Extra: A Modern Whaler Speaks Up (Update) | Freakonomics Radio

Bjørn Andersen has killed hundreds of minke whales. He tells us how he does it, why he does it, and what he thinks would happen if whale-hunting ever stopped. (This bonus episode is a follow-up to our series “Everything You Never Knew About Whaling (https://freakonomics.com/podcast-tag/everything-you-never-knew-about-whaling/).”) You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/a-modern-whaler-speaks-up-update/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: http://eepurl.com/bKm0cf

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. We just republished a three-part series called Everything You Never Knew About Whaling. We spoke with economists, historians, Moby Dick scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop whale hunting. We also tried to speak with a whale hunter, but public sentiment against whaling is so strong that most modern whalers don't want to speak with the press. Also, there just aren't that many whalers around anymore. In the 1960s, at the peak of industrial whale hunting, thousands of whalers in more than a dozen countries were killing tens of thousands of whales a year. Today, commercial whaling happens in only three countries: Norway, Iceland,

• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  and Japan. And collectively, they only kill about 1,000 whales a year. There just isn't much demand for whale meat, it turns out, and even less for whale oil. Anyway, we couldn't get a modern whaler to go on the record with us, but then, right as we were finishing our series, we landed our white whale, Bjorn Andersson, one of the biggest whalers in Norway. The Norwegian government allows for the harvest of 1,400 minca whales a year. The minca is plentiful. It's not at all an endangered species. Even so, Andersson and his fellow whalers usually take less than half of the allowed quota each year. Like I said, just not much demand for whale meat these days. When we caught up with Andersson back in

• 1:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  2023, he had just finished his whaling season. In the conversation you're about to hear, he tells us why he loves hunting whales and how he does it, why harvesting whales is important to maintaining the supply of fish, and why he thinks that in the future, there will be more whale hunting and not less. That's coming up on this bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, starting now.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 2:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, Bjorn, it's Stephen. You can hear me okay?

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yes, I hear you.

• 2:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm sorry to interrupt your holiday. Yes, you're on holiday in Sweden?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I am outside Söderhamn, in the middle of Sweden. We have to go to my wife's home place.

• 2:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what do you do when you're there on holiday?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Cutting grass.

• 2:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you do any fishing?

• 2:46Speaker 02

  No, it's holiday.

• 2:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, where in Norway do you live?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  In Lofoten, in the westly part of Lofoten, on the water. We live on a small island.

• 2:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that where you grew up?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you grow up in a fishing family?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yes, my father was a fisherman and a whale hunter.

• 3:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  And can you tell me about your work now? You're mostly a fisherman and then you whale during the whale season?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  In the 1st of January, we start fishing cod. When it comes to spring, April, or something like that, we start minke whale hunting. And that go on to the summer. After summer, we go to shipyard to repair and fix the boat. And in the autumn, we fish herring.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  So of the three things that you catch mostly cod, whale, and herring, which makes you the most money?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It depends. Cod and herring are this year the best.

• 3:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  How was your whale season this year? How many whales did you get?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  111 whale.

• 3:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. Holy cow.

• 3:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you alone are responsible for like 25% of all the whales taken in Norway this year, yeah?

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So 111, how many trips was that?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Four trips.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you describe how you sell it then? Who do you sell it to?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's a company I'm co-owner in and then we distribute it to all the Norway, to the stores. We export some whales to Japan.

• 4:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  One thing that confuses me is I read that the Norwegian quota for Minko whale in a year is 1,000, but that all of you collectively, all the whalers only take like 500 or 600 in a year. So why are you not getting up to the quota? Is it just not worth it? Are there not enough whalers?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  It's a problem to distribute and get it in the store everywhere and people have to buy it.

• 4:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about the price of whale meat over the past few years? It goes up? It goes down? Where is it?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  No, it's going up, but not in that speed. We want the price of whale meat to have rise every year almost, but not enough. It's about one-third or one-fourth of our income.

• 5:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does the government subsidize fishing and whaling?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Not at all?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are there any price guarantees for the fish or the whale that you catch?

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yes, all fisheries in Norway have a guarantee minimum price. It's regulated by law.

• 5:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it usually sold for more than that anyway?

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yes, often it's over the minimum price.

