← Against the Rules with Michael Lewis
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This is an I Heart Podcast Guaranteed Human Hi, I'm Julieann Moore. I learn a lot from every role, but some things stay with me more than others, like the impact of Alzheimer's disease. It's important to think about brain health now because there's so much we want to do. Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease. At Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment, learn more@brainhealthmatters.com this is a paid partnership with Lily Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts why did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic sores in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that. Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful. Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us Sanjana Bhasker and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, booktok drama and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy identity, and how we love. Now listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Pushkin hey listeners, Amy here. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of the new season of my podcast, Drilled. As a longtime climate journalist, I've been hearing for at least 20 years that the markets will solve climate change. On this season of Drilled, we look at where that approach has landed us, following an ethanol kingpin and carbon entrepreneur from Iowa to Brazil and asking, is this really helping anything? I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, find drilled carbon cowboys wherever you listen to your podcasts, Pushkin plus subscribers can hear episodes early and ad free. Sign up on the Drilled show page on Apple or Pushkin FM plus. In early September 2025, a handful of Brazilian government officials headed to North Dakota on a mission. It was a technical mission. They were there to see a shiny new green technology in action. The idea behind this new technology was simple. When you turn corn into ethanol, it generates carbon dioxide. And that's a problem if you're trying to be a green fuel. But now, people from Iowa to North Dakota were capturing that carbon dioxide, storing it and selling it. Never mind that they were selling it to people who would inject it underground to get more oil out. Some of it would surely still stay underground. And if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, that made it a climate solution. The American company selling the Brazilians on this idea had a lot riding on these officials believing that carbon capture connected to ethanol was a great green success story. Win, win for industry and the environment, an American dream they could take home to Brazil. But had the visiting bureaucrats scanned the local newspapers, they might have found a different story. If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk, thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter. You know, essentially paying him to capture CO2 at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere, many states away. On September 2, the Brazilian contingent met with an Iowa company called Summit Carbon Solutions. Summit has been trying for years to build a carbon capture pipeline to connect dozens of ethanol plants from Iowa to North Dakota. It's called the Midwest Carbon Express Project. Harold Ham, who controls many of North Dakota's oil fields and is an energy advisor to President Trump, is a major investor in the company. Bruce Rastetter is the company's co founder. He's also founder and executive chairman of its parent company, Summit Agricultural Group. For all their cheerleading of the project to visitors, the Summit pipeline is years behind schedule and facing multiple political and legal roadblocks. In fact, it's managed to do what almost no policy, politician, issue, or campaign has been able to do in the US for years. United far left and far right populace. People from both sides hate this pipeline. For Ras Dutter, it's not the first time he's faced opposition, especially in his home state of Iowa. Anyone who remotely follows politics or agriculture. You say Rastetter, you're going to get a response. Jess Mazur is the conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club, Iowa. For Jess, the carbon pipeline was not the first time she dealt with Bruce Rastetter. They know who it is, and they go, oh, you know, that guy did this, or that guy put a factory farm near my house. Or he's the one that got Iowa State in trouble. So I think everyone's got an opinion of him. And he's really, really good at being able to avoid ever having to be in the public. He doesn't get interviewed. He doesn't take media requests. Kind of secretive. He lives out in the middle of nowhere in Hardin County, Iowa. Rastutter got his start as a big hog farmer. From there, it wasn't a big leap to Growing corn. And then, like a lot of corn growers, that led quickly to getting into the corn ethanol business. As a longtime climate reporter, I keep waiting for people to stop calling corn ethanol green. Its current footprint is similar to regular old gas. It requires around 30 times as much land as solar, plus lots of water and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. But industrial agriculture gets loads of subsidies from it, so they're always finding a way to keep it Alive. And in 2022, Congress handed it its latest lifeline.
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The Inflation Reduction act contains some really incredible things for our shareholders. It contains sustainable aviation fuel. We think that's an incredible part of decarbonizing the planet.
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The Inflation Reduction Act, Biden's big climate policy created a whole new revenue stream for the corn ethanol guys. Now they could sell to airlines, but only if they embraced carbon capture. Bruce Rastetter to the rescue.
