Keiko Part 2 with Brianna Bowman

The movies freed Willy, but what about Keiko? For the second part of our trilogy on the biggest aquatic star of the 90s, deep sea correspondent Brianna Bowman takes Sarah through Keiko’s journey to the Oregon Coast Aquarium for rehabilitation and the developing plan to return him to the open ocean. But first, both marine scientists and rich benefactors have to try to teach a killer whale to be wild again. Digressions include the books of Jean Craighead George, the tragedy of the puns we missed, regurgitated meat influencers, and Star Trek IV. Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler More Brianna Bowman: Brianna's Website Support Brianna's new podcast Rewilding Keiko on Patreon Submit a voicemail with your memories of Keiko at [email protected] (Brianna's Note: yes, Outlook! I’m a weirdo) Linkedin (Brianna's Note: yes I am a double weirdo) @rewildingkeiko on Instagram Buy her a coffee! More You're Wrong About: linktr.ee/ywapod Bonus Episodes on PatreonBuy cute merchYWA on Instagram Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Sarah Marshall?

  What if that mantis shrimp is like the little girl in The Exorcist? And it's like, you're gonna die up there.

• 0:16Sarah Marshall?

  Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you about your favorite Oregon celebrities. And of course, the best one of all is Keiko. And with me today to talk about Keiko is certified orca girl and also dolphin girl, Brianna Bowman.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Hi. Yes, that is, I really should put that on my business card, I think. Certified dolphin girl. Did I ever tell you, Sarah? Okay, this is kind of embarrassing.

• 0:44Sarah Marshall?

  Good. Great way to start.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  This is how much of a dolphin girl I am. Do you know what my first email address was?

• 0:51Sarah Marshall?

  Dolphin girl.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  No, I was trying to be a little.

• 0:54Sarah Marshall?

  Squeak squeak.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I was trying to be a little, a little cooler than just dolphin girl. It was dolphin underscore chica four at hotmail.

• 1:08Sarah Marshall?

  That's so beautiful, though. Okay, do you know what my first AOL username was? I bet I've told you this before.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  No, I don't know.

• 1:18Sarah Marshall?

  Amoredragon88. Aren't those two both so on brand?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  They really are. We haven't changed at all.

• 1:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you're still a dolphin chica and I'm still an Amore dragon. At AOL.com. And then I read in like, you know, 17, it was like, you should never put your birth year in your email. And I was like, oh, no.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  What have I done? I have to say, though, I think I've, I was definitely a dolphin girl as a kid. And I think as a woman.

• 1:52Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  I am an orca woman.

• 1:54Sarah Marshall?

  That's interesting. Because you used to be really cute and, you know, people pleasing. And you would jump through hoops and now you just want to attack billionaires' yachts.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Yes, actually, that's a, that's a fair, fair summary.

• 2:08Sarah Marshall?

  Pretty accurate. Um, I feel like we should do a bonus episode on my lingering question of like, what, what is the deal with the orcas allegedly attacking billionaires' yachts? And do they hate capitalism specifically? Because that would be very exciting.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Say that again, but in a Jerry Seinfeld voice.

• 2:29Sarah Marshall?

  What's the deal with these orcas? Why do they keep attacking billionaires?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  What is the deal with these orcas?

• 2:38Sarah Marshall?

  So, okay, so this is part two of the Keiko story. If you don't know who Keiko is, we bring you up to speed in the last episode. But if I may, in classic You're Wrong About Fashion, I'd like to attempt to summarize it, and you can correct me as needed.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Go for it.

• 2:53Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so Keiko is a lovely little whale, killer whale slash orca. And he certainly is killer, and he's a sweet little guy. And he-

• 3:02Speaker 01

  He's very sweet.

• 3:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and he was born around Iceland, obviously not in Iceland, in the 70s, and was captured in 1979.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah, 78 or 79. Good memory, as usual, Sarah.

• 3:16Sarah Marshall?

  Thank you. At a time when random dick wheels were going around capturing killer whales for fun and profit and to exhibit them and make ridiculous movies about them, I realized after we recorded the other day that I actually have a poster for a different killer whale movie-

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Oh, you do!

• 3:32Sarah Marshall?

  -on my bathroom door.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I forgot.

• 3:34Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, let me go open the door, and then I can read it to us. Are killer whales an apex predator?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, there's not really anything that is a threat to a killer whale besides people in the ocean.

• 3:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I was gonna say killer whales are the cutest apex predator, but actually I think it's gotta be polar bears.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, polar bears are pretty stinking cute.

• 3:57Sarah Marshall?

  Right, because kids love polar bears, they're in Coke ads, they're drinking Coke, they're looking at the sunset or the northern lights, I guess.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:05Sarah Marshall?

  And yet, according to Blair Braverman, who certainly would know, in real life, polar bears see us much as I would see a delicious Taco Bell gordita.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yes. No, polar bears are, I know, like, you know, we're supposed to be wary of grizzly bears if we're out in the woods and-

• 4:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I mean, I certainly don't want to force them to be friends with me.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  No, and like, with a grizzly bear, it's mostly-

• 4:28Sarah Marshall?

  You know how that goes.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  It's mostly like, you just don't want to surprise them, because they might hurt you that way. A polar bear will, as far as I know, try to eat you. They do see you as a tasty snack, so not a good situation if you're- If you're near one.

• 4:43Sarah Marshall?

  So I guess say no. Okay. So let me read you this Namu poster. So it's got a lovely painting of Namu?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Namu, yeah.

• 4:52Sarah Marshall?

  Namu.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I think.

• 4:53Sarah Marshall?

  The, the killer whale with some asshole holding on to his fin and, and riding him while he leaps. We love the idea of just like riding a beautiful animal.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we really wanted to make orcas like the horses of the ocean for us, I think.

• 5:09Sarah Marshall?

  God. Yeah, that's so depressing. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I guess if a horse could hold its own against a great white shark, I might think a little bit more about that. It's amazing that we got our way with horses. We should quit while we're

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Sarah Marshall?

  Not ahead exactly, but you know.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:26Sarah Marshall?

  Um, and the text says, anybody want to make friends with a very big, very wet, very playful killer whale?

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Very wet.

• 5:33Sarah Marshall?

  Question mark, three exclamation points. He's the biggest hero in the whole wide world of adventure. And then it's got a little girl with pigtails saying, don't let them hurt Naboo mommy. I love him. So you can see that Free Willy is working on a precedent that maybe had not been perfected yet.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:52Sarah Marshall?

  But sort of existed as, as a, you know, because there's so many narratives in American culture, and I'm sure pretty much any culture about kid and animal.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:03Sarah Marshall?

  Who become friends and understand each other.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, those are my, they still are my favorite stories. They were my favorite stories when I was a kid. I definitely gravitated to any story where a protagonist that's a young child is making, their best friend is some sort of animal. Like what was it in My Side of the Mountain? Didn't he, he had a hawk?

• 6:24Sarah Marshall?

  Peregrine Falcon.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  A Peregrine Falcon.

• 6:26Sarah Marshall?

  Frightful.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Sarah Marshall?

  I think about frightful more often than actual people I have known in my life or like family members, you know?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, well, I don't know. I can't remember the plot of Julie of the Wolves, if she actually had a connection.

• 6:41Sarah Marshall?

  She's married off like as a 13 year old, I think. She's like married to a fellow kid.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:48Sarah Marshall?

  I think she's in like Barrow or something and she, she runs away and like loses her bearing. And then she's adopted by a family of wolves and they, they go hunting and then they regurgitate meat for her, which is so gross and so great.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:05Sarah Marshall?

  You gotta do what you gotta do.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Sarah Marshall?

  You know, I'm sure there's an influencer today who's thinking, you know, what we should all be eating is regurgitated wolf meat.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Oh God, there probably is, honestly.

• 7:15Sarah Marshall?

  That's the next thing billionaires are gonna pull, I swear to God.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Oh, probably.

• 7:19Sarah Marshall?

  While they listen to the Eyes Wide Shut soundtrack. We're producing some really big trends here, I think, today.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  We really are.

• 7:25Sarah Marshall?

  But, I mean, I also, I'll say that like, the success of this show, which has been listened to by more people than I would ever imagine possible.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:34Sarah Marshall?

  When we started out, is to me like further proof of my theory that like, obviously, people are different from each other, to quote Eve Segtwick, but that there are a lot of basic human tendencies and drives. And one of them is that we're very curious and we love learning. If we didn't love learning, we wouldn't have landed on the moon.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:52Sarah Marshall?

  With like, computers that had less memory than probably what it takes to power one of those games where you have to save a king by sorting jewels.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, we wouldn't have landed on the moon and we wouldn't have, to bring it back, we wouldn't have tried to free Keiko, I think.

• 8:10Sarah Marshall?

  Exactly. And you wouldn't be listening to this wanting to know how this happened.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:14Sarah Marshall?

  Because this is also a way, I think, for you to tell us about kind of the, some of the concepts and science that are behind everything that is happening and that we're gonna learn today.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It was a, it was an astronomical feat and we learned a lot and it also did not go perfectly.

• 8:35Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And that is. Part of the process of science and learning and trying new things. So I just want to say, like, you know, people try to talk about the Keiko story in terms of whether was it a success or was it a failure? And I certainly used to think of it in those terms of like this very black and white. Did they achieve their goal or did they fail? And I think like all stories and just real life in general, the more interesting question is about what we did learn and the parts where we did fail to reach the goal and how we can do things differently next time and understanding the nuance involved and all the, all the

• 9:18Speaker 01

  shades of gray in between. And that's where the real interesting part of the story lies. It's, it's not just, you know, a yes, no binary of whether we did what we set out to do.

• 9:32Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I guess like in the newsboy strike.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 9:36Sarah Marshall?

  Well, and I feel like one of the things that we're going to get into maybe is also when so many people are working on a project, there being conflicting ideas of what the goal is.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:46Sarah Marshall?

  And so, yeah, so to catch us up, so he's, he's a lovely little, little killer whale. He's captured, he ends up in a theme park that is now a Six Flags in Mexico City. So he's a whale at altitude.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:58Sarah Marshall?

  Which is funny to think about, but also worrying. And he's in a tank that's like, and I remember this from when I was a kid, to be clear, because our chapter last time ended with Keiko on his way to the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which I remember, and which was like, everyone was excited about in my memory. And it was huge, basically, certainly for children, but I think kind of for everybody.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:20Sarah Marshall?

  And especially in Oregon. And that became kind of part of our identity, certainly as millennials, that we had like, provided transitional housing for Keiko.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:32Sarah Marshall?

  But so he was in a tank that I remember learning as a kid was like, and that you reiterated in this episode was like consistently gets like too small and too warm for his needs, like based on his species. And then when they were making Free Willy, they were like, we need a whale, a whale that can act, that works well with people, and that isn't owned by SeaWorld, who don't want us to work with their whales, because for some reason they don't want to help with a movie that's about freeing whales.

• 11:02Sarah Marshall?

  And this theme park in Mexico was like, yeah, you can film with our whale. And so of course, then we have our like adolescent protagonist, opening a door in Astoria, Oregon, and then going through it. And he's in a theme park in Mexico City with Lori Petty and Keiko. And so it's like a lovely movie where they like free Keiko and he goes back to his pod and they're together again. And as we also talked about, killer whales are very social.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yes, very social.

