Bittersweet Infamy - #110 - The Killers of Eden

Episode Date: September 29, 2024

Guest host Peter Chiykowski tells Josie and Taylor about the pod of orcas who hunted in harmony with humans until a brutal betrayal ended it all. Plus: catch up with Darwin the Ikea Monkey, the stylish snow macaque whose fetching winter coat kept him warm through a chilly legal battle.

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Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome to Bitter Sweet and Fee. I'm Taylor Basso. And I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, we share the stories that live on in NBA. The strange and the familiar. The tragic and the comic.

The bitter. And the sweet. Josie, there's a chill in the air. The Scarecrow, it's becoming sentient. Again? That means we're moving towards October again. Like every year. That means we're moving toward October, which means we're wrapping up September, which means

two things. Number one, you can wake up Billy Joel Armstrong from Green Day. And number two, bittersweet harvest is coming to a bittersweet conclusion. It's so sad. It's been a good bountiful harvest, hasn't it? It's true. We had Tanya had the 9-11 faker. We had the Sentinelese people and John Chau.

Last week you gave us a night at the Dick Museum, which was really something. I'll salute to that. I'm saluting out of frame. And we've got one more Bountiful episode before we wrap up this Bountiful Harvest Bountifully. With a bounty. With a bounty. But we've perhaps saved the best for last. It's only Peter Czajkowski. Peter, welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

Also, I like visually reacted to hearing that you have an episode on the Sentinelese, because that has been a recent hyperfixation of mine. So, I'm so excited to listen to that. Well, give us an hour and 30 something minutes of your time, then. It's the art was number one to eight. Super excited. And it was our second guest of Bittersweet Harvest, Erica Jo Brown, who told the story. So our second guest farmer with a big pitchfork full of hay.

Peter, how are you doing to where we where are we hearing from you from today? Where are you? Skype and zoom in? What are you doing? What are you zooming in from today? I'm zooming in from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Beautiful, beautiful. Tell us a little bit about Halifax as a city, for those of us who don't know about it. It is so lovely. It's a little bit because I know you got a bunch of West Coasters,

so it's a little bit like Victoria, I find. But it's got a bit more of that like East Coast hospitality vibe. So like Victoria by way of like Newfoundland. So super friendly, super progressive. I love it here. It's really good. Nautical nautical. Yeah, very nautical. Good. We love to hear it was Halifax where you met Jasmine. Yeah, Halifax is where I met your high school friend, my wife, Jasmine Minoza.

Yes, my buddy from high school, Jasmine Minoza, who's Peter's wife, which is how we kind of first come to know each other. But how you, dear listener, might know Peter, because this is a very famous guy. Same guy. Peter Czajkowski is the creator of the award-winning webcomic Rock Paper Cinec, the story engine deck of writing prompts,

and six books of comics and short stories. He's twice won the Aurora Award for Best Graphic Novel from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. His fiction, game writing and poetry have appeared in the award winning tabletop RPG Emberwind, the video game factor and publications like Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Speculative Writing, Globe and Mail, Asimov, Science Fiction and more.

His comics, memes and social media shenanigans, or as we like to say here, shenanigans, have been covered by last week's with John Oliver Entertainment Weekly Buzzfeed Newsweek and the Huffington Post. Peter, welcome. Thanks for slumming it here. Thank you so much for having me. I listened to the pod and I really love you guys as storytellers and I am intimidated by like for all that you're like jokey and you sort of played off like the level to which

you research your stories and you cite your sources and you like responsibly talk about the larger frameworks around stories like the mine online episode. I like found that actually intimidating and I was seriously I was telling Jasmine like I'm actually a little bit nervous about this like maybe an hour ago before he jumped in. She's like don't worry. Taylor's really good at making people making people sound funnier than they actually are and it was like simultaneously very comforting. And also like she nuked your ass though. She fucking. A great drive by dunk.

Yeah. You see why Jasmine and I were such good friends. Oh yeah. Yeah. You got to you got to be able to stand toe to toe, right? You got to be able to knock people down a peg if you want to. If you want to hang, I need to be knocked down a peg.

Her capacity for dunking is endless. Perhaps another thing that I know Peter for and think of often in association with Peter, and I don't know if I've actually said this to him before, but he was the first of my, I guess, creative friends acquaintances to really pursue entrepreneurship and to do so in a way that was publicly accessible to me because I was Facebook friends with him and still am Facebook friends with him. Yes, I keep meaning to shut that baby down, but here we still are.

And I remember observing in his kind of like early days of striking it out with, I think at the time it was like comic books and publishing at the time, predominantly, but I remember thinking like, I think this young man's gonna do it. Like, I think he's got the moxie, as they say. I really do. And you really have made a great success of yourself both like creatively and in sort of the conventional business metrics.

Thank you. Yeah, like it took a few tries to get it right. And there's some... It does, doesn't it? It definitely does. And like also, it doesn't hurt to be a white man doing it, you know, like that there's some leg ups there that certainly make it like a little bit easier to live your life publicly on the internet

and not for that to be a position of vulnerability and attack. Or for it to be like a vulnerability that benefits you rather than working against you. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to put it. That's a good way to put it. But yeah, you like cobble together, we just become a really satisfying and rewarding and fun and varied creative career that is a little bit of like a weird

ADHD interest labyrinth and retrospect. I wasn't diagnosed until like two or three years ago. And I'm like, Oh, that's, that's, that's why I have like, Oh, thank you. Genuinely. Like I divided my life into before and after diagnosis. Life makes a lot more sense now that I kind of know what's going on up there in the brain. But I live a life where I get to be very interested in things and learn about them and tell other people about them and share that excitement naturally. And it's really good. I like it a lot.

And we're glad that you brought that big old brain here to benefit our our little dog and pony show. And one thing that I should be crystal clear on is that we, and by we I predominantly mean me. I'm going into shill mode now and proudly so. Peter actually, I had to arm twist him a little bit because when I gave Peter like, here's my plan, he was like, oh, I was kind of just like

gonna come in and tell this story, just like any other guest. I was like, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. I have like a little bit of an infomercial in my head now. So that's what we're doing. Peter's the brain or one of the brains, the original brain, let's say, behind the story engine deck. Are you guys storyenginedeck.ca?

Dot com, we went American. Dot com. Good for you. Congratulations. Look at this. No dog and pony show here, folks. Peter wants to make actual money, big boy money. So he got the dot com, not the dot ca. This isn't Saskatoon berries here, folks. Story engine deck dot com. And this is going to be easy to shill for because it's kind of a product

that I actually really believe in. It's basically a way to generate story prompts that might be useful to a writer, somebody who does DMing or tabletop gaming, someone who does teaching. I could have used this literally yesterday. I was trying to generate prompts for an English student that I'm working with who I wanted to teach a little bit

something about story structure. And I was like, I just, I wanna show them a quick way to bang out a beginning, a middle, and end in a climax, even if just conceptually, even if you're not actually writing it out. And I thought, oh, God, you know, it would be perfect for this. I've got someone to talk to about this tomorrow.

And so here I am. Tell us a little bit about what is the Story Engine deck, how does it work, and where did it come from? Yeah, so it's a deck of 180 cards that you use to build custom story prompts, and you build them one small creative choice at a time. So it tends to help people, A, make one creative decision at a time.

It can be very easy to feel overwhelmed with the field is wide open, the page is too blank. First, you're making a decision about who's my character going to be, and then what's their motivation, and then what's that motivation anchored to, and then what's their obstacle going to be and by the end when you're just layering in a little adjective to like put a bit of spice on it, your brain is already doing the work of constructing a story out of those pieces and like brains are such good story machines

like we think narratively about the universe, we can't help it. You know, this random thing that happened to me happened because of a thing that I did earlier this morning that I believe is somehow linked because of bad luck. Like that's a story that our brain made up. We do it all the time. We apply cause and effect. And most people who don't think that they're creative, generally speaking, still have really good story brains. And if you put a few points in front of them, they will build a pattern out of it. And they will, they can spin that off into some pretty amazing yarn. So the deck kind of does the work of giving people the essential ingredients for a story and in an order that their brains can be really happy to play with. And then

the rest is just the cards getting out of the way and the user kind of doing their thing and spinning out what they want to do with it. We can just kind of jump right in and do it if you want, if you like. One thing that I should say is that this is a series of products. Now it started off as just a single deck, but now there are expansions and you've recently expanded into like a world building deck called? Oh, deck of products. Now it started off as just a single deck, but now there are expansions and you've recently expanded into like a world building deck called... Oh, Deck of Worlds. Deck of Worlds, thank you. Good name.

So this is something where if you nibble on this original offering and you're like, oh, this actually really suits the way that I work so much so that I'm a little worried that I might even run out of prompts. Oh, well, baby, we've got genres for you. We've got steam. I was sitting in the audience of one of your live streams that you do on YouTube, which are these really kind of cool little community building and product demo live streams. And I was impressed because there's like a deck for if you want to do vampires,

there's a deck for if you want to do steampunk, there's a deck for if you want to do like a hard-boiled detective thing. It's cool. Yeah, we got it all, baby. These are just like, yeah, we... I don't know, I looked at all the things that I think make those genres interesting and different from other genres and tried to like throw those into a mixed bag so that you can like, my favorite thing to do

is to genre mix. I love like a vampire inexplicably in the post-apocalypse. And for some reason there's gears in steam. I don't know, we'll figure it out later. I love genre mixing. And I think that you get some really cool stories when you start to, like, pull themes and, I don't know, they're really, like, iconic visuals from one genre

and, like, slap them into another and just you get these weird resonances that can just be really fun to play with. We got genres for days, baby. Before we move on to doing our tarot reading here with your cards, where did the idea for this come from? Yeah. Actually, so tarot is one of... There's like a few things that kind of came together at the same time.

And the deck happened at a time in my life that was very weird and hard. So the kind of the short version of it is that Jasmine and I had just moved to the UK, which was wonderful in a lot of ways, because like UK is awesome, we were in London, but also like didn't really know anyone locally. Our senior rescue dog, Tommy, we were in London, but also like didn't really know anyone locally. Our senior rescue dog, Tommy,

we were doing palliative treatment for cancer. For a while I was like in Canada with Tommy and Jasmine because like she was moving for school. So she like had to go by a certain date. So we were apart for part of this. And basically it was the year that Tommy died. It was the year that we had just moved and we didn't have like a strong social network around us.

And I had also gotten into like, we're call it for the purposes of of respecting the NDA A legal situation with a publisher that was they were basically were trying to claim They had the IP rights to everything that I'd ever created or would create for the rest of my life and we're like Kept threatening to sue me and and people that I cared about It was very bad Yeah so I was like thinking I might be done with writing because if I write anything, they'll just take it. If I like make anything good, they'll just

sue me. I was kind of considering like this might be the like I might just be done writing. So awful. It was terrible. But the one thing that that year did for me that was like a good thing is it kind of forced me to treat writing more like yoga or like exercise where I wasn't doing it to like make something or there wasn't an angle. I was doing it because the practice of it was healthy and good for me. Not the product, but the practice, yeah. Yeah. And the thing that I'm really grateful that I like know now, and it's a soapbox that I jump on a lot, is telling young writers to stay in love with your craft, stay in love with the process. Because if you use as motivation, like the eventual goal of getting published, which is a

great goal to have, like that's totally valid. If you use as your, like, the eventual goal of getting published, which is a great goal to have, like, that's totally valid. If you use as your motivation, wanting accolades, it's kind of like setting out on a road trip, but planning to get gas a thousand kilometers down the road. You're not gonna get there. You're not even gonna get there. You're gonna burn out before you get there. So, make your fuel the process, because that's something you can control.

