Episode 2000: TV Offers, Job Offers, and a Major Announcement

0:00 When I recorded episode one of the podcast, I had no idea it would lead to TV offers, job offers, and eventually my dream job. Today is episode 2,000, that's 2,000. And I wanna tell you exactly how that happened on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. This is probably one of my biggest episodes that I've ever produced, not because it's just a solo episode, but because of the milestone, the 2,000 episode mark in podcasting, that is a huge thing. I'm gonna tell you how I got there, why it's so important. But before I do, if you are interested in hearing another 2000 episodes on how to protect the ocean, you can do so by following this podcast.

0:41 Just hit that follow button on your favorite podcast app, or you can go to speakupforblue.com forward slash podcast to look at the podcast and listen to all of it. The last 2000 episodes when I started like, look, this is a huge deal for me. This is this is massive for me. I never thought I would get to 2000, especially the journey that got me to podcasting. I started off if for those of you who don't know, first of all, if you've been with me since day one, thank you so much. But if you don't know the story, I'm going to tell you a little bit of the story of how I got into podcasting. It was around 2010. I was at a job. I want to start some kind of science communication.

1:21 I was talking to a bunch of different people about, you know, blogs and stuff like that. I started off, you know, what everybody's doing blogs. There's seven fried science. There's deep-sea news. They're amazing. I want to contribute in my own kind of way. I'm going to do five episodes or five blog posts a week on different stories. I'm going to write is going to be amazing. I'm going to make so much money off of blogging. That didn't happen. I did not like writing, especially five days a week. It's a lot to be a reporter, a journalist in such a way that I wanted to be. That's a lot of of time and effort and I just wasn't willing to put it in. Writing was not my forte not something I enjoyed to work at and I respect everybody who does writing and does science communication through writing.

2:04 It's an absolute amazing feat to be able to do and great skill, but I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't handle the amount of work that needed to go into it. So then I want you know, what YouTube is getting bigger and bigger. It's 2010. It was started in 2006 or eight or somewhere around there and podcasts were in and around that area and it was kind of like under the radar. It was kind of going through a little bit of a dip. It started in 2006 kind of went up a little bit that it started to go down and then I started to do YouTube videos. Now my kids were were toddlers. So they would go to bed early. They go to bed like seven to eight o'clock and then at that time after I came down from reading the books and stuff like that, my wife reading the books, I would start doing videos and I would you know, record these videos in front of my fish or in front of my fish tank and I would have this recording going on and I would edit the video right then.

2:53 And then I would post it that night and then I would do that four days a week. That was a lot of work editing and doing everything was a ton of work and I just wasn't feeling it because it would take up my entire evening. And so I was like, okay, you know what? I need to start to change the way I do things and I was still doing the videos, but I was in a bit of a flux and I spoke to an old high school football teammate of mine and he was like, you know what? He's like, have you ever heard about this guy that does this this podcast on on video? And I was like, oh, he does a video show. He does a YouTube show. He's like, yeah, but he's got an audio podcast as well. I forget the guy's name, but he had a show called Mixer G.

3:34 It was Mixer G dot com. I don't even know if it's still around but in around like 2010 2011 actually like 2011 to 2012. And so I started listening to it. It was all about entrepreneur, entrepreneurial kind of thing. So if you are an entrepreneur, especially from a text perspective, he would talk to you do interviews with different things. Very enlightening. I really enjoyed the show and I started to be like, well, I'm not going to watch it all the time, but I go for dog walks all the time. So I'm going to listen to it as a podcast. I downloaded the podcast app or, you know, Apple podcast already had a podcast app and I was like, okay, I'm going to listen to the subscribe and start listening and listening and listening. And it was great. And I was like, this is cool. And then I started looking at all there's other podcasts out there. So I started looking at other podcasts because I was watching his show from his website.

