Brokers, Bagmen, & Moles TRANSCRIPTS

[00:00:00] Anjay: Previously on Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

[00:00:05] Bill Crawford: It's a Wednesday afternoon and the call comes in. Now! Now!

[00:00:09] News: The FBI in Chicago has been looking into charges involving multimillion dollar fraud.

[00:00:14] Vinny Provenzano: I think they were going after my boss, Leo Melamed and Jack Sandner, trying to get the guys up top.

[00:00:19] Bill Crawford: You've had four agents undercover for two years.

[00:00:23] David Greising: Archer Daniels Midland, they brought a complaint to the FBI.

[00:00:39] Anjay: January 20th, 1985 was the coldest day in the history of Chicago. It was a mind numbing 27 degrees below zero. The streets were desolate because in that kind of a cold, you can get frostbite in just a few minutes.

But even the bone-numbing cold didn't stop Wayne Cryts from gearing up for an important demonstration early the next morning.

[00:01:07] Wayne Cryts: The reason why we're up here is to draw attention to the most unjust marketing system in the world. It's unbelievable the type of market system that allows people to sell our product before they ever buy it from us. Total disregard for our cost of production and our need for a reasonable return.

[00:01:26] Anjay: Cryts was a sixth-generation farmer and one of the leaders of a group called the American Agricultural Movement. And on that frigid day, at the same time president Ronald Reagan was inaugurated for a second term in Washington, Wayne and his organization took to the streets in protest.

[00:01:50] Wayne Cryts: No one should be able to be allowed to sell something that they don't own, have no money tied up in, sell it short, and drive those prices down and make a profit by doing so.

[00:02:00] Anjay: Cryts and his colleagues were mad because family farmers were spiraling into debt as a result of tumbling crop prices. From his point of view, the source of the farmer's pain had nothing to do with droughts or freezes or the things that typically affected crop prices. Rather, it was all because some traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Board of Trade realized they could make big money by speculating on the future prices of those crops.

[00:02:32] Wayne Cryts: The thing that concerns me the most is the amount of desperation that's out there on the farm. These thousands and thousands of farmers as good producers, good managers, and they're being forced off of that land with nowhere to go.

[00:02:51] Anjay: Farmers weren't the only ones feeling the squeeze. During Reagan's time in office, wages for low-income workers plummeted while those for the country's top earners skyrocketed. Social services were down and homelessness was up. None of this really mattered if you worked on Wall Street or a Chicago counterpart, LaSalle Street.

The world of finance was booming. And to those on the outside, that was precisely the problem.

[00:03:23] Farmer: That just doesn't seem right to me, that they can trade my product before I even plant it. They can trade it before I even harvest it, and they never ask me can they trade it or buy it, and they never take possession of the product. Mm-hmm.

[00:03:34] Wayne Cryts: What our goals are is to be able to get in on the floor trade and get the traders to suspend trading until we can sit down and work out these products.

[00:03:48] Anjay: They never did make it to the trading floor, but they tried. And dozens of farmers were arrested. It made the national news. The head of the Board of Trade, Karsten “Cash” Mahlmann even made a statement.

[00:04:03] Cash Mahlmann: Last week we set up a meeting with the USTA and Mr. Cryts. We informed him, we sympathize with the plight of the marginal farmer. We are not the cause of this problem. It's a problem. We suggest that he go to, uh, Washington, speak with the administration, speak with Congress, and uh, he might have better success there.

[00:04:23] Anjay: As it turns out, somebody already did go to the government and it was someone much more powerful than Mr. Cryts. Because before the farmers ever gathered outside the board or the Merc, the FBI had put together a plan to have agents go undercover and infiltrate the exchanges. The consensus was that something rotten had to be going on in the trading pits because the fortunes being made on the floor were too good to be true. Or at least to be legal.

I'm Anjay Nagpal, and this is Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

[00:05:18] Bill Crawford: Took one look at me and spit at me, and that was the end of it.

[00:05:22] David Greising: He certainly had a fair degree of animus toward what he thought was happening on the trading floor.

[00:05:28] The Informant: It's been going on as recently as three weeks ago. Nothing's changed.

[00:05:31] Vinny Provenzano: No one trusted anybody. No one knew who was flipping.

[00:05:34] Dwayne Andreas: Bugs that you know about are not the ones to worry about. It's the bugs you don't know about.

