Hey you Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you an episode from the Vault. This one originally aired on June twenty third, twenty twenty two, and it is Rob's interview with Ryan Tucker Jones, author of a book called Red Leviathan, which has to do with whales. And I think we've been doing a lot of whales lately, so it seemed appropriate.
Yeah, and I've referred back to this book a couple of times as well, read Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling. So I thought it'd be a great time to just go ahead and feature this interview once more. Things a really informative one, And here we go.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. This is Robert Lamb. My co host Joe is on leave this week, so I have an interview for you. I recently talked with Ryan Jones of the University of Oregon. His new book is Red Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling.
So this is a fascinating book, and I think we had a fascinating chat about the history, specifically the twentieth century history of whaling and how that factors into Russian history, the history of the Soviet Union, but also global history as well. A word of caution that this interview will of course discuss whaling, which is going to have some graphic details in it, so be advised on that count. But on the other hand, I want to stress that
this will not just be a parade of horrors. There's a lot of interesting historical and cultural information in here as well. So without further ado, let's go straight to the interview. Hi, Ryan, welcome to the show.
Hey Rob, thanks for having me.
So your book concerns whaling, which humans have been engaging in for thousands of years, and yet twentieth century whaling stands out in rather appalling ways. Can you set the scene for us regarding twentieth century whaling and what truly sets it apart from the sort of nineteenth century whaling that many of us are probably familiar with from the likes of Moby Dick.
Yeah, that's right, Rob, I mean nineteenth century whalen, which was dominated by the Americans, was a really low tech enterprise that still managed to manage to sweep nearly the entire Earth Pacific, Indian, Atlantic Ocean, and I had a pretty massive impact on certain whale species like sperm whales. Others it left entirely untouched, especially the fast whales, the big whales that many people will be familiar with, humpback whales, blue whales, fin whales.
Et cetera.
And major parts of the ocean that were just off limits to people working with sale technology, like the Antarctic, which is the place where the most whales used to live at least.
And so twentie central whalen was.
Far I think, far less talked about, far less romanticized about. There is no Herman Melville for the twentieth century industrial era, and yet it was by an order of magnitude more devastating for most whale species. Do you want me to talk a little bit about the technology. I'm mindful of not just going on and on with my answers and new readers.
No, No, I think we'd all love to have a little technological background. My next question, in fact, was going to be about the Stern Slipway and what it was and why it was so essential to modern whaling.
Yeah, I mean the technology.
There was really a major change in the technological implementations of oiling at the end of the nineteenth century, mostly brought about by Norwegians who had been whaling in their near shore waters, but perfected a few things like the exploding harpoon gun, which actually sent a grenade into a whale exploded inside its body, which was far more lethal and far less lethal for humans because they could kill the whale, often with one or two shots, rather than
having to tire it out over a long period of time being attached to this gigantic, dangerous creatures they had in sail whaling. So that was one of the major changes that took place. The other was the stern slipway raw which you just mentioned, and this was a classical industrial piece of technology which allowed whales to be winched on board the whale ship, which really fundamentally changed the
whole industry. It meant that you didn't have to process whales either in the ocean on the side of the ship as you know, as people did in moby Dick for example, or that you even had to go ashore and process whales at shore factories. What this meant was that you could stay out to see with your mother ship, your factory, your factory ship, and just process whales day
after day after day. They'd be brought to you by a fleet of catcher boats taken to the mothership, winched up at the stern slipway, and then a whole team, whole army of industrial workers would process that whale carcass into the products that people in the twentieth century wanted, which increasingly was margarine, you know, butter substitute. That was another technological innovation, the process of hydrogenation, which allowed people as scientists to inject hydrogen.
I better not.
Maybe I won't go so firmly into the details of hydrogenation, but it allowed them to to process whale meat in such a way that it was basically stripped of any fishy flavor. People didn't even know they were eating margarine. They had come from whales oftentimes, and this was the major driver behind twentieth century global industrial whaling.
You also mentioned that this allowed for the processing of the carcass to take place out of sight, right, This made it a little more hidden.
Yeah, that's right. I mean, certainly not for those involved in it. For those involved in it, you know, you could you would see just one hundreds on some days, literally hundreds of whales being processed. But it was it allowed the industry really to take place. Well, first of all,
in the Antarctic. The Antarctics started being hunted in the nineteen tens based on this new technology, and then really peaked in the twenties and thirties, so far away from where any humans lived that you would, you know, you'd get this product margarine with really no sense of what kind of labor, what kind of danger, what kind of slaughter had produced it.
