Welcome to the Speaker for Blue Podcast, session 142. You know, movies are always something that I like to watch. I'm a big movie buff. And today on the Speaker for Blue Podcast, we are going to go over my four, what I think are the top marine conservation documentaries. I'm going to tell you why I think they're the top, why they were so important, and how I think they can continue to change the game. So that's on this episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast. And once I learned to speak, we will listen to it, so stay tuned. Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now, here's your host, he just discovered periscope, and might be slightly addicted, Andrew Lewin. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, founder, SpeakUpForBlue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right, I'm an entrepreneur and everything I do in my entrepreneurial world is to protect the oceans. And today, we're going to go over my top four movie documentaries, marine conservation movie documentaries that I think have the most impact or can continue to have the most impact on marine conservation. In other words, the entire point of a documentary is to actually make people aware of what's happening. So there are some videos that come out, the some documentaries that we're going to talk about that are shock and awe, and there are some that are just like, wow, this person went through so much because they believed in this specific issue or issues and really need to tell people. So and I'm talking about a particular movie in that case, and we're going to talk all about it today. So I'm going to go through the top four movies. I don't know how long this is going to take, but I'm going to kind of give a description of why I think it's so good, what it's about, why I think it's so good. And then all the links to all the trailers we're going to embed on our all the YouTube trailers. Anyway, we're going to embed on our show notes. So if you go to speakupforblue.com/session142, it's really easy to get to. If you're listening to on your phone and you're not on Wi-Fi, you want to wait until you're on Wi-Fi, wait until you go home, go to the podcast app, it'll be in the show description, just the show notes there, and you can just tap on and watch it on your phone, or you can just Google it, or you can just go right to the show notes, go to our show notes and go speakupforblue.com/session142, it's really easy to figure it out, or you can always Google it if you really want to go speak up for blue and then movie documentaries. So yeah, so that's what I'm going to go through today. These are things like when I watch the movies, like now, of course, I'm aware of a lot of the issues that are going on. And there were a few movies where I was like, okay, I'm like, this is kind of good, like I've seen documentaries before, it's like, oh yeah, I kind of knew this stuff, and there's other ones where I'm like, oh wow, I didn't know the severity of the impact, and watching it happen in certain movies, particular situations, you actually see all the stuff that people do or that are really bad, or they continue to do things knowing a species is going to go extinct or extinct or something. These are documentaries that really kind of put things into perspective gives you that visual cue to be like, holy crap, we need to do something about it. And some of these movies have, they've really catapulted these issues into the mainstream. Sort of the mainstream, like what I mean, that means the public, the general public kind of step up and say, no, this is wrong, damn it, and I'm going to do something about it, and they have, and they will, and they continue to do so, that's why I always tell, say these movies will be sort of evergreen, they will all, every time somebody watches it, they're like, oh my God, there are still some people that I know, if they say, hey, I want to get into, you know, ocean conservation, I want to know what I can do, I'm like, watch these four movies, you know, start by watching one of them, and then watch them, and then tell me how you feel, and then they'll watch one, they'll come back like, holy cow, I did not know that this was going to happen, or this is happening, I mean, it's just unbelievable, okay. Now, I did leave out one movie, and in particular, and that is, I left out the inconvenient truth, there are Al Gore kind of spoken a lot of stuff, because I'll be honest, I didn't really like the movie, I thought it was good to get out into the public and to speak about it, and I think it was really good, I knew so much about the situation that was going on, I just found it boring, because it was just the dude talking, and it wasn't very exciting in terms of what other movies we've seen in documentaries, and it was just for me to watch somebody in a suit, speak, and tell people what's happening by looking at a graph that keeps going up and up and up, I just didn't, it didn't capture me, even though I knew the severity of the situation, and I knew how important it was, I actually fell asleep during that movie. So I'm not going to talk about it today, I do recommend if you haven't seen the inconvenient truth, I do recommend that you see it, it's just, for me, it just didn't hit me, that's all, but these four movies that I'm going to talk about, these really hit me, and the first movie I'm going to talk about, I'm kind of going to go in, I guess, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to go in order of, when it was, yeah, I guess I'm going to go order of when they were released. So in 2006, the initial release, and then the DVD was released in 2008, Rob Stewart produced a movie, directed and starred in a documentary called Sharkwater. If you haven't seen it, or even if you have, I'm going to recount what it's all about. The movie, the documentary first starts out, is Rob is a biologist, a young biologist, and he starts out by saying, you know, by talking about, wanting to make a movie about sharks, to show people the sharks that he knows, I guess, in his education he worked with sharks, and he dies with sharks, he was a videographer, a photographer, and he went all over the world and he died with sharks, and he noticed something that was not what he expected with a lot of sharks, or I guess what not, what a lot of people talk about when they talk about the reputation of sharks. Usually when you say, oh, I'm going shark diving, they'll be like, I can't believe you're going shark diving. Isn't that dangerous? Oh my God, I'm thinking to bite you. What are you worried about? You're just going to get eaten, why would you do that? And people are