4:14 And then the podcast was from on the podcast app. So there are other shows out there. I'm like, I wonder if there are any ocean shows and ocean podcasts out there and there are a few, but they were disconnected. They weren't consistent. And I was like, I wonder if this is something that I could do. There's no video that's necessary and you can just record. You don't have to worry about what you look like. You can just keep going your pajamas if you want and you can record. And so I started to do that. I started to look into it. And it was it's not as it wasn't as easy to start a podcast as it is today back then. So I was like looking at that. I'm like, how do I start this podcast?

4:55 How do I like what do I have to do? I have to find a host. I have to record. I have to start the show. I have to pay for the hosting and all this stuff. And then I had this video software that I was using for a course, Ocean Conservation Careers dot com. And I was like, okay, I did this course with the podcast. And I was like, oh, I'm going to do this. And I use the video sort of like, I guess that the box or the framing is to the software for the video. How do I they offered a podcasting feature? And I was like, oh, this is cool. So it attached to a host and it's had stats and everything. And then it had like the hosting was lips at liberate syndication, which I'm still with today. And so you can see the stats on both.

5:35 You had an account on both, but I didn't really pay attention how to start. I just want to start the show. And so I started the show or I started uploading stuff and it took me a while to kind of figure it out. But I started with interviews once a week and I started interviewing my friends that I met at conferences. That's the whole point of the podcast was to bring the podcast to people who didn't know the people that were on the show. And I wanted them to know and I wanted the I wanted to know the projects that they were on and I wanted them to talk about what they were doing and get to know who they are because there was a there was a thing at that point. And so I think it's still today that scientists are these elitists and there's this like, you know, reputation that we have for some reason words like we know better than everybody else when we're just like everybody else.

6:15 We get paid just like everybody else, often underpaid. And so this is these are the people that are working in ocean conservation from advocacy to science to conservation, to activism to everything. Right. And that's how I've continued with that same kind of mission, although I've added solo episodes, now I added solo episodes after the 10th or 11th episode. And I really enjoyed it. I said, look, I'm going to I had the mic that I have back there. You can't see it right now because it's not video, but it was a Yeti mic and it was a mic that I didn't know how to use very well. And so you could really hear the echo in my room that I'm in same office, but I have a better mic now. So I invested into a better microphone assures SM7B, which was like the ones that the radio broadcasters had.

6:59 It was expensive. But I'm like, you know what, I'm going to get it. And I got the I got the mic and I started doing five episodes a week. And I did that for about a year, year and a half. I had a friend or a guy that I met through like the interning and Nathan Johnson, who was fantastic, still fantastic today. We keep in touch every once in a while. And he would do the writing for me. He would do my show notes and the blog posts and everything. And then we had an episode every Friday called Ocean Talk Friday, where he would pick five, four or five episodes, four or five stories. And we would talk about them throughout the story. And I would just kind of cold react to him. He did a lot of work. He ended up getting a job, left the show because he was too busy, which is understandable.

7:39 And then we went and then I just continued going and I went to three episodes a week because it was it was difficult to keep up with a job and everything and the kids as they were growing up. But I kept doing it and I kept doing it and kept doing it. And then I did seven days a week. I was out of a job. I decided, you know what, I'm going to take podcasting full time. I did seven days a week, which helped me accrue to the closer to the 2000 episodes. And then I remember I got a job and then I went to three days a week and I just continued to pump out episodes. And recently I decided to go five days a week, which accelerated my this milestone of getting to 2000 episodes.

8:22 Well, that's sort of the history of of of how to protect the ocean. Now, to start, the name of this podcast was Speak Up for Blue. Hence the website name, which is our network now, SpeakUpForBlue.com. And then I went to Speak Up for the Ocean Blue. And the reason why I went to Speak Up for the Ocean Blue is because of SEO, search engine optimization within podcasting. And so what I realized that when I typed in to Apple podcast for a lot of the podcasting apps, they were going by specific keywords in the title of the show. So Speak Up for Blue, although the blue signified oceans and the cover, it looked like oceans actually didn't look like oceans. It didn't look like we were talking about the ocean.

