 2: They've enacted a series of on again, off again restrictions
Speaker 2: in hopes of saving the tree. Now, Alexander von Bismarck,
Speaker 2: the guy from the last episode at the Environmental Investigation Agency.
Speaker 4: Explains Zambia responded to to really public pressure by implementing
Speaker 4: their own zero export quota or effectively a.
Speaker 2: Ban, but it didn't stick.
Speaker 4: Those bands were not worth the paper they were written on.
Speaker 4: Container after container was flowing out of Zambia to China
Speaker 4: for their demand for this red wood for redwood furniture
Speaker 4: and China.
Speaker 2: In a twenty seventeen speech, one government official stepped up
Speaker 2: to ask why.
Speaker 5: The GOVERNMENTI has a putt sit regent recitrication in place,
Speaker 5: but it was a surprise. The logging and continuous. Who
Speaker 5: does the government te think is the many cow pretty
Speaker 5: in activity?
Speaker 2: That is a good question. So in twenty seventeen, the
Speaker 2: Environmental Investigation Agency went undercover. They cooked up aliases pretending
Speaker 2: to be investors and timber traders. They wore secret cameras
Speaker 2: and microphones, and they plunged into the forest and snuck
Speaker 2: around high rise offices. They found shocked everybody. I'm Summer
Speaker 2: rain Oaks from School of Humans and iHeart podcasts. This
Speaker 2: is bad seeds. To understand what's happening in Zambia, you
Speaker 2: have to know about an event that rocked China twenty
Speaker 2: five years ago. It's nineteen ninety eight and the forecast
Speaker 2: calls for rain. First comes El Nino and then without
Speaker 2: any break, La Nina. As rain pours, sheets of snow
Speaker 2: on the Chinghai to bat Plateau start to melt, draining
Speaker 2: into China's rivers. The yank Sea, sung Hua and Nintiyong
Speaker 2: rivers swell, and for the next sixty days, floods swallow
Speaker 2: farmland and destroy homes, hospitals, and schools. More than thirty
Speaker 2: seven hundred people die, fifteen million are left homeless, just
Speaker 2: as many farmers lose their crops, and a total of
Speaker 2: two hundred and twenty three million people. Then a fifth
Speaker 2: of China's population is affected. But when it comes time
Speaker 2: to assess the damage, Chinese officials do not blame the
Speaker 2: excess rainfall. They look to the past. Because for the
Speaker 2: previous half century, China had clear cut its woodlands. In
Speaker 2: some parts, fifty percent of the forest had disappeared. The
Speaker 2: deforestation caused soil to erope. Vast blankets of silt drained
Speaker 2: into the waterways and settled, making rivers more shallow. The
Speaker 2: country's waterways couldn't hold as much rain as they used to.
Speaker 2: In other words, had helped cause the floods. The government
Speaker 2: swiftly banned logging in the country's natural forests. They started
Speaker 2: a major replanting program, and they restricted logging to a
Speaker 2: handful of state owned farms. It was one of the
Speaker 2: most dramatic conservation policies ever enacted, but it had consequences
Speaker 2: because the country's thirst for timber did not diminish. It
Speaker 2: soon became the world's top importer of wood.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: In the words of forest Trends in Ngo, the vision
Speaker 2: for a greener China may end up exporting environmental damage
Speaker 2: to other more vulnerable countries, among them Zambia.
Speaker 4: Demand from China for the Mukula tree was overwhelming and
Speaker 4: was devastating that population of tree, and that it was
Speaker 4: clear that it wasn't going to be long before it
Speaker 4: would be economically extinct and ultimately biologically extinct.
Speaker 2: In Zambia, trees are a big economic driver. The forestry
Speaker 2: sector employs one point one million people and contributes to
Speaker 2: more than five percent of the country's GDP. It's such
Speaker 2: a big deal that in Andola, the Premier League soccer
Speaker 2: club is called the Forest Rangers. The fees collected from
Speaker 2: forestry are important too. They help build hospitals and schools
Speaker 2: and keep the economy humming. As a result, most people
Speaker 2: in Zambia understand that it's important to harvest trees at
Speaker 2: a healthy pace. Overlogging could destroy all of this economic
Speaker 2: momentum because no trees means no money.
