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Big Fish

2024/8/16
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Two seasoned fishermen, Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminski, were suspected of cheating in a Lake Erie walleye tournament. Tournament director Jason Fisher noticed inconsistencies with their catch and upon inspection, found lead weights and walleye fillets stuffed inside their fish. The incident caused uproar amongst other competitors, leading to police involvement.
  • The fishermen were caught with lead weights and additional walleye fillets inside their fish.
  • The tournament director, Jason Fisher, discovered the cheating after noticing inconsistencies and physically examining the fish.
  • The incident sparked outrage and chaos among the other participants in the tournament.
  • The fishermen had a history of winning tournaments, raising suspicions among fellow competitors.

Shownotes Transcript

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home.

His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative.

Along the Mississippi River, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, there's a stretch of land nicknamed Cancer Alley, because according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the cancer rate is more than seven times the national average, reportedly due to a very high concentration of petrochemical plants. Hear how the community is fighting back against some of the top polluters in the country. Subscribe to Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast.

Siobhan is in love. She and her boyfriend are maybe thinking wedding bells. And even though there's no one she'd rather be with, she still wonders, what's the chance of this lasting? How do you get from that point to also being like, I cannot stand you, to the point that I want to cut my ties with you? This week on Explain It To Me, we find out, are we less likely to get divorced than our parents?

Follow Explain It To Me wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday. This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. Okay. Phoebe, talk to Jason. See if you guys can hear each other. Yes, I can hear him. Jason, you can hear me? I can hear you. Good. Yep. Well, Jason, thank you very much for doing this. Yeah, no problem. Am I always going to be able to hear myself? Would you rather not? It's bad enough hearing me once.

This is Jason Fisher. He runs fishing tournaments on Lake Erie, not far from where he lives, outside of Cleveland.

These are not full-time gigs. These are just kind of part-time, labor-loved type deal. I grew up competitive, played sports, played some college baseball, so I like to be competitive. And later on in life, you get old, you get fat, you get washed up, you got to find something else to do. How old are you? I'm 39.

You just called yourself old and fat and you're 30. I'm 40. Well, you know, in sports terms, you're not playing, you know, real good baseball, football, wrestling when you're 39 years old. You got to do something else. But you can hold a rod. Yeah. The efficient is pretty low impact on the body.

The tournaments that Jason Fisher runs are walleye tournaments. He says about 100 teams usually participate. Lake Erie is the best place in the world to fish walleye right now. Lake Erie is the smallest and the shallowest of the Great Lakes, but it also has the most fish. Warm water and lots of plankton make it a good place for fish like yellow perch, trout, bass, and walleye. Walleye have sharp little teeth.

They grow to be between two and three feet long. And earlier this summer, the Ohio House of Representatives signed a bill naming the walleye the official state fish of Ohio. Our tournaments are five fish. You can weigh any five fish that you catch. And your team, it's a joint tournament.

five fish so you bring your five biggest fish to the scales and at the end of the day you kind of stack up and see who wins and what what are the prizes what are people trying to win

It's always different. Five, five hundred dollars, five thousand dollars. I would say on average, the winner is going to take home about five to eight thousand dollars. And then the guys always have, you know, like big fish side pots and overall side pots. So that'll generate another couple thousand as well. So, I mean, on an average tournament, if you win and then you, you know, win the bonuses along with it, I'd bet you could win probably fifteen to eighteen thousand on a good day.

That's a lot of money. It's a solid day's work, in my opinion. At the end of a tournament on September 30, 2022, Jason was weighing in each team's fish. The winners that day would take home a $5,000 prize, and the team that had performed the best over the entire season would take home almost $30,000. Each team entered their five biggest fish to be weighed on a small stage in a parking lot.

Fishing teams were standing around watching, and Jason was emceeing, telling the crowd the weights for each team's fish. 743, 743, you got, what is it, two? One of the last teams to weigh in was boat number 12, Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminski. Were they well-known in the fishing community? Yeah, these guys have been, they've been around, they were around a while. They had competed in not only our tournament, but other tournaments for years.

