Unexplainable - The Codfather

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

How many fish are in the sea? It's a question that has had enormous consequences for the fishing community in New Bedford, Massachusetts. But one man managed to find a way around it. That man? The Codfather. Guest: Ian Coss, host and producer of WBGH's Catching the Codfather For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This episode is brought to you by Defender, with the towing capacity. of 3,500 kilograms and a weighting depth of 900 millimeters, the Defender 110 pushes what's possible. Learn more at landrover.ca. Okay. It's unexplainable. I'm Noah'm Hassanfeld. And how should we introduce you? Why don't you introduce me or my friend? You're the reason we're here. You're the one who dragged me out of whatever I was supposed to be doing today to come in and tape this. This is true. At least you can do. Ian Koss, reporter, producer, host. at GBM News in Boston. Is that it? Nailed it. And also currently the host of the new series

Catching the Codfather. Yeah, the Codfather. This is what you've been telling me about like every single time I see you recently. This is what I tell everybody about when they ask me, hey, so what are you working on lately? Have I mentioned the Codfather? So, yeah, so who is the Codfather? So the Codfather is a very controversial and divisive figure in the fishing port of New Bedford, Massachusetts. The American dream, it's a certain amount of sacrifice you've got to make. And they say, lock, lock bullshit. You have to go look for luck.

Locke doesn't come to you. So his real name is Carlos Raphael. He's a fishing mogul. And about 10 years ago, the fishing industry in New Bedford was really in rough shape. The regulations around fishing were very tight. The science was. saying the fish docks were in poor shape. And yet, Carlos, the codfather, continued to thrive.

He continued to buy more boats. He continued to make money. I got to do what I got to do. I'm going to survive. So there was a lot of intrigue around what he was really up to. With a name like the codfather, I mean, it's all got to be above board, right? Yeah, and it didn't help that people around town called him the codfather. We're going to have to call him the codfather.

and the stupid shit stock. So eyebrows are raised. Suspitions are aroused. And this team of IRS investigators, they pose as Russian businessmen and offer to buy the business of Carlos Seafood. To try and figure out what he's up to? Yeah, to figure out where the money's coming from.

Hi, this is Xavier. How you doing? That's the sales van. How's it going? How's it going? I'm born. They show up in their full get-up. Rolex watches, pinky rings, Versace.

I talked to the undercover agents. He told me he had a pinky ring, he told me he had a Versace belt, and Louis Vuitton shoes. It's funny. They remember all these details. Incredible. And I also talked with the case agent who was listening outside as the other agents went into the fish plant with Carlos. He took him upstairs into his office. And I should just paint a portrait here for you quickly.

The walls of Carlos' office are covered in pictures from the movie Scarface. Al Pacino from Scarface sitting in the bathtub. The machine gun, the cigars. The world is not enough, the whole bit. They says, is that your favorite act? It's definitely so. So they start asking him all these questions. Like, well, you know, how do you make all this money?

Where does the money come from? How is the business worth what you're saying it's worth? It says the numbers doesn't justify $175 million. So stupid of me, I go in a bottom draw and I got another set of books. That just says cash. There you go. There are you. This is.

This is a cow of seafood. Turns out there was a whole other side of the business of Congress. Carlos seafood that nobody knew about. That explains how Carlos was able to keep succeeding. And was it drugs? Okay, so here's the twist. The federal investigators were all assuming that it was drugs, potentially arms dealing, human trafficking.

Several different agencies had feelings that it was something, but none of them could figure out what it was. But what's inside this cash ledger is lists of fish. It's just fish. There's no drugs. Okay. And so the IRS agent goes back to the Coast Guard and says I think he's up to

something with the fish. And as the IRS agent told me, the Coast Guard were like, no, no, no, no, it's definitely a drug case. They were convinced that that's what it was, but they had nothing to back it up. It took them while to figure this out. But what this cash ledger revealed

was that the fish that Carlos was catching and selling were not the fish that the government thought he was catching and selling. And this little sleight of hand was the secret to his business. Huh. And what was behind the sleight of hand? Why did he have to keep a secret folder of fish? Well, this is where the science comes in.

