I first heard the idiom "worse things happen at sea" in Monty Python's Life of Brian, and it's true.
Ian Urbina has made a career of telling stories of the ocean. From piracy, illegal fishing, and sea slavery to seasteading and rogue carbon removal experiments, he's covered the gamut.
How does one continuously report on topics of concern to relatively intimidating people? As the old line goes, "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations."
In today's episode, Ian and host Ross Kenyon discuss these topics, but also broader questions of what is happening to journalism in a political environment where retaliation feels very possible.
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The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the World's Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I’m a climate tech and carbon removal entrepreneur. I read a book. I liked it so much that I wanted to invite the author on. His name is Ian Urbina. He wrote this book called The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the World’s Last Untamed Frontier. It’s an amazing set of chapters that chronicles bad behavior at sea. Much of the book is about sea slavery and about how people will take these contracts that will get them into fishing work. And it ends up being very parallel to stories you’d hear about company towns in the US where you’d be paid in scrip and you can never really earn enough to leave.
These contracts were ostensibly entered into voluntarily, but they basically just become a form of human trafficking, and it’s much more common than you might think. So we talked about labor issues that take place on the high seas. We talked about illegal fishing and how common that is too, and what it means to bring illegal fishers to justice. And that involves Ian trying to catch up with some of the ships from the Sea Shepherd organization, trying to join their pursuit of an illegal fisher.
We spend some time talking about ocean iron fertilization, which I’ve been really interested in recently. By coincidence, I’ve been in touch with several ocean iron fertilization people lately. And culturally, they’re a really interesting type of person because it’s one of those techniques that inspires silver bullet thinking, which if they’re right, it truly is a silver bullet, but it is also the most polarizing carbon removal technique or possible technique that ever gets brought up. Essentially, I was at a marine CDR meetup recently and I asked someone whose opinion I respect if there’s a there there, essentially.
And the there that I’m asking about is: can you pour iron filings into certain parts of the ocean where much biological growth, especially for very small types of marine life, is iron limited? So by adding iron, you will produce a bloom of life and this could feed fish. And then the hope is that these small critters drift down to the ocean floor and become relatively immobilized carbon and becomes a type of carbon removal. And this person just said, like, yeah, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t get that far down, and it just ends up cycling through the top layers of the ocean.
I don’t meet a lot of people who are neutral parties on it. The people who get into it get really into it. And if they’re right, then basically all the other types of carbon removal become irrelevant because of the price and the scale of action that is available to them. But many of the marine scientists with whom I speak are deeply skeptical, at least, if not actively hostile. So that’s a fun one to talk to Ian about, as deep in the carbon removal weeds.
We also just spend a fair amount of time talking about the nature of journalism. I really like this book and Ian’s writing because I think he does try to honor the stories of people that — even those who are not noble people, but they’re also people who are just trying to get by and feed their family. And I can tell that the book was written with a fair amount of empathy in a place where it would be much easier to blame them and call them terrible people. And we talked about why that’s important and how journalism is changing too, because right now it’s really unclear what’s going to play out with the Trump administration.
I’m hearing a lot about the various ways in which people are self-censoring or changing the way that they’re talking about their work so that they don’t face retaliatory action from the administration. And that’s news publications, philanthropies. It’s an interesting time. And Ian, despite working for and writing for a number of very prominent newspapers and publications, he founded The Outlaw Ocean Project, which is his nonprofit where he’s able to make sure reportage on these topics gets financed, gets produced and gets distributed.
So if you like this content, one, go read his book The Outlaw Ocean. It’s very fun. It’s a great listen too. If you like audiobooks, it’s really the perfect kind of nonfiction to listen to. It reads very well that way. It isn’t the easiest thing to write copy that reads well. So that’s a testament to skill. And if you’d like to support his organization, the link is in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening.
If you like this show, please do me the favor of becoming a paid subscriber. It’s $5 a month, gets you ad-free listening and bonus content. It helps keep the show alive, helps to grow. It is really important to me. If you love the show but you can’t do $5 a month, if you could give me a great rating and review in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whichever podcast app that you use, that is also massively appreciated. And thank you so much for your support. Here is your show.
Thanks for being here, Ian.