That is something inside the realm of your control that you can stay in love with. And have those goals, but, like, don't fuel yourself by them. Oh, make me cry! That's so sweet! I love that! I was, it was like weirdly lucky that that was like a thing that I got to figure out. And one of the things that I was really in love with, process-wise, was this idea for a deck.

So Story Engine Deck was one of the things that kept me writing because I just loved working on it. It was a really exciting idea. And also the story ideas I've come up with using the deck. Again, I would find that I was excited about them in a very natural way. Whereas if I was trying to write to force something out, I was just very depressed that year. So I just often wouldn't have the baseline level of motivation

required to go do a creative thing when instead I could not do that. Because that's a lot easier. That's huge. And then I always like to credit, there's a Canadian novelist named Douglas Glover who wrote the sentence, a story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it.

And it's one of my favorite diagrams for a story that I've ever heard. It's so simple, so short. And I think it's certainly like one very helpful lens for constructing a compelling story. So that sentence, which I've been like chewing on for a couple of years since I'd heard it in a creative writing classroom in Halifax, that kind of became the basis for diagramming the deck.

So the card types in the deck kind of correspond to those concepts of you need to have a character, they need to have a motivation, they need to want something. There needs to be trouble. There's going to be a problem that they're going to come across. And then the fifth card type aspects is like just adjectives that are there to help you like remix and describe and layer other prompts so that you're not always working with just

like a basic word, you're able to reflavor things. So that really helped with bringing the idea together. And then tarot was actually the third influence, being able to like rotate a card to change its meaning if it's upturned or downturned, being able to create spreads and patterns by which you can create these more complex stories out of these kind of like individual nucleuses making little story molecules. That came from talking to some Taro users and getting their thoughts on this idea

that I was putting together. And it all came together, and then that was the Story Engine deck. Like, that is the reason that I now have a stable, happy creative career. Wow. And this was like a big Kickstarter success specifically. Yeah, yeah, it launched in 2019. I had been writing a book of stories

alongside developing the deck. In some ways, I developed the deck by writing the stories, and in some cases, I wrote the stories using the deck, so it's kind of a mix of both. And I launched them together, and I thought it was just going to be my existing short story fans who would back it, and I thought this will just be a small thing. And there's a cool deck that I want to share with people,

but I didn't think it was going to be the headline. You thought the stories were the hero, not the deck. Yeah, and very quickly, there was gonna be the headline. You thought the stories were the hero, not the deck. Yeah. And very quickly, there was a community of writers and dungeon masters and actually a lot of teachers, a lot of teachers who saw this thing and were like, I know exactly what I would do with this. The theory of this makes sense to me. It feels very intuitive. And we're like excited to pick it up and just had their own ideas about how to use it. So it was very briefly humbling to have no one interested in my book of short stories, but, you know,

experimental microfiction is a hard sell. And do you want to know something? I wrote short stories at like 40 pages of length and no one wanted those either. It's a genre thing, baby. I was, it's not personal. It's not personal. And I hope no short story writer has ever taken a bridge at the fact that their genre is just a bit of a tough sell.

Dude, I have, but like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? I hope no short story writer has ever taken a bridge at the fact that their genre is just a bit of a tough sell. Dude, I have. But like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? Write a story about it, right? A story about it. Yeah. No, we didn't find a way for people. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, so I like I think in the end, we had three and a half thousand backers who came on board. And I just very quickly, like, took the message like, hey, they they are interested in the deck. That's when I had a lot of requests for expansions, which I originally wasn't gonna do,

but eventually my very kind community like friendly bullied me into it. Thank God. Sometimes you need that. I know, right? Yeah. It was the community that pitched me the idea to if I developed a world building deck.

And actually the story that I'm gonna be telling today for the infamous portion here when we finished the extended commercial. Yeah. Is like, Is that I insist this wasn't Peter. This was not a Peter condition. This was a Taylor condition. Let it be known.

Don't hold it against this man that he has an awesome product. You're very sweet. You did warn me that it was going to be, and I quote, a tongue-bath. I did. I did. Yeah. But the research for the world building deck, I'm just going to only mention briefly, is what first put on my radar the story that I'm going to be telling today, which is an example that I call like real world world building deck, I'm just gonna only mention briefly, is what first put on my radar the story that I'm gonna be telling today, which is an example that I call like real world world building, where something in the real world, when you hear it, you're like,

that feels like someone wrote it. It's so cool and specific and can only happen under the we know about that. Yeah. We know about that. That's what the whole podcast is here. And I love it. Yeah, absolutely. I was literally just thinking that about when the Galapagos

affair episode that we did back way back when this is another one of the ones that we just restored episode 21. The whole time I did that, I remember just thinking like, this is made up. This isn't true. Yeah. This is this story fiction. Yeah. That's the stories feed real life and real life feeds the story. Right. That's what we also do here. It's an interesting push and pull.

But it sounds like you've had like a really good experience of being guided by your own community, which is really cool. Yeah, definitely. So listening to the community has kind of led to all of the best decisions that I've made about the deck. And then also bringing in originally, so she was a friend who became a consultant for me in 2020. And then who came on full time as like my business partner last year. So Marokee Tong, who I know she's the business brain for the whole thing. I just get to sort of focus on the creative and it has been a really wonderful way to divide things up.

Living the dream. Living that you were right in that Facebook post. You could do it. See? So there's so much more I'd like to ask you about yourself, about the product, about Peter Fences. We should talk about the fencing at some point. What's your favorite color?

It'll still get to the bottom of the bullet. But for now, favorite color? Yeah, this will get to the bottom of my wallet. But for now, why don't we, since we're on the subject of the story engine deck, why don't you do a little demo with Josie? And so, Josie, I specifically said to Peter in advance, if he's the traveling salesman coming in and hawking his wares, and I'm like the QVC host who's like in on the job, then you're like the audience surrogate

who you're just here to be like, wow! Yeah, yeah. Holy shit! I've excitedly raised my hand from the studio. who's like in on the job, then you're like the audience surrogate who you're just here to be like, wow! Yeah, yeah. Holy shit! I've excitedly raised my hand from the studio audience, and I was... That's you. You're like Josie No Last Name. Yeah, that's me.

You were vetted before you came in the room, but it looks like it was random. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. I can speak full sentences. Even better, she's like, we had a plant in the audience, but it's not Josie. Josie just like took her initiative and raised her hand quicker. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shot your shot. And they were like, fuck it. Let's just let her freestyle.

Let's see what she does. Let's let her cook. She's got a chutzpah. Let's go. Well, here's our old deck for those who aren't part of a Zoom call. It's a little box about the size of like, I don't know, two dungeons and dragons rulebook stacked on top of each other. Opens like, I don't know, two Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks stacked on top of each other. And you all know how that is. We've all carried heavy backpacks of that around high school, making us slow moving

targets for bullies, right? All of us have done that. Didn't leave any room for your miniatures. It was a real shame. Oh yeah, you know, this guy knows. Yeah. All right, well here, I'm going to quickly show you. So we got five hard types and we're just going gonna pull one of each of them and we're gonna have

a little story seed. So we'll start with our agent card, which is our character here. Okay. Josie, why don't you read out the prompts on the card? We've got a merchant, an investor, a grifter and a miser. What would you, and keep in mind, you're not permanently committing to this. If you want to change your mind later, we just rotate the card. But what do you want to use as our character here for our story?

It's a finance theme. All the cards are the main deck. Again, like T.R.O. themed to one particular cluster of ideas. Yeah. The devil is in the details. They love fine details. Very good, very good. Let's go Grifter. We love a Grifter on Bitter Suites.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The anti-hero kind of vibe. Grifters are especially fun because conflict kind of comes baked in with them, right? Like, it's when are we gonna figure out the grift, what are the consequences gonna be? I love the drama. And you get to come up with the grift. Well, here, let's figure out their motivation.

Let's figure out what's moving them in the story. So, this is our engine card. So, what do we have here, Josie? Okay, so the card is split in two, and one half says wants to hurt and in parentheses or damage wants to heal or fix. What are you vibing with for the grifter here? I like the incongruence of a grifter who wants to heal or fix. Maybe this is a redemption arc. I love a story where someone who's lied a lot of times tries to tell the truth and then

no one believes them. So I think I like I like your choice there to kind of lean away from type. I think that's a lot of fun. All right, cool. So we're going to find out what they want to heal or fix and we're going to pull an anchor card here. Anchor cards are locations, objects and events in the story. So basically non-people things. So this is what their motivation is going to be anchored to. What do they want to heal? What do they want to fix? So what do we got here? A cache, a camp, a bag, a disaster. Yeah. Oh, and if you ever don't like a card, you can just check it and draw another one.

I think I'm leaning towards a disaster. It creates an opportunity for healing. Also, the word disaster comes from the stars, like asteroid, and so it's like, like the stars are out of line. OK, Josie, somebody Wikipedia disaster once asteroid, and so it's like, like the stars are out of line. Okay, Josie. Somebody Wikipedia disaster once. I love it so much. Yeah, like it could be trying to fix a bad pattern,

a misalignment of the stars. I have a friend who in his romantic relationships, they refer to an apple as like when you just give someone a fun little factoid that they can carry and walk around with, and that was an apple. Thank you for that. Okay, so conflict card is probably my favorite card type because this is kind of where the story starts to heat up a little bit. What are the stakes here? Sometimes these are like an obstacle we have to overcome. Sometimes it might be like the price they have to pay or sometimes it's kind of a fallout

for if they go for it, but they will likely lose their life, or they will lose their life's work. Oh. Ooh, this is hard. This is really hard. I'm intrigued by they will lose their life's work, but I'm worried that for a grifter, they have to be kind of maybe separated from their life's work a little bit. But what if it's remember your boy Elmire the Forger

who made these, like, great forgeries? True. Perhaps there's something in, like, the body of work of the forger, you know? But theygeries. True. Perhaps there's something in like the body of work of the forger, you know? But they will lose their life's work. Let's do it. Let's do it. Well, and especially, I don't know what kind of grift they're on, but if it is something where like they're discovered

to have been behind a bunch of these like forged objects or something, then all of those suddenly become worthless. Or it just might be that like once their grifting comes to life, then that like the basis of trust that they've been exploiting for all their grifting is gone now. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Or they lose their money. Or the whole fortune is up for it.

We got a lot of options here. And then last card type is our aspect card. These are just gonna be four adjectives that you can slap on any other card to describe it. So we have irreplaceable, broken, powerful, and harmless. And that can be for our disaster. It can be for our grifter. We can describe the manner of the fixing with one of these. We could describe

their life's work with one of these adjectives. Okay, powerful. Let's up the stakes, baby. Can we put it on the agent? Can we put it on the grifter? We can have a powerful grifter for sure. I have been flipping over cards in the box in their little trays, but this is where I'm actually going to pull them out so we can lay them out. And now we have like a functional sentence that works as our story prompts. And you built it on your own. There we have a powerful grifter wants to heal or fix a disaster, but they will lose their life's work. And let's imagine we want to like spin out more from here, like,

because right now we're, we're theory crafting, we're story crafting, but we want like to get specific about what is their life's work? What do they build? We might just like stack these like little story Legos. So what's their life's work? What do they build? We might just like stack these like little story Legos. So what's their life's work? We'll pull some anchor cards and see if we can find something that makes sense. So I've pulled some cards here. No, that's where it could be some kind of machine. Oh, it could be a letter like they're a letter forger, actually.

