November 29, 2019 • 44 mins
Look around you as you listen to today'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
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, they call
me Ben, and you're joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you.
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 have you all, either
of you all started ordering holiday gifts things of that nature. No,
(00:46):
I have not. 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 UH in the year for at
least the domestic US and a lot of other countries
where in UH the Christian celebration of Christmas is common, right,
(01:09):
And the weird thing 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 seven
three sixty five days a year operation and it's huge.
The evidence about the enormity of this industry is all
(01:32):
around you. Specifically, 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. Can we say legendary? It
is certainly, Yeah, first show to hit a billion downloads,
it's a legend. And we're looking at pictures of Josh
(01:53):
and Chuck all around us, and there are a couple
of ure are a couple of cameos of other non
on SISK people here. Let's say I think that's Jonathan
Strickland there the back left of and and all of
these were shipped to our offices. 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
(02:17):
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 mundane items may come from
halfway across the planet. We're talking towels, uh, chess sets,
(02:39):
any consumer good really created out of either plastic or metal,
and that you and Paul and I went through a
period a few years back where, for reasons we we
don't need to get in the weeds about we were
getting a lot of technological stuff from China from a
place called Mono Price. Remember that I do recall, and
(03:02):
I would be so baffled because some of this was
relatively sophisticated equipment. It would be so baffled to think
that the 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,
(03:26):
and so we're going 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. So the post
(03:49):
Office nowadays, on on podcast, ads and other places alike,
is often maligned, though the ads have lessened quite a
bit in the past few years. Um, but you know,
when you imagine the post office and going to visit
there to send something out, that's one thing. But then
(04:09):
when you imagine the orchestration that it is required to
get things, whether it's just a simple letter or package
that ways a hundred fifty pounds shipps from one place
to another, it's it's a incredibly difficult task that they're
faced with, and they do it every day. Before the
United States Post Office, you have to imagine you were
(04:31):
putting things on a rail car a lot of times
and then sending it off. You were putting it on
a person who was riding horseback for a long time. Yeah,
that's right. Before these state levels shipping institutions existed, moving
goods from one place to another was a just one
(04:51):
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,
if they made it from point A to point B,
would take a long time, especially if it wasn't from
(05:12):
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. Remember all that includes
personal security of the courier, right right. It depends upon that,
and it depends upon the trustworthiness, the dependability of the courier.
(05:32):
If this courier disappeared for one reason or another, you're
s o l 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. Things like the pony
express that you mentioned earlier, matt Uh. Those those things failed,
(05:55):
they were bought up, or they simply went away. Other
job ance rose, like Wells Fargo, which some people may
not know. Wells Fargo did not begin as a bank.
It began as a shipping interest. Yeah. They they brought
carriages into the mix. They also retained that logo iconic.
(06:17):
What what colors are those? Yellow and red? Orange and magic?
I just see the red, okay to see the read. Uh.
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.
Ever since then, shipping and transportation have evolved in step
(06:41):
with one another, and eventually this created the massive interconnected
trad 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 via livestock. Nice like beast a burden,
(07:07):
I mean too bad for the beast, I guess, which
feels like a derogatory term. But the animals um and well.
And think about it this way. There is a very
very much distinct possibility that the components the things that
make up with the electronics you're using right now, your laptop,
whatever it is you're using, your your phone maybe to
(07:29):
listen to this, they have traveled further around the world
than you may Ever, that's true. That's true. They came
a long way to see you. 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 one famous example concerns fish in Scotland. It is
(07:53):
economically more feasible for fish to be caught in Scotland,
shipped to Nina for processing, you know, the filet of
the fish and so on, and then shipped back to Scotland.
Then it does to have the fish processed in Scotland.
It's weird, right, It boggles the mind, it does. And
(08:14):
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. It describes this process. We've
all seen those looming rectangular containers on the backs of
tractor trailers, on train cars, rusting away and weird industrial areas,
(08:38):
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's anderdize
(09:00):
as 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 of people who work in shipping.
So first off, you are on sung heroes. Thank you
(09:23):
very much for keeping this strange house of cards from
collapsing absolutely. And also shout out to all you lorry
drivers out 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
(09:45):
want to say, in the coal mining regions of England
it really hits its boom, and it goes worldwide after
World War Two, and this boom has continued. We have
the numbers to prove it. Yes, in the world of tipping,
the cargo ship stands ahead above all others. It is
the king, according to the International Maritime Organization, of everything
(10:11):
shipped in the world, everything shipped in the world is
on a cargo vessel at some point. That's bizarre. Of everything,
not of Tickle me Elmo's, not of your favorite vinyl
re issues, of everything. There are over twenty million shipping
(10:32):
containers in the world. We actually don't know how many
there are anymore, because we built them so quickly. 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
(10:57):
million trips per year they get around. This works out
to more than eleven billion tons of stuff. Etches, sketches, volvos, grain,
different cereals, oil, pictures of Christopher walking. Whatever, you can imagine,
it has been on a cargo ship at some point.