Ian Urbina: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Ross Kenyon: You tell so many stories in your book, The Outlaw Ocean, about what happens at sea, most of them pretty horrible. I’m trying to think if there’s any really happy ones in there. What’s happened since the book’s publication, and is the trajectory nearly as grim as you present?
Ian Urbina: Well, I mean, I present what I think is accurate and I think it is probably even darker than what I captured because, you know, there were so many stories I just couldn’t get to. What’s happened since the story is, you know, I spent two years doing a series called The Outlaw Ocean for the Times and then went out and did the book. And then after the book, I kind of was changed as a journalist. And so I decided to open a nonprofit news organization called The Outlaw Ocean Project and to keep doing these kinds of stories. So that’s what’s happened in the five years since.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, what made it on the cutting room floor?
Ian Urbina: You know, sort of smaller things that I touch on but didn’t go as deep in. I mean, you know, conspicuously missing in the book were China, you know, like the biggest fleet out there. I couldn’t really find a way to tackle the largest and most opaque fleet on the water, which is China. So that’s one thing that we spent three years at, you know, at the nonprofit, pursuing as a story.
And then another huge story that didn’t make it in the book that I chased afterwards was the migration crisis on the Mediterranean and sort of the horrific stories of what is happening to folks as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean to make their way to Europe. That was also a story I couldn’t figure out. It was clearly an Outlaw Ocean story because there was human rights and environmental angles and real pathos and investigative potential, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it new and fresh. So I just didn’t touch it. But then I did so after I left, after I finished the book. So those are two examples.
Ross Kenyon: You mean just showing up in Lampedusa or something like that is just not new enough or not a fresh enough angle for you?
Ian Urbina: Yeah, I mean, I — yes, there’s been amazing reporting. The bar was really high, including out of Lampedusa. What I wanted to do was, number one, find something that felt like no one had done before. And the first window on that was a piece I did after the book about these cruise vessels that Italy had rented. There were five at the time, huge cruise vessels, and they were housing, you know, thousands of migrants there to keep them off land and to sort of manage how they were going to handle them. No journalist had been allowed on board any of those vessels. And I thought, well, if I could get on there, it would be pretty amazing just to see what the conditions are like and to talk with those who were there. And so we orchestrated a way to get on board by working with the Red Cross, a photographer and I. And so that was the first exposure.
And then in producing that story, we were hearing horrific stuff out of Libya. You know, the folks launched from different places, but Libya is one of the biggest launching spots. And so many of the most gruesome stories were coming from folks who had launched from Libya. So the next thing we wanted to do is, OK, if we’re going to do that story well, then we need to go into Libya. And so that is logistically very, very tough. It’s a super dangerous place. And so that was the next big investigation we did: going into Libya and looking deeply at, you know, kind of how the EU is funding the capture and detention of folks in Libya especially, and what happened to those people when they’re detained in the gulags that exist in Libya.
Ross Kenyon: The beat is so interesting and there’s so much variability in what you can cover with the ocean being your main subject. Why isn’t this more supportable or fundable by mainstream publications?
Ian Urbina: For the reasons of the first part of your sentence, in that it’s really sprawling, and B, simply by dint of the geography, it means everything takes longer, and time costs in the business of journalism. So the price point of doing good journalism — I mean, there’s always been good journalism on the oceans written from shore, but it’s limited, right? It’s oftentimes rewrite of academic studies and it’s usually from an environmental lens. All very important and worthy, but very narrow, right? And so if you’re going to try to tell human stories and human rights or labor stories plus environmental stories, you really got to get out in the space. That adds a huge amount of time and cost, sometimes a little bit of a danger factor as well. And so all those things make, you know, the editors or the business bosses above them or the Wall Street financiers above them who run papers not so thrilled about those stories that take six months, a year to produce rather than producing six stories a week.
Ross Kenyon: So it’s private equity’s fault, basically.
Ian Urbina: Partially, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. How’s it going now that you have your own shop?
Ian Urbina: It’s good. Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t be happier. It’s tough. I was only ever a journalist, but I was a cultural anthropologist, then journalist, and so I’d never run, you know, an organization, small though we are. You know, just works different muscles to manage people and kind of all the duties that that entails. But I quite like it. We’re funded, you know, two-thirds by foundation philanthropies. We stick with the ones that really know journalism and are pretty accustomed to the rules that are needed to protect journalism from being unduly influenced by funders. So we have a bunch of funders in that space. And then a third of our funding comes from just average folks who think it’s unusual and they want to give two bucks a month or something like that. You know, so we’re in decent shape and we’re producing stuff I’m really proud of and I have a really amazing team with me now.
