 So welcome, everyone. I'm Evan Wilson from the Hatton North Center. It's good to see so many people here. We'll have a couple more people dribble in, I'm sure, as we go along. It's my pleasure today to introduce Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter who spent much of his career at the New York Times. I guess it's sort of, are you still there? I'm not entirely clear on. I have one. Yeah, I still write for them, but I'm not on staff. I'm on contract. Got it. You want to pull a surprise in 2009 as part of the team that broke the Elliott Spitzer story. He's contributed to the Atlantic and the New Yorker and NPR and countless other outlets. But you're all here because of his most recent book, The New York Times bestselling Outlaw Ocean, which is getting ruined by my stupid boom background. There we go. Outlaw Ocean, Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier. The book began Life, which you know, tell you as a series of stories published at the Times and he traveled all around the world to work on offshore crimes and stowaways and sea slavery and illegal fishing and so many more things to hear about shortly. Not only did he expand on that work when he wrote the book, he's also continuing to report on crimes at sea. So he's got a recent article about China's fishing armada and it's subsidizing of fishing fleets in West Africa and North Korea. He published a story in the broader context for the explosion in Beirut with a number of international outlets. So many of the stories are so unfolding and I think when we see the screen share, you'll see a lot of the ways that you can go keep up to date with these stories at his website, thelawocean.com. I'm really excited that he's able to be with us virtually today. We had to reschedule the talk because he was apparently off the coast of Italy or something exotic like that embedded on a ship, which he might tell us about. He's a hard guy to come down but I'm glad that he's here enough from me so welcome and Ian over to you and Charlotte thanks for being here. Thanks. This. So I was on staff at the New York Times for about 17 years and much of that time I was categorized as an investigative reporter, which essentially means I had the luxury of time. But the expectation that I would find Virgin snow, you know, kind of novel topics or new ways to tackle old topics. Usually also so that's the enterprise part of what I was supposed to do. The investigative part was really highlighted on things that are broken, you know, as opposed to a beat reporter that's doing. He said she said sort of updating on the basic events of yesterday. Investigative as opposed to really kind of have almost a prosecutorial ambition and find things that most people would agree are in desperate need of correction. And in the very explanatory and narrative rendering of those topics. There's usually suggestive, you know, sort of fixes, but not. I mean, Charlotte, can you guide me on how I turn this off. So it's not doing that. They're muted. Sure. Go into your messages preferences in the top left. This may be if you click into the message app in your taskbar at the very bottom it's a blue thought bubble looking. I've expanded the. I'll bag it for now and hope that. Okay. This is my son at school saying he needs to be picked up early so. So I was supposed to find individual stories that take a while or series stories that topics that could be rendered as series. Six years ago I finally found an editor that was willing to launch me on a series about this offshore realm and kind of the ambition of it was to focus primarily on the humans out there the 56 million people who work offshore as the sort of entry point to the world and then secondarily to sort of back our way into the the environmental or marine story. And the other ambition of the reporting was to really broaden people's awareness of the diversity to sort of expand the spectrum. That people have in their head about illicit extra legal even heroic. You know, behavior offshore. Most people when you would mention Coast Guard or Navy or maritime crime would think of what Hollywood had helped them think of which was, you know, the BP spill and Captain Phillips Somali piracy and ocean plastic and maybe whaling, but there was not a real awareness of the plethora of other activities out there sea slavery arms trafficking intentional dumping of oil, human trafficking illegal whaling repo men who still ships, you know and myriad activities. So our goal in the reporting at the time so the first two years was to expand that taxonomy and the two years in the times eight stories melded into a book project two more years at sea. And many of you are familiar with what came out of that. And out of the book came. A, a reporter who had been spoiled by too much freedom and didn't want to go back to the short leash of what I've been doing before and so I decided to go back to the paper for a year did a series on ammunition and bullets, the global trade and but then realize there are so many stories that we didn't get to touch in the book, and there's so little journalism of a certain sort, meaning narrative high gloss long form investigative journalism. There's so little of that occurring in the space that I wanted to sort of die back in and so I created a nonprofit called the outlaw ocean project. It's sort of funded by philanthropies 50% and then individual subscribers and donors the other 50%. So our mission is to continue producing these stories and then we place them in sort of tier one venues to the New Yorker New York Times Magazine, BBC Durst Beagle, etc. And then we maintain copyright over them. And after 72 hours we take them back and we translate them into a bunch of other languages, and then push them out to other venues around the world to try to get more eyeballs on the content. That's sort of a large part of what we do. One thing I'll mention briefly is in the ambition of trying to get this journalism to be financially sustainable on the one hand and also seen by more people on the other hand. We also, I with Charlotte and a team of three others, try to take the stories and translate them convert them into other forms. And that could be podcast projects or TV series or music or animated series short