Speaker 4: The concern is that it really threatens the economic future
Speaker 4: of the country. Deforestation is identified as one of the
Speaker 4: major threats to zambia sustainability, to agriculture, to ecosystem services
Speaker 4: that are given to everybody by the landscape.
Speaker 2: Preventing deforestation is an economic priority and one of the
Speaker 2: groups responsible for helping that mission is the Zambia Forestry
Speaker 2: and forest Industries Corporation, better known as ZAFFACO.
Speaker 4: That is a longstanding company in Zambia that was really
Speaker 4: controlled by state officials.
Speaker 2: Zaffaco employs thousands of people and manages fifty thousand hectores
Speaker 2: of plantations where it grows pine and eucalyptus, making things
Speaker 2: like utility poles and fences. On their website, a slick
Speaker 2: corporate values page states we put Zaffaico's obligations above our
Speaker 2: personal interests and conduct ourselves in a manner that is
Speaker 2: beyond reproach. Now around twenty sixteen, Zaffaco was on the
Speaker 2: forefront of stopping the illegal theft of micula. The Zambian
Speaker 2: government had banned logging micula. When the FED seized illegal shipments,
Speaker 2: they handed it over to Zaffaco, who auctioned off the logs.
Speaker 2: The thinking went, if we catch you cutting micula, we'll
Speaker 2: take those logs from you. You'll get no money and
Speaker 2: then we the public will enjoy your profits. As one
Speaker 2: Zambian politician.
Speaker 6: Put it, the people need to benefit from their trees.
Speaker 6: They just can't experience the deferstration for nothing. Let mukula
Speaker 6: revenue build hospitals with mantilla doings.
Speaker 2: Zaffaco reported that they made four point three million dollars
Speaker 2: from the first seizure, all of it going to important
Speaker 2: state services.
Speaker 4: To where it is desperately needed, to schools, to hospitals,
Speaker 4: to infrastructure.
Speaker 2: In twenty seventeen, the country tightened the clamp even more,
Speaker 2: banning movement of micula locks. In a speech, ze Mbia's
Speaker 2: Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Jean Kapita, made it clear.
Speaker 7: Zambia is not going to allow any transit of mukula
Speaker 7: logs on each soil.
Speaker 2: The borders suddenly choked with trucks hauling timber. Once again,
Speaker 2: the same story played out. The logs were seized, Zaffago
Speaker 2: gained control, it auctioned them off for the people's benefit.
Speaker 2: In government, Minister Kapita rejoiced in the ban.
Speaker 7: The Mukula tree is too valuable to be left to
Speaker 7: a small part of the population to reap the benefits.
Speaker 2: Many Zambians applauded the effort too. They didn't know that
Speaker 2: undercover agents with the Environmental Investigation Agency had discovered that
Speaker 2: Zaffago was engaged in a cover up.
Speaker 4: We just heard the alarm calls four years ago or so,
Speaker 4: and there was really outrage on the ground by the
Speaker 4: people for what was having happening to their forest.
Speaker 2: Just listen to one of their secretly recorded conversations.
Speaker 8: If you really follow the trained in Zambia, individuo Chinese
Speaker 8: companies of quoting export paymits. Now the ones that are
Speaker 8: responsible in the facilitation of these export paymits, it is
Speaker 8: afficos just some very well to some mixed I must conface.
Speaker 9: It's just this Smoka.
Speaker 2: Taio Zaffaco was quote a small cartel. In the same
Speaker 2: secret recording, the source had even harsher.
Speaker 8: Words and that you felt it all comes as just
Speaker 8: the contuit of crime.
Speaker 2: A conduit of crime. The state had a dirty secret.
Speaker 2: Zaffaca wasn't just seizing a legal locks. Zaffaca was also
Speaker 2: cutting them down and then sneaking them into the stockpile
Speaker 2: of seized locks. Zaffaco, in other words, was using the
Speaker 2: seizures as a cover.
Speaker 4: It was the chief mechanism for getting the wood out
Speaker 4: of the country to China with a veneer of legality.
