March 6, 2025 • 49 mins
Look around you as you listen to tonight's episode -- how far did these objects travel to meet you here? In centuries past, the average person would be surrounded by local objects. Today, the most mundane of possessions may have traveled more than halfway across the world to become your fabrics, your electronic components, your favorite snacks. Make no mistake: The world as we know it will collapse if our species stops shipping things across the planet. Global trade is dangerously close to a religion -- literally every nation has a set of laws applying to the passage of goods. So why are these laws so easily broken? Why do the same nations and conglomerates touting 'rule of law' seem to obey another set of rules?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are on the road, traveling abroad,
and that's part of why we have had a lot
of classic episodes to share with you lately. This one,
this one, I think speaks to us as well as
our guest producer, Matt the Madman Stillo Ben.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Have you ever thought about flights as just being another
form of cargo shipping where humans are the cargo.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think about most forms of transit with humans as
the cargo, people moving right, Yes, yes, just like a podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Cargo ships move people. Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And there are many, many, very interesting and varying in
in provenance and accuracy conspiracy theories around the world, the
wide world of shipping.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, let me be honest with you, guys. Noel, Matt,
Rachel back here.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
We we got to give Rachel and nickname.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I don't know if we have think about this, but
after a long journey, especially returning home, I can look
at the most mundane of objects, say maybe a handwritten
note of places to visit and cutter, and just marvel
at how far this thing traveled to arrive at my hand.
You know, it reminds me of the scene and no
(01:19):
country for old men right where Sugar is talking to
the gas station attendant. Sugar, Yeah, and they have a
They weirdly enough, don't talk about a strange haircut. Instead,
they talk about how far this quarter traveled through toime.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, it's true, I mean pocket change. Especially when you
look at you know, coins that are quite old. You
think about the story behind it and all of the
places and people's possessions that it's been in over the years,
and there's a whole story to that. But shipping and
the logistics of shipping in and of itself, it's obviously
a very ancient, you know, profession and has come a
(01:54):
very very long way and determined the course of civilization
as we know it. Make no mistake, folks, current civilization,
this whole group project we call humanity, will collapse if
people stop shipping things. We literally just did an episode
of our other show, Ridiculous History about the US camel
(02:15):
Core and how during the Civil War logistics of moving
supply supply chain was absolutely crucial to the war effort.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yes, and if you look at our previous episodes on
things like freeports, which we did after tonight's classic episode,
you will see that the world is not just inundated
with shipping routes, some of very ancient provenance, like the
Silk Road. Later now the precedent for the Belton Road
(02:44):
initiative being built across the world via China. What you
will see is that there's this whole regime of laws,
and they are complicated, they are in a ven diagram,
they're weirdly connected, and everybody breaks those laws.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Which that was a really good post, by the way,
very intense.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
He just looked directly into the camera when he said that,
and he was kind of moving his hands around some
invisible orb of energy.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I loved it. Thank you, Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So. In twenty nineteen, we got together with our brother
Matt Frederick and we asked, why are there so many conspiracies,
specifically about shipping stuff around the world.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Remember the Wayfair conspiracy. Sure did we talk about that
in this episode. We can't remember mention.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It may have been outside of the scope of Rider
hadn't happened yet.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
There was furniture as a code, Furniture.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
As a code, the idea that this company Wayfair, that
ship's kind of ikea fied furniture, you know, sort of
faux mid century modern types.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
That I've got some.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Wayfair stuff that they were in the human trafficking trade, right,
the idea that certain certain specific brand names may indeed
be an indicator for villains in the know, and that
they were actually per seeing human cargo. Yeah, and I
mean just the human trafficking aspect of it is fascinating
in and of itself. There's a whole season of the
(04:07):
fantastic HBO series The Wire that revolved around sex workers
being trafficked into the United States in chipping containers and
a horrific situation involving many of them passing away because
they were deprived of oxygen and they were, you know,
sitting on a loading dock for an undetermined amount of time.
And that was sort of the inciting action of that season.
(04:29):
And it really speaks to the crime aspect of shipping
and moving cargo and of course people.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And to put it in an even simpler use case,
here another conspiracy that is completely legal. This one is
afore all the vexillologists out there on the bans of flags. Yes,
it is completely legal to have a ship that is
flagged as a ship operating under the auspice of one country. However,
the crew is from a conglomeration of other countries. However,
(04:59):
the people who built the ship or from a different country. However,
the folks that in the origin and destination are from.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Look machinations within machinations.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm just saying, there's a lot of sandbox to play in,
and we want to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
And a lot of sands to these very very real conspiracies,
in addition to some that maybe hold a little bit
less sand. But Ben, before we roll this tape, I
do have to ask, since you said vexillologists, we were
having a little moment outside getting some air at this
conference here websumm at Qatar, and you hipped me to
another term for people who collect matchbooks, voluminousvolluminists.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, there you go. So let's get into the episode
of good. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
They call me Ben, and you're joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control Decat Most importantly, you
are here and that makes this stuff They don't want
you to know. A question for you guys at the
top of the show, have either of you all started
ordering holiday gifts things of that nature.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
No, I have not.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah, I'm one of those last minute is the best
minute types myself when it comes to this. But we
know that we are entering one of the busiest shipping
periods in the year for at least the domestic US
and a lot of other countries where in the Christian
celebration of Christmas is common, right, And the weird thing
(06:51):
is that although we always think about shipping and the
passage of letters and goods during this time of year,
it's an ongoing, twenty four to seven, three hundred and
sixty five days a year operation and it's huge. The
evidence about the enormity of this industry is all around you. Specifically,
(07:14):
you look around as you're listening to this episode. Where
does all this stuff around you come from? We are
today recording in the legendary stuff you should know studio,
I say legendary.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Can we say legendary?
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah? It is certainly. Yeah, first show to hit a
billion downloads, it's a legend. And we're looking at pictures
of Josh and Chuck all around us.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Mmmmmmmm.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
And there are a couple of a couple of cameos
of other non SISK people here. Let's say, I think
that's Jonathan Strickland there the back left of Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
And all of these were shipped to our offices.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, that's correct. And if you look around your neck
of the Global Woods, whatever room or environment you find
yourself in today, it's strange to think about how much
of this stuff came from so far away. You see,
centuries ago, most of the possessions the average person had
would probably be locally made. But nowadays even the most
(08:11):
mundane items may come from halfway across the planet. We're
talking towels, chess sets.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Any consumer good really that is created out of either
plastic or metal.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And Matt, you and Paul and I went through a
period a few years back where, for reasons we don't
need to get in the weeds about, we were getting
a lot of technological stuff from China, from a place
called Monoprice. Remember that I do recall, and I would
be so baffled because some of this was relatively sophisticated equipment.
(08:48):
I would be so baffled to think that the economy
was so complicated it was cheaper for us to buy
something from China oceans away that it was to buy
something from say, California. It's true, and so we're going
(09:09):
to look into shipping today, but perhaps not in the
way you might assume. And to get us to the dark,
murky exploration of today's episode, we're going to have to
start with things that are absolutely true. So here are
the facts.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
So the Post Office nowadays, on podcast ads and other
places alike, is often maligned, though the ads have lessened
quite a bit in the past few years. But you know,
when you imagine the post Office and going to visit
there to send something out, that's one thing. But then
(09:49):
when you imagine the orchestration that is required to get things,
whether it's just a simple letter or package of weighs
one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another,
it's an incredibly difficult task that they're faced with, and
they do it every day. Before the United States Post Office,
(10:10):
you have to imagine you were putting things on a
railcar a lot of times and then sending it off.
You were putting it on a person who was riding
horseback for a long time.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, that's right. Before these state levels shipping institutions existed,
moving goods from one place to another was a just
one long trust fall. You'd have to find a private courier.
That courier would have to make their own way from
point A to point B. We're talking, you know, we're
talking like European history, the history of ancient empires. This courier,
(10:46):
if they made it from point A to point B,
would take a long time, especially if it wasn't from
if point A was in a different city, country, or
region than point B. If you were lucky months later,
then we get back to you.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, I remember. All that includes personal security of the courier.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Right right. It depends upon that, and it depends upon
the trustworthiness the dependability of the courier. If this courier
disappeared for one reason or another, your sol as everybody understands,
this is a family show. And thus that stands for
sorely out of luck. In the US, the gold Rush
and the westward expansion led to a fundamental shift in shipping.
(11:29):
Things like the pony Express that you mentioned earlier, Matt.
Those things failed, they were bought up or they simply
went away. Other giants rose, like Wells Fargo, which some
people may not know. Wells Fargo did not begin as
a bank. It began as a shipping interest.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
Yeah, they brought carriages into the mix.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
They also retained that logo iconic. What colors are those?
Yellow and red?
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Orange?