Although stuff they don't want you to know. T shirts right,
(11:17):
they're out floating somewhere by Diego Garcia as we speak, right, 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. Yeah, there are certainly downsides to
this whole system. About ten thousand containers get lost at
(11:37):
sea every year. Imagine that just it fell over the side. Guys,
I don't know what to tell you. Or all that
ship we can't find it. Yes, yes, we see different
examples of this in economic anecdotes. One of them would
be the story of the rubber Ducks. Did you ever
(12:00):
hear about this? I've read that book, The Small the
short book by Coral. No, I don't 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. Yeah, a little bit less than twenty
nine thousand rubber ducks were lost in because the cargo
(12:25):
ship container tumbled into the North Pacific. I think the
newer was around eight hundred, and the rubber ducks were
packaged with other bath toys. They were headed from China
to the US, but the currents took them and took
They actually provided a great deal of insight for oceanographers,
people who study ocean currents and Arctic geography, and they
(12:48):
were able to learn more about how currents functioned because
they just had to follow the ducks. Uh, that's amazing
because it's literally the story of Eric Carls ten little
rubber ucks. Well, the story I've been reading to my
son forever. Well, well it appears, uh it is non
fiction or at least based on a true story. There's
(13:11):
another drawback, which is that these cargo ships generate a
great deal of pollution. They emit an estimated seven hundred
ninety six million tons of carbon dioxide that was in
two thousand twelve, and while the number, while people are
working to bring that number down, it's it's a hard
(13:32):
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 move it that way than
it is by shipping it via land or air. Just
the way. It's geography, it's the way the continents work.
(13:53):
It's geography, and it's mass. Like if you even if
you have giant airplanes, they 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
it's obviously and you obviously can't get to certain parts
(14:13):
of land from other parts of land when there's a
giant ocean in between. 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
(14:37):
stuff via plane or truck, 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 omit fewer greenhouse gases than
the truck that takes the container from one place in
(14:57):
France to another. Wow, 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 we would enter a
(15:21):
dark age. It is the backbone right now of our society,
whether whether we want to believe that or not. It's weird, yeah, yeah,
just as the U S 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
(15:42):
it's a question we encounter any time we contemplate any
system of this size. What if there's more behind the curtain?
What doesn't the shipping industry want you to know? And
we'll get to it right after a word from our
sponsor and we're back. Then let's get into the people
(16:09):
who want to either take stuff away from our shipping
containers or smuggle something through our shipping systems. Here's where
it gets crazy. This industry is cartoonishly crooked. It is
so crooked and so corrupt. And let's let's look at
a couple of specific examples here. First, smuggling. Doubtlessly, smuggling
(16:34):
is one of the first things we think of when
we think of crime and the transportation of goods. 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
(16:56):
probably not going to stop. With the sheer volume of
activity occurring every single second at every single level of
the global trade network, authorities are at the very least
hard pressed to discover, apprehend, and prosecute the criminals involved.
It doesn't help right that, unlike street level dealers, groups
(17:17):
or individuals with the capital to operate international smuggling rings
are not only overwhelmingly well off, they're often connected 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, or even low level people within
(17:38):
those systems that they know are at certain strategic places. Yikes.
So Let's let's consider a specific story to to kind
of look closer into this. So let's go back to
July twenty eleven the Guyane, which is a ship. It
was seized by the US Customs after authorities found twenty
(18:00):
tons twenty tons of cocaine aboard or was it eighteen tons? Oh?
It makes a massive difference, doesn't it. This is so
this happens pretty frequently in uh in drug bust, and
I think it's hilarious and I think a lot of
people listening are going to agree with us here. Why
would two tons go missing? Have you ever noticed? Have
(18:22):
you ever noticed when there's a large bust of illicit drugs,
the numbers get kind of uh, kind of fudgy real quick.
It was twenty but you know, we just rewaited. It
was just eighteen. I guess we made an error, you know,
heat of the moment. Sheets that's a Yeah, we're not
accusing anyone here, We're just saying maybe it's a bit
(18:42):
of a pattern. 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 uh, we thought we
found uh five hundred pounds of marijuana, but actually it
was five hundred and sixty. No, the never goes up,
It always fudges down anyhow. So let's get back to
(19:04):
that twenty or eighteen tons of coke. 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. So yea for customs. They
(19:29):
caught this, right, they caught this. They seized the craft
the what is it called the Mediterranean Shipping Shipping Companies Guyane,
the MSc Guyane. Things got complicated very quickly. You see,
the MSc Guyane is a Liberian flagged vessel. That means
it sails under the flag of the country Liberia, but
(19:50):
it is not owned nor operated by a Liberian company. Instead,
it's operated by that company. You just give a shout
out to Matt the Mediterranean Shipping Coe. They are a
Switzerland based global shipping conglomerate. Hold on a second, so
it's the Mediterranean Shipping Company with a Liberian flag based
(20:12):
in Switzerland, and they only sort of own it bis
gets sketchering sketcher as we ascend the ladder of ownership
and profit. The vessel was financed by JP Morgan what
you may recognize from some earlier episodes in New York City, Right,
(20:34):
the two companies structured the purchase of this vessel such
that the ship was quote left unpack this owned by
client assets in a transportation strategy fund run for JP
Morgan's asset management arm. What right, exactly who really owns
(20:57):
this at the end of the day. Where does the
check get sent to you know what I mean? Where
does its bank account ultimately collects whatever margin a prophet
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. And look, we don't know where
(21:17):
all that coke came from, but it was not us, 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. They go, oh, interesting, wrong number.
Uh this is j Dan. Yeah, there's not the one
(21:38):
you're looking for. Yeah, we're technically a river bank, not
a financial institution. I'm pretty sure you're looking for HSBC.
They're they're the ones. HSBC, is what I said, H
S B C C. 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
(21:59):
other eyes legitimate financial institution, maybe in the days of
like telegraphs or something, who totally faked that their equivalent
of a phone wasn't working. I think, oh, sorry, we
thought it was an a then a dash our our
dinner daughter was just not and then the Great Depression.
