Mentioned In Podcasts – Book details

Mentions in Episodes:

• Episode: Joe Rogan Experience #2235 - Mike Rowe
  Podcast: The Joe Rogan Experience
  

  The sinking of this ship inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick, and what happened was, in I think it was 1821, the whaling industry in Nantucket was so fascinating.
• Episode: 141. The Language of the Universe | People I (Mostly) Admire
  Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire
  

  He started reciting Moby Dick; the opening to Moby Dick was really striking.
• Episode: Has America Completely Lost Its Mind? - Ben Shapiro (4K)
  Podcast: Modern Wisdom
  

  I mean, like we tried this; we had a book club and the book club was, you know, we’d read like great works of literature, so we read Moby Dick. Yeah, you were on a deck of a ship, right? Exactly, so we did one with Moby Dick and it’s like I love that stuff, right?
• Episode: 592. How to Make the Coolest Show on Broadway | Freakonomics Radio
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  We met and we talked about like Herman Melville and Moby Dick for a really long time.
• Episode: Joe Rogan Experience #2148 - Gad Saad
  Podcast: The Joe Rogan Experience
  

  It’s both the greatest time and the worst time ever, right? Yeah, it’s a great time because it feels like an asteroid’s coming, yet the asteroid isn’t here just yet. Well, our mutual friend Sam Harris would argue that the asteroid is actually Donald Trump. Oh, for some people, that’s their white whale.
• Episode: Daemons, Demons, God, & the Meaning Crisis | Dr. John Vervaeke | EP 414
  Podcast: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
  

  I've always been fascinated by that story; of course, Melville makes a lot of it in Moby Dick. There's a moment in that story that I find particularly compelling, and one of the things I like about the Bible is it will have these little moments of very powerful humanity in the midst of wrestling with the numinous.
• Episode: Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #394
  Podcast: Lex Fridman Podcast
  

  I remember when we did the Mandela Pavilion, we read 'Moby Dick,' the whiteness of the whale, the albino, the different, the other. And that got us to work on melanin.
• Episode: How This Big Wave Surfer Built A +$10 Million Business Empire (#483)
  Podcast: My First Million
  

  If you've ever read Moby Dick, you know about the whale that sinks the ship. Yes, there's actually a true story behind it. So Nantucket originally was for Quakers, yeah, were whale men.
• Episode: Bonus Episode: A Modern Whaler Speaks Up | Freakonomics Radio
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  We spoke with economists, historians, a Moby Dick scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop whale hunting.
• Episode: Bonus Episode: A Modern Whaler Speaks Up | Freakonomics Radio
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  Yeah, I see. Have you read Moby Dick?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The idea that things can be messy is part of the form of Moby Dick's own messiness.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  Moby Dick is deeply weird and funny, and what it especially does for me, both the 17-year-old me and the 18- or 20-year-olds to whom I teach it now, and to my 50-year-old self who still reads it at least once a year, is that Moby Dick takes any sense that you might have that there is some transcendent, great, perfect work of genius or truth in the world and turns it into a mess.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  So if you could go back to your 17-year-old self, and maybe when you first read it and fell in love with it, but then tack onto your 17-year-old self your current self with your deeper understanding of the book, how would you describe to your classmates who were not interested in reading Moby Dick, or maybe to the millions of people today, the billions of people today who remain uninterested in reading Moby Dick?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The challenge of reading Moby Dick is having a comfort in not knowing, being someone who can sit with dissatisfaction, or sit with inconclusiveness, sit with discomfort, sit with the idea that things will not be resolved necessarily in the timeframe or the way that you want them to. I don't think everybody's comfortable with that.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  It's an outlier only in the sense that it remains widely read today, in part because by naming the whale Moby Dick, I mean, there are so many ways. Melville is like a deeply queer writer; all of his texts have scenes of mutual masturbation or various other queer subtexts.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The distracted boyfriend meme is a common one where the original girlfriend is something like the plot of the novel, and the girl that is distracting the boyfriend—the boyfriend is Melville, and the girl distracting him can be something like minute details about whaling taxonomy. So that kind of meme.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  Well, a lot of it is taking lines from Moby Dick and translating them into popular memes, and so that’s always amusing. Do you have a favorite or two?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  Part of what makes Moby Dick funny in some ways is that there’s a hatred for a specific animal. Can you describe in just a few words what Moby Dick Twitter is like?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  I'm laughing, especially because one of the very funny discourses on Twitter about Moby Dick is that there's a whole kind of subset of Moby Dick-obsessed Twitter, and one of the jokes is about what it means to hate a specific animal.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod. The crew of Moby Dick is probably more diverse than any historic whaling ship was.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  And how about the crew in Moby Dick? The book you love more than anything describes for me the diversity of the crew on the Pequod.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  And what was life like on board the Pequod, the whaling ship in Moby Dick? After the break, we tried to get a feel for that.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  But as much as I’d like to say that Moby Dick is a book about whaling, I mean, we have been doing this three-part series on the history and economics of whaling, Moby Dick isn't really about whaling.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  In 1851, he published a novel called The Whale, later retitled Moby Dick or The Whale. At some point, you may have read Moby Dick or pretended to.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  I could not believe the book; if it were not for Moby Dick, whaling would be one of a series of interests, but because Moby Dick has loomed so large, I went all in on whaling then, huh?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  I read Moby Dick for the first time at the age of 17. What was your impression on your first reading at 17 years old?
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  How many times have you read Moby Dick? I’m 50 years old.
• Episode: What Can Whales Teach Us About Clean Energy, Workplace Harmony, and Living the Good Life? | Ep. 551
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  But the odds are you will have to seek it out, as Melville writes in Moby Dick: it is not down in any map; true places never are.
• Episode: Why Do People Still Hunt Whales? | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 550
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  Also, why is it still a good idea to read Moby Dick? There's a headline early in the novel that says bloody battle in Afghanistan, grand contested election for the presidency of the United States—and is a 19th-century whaling crew more ethnically diverse than your 21st-century office?
• Episode: The First Great American Industry | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 549
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The whale itself became central to our art and culture. Part of what makes Moby Dick funny is that there's a hatred for a specific animal.
• Episode: The First Great American Industry | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 549
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The most famous whale ship disaster was the Essex; just about every kid in America learned the story of this ship that was rammed by a whale and which Melville would use for the climax of Moby Dick.
• Episode: The First Great American Industry | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 549
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The ship in Moby Dick isn't called the Essex; it's called the Pequod.
• Episode: The First Great American Industry | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 549
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  That again is Nathaniel Philbrick; for my money, Moby Dick is America's Bible.
• Episode: The First Great American Industry | Freakonomics Radio | Episode 549
  Podcast: Freakonomics Radio
  

  The Essex was the real-life inspiration for Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the whale of all whaling books.
• Episode: The Joy of Math With Sarah Hart | People I (Mostly) Admire | Episode 104
  Podcast: People I (Mostly) Admire
  

  I'm getting there. I wrote an academic paper actually about the mathematics in Moby Dick, and that came out in 2021.