Red Leviathan, with Ryan Tucker Jones

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 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 of horrors. Uh. 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. 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 whaling, which was dominated by the Americans, was a really low tech enterprise that still managed to manage to sweep nearly the entire Earth specific Indian Atlantic Ocean, and i had a pretty massive impact on certain whale species like sperm way else others it left entirely untouched, especially the fast whales, the big whales that many people be

familiar with, humpback whales, blue whales, fin whales, etcetera. And major parts of the ocean that were just off limits to people working with sale technology, like the Antarctic, which is is the place where the most whales used to live at least. And so twenty centure whalen was 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 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 your readers. No, No, I think we'd we'd all have to to have a little technological background at 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 whaling 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, you know, sentti 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. Rabich you just mentioned, and uh, this was a classical industrial piece of technology which allowed whale 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 on this in the ocean on the side of the ship, as you know, as people did in 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 your mother ship, your factory um, 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 mother ship, 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 was margarine um, you know, butter substitute. That was another technological in a Asian the process of hydrogenation, which allowed people a scientist

to inject hydrogen. I better not maybe I would go so firmly into the details of hydrogenation, but it allowed them to uh to process whale meat in such a way that it was basically stripped of any um, fishy flavor. People didn't even know they're eating margarine um that come from whales oftentimes, and this was the major driver behind the 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 was made a little more hidden. Yeah, that's right. I mean, certainly not for those involved in it. For those involved in it, um, you know, you could you would see just hundreds on some days, literally hundreds of of whales being processed. But it was it allowed the industry really to take place well,

first of all, in the Antarctic. The Antarctic started being hunted in the nineteen tens based on this new technology UM, 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, this margarine, with really no sense of what kind of labor um, what kind

of danger, what kind of slaughter had produced it. You know, were 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 processed the whales. It's 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 um you know, some ways far more mysterious for most people. And you mentioned to the twentieth century whaling also it impacted more species of way old stra as compared to the nineteenth century. Yeah, you know, whales, A lot of whales are really hard to catch without industrial technology. They're they're fast, they can standard water for a long period

of time. And as with fishing, the twenties century just saw a series of innovations that allowed people to overcome uh, you know, the whales ability to escape. First of all, diesel engines of course, which are so much faster, allowed them to to really run down any species they wanted to. Uh. Then sonar after the Second World War came into greater

use airplanes which allowed them to spot you. Often on this mother ship would have a helicopter or an airplane, but usually a helicopter pad where helicopters would take off and search the area for whales, telp people where the large agglomerations were. Then they could chase them down with these really fast ships and then process them on board. I mean for whales, you can only imagine this was

a obviously devastating suite of technologies. They never faced predators like this um on this scale or with this lethality. They were really totally unprepared, 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 tiens through the sixties. Yeah, in terms of what it was like for the whales, you described this as the breaking of their their quote, cultures and families.

Can you uh describe that a little bit for us? Yeah, thanks for rop. This is one of things I wanted to do with the book. Was it was to mean the statistics can be numbing and it feels like an industrial slaughter house, 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 and 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 um, the other whales around them. It's not embedded genetically certain behaviors, migration routes, feeding areas, feeding strategies, etcetera. 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 but

also the loss of of knowledge amongst 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, to maid, to feed, etcetera, in part because there was just such a 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. Uh. And so that that's kind of knowledge reverberate that loss reverberates today. Uh. Sperm whale mothers, for examples, seem to be far less adapted keeping their calves alive than they