But but it's true. They've been tremendously cag about this
(22:22):
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 very much like
a way to maximize profit while avoiding liability, which is
what companies do well. And they just happened to get caught.
(22:45):
They just happened to get caught. Yeah, this single bust
as 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 ard parcels of cocaine off the
coast of Perue. But as far as the person who
(23:07):
organized brokered the whole deal, the reason the coke interest
in Perue 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 thou dollars
for helping loaded on, which sounds like great money until
you know you're going to jail. Uh. These these people
(23:29):
have been implicated, but there's no one has found the
puppet master yet. And while this was a big bus,
this was not anomalous by virtue of simply being a
drug bus. Because the U. S. Customs and Border Protection
claims that they are busting people left and right every day.
The U S. Customs and Border Protection claim that they
(23:52):
seas 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. Right. This leads
(24:13):
us to another dark side of the industry, and we'll
dive into it. After a word from our sponsor, we're back.
So the shipping industry probably since the first boat was made,
(24:33):
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 of whatever this pie
is in question. Ever since that moment, corruption has existed
every time somebody makes uh. Let's think of it as
(24:54):
um light and shadow. Right. Every time somebody makes a
law that exists in the light, allow with transparency, you
know what I mean, there is another practice, uh, an
analog to that, a shadow law that will exist in
the criminal community or in the underground. That's why we
have all these old tropes about honor among thieves and
(25:16):
whether or not it exists. That's why you hear uh
mafios talk about a code of one sort or another.
Because human beings inherently attempt to impose order upon any
sort of interaction with the world around them or with
the people they meet. The shipping industry is going to
(25:39):
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 ports are in numerous countries, very very different countries.
(26:00):
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 the rule of law is pretty secure. Your odds
of getting in trouble for murdering someone are pretty high. Again,
(26:25):
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
places with vastly different sets of laws, social moorias, legal systems,
(26:45):
things like that, different institutions they have to interact with.
They also encounter tremendous bureaucracy, right, I mean, in all
kinds of different ship inspections. Every time or mostly when
they go into port, there's gonna be some kind of inspection,
some kind of immigration or customs that they have to
deal with just by even entering apport um. And there
(27:07):
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, during these um inspections, right,
you're you're on this ship, you're the captain or the crew.
You show up. Now this whole other team comes through
and runs these inspections, right, and a lot of times
(27:27):
just to get through that inspection, or maybe even to
have someone look the other way. That's just hypothetically about
some you know, discrepancy in the weight of certain cargo, sure,
or the screams coming from a container. Yeah, maybe that too, um,
but you would have to bribe this team of people
(27:48):
coming in from whichever country you're going to. And even
if you're not shipping anything, I listen, 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 gonna keep calling these
things shadowy, refusing to pay these shadow taxes will lead
(28:08):
to at the very least delays, sometimes 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're also punitive finds that
will be legally defended by the country in which the
(28:30):
port exists, and these fines can you know. It's like
they used to say about law enforcement officers in the
US that if if an elio wants to write you
a ticket for something, they will find something. While that
may not be a d percent true, it's absolutely true,
and a lot of these ports, the worst case scenario
(28:50):
is that refusal to participate in 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? Oh yeah, A you're
(29:11):
doing No, that's great, that's great. We're gonna get you
out of here like it. He split. We just gotta
get this little facilitation payment going first, if you know
what I mean. I'm just gonna hold my hand out
here and wait for you to facilitate. Wait, wait, I'm
facilitating the payment. I thought you were. I thought this
was a payment for you to facilitate. You don't understand
(29:32):
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. Oh you know, okay, okay,
now that's my first time in the Port A Lago, sir.
But I have nothing in my hand still. Oh oh
oh gosh u okay, hang on, let me let me
make a phone call real quick. But actually it would
(29:54):
probably be much smoother than yeah. Yeah, really, it's kind
of like ah, it's I know a friend of mine
whom I will not identify, actually did participate in low
level smuggling from Russia to the U S not for
not for some sort of nefarious reason, snowden right, he
(30:18):
was just coming back to see some people and then
left again. Uh, this friend of mine actually was getting
some pre uh communists takeover children's literature because this friend
of mine is a nerd, 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
(30:40):
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
have never been right, Paul, you haven't been to okay, correct,
So I just wanted to check. So here's what this
(31:04):
person says. A 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 you know, weapons
of war or anything. So they go to essentially a
(31:24):
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 in the West, niceties that just
(31:44):
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 bill,
that will make change for you. In Russia, apparently that
was not the case. You're expected to have exact change.
Now again, I don't know I cannot first verify this firsthand,
(32:06):
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 multilingual,
and this person speaks Russian, so anyway it shouldn't have mattered.
And then they happily made change, and the person said,
(32:29):
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. I think the people
whom your friend encountered, we're just reading him and or
his or her compatriots who were with her or him,
(32:51):
whoever it was. I think the smiling thing was just
a tactic to read whether or not they were police. Oh,
I see, Well, maybe it's just flexion of energy to write.
