Search Engine - Am I the victim of an international sushi scam? (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

We investigate unsettling rumors that fish purveyors may be mislabeling fish to save a buck. Our path leads us deep into the shadowy world of blackmarket fish sales, and sends us hot on the trail of the infamous ex-lax fish. Plus, we look back to antiquity for the first ever recorded emergency podcast. Support the show at pjvogt.com! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I used to have this sushi spot that I'd order from pretty constantly. I'm not going to name it for reasons that it'll become clear soon enough. One thing I need you to know about this restaurant, just to preemptively defend some of my own decision-making, is that they did have very good branding, which mattered because I'd never go in person. I would only order online. And on the food delivery app I used, this restaurant had the best-looking logo of any of the other sushi restaurants.

It almost looked like a startup. And it wasn't just the logo. The photos of their food were also very beautiful. Perfectly lit, salmon row glistening like tiny jewels. It was pretty, it was modern, it was expensive-looking. The sushi itself tasted pretty good, and despite the glitzy photos, it was also surprisingly cheap. I'd get the same thing every time, double order spicy tuna rolls. But there was a catch, which is that nearly every time I ate it, I would get sick. Sick enough that later, often from the bathroom, I would find myself Googling

sushi allergy, or else, what are the ingredients in sushi? And then I'd read the ingredients, I'd see that I wasn't allergic to anything in sushi. There's not a lot of ingredients in sushi. And then sometime later, when I was hungry for sushi again, I'd order from the same place,

and I'd usually get sick. Again, this happened dozens of times over a couple of years, and then one day, things changed for me. They changed because that day, I was in the bathroom, asking myself why I'd done this to myself yet again, and I finally Googled something new. Instead of Googling what's in sushi or sushi allergy, I googled, why would sushi make me ship my guts out? And that phrase opened up a kind of internet-trap

door into this whole other world of information that I'd not been exposed to. The world of fish fraud. So what I read is that it was possible that the tuna rolls I was ordering did not actually contain tuna, that instead I might be eating a kind of fish called Escalar, also referred to as the Walloo Walloo, also referred to as the Xlax fish, and that a lot of people who eat Eskawar have the same reaction I was having.

If customers really knew about Eskolar, they might steer clear because it's known as the Xlax fish. The Xlax fish. Laxative of the sea. It's a bottom feeder. packed with an indigestible, waxy substance that can cause explosive, oily, orange diarrhea. Gross. People get radicalized online every day.

No one ever thinks it's happening to them. When I first started poking around on this fish question, all I wanted to know was whether I personally had been chowing down on the X-lax fish. And if I just never pulled on that one little loose thread, well, we can't go backwards. There isn't what could have been. There's only what happened. After the break, we get Walla Walla Pilled. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard.

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I'm Peter Marco. I'm a professor of life sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and I study biogeography and population genetics of marine organisms. Peter and I were talking over Zoom. To start, I just told Peter about my misadventures, about my desperate Google searches, about my suspicion that this all might have something to do with a mysterious gut-destroying fish called the Wallo Wallo. When I started Googling this sushi experience, I was sort of plunged into a world of academics talking about how, in America,

sushi can be like a three-card-plante game a little bit, where what people are ordering might not be what they're getting. And I just wanted to know, like, what your research has shown, and sort of like how you even started poking at this question, of like fish in the States at all. I got into this field purely by accident. I was a brand new assistant professor at the University of North Carolina,

and I wanted to run a class for graduate students on molecular biology techniques. And so I was thinking, well, what can we do? What can we do? Well, a colleague of mine who happens to also be my partner in life, suggested, well, why don't you guys go down to grocery and buy some seafood and, you know, bring it back to the lab

and just extract DNA and identify and just see what it actually is. So that was the idea for the experiment. But then, when Peter started thinking about what fish he'd want to test, he very quickly stumbled on a pretty good question. His question was about Red Snapper, a very sought-after, very popular fish. Once I had a look at fisheries' landings for Red Snapper in the United States and how much Red Snapper was caught in the Gulf of Mexico

and how much was imported from South America, I said, how is it that I can buy Red Snapper at any time of the year in any quantity, at any grocery in the Chapel Hill area. There wasn't nearly enough for this fish being caught and imported to supply every grocery in the United States. And my experience was that you would see Red Snapper everywhere. And so this is just impossible. How could all this be Red Snapper? So we keyed in on Red Snapper and collected them from groceries. Students got their relatives to send samples from around the Southeast and the East Coast.

a few from elsewhere. And so we identified them using DNA sequencing. And so it turned out that I think it was 77% of them weren't actually a red snapper. 77%. 77%, yeah. So it was a small sample of just 22 fish, but 77% of them were not red snapper. It was really surprising. But at the time, I didn't really understand the significance of it or think too much about it.