Ross Kenyon: Could you explain the mechanics of sea slavery? It seems you would expect more people to come back from that experience and warn people to not take these debt deals to illegally migrate to some other country and get ensnared into this. But it seems very common. It’s disgusting how pernicious and common it is, actually, in reading this.
Ian Urbina: Yeah. I mean, I think the reasons for it not being more known are several. One is shame and sort of a sense of embarrassment. Oftentimes you’re dealing with a demographic who might be, you know, small village inlander, right, in country X, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, wherever. So they’re probably from a Global South country. They’re probably pretty poor. They’re probably inland and village based. So they’re not super savvy. They’re not coastal, port-near, you know, very savvy about what the work looks like. They’re pretty desperate. They’re often illiterate. Sometimes they’re trafficked or they’re undocumented crossing borders.
All right, so all those demographic variables mean you have someone who oftentimes had to borrow money just to get the job because there are these upfront fees. You’ve got to pay your own flight to Busan, South Korea to board the ship and you’ve got to pay the manning agency to get your licenses and paperwork. And so you end up borrowing money from your cousin, your uncle, your friend in your village. So you’re already in debt at the outset and you’ve sold this opportunity to them as one that’s hopeful and promising and a good bet, right? And so then a year and a half, two years later, you come back with your tail between your legs and you don’t really have any money to show for it. And some bad stuff happened. You kind of feel embarrassed, right? So the shame factor means you’re probably not going to talk about it too openly when you get back home.
The second factor is often blacklisting. You know, oddly, you know, irrationally — a lot of these guys, and this is a mostly male workforce, if they speak ill of the manning agency, the employment firm that hired them, or the ship, the fishing company, the ship captain, whatever, word gets round and they don’t have another chance at it. And crazy — if you’re abused, why are you trying to go again? If you don’t have many options and the only job in town is at the local five-and-dime or whatever, or on the rice paddy, like, you might say, well, I gambled, I lost, but I’m heading back to the casino ’cause I might win, right? You know, like, this is what we humans do. Hope springs eternal, for better or worse.
So I think the desire to not speak ill and then get a bad rap and therefore be locked out of job options is another factor that prevents folks from talking openly about what happened to them. And sometimes it’s more than just blacklisting. If you speak of what happened to you in these small places, in these small villages, they will come for you. You know, someone will go and either say, hey, look, you know, we said we would pay you a concession fee for what happened to you, but we’ve heard you’ve been bad-mouthing us, and not only are we not paying you a concession fee, but you know we’re going to teach you a lesson. So that is not typical, but is not uncommon either.
So I think these are probably the biggest factors. It’s also just like, you know, these are places where word isn’t traveling very far about certain things. Good news travels further than bad news, I would just say. And so when someone comes back to the village and things went OK for them — and this does happen, and they earned well and they got paid and no one got beaten up and the contract was the contract — and they come back and now they pay off the people they borrowed from and they bought a new moped and they put a new roof on their mom’s house, like, that gets around. Like, hey, did you see so-and-so got back from his job at sea and he looks — he’s doing pretty well. He’s got new sneakers and he’s got a new moped. And you know that word travels further than the opposite, which tends to be when things don’t go well.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. You have someone, your cousin, your coworker, won $1,500 at the slot machine, but they pumped in six grand to get it, and all wrapped up in shame. And the good news feels so good. In that case, I could — it really does a number on one’s psyche. I can imagine it keeps you busy as someone with an anthropology background.
Ian Urbina: Yeah. I mean, it’s that anthropology background, such as it was, is what kind of drew me to this kind of realm. Like, people are often like, oh, well, have you always been interested in marine biology? And I’m like, I was never — still interested in marine biology per se, I mean. My [unclear] interested in that, or what I was. I just — I’m interested in this stuff, but I was mostly interested in this weird frontier where there are these people that live very differently, and that interests me most.
Ross Kenyon: I think that reads very strongly. I mean, you definitely reference this in the book too, especially in the introduction. But it does seem to be a very human-centered book. One might expect this to be more environmentally oriented, but that seems to be a secondary subject area relative to just how humans treat one another in this environment.
