Hey, it's Max. It's Friday, which means it is the end of our week-long series of interviews

with this year's George Polk Award winners. We really love doing this every year. This

is the third time and we've got one last one for you today. Then it's back to our regularly

scheduled programming next week. For this last episode in the series, I talked to Terry

McCoy of The Washington Post. Terry won the Environmental Reporting Award for a series

called The Amazon Undone, which took an in-depth look at the illegal and often violent exploitation

of the rainforest in Brazil. Terry reported the series over two years and as you'll hear,

it's both a climate change story, but also a true crime story. And over the two years,

it became a quite personal story too. So anyway, here is my conversation with Terry McCoy.

Thanks again for listening to the series all week and thanks so much to everyone at the

Polk Awards for making it happen.

Terry, thanks so much for doing this, man. Hey, thanks for having me, Max. Where are we

zooming from? Where are you, exactly? I am in Cloudy, Rootage, Nero right now. So in

Southeast Brazil, we live in the epinema, so we're along the beach, so definitely not

a hardship posting, but you know, it's exciting nonetheless. You're not allowed to complain

about exactly where you are, but man, I would be surprised if you didn't have a few complaints

about what it took to do this series that you won the Polk Award from. I have to tell you

I have so many questions about it, but maybe to start, you can just quickly give me a summary

of it and then I'll get into all my questions about your various complaints.

Yeah, sure, no, I appreciate it, Max. So the Amazon rainforest is the most important tropical

rainforest in the world, and it holds an estimated 123 billion tons of carbon. And what that means

is that if the Amazon goes bust, that's going to destabilize dramatically the climatic balance

...