like, yeah, that's what they think of when they think of sharks, they think of big, great whites, they think of bull sharks and tigers, always just ripping people apart because that is what we've been programmed to think through other movies, like Jaws and God knows what else. There have been so many movies where there's just unnecessary violence and giving that persona and reputation that sharks are killing machines and they seek humans to eat them, and people are deathly afraid of sharks, because when you go in the water, you're not in control. You may be able to swim well, but whatever is underneath, you are not in control of people who get scared because they're not in control, and that is a big problem to them. So when people work on that, and they make movies based on sharks that can come from the bottom and that are in their domain and do really well, that gives them a big reputation of these things are killing machines, and they are going to try and eat us if they see us in the water, which we've proven on this show, we've proven on other shows that this is not the case. Science has proven that this is not the case. They don't like human beings because we are too skinny. We do not have the fat deposits for a lot of these sharks to eat. A lot of times sharks like to eat bigger animals, sea turtles, seals, sea lions, other sharks, things that have a lot of fat on them and a lot of energy, that's what they need, and they don't need us because we don't have that much energy. We don't have in storage of fat. So going back to shark water is Rob was essentially trying to take that reputation and throw down the toilet and change the reputation to something of, hey, these animals are just animals. They hunt because they're predators and they need to eat. And yes, sometimes it looks barbaric because when they eat something, there's a lot of blood in the water because they eat bigger things, especially these bigger sharks. However, they're actually gentle animals. And a lot of times in the movie, you actually see him kind of petting a shark, which I'm not big on. I'll be honest, when I saw that, I'm like, not because I'm worried that they're danger. You know my position on don't touch. When you're a scuba diver, you should not touch animals. No matter how much they want to touch you, you should not touch animals. That's just my personal beliefs is what I think we're down there as a guest. You don't go into somebody else's house and you touch everything because they're not going to like it. It's the same thing of going in underwater. You don't go to somebody else's home and touch them. So that's just my personal. So when I saw that, I was like, well, okay, at the beginning, but he just started to make this, you know, this documentary about sharks and I thought it was really good. And I started going and then as it progressed and progressed and progressed, it started to come down to talking more about conservation. Now I have to say something. A lot of documentaries, marine conservation documentaries, they're not really about marine conservation. They're more about exploration and telling you the beauty of oceans, which they are. They're magnificent. But when we look at marine conservation documentaries, we want to look at specific issues that are affecting the ocean, I mean, it's conservation. Yes, education is part of conservation. You need to know about the ocean and all the different animals, but you need to know what the issues that are affecting them. And shark water really took that and brought it like straight to your face. It was like a punch in the face because all of a sudden, you know, you know, Rob was tagging along on a sea shepherd ship with Paul Watson, who is the infamous executive director or leader or president of sea shepherd and sea shepherd is an organization for those who don't know who go around the world and enforce protection of animals. And they are very diligent and they sometimes they take pride in ramming boats and there was a show about them shark. I believe it was a shark what no, whale wars, whale wars because they protect the whales from the Japanese down in the southeast, southeast, southeast Pacific or southwest Pacific and in the Antarctic waters. And you know, so, so they were tagging, he was tagging along on one of their ships and they were going into Costa Rican waters. And they found a Guatemalan boat that was getting sharks. And while the sharks were alive, they get them on the boat while the sharks were alive, they would cut their fins off their pectoral fins, their dorsal fins, their tails. And then they would throw the shark back in the water alive. Probably one of the most brutal ways to kill an animal. It's like somebody cutting off our limbs while we're still alive and then just throwing us back out on the street and expecting us to survive or not really caring about what we do. It is probably one of the most brutal ways we've seen because they've showed that people are actually cutting off the fins. It's a very, you know, just, all I can say is really brutal and vivid imagery that you will never get out of your head. Right. Now, if you ever watch when you see, you know, the ivory trade of elephants, you know, people cutting off the ivory test of elephants, you never actually see them cutting off. It's always after the fact, which probably if they did, I think people would, although it's so brutal to watch, but if they showed it to more people, I think more people would stand up and say, Hey, we got to do something about this. So that we use it's that movie gets into this whole shark finning and selling fins for shark fin soup. They explain what shark fin soup is. They explain how important it is in China. They explain how it's a, it's a status symbol in China. It's expensive. And then it doesn't taste like anything. And this is happening all over the world. It's not just this Guatemalan boat. So I'm not going to tell you the entire story of the movie, but stuff happens between the Guatemalan boat and the sea shepherd boat. They go into Costa Rica because they want to find out the Costa Rican is apparently a big haven in the central, uh, in Central America of these shark fins. And because you're allowed to hunt sharks and there weren't any, there wasn't any specific rule to, uh, to fin or not fit. So Rob goes in, takes these pictures on the rooftops of all these warehouses, drying off shark fins and they're covered, these rooftops and these industrials are covered. Somebody sees them. They have to run. It becomes this big, big movie and it's really actually for marine documentary, marine conservation documentary, it's probably one of the most