were before whaling. It surmised that this is one of those knowledge losses that that happened as a result of industrial whaling. So we still see the impacts even as whale numbers are rebounding here in the twenty one century. Now, Redd Levithan is the Secret History of Soviet whaling, So I'm getting a little bit into the history of Soviet whaling and all. So just the 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 their involvement in whaling. Yeah, you know, Russia, but it's such an interesting place to think about humans relationship to the ocean. You know, 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 whales, you know, for a couple of thousand years of all sorts of different species, and the Pacific in the Arctic, and the Baltic in the Ocean, you name it. The Russians had had relationships with whales there, and I mean, I think the important thing for Russians was that they basically missed this period of sail 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, you know, quite poor compared to Western European and America nations. And so what they saw is year after year Americans coming to Siberian shores, for example, um and doing whatever they wanted, even though this was part of what Russia thought of

as their own territory. Americans would come in and kill as many whales as they wanted, basically laugh at in any kind of Russian attempts to stop them. They trade with indigenous people, uh 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 is just outrageous. They these capitalist whalers, Yankee whalers as they call them, We're

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 industry. They came with a you could say a lot of historical baggage into it.

And when when Russia finally established its own whaling industry in the nineteen thirties, and you Stalin, Joseph Stalin, uh, 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 the mystry of whales as well. I was taken by what you shared about the mystery of baleen whales, including a tenth century Russian poem that concluded that the the these whales fed on quote heavenly fragrances. What are we to make of that? Yeah, whales are pretty mysterious creatures. They were for humans, well they still are in a lot of ways. You know, they spend

of their life underwater. Humans really only got to know them when they were washed up on shore or once they've been harpooned, and so that, you know, whales lent themselves to a lot of mystery. Um. And 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 you read this poem, this was a great indication of the really almost total ignorance of whales they 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 after the Second World War. They also studied whales in greater depth than any other country did their way. Their scientists were on the whale ships, you know,

digging through whale carcases, watching whales as they were being hunted. Uh, using captive dolphins for study, you know, the Soviet Union as much as any country, really advanced our knowledge of what whales. Where no one was talking about them feeding on Heavenly miss by the late twentieth century, the Soviets were talking about them nearly going extinct, and they were some of the first to understand how deep the crisis

was as well. Yeah. So, and this you're getting into into what you refer to in the book, is that the challenging contradictions that you encountered 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 came and I wrote. I wrote this book because I it was horrified and shocked by a lot of things. I've just been talking about, the numbers of whales killed,

the you know, the pain that wales 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 whales ships. I went to Ukraine and I went to I went to Moscow and Colen and Grad and other places and talked to people who had been part of this and it was. It was hard not

to like them. Frankly, you know, they're there are people who not only didn't think at the time that what they were doing was wrong, many of them, um, 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 not only that, but also that they were you know, they were also really deeply interested in whales, you know, like myself, really fascinated by these creatures. And uh, you know when I talked to them, I talked to whale scientists, you know, they they they wanted to talk. They they were so um, 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 really who still really care about whales, who who had tried to blow the whistle uh in the Soviet Union about some of the the illegal whaling that was taking place, and some of them turned out to be Um,

you know, as you said, Chaney contradictions. Uh, you know, one of one of the whale scientists that I really relied on for a lot of the information for these books living in Odessa in Ukraine now and um, you know, it's 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're not not easy to to pigeonhole them into easy dichotomies

that we often fall into. And looking at Russia, so we touched a little bit already on the like the history of of Russian whaling and their relationship with the resources of the sea prior to the twentieth century. But then what other reasons are 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 that came 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 see, 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 waling anymore. Everyone saw the writing on the wall. Look the large profitable whales, We've wiped it out. You know, they're gone.

It's it's not gonna pay. And you know, the Soviet Union, they 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 uh, those kinds of superstitions. You know. They were going to integrate all kinds of economic planning with

x 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 that they were the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev, I was thinking about building. They thought about building nine new factories floating factories in the in the nineteen fifties, UM which was you know, was going to

make them the biggest whaling country on Earth. And they asked their scientists and it was just a good idea. Every scientist sit now, they said, like 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 um whale and fish stocks at that time really recklessly. And Soviet scientists understood this perfectly. They were they were seeing it happened on board to a to a man,

and they were all men at that time. They they advised the Soviet economic planners like, don't do this, it's crazy. And what did they do? They said, Okay, instead of nine, will build seven. They built seven new factory fleets UM, which you know, dwarf everyone except the Japanese at a time, as I said, when people were getting out of this industry justified logic, uh, and it led to predictable disaster.