Maybe I don't know so. So anyhow, we know that
bribery exists and proliferates throughout the world. The shipping industry
(33:13):
is is no different, and anybody who has traveled extensively,
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 officer's job to propose
and accepted bribes, and woe betide those who refused to
(33:34):
play the game. According to someone named Cecilia Mueller 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 you were already entitled to. And
this is so common that other countries you know that
(33:58):
participate in the shipping industry have some names and slang
for these sorts of payments, and frankly, several of them
are pretty funny. Oh yeah, I very much enjoyed China's
which is tea money, a lot of tea shipping, give
me that extra tea money, or the one in Brazil,
which is just called make me laugh. It sounds like
(34:21):
a greeting like, yes, hello, welcome to Brazil. We hope
you're enjoying the port. Now make me laugh. 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. He was in Jersey. I
misread the accent. So another you know, just for comparison,
(34:48):
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 chicklets.
I've heard that as actually weirdly specific. Yeah, wait, where
did you hear I've got some friends in Jersey? Now,
(35:10):
friends in Jersey also sounds like a euphemism, does it not, Yeah,
you got some friends in Jersey. 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, with many states honestly
legitimately working to address the endemic corruption in the shipping industry,
(35:35):
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 or statements. You know,
(35:56):
So what does this all mean? Well, I 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're not
exactly sure, and we cannot be definitely sure about how
(36:17):
much stuff is being traded and how much it's all costing.
We we get the estimates from the conglomerates. Essentially, we
don't know how much shadow money exists out Yeah, that
stuff that is either willingly or unwillingly being traded and
for how much money. And there is genuinely no workable
solution at this time. Legalizing drugs, of course is I
(36:43):
think it's clear to say that would be one of
the biggest, most profound steps towards crippling criminal cartels, at
least in South America and in maybe a couple of
maybe in the Golden Triangle. But that won't stop the
bribery because corrupt corruption and smuggling are not simply dependent
(37:07):
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 to staunch the bleeding.
But this is a grievous wound um And I don't know, man,
I feel kind of weird ending on just such a
(37:29):
negative note. I mean, it's true. Everything we said is true. 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, um and
then losing their you know, their wealth that they get
(37:51):
from working there. They would be incentivized to not break
the rules. But wouldn't that cut into the profits for
the conglomerates. Well maybe over you Yeah, you're right, it
totally would. But what about the ports then, because that's
where a lot of the corruption comes to your right,
So you would need turrets that had an AI sophisticated
enough to identify when a bribe was occurring. Oh nice,
(38:16):
and then they could shoot sleep darts rapidly at any
possible bribery. And we can do we we can be
adventures 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. I
(38:37):
like the gravitas of that, but I don't know if
it's accurate. I love it. Well, the thing is too
and 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 then the course of
experienced conversation have pretty well and definitively established that happiness
(39:03):
is a comparative or relative term 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
(39:25):
in a group environment, they want to know that they
have more than the other person, or at least as much. So.
If um, if you and Paul and I were we're
working in a totally different industry and we all have
the same job, and we all, let's say we all
made I don't I'm just fifty thousand a year, and
(39:47):
we were happy as clams. I don't know where that
saying comes from, but that that's us. We're super happy.
And then we find out that one of us makes
fifty 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
(40:09):
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. Interesting point capitalism, baby, Yeah, I don't
(40:29):
know if it. I don't know if that bears out
for everyone. Perhaps you're right. I wish it's too broad
to brush many people. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So
let's 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 I did? I
(40:52):
heard tell via some tweets. Yes, that's correct, that's correct.
The president and claimed that 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 bills. He had one tweet about this, and
then he doubled down a few days later and he said, quote,
(41:16):
I am right about Amazon costing the US Post Office
massive amounts of money for being their delivery boy. Amazon
should pay these costs plus and not have them born
by the American taxpayer many billions of dollars. Post Office
leaders don't have a clue, or do they. We looked
into this and luckily for the U. S taxpayer. The
(41:39):
numbers don't seem to bear out. The US Post Service
did lose two point seven billion dollars in 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 million dollars of the nineteen point five
(42:02):
billion dollars in revenue that the Post Office made during
that time. So what that means is that there 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 being wouldn't get? But yeah, absolutely,
because they're also bringing billions of dollars in business, you
(42:25):
know what I mean? Yeah, losing two point seven billion
to make nineteen point five billion, it's weird. Well you
know again, it's the it's that high level math where
it almost becomes imaginary. It all is. Certainly it's got
a million or a billion, whatever you say. And speaking
(42:46):
of what you say, we want to hear from you, folks.
Thank you so much for tuning in. This concludes today's episode,
but not the show do we have any merchant marines
in the audience. What's the weirdest thing you ever had shipped?
You know, What's what's weirdest think you ever received in
the mail? What's the weirdest thing you've ever carried in
the back of your truck that you're driving right now? Oh? Yes, yeah,
(43:07):
good point. And I know we've got again we mentioned
it earlier, but we know from our emails and call
ins and things that a lot several of you, I'm
gonna venture to say, dozens of you are very are
driving large trucks with possibly shipping containers on them. Have
you ever had a sealed container? Oh? Yeah, those are
(43:27):
that's strict. Are they all sealed? Now? I don't know
how it works exactly once you get down into it
that far, but I know a lot of them actually seal.
A lot of places seal their containers. Now, do you
work for the rail system? Have you ever encountered modern
hobos a k A train kids? Let us know as well,
that seems like a weird thing to ship. You can
find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram.
(43:48):
You can find us on Twitter where we are Conspiracy
Stuff Conspiracy Stuff Show, or some derivation thereof. If you
want to call us, you can leave us a message.
We are one eight three three st d w y
t K. If you don't want to do any of
that but you still want to get in touch with
us and give us a suggestion or a story, you
can always email us. We are conspiracy at i heart
(44:09):
radio dot com. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
(44:30):
is a production of I heart Radio's How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learned the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Gradios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome
(00:25):
back to the show. My name is Matt, they call
me Ben, and you're joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you.