So this comes back to an effort to protect the oceans and conserve the fish. Because scientists are trying to prevent overfishing. Exactly. but Carlos had figured out a way to catch the fish that the scientists didn't think he should be catching. Because at the heart of all this is a very, very simple but also really difficult question. And this is a question that nobody can agree on,

especially the scientists and the fishermen, which is just how many fish are in the sea. So how do you actually count the fish in the ocean? Like who does the counting? It's more complicated than you. you might think. I mean, it seems complicated, to be honest. Okay, so maybe it's exactly as complicated as you might think.

Okay. The problem with counting fish is that they're in the water and they move around. Two things that I know about fish. So, you know, if you want to count lobsters, it's much easier. Right. Because they don't move as much. Right. If you want to count trees, it's much easier.

They don't move at all. If you want to count birds, they move, but at least they're. They're not in the water. But fish are incredibly difficult to count. Take a codfish. It travels hundreds of miles every year, possibly, to spawn, right? So it's not like the fish are all in one place. They're moving around.

They're deep in the water. You know, they're all mixed in with other fish. They're hiding in, you know, rocky areas of the bottom of the ocean. So in the 1960s, the federal government, started this program of what they call trawl surveys. Okay. Which was an effort to systematically measure how many fish are in the ocean. And how does it work?

What they do is they divide the ocean up into quadrants, and every year they have a computer that spits out different numbers that tells them which quadrants they will fish. They drop a net, they tow it through the water for a prescribed amount of time, they pull up everything that's in it, and they count, and say, okay, this is a sample of this one piece of the ocean. They do that many, many times for years and years and years to over time create a picture of how many fish are out there and whether those numbers of fish are going up and down. And did you talk to anyone who did this personally? So I met a marine biologist

named Linda Desprey, who for many years was a lead. scientists on Noah's trial surveys. When she started out in the 1970s, by the way, there were basically no women who did this. She was like doing sample counting, like sorting through shrimp larva and stuff like that. And one day I was asked if I wanted to go out on the boat and actually collect the samples. And she was all excited and she showed up at the dock of the boat and somebody was like, I'm sorry, you can't go. as I was told, what would the wives think of a girl staying on a boat overnight? The crew was all man, like, I'm sorry.

And God bless the captain who said, we'll get you out there. So instead of leaving at 8 o'clock at night, we left at one minute past midnight. And so I was technically not on an overnight cruise. and because I had that experience of going to see, collecting samples, sorting fish, just for that one-day cruise, that gave me a leg up. And that was how she got her foot in the door. So basically the next time she applied for a job,

she could say she had that experience. I didn't say it was for one day. I just had experience. I didn't lie. So Linda spent, by the end, of her career, I think, over a thousand days out at sea doing sample collection. And they would catch all kinds of stuff because they would fish in places where fishermen wouldn't go, where nobody would go.

You have no idea what's down there. We brought up anchors. We brought up the kitchen sink. We brought up tires. Apparently there are Noah boats that have found, like, human bodies, that have found unexploded bombs left over from World War II. crazy animals, you know, like a barn door skate. I'd never heard of a barn door skate,

but as the name suggests, it's huge. And she did this for years. So they go out, they trawl the ocean floor with this net. They randomly select places. They model that across the ocean, and they kind of say, okay, this is about how many fish there are. Is that it? Like, why is this more of a complicated question?

So if you talk to fishermen about the trawl survey, you will almost universally hear, the same thing, which is that it's totally wrong. In my opinion, your data sucks. So I met this fisherman named Tony Alvarez, who for many years worked on one of these NOAA boats. Because NOAA, the government, would hire fishermen to come out and work the gear on the research boats.

And Newlanda very well. And he had opinions. So Tony went out on a number of these surveys in the 1990s, and he remembers just being horrified. This is a joke. Because he realized very quickly that this is the boat that determines how many fish he and his friends are allowed to go and catch. Right. Right.