But then, you know, we talked about it as a class and we said, well, maybe we could write this up into a paper. And we did, and we ended up submitting it to the journal Nature, and they took it, and they published it. And the rest was history. It got a lot of attention. It somehow pinched a nerve with both scientists and consumers, as well as people involved in the seafood industry. There's a certain amount of, like, I don't know, you assume that there's like a, whatever your faith in society is, however, like, paranoid you are or not paranoid you are. I guess I always assume that through some combination of, like, regulation or just like marketplaces, that at the end of the day, if you go to the grocery store and you buy something, the marshmallows are marshmallows and the

hamburgers or hamburgers and the Red Snapper, like, I think it undermines people's sense of reality a little bit. Absolutely, yeah. And if they found out the same thing about chicken or beef or marshmallows, they would have exactly the same reaction. And did you Were you able to tell when you found yourself DNA testing supermarket Red Snapper, could you tell what fish it was instead, or can you just tell genetically this isn't Red Snapper? The answer to that is sort of yes and no. So when you sequence the DNA from an unknown subject, you try to identify it by comparing it to DNA sequences that are available on public databases.

And the biggest one that is used around the world is called GenBank. So you can identify any sample you've got with a DNA sequence provided there is a sequence in GenBank to match it to. So in some cases, we were able to identify what the fish were, and in other cases we couldn't, because there were no reference sequences available in these databases to identify what it was. We could say it was a close relative of this thing,

but we couldn't actually say what it was. It's crazy that we're eating things that we can't, scientifically know what they are. It is kind of mind-boggling, yeah. And the idea that potentially you could discover a species that is well-known from the grocery aisle but not known to science is also kind of interesting to think about. Peter's study had started out as a fun classroom experiment, but he was so excited by what he found, he ended up doing a follow-up study using the same methods.

Some fish are sold at a higher price because they're labeled as being caught using environmentally friendly methods. Peter used DNA testing to check if that labeling was always accurate. He found a lot of fraud there, too. But Peter says, even though fish fraud is rampant, there's not a lot of funding available to study it, which makes it a harder problem to deal with. Where do you think the mislabeling happens?

Do you think it's happening in the grocery store? Do you think it's happening from the fishermen? Where in the distribution chain, I don't even really know how a fish goes from the ocean to a grocery store. Yeah, well, it's complicated in most cases, especially in the United States because we import most of our seafood from other countries. Where does the mislabeling happen? Well, anywhere where some profit can be made, I would imagine.

But seafood is particularly susceptible to this kind of substitution and fraud because the supply chain is so complex. A fish that is caught on a hook can change hands five or six times and be modified a couple of times or processed a couple of times on its way to, your plate. So a fish could be caught in one country, processed in another country, imported to a third, and then exported to the United States. When Peter talks about fish processing, what he means is everything that happens to a fish between it being caught and you consuming it. You can watch videos of all the in-between on YouTube, and apparently many people choose to. The three-minute

clip titled Processing Fish somehow has over half a million views and zero comments. This fish is going to be washed. Washing the fish will remove the slimy slipperiness from the skin before it is prepared. The fish travels at the conveyor belt to the water. This woman's voice is incredibly soothing, unless I imagine you're a fish. The viewer watches as dead fish are poured from a crate onto a watery conveyor belt. At its most simple, processing is something a fisherman could do, just on a boat with a knife. But here, factory workers cut the fish's head off, eviscerate the fish's body.

take out its guts and internal organs, and finally, its ribs. What's left is the fillet. These people are experts at filleting fish. Look how quickly they can work. They can fillet thousands of fish a day. Such a large number of fish are not needed all at once, so some of the fish will be frozen.