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 have you all, either
of you all started ordering holiday gifts things of that nature. No,
(00:46):
I have not. 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 UH in the year for at
least the domestic US and a lot of other countries
where in UH the Christian celebration of Christmas is common, right,
(01:09):
And the weird thing 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 seven
three sixty five days a year operation and it's huge.
The evidence about the enormity of this industry is all
(01:32):
around you. Specifically, 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. Can we say legendary? It
is certainly, Yeah, first show to hit a billion downloads,
it's a legend. And we're looking at pictures of Josh
(01:53):
and Chuck all around us, and there are a couple
of ure are a couple of cameos of other non
on SISK people here. Let's say I think that's Jonathan
Strickland there the back left of and and all of
these were shipped to our offices. 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
(02:17):
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 mundane items may come from
halfway across the planet. We're talking towels, uh, chess sets,
(02:39):
any consumer good really created out of either plastic or metal,
and that you and Paul and I went through a
period a few years back where, for reasons we we
don't need to get in the weeds about we were
getting a lot of technological stuff from China from a
place called Mono Price. Remember that I do recall, and
(03:02):
I would be so baffled because some of this was
relatively sophisticated equipment. It would be so baffled to think
that the 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,
(03:26):
and so we're going 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. So the post
(03:49):
Office nowadays, on on podcast, ads and other places alike,
is often maligned, though the ads have lessened quite a
bit in the past few years. Um, but you know,
when you imagine the post office and going to visit
there to send something out, that's one thing. But then
(04:09):
when you imagine the orchestration that it is required to
get things, whether it's just a simple letter or package
that ways a hundred fifty pounds shipps from one place
to another, it's it's a incredibly difficult task that they're
faced with, and they do it every day. Before the
United States Post Office, you have to imagine you were
(04:31):
putting things on a rail car a lot of times
and then sending it off. You were putting it on
a person who was riding horseback for a long time. Yeah,
that's right. Before these state levels shipping institutions existed, moving
goods from one place to another was a just one
(04:51):
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,
if they made it from point A to point B,
would take a long time, especially if it wasn't from
(05:12):
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. Remember all that includes
personal security of the courier, right right. It depends upon that,
and it depends upon the trustworthiness, the dependability of the courier.
(05:32):
If this courier disappeared for one reason or another, you're
s o l 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. Things like the pony
express that you mentioned earlier, matt Uh. Those those things failed,
(05:55):
they were bought up, or they simply went away. Other
job ance rose, like Wells Fargo, which some people may
not know. Wells Fargo did not begin as a bank.
It began as a shipping interest. Yeah. They they brought
carriages into the mix. They also retained that logo iconic.
(06:17):
What what colors are those? Yellow and red? Orange and magic?
I just see the red, okay to see the read. Uh.
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.
Ever since then, shipping and transportation have evolved in step
(06:41):
with one another, and eventually this created the massive interconnected
trad 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 via livestock. Nice like beast a burden,
(07:07):
I mean too bad for the beast, I guess, which
feels like a derogatory term. But the animals um and well.
And think about it this way. There is a very
very much distinct possibility that the components the things that
make up with the electronics you're using right now, your laptop,
whatever it is you're using, your your phone maybe to
(07:29):
listen to this, they have traveled further around the world
than you may Ever, that's true. That's true. They came
a long way to see you. 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 one famous example concerns fish in Scotland. It is
(07:53):
economically more feasible for fish to be caught in Scotland,
shipped to Nina for processing, you know, the filet of
the fish and so on, and then shipped back to Scotland.
Then it does to have the fish processed in Scotland.
It's weird, right, It boggles the mind, it does. And
(08:14):
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. It describes this process. We've
all seen those looming rectangular containers on the backs of
tractor trailers, on train cars, rusting away and weird industrial areas,
(08:38):
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's anderdize
(09:00):
as 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 of people who work in shipping.
So first off, you are on sung heroes. Thank you
(09:23):
very much for keeping this strange house of cards from
collapsing absolutely. And also shout out to all you lorry
drivers out 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
(09:45):
want to say, in the coal mining regions of England
it really hits its boom, and it goes worldwide after
World War Two, and this boom has continued. We have
the numbers to prove it. Yes, in the world of tipping,
the cargo ship stands ahead above all others. It is
the king, according to the International Maritime Organization, of everything
(10:11):
shipped in the world, everything shipped in the world is
on a cargo vessel at some point. That's bizarre. Of everything,
not of Tickle me Elmo's, not of your favorite vinyl
re issues, of everything. There are over twenty million shipping
(10:32):
containers in the world. We actually don't know how many
there are anymore, because we built them so quickly. 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
(10:57):
million trips per year they get around. This works out
to more than eleven billion tons of stuff. Etches, sketches, volvos, grain,
different cereals, oil, pictures of Christopher walking. Whatever, you can imagine,
it has been on a cargo ship at some point.