This is the boat that sets the rules. This is like the voice of God. The way he describes it is that net would make scripture. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And he found the boat extremely lacking. So I mentioned this is called a trawl survey. Trauling refers to the method of towing a net behind the boat and catching fish, right?

And the key of the trawl survey is that you're really trying to measure change over time. Like are there more fish or less fish this year relative to last year? And so to get that clear comparison across the years, you want to keep the fishing gear really consistent so that you can say year to year, oh, okay, we're definitely catching more fish this year. The net's the same. The boat's the same. The tow time's the same. Therefore, it's the fish.

But the net on this government boat was outdated by commercial fishing standards. You know, once you get to the 90s and 2000s, you couldn't even buy that style of net anymore. Right. So the idea is like it's a bad net. It could be missing a lot of the cod that's out there. Exactly. What Tony saw was, you know, the net would go down in the water. It would come up with, you know, this small amount of fish.

And he would know, know in his bones that if it were his boat and his net, dragging that same stretch of ocean, he would be catching way more fish. He was always suggesting new ways of making the net better, fish better, or work better. Anytime I question the integrity of the nets and blah, blah, blah, I was wrong. And it's like, we can't do that, Tony. And yet this is the net that is setting scripture. This is the net that's deciding how much fish his buddies can go out and catch that they rely on to make their living. Yeah, Tony, we know, we know, but we needed to keep it the same.

Was that the only thing that made Tony skeptical of the NOAA surveys? Oh, no, that was just the beginning of it for Tony. Oh, okay. The way he described it is that just the whole setup of this boat, was done by people who did not really understand and work with fishing gear on a day-to-day basis. This is Tony's opinion, but it was really just this constant series of issues that for him undermined his trust in the whole system. Got it.

So the best and most clearly documented example of what Tony's talking about was an incident from 2002 that came to be known as trawlgate. Traal gate. Everything's got a gate. Everything's got a gate. Yeah. A couple of commercial fishermen were working on this. the know about, they noticed that the lines that were attached to the net were not the same length. The net was going to turn sideways and maybe even collapse in on itself.

It's not going to catch fish. And what they had realized is that these lines had been mismatched for about two and a half years. Whoa. So this was, as you can imagine, a huge scandal in the industry because, again, this is the boat to make scripture. This is the boat that determines people's livelihoods. This was a boat that had been criticized for years and years by fishermen like Tony Alvarez. I wanted to make sure those nets fished as proper as they could, yes. At this point, we're not talking about consistency. This is just a mistake. And so I think that one mistake became emblematic of just this larger

sense of mistrust within the industry towards the science. Did the scientists respond in any way? I mean, like, what do the scientists say to either the criticisms of Trollgate or

the criticisms from Tony in terms of like everything's not working on the boat? So I talked to somebody who was running the NOAA Science Center in the 2000s about this. And he recognized that Trawlgate had seeded all this intense mistrust.

So the Science Center tried to update the gear, update the boat, and try and do like a fresh start in hopes of building more trust. Unfortunately, that backfired. They built a new boat, and the new boat, it was much more sophisticated technologically. But because, you know, they'd been doing these surveys on the old boat going back decades, the scientists who were analyzing all this data wanted to find some way of calibrating the new data to match the old data.

But this whole process of changing the boat, changing the net, developing this formula, it only fed into the mistrust, partly because right around when this new boat is introduced, the fish numbers start to look really bad. And here's where there's like, just a really unfortunate confluence of events because you had a few things happening at once.

One is you had a few really bad years of fish counting data. You also had this historic warming event in the Atlantic Ocean off of New England, and at the same time, you have this new boat. And everyone's sort of wondering, well, is it the boat? Is it the net? Is it actually the fish? One of the scientists I talked to at the NOAA Scientist Center

described this period as a perfect storm for mistrust. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination in its own right in 10 minutes or less.

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Amazon Presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing. Russian roulette with a flame thrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero, more like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. For your listeners who are not New Englanders, like you and I, we should really stress

that the codfish has a deep symbolic importance in this region. It is not just a food that you eat. It is the reason why the Massachusetts Bay Colony exists in the first place. It is the reason why Cape Cod is called Cape Cod. It is what built the economy of the state. Really? They made it so that there were powerful merchants here that could rally for independent. You know, it is codfish.