You know. The Soviets, having built these these huge fleets, UH, 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 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, uh, 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 um, you know, it's it's it's hard to read that stuff, and it it really feels like, um, a kind of a tragic failure of the Soviet belief that's that science would really make them able to to operate more effectively in the world.

You know, they could have worked now the scientists told them the right thing, and they ended up ignoring the advice, really 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 said, you know, they understood probably better than any country in the world, what you know, exactly how deep the crisis

was with the world's whales. And that's that's the that's the difficult contradiction here. So they were they were international quotas at the time though, right, Um, how did how did this playing into Soviet whaling activity at the time. Yeah, right, So, you know, the Soviet Union was one of the original signatories to the International Whaling UH Convention that established the National Whaling Commission in six and they had agreed to abide by quotas quota which at first were kind of

laughably generous. Um, they wanted to make sure that whalers were still profitable, but became increasingly restrictive over the years, and especially in the nineteen sixties that they had some real teeth in them, and the Soviet Union pretended to

abide by those quotas. They would come back and every year whalen nations would have to report how many whales they'd killed that they at the medium of the IBC, and so the Union would do this, they'd make their reports and they started falsifying them in the nineteen fifties. At first overstayed in the number of whales that they'd killed, in part because they wanted to uh to look like they were bigger whalers than they were, in part because they you know, they wanted to establish a precedent for

having killed this MANI. But then after they built these big fleets. They realized, you know, we we can't abide by any of the stuff. Um, we're to make any money from this at all, we're gonna have to cheat wildly, and they did. Uh. And so throughout the late fifties and sixties. Uh, they'd come back from the Antarctic and say we killed three huntback whales and they'd killed twelve. You know that kind of just devastating numbers, which flemmixed

people around the world. You know, whale scientists in Australia, New Zealand who are monitoring local populations that migrated down to the Antarctic starting in fifty nine, they they saw that suddenly there were no whales coming back and they couldn't understand why. They well, maybe there's some cheating going on. Uh, 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.

It was an unbelievable crime. Really was was a tragedy. Of course, no for whales, but um, 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, and they 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, uh, the extent of what was going on. Now, could you take us to a pivotal point in the 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 n Yeah. You know, green Peace people are quitty familiar with the with the organizations still around, of course, an important environmentalist organization, but they

really cut their start as an anti whaling group. They tried some anti nuclear actions that were only mildly successful in the early seventies, but they hit on this, 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 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 how awful it was to see these whales being killed. And so what's something Greenpeace called mind bomb um crafting an image that would be so powerful that it would immediately sway global opinion. And they were pretty successful with this. Uh, this was kind of groundbreaking moment in the history of global environmentalism. And it was the

Soviets that they decided to target. It was one Soviet ship out of the Russian Siberian port of Lativo stock that they located in June, and um was a ship that had just been warned by Soviet authorities and especially

Soviet scientists not to take under sized sperm whales. UM. Soviets were really nervous about bad publicity that was caught red handed by green Pace in this moment, taking sperm whales just off the coast of California that were really small, um infants, really young spring whales, maybe not infants, And uh, this was, you know, for the Soviets as well, one of the turning points, you know. They the negative press that they got was was really pretty um, pretty devastating

for them. They didn't end whaling right away, but one could point to the Greenpeace confrontations. It's really the beginning of the end for Soviet and industrial whaling um 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 many 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, a Western radio reports, television, Um, they could get some of that. And Yeah, 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 of ton of credit for for saving the loss of the whales, but they're that's it's not the it's not the whole story. And the whole story really does connect to some of these same Soviet scientists who by the nineteen seventies were publishing a lot of their research in you know, for domestic consumption. Soviet people love to read about the ocean. Um. They were

