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so you never miss an episode. I

1:27

used to have this sushi spot that I'd order from

1:29

pretty constantly. I'm not going to name it for reasons

1:31

that will become clear soon enough. One thing I need

1:33

you to know about this restaurant, just to preemptively defend

1:36

some of my own decision making, is

1:39

that they did have very good branding, which mattered because I'd never go in person. I

1:44

would only order from the restaurant that I knew. I

1:47

was never a fan of the restaurant. I was never a fan

1:49

of the restaurant that I knew. I was never a fan of

1:51

the restaurant that I knew. which

1:54

mattered because I'd never go in person. I would only

1:56

order online. And on the food delivery

1:58

app I used, this restaurant had the best brand. best-looking logo

2:00

of any of the other sushi restaurants. It almost

2:02

looked like a startup. And

2:04

it wasn't just the logo. The photos of their food

2:06

were also very beautiful. Perfectly lit.

2:09

Salmon-roed, glistening like tiny jewels.

2:12

It was pretty. It was modern. It

2:14

was expensive-looking. The

2:16

sushi itself tasted pretty good. And despite the

2:18

glitzy photos, it was also surprisingly cheap. I

2:21

get the same thing every time. Double-order

2:23

spicy tuna rolls. But

2:27

there was a catch, which is that

2:29

nearly every time I ate it, I would get sick. Sick

2:32

enough that later, often from the

2:34

bathroom, I would find myself Googling,

2:37

sushi allergy? Or else, what

2:40

are the ingredients in sushi? And then

2:42

I'd read the ingredients. I'd see that I wasn't allergic

2:45

to anything in sushi. There's not a lot of ingredients

2:47

in sushi. And then sometime later, when

2:49

I was hungry for sushi again, I'd order

2:51

from the same place. And I'd usually get sick. Again,

2:55

this happened dozens of times over

2:57

a couple of years. And

2:59

then one day, things changed for me.

3:02

They changed because that day I was in

3:04

the bathroom asking myself why I'd done this

3:06

to myself yet again. And I finally Googled

3:08

something new. Instead of

3:11

Googling, what's in sushi or sushi allergy?

3:13

I Googled,

3:16

why would sushi make me shit my guts out? And

3:19

that phrase opened up a kind of

3:21

internet trapdoor into this whole other world

3:23

of information that I'd not been exposed

3:25

to. The world of

3:28

fish fraud. So

3:33

what I read is that it was

3:35

possible that the tuna rolls I was ordering did

3:37

not actually contain tuna. That

3:40

instead, I might be eating a kind

3:42

of fish called Escolar, also

3:44

referred to as the walloo walloo,

3:47

also referred to as the X flags

3:50

fish. And that a lot of

3:52

people who eat Escolar have the same

3:54

reaction I was having. If customers

3:56

really knew about Escolar, they

3:58

might steer clear. because it's

4:00

known as the X-lax fish. The

4:03

X-lax fish. Laxative of the sea.

4:05

It's a bottom feeder packed

4:08

with an indigestible, waxy substance

4:11

that can cause explosive, oily,

4:13

orange diarrhea. Gross.

4:17

People get radicalized online every day. No one

4:19

ever thinks it's happening to them. When

4:22

I first started poking around on this fish

4:24

question, all I wanted to know

4:26

was whether I personally had been chowing down

4:28

on the X-lax fish. And

4:31

if I just never pulled on that one little

4:33

loose thread, well, we

4:36

can't go backwards. There isn't what could have been.

4:38

There's only what happened. After

4:41

the break, we get Walla Walla Pilled.

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Call Instacart. To

6:02

start, can you just introduce yourself, say your name, and

6:04

what you do for a living? I'm

6:06

Peter Marko. I'm a professor of life

6:08

sciences at the University of Hawaii at

6:11

Manoa, and I

6:13

study biogeography and population genetics

6:15

of marine organisms. Peter

6:18

and I were talking over Zoom. To

6:20

start, I just told Peter about my

6:22

misadventures, about my desperate Google searches, about

6:24

my suspicion that this all might have

6:27

something to do with a mysterious, gut-destroying

6:29

fish called the Walu Walu. When

6:32

I started Googling this sushi experience,

6:35

I was sort of plunged into a

6:37

world of academics talking about how, in

6:40

America, sushi can be

6:42

like a three-card-planty game a little bit, where

6:44

what people are ordering might not be what

6:46

they're getting. And I just wanted to know

6:50

what your research has shown, and sort

6:52

of how you even started poking at

6:54

this question of fish in the States

6:56

at all. I got

6:58

into this field purely by accident.