[00:05:39] John Troelstrup: Okay, we have that on tape. Don't you want to talk to us about that?

[00:05:56] Anjay: In January of 1989, after the FBI investigation was leaked by the Chicago Tribune, it was repeated over and over again—that Chicago's future traders were involved in a massive criminal conspiracy.

[00:06:11] News: The FBI was investigating possible massive fraud in the future's markets. As many as a hundred brokers and traders are alleged to have systematically cheated customers out of millions of dollars.

[00:06:23] Anjay: In any criminal case, there's the accused and the victims in this case. The victims were customers of the Exchange who ranged from large institutional customers like banks, hedge funds, and pension plans to small individual investors. The funny thing about this particular investigation was that so far no victims were identified and none had complained publicly except the farmers, as we heard at the top of the episode.

So Tribune reporter, Bill Crawford—who we heard from an episode four and who broke the story—went looking for some victims.

[00:07:08] Bill Crawford: I had a, a guy who was under investigation, a young kid, 22 years old. He made a trade. Somehow I traced the trade that had been made by a farmer and a young guy. Up in, um, what was it, Double Eyes? Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. I go up there and, and I locate him and, uh, he's, he's out on the tractor and he's tilling the soil.

I waved him over and he was nice enough to come over, had the engine roaring at as loud as he possibly could, and he said, what do you want? And I said, Hey, look, I'm of the Chicago Tribune. I said, uh, did you make a trade on corn? Blah, blah, blah. And he says, uh, who wants to know? And I said, I'd like to know. And I said, I'm told that, uh, you got screwed on the fill.

[00:07:59] Anjay: Bill said he heard the farmer got screwed on the fill, which is trader speak for, he paid more for a futures contract than he should have.

[00:08:09] Bill Crawford: You know what he did? Took one look at me and spit at me, and that was the end of it. Got back on the tractor and left.

[00:08:21] Anjay: So that farmer didn't wanna talk about getting ripped off, but there was another farmer, the biggest one of all, who did. Here's former Merc Chairman Jack Sandner from an old interview.

[00:08:36] Jack Sandner: And involved Archer Daniels Midland. He felt he was being, was being taken advantage of at the Board of Trade at the Merc, and somehow then they end up with an FBI investigation at the Board of Trade and at the Merc.

[00:08:49] Anjay: The Archer Daniels Midland Company, otherwise known as...

[00:08:55] ADM Video: ADM, supermarket to the world.

[00:08:58] Anjay: They're also the company at the center of one of my favorite movies, “The Informant.” In the movie, Matt Damon plays a high-ranking ADM executive.

[00:09:09] The Informant: Archer Daniels Midland. Most people have never heard of us, but chances are they've never had a meal we're not a part of. Just read the side of the package.

That's us.

[00:09:18] Anjay: In the 1980s, ADM was one of the largest agricultural companies in the world. Here's an old video I found online to add some color.

[00:09:29] Food & Beverage: Over the course of a hundred years, ADM has grown into a multinational giant, known as the supermarket to the world, developing a global network of processing plants, research labs, and transportation systems.

[00:09:43] Anjay: That doesn't exactly sound like today's sustainable organic farming. In fact, ADM claimed that all the chemical processing and refining was necessary to preserve and multiply the world's food supply. They felt they had a higher calling as if by Providence.

[00:10:02] Food & Beverage: ADM has always seemed to be in the right place at the right time, with the right solutions to some tough problems.

To answer the world's food shortages, ADM came up with dehydrated soy protein that feeds many of the poor nations. In response to the Arab oil embargo of the ‘80s and a personal plea from President Reagan, ADM took its corn and made ethanol, the revolutionary gasoline additive that has dramatically cut fuel consumption and carbon monoxide pollution.

[00:10:34] Anjay: So yeah. ADM was a big deal and so was its powerful CEO, Dwayne Andreas.

[00:10:42] ADM Video: Dwayne O. Andreas, is the number one titan of agribusiness and has been chairman and CEO of Archer Daniels Midland since 1970.

[00:10:50] Anjay: Dwayne Andreas was a college dropout. Who leaned on a little ingenuity and lots of connections to become one of the nation's most prominent businessmen. To say he had lofty ambitions would be an understatement.