• 11:32Sarah Marshall?

  And like, would be fair to say, like, don't thrive as loners, which might be foreshadowing.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yes. There are some examples of loner killer whales, but I think it's sort of similar, again, to people in that it's not really the norm to have a completely isolated life.

• 11:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right. So we're telling the story of like, human beings coming together, you know, kind of inadvertently making Keiko a symbol of what happens in the movie he's the star of, which as you pointed out in the past, I cannot think of a single, you can't think, and I can't think of a single example of this happening in any other case, where fact imitates fiction to this extent, unless you count things like Fantasia from American Idol playing herself in a movie, which I've also always found trippy.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The only, well, and the other example I can think of, President Zelensky, when he, of Ukraine, you know?

• 12:24Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Wasn't he an actor in a show about becoming president?

• 12:28Sarah Marshall?

  Something like that. Keiko is really the, the President Zelensky of the ocean. So, okay, so our last installment ended with Keiko merrily on his way to Newport, Oregon.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:41Sarah Marshall?

  And the plan at the time, which I didn't realize as a little kid, because I'm sure no one explained this to me with enough nuance, or I just ignored it possibly, was for him to be there for like a while, but then ultimately to be brought back to the waters outside Iceland, where he was, was from.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:57Sarah Marshall?

  And my first question, based on that, which I feel like we, we're about to, to get into, is how, how do you transport a whale? Especially if you don't have the Enterprise, like in the Star Trek movie I made you watch.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's not easy, but you'd be surprised how much whale transport takes place. I mean, any-

• 13:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, say more about that.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Well, they, it primarily happens by air.

• 13:27Sarah Marshall?

  Oh.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  I believe that the plane that transported-

• 13:32Sarah Marshall?

  I want an action movie about this.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 13:34Sarah Marshall?

  The clock is ticking when you've got a whale in the cargo hold.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yes. And speaking of a ticking clock, I think where we ended last time, I was saying that there was a budget shortfall at this point in the story. So Earth Island Institute, we had our protagonist, David Phillips.

• 13:52Sarah Marshall?

  What does David Phillips look like? Does he wear Tevas at all?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  So I, I was thinking about this. I was thinking about like, who would I cast in my movie about Keiko?

• 14:01Sarah Marshall?

  Mark Ruffalo?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Ooh, that's a good one, actually.

• 14:04Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  I was thinking, um, Tom Hanks, actually.

• 14:07Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, Tom Hanks when?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Um, recently, like older and with a, with a beard, like, you know, grizzled-

• 14:15Sarah Marshall?

  Looking kind of fed up with everybody, but still very nice in the end.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, and like, I've spoken with David Phillips and he's, yeah, he's very pleasant guy and really passionate about the work that he did. And he's very like strategic. He, he was involved in a lot of like media campaigns around Save the Dolphins in the seventies, um, when it came to like tuna fisheries.

• 14:38Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  And yeah, I think he's very savvy and he understands how to make these big projects come together. Like, he's a project manager, essentially, in this story.

• 14:50Sarah Marshall?

  Which is real world talk for producer, from what I understand.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, yeah, that's true. That is kind of, it is the same thing. Now that I'm like getting more into this space, I'm like, oh, yeah, that, that is what a producer is.

• 15:02Sarah Marshall?

  There's an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show where they like take Richie's class on a field trip backstage to the Alan Brady Show, where like the premise is that Dick Van Dyke is a comedy writer. And they try to introduce, I think, the kids to their producer who's walking by saying, "Don't talk to me. I got a big problem." And I was like, that's a great depiction of producers.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so we have, we have David Phillips and he's like, crap, we need money like now. And they had at this point secured that they're going to take him to Oregon. The facility in Oregon that was gonna house CAKO, the, the tank, it wasn't already in existence. They built that specifically for CAKO.

• 15:46Sarah Marshall?

  Just like making Titanic, they built a tank for that too.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 15:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, that's a little trivia.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  So they, they built this tank for CAKO and it was gonna, the deal was with Oregon Coast Aquarium that the Free Willy CAKO Foundation was going to pay for it. So Oregon Coast Aquarium just got this huge facility for free, essentially.

• 16:07Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, great. I'm sorry. I thought you were gonna be like, and then they refused to pay. I've become so jaded.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Oh, no, but they were, they were behind on how much it would cost. Warner Brothers, they chipped in some money.

• 16:20Sarah Marshall?

  Well, they're from Hollywood. They should have anticipated going over budget, but they never do.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Earth Island Institute, they started fundraising quite a bit. So this is when we started getting the, there's these like CAKO adoption kits that people and mostly kids.

• 16:37Sarah Marshall?

  I remember this. Oh my God. Yeah. Wow. Holy shit, dude.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  So like a few dollars, you could, you know, get little updates about CAKO in the mail and get a picture of him and you can get a little certificate saying like, I'm helping free CAKO or whatever it said. So they started that kind of fundraising. CAKO certainly had a personality that people felt like they knew and, you know, identified with.

• 17:06Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and it does feel like, yeah, we're really, we're drawn to animals that possess what we see as kind of a humanoid intelligence. But interestingly, what that often means is that they're more likely to be dangerous to us, you know? And I'll also just say another story I heard recently. There was this woman, I think in the Netherlands at a zoo. Who kept visiting this gorilla. Maybe you've heard this story, this gorilla named Bukido. And was like, we have a bond and part of that bond is sustained eye contact.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Oh, I vaguely remember this.

• 17:39Sarah Marshall?

  And I visit this gorilla all the time and I love this gorilla. And then after this gorilla had a particularly stressful day, he somehow escaped his enclosure and attacked her. And when I kind of a bit of a rampage and it all, you know, ended up okay. But it turns out that that's like a sign of aggression for gorillas. But for a person, sustained eye contact is like what they make you do in acting class to like, open up your emotional pores, you know? So it's just like a complete difference in how we process something and like assuming that human body language is universal, especially with primates. You know, they didn't have to like gun down Bukido, which is good.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:18Sarah Marshall?

  But also that this woman kept visiting and kept looking at him.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Really?

• 18:23Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  After she got attacked?

• 18:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 18:27Sarah Marshall?

  She's just a girl who can't say no.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  She was still convinced of their bond even after, oh geez.

• 18:34Sarah Marshall?

  So there's just this, this theme here, I think, in all of our interactions with animals that you and I have already been talking about. And one question maybe that I want to bring to you that I think might be a thread here is like, it feels like there were people throughout who were like, well, we must get Keiko back to the wild as he deserves. And that is the only possible course of action. It seems like maybe it would be fair to say.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:56Sarah Marshall?

  And it's also interesting to ask the question, I think, of whether that might inevitably be influenced by the, the very human perspective that values freedom as a value. That possibly is a value that orcas might not have.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think you nailed it. Cause yeah, they're kind of throughout the course of the Keiko story and especially during what I consider kind of the second half of the story. There were these two main threads that persisted throughout the Keiko story. And one was that he's going to be released, he's going to be free, he's going to find his family, we're going to help him do that. That's what he wants.

• 19:37Sarah Marshall?

  He said it in therapy. He said it himself.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  Because of course he wants it because every, you know, being deserves to be free. And we screwed up by, you know, putting him in captivity in the first place.

• 19:52Sarah Marshall?

  And what's the situation socially here? Because was there a hope that they could like, were they like, we have to get him back with his family? Or was there the sense that there was like a fallback of like finding other orcas to make him be friends with? Because I feel like this part, because it's like hard enough to put a human child in middle school. So like the social aspect here seems difficult.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting talking to people that were involved with the project. And I will talk more about one person in particular, who was pretty critical of how the end of the project went. But there was this sense that there would be this intuition or instinct from Keiko that he would just kind of find his family. Like, I don't know how else to put it. Like, he would just know.

• 20:38Sarah Marshall?

  Which is always worrying.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were attempts and plans to get information on the whales around Iceland to try to narrow it down. They were gonna, you know, try to record vocalizations of Icelandic whales. So they could maybe find his pod through identifying the dialects, which we explained last time. Killer whales have dialects amongst pods.

• 21:01Sarah Marshall?

  So all these whales sound like Bjork.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they could maybe identify him that way. But then they were also going to look for genetic data and try to do that. But it was like, in hindsight, I think that was one of the things that people learned in the project, that that was a key piece of information that they did not have enough data on.

• 21:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because how are you supposed to find someone's whale family from like the 70s? That's like having a kid get lost in the mall. And you're like, well, it was in Illinois. I mean, look, I don't, that might, that might be a really silly comparison.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  No, I've, I've made this exact comparison.

• 21:36Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. Listen, I'm no scientist, Brianna, but I've heard that the ocean is pretty large.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  It's, it's a big place.

• 21:44Sarah Marshall?

  It's famously not a pale green dot. It's a pale blue one.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and then on top of that, there's not just like a handful of killer whales in the North Atlantic. There's like thousands of them. Like they're doing pretty well, population wise. So narrowing it down to Caico's specific family was gonna be a bit of a needle in a haystack situation, especially at the time. I believe now there's a lot more data and there's a lot more researchers that are documenting the genetic lineage of killer whales in the North Atlantic. And documenting their dialects and identifying them by individual and that sort of thing. But it's still like a much larger population. It's harder to keep tabs on than say, the Pacific Northwest,

• 22:32Speaker 01

  southern resident killer whales, which as I mentioned, there's only currently 75. Well, 74, tentatively 75. But one key thing before we leave Mexico, so they didn't have enough money. And another really important character in the Caico story enters here. His name is Craig McCaw. Craig McCaw was a tech billionaire from the early 90s. Yes.

• 22:58Sarah Marshall?

  Who would you cast to play him in our movie?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Well, I need some help with that one.

• 23:02Sarah Marshall?

  Can you send me a picture of him?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, Craig McCaw.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  He was like the one person I like couldn't figure out.

• 23:09Sarah Marshall?

  Interesting.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:11Sarah Marshall?

  I gotta say, um, Bill Paxton.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 23:16Sarah Marshall?

  Right? With a sweater on.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, we'll, we'll go with Bill Paxton.

• 23:20Sarah Marshall?

  Vertical limit era Bill Paxton.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Yes. Uh, Bill Paxton with a comb over.

• 23:26Sarah Marshall?

  So we got Bill Paxton and Tom Hanks. It's a star studded spectacular.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  It is. Um, in terms of a character and like what role he kind of serves in the story, he's definitely our John Hammond from Jurassic Park. He just has a lot of money and is very enthusiastic about this project.

• 23:50Sarah Marshall?

  And may I just say, if you have way too much money, as so many people do these days, why not free a whale? For God's sake.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:57Sarah Marshall?

  Having a big building with your name on it won't help you. Teenagers will put gum on it.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so he got involved because literally he and his wife saw Free Willy and they're like, oh, they were moved by the story. They were happy to chip in some money at this early stage, something in the order of like a million dollars or $2 million to help with the shortfall of specifically just this stage of getting CAKE out of Mexico. So one other like significant donation that happens at this point is David Phillips was able to get UPS to donate a plane to fly CAKE to Newport.