A grifter who like forges historical letters. Mm hmm. That would be really, really fun. That is good. So I might talk that under the conflict card there, just as a little reminder as to what that means. And you can just stack up cards like LEGO, stack meetings. This is kind of the base spread, but you can get very creative with it.

How about this? One of the letters that this character has forged has had some sort of terrible, unforeseeable consequence, a disastrous consequence, if you like. And by coming out as the person who forged this letter, they would be able to heal this rift, but at the cost of everything, right? At the cost of all their livelihood.

Yeah, I love it, I love it, I love it. What is the name of the potter who was so good that his work was mistaken for artifacts being sluggish? Brighidolada. Yeah. We wrote Brighidolada." -"Yeah." We wrote Brigidolada. That's true. (*ALL LAUGHING*) But see, if you imagine yourself in a situation

where you did have a creative block, do you see how that became something fun to discover? Where we were like, ooh, let's find out what kind of grifter this person is. Ooh, you know? It just becomes a space that you can play in and gamify a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, and I do feel like play as part of the creative process

is something that's so underrated and so hard to, like, create good conditions for. Can I say one more thing about this? Because I think it's so cool. What I love about, like, a prompting general, I suppose, is the ability to, like, push against it, to be like, fuck, I hate this. And then you can, like, in this case,

you can either toss out a card and replace it, or you can, I call it going grad school, you try and break the prompt, right? You're like, okay, then what's a disaster? Okay, this disaster could be a tiny little thing in this person's life and not the real implications of that. And like, there's something so generative about, even if you don't like prompts, there's something so generative about,

even if you don't like prompts, I guess is what I'm saying. There's something so... I don't like prompts. And Taylor hates them. Yeah. I hate prompts. I was trying to keep it on the low-low because we have, like, prompt king here. I hate prompts. I never use them. I would use this. I would use this all the time.

And you are, as far as I know, the first person to have used the deck for narrative nonfiction. Hey, so I'm a trailblazer, actually. I'm breaking glass ceilings here. Interesting that you say that. So I've written my Minphemous for today based on a card from the story engine deck. And it's really interesting.

I was thinking earlier when you were talking about tarot and how you can use different spreads and how you can change the meanings by flipping them upside down. I famously don't do upside downs on my tarot and how you can use different spreads and how you can change the meanings by flipping them upside down. I famously don't do upside downs on my tarot because I don't like how it complicates the meaning of it. And I never do very complex spreads because I just don't want to do that amount of thinking.

I'm much more liable to take a single card. It's just something for me to chew on through the day, kind of thing, and how I can incorporate it and how I can change my thoughts around that. And kind of funnily enough, much in the way that you're not tethered into using this deck in any particular way, Peter just gave you a very ornate way to do it, one with like a logical progression that will get you to a very holistic conclusion.

Yeah. Guidance. Guidance, exactly. I took the Taylor-Bastor approach and I said, just give me one anchor card and let me cook. And so an anchor card again is a location, an object or an event. It's basically you're like, you're indirect now, right? And for the last effort that we did there, the anchor card was the disaster. And so Peter gave me an anchor card, which again had four prompts on it. And the four prompts were an accident, a piece of clothing,

a construction site and a blueprint. And so I was like, I'm going to take one of these and I'm going to come back to you with a minfamous just to show you, just to just to hawk this thing even further, right? Because it's already in your cart, but you need to check out. And you can do that at story and shintek dot com dot com. Not see a dot com dot com. Very, very important. This is an international operation. The hometown, right?

Yes. So I looked these over, and I'll give you a little bit of an insight to my thought process here. I threw out an accident right away because it was too easy. Right, yeah. I think life is a series of accidents, man. I think it's an accident that we're kind of all here right now talking together via screens. Like, that's weird, right?

Did the universe not start with an explosion? Exactly, exactly. You get it. And so I thought that that would be too easy to fulfill accidentally, see? So I put that one to the side. I ended up having to discard a blueprint because I didn't come up with a single thing that fit the prompt. Okay, yeah.

Which I'm annoyed with myself about because my goal was to come up with one for each of them just as a flex. So, I came down to a piece of clothing and a construction site. And I have to say, I really liked the generative process, and I'm gonna use the one that I came up with for a construction site at a later date.

And the other thing that's funny is that when it came down to construction site and piece of clothing, both of the stories that I came up with were monkey-centric. Mmm... Something simian in the air, perhaps, these days. We remember, Josie, back in episode 75, you told us the story of Tanya Haddix and her army of celebrity chimps.

And basically, she's now gotten the Tiger King treatment, and there's an HBO Chimp Crazy. I haven't seen it, but it's supposed to be good. Peter, have you seen this? I have not. My coworker has been watching it and likes it, says it's wild, says it's just insane. It's Chimp Crazy.

Crazy, yeah. I just wanted to invite all of us to go Chimp Crazy together here for Arm Infamous. Not Chimp Crazy. Crazy, yeah. I just wanted to invite all of us to go Chimp Crazy together here for Arm Infamous. Not Chimp Crazy perhaps, but like Japanese SnowmaCat Crazy. I don't know. I promise to oo-oo and ah-ah. At appropriate intervals please. No monkey business.

So, you're a man, Peter. You've lived in a few places in this beautiful country of ours. You've lived in Halifax. I know you lived in North Vancouver for a little bit. Where else? Ontario and New Brunswick. Whereabouts in Ontario? Mostly Toronto.

I grew up in Richmond Hill, which is a very boring suburb of Toronto and then lived downtown for seven years as well. Got any intel on North York? Does that mean anything to you? Malls. Malls, good. You got it exactly.

Let's zoom in to Five Provost Drive in North York, Ontario. Although this may unofficially count as Swedish territory because we find ourselves in the attached two-level parking lot of consumer mega-giant IKEA. Peter, you're nodding your head in recognition. Do you have suspicions about where we may be going? I have some suspicions, but I would much rather listen to a story than nod my way through it, so I'm gonna... Sweet. How about you, Josie? Do you have any suspicions about where we may be going? I have some suspicions, but I would much rather listen to a story than nod my way through it,

so I'm gonna... Sweet. How about you, Josie? Do you have any suspicions about where we may be going? Uh, yeah, I'll voice them, sure. Is this the, like, the telenovela that was filmed in an Ikea? It's not that. It's not. I love Ikea Heights, and that has been, I have considered doing

an Ikea Heights in Infamous before, but no, it's a little before 2 p.m. on December 9, 2012, and Bronwyn Page is here with her sister to shop for a Christmas tree. But Bronwyn insists get more than they bargained for when they spot a circle of people gathered around something. Now, Josie, Peter, I know what you're thinking. Someone busted up a cardboard box and started break dancing for the crowd.

Unfortunately, no. But the truth is even more remarkable. The sisters join the group to see a small, fuzzy animal hopping up and down. At first, Bronwyn thinks it's a rabbit, but no, it's a monkey. And specifically, it's a Japanese snow macaque, the type of monkey you imagine bathing in a hot spring on an icy mountain. Drinking a nice cup of cocoa kind of vibes. Yeah, there's some Yuzu oranges floating around them, just living its best life.

And notably, it is wearing a diaper and Peter, I think a fur coat. It's close. It's a small faux shearling coat. So if you imagine like it's the tanned skin of a sheep on the outside and then the furry woolen flaps for the collar, that but faux, because this is a cruelty-free monkey. It's a very... It's a faux shearling coat in a very flattering shade of tan.

Says customer Stephanie Yim, he was lost and clearly looking for someone familiar. He didn't seem agitated, just more bewildered or scared, says Bronwyn Page, who will later appear on the evening news with the caption. Bronwyn Page saw the monkey. It was incredibly bizarre to see. It was so small, like a baby. I would have stuck around, but my sister didn't care.

I just snapped a few photos and then we went into the store. It was so weird. I kept thinking, what just happened? So Peter, what do you remember about this lost monkey in a little coat? I don't remember how the story resolves. I remember that was the winter that we had moved to Toronto that year. Oh, perfect. So you're right for this. Yeah. And we, down the subway line

from the mall, if I remember correctly. Right, so if you were quick enough to see the tweets, you could have gotten on the tube and made it there before Animal Control, maybe. Yeah, and I gotta say, like, I'm so proud of my bio, but I don't have Peter Chachowski, comma, -"Saw the monkey." -"Saw the monkey!" I don't have that credential, and I'm actually starting

to beat myself up about it. But you need to have things to reach for. Do you want to have achieved everything before you turn 40? This isn't Forbes. Although you have been in Forbes, haven't you? Story Engine Deck has been in Forbes. Congrats to you. So this is kind of Forbes. Yeah. So I don't remember how the story resolves. I just remember thereafter, always known as Ikea Monkey, but there was a monkey loose in Ikea, and I believe he belonged to a local woman, but I truly don't remember.

Josie, do you remember this? No, uh-uh. This did not filter to me. To be fair, though, you weren't living down the subway line from Monkey Ikea either, were you? No, no. I may have even been in China at that point. I've noticed that very convenient excuse come up a lot. -♪ De-de-de-de-dee!. For like, anytime Josie biffs something from like 2011 to like 2014 or whenever you were there, you're like, that's the reason that I know the vague words of Rebecca Black's

Friday but I sing it to the tune of Justin Bieber's Baby. That's why I was in China. There were other things I was learning. Okay. I was learning Chinese. Yeah. Okay. other things I was learning okay I was learning Chinese yeah okay so within the hour animal control officer Joe Fiorillo arrives to find the situation pretty much under control quote I just went in to assess it and I asked the security

guard how is he the guard said oh he's fine if you put a blanket over him he stops right away and he did. Same. Me too. Me too. Where'd the lights go? You know, oh, so much calmer. OK. Oh, this is chill. This is chill. They sequester the monkey in a glass vestibule, which is where the most circulated picture of the monkey

staring longingly out of the glass comes from courtesy of customer Lisa Lin. Sadly, contrary to my own, and I suspect popular belief, and I noticed Peter's belief just there, the IKEA monkey never entered the IKEA store. Heartbreaker. Because you instantly go to like, oh, if I was a monkey lost in an IKEA store in a little coat, you know? My god, yeah.

I would play with the taps, I would lay under the dorm room art of Audrey Hepburn on the big bed, you know? Peter, you looked surprised. I mean, it's there in the name. I feel like it. Yeah. He never made it past the parking lot,

past the vestibule, really. Wow. In our macaques, even monkeys. Is either half of the name correct? OK, so this is interesting because I was like self-conscious about constantly calling this thing a monkey. So I made that check.

So don't ask me about kingdom and phylum and species. I'm an art school graduate with a lit joint in my hand. But macaques are at least colloquially called Japanese snow monkeys. So I think we're in the clear to call them that. Whether that's a koala bear situation, I don't know. Don't come for me zoology grads. But that's what I've, I checked as far as like, can I get off the hook

for calling this thing a monkey? And I think that we all collectively can. The IKEA part, this is, I guess, maybe because Vestibule Monkey didn't have the same ring to it. Not specific enough. The devil's in the details. Yeah. The administrator of KnowYourMeme.com or an administrator of KnowYourMeme.com. I'm sure there's it takes a lot of people to know that many memes. But his name is Don Caldwell.

He says being at IKEA was important. Memes need a catchy name and Ikea monkey was catchy. He also adds the coat was a huge part of it. People love to anthropomorphize animals. Much of the attention around this instant, which instantly goes viral. As soon as these pictures hit the internet, they go viral. The monkey becomes a meme. There's artistic tributes, there's songs, there's a butter sculpture at the Canadian National Exhibition.