Codfish is baked into the history of this reason. Okay, yeah, I know. Have you ever been to the Massachusetts State House, by the way? Sure, yeah. Okay. into the House chamber in the Massachusetts. I have not. Okay. So if you go into the chamber where the legislators sit and they vote, you know, you have this raised, like, platform at the front where the speaker sits and, you know, all the head honchos are, if you sit at the speaker's desk and you

look out across the legislature, what you see directly in front of you is a five-foot-long effigy of a codfish. What? That is called the sacred cod. Get out of here. It's known as the sacred cod. It was gifted to the legislature years and years and years ago, and it has hung in the Massachusetts Statehouse ever since. So you should have in the back of your mind, it's not about food, it's not about money, it's about something much, much deeper. Wow. So like counting the cod is not just counting fish.

This is like counting the soul of Massachusetts. It's counting the symbol of our abundance and God-given fortune. So if we go back to where we left off, we're what, like early 2010s? Yes. We got this new boat, new survey, and the cod quota is suddenly dramatically smaller. How do people react? It was a shock and a disappointment because, you know, there have been trouble with the fish stocks for years. And there have been, you know, regulations that have, you know, been tightening.

And a lot of people felt like we had solved the problem. We fished a little less, and now, you know, the population is going to recover, and we're reaching a point of sustainability. And the science actually backed that up for a time. It looked good. And then you get this shock in 2011, 2012, 2013, where suddenly the data starts to look really bad. Right. So what you see in those years is huge cuts in the amount of fish that fishermen are allowed to catch. I'll give you one example. In 2013, they cut the quota for all codfish in the entire Gulf of Maine by 77% year over year.

So if you were catching 1,000 pounds in one year, you're now catching a couple hundred pounds. That's crazy. And I guess I'm wondering if the scientists say don't catch cod, I mean, the nets are big, right? You can't make a net that specifically has a whole shape for nests. no cod, right? Right. A cod-shaped hole that they all swim out of. Exactly, yeah.

And this creates a problem that fishermen call the choke species. Because the problem is these fish, they all swim together. You pull up a net, and it's a whole mix of different things. And so the problem is, if you run out of your quota for codfish, then that is your choke species, and that means you can't go fishing anymore. So what do you do if you catch cod? So let's say your quota for cod. is very small. You go out and on day one of your season, you've caught your entire quota for the year,

which could happen, right? You put the net back in the water and you get more cod. What are you going to do now? At that point, you have three options. Some of them are legal and some of them are illegal. One option is you could like go to your neighbor at the dock and try and buy their cod quota or buy somebody else. So then they can't fish for cod. Exactly. Got it. But the, but the, The quota itself is extremely expensive for these limited species. In fact, the quota costs more than the fish's worth. The second option, which from many fishermen I've talked to, was pretty common at the time, is you discard the choke species.

You just throw it overboard. Because as long as you don't bring it back to shore and sell it, then it's not going to count against your quota for the year, right? To be clear, this is not legal. You're not supposed to discard fish. What's the problem with discarding fish? Well, that a lot of those fish will die anyway. Oh, so you're not just like catch and release.

This is not catch and release. Because we're talking about a net that's dragged through the water for maybe an hour, right? Thousands of pounds of fish packed into this net, dumped on the deck of a boat, sifted through, tossed overboard. So this fish that gets tossed back in the water has been through the ringer. And a lot of what you'll see behind the boat when you discard is just white bellies floating on the surface. So if you discard the cod, then you're actually killing the cod and you're not reporting it. Yeah, so this is a lose-lose for everyone. Nobody gets to eat the fish.

The fish is not conserved. The fish does not go on to live a healthy life and reproduce and make more fish. Nobody makes money off of it. It is pure waste. This is the unintended consequences of this regulation at that time. But a lot of people were doing that? It was common. I talked to one fisherman who described, he would hear stories about boats that would get

a thousand pounds of excess cod on a single toe and shovel it overboard with shovels. Dead fish. And this, again, this is the fish that we are trying to bring back the symbol of our abundance and vitality. It's the sacred cod. It is literally the sacred fish of the region being shoveled overboard, dead, a thousand pounds at a time. So option one was... You pay for it.