9:04 But when I changed it to Speak Up for the Ocean Blue, all of a sudden, if I typed in ocean, my podcast would come up one of the first or the top 10, which was great to see. Over time, there have been more and more podcasts on the ocean, education shows, conservation shows, all these different types of shows. Whether they're large organizations or individuals. And I applaud each and every one of them for applying their creativity to be able to work within this podcasting platform is not easy. And to be able to pump out shows, whether it's once a week or five days a week or seven days a week or once a month, is difficult to do consistently. And I applaud everybody who's done it.

9:45 And I think, you know, I remember one of the IMCCs, the International Marine Conservation Congress, I was at in Newfoundland, I did a presentation on podcasting and why I think more people should podcast. And somebody asked me, they said, hey, you know what, why do you want more people podcasting? Don't you want to be like the top podcast? I'm like, yeah, of course I want to be the top podcast. I'm not the only podcast that should be around. I'm not the voice of the ocean in the podcasting platform. I want there are many voices that need to be heard. There are many people from all over the world, from different cultures, from different creeds, like different religions. They need to be heard speak to the people that identify with them. I'm not I'm a middle age white guy. Not everybody, you know, connects with me and that's fine.

10:30 And and I want to put out the information for people who want that information, which is available to anybody they want freely because it's all over podcasting. And then other people who start podcasting, I want to support. I want to help out. I want to have them on the show to be able to talk about their their podcasts and so who they're connected with, who their audience is because look, we're in ocean conservation. The oceans in enough trouble. We can't be competing against each other on podcasting platform. We need to be supporting each other as much as possible. And the more podcasts that are out there and the more we support each other, either by collaborating or having each other on each other's podcast, I think is that much more benefit to creating. And I think that's a benefit to cross pollinating target audiences so that they can they can make decisions on who they want to talk to or who they want to listen to and who that where they get their information from, which I love.

11:18 So the fact that we're seeing more and more ocean conservation and science podcast is huge. It's really great to see how people have have taken up podcasting. But yeah, like the you know, one of the things that that's been that's been cool is to see how things have changed over the years in terms of podcasting. I've accrued over three hundred or three million podcasts, three million, not three hundred million, three million podcasts over like downloads over the 11 year span that I've been doing this. I started in 2015. I started recording in 2014. I was scared for a year to publish because I was worried about what my colleagues would think about me talking about science.

12:00 I didn't want to be wrong. I had a big time in posture syndrome, but I've been doing it for 11 years, different frequency once a week, three times a week, five days a week, seven days a week, back to five days a week. And it's been absolutely wonderful. When I got close to when I got past a thousand episodes, I was like, this is kind of cool. I wonder how long I can go now that I'm at 2000. I don't think I can stop. No matter where I go, I think I'm always going to be podcasting. I'm always going to be doing this type of podcast. This will always be my quote unquote flagship podcast. And I think that's really important to say because it's not something that happens every day.

12:43 I've been a part of other podcasts. I've actually helped start and launch probably about 15 different podcasts, whether they've been oceans or not actually more than that. Probably about 20 to 25 now, if you don't count the ocean podcast that I've been able to do consistently, I've been co-hosting the Beyond Jaws podcast. And so that was kind of cool because it actually came out of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Dr. David Ebert, a good friend of mine, Dave, came on the podcast and we just hit it off. Like I asked him to come on and talk about Basking Sharks. He came on. We talked for an hour. And then before we talked for an hour before we recorded, we recorded. And then we talked for about two hours after we recorded. And to be honest, that relationship has never really gone away. We get along really well.

13:23 And I consider him one of my great friends. He's a wealth of knowledge. He knows a lot of people in the business. And the Beyond Jaws podcast is all about the shark science career and documenting the careers of everybody through interviews of different people from around the world. And we talked to people in the US, in Canada, from India, from Bangladesh, from New Zealand, from Australia, from Brazil, from Chile, all these different places in South America, all these different places in Europe and Africa as well. And we're able to meet so up and coming people, people who've been around for like 30 plus years. We had an episode about Jaws, the 50th anniversary, because like four of the people were working, like including Dave, were working as shark scientists.