You know.
Previously, I mean, whaling had always taken place pretty far from shore, but it had always been you know, pretty closely connected with shore industry as well, since you know, often process the whales on shore, et cetera. Often hunted whales in many cases that were not that far away from human population. So yeah, it allowed it really changed the industry in a lot of ways, making it in some ways far more mysterious for most people.
And you mentioned too that the twentieth century whaling also it impacted more species of whales as compared to the nineteenth century.
Yeah, you know, whales, a lot of whales are really hard to catch without industrial technology. They're fast, they can standard water for a long period of time, and as with fishing, the twentieth century just saw, you know, a series of innovations that allowed people to overcome the whales ability to escape. First of all, diesel engines, of course, which are so much faster, allowed them to really run
down any species they wanted to. Then sonar, after the Second World War came into greater use airplanes which allowed them to spot you. Often on this mothership would have a helicopter or an airplane, but usually a helicopter pad where helicopters would take off and search the area for whales, tell people where the large agglomerations were that they could chase them down with these really fast ships and then
process them on board. I mean, you know, for whales, you can only imagine this was a obviously devastating suite of technologies. They never faced predators like this on the scale or with this lethality. They were really totally prepared, especially the big ones like blue whales and fin whales, you know, the two largest species on Earth, which really sustained the whaling industry from the nineteen tens through the nineteen sixties.
Yeah, in terms of what it was like for the whales. You described this as the breaking of their quote, cultures and families. Can you describe that a little bit for us?
Yeah? Thanks Rob.
This is one of the things I wanted to do with the book was to I mean, the statistics can be numbing and it feels like an industrial slaughterhouse, which of course it was in a lot of ways. But you know, the whalers were catching wild animals, wild animals that had as you know, scientists are telling us these days, they've done incredible research into whale cultures, the whale emotions,
whale behaviors that you know, whales are complex creatures. They passed down a lot of the information necessary for their lives through cultural transmission. That is, they learn it from the other whales around them. It's not embedded genetically. Certain behaviors,
migration routes, feeding areas, feeding strategies, et cetera. And so it allows us to understand what was happening with this unprecedented onslaught, which was not just the kind of devastation of a population, but also the loss of knowledge amox
whale communities. That we have pretty clear evidence that whales, even as they've rebounded since the end of industrial whaling in the eighties, have failed to recolonize certain areas, places that they used to go to to give birth, the maid, to feed, et cetera, in part because there was just such a loss of cultural knowledge that was part of
this slaughter. You know, you killed so many nursing mothers, for example, right, who have then failed to pass on to their offspring certain important facets of what it meant to be a humpback whale.
And so that's kind of.
Knowledge reverberate that loss reverberates.
Today.
Sperm whale mothers, for example, seem to be far less adapt at keeping their calves alive than they were before whaling. It's surmised that this is one of those knowledge losses that happened as a result of industrial whaling. So we still see the impacts even as whale numbers are rebounding here in the twenty first century.
Now, red Leviathan is the secret history of Soviet whaling, So I'm getting a little bit into the history of Soviet whaling and also just Russian history with whaling. I'm always fascinated by a particular culture relationship with the sea, and you discussed this in the book concerning Russia. So how did Russia historically view the ocean and its resources and how did this impact involvement in whaling.
Yeah, you know, Russia such an interesting place to think about humans relationship to the ocean. You think about Russia, it's this huge land empire, which.
It is, of course, but it also has.