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So I think without continuing to attain new markets, the ethanol industry is in jeopardy. So that's what lowering carbon scores this project on the pipeline is about. With 34 ethanol plants across the upper Midwest, but in particular, Iowa.
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Summit Carbon Solutions still talks about the project today as a way to open up new markets for Iowa corn farmers. So the company was caught off guard when people across multiple states began organizing against the Midwest Carbon Express. And it quickly became a big problem because Rastetter was not just the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. His company was also the majority owner of a Brazilian ag company, FS Fueling Sustainability. And he'd helped to make corn ethanol a thing in Brazil, too. Now Summit is trying to make carbon capture happen there, too. Welcome to Drilled Season 15 Carbon Cowboys. I'm Amy Westervelt, and this season we've partnered with the amazing reporters at the Intercept Brazil to learn more about what Rastetter is doing down there.
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I'm Felipe Sabrina with the Intercept Brazil. I will be hosting the Portuguese version of the season over on the Intercept Brazil feed. This is a story about how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil and how a
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bunch of ideas that are great for the oil and ag industries got rebranded as climate solutions and created a carbon gold rush. A few months ago, Felipe started telling me about this giant pig statue that greets people near Bruce Rastetter's home base in Brazil. Because, yes, his partners in Brazil also started out as pig farmers. These guys are all still in the pig business, and, boy, do they love pigs. When Felipe sent me a picture of this pig statue, I was kind of shook. If you're imagining some sort of tasteful bronze statue. Think again. This is a massive porky pig looking thing wearing lederhosen and a bright green hat holding a corn cob.
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And it even has a name, Lucina, or little Lucas. Because the town is called Lucas do Hioverde, it tells you actually a lot about this place. It was proposed by one of the largest landowners in the area. Big agriculture business guy. He comes from a German family, which is why the pig is wearing a German outfit. Around 50 years ago, the Brazilian agriculture industry came to this place looking for a cheap and easy land grab. Today, the American agriculture industry is doing the same thing. Vosista in Lucas do Rio Verge.
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This audio you're listening to with the epic background music is from a promotional video by the Lucas Torio Verges city government. Highlighting the wonders of the city, the video mixes images of macaws, forests in the sunset and large cotton, soybean and corn fields. The city government wants you to know that Lucas is the city of opportunities. It has more than 95,000 inhabitants and produces more than 2 million tons of grain per year. The narrator of the video says, we are one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil. And then the screen fills with a mix of smiling children growing crops and grain pouring out of machines. Lucas, the Rioverde, is all money, growth and seas of corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see.
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The first time I visited, it shocked me to see massive crops right next to people's homes. But the more I learned about Lucas, the more it made sense. The town is a fiction designed and built by the government to impose development on this region. Lucas was entirely created to serve agriculture and its owners. The wide avenues are lined with silos, agricultural machinery stores, supply stores, credit banks and real estate agencies. Trucks over 20 meters long, loaded with soybeans or corn have plenty of space to drive around or park on the curb. Walking in Lucas, on the other hand, is a challenge because of the distances between the long avenues, the heat and the lack of trees to provide shade. The city is obsessed with imperial palm trees. There are hundreds of them in the town center and on the sides of the roads with nothing but monoculture crops and imported palm trees. There is no vegetation in the area to insulate it from extreme temperature changes. Lucas can go from freezing cold to unbelievably hot from one moment to the next. It was weird for me, but the people I spoke with here didn't seem to mind. The image of abundant harvests has drawn people from all over the country to Lucas.