14:16 They call themselves the Jaws generation of science, the shark science, because that actually helped catapult their careers because there was more funding to discover more about great white sharks and other sharks. Dave has since become the lost shark guy. I've gotten him to get really into Instagram and social media and videos. He now has a documentary series on his YouTube channel called at Lost Shark Guy, which I edit for him. And it's been a crazy experience in the eight years that we've known each other. It's been phenomenal to see how he's grown within social media and using that, but also connecting to different people. It's just absolutely amazing.

14:59 Now, one of the podcasts that's going to come out has to do with another thing that I wanted to talk about because I got a job because of this podcast. I mentioned at the beginning I got job offers and actually led to the job that I'm at now, which is a dream job for me. I get to stay in Ontario, which is a big thing for me because one of the reasons why I started podcasting and science communications is because I want to stay in touch with all my ocean conservation friends, but also still maintain in Ontario. And, you know, the big thing for me was, you know, I couldn't find a job in Ontario as a marine biologist. No, duh. There's no oceans around here. There's not there aren't many institutes and things like that that talk about oceans. I was working in freshwater. I worked as a consultant. I worked all over the place, but I never actually had a job that I truly, truly loved. Right. I had one like like contract or temporary job with the Department of Fisheries Oceans with Dr. Nick Mandrak. But that only lasted a year because of budget cuts and so forth. Not because I didn't like the I didn't like the job. But regardless, following this path really made me fall in love with science communication.

16:06 And being and this kind of like every time I had a regular job, like just a non science job for a while for the last seven years. And although I enjoyed the people I work with, it wasn't the same to be able to say that I worked in ocean conservation. It was kind of a little embarrassing because I felt like I failed in doing my full time job as someone who deals with oceans and works within oceans. And I spent 16 years in science communication. 11 of those years working as a science community here full time pretty much on my podcast, but outside of work hours. Right. And so basically from five o'clock until sometimes midnight or two or three in the morning and sometimes early, early in the morning.

16:46 And and it led to a lot of opportunities TV shows, podcasts, hosting, all that kind of stuff. But but it never led me towards that full time job until this year when I joined Pisces Oceans as their ocean communications manager. Natalie Gilson and I had been friends for a while. She had been on this podcast because she reached out because she was a marketing person getting into oceans and wanted to have more of an impact. She found this job at Pisces. She brought me on this past year. And it's been an absolute dream to work with the people that I do to work on the projects that I get to work on. And I get to have a lot of say. They take into my feedback. I've learned a lot since I've started from a communication standpoint and from a science communication standpoint, which has been phenomenal, which has been wonderful to be able to work in.

17:40 And be able to get that job allows me to feel fulfilled. It fulfills me throughout the day to be able to say I get to work on ocean projects every single day. And I get to help. One of my coworkers, Kristina, who's been on the podcast as well, she was saying to me, she's like, yeah, she's like, you know, the one thing we love working, we were saying to each other is that we get to help other projects really make sure they have an impact. They get to focus on that impact. And that's great because we're almost scared of that. And that's great because we're almost scaling our impact by helping other clients and companies and nonprofit organizations and academic networks and academic people who just like doing projects and need our help. And we were able to provide that help. That's wonderful to be able to do. That makes me feel good.

18:25 And I think that's what I said when I first started, you know, it's still a lot. You're working eight hours and then you're going home and you're doing, oh, I work from home. But you after that, you work on the podcast and you work on putting five episodes together, including an interview episode. You're doing it outside of work hours, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes late at night. And that is taxing on somebody right now who's 47 years old. I'm not a young spring chicken anymore. And so I need to get my rest and I wasn't getting it. And, you know, Pisces and I like Natalie Melissa Weber, who's the their co CEOs and Christy, we were talking a lot about the podcast and how we can incorporate the podcast within Pisces. And we finally found a way. So with this 2000 episode, I get to announce that I've licensed out the how to protect the ocean podcast with two Pisces for a lot of different reasons.