And much of the love and attention is focused on the fact that, as we say, this monkey is dripped the fuck out. A piece of clothing, as Card once told me, right? The Globe and Mail headline on the incident, for example, proclaims, stylish but illegal monkey found roaming Toronto, Ikea. And again, suggests that he was inside the Ikea, which is such a tempting way to narrativize this in our heads. There's always one detail about the story wrong,

and it's always the most interesting detail. It's such a shame. Says Canadian fashion journalist Jeanne Becker, can't wait to dish critique on that divine Russian inspired shearling coat What happened to him? Well Bronwyn says that as she and her sister left Sweden They saw security guards speaking with an agitated woman who will turn out to be the monkey's owner as as Peter indicated a local woman Toronto real estate lawyer Yasmin Nakuda who had bought the macaque six month old Darwin for $5,000 from an exotic animal dealer introduced by a client.

Says Nakuda, quote, I had no choice but to carry Darwin everywhere I went. He would have anxiety fits if I kept him away from me. However, the last time we went to IKEA, I was approached by one of the staff and told that I could not bring him in. He had a soft zippered crate that he generally was not able to get out of, which he was able to rip apart. He was locked in our SUV and from the inside, he unlocked the car by himself, none of which we could foresee at the time, given that we had not seen him do it.

We were obviously panic stricken, and I started running up and down the parking lot until someone indicated to me that they had seen a little monkey running back to the store. And of course, I imagine to confirm here, she was like, okay, what was he wearing? And then they said, an adorable little shearling coat. And she was like, okay, yes, that's my monkey. Oh!

Someone's like, oh, fleece-lined denim. And she's like, dang, so close. Yeah, damn it. That's not mine. These Canadian tuxedo monkeys. Kind of a few contradictions in the way that she, you know, she's like, he was locked safely in his soft zippered crate, which he was able to rip apart without any particular problem, right?

So, a few things like that. From there, animal control takes possession, it's quickly determined that this is a wild animal that needs to live in a sanctuary. It's here that we note that macaques, like Darwin Darwin are literally poached off their mother's backs as babies, that the process of transporting them to private pet owners is potentially fatal, and that primates in general are not good pets for everyone's safety, for everyone's sake. For your face.

The human and the primate alike. Katherine Cronin, a research scientist from the Linkin Park Zoo, and it has taken all my effort not to make a Linkin Park joke here, but I'm just gonna zoom through, says that when macaques get close to maturity, as I am, I've stopped making Linkin Park jokes. I know, it becomes so numb.

Yeah, damn it, Peter. I was leaving it for the guests, Josie. That's what you do. You leave the last one for the guests. That's nice. In our farm culture in Bitter Sweet Harvest. Exactly. When macaques get close to maturity, they can quickly become pushed away from people and grow more aggressive, which scans with Yasmin Nakahuta's own reports about Darwin's behavior. Yasmin signs the form to send Darwin to Storybook Farm

Prime Ape Sanctuary in Sunderland, Ontario. And that is a harbor for animals mainly sourced from labs, roadside zoos and the exotic pet trade. It's actually home to another famous monkey, the painter Pockets Warhol. Joe, do you got anything on Sunderland, Ontario, Peter? Nothing. Not a thing. That one slip below the radar. All right. Yeah.

Fair. You weren't you were not visiting. You were not the Pockets Warhol gallery opening. No, slipped below the radar? All right. Yeah. Ferdy, you weren't you were not visiting, you were not at the pockets, Warhol gallery opening. Nope. No, I somehow missed that one. I was in China. Yeah. Got him.

Got him. It's a great excuse right here. Yeah. It comes so much in any. I'm just using that for sure. I was singing Friday by Rebecca Black to the wrong tune in China and I just didn't know. When Darwin arrives at Storybook Farm, he is noted as being very small and very shy. Just a young guy says former Storybook Farm owner Sherry Delaney, the day he arrived,

I got a call from Yasmin Nakuta, the former owner. She had intended to come right out, but I put my foot down and said no. She was very demanding. I wanted to give Darwin a few days to settle down from all the excitement and then we could talk about it. She didn't like that. And that was the end of the conversation. This is the beginning of a contentious relationship between Storybook and Yasmin Nakuda, especially as Ikea gives the sanctuary a five figure donation.

Oh, shit. OK. Quoting Yasmin. I was angry, hurt and truly heartbroken to see my baby being peddled for money. I heard that as like, IKEA got a lot of press because there was a monkey on one of its premises. And so then. And so they decided to just do the obvious thing and just fucking ride the monkey. Right, yeah, follow the press and.

Follow the monkey. Monkey see monkey do. It's hard to be mad about a charitable donation. You know, that's what I mean to say, Peter. I think Yasmin wouldn't agree with that statement. I think I think the Yasmin would would find it pretty. Yasmin is pretty affronted by anything to do with this monkey. Yasmin also left a monkey in her SUV to go inside for a minute

to go get some meatballs. OK, Josie, calm down. Monkey police is not a minute. You have to go through that entire race. You got to follow the black line on the goddamn grid. We got to go through home appliances. We got to go through quick wear. It is 35 minutes minimum. And that is like a jogging pace.

OK? On December 14, 2012, so five days after Monkey Day one, Yasmin Nakuda sues Storybook Farm for unlawful detainment of a monkey. Oh. Claiming she'd been coerced by Toronto Animal Services into signing that release that I told you about. She files a petition to have Darwin return to her.

The blowout is big and bloody with random members of the public getting involved on passionate wins, says Delaney. We had threats that someone was going to come and burn down the sanctuary itself. There was another threat to kill me. It was draining on everyone. Always death threats. Don't look so surprised. The case has it several days in court through May and June 2013. Well, the actual legality of having a monkey as a pet is determined on a municipality by a municipality basis under Canadian law. The legal dispute here is who should be in possession of the monkey now, says Peter Toyn,

the lawyer who tried the case on behalf of Storybook Farm. Yasmin's position, the lawyer who owned the monkey, Yasmin's position was that she never gave up ownership and so my clients were not entitled to have him. The sanctuary position was as soon as he got out of the car at IKEA, he no longer belonged to Yasmin. Canada has a constitutional division of power. Certain things are federal or provincial, the equivalent of states. Animals largely fall into provincial government. The problem is, virtually no province has a statute that talks about exotic animals. The case ends up boiling down to not who can offer the best home for Darwin, but a simple

matter of property rights. Quoting the 2017 Mental Floss oral history by Jake Rawson, Justice Mary Valley issued her decision in September 2013. She found Nakuda knew she was signing a surrender form and that Darwin was a wild animal and as such could only be possessed by whomever currently possessed him in this instance, storybook. Says Peter Toyn, the storybook lawyer, in this case, possession was ten tenths of the law.

That's a mic drop right there. This guy's gotta be like, he's, you know, he was putting out press releases like, uh-uh, uh-uh, local lawyer goes ape against, you know, it rates itself. And then people are like, actually, it's not an ape. And you're like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Why are you going so bananas, bro?

The real question is, whatever became of the Sherling coat? The piece of clothing, if you will. I don't know. It makes me sad to think that whoever made that Sherling coat didn't really get the shine off it that they should have. Because I didn't look extensively, mind you, but I wasn't able to, like, steal his look. You know what I mean? I couldn't source the little shearling coat and that seems like a shame. Yasmin Nakuda says that the moment she realized the trial was lost

and Darwin was never going to come back, she knew that she wanted another male baby Japanese quote. I knew that even if he was returned, given the time that had elapsed during the separation, the bond was not going to be the same. I needed to pick up where we left off. I was haunted by him. I missed him. I ached for him. I did not have closure to have another Darwin had become an obsession.

So she's down. Wow. Yasmin moves to an area where municipal laws allow for primate ownership and ends up getting multiple other monkeys. While a 2015 CBC article makes reference to two six-year-old macaques named Sumo in Tibet, she mentions a monkey named Caesar in the 2017 Mental Floss article. Oh, wow. Maybe someone got a name change, maybe there were three monkeys,

maybe monkeys in, monkeys out, No more monkeys falling off the bed. We don't know. In any case, she tells mental floss, quote, Yes, a miracle happened. I feel that I proved my love and that it was only natural justice that I get what I was craving for. Yes, the emptiness that Darwin left behind may not have been filled entirely, but Caesar has brought light where darkness was. I felt blessed.

I'll swallow that ends well. Darwin has made new friends too. Finally able to go have it with other semi-wild animals after many years of relative solitude, he even has a best friend named Maximus, one of the 26 other primates at Storybook, says Storybook board chair Rochelle Hansen, quote, he's shy, but he's a sweetheart. He likes to wash his grass for some reason. We have a day open to the public once a month, and people will ask about Darwin, but they want to see him in the coat.

And that is the story of a piece of clothing, the impeccable tan shearling coat of Darwin, the IKEA monkey. I love it. There you go. Now, next time someone says, I want to do the story engine deck nonfiction treatment, you say, been there, done that. You say, get out of my face, you're not Taylor.

And that's how you lose a sale, but you gain a friend in me. Yeah, yeah. How do you like being second? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. Call them a cat, please, for me. That was a lot of fun. I really liked researching that story, and I liked being spurred to research that story in my consideration of iconic items of clothing by the deck. So thank you for the opportunity. Bye-bye.

Thank you. I wasn't sure how it was gonna function in a narrative nonfiction context. And you nailed it. Thank you. Thank you. Full marks. Full marks, Josie. Do you give it full marks? I give it a full marks. I give it a.ca at at the end too. That's a Canadian branded story right there. Damn..com? Can I get a.com just for an international audience? A deal..org? You know?

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops.

So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit DejaDen.com slash care. And get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? We've picked an infamous beauty for this month's episode of the Bittersweet Film Club.

It's only the 2019 Cat-tastrophe, Cats, starring Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Taylor Swift, and more. Now you know that even with our perennial special guest Mitchell Collins, we couldn't match up to the all-star cast of Cats so we had to call in some reinforcements in the form of friend of the podcast Ramon Esquivel. What should have been a highlight of the film instead becomes this moment where I, and I'm sure every other audience member was like, holy shit look what they did to Jennifer Hudson. You can look forward to the Film Club discussion of that and our upcoming discussion on 2017

sports biopic, I, Tonya, over at ko-fi.com. That's k-o-h-i-f-i dot com slash bittersweetinfamy. Become a monthly subscriber and we'll see you at the movies. I want to tell you a story that has everything that I think is cool. It's got killer whales, severed tongues, human-animal friendships, Indigenous storytelling and knowledge-carrying traditions, celebrity animals, Australian accents, and a true crime betrayal twist uncovering a piece of evidence that went hidden for over 70 years. Whoa, that's a lot. There's a lot in there.

It is a story that is infamous within a certain region of the South Coast of Australia, but that I think everyone on the planet should be as obsessed with as I am. That's what guests bring is like, why aren't you listening to me about this? Yeah, exactly. This is important information.