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My husband was unemployed for two years. Then we saw reports about the city, which is a very good place to live, to raise children, even in terms of violence. So we packed our bags. Isabela is from Minas Gerais, a Brazilian state southeast of Lucas. But since 2021, she's been living here with her husband and children. She sells acai bowls in front of the parking lot of a multinational grain company. Acai is a fruit typical of the Amazon. Isabella buys it from suppliers and sells it to truck drivers who load and unload grain here. She passes small bowls of acai cream through the fence, and the truckers pass back cash. Isabella said Lucas is great, not least because when she needs to take her kids to a public hospital, she never waits more than an hour to be seen. Here in the city, I don't think anyone can complain about health care, she says. The Lucas do Rioverde hospital, San Lucas in particular, is especially nice. It's run today by a partnership between the city and agribusiness entrepreneurs. Now they've opened a really nice ward at you. The whole hospital has been renovated. In fact, the new maternity ward at the Saul Lucas Hospital has a promotional video, too. And a few seconds into it, listeners might recognize a not so Brazilian sounding name. Bruce Rastetter, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. He wields a lot of power there, but outside the state, he's not exactly a household name. Now suddenly, a new wing in the hospital in this Brazilian farm town was being named after this guy. How did that happen?
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The hospital canceled my tour just before I arrived. So our producer, Marce Riverdoz, and I just showed up to see what we could see. We talked to a hospital worker in the hallway.
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It's a little hard to hear there because Felipe and Marcia were trying to tape with their phone. And of course, she's speaking in Portuguese, too. But when they asked her about the name of the ward, the Bruce Rastatter wing, she said it was named after Bruce, a doctor from Ohio. We're still not sure where she got that idea, but funding big public projects, especially around hospitals and healthcare, is really common in Brazil. You just heard how, when telling Felipe about what she likes about Lucas, Isabela mentioned healthcare. People think of hospitals as an example of how nice a city is or how well it's working. So if Lucas has a good hospital, no one can say that the politicians or the businessmen running things here are bad. That goes double for anything that's focused on women and children. So a maternity ward checks a lot of boxes. And then we found out that the hospital is run by a foundation led by one of Rastetter's Brazilian business partners, Marino Franz. Marino's brother Paolo, was the one that proposed that giant pig statue that looks out over Lucas. And to understand how Rastatter, the American farmer, ended up with a Brazilian rural maternity ward named after him, we had to figure out how the Franz Brothers fit into it and what brought Bruce to Brazil in the first place. That's coming up after the break. Everybody knows Shaq, but off camera, he's just a regular guy. People never believe me when I say I'm just like them. I take out the trash, do dishes, and I struggle with moderate obstructive sleep apnea, or osa. And a lot of adults with obesity also struggle with moderate to severe osa. You know, those scary breathing interruptions during sleep, the loud snoring, choking and daytime fatigue. I knew I had to talk to my doctor. Don't sleep on the symptoms. Learn more@don'tsleeponosa.com this information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company. Amazon Health AI presents Painful Thoughts why did I search the Internet for answers to my cold sore problem? Now I'm stuck down a rabbit hole filled with images of alarmingly graphic source in various stages of ooze. I can clear my search history, but I can never unsee that. Don't go down the rabbit hole. Amazon Health AI gets you the right care fast. Healthcare just got less painful this summer. Don't squeeze in, spread out. Find homes big enough for your whole guest list on vrbo. That's vacation rentals done right. Book your stay now. Lucastorio Verde is in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a state that is almost exactly half agriculture and half Amazon rainforest. It used to be even more Amazon. For decades, the state was considered the frontier in Brazil. The forests were preserved and it was home to even more indigenous people than it is today. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Brazil's military government deployed a new strategy. It was called the National Integration Plan. The idea was to eliminate indigenous communities that were seen as anti development and integrate the north and midwest of Brazil into the national economy. This propaganda film from the 70s celebrates the quote, revolution reaching the jungle, toppling trees in favor of roads. The goal was to develop the Amazon by building infrastructure in the wilderness, displacing indigenous residents and encouraging people from outside the region to move there, to be pioneers and go to this frontier and tame it. The main farm towns in Mato Grosso today were deliberate colonization projects, many of them built and funded by the Brazilian Government. The government offered people plots of land, housing, and sometimes even credit to move there. They even funded research to figure out how crops like soybeans and cotton could be grown in the tropical climate climate there. That's what brought the Franz Brothers there decades ago. And according to Paolo, it's the Franz Brothers who brought Bruce to the area. In Paolo's telling, it all happened because of an internship he did in Iowa and an important contact he made there. Here he is talking about it on a Brazilian podcast.