totally intrigued by it. Uh, and this they love. They love 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 whales as humans best friend. You know, they're they're they're gentle creatures. Uh, they're useful. Their dolphins are really loyal to humans, like

like dogs. Like. This is one of the things that Soviet scientists were saying and people were reading about. Uh. Some of the Soviet Union's indigenous authors, people from Chakota Guy by the name of Your Red Hue in particular, was was writing novels that really talked about whales from

an indigenous perspective as sentient, um intelligent creatures. And so Soviet people, uh really gaining this 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 quick quite clearly. They wrote letters to um 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, uh will before the United States ended marine mammal hunting in nineteen seventy two, and then increasingly letters to the 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? Putting a lot of pressure on the Soviet Union to end this way and that that's a big part of the That has to be part of the explanation for why the Soviet Union ultimately agreed in to stop industrial whaling. It's a it's a combination of Western environmentalists and 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 into the Soviet Union kind of insulated from like market forces. Yeah, they did. It did play a role, um, you know, Soviet whale It's unclear if they ever made any money off of it. In another the like, I don't know, tragedy in some way. Um if if they really care 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 it's 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. Uh, minkies are you know, twenty thirty ft whale and that's a lot less whale product than you got from eighty to h foot blue whale back in the nineties fifties. So 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. Um, but it hadn't 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 Soviets were pretty secretive about what they were doing. Uh. Part of it

is this period of industrial whaling. Um. Yeah, but I don't think people really like to think back on it that much. It was 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 their 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 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 mentioned there. Look, it's not like just like they were doing this in some far away corner of the yearth One of the things that struck me was, you know, when I went to the Ocean as a kid, and 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 whaling stations as well. Um, but the Soviet Union was impacted my own history here, so I thought it was really important to to understand how and why it had done this on you know, for the for the globe, not just for those interested in Russia, but also to give you know, to give the Soviets there do especially in the way that they advanced our

knowledge of whales. Uh, they made really important contributions. We wouldn't understand whales the way we do without the work of their scientists, um, who did really incredible stuff, not not not just an understanding whale behavior, which was their main focus, but also in in keeping the records that we have today of of exactly how many whales were

killed in the twentieth century as well. Yeah, I want to stress to it to our readers that even though the subject matter is is grim and 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 and and in the in the science of whales UM. 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 tale, 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. UM carved out a really successful niche 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, Roberts Calculus, you say, you know it's a UM people lived rich lives even as they were, you know, destroying these creatures and and actually, you know, the Soviet whaling industry allows us to kind of look at you know, some of the really really um 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 uh in the communist project through their

own work, through adventure UM and the ocean. You know,

they've through through real scientific accomplishment. You know, there's I used this story as a way to 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 up pretty clearly in the way that people made um you know, some really really meaningful lives for themselves aboard whales ships, getting to see the world, getting to know

these creatures that they were killing, um in really unsurpassed detail. Uh. And also you know the real pain that a lot of whalers themselves experienced trying to reconcile all the great experiences they were having with the with the fact that they were destroying these families of whales. Uh. And they couldn't they couldn't get they couldn't overlook that fact. All right. The book is read Leviathan, The Secret History of Soviet Whaling. It's out now in physical and digital formats. Um, we've

we've been chatting with Ryan Tucker Jones. Ryan, thank you for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, all right, Thanks once more to Ryan Tucker Jones for chatting with me about the new book, Read 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 were 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 Monday's you'll find our listener mail episodes. On Wednesday's we tend to put out a short form artifact or monster fact episode, and on Friday's we set aside most serious concerns and just talk about the weird film. Uh. Thanks as always to

Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing this episode. And if you want to Get in touch with us about anything this episode, future episodes, past episodes. You can do so by emailing us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind's production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or where every listening to your favorite shows. Bigger fourt