7:01

I was a brand new assistant professor

7:03

at the University of North Carolina, and

7:06

I wanted to run a class

7:08

for graduate students on molecular biology

7:10

techniques. And so I was thinking, well,

7:12

what can we do? What can we do? Well, a colleague of

7:14

mine who happens to also be my partner in life suggested, well,

7:17

why don't you guys go down to a

7:19

grocery and buy some seafood and bring it back

7:22

to the lab and just extract DNA and identify

7:24

it and just see what it actually is? So

7:27

that was the idea for the experiment. But

7:30

then when Peter started thinking about what fish he'd

7:32

want to test, he very quickly stumbled on a

7:34

pretty good question. His question

7:36

was about red snapper, a very sought-after,

7:38

very popular fish. Once

7:40

I had a look at fisheries landings for

7:42

red snapper in the United States and how

7:44

much red snapper was caught in the Gulf

7:47

of Mexico and how much was imported from

7:49

South America, I said, how

7:51

is it that I can buy red snapper

7:53

at any time of the year in any

7:55

quantity at any grocery in the Chapel Hill

7:57

area? There

8:00

wasn't nearly enough for this fish being

8:02

caught and imported to supply every grocery

8:04

in the United States. And my experience

8:08

was that you would see red snapper everywhere.

8:10

And so it was just impossible. How could

8:12

all this be red snapper? So we keyed

8:14

in on red snapper and collected them from

8:16

groceries. Students got their relatives to send samples

8:19

from around the Southeast and the East

8:21

Coast and a few from elsewhere. And

8:25

so we identified them using DNA

8:27

sequencing. And so it turned

8:29

out that I think it was

8:31

77% of them weren't actually red snapper. 77%,

8:35

yeah. So it was a small sample. It's

8:37

just 22 fish, but 77% of

8:40

them were not red snapper. It was

8:42

really surprising, but at the time I didn't really

8:44

understand the significance of it or think too much

8:46

about it. But then, you know, we talked about

8:48

it as a class and we said, well, maybe

8:51

we could write this up into a paper. And

8:53

we did, and we ended up submitting it to

8:56

the journal Nature and they took it. And

8:58

they published it. And the

9:00

rest was history. It

9:07

got a lot of attention. It somehow pinched

9:09

a nerve with both scientists

9:11

and consumers, as

9:14

well as people involved in the seafood

9:16

industry. There's a certain

9:18

amount of like, I

9:20

don't know, you assume that there's like a, whatever

9:24

your faith in society is. However

9:27

paranoid you are or not paranoid you are. I

9:30

guess I always assumed that through some combination of

9:32

like regulation or just like marketplaces,

9:36

that at the end of the day, if you go to the

9:38

grocery store and you buy something, the marshmallows

9:40

are marshmallows and the hamburgers are hamburgers

9:42

and the red snappers are red snapper.

9:44

Like I think it undermines people's sense

9:46

of reality a little bit. Absolutely. Yeah.

9:48

And if they found out the same

9:50

thing about chicken or beef or marshmallows,

9:52

they would have exactly the same reaction.

9:55

And were you able to tell when you found

9:58

yourself DNA testing supermarket? red

10:00

snapper, could you tell what fish

10:02

it was instead or can you just tell genetically

10:04

this isn't red snapper? The

10:06

answer to that is sort of yes and no. So

10:09

when you sequence the DNA from

10:11

an unknown subject, you

10:14

try to identify it by comparing

10:16

it to DNA sequences that are

10:18

available on public databases and

10:21

the biggest one that is used around

10:23

the world is called GenBank. So

10:26

you can identify any sample you've got

10:28

with a DNA sequence provided there is

10:30

a sequence in GenBank to match it

10:32

to. So

10:34

in some cases we were able to identify

10:36

what the fish were and in

10:39

other cases we couldn't because there were

10:41

no reference sequences available in these databases

10:44

to identify what it was. We

10:46

could say it was a close relative of this thing but we couldn't

10:48

actually say what it was. It's

10:50

crazy that we're eating things that we

10:53

don't, we can't scientifically know what

10:55

they are. It is

10:57

kind of mind boggling yeah and the

10:59

idea that potentially you could discover a

11:01

species that is well known from the

11:03

grocery aisle but not known to science

11:05

is also kind of interesting to think

11:07

about. Peter's study

11:09

had started out as a fun classroom experiment but

11:11

he was so excited by what he found he

11:14

ended up doing a follow-up study using the same

11:16

methods. Some fish

11:18

are sold at a higher price because

11:20

they're labeled as being caught using environmentally

11:22

friendly methods. Peter used

11:24

DNA testing to check if that labeling was

11:27

always accurate. He found a lot of

11:29

fraud there too. But Peter

11:31

says even though fish fraud is rampant there's

11:33

not a lot of funding available to study it

11:36

which makes it a harder problem to deal with. Where

11:39

do you think the mislabeling happens? Like do

11:41

you think it's happening at the grocery store?

11:43

Do you think it's happening from the fishermen?