One of the longest coastlines in the world. And Russians have been interacting with wales, you know, for a couple of thousand years, of all sorts of different species in the Pacific and the Arctic and the Baltic, in the Ocean, you name it. The Russians had relationships with whales there. And I mean, I think the important thing for Russians was that they basically missed this period of sale whaling. Well they didn't miss it exactly. They saw themselves as
victims in this period. Americans British dominated that they had the capital to sustain these long distance whaling expeditions. The Russians didn't. They were quite poor compared to Western European and America nations. And so what they saw year after year Americans come into Siberian shores, for example, and doing whatever they wanted, even though this was part of what Russia thought of as their own territory. Americans would come and kill as many whales as they wanted, basically laugh
at any kind of Russian attempts to stop them. They trade with indigenous people, Siberians, who in many cases depended on whales for their own sustenance, Alaskans as well. You know, Russia controlled part of Alaska in the nineteenth century, and you know, from the Russian perspective, it's just outrageous. These capitalists whalers, Yankee whalers as they called them, were destroying
indigenous livelihoods. Russians really actually cared about this. They were destroying whales that Russians would have liked to have made some money off of. And so that really helped shape Russia's major entry into the end industry. They came with it,
you say, a lot of historical baggage into it. And when Russia finally established its own whaling industry in the nineteen thirties under Stalin, Joseph Stalin, they thought of it not just as a way to industrialize the country that was part of it, but as a way to kind of rectify this historical wrong, that their whaling industry was Russia. Finally Russia getting its share and finally able to sort of defend its own oceans against Americans, British and increasing the Norwegians as well.
Now you get into the mystery of wales as well. I was taken by what you shared about the mystery of baleen whales, including a tenth century Russian poem that concluded that these whales fed on quote heavenly fragrances. What are we to make of that?
Yeah, whales are a pretty mysterious creature. They were for humans, well they still are in a lot of ways. You know, they spend ninety nine percent of their life underwater. Humans really only got to know them when they were washed up on shore or once they'd been harpooned, and so, you know, wales lent themselves to a lot of mystery.
And you know, one of the interesting things that I found research in this book is, you know, the really important work that the Soviet Union did, especially as scientists and kind of unraveling some of these mysteries. You know, you read this poem. This was a great indication of the really almost total ignorance of whales that humans had in the tenth century, but really up until the twentieth century in a lot of ways. And you know, the Soviets they killed more whales than any country did after
the Second World War. They also studied wales in greater depth than any other country. They're scientists, were on the whale ships, you know, digging through whale carcasses, watching whales as they were being hunted, using captive dolphins for study. You know, the Soviet Union, as much as any country,
really advanced our knowledge of what wales. Where no one was talking about them feeding on heavenly mists, by the late twentieth century, the Soviets were talking about them nearly going extinct, and they were some of the first understand how deep the crisis was as well.
Yeah, so in this you're getting into what you refer to in the book, is that the challenging contradictions that you encountered and sometimes you're encountering in interviews with Russian whalers and scientists. Can you can you speak to this a little bit?
Yeah, you know, I kim In.
I wrote this book because I was horrified and shocked by a lot of things I've just been talking about the numbers of whales killed, the truth, you know, the pain that whales felt, but you know, to to try to understand this and the role specifically that the Russian Soviet Union played. Of course, I went out and I talked to people who had been on board these whale ships.
I went to Ukraine and went to I went to Moscow and Coliningrad and other places and talk to people who had been part of this, and it was it was hard not to like them, frankly. You know, they're people who not only didn't think at the time that what they were doing was wrong, many of.
Them, some of them did.
I should make that clear that you know, some people were really disturbed by the whaling that they were doing.
Many were not.
And you know, frankly, most people around the world didn't really care that whales were being killed.
For most of the time period.
But you know, not only that, but also that they were you know, they were also really deeply interested in wales, you know, like myself, really fascinated by these creatures. And you know, when I talked to them, I talked to whales scientists. You know, they wanted to talk. They were so you know, they wanted to relive their experiences with whales.
They expressed sympathy for these creatures, fascination for them. You know, I met some of really the greatest whale scientists, probably the twentieth century, people who are still who still really care about whales, who tried to blow the whistle in the Soviet Union about some of the illegal whaling that was taking place, and some of them turned out to be,
you know, as you said, challenge contradictions. You know, one of the whale scientists that I really relied on for a lot of the information for this books living in Odessa and Ukraine now and you know, has been emailing me telling me he can't wait for Russia to come free Ukraine from the Nazis. You know, he's a deep Russian patriot who really regrets the demise of the Soviet Union as well. You know, people who's not not easy to pigeon hold them into easy dichotomies that we often fall into.
And looking at Russia, so we touched a little bit already on the history of Russian whaling and their relationship with the resources of the sea prior to the twentieth century. But then what other reasons they're pushing the Soviet Union then to pursue industrial whaling so strongly during a time when other countries are dropping out of the practice.
Yeah, that was the crazy thing about this, and the King really came through heartbreaking details. I was reading scientists reports. You know, the Soviet Union really expanded their whaling presence in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties, just at a time, as you say, Rob, when the Norwegians were starting to drop out, the British were starting to drop out, the Dutch were starting to drop out, The US wasn't whaling anymore. Everyone saw the writing on the wall.