• 24:38Sarah Marshall?

  Because this is like a great PR thing to get in on, right? Like even if it's a stunt for some people, it's like, who cares? If you want to like, look good by charming the kids of America by being the CAKE male place, then like, it's a great idea. Like, I'm all for corporate manipulation if it's basically harmless and just kind of annoying if you, you know, try really hard to be cynical, which I obviously sometimes do.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And many people will kind of use CAKE in this way. So then we're leaving Mexico and it was supposed to be a secret, like CAKE was supposed to leave in the, in the wee hours of the morning of January 7th, 1996. And it was supposed to be a secret. I don't know why they thought they could keep it a secret.

• 25:23Sarah Marshall?

  CAKE and Princess Diana are the two main characters of 1996, I realize now.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  I know. I've thought about Princess Diana so many times during this story too.

• 25:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  But of course, people knew he was leaving. It wasn't a secret that he was leaving. I don't know why they thought that people wouldn't show up, but apparently the streets were just lined with people wishing, you know, CAKE.

• 25:45Sarah Marshall?

  That's so beautiful.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. A good farewell and.

• 25:49Sarah Marshall?

  It's like the ending of Ted Poet's Society.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:52Sarah Marshall?

  And it's so beautiful. At the same time, it's so funny to think of CAKE being like, I'm just a whale. I don't really understand what this is about, to be honest.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  It didn't go as David Phillips had hoped it would go. He thought it would, he wanted it to go a lot more smoothly than it did. But they make it to the plane, which is like a C-130, which is just an enormous plane, obviously you would need. He makes it to Newport finally. They had to do a couple refuelings on the way there, but well, this is where, yeah, we can introduce the town of Newport.

• 26:27Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  In the story, which is where I currently live. And honestly, seeing Keiko here when I was a kid was probably what planted the seed in my brain of, hey, I would really love to live here one day.

• 26:38Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I, we would go there for like weekend trips when I was growing up. And it's like, I feel like for people in most states with a coastal part, there's like a place where you eat taffy and Newport is like the place where you eat taffy. Astoria is also very pretty, but it's on a river. It's, it's not right on the coast.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Astoria is also home to the Fisher Poets Gathering, which I think is my favorite festival I've ever been to.

• 27:02Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, which I have to go with you too.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, uh, yeah, Newport's wonderful. I've, like I said, I wanted to live here since I was a kid. And now I do, and I made the best possible decision for my life moving here. I just love it.

• 27:17Sarah Marshall?

  What's something that too exemplifies what Newport is like? Like what's a Newport thing?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  I think the thing that I love, I walk, I walk on the beach every day with my dogs and I live close to the bay entrance, so the river bar is not too far from me. And I love when I am walking on the beach near sunset and I look down south towards the bar and I can see fishing boats coming in and I see like their big, bright glowing sodium lights and can see them making their way back into the harbor and. I don't know. Newport just encapsulates everything that really excites me. Like, I love the ocean. I love learning about the ocean. I love marine science. There's the

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Hatfield Marine Science Center here. So there's world-class research happening in this tiny town.

• 28:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. What is it like when Keiko comes to town?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Well, you know, he had a huge procession that said farewell to him from Mexico City. And there was a sizable crowd here in Newport, but it is a small town. And there's, so it wasn't as many people. But I think that actually, like, for David Phillips, I think he was a lot more comfortable with that. He wanted to keep things a little more low-key.

• 28:38Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  And he, and Keiko arrives, he goes from the airport to the aquarium. They put him in his brand-new fancy tank. But there's still not enough money.

• 28:51Sarah Marshall?

  It's very stressful, I imagine, to be running out of budget, because you have a whale you have to keep feeding now.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:56Sarah Marshall?

  And I bet he's eating a lot.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Specifically, the budget for the tank itself, that was gonna all be paid for by the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. Again, they were short some money for that specifically.

• 29:11Sarah Marshall?

  I feel like if I'm like Joe Hollywood, I would just go to like a Dodgers game and just like ask the people in my row, just like pass down a memo pad and be like, will you pledge some money to the Free Willy thing? Write down how much? And like, right?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Like a congregation in a church, like passing down the offering plate. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's basically what David Phillips was doing. It was just, it just didn't happen fast enough, is my understanding. And the thing is, they were building it, and they knew they were short of the money. But there was so much pressure to finish it from the public and from kids, that the contractor didn't want to be the bad guy in the situation.

• 29:55Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, nice. Okay.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  So they were like, okay, we'll finish this project, even though you owe us, like, literally, like, a few million dollars. Like, I can't imagine... Finishing a project where I'm owed that much money. Like, I

• 30:09Sarah Marshall?

  Well, no.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  It was actually pretty generous of them.

• 30:13Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's because the contractors are coming home to little Timmy every night and having to explain the whale situation, I hope.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Well, and also, if they didn't finish Keiko's tank, Keiko's health was deteriorating in Mexico City. And so they kept saying, like, he's not going to last much longer.

• 30:32Sarah Marshall?

  And what's the issue with his health? Because we haven't talked about that since the first episode, I don't think.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  I mean, overall, he just wasn't thriving.

• 30:40Sarah Marshall?

  Doesn't he have HPV or whale PV, whale papillomavirus?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  He's got the papillomavirus, so it was a skin condition. And it was really bad in Mexico City. And part of that was to do with the temperature of the water in his tank. It just kind of allowed the virus to thrive and get out of control. And I believe it was having a negative effect on his immune system. So anyway, they finished the project, but then David Phillips is like, oh, my God, I have so much money that we owe these people. And that's where Phillips approached Craig McCaw again. And Craig McCaw was like, all right, I will give more money to this project, but this is the deal I want to make. The Oregon

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Coast Aquarium will give a percentage of its sales to the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. And he also pressured Warner Brothers to hold up an end of an agreement. Warner Brothers did say they were going to contribute some money, but at some point, they kind of backed out of the deal. And then

• 31:44Sarah Marshall?

  God damn it.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  So anyway, McCaw, yeah, McCaw made sure that they were going to honor their end of an oral agreement. And then McCaw said, if I'm going to be like, basically bankrolling this project from now on, I'm going to be the chair of the board of the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. And so therefore, he would have a lot more say and control over how the project was going to be executed. This was quite the big shift for the Free Willy Keiko Foundation. So David Phillips was the executive director of the board before. And so

• 32:21Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  David Phillips was like, okay, I guess I'm going to Hand over leadership of this

• 32:28Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  conservation projects to a billionaire.

• 32:32Sarah Marshall?

  So Craig McCaw is like, it's my money, it's my show.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he wanted to have a lot more control.

• 32:38Sarah Marshall?

  Which is like, to one degree understandable and

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:43Sarah Marshall?

  to another degree stupid because he's not a scientist.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Right. There's a lot of people that start to get involved with the leadership of this project that are not, they're not scientists and they're not animal behaviorists. They're not trainers. There's a lot of like documentary filmmakers and that sort of thing going into it. And it's like, that's, that in itself isn't a bad thing, but sometimes the goals are not aligned.

• 33:11Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Cause I mean, not to like even accuse anyone of shadiness, but if you're making a documentary, if you're trying to create media, you have some degree of interest in interesting things continuing to happen.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 33:23Sarah Marshall?

  And that you might feel pressure to shape the story a certain way, based on the needs of your industry.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly.

• 33:31Sarah Marshall?

  You know, has led to some unfortunate outcomes in the past.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. The documentary filmmakers or the people with that kind of leaning, they wanted to make sure they documented the Hollywood story of Keiko.

• 33:45Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Swimming off with his family. And so their priorities were not aligned with the priorities of the people that kind of understood more of how a re-introduction process would take place. And it's not

• 33:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  a one and done kind of thing. And with that shift of the leadership of the board of the foundation from an environmentalist leaning to a more kind of capitalist perspective. Other members of the board began to become a little uneasy of whether the foundation was going to remain true to its goals of the rehabilitation and release. Some of the people on the board felt like maybe Craig McCaw and his underlings were maybe secretly in cahoots with SeaWorld and they were just going to try to get Keiko back into SeaWorld somehow.

• 34:37Sarah Marshall?

  That's what would happen on the Ryan Murphy show, for sure.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So people were like, why, why does this guy even want to help Keiko? And it might've been mostly his wife, Wendy McCaw. Even later on in the story, when Craig McCaw kind of ducks out, Wendy McCaw stayed involved with the project. So there was just some skepticism about what his motivations were.

• 35:01Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. To speak about skepticism, I guess it's just fair to say that like, when someone has enough money to exert control over a project, that kind of always puts everyone in a precarious position, even if they make great decisions the whole way through, because it still means that like, for someone to have more control than anyone else in a situation of this kind, especially coming in kind of later in the day is just like, it creates the potential for someone not being able to be overridden, basically. And I think in a way that's always worrisome regardless of

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:34Sarah Marshall?

  who's playing that role.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Even though there's a board and it's supposed to be this sort of democratic structure.

• 35:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Kenneth Brower, the author of Freeing Keiko, his analogy was that it operated a bit like the Roman Senate under Julius Caesar. So it was like, yeah, we're, we're all making this decision together, but everyone's kind of looking at Craig McCaw every time of like, but what do you want to do?

• 36:02Sarah Marshall?

  It's like whale succession.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:05Sarah Marshall?

  How, well, how is, how's life for Keiko at the aquarium? What's this chapter like from his perspective?

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is, I think, something really positive to focus on in this story is Keiko's health really improves during his stay at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. So he has this much, much, much larger tank where he can actually dive all the way down and is, you know, completely submerged himself, do laps around the tank. It just is really substantially larger than his tank in, in Mexico. It has actual seawater pumped in from Iquina Bay. And the temperature is a much more pleasant temperature for a killer whale. The sea temperatures around here, I think are like in the like 40s in the winter,

• 36:56Speaker 01

  and then maybe in the low 50s in the summer or something like that.

• 36:59Sarah Marshall?

  That's why we don't swim in the ocean.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Or you wear a wetsuit.

• 37:03Sarah Marshall?

  That too.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's, uh, it's cold.

• 37:07Sarah Marshall?

  It's real cold. Even with a wetsuit, I imagine it's pretty freaking cold.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:12Sarah Marshall?

  Cause you still get your, your poor little face and your hands are in contact with the ocean.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd be surprised. I mean, I go surfing here and I mean, I do wear gloves and, and booties too. Cause my, I mean, my hands and feet are just cold all the time anyway.

• 37:27Sarah Marshall?

  But perfect for a killer whale.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yes, perfect for a killer whale.

• 37:31Sarah Marshall?

  Cause this is like literally, I mean, is, are there ever killer whales off the actual Oregon coast historically? Is this like where he would like to normally be?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  There are. The southern resident killer whales occasionally make their way down here.

• 37:45Sarah Marshall?

  Nice.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  It's not super common, but during the winter.

• 37:48Sarah Marshall?

  They take a little trip.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they take a little trip. There's also the biggest transient killer whales and then offshore whales. Some other groups that live further offshore, they're different like culturally than southern resident killer whales.

• 38:02Sarah Marshall?