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I just see the red, okay, just see the red.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
But because of these things, soon it was possible to
reliably send goods and letters from one end of the
continent to the next, and the rise of the transcontinental
railroad played a huge role in that in this country,
and ever since then, shipping and transportation have evolved in
step with one another, and eventually this created the massive
(12:24):
interconnected trade sphere we all enjoy the benefits and drawbacks
of today. This sphere ranges across public entities and private companies.
Things are carried by automobile, aircraft, cargo, ship, on foot,
and even occasionally here in twenty nineteen, via livestock.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Nice like beast a burden I mean too bad for
the beast, I guess, which feels like a derogatory term,
but the animals. And think about it this way, there
is a very very much distinct possibility that the components
the things that make up the electronics you're using right now,
(13:05):
your laptop, whatever it is you're using your phone, maybe
to listen to this. They have traveled further around the
world than you may ever.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
That's true. That's true. They came a long way to
see you.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Also, we're in a situation such that it makes more
economic sense for these long trips to occur, more so
than you would think. One famous example concerns fish in Scotland.
It is economically more feasible for fish to be caught
(13:38):
in Scotland shipped to China for processing, you know, to
filet of the fish and so on, and then shipped
back to Scotland than it does to have the fish
processed in Scotland.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's weird, right, yeah, that it boggles the mind.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It does. And one of the primary players in this
story is something called containerization, which I know sounds like
a buzzword, made up term, but it describes this process.
We've all seen those looming rectangular containers on the backs
of tractor trailers on train cars, rusting away in weird
(14:16):
industrial areas, or maybe being repurposed to be a chic
hipster cocktail bar or something those things are ubiquitous, They're everywhere.
Each one of these shipping containers is a tiny vital
piece forming the backbone, or perhaps the circulatory system of
the world's trade economy. Containerization basically, it's a system that
(14:39):
standardizes these containers such that they can fit on the
majority of things that will transport them. You can fit them,
You can fit x amount of them on a cargo ship.
From there, you can break up that load of containers
to ship some via tractor trailers. We have a ton
of truckers in our audience and people who work in shipping.
(15:00):
So first off, you are unsung heroes. Thank you very
much for keeping this strange house of cards from collapsing.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Absolutely and also shout out to all you lorry drivers out.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
There and lorry drivers as well. So this concept of containerization,
this great standardization of shipping containers, dates back centuries, right,
goes back to the seventeen hundreds. I want to say,
in the coal mining regions of England it really hits
its boom, and it goes worldwide after World War Two,
(15:34):
and this boom has continued. We have the numbers to
prove it.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
Yes, in the world of shipping, the cargo ship stands
ahead above all others. It is the king. According to
the International Maritime Organization, ninety percent of everything shipped in
the world, everything shipped in the world, is on a
cargo vessel at some point.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
That's bizarre. Ninety percent of every everything, not ninety percent
of tickle me elmos, not ninety percent of your favorite
vinyl reissues, ninety percent of everything. There are over twenty
million shipping containers in the world. We actually don't know
how many there are anymore, because we built them so quickly.
(16:18):
They're somewhere right now as you listen to this, between
five or six million that are on the road or
on the ship at sea, all across the planet. In total,
these cargo containers, as individual boxes, make about two hundred
million trips per year they get around. This works out
(16:41):
to more than eleven billion tons of stuff. Etches, sketches, volvos, grain,
different cereals, oil, pictures of Christopher walkin, whatever you can
imagine it has been on a cargo ship at some point.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
All those stuff they don't want you to know, t shirts.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Right, they're out floating somewhere by Diego Gard as we speak, right.
So there are some downsides though, because we mentioned everyone
enjoys the benefits of this, but we also just briefly
alluded to some drawbacks.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Yeah, there are certainly downsides to this whole system. About
ten thousand containers get lost at sea every year. Imagine
that just it fell over the side. Guys, I don't
know what to tell you or all that ship, Eh,
we can't find it.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yes, yes, we see different examples of this in economic anecdotes.
Sure one of them would be the story of the
rubber Ducks. Did you ever hear about this?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
I've read that book, The Small The Short Book by
Carl No. I can't remember who wrote it, but it's
a book about ten little rubber ducks that fell overboard
when they were being shipped across the sea.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, a little bit less than twenty nine thousand rubber
ducks were lost in nineteen ninety two because a cargo
ship container tumbled into the North Pacific. I think the
number was around twenty eighty eight hundred, and the rubber
ducks were packaged with other bath toys. They were headed
(18:15):
from China to the US, but the currents took them
and they actually provided a great deal of insight for oceanographers,
people who study ocean currents and Arctic geography, and they
were able to learn more about how currents functioned because
they just had to follow the ducks.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
That's amazing because it's literally the story of Eric Carl's
ten Little rubber Ducks. Well, this story I've been reading
to my son forever.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Well, it appears it is nonfiction, or at least based
on a true story. There's another drawback, which is that
these cargo ships generate a great deal of pollution. They
emit an estimated seven hundred nine ninety six million tons
of carbon dioxide that was in twenty twelve, and while
(19:06):
the number, while people are working to bring that number down,
it's it's a hard economic cost. There's not really way
to move around it. Because you see, despite those drawbacks,
despite the fact that we lose ten thousand containers at
least of stuff a year, it's still more efficient to
(19:26):
move it that way than it is by shipping it
via land or air.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Just the way.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It's geography, it's the way the continents work.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
It's geography, and it's mass. Like if you even if
you have giant airplanes that can carry a proportion of
what would be on a shipping container ship. That's so
weird to say you couldn't carry as you know, you
couldn't get as much across for the price. It's it's obvious,
and you obviously can't get to certain parts of land
(19:54):
from other parts of land when there's a giant ocean
in between.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Right until we create a global road network, Yes, this
is a possibility, but it's still very very much not plausible.
One day, one day it's yeah, it's it's strange because
compared to the energy expended moving stuff via plane or truck,
(20:19):
shipping is actually far less damaging in terms of greenhouse
gases released when you ship stuff via cargo ship. If
you send a container from say Shanghai to France, you
emit fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the
container from one place in France to another. Wow, it's
(20:40):
weird when you think about it. It's it's again it's
a problem of scale, and there is absolutely no question, folks,
this is a massive, gargantuan industry. It employs millions of
people and it moves billions of dollars. The world economy
as we know it would be gone without global shipping,
right we would enter a dark age.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It is the backbone right now of our society, whether
whether we want to believe that or not.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
It's weird, yeah yeah, just as the US economy would
collapse without shipping companies or state institutions like the usps UPS, FedEx,
of course, and so on. But here's our question for today,
and it's a question we encounter anytime we contemplate any
system of this size. What if there's more behind the curtain.
(21:32):
What doesn't the shipping industry want you to know?
Speaker 4 (21:35):
And we'll get to it right after a word from
our sponsor and we're back. Then let's get in to
the people who want to either take stuff away from
our shipping containers or smuggle something through our shipping systems.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Here's where it gets crazy. This industry is cartoonishly crooked.
It is so crooked and so corrupt. And let's look
at a couple of specific examples here. First, smuggling. Doubtlessly,
smuggling is one of the first things we think of
when we think of crime and the transportation of goods.
(22:21):
It's a big business, and business is great for smugglers
and traffickers. Whether we are talking the smuggling of drugs,
the smuggling of weapons, the tragic and heartbreaking trafficking of people.
It's probably not going to stop. With the sheer volume
of activity occurring at every single second, at every single
(22:44):
level of the global trade network, authorities are at the
very least hard press to discover, apprehend, and prosecute the
criminals involved. It doesn't help right that, unlike street level dealers,
groups or individuals with the capital to operate international smuggling
rings are not only overwhelmingly well off, they're often connected
(23:07):
to state level actors or enormous private entities also known
as the same people who are tasked with on paper
stopping these crimes from recurring.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Or even low level people within those systems that they
know are at certain strategic places. Yikes. So let's consider
a specific story to kind of look closer into this.
So let's go back to July twenty eleven, the Guyan,
which is a ship. It was seized by US customs
(23:38):
after authorities found twenty tons twenty tons of cocaine aboard.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Or was it eighteen tons?
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Oh, it makes a massive difference, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
This is so this happens pretty frequently in drug busts,
and I think it's hilarious, and I think a lot
of people listening are going to agree with us here.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
Why would two to go missing?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Have you ever noticed? Have you ever noticed when there's
a large bust of illicit drugs the numbers get kind
of kind of fudgy real quick.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
It was twenty, but you know, we just reweighted it
was just eighteen. I guess we made an error.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
You know, heat of the moment.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
Cheez, that's a yeah. We're not accusing anyone here, We're
just saying, maybe it's a bit of a pattern.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
I'm not accusing, I am observing a pattern. Sure, Yeah,
no one ever. You never see a drug bust where
someone says, oh, we thought we we thought we found
five hundred pounds of marijuana, but actually it was five
hundred and sixty. Yeah. No, the number never goes up.