Speaker 2: So much for that slick company values page saying they'd
Speaker 2: put their obligations above their personal interests. The question agents
Speaker 2: had was who in government was behind the cover up.
Speaker 2: To find out, they would have to go deeper. In
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen, undercover sleuths from the Environmental Investigation Agency began
Speaker 2: tapping into Zambia's illegal macula trade. Understandably, Von Bismarck couldn't
Speaker 2: give us too many details of how exactly his agency
Speaker 2: managed to infiltrate the illicit logging operation.
Speaker 4: We have to protect our sources, particularly in the cases
Speaker 4: where the corruption is so serious that it is really
Speaker 4: very dangerous for anybody that speaks up. But generally an
Speaker 4: investigation like this we tend to go undercover to talk
Speaker 4: to people along the supply chain as fellow.
Speaker 2: Traders, pretending to be an interested buyer. An ei A
Speaker 2: agent sat down with the macula trafficker with of course
Speaker 2: his trustee recorder rolling.
Speaker 9: So what you're here? First, you trotter par so work.
Speaker 2: The agent's voice is obscured for his safety, which is
Speaker 2: why it's kind of hard to understand.
Speaker 9: We're concerning broke. Is that off or is utigal or legal?
Speaker 9: It is illegal?
Speaker 4: I bet this is h Sursport Sylvie.
Speaker 9: Now it's over people.
Speaker 2: The trafficker tells the agent that macoola trading is his
Speaker 2: business and although it's illegal, it's open. The EIA would
Speaker 2: have many more conversations like this, such as this one
Speaker 2: with a Chinese trafficker. We had some actors translate.
Speaker 9: Are there still a lot of macola trees out there?
Speaker 10: If we keep logging like this? In two years all
Speaker 10: mcoola trees will be logged in North Province.
Speaker 9: So they're almost extinct.
Speaker 10: Almost five years ago you see mcola everywhere East Province,
Speaker 10: everywhere you go. Basically now there is nothing.
Speaker 4: It's interesting when you're just having a conversation with traffickers,
Speaker 4: you know, it's kind of shooting the breeze. Business to business,
Speaker 4: you do often find people who are conflicted. We had
Speaker 4: traffickers talk about that it's very clear that that species
Speaker 4: is going to be gone very soon. So in the
Speaker 4: context of those kind of conversations that were recorded, the
Speaker 4: truth from really multiple well placed sources, meaning traders, people
Speaker 4: doing the work, the truth became pretty clear.
Speaker 2: Indeed, as the agency crept through the underworld, they discovered
Speaker 2: all the ways Zaffago laundered illegal wood. One way was
Speaker 2: through phony permits.
Speaker 4: If you are a corrupt official, there are a lot
Speaker 4: of ways you can use permits. Even when theoretically cutting
Speaker 4: is not allowed, you have the ability to use all
Speaker 4: kinds of paperwork to allow that wood to move. Hey,
Speaker 4: you've got a band in place, but this is an
Speaker 4: exceptional permit or a special permit, or it is covering
Speaker 4: maybe a fallen wood from a storm.
Speaker 2: In the words of one trafficker whose testimony is in
Speaker 2: the EIA's final report, Zaffago was even in charge of
Speaker 2: some logging.
Speaker 11: It's always their own locked wood. They'll handle the logging.
Speaker 11: After you paid, you go to their concession and load
Speaker 11: your trucks. They will handle the exporting permit and you're
Speaker 11: good to go.
Speaker 2: The report says that Zaffaco was quote allowing anyone with
Speaker 2: enough money and high level connections to secretly export freshly
Speaker 2: cut makola logs out of Zambia. The anyone with enough
Speaker 2: money bit is key. Another trafficker stated.
Speaker 10: If you are not willing to pay, I won't be
Speaker 10: able to get you this permit. Mukula itself does not
Speaker 10: cost a loss of money, only five thousand dollars per container.
Speaker 10: Transport costs another eight thousand US dollars. The rest is
Speaker 10: government fees.
Speaker 2: By fees, he means bribes.
Speaker 4: Getting those permits ended up costing around fifteen thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: so more than half of the value of a container
Speaker 4: was spent on getting these illegal permits. Making payments to
Speaker 4: officials to cover for entirely illegally stolen.