• 5:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the minimum price is useful to you just in case the prices fall, yeah?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  It's useful for everybody because you don't have those ups and downs. Everybody are jealous on our fishermen today because it has been quite good to be a fisherman in the last 20 years now because we have had quite good quotas and good money.

• 6:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what would happen to you if Norway decided that they don't want to allow anyone to hunt whales anymore?

• 6:10Speaker 02

  If they do, they are crazy.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Some years from now, there will be no cod or no herring to fish because there are so many whales. That's the food for the whale. Mink whale is an opportunist. We eat even salmon and cod and herring and everything. If you hunt whale, you can fish more fish because you have the balance in the ecosystem.

• 6:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you know how many Mink whales there are in the world?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  The latest number is 150,000.

• 6:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  In the world?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Not in the world, in the North Atlantic.

• 6:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  I saw a number, this was a few years ago, that said there were maybe half a million of Antarctic Mink stocks. Does anyone talk about the Mink whale as endangered at all?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  That must be people who don't know anything about the sea. Because if you are going to the coast of Norland and Troms and Finmark, you can see Mink whale and humpback and fin whale all the spring and summer and the autumn. If you number out how much Mink whale eat, if there are 150,000 Mink whales, it will be about 50,000 to 60,000 ton each day of fish. They have studied the numbers of how much the sea animal, including birds and everything, eats in a year.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  It's 25 million tons of food and the fishermen only take 4 million ton.

• 7:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you get the whale, you kill, you bring the whale on board the boat and you open up the stomach. What do you find in the stomach of a Mink whale?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Everything. It could be salmon, it could be cod, it could be herring.

• 8:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does a modern day whaler think of the Save the Whales movement? That's coming up. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 8:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, I'm Stephen Dubner. Let's get back to my conversation with Bjorn Anderson, a Norwegian fisherman and whale hunter.

• 8:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So do you think the Save the Whales movement that started in the 1970s, do you think it's gone too far? That there are too many whales that are eating too much of the fish supply that people eat?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yes, it will come to that soon.

• 8:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when someone says to you, Bjorn, "I like whales. I don't want any whales to be killed." What do you say to them?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  No, I don't like to kill them. It's for food. A minke whale is very closely related to a cow because the minke whale has a poor stomach. So I cannot see any difference to kill a cow or kill a minke whale.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  The entire commercial whaling industry, Norway, Japan, Iceland, wherever, kills only about 1,000 whales a year. But hundreds of thousands of whales are dying every year from plastic pollution and noise pollution and boat strikes and most of all, from getting caught up in fishing gear. But it seems that most of the protest by environmental activists is directed at you, at the commercial whalers. Why do you think that is?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  It's a human's bad conscience due to environmental stuff.

• 9:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think of yourself as a conservationist?

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yes, I think it's common sense. If you harvest the nature, you have to make sure that there are growing up things to hunt or to harvest next year.

• 10:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what do you say to someone who thinks that they are being a perfect moral person, right? And says that no one should ever kill whales?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Get some understanding of the nature. It's simple like that. They don't understand the nature. They believe more on Walt Disney or something like that. I have not so much to say about that because I'm just fed up with them. They are so wrong in many, many places. Stop the plastic pollution we have now. They should have worked for stopping plastic pollution many, many years ago. And even petrol. The global warming is also a big issue. We don't know what's happening in the years to come.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  They should have done more work on those issues. It's really become a problem for us. Mink whale or whale hunting is not a problem. It was a problem for the whale some years, so many years ago. Now it's no problem with the whale stock.

• 11:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think the International Whaling Commission did a good job years ago when they tried to regulate the number of whales that could be killed?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  They didn't do their job.

• 11:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why not?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  They are an organization based on the scientific committee. And the scientific committee said there was enough mink whale. So they should have given out quota on mink whale, but they didn't.

• 11:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what would happen if everyone in the world were allowed to hunt mink whale starting next year? Would that be a problem for the mink whale population?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Of course. You have to do a regulation. You have to count them. You have to give out quota and then do it sustainable.

• 12:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've read that whalers wanted the Fisheries Ministry in Norway to promote whaling and whale meat, but that it didn't work, that they were worried that trading partners would get upset. Do you know anything about that?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yes, I was one of those who wanted him to respond on that, but he didn't.

• 12:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Have you ever been to the U.S., Bjorn?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where did you go?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  New York.