  This is so good.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  They are primarily marine mammal eaters. Like they hunt other marine mammals. So they'll go after seals and sea lions and, uh, they can be spotted off of Oregon.

• 38:14Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. So this is like, he's in something that like is at least much closer to his habitat.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:20Sarah Marshall?

  While still being captivity.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  It's way better than being at 7,200 feet elevation in the middle of the desert, which is where he was.

• 38:29Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  In Mexico City.

• 38:31Sarah Marshall?

  In a small enclosure that gave him the curly fin.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, uh, so like that virus that he had on his fins, that is starting to clear up. Like the cold water, I guess alone just kind of helps keep the virus at bay. And then of course he's getting like really good veterinary care at this point too. So they're doing everything. Cause part of his eventual conditions for release, those involved with the project are going to have to. Convince the government agencies that they have to, you know, apply for a permit from that CAKO is in good enough health to be released. They can't ethically release him if he's like really dependent on veterinary care, on medicine, or whatever it is. So,

• 39:18Speaker 01

  part of this middle stage between Mexico and Iceland was bringing him back up to health.

• 39:26Sarah Marshall?

  Right. So he's in rehab, basically?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Essentially, yeah. Rehabilitation and release were two of the main concepts of this project. Rehabilitation was a big part of it. And I would say that they really did that successfully at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And once his health started to return, they started to introduce a program to get him trained up to exhibit wild behaviors again.

• 39:54Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. So what, tell me, what, tell, tell me more about that. Because what, what was he like that told them that he wasn't showing wild behaviors? And what did those look like that they were trying to teach to him?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Well, I, I know one of them specifically was they were working on his diving time, like he just wasn't, I mean, it was basically impossible for him to.

• 40:16Sarah Marshall?

  That's so cute.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I know he's like in a little swim class or whatever. Swim team at school.

• 40:24Sarah Marshall?

  I love you.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Improving his times. But he, of course, couldn't really dive hardly at all in Mexico.

• 40:32Sarah Marshall?

  See, and this is again, we were doing the thing we're talking about where he's like an adult male predator. And we're like, he's our baby boy.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  I know. We just, we want to see him do well. And we're like, oh, I think I know what you need. And

• 40:43Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  It's, it's really hard to just not naturally do that, even just talking about him in hindsight. But yeah, he couldn't hardly dive at all in Mexico. So that was one thing. They, he needs to be able to dive and like

• 40:56Sarah Marshall?

  He's all out of practice.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Hold his breath for longer. They wanted to up his

• 41:00Sarah Marshall?

  I'm sorry, it's so cute.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  I know. He's on like a little training program.

• 41:05Sarah Marshall?

  He's a minnow, is working his way up to tadpole. And then after a few more levels, he'll be at himself.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  They wanted to improve his stamina because wild orcas swim a lot. You'll be surprised to know.

• 41:21Sarah Marshall?

  I guess they would have to, huh? Do they, do they swim while they're sleeping? How's that work?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for cetaceans, for dolphins and whales, how they sleep, in a nutshell, is they sleep with half of their brain at a time. So they will, I was like, how do I say this? It is, it's so cool. I don't think enough people talk about it because it is really cool.

• 41:44Sarah Marshall?

  So you're learning to be a science communicator. And this is a great context because you're like, how do I explain this to somebody whose kids are yelling right now, which is the condition under which perhaps you are listening to this right at this moment.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:56Sarah Marshall?

  Maybe your kids are shouting at you because they want another waffle.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, whales and dolphins, they sleep with half of their brain at a time. Because this is the important thing. When a whale or dolphin needs to breathe, they have to think about it, right?

• 42:11Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, right.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  I mean, we can kind of switch between consciously controlling our breath, you know, like we do when we're meditating or whatever.

• 42:19Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Or you can go the whole day without thinking about breathing.

• 42:24Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  You could go for weeks without, yeah, or years.

• 42:26Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  But a whale, as you can imagine, cannot. They have to think about every breath that they take. So if they sleep, they can't completely go unconscious because, well, the way that their brains wired to their lungs, they would actually just, I guess, stop breathing because there would be no part of their brain telling them to breathe. So they have to keep one half of their brain alert so that they can continue swimming to the surface and.

• 42:53Sarah Marshall?

  I've never understood why people think that like God and evolution are sexually counterintuitive ideas, because if you believe in God, surely you can believe in a God who invented whales and it was like, and then, uh, half at a time. I don't know. I really painted myself into a corner with this one.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. He made the whale and then his like angel assistant is like, oh, wow. Beautiful, beautiful work. Just one thing.

• 43:23Sarah Marshall?

  And then he just throws his world's best God mug.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  But honestly, what he came up with is pretty cool. Like uni hemispheric sleeping is a pretty, pretty cool adaptation.

• 43:35Sarah Marshall?

  And then it's like, is that semi-consciousness?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  From what I understand, the half of their brain that's asleep is something called slow wave sleep, I believe. And I believe the half of their brain that's awake, I can't imagine that it's super alert. And when pods of dolphins and whales, like killer whales, are sleeping, they'll like sleep together. It'll be like nap time. And they'll, you know, kind of swim close to each other. Their pectoral fins might be touching each other. So they're like, you know, they're keeping an eye out, but they're also collectively sleeping at the same time.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  And other thing that I think is interesting about uni hemispheric sleep, which I think that's the term, that I read in a paper is that dolphins and whales, cetaceans, they don't go into REM sleep ever, like the deep sleep. They just don't do it, which to sleep scientists is interesting because it was thought that REM sleep is necessary for proper brain function. Like you need that deep sleep.

• 44:53Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  But apparently whales and dolphins don't. So.

• 44:57Sarah Marshall?

  It makes sense. We are pretty different, you know, because humans also can't live in the ocean and eat fish the whole time.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whales and dolphins are just multitasking all the time and they're doing a great job.

• 45:09Sarah Marshall?

  Okay. So, so Keiko is at, is at the aquarium.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  The aquarium.

• 45:14Sarah Marshall?

  As Sandra Lee would say. And I would, I would love for us to talk about the, the chapter where he is delighting the schoolchildren of Oregon and about your memories of going to see him and what that was like for you personally as a dolphin girl.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you, as a listener, go to my Patreon page for the podcast that I'm making about this story, I have posted a couple of pictures of me and my mom and my sister. And we're standing in front of the tank and Keiko is right there. He looks like he's photoshopped in. He's just posing perfectly for this photo.

• 45:53Sarah Marshall?

  He's like, yeah, that'll be five bucks.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  And I remember this from visiting Keiko. He was so engaged with people.

• 46:03Sarah Marshall?

  I will get my story out of the way, which is that I went on a class field trip to see Keiko in second grade. It was a huge deal. We like got to school at like seven and we got back at like 7pm or something like that. Cause it's like, you know, two, two and a half hour drive from Portland, I would say, or at least two hours. And I remember buying a book in the gift shop about bats. And I remember the gift shop having that very nineties thing where there was like a bunch of tiny TVs all arranged in like a grid on a wall in a store. And they each had a part of the same picture. So they all became like a giant screen, but like one that was made out of little TVs. Do you remember that?

• 46:40Speaker 01

  I think I do. Yeah. Yeah.

• 46:42Sarah Marshall?

  And I remember, this is so silly, but it's also so cute. I was like, everyone's Gaga for Keiko. I'm going to show I'm not like other girls by ignoring Keiko. And I think truly I felt that I was going to be like Bella Swan for Keiko. You know, I was like, I must distinguish myself to the witch Keiko. Cause secretly I love Keiko so much. I didn't know what to do.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:04Sarah Marshall?

  And now I realize that like whales and men are simple creatures. And you really just have to, you know, just be direct as you were. And so, and so I didn't know that he was interactive. And that's, I don't know. That's so cool.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, this is, this is something that came up for many people as well that I talked to. Just how much Keiko was engaged with people at the aquarium in this like underwater viewing area and how much he like preferentially liked to engage with the kids that visited him.

• 47:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  How could you even imagine a better whale to cast in this role?

• 47:42Sarah Marshall?

  I know. And what was that engagement like for him?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I mean, from what I understand, he, he just, he would hang out at the window where you could see him and he would just watch you. So like kids would be like doing silly things.

• 47:55Sarah Marshall?

  He was just an extrovert.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  He was. I mean, he, it's funny. Uh, he's an extrovert in that way. In terms of like the skills he needed to be a wild whale and engage with other whales. He was much more introverted.

• 48:09Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. It's that, that classic thing where humans, I think we feel deficient in how far we've gotten away from. Animals in the way we live and we want animals to include us and then we make them worse at surviving among their own.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like kids loved him, the public loved him. I have a video that I would love to share with you.

• 48:31Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, please do. Let's do it.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  It'll bring you back to this time of

• 48:36Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  visiting Keiko at the aquarium.

• 48:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, I remember that viewing area. Yeah, and it's like, you know, where you would see seals, I think, normally, where you kind of go into this almost theater type environment. Ah, yeah, there he is. He's hanging out by the glass and the kids are touching the glass and he's, they're holding up little toys of him to the glass.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  I want to thank you all for coming to Keiko's get well party. Today's

• 49:06Sarah Marshall?

  They're having a Keiko's get well party.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  So there's this lady with a big check and I think it's a donation from Mattel. So Mattel made a Barbie.

• 49:18Sarah Marshall?

  Oh my god.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  From the movie studio.

• 49:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Mattel knows what's good.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  We really wanted to help too. So we created Ocean Friends Barbie and a portion of the proceeds from Ocean Friends Barbie will go towards Keiko's recovery. So I am very happy today to present to you Beverly on behalf of Ocean Friends Barbie and everyone at Mattel, this donation for $500,000 for the continuation of Keiko's rehabilitation. Very, very generous. Thank you very much.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Keiko's just hanging out.

• 49:47Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  He's watching. He's like, what are you guys up to?

• 49:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  I talked to someone here, the Oregon Coast Aquarium is down by Yakuna Bay.

• 49:54Sarah Marshall?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  And you can see, Keiko's tank was not in the ground. It was all above ground. So it was like, you know, like the biggest above ground pool you can imagine. And if you walked along the bay, you could like look towards the aquarium and you could possibly see him like jumping out of his tank. And I'm like, what? That would be amazing.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm glad that we made the attempt to put him back in the wild, but it would be pretty cool if I could still see that. But yeah, so I just love that video because I feel like it captures that moment in time of visiting him at the aquarium. And another fun story that someone told me about why Keiko was so engaged with people in the underwater viewing area is that so in Free Willy with movie magic, they made it look like there was an underwater viewing area where they filmed it in Mexico City, but that didn't exist in Mexico City. They didn't have that actually. So when Keiko came to Oregon Coast Aquarium, that was the first time that he had been in a place like that where he could like, look at people. And I'm sure he was like,

• 51:00Speaker 01

  whoa, this is different. All you guys are underwater. Like, you're not usually underwater. And yeah, the person that mentioned that, they think that that was part of his curiosity and where that interest came from was it was just new. It was novel to him. Yeah. He was gaining weight. He was, his health was improving. And then, like they mentioned, he was eating fish. And one of the biggest points of contention in the Keiko project was whether Keiko was successfully eating live fish or not. So they started this process at

• 51:41Speaker 01

  the Oregon Coast Aquarium of teaching Keiko to eat live fish. So this was something that they were, this is one of the criteria for release to the wild that he could, they could demonstrate that he could hunt live fish and eat live fish and be able to sustain himself that way, which makes a lot of sense. Like, of course, like, you need to be, if you're going to be wild again, you're going to have to be able to feed yourself. It is a little funny to think that. We thought we had the capability of teaching an apex predator like a killer whale.