Although stuff they don't want you to know. T shirts right,
(11:17):
they're out floating somewhere by Diego Garcia as we speak, right, 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. Yeah, there are certainly downsides to
this whole system. About ten thousand containers get lost at
(11:37):
sea every year. Imagine that just it fell over the side. Guys,
I don't know what to tell you. Or all that
ship we can't find it. Yes, yes, we see different
examples of this in economic anecdotes. One of them would
be the story of the rubber Ducks. Did you ever
(12:00):
hear about this? I've read that book, The Small the
short book by Coral. No, I don't 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. Yeah, a little bit less than twenty
nine thousand rubber ducks were lost in because the cargo
(12:25):
ship container tumbled into the North Pacific. I think the
newer was around eight hundred, and the rubber ducks were
packaged with other bath toys. They were headed from China
to the US, but the currents took them and took
They actually provided a great deal of insight for oceanographers,
people who study ocean currents and Arctic geography, and they
(12:48):
were able to learn more about how currents functioned because
they just had to follow the ducks. Uh, that's amazing
because it's literally the story of Eric Carls ten little
rubber ucks. Well, the story I've been reading to my
son forever. Well, well it appears, uh it is non
fiction or at least based on a true story. There's
(13:11):
another drawback, which is that these cargo ships generate a
great deal of pollution. They emit an estimated seven hundred
ninety six million tons of carbon dioxide that was in
two thousand twelve, and while the number, while people are
working to bring that number down, it's it's a hard
(13:32):
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 move it that way than
it is by shipping it via land or air. Just
the way. It's geography, it's the way the continents work.
(13:53):
It's geography, and it's mass. Like if you even if
you have giant airplanes, they 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
it's obviously and you obviously can't get to certain parts
(14:13):
of land from other parts of land when there's a
giant ocean in between. 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
(14:37):
stuff via plane or truck, 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 omit fewer greenhouse gases than
the truck that takes the container from one place in
(14:57):
France to another. Wow, 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 we would enter a
(15:21):
dark age. It is the backbone right now of our society,
whether whether we want to believe that or not. It's weird, yeah, yeah,
just as the U S 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
(15:42):
it's a question we encounter any time we contemplate any
system of this size. What if there's more behind the curtain?
What doesn't the shipping industry want you to know? And
we'll get to it right after a word from our
sponsor and we're back. Then let's get into the people
(16:09):
who want to either take stuff away from our shipping
containers or smuggle something through our shipping systems. Here's where
it gets crazy. This industry is cartoonishly crooked. It is
so crooked and so corrupt. And let's let's look at
a couple of specific examples here. First, smuggling. Doubtlessly, smuggling
(16:34):
is one of the first things we think of when
we think of crime and the transportation of goods. 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
(16:56):
probably not going to stop. With the sheer volume of
activity occurring every single second at every single level of
the global trade network, authorities are at the very least
hard pressed to discover, apprehend, and prosecute the criminals involved.
It doesn't help right that, unlike street level dealers, groups
(17:17):
or individuals with the capital to operate international smuggling rings
are not only overwhelmingly well off, they're often connected 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, or even low level people within
(17:38):
those systems that they know are at certain strategic places. Yikes.
So Let's let's consider a specific story to to kind
of look closer into this. So let's go back to
July twenty eleven the Guyane, which is a ship. It
was seized by the US Customs after authorities found twenty
(18:00):
tons twenty tons of cocaine aboard or was it eighteen tons? Oh?
It makes a massive difference, doesn't it. This is so
this happens pretty frequently in uh in drug bust, and
I think it's hilarious and I think a lot of
people listening are going to agree with us here. Why
would two tons go missing? Have you ever noticed? Have
(18:22):
you ever noticed when there's a large bust of illicit drugs,
the numbers get kind of uh, kind of fudgy real quick.
It was twenty but you know, we just rewaited. It
was just eighteen. I guess we made an error, you know,
heat of the moment. Sheets that's a Yeah, we're not
accusing anyone here, We're just saying maybe it's a bit
(18:42):
of a pattern. 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 uh, we thought we
found uh five hundred pounds of marijuana, but actually it
was five hundred and sixty. No, the never goes up,
It always fudges down anyhow. So let's get back to
(19:04):
that twenty or eighteen tons of coke. 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. So yea for customs. They
(19:29):
caught this, right, they caught this. They seized the craft
the what is it called the Mediterranean Shipping Shipping Companies Guyane,
the MSc Guyane. Things got complicated very quickly. You see,
the MSc Guyane is a Liberian flagged vessel. That means
it sails under the flag of the country Liberia, but
(19:50):
it is not owned nor operated by a Liberian company. Instead,
it's operated by that company. You just give a shout
out to Matt the Mediterranean Shipping Coe. They are a
Switzerland based global shipping conglomerate. Hold on a second, so
it's the Mediterranean Shipping Company with a Liberian flag based
(20:12):
in Switzerland, and they only sort of own it bis
gets sketchering sketcher as we ascend the ladder of ownership
and profit. The vessel was financed by JP Morgan what
you may recognize from some earlier episodes in New York City, Right,
(20:34):
the two companies structured the purchase of this vessel such
that the ship was quote left unpack this owned by
client assets in a transportation strategy fund run for JP
Morgan's asset management arm. What right, exactly who really owns
(20:57):
this at the end of the day. Where does the
check get sent to you know what I mean? Where
does its bank account ultimately collects whatever margin a prophet
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. And look, we don't know where
(21:17):
all that coke came from, but it was not us, 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. They go, oh, interesting, wrong number.
Uh this is j Dan. Yeah, there's not the one
(21:38):
you're looking for. Yeah, we're technically a river bank, not
a financial institution. I'm pretty sure you're looking for HSBC.
They're they're the ones. HSBC, is what I said, H
S B C C. 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
(21:59):
other eyes legitimate financial institution, maybe in the days of
like telegraphs or something, who totally faked that their equivalent
of a phone wasn't working. I think, oh, sorry, we
thought it was an a then a dash our our
dinner daughter was just not and then the Great Depression.
