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This month, Freakonomics Radio voyages from New England to Japan to Norway on a special three-episode series titled “Everything You Never Knew About Whaling.”
“You may be surprised to hear that there is still whale-hunting going on,” host Stephen Dubner says in the introduction to episode one, “The First Great American Industry,” out today. “When people go out on boats these days in search of whales, they’re usually just whale-watching… On the other hand: for centuries, people all over the world hunted whales; in some places — especially the U.S. — the whaling industry was a central part of the economy, and of life, in ways that can be hard to fathom today. In a way, the story of the whale is the story of our economic history.”
Along the journey, Dubner and his team will visit the last remaining American whale ship; look at the rise of the environmental movement in the U.S. and its connection to Save the Whales; and speak to, among others, a Moby Dick scholar, a journalist in a remote Japanese whaling town, and the infamous "eco-warrior" Paul Watson, who confronted whale-hunting ships on the TV show Whale Wars.
The first episode, “The First Great American Industry,” is available today at freakonomics.com and on all podcast platforms. The next two episodes will come out on Wednesdays July 19 and 26 at 11:00 PM ET.
The whaling miniseries follows other recent special programming across the Freakonomics Radio Network, including multi-part series on art repatriation, air travel, and Adam Smith (all on Freakonomics Radio) and the seven deadly sins (on No Stupid Questions), as well as the launch last month of the network’s newest show, The Economics of Everyday Things.
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