11:45

Where in the distribution chain? I

11:47

don't even really know how a fish goes

11:49

from the ocean to a grocery store. Yeah

11:51

well it's complicated in most cases especially in

11:54

the United States because we import most

11:56

of our seafood from other countries. Where

11:58

does the mislabeling happen? Well, anywhere

12:00

where some profit can be made, I would

12:03

imagine. But

12:06

seafood is particularly susceptible

12:08

to this kind of substitution and

12:11

fraud because the supply chain is

12:13

so complex. A

12:15

fish that is caught on a hook

12:17

can change hands five or six times

12:19

and be modified a couple of times

12:21

or processed a couple of times on

12:23

its way to your plate. So

12:26

a fish could be caught in one country, processed

12:28

in another country, imported

12:30

to a third and then exported to the

12:32

United States. When

12:36

Peter talks about fish processing, what he means

12:38

is everything that happens to a fish between

12:40

it being caught and you consuming it. You

12:43

can watch videos of all the in-between

12:45

on YouTube and apparently many people choose

12:47

to. The three-minute clip

12:49

titled processing fish somehow has over

12:52

half a million views and zero

12:54

comment. This

12:57

fish is going to be washed. What

12:59

in the fish will remove the slimy secondness

13:01

from the skin if it was prepared? The

13:05

fish travels at the conveyor belt to the water.

13:07

This woman's voice is incredibly soothing unless

13:09

I imagine you're a fish. The

13:12

viewer watches as dead fish are poured from

13:14

a crate onto a watery conveyor belt. At

13:17

its most simple, processing is something a fisherman could

13:19

do just on a boat with a knife. But

13:22

here factory workers cut the fish's head

13:24

off, eviscerate the fish's body, take out

13:26

its guts and internal organs, and finally

13:28

its ribs. What's left

13:30

is the fillet. These people are experts at

13:32

filleting fish. Look how quickly

13:34

they can work. They

13:37

can fillet thousands of fish a day. Such

13:40

a large number of fish are not needed all at

13:42

once, so some of the fish will be frozen. The

13:44

tricky fact about fish is that there's over 30,000 species

13:47

of them. In

13:49

the water they can look very different from each other.

13:51

You would notice if someone swaps your goldfish for a

13:53

great white. But by the time

13:56

they're filleted, they're harder to distinguish. Salmon

13:58

from tuna, sure. But

14:00

in general, 30,000 biodiverse species end

14:03

up, by the time humans are done

14:05

with them, as some form

14:07

of rectangular-ish mass, usually either white

14:09

or pink. Or in

14:11

the case of this video, shaped like

14:13

a stick, breaded and fried. All

14:19

of that happens here in one

14:21

factory, but as Peter Marco says,

14:23

fish processing is often staggered across a

14:25

long distribution chain. Each

14:27

step, each pair of hands, an

14:30

opportunity for fraud. So

14:33

at every step, fish are often

14:35

being processed to some degree. And

14:38

so the more processing you get, and the more

14:40

steps there are in that supply chain, the

14:42

more likely it is that you're going to have

14:45

some sort of mislabeling or fraud because it becomes

14:47

more and more difficult to identify what it

14:49

is because it's becoming progressively more

14:52

and more modified as it moves along the

14:54

supply chain. That's in part why

14:56

I think that it's unlikely that it's fishers

14:59

responsible for very much mislabeling because they're

15:02

dealing with whole fish. Right. And it's

15:04

pretty hard to pretend that, you know,

15:06

a whole red snapper, it isn't a

15:08

red snapper, it actually is. Whereas

15:11

once you start chopping it up or turning it

15:13

into a fillet, then it becomes much easier. Peter

15:16

says the same market forces that cause people

15:19

to swap cheap fish for more expensive fish

15:21

also drive other sorts of ethically

15:24

suspect fish-based behavior. He

15:26

told me it's not uncommon to hear stories about fish

15:28

that have been banned from the US for ecological reasons

15:31

actually being snuck into the country labeled as

15:33

something else. There's just a

15:35

lot of retailers out there and there's a

15:37

lot of time spent trying

15:39

to stop fish at the border, you

15:42

know, illegal imports of fish

15:44

that are either illegally caught

15:47

or from underreported fisheries or

15:49

unregulated fisheries. Will Smuggle

15:51

fish? Absolutely, yeah. There

15:53

have been some really amazing and

15:55

sort of notorious cases over the

15:57

past 20 years of large fish.

15:59

large amounts of illegal fish being imported

16:02

to the US, largely

16:04

fish being imported with the

16:06

name of one thing, but

16:08

actually being something else. Okay, so it's not as

16:11

if like, it's not like someone's driving like a

16:13

Toyota Corolla and there's like a bunch of fish

16:15

in the door panels. It's like, they're bringing the

16:17

fish in a normal way, but they're lying about

16:19

what it is. Well, yes

16:22

and no. So some illegal imports

16:25

are fish coming in huge containers

16:27

of, say, rockfish being

16:30

imported as red snapper,

16:32

right? And that's illegal. But

16:36

Peter says there are also actually examples of

16:38

smugglers sneaking fish into the country in trucks

16:40

the way they would sneak in drugs. The

16:43

best example is freshwater eel, an

16:46

endangered species that many people still want to eat.