• 12:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, that's where I am. Did you like New York?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yes, because I study engineering, high-power electricity engineering. So we was visit Con Edison in New York.

• 12:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you were working as an engineer then?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who did you work for?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Nosh Hydro. It was a power plant, yes. We produced about 3% of Norwegian electricity.

• 13:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why did you stop working as an engineer and become a full-time fisherman?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  It's a much better way of life. You are free and you are out. You can see the nature, you can see whales, you can see other fish. And you can feel the weather, bad weather or good weather in a much better way than you do in an office.

• 13:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you came to New York, did you go into the rural areas at all or just the city?

• 13:36Speaker 02

  No, we were just in New York.

• 13:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so if you had gone upstate into New York, you would see a lot of deer. And in the US, some species of deer are considered a nuisance animal for a lot of reasons. They eat crops, they spread disease, they cause car crashes. And so hunting of deer is encouraged. There's a season and there's a limit. Do you see the Minko whale as sort of a nuisance animal like that?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  No, it's a source of food. But you have to try to balance the ecosystem as good as you can because then it will produce the most. We have to harvest our resources in a sensible way. If we don't shoot whale, the ecosystem will collapse sooner or later.

• 14:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, how exactly does Bjorn Anderson harvest those resources?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  You have to think like a whale.

• 14:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 14:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Welcome back. I'm speaking with Bjorn Andersson, a Norwegian fisherman and whale hunter.

• 14:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tell me about your ship. How big is the ship? What's it called?

• 14:58Speaker 02

  The boat is called Reinebuen and is a 32-meter-long steelboat.

• 15:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the name of the boat, Reinebuen, what does that mean?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  My father was grown up on Reine. It's a place in Lofoten. Reinebuen, it's like a man who lived on that place.

• 15:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you grow up wanting to be a whaler when you were a kid?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I was. Five years, first time I saw a whale, was shot. It was very excited.

• 15:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why did you get talked into becoming an engineer then?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  There was a stop in the whale hunting, so I didn't know what to do.

• 15:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  This was in 1986, when the International Whaling Commission put a moratorium on commercial whaling. But in 1992, Norway announced it would resume hunting minco whales in defiance of that ban. Andersson, who was by then working as an engineer for a power company, was able to get back to his first love.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  I think that was a very good decision, because the culture and the know-how starting to disappear and it could be very hard for the coastal people here in Norway.

• 16:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have kids, Bjorn?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have young crew members that are going to become like you, a whaling boat captain?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yes, they just finished school and they started to onboard the ship and learn to catch whale or fish. Some are good, some are bad.

• 16:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're good?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yes. My father, he learned me everything. You have to have a good interest in what you're doing. And it's whatever you do, if you don't have the interest, you will be not so good.

• 16:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about the crew size on your boat?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  We are six people all the year.

• 16:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  They work for you year round, the same six?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do they live in your town?

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Nearby.

• 17:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the longest you've ever gone from land then?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Two, three, four weeks. We have been on the north side of Spisbergen, almost eighty-one degrees north.

• 17:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you're out on the water, can you describe how you locate the Minko whale?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  We only use our eyes.

• 17:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow. No sonar, nothing like that?

• 17:26Speaker 02

  No, nothing. It's the best equipment we have.

• 17:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so what are you looking for?

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Ah, looking for the whale.

• 17:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're not looking for birds or a spout?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  The birds as well, they often give away where the whale are. So we know to use all the nature.

• 17:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how often does the Minko whale breach?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  It's three to five minutes and then they come up and blow three times. I try to get close to the whale and try to think out where it's possible where the whale go. You have to think like a whale.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  It's like a chess player. You have to think some step forward. It's a hunt. You have to get close with it because we don't shoot long distances. Just a thirty or forty meters, something like that, or closer.

• 18:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  And describe the harpoon.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  The harpoon is seventy millimeter, but the barrel on the cannon is sixty millimeter.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  So it's a big hole where the harpoon hits the whale. In the front of the harpoon, we have, of course, the grenade. We explode inside the whale.

• 18:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how fast does that kill the whale then?

• 18:53Speaker 02

  It's instant. If you don't kill it, maybe make it unconscious. And then we kill it with the rifle.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what kind of rifle do you use for that?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Ah, it's American rifle. Three seventy-five Remington.

• 19:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just so I'm clear, the grenade that's at the end of the harpoon.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  In the front of the harpoon.