19:17 But the main reasons is that this show becomes better. And I can tell you why it becomes better because I can work on the show during my work hours. I'm this is I'm during work hours right now doing this podcast and the podcast that how to protect the ocean podcast and Pisces has a very similar mission. We're here to to create an ocean impact. We're going to have a positive ocean impact through science, strategy and story. Very similar in terms of our visions, very similar in terms of our missions and to bring us together made sense. The other aspect is I get to work on a journey of the day. So I'm not working at midnight or 11 o'clock. So I'm getting I'm not exhausted when I do it. There have been times there have been times where I've done a podcast. I've started recording at midnight.

20:01 And it goes on for like 20 minutes or 45 minutes or whatever. And then I realized this is one time in particular, I realized I didn't hit the record button 45 minutes 1245 in the morning, I didn't hit the record button. I want to put this episode out that next morning. And I'm like, what do I do? Do I go to bed or do I do it in the morning? Or do I just do it again? I did it again. The record button, I thought I press it. I swear to this day, I thought I pressed it. Did not press it. Another 45 minutes goes by me doing the entire show. And I was like, oh, God, nothing did it. So I'm at this point now. It's 130 in the morning, give or take. And I'm I'm tired. I'm angry. Possibly emotional in other ways. And I'm like, what do I do? Like, how do I do it again? Like, like third time's a charm. I did a third time. I ended up going to bed finally, like 230 after editing and everything like that. But I did it again.

20:47 And, uh, and, uh, and, you know, waking up the next morning, I'm just useless to my family to work and everything. And so I've spent a lot of late nights. I spent a lot of early mornings getting up and, um, you know, talking to people who are in a time zone, like in European time zone where they're like six, seven hours ahead. Uh, South Africa, like they're, they're around the same time talking to people there. So I'm getting up at seven o'clock or eight o'clock in the morning doing these interviews while people are sleeping. So I'm trying to keep it down. So I don't wake up my wife and kids. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to get up. I'm like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm not doing this. I'm like, I'm like, I'm not doing this. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm not doing this. I Maija activating my body. Um, so the last time I was back in the morning, uh, I was awake. And I was breakfast doing, um, um, dinner warmer, um, because I'm front, uh, did I have issues with my kids, um, just need to come and get sleep. A little bit? Maybe I needed a long time to come on my, to pay my fees. Obviously I feel in a 62- Trailer appears in May just last week and that'll help my spouse, my weightedert, my kids, uh, cause they're job that I do. But now I get to make better episodes for you.

21:51 And now we're talking with my coworkers on how to make more of an impact with Pisces and how to protect the ocean through various ways, which we'll come out and we'll talk about, you know, in the next in the next upcoming months, which I'm excited about. I'm really, really excited about. With that said, we are going to have a Pisces podcast called the Ocean Leaders podcast. And so it's going to join the Speak Up for Blue network. It's already has myself, it already had like how to protect the ocean. It'll have Ocean Leaders podcast, it'll have Beyond Jaws podcast. And of course, it'll have as we're getting, getting ready to do the next season and get ramped up, Polar Bears and Foot Flops with Angelo Villagomez. So we have four, four podcasts coming out, including the Ocean Leaders podcast, which will be like, if you're interested in, in Ocean Leading Leader podcasts, and you're like an Ocean Leader, and you work on projects, this is the podcast that you're going to want to listen to. It's all about why Project stall, it's all about, you know, making sure you have a communication strategy, all that kind of stuff. It'll be Pisces very focused on people who are in and doing projects, whether you're a nonprofit organization, whether you're by yourself, whether you're part of a larger corporation, or a startup, you know, we're here to help you with that. So that's going to be a lot of fun to be able to do.