Ian Urbina: Yeah, I mean, and again, it’s not because — I just felt like if you’re trying to do storytelling, like, you can write an article or you can write a story, and an article is sort of stacked facts, right? I wrote a lot of those at the Times. They’re important, they serve a purpose, but there’s no narrative arcs, there’s no main characters, not really a clear beginning, middle, and end. A lot of it’s expository, explanatory stuff, right? And I just personally don’t think that moves the needle and grabs people as much as narrative. And if you’re going to do narrative, you need humans. If you need humans, then you probably need a way into this space. So and then the back end can be, oh, by the way, this thing that’s happening out here has broader consequences, such for marine life and for the existence of the planet. Let’s talk about those too. But I feel like that’s better left — from my view — as backdrop to a human-centric story.
Ross Kenyon: What’s changed since the election and inauguration? What hasn’t, in the world? Wide open-ended question, any way you’d like.
Ian Urbina: Yeah, I mean, in my space — I mean, I think a lot has changed in the big sense of the word: civility, democracy, the fate of journalism, the existential status of truth. You know, like these things are all, you know, I think seeing changes in our country, and that scares me. But I won’t head there. More narrowly, on my subject matter, things have gotten a lot harder. I mean, things that science fairly well established as fact and therefore you could move ahead from there and get to other facts, now are not even mentionables, right? So like, you know, climate change, the climate crisis as a reality that we’re no longer debating, but rather we’re going to cover the real world impact, solutions, arguments over what to do about it — now we’re back at, like, we’re not supposed to mention climate.
I’m not running into this. I’m my own boss and the editors I deal with are not of this ilk. But it is the ether of current mentality, and it’s certainly the case that all the sources I used to turn to in the government are scared shitless, you know, and like they’re not as inclined to talk with me about things until they figure out what their fate is, you know, in terms of having a job or in terms of what the priorities of the political administration that will run them now are. So, you know, whereas you could talk about human rights abuses on Chinese vessels before, now, if we’re going to bring up Chinese vessels, it’s in a geopolitical hawkish context. But the human stuff isn’t really the entrance, even if it might arguably be more important. These are the sorts of shifts I’m seeing in terms of positioning the journalism into venues that will publish them, or talking about sources.
Ross Kenyon: Now, I could see that maybe happening with the Washington Post editorial page changes, but you’d think with The Gray Lady — probably would be unshakable on this. Is that not the case?
Ian Urbina: I don’t really write for the Gray Lady anymore. I mean, not because I don’t love her and she didn’t teach me everything I knew, but because when I left, one of my goals was to broaden my partners, if you will, and sort of be in a polygamous, you know, situation where I have as many different publishing outlets as possible. Maybe that’s — I said it — that’s down the wrong track. When you cut this out and take it out of context, I’m going to be divorced by my wife. But no, I mean, I think we do at the Boston Globe, the LA Times. I just got off a call with Nat Geo. Like, all these big Tier 1 venues that we provide content to, all of them are sort of, you know, the bosses up high are still trying to figure out what they can say and not get acute pushback on.
Ross Kenyon: Pushback from whom?
Ian Urbina: I don’t know. I mean, now I’m out of my depth, honestly. It’s not because I’m afraid to say, it’s just because I don’t like talking about things I don’t know really what I’m talking about. I’m intuiting a lot. And what I can say at the level of intuition, probably four people removed from the people I’m describing, is that I do sense a certain fear among journalism outfits, legacy Tier 1 outfits. I’m smelling a sense of fear and uncertainty about what coverage should look like and what things should say. But can I be more concrete than that? Probably not. I’m not afraid to if I have more to say. I just — I’m sensing that there is a fear about, like, what feels good to run.
I’ll give you one example. There’s a paper I was talking about yesterday. I won’t say which one, but they’ve gone a lot — undergone a huge amount of turmoil. Tier 1 shop. You know, their main editor just took a buyout. A new editor’s come in their place. I had a meeting with them: hey, we’ve got this huge package, here’s — I want you to look at it. You guys interested in running it? We’re cheap dates — free, you know, etcetera, etcetera, all the standard things. And this new editor said, the new folks, that the direction of the paper is going local, and they’ve gutted their foreign desk and they are undergoing a mandate to try to be very, very local in all the stories they cover.