So the guys knew them. You know, all of our anglers knew them. They had won, I want to say, the previous two, if not three events. But fishing isn't always about talent. It's luck, too.

You know, you can be a good angler, you could be the best angler, but at the end of the day, you still have to catch the fish. And there's a huge variable there. So, you know, we could all be in the same spot using the same bait, doing the same thing. But that doesn't mean that the same person is always going to catch the biggest, best fish of the day. So it drew a lot of suspicion.

Jake Runyon went up onto the stage with their five heaviest fish. He put their biggest one on the scale. And in my head, I'm like, OK, probably, you know, four to five pound fish based on the fish I get to look at every day. And they put the big fish on the scale and it's seven nine zero, I think. And I'm just sick to my stomach. I'm like, there's no way that's an eight pound fish.

The whole place, and I'm not even kidding you, there's not a single word being said except for, you know, yeah, right, BS, you know, and it was just an awkward silence. Jake Runyon then put all five of their fish on the scale. Jason announced their team's total weight, 33 pounds, five pounds heavier than any other team's catch. So Jake walks off stage, um...

I'm trying to gather my thoughts as an MC, so to speak, and just, you know, wrap up the event because they now won the tournament. They won the team of the year championship. They would win our season long big fish title. There's a lot of things that they won on the day. So I'm just trying to do my best with it. And I start to hear, you know, some grumblings in the crowd. And I'm like, I have to do something about this.

As Jake started to walk away with the fish, Jason called out to him and asked him to come back to the side of the stage. He looks at me and he's like, are you serious? I'm like, yeah, you know, I have to check him out. So I pull the fish out.

And I just looked to see if the fish has color, if it looks lively. It might even be alive because these guys all have live wells in their boats. So I take a look at the fish and I'm like, you know, it looks dead, lack of color. So I put my hands on the fish and I kind of like squeeze the fish. And I instantly, with my thumb, I instantly felt that inside one of these fish was just a hard object. ♪

Jason asked someone to get him a knife. I'm actually slicing these fish open pretty aggressively because I'm pissed. I know exactly what's going on. And as soon as I open that fish up, I see these, you know, sinkers, these lead weights fall out of this fish.

And right then and there, you know, the reaction is just all emotion. I basically grab the weight and I tell everybody, I told all my anglers that there's weights in the fish. We got weights in this! There we go! I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. It was essentially like a mob scene. I mean, these guys...

It went from silence to just, you know, kind of chaos all at the same time. Inside the fish were lead weights about the size of eggs.

and also walleye fillets. What I think is, is they probably put the fillets inside the fish to pad, you know, the heavy lead weights that they had in there. I mean, a 12 ounce weight, you know, if you're holding a fish or feeling a fish, you know, it'd be pretty obvious. So I think that the

The flays were just padding. So what had they done? Stuffed the stuff down the fish's throat? Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's sickening. Still thinking about it. It's sickening. What did the team do? What did they do? Well, Chase ran. He went to his truck. And from what I understand, he basically just got in his truck and shut the door and stayed there. He didn't leave. I don't know as if...

you know, there was people around his truck or maybe he couldn't back out. I'm not sure I wasn't there, but, but Jake, you know, just sat there and just, you know, the anglers just let out all of their frustrations, you know, of, you know, the year or, or years past, you know, just cheaters and, you know, it's over, you're, you know, you'll never fish again. And, you know, and these guys, these guys were,

They prided themselves on being the best. It was a big to-do. They basically just let it all loose and let Jake know exactly how they felt about him. Do you have anything to say, Jake? And then someone called the police. Call the cops! Call the fucking cops! That's fucking death! We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice, produced with Vox Creative. Season three of this award-winning podcast is back, with stories about people fighting for justice in their communities. In the latest episode, host Ashley C. Ford talks to Sharon Levine, who's fighting to protect her hometown, St. James, Louisiana, from petrochemical pollution. I would smell that smell in the morning, but not knowing where it was coming from. Right. And all of a sudden, I said, I wonder if the whole world's smelling it.