Speaker 2: Would and there was really only one way to even
Speaker 2: pay those bribes.
Speaker 10: If you have connections with higher level relations, you can
Speaker 10: get an export permit with Zipico.
Speaker 2: You needed to know people with high level relations. Zaffaco,
Speaker 2: in other words, was not just a government agency that
Speaker 2: had gone rogue. The fake permits were coming from higher up, and,
Speaker 2: as one trafficker described, only for special people.
Speaker 9: You could hold you with higher.
Speaker 4: Help you of course number three number.
Speaker 9: Or meeting.
Speaker 2: That audio is tough to hear, so if you missed
Speaker 2: any the traffickers justs that you have to be connected
Speaker 2: to the country's third highest government official, Zambia's then Justice minister.
Speaker 2: That's when von Bismarck realized something that the bans on
Speaker 2: Micula were part of an even greater conspiracy.
Speaker 4: Controls were simply used by the most powerful to control
Speaker 4: the trade, rather than to actually stop the trade. It
Speaker 4: was being used really as a way to limit the
Speaker 4: trade to the most powerful.
Speaker 2: The EIA realized if it was going to get to
Speaker 2: the bottom of the Mcula heist, its agents would have
Speaker 2: to work their way up to the highest rungs of
Speaker 2: Zambia's government. It started by finding a foot soldier among
Speaker 2: the country's political elite.
Speaker 4: I am in the system.
Speaker 11: I wake in the system, I wake in the governments.
Speaker 2: The government worker offered agents help with paperwork, export permits, certificates,
Speaker 2: all of it illegal, and he didn't stop there. The
Speaker 2: worker explained how the logs would be shipped, where they'd
Speaker 2: be shipped, the corrupt customs agent they'd meet at the port,
Speaker 2: and how to properly misdeclare the wood on documents to
Speaker 2: trick clean agents, but you still needed approval from higher up.
Speaker 2: You had to pay so called fee. When agents talked
Speaker 2: with a Chinese trafficker, they got some helpful advice on
Speaker 2: who exactly to talk to.
Speaker 9: How did you get the logs out?
Speaker 1: We are one of the three exputters who got the
Speaker 1: permise there. We were able to get containers out of
Speaker 1: Zambia since then.
Speaker 9: So you've been shipping out for a year.
Speaker 1: Yes, we had been in this business for over ten
Speaker 1: years in Zambia.
Speaker 12: Did you mention last time that you were partnering with
Speaker 12: the Minister of Land and Natural Resources? Yes, female minister. Yes,
Speaker 12: her name is Capita.
Speaker 2: Yes, Jeane Capita, the Minister of Land Lands and Natural Resources,
Speaker 2: the same person who you might remember gave a speech
Speaker 2: in Poland celebrating the mccoola band calling the wood quote
Speaker 2: too valuable for just a small part of the population
Speaker 2: to reap the benefits. It turns out that small part
Speaker 2: of the population she was a part of it. I
Speaker 2: want to share two numbers with you that are going
Speaker 2: to make you see the world a little differently. Fifteen
Speaker 2: to thirty. That is fifteen to thirty percent of all
Speaker 2: the wood on the market right now is illegal.
Speaker 4: Throughout human history, for as have been a real problem
Speaker 4: because they're difficult to know what's going on inside them,
Speaker 4: and when you have huge demand on one side of
Speaker 4: the world for a certain tree in a deep forest,
Speaker 4: it still becomes pretty easy to steal it.
Speaker 2: Corruption is everyone. In Romania, the police tasked with monitoring
Speaker 2: illegal logging, that is, the group designed to track corruption,
Speaker 2: are themselves allegedly corrupt by organized criminals. In Eastern Russia,
Speaker 2: mafioso's were recently caught supplying a legal hardwood to Americans,
Speaker 2: eventually selling stolen wood to your local lumber liquidator's store.