The tricky fact about fish is that there's over 30,000 species of them. In the water, they can look very different from each other. You would notice if someone swapped your goldfish for a great white, but by the time they're filleted, they're harder to distinguish. Salmon from tuna, sure, but in general, 30,000 biodiverse species end up, by the time humans are done with them, as some form of rectangularish mass, usually either white or pink. Or, in the case of this video, shaped like a stick, breaded and fried. All of that happens here in one factory, but as Peter Marco says,

fish processing is often staggered across a long distribution chain. Each step, each pair of hands, an opportunity for fraud. So at every step, fish are often being processed to some degree. And so the more processing you get and the more steps there are in that supply chain, the more likely it is that you're going to have some sort of mislabeling or fraud because it becomes more and more difficult to identify what it is because it's becoming progressively more and more modified as it moves along the supply chain. That's in part why I think that it's unlikely that it's fishers responsible for very much mislabeling

because they're dealing with whole fish. Right. And it's pretty hard to pretend that a whole red snapper, it isn't red snapper actually is. Whereas once you start chopping it up or turning into a fillet, then it becomes much easier. Peter says the same market forces that cause people to swap cheap fish, for more expensive fish, also drive other sorts of ethically suspect fish-based behavior. He told me it's not uncommon to hear stories about fish that have been banned from the U.S. for ecological reasons, actually being snuck into the country labeled as something else.

There's just a lot of retailers out there, and there's a lot of time spent trying to stop fish at the border, you know, illegal imports of fish that are either illegally caught or from underreported fisheries or unregulated. Fisheries. People smuggle fish? Absolutely, yeah. There have been some really amazing and sort of notorious cases over the past 20 years of large amounts of illegal fish being imported into the U.S. Largely fish being imported with the name of one thing, but actually being something else. Okay, so it's not as if like, it's not like someone's driving like a Toyota Corolla and there's like a bunch of fish in the door panels. It's like they're bringing the fish in in a normal way, but they're lying about.

what it is? Well, yes and no. So some illegal imports are fish coming in in huge containers of, say, rockfish being imported as a red snapper, right? And that's illegal. But Peter says there are also actually examples of smugglers sneaking fish into the country in trucks the way they would sneak in drugs. The best example is freshwater eel, an endangered species that many people still want to eat. Smugglers don't bring in the adult eel. They actually sneak in larvae, the babies. So there's not enough adult eel out there to harvest, and the harvest is extremely limited for all of these species.

So the next best thing is to go out into nature and gather up the babies and then ship them off to aquaculture facilities in other countries. They don't look like much, but these eels are as valuable to smugglers as cocaine. This is from a TV news report. Law enforcement officers with guns storm a shady warehouse to find little pools of illegal eels. The adult eels look like big black snakes.

There's something beautiful about them. The babies are little white squiggles. In the clip, a conservation advocate breaks down the economics of these schemes. You can get up to 100,000 glass eels in one suitcase. And if they're leaving Europe at a euro each, that's 100,000 pounds in your suitcase. And then at the other end, you grow them on in a pond in China, and a year later, that's a million. A million euros worth.

Asia, where they're considered a delicacy. We're talking about huge amounts of money that are being exchanged for these glass eels because they're worth an awful lot. And is it like cartels and violence? I don't think so, but it's certainly fairly serious guys that are involved in this because it involves so much money. Wow. That's fascinating.

Do you eat fish? Yeah, I do. I love seafood. Absolutely. How do you think about it? Do you eat it differently than I eat it? I don't know. I've never seen you eat.

I consume it like a person who doesn't know that, you know, a large percentage of it might be mislabeled, and I've never thought very much about conservation when it comes to my seafood habits. Well, yeah, I always approach it kind of, you know, like from the scientist lens, like, oh, so I wonder what this is, or let's get this and see what it's like. You know, so there are things that you can buy reliably and you know what it's going to be and it's not going to be mislabeled. Like what?

Well, things like salmon. It's very hard to substitute something for salmon. Of course, there's the issue of wild caught versus farm-raised salmon, where farm-raised salmon can be easily substituted for wild-caught salmon. But here in Hawaii, we have a sort of a handful of basic. that are sold at groceries. A number of them are caught here locally, and they have very distinctive tastes and flavors and textures, and there's just no way anybody is going to pull off a species substitution with those things. So I'm talking about Ahituna, Monchong, and another called Ono. These are fish that everybody knows, the population knows, and it's just not going to happen. So I buy those

knowing that I'm, that's going to be what it is. When I see other unusual things, I may buy it and, you know, evaluate it with my taste buds. Rarely do I often test something genetically that I've eaten, although there's a story there too. Wait, what's the story? Well, it goes back to the original Red Snapper study with the students. These are grad students, and they're pretty cash-strapped,

