Chad Kirchner (00:00)
This is some bonus content that we recorded prior to episode 2 and is available normally to Patreon members and channel members at the commander rank or higher. That's at patreon.com slash starbase80. Thought it was a good conversation so wanted to share it with all of you, If you like it, do consider becoming a member at patreon.com slash starbase80. We won't be doing this all that often but

Again, it was a good conversation. I think that you'll all enjoy.

Andrew Thaler (00:29)
1985 whaling was still very much a significant industry. The Soviets had been lying about their catches for about 30 years and we were just discovering just how many whales they'd actually killed. Japan's fleets were ramping up and like,

Chad Kirchner (00:29)
And remember, watch.

Benjamin Hunting (00:38)
Yeah.

Andrew Thaler (00:47)
The International Whaling Commission wasn't really a thing then, it was just getting started. And so like, that really was like a pivotal moment for like public consciousness about whales to be that much in the forefront.

Benjamin Hunting (01:00)
The Chicago ⁓ University Press put out a book maybe like four or five years ago called Read the Viathan. Did you read that? About it's the secret history of Soviet whaling. is, it is a horror show to read.

Andrew Thaler (01:07)
Mm-mm. No.

yeah.

Yeah, was, ⁓ Soviets were not nice to whales. We were not nice to whales either, but, but our heyday of whaling, had much less technology. So.

Chad Kirchner (01:19)
No.

Benjamin Hunting (01:23)
Exactly. wasn't

Chad Kirchner (01:24)
Good.

Benjamin Hunting (01:24)
a fully

mechanized floating industry at that point.

Andrew Thaler (01:27)
Yeah, sometimes

the whales won.

Chad Kirchner (01:29)
Well, YouTube channel, the animation one, can never pronounce the German name right. It's the internet show. You would know it if saw it. They just started an quote unquote after dark channel where they're covering more historical stuff. And they just talked a little bit about ⁓ China like 1800s whaling there. That's really kind of fascinating. ⁓

in talking about how, you know, how whaling kind of started for the industrialized kind of world and how the US and the West wanted in on it. ⁓ yeah, Commodore Perry's brother, Commodore Perry.

Benjamin Hunting (02:12)
I'm action.

Chad Kirchner (02:16)
There's two Commodore Perrys, which I didn't learn until later in life. The one that didn't win the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812 actually used force in China to open ⁓ fishing ports and shipping ports in Southeast Asia, in like Macau and that kind of area. So yeah, yeah.

Andrew Thaler (02:18)
yeah.

Yeah.

Benjamin Hunting (02:39)
Japan as well. I think Incidentally,

I just realized that I'm you can't really see it. I'm wearing a sea shepherd belt right now. I Don't know if that makes this officially a terrorist podcast but

Andrew Thaler (02:47)
Excellent!

Chad Kirchner (02:47)
was just gonna,

I was just gonna ask. ⁓

I've said mean things about the US government, so I'm already a terrorist.

Benjamin Hunting (02:56)
Depends where you're

Andrew Thaler (02:57)
there.

Benjamin Hunting (02:57)
listening to this from, I guess.

Andrew Thaler (03:00)
Also at sea we call them pirates.

Chad Kirchner (03:03)
Yes. Speaking of the Sea Shepherd, is Japan still whales? they not?

Benjamin Hunting (03:09)
yeah.

Andrew Thaler (03:10)
They, so they still

maintain a fleet. Yeah, they, they have officially pulled out of the international whaling commission. That happened in like 2018 or 2019. ⁓ practically speaking, whales are not all that popular in Japan. Well, whales are popular. ⁓ whaling is not all that popular in Japan. ⁓ and really hasn't been like Japanese whaling is a U S industry. It was.

Benjamin Hunting (03:13)
for research purposes only.

Chad Kirchner (03:14)
Right,

yeah.

Benjamin Hunting (03:25)
Is

Andrew Thaler (03:39)
post-World War II in an attempt to kind of rebuild their industrial ⁓ economy, we gave them the ships and we basically created the industry for them. ⁓ We being United States of America for those listening who aren't, you know, the three of us. ⁓ But, ⁓ you know, traditional whaling in Japan, it's not like a deep, long tradition. It's really just the last three generations ⁓ for industrial whaling. There's coastal whaling and most coastal.

civilizations have had whaling throughout their history. But the industrial whaling was never particularly popular except at the upper level of the government as an ⁓ economic driver and a diplomatic driver. Japan used whaling as a diplomatic wedge issue for a lot of other things. ⁓ But mostly what they did was they sold their whale meat to Iceland and ⁓ the Nordic countries because it wasn't all that popular in Japan.

Benjamin Hunting (04:36)
Is Norway still whaling?

Andrew Thaler (04:37)
Norway whales a little bit. I think they have four or five boats maybe and not nearly at large scale. Iceland has a whaling fleet. There's been a bunch of legal challenges recently. I don't think they've gone out in the last two or three years. Generally speaking, the era of industrial whaling is not over over, but largely over.

Benjamin Hunting (05:02)
The craziest thing about the Soviet industrial whaling is that it was entirely unnecessary. And it was, it was a product of the command economy because they had all the products that were being produced by commercial whaling had been replaced within the Soviet Union. Many, many, many years, decades before they ended their, their own.

wailing fleet operations. And yet, because of the way their economy was structured, there were all of these incentives for these fleets to continue to exist and continue to meet these completely arbitrary quotas that were in no way tied to the use of whale products in Soviet or Russian society. It's really insane.

Andrew Thaler (05:41)
Yeah, it's, I mean, the whole industry, up until, you know, the Nantucket whaling industry was pretty much dead by the time the Industrial Revolution kicked over. Like, whale oil was not mostly a lubricant, it was mostly used for illumination. And it smelled terrible, like, you don't really, I've smelled sperm oil candles, they're horrifying. It's, yeah.

Benjamin Hunting (06:01)
and was super hard and expensive to get, know,

compared to any other form of ⁓ oil.

Chad Kirchner (06:06)
And I mean,

for the people going out, incredibly dangerous too. You know, lucrative, but.

Andrew Thaler (06:09)
yeah. But that was the first global

Benjamin Hunting (06:09)
Sure. Yeah.

Andrew Thaler (06:12)
industry was Nantucket whaling. ⁓ was a weird ⁓ kind of infamous rumor that had been going around for years and years and years that ⁓ because of some of the unique properties of sperm ⁓ whale oil, ⁓ it was used in spacecraft. So the last

Chad Kirchner (06:16)
and tuck it with.

Andrew Thaler (06:37)
commercial use of sperm whale oil was in the space shuttle because it behaves differently in low temperature and in vacuum that Yeah, so it didn't actually NASA had to put out a whole thing It was like early internet viral fact that someone got excited about NASA had to put out a press release being like this isn't true We don't know where it came from ⁓ In the early days of my science blogging. We actually tracked down the origin of this rumor ⁓

Benjamin Hunting (06:45)
That's what took down Columbia. was just this reliance of.

Andrew Thaler (07:04)
And the origin of the rumor is because one of the main suppliers of lubricants for NASA was a company ⁓ called Ni-Lubricants, NYE, ⁓ which was originally a whaling company. It's an old ⁓ New Bedford whaling company that at the end of the age of whaling, they just pivoted to synthetic lubricants and continued on. And so NASA did have contracts with a company that was like...

Chad Kirchner (07:26)
Sure.

Andrew Thaler (07:31)
at that point called like Nye Whaling Lubricant Co. ⁓ But the fascinating, the real fun little hitch in that whole story is that the last scion of the Nye family of this great whaling company is Bill Nye, the science guy.