Good evening Ian Obina. Welcome to that would unleash. How are you sir? I'm great. How are you? Yeah very good. Thank you for asking. Maybe for our listeners and viewers maybe you can just let them know exactly what it is you do what keeps you

busy I'm a journalist I'm based in Washington DC and I am the director of the

outlaw ocean project which is a journalism organization that looks at lawlessness at sea around the world, crimes offshore.

Right, I mean this is obviously a huge issue, but it's a very specialized interest.

What may have first caught your eye about this issue?

What made you interested in it?

So I spent 17 years at the New York Times

and the last doing investigative work for them and the last couple years was

spent on a series called the Outlaw Ocean.

My exposure had been, before I was a journalist I was an anthropologist and I'd spend some time on fishing vessels and so I sort of got exposed to the wild world that is.

Yeah, but what kind of things are we typically talking about here in terms of the crimes that take place that see except for most people it was it was a really foreign kind of concept this idea of crime at sea.

What are the main things you would see or that would be flag up for you?

Yeah, I mean, so this reporting began in 2014,

and one of its ambitions was to sort of broaden people's

imagination their understanding of what happens out there. I think traditionally

people think Somali privacy you know plastic

pollution the BP spill these are sort of big headlines that burn their way

into your consciousness you know what what I looked at in the original series and then a book and then a podcast and Doc series and now what we do is repo men of the sea who steal ships on behalf of banks and mortgage lenders, abortion providing at sea and sort of doctors who go to the high seas to evade national laws so as to provide abortions, arms trafficking, human slavery, intentional dumping of oil,

illegal fishing, illegal whaling, you name it, it happens out there.

Wow, God, that is a lot.

So I mean, you say that doctors would go out there to kind of, I suppose, you know, find a way to circumnavigate laws regarding abortion I mean how common is that I mean that sounds

horrendous it's it's not too common and and and depending on your view on the issue it's either horrendous or a life saving, you know,

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