16:48

Smugglers don't bring in the adult eel, they actually

16:51

sneak in their larvae, the babies. So

16:56

there's not enough adult eel out

16:58

there to harvest and the harvest

17:00

is extremely limited for all of

17:02

these species. So the next

17:04

best thing is to go out into nature

17:06

and gather up

17:09

the babies and then ship

17:12

them off to aquaculture facilities in other

17:14

countries. They

17:16

don't look like much, but these eels

17:18

are as valuable to smugglers as

17:20

cocaine. This is from

17:22

a TV news report. Law enforcement officers

17:25

with guns storm a shady warehouse to

17:27

find little pools of illegal eels. The

17:30

adult eels look like big black snakes. There's

17:32

something beautiful about them. The babies

17:34

are little white squiggles. In

17:36

the clip, a conservation advocate breaks down the

17:38

economics of these schemes. You can

17:40

get up to 100,000

17:42

glass eels in one

17:44

suitcase. And if they're

17:46

leaving Europe as a euro each,

17:49

that's a hundred thousand pounds in your

17:51

suitcase. And then at the other end, you

17:54

grow them on in a pond in China and

17:57

a year later, that's a million, a

17:59

million years. We're

18:04

talking about huge amounts of money that are

18:06

being exchanged for these glass eels because they're

18:09

worth an awful lot. And

18:12

is it like cartels and violence?

18:15

I don't think so, but it's

18:17

certainly fairly serious guys that are

18:19

involved in this because it involves

18:21

so much money. Wow,

18:24

that's fascinating. Do you

18:26

eat fish? Yeah, I do. I love

18:29

seafood. Absolutely. How

18:32

do you think about it? Do you eat it

18:34

differently than I eat it? I don't know.

18:36

I've never seen you eat. I

18:39

consume it like a person who doesn't know

18:41

that a large percentage of it might be

18:43

mislabeled. And I've never thought very much about

18:45

conservation when it comes to my seafood habits.

18:47

Well, yeah, I always approach

18:50

it from the scientist lens like,

18:52

oh, so I wonder what this is. Or

18:54

let's get this and see what it's like. So

18:57

there are things that you can buy reliably and

18:59

you know what it's going to be and it's

19:01

not going to be mislabeled. Like what? Well,

19:04

things like salmon, it's very hard to substitute

19:06

something for salmon. Now, of course, there's the

19:08

issue of wild cod versus farm raised salmon

19:11

where farm raised salmon

19:13

can be easily substituted for wild cod

19:15

salmon. But here in

19:17

Hawaii, we have a sort of handful

19:19

of basic fish that are sold at

19:21

groceries. A number of them are

19:23

caught here locally and they

19:26

have very distinctive tastes and flavors

19:28

and textures and there's just no

19:30

way anybody is going to pull

19:32

off a species substitution with those

19:34

things. So I'm talking about Ahitina,

19:37

Monchong and another called Oh No.