[00:11:07] ADM Video: Dwayne believes world peace can only be achieved when today's billion starving people are hungry. No more.

I've always had objectives in mind doing tremendous things for the world to help feed the world.

[00:11:24] Anjay: Andreas actually sounds a lot like Leo Melamed, the longtime Merc chairman and godfather of financial futures, who we learned about in episode four. The two even look alike.

And while Leo was engineering new financial products, Andreas engineered new food products.

[00:11:44] Food & Beverage: It was ADM that provided low-fat, low-cholesterol oils to a health-conscious America looking for an alternative to butter and animal fats. And it was ADM that replaced sugar with fructose in soft drinks and countless other products on the market.

[00:12:00] Anjay: Good old fructose, I can't imagine soft drinks without 'em. And by the way, ADM did not end world hunger, but they did reap unimaginable profits with a lot of help from government subsidies. And if we thought Leo Melamed was well-connected in Washington. Well, Andreas made him seem like a nobody.

[00:12:25] Food & Beverage: The man who sits at the top of this great multinational is more than your traditional chairman and CEO. Dwayne Andreas is an American icon whose business expertise has had a profound impact on the world and made him a friend and confidant to world leaders from Eisenhower and Nixon to Reagan and Gorbachev.

[00:12:44] Anjay: His influence reached generations of American politicians and global politicians as well. According to him, that influence could never be used to his own advantage.

[00:12:59] Dwayne Andreas: I have found in my life politicians to be highly ethical people. I've never experienced any direct exposure to any skullduggery in politics. I have never seen money, in any time in my life, connected with what a politician does.

[00:13:23] Anjay: That's from a 1989 interview, and he said all of that with a straight face.

ADM’s food business was so big, that the company became one of the biggest traders of commodities in the world.

[00:13:41] ADM Video: We're at ADM's gateway to the world, and it's here in this trading room that ADM manages the ebb and flow of the world's commodity markets.

[00:13:49] Anjay: ADM used futures to lock in prices of crops that served as raw materials for all their processed foods.

By the 1980s, it was one of the most prominent companies at the Board of Trade. But even with all that scale, they felt like they were getting ripped off on the floor.

[00:14:08] David Greising: Archer Daniels Midland for years had various issues that that had to do with the way that its order flow was handled on the trading floors.

They brought a complaint to the FBI and the first undercover agent went through the training program at ADM, so it's not that difficult to, to connect the dots.

[00:14:30] Anjay: That was author David Greising again. In his book, he outlines how Andreas sent ADM’s director of Security to complain to Andreas's friends at the FBI.

That meeting took place in 1984. By 1986, the FBI was ready to send undercover agents to the pits of Chicago, but first they had to learn the ropes, so they sent an agent to ADM headquarters in Decatur, Illinois. And they enrolled him in the ADM training program.

[00:15:07] The Informant: This would be a great place for some outlet stores. People would come from all over Southern Illinois, probably Missouri too. Famous name brand labels and appliances at savings of up to 50% every day. Maybe a food court with a Mexican place. The birds eat the bugs, the cars eat the birds, the rust eats the cars and the new construction.

[00:15:26] Anjay: Oh, the glamorous life of an undercover FBI agent. He ended up spending four months in Decatur before beginning his real assignment as a mole on the floor of the Board of Trade.

After the story of the investigation broke in January of ‘89, an ADM spokesperson confirmed that they did file a complaint. To this day, the ADM complaint remains the prevailing theory as to why the FBI launched operations Hedge Clipper and Sour Mash. There's just one problem.

[00:16:05] David Greising: Nobody has been able to prove that necessarily was the genesis of the investigation.

[00:16:12] Anjay: The government never said the ADM complaint was the origin for this investigation. Just that they did complain about the exchange. And that they helped train the agents and that they got them on the floor.

[00:16:27] David Greising: I interviewed Dwayne Andreas. He declined to comment on it, but he certainly had a fair degree of animus toward what he thought was happening on the trading floors.

[00:16:39] Anjay: So I went back to Tribune reporter Bill Crawford to see if after all this time, he still thinks it was Andreas and ADM who started the investigation.

[00:16:51] Bill Crawford: The guy downstate here in Illinois is a guy who presumably, uh, got the investigation going.

[00:16:57] Anjay: You're talking about Archer Daniels Midland?

[00:16:59] Bill Crawford: I am. That was the, uh, the genesis.