By new quota. Option two is this terrible lose-lose option. Yep. Is the third one good? Well, it depends on your point of view. And this is where we connect back to Carlos Raphael. The codfather. The codfather.

He brought those fish to shore. that he did not have quota for, and he very carefully sold them without anyone ever realizing what they were. He would pass them off as other species. Got it. So like a species that, like, had a higher quota or something. Exactly.

Got it. So what was going on at the time, again, like 2010s, the cod quota very low. Gray soul, very low. Flounder, very low. Haddock, pretty high. And so what Carlos would do is fudge the paperwork so that his cod and his flounder and his soul looked like Haddock.

What Carlos was able to do was misreport the fish at many different stages along the supply chain so that all along the way the government sees, okay, Haddock, Haddock, land of the dock, Haddock was sold to Carlos Raphael, Haddock went on the truck to New York, but then when it actually lands on the plate at the restaurant, it's your grace hole.

How was he able to do this? The key was vertical integration. I was a fish buyer. I didn't have to go through when the other people go through. So Carlos had been around the docks in New Bedford for a long time, and he had built up this kind of unique, empire where he was both the biggest boat owner in the fleet. He owned about 40 boats, and he also ran the biggest fish processing plant in the city. He was like the buyer and the

seller, if that makes sense. The way Carlos described it to me was, it came from the ocean direct to me. Nobody else put their fingers on a cake. He controlled the entire chain. He called it painting the fish. He really drew out this metaphor when he was talking with the undercover IRS agents. Eventually, they got to the point where he was just talking openly about how he went about this fraud. And he would say, yeah, I can paint the fish any color I want. The more rules they put on my ass, I'll keep painting the sun up a picture of the different colors.

Oh, my God. So he is clearly committing fraud here, right? Yes. And has he been convicted? So in 2016, federal agents raided Carlos Seafood. They froze the permits on his boats. And ultimately, he did plead guilty to falsifying documents as well as a number of other financial crimes. So where's Carlos now?

Carlos is out of jail. Okay. And I first reached out to him a few years after he got out of prison. And at the end of that interview, I left feeling like, yeah, this guy's a very convenient narrative about himself, you know, that he's the hero, that he was doing what he had to do. But I didn't take him that seriously. But then I started going around town and interviewing some other folks who worked in politics, who worked in the fishing industry, some academics. journalists, you know, regulators. And the thing that really started to draw my interest in this whole story was how many people

I met who, if they didn't express outright sympathy for Carlos Raphael, they had at least some ambivalence about him. They would say something like, well, you know, there's two sides to Carlos. You know, yeah, he was crass, but, but, you know, he did a lot for this industry. And some people out meet who had asked them straight out, do you think what Carlos did is wrong? And they would tell me, no. No, he was right.

And what do you think that's about? To me, it's emblematic of a much deeper mistrust and antagonism towards the government and science because the science is what drives the policy and the policy is what, you know, what affects these people's lives. New England is like a case study in how trust within that system can break down.

You have this changing assessment method, right? The new boat they brought in, the new net, the new survey techniques. You have these changing regulations. There's all this change happening at once in a fishery that has been there for 400 years. and it bred this really intense distrust that whatever side of it you're on,

whether you're a policymaker, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a fisherman. I think everyone around it can agree that the relationship is broken. And I came to the conclusion, you know, after studying the story and talking to so many people in the industry,

that Carlos could not have gotten away with it for so long. If there weren't a whole lot of other people, around him, who shared that mistrust, who also thought the science was questionable and the policy based on that science was unreasonable, and that therefore, you know, if you paint a few fish and it allows you to keep your boats working and keep your people employed, then that is the right thing to do. You spoke to a lot of scientists. I mean, what is your sense of the accuracy of the science here, the accuracy of saying that there is a low cod count. I think there are some tremendously smart people doing science in New England about fish.