It always fudges down.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Anyhow, So let's get back to that twenty or eighteen
tons of coke.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Right, For comparison, eighteen tons of cocaine, that's about the
size of three full grown African bull elephants, And that
translates the cocaine, not the elephants, to an estimated street
value of over over one billion dollars us yi. So
yay for customs. They caught this, right, they caught this.
(25:11):
They seize the craft.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
The what is it called, the Mediterranean Shipping Shipping Company's Guyan.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
The MSc Guyang. Things got complicated very quickly. You see,
the MSc Guyan is a Liberian flagged vessel. That means
it sales under the flag of the country Liberia. But
it is not owned nor operated by a Liberian company. Instead,
it's operated by that company. You just give a shout
(25:38):
out to Matt the Mediterranean Shipping Co. They are a
Switzerland based global shipping conglomerate.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Hold on a second, So it's the Mediterranean Shipping Company
with a Liberian flag.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Based in Switzerland, Okay, and they only sort of own it, right,
It gets sketch and sketcher as we ascend the ladder
of ownership and profit. The vessel was financed by JP Morgan,
who what you may recognize from some earlier episodes.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
In New York City.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Right, the two companies structured the purchase of this vessel
such that the ship was quote, we'll have to unpack
this owned by client assets in a transportation strategy fund
run for JP Morgan's asset management arm. What right exactly
(26:36):
who really owns this at the end of the day.
Where does the check get sent to? You know what
I mean? Where does it whose bank account ultimately collects
whatever margin of profit is here. It's a strange question.
JP Morgan, by the way, has at the time of recording,
refused to release a public statement regarding this.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
And look, we don't know where all that coke came from,
but it was not us.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Right, and said, yeah, look guys, we had nothing to
do with that twenty six tons of cocaine. And they're like, oh,
we thought it was eighteen.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
They go, oh, interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Wrong number.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Uh this is J. D.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Horgan.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Yeah, there's not the one you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yeah, we're technically a river bank, not a financial institution.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I'm pretty sure you're looking for HSBC. They're they're the ones.
It's HSBC, is what I said It HSBC.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I can't hear you, so I hope that's how it works.
You know, at some point in history there was someone
who was part of an otherwise legitimate financial institution, maybe
in the days of like telegraphs or something, who totally
faked that their equivalent of a phone wasn't working. Yep,
oh sorry, we thought it was a then a dot, then.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
A dash, our dinner daughter was just not working.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And then the great depression. But it's true they've been
tremendously cagey about this because we see this interlocking system
of ownership which, without profiling too hard, I want to say,
it feels very much like a shell game. It feels
(28:16):
very much like a way to maximize profit while avoiding liability, sure,
which is what companies do well.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
And they just happened to get caught.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
They just happened to get caught. Yeah, this single bust
is part of an ongoing investigation, so we don't know
all the details about it. You can see some low
level and some pretty high level crew members who were
implicated in bringing a board parcels of cocaine off the
coast of Peru, but as far as the person who
(28:47):
organized brokeered the whole deal. The reason the coke interest
in Peru knew where the ship was going to be,
and the reason people in the ship got I think
one guy got just as little as fifty thousand dollars
for helping load it on, which sounds like great money
until you know you're going to jail. Yea, these people
(29:09):
have been implicable. There's no one has found the puppet
master yet. And while this was a big bus, this.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Was not.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Anomalous by virtue of simply being a drug bust because
the US Customs and Border Protection claims that they are
busting people left and right every day.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
The US Customs and Border Protection claim that they sees
an average or seized an average of four thousand, six
hundred and fifty seven pounds of narcotics every day. That's
a lot, not quite eighteen tons, but it's a lot.
And again we've talked about this before. It really is
just one of those things that cannot occur without help
from somebody somewhere, some kind of corruption.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Right, this leads us to another dark side of the industry,
and we'll dive into it after a word from ours sponsor.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
So the shipping industry, probably since the first boat was made,
or the first moon, not the first boat, since the
first laws were made by some authority saying thou shalt
give me a cut right of whatever this pie is
in question. Ever since that moment, corruption has existed every
(30:30):
time somebody makes let's think of it as light and
shadow right. Every time somebody makes a law that exists
in the light, a law with transparency, you know what
I mean, there is another practice, an analog to that,
a shadow law that will exist in the criminal community
(30:50):
or in the underground. That's why we have all these
old tropes about honor among thieves and whether or not
it exists. That's why you hear MAF you also talk
about a code of one sort or another. Because human
beings inherently attempt to impose order upon any sort of
(31:12):
interaction with the world around them or with the people
they meet. The shipping industry is going to be cursed
with corruption for the foreseeable future because of a few
very easily explained reasons. First, the crews in these vessels
have a really tough job. They make thousands of stops
at ports all around the world every year, and these
(31:36):
ports are in numerous countries, very very different countries. Every
single one has its own distinct set of laws and
legal systems, and as anyone can assure you, the rule
of law is not the same in every country. Like
here in the US, if you are not wealthy, then
(31:56):
the rule of law is pretty secure. Odds of getting
in trouble for murdering someone are pretty high. Again, if
you're not wealthy. If you are wealthy, then you have
a different set you have a set of shadow laws,
just like we described before. But these folks, these captains
and crews of these ships will not only go to
(32:20):
places with vastly different sets of laws, social mores, legal systems,
things like that, different institutions they have to interact with,
they also encounter tremendous bureaucracy, right.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Oh yeah, I mean in all kinds of different ship inspections.
Every time, or mostly when they go into port, there's
going to be some kind of inspection, some kind of
immigration or customs that they have to deal with just
by even entering a port. And there are also you know,
different environmental concerns in the varying countries that you're going
to encounter as well. And you have to imagine, you know,
(32:55):
during these inspections, right, you're on this ship, you're the captain,
you're the crew. You show up. Now, this whole other
team comes through and runs these inspections, right, and a
lot of times, just to get through that inspection, or
maybe even to have someone look the other way, that's
just hypothetically about some discrepancy in the weight of certain cargo.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Sure, are the screams coming from a container?
Speaker 4 (33:23):
Yeah, maybe that too. But you would have to bribe
this team of people coming in from whichever country you're
going to.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
And even if you are not shipping anything illicit, even
if you're not doing anything illegal, you may still have
to participate in this bribery system just to get through
your date. Because refusing to pay these I'm going to
keep calling you seeing shadowy. Refusing to pay these shadow
taxes will lead to at the very least delays, sometimes
(33:51):
huge delays. And you have to understand when these people
are operating, that last port of call that they just
went to is one in a series of ports, so
there's a very very high chance of a domino effect
if they don't get to leave on time. They are
also punitive fines that will be legally defended by the
country in which the port exists, and these finds. Can
(34:13):
you know, It's like they used to say about law
enforcement officers in the US that if an l e
O wants to write you a ticket for something, they
will find something. While that may not be one hundred
percent true, it's absolutely true, and a lot of these ports.
The worst case scenario is that refusal to participate in
(34:33):
this bribery system can result in physical harm to the crew,
maybe even fatalities. The typical euphemism for bribery, we hope
you enjoy this, and we hope you have examples of
your own is a facilitation payment. A facilitation payment?
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Oh yeah, you doing No, that's right, that's great. We're
gonna get you out of here like aty split. We
just got to get this little facilitation payment going first.
What I mean, I'm just gonna hold my hand out
here and wait for you to facilitate.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Wait, wait, I'm facilitating in the payment. I thought you were.
I thought this was a payment for you to facility.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
You don't understand. This is my this is my job,
and what I'm saying is in order for me to
do my job, I need a little facilitation.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Oh you know.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Okay, okay, now, this is my first time in the
Porto Lago, sir, But I.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Has nothing in my hand still.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Oh oh oh oh gosh, okay, hang on, let me
let me make a phone call real quick. But actually
it would probably be much.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Smoother than Yeah, yeah, it really would be.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
It's kind of like a decide to a friend of
mine whom I will not identify, actually did participate in
low level smuggling from Russia to the US. Not for
not for some sort of nefarious reason.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Yeah, it was snowting right. He was just coming back
to see some people in life.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Again, this friend of mine actually was getting some pre
communists takeover children's literature. Okay, because this friend of mine
is a nerd, so snowden right, And this friend of
mine had never broken a law in the US of
which I am aware, and this friend of mine had
(36:20):
never broken a law in any country, but they said
it was very easy to break the law in Russia.
And they have following complaint. Again, Russian, Russian speakers, people
have lived in Russia, please let us know if this
jives with you, because Matt and Paul and I have
never been right, Paul, you haven't been a okay, correct, correct?