19:40

These are fish that everybody knows, the population

19:42

knows, and it's just not going

19:44

to happen. So I buy those knowing

19:46

that that's going to be what it is. And

19:49

I see other unusual things. I may

19:51

buy it and evaluate it with my

19:54

taste buds. Rarely do I often test

19:56

something genetically that I've eaten, although there's

19:58

a story there too. But wait,

20:00

what's the story? Well,

20:03

it goes back to the original red snapper

20:05

study With the students

20:07

these are grad students and

20:09

they're pretty cash-strapped living bohemian

20:11

lifestyles so they had to

20:13

go out and get these expensive red snapper

20:15

fillets and They were reluctant

20:17

to ask for just little pieces because that would

20:20

be sort of strange and odd They didn't want

20:22

to attract attention by buying tiny pieces of fish

20:24

So they bought fillets and I promised them I

20:26

would Reimbursed them for every fillet out of my

20:28

pocket, which I did and so I

20:31

ended up eating most of the fish that were bought in the

20:33

study and That's

20:35

when I realized I said, oh my

20:38

gosh, this is really different So I

20:40

think I've only ever had red snapper

20:42

twice before in my life before the

20:44

study Because of the

20:47

high rate of substitution. It was so obvious

20:49

that I was just sort of stunned by

20:51

that and and Subsequently

20:55

a reporter once asked me in the wake

20:57

of that study. Well, you know so

21:01

it's not red snapper and It's

21:03

you know, most of these things are actually

21:05

snappers. So what's the harm? I mean, they're

21:07

basically all the same aren't they and I

21:09

just said so Obviously, you've never

21:12

had red snapper or you don't remember the last time

21:14

you that red snapper because he wouldn't say that I

21:17

think there's like a bargain most of us make

21:19

with consumerism which is that you go to the

21:21

store and you buy things and you're not like

21:23

interrogating whether what you're getting is what fits

21:27

the labels the thing but it sounds

21:29

like the way you consume fish is

21:33

As a skeptic a little bit a

21:35

little bit But like I said, I mostly buy

21:37

things that I know what they

21:39

are buy them from reliable Retailers,

21:43

you know once the while and it's typically

21:45

in a restaurant. I'll get something and I'll

21:47

say okay This is not my money. This

21:50

is kind of ridiculous that you're trying to

21:52

pass this off as my my because obviously

21:54

tilapia Will you say something? Not

21:56

anymore? I mean I sort of gotten past

21:59

the point of complaining about

22:01

that because I don't know I

22:03

sort of get tired of it and I just

22:05

now go to places where I know

22:08

that I can reliably buy fish

22:11

and get what I'm looking for and that

22:13

typically involves buying your own fish cooking

22:15

it yourself. Seafood fraud

22:17

is a tricky thing to fix but it could

22:20

be done. It falls into a

22:22

category I've begun to encounter someone frequently with search

22:24

engine. National problems that could

22:26

technically be solved if they became a priority

22:29

but which I can never

22:31

really imagine becoming a priority. Solvable

22:33

nuisances like daily saving time, pennies,

22:36

half full potato chip bags, all

22:38

the things you won't find in heaven. But

22:41

Peter does say that when he publishes

22:43

one of his studies there is a

22:45

moment of outcry and attention. Local

22:47

news shows do their segments. The seafood

22:49

you buy at the supermarket may not

22:52

always be what it says on the

22:54

label. You order red snapper but you

22:56

serve tilapia. It says tuna and you

22:58

end up getting scrod. Maybe some podcaster

23:00

does his less timely version a few

23:02

years later. This week is my

23:04

local sushi restaurant running a scam on me.

23:06

And when that article

23:08

or episode comes out everyone talks about it for

23:11

a week maybe two. But

23:13

then sometime soon after everybody

23:15

finds something else to talk about. It's

23:17

just simply not a high enough

23:20

priority for consumers and

23:22

for regulatory agencies. I've got some

23:24

ideas about what contributes to that

23:27

but it isn't currently a

23:29

high enough priority to regulate

23:31

at the level that would change

23:33

a whole lot. And what are your ideas

23:35

about why it doesn't? Because like

23:37

for me when I began

23:39

to suspect that this one sushi

23:41

place was not being honest with me I

23:43

stopped ordering from that sushi place. Why does everyone

23:45

kind of just go back to eating

23:49

funky fish? I

23:51

think it's complex but I think the way

23:53

the public thinks about seafood contributes to it.

23:55

I think one of the problems is that

23:58

we don't think of fish as sort of of wild

24:01

animals. The ocean is really

24:04

the only place on Earth where we

24:06

still harvest wild populations of organisms to

24:08

eat. So on

24:11

land, it's all agriculture. Even forestry

24:13

products are just essentially

24:15

agriculture, at least in North America.

24:18

But fish, I think, because they sit

24:20

on the grocery aisle along with chicken

24:22

and beef and very

24:24

reliable things you can buy, they can always

24:27

get when you go to the grocery store.

24:30

I think seafood gets lumped into those

24:32

things along with marshmallows and other sorts

24:35

of products that are always there that have a

24:37

familiar name and that are

24:39

viewed as commodities, food rather

24:42

than wild organisms. Peter's

24:45

view of the world, it's not that

24:47

I'd never considered it. I just never

24:49

considered it deeply. The human desire to

24:51

consume animals has made many species

24:53

no longer wild, but it's harder

24:55

to do that with fish. They

24:57

are stubborn in their wildness. With

25:00

fish, we can't always have exactly what we

25:02

want, but we want it anyway. And

25:04

that's where the fraud comes in. Peter

25:07

says that in the eternal war between

25:10

value-seeking consumers and the companies which ripped

25:12

them off, his work has actually

25:14

given some consumers the upper hand. But

25:17

since he began publishing, he's noticed that

25:19

savvy restaurants and grocery stores have actually

25:22

found a new tactic. After

25:24

the time that I've done these studies, it seems

25:28

to me that one of the

25:30

consequences of all this mislabeling evidence

25:32

and studies is that fish

25:34

just aren't labeled as specifically as they used

25:36

to be. So I think

25:38

now if you make a tour of

25:40

your local grocery store, with the exception

25:42

of the higher end groceries, you're

25:45

unlikely to find red snapper in a grocery.

25:47

It's just going to be labeled snapper. That's

25:50

my impression is that stuff is

25:53

now labeled so generically, shrimp, salmon,

25:56

ahi, that strictly speaking, nobody's

25:58

going to be disappointed. So

26:00

if you go to a sushi restaurant and

26:03

you want a spicy ahi tuna roll, then

26:06

you're probably not going to be disappointed

26:08

when it comes to substitutions. You know,

26:10

with some exceptions, because of course there's

26:12

different species of tuna. You know, if

26:14

you're expecting an Atlantic bluefin and

26:16

you get Pacific yellowfin, you might be disappointed

26:19

if you have a discerning palate that can

26:21

tell the difference between those two. I

26:23

don't have a particularly discerning palate, but now I'm thinking

26:26

I should develop one. Well,

26:28

I think if you had more exposure

26:30

to these higher end things, you would.