living bohemian lifestyles. So they had to go out and get these expensive red snapper. filets, and they were reluctant to ask for just little pieces because that would be sort of strange and odd. They didn't want to attract attention by buying tiny pieces of fish, so they bought fillets, and I promised them I would reimburse them for every filet out of my pocket, which I did. And so I ended up eating most of the fish that were bought in the study. And that's when I realized, I said, oh, my gosh, this is really different. So I think I've only ever had Red Snapper twice before in my life, before this study, because of the high rate of substitution.

It was so obvious that I was just sort of stunned by that. And subsequently, a reporter once asked me in the wake of that study, well, you know, so it's not red snapper. And it's, you know, most of these things are actually snappers. So what's the harm? I mean, they're basically all the same, aren't they? And I just said, so obviously you've never had. red snapper or you don't remember the last time you had red snapper because he wouldn't say that.

I think there's like a bargain most of us make with consumerism, which is that you go to the store and you buy things and you're not like interrogating whether what you're getting is what fits the label of the thing. But it sounds like the way you consume fish is as a skeptic a little bit? A little bit. But like I said, I mostly buy things that I know what they are. I buy them from reliable retailers. You know, once in a while, and it's typically in a restaurant. I'll get something and I'll say, okay, this is not Mahi-Mahy. This is kind of ridiculous that you're trying to pass this off as Ma'i-Mai,

because it's obviously tilapia. Will you say something? Not anymore. I mean, I sort of gotten past the point of complaining about that because, I don't know, I sort of get tired of it. And I just now go to places where I know that I can reliably buy fish and get what I'm looking for. And that typically involves buying your own fish cooking it yourself. Seafood fraud is a tricky thing to fix, but it could be done. It falls into a category I've

begun to encounter somewhat frequently with search engine. National problems that could technically be solved if they became a priority, but which I can never really imagine becoming a priority. Solvable nuisances like daily savings time, pennies, half-full potato chip bags, all the things you won't find in heaven. But Peter does say that when he publishes one of his studies, there is a moment of outcry and attention. Local news shows do their segments. The seafood you buy at the supermarket may not always be what it says on the label. You order a red snapper, but you serve tilapia. It says tuna and you end up getting scrod. Maybe some podcaster does his less timely version a few years later. This week is my local sushi restaurant running a scam on me. And when that article or

episode comes out, everyone talks about it for a week, maybe two. But then, sometimes soon after, everybody finds something else to talk about. It's just simply not a high enough priority for consumers and for regulatory agencies. I've got some ideas about what contributes to that, but it isn't currently a high enough priority to regulate at the level that would change a whole lot. And what are your ideas about why it doesn't? Because for me, when I think, began to suspect that this one sushi place was not being honest with me. I stopped ordering from that sushi place. Why does everyone kind of just go back to eating funky fish? I think it's complex, but I think the way the public thinks about seafood contributes to it.

I think one of the problems is that we don't think of fish as sort of wild animals. The ocean is really the only place on earth where we still harvest wild populations of organisms to eat. So on land, it's all agriculture. Even forestry products are just essentially agriculture, at least in North America. But fish, I think, because they sit on the grocery aisle along with chicken and beef and very reliable things you can buy, they can always get when you go to the grocery store, I think seafood gets lumped into those things along with marshmallows and, you know,

other sorts of products that are always there that have a familiar name. and that are viewed as commodities, you know, food rather than wild organisms. Peter's view of the world, it's not that I'd never considered it. I just never considered it deeply. The human desire to consume animals has made many species no longer wild, but it's harder to do that with fish. They are stubborn in their wildness. With fish, we can't always have exactly what we want,

but we want it anyway, and that's where the fraud comes in. Peter says that in the eternal war between value-seeking consumers and the companies which rip them off, his work has actually given some consumers the upper hand. But since he began publishing, he's noticed that savvy restaurants and grocery stores have actually found a new tactic.