So I just wanted to check. So here's what this
(36:44):
person says. This person says they heard that they could
buy some of this literature, and technically it's illegal for
them to take it out of the country. But again,
they're not moving heroin, they're not moving weapons.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Of war or anything.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
So they go to essentially a black market location to
buy these books, these children's books, and they said it
was the best customer service experience they had in the
country because apparently at the time this person was there,
there are all kinds of things we take for granted
(37:22):
in the West, niceties that just do not exist there,
and one of them is that here here, if you
go to a business, they will make change. If you're
paying for something that's ten dollars and thirteen cents and
you just have a twenty dollars bill, they'll make change
for you. In Russia, apparently that was not the case.
You were expected to have exact change. Now again, I
(37:43):
don't know, I cannot first verify this firsthand, but this
person said when they went, no one would smile at
them when they were, you know, in a legal transactional situation.
But when they went to the black market thing, the
people were all pretty nice and multi lingual, and this
person speaks Russian, so anyway it shouldn't have mattered. And
(38:04):
then they happily made change. Yeah, And the person said,
you know, sometimes the black market just works better and
more efficiently depending on where you are in the world.
And as much as I hate to admit it, I
think that person is onto something.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
I think the people whom your friend encountered were just
reading him and or his or her compatriots who were
with her or him, whoever it was. I think the
smiling thing was just a tactic to read whether or
not they were police.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Oh, I see, Maybe it's just reflection of energy too, right.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
So. So anyhow, we know that bribery exists and proliferates
throughout the world. The shipping industry is no different, and
anybody who has traveledively depend on where you've gone, you
have found yourself in a bribery situation. Like in some
parts of the world, it's just part of a police
(39:08):
officer's job to propose and accept the bribes, and woe
betide those who refuse to play the game. According to
someone named Cecilia Muller tor Brand, who is the program
director at the Maritime Anti Corruption Network or MACIN, a
facilitation payment is a low level payment made to a
low level official to perform a routine task, a task
(39:31):
you were already entitled to. And this is so common
that other countries you know that participate in the shipping
industry have some names in slang for these sorts of payments,
and frankly, several of them are pretty funny.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Oh yeah, I very much enjoy China's which is tea money,
lot of tea shipping, just give me that extra tea money.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Or the one in Brazil, which is just called make
me laugh.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
It sounds like a greeting like, ah, yes, hello, welcome
to Brazil. We hope you're enjoying the port. Now make
me laugh.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
And then, because we're an audio podcast, Matt here you
extended your hand just like that port authority member in
oh Okay, I thought it was Lagos.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
He was in Jersey.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
I misread the accent. So another you know, just for comparison,
many of us might be more familiar with police bribes.
In Guatemala. They say something like, well, you know, could
you give me some money to help me buy some
chick lits.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
I've heard that as well, actually weirdly specific. Huh yeah,
wait where did you hear I've got some friends in Jersey?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Now friends in Jersey also sounds like a euphemism, is it not, Yeah,
you got some friends in Jersey? I think it might
be they said make me laugh, They said, you would
make me laugh. So we want to hear your slang
terms for this kind of bribery. In the meantime, we
want to establish that while there are some states, many
states honestly legitimately working to address the endemic corruption in
(41:13):
the shipping industry, most of the burden of this falls
on the gigantic private shipping conglomerates, and those conglomerates, in
many cases themselves can benefit from these same corrupt practices
that they may lament in public or forward facing literature
(41:34):
or statements.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
So what does this all mean?
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Well, I guess ultimately it means the official numbers that
we all get to look at, the statistics, the estimates
for global shipping trades are all at least somewhat inaccurate
because we are not exactly sure and we cannot be
definitely sure about how much stuff is being traded and
(41:58):
how much it's all cost. We get the estimates from
the conglomerates. Essentially, we don't.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Know how much shadow money exists out there.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Yeah, stuff that is either willingly or unwillingly being traded
and for how much money.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
And there is genuinely no workable solution at this time
legalizing drugs, of course is I think it's clear to
say that would be one of the biggest, most profound
steps toward crippling criminal cartels, at least in South America
and in maybe a couple of maybe in the Golden Triangle.
(42:37):
But that won't stop the bribery, because corruption and smuggling
are not simply dependent upon illicit drugs. The problem is
that no one is incentivized to play straight here. There
are state level agencies and institutions doing their level best
(42:59):
to staunch the bleeding. But this is a grievous wound.
And I don't know, man, I feel kind of weird
ending on just such a negative note. I mean, it's true.
Everything we said is true.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Yeah, I think I'll give you one solution. Anyone and
everyone working around that ship of containers has to be
paid so much money that the thought of being able
to be bribed to bring something onto that ship and
then losing you know, their wealth that they get from
working there, they would be incentivized to not break the rules.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
But wouldn't that cut into the profits for the conglomerates.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Well maybe over you know, Yeah, you're right, it totally would.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
But what about the ports then, because that's where a
lot of the corruption comes out.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
You're right, So you would need turrets that had an
AI sophisticated enough to identify when a bribe was occurring.
Oh nice, and then they could shoot sleep darts rapidly
at any possible bribery.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
And we can do we can be adventurers and make
a documentary about the death of the illegal shipping industry
in Brazil and we can call it. No one laughs
in Rio. I just like, I like the gravitas of that,
but I don't know if it's accurate.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
Yeah, I love it. No more laughter.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Well, the thing is too delving a little bit too
far into psychology here, But just really briefly, over the years,
you and I, in the course of research and in
the course of experienced conversation, have pretty well and pretty
definitively established that happiness is a comparative or relative term
(44:46):
for this species. Multiple studies have shown us that below
a certain financial threshold, people are not just happy. It's
not enough to know that you make money or that
you make a wage. People don't want to just be
satisfied if they work in a group environment. They want
(45:06):
to know that they have more than the other person,
or at least as much. So if if you and
Paul and I were were working in a totally different
industry and we all have the same job, and we all,
let's say, we all made I'm just fifty thousand a year,
(45:27):
and we were happy as clams. I don't know where
that saying comes from, but that's us. We're super happy.
And then we find out that one of us makes
fifty five thousand dollars a year, we are very much unhappy.
Nothing for our personal experience has changed in any way whatsoever,
save for the knowledge that someone else is doing a
(45:49):
little better than us. And that is why, that is
why I argue that bribery at this point will always
exist because it's not enough for many people to be
happy with themselves. They have to feel like other people
are doing worse.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Interesting point capitalism, baby, Yeah, I don't know if I
don't know if that bears out for everyone.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Perhaps you're right, it's too broad a brush many people.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
So let's add just one more for fun. Because we
talked a little bit about the post office, but we
didn't go into detail. Did you hear about the conspiracy
theory proposed by President Trump back in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
I did I heard tell via some tweets.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yes, that's correct, that's correct. The President in twenty eighteen
claimed that the company Amazon, with whom I think many
of us are familiar, is costing the United Postal Service
billions of dollars, and the US taxpayers are footing the bill.
Speaker 4 (46:49):
Bezos.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
He had one tweet about this, and then he doubled
down a few days later and he said, quote, I
am right about Amazon costing the US Post Office massive
amount money for being their delivery boy. Amazon should pay
these costs plus and not have them borne by the
American taxpayer many billions of dollars. Post Office leaders don't
have a clue, or do they. We looked into this,
(47:16):
and luckily for the US taxpayer, the numbers don't seem
to bear out. The US Post Service did lose two
point seven billion dollars in twenty seventeen, that's per PolitiFact,
But it wasn't because it was delivering stuff for Amazon. Actually,
the opposites the case. Those kind of parcel delivery deals
they make with private companies like Amazon, accounted for seven
(47:39):
billion dollars of the nineteen point five billion dollars in
revenue that the Post Office made during that time. So
what that means is that those kind of companies are
forming a large amount of the revenue generated for the
post Office. Are they getting these price breaks that the
ordinary human wouldn't get, Well, yeah, absolutely, because they're also
(48:03):
bringing billions of dollars in business.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
Yeah, losing two point seven billion to make nineteen point
five billion. It's weird.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Well you know again, it's the it's that high level
math where it almost becomes imaginary.
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Oh, it all is, certainly if it's got a million
or a billion. Okay, sure, whatever you say.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
That's right. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
You can reach you to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on Instagram and
TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK that's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are on the road, traveling abroad,
and that's part of why we have had a lot
of classic episodes to share with you lately. This one,
this one, I think speaks to us as well as
our guest producer, Matt the Madman Stillo Ben.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Have you ever thought about flights as just being another
form of cargo shipping where humans are the cargo.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I think about most forms of transit with humans as
the cargo, people moving right, Yes, yes, just like a podcast.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Cargo ships move people. Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And there are many, many, very interesting and varying in
in provenance and accuracy conspiracy theories around the world, the
wide world of shipping.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah, let me be honest with you, guys. Noel, Matt,
Rachel back here.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
We we got to give Rachel and nickname.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
I don't know if we have think about this, but
after a long journey, especially returning home, I can look
at the most mundane of objects, say maybe a handwritten
note of places to visit and cutter, and just marvel
at how far this thing traveled to arrive at my hand.