• 52:20Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  How to hunt.

• 52:21Sarah Marshall?

  Hubris. We're like, where are you going to find your family? We put an ad up, so it's only, it's only a matter of time until they see it in the paper.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  Right. And it's not to say that I think it was wrong to try. I just.

• 52:33Sarah Marshall?

  No, yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  You know, like, I'm glad we did. I'm glad we tried. But yeah, we might have been a little aspirational.

• 52:41Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's like, people are nostalgic about, you know, the kind of optimism of the 90s or the way we see that now. And one of the counterpoints to that is that just because you're optimistic doesn't mean you're right.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we need that optimism, but, you know, it's complicated, as we've mentioned many times.

• 52:59Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. And we're gonna keep getting into that. So, so how long is he at the Oregon Coast Aquarium? I'm gonna guess, like, is it like, three years?

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, about three years. So he arrived in 1996. And then Kago's making improvements over the next few years. And the next big step is like, okay, we got to figure out where he's gonna go next, right? And you would think, oh, he's, he went to Iceland. They always thought he was gonna go to Iceland. That's not true. They actually had a couple of other places in mind, too. Which I won't go into too much detail on, but they were looking at Ireland and they were looking at Scotland at one point. Iceland was actually the last place they wanted to go for a few different just logistical reasons.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  And also the fact that Iceland culturally, especially at that time, was a pro-whaling nation. And so they just thought that Iceland was not gonna be cool with the idea of this whole project in general. Iceland also had some history with environmental activists, specifically Greenpeace activists. There's this really wild story of some Greenpeace activists sinking a couple of boats in a harbor that were commercial whaling boats back in the 70s or 80s.

• 54:19Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, Greenpeace will, will fuck up your boat.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:22Sarah Marshall?

  From what I understand.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so David Phillips and a couple of other people, they went to Iceland to, you know, schmooze the right people. They talked to the prime minister, they talked to the minister of fisheries and. They got a few different mixed messages. You can imagine like the Minister of Fisheries, which I believe that encapsulated the whaling industry at the time. He was not a fan and made it very clear that if anything, people in his kind of world and personality, he was inclined to say things like, "You should just butcher Keiko."

• 54:58Sarah Marshall?

  That's the kind of humor that sometimes doesn't translate very well.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't. Well, and I don't even think he was making a joke. I think he was actually fairly serious. Yeah.

• 55:08Sarah Marshall?

  Well, come on.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there is, yeah, there was some conflicting sentiments about Keiko, but then David Phillips spoke to the Prime Minister and Prime Minister was really on board. There was this shift in Iceland as well at the time of people recognizing like, "Hey, we can still like make money on whales. We just take people to go watch them instead."

• 55:30Sarah Marshall?

  Right. Yeah. It's the inevitable outcome of any American industry. We're teaching them of our ways.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. That saga is, I do find, pretty interesting.

• 55:40Sarah Marshall?

  An Icelandic saga, if you will. Sometimes people in comments are like, "Sarah, you missed this pun you could have made." And I'm like, "I know. I know now."

• 55:48Speaker 01

  I know. I know. And you're, you're really good at it, Sarah.

• 55:53Sarah Marshall?

  But there's still so many that you miss, you know?

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I know. We can't get them all, unfortunately.

• 55:58Sarah Marshall?

  Moment of silence for the puns we didn't do.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Pour one out for the puns. The other thing about Iceland, of course, is that the narrative of this whole endeavor, the most satisfying ending is for Keiko to go back to Iceland. Like, it would have been a little weird to be like, "And now he lives in Ireland. He's not from there, but..."

• 56:19Sarah Marshall?

  He's learning to love fish and chips.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Guinness. He's, yeah, he's now, now loves the Irish. But even though there's all these things, also Iceland was like, the weather is just really difficult to deal with. There's a language barrier, so just logistically, it was going to be challenging. There was just like a lot of logistical things that were, it was not appealing to people. And so Phillips putting on his media campaign hat from back in the day of like, oh, this could be an opportunity to shift hearts and minds in Iceland too.

• 56:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, nice.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Of one of the few remaining whaling nations in the world.

• 57:00Sarah Marshall?

  This is our Tom Hanks character and he can't be stopped, as we know.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  He can't. No, he's, he's very, very persistent. So David Phillips and his colleague, Catherine Hanley, they were the pro Iceland team. And then there was another team with Jeff Foster, who was another trainer. He was a former SeaWorld trainer that got involved with the project. And he went and scouted out Scotland and Ireland, and he was very pro Scotland and Ireland. And what happened is that they presented their cases to the board. And remember Craig McCaw is the executive director of the board.

• 57:35Sarah Marshall?

  Sorry, Bill Paxton. Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  And David Phillips is making his case for Iceland. Jeff Foster is making his case for Scotland and Ireland. And I'll just read this from Kenneth Brouwer's book. David Phillips had noticed that when McCaw came out in favor of something, suddenly all his corporate people were enthusiastically for it too.

• 57:56Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, no.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  As the meeting progressed, Phillips glanced at McCaw occasionally, trying to gauge the billionaire's mood. "I don't understand," McCaw broke in finally. "Keiko from Iceland, and we're thinking of bringing him somewhere else?" When Jeff Foster started to explain the logistical difficulties, McCaw broke in again. "No, no, no. We're bringing him to Iceland."

• 58:15Sarah Marshall?

  This is why I don't do group projects.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Phillips, Hanley and Dr. Cornell, who's the veterinarian, tried to not look at one another and they fought to stifle grins. They had expected to have to battle fiercely for Iceland, but the fight was over before it began. So it was just funny because there was so, so much work, so much scouting. Yeah, of locations.

• 58:37Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Okay. And then, and then a guy is like, hey, what if we send him to Iceland? I like the sound of that.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah.

• 58:44Sarah Marshall?

  And that's the world we, we live in in a big way now, right? Where it's like, we're kind of at the mercy of the whims of billionaires. And even when they happen to be right, maybe it's still like, well, it's just still uncomfortable how we got here.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've noticed that, you know, I've been working with. A few nonprofits and then, you know, I work for a public radio station and it does feel like there's this shift of, okay, all the grants are kind of drying up. So now we gotta figure out where all the rich people are. And to be fair, you had to know that before, but now it's just like, you have to rely on that even more. You have to rely on the whims and interests of rich people.

• 59:22Sarah Marshall?

  And then let them transfuse the blood of our firstborn children into their desiccating bodies.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, it's not a great system for getting things done, unless you have really binding contracts, I guess.

• 59:40Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, when people call something medieval, which of course is like a very oversimplified term, and really we should do more episodes of the show about like what the Middle Ages were actually like.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:50Sarah Marshall?

  And what we're wrong about, which I'm sure is most of it.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  That would be cool.

• 59:54Sarah Marshall?

  But that like, what we're really referring to is this, I think, idea that we have of how the Middle Ages functioned, which is of course true to an extent, just not in every way and without nuance, where I think one of the things we're describing is the concept of might making right, right? And this idea that I think the way that a lot of people have distinguished today from what we feel to be kind of the darker intellectually ages of, you know, various periods of history, is that you can no longer theoretically use the alleged God given power of the monarchy to try to stop science from proving what it absolutely does. Right? Like the enlightenment that we're living in, such as it is, like

• 1:00:35Sarah Marshall?

  that isn't like a gift granted to us by the fact that time has progressed. It only happens if we continue to protect actual scientific findings from being changed by people who have amassed a lot of power and don't like it.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. We live in very weird times, but it's not actually something that we haven't seen before. And I think that we've been unfortunately perhaps lulled into a false sense of security that those days were behind us. And now we have like all these institutions.

• 1:01:05Sarah Marshall?

  Well, that's the thing about growing in the nineties. People are moving whales around. You're like, well, God, I guess things are kind of figured out. And then you grow up and you're like,

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  Life's great.

• 1:01:14Sarah Marshall?

  No, we, we gotta, we gotta keep an eye on everybody.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, we sure do.

• 1:01:20Sarah Marshall?

  But we get to do it together.

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so, so we have, I guess, the random rich guy whim that happens to go with what the kind of some of the experts on this team are wanting to do anyway, which is always nice when that happens.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it aligned well at the time, so it was fine. And they were like, cool, we're going to Iceland, we're taking Keiko to Iceland. And I just love this little story where two of the board members went to Iceland to scout out locations. Like, of course, they knew Iceland, but like, where in Iceland are they going to put them?

• 1:01:53Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  They had a couple of different ideas. David Phillips and Catherine Hanley had a couple of different places they had in mind. But a couple of board members went, and they ended up in the Westman Islands, which is a little island off the southern coast of Iceland, or a few islands off the southern coast of Iceland, famous for a volcanic eruption that happened in the early 80s, I believe. But they were like, okay, well, this place has a harbor, and, you know, they have an airport, so we can get Keiko here. And they have facilities and all that. So it seems like it'd be a good, good location. And they go out with a guide in the bay, in what's called Kletsfik Bay, which is where

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Keiko will end up eventually. And they go out on the boat, and I'm just imagining them in their suits, because even though I'm sure they didn't, I just imagine board members

• 1:02:46Sarah Marshall?

  Like the lawyer in Jurassic Park.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the guide takes them out. And so this bay has this, I've seen pictures, it's got this amazing rock wall feature from the, you know, many volcanic eruptions that have happened over the millennia. And it's just like this really high, flat, kind of enclosed space, or concave space, at the north end of this bay. And so they're kind of scouting out the bay, and the guide takes them over there. And the guy's like, hey, check this out. And he opens up a case on the boat, and the board members are like, what's he gonna do? He opens it up, and there's a saxophone inside.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  And he proceeds to play Amazing Grace on his saxophone.

• 1:03:36Sarah Marshall?

  Wow.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  And it's like echoing off the rock walls. And that's when these two board members are look at each other and they're like, yep, this is the place.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  This is a story from Kenneth Brower's book and I don't know, it's hard for me to confirm whether that actually happened, but I just love it so much.

• 1:03:57Sarah Marshall?

  Why would anyone make that up?

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. Why?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  But anyway, so we're about to bring Keiko to Iceland. They sort of scouted out and thought, oh, this looks like a nice, this could suit our needs. There's, it's a big bay. It's pretty protected. There's a small harbor, but a really small town nearby. So there's services and places for staff to stay and all that sort of thing.

• 1:04:23Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm. Right. And what are their needs and like, how, like, what level of staff are we talking about here? Like, maybe this is a good time to talk about what their goals are exactly.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  So there's going to be the large sea pen that where Keiko is going to stay inside the bay in the Kletsvik Bay. You're going to need food for Keiko. So there's going to need to be a warehouse with like hundreds of pounds of frozen fish accessible daily for him. Staff were rotated in and out of Iceland. They were staying within whatever the labor immigration laws were for Iceland at the time. So staff were on a three month rotation. As you can imagine, there's not many people in Iceland that know how to train a killer whale or have done any kind of killer whale husbandry. There's probably been a handful, but not many.