Over the time that I've done these studies, it seems to me that one of the consequences of all this mislabeling evidence and studies is that fish just aren't labeled as specifically as they used to be. So I think now if you make a tour of your local grocery store, with the exception of the higher end groceries, you're unlikely to find red snapper in a grocery. It's just going to be labeled snapper. That's my impression is that stuff is now labeled so generically, shrimp, salmon, ahi, that strictly speaking, nobody's going to be disappointed. So if you go to

sushi restaurant and you want a spicy ahi tuna roll, then you're probably not going to be disappointed when it comes to substitutions, you know, with some exceptions, because of course there's different species of tuna, you know, if you're expecting an Atlantic bluefin and you get Pacific yellow fin, you might be disappointed if you have a discerning palate that can tell a difference between those two. I don't have a pretty purely discerting palate, but now I'm thinking I should develop one. Well, I think if you had more exposure to these higher-end things, you would. And this gets back to that epiphany where I realized I'd rarely had Red Snapper before.

I think that's the case for most consumers is that they simply don't know what they're missing, right? They haven't ever had it. And so when they get tilapia or something else, they don't think anything of it because they just have never had Red Snapper. The opportunity to learn that there's a better version of something you were already enjoying the Just Fine version of,

let's acknowledge that this is, at best, a mixed place. blessing. I learned that there's a difference between regular coffee and good coffee, and I enjoyed my coffee less. I learned there's a difference between how cheap and expensive t-shirts fit, and it made me feel like a lot of my t-shirts look goofy. Refining your taste is not always a net good. But sometime after this conversation, I'd find myself in South Carolina with my friend at an incredibly questionable roadside restaurant. The only fish on the menu, Red Snapper. My friend, went to order it, and in a very stressed out whisper, I said, stop, I'll explain later. She got the onion rings instead. I felt glad to know that one of the world's many small

scams had been made visible to me. Is it better to know or not to? A question every idiot has asked themselves upon receiving some new, horrifying knowledge. But after a short break, I will ask the specific question that brought me here. Have I personally been a victim of fish is a New York City sushi restaurant running rampant with a dreadfish Wallo Wallo. It's so good. Spring styles are at Nordstrom Rack stores now, and they're up to 60% off. Stock up and save on Ragginbone, Made Well, Vince, All Saints, and more of your favorites. How did I not know Rack as Adidas?

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Welcome back to the show. It was shockingly late in the reporting of this story when I finally pulled up a picture for myself of a walloo-walo, of an escolar. In the wild, an adult Escalar, it looks like something you'd use to scare a child. A mouth filled with tiny, sharp little teeth spaced at irregular intervals, two large dead eyes, scales in oily black, the color you see when it rains on your driveway. Escalar is not an attractive fish. But few fish are. Fish are sometimes renamed in an attempt to try to make them marketable. The most famous story is the tale of the unappetizing-sounding sounding Patagonian toothfish, which was renamed the Chilean sea bass. Some fish are the famous.

Fish sellers have tried to label Esklar as something called white tuna. Escalar is not a tuna. Others will sell it as a variety of butterfish, which is also inaccurate. Esklar is a proud member of the snake mackerel family. For those brave lunatics who choose to prepare Esklar on purpose, recipes exist. The recipes are typically written in a very cheerful tone. Quote, everyone, meet Eskalar. I'm always excited to try a new fish, and this one has been the biggest revelation for me since Sable.

But the tone of the comments sections on these recipes tends to run much more dire. They read like warnings scrawled on the wall of a crypt. Quote, Last night my husband grilled up two lovely pieces of Escalar. Today he is quite ill with a headache, loose bowels, and nausea. I am suffering from a headache and loose bowels. I strongly recommend doing a little research before purchasing the fish. Or here's another one.

Quote, don't eat this fish unless you want orange or orange or oily substance to excrete from your butt and major diarrhea. Some people eat it okay, but it's not worth it if you get the symptoms. Read the discussion from this link. One guy even claims it is what killed his wife. End quote. This is not a fish designed to succeed through word of mouth recommendation, but we already know that it's not the Escalor seller's strategy. Before speaking to Dr. Peter Marco, I found a 2012 study from Oceana, an ocean conservation group that looked specifically at seafood fraud in New York City. According to Oceana's study, within its sample, 94% of so-called white tuna sushi rolls had actually contained Escalar. Oceana is an advocacy group, which

gave me a little pause, but I found a similar study connected by UCLA testing sushi in Los Angeles. While their numbers weren't as high, honestly, they were high enough. In three years of tests, they found that 47% of their sampled sushi was mislabeled. I took all this information and all the anxiety it had given me to Dr. Marco. Dr. Peter Marco, a marine biologist academic acclaim, who has worked in the field for over two decades, written numerous well-sighted papers, a professional arguably overqualified to answer my question about why my tummy hurts when I get sushi from a local sushi restaurant. So you're saying that you get sick after eating any kind of sushi?