You know, it reminds me of the scene and no
(01:19):
country for old men right where Sugar is talking to
the gas station attendant. Sugar, Yeah, and they have a
They weirdly enough, don't talk about a strange haircut. Instead,
they talk about how far this quarter traveled through toime.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, it's true, I mean pocket change. Especially when you
look at you know, coins that are quite old. You
think about the story behind it and all of the
places and people's possessions that it's been in over the years,
and there's a whole story to that. But shipping and
the logistics of shipping in and of itself, it's obviously
a very ancient, you know, profession and has come a
(01:54):
very very long way and determined the course of civilization
as we know it. Make no mistake, folks, current civilization,
this whole group project we call humanity, will collapse if
people stop shipping things. We literally just did an episode
of our other show, Ridiculous History about the US camel
(02:15):
Core and how during the Civil War logistics of moving
supply supply chain was absolutely crucial to the war effort.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yes, and if you look at our previous episodes on
things like freeports, which we did after tonight's classic episode,
you will see that the world is not just inundated
with shipping routes, some of very ancient provenance, like the
Silk Road. Later now the precedent for the Belton Road
(02:44):
initiative being built across the world via China. What you
will see is that there's this whole regime of laws,
and they are complicated, they are in a ven diagram,
they're weirdly connected, and everybody breaks those laws.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
Which that was a really good post, by the way,
very intense.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
He just looked directly into the camera when he said that,
and he was kind of moving his hands around some
invisible orb of energy.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I loved it. Thank you, Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
So. In twenty nineteen, we got together with our brother
Matt Frederick and we asked, why are there so many conspiracies,
specifically about shipping stuff around the world.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Remember the Wayfair conspiracy. Sure did we talk about that
in this episode. We can't remember mention.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It may have been outside of the scope of Rider
hadn't happened yet.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
There was furniture as a code, Furniture.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
As a code, the idea that this company Wayfair, that
ship's kind of ikea fied furniture, you know, sort of
faux mid century modern types.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
That I've got some.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Wayfair stuff that they were in the human trafficking trade, right,
the idea that certain certain specific brand names may indeed
be an indicator for villains in the know, and that
they were actually per seeing human cargo. Yeah, and I
mean just the human trafficking aspect of it is fascinating
in and of itself. There's a whole season of the
(04:07):
fantastic HBO series The Wire that revolved around sex workers
being trafficked into the United States in chipping containers and
a horrific situation involving many of them passing away because
they were deprived of oxygen and they were, you know,
sitting on a loading dock for an undetermined amount of time.
And that was sort of the inciting action of that season.
(04:29):
And it really speaks to the crime aspect of shipping
and moving cargo and of course people.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
And to put it in an even simpler use case,
here another conspiracy that is completely legal. This one is
afore all the vexillologists out there on the bans of flags. Yes,
it is completely legal to have a ship that is
flagged as a ship operating under the auspice of one country. However,
the crew is from a conglomeration of other countries. However,
(04:59):
the people who built the ship or from a different country. However,
the folks that in the origin and destination are from.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Look machinations within machinations.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
I'm just saying, there's a lot of sandbox to play in,
and we want to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
And a lot of sands to these very very real conspiracies,
in addition to some that maybe hold a little bit
less sand. But Ben, before we roll this tape, I
do have to ask, since you said vexillologists, we were
having a little moment outside getting some air at this
conference here websumm at Qatar, and you hipped me to
another term for people who collect matchbooks, voluminousvolluminists.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, there you go. So let's get into the episode
of good. From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.
A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (06:04):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
They call me Ben, and you're joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control Decat Most importantly, you
are here and that makes this stuff They don't want
you to know. A question for you guys at the
top of the show, have either of you all started
ordering holiday gifts things of that nature.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
No, I have not.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
Yeah, I'm one of those last minute is the best
minute types myself when it comes to this. But we
know that we are entering one of the busiest shipping
periods in the year for at least the domestic US
and a lot of other countries where in the Christian
celebration of Christmas is common, right, And the weird thing
(06:51):
is that although we always think about shipping and the
passage of letters and goods during this time of year,
it's an ongoing, twenty four to seven, three hundred and
sixty five days a year operation and it's huge. The
evidence about the enormity of this industry is all around you. Specifically,
(07:14):
you look around as you're listening to this episode. Where
does all this stuff around you come from? We are
today recording in the legendary stuff you should know studio,
I say legendary.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
Can we say legendary?
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah? It is certainly. Yeah, first show to hit a
billion downloads, it's a legend. And we're looking at pictures
of Josh and Chuck all around us.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
Mmmmmmmm.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
And there are a couple of a couple of cameos
of other non SISK people here. Let's say, I think
that's Jonathan Strickland there the back left of Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:45):
And all of these were shipped to our offices.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yes, that's correct. And if you look around your neck
of the Global Woods, whatever room or environment you find
yourself in today, it's strange to think about how much
of this stuff came from so far away. You see,
centuries ago, most of the possessions the average person had
would probably be locally made. But nowadays even the most
(08:11):
mundane items may come from halfway across the planet. We're
talking towels, chess sets.
Speaker 4 (08:19):
Any consumer good really that is created out of either
plastic or metal.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
And Matt, you and Paul and I went through a
period a few years back where, for reasons we don't
need to get in the weeds about, we were getting
a lot of technological stuff from China, from a place
called Monoprice. Remember that I do recall, and I would
be so baffled because some of this was relatively sophisticated equipment.
(08:48):
I would be so baffled to think that the economy
was so complicated it was cheaper for us to buy
something from China oceans away that it was to buy
something from say, California. It's true, and so we're going
(09:09):
to look into shipping today, but perhaps not in the
way you might assume. And to get us to the dark,
murky exploration of today's episode, we're going to have to
start with things that are absolutely true. So here are
the facts.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
So the Post Office nowadays, on podcast ads and other
places alike, is often maligned, though the ads have lessened
quite a bit in the past few years. But you know,
when you imagine the post Office and going to visit
there to send something out, that's one thing. But then
(09:49):
when you imagine the orchestration that is required to get things,
whether it's just a simple letter or package of weighs
one hundred and fifty pounds from one place to another,
it's an incredibly difficult task that they're faced with, and
they do it every day. Before the United States Post Office,
(10:10):
you have to imagine you were putting things on a
railcar a lot of times and then sending it off.
You were putting it on a person who was riding
horseback for a long time.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Yeah, that's right. Before these state levels shipping institutions existed,
moving goods from one place to another was a just
one long trust fall. You'd have to find a private courier.
That courier would have to make their own way from
point A to point B. We're talking, you know, we're
talking like European history, the history of ancient empires. This courier,
(10:46):
if they made it from point A to point B,
would take a long time, especially if it wasn't from
if point A was in a different city, country, or
region than point B. If you were lucky months later,
then we get back to you.
Speaker 4 (11:01):
Yeah, I remember. All that includes personal security of the courier.
Speaker 1 (11:05):
Right right. It depends upon that, and it depends upon
the trustworthiness the dependability of the courier. If this courier
disappeared for one reason or another, your sol as everybody understands,
this is a family show. And thus that stands for
sorely out of luck. In the US, the gold Rush
and the westward expansion led to a fundamental shift in shipping.
(11:29):
Things like the pony Express that you mentioned earlier, Matt.
Those things failed, they were bought up or they simply
went away. Other giants rose, like Wells Fargo, which some
people may not know. Wells Fargo did not begin as
a bank. It began as a shipping interest.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
Yeah, they brought carriages into the mix.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
They also retained that logo iconic. What colors are those?
Yellow and red?
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Orange?
Speaker 4 (12:00):
I just see the red, okay, just see the red.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
But because of these things, soon it was possible to
reliably send goods and letters from one end of the
continent to the next, and the rise of the transcontinental
railroad played a huge role in that in this country,
and ever since then, shipping and transportation have evolved in
step with one another, and eventually this created the massive
(12:24):
interconnected trade sphere we all enjoy the benefits and drawbacks
of today. This sphere ranges across public entities and private companies.
Things are carried by automobile, aircraft, cargo, ship, on foot,
and even occasionally here in twenty nineteen, via livestock.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
Nice like beast a burden I mean too bad for
the beast, I guess, which feels like a derogatory term,
but the animals. And think about it this way, there
is a very very much distinct possibility that the components
the things that make up the electronics you're using right now,
(13:05):
your laptop, whatever it is you're using your phone, maybe
to listen to this. They have traveled further around the
world than you may ever.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
That's true. That's true. They came a long way to
see you.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Also, we're in a situation such that it makes more
economic sense for these long trips to occur, more so
than you would think. One famous example concerns fish in Scotland.
