2. Tree of Life, Tree of Money: Palms and People

The palm as a mirror for civilization. Colin and Christian trace how one plant family got woven into money, faith, and identity: the date palm that bootstrapped desert life and earned the name "tree of life"; palm oil, the world's most-produced vegetable oil, hiding in roughly half your groceries and forcing a genuinely hard conversation about efficiency versus rainforest; the palm frond as a shared symbol of victory and paradise across Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; and the great twist of Los Angeles — a city that imported a tree it isn't native to, planted tens of thousands of them to sell an image of paradise, and is now slowly saying goodbye as it swaps glamour for shade. Episode two of two.