So this piece that I was offering them had one component that was about seasteading and tech folks and libertarians. And they’re like, we’d like to lead the story with that, as opposed to the story being largely about the largest seagrass field in the world and all this other stuff, which was previously the lead. And they were like, could we switch it around because this lead will speak more to a local audience? And I was like, well, but that’s kind of a weird sidelight, not the lead of the story. And I’m not sure that it feels comfortable to turn it upside down. That’s what I mean. Like, there is a shifting of priorities and attention based on readership.
Ross Kenyon: What did Russia Today think?
Ian Urbina: I didn’t pitch at them, you know. Again, I’ll take eyeballs anywhere. If you don’t — if you don’t edit my copy, then I’ll publish in Russia Today.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. What is happening with the seasteading folks? I mean, I did a show on seasteading years ago and there’s always been a strong tension between how ecologically oriented projects like that can be versus how secession oriented in a way that might turn people’s stomachs. And I think there’s versions of each that are present. What’s happening now? It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on them.
Ian Urbina: Yeah. I mean, I only checked in recently because we’ve been working on this piece about a place no one’s ever heard of called the Saya de Malha Bank, which is this Switzerland-sized plot of high seas between Seychelles and Mauritius. And it’s the largest seagrass field in the world and it’s getting obliterated by industrial fishing. And it’s in the high seas and no one’s paying attention to it. And it’s this really interesting place. And among the many things that have happened, there has been two bouts with seasteaders, very of the typical mold: super wealthy libertarian types who wanted to kind of create a new community from scratch and get away from taxes and whatever else they were trying to get away from.
So that’s why I went back to it, because this place had a guy who just died about a month and a half, two months ago, I think, who is on the run from the law — a billionaire tech American, lived in Italy, a guy named [unclear], who was trying to create a seastead. He had bought a barge and he had sort of set it up off the coast of UAE or Qatar and he was going to kind of refine his plan and then move it to the Saya de Malha Bank. But a rogue wave hit his vessel and it sunk and a bunch of them died.
So, but that’s interesting in that, like, that is the fate that a lot of these ambitions, love them or hate them, meet, which is that, like, the reality of remoteness, the hidden costs and the strains of the conditions out in these far-off places are often underestimated. And just like I said, the hidden costs of — there’s a reason society has developed to where it is now, right? Cops and fire and roads and, like, pooled monies called taxes that pay for services we all benefit from make sense from a civilization point of view, even if it’s burdensome to have to pay the taxes. The seasteaders, I think, oftentimes underestimate that variable. And then when they start creating a new society where taxes are lower or nonexistent, they’re like, wait, but what are we going to do when there’s a crime? Or, you know, like, they start reinventing the wheel of, like, public services. And that’s coupled with the conditions of transporting food and things like that out. It just catches up with these projects and they often fail. There’s very few that have succeeded.
Ross Kenyon: Among the archetypal seasteaders that you’re describing, I think there’ll be probably less desire for that, at least for the next couple years, because the people I know that support that approach tend to be very favorable towards Trump. The growth of seasteaders — I know this — they probably see more reason to get out on the sea, but among the more conservative or libertarian ones, I don’t think they’re going to be taking to the high seas in as great a frequency or strongly.
Ian Urbina: Or they’re waiting on Elon to get the shuttle to Mars. Like, that’s a quintessential seastead, right? It’s just outer space. It’s — but it’s the same demographic. It’s a super wealthy kind of libertarian tech type who wants to get away and do things differently, if I’m being very generous to the philosophy.
Ross Kenyon: You are trying to be generous.
Ian Urbina: I’m trying. I’m trying. I’m trying.
Ross Kenyon: Do you follow much in the world of ocean iron fertilization?
Ian Urbina: Not hugely. I mean, I wrote about in the book that one experiment and cast a pretty skeptical eye in the book, as you know, on it.
Ross Kenyon: Many years have passed since that, and have there been more promising possibilities of geoengineering that actually could, like, help save us from the climate crisis?
Ian Urbina: I don’t know. I frankly don’t know. I don’t want to assume that all models are terrible models. I kind of want to be careful about that inertial perspective. I think the model I focused on was seemingly perilous from the people I trusted that I talked to about it, but I don’t know if it’s still being attempted anywhere.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, you primarily cover the Russ George, Haida Gwaii example, right?