[00:17:06] Anjay: The only person I talked to that thought I was right to be skeptical was Lori Morse, co-author of Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

[00:17:15] Laurie Morse: Again, a lot of it’s speculation. Our reporting, uh, did not for the book, uh, reveal any specific start. No one really acknowledged saying, yes, this was me. I wanted to do that.

[00:17:29] Anjay: If ADM, a giant food processor complained about getting ripped off on agricultural futures, why did the FBI put three of the four undercover agents in financial rather than agricultural futurist pits?

[00:17:46] Laurie Morse: That's why it's all so ridiculous, right?

[00:17:48] Anjay: Yes, exactly. Exactly. That is exactly it. And that's why when I first heard about this, I just laughed.

[00:17:55] Laurie Morse: And, and they didn't put anybody in the meats at the Merc. So that's what we heard is like, why didn't they go to the meats?

[00:18:01] Anjay: That's where everyone was, you know, it was the easiest to catch.

Everyone was cheating in there.

The meats are futures on meat products like pork belly and cattle. Time and time again while making this podcast, those pits were identified as the worst abusers in terms of manipulating customer orders.

[00:18:20] Laurie Morse: Who knows what they were thinking. That's what this is all about, right? We have to find that out.

[00:18:25] Anjay: If you're still wondering how ADM and the FBI had such a close relationship, here’s a line from The Informant that will fill you in.

[00:18:34] The Informant: Mick Andreas gets born with the Vice President of the United States as his godfather. He goes to Richard Nixon's house for Thanksgiving. Hey, Mick's dad wrote a check to the Nixon campaign and it wound up in the bank account of the Watergate burglars. Did he admit it? I don't think so. Besides ADM probably owns the FBI.

[00:18:52] Anjay: He's now deceased. But just after the investigation broke, Andreas was asked if ADM started this whole thing. His response? Quote, We didn't have anything to do with it, and if we did, I'd lie to you about it anyway.

Back in episode two I mentioned I had reached out to the FBI agents who worked this case. I haven't heard back from them, and without them it's hard to find out more about the why of this investigation. As for ADM, they were probably happy somebody else was taking heat.

[00:19:43] Dwayne Andreas: Now the average businessman, if he's smart, he assumes he's bugged all the time cuz you never know when you might be bugged.

[00:19:49] Anjay: More than a few times in his career, Andreas faced charges related to political campaign contributions. Most shockingly, in March of 1985, the Board of Trade’s business conduct committee accused ADM’s soybean oil traders of a brazen price manipulation scheme from which they profited handsomely.

[00:20:13] Dwayne Andreas: There are techniques in technical ways, to inhibit that bugging. Bugs that you know about are not the ones to worry. It’s the bugs you don't know about.

[00:20:23] Anjay: As it would turn out the bugs he didn't know about were just a few years away. If you've watched The Informant, you'll know that things got a lot worse for ADM after the FBI left the floor.

[00:20:37] The Informant: What I'm about to tell you, is it involves something very large, the price fixing in the lysine business.

Who told you to participate in these price fixing talks?

I'm operating under the direction of Mick and Dwyane Andreas.

[00:20:50] Anjay: With the help of ADM employee Mark Whitaker, played brilliantly by Matt Damon, the Feds caught ADM attempting to fix the price of Lysine, an essential amino acid that helps our body make proteins. The scheme was so egregious that ADM was find a whopping $100 million.

[00:21:13] The Informant: It's been going on as recently as three weeks ago. Nothing's changed. I mean, it's not just lysine, it's, it's citric, it's gluconate. There was a guy who left the company cuz he wouldn't do it. He was forced out. The gluconate guy, he's out of a job.

[00:21:26] Anjay: So Andreas was an informant against Chicago traders. Then a few years later, an informant from within ADM itself resulted in the company being slapped with what was at the time the largest criminal antitrust fine in history.

Here's David Greising again.

[00:21:48] David Greising: He was a global operator and to him kind of siccing the feds on the exchanges was not one of the big events of his life. He was probably just thinking, you know, I'm sick and tired of this. These guys have screwed me in this, in this minor violation. I, I'm going to show them, you know, what happens when you mess with Dwayne Andreas and ADM.