Not any kind of sushi. Oh. Sushi from one specific sushi restaurant and tuna rolls from one specific sushi restaurant. So you think that it's because you keep getting the same thing to a particular kind of order that you're making? Yes. And I will say, like, since this Google search, I have actually ordered from that sushi restaurant, but I haven't ordered the tuna and I haven't been sick. Well, I mean, it could be Escalar, right? It does make people sick if you eat it in large enough quantities.

It's a weird fish. It stores its fats in the form of things called wax esters. So you're kind of like eating wax. And it can cause severe gastric, distress, diarrhea. Yeah. It's been banned in some countries. It's pretty notorious and pretty bold for a restaurant to serve that. I've never seen it sold as sushi.

I've seen it here at fish markets in Hawaii. You've seen it sold on purpose and correctly labeled in fish markets? Well, correctly labeled in the broad sense, it was labeled as fish, fresh fish. I thought it was so entertained by that, that I put a picture of that in the paper, and I was surprised that the scientific journal actually took it, but it's a picture of this escolar chopped up, and it says fresh fish, $5.99 a pound, I think. And when I asked the person what it was, they didn't want to say, and then I pressed them on it, and they said, Walu.

I said, oh, okay. And we had genetically tested it and turned out to be Escalar. So I've never seen it as sushi, but supposedly it is called white tuna, because it's got a whitish color. Maybe you could pass it off as albacore, perhaps. But I've never eaten it, so I don't actually know what it tastes like. I'm kind of afraid to, but maybe I should, in the interest of science, get some and just taste it to see what it's actually like. But, I mean, that could be it. It's either a fish like that, or it's just unsafe food practices, I suppose.

that's the other possibility. As we started to wrap up our conversation, I told Peter, I tried to dig up more info on these mystery tuneroles, and Peter made an offer I wasn't expecting. I'll let you know if I learn anything about these tuner rolls, just because I feel like I obliged to inform you as my quest continues. Yeah, so feel free. And if you get stuck, you can always send them to me,

and I'd be more than happy to identify them for you. Oh, I would absolutely take you up on that. if you don't mind me shipping two and rolls to Hawaii. Yeah, no problem. Just, yeah, get some vodka or Everclear. I'm sure you have something like that lying around at home, right?

Okay. Yeah, I'll buy some. I don't think I'd ever clear about it. So, on a sunny Thursday morning, Surgeon producers, Garrett Graham and Noah John, packed up the sushi. Just kind of scrape out a little bit in the middle here. Yeah, there we go.

Preserved it in alcohol. And then... I guess just fill it up with alcohol. And shipped it from New York to Hawaii. The USPS has... has rules on how much liquid can go in. Next week on search engine, the world's most consequential DNA test ever performed resolves itself.

We find out what this fish is. Stick around after these ads, though, because this week we actually have one more question, and this question is a bit of an emergency. That's coming up. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one.

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and build organizations that grow the good in the world through discipline leadership, strong judgment, and a community that expects more from business. That's how Notre Dame graduates launch impactful careers at top companies across industries. Lead with purpose. Lead with the Notre Dame MBA. Tap now to learn more. Last week, I interviewed reporter Casey Newton about a breaking news story at the company OpenAI. Also, was this another week for your story? supposed to be on vacation?

Not really. I mean, like, today is a workday for me. I am supposed to be off starting tomorrow, but I fully expect I'll be making between three and seven emergency podcasts in the next week. Who invented the emergency podcast? Casey's podcast Hard Fork put out two emergency podcasts

during the Sam Altman opening eye drama, and Hard Fork was not alone. Last week, seemingly, every tech show was pushing the big red emergency button that comes standard in most podcasts studios. We are doing an emergency podcast. This is an emergency crossover episode of Pivot and the

Prof G. Pod. Welcome to Big Technology podcast, Emergency Edition. Sam Altman has been fired by Open AI Edition. The question that I'd offhandedly ask Casey, I realized I actually would like an answer to. When was the first time someone published an emergency podcast?