• 1:05:14Sarah Marshall?

  There's probably not that many in any country, to be honest. And that's the whole problem.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  Yes. I think actually, yeah, the US kind of had that market at the time.

• 1:05:25Sarah Marshall?

  Because we were the ones who decided to abuse killer whales to begin with. And then they were like, well, crap, we got to learn how to keep these guys alive a little bit longer.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, it was once killer whales started to be in captivity, once we started to put them in captivity. It was a new job in animal husbandry and training that was appealing to people like

• 1:05:50Sarah Marshall?

  Well, this is like, this is like a question I always have about Jurassic Park, right? We're like, how many times have you seen Jurassic Park?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  A few.

• 1:05:57Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, I've probably seen it like between 30 and 50 times.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  Okay, not that many times.

• 1:06:02Sarah Marshall?

  Not to brag, I'm not bragging or anything.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  You should.

• 1:06:05Sarah Marshall?

  I'm ashamed and I'm not proud to quote Arlo Guthrie. But there's a part, because you know, the premise is that they're calling in Sam Neill and Laura Dern is like the preeminent paleontologists and paleobotanists in their field, or possibly Sam Neill is the preeminent paleontologist and Laura Dern is his girlfriend. But she seems good at what she does. And I mean, not to insult her abilities, we just don't get any sense of her having a reputation. It would have actually been nice.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Sarah Marshall?

  But there's that sick triceratops that they're treating like a, you know, dog who got into the garbage, right? Because she ate something she shouldn't have and like her pupils are dilated. And they have like a vet on staff at Jurassic Park, which hasn't opened yet, being like, no, the triceratopses don't eat the African lilac berries. They're toxic, but that's all right. And you're like, and my first question honestly is like, where did they hire this guy? Like, they didn't bring in the preeminent paleontologist to like consult on dinosaur health, but they did find someone else. Do you see what I'm saying? Where it's just if you're like gonna start a dinosaur theme park, like, how do you find people to take care of the dinosaurs?

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Right, exactly.

• 1:07:19Sarah Marshall?

  Because people can't even find vets for their chameleons half the time, like right now. And that's a lot more modest of a need.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Sarah Marshall?

  So I feel like that has bearing with, with the CAKO thing where it's like, yeah, it's worth remembering as you're saying that like this is a field that didn't basically exist, maybe like 30 years before this was happening, it seems like.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Right. And of course, there's been large animal veterinarians for a long time, but you know, a whale is on a different scale. And then every species has their own physiological needs.

• 1:07:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, because horses aren't giant and aquatic and they couldn't eat a great white shark, probably.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:55Sarah Marshall?

  Most horses. Okay, so they, so they've decided on Iceland for good and, and random reasons.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:08:03Sarah Marshall?

  How does this go for CAKO?

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so obviously the next step in this huge project is to now bring CAKO to Iceland. Uh, which they did once again with a plane and once again, Keiko had a farewell procession from Newport and a welcoming procession in Iceland. He's like the royal family. He just has a

• 1:08:24Sarah Marshall?

  He's our special little guy.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. He has, he has a welcoming committee everywhere he goes. As you can imagine, when he gets to Iceland, um, I mean, there's a, a huge amount of media presence there. The community is like in a lot of places, kind of divided between the older generation and the younger generation. So the kids are just stoked to have Keiko there.

• 1:08:48Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  And of course, the older generation is more like, what are these Americans doing? This is, I think Kenneth Brower said that the Icelanders found the Americans enthusiasm off-putting.

• 1:09:05Sarah Marshall?

  You know,

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Which I get.

• 1:09:06Sarah Marshall?

  Americans are the most enthusiastic people in the world.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  We are.

• 1:09:09Sarah Marshall?

  You know?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:10Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. Well, okay. So two questions. What is the goal here? Right? Cause we're bringing him to Iceland.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Sarah Marshall?

  But what do people want to do? And are, is there kind of disagreement already about how, how this is supposed to play out? And is like one person in charge of this? Or is it like a group effort where people are, you know, it's where it's not necessarily clear if there's a leader or something?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what I have gleaned from the reading and the research that I've done is that so far up until Iceland, there's been this very clear, almost like a narrative arc to this project of moving forward. And yeah, there's little challenges along the way, but we still managed to make forward progress. And then Iceland, there's still forward progress, but it's, it gets a whole lot messier. And that is because there's just differing opinions on the way to go about this next stage of the project where the goal is to release

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Keiko back to the wild. And in essence, that seems like, oh, yeah, we know what that means. But when you start to really tease that apart of like, okay, well, what does that look like for Keiko?

• 1:10:28Sarah Marshall?

  Right. And this idea of finding his family, which is not clear, or his pod, I guess, which it seems like it's, no one can really say how they're going to do it exactly.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, actually, I have a question for you, Sarah.

• 1:10:41Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  If you were in charge of this project.

• 1:10:44Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God. This is too much pressure.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Do you resign already?

• 1:10:50Sarah Marshall?

  Yes. Shortest tenure ever. Like, the guy was king of Spain for 15 minutes.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I guess my question is, if you were going to try to define what successful release for Keiko would look like, what comes to mind for you?

• 1:11:09Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's tricky, you know, because I do feel like, I mean, I don't know, because I'm not in this field at all. Some trivia for you guys.

• 1:11:21Sarah Marshall?

  I've dealt mostly in pop culture.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  We're very much armchair quarterbacks for this.

• 1:11:25Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But it feels like having an animal who has lived captive for perhaps basically his whole adult life, that maybe there is an open question still at this point of whether being in the wild is what's best for him, because it does also seem like he's become extremely social with humans and acclimated extremely well with them. And also, it also seems like he hasn't had that many opportunities to socialize with other killer whales.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:11:53Sarah Marshall?

  And so I feel like if I were in charge of this, I would leave, I would maybe kind of like, see the first, perhaps like 12 months as like a research period where we're going to attempt to gather whatever data we feel is potentially relevant to the question of whether his best quality of life is being released and living without humans, or whether he knows how to live that way or would thrive that way anymore. And of course, obviously, I kind of, I have a feeling based on what I think I remember, that I wish Keiko had been around for longer because he's not with us anymore. Not that he would be listening to a podcast if he was. But yeah, and I guess we're going to get at the end to kind of maybe

• 1:12:37Sarah Marshall?

  what you think about all this. But that would be my concern, because I do feel like perhaps we haven't really tried to do this before. I mean, have we released other killer whales to the wild in the past at this point in time?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  I've come across some stories of releases, but I think one of the main points, and whether those were actually successful or not, is

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Unclear to me.

• 1:13:03Sarah Marshall?

  Cause like they weren't tracking.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Sarah Marshall?

  Afterwards.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:07Sarah Marshall?

  So, yeah, that's not really informative, I don't think, really.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I could be wrong. Like, if someone is out there like, whoa, you didn't know about this. Um, yeah, there could be one that I'm not.

• 1:13:18Sarah Marshall?

  You forgot Trixie. Yeah. We released Trixie and she lived for 13 years and became a mother. That would be nice to hear.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I am aware of a release project that happened after CAKO.

• 1:13:30Sarah Marshall?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  That actually involves some of the same people involved with this project. And it was successful, but there was a couple of really key differences. One, this young whale who was named Springer, she was, or he, I believe, was a part of the southern resident killer whale population. He was only in human care for like a couple of months, I believe.

• 1:13:52Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, yeah. That's like how my parents took care of a pigeon for a month one time.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:59Sarah Marshall?

  Like, I don't think that pigeon had time to forget how to be a pigeon.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:02Sarah Marshall?

  Not that I know anything about pigeons.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:04Sarah Marshall?

  If someone is an expert on pigeons, like, please let us know about pigeon memory. I assume it's gotta actually be pretty good, because if you think about homing pigeons, like, they never forget how to get back to where they're from, so.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure pigeons are like, it's, it's one of those species where we kind of dismiss their intelligence, but I'm sure they do things all the time that would.

• 1:14:25Sarah Marshall?

  Not that that means they can do Wordle or anything, but you know.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:28Sarah Marshall?

  Cause like, I'll also, speaking of anthropomorphizing, I feel like we want animal intelligence to manifest the same way human intelligence does. And it's like, no, they're intelligent in so many different and frankly, better ways than us, you know?

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's hard for us to comprehend that something, we're always thinking of intelligence as this hierarchical thing and we're at the top.

• 1:14:51Sarah Marshall?

  Right, because that's comforting for us, because we're so crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery, nougaty delicious to all the other big animals.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's probably just more of a difference in types of intelligence more than

• 1:15:06Sarah Marshall?

  Right, or you know, adaptation to your environment.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you, as a species, you adapt specifically to your environment and there's things that we probably just can't even understand.

• 1:15:18Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, and I feel like it's probably like, you know, when you're like learning animal trivia as a kid, or at least when you and I were kids, not every kid does this, but it's, I think, probably most, it's just fun, where you learn, it's like the trivia about animals, like who can leap the farthest proportional to their size, and it's actually a flea. And who has the biggest penis, and it's a barnacle, because he has to reach the other barnacles. I'm sure, have you seen that video? I saw that video.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  I am pretty sure I have.

• 1:15:48Sarah Marshall?

  They showed it to us in eighth grade, and it's like, look, you asked for this.

• 1:15:53Sarah Marshall?

  And so I feel like maybe you could also measure intelligence in terms of like, who is best adapted to their circumstances, and it would not be humans, it would probably be like razor clams or something like that.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when I think of the notion of like different, of animals with different types of intelligence, I always think of, are you familiar with mantis shrimp?

• 1:16:13Sarah Marshall?

  Yes, a little bit, but tell us about mantis shrimp.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Like the, the peacock, I think it's peacock mantis shrimp is one of the species, but they're this shrimp, I mean, they almost, they're, they're large, I'd say they're like, I don't know, almost like the size of like a rodent, like a rat or something.

• 1:16:29Sarah Marshall?

  Gross.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  And, yeah, I know, well, they're, I think rats are cute, so.

• 1:16:34Sarah Marshall?

  No, I like rats too, because the, the, the idea of a shrimp the size of a rat is like, trips something uncomfortable in my brain.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  That's fair, that's fair, but they're incredibly colorful, and they've done a few different experiments measuring their quote unquote intelligence, and they are like very smart. I just remember at my college where I did my undergrad, there was actually a mantis shrimp in the zoology lab, and you just always got the eerie sense like, you know, there's animals that'll kind of like look at you as you walk by, but it really felt like the mantis shrimp was really. Looking at you and like really observing what you were doing. It was kind of spooky, but also very cool. And also, and another thing with mantis shrimp is that the spectrum of colors that they can see is way beyond what we can see. I think they can see in like

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  infrared and ultraviolet and all these other spectrums of the light wavelength.

• 1:17:34Sarah Marshall?

  See, we're missing out on so much.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And how would that affect how you move through the world and how you interact with the world?