The large profitable whales wiped out. You know, they're gone. It's not going to pay. And you know, the Soviet Union, they had a real belief in the power of science. You know, this was a society that was had thrown off God, thrown off religion. It was going to rely on the expertise of people who weren't subject to those kinds of those kinds of superstitions. You know, they were going to integrate all kind of economic planning with experts.
So they had a real belief that they were actually going to be really more responsible environmentally than other countries, So it was it was just bizarre to read, you know that they when the Soviet Union under Nikita Krushev was thinking about building they thought about building nine new factories floating factories in the nineteen fifties, which was, you know, was going to make them the biggest whaling country on earth. And they asked their scientists, is this a good idea?
Every scientist said, now, they said, look, the oceans are in crisis, and they really were in the in the nineteen fifties. It's easy to forget just how we had exploited whale and fish stocks at that time really recklessly. And Soviet scientists understood this perfectly. They were seeing it happen on board to a man, and they were all men at that time. They advised the Soviet economic planners like, don't do this, this is crazy. And what did they do?
They said, Okay, instead of nine, were build seven. They built seven new factory fleets, which you know, dwarfed everyone except the Japanese at a time.
As I said, when people.
Were getting out of this industry justified logic, and it
led to the predictable disaster. You know, the Soviets having built these these huge fleets found that there weren't whales to catch, so they started catching the last of the whales that were prohibited, you know, and they really, you know, the special contribution that the Soviets made was catching those last few whales of the species that really didn't make any economic sense to catch the Soviets for the Soviets, though they had the capacity.
They did it.
They wiped out almost the last of the humpback whales in the southern hemisphere, the last of the southern right whales. So you know, it's it's hard to read that stuff, and it really feels like a kind of a tragic failure of the Soviet belief that science would really make
them able to operate more effectively in the world. You know, they it could have worked, you know, the scientists told them the right thing, and they ended up ignoring the advice, really, you know, to the great tragedy of the whales around the world.
But they did end up sending scientists out on these ships as well.
Yeah.
Oh, the Soviet Union had the largest net of whales scientists really in the world, and so they understood probably better than any country in the world what you know, exactly how deep the crisis was with the world's whales's that's the that's the difficult contradiction here.
So there were there were international quotas at the time, though, right, how did this play into Soviet whaling activity at the time?
Yeah, right, So you know, Soviet Union was one of the original signatories to the International Whaling Convention that established in the National Whaling Commission in nineteen forty six, and they'd agreed to abide by quotas. Quotas which at first were kind of laughably generous. They wanted to make sure that whalers were still profitable, but became increasingly restrictive over the years, and especially in the nineteen sixties. They had
some real teeth in them. And the same the Union pretended to abide by those quotas, they would come back and every year whale nations would have to report how many whales they'd killed at the at the meeting of THEWC, and so an you would do this, they'd make their reports and they started falsifying them in the nineteen fifties, at first overstating the number of whales that they'd killed, in part because they wanted to look like they were bigger whalers than they were, in part because you know,
they wanted to establish a precedent for having killed this many. But then after they built these big fleets, they realized, you know, we can't abide by any of this stuff. We're to make any money from this at all, We're
going to have to cheat wildly, and they did. And so throughout the late fifties and sixties, they'd come back from the Antarctic and say we killed three hundred and fifty humpback whales and they'd killed twelve thou you know, that kind of just devastating numbers, which flummoxed people around
the world. You know, whales scientists in Australia and New Zealand who were monitoring local populations that migrated down to the Antarctic starting in fifty nine, they saw that suddenly there were no whales coming back and they couldn't understand why. They said, well, maybe there's some cheating going on, but we'd have to, you know, there'd have to be tens of thousands of missing whales to explain what's happening. No
one's cheating like that. But actually, the Soviets were was an unbelievable crime, really was a tragedy, of course, not only for whales, but you know, for those who were studying and cared about them, one that wasn't unraveled until the nineteen nineties, you know, about thirty forty years later. It was thanks to those same Soviet scientists who who
were really upset by this, kept their own figures. They kept the real numbers, in part because they hated to see their science messed up by the fake numbers, and in part because they really cared about the future of whale stocks. And thanks to them, we actually know the extent of what was going on.