Not knowing it was just St. James Parish, it would smell so bad. For more than 80 years, the petrochemical industry has operated in the region. And now, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the cancer rate is more than seven times the national average. When Sharon Levine heard about a new multi-billion dollar deal to build another plant near her home, she rallied her neighbors to fight it. I've been speaking ever since. I've been talking. You can't shut me up now.

About a year ago, two twin brothers in Wisconsin discovered, kind of by accident, that mini golf might be the perfect spectator sport for the TikTok era. Meanwhile, a YouTuber in Brooklyn found himself less interested in tech YouTube and more interested in making coffee.

This month on The Verge Cast, we're telling stories about these people who tried to find new ways to make content, new ways to build businesses around that content, and new ways to make content about those businesses. Our series is called How to Make It in the Future, and it's all this month on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts. In 1984, a man was found shot to death in a boat on the banks of a lake in Grand Prairie, Texas. His name was Danny Ray Davis.

and he was about to appear in front of a federal grand jury. He'd been suspected of cheating in a fishing tournament where he'd won $50,000, and he agreed to testify against several other men who were also believed to have cheated in tournaments across the state. They were all accused of bringing in big fish from Florida, keeping them in tanks, and then secretly moving them into lakes, in floating cages, the night before fishing tournaments.

The Dallas County Medical Examiner's Office ruled Danny Ray Davis' death a suicide, but his family believed he was murdered in order to stop him from testifying. Another fisherman, who was a witness in the investigation, had told police that he feared for his life and that he, quote, wouldn't live until sundown if the people in the cheating ring knew that he was cooperating.

A few months later, four men involved in the cheating scheme were convicted in federal court for transporting wildlife across state lines. And later that year, Texas became the first state to criminalize cheating in fishing contests. It became a misdemeanor to cheat or help someone cheat. And if the tournament prize money was worth more than $10,000, it became a felony.

In the 1970s and 80s, fishing tournaments started offering bigger and bigger prizes. One columnist wrote, it's gotten too big for its britches. A well-known bass fisherman told a reporter that, quote, when you get a $100,000 prize, it invites the criminal element in. How big of a problem is cheating in fishing tournaments? I don't think it's very big or widespread. This is these guys' names on the line, and they don't want to be, you know,

booted from the society, essentially. These are all their friends. They fish against the same people weekend after weekend. It's hard competition, but you're not seeing people blatantly cheat. I do feel that there are rule violations, whether it's carelessness or

or, you know, kind of just, well, that rule doesn't really matter, so I'm not going to follow it. But, you know, I don't think cheating is widespread. So when you started running the tournament, you weren't particularly concerned about cheating. No, actually, I was not concerned with cheating. I did, however, enforce the mandatory polygraph testing. Polygraph testing in fishing dates back to the mid-1970s.

In 1974, the American Bass Fisherman's World Open in Florida, which offered a $100,000 prize, gave polygraph tests to its top ten finalists. The man who administered the test, named Ben Bennett, said when he heard that a fishing tournament wanted to use his services, I thought it was some kind of practical joke or something. He said he was, quote, sure, no one in the business has ever been given such an assignment. He asked each finalist four questions, and he said,

and said that he would definitely know if someone cheated. One finalist said, I thought it might make me nervous, but it didn't. He added, it's probably something tournaments need. Everyone passed. More and more fishing competitions started making polygraph tests mandatory. Those tall fish tales may be over, one article read in 1975. Quote, even fishing in this post-Watergate world has fallen under the heavy hand of the reformer, said another.