But but it's true. They've been tremendously cag about this
(22:22):
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 very much like
a way to maximize profit while avoiding liability, which is
what companies do well. And they just happened to get caught.
(22:45):
They just happened to get caught. Yeah, this single bust
as 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 ard parcels of cocaine off the
coast of Perue. But as far as the person who
(23:07):
organized brokered the whole deal, the reason the coke interest
in Perue 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 thou dollars
for helping loaded on, which sounds like great money until
you know you're going to jail. Uh. These these people
(23:29):
have been implicated, but there's no one has found the
puppet master yet. And while this was a big bus,
this was not anomalous by virtue of simply being a
drug bus. Because the U. S. Customs and Border Protection
claims that they are busting people left and right every day.
The U S. Customs and Border Protection claim that they
(23:52):
seas 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. Right. This leads
(24:13):
us to another dark side of the industry, and we'll
dive into it. After a word from our sponsor, we're back.
So the shipping industry probably since the first boat was made,
(24:33):
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 of whatever this pie
is in question. Ever since that moment, corruption has existed
every time somebody makes uh. Let's think of it as
(24:54):
um light and shadow. Right. Every time somebody makes a
law that exists in the light, allow with transparency, you
know what I mean, there is another practice, uh, an
analog to that, a shadow law that will exist in
the criminal community or in the underground. That's why we
have all these old tropes about honor among thieves and
(25:16):
whether or not it exists. That's why you hear uh
mafios talk about a code of one sort or another.
Because human beings inherently attempt to impose order upon any
sort of interaction with the world around them or with
the people they meet. The shipping industry is going to
(25:39):
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 ports are in numerous countries, very very different countries.
(26:00):
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 the rule of law is pretty secure. Your odds
of getting in trouble for murdering someone are pretty high. Again,
(26:25):
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
places with vastly different sets of laws, social moorias, legal systems,
(26:45):
things like that, different institutions they have to interact with.
They also encounter tremendous bureaucracy, right, I mean, in all
kinds of different ship inspections. Every time or mostly when
they go into port, there's gonna be some kind of inspection,
some kind of immigration or customs that they have to
deal with just by even entering apport um. And there
(27:07):
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, during these um inspections, right,
you're you're on this ship, you're the captain or the crew.
You show up. Now this whole other team comes through
and runs these inspections, right, and a lot of times
(27:27):
just to get through that inspection, or maybe even to
have someone look the other way. That's just hypothetically about
some you know, discrepancy in the weight of certain cargo, sure,
or the screams coming from a container. Yeah, maybe that too, um,
but you would have to bribe this team of people
(27:48):
coming in from whichever country you're going to. And even
if you're not shipping anything, I listen, 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 gonna keep calling these
things shadowy, refusing to pay these shadow taxes will lead
(28:08):
to at the very least delays, sometimes 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're also punitive finds that
will be legally defended by the country in which the
(28:30):
port exists, and these fines can you know. It's like
they used to say about law enforcement officers in the
US that if if an elio wants to write you
a ticket for something, they will find something. While that
may not be a d percent true, it's absolutely true,
and a lot of these ports, the worst case scenario
(28:50):
is that refusal to participate in 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? Oh yeah, A you're
(29:11):
doing No, that's great, that's great. We're gonna get you
out of here like it. He split. We just gotta
get this little facilitation payment going first, if you know
what I mean. I'm just gonna hold my hand out
here and wait for you to facilitate. Wait, wait, I'm
facilitating the payment. I thought you were. I thought this
was a payment for you to facilitate. You don't understand
(29:32):
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. Oh you know, okay, okay,
now that's my first time in the Port A Lago, sir.
But I have nothing in my hand still. Oh oh
oh gosh u okay, hang on, let me let me
make a phone call real quick. But actually it would
(29:54):
probably be much smoother than yeah. Yeah, really, it's kind
of like ah, it's I know a friend of mine
whom I will not identify, actually did participate in low
level smuggling from Russia to the U S not for
not for some sort of nefarious reason, snowden right, he
(30:18):
was just coming back to see some people and then
left again. Uh, this friend of mine actually was getting
some pre uh communists takeover children's literature because this friend
of mine is a nerd, 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
(30:40):
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
have never been right, Paul, you haven't been to okay, correct,
So I just wanted to check. So here's what this
(31:04):
person says. A 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 you know, weapons
of war or anything. So they go to essentially a
(31:24):
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 in the West, niceties that just
(31:44):
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 bill,
that will make change for you. In Russia, apparently that
was not the case. You're expected to have exact change.
Now again, I don't know I cannot first verify this firsthand,
(32:06):
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 multilingual,
and this person speaks Russian, so anyway it shouldn't have mattered.
And then they happily made change, and the person said,
(32:29):
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. I think the people
whom your friend encountered, we're just reading him and or
his or her compatriots who were with her or him,
(32:51):
whoever it was. I think the smiling thing was just
a tactic to read whether or not they were police. Oh,
I see, Well, maybe it's just flexion of energy to write.