At a high level, I have no reason to distrust the motives and methods of the very professional qualified scientists doing this work. But there's this feeling of it kind of lurching from crisis to crisis, from lawsuit to protest, and it's really hard to actually bring together the stakeholders. It's difficult because the fishermen clearly have an incentive for there to be a larger quota. It's not clear that the scientists have an incentive one way or the other, and that doesn't necessarily mean that the scientists are right, but the fishermen clearly are motivated here.

Yes, there is no doubt that the fishermen have an economic motivation to see fish out in the ocean. But fishermen have this very intense lived experience of the ocean. Some of the people I talk to spend hundreds of days a year out at sea, more days a year, out on a boat in the ocean hunting fish than they do standing on land. And that gives them a very intimate understanding of what's out there, but a very particular understanding. And a scientist with a PhD and surveys and analysis has a very different. kind of understanding, a different way of knowing the world. And that is part of what we're reconciling here, is different ways of thinking about expertise and understanding and who actually knows best. And those are very difficult to reconcile. Is there anything that you have learned

about the distrust of science in the fishing community in New Bedford that sheds light on the distrust of science in the rest of the country? Does it help you understand it any better? I think the thing that's really nailed home for me is the scientist does not win that argument with logic and data and saying, oh, no, no, no, no, but look, but we controlled for that. No, no, no, look, but we tested that. When that mistrust is there and it's so deep, you're never going to break through that. You have to get it back to a place of shared understanding and working together.

What you're basically saying is that if you want the, science to speak for itself in a place where communities have lost trust in science, you have to build that trust back before you present them with the new science, before you try to get them to change their lives in any way. You have to find a way to connect with each other again. Yeah. I've watched all this footage of these fishery meetings, you know, where regulators and scientists would present an argument, and then fishermen would get up and present their argument, and it just, it always seems like they're talking past each other. There's fish coming in all different sizes.

Talking from baby cartfish to large cart. Take a look at our numbers. It's all we're asking. We're accountable for what we do, and what we do is follow your rules. Where is your accountability? It's bullshit. Because you guys are wrong and you know you're wrong, and no one up here has a ball to admit it.

You're going to hang a bunch of people, and you're all putting your heads down, because you know I'm right. And I think what I see in that is that if you have difficult science that you're trying to communicate, science that's going to affect people's lives and they don't trust it, you do not overcome that mistrust by proving that you are right. You need to somehow incorporate their worldview and their understanding, their curiosity, their knowledge into what you're doing. This one moment I still think about from 2014 when the top regulator from the region went to one of these fishery meetings

where everybody comes together, industry members, scientists. And he gets up there and he gives this plea, really, to everyone gathered there that we have to find a way to understand each other. I do think it points out the continuing need that has existed for gentlemen, generations to build bridges between science and fishermen. Because you can have the best science in the world.

And if there isn't an understanding of that, it just simply doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if people don't believe it. If you want to hear how Carlos Rafael became the codfather in the first place, how he built his empire of fish, and why he thinks he was right to break the law, check out Ian's show The Big Dig. Season 3 is called Catching the Codfather. And if you are into infrastructure or gambling, seasons one and two are excellent as well.

You can find them wherever you listen. This episode was produced and hosted by Noam Hassanfeld, who also wrote the music. It was edited by me, Sally Helm, and Joanna Solitaroff. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch. Julia Longoria and Jorge Just are our editorial directors. Amy Padula and Meredith Hodnott are the fact that Sockye Salmon can navigate using the Earth's magnetic field.

And Bird Pinkerton ran off with the beak beeper, searching for Flapton. It was beeping all over the place. She needed to find a place far away from the sky, far away from all the birds flying overhead, a place where a beep would mean she was close. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about this episode, we are at Unexplanable at Vox.com. Please write to us. If you want to support the show and help us keep making it,

please join our membership program at Vox.com slash members. You will get ad-free podcasts and other perks and unlimited access to Vox journalism. You can also support us by leaving a rating or a review or by telling people in your life to listen to Unexplainable. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back in your feed very soon. Rosen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time.

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