Now, could you take us to a pivotal point in the international reaction to Soviet whaling, the one that you touch on several different times in the book, and that's the green Peace protest in nineteen seventy five.
Yeah, you know, green Peace people are putty familiar with the organization. It's still around, of course, an important environmentalist organization, but they really got their start as an anti whaling group.
They tried some anti nuclear actions that were only mildly successful in the early seventies, but seventy five they hit on this strategy of going out to the open ocean and locating whaling fleets and coming between them and their prey, trying to stop them from killing whales, and of course most importantly photographing this all video recording it and letting the world know, letting the world see just how brutal industrial whaling was, just how awful it was to see
these whales being killed. And so some of the green piece called mind bomb crafting an image that would be so powerful that it would immediately sway global opinion, and they were pretty successful with this. This was a groove, groundbreaking moment in the history of global environmentalism, and it
was the Soviets that they decided added to target. It was one Soviet ship out of the Russian Siberian port of Vladivostok that they located in June nineteen seventy five, and was a ship that had just been warned by Soviet authorities and especially Soviet scientists not to take undersized
sperm whales. Soviets were really nervous about that publicity that was caught red handed by Greenpeace in this moment, taking sperm whales just off the coast of California that were really small infants, really young sperm whales, maybe not infants, and this was, you know, for the Soviets as well, one of the turning points. You know, they the negative press that they got was really pretty pretty devastating for them. They didn't end whaling right away, but one could point
to the green Peace confrontations. It's really the beginning of the end for Soviet and industrial whaling as a whole.
Now, how much of that came through to the Russian people at that time or were they more or less cut off from any.
Of this in the media.
Yeah, you know, the Soviet Union did its best to hide the confrontation from the Soviet people, but they had access to Western media, western radio reports, to television.
They could get some of that.
And you know, one of the things that was I found really interesting in the book was to trace Russian popular opinion around whaling, and it was really changing as well by the nineteen seventies. You know, I give green Piece a ton of credit for saving the loss of the whales, but there it's not the whole story. And the whole story really does connect to some of these things. Soviet scientists, who by the nineteen seventies were publishing a
lot of their research in for domestic consumption. Soviet people love to read about the ocean. They were totally intrigued by it and this they they loved to read these popular scientific accounts, and what they were reading was was really changing. By the seventies, Soviet scientists were in some ways kind of similarly to the West, kind of rethinking what whales were. And a lot of the popular publications at the time we're talking about wales as humans best friend.
You know, their their their gentle creatures, They're useful, their you know, dolphins are really loyal to humans like dogs like this is one of the things that Soviet scientists
were saying, and people were reading about. Some of the Soviet Union's indigenous authors, people from Jakotka, God by the name of Urrit Hugh in particular, was writing novels that really talked about wales from an indigenous perspective as sentient, intelligent creatures, and so Soviet people really gaining this really different view of wales and it led them to question their own industry, even aside from what Greenpeace was doing,
and it comes to quite clearly. They wrote letters to members of the Bolshevik Party, the Communist Party, demanding, for example, that the dolphin hunt be ended, which the Soviet Union did ended in nineteen sixty six, well before the United States ended marine mammal hunting in nineteen seventy two, and then increasingly letters to newspapers, you know, saying, hey, look are we really adhering to the IWC conventions? Are we
going to end whaling? What's going on here? And a lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to endus well, And that's a big part of the That has to be part of the explanation for why the Soviet Union ultimately agreed in nineteen eighty seven to stop industrial whaling. A it's a combination of Western environmentalists and some pressure from Russian people at home too.
And did the did the economic aspects of it play into it at all? Or was that or was the whaling industry kind of in the Soviet Union kind of insulated from like market forces.
Yeah, they it did play a role, you know, Soviet Wales. It's unclear if they ever made any money off of it. Another the like, I don't know, tragedy in some way. If they'd really cared about profits, they never would have
built those huge fleets in the sixties. But the Soviet Union was entering into an economic crisis by the seventies, and so these industries like the whaling industry, which were lavishly financed people make great salaries in whaling, they begin to seem like more of a problem as the Soviet economy as a whole was slowing and then by the early eighties really lurching into a crisis, and so the
economics did play a role. Yeah, so it was, you know, the Soviets, like the Japanese by the early eighties were catching really small whales in comparison to the earlier catches, minky whales mostly and some sperm whales. Minkys are you know, twenty thirty foot whale, and that's a lot less whale product than you got from an eighty to two hundred foot blue whale back in the nineteen fifties.