documentary films, but we try to give the stories more, you know, more of a runway. I'll, since we're on the page I'll give you an example of that Evan refer to it briefly. This is sort of a textbook we've only been up and operating we did outlaw ocean project for a year. And my biggest fear in making this grand shift I'd only ever been at the times was that I'd have trouble getting outlets to take the reporting and publish it. This collaboration on the, this first story was a sort of textbook scenario of what I hope might happen. On the one hand, it brought to bear a really creative and in many ways hopeful use of technology. Namely satellite technology in the form of an organization called global fishing watch, which I'd worked with before and know those folks really well. And they were really using various types of satellite data to figure things out that had been murky or mysterious. And in this case, the focus of our shared interest and this was a sort of trilateral collaboration. Global fishing watch on the one hand, a team of international academics from Japan, South Korea, the US, Australia, UK. On the other hand, and the outlaw ocean project and NBC News on the third hand, and the kind of the core questions at the center of this reporting were twofold kind of mysteries, if you will, for which there were answers but they were half baked. One was, why in the East Sea, these waters near the Korean peninsula, have we seen in the last eight or so years this precipitous decline in the squid stock, or everywhere else in the world, squid are blossoming, not for good reasons, namely overfishing has killed all their predators. But, but in the East Sea you saw an 80% drop in eight nine years. And that's a really huge drop. The half baked somewhat true answer was climate change was causing migration shifts and the squid were following a different path and fisheries stock analyses were under counting or the fish had moved the squid had moved elsewhere. Kind of more in my view urgent mystery was, why are all these dead bodies showing up on the coast of Japan. These are dead bodies of North Korean fishermen. These are in, you know, over the course of about six years several hundred, usually washing up in these rickety wooden North Korean boats, these are four or five man, you know, outboard motor boats squid, you know, very basic squid jiggers. And they would wash up due to the way the currents work, always on the coast of sometimes rush up but usually on the coast of Japan, and the going theory again somewhat true but half true was that partially worsened by the imposition of sanctions. But on its own accord Kim Jong Un and the North Korean government were applying intense pressure for the sake of revenue for the sake of protein food security intense pressure on their fishing sector, including moving military personnel onto fishing boats terrible idea because many of them didn't know what they were doing, but trying to get more boats out in the water trying to get the boats to go out further and trying to bring in more catch, and that pressure was resulting in risk taking and risk taking in the form of going out too far dirty fuel, not great engines rickety boats bad storms, people get stranded stock starve capsize or not, but end up dead and washing up on Japan shores. True from what analysts seem to think is going on there, but not the full true. So, what, what we came in in this story to do was to see if this other portion of an explanation that had anecdotally bubbled up in the form of South Korean and Japanese fishermen, saying they've spotted all these Chinese vessels seemingly coming through their waters and heading to North Korean waters, as well as anonymous reports submitted to the UN by most likely they were anonymous but most likely the Japanese and South Koreans, saying they had documented cases of Chinese vessels, large numbers heading through South Korean waters on their way to North Korean waters. Why this matters from a governance or for this crowd Navy and law enforcement point of view is that 2017 Security Council, China included unanimously impose sanctions as a response to the nuclear testing going on in North Korea on North Korea and very key component of those sanctions was meant to squeeze the country economically, including their fishing sector, and there was a explicit prohibition on any foreign fishing in those waters. So if the Chinese were in large numbers, sending or aware of or tacitly accepting large numbers of these boats going North Korean waters. That was a real big violation. And so what gold fishing watch and the academics did is they had dots on a map they had through scrappy interesting tactics of satellites had had sort of estimated an annual number ranging from 700 to 900 vessels each year, all Chinese in North Korean waters post 2017. This is a huge number, you know, China's numbers are mushy but it's it's roughly a fourth to a third of its entire distant water fishing fleet. So it became if those numbers were right it became very difficult for the Chinese government to claim these are a few bad apples and they weren't, you know, able to do anything about it. So what we wanted to do at the ocean project was number one, ground truth these data points, get footage and make it narrative, you know, tell a story, so that average folk could care, you know, and understand. We assembled a team went to South Korea, bought our way onto a squid vessel, convinced, you know, paid and convinced the captain to take us out. All officially say near North Korean waters, do not allow to go into North Korean waters and doc and essentially see if we could spot what the satellite seemed to be telling us which immediately happened. We went to the sort of key location where normally these ships traverse and, lo and behold, what had looked like a single blip on the map was actually a lead ship that was followed by 10 other ships who had their transponders turned off their as turned off so they were dark, and we began following them. Anyway, we follow them documented them until they got aggressive with us and then we pulled off and ran away and told this story about a what you know analysts say is the largest discovery of an illegal fishing fleet ever, you know, 900 vessels and