[00:22:16] Anjay: So we still don't know for sure why the investigation got started. But we're starting to see the big picture, and it doesn't just involve small time traders like Ray Pace and T-Bun, but also the nation's farmers, the heads of the exchanges, and extremely powerful CEOs. It's clear that the floor was pretty loosely regulated at the time, and some traders took advantage of that way more than others. So the exchanges took action.

[00:22:48] News: The burgeoning scandal is bringing change to Chicago's brash aggressive markets even before the first indictments. Today at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where widespread fraud is alleged, a special commission held its first meeting to consider dramatic reform.

[00:23:02] Anjay: Those reforms included banning in certain pits, the controversial practice of dual trading that Ray outlined for us in episode three.

The Board of Trade even hired former US attorney, Dan Webb, as a consultant to help it defend itself. Webb was the US attorney when this investigation was first conceived, and his hiring by the Board will come up again in future episodes. But overall, as John Ryan said, things pretty much went back to business as usual.

Today, the CME is the largest exchange in the world. At time of recording, it was valued at 67 billion. Leo is considered a living legend, and Dwyane Andreas died a rich and celebrated CEO. The guys on the floor, however, their lives were about to be turned completely upside down.

It would be more than six long months between the investigation becoming public and the indictment of a single trader. Once the public processed the staggering allegations against Chicago's futures brokers and the FBI's daring mission to reveal them, observers were able to play along in real time, and that's when the attention started shifting away from the traders.

Here's John Troelstrup, a defense attorney in this case who also just happened to be a former VP of Law and Compliance at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

[00:24:46] John Troelstrup: The agent who had been in the pit appeared at the door with another one or two agents, and that was his first realization that this man had been in the pits as an undercover agent.

[00:24:56] Anjay: John Troelstrup and others turned attention to the way FBI agents served subpoenas to traders in their homes.

[00:25:02] John Troelstrup: The person is confused, he's startled. He may be scared, just plain scared. They gain entry and they have conversation.

[00:25:11] Anjay: We've talked about some of these stories in previous episodes. Melanie Kozar being interrogated in a bathrobe. John Baker being interrogated as he polished off a Burger King Whopper and his what? 18th beer of the night.

[00:25:28] John Troelstrup: The conversation relates to their observations. The conversation may relate to observations about things that occurred on the floor. A one agent may ask another agent. Do we have that on tape? Oh yes.

We have that on tape. Okay, we have that on tape. Now. Let's talk. Don't you want to talk to us about that?

[00:25:44] Anjay: John Troelstrup said the FBI abused their subpoenas using them as tools to enter trader's houses so they could scare and threaten them. To understand why, let's look at the big picture.

In the last episode, Tribune reporter Bill Crawford told us that US attorney Anton Valukas was upset about the Trib breaking this story while their investigation was still ongoing. But now David is telling me, It's the other way around.

[00:26:18] David Greising: The, the media really was used as a tool of the FBI investigation. The Chicago Tribune broke the story, uh, and I think it's fairly evident that it came from a leak at the Justice Department of Washington.

[00:26:33] Anjay: So the government used the media to make it seem like the FBI caught brokers red-handed.

[00:26:40] News: As many as a hundred brokers and traders are alleged to have systematically cheated customers out of millions of dollars.

[00:26:47] Anjay: Then they used late-night raids where they served subpoenas as scare tactics, and it was becoming clear why.

[00:26:56] David Greising: The media was used to hype the investigation. And in that initial effort to stampede witnesses, to flip, to cooperate, and ultimately to try to help them make their way up.

[00:27:14] Anjay: Everyone agreed that the FBI's plan was to shake down the guys at the bottom of the totem pole and work their way up, presumably to Mr. Number One and Mr. Number Two, as Bill Crawford put it in the last episode. And while some traders did cooperate, the FBI was running into more guys like T-Bun and Ray.

[00:27:37] T-Bun: I said, listen, I don't do nothing wrong. You know what goes on? You talk. We'll spare you jail. I, how about this? Go fuck yourself.

[00:27:48] Ray Pace: From the beginning, I was never gonna cooperate with the government and they know it. My lawyer had already told him, he says, you're never gonna cooperate.

[00:27:54] Anjay: Even after being threatened with RICO charges, most traders refused to talk. Because they weren't Wall Street guys. They were Chicago guys.

[00:28:05] Goodfellas: And you learned the two greatest things in life: never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.