• 1:17:45Sarah Marshall?

  And whether you stare at Brianna.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like what if I'm giving off some crazy ultraviolet light and I'm just not even aware of it? I don't know.

• 1:17:54Sarah Marshall?

  What if that mantis shrimp is like the little girl in The Exorcist and it's like, you're gonna die up there?

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  That is kind of the vibe I got from it, honestly. It just kind of felt like that mantis shrimp knew things. Like, hmm.

• 1:18:09Sarah Marshall?

  I love thinking about you having this kind of like ongoing, like nemesis relationship with a shrimp.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  I spent a lot of time in that zoology lab. I had to, I was the TA for zoology and I would be grading like papers and quizzes and that mantis shrimp was just always watching me.

• 1:18:30Sarah Marshall?

  Always just never, you know, just like what happened with that Dutch woman in Bokido.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Except with the mantis shrimp, I felt like I was trying to avoid eye contact. It's like someone staring at you really intensely.

• 1:18:42Sarah Marshall?

  Right. No, like you're, you're Bokido in this situation and the mantis shrimp is the Dutch one. Okay.

• 1:18:50Speaker 01

  So anyway.

• 1:18:51Sarah Marshall?

  All right. Back to Keiko. Okay. So we have kind of precedent for like, or I guess after the fact where like, humans have released a couple of workers back to the wild, but perhaps not one who's, you know, at this point spent like close to 20 years in captivity, it seems like, right? Yeah.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, he, what year is it? We're, so when we go to Iceland, it's 1998 and he was, yeah, he was born in 78 and then caught a couple of years after that. So yeah, he's been in captivity for about. 20 years, that's a very, very long time for an animal or a human to be institutionalized in some way. And yeah, and so there was amongst the people involved and the staff involved, there were a lot of different ideas and feelings about how to approach this next stage of the project. And I will say that when they first got to Iceland, it was acknowledged

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  fairly quickly, like, hey, we don't have, we don't really have the expertise to do this. We don't have a lot of people that have worked extensively with killer whales on our staff. We have a couple of people, but they wanted to have additional staff that had that specialized experience. Because some of the people that were involved in training with CAKO at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, they had never had any experience with a cetacean, whether it was a dolphin or a killer whale.

• 1:20:25Sarah Marshall?

  Because contrary to Star Trek IV, there aren't many captive cetaceans bigger than dolphins.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Sarah Marshall?

  In human history, yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  No, I'd say killer whales are the largest ones that we've been able to quote unquote successfully have in captivity, though, you know, their survival rates are on average lower in captivity than they are in the wild. So whether or not you could say that's successful or not is, I don't know, I wouldn't say it was.

• 1:20:58Sarah Marshall?

  I can hear you saying successful in quotes.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:21:01Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, so yeah, so there's just kind of not really enough people with much experience, it seems like.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Right. And, you know, this is a very unique project. There wouldn't be a lot of people on the planet that could really pull this off.

• 1:21:16Sarah Marshall?

  Well, it's like starting a space program. It's like you don't start the first space program and then try and hire people who work in previous space programs because there isn't any of that. So it seems like you kind of have to cobble something together based on existing fields, partly.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's a good point, because there are people that have worked with killer whales at this point, but they are a part of an industry that people involved with this project are very uncomfortable with. People are really

• 1:21:42Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  uncomfortable with SeaWorld.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  And their motivations.

• 1:21:48Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  And so I totally, I understand. Like, I, I don't think it was necessarily a bad gut feeling to have for people involved with the project, but they did recognize that they needed some people who really understood how to train killer whales, because that's essentially what they were going to have to do with Keiko, which is kind of funny.

• 1:22:10Sarah Marshall?

  What were they training him to do? And what was the kind of, because it's like, if you break it down into steps. So he's in the sea pen, which is like,

• 1:22:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Sarah Marshall?

  Does that have like netting underwater to keep him in? Or what's, what does that look like?

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So on the island where there was Klutzvik Bay, where they ended up setting up shop, they installed a sea pen, which you could, I don't know if you're familiar with salmon farms, but I believe the contractor that made it.

• 1:22:39Sarah Marshall?

  Surprisingly, not very much. And I bet there are people listening who even don't, can't even visualize a salmon farm.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  Essentially, you have a platform or a dock out on the water. And then, yeah, basically a net hanging down and the net would hang down to the seafloor. And it was a large area, I believe it was larger than his tank at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And there's the platforms where the trainers could interact with Keiko, do any, you know, veterinary care, that sort of thing. So that was going to be where he started. And there is a key point of that, too, is that when Keiko arrived in Iceland, there were permits that the project had to apply for with the National Marine Fisheries Service in the United States, I guess because he was.

• 1:23:29Sarah Marshall?

  An American whale?

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, I guess maybe.

• 1:23:33Sarah Marshall?

  He became a naturalized US citizen like Johnny Five.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  I guess, yeah, maybe Keiko had a few passports at this point. I don't know. But he, um, there was a permit that had to be filed with, uh, the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is the service that manages marine mammals in the US. And I, and I believe because even though he was going Icelandic waters, he was leaving US jurisdiction and it was a US project. And then part of that, though, was that Keiko had to meet some criteria before he was released. So he couldn't just, they couldn't just put him into the bay without any kind of barrier. It wasn't, it was a next step. But there were some things with. Some of his training and showing that he was feeding himself and showing that he was

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  continuing to improve in health and not rely on veterinary care. And that he was demonstrating that he was not relying on people nearly as much. And there's a few other criteria as well, but all of these things needed to be met in order for Keiko to then actually be released to the wide open ocean. So that's why they couldn't just plop him in the bay and, and see how he does. Oh, and with the veterinary care, an important, important point with that

• 1:24:52Sarah Marshall?

  An important point.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Is, you know, say that three times fast.

• 1:24:55Sarah Marshall?

  Most importantly.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  Importantly, they, uh,

• 1:24:59Sarah Marshall?

  Headlines don't sell papes, newsies sell papes. All right, go on. I'm so sorry. I love you. My oldest friend.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  I love you too. I know. But, uh, they wanted to make sure he was healthy also, not just to show that he wasn't reliant on people for healthcare, but that he wouldn't pass anything on to wild whales. That was a concern. And that was like a concern with that papilloma virus that he had. According to the veterinarian, Dr. Lanny Cornell, he said that that virus has been shown in other populations of wild whales. It's just kind of present, kind of like HPV is in humans, I guess. And how extreme it got was mostly dependent on Keiko's living conditions in Mexico. That's why it got so bad.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  So that was shown that like, that wasn't necessarily going to be a concern, but there were concerns. They wanted to make sure he was going to be healthy and not introduce some weird pathogen to the wild population of whales. So that's the first stage of Iceland is he's in his sea pen. They bring in some new staff that have been involved with killer whale training at Sea World, notably a pair named Robin Friday and Mark Simmons. And there's two main books you can buy about Keiko. One was called Freeing Keiko by Kenneth Brower, and I've been citing his beautiful book a lot during these episodes. And then the other book was written by Mark Simmons,

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  and it is called Killing Keiko. So you can imagine that Mark Simmons was not pleased with how the end of the project went, and he decided to write a whole book about it.

• 1:26:47Sarah Marshall?

  Mark Simmons is not going to make you wait until the epilogue to let you know what he thinks. And I appreciate that in an author. Yeah.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  And you know, like, Mark Simmons has his very particular point of view and his role in the project. And his book is is also really well written. And he obviously has a lot of experience. He started working with orcas at SeaWorld, I believe, when he was 18. Like, he just went straight into it out of high school, apparently. And he really values the science of animal behavior and understanding animal training from that perspective and as like, a particular skill set and field that has its own body of literature

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  and, you know, best practices. And that was the attitude that he and his colleague, Robin Friday, brought to the project. They actually had recently left SeaWorld, and they were starting a consulting business, probably the most niche consulting business you could think of, where they're providing their services to other zoos and aquariums on animal training. And I suspect also, like, specifically for killer whale training. So they were brought on to the project. And because they were former SeaWorld trainers, there was some skepticism among some of the staff of like, what their motivations were.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  But from what I can gather from Mark Simmons' book and also from interviewing him, like they very much believed in this endeavor of releasing CAKO to the wild. They just had a very particular approach that they wanted to use. And from what I understand, they were very systematic. It was like if Spock, I think, and I believe Mark Simmons used that comparison in his book, if Spock were to run this project. Like what he and Robin Friday noticed when they arrived on the project was that they're, the impression I get from how he describes it is that there just didn't seem to be many

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  systems in place in terms of like, how we're going to interact with CAKO? What kind of reinforcement and animal training strategies are we going to use? Having it very clear, like who's interacting with him and who's not? He, he wrote in the book that when they arrived on the project, that they felt like anyone in the vicinity that was involved with the project could just walk out to the platform and interact with CAKO and that that was counterintuitive to what the end goal of the project was.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  If they're going to try to limit CAKO's dependency on humans and seek out human attention, you're going to need to limit the amount of interaction that he has with people. And I totally understand too, that that would feel really hard. Like I would have a hard time with it.

• 1:29:59Sarah Marshall?

  I don't know, I ignored CAKO. I would have been great at this job.

• 1:30:03Speaker 01

  They should have hired you, Sarah.

• 1:30:05Sarah Marshall?

  I know, why didn't they? I can't believe I didn't, like, they should have been like, wanted adolescent girls with no experience who have ignored CAKO previously. I would have been off like a shot.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Right? And I would have been the worst candidate because I, I probably wouldn't leave CAKO alone.

• 1:30:24Sarah Marshall?

  I mean, I saw three coyotes in my neighborhood the other night while on a walk. And it's very hard when you see a coyote to not go, here kitty.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  I know. Yeah. I mean, and especially if it's like an animal that you have a relationship with, like, and Keiko was a very friendly whale and likes people. So

• 1:30:43Sarah Marshall?

  This is one of those things where it feels like logic and sentimentality are a little bit at war where, and is that what they're saying in terms of like dependence on humans? That it's mainly dependence for like attention and relationships?

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe so. Cause um, of course, there's the issue of food too, like Keiko

• 1:31:02Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  At this point has been relying on humans for food for his entire life. And part of it was just the, the relationship aspect of it. They wanted him to learn how to seek out the attention of other wild whales and somehow essentially lose interest in people, which I understand that that's like, yeah, that's exactly what needed to happen for this project to succeed. I think, you know, hindsight is 2020 and it's easy to be critical from, you know, 2026, uh, looking back on this project. But that does seem like it was always going to be nearly impossible. And also, I'll say that it would have depended

• 1:31:45Speaker 01

  on the whale. I think that's something that I've come across, like, reading a little bit about animal training and animal behavior. And this is true for people too, that you can say like, okay, this is how the project's gonna go. We're going to, you know, limit our interaction with Keiko and then he's just gonna slowly lose interest in us and then he's gonna move on or whatever. And I'm grossly oversimplifying. But I would say that when you're asking an animal trainer, like a dog trainer, like, hey, does this approach, would that work for training my dog how to, you know, for better recall or something? And I think the sign of a good animal trainer is they'll say, well, depends on the dog.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  Depends on the individual, you know, for some individuals, positive reinforcement is all you need. Like my dog, Murphy, I barely have to raise my voice and she is cowering in a corner and I have to be so careful because she's just such a sensitive little soul. And I know, and she just needs positive reinforcement because otherwise it just, any kind of negative reinforcement, and I know there's really strong feelings on both sides. Like I know there's a whole camp of people that really believe in only positive reinforcement and I'm not here to argue for or against it. But I'm saying that it just depends on the

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  individual. And so for Keiko, I think like some of the attitudes about how the release side of things was gonna go could have worked for a different whale.