• 19:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where do you aim on the whale for the head, the heart?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  In the chest.

• 19:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then if it doesn't succeed in killing the whale, then you kill it with the rifle, yes?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then how do you get it on the boat?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Ah, we have a strong wire. We put on the tail and then we pull it up on the deck with a winch.

• 19:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  And how big are they?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Eh, could be up to ten meter.

• 19:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does it weigh, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  I don't know about pounds. It's up to eight, nine ton.

• 19:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you get it on the boat with the winch. What happens now? Who butchers it and so on?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  No, it's the crew. Cutting up the blubber and the meat and then we put the bone back to the sea.

• 20:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you do with the blubber?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Eh, we give it to the birds.

• 20:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so the oil is not worth anything?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Not for now. It's a very healthy oil. We haven't managed to get any good system protecting the oil.

• 20:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do they travel solo or in groups?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Both. But very often, the Minka whale is a lone so cowboy.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  They travel individual and but when they came to places where there are a lot of food. There could be very many.

• 20:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does the Minka whale ever try to attack the boat?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 20:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some whales do, yeah?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  No, no. It's more like accidents, you know, you have some YouTube clip where a humpback guy jump up and fall down on a sailing boat or something like that. But I don't think is attack. It's just an accident.

• 21:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I see. Have you read Moby Dick?

• 21:07Speaker 02

  No, I'm not a reader.

• 21:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you see a whale breach, how can you tell if it's a mink whale or maybe some other kind of whale?

• 21:16Speaker 02

  It's like to see the difference on a horse and a pig. Maybe you can mix them up if you are from New York or something like that, but not crew on the whale boat.

• 21:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you ever hear the whales communicating or singing?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  You could sometimes. You can hear the white whales and sometimes humpback.

• 21:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  If Norway were to allow the hunting of other species of whale, which ones would you want to hunt?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  I have enough with mink whale because we have to have bigger boats and other equipment to hunt bigger whales.

• 21:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  We spoke with someone in Japan who said that one reason that some whalers there still hunt whales is because the world tells them they can't. And I'm curious if that's the same for you in Norway.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  That's stupid.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yes, that's stupid. I already said that you have to harvest in a sustainable way. It's stupid.

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bjorn, we've been working on this series about the history and economics of whaling for about six months. And you are the first whaler who agreed to speak with us. Why do you think that whalers are so reluctant to speak about whaling?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I have had a lot of journalists on board a ship. And there are many bad journalists who only want to have the big scoop, you know, want us to say something they could put together so they could make a scoop or something like that. A lot of journalists are very bad. That's a pity. When I watch the news, I have a big question signs. Is this true or not? Because I have experienced many bad journalists, but also.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Some good. I think people, the whalers are fed up with the bad journalists who only want to have a scoop.

• 23:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when you say they want a scoop, what does that mean? It means they want to make you look bad? It means they want to make you look like you don't have morals?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that.

• 23:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think whaling will still exist in Norway in 10 years?

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about 50 years?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Then it will be more. It has to be.

• 23:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  You say it has to be to protect the fish stock, you say?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yes, and to produce food enough for the people on the planet.

• 24:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is there anything we didn't talk about that we should? Is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have, or anything you just want to tell me about?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 24:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  No, it's enough? You've had enough of me?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  I hope people in the United States will understand that it's, to hunt an animal, it's not a nice thing to do, but it's necessary. It's good food. It's not nice to see a cow being killed, not even a chicken. You never get allowed to see that. The minke whale have a nice, free life before you meet me. Then it's over.

• 24:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, Bjorn, thank you very much. I appreciate your talking to us, and I enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you.

• 24:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  And thanks to you for listening to this conversation with the Norwegian whaler Bjorn Andersson. If you want to learn more about the modern whaling industry, I recommend you listen to part two of our whaling series. It's called Why Do People Still Hunt Whales? And while you're at it, you can listen to episodes one and three also. We will be back soon with another episode of Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself, and if you can, someone else, too.

• 25:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Zach Lipinski. It was mixed by Greg Rippon with help from Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouaji, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Morgan Levy, Jasmine Klinger, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 26:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  How many times a week or a month do you eat whale, would you say?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  One or two times in the week. We have chopped whale meat. We have taco, pizza, everything.

• 26:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you ever eat it raw?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, tartare. It's very good.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Stitcher.