But polygraphs are controversial. Many states don't allow polygraph evidence in court. In 1998, in a Supreme Court ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable. And the National Research Council wrote that people can alter their physiological responses during polygraph tests through, quote, cognitive or physical means. But they're still widely used in fishing tournaments today.

A writer for Game and Fish magazine wrote in 2016, it is believed that polygraph tests help deter cheaters, much as speed checked by radar signs help discourage speeding. Many tournaments, including Jason Fisher's, require that winners pass a polygraph test in order to claim their prize. Do you have faith in polygraphs? You know, they're a tool. I do believe that they work.

They're obviously not 100%. I don't think anything is 100%.

But they're a deterrent. You know, these are more on the honor system. We don't have people in their boats. So we do polygraph as truth verification. So they'll go out there and ask, did you abide by tournament rules? Did you abide by state rules and regulations, et cetera? Did you catch the fish legally? And we basically run that off what the anglers want to see. And as of right now, the anglers are with polygraph testing and random testing. They'd like to keep it honest.

The year before Jason Fisher started running one of his tournaments, a winning team was disqualified after failing a polygraph test. It was their third recent tournament win, and they were set to take home more than $300,000 for the year. The team was made up of Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky. After Chase failed a polygraph test, their team was disqualified, and the tournament's prize, an expensive boat, went to the second-place team.

Jake told a reporter that they were hiring an attorney and that, quote, we would never cheat. I'm fully aware of his failed polygraph at another competition. However, I basically just treat people, you know, how I would want to be treated. And without any real proof of what went wrong or what was violated, I still allowed them to fish my events despite the

the failed polygraph because, again, like I said, there's a big difference between violating a rule and blatantly cheating. But then, at that 2022 competition, Jason Fisher found lead weights in Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky's fish. You know, everybody was chirping, call the police, call the police. So, somebody did call the police and

And then they basically treated it as, you know, a crime scene, essentially videotaped all the fish and the sinkers. And they took reports on the whole thing. Officers from the Ohio Division of Wildlife prepared a report for the Cuyahoga County prosecutor. He told a reporter, I take all crime seriously, including attempted felony theft at a fishing tournament.

Jake Runyon and Chase Kaminsky were indicted on felony and misdemeanor charges of attempted grand theft, possession of criminal tools, unlawful ownership of wild animals, and cheating. In Ohio, cheating is illegal, from bingo to Little League to spelling bees to fishing tournaments. It's a first-degree misdemeanor unless the potential gain is over $1,000. Then it becomes a felony.

Chase Kaminsky and Jake Runyon initially pleaded not guilty, but changed their plea minutes before their trial began in March of 2023. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop the criminal tools charge, as well as the attempted grand theft charge. Both men lost their fishing licenses for up to three years and were forced to forfeit their boat. During their sentencing hearing, both men said they were sorry.

I just want to apologize to you, Your Honor. I want to apologize to my family, my friends, the fishing community. I'm feeling embarrassed. Super embarrassed. The judge in the case said, at the end of the day, you're convicted felons and cheaters. And he sentenced both men to a year of probation, a $2,500 fine, and 10 days in jail.

Were you surprised that these guys were given jail time for cheating in a fishing tournament? Quite frankly, I am surprised. The way things work nowadays, not a lot of people get jail time for crimes other than violent crimes. There's a lot of serious things. And so to see fishing and basically a cheating story take the headlines here in Cleveland was shocking to me.

Um, I'm just, I'm glad that the court system and the division of wildlife and everybody, you know, took notice of how big of a deal this was to these, these anglers. And they wanted to set a precedence that, you know, Hey, we take this seriously. And this is what could happen to you. Tournament fishing. It's, you know, I'm not going to say it makes the world go round, but with Lake Erie being the walleye capital of the world, um,

It's big business. These anglers come from all over. They spend money at our hotels, our gas stations, our restaurants. The actual park that we were fishing at that day makes a parking fee. You know, if we were to lose tournament fishing, you know, it's taken away a lot, not just within the bait shops and the tackle shops up and down the lake. It's the restaurants, it's the hotels, it's the gas stations, you know, which ultimately trickle out and ripple effect into the whole economy of Ohio. ♪

Has this whole thing changed the way that you run your tournaments now? We cut open the fish at the end of the day. It's almost comedy because these anglers know that they're not going to find anything in their fish and they want, they almost want to cut the fish open to prove that they were out there being the best. We do have some metal detectors and things like that. But again, it's, it's these anglers that do this, you know, day in and day out. They know that they're doing it the right way.