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Un homied. Terry Branstad.
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Terry Branstad, the governor of Iowa at the time and eventually US Ambassador to China during Trump's first presidency. Powell says they all went to soccer games together a lot. Powell says it was Branstad who introduced him to Bruce Rastetter. Bruce is the CEO of the company, the founder. He has a huge passion for pigs and has been involved with pigs his whole life. He was a pig farmer until he started getting into ethanol, which is a very recent thing. I don't know whether, just to clarify, Americans produce more ethanol from corn than we do from sugar cane. There, the philosophy, the culture is producing ethanol from corn. So as president, I met with this Terry Branstad, who is the governor of Iowa. We met and he wanted to buy some land here in Brazil. Bruce doesn't mention any of this when he's asked about how he wound up in Brazil. Here's how he talked about it on a farming podcast podcast a couple of years ago.
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So when we sold Hawkeye to Koch
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Industries, that was one of his ethanol
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companies, that freed me up for the first time to do other things outside of being responsible for a larger company, and started traveling to Brazil.
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This is how Bruce talks about it in other interviews, too. He was interested in Brazil because it's the main agricultural competitor to the US or because other US companies had done well there, etc. Etc. It was when we were trying to verify Bruce and Paolo's differing versions of this story that our Brazil editor, Alice de Souza, found a guy with yet another version.
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Is this pro ethanol? Are you tree huggers? Are you looking at this from a negative standpoint, or are you looking at it from a neutral standpoint? I don't mind being neutral. I can be critical of this too. Yeah, but I'm. Because clients of mine have invested upwards of a billion dollars now in my Pedroso. I don't want to fuck this up.
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That's Corey Melby, an agriculture consultant in Brazil.
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I came from Northwest Minnesota, developing land. So of course, when in the early 2000s, when Macro Grosso and all of this soybean expansion was taking place. I was going to be the lam guy for a group from some of the first guys I went down with. You're going to be here, Cory. Pick up the language, pick up the contacts. You could be the real estate guy. So that's where I started was from that perspective.
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Full disclosure. We paid Corey Melody to be a fixer for us on the ground in Mato Grosso. The idea was that he would take us around and ideally arrange a meeting with the Brothers Franz at their farm. None of that ended up panning out, but he did talk to Felipe and I and he told us a lot about how Bruce started out in Brazil. He also added me to his newsletter list, which is a wealth of ag knowledge about Brazil. Although it comes out so many times a week, I still have about 500 unread emails in a folder marked Corey.
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So I've been on every farm in my Perosa. I rode the boom times and the bus and the boom times and the pus again with all my friends. So I, you know, I have that 25 year arc of experience now of the good, bad and ugly of Macro Grosso. And believe me, there's plenty of all of it.
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He knows a lot about Bruce and the Franz Brothers because he did for Bruce what he's done for the past 25 years for other Americans looking to get into the ag business in Monte Grosso. He toured them around looking for land.
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Back in 2011, I was visiting and he was a young, dynamic guy and he would say, Cory, we're looking to develop a corn oil mill. Processing and investors are partner in that corn oil. So I was writing about this BS in my newsletters at the time and also visiting and Lucas de Hil Verde at the elevators at the time talking to climbers. Oh, corn ethanol, corn ethanol. We gotta get corn ezinol here or we're going to bury ourselves.
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Because of his newsletter and his ties to various American ag folks, Corey has kind of become known as the guy to call if you're an American who wants to get a sense of Mato Grosso. So when people started talking about corn ethanol there, it was only a matter of time before he got a call
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from you know who Summit from Iowa, which I'm sure you are very familiar with. Bruce Rashtadder and Eric and then the whole club get a call from Bruce, email. Hey, we would like a tour of Macroproso. We're going to be down there for another reason. Could, could we do something a la carte with you, Cory.
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They didn't want to take one of Corey's prepackaged ag tours.
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Okay, so this is 2011. We do a little quick power tour, they go home. I figured just another tour. We were looking at land. We would love to get going on some land deals.