Maybe I don't know so. So anyhow, we know that
bribery exists and proliferates throughout the world. The shipping industry
(33:13):
is is no different, and anybody who has traveled extensively,
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 officer's job to propose
and accepted bribes, and woe betide those who refused to
(33:34):
play the game. According to someone named Cecilia Mueller 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 you were already entitled to. And
this is so common that other countries you know that
(33:58):
participate in the shipping industry have some names and slang
for these sorts of payments, and frankly, several of them
are pretty funny. Oh yeah, I very much enjoyed China's
which is tea money, a lot of tea shipping, give
me that extra tea money, or the one in Brazil,
which is just called make me laugh. It sounds like
(34:21):
a greeting like, yes, hello, welcome to Brazil. We hope
you're enjoying the port. Now make me laugh. 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. He was in Jersey. I
misread the accent. So another you know, just for comparison,
(34:48):
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 chicklets.
I've heard that as actually weirdly specific. Yeah, wait, where
did you hear I've got some friends in Jersey? Now,
(35:10):
friends in Jersey also sounds like a euphemism, does it not, Yeah,
you got some friends in Jersey. 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, with many states honestly
legitimately working to address the endemic corruption in the shipping industry,
(35:35):
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 or statements. You know,
(35:56):
So what does this all mean? Well, I 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're not
exactly sure, and we cannot be definitely sure about how
(36:17):
much stuff is being traded and how much it's all costing.
We we get the estimates from the conglomerates. Essentially, we
don't know how much shadow money exists out Yeah, that
stuff that is either willingly or unwillingly being traded and
for how much money. And there is genuinely no workable
solution at this time. Legalizing drugs, of course is I
(36:43):
think it's clear to say that would be one of
the biggest, most profound steps towards crippling criminal cartels, at
least in South America and in maybe a couple of
maybe in the Golden Triangle. But that won't stop the
bribery because corrupt corruption and smuggling are not simply dependent
(37:07):
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 to staunch the bleeding.
But this is a grievous wound um And I don't know, man,
I feel kind of weird ending on just such a
(37:29):
negative note. I mean, it's true. Everything we said is true. 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, um and
then losing their you know, their wealth that they get
(37:51):
from working there. They would be incentivized to not break
the rules. But wouldn't that cut into the profits for
the conglomerates. Well maybe over you Yeah, you're right, it
totally would. But what about the ports then, because that's
where a lot of the corruption comes to your right,
So you would need turrets that had an AI sophisticated
enough to identify when a bribe was occurring. Oh nice,
(38:16):
and then they could shoot sleep darts rapidly at any
possible bribery. And we can do we we can be
adventures 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. I
(38:37):
like the gravitas of that, but I don't know if
it's accurate. I love it. Well, the thing is too
and 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 then the course of
experienced conversation have pretty well and definitively established that happiness
(39:03):
is a comparative or relative term 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
(39:25):
in a group environment, they want to know that they
have more than the other person, or at least as much. So.
If um, if you and Paul and I were we're
working in a totally different industry and we all have
the same job, and we all, let's say we all
made I don't I'm just fifty thousand a year, and
(39:47):
we were happy as clams. I don't know where that
saying comes from, but that that's us. We're super happy.
And then we find out that one of us makes
fifty 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
(40:09):
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. Interesting point capitalism, baby, Yeah, I don't
(40:29):
know if it. I don't know if that bears out
for everyone. Perhaps you're right. I wish it's too broad
to brush many people. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. So
let's 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 I did? I
(40:52):
heard tell via some tweets. Yes, that's correct, that's correct.
The president and claimed that 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 bills. He had one tweet about this, and
then he doubled down a few days later and he said, quote,
(41:16):
I am right about Amazon costing the US Post Office
massive amounts of money for being their delivery boy. Amazon
should pay these costs plus and not have them born
by the American taxpayer many billions of dollars. Post Office
leaders don't have a clue, or do they. We looked
into this and luckily for the U. S taxpayer. The
(41:39):
numbers don't seem to bear out. The US Post Service
did lose two point seven billion dollars in 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 million dollars of the nineteen point five
(42:02):
billion dollars in revenue that the Post Office made during
that time. So what that means is that there 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 being wouldn't get? But yeah, absolutely,
because they're also bringing billions of dollars in business, you
(42:25):
know what I mean? Yeah, losing two point seven billion
to make nineteen point five billion, it's weird. Well you
know again, it's the it's that high level math where
it almost becomes imaginary. It all is. Certainly it's got
a million or a billion, whatever you say. And speaking
(42:46):
of what you say, we want to hear from you, folks.
Thank you so much for tuning in. This concludes today's episode,
but not the show do we have any merchant marines
in the audience. What's the weirdest thing you ever had shipped?
You know, What's what's weirdest think you ever received in
the mail? What's the weirdest thing you've ever carried in
the back of your truck that you're driving right now? Oh? Yes, yeah,
(43:07):
good point. And I know we've got again we mentioned
it earlier, but we know from our emails and call
ins and things that a lot several of you, I'm
gonna venture to say, dozens of you are very are
driving large trucks with possibly shipping containers on them. Have
you ever had a sealed container? Oh? Yeah, those are
(43:27):
that's strict. Are they all sealed? Now? I don't know
how it works exactly once you get down into it
that far, but I know a lot of them actually seal.
A lot of places seal their containers. Now, do you
work for the rail system? Have you ever encountered modern
hobos a k A train kids? Let us know as well,
that seems like a weird thing to ship. You can
find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram.
(43:48):
You can find us on Twitter where we are Conspiracy
Stuff Conspiracy Stuff Show, or some derivation thereof. If you
want to call us, you can leave us a message.
We are one eight three three st d w y
t K. If you don't want to do any of
that but you still want to get in touch with
us and give us a suggestion or a story, you
can always email us. We are conspiracy at i heart
(44:09):
radio dot com. Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
(44:30):
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