It is economically more feasible for fish to be caught
(13:38):
in Scotland shipped to China for processing, you know, to
filet of the fish and so on, and then shipped
back to Scotland than it does to have the fish
processed in Scotland.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
It's weird, right, yeah, that it boggles the mind.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
It does. And one of the primary players in this
story is something called containerization, which I know sounds like
a buzzword, made up term, but it describes this process.
We've all seen those looming rectangular containers on the backs
of tractor trailers on train cars, rusting away in weird
(14:16):
industrial areas, or maybe being repurposed to be a chic
hipster cocktail bar or something those things are ubiquitous, They're everywhere.
Each one of these shipping containers is a tiny vital
piece forming the backbone, or perhaps the circulatory system of
the world's trade economy. Containerization basically, it's a system that
(14:39):
standardizes these containers such that they can fit on the
majority of things that will transport them. You can fit them,
You can fit x amount of them on a cargo ship.
From there, you can break up that load of containers
to ship some via tractor trailers. We have a ton
of truckers in our audience and people who work in shipping.
(15:00):
So first off, you are unsung heroes. Thank you very
much for keeping this strange house of cards from collapsing.
Speaker 4 (15:07):
Absolutely and also shout out to all you lorry drivers out.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
There and lorry drivers as well. So this concept of containerization,
this great standardization of shipping containers, dates back centuries, right,
goes back to the seventeen hundreds. I want to say,
in the coal mining regions of England it really hits
its boom, and it goes worldwide after World War Two,
(15:34):
and this boom has continued. We have the numbers to
prove it.
Speaker 4 (15:38):
Yes, in the world of shipping, the cargo ship stands
ahead above all others. It is the king. According to
the International Maritime Organization, ninety percent of everything shipped in
the world, everything shipped in the world, is on a
cargo vessel at some point.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
That's bizarre. Ninety percent of every everything, not ninety percent
of tickle me elmos, not ninety percent of your favorite
vinyl reissues, ninety percent of everything. There are over twenty
million shipping containers in the world. We actually don't know
how many there are anymore, because we built them so quickly.
(16:18):
They're somewhere right now as you listen to this, between
five or six million that are on the road or
on the ship at sea, all across the planet. In total,
these cargo containers, as individual boxes, make about two hundred
million trips per year they get around. This works out
(16:41):
to more than eleven billion tons of stuff. Etches, sketches, volvos, grain,
different cereals, oil, pictures of Christopher walkin, whatever you can
imagine it has been on a cargo ship at some point.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
All those stuff they don't want you to know, t shirts.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Right, they're out floating somewhere by Diego Gard as we speak, right.
So there are some downsides though, because we mentioned everyone
enjoys the benefits of this, but we also just briefly
alluded to some drawbacks.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
Yeah, there are certainly downsides to this whole system. About
ten thousand containers get lost at sea every year. Imagine
that just it fell over the side. Guys, I don't
know what to tell you or all that ship, Eh,
we can't find it.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yes, yes, we see different examples of this in economic anecdotes.
Sure one of them would be the story of the
rubber Ducks. Did you ever hear about this?
Speaker 4 (17:40):
I've read that book, The Small The Short Book by
Carl No. I can't remember who wrote it, but it's
a book about ten little rubber ducks that fell overboard
when they were being shipped across the sea.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Yeah, a little bit less than twenty nine thousand rubber
ducks were lost in nineteen ninety two because a cargo
ship container tumbled into the North Pacific. I think the
number was around twenty eighty eight hundred, and the rubber
ducks were packaged with other bath toys. They were headed
(18:15):
from China to the US, but the currents took them
and they actually provided a great deal of insight for oceanographers,
people who study ocean currents and Arctic geography, and they
were able to learn more about how currents functioned because
they just had to follow the ducks.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
That's amazing because it's literally the story of Eric Carl's
ten Little rubber Ducks. Well, this story I've been reading
to my son forever.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Well, it appears it is nonfiction, or at least based
on a true story. There's another drawback, which is that
these cargo ships generate a great deal of pollution. They
emit an estimated seven hundred nine ninety six million tons
of carbon dioxide that was in twenty twelve, and while
(19:06):
the number, while people are working to bring that number down,
it's it's a hard economic cost. There's not really way
to move around it. Because you see, despite those drawbacks,
despite the fact that we lose ten thousand containers at
least of stuff a year, it's still more efficient to
(19:26):
move it that way than it is by shipping it
via land or air.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
Just the way.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
It's geography, it's the way the continents work.
Speaker 4 (19:33):
It's geography, and it's mass. Like if you even if
you have giant airplanes that can carry a proportion of
what would be on a shipping container ship. That's so
weird to say you couldn't carry as you know, you
couldn't get as much across for the price. It's it's obvious,
and you obviously can't get to certain parts of land
(19:54):
from other parts of land when there's a giant ocean
in between.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Right until we create a global road network, Yes, this
is a possibility, but it's still very very much not plausible.
One day, one day it's yeah, it's it's strange because
compared to the energy expended moving stuff via plane or truck,
(20:19):
shipping is actually far less damaging in terms of greenhouse
gases released when you ship stuff via cargo ship. If
you send a container from say Shanghai to France, you
emit fewer greenhouse gases than the truck that takes the
container from one place in France to another. Wow, it's
(20:40):
weird when you think about it. It's it's again it's
a problem of scale, and there is absolutely no question, folks,
this is a massive, gargantuan industry. It employs millions of
people and it moves billions of dollars. The world economy
as we know it would be gone without global shipping,
right we would enter a dark age.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It is the backbone right now of our society, whether
whether we want to believe that or not.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
It's weird, yeah yeah, just as the US economy would
collapse without shipping companies or state institutions like the usps UPS, FedEx,
of course, and so on. But here's our question for today,
and it's a question we encounter anytime we contemplate any
system of this size. What if there's more behind the curtain.
(21:32):
What doesn't the shipping industry want you to know?
Speaker 4 (21:35):
And we'll get to it right after a word from
our sponsor and we're back. Then let's get in to
the people who want to either take stuff away from
our shipping containers or smuggle something through our shipping systems.
Speaker 1 (21:58):
Here's where it gets crazy. This industry is cartoonishly crooked.
It is so crooked and so corrupt. And let's look
at a couple of specific examples here. First, smuggling. Doubtlessly,
smuggling is one of the first things we think of
when we think of crime and the transportation of goods.
(22:21):
It's a big business, and business is great for smugglers
and traffickers. Whether we are talking the smuggling of drugs,
the smuggling of weapons, the tragic and heartbreaking trafficking of people.
It's probably not going to stop. With the sheer volume
of activity occurring at every single second, at every single
(22:44):
level of the global trade network, authorities are at the
very least hard press to discover, apprehend, and prosecute the
criminals involved. It doesn't help right that, unlike street level dealers,
groups or individuals with the capital to operate international smuggling
rings are not only overwhelmingly well off, they're often connected
(23:07):
to state level actors or enormous private entities also known
as the same people who are tasked with on paper
stopping these crimes from recurring.
Speaker 4 (23:16):
Or even low level people within those systems that they
know are at certain strategic places. Yikes. So let's consider
a specific story to kind of look closer into this.
So let's go back to July twenty eleven, the Guyan,
which is a ship. It was seized by US customs
(23:38):
after authorities found twenty tons twenty tons of cocaine aboard.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Or was it eighteen tons?
Speaker 4 (23:45):
Oh, it makes a massive difference, doesn't it.
Speaker 1 (23:48):
This is so this happens pretty frequently in drug busts,
and I think it's hilarious, and I think a lot
of people listening are going to agree with us here.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
Why would two to go missing?
Speaker 1 (24:01):
Have you ever noticed? Have you ever noticed when there's
a large bust of illicit drugs the numbers get kind
of kind of fudgy real quick.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
It was twenty, but you know, we just reweighted it
was just eighteen. I guess we made an error.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
You know, heat of the moment.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
Cheez, that's a yeah. We're not accusing anyone here, We're
just saying, maybe it's a bit of a pattern.
Speaker 1 (24:23):
I'm not accusing, I am observing a pattern. Sure, Yeah,
no one ever. You never see a drug bust where
someone says, oh, we thought we we thought we found
five hundred pounds of marijuana, but actually it was five
hundred and sixty. Yeah. No, the number never goes up.
It always fudges down.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:42):
Anyhow, So let's get back to that twenty or eighteen
tons of coke.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
Right, For comparison, eighteen tons of cocaine, that's about the
size of three full grown African bull elephants, And that
translates the cocaine, not the elephants, to an estimated street
value of over over one billion dollars us yi. So
yay for customs. They caught this, right, they caught this.