This is vitally important information. It's the story of the killers of Eden. Cool. So the killers of Eden were a pod of 30 highly intelligent and also highly coordinated orca whales who hunted cooperatively with European whalers for almost 100 years near the port of Eden, which is on the south coast region of Australia in an area called Twofold Bay or Turambulara in the local Indigenous language. I'm going to put my first asterisk on the story here and say that this

telling and pretty much all tellings of this are deeply shaped by the history of Australian colonialism. We will talk about the millennia-old relationship between the local Yuin or Tawai people and the orcas of the region and how European settlers directly benefited from and also commodified Indigenous knowledge and their skilled labor when they colon of the region, and how European settlers directly benefited from, and also commodified, indigenous knowledge and their skilled labor when they colonized the region. We will discuss how local indigenous populations left the area as the result of Europeans, and we will hear from modern day knowledge holders

who will speak to the sacred bonds between their human ancestors and the orcas, many of whom see orcas as family from another species, but as a result of whose stories we preserve, almost all of the records that we have about the killers of Eden concern the relationship between the orcas and one family, the Davidsons, who were Scottish settlers who came to Australia about 150 years ago. With that said, let's meet the Davidsons. Matthew 20 Sure. Matthew 21 The Davidsons ended up being a family who had four generations that wailed alongside

the killers of Eden. At the height of their relationship with the Orcas, a Davidson shore whaling expedition might go something like this. Just offshore of their whaling station near the mouth of the Kia River, a sleek black tail breaks the surface in a spray of brine and then slaps down with a thunderously loud sound. A cry goes up amongst the workers of the station. The killers are home. The killers are home. The men muster. A mix of Davidson family members and local Ewan people. They clamber into nine-meter cedar longboats armed with harpoons and lances, lines and hooks. They know that a tail slap or a blowhole burst at the mouth of the river is a signal that the orcas have cornered their mutual prey, a baleen whale. So the orca who signaled them, a massive

male named Old Tom, waits patiently until the men are assembled and then begins to guide them out deeper into the bay. So this journey can be perilous, depending especially on what season we're in and the time of day. The whales will signal the whalers at night and they'll signal them pretty much any time you're around that the time of day. The whales will signal the whalers at night and they will signal them pretty much anytime you're around that the whales are in the area. So killer whales migratory patterns usually bring them to Two-Fold Bay in June for the start of Australian winter.

They might be guiding these whalers through chill winds, through fog, through lengthening nights. If our whalers lose sight of them, they will actually slap the water with their oars until their cetacean guide backtracks to retrieve them. Cetacean, nice. Yeah, we're gonna use that at least three more times in this first volume of story. I tried not to overuse it, but it's a good one.

What an Eden. Yeah, and much like somebody trying to write a long research-based story, if ever the whalers lost their way, they just put a little footnote that says, cetacean needed. Oh, stop it. Stop it. That was an on-the-fly one.

That was not part of the prepared remarks. Folks, don't buy the story engine deck. It's, uh... It's no longer necessary anymore. With drawing support. If you've got it, send it back. Yeah. So we're out on the bay. We're rowing. Wait, these waters are cold enough for orcas? I thought orcas had to be in like pretty chilly

situations. I did look up the June temperatures in the area because I was curious to know how cold it got. We're looking at a high of 16, a low of six for like above water. The ocean stays much more moderately temperate like year round. And like the South Coast of Australia is kind of the first thing you hit coming up from the pole. So there are some fairly cold waters and orcas migrate on very long migration paths, as do the whales that they hunt like humpbacks and other sort of baleen species. So the guide here, old Tom, might take these whalers as far as 10 kilometers out from the station to the prize, kind of the

destination of their journey here, which is a cornered baleen whale. Now, you might be asking, what is a baleen whale? The answer to that is that it's not one type of whale. It's actually like a name for a grouping of a bunch of different whale species. It's an umbrella group. It's a big tent. Yeah, it's an umbrella group. Yeah, exactly.

Much, much like monkey, I'm assuming. The types of whales that we'd be hunting in this region might be right whales, mink whales, humpbacks would be kind of the biggest thing that we'd see there. These are some of the largest animals on the planet. For the purposes of today's story, we're going to say it's a humpback. The humpback has been cornered by a pod of 30 orcas that are circling it. The orcas are probably maxing out at about 30 feet long. The humpback is 100 feet long. Okay, now I'm less impressed by the orcas. That is a big humpback. But the orcas seem to know what they're doing. All around them,

the whalers see surf slick dorsal fins slicing through the water, suddenly submerging to cut off their quarries attempt to dive deeper into the bay, which is a common escape tactic of humpbacks who can dive a lot deeper than orcas can. This baleen ambushed mid-migration as it transitioned from the open ocean to the bay's shallower waters is not doing well. The bay is deep, but not deep enough for it to use its evolutionary advantage and outdive the orcas. It's been trying to escape for hours and it's beginning to actually suffocate as the orcas swarm and prevent it from breaching for a proper breath. Whoa. Oh, I forgot about how whales work.

I imagine that's going to come up a few times how whales work today. Yeah. Oh, we're going to talk so much about how whales work. Interesting. Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. A whole section called how whales work. Workers compensation.

Oh, I love it. I love it. The employment law of whales. I'm so excited. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah employment law of whales. I'm so excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And actually from here on out is kind of when the shift change happens. This is when the whalers take over. So they're working very carefully, knowing not to risk harming the orcas with a stray harpoon or an errant lance. A strong armed worker hurls a whaling iron, the point penetrating the baleen's skin, blubber and flesh deep enough to stick or

fasten. And the baleen takes off, dragging the boat behind it at top speed. The extending line of the fastened harpoon is moving fast enough to crush in several limbs, and the friction against the boat's pleats is enough to cause devastating burns. The orcas might drop back here as the whalers tie weights to the line to slow the baleen, gradually closing distance. As they draw in, the desperate animal rallies and delivers a tail slap powerful enough to turn a 30-foot boat into matchwood. The whalers call the impact of a baleen's tail slap, the hand of God. Yeah. That's right. Good names in this so far in general.

Yeah. Killers needed, yeah. Hand of God. With Tom. With Tom. Oh yeah. We got everything needed for a good story. And to just pull a little tailor-like poetic transition here. Oh, I'm scared. But if the baleen's tail is the hand of God, then the orcas are his angels. There we go. That was nice.

But our angelic orcas are circling the capsized men, warding off any sharks that might be in the area while another boat closes in. The baleen gives a last keening cry, the sound of an animal driven beyond the limits of exhaustion and despair, and a whaler raises a six foot lance to deliver the chili blow. The Moby Dick stuff. Yeah, I was thinking of Moby Dick too,

so I went to sleep to Moby Dick for a while until I just couldn't take it anymore. I feel like you're kind of curating the best of whaling for us, and Melville was not similarly concerned. He wanted all of it. Yeah, Melville was not similarly concerned. He wanted all of it. Yeah. Yeah, Melville was not working in the like

hour to hour and a half pod format. No, no, he didn't see the need for those constraints. If I were hyper fixated on whaling, if that was like my most granular interest, hell yeah, Moby Dick. But like as a fan of narrative, I'm like, ooh, ooh, this is a textbook with a little bit of a story in it. The Peter, proceed. We're going to get granular with some details here.

Sure, love it. But I'll try to make sure that something dies every 30 minutes or so. If a whale gets boring, please blow it up for me. Thank you. Yeah, perfect. Done and done. Done and done.

This is a great way to get rid of whales. But listen, we've caught our baleen. The hunt is over. But there's still work to be done, and there are still rituals to be observed. The crew gather themselves and prepare to haul the carcass back to the tri-works for processing. They drag it to the shallows, where 103-year-old local resident Alice Otton will later remember

the carcass as being, quote, an island in the water. It will be a record for the largest whale ever caught with a hand-thrown harpoon anywhere on the planet. Wow. Yeah. Records that you don't think about, but everyone's setting records all the time, huh? Yeah, yeah.

Guinness didn't come to check that one, but I'm gonna give it to them. Didn't they come to measure the whale? Come on. There are photos. There's actually a pretty great photo database for a number of the moments in this story. Cool. We've got our island-sized whale out in the bay, and strangely, the whalers will not haul

their hard one catch ashore yet. Instead, they'll leave it anchored in the water overnight. For whalers beyond the fold of the bay, this might seem like a bit of a strange custom. A sudden storm or a rogue wave or an enterprising scavenger could easily make off with the whaler's hard-won prize, but the orcas don't seem concerned. The next day, when they do haul the carcass up out to strip the blubber with hooks and pikes and to boil it down for oil, there will only be one sign of any tampering. The lips and the tongue of the whale have been eaten away, and out in the bay, some might wonder if the orcas don't look particularly pleased with last night's midnight snack. So that is my

reconstructed account of a Davidson family whale hunt. Well done. Thank you. I had fun with that one. They do hold the record for the largest whale caught with a hand thrown harpoon and the particulars are recorded in multiple eyewitness accounts. Some of them have been photographed, the whale signaling the whalers, guiding the boats, responding to oar slaps, and protecting submerged whalers. All things that appear multiple times on record. Wow. But perhaps the best documented detail in all of this

is something known as the law of the tongue, which is just a banging name for a local custom. Such great names. Let's talk about the law of the tongue. Please. It seems to be something of a contract that governed the relationship between human and orca inhabitants of Twofold Bay. The orcas would ambush migrating baleens, signal the whalers and guide them to the kill zone. But we get the tongue.

We get the tongue and we get the lips. And the Europeans put in some work. They'll finish the whale off and leave the carcass in the water overnight, specifically so that all the choice bits, again, usually tongue and lips were the favorites. That was the, like, the high quality treat. Those all go to the whales. Would those things,

assuming that we didn't have this contract with these whales, would those things, the tongue and the lips, be of use to the human hunters? They weren't particularly prized. Mostly what you're trying to get the whale for is whale bone and cartilage is a really useful material for constructing things, garments, poop skirt, skirts, shearling coat. If you need to have like a little constructed feature on that, you're going to want to get whalebone. But it's blubber that they boil down for oil. That's the

real valuable commodity here. Yeah. We're going to talk about the boring textbook that is Moby Dick. Somebody did the work of trying to figure out how much money the haul of the ship and that would have actually been worth in the modern day. And it's about two and a half million dollars worth of whale oil that they managed to get on that one trip. Well done. Big, big money. Big money in whaling.

Those are the main valuables. So they're probably not looking for the tongue. The teeth might be good as a souvenir, but yeah, they're not super interested in the tongue and the lips, which the whales are interested in because very, very nutrient dense parts of the body. I also have some theories about, well, I'll get into those theories later when we get to how whales work. Particularly happy section of mine. Everyone at home, you better, you're going to want to put in that toast now because it'll pop out just in time for the Howe Whales where you butter that up, put some coffee, and just sit down with your hand on your chin and listen to how whales work.

That's coming up. Get ready. Yeah, and again, the whales, like, very much worked alongside the whalers, and for a very long time, accounts of the killers of Eden described the law of the tongue as an emergent relationship between the orcas and the newly arrived European whalers. But as is so often the case in the history of colonialism, it looks like white men showed up late, claimed credit for something indigenous people started, and then exploited it for profit. There is a lot of compelling evidence that a deep relationship governed by respect, reciprocity, and siblinghood existed between the local Yuin or Tawa people and the Orcas for thousands of years before

Eurydians first set their blunstone-clad feet on the shores of Australia. You're saying that the whales didn't just decide, did they, like, people and the white people showed up? Get out of town. No, I know, it's wild. It's wild. Taylor, Josie, I'm gonna send you a statement that was written by Stephen Holmes, who is a Tawa traditional custodian of the area, speaking about his ancestor, Bodgenbroe, who was a close friend of the whaling station manager in the 1840s before the Davidsons arrived. And I'd love to have one of you read it for me.

We consider Bayoas, killer whales, to be our brothers. When a Tawa member dies, they are reincarnated as a Bayowa. The Bayowas remained part of the Tawa even after passing. The Bayowas would help the men by herding the other whales in the Bay of Turambular or Twofold Bay for the whalers to kill. Budgenbro, as his ancestors and the other Aboriginals would give the Bayowas the tongue of the dead whale.