• 1:33:25Sarah Marshall?

  Right.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  For Keiko, what everyone talked about from day one was just like, he was just a very affable, friendly, you know, golden retriever of a whale, even to the point of being passive and not showing a lot of motivation, I guess. And I, I don't, I'm not saying that's like a flaw. I just, if you're looking at Keiko as a whole, and whether the approaches they were, you know, flinging at him, or, you know, trying to see what would work, it probably just, I don't know, I just think it was maybe not gonna work for him. Could have worked for somebody else, but maybe not for Keiko. And I think like, a lot of people involved

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  with the project, and certainly a few of the trainers, definitely Mark Simmons, they all expressed their doubts about whether Keiko was going to be able to.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Be successfully introduced to the wild. And so when Simmons and Friday first arrive, they kind of shake things up and say, all right, we're gonna, you know, whip this team into shape and we're going to-

• 1:34:32Sarah Marshall?

  There's a new sheriff in town.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, which kind of also, according to Mark, didn't make for the best camaraderie at times. Like, some of the other people that were involved with the project didn't really love their new approach. But part of it was having much stricter protocols about like, who's interacting with Keiko and when and what kind of behaviors they're going to work on and reinforce. One behavior that Mark said he had a problem with, it's something that they started at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. And I remember hearing about this as a kid. And as a kid, I was like, oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense. And now as an adult, I'm like, oh, I kind of see Mark's point. So they introduced this thing at the Oregon Coast

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Aquarium, which they called the innovative behavior. And it was basically, they just-

• 1:35:25Sarah Marshall?

  They made him do Odyssey of the Mind.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  No, they wanted him to just do something new. And he couldn't repeat it. So he could go, I don't know, breach in the corner. He could slap his tail. He could do a barrel roll or something. But he just like, couldn't do the same thing twice. And the, and the idea, like, when I heard about it as a kid was, well, if he's going to be a wild whale, he's going to have to be creative. He's going to have to exercise his imagination. And so we want to encourage that. And Mark Simmons, in reading his book, he was like, really, all it really does is just confuse Keiko. Because Keiko's like, what do you want?

• 1:36:09Sarah Marshall?

  It does make you think about, right. Because, again, dogs are very different, I know. But even a dog, and I think of dogs as being kind of like- The animal that understands humans the most, or at least has had the most time to like, you know, I think dogs and humans very much kind of evolved together. I can't think of of many dogs that I have known that wouldn't hate that.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Sarah Marshall?

  And I don't know if that's even a meaningful thing to bring up, but that is what that makes me think of.

• 1:36:42Speaker 01

  Right. And, and so you bring up a good point that, okay, if, if a reaction from a dog or a whale is that, like, oh, God, I hate it when they tell me to do this.

• 1:36:54Sarah Marshall?

  Or just like, I don't know what's happening. I don't know.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Sarah Marshall?

  Because again, it's like, training is about repetition.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:00Sarah Marshall?

  And if, I don't know, I feel like training was a concept that made me a little bit uncomfortable. And that sort of like born free, free as the wind blows, kind of sentimental child brain kind of a way. And now as an adult woman, I'm like, everyone needs to be trained, especially me, you know? And I like woke up this morning and immediately made my bed. And I was like, that was some good training I did on myself. Like, I had to teach myself how to do that over a very long period.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:25Sarah Marshall?

  And it feels much better to wake up and have like automatic things that your brain does than to be like, what do I do?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:32Sarah Marshall?

  In the morning?

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Sarah Marshall?

  Do I breach? Do I swim in a circle?

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Do I eat a salmon? Yeah, I, that's funny, because I feel like that's my New Year's resolution this year is, you know, quote unquote, developing, you know, healthy habits, but it's really training myself.

• 1:37:49Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah, you're just behaviorizing yourself. You're, you are Skinner and the pigeon all in one.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Right. But as you mentioned, so like if a dog or a whale hates it when they say, hey, go do something new. And you're like, I don't know what you want. You can see how that would start to incite frustration.

• 1:38:08Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Keiko actually was starting to demonstrate, according to Mark Simmons, some behaviors that would say that he was frustrated. And he was developing this thing called a thrashing behavior, where basically he kind of tossed his head. And I think he actually started doing that maybe at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

• 1:38:26Sarah Marshall?

  I'm sorry, it's making me picture him with like emo bangs.

• 1:38:31Sarah Marshall?

  You're all about you conformist.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I think Keiko was a little emo. He's just a sensitive, sensitive little emo kid.

• 1:38:39Sarah Marshall?

  A sensitive boy.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Sarah Marshall?

  Where are you?

• 1:38:47Sarah Marshall?

  And I'm so sorry. He's listening to his Walkman and his pen.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  Oh, little emo Keiko. And he's already got the right outfit for it, too.

• 1:38:56Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  But, uh, yeah, he started doing this thrashing behavior, which, uh, Mark said was a, a sign of frustration. And so Mark and Freddie sort of tried to get the team a little bit more in sync, a little more cohesive about what their approach with Keiko was going to be. And one, one little moment that I loved in his book, there's lots of little scenes. And as I mentioned before, if I was writing a movie about this, this is a scene I would include, but there's literally a training montage.

• 1:39:34Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Where Simmons is describing all these things.

• 1:39:37Sarah Marshall?

  Okay, wait, what are you setting? Okay. What song is this set to in your movie? And then, yeah, tell me what he's doing. Okay.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Mark Simmons already told us what the song is.

• 1:39:46Sarah Marshall?

  What?

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:39:47Sarah Marshall?

  Okay.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  What do you?

• 1:39:48Sarah Marshall?

  God, I didn't know you were being so literal.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  I know. Okay. Just imagine, you know, people in like their wet suits, splash suits, out on the dock and they got their whistles, you know, to, to do the bridge when Keiko does a correct, uh, behavior. Keiko's, you know, jumping out of the water, swimming in circles, whatever it is. So the song that Mark Simmons mentioned in his book was Dancing Queen by ABBA.

• 1:40:18Sarah Marshall?

  No, yes.

• 1:40:21Sarah Marshall?

  He is the Dancing Queen.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so.

• 1:40:24Sarah Marshall?

  He can dance, he can jive, he's having the time of his life. See that whale, dig that scene.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Queen. Oh.

• 1:40:33Sarah Marshall?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  I know, it's so perfect. But yeah, I guess they would actually play that song to like hype up people when they're about to go out on the, on the water with Keiko. Cause I mean, I remember this from watching SeaWorld Trainers, like it's a very, you have to be very expressive and you have to be, you're like running across, you know, platforms and trying to keep, it's a very physical thing. You're not just standing in one place and, you know, you have to get the energy up, get people excited. And also on top of that. Iceland, this came up many times in both Brower's book and Mark Simmons' books, that Iceland is a difficult environment to work in outside, as you might be able to imagine.

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  It is very, very exposed to the harsh North Atlantic winds and storms. And they had to be out there every day, rain or shine, or snow, or sleet.

• 1:41:34Sarah Marshall?

  God, that would have been a good chapstick ad.

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Oh my God, that would have been amazing.

• 1:41:40Sarah Marshall?

  Yes.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, I can picture it.

• 1:41:42Sarah Marshall?

  We should go back in time and pitch this idea. I think we could make this happen.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  I think we could.

• 1:41:46Sarah Marshall?

  Perhaps it would have a butterfly effect.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:41:49Sarah Marshall?

  This is such a side note, and it probably makes me sound like Andy Rooney, but like, I really was annoyed by that TikTok trend that turned into like, because everything devolves in meaning, you know, and gets squishier, but where it was like, the butterfly effect is crazy because if I hadn't gone to Tulane, then I wouldn't have met my roommate and be in her wedding now. And it's like, the butterfly effect isn't what college you choose. It's like a butterfly flapping its wings in Indonesia causes, you know, a hurricane in Houston. It's like, wow, the butterfly effect is crazy because if I hadn't left my chapstick on the subway, then I wouldn't have ended up playing Mimi in Rent. Like, that's the butterfly effect.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Sarah Marshall?

  You guys, that trend has been over for months now.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  No, I see what you mean, though. It's not, yeah, just listing a sequence of events, it's not, like Back to the Future, I don't think was like a butterfly effect movie.

• 1:42:47Sarah Marshall?

  Because like, when you make a massive choice in your life, it actually is kind of predictable that other large changes will happen because of it.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Sarah Marshall?

  Or the thing of, you know, the butter, the, or I guess this is like a separate butterfly metaphor, but like the time traveler butterfly where like you step on a butterfly in, you know, the Cetaceous period and it changes the entirety of the future, which is a Treehouse of Horror premise, which I know is a parody of something, but I don't know what the original is. I guess know it because of the Treehouse of Horror, because that's how people got their cultural education in the 90s. So if we had pitched this Chapstick ad, we might be living in a democracy right now. It's hard to know.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  We might. Yeah.

• 1:43:28Sarah Marshall?

  Yeah. But you know what? We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have one again.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are. It's, it's, uh, we're working on it. Everyone's, you know, doing their best right now and we're fighting for it.

• 1:43:39Sarah Marshall?

  I saw a high school production of Newsies last night.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  Of course you did.

• 1:43:43Sarah Marshall?

  The kids are, the kids are okay. The kids are gonna be all right. They were singing and dancing about soaking scabs.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  Oh. Wait, Sarah, you did that, which is quintessentially you. And then I went to a marine science film festival and I watched movies about whales yesterday. So.

• 1:44:03Sarah Marshall?

  Which is quintessentially you.

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we all just, we both just had a great Saturday night last night.

• 1:44:11Sarah Marshall?

  We really did. Yeah. Do a Saturday night that if you tell your friend about it later, they'll be like, yeah, of course you did.

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. You'll have a great time.

• 1:44:25Sarah Marshall?

  And that is our episode. Thank you so much for listening and we are going to have the thrilling conclusion to our trilogy out in one week. We can't wait to share it with you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Brianna Bowman for being our guest and Orca Lady. Thank you to the people who helped make this show. Thank you to Miranda Zickler, who is our producer and editor, and Nicole Ortiz, who is our administrative assistant. Please make sure to check out Brianna's website. You can find it in the show notes, and you can find our bonus episodes on Patreon and Apple Plus. And right now, you can listen to our January bonus with Paul Shear and Amy Nicholson of the Unspooled Podcast,

• 1:45:07Sarah Marshall?

  who came on to tell me about Ishtar, the worst movie ever made. Or is it? We'll find out. Thank you again for joining us and continuing to share this experience of just caring a whole lot about things. Keep on doing it. We'll see you in one week.