Ian Urbina: Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I meet people sometimes who have a revisionist take on that experiment, said he had permission from the Haida people and he got great data and the experiment broadly worked. Of course it led to the London Protocol banning commercial exploration of this entire area, so some people are salty about that. But I don’t know, it seems like it has a mixed legacy. But I’m also speaking with people who think ocean iron fertilization could be a climate silver bullet. And this is from a community of people who basically say we need silver buckshot and silver bullets do not exist. Some people are like OIF or nothing, and I always find that to be a really interesting take. More work is being done on this now too. Woods Hole is doing research on OIF right now. I’m not sure if you’ve — it might be worth another look. I’m trying to get you back on this beat. Please write.
Ian Urbina: No, I — I mean, I like your metaphor, silver bullet, silver buckshot. And I feel like there is wisdom in the notion of we’re in a pretty serious situation and there are gonna be risks with every move we could make, including the don’t-do-anything, that’s really risky. So yeah, I owe it to the topic to go back and try to open my ears to a diversity of smart folks and see what they’re saying now.
Ross Kenyon: I am trying to maintain an open mind and I always hope that climate solutions are not as crazy as they sound and they might actually have something there. But I feel like I’ve been burned a couple times before too, and so I’m also wary.
Ian Urbina: It’s good to have a little bit of distance, I think. Yeah, I guess. And one philosophical thing that I often feel is true and probably lasting, because I’ve seen it enough, is that oftentimes the best solutions are — well, sometimes the best solutions are the hardest solutions. And they may be undramatic, but they are kind of glossed over because they’re not easy. And degrowth and conservation are hard. But they have a huge logic, like, we are just consuming too much in the sort of disposable economy and the Amazon purchasing phenomena that we’re in now. And I do wonder sometimes with these silver buckshot, silver bullet solutions whether they’re just like elaborate, you know, kind of workarounds to avoid degrowth, you know, like slowing purchase, reusing, these sorts of things, with all the standard concerns about recycling doesn’t work, etcetera. But like, just thinking about ways that we could consume less and keep things longer, that just doesn’t get a lot of attention ’cause it seems very Carter-esque, you know, like an old school.
Ross Kenyon: Could be true nonetheless. Probably true in the ocean as well. But I’ve also seen proposals that have really interested me about tradable fishing quotas being a way of introducing private property in fisheries in a way that might encourage a longer view rather than this race to the bottom, get as much as you can because the next guy isn’t going to care as much. Like, is there anything to that these days? Is there still an active debate on that?
Ian Urbina: I’m going to plead the Fifth on that. I don’t know anything about it so I won’t touch it.
Ross Kenyon: OK, I’ll send you some things I’ve seen in the past that have taught me some. It’s an interesting area and I think it applies to some fisheries and not others. But yeah, I won’t force you to break the — as long as we still have it, I don’t want to force you to break it. What stories are you looking forward to now? “Looking forward to” is probably the wrong way, but what are you working on? And I imagine people listening may want to support your work. What would your donation support now?
Ian Urbina: No, I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, theoutlawocean.com, donate button at the top, pretty easy to give what you want. A lot of folks are like, oh, well, there’s a Substack link. And if you want to — we like folks, it’s all free. But it says like, hey, if you want to toss something in, you could do that too and help through Substack. But Substack is sort of how we alert folks when we have something to say.
And we’re working on bigger projects now. After the big China project, I realize, you know, sort of decidedly slow journalism, bigger targets is how we can distinguish ourselves from the dailies and weekly magazines. We’re kind of a big project about the fishmeal industry, fishmeal and fish oil. You know, a fifth, a fourth, depending on your metric, of all marine life pulled out of the ocean ends up not for human consumption but for feed, especially aquaculture, but chickens and pigs too. And sort of it’s a very, very dark supply chain. You know, we know some about where our food comes, less about where our seafood in particular comes, but where the feed that goes into our animals comes from is very dark. And so we’re going to try to crack the code on that. You know, like map the entire industry globally, figure out where all the plants are, where they’re getting their fish from, where they’re shipping the feed to, what does it end up producing that people eat, etcetera. That’s a big target to take on. We’re two years in, we probably have another year or half to go.