This was soon known as the law of the tongue. Holmes goes on to talk about how Ludgenbrough used to swim with old Tom, holding on to his dorsal fin, how Ludgenbrough's father would walk along the beach, singing to the Bayoas and killer whales would follow along with him singing back. And there are Taoist stories dating back to the dreaminging, which is a time before recorded time, of deep, familiar relationships with whales. Researchers estimate these stories maybe as much as 10,000 years old. A very old tradition that for a very long time, 100% Europeans were kind of just claiming credit for. The earliest European records from the area is the Journal of a Whaling Station Manager from the 1840s. They mentioned that the

orcas were already there and would often help in the hunt. Apparently, European whalers used to try and actually drive them away from the kill, but it does seem that they left the carcass in the water overnight. And Yu and Nintawa, the men were like very sought after as whaling employees, as crew members. They were skilled, they were knowledgeable. So it seems very highly likely that the custom of leaving the tongue and the lips came from these crew members. It doesn't sound like a European custom to leave anything for anyone else. Yeah. No, not at all. And the other thing that's just interesting is again, for this relationship to have developed into what it developed into under the Davidson's, you need to have a situation

where killer whales and people feel very safe around each other. And in general, killer whales aren't interested in people. I think in the wild, there's never been a human fatality caused by a killer whale, period. It's only ever been in captivity. They should change the name to like killer depending on who you are, whale.

You know what I mean? It's bad PR. It's like the drug acid. I feel like everyone would do more acid if it wasn't called acid killer whales kind of the same thought Yeah, yeah exactly train Doug for acid and killer whales Listen Listen to number 17 dolphin house. There's something to this general line of pink extra

We are gonna have a dolphin in our story later, too You know, there's a species of dolphin called a grampus? A grampus. Great. Thank you for that. What an apple, yeah. What an apple, yeah. So I think that there were a lot of preconditions that had already been established,

and then a lot of very important information that was given to the Europeans by the UN crew members that made any of this possible. And also, what makes this possible is kind of some very specific things about whale biology and how whales work. So now we're officially in the how whales work section of our story. I hope your toast is ready, everyone.

So, as a whole side note, I am obsessed with animal cognition. One of my favorite books of all time is a book called Other Minds, and it's this very deep dive on kind of the evolution of octopus brains. Um, so the minds of whales, and specifically killer whales, how smart are they? As far as we know, they're very smart. They're a very intelligent species. I think of them as being quite bright,

and cetaceans of their type generally being quite bright. You've taken one cetacean out of my cetacean's budget, and now I'm gonna have to cut it later. Now you have a cetacean needed. Damn it! Now I have a cetacean needed. Now you need a cetacean. Shit. Yeah, yeah. Actually, this is a fun little trivia question. If you're going to equate an adult orca's intelligence level

to a human at a certain age and development, how old of a human do you think an adult orca's brain is equal to, roughly, in terms of IQ? Oh, this is fun. Fourteen. Oh, I was gonna say 17. Wow, okay, so 15 to 16. Take the average. Perfect. You guys are spot on.

Oh, look at us. Look at the bookends. Oh, my gosh. Teamwork. We got killer whale brains up here. Just north and south of killer whale brains, really. But... Your prize is a footnote that measuring IQ is a science that is mixed with so much bullshit and racism that it's not particularly helpful, but that said,

it is one way of understanding, if not intelligence, then how much one mind is like in complexity and pattern to the mind of the person who developed the test thinking that the world works the way their brain thinks it works. We do know that orcas have the second largest brain of any marine mammal. Are we talking like in terms of actual like size? When we say large brain, we're talking like literally weight

or density or... Yeah, weight and density, which is not always one... It's not one-to-one with intelligence. And in fact, like when we look at orca brains, they don't seem to have as many areas dedicated to say memory, but they have a lot dedicated towards play and movement and behavior, like hunting behaviors. They're living in the moment. That's what like you Josie, they're like you.

Thank you. You're a hunter. I meant that you're a good hunter. I meant that you're a highly coordinated pod hunter. That's what I meant. That's what I meant. And you sing, obviously, You sing beautiful haunting melodies. Ooh! Yep.

Ooh! So, orcas. Big brains, highly social. They even develop local dialects in their speech and their vocalizations. And they have been observed passing down highly organized hunting strategies across numerous generations. So, individual populations can develop what I would call is actually a culture, right? Like, they have their own way of doing things, their own way of speaking. That's culture, baby.

That's animal culture. Absolutely. And killer whales have been trapping baleens and eaten for thousands of years, where the size and the placement of the bay provides a really good funneling position and ambush spot for orcas to hunt these much larger whales during their annual migration. These whales need to, these baleens, they need to find a different path, huh? They can't be cutting through the bay like this. It is hard because like if you look at the map of southern Australia, so they come up from Antarctica and they kind of hit the continent and they can go west or east to cut around the south coast. And when they go east, they end up going

by Eden. And I don't know, this is like you'd have to really willingly, willingly not take an obvious shortcut to avoid them. And the other thing is sound conducts really well underwater, especially whale song. So you can hear whale calls hundreds of kilometers away. Sound carries on the water. And the orcas can just, they can hear them coming. They have so much time to set up the ambush. A very unfair advantage.

Yeah, we have these very smart social creatures. And the other sort of really key thing about how whales work is that they don't seem to hunt humans as prey. As I mentioned before, no recorded human fatalities caused by killer whales in the wild ever. And we have seen a lot of human neutral to human friendly behaviors with orcas in the wild. And then especially we see a lot of friendly behaviors that have gone back a long time into fooled bay. And so like orcas can recognize individual human faces, can recognize individual human voices. we see a lot of friendly behaviors that have gone back a long time in Two-Fooled Bay. And so, like, orcas can recognize individual human faces, can recognize individual human voices. Taylor can't even do that.

Yeah, they're better than me. Damn, I'm getting outsmarted by these. You said 14 to 17. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. Their social game is high. They maintain friendships with people, with other whales. And I love this quote from there's a whale researcher named Danielle Claude, who's done a lot of work on the killers of Eden. So there's a really great documentary or as the Australians call it a DACO. In 2005. When you hear DACO, you have to say DACO. It's so satisfying to say. And there's two researchers who kind of feature prominently in it, the kind of really gung-ho, like wants to be a believer is Greg McKee, who's kind of an initializing force for a lot of the revisiting of this story. And who also, I think, started

to recognize earlier than a lot of people did that a lot of the story comes from Indigenous origins. And then we have another whale researcher named Daniel Claude, who's like very much in the pair is like the skeptic, the scully to... Nice. That's a good way to put it. ...Great Smulder. Our skeptic in that relationship, Daniel Claude, she has a really lovely quote about kind of how the very unique relationship might have developed. So I'm going to plop that one in the Discord. Yeah, Josie, could you read this one? Okay, we'll see. You've got a situation where two highly armed and dangerous predators are

coming together in a very vulnerable situation for both of them. If you're hunting a 70 foot whale, humans are likely to end up in the water, killer whales are likely to end up near harpoons. So there had to be some level of trust between the two species. We tend to think of trust as a very human emotion, but it's not that uncommon in the animal kingdom either. Is there skeptic? Is there skeptic talking about trust being a social fabric in animal groups? I love that there's this like trust based relationship that builds. It underscores too that we are animals as much as we don't like to think of ourselves that way. We think of ourselves as this. Or fail to think of ourselves that builds. It underscores, too, that we are animals as much as we don't like to think of ourselves that way.

We think of ourselves as this... Or fail to think of ourselves that way. Or fail to think of ourselves as this, like, other force that civilizes and tames, and, like, by virtue of being the top of the food chain and having more sophisticated intelligence in some ways than other creatures, we're different, but we're not.

When I was talking earlier about, like, primates aren't good pets, I was like, about, like, primates aren't good pets, I was like, yeah, for other primates, like, what are we doing here? We're monkeys. Yeah. But yeah, like, in this story, there's definitely, like, the risk or the bias that we've assigned some human emotions and some human intentions to the animals,

but also, like, these people, some of them lived their entire lives alongside these whales. As we'll hear about, they were actually on first name basis with most of them. So what's in it for the whales? You know, what are they getting out of this? Lips and tongues! Yeah. Yeah, delicious lips and tongues.

But like, think about it. A 200-tongue whale, and they just want the lips and tongue? If you're just going on like a pound-for-pound partnership here, how we're dividing up the stakes of the hunt, doesn't sound very fair to me, especially given how much work the whales do. So why would they bother developing this trust with humans when it seems like the whales are doing a lot of work for just tongues and lips? I think there are a couple benefits. The benefit that I find, I don't know if this is the truest one, but it's the one that I personally find most interesting, is that the partnership with humans let these whales hunt bigger prey. Note, I don't say,

like, get more food. I mean, hunt bigger prey. In most other places in the world, killer whales only hunt whale calves. So, little baby whales. Okay. We don't generally see orcas taking down 100-foot adult humpbacks, except in two-fold bay. Sure. So, teaming up with humans would let them bag bigger baleens.

And while they don't eat the full whale, the lips and tongue are nutrition-rich prizes for the orca's to claim. It's still more. I haven't seen anyone else discuss this in any of the coverage of this, so this is purely Peter's opinion here. But we know orcas are a very playful species.

So you remember all of those orca attacks that were happening on boats in the past year? Yeah. People were talking about that. I miss this. Were you in China? Yeah, damn, I was in China that whole time. Sorry. A lot of them happened in that region, so not a great excuse here.

Damn. So I think in, there was a period of like a few months to up to a year where I believe there were, and I might remember wrong here, but I think it was 600 whale attacks on human boats. They were called attacks. A number of capsizing, no fatalities. These whales are knocking over all kinds of boats. Eventually, I think it was the Portuguese or the Spanish government calls in some whale experts to do some research on like, why is this happening? And they determined that it's all play-based behavior. This is sport. Like, none of them are looking for food. They're not confused. They're like seeing an object that they maybe haven't

hunted before and possibly just trying to figure out how they'd sink it. Cause that's like, that's another play in their playbook. So knowing that, I don't think it is farfetched that orcas would want to attempt new strategies to take down larger prey just because it's fun and novel. I think that's perfectly in keeping with the way that their brains work and the way that we've seen their brains work. For the love of the game, Kevin Costner, bam.

For the love of the game. As I said earlier, stay in love with the process. If you're just hunting whales because you want the blubber, you know, you're going to burn out. You got to hunt whales because you love hunting whales. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Wow. If you eat a hundred lips and tongues and you don't love it, they'll all taste the same.

But if you if you love that lips and that tongue, you stay in love with that lips and that tongue, you have one. It's like you've had a thousand tongues. That's what they say. You know? Yeah. That's what they say. Josie. All right. Don't look at me like that. They said it, not me. The second reason that the whales benefited was because of the byproducts of the whaling industry and shipping out that sweet, sweet oil. So you get a lot of fish and birds that gathered to gobble up the scraps of meat blubber

and nutrient dense runoff that would leave the tri-works where they would render the whales down into their sort of constituent products. Those are great food for orcas. Clouds of happy fish that aren't paying attention, tasty seabirds. It's great. So even if they weren't going for the whales or they weren't going for as much of the whales as the humans were getting, they were still well fed by some of the byproducts. So in other words, the orcas and humans not in direct competition over the same prey, very capable of working together. And also just a little side note, this would only work in a situation where we have shore

whaling and not to get Melville about this, but shore whaling, very different from commercial whaling. We're not out on the ocean, there's no big boat motor cranking it and making noise. There isn't like a giant ship kind of listening to the water being an unfamiliar shape. There aren't any like pops of mechanically fired harpoons that are all noises that could distress and drive off orcas. This is possible because we're in shore boats,

because this is a much quieter and more craft-based form of hunting. And you know, like a longboat and then adult orca are almost the exact same length. So there's probably like a little familiarity in like the shape that we're hunting with. So we got some preconditions here that make this work. From the oral accounts and the earliest journal entries we have from the 1840s, we know that the whalers, especially the Yuin and Tawa whalers, were on a first name basis with the killers. In fact, many whales were actually named after Yuin people who had passed away. We've got an incredible killer is the band joke coming.