Metal detectors. You pass the fish through and you can tell if something's in its stomach. It's not like you're walking into the airport with the TSA check. We have the metal detector wands. It would be kind of cool to have the anglers with that 360 scan you get at the airport to have their fish, but we don't have that kind of a budget. We'll be right back.

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Creativity is one of the core traits that makes us human. It allows us to tell stories, to create, and to solve problems in new and exciting ways. So why does it feel so threatened? With new technological advances that can create art in milliseconds, where does that leave us? In this special three-part series, we wanted to ask, how can we save and celebrate creativity?

Tune into Saving Creativity, a special series from The Gray Area sponsored by Canva. You can find it on The Gray Area feed wherever you get your podcasts. In 2012, a 29-year-old man won a bass fishing tournament in the UK. He turned in a 13-pound fish and won 800 pounds, more than $1,000 as his prize. But then another fisherman noticed something odd about the winning fish. It had unique markings on its head.

He'd seen it before, and he said he recognized it from the local aquarium. When he told the tournament organizers, he says they laughed at him. So the next morning, he went to the aquarium and looked at the tank where he thought he'd seen the fish before. The fish wasn't there. The winner eventually admitted that he'd stolen the fish out of its tank. He pleaded guilty to burglary and fraud charges and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

In 2018, two men turned in several bass in a fishing tournament at Lake Powell in Utah that also didn't look quite right. What was it that seemed suspicious about the fish that this team was turning in? Yeah, the reason the organizers of the tournament called was because when you're dealing with fish all from the same lake...

They tend to look fairly similar. I mean, you have fish that are littler and fish that are bigger, but they're usually in about the same body condition as far as fat and skinny goes. Hal Stout worked as an investigator for the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources for more than 20 years. Fish are an interesting animal because they can grow and then they can shrink depending on their food sources.

And so once they've grown large, their head grows with their body. But the head, because it's bony, doesn't shrink. So you end up with sometimes fish with big heads and skinny bodies. And so the fish at the time at Lake Powell were kind of long and skinny with bigger heads. The fish that were turned in by these individuals were fat fish with little heads,

And they just didn't match up physiologically with the fish at Lake Powell. The tournament organizers also noticed that the fish had bright red fins. Which is not normal. They're usually not red at all. When Hal Stout arrived at the tournament, he looked at the unusual fish. He then talked to one of the fishermen who had turned them in.

I told him that I believed the fish had been held in captivity. The theory behind the red fins was that the fish were stressed for a period of time, which caused the reddening to the fins. I was thinking that it was likely that the fish had been held in captivity and then transported to Lake Powell and then probably released into the lake in cages so that they could...

bring the fish back up, and he flat out denied everything and almost challenged us to try to catch him. He said, there's no way you can prove what you're saying. And I told him that I thought that there might be a way that we could prove it through the science of stable isotopes. Stable isotope analysis is used in a lot of different fields.

Using an instrument called a mass spectrometer, biologists can measure the types of carbon or nitrogen atoms inside of bones, hair, and teeth to learn more about an animal's migratory patterns or diet. The FDA has also used stable isotope analysis to detect food fraud like mislabeled wines or diluted maple syrup.

And forensic scientists have used the technique to try to identify unknown remains by narrowing down where a person might have lived before their death. And they can, for example, tell that maybe this individual was from the northwestern part of the United States because of the water that the person had been drinking that now is found in molecules in the hair.