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Corey carried on, thinking nothing of it, but six months or so later, he got a call from some friends in Mato Grosso.
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My good friend, the Franzes, you know, they were Corey, we want to get an ethanol mill going out here, but we need help. We need American, we need capital, et cetera, et cetera. So I was telling Bruce and the guys at the time, you know, I've got friends.
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According to Corey at the time, Bruce and the guys weren't quite ready to get into the ethanol business in Brazil. They were just looking for some farmland. Then they came back for another trip. And as Corey tells it, this is when they met the Franzes.
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All of a sudden, you know, Brazilians being Brazilians, we've got a farm for sale.
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Corey helped broker the deal between Bruce and the Franzes, and it kept them all talking.
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Three years to close on this damn farm. But that farmer just then opened the door with trust and capital. Hey, let's. Let's build an ethanol mill in Lucas.
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Together, the Franz brothers had hit the big time. They were getting into business with the ethanol kingpin of Iowa. It was a whole new level, or as Corey calls it, cycle three.
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Cycle one is deforestation in cattle. Cycle two is. So cycle 2.5 is soy corn. Basically, you know, the combination cycle three now gets to be what we would say, industrial or added value. No different than Iowa.
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For the Franz Brothers, Bruce was a white whale. At a time of booming Brazilian industrial agriculture. He happened to have some free time on his hands. And now this international king of corn had picked them. What luck. But that story misses one important detail. At the time he was doing land tours in Brazil, Bruce Rastatter was having a really bad time back home in Iowa. Since 2012, since that big land grab attempt in Africa, he has become a dirty word in Iowa. It's just that's what he does. It's like his business model, you know, and whether it was in Iowa with, you know, how he was treating Iowa farmers, or now it's globally. Yeah, he just keeps pushing his business advancement. Right. It's all about his corporate profits. Friends of friends have said that he's kind of over Iowa and more interested in Brazil, which, I mean, I suppose if I was in his shoes, as if I had the choice of, you know, being at a place where everybody hated me, in a place where people fond over me. I'd probably go to the place where people fond over me. That's our story next time. We reached out to Bruce Rastetter, Harold Ham, the Frowns Brothers, Miguel Vas Ribeiro and all Summit companies and Brazilian government agencies mentioned in this season for comment and have incorporated any responses we received received throughout the season.
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Carbon Cowboys Cowboys of the Cerrado is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil.
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The show was reported and written by Felipe, Sabrina and me, Amy Westervelt.
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Our editors are Audrey Queen in the US and Alice de Sousa in Brazil.
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Our senior producer and sound designer is Martin Zaltz Ostwick. Audio production and sound design in Brazil by Marcia Heverdosa and Felipe Mooks.
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Our impact producer is Lindsey Crowder. Theme song and original music by Eric Terrena.
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Additional music by Martin Saltz Ostwick. Our engineer is Peter Duff.
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Artwork for Drilled is by Matt Fleming.
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US Fact checking from Naomi Barr.
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Brazil fact checking by Studio Frontera.
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Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton with the First Amendment Project. We are also proud members of Reporter Shield. Big thanks also to Andrew Fishman, President of the Intercept Brazil.
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Drilled is distributed by Pushkin Industries.
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Huge thanks to the team there including Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Grace Ross, Morgan Ratner, Owen Miller, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan, Brian Schrebernek and Jake Flanagan. To hear the Portuguese version of this series, head over to the Intercept Brazil's site or search for the Intercept Brazil's podcast feed. Wherever you listen to podcasts, We all take good care of the things that matter. Our homes, our pets, our cars. Are you doing the same for your brain? Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of doing dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease. Studies have found that up to 45% of dementia cases may be prevented or delayed. By managing risk factors, you can change make brain health a priority. Ask your doctor about your risk factors and for a cognitive assessment. Learn more@brainhealthmatters.com why are we all so obsessed with Romance on the Radio 831 podcast, join us Sanjana Bhasker and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, buzzy adaptations, booktok drama and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity and how we love. Now Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.