I’m eager to do a big project on the poles. I just think it feels — there’s some really interesting funky stuff happening at both poles. It’s very much like Outlaw Ocean in the sense that it’s this weird liminal space with legal ambiguity, kind of like outer space. And there’s all sorts of geopolitical and other, like, biopharmaceutical exploration, just funky stuff happening, rocket launches and satellite firms up there. And so I’m shopping around for U.S. Navy and other NATO, you know, folk, see if anyone can get me on a sub, you know, ’cause that would be the way to tell that story. And I know the guy that got an embed on a nuclear sub for the New York Times. So I know that it can be done. And so I’m trying to orchestrate that to do a story like that. And then doing some stuff on the Chinese, on the South Korean, Taiwanese fleets and some specific questions about their squid fleets and what they’re up to.
And then we just have a lot of stuff going on. Like, we make stories, we’re a story factory, right? We do the journalism, but the place that’s really radical and weird is not in the story production, but in the distribution of it. And so we have, like, all these — half of my staff is just with, how do we take this body of really good reporting and convert it into different forms: murals, music, video game, animation, rap album, you know, stage performance, like all sorts of weird things where we convert the journalism into other forms to try to get people to pay attention.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s fascinating. OK. Glad to hear of all those opportunities to absorb your reportage. I want to ask a question, it might sound a bit flattering.
Ian Urbina: Oh no, please don’t. I know I’m blushing a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: A lot of the stories you named are with not savory groups and countries that can be relatively intimidating that you’re almost certainly on some lists. They probably watch you in areas. Where do you get the courage to do work like this? It seems intimidating work to pursue.
Ian Urbina: Well, I mean, thanks. You’re giving me a large benefit of the doubt. I would —
Ross Kenyon: Are you actually a coward?
Ian Urbina: No, I would probably submit that it’s not courage. It may not be cowardice either. It’s probably something in between. I think it’s — when I try to, like, soberly reflect on what motivates me as if I’m analyzing someone else, the best answer that feels true to me is that I enjoy the work because it feels like it has impact in a way that nothing else in my career has had. It gets me into a space that I find scary and marvelous, you know, including conflict zones, but also at sea, that are just wide. You know, as a journalist, you’re curious. I do not think I’m an adrenaline junkie. I don’t enjoy danger at all, but I do enjoy — I am a junkie of novelty, like, and in places that few people get to go, that gives me a high. And there’s a lot of that in this reporting.
But I think the thing that most motivates me to keep doing it is, truth be told, a sort of almost Catholic guilt. Like the sense that, like, a discomfort with the whispering voice that says you had the lottery at birth, you were born into this very lucky life of yours, and you’re OK with all those people you know about not having lucked out on the lottery? Is that OK with you, to just live in your isolated way? And that whispering voice has haunted me my whole life. And my journalism is an attempt to try to keep it at bay. Like, OK, OK, OK, I’m going back out and I’m going to do my service, you know, like, of trying to do it in the way I can. I’m not working in refugee camps, I’m not — but I am doing this journalism and I’m trying to be honest. Not an advocate, but I am trying to do journalism that helps fix things that are wrong. And if that means going to unsavory places, then — where I can do the most stuff, then that’s what I do, and these days that’s kind of what I do.
Ross Kenyon: Have you felt yourself entangled in geopolitics or just some of the great power rivalries that are shaping up? Is that something that concerns you at all, or does that feel just the same as reporting about something more criminal and smaller scale?
Ian Urbina: No, I mean, I’ll give you a concrete example. So in the last big project we did, which was taking a global look at the Chinese distant water fishing fleet, we reported at sea, high seas Galapagos, high seas near Falkland Islands, the border with North Korea, so South Korean waters right at the border, and then coast of West Africa. The high seas Galapagos trip — we left one of the Galapagos Islands on a big vessel, went way out in international waters to the fishing grounds, to 250, you know, Chinese vessels in a 50-mile radius, and spent quite a while talking our way on board, you know, and talking to captains and filming them and doing the whole thing.
We don’t engage in illegality, you know. We don’t unilaterally board. We don’t engage in deception in those contexts. Like, we always just say we’re journalists and here’s what we’re doing. And then we try to convince him to let us on board. And we get lucky, you know, and folks are kind. Chinese captains are as weirded out and confused and curious about us being there and eager to tell their story about the important work they do. OK. So we had a very successful trip, high seas near Galapagos. We come back in, we’re met by two Ecuadorian Navy vessels and very aggressively on the radio: you move, you know, 20 meters more, we’re going to open fire. We’re coming on board. They come on board armed, whole thing. They arrest me, my crew, my team, the crew. They say you have to turn around, you can’t come to port. And we say we don’t have enough supplies, we have to — this is illegal, you can’t send us back out to sea, we don’t have enough water.