Speaker 2: The stories go on. A governor in Peru, the vice
Speaker 2: president of Gabon, the environment minister in Brazil. According to
Speaker 2: the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, most government
Speaker 2: workers who get caught committing wildlife crimes are just foot soldiers,
Speaker 2: a third are police, nineteen percent work in administration, and
Speaker 2: seven percent are elected officials. To von Bismarck, he could
Speaker 2: understand why someone on the lower rungs might be seduced
Speaker 2: by illegal logging. They need the money.
Speaker 4: I think you have different motivations, and you have different
Speaker 4: situations along this.
Speaker 2: Chain, but it's those with power, those with money, that
Speaker 2: he's most disappointed by.
Speaker 4: Those are the decision makers in that chain that are
Speaker 4: particularly tragic, that have the power to say no and
Speaker 4: don't do it.
Speaker 2: In Zambia, high level government, while giving speeches about the
Speaker 2: dangers of the makola trade, were not only in direct
Speaker 2: talks with the traffickers, but we're extorting them. EIA agents
Speaker 2: talked to one Chinese trafficker who complained that the bribes
Speaker 2: were so high that only wealthy traffickers could afford them.
Speaker 10: The export permit is very expensive, actually, to some extent,
Speaker 10: is more expensive than buying the product and bringing it
Speaker 10: here to Lusaka, because that's how Zifhko has done it.
Speaker 10: If they are telling you to produce fifteen thousand dollars,
Speaker 10: where do I get that money? It means they are
Speaker 10: telling me don't do the business. That it is for
Speaker 10: the big boys.
Speaker 12: So fifteen thousand dollars is the price you have to
Speaker 12: pay for the document? Yes, okay, So does the government
Speaker 12: actually have that money, Does that go into the country
Speaker 12: or does it just get pocketed.
Speaker 10: That's for the big boys. They want to make money themselves.
Speaker 10: It's not for everyone. It's for them, the big boys
Speaker 10: and the big girls.
Speaker 9: Are there just a few big people or many a few.
Speaker 2: I think just five, just five people all the way
Speaker 2: at the top, making fifteen thousand dollars per illegal permit.
Speaker 2: So agents kept plugging to see if they could get
Speaker 2: names besides gen Kappata and the Justice minister, and they
Speaker 2: got one Lungu Tasila lunguores.
Speaker 9: Everything.
Speaker 2: The mccula scheme was far bigger than Zaffago and much
Speaker 2: bigger than a few dirty ministers. It went all the
Speaker 2: way to the top, to the President's daughter and to
Speaker 2: the President of Zambia, Edgar Lungo himself. According to these
Speaker 2: MKULA dealers, the daughter was allegedly the glue of the operation,
Speaker 2: the vital person linking most traffickers with the highest level
Speaker 2: of government, including the president.
Speaker 5: They have Mukula take it devided by the dutta of
Speaker 5: the man, the dutta of the president.
Speaker 11: Whatever comes, she gets faced.
Speaker 9: Or fists, so someone pays to the president.
Speaker 2: The answer, they alleged was yes, I don't.
Speaker 10: Give money to the president directly. I bred those who
Speaker 10: are above minister's.
Speaker 12: Level, above the ministers, so you don't have to pay
Speaker 12: the ministers.
Speaker 10: I have a good connection with people around president who
Speaker 10: collect money for him.
Speaker 2: According to a report by the Zambia newspaper News Diggers,
Speaker 2: the president allegedly surrounded himself with people who collected money
Speaker 2: on his behalf, people who acted quote like the president's housekeeper.
Speaker 2: Another person in the conspiracy who worked in government, explained
Speaker 2: it succinctly, quote we are protected by the party, by
Speaker 2: the government.
Speaker 4: The corruption was so high level that the paperwork could
Speaker 4: be really seem pristine enough to get through even neighboring
Speaker 4: countries that are supposed to not allow that trade.
Speaker 2: So here's a fun fact. In Zambia, you could go
Speaker 2: to jail for three years for criticizing the president. The
Speaker 2: country's libel laws are a strict clamp on the freedom
Speaker 2: of the press, preventing everybody from opinion call to TV satirist,
Speaker 2: even regular citizens from criticizing the head of state. So
Speaker 2: when the EIA's report came out, they got sued.