put that story out. This was a perfect this is what I left the times to do important stories interesting stories stories that no one else was accessing stories in located in this space stories that are at the intersection of environment and human rights stories that have a law enforcement element to them stories that also get seen, you know, because they get run by large venues. And so this was the first big piece that we ran and since then had a piece on the front page of the story about a murder caught on camera at sea and a piece coming up in New Yorker and piece a month ago and the economist. So things are going well in terms of getting these outlets to run these largely because we give it to them for free. And the state of journalism is such that free reporting is not on offer very frequently. But it's also journalism that not many other folks are given the budget and time to do. So, that's an example of the kind of story. I'll just briefly touch on a second quick story. I didn't look at the time. The story that's coming up in the in the New Yorker is another story that for this crowd may be of interest because it raises all sorts of interesting kind of questions about who should be doing this policing work. The heart of which is really about unintended consequences and in this instance, the unintended consequences at the root of the emergence of aquaculture and the well intentioned and in some ways quite positive global shifts toward farming fish, be it in on land ponds or in near shore pens. And the push towards aquaculture was a push that was driven largely as an effort to slow down ocean depletion and lessen the over the unsustainable over fishing and illegal fishing of wild caught, you know, fish. If we could raise them on our own, then we could let those guys roam free and proliferate and stocks renew themselves. The problem that has a, well, a bunch of problems emerge with aquaculture, you know, standard problems that you see replicated in CAFOs, you know, sort of on land. When we began penning animals of any sort pigs, chickens, cows, you have big problems, you have health problems who start pumping them with antibiotics because they're too close to each other catching diseases. They're not living natural healthy lives. You have pollution problems from their waste, because you've got too many in such close quarters and that's a large amount of bad stuff that you got to get rid of. And you have feeding problems, meaning, you know, the drive to make money on, you know, handing animals means you want to accelerate their growth. And so you start cutting corners and beefing them up faster, you know, fattening them up faster. So you start feeding them things that will accelerate their plumpness, right. And that's the CAFO story, the big agriculture story, and aquaculture has the same narrative. And the specific part of that narrative that interested us is an even darker twist, which is the industry has begun shifted away from the use of soy, which used to three years ago was the cheapest protein option, pelletized soy to feed the fish to fatten them up faster. Fish being shrimp, fish being salmon, other sorts catfish cod. When soy became more expensive than just fish meal, so catching forage fish, fish that typically are too small or bitter, not cost effective for human seed, but you could scoop them up, usually trawl them up in huge quantities, ground them up, pelletize it and feed that high protein source to aquaculture fish. That's when the industry switched over to a deeply worrisome phenomenon, which this industry that was supposed to slow ocean depletion began accelerating it because they were catching wild caught to feed farmed. This struck me as a crazy kind of narrative of great interest to me at least, and playing out in really dramatic fashion off the coast of West Africa, largely on Chinese industrial boats that have set up processing plants cold storage and landed licenses with Ghana, a bunch of countries along the coast, and in this case, my team went to Gambia, and Gambia had three main processing, fish meal processing plants, all Chinese-owned, and Gambia had only recently come out of a repressive government after several decades under an autocratic leader that had a new promising sort of pro-democratic set of guys in power, and then this whole fish meal thing became a headache, the role of foreign investment, the role of foreign players to circumvent inspections and taxes and whatnot, environmental rules, emergent youth protesters shutting down the plants, the return of really repressive secret police forces to get the youth back from the plant so they could be up and running. So you have really interesting political stability, democratic issues playing out with environmental and human rights issues, all in a law enforcement context off the coast of West Africa. So Sea Shepherd, as many of you know, is sort of a direct action ocean conservation group controversial, but for their mission pretty effective, and they in the last five, six years have begun moving toward going to developing nations and offering their navy, essentially, the Sea Shepherd navy, huge ships and their personnel and their training and their resources and their PR machines to these countries and saying, look, you guys have no boats, Gambia, you have no real boats that can go past 10 miles from shore, the real crimes here are occurring further out. We'll bring two of our ships by, we'll help you coordinate some sort of covert law enforcement exercises, we'll train your people, we'll get press on the problem here, we'll make some arrests of some of these illegal foreign largely foreign vessels, and will help identify the, to the world stage, the problem of illegal fishing as it and over fishing as it plays out in developing nations such as Gambia. Furthermore, to my interest, much of the fishing and legal fishing going on there was for these fish meal plants which were feeding, you know, American and Norwegian, you know, Chinese aquaculture farms. So we went there, embedded, did a long story about that kind of patrols and the deeper issues, and that piece is coming out in the New Yorker in a couple months. So this is the sort of reporting we do. I'll go, I'll drift off the reservation, just briefly