And so I call the U.S. ambassador, get him involved. We negotiate a port entry, and they say, OK, you got to get out of the country in 48 hours. We’re going to escort you. The ship’s got to be out of port in 72 hours. OK, all this is reported and well documented. I do spend the next six months digging into what the hell happened there. It’s that the Chinese vessels, the captains, then dutifully called their corporate, you know, CEOs and said, hey, we had some Westerners on board. The companies were like, you did what? And they report to the party. The party reports up the chain. The chain calls their friends in Ecuador and says, hey, there are these guys out there, U.S.-flagged vessel, that are boarding our vessels. They didn’t unilaterally board, but we don’t love it. Don’t let those guys back in port.
And so they lean on Ecuador. And don’t forget, Ecuador’s got huge financial ties with China, as they should. You know, they’re playing both sides, us and China. And that — we were completely meat-grinded from that clash. China did not want more bad press on their fleet. And they had took a whoopin’ in 2020 when there was a lot of news coverage about their fleet being near the Galapagos. So they had pulled way back, and now supposedly some journalist was boarding them again in 2024. And so they were like, oh, this is really bad, let’s, like, push these guys back. So that’s an example of where it does catch up with you in the reporting.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Even in the way that you describe the Chinese captains, it seems like it would be easier not to have sympathy for someone that is probably not fishing in the most harmonious way possible. How important is sympathy for your subjects in journalism for you?
Ian Urbina: I think it’s kind of fundamental, even. I mean, I think most — if you start out from the perspective that most people are good and those who are bad are probably not all bad, right? Like, if you try to carry that around with you as your default, I think you’re probably number one, living in an accurate space. Like, that’s probably, in my view, the truth about the world. And number two, you’re also, I think, on the right footing journalistically to start there. It’s especially true with the Chinese captains, as Gambian captains, as American captains. Like, I think at the end of the day, the captains typically are pretty poor grunts that are working pretty hard. They’re often older, that this is all they know how to do now.
Interesting side story. You know, I’m in Thailand, I’m doing the original series of the Times, and I’m honing in on captains who I know from having interviewed workers of theirs that they systematically beat their crew. And they do so really quite by design. And I need to talk to those captains and I want to hear why. I want to hear from their perspective why it’s justified and why it’s logical, you know, like, even if I think it’s completely wrong. It doesn’t much matter if I can represent them and they’re not going to represent themselves well. I’m like their lawyer, even though they don’t maybe deserve one, or whatever, or you might say they do deserve one.
And so I spent weeks chasing these captains and learned — OK, a lot of them are — what I learned justified why it’s good to have empathy methodologically, which is: a lot of these captains are over 55. They’re on a vessel where they have — these are Thai captains in this case — they have maybe four officers that are also Thai. And then they have a crew of maybe 30, under 25, migrant crew. OK, look at those numbers. Like, that’s like a slave plantation. Like, the odds are the slaves can overthrow the plantation masters, except for the fact that there’s four of them and they have guns. But even still, if you coordinated, you could probably still beat them. Sure, two or three of you are going to take bullets.
But, like, OK, so by the same logic, you’re a ship captain, you’re worried about mutiny and the numbers add up and the mutinies do happen. So you’re like, I need to show them who’s boss from the get-go. So I’m going to do preemptive sort of performative violence so that they’re scared shitless of me and my bosun and then my officers. And I’m also going to, like, figure out who are the rabble rousers and I’m going to aim at them first. Like, that makes total sociological sense, right? Like, for survival tactics as the captain. I don’t agree with it. It’s completely unethical and illegal. But it’s, like, never going to be something I would have found out just talking to crew, right? I’m not going to understand their perspective. And it’s just damn interesting, right? Like, readers want to know that if it’s there to be known. So I just think you kind of have to assume that there’s stuff you don’t know and you might get out if you approach people humanely, even if you think you probably don’t like them or agree with them.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being here, Ian.
Ian Urbina: Thank you for having me.