Speaker 4: A few individuals ever mentioned in the report sued us
Speaker 4: for libel and we made clear that we stand entirely
Speaker 4: by the evidence that is very plainly available in the report.
Speaker 4: Since then there's been more evidence, evidence that has been
Speaker 4: presented that really corroborates the findings.
Speaker 2: Zaffaco has denied any wrongdoing. Gene Kapita, who currently is
Speaker 2: being investigated under corruption charges, has called the EIA's report fake,
Speaker 2: and to Sila Lungu, the president's daughter who is reportedly
Speaker 2: at the center of the cabal, stated I have not,
Speaker 2: at any juncture been involved in either of the alleged
Speaker 2: criminal transactions. And beyond putting Zambia's political leaders on the defensive,
Speaker 2: EIA's work sent shockwaves elsewhere too. In twenty nineteen, it's
Speaker 2: reporting helped make mcuola an internationally protected species. Unfortunately, the
Speaker 2: illegal trade appears to continue. For every micuola tree Zambia
Speaker 2: claims to send, China receives about six and those numbers
Speaker 2: just don't add up.
Speaker 4: The demand is still there, so the motive is not
Speaker 4: entirely removed, and so the question is do we put
Speaker 4: the mechanisms in place to be able to.
Speaker 9: Stay on top of it.
Speaker 2: The micuola trade in Zambia brings in an estimated seven
Speaker 2: point five million dollars in bribes every year. To stop it,
Speaker 2: the first aim is to educate people. People like you
Speaker 2: and me.
Speaker 4: So it's right to point fingers and some real criminal elements,
Speaker 4: but we have to be very aware of our own role.
Speaker 4: US consumers and European consumers are incredible financiers of the
Speaker 4: same kind of destruction and corruption. Because they don't, we
Speaker 4: don't have the motivation to ask the extra question of
Speaker 4: where does our furniture come from? What is really the
Speaker 4: impact at the beginning.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, places like the EIA are coming up
Speaker 2: with tricks to stop the trade.
Speaker 4: In some places, we had some great breakthroughs. In Romania,
Speaker 4: for example, ethical hackers worked on a system that allows
Speaker 4: you to see every logging truck move in real time
Speaker 4: and tested against other data sets to determine its legality.
Speaker 4: We've seen now in places that were beset by illegal
Speaker 4: logging the really mind blowing opportunity to take a picture
Speaker 4: of a logging truck's license plate and within seconds be
Speaker 4: able to determine whether that truck was legal or illegal.
Speaker 2: Those technologies can be game changers, but so can the
Speaker 2: ballot box. Today Zambia has a new president and new ministers.
Speaker 2: Time and investigations will tell if the culture might change
Speaker 2: with them.
Speaker 4: It's about political will and I think we can do
Speaker 4: it if people want to.
Speaker 2: Coming up.
Speaker 9: The plants that occur here, many of them her nowhere
Speaker 9: else in the world.
Speaker 2: The vote underground is actually within half me to thick
Speaker 2: reinforced concrete. The idea was it could withstand a plane
Speaker 2: going down.
Speaker 4: They hated him down in Brazil. They thought you had
Speaker 4: raped the nation. He was the devil incarnate.
Speaker 2: I'm Summer rain Oaks join us again next time for
Speaker 2: Bad Seeds. Bad Seeds is a production of School of
Speaker 2: Humans and iHeart Podcasts. I'm your host Mriine Oakes. Lucas
Speaker 2: Riley is our writer, Gabby Watts is our producer, and
Speaker 2: Amelia Brock is our senior producer. Fact Checking is by
Speaker 2: Savannah Hugely and Zoe Farrow. Original music is by Claire Campbell.
Speaker 2: Sound design and score is by Jesse Niswanger. Our show
Speaker 2: art is by Pam Peacock. Development was by Brian Lavin
Speaker 2: and Jacob Selzer. Special thanks to our voice actors Kate Lew,
Speaker 2: Carl Zoo, Patrick Matukua, Muiza Simwanza, Amo Sakapu, Suzie Zulu
Speaker 2: and Lee Sandford. Executive producers are Brian Lavin, Elsie Crowley,
Speaker 2: Brandon Barr, Virginia Prescott, and Jacob Selzer