(25:11):
They seize the craft.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
The what is it called, the Mediterranean Shipping Shipping Company's Guyan.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
The MSc Guyang. Things got complicated very quickly. You see,
the MSc Guyan is a Liberian flagged vessel. That means
it sales under the flag of the country Liberia. But
it is not owned nor operated by a Liberian company. Instead,
it's operated by that company. You just give a shout
(25:38):
out to Matt the Mediterranean Shipping Co. They are a
Switzerland based global shipping conglomerate.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Hold on a second, So it's the Mediterranean Shipping Company
with a Liberian flag.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Based in Switzerland, Okay, and they only sort of own it, right,
It gets sketch and sketcher as we ascend the ladder
of ownership and profit. The vessel was financed by JP Morgan,
who what you may recognize from some earlier episodes.
Speaker 4 (26:12):
In New York City.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
Right, the two companies structured the purchase of this vessel
such that the ship was quote, we'll have to unpack
this owned by client assets in a transportation strategy fund
run for JP Morgan's asset management arm. What right exactly
(26:36):
who really owns this at the end of the day.
Where does the check get sent to? You know what
I mean? Where does it whose bank account ultimately collects
whatever margin of profit is here. It's a strange question.
JP Morgan, by the way, has at the time of recording,
refused to release a public statement regarding this.
Speaker 4 (26:56):
And look, we don't know where all that coke came from,
but it was not us.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Right, and said, yeah, look guys, we had nothing to
do with that twenty six tons of cocaine. And they're like, oh,
we thought it was eighteen.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
They go, oh, interesting.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Wrong number.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Uh this is J. D.
Speaker 1 (27:15):
Horgan.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
Yeah, there's not the one you're looking for.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Yeah, we're technically a river bank, not a financial institution.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
I'm pretty sure you're looking for HSBC. They're they're the ones.
It's HSBC, is what I said It HSBC.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
I can't hear you, so I hope that's how it works.
You know, at some point in history there was someone
who was part of an otherwise legitimate financial institution, maybe
in the days of like telegraphs or something, who totally
faked that their equivalent of a phone wasn't working. Yep,
oh sorry, we thought it was a then a dot, then.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
A dash, our dinner daughter was just not working.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
And then the great depression. But it's true they've been
tremendously cagey about this because we see this interlocking system
of ownership which, without profiling too hard, I want to say,
it feels very much like a shell game. It feels
(28:16):
very much like a way to maximize profit while avoiding liability, sure,
which is what companies do well.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
And they just happened to get caught.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
They just happened to get caught. Yeah, this single bust
is part of an ongoing investigation, so we don't know
all the details about it. You can see some low
level and some pretty high level crew members who were
implicated in bringing a board parcels of cocaine off the
coast of Peru, but as far as the person who
(28:47):
organized brokeered the whole deal. The reason the coke interest
in Peru knew where the ship was going to be,
and the reason people in the ship got I think
one guy got just as little as fifty thousand dollars
for helping load it on, which sounds like great money
until you know you're going to jail. Yea, these people
(29:09):
have been implicable. There's no one has found the puppet
master yet. And while this was a big bus, this.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
Was not.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
Anomalous by virtue of simply being a drug bust because
the US Customs and Border Protection claims that they are
busting people left and right every day.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
The US Customs and Border Protection claim that they sees
an average or seized an average of four thousand, six
hundred and fifty seven pounds of narcotics every day. That's
a lot, not quite eighteen tons, but it's a lot.
And again we've talked about this before. It really is
just one of those things that cannot occur without help
from somebody somewhere, some kind of corruption.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Right, this leads us to another dark side of the industry,
and we'll dive into it after a word from ours sponsor.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
We're back.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
So the shipping industry, probably since the first boat was made,
or the first moon, not the first boat, since the
first laws were made by some authority saying thou shalt
give me a cut right of whatever this pie is
in question. Ever since that moment, corruption has existed every
(30:30):
time somebody makes let's think of it as light and
shadow right. Every time somebody makes a law that exists
in the light, a law with transparency, you know what
I mean, there is another practice, an analog to that,
a shadow law that will exist in the criminal community
(30:50):
or in the underground. That's why we have all these
old tropes about honor among thieves and whether or not
it exists. That's why you hear MAF you also talk
about a code of one sort or another. Because human
beings inherently attempt to impose order upon any sort of
(31:12):
interaction with the world around them or with the people
they meet. The shipping industry is going to be cursed
with corruption for the foreseeable future because of a few
very easily explained reasons. First, the crews in these vessels
have a really tough job. They make thousands of stops
at ports all around the world every year, and these
(31:36):
ports are in numerous countries, very very different countries. Every
single one has its own distinct set of laws and
legal systems, and as anyone can assure you, the rule
of law is not the same in every country. Like
here in the US, if you are not wealthy, then
(31:56):
the rule of law is pretty secure. Odds of getting
in trouble for murdering someone are pretty high. Again, if
you're not wealthy. If you are wealthy, then you have
a different set you have a set of shadow laws,
just like we described before. But these folks, these captains
and crews of these ships will not only go to
(32:20):
places with vastly different sets of laws, social mores, legal systems,
things like that, different institutions they have to interact with,
they also encounter tremendous bureaucracy, right.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
Oh yeah, I mean in all kinds of different ship inspections.
Every time, or mostly when they go into port, there's
going to be some kind of inspection, some kind of
immigration or customs that they have to deal with just
by even entering a port. And there are also you know,
different environmental concerns in the varying countries that you're going
to encounter as well. And you have to imagine, you know,
(32:55):
during these inspections, right, you're on this ship, you're the captain,
you're the crew. You show up. Now, this whole other
team comes through and runs these inspections, right, and a
lot of times, just to get through that inspection, or
maybe even to have someone look the other way, that's
just hypothetically about some discrepancy in the weight of certain cargo.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
Sure, are the screams coming from a container?
Speaker 4 (33:23):
Yeah, maybe that too. But you would have to bribe
this team of people coming in from whichever country you're
going to.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
And even if you are not shipping anything illicit, even
if you're not doing anything illegal, you may still have
to participate in this bribery system just to get through
your date. Because refusing to pay these I'm going to
keep calling you seeing shadowy. Refusing to pay these shadow
taxes will lead to at the very least delays, sometimes
(33:51):
huge delays. And you have to understand when these people
are operating, that last port of call that they just
went to is one in a series of ports, so
there's a very very high chance of a domino effect
if they don't get to leave on time. They are
also punitive fines that will be legally defended by the
country in which the port exists, and these finds. Can
(34:13):
you know, It's like they used to say about law
enforcement officers in the US that if an l e
O wants to write you a ticket for something, they
will find something. While that may not be one hundred
percent true, it's absolutely true, and a lot of these ports.
The worst case scenario is that refusal to participate in
(34:33):
this bribery system can result in physical harm to the crew,
maybe even fatalities. The typical euphemism for bribery, we hope
you enjoy this, and we hope you have examples of
your own is a facilitation payment. A facilitation payment?
Speaker 4 (34:51):
Oh yeah, you doing No, that's right, that's great. We're
gonna get you out of here like aty split. We
just got to get this little facilitation payment going first.
What I mean, I'm just gonna hold my hand out
here and wait for you to facilitate.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Wait, wait, I'm facilitating in the payment. I thought you were.
I thought this was a payment for you to facility.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
You don't understand. This is my this is my job,
and what I'm saying is in order for me to
do my job, I need a little facilitation.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Oh you know.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Okay, okay, now, this is my first time in the
Porto Lago, sir, But I.
Speaker 4 (35:23):
Has nothing in my hand still.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Oh oh oh oh gosh, okay, hang on, let me
let me make a phone call real quick. But actually
it would probably be much.
Speaker 4 (35:35):
Smoother than Yeah, yeah, it really would be.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
It's kind of like a decide to a friend of
mine whom I will not identify, actually did participate in
low level smuggling from Russia to the US. Not for
not for some sort of nefarious reason.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
Yeah, it was snowting right. He was just coming back
to see some people in life.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Again, this friend of mine actually was getting some pre
communists takeover children's literature. Okay, because this friend of mine
is a nerd, so snowden right, And this friend of
mine had never broken a law in the US of
which I am aware, and this friend of mine had
(36:20):
never broken a law in any country, but they said
it was very easy to break the law in Russia.
And they have following complaint. Again, Russian, Russian speakers, people
have lived in Russia, please let us know if this
jives with you, because Matt and Paul and I have
never been right, Paul, you haven't been a okay, correct, correct?
So I just wanted to check. So here's what this
(36:44):
person says. This person says they heard that they could
buy some of this literature, and technically it's illegal for
them to take it out of the country. But again,
they're not moving heroin, they're not moving weapons.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
Of war or anything.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
So they go to essentially a black market location to
buy these books, these children's books, and they said it
was the best customer service experience they had in the
country because apparently at the time this person was there,
there are all kinds of things we take for granted
(37:22):
in the West, niceties that just do not exist there,
and one of them is that here here, if you
go to a business, they will make change. If you're
paying for something that's ten dollars and thirteen cents and
you just have a twenty dollars bill, they'll make change
for you. In Russia, apparently that was not the case.
