Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.

We just republished a three-part series called Everything You Never Knew About Whaling.

We spoke with economists, historians, Moby Dick Scholar, and an environmental activist whose

mission in life is to stop whale hunting.

We also tried to speak with a whale hunter, but public sentiment against whaling is so strong

that most modern whalers don't want to speak with the press.

Also, there just aren't that many whalers around anymore.

In the 1960s, at the peak of industrial whale hunting, thousands of whalers in more than a dozen countries

were killing tens of thousands of whales a year. Today, commercial whaling happens in only three

countries, Norway, Iceland, and Japan. And collectively, they only kill about a thousand whales a

year. There just isn't much demand for whale meat, it turns out, and even less for whale

oil. Anyway, we couldn't get a modern whaler to go on the record with us, but then, right

as we were finishing our series, we landed our white whale, Bjorn Anderson, one of the biggest

whalers in Norway. The Norwegian government allows for the harvest of 1,400 minka whales a year.

The minka is plentiful. It's not at all an endangered species. Even so, Anderson and his fellow

whalers usually take less than half of the allowed quota each year. Like I said, just not

much demand for whale meat these days. When we caught up with Anderson back in 2023, he just finished his whaling season.

In the conversation you're about to hear, he tells us why he loves hunting whales and how he

does it, why harvesting whales is important to maintaining the supply of fish and why he thinks that in the future

there will be more whale hunting and not less. It's coming up on this bonus episode of

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

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

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