So there, that was a part of and they were.
Trying to economize on fuel and definitely played a role in getting rid of the Soviet whaling industry, but it had a long history of operating without much attention to profits or losses. So yeah, it is, it is part of the explanation, but it's definitely not the whole explanation.
So why are Soviets barely a part of the history of whaling, as you discussed in the book, despite playing such a you know, obviously significant role in it.
Yeah, you know, I.
Mean part of it is because sobjects were pretty secretive about what they were doing. Part of it is this period of industrial whaling. Yeah, but I don't think people really like to think back on it that much. It was a it was a grizzly history. It was a
depressing history, there's no question about it. But I think, you know, maybe most of all this, you know, the Soviet Union, despite producing this really top notch research, despite killing so many whales, and there're scientists, weren't allowed to travel around the world share their research, at least not until the nineteen late seventies and early eighties, and so a lot of what they were doing just the world didn't.
Know about, for better or for worse.
And you know, that's that's part of what I wanted to do with this book, was to bring that back into global attention and you know, account you know for the destruction that the Soviet Union reeked on our oceans, and you know, I should mention that. Look, it's not like just like they were doing this, you know, in
some far away corner of the Earth. One of the things that struck me was, you know that when I went to the ocean as a kid in the North Pacific on the coast of California and Oregon, you know, the lack of whales there. Well, this was part of the Soviet Union's legacy. They were killing whales just offshore, as were the Japanese, you know, as had American wheeling
stations as well. Sovie Union was impacting my own history here, so I thought it was really important to understand how and why it had done this on you know, for the for the globe, not just for those interests in Russia, but also to give you know, to give the Soviets there due especially in the way that they advanced our
knowledge of wales. They made really important contributions. We wouldn't understand whales the way we do without the work of their scientists, who did, you know, really incredible stuff, not just an understanding whale behavior, which was their main focus, but also in keeping the records that we have today of exactly how many whales were killed in the twentieth century as well.
Yeah, I want to stress to our readers that even though the subject matter is grim in many in many cases, like the book is not just one endless horror show. You know, there's there's so much fascinating content about the people involved, the cultures involved in the uh, in the in the science of whales. So I want to I want to stress that to everyone. And and also you you do specifically mention you know that there is there is light in an otherwise dark taiale.
Right, I appreciate that, Rob. Yeah, so you know the book, the book does chronicle a lot of whales being killed. Yeah, this is fundamentally kind of a I mean, I turned one chapter of the Whale Genocide. This is the story of a number of species of creatures which it really flourished on this planet for a long time, carved out a really successful nis for themselves, really suddenly facing extermination.
And part of the book is, you know, it's chronicle in that and trying to understand how whales did survive through this.
If barely. But the other part of it, Rob is accactive.
As you say, you know, it's a people lived rich lives even as they were you know, destroying these creatures. And actually, you know, the Soviet whaling industry allows us to kind of look at, you know, some of the really really messed up, cynical aspects of Soviet life, but also some of the great dreams that people had and some of the ways that they really found meaning in the communist project through their own work, through adventure and
the ocean, you know, through through real scientific accomplishment. You know, there's I use this story as a way to think about what life was like in the Soviet Union, all all of it's really horrible and wonderful aspects and like like any human society, and I had both, and it comes out pretty clearly in the way that people made, you know, some really really meaningful lives for themselves aboard whaleships, getting to see the world, getting to know these creatures
that they were killing in really unsurpassed detail.
And also you.
Know, the real pain that a lot of whalers themselves experience trying to reconcile all the great experiences they were having with the with the fact that they were destroying these families of wales.
Uh.
And they couldn't they couldn't get you know, they couldn't overlook that fact.
All right.
The book is red Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling. It's out now in physical and digital formats. We've we've been chatting with Ryan Tucker Jones. Ryan, thank you for coming on the show.
Rob, Thanks for having me.
All right. Thanks once more to Ryan Tucker Jones for chatting with me about the new book, Red Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling. You can get it right now in physical or digital formats. Uh. Definitely, if you're if you're interested in anything that we discussed in this episode, definitely pick up a copy of this book. It's a
wonderful read. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our core episodes published every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Mondays, you'll find our listener mail episodes. On Wednesdays, we tend to put out a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and just
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