You were expected to have exact change. Now again, I
(37:43):
don't know, I cannot first verify this firsthand, but this
person said when they went, no one would smile at
them when they were, you know, in a legal transactional situation.
But when they went to the black market thing, the
people were all pretty nice and multi lingual, and this
person speaks Russian, so anyway it shouldn't have mattered. And
(38:04):
then they happily made change. Yeah, And the person said,
you know, sometimes the black market just works better and
more efficiently depending on where you are in the world.
And as much as I hate to admit it, I
think that person is onto something.
Speaker 4 (38:20):
I think the people whom your friend encountered were just
reading him and or his or her compatriots who were
with her or him, whoever it was. I think the
smiling thing was just a tactic to read whether or
not they were police.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Oh, I see, Maybe it's just reflection of energy too, right.
Speaker 4 (38:42):
Maybe I don't know.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
So. So anyhow, we know that bribery exists and proliferates
throughout the world. The shipping industry is no different, and
anybody who has traveledively depend on where you've gone, you
have found yourself in a bribery situation. Like in some
parts of the world, it's just part of a police
(39:08):
officer's job to propose and accept the bribes, and woe
betide those who refuse to play the game. According to
someone named Cecilia Muller tor Brand, who is the program
director at the Maritime Anti Corruption Network or MACIN, a
facilitation payment is a low level payment made to a
low level official to perform a routine task, a task
(39:31):
you were already entitled to. And this is so common
that other countries you know that participate in the shipping
industry have some names in slang for these sorts of payments,
and frankly, several of them are pretty funny.
Speaker 4 (39:46):
Oh yeah, I very much enjoy China's which is tea money,
lot of tea shipping, just give me that extra tea money.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Or the one in Brazil, which is just called make
me laugh.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
It sounds like a greeting like, ah, yes, hello, welcome
to Brazil. We hope you're enjoying the port. Now make
me laugh.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
And then, because we're an audio podcast, Matt here you
extended your hand just like that port authority member in
oh Okay, I thought it was Lagos.
Speaker 4 (40:20):
He was in Jersey.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
I misread the accent. So another you know, just for comparison,
many of us might be more familiar with police bribes.
In Guatemala. They say something like, well, you know, could
you give me some money to help me buy some
chick lits.
Speaker 4 (40:39):
I've heard that as well, actually weirdly specific. Huh yeah,
wait where did you hear I've got some friends in Jersey?
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Now friends in Jersey also sounds like a euphemism, is it not, Yeah,
you got some friends in Jersey? I think it might
be they said make me laugh, They said, you would
make me laugh. So we want to hear your slang
terms for this kind of bribery. In the meantime, we
want to establish that while there are some states, many
states honestly legitimately working to address the endemic corruption in
(41:13):
the shipping industry, most of the burden of this falls
on the gigantic private shipping conglomerates, and those conglomerates, in
many cases themselves can benefit from these same corrupt practices
that they may lament in public or forward facing literature
(41:34):
or statements.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (41:36):
So what does this all mean?
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Well, I guess ultimately it means the official numbers that
we all get to look at, the statistics, the estimates
for global shipping trades are all at least somewhat inaccurate
because we are not exactly sure and we cannot be
definitely sure about how much stuff is being traded and
(41:58):
how much it's all cost. We get the estimates from
the conglomerates. Essentially, we don't.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Know how much shadow money exists out there.
Speaker 4 (42:07):
Yeah, stuff that is either willingly or unwillingly being traded
and for how much money.
Speaker 1 (42:13):
And there is genuinely no workable solution at this time
legalizing drugs, of course is I think it's clear to
say that would be one of the biggest, most profound
steps toward crippling criminal cartels, at least in South America
and in maybe a couple of maybe in the Golden Triangle.
(42:37):
But that won't stop the bribery, because corruption and smuggling
are not simply dependent upon illicit drugs. The problem is
that no one is incentivized to play straight here. There
are state level agencies and institutions doing their level best
(42:59):
to staunch the bleeding. But this is a grievous wound.
And I don't know, man, I feel kind of weird
ending on just such a negative note. I mean, it's true.
Everything we said is true.
Speaker 4 (43:12):
Yeah, I think I'll give you one solution. Anyone and
everyone working around that ship of containers has to be
paid so much money that the thought of being able
to be bribed to bring something onto that ship and
then losing you know, their wealth that they get from
working there, they would be incentivized to not break the rules.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
But wouldn't that cut into the profits for the conglomerates.
Speaker 4 (43:38):
Well maybe over you know, Yeah, you're right, it totally would.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
But what about the ports then, because that's where a
lot of the corruption comes out.
Speaker 4 (43:46):
You're right, So you would need turrets that had an
AI sophisticated enough to identify when a bribe was occurring.
Oh nice, and then they could shoot sleep darts rapidly
at any possible bribery.
Speaker 1 (44:02):
And we can do we can be adventurers and make
a documentary about the death of the illegal shipping industry
in Brazil and we can call it. No one laughs
in Rio. I just like, I like the gravitas of that,
but I don't know if it's accurate.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
Yeah, I love it. No more laughter.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Well, the thing is too delving a little bit too
far into psychology here, But just really briefly, over the years,
you and I, in the course of research and in
the course of experienced conversation, have pretty well and pretty
definitively established that happiness is a comparative or relative term
(44:46):
for this species. Multiple studies have shown us that below
a certain financial threshold, people are not just happy. It's
not enough to know that you make money or that
you make a wage. People don't want to just be
satisfied if they work in a group environment. They want
(45:06):
to know that they have more than the other person,
or at least as much. So if if you and
Paul and I were were working in a totally different
industry and we all have the same job, and we all,
let's say, we all made I'm just fifty thousand a year,
(45:27):
and we were happy as clams. I don't know where
that saying comes from, but that's us. We're super happy.
And then we find out that one of us makes
fifty five thousand dollars a year, we are very much unhappy.
Nothing for our personal experience has changed in any way whatsoever,
save for the knowledge that someone else is doing a
(45:49):
little better than us. And that is why, that is
why I argue that bribery at this point will always
exist because it's not enough for many people to be
happy with themselves. They have to feel like other people
are doing worse.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Interesting point capitalism, baby, Yeah, I don't know if I
don't know if that bears out for everyone.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Perhaps you're right, it's too broad a brush many people.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 1 (46:19):
So let's add just one more for fun. Because we
talked a little bit about the post office, but we
didn't go into detail. Did you hear about the conspiracy
theory proposed by President Trump back in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4 (46:32):
I did I heard tell via some tweets.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yes, that's correct, that's correct. The President in twenty eighteen
claimed that the company Amazon, with whom I think many
of us are familiar, is costing the United Postal Service
billions of dollars, and the US taxpayers are footing the bill.
Speaker 4 (46:49):
Bezos.
Speaker 1 (46:51):
He had one tweet about this, and then he doubled
down a few days later and he said, quote, I
am right about Amazon costing the US Post Office massive
amount money for being their delivery boy. Amazon should pay
these costs plus and not have them borne by the
American taxpayer many billions of dollars. Post Office leaders don't
have a clue, or do they. We looked into this,
(47:16):
and luckily for the US taxpayer, the numbers don't seem
to bear out. The US Post Service did lose two
point seven billion dollars in twenty seventeen, that's per PolitiFact,
But it wasn't because it was delivering stuff for Amazon. Actually,
the opposites the case. Those kind of parcel delivery deals
they make with private companies like Amazon, accounted for seven
(47:39):
billion dollars of the nineteen point five billion dollars in
revenue that the Post Office made during that time. So
what that means is that those kind of companies are
forming a large amount of the revenue generated for the
post Office. Are they getting these price breaks that the
ordinary human wouldn't get, Well, yeah, absolutely, because they're also
(48:03):
bringing billions of dollars in business.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
You know what I mean.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
Yeah, losing two point seven billion to make nineteen point
five billion. It's weird.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Well you know again, it's the it's that high level
math where it almost becomes imaginary.
Speaker 4 (48:19):
Oh, it all is, certainly if it's got a million
or a billion. Okay, sure, whatever you say.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts.
Speaker 3 (48:32):
That's right. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
You can reach you to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where
we exist on Facebook x and YouTube on Instagram and
TikTok or Conspiracy Stuff Show.
Speaker 4 (48:41):
If you want to call us dial one eight three
three std WYTK that's our voicemail system. You've got three minutes.
Give yourself a cool nickname and let us know if
we can use your name and message on the air.
If you got more to say than can fit in
that voicemail, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
We are the entities that read every single piece of
correspondence we receive. Be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the
void writes back conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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