to talk about maybe not of interest since this isn't a journalism crowd per se, but I'll indulge myself nonetheless. You know, I think one of the challenges for journalism generally and for legacy institutions like the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. is, you know, the cacophony of information and democratization of journalism through the internet has made for a really crowded short attention span place and finding innovative ways to access new audiences, be they Chinese readers, be they 17 year old readers anywhere. For example, so youth and Asia are the holy grails is kind of a big ongoing challenge for journalism outlets. And these institutions have been slow to experiment, in my view. And one of the things I wanted to do when I left the Times was experiment. So the music project, which Charlotte will toggle over to was one such experiment. Essentially, it began with the book, and it involves teaming up with musicians, be they classical or hip hop or electronic whatever from, you know, what's now 80 different countries. And essentially saying, look, would you read the book, I'll give it to you for free. You know, find things in there, plastic pollution, murder, sea slavery, whaling, IUU, what have you that move you personally, focus on the emotions in the narrative in the chapter. You know, what are the emotions that, you know, kind of come out from there that's the shared language between my words and their music, and make an album that attempts to sort of convey some of the motion emotions of the story. And then we're going to put at your disposal, a archive that we've built, stripped from five years of footage of sounds and the sounds are ambient so they're textured sound machine gunfire and Somalia or chanting Cambodia and deckhands in the South China Sea. So we have captured interesting ingredients that a musician could use as samples, or pros. So with words that Secretary of State John Kerry at the UN, talking about governance on the oceans. That's an interview with a Tanzanian stowaway, you know, it's just interesting words, and the musician is invited not obligated to use these sounds as well, and passages read from the book by me by someone else with a better voice by the musician themselves, whatever. And then recruiting and expected this to be five artists, and it exploded is now 460 artists and 80 countries 90 million listeners. And the, and the goal here was number one to reach my 17 year old son, you know, like, he won't read the New York Times he won't read anything I write, boring and long and, you know, depressing. But he consumes a lot of information pretty smart kid gets it a lot from comedy and YouTube and tick tock and Spotify and these other watering holes and the thought was if we could bring, you know, almost a gateway drug out there, sorry to use a terrible metaphor especially when talking about minors, but like if we could be informationally, you know, sprinkle breadcrumbs from their watering holes say Spotify, over to our watering hole say this online article at the end of the book, and if we can embed these, you know, I'm mixing metaphors terribly but, you know, if we can embed our stuff, be it footage, these sounds, what have you, in the music, and the album cover and the songs, maybe people's curiosity will say I wonder why what's that drum you know what's this about, and they will begin clicking over, you know, and it has worked, you know, we watch the IP traffic. And, you know, we, we now have deals with Spotify and Pandora and a bunch of places where they give us more ability to run videos and all sorts of stuff, but it's really interesting and it has brought a lot of readers over to the journalism. And then you're also making musicians sort of cultural informational diplomats of this stuff. And so, boy, I just put out an album on this topic I better know something about it because I'm going to be interviewed by the the newspaper here in Rome or, or the radio host here in Netherlands you know and so they become fluent in the topic, which is great. And then also some of the streaming revenue that comes from the music go anything that we take 50% of any revenue made on the music, we being the Outlaw Ocean project is synesthesia and media and and 100% of what we make on it goes right into the nonprofit for more journalism so there's no profit to be made from the music, but there is a subsidizing source of the journalism. A typical story the New Yorker piece costs about $108,000 to produce. That's photographer security, you know everything you can imagine video editors the planes, you know, the New Yorkers paying best paying outlet in the country, 8000 bucks for that story. So, you know, do the math that's $100,000 that's got to come from somewhere. And that's why, you know, the Washington Post is lucky because they've got Bezos and the New York Times is lucky because they've got Solesberger, but the smaller outlets that are doing this have to find other side games and the music is one method that we've found to try to eventually make the journalism sustainable. So to get back to your comfort zone, I would say, you know, on the issue of navies coast guards and the challenge of law enforcement. I do think if there's one major lesson to be learned in the book and the subsequent reporting. It's, it's that the layers of problems that exist in the offshore space are distinct from on land, partly because of the sprawling geography, partly because of the actual complexity of the high seas, belong to no one and everyone. But at root and also partly because the way the rules were written, typically by industries and, and you know, kind of lawyers and diplomats, rather than by human rights, labor, and kind of international law specialists. The way the rules were written are distinctly murky. They lean towards especially in maritime law privacy of the players, especially in fishing. And furthermore rules are only as good as their enforcement and the presence of law enforcement who actually will investigate prosecute, etc. patrol. So even near shore waters, not to mention high seas is not existed. And so all that's together is why you have this robust, somewhat extra legal frontier right for stories. Why don't I stop there and open it to questions.