26:32

And this gets back to that epiphany

26:34

where I realized I rarely

26:36

had red snapper before. I think that's the case

26:38

for most consumers is that they simply

26:40

don't know what they're missing, right? They haven't ever

26:42

had it. And so when

26:44

they get tilapia or something else, they don't

26:47

think anything of it because they just have

26:49

never had red snapper. The

26:55

opportunity to learn that there's a better

26:57

version of something you were already enjoying

26:59

the just fine version of. Let's

27:02

acknowledge that this is at best a

27:04

mixed blessing. I learned

27:06

that there's a difference between regular coffee

27:08

and good coffee, and I enjoyed my

27:10

coffee less. I learned there's

27:13

a difference between how cheap and expensive

27:15

t-shirts fit, and it made me feel

27:17

like a lot of my t-shirts looked goofy. Refining

27:19

your taste is not always a net good.

27:23

But sometime after this conversation, I'd

27:25

find myself in South Carolina with

27:27

my friend at an incredibly questionable

27:29

roadside restaurant. The only

27:31

fish on the menu, red snapper.

27:34

My friend went to order it, and in a

27:36

very stressed out whisper, I said, stop. I'll

27:39

explain later. She got the

27:41

onion rings instead. I felt glad

27:44

to know that one of the world's many small scams

27:46

had been made visible to me. Is

27:49

it better to know or not to? A

27:53

question every idiot has asked themselves

27:55

upon receiving some new horrifying knowledge.

27:59

But... After a short break, I

28:01

will ask the specific question that brought me here.

28:04

Have I personally been a victim of fish

28:06

fraud? Is a New

28:08

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28:10

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28:51

I'm Snoop Dogg and I'm giving up

28:53

smoke. I know what you're

28:55

thinking. Snoop, smoke is kind of your

28:58

whole thing, but I'm done with it. I'm

29:00

done with the coffin and my clothes smelling

29:02

all funky. I'm going smokeless.

29:05

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29:08

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29:10

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29:12

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29:15

to solo stove.com. Tell

29:17

them big Snoop Dogg sent you. Welcome

29:25

back to the show. It

29:28

was shockingly late in the

29:30

reporting of the story when I finally pulled up a picture

29:33

for myself of a wallow wallow of an Escalar. In

29:36

the wild, an adult Escalar looks like something you'd use

29:38

to scare a child. A

29:41

mouth filled with tiny, sharp little teeth

29:43

spaced at irregular intervals. Two large, dead

29:45

eyes. Scales in oily black, the color you see

29:47

when it rains on your dryer. Escalar

29:50

is not an attractive fish, but few fish

29:53

are. advocacy

32:00

group, which gave me a little pause, but

32:02

I found a similar study connected by UCLA

32:04

testing sushi in Los Angeles. While

32:07

their numbers weren't as high, honestly they

32:09

were high enough, in three

32:11

years of tests they found that 47% of

32:14

their sampled sushi was mislabeled. I

32:17

took all this information and all the anxiety

32:19

it had given me to Dr. Marco. Dr.

32:22

Peter Marco, a marine biologist, academic

32:24

acclaim, who had worked in the

32:26

field for over two decades, written

32:28

numerous well-sited papers, a professional

32:31

arguably overqualified to answer my question about

32:33

why my tummy hurts when I get

32:35

sushi from a local sushi restaurant. So

32:38

you're saying that you get sick after

32:41

eating any kind of sushi? Not any

32:43

kind of sushi. Oh. Sushi from one

32:46

specific sushi restaurant and tuna rolls from

32:48

one specific sushi restaurant. So

32:50

you think that it's because you keep getting

32:52

the same thing to a particular kind of

32:54

order that you're making? Yes, and I will

32:56

say like since this Google search, I have

32:58

actually ordered from that sushi restaurant, but I

33:00

haven't ordered the tuna and I haven't been

33:02

sick. Well, I mean it could be Escolar,

33:04

right? It does make people sick if you

33:06

eat it in large enough quantities. It's

33:09

a weird fish, it stores its fats

33:11

in the form of things called wax

33:13

esters. So you're kind of like eating

33:15

wax and it can

33:17

cause severe gastric distress, diarrhea. Yeah.

33:19

It's been banned in some countries.