Oh, damn. Sorry, I didn't mean to step on you. I didn't mean to step on you. Oh, damn. I'm sorry. Prime yourself, Taylor. We get excited to play in the whale space, don't we? I think that's only human. And that's only human and also a little bit whale. A little bit whale as well.

As whale. Ah, it never ends. It never ends. I don't know who wants this one, but Taylor, Josie, I'm gonna send you a list of the names of some of the orcas that you'd see splashing around Two-Fold Bay between the mid 1800s until the early 1900s. And I'd love someone to just list them

because they're really great names. Okay. Hookie, Humphie, Koopa, Typie, Jixson, Stranger, Big Bin, Young Bin, Kinsher, Jimmy, Shackie, Charlie Agery, Jixon, Stranger, Big Bin, Young Bin, Kinsher, Jimmy, Shackie, Charlie Adery, Broily, Albert, Youngster, Walker, Flukey, Big Jic, Little Jic, Skinner, Montague, and of course, old Tom. Old Tom. If the killers were a band, old Tom would be Brandon Flowers.

That is to say, there we go. There we go. That's good. I liked it more knowing it was coming. I liked it more knowing it was a difference between a suspense and surprise. Yeah, yeah. Mm hmm. That was just foreshadowing, really. All right. So let's let's talk about old Tom. Let's meet old Tom.

Ooh, please. Sweet old soul. Old Tom. We've heard so much about him. He was a big boy. He measured almost seven meters long, weighed six British tons. I should note, did you know that the short ton, the American ton, is spelled with T-O-N

and then the British ton is T-O-N-N-E and they're actually different measurements? That's fucked. No, I didn't know that. That's disgusting. How do they get away with it? Yeah, with wild. I don't know how... That makes me want to sell that movie. That's disgusting. That makes me so mad. So, 200 short tons was the weight of the giant humpback mentioned earlier.

Six long tons is the weight of old Tom here, which is about 6.6 short tons for all of our, for all of our. I want to glass somebody when I hear that. Who's responsible? Well, that's so. Oh, man, that makes me rage. It's the whole imperial metric thing. And basically, I think what happened was so there's a whole measurement system based on like parts of the king's body, his feet, and we're going to. That's going to be one measurement in the yard.

It's going to be this measurement of his body. Yes. And then the Americans go through so much effort to rebel against England, keep all the footstuff, and then they don't get invited. Maybe they were just like foot guys. Yeah, yeah, foot guys. Just the whole continent of foot guys. And then they don't get invited to the, like, I think, conference in France, where they come up with the metric system.

And so the Americans just keep this terrible legacy system. Is that what that is? I think I'm summarizing it poorly. That's what this is in the whole time. That is my understanding of what happened. I could be wrong. Old Tom, seven meters long, six tons, big boy, sweet boy. He was usually the guy who would swim to the mouth of the Kia River and signal the whalers by slapping his tail, sometimes doing the blowhole thing. Also a real big personality in the water, says Eden resident Bill Blackster.

He'd work around them, the humpbacks. They're like a cattle dog would work the sheep. Tom would just grab lines during the hunt. I always imagine, like, when a dog gets so excited about just being outside, that it has to grab another dog's leash in its mouth. That seems to be old Tom a little bit. Wow.

He seems to have developed what I would describe from the outside anyway, as being like a genuine friendship with the Davidson family, even going so far as to grieve with them. So on Sunday, October 24th, 1926, Jack Davidson, son of fearless George Davidson. So Jack is the fourth generation of Davidson's whaling in this area. He's

rowing home from Eden with his family and his boat, the rocking bin, when a rogue wave strikes the boat, capsizing it. Hearing their screams, the family patriarch, fearless George Davidson, joined by other family members, rushes out to help. They manage to pull out Jack's wife, Anne, and his daughter, Tommy, but amid the churning waves and the roaring surf, the others are lost. Over the next week, the beach brings up the bodies of Jack and Anne's son Roy, age 11, and their daughter Patricia. But no sign of Jack. That's quite sad. It's a very sad story. No sign of Jack. However, residents, multiple

residents, noted that all that week the killers never left the bay, perhaps searching, perhaps on standby. And Old Tom began to circle one particular spot out in the bay again and again and again. So the search party goes out to meet Old Tom, and the Friday after the Sunday that the boat capsized, they find what their whale friend had found days ago, which is the body of Jack Davidson. Later, as Jack's funeral procession is crossing the bay in a boat, Old Tom crosses with them, keeping pace like an honor guard. He was never seen to do this outside of when he was guiding them out for a kill. This is, as far as we know, the only time that he just followed along when there was no food or hunt involved. After Jack's death in 1926, we see there's a bit of a breaking point for the Davidson family

whose whaling operations had already been in decline. So I think let's take a moment to talk about the decline of whaling in southern Australia. Specifically, Two-Fold Bay whaling had been falling off since well before the death of Jack Davidson. Residents remember a particular event that they feel marked the beginning of the end, which was the killing of the orca Jackson. Although others contend that it was actually the orca Taipi who died on that day. But the story goes that in August 1900, Jackson is chasing a grampus, which we already know is a weird dolphin. So far up a slings beach that he beached both himself and his quarry. George Davidson and crew climb into a boat to go rescue him, but before they can get to him,

a man named Harry Silks approaches, draws a knife, and delivers killing blows to both of the helpless cetaceans. Hoping to... Harry. Harry, what you doing, bud? There's a treaty, bro. You don't know? to both of the helpless cetaceans. Hoping to... Harry. Harry, what you doing, bud? There's a treaty, bro. You don't know? I love the tongue, my guy.

The theory is that he was probably, he wasn't a whaler, so maybe he was just hoping to claim their teeth as valuable trophies. Some versions of the story have Harry Silks acting alone. Others have him accompanied by two other men. Some have Jackson chasing a mink whale, or a minke whale instead of a grampus. Some have it happening in 1901 instead of 1900.

There is, I think this only was found either in the late 90s or early 2000s. There is a photo dated August 1900 of a beached orca and a grampus on the beach together dead. You can look that up in the photo archives. So that's, I'm going to go with August 1900. Whatever the case, the deed was done in both the Orca and human communities reeled from Harry Silks' violation of their time-honored partnership. Accounts of the incident say that the local Yuan people grieved the death of Jackson as though

he were their brother that had been slain. The local police caught wind that the Yuan were out for revenge and so escorted Silks to the edge of town and told him never to return. Wow. Wow. I bet though. I bet you killed my coworker.

And after the incident, the local Yuin, most of the population moved out of the area, moving about a hundred kilometers to Wollega Lake. As a result of or just at the same time as? Afterwards, and I don't think, so I've not found a source that explicitly says this is because of this, but it seems that it was something of a breaking point. Understood.

And again, the decline of whaling may have been a contributing factor. Let's talk about kind of what happens in Two-Fold Bay after this. So this happens in 1900, and in the 30 years after the incident, orcas begin to vanish from Twofold Bay one by one. Soon enough, it's actually just old Tom and three of his most loyal pod mates who are hunting

alongside the Davidson. So there's a lot of theories as to what happened here, to why they leave and to why the UN leave. A lot of weight gets put on, and I think fairly put on a human killing an orca and shattering the trust between the species. I would like you to come up with what verb or noun would you use for when whales like pop up out of the water to look around them above the surface. There's a name for it and it's so cute. And I don't think it can be topped, but I want to hear your pitches. I would call it periscoping.

Periscoping's great. I love that. I was gonna say prairie dog. But that's another name. Which is confusing. Some would say that the ocean is the prairie of the ocean. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, I would say that. I think the prairie of the ocean. Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, I would say that. I think, yeah, I think Josie was saying that before.

Yeah, but you read it from a pillow stencil. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's called spy hopping. Spy hopping, which I think is adorable. Periscoping. I'll put periscoping on the same tier as spy hopping. That's good, yeah.

That's a name for that. Thank you. I appreciate that. So whales are very capable of perceiving what happens above water. This is like, it's one of the tools in their toolkit for surveying the surrounding ocean and hunting. So they easily could have seen this.

And not only that, but depending on how familiar they were or how loyal they were to the kind of the humans of Two-Fold Bay, they may or may not be able to recognize that the person who did this is kind of not one of us, not representing the rest of the humans of the area. That this guy Harry Sil, is a rogue agent. They might have known that, they might not have known that. The reason that we only end up with a few pod mates left over is it might be the people who knew the whalers

well enough to know that that was a different guy. But perhaps the decline in the orca population is due to the departure of the Yuen, who were the ancestral keepers of the law of the tongue. Might be that if they go, the law goes. The stewardship goes too, right? The relationship, they took the relationship with them. Yep, and when you're out on the ocean,

the relationship is the most important ship. Oh. Stop it. You should go. I should leave right now. You should stay. You should leave, yeah. I should make like an orca in Twofold Bay between the years of 1900 and 1930 and leave.

So there were some other larger environmental factors. Norwegian whalers in Jervis Bay were hunting a lot of orcas and that was a spot along the migration route. So we think that some of them may have been caught in a rather unfortunately poetic situation as they were hunted and ambushed mid-migration, moving through cold waters. Yeah. You live by the sword, you die by the sword, as we say so often on the podcasters, I say frequently all the time.

That one I may actually have seen printed on something at some point. Yeah, that's not mine. That one I found somewhere along the way, for sure. And then also, there's a huge diminishment in food supply for what the orcas eat because of commercial whaling. In this period, we're losing about 95% of the humpback and right whale populations in the Southern Ocean.

So we got a lot of workers going hungry. But for locals, it was the murder of Jackson that was the equivalent of Eve eating the forbidden fruit. The law of Eden had been broken. There was trouble in paradise. Yeah. There we go. You have time to... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I imagined how it would go when I said it to you guys. You're giving me exactly the reaction. Yeah, yeah, that we go. You have time. OK. Yeah. I imagine how it would go when I said it to you guys. You're giving me exactly the reaction. Yeah, yeah, that's nice. Thank you. Thank you. Like a puzzle piece is just fitting exactly. It's gorgeous. Feels really satisfying. I love a turn where the listener figures it out as it's being said. There's something about that that just the timing is right.

So old Tom and Zip being kind of the last of the group. By the late 1920s, it's just him. It's just him and Eden. We think that his brothers, I think Humpy and Hooky were his brothers, who both died kind of up coast a little bit in the 1920s. The story goes that throughout these years, George Davidson is seen hand-feeding fish to the aging orca just to keep him going. And on September 17, 1930, Tom makes one final appearance, washing up dead on the beach of Twofold Bay. Oh, God.

Well, that will be the last appearance, won't it? Maybe, maybe not. Ghost Whale. Taylor, I'm gonna send you an article from page nine of the Sydney Morning Herald the day after Tom's death in 1930. I'm also gonna point out this article runs an article from page nine of the Sydney Morning Herald the day after Tom's death in 1930. I'm also gonna point out this article runs

September 18th, 1930. What day is it today? Ah! September 19th. Yeah, we're just a scooch off commemorating the 94th anniversary of the last killer reading. That's the most important anniversary to get exactly on the day. It's the whalebone anniversary, the last killer. That's the most and most important anniversary to get exactly on the anniversary, as they say.