23:08 And of course, I've got Ocean Decoded Live, which is my YouTube show live show, which I went live yesterday, had some problems, but ended up being okay. I'll talk about that on another time. So we got lots of stuff coming. But I'm really excited about this, this licensing agreement with how to protect the ocean. The fact that we have the very similar missions, and it just works really, really well. And we're hoping to sort of increase that ocean impact as we go through that. Now, of course, you know, this has changed my life. I talked a lot about it. I had I've been on TV for documentaries, which has been great. I've had podcasts, I did a hosting of the podcast, I hosted the Toronto Zoo podcast for a couple of years, which was great. I've had job offers, which of course, the dream job is here. And I think the big thing is, is that I continue to do it. I just stayed consistent. You know, it wasn't I'm going to go to 1000, I'm going to go to 2000. It's like, I'm already thinking of the next five episodes, I have the next like 10 episodes planned out. So I'm already beyond the 2000.

24:10 You know, and I think that's important to say it's like, it's not just about the numbers. This is a big milestone for me in the podcasting industry, but it's not the fact that like, I'm going to stop at 2000, I'm just going to continue to go. And whatever the frequency changes, the frequency changes, but I'm still going to be talking about ocean conservation. And I think that's, that's really an important part of the of the business really is is what we do with with our voice. You know, that's what how it started off as speak up for the ocean blue or speak up for blue is how can we talk about the ocean more, you know, it helps with our ocean anxiety and climate anxiety, be able to talk to people, whether we're in a debate or not being able to get the message out that ocean needs our protection and needs our help. And the first way to do that is to be able to talk about it. And so the podcasting medium is a great way to get the message out, not the best way to get the message back and continue that conversation.

25:11 Although if you're on Spotify, you can you can comment and you can ask questions and so forth. I always I always ask that that happen. And so that's always great. But and then of course, Ocean Decoded Live at four o'clock every Monday to Friday, at four o'clock Eastern, you can run that around that time, you can join me and we can talk about the ocean some more and then you can actually comment and I'll be right there listening to your comments. So this has been something that has been huge for me. This is a big step, not only for the 2000 but the 2000 episodes, but it's also the fact that I am licensing out how to protect the ocean with Pisces to make better quality shows for you and to increase the quality of the ocean.

25:56 And so I think that's a great way to increase the ocean impact of the podcast, which has always been the goal, not only just to talk about the ocean, but to have impact on the ocean, whether it's through others or by platforming others. That's always been the goal and will continue to be the goal as long as I'm living. And hopefully whoever takes over afterwards when I when I eventually stop because I'm not breathing anymore, which hopefully will be for a very, very long time from now. But I think this is something where I'm excited to see where the future goes. This is definitely not the end. Only just beginning. So the thing that I want to do though right now is I just want to thank you for what you've been able to do for me for the people who have talked to me about how this show has impacted them who have supported me by listening to the episodes. Obviously not everyone don't expect everyone to listen to everyone.

26:47 But the fact that you've given me that feedback, whether it's critique, whether it's great feedback, you know, in terms of how it affected your life, I always like hearing that, you know, always like hearing it in the reviews on Apple or if you reach out to me. I always love hearing these types of the type of feedback because it helps motivate me to do more. Podcasting is not an easy thing to do each and every week, especially five days a week. It takes up a lot of time. I have more time to do it. This shows getting better quality, but still takes up a lot of time. It takes a lot of creative space in my mind. And so this being able to do this for you is a privilege, but also I really appreciate the feedback you give whether you like something or you don't like something. I always like to hear that feed.

27:34 But I want to thank you so much for supporting me through 2000 episodes. Whether you're with me through from episode one or you just started yesterday or you just started listening today, I do appreciate it. Tomorrow I'm going to be talking about YouTube and YouTube Live as a science communication platform. And then on Friday, we're going to be talking to Amy Weldon, who is launching her second season of the podcast, Blue Collar White Coat on second season. It's going to be great. You're going to want to listen to that interview because she's always wonderful. And we're both presenting at IMCC eight in Scotland in November. So if you're thinking about going there, come say hi to me as we are there. But thank you again for the support for those of you who reached out or will reach out. I really do appreciate everything you guys have done for me.

28:22 All my social links are in the show notes. I want to thank you so much for joining me on this very special episode, two thousandth episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and happy conservation.