33:23

It's pretty notorious and pretty

33:25

bold for a restaurant to serve that. I've

33:27

never seen it sold as sushi. I've seen

33:29

it here at fish markets in Hawaii. You've

33:32

seen it sold on purpose and correctly labeled

33:34

in fish markets? Well

33:36

correctly labeled in the broad sense. It

33:38

was labeled as fish. I thought

33:42

it was so entertained by that that I put a

33:44

picture of that in the paper and I was surprised

33:47

that the scientific journal actually took it, but it's a

33:49

picture of this Escolar chopped up

33:51

and it says fresh fish, 5.99 a

33:54

pound I think. And when I

33:56

asked the person what it was, they didn't want to

33:58

say and And then

34:00

I pressed them on and they said, wallow said,

34:03

oh, okay. And we had genetically tested and

34:05

turned out to be Escalar. So I've never

34:07

seen it as sushi, but supposedly it is

34:09

called white tuna because it's got a whitish

34:12

color. Maybe you could pass it off as

34:14

albacore perhaps. Yeah. But I've

34:16

never eaten it. So I don't actually know what it

34:18

tastes like. You know, I'm kind of afraid to, but

34:20

maybe I should in the interest of science, get

34:23

some and just taste it to see what it's actually

34:25

like. But I mean, that could

34:27

be it. It's either a fish like that

34:29

or it's just unsafe food practices.

34:31

I suppose that's the other possibility. As

34:38

we started to wrap up our conversation, I told

34:40

Peter, I try to dig up more info on

34:42

these mystery tuna rolls. And Peter

34:44

made an offer I wasn't expecting. I'll

34:47

let you know if I learn

34:49

anything about these tuna rolls,

34:51

just cause I feel like I obliged to

34:54

inform you as my quest continues. Yeah.

34:57

So feel free. If you get stuck, you can

34:59

always send them to me and I'd be more

35:02

than happy to identify them for you. Oh, I

35:04

would absolutely take you up on that. You don't

35:06

mind me shipping tuna rolls to Hawaii. Yeah,

35:09

no problem. Just yeah, get some vodka

35:11

or Everclear. I'm sure you have something

35:13

like that lying around at home, right?

35:15

Okay. Yeah. I'll buy some. I don't

35:17

think I have Everclear on it. So

35:19

on a sunny Thursday morning, search

35:21

engine producers, Garrett Graham and

35:23

Noah John packed up the sushi. Just kind of scrape out

35:26

a little bit in the middle here. Yeah, there we go.

35:28

Preserved it in alcohol. And then... In an

35:30

alcohol in there. I guess just fill it up with alcohol. And

35:32

shipped it from New York to Hawaii. The USPS has rules on

35:34

how much liquid can go in, but... Next

35:37

week on Search Engine, the world's

35:39

most consequential DNA test ever performed resolves

35:44

itself. We find out what this fish is.

35:47

Stick around after these ads though, because

35:49

this week we actually have a... And

36:00

this question is

36:02

a bit of an emergency. Last

36:48

week I interviewed reporter Casey Newton about a

36:50

breaking news story at the company OpenAI. Also,

36:53

was this another week where you're supposed to be on vacation? Not

36:57

really. Today is the work day for me. I

36:59

am supposed to be off starting tomorrow, but

37:01

I fully expect I'll be making between

37:04

three and seven emergency podcasts in the

37:06

next week. Who invented

37:08

the emergency podcast? Casey's

37:11

podcast, Hard Fork, put out two

37:13

emergency podcasts during the Sam Altman

37:16

OpenAI drama, and Hard Fork was not

37:18

alone. Last week, seemingly every tech

37:20

show was pushing the big red emergency

37:22

button that comes standard in most podcast

37:24

studios. We are doing an emergency podcast.

37:26

This is an emergency crossover episode

37:29

of Pivot and the Prof G

37:31

Pod. Welcome to Big Technology

37:33

podcast emergency edition. Sam Altman

37:35

has been fired by OpenAI

37:37

edition. The question that I'd

37:39

offhandedly asked Casey, I realized I

37:42

actually would like an answer to. When

37:44

was the first time someone published an emergency podcast?

37:46

I feel like I most

37:48

noticed them in the Trump era. The Pod

37:51

Save America crew, in my memory, was often

37:53

broadcasting emergency podcasts to cover a president who

37:56

created a lot of emergencies. But

37:58

my suspicion was that the emergency- podcast predates

38:00

the decline of the American Republic. So

38:03

I texted a shadowy associate

38:05

who preferred to remain anonymous. This

38:08

person I would say is sort of a purveyor

38:11

of information, an informal

38:13

maybe black market podcast librarian.

38:16

I asked them to dig up the earliest

38:18

example they could find of an emergency podcast

38:21

and my source found this in 2007. Hi

38:52

everybody welcome to Chaos Dwarves online this

38:54

is our first emergency podcast as you

38:56

may have noticed the site is down.