So here we go. Yeah. King of killers, dead body washed ashore. Whalers ally for 100 years. Eden Wednesday, old Tom, the king of the far famed pack of twofold bay killers and the last of his tribe is no more. For over 100 years, he and others of the pack at one time numbering as many as 30, rendered great service to local industry by intercepting whales traveling north and

south and driving them into twofold bay where they kept them corralled until local whalers could complete their capture. While the pack kept the whales cornered, old Tom would station himself at the river mouth near the whaling station and attract the whaler's attention by lashing at the water with his tail until boats pulled out of the river. So I love that he gets his own little in memoriam. Yeah.

I love that he gets his own little newspaper clip. Yeah, he gets an open, baby. So the article goes on to talk about a couple of the things that happened the day that old Tom washed up. And we have some additional eyewitness accounts that bring a few details here that I just want to highlight for a sec here. So after Tom's death, George Davidson opened his belly to discover that he hadn't eaten in a very long time, just empty stomach. George and his friend JR Logan, who's a rancher and military veterinarian who retired to Eden, they were going to tow Tom's body out to sea,

but it was Logan who then offered to clean old Tom's bones and provide the premises and funding to open what becomes the Eden Killer Whale Museum, where old Tom's bones reside to this day as a testament to this incredible relationship spanning four human generations. In 2005, Daco, researcher Greg McKee says... He is a part of Daco. Sorry. So our buddy Greg McKee says,

Old Tom chose Eden as the place to die. This was his last place. He was the last of his family. So at the top of this story, I told you, I read a list of the things that this story was going to deliver on, and I think I've given you most of what's in that list, correct? I believe so. There's a betrayal yet to be discovered.

Oh, those are the worst kind! So, one final twist in the tale here. True crime betrayal, I promised to tell this secret that kind of went hidden for about 70 years. And that is the real reason that old Tom died. And what happened on a day seven years earlier that George Davidson betrayed his friend and violated the law of the time. That son of a bitch.

So in 1998, our buddy Greg McKee is in Eden. This is seven years before the documentary comes out. He's in Eden conducting interviews and delving archives for accounts of the killers of Eden, preparing for what will eventually become this documentary that was written and directed by Klaus Taft for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Anytime I say ABC, by the way,

I mean Australian Broadcasting Corporation here. Right, right. I had to do that recently by clarifying that I meant Abete, the Spanish language, Catalan. You know what I mean? Yeah. Mckie's talking to a local named Margaret Brooks, who is the daughter of J.R. Logan,

who was there the day that old Tom washed up and was the neighbor of the Davidsons. And she tells Greg a story that he has never heard before and that as far as he knows, has just not locally come up before. It's a story that reframes the final years of Old Tom's life and the actions that George Davidson and JR Logan took on the day that Old Tom washed up on the beach. This is hot goss!

What? Hot goss, baby. Yeah, no, I'm spellbound. I want to know more. So, her story takes place in 1923, which is seven years before the death of Old Tom. She is, I think, 11 years old at this point. So, JR Logan and George Davidson have brought Margaret along for a day of fishing in JR's motorized yacht, the White Heather.

They are not whaling today. Old Tom drives a whale up towards them, and they do have a harpoon on hand, so they end up enjoying a very easy kill. As Old Tom circles the boat, the two men discuss whether they should anchor the carcass in the water for Old Tom or haul it back for processing. You fucking greedy fuck. Sorry, go ahead. Wait till you see a picture of JR Logan,

because he looks like a cartoon colonial villain. I was gonna say he's motorized yet. And he's on his yacht? Yeah, he's... That makes me so mad. He retired to Eden. He's not originally from there. So like, he's bringing that outside colonial energy. So he says, come on, George, we'll take the whale back into the bay. No, JR says, George, we'll leave her here. Listen, says JR, if you leave this whale here overnight, you'll lose it. It's one of the last you'll ever have. Perhaps what happens next is due to George Davidson's declining whaling prospects.

Perhaps it's due to JR Logan technically being the captain of the vessel, and so George Davidson decides to defer to him and obey the laws of man instead of the law of the tongue. Whatever happened, that is the day that master whaler George Davidson Agreed to turn his back on a four-generation pact with the killers of Eden to break the lifelong trust of his friend old Tom Yeah, all right. All right, he agrees So Taylor because you have the Aussie accent you're gonna get this next one as well. This is Margaret Brooks daughter of JR Logan in 1998, talking into George McKee's camera to explain what happens next. And it just features some really lovely British slash Australian slang. Well, Tom was in a real petty.

Did said you better go stand on the after deck, darling, and hang on to the mist and hang on hard. And Tom came up the stern of the boat, railed over and looked at me like this, grabbed a hold of the rope in his mouth and went backwards trying to get the whale away from us. I said, look out, Dad, he's going backwards. He said, yes, he'll go backwards, I'll go forwards. Tom hung on and had to go with him, of course.

Dad went to stern and banged him on the nose. Well, Tom rolled over and had to go with him, of course. Dad went to Stoon and banged him on the nose. Well, Tom rolled over and looked at me again and had another go at it. And Didz did the same thing again, and that's when we pulled the tooth out of his mouth. So this tooth matters a lot more than you'd think it would. Oh, my... No, I think it matters more than anything in the world.

I'm horrified. So, in 2005, the documentary team, and like everybody comes, Scully and Mulder are together for this, so Danielle Claude is there, Greg McKee is there, and they bring in a dental specialist to examine the skeleton of old Tom, which of course, as we know, continues to hang in the Eton Kettlebell Museum. They find evidence not just of the missing tooth, but of a dental abscess that grew from the wound until it had bored a hole all the way up through

the top of old Tom's skull. According to Margaret Brooks, when the tooth came out, her father cried out, Oh God, what have I done? As a former military veterinarian, he would know how bad it is for an aging animal to lose a major tooth. The documentary researchers confirmed that the abscess was exactly the kind of injury that could easily contribute to an already venerable and vulnerable whale starving to death. And so, if we revisit old Tom's final years, we might begin to see the actions of George Davidson and JR Logan a little differently. George began hand-feeding Old Tom Fish. Of course, he knew that Tom could no longer hunt for himself.

Yeah. And seven years later, when he cuts open Tom's belly, he's just confirming what his guilty conscience has been whispering to him for years. Yeah. That Old Tom starved to death. And J.R. Logan, despite not being from Eden originally, still committed his time and energy to cleaning old Tom's bones and his property and funding to housing the remains. In 1931, he bankrolls the opening of the Eden Killer Whale Museum. Margaret Brooke contends that her father acted

out of guilt. Yeah, big time. And controlling all the evidence. In addition to Harry Silks, our story gets a proper villain here in J.R. Logan. Wow. How frightening that, I guess, like, from a whale's eye perspective, how frightening, right? To be sold out. If that's the last thing you see while spy hopping, that would suck. Whatever factors sort of came together to eventually lead to Old Tom's death seven years later,

people mark this, his demise is the end of an era. However, local indigenous people have maintained their interest in the law of the tongue, in their ancestors' relationships with the Bayo'a, and with other elements of their culture that were damaged or forbidden by colonial rule. You might remember that earlier we heard a quote from Tawa traditional custodian Stephen Holmes, who is a direct descendant of Chief Budgenbrough. That quote actually came from a 2023 paper written by geneticist Isabella Reeves, who published some interesting results

after testing the DNA from old Tom's skeleton and running it against kind of a database of other orchid DNA, and who also actually consulted Tawa Perspectives in her research work. So she found that Tom and his family seem to have been very much the last of their genetic line. Most of Tom's DNA is not found anywhere else in the world, suggesting that the killer whales of Eden represented a very unique set of genetic traits and predispositions, which have gone extinct with the passing of Big Tom. Yeah, really, truly, like we know that it's the end of an era. As Stephen Holmes said in the foreword to that paper, which he contributed, for the Tawa, this was a special time to be alive,

a part of our history that was passed on from generation to generation. I hope one day I am able to reconnect with Bayoas. Orakas are of course globally endangered, but you can support environmental organizations like the Ocean Alliance and Orakka and their critical protection and preservation programs, as well as support UN cultural nonprofits like Back to Country, which you can find

at backtocountry.org.au. And that is the story of the killers of Eden. Damn! That's me slapping my tail finn against the water. Aw, thank you. Aw, well thank you. or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you want to support the podcast, shoot us a few bucks via our Ko-fi account at ko-fi.com forward slash bittersweetinfamy. But no pressure, bittersweetinfamy is free, baby. You can always support us by liking, rating, subscribing, leaving a review, following us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy, or just

pass the podcast along to a friend who you think would dig it. Stay sweet! My sources for the minfamous of this episode included Stylish Monkey found outside Toronto IKEA stores having a stressful time. In The Windsor Star, December 10, 2012, IKEA Monkey Darwin's former owner has two new monkeys. In CBC News, January 20th 2015. I, Darwin, An Oral History of the Ikea Monkey by Jake Ross and Immental Floss, October 3rd 2017,

and 10 years later, The Ikea Monkey is Thriving by Katie Nutopoulos for Buzzfeed News, December 9th 2022. In my research on this story, I consulted the 2005 DoCo, Killers in Eden, written and directed by Klaus Toft for ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, during researchers Greg McKee and Daniel Claude, as well as 1840s whaling journals. I consulted the article The King of the Killers, published unattributed in the Sydney Morning Herald, September 18, 1930, as well as another article under the same name, published by the same paper, on September 17, 2010, on the 80th anniversary of Old Tom's death. The article The Legend of Old Tom and the Gruesome Law of the Tongue, by Beck Crew, published

on the Scientific American Blog June 14, 2014. The Research Paper, Ancestry, Testing of Old Tom, A Killer Whale Central to Neutralistic Interactions with Human Whalers by Isabel M. Reeves et al., featuring a foreword by Stephen Holmes, and published by Journal of Heredity, Volume 114, Issue 6, December 23, 2003. I consulted the catalog entry for Object No. 2012.133, Boat Remnant, Rocking Bin, Timber, Kaia Inlet, NSW Australia, 1890-1940, which was prepared by the Davidson Whaling Station Historic Site Collection and is available on ehi.com.

Consulted the article, How Smarter Killer Whales, by Kevin Spear, published on fizz.org on March 8th, 2010. The article, Orcas May Be Smarter Than You Think, by Jake Parks, published by Discover Magazine on the 18th, 2024. The article, Killer Whales Are Ramming Boats for Fun, Scientists say, by Amanda Bukowicz, published by CBC Radio May 21, 2024, and the webpage Meet the Killers on the Killer Whale Museum website, access 18 September 2024. Also, the Eden Killer Whale Museum has an adorable newsletter called Soundings, which you can find at kitterwhalemuseum.com.au when their PDF links are not real. Thanks!

A big whale done to our guest, Peter Czachowski. You can check out the Story Engine deck at storyenginedeck.com, or you can learn more about Peter at lookitpeter.com. If you want to support the podcast, join us at ko-fi.com slash bittersweetinfamy. Become a subscriber and you can join the Bittersweet Film Club like Ramon, Jonathan, Lizzie D, Erica Jo, Soph, Dylan and Satchel. Bittersweet Infamy is a proud member of the 604 Podcast Network. This episode was edited by Alexi Johnson, Alex McCarthy. We'd love to see you at the theaters over there. We're watching itonia this month.

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