Hal Stout had learned about stable isotopes when he was getting his master's degree in forensic science. And my idea was that we might be able to use something similar from the water where the fish had been living to show that that water is different than Lake Powell and it would have stable isotope ratios that are different than fish that live in Lake Powell was the theory.

and I didn't know for sure at the time that we could or couldn't, but it was an idea. So you were kind of bluffing a little bit. I was definitely bluffing at the beginning, but it was based in some science that I knew a little bit about, and I thought that it would be worth a try. And I thought it would sound really good to him and probably help him want to just

Tell me the truth. But it didn't work that way. If I had heard, we're going to look at the stable isotopes, I think it would have turned me. It would have me too. It has scared me, I think. But he had ice in his veins.

Hal Stout started asking around, talking to labs about testing the fish. And I also spoke with our fisheries biologists that work for the Utah Division of Wildlife, and they told me some interesting things that they had done with fish otoliths and stable isotopes. What is an otolith? An otolith, it means basically ear rock.

and it's a crystal that forms in the inner ear of a fish, and they look just like kind of a jagged, clear crystal. And they float around in the inner ear of the fish, and it's what gives the fish equilibrium and helps it know how to stay upright. They decided they could test the otoliths to figure out what body of water the fish came from. We suspected that the area where they would have caught the fish was

was probably not terribly far away and so it narrowed down our list of areas that have largemouth bass of that size. And so one of those places being Quail Creek Lake State Park. And that state park is interesting because when you enter the state park, you check in your boat at the entrance station.

and they keep a log of who was on the lake. And so we went down and got the log for the days preceding the tournament, and we noticed that our suspect and his boat had been on the lake on Thursday in the evening. Two days before the tournament. So we sampled fish from Quail Lake Reservoir, and we had the evidence fish that we had seized there,

And we also sampled some more fish from Lake Powell and we sent the otoliths in. And what did you find? We found that it was a very clear isotopic ratio that delineated the fish from Lake Powell and the fish from Quail Creek Reservoir. And we also found that the evidence fish had the same isotopic ratio as the fish from Quail Creek Reservoir.

And so it ended up being like a one in so many billion chance that those fish came from anywhere other than Quail Creek Reservoir. The two men were charged with tampering to influence a contest, unlawful release of wildlife, and captivity of protected wildlife. Once they were faced with the totality of the evidence, they just pled guilty. They had to pay a fine and do community service. They also temporarily lost their hunting and fishing licenses.

It was the first time that anyone had ever been prosecuted in Utah for cheating in a fishing tournament. It is a big deal to transport wildlife illegally. And also, it's basically the same as theft. You know, it may not sound the same, but it's very similar to stealing $2,500 from someone. Why do you think people cheat at fishing competitions? I mean, is it just for the money?

You know, I think that it's not for the money. I think it's more for the ego and more for the status because most of these individuals have a fair amount of money. You wouldn't think that they would be throwing everything on the line for $2,500, but...

But these particular individuals had been very successful placing in the top three, I believe, in the last eight tournaments that they had entered. And so it was pretty coincidental that they had done so well. We suspected that they probably had done this before. You must have been kind of proud of yourself. You got to use a little ingenuity. Well, it was fun to put science to work and science.

and use something that maybe we hadn't looked at before. Not so much proud of myself, but it was, I had fun, I should say that. It was just a really enjoyable case. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to Criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, too. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus.

We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show, and Instagram and TikTok at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. This is about the third week of fishing and I've caught nothing. I don't think I would cheat, but...

Once you've been out here for a long time and you're not getting any fish, and you brought one in that was maybe just a little under the size you were supposed to take, I can see the appeal. I caught a fish! Just kidding.

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Thank you.

It's time to cut through the noise and make a real impact. So tune into the future of marketing, a special series from the PropG podcast sponsored by Canva. You can find it on the PropG feed wherever you get your podcasts.