38:59

This emergency podcast is the very first

39:01

episode of a show called Chaos Dwarves

39:03

radio, a podcast for

39:05

people who loved a certain tabletop fantasy

39:07

board game. The emergency that

39:10

had prompted the podcast it

39:12

was that the Chaos Dwarves online message board

39:15

had just crashed. The style sheet is not

39:17

being displayed so nothing looks proper as you're

39:19

used to seeing it and that's because it

39:21

gets that information from the forum which is

39:23

you know all stored in a database and

39:25

that database cannot be accessed and it's the

39:27

same thing with the wiki the database is

39:29

not functioning. So there's some

39:31

non-functioning databases going on. What I

39:33

hear in this emergency podcast from

39:36

15 years ago is a perfect

39:38

fossil of podcasting before money ruined

39:40

everything. I'm

39:42

joking but barely? I loved

39:44

the era of podcasting where everything sort

39:47

of resembled one infinite public access channel.

39:49

My name is

39:51

Alexander on the forums I'm the administrator

39:53

of CDO and founder and with

39:56

me is Hasheet Sblassen the

39:58

moderator of the forums. And

40:01

one of our first moderators as well, I should note.

40:05

The online message board whose crash

40:07

prompted this emergency podcast was eventually

40:09

fixed. It lives on today. As

40:12

for the podcast, like most podcasts, it

40:14

started in a burst of passion, began

40:17

to publish somewhat sporadically, each episode

40:19

beginning with an apology for how long it had been since

40:21

the last one, and then after

40:23

10 episodes, it shut down quality. Not

40:26

everything that dies gets a funeral. Here

40:29

was the final Chaos Dwarfs radio transmission.

40:31

Time to strap on your Chaos Armor,

40:33

pat down your beard, sharpen

40:36

your tusks, and down a blunderbuss

40:38

full of brew. It's been

40:40

a long time coming, so hold on to your

40:42

hats, masks, helmets, or

40:45

just cover those heads Baldilocks. It's

40:47

finally here. Chaos Dwarf Radio,

40:50

Episode 10. So

40:52

2007. The

40:55

year feels like the right era for the

40:57

first emergency podcast. 2007 is just

40:59

three years after the word podcast has even

41:01

been coined by a British journalist

41:03

named Ben Hammersley, who, as far as

41:05

I know, has never apologized. 2007

41:09

felt early enough to be right. But

41:11

then, sometime after sending me the clip of

41:14

the Chaos Dwarfs, that shadowy

41:16

podcast librarian emerged again. They'd

41:19

sent the request to one of their associates,

41:21

who had dug up a possible earlier example.

41:24

Hi, this is Leo Laporte, and this is

41:26

This Week in Tech, a special midweek edition,

41:28

episode 8A for June 8, 2005. This

41:33

is from a podcast called This Week in

41:35

Tech, or Twit. It was published all the

41:37

way back in 2005, one year after the

41:39

word podcast first blighted the earth. In

41:41

the clip, the host announces that they are

41:43

breaking from their usual schedule to record

41:46

a special podcast because something

41:48

huge has happened. We decided to release an

41:50

extra edition of This Week in Tech this

41:53

week due to the Big Apple Intel announcement.

41:55

We recorded this on Tuesday, June 7, 2005, the day

41:58

after Steve Jobs' Steve

42:01

Jobs, who in 2005 is

42:03

still alive, announced that

42:05

week that Apple computers would now

42:08

use Intel microprocessors. Patrick Norton joined

42:10

me at the Thirsty Bear Brewery

42:12

next door to the Worldwide Developer

42:14

Conference at Moscone Center. In the

42:16

recording, the sense of excitement about

42:18

this fact is quite palpable. Also

42:20

joining us, Ralph Likinski and August

42:22

Trumeter, very well-known Macintosh

42:25

developers, the authors of the great

42:27

iPodder X podcasting client. As

42:29

Mac developers, they had something to say about Steve's announcement,

42:31

and of course, they were also

42:34

very interested in what Steve showed as

42:36

part of the new iTunes 4.9 podcasting capabilities.

42:40

I will say, though, I'm not sure that this 2005 broadcast

42:42

qualifies to me as a genuine emergency

42:47

podcast. Yeah, it

42:49

breaks the traditional publishing schedule to address breaking

42:51

news, but they don't

42:54

use the word emergency. So

42:57

right now, the leading candidate I

42:59

have for earliest emergency podcast is Chaos

43:01

Dwarves Radio in 2007. This

43:04

remains an open question, though. If

43:06

you find an earlier example of an emergency

43:08

podcast, please shoot us an email,

43:11

searchengineshow.com. Search

43:22

Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw

43:24

Productions. It was created by me,

43:26

PJ Vogt, and Truthy Penomenany, and it's produced by

43:28

Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking

43:31

this week by Sean Merchant. Theme,

43:33

original composition, and mixing by Armin

43:35

Bazarian. Our executive producers

43:37

are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Ries-Denner.

43:40

Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex

43:42

Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt, and

43:45

to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

43:47

Crowley, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric

43:49

Donnelly, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina

43:51

Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Elrin Shaw. Our

43:55

agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Our

43:57

social media is by the team at Public Opinion. NYC.

44:32

NYC.