[00:28:13] Anjay: Or to make it Chicago style…

[00:28:16] T-Bun: Fuck you. You try to set me up, you cocksucker. You have to tell us. I don't have to do fucking shit.

[00:28:23] Anjay: The FBI was hitting a wall. The clock was ticking and the public wondered if the government had much of a case at all. Meanwhile, the traders, they gained confidence through a coordinated defense strategy.

[00:28:38] David Greising: You know, we had this one scene where there were a number of traders in a lawyer's office, uh, cuz there was a big scramble going on to get the best lawyers one possibly could. And these traders were all sitting around saying, you know, as long as we all don't flip on each other, we, you know, we should be okay.

And that seemed to have actually held for them.

[00:29:00] Anjay: Vinny Provenzano, the guy who worked for Leo Melamed, who we talked to in episode four, knew the traders that David was referring to.

[00:29:10] Vinny Provenzano: It was difficult cuz everybody, no one trusted anybody. No one knew who was flipping, no one who was doing anything. I mean, I used one of the groups in the Swiss Franc that was targeted by the, uh, The FBI guy, and, uh, I knew what these guys did for years.

I mean, I knew that they kept cards in their pocket, who, who owes how many ticks to who, what have you. And, uh, so I knew they ready to be in trouble.

[00:29:33] Anjay: He knew some of the guys in that Swiss Franc pit were cheating. And despite their cool exterior, he sensed some nervousness.

[00:29:42] Vinny Provenzano: They all agreed that if no one flipped, they'd have nothing.

[00:29:46] Anjay: But the government kept the pressure on. And eventually.

[00:29:51] Vinny Provenzano: But one of the guys in their group did flip and uh, then they had something.

[00:30:00] Anjay: The government finally got a handful of traders to admit they were stealing, and in exchange for a reduced sentence, they agreed to testify against their fellow traders. I needed to track down someone who cooperated because in that process, one would probably learn a lot about the FBI's investigation—like who were the ultimate targets and what exactly they were looking for.

Eventually I did manage to talk to a trader who cooperated. I. He traded in the same pit as John Ryan, who we interviewed in episode one, the soybean pit at the Board of Trade.

[00:30:40] David Skrodzki: You know, I was a pariah because I corroborated. Certainly didn't wanna do it, you know? But again, you're on their own here.

[00:30:49] Anjay: Next time on Brokers, Bagmen, and Moles.

I'll talk to one of the men who not only cooperated, he actually wore a wire in the pit.

[00:31:00] David Skrodzki: It lasted ten minutes. He figured something was up and clammed up and didn't say anything. Talk about shit in your pants. I was so fucking nervous.

[00:31:11] Anjay: We'll be taking a week off to let you enjoy your Memorial Day, and we'll be back with episode six on Wednesday, May 31st.

In the meantime, we'll have some new fun stuff on social media, so follow us @entropymediaco.

Before you go. If you or someone you know might have a hot tip or just a funny story related to our show, we have a hotline for you. Call us at (646) 820-1452.

That's 646 820 1452. And please follow us on social media. Our handle is @entropymediaco. That's at Entropy Media Co where we'll be posting additional information about the case and awesome behind the scenes action.

This has been a production of Entropy Media in association with Stretch Productions.

This is Entropy's very first show, so if you've enjoyed it, please follow wherever you listen to podcasts and rate us there too. Every follow rating or even a personal recommendation to a friend or family member really helps.

I'm your host, Anjay Nagpal. Our showrunner and senior producer is Danielle Elliot.

Our producer is Jenn Swan.

Our executive producers are Tim Hendricks, Kevin "Stretch" Huff, and Dennis Stratton. Original music, sound design, and editing by Gerard Bauer.

Music clearances by Deborah Mannis-Gardner from DMG Clearances.

Production legal by Bruns, Brennan, and Berry.

Legal clearance/Fair use by Rachel Strom at Davis Wright Tremaine.

Fact checking by Delilah Friedler.

Show art by Rebecca Hendin.

And from Entropy Media, our in-house executive producer is Josh Fjelstad. Our head of operations is Nuna Eboe. Our project manager is Sebastian Perry. Our associate producer is Heidi Roodvoets. Our development coordinator is Simona Kessler.

And I wanna send a very special thanks to Laurie Morse and David Griesing.