I feel like I most noticed them in the Trump era, the Pod Save America crew, in my memory, was often broadcasting emergency podcasts. to cover a president who created a lot of emergencies. But my suspicion was that the emergency podcast predates the decline of the American Republic. So I texted a shadowy associate who preferred to remain anonymous. This person, I would say, is sort of a purveyor of information,

an informal, maybe black market podcast librarian. I asked them to dig up the earliest example they could find of an emergency podcast. And my source found this from 2007. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Chaos Dwarves Online. This is our first emergency podcast, as you may have noticed, the site is down. This emergency podcast is the very first episode of a show called Chaos Dwarves Radio, a podcast for people who loved a certain tabletop fantasy board game. The emergency that had prompted the podcast, it was that the Chaos Dwarves online message board had just crashed. The style sheet is not being displayed, so nothing looks proper as you're used to seeing it. And that's because, it gets that information from the forum, which is all stored in a database, and that database

cannot be accessed. And it's the same thing with the wiki. The database is not functioning. So there's some non-functioning databases going on. What I hear in this emergency podcast from 15 years ago is a perfect fossil of podcasting before money ruined everything. I'm joking, but barely. I loved the era of podcasting where everything sort of resembled one infinite public access channel. My name is Exander on the forums. I'm the administrator of CDO and founder. And with me is,

Herschel's blessing, the moderator of the forums. And one of our first moderators as well, I should note. The online message board, whose crash prompted this emergency podcast, was eventually fixed. It lives on today. As for the podcast, like most podcasts, it started in a burst of passion, began to publish somewhat sporadically. each episode beginning with an apology for how long it had been since the last one, and then, after ten episodes, it shut down quietly.

Not everything that dies gets a funeral. Here was the final Chaos Dwarves radio transmission. Time to strap on your chaos armor, pat down your beard, sharpen your tusks, and down a blunderbuss full of brew. It's been a long time coming, so hold on to your hats, masks, helmets, or just cover those heads, baldy locks. It's finally here. Chaos Dorf Radio, episode 10.

So, 2007, the year feels like the right era for the first emergency podcast? 2007 is just three years after the word podcast has even been coined by a British journalist named Ben Hammersley, who, as far as I know, has never apologized. 2007 felt early enough to be right. But then, sometime after sending me the clip of the Chaos Dwarves, that shadowy podcast library, Buryan emerged again. They'd sent the request to one of their associates who had dug up a possible earlier example. Hi, this is Leo Leport, and this is This Week in Tech, a special midweek edition, episode 8A for June 8, 2005. This is from a podcast called This Week in Tech, or Twit. It was published all the way back in 2005, one year after the word podcast first blighted the earth. In the clip,

the host announces that they are breaking from their usual schedule to record a special podcast because something huge has happened. We decided to release an extra edition of this week and tech this week due to the big Apple Intel announcement. We recorded this on Tuesday, June 7, 2005, the day after Steve Jobs' keynote speech. Steve Jobs, who in 2005 is still alive, announced that week that Apple computers would now use Intel microprocessors. Patrick Norton joined me at the Thirsty Bear Brewery next door to the worldwide developer

conference at Moscone Center. In the recording, the sense of excitement about this fact is quite palpable. Also joining us, Raye Likensky in August Trometer, very well-known Macintosh developers, the authors of the great iPodder X podcasting client. As Mac developers, they had something to say about Steve's announcement. And of course, they were also very interested in what Steve showed as part of the new iTunes 4.9 podcasting capabilities. I will say, though, I'm not sure that this 2005 broadcast,

qualifies to me as a genuine emergency podcast. Yeah, it breaks the traditional publishing schedule to address breaking news, but they don't use the word emergency. So right now, the leading candidate I have for earliest emergency podcast is Chaos Dwarves Radio in 2007. This remains an open question, though. If you find an earlier example of an emergency podcast, please shoot us an email. Search Engine Show at gmail.com. Thank you. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruthy Pinnaminani. And it's produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.

Fact-checking this week by Sean Merchant. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrault, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D. Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Matt Casey, Morah Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schuff. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Our social media is by the team at Public Opinion, NYC.

Follow and listen to Search Engine with PJ Vote now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, if you want to become a paid subscriber and support the show, head over to PJVote.com. We are having a in-person meetup with the search engine team and paid subscribers in New York City. probably in January. We're figuring it out. All right. That's it for us this week. Thank you for listening.

We will see you next week.