exciting movies you've seen because it's a bit of a cat and mouse kind of game, a little bit of a mystery kind of game. You realize that the, uh, the mob is involved. I think it's like an Asian mob that's involved and they're in this because it's very profitable and obviously illegal and kind of brutal. And it goes into this whole thing. How in Asia, it's a big, it's a big thing in China, uh, Hong Kong is a big hub and everything like that, but the most important thing after this movie was released and really got popular, blew up. Right. When it went on to DVD, it blew up. Everybody started watching and people started to say, Oh my God, did you know about this, Andrew? Like they started coming to me and I'm like, Holy cow, yes, I did. I watched the movie. It's unbelievable. I knew about this shark finning, but I didn't know it was to that level and I never actually saw it happen. I just heard about it and this sort of, you know, there were organizations that were involved in trying to stop shark finning before, but what happened after this movie was the public gotten involved and you probably still see it because it's, I mean, shark finning still goes on, but you probably still see people put petitions on shark finning and it just went on from like 2006 all the way to now. It just went on and it really hit a peak in about 2008, 2010 between those times. And it was just unreal. Like you just, it was everywhere, you know, on my, on my Facebook feed, it was just, it really showed how rain conservation and social media really came together. And so many people were talking about it, that it just, it, it went beyond viral. It was always there, especially if you clicked like and engaged and commented, you always saw it in your news feed and Facebook and Twitter and all this kind of stuff. And it was just unreal. So you know, the movie blew up, Rob's sort of persona blew up and a lot of organizations jumped in and said, we got to help stop this. Wild Aid was already involved, but they up their game because they got more support from people. Fundraising was getting better and there was more funding and what happened is organizations like Shark Savers and Wild Aid went over to China and started to, and Asian countries and started to educate kids, families, people about what the effects are of, you know, three billion people eating shark fin soup, right? Or probably less than that. But it was getting more, the reason why I was getting so bad was getting more affordable. You know, people in China were kind of climbing up that social ladder and to show that they were actually doing better, they would go out and they would have shark fin soup for a whole family, which is like 90 euros a plate or a bowl of soup. So it's quite expensive, but people were doing it because they wanted to show their status. So with all the, with all the public support, you know, around in North America, we started to see cities ban shark fin soup all around the city. It went back and forth a lot of times. Then in Asia, we started to see the education process happen. And now just this year, we saw a document or a report saying that shark fin consumption has actually gone down 70%, 70%. That's amazing. Starting off with blowing up of one big marine conservation movie, like that is unreal. So that is shark water in essence, and the trailer is going to be on our website. It's a short, speak up for blue dot com forward slash session 142. So you can just look at that with all the other trailers, but I'm going to just continue mentioning it. So anyway, so that's, you know, that, that movie, you know, which was absolutely amazing in terms of what it did. And Rob has since released other movies, and it's, you know, one was a revolution about talking about the movement of how people can actually do things. And it was just, it's pretty good too. Not as much of an effect as shark water though in this, in this area. So I think it's just, you know, it's one of those things where you put a movie together. It blows up. It really captures people. But that was also the really the beginning of capturing other movies and other movies doing so well, right? One movie that I like that I still felt is under the radar and is, is, is really what do you say? I guess undervalued still to this day. It's just, and it's called, it's, it's the movie's called End of the Line. It was released in 2009, or sorry, no, hold on, End of the Line documentary. Sorry. I'm just, I'm actually looking for the stats, whoops. End of the Line documentary. I'm just looking up on Google tooth. It was released in 2009 and a great movie. I watched it actually on Netflix and I think it's still on Netflix. I didn't believe shark waters on Netflix as well, or actually Sharf a lot of water. You can actually watch it on YouTube. So End of the Line is a movie. It's a documentary, the documentary, it's a, the filmmaker Rupert Murray. He examines the devastating effect of overfishing has had on the world's fish population and argues that drastic action must be taken to reverse these trends. Now the people, the, the one kind of cool thing is Ted Danson, who's actually a big marine conservationist and one of the founding members of the big organization, Oceana, who are very into fisheries, he, he narrated this movie and it's just a really good, now it's based on a book at the end of the line and what it does is really goes after overfishing. And I've actually mentioned one of the stories from here, and I'm going to mention it again, but I've mentioned one of the stories in here, but it's, it's a documentary that looks at overfishing all over the world and what's happening, why it's happening, how good our technology has gotten so that we become more efficient in getting fish, how many more people eat fish. We have a population problem that a lot of them solely rely on fish to eat or seafood to eat. And then there's the commercialization and globalization problem of it, the transportation of fish, the storing of fish and then the excessive fishing, which is what we call overfishing, to the point, to the brink of extinction and beyond, you know, there's two big examples of this, 1992 in Canada, East Coast, Newfoundland and Halifax and all over the Atlantic coast. The fisheries, the federal government came federal government closed down the cod fishery, there was a moratorium on cod, and because it came to the point where it wasn't sustainable to fish it. In other words, so many people, the quotas were too high, and so many people were fishing it, that the fish population just kept going down, down, down, down, but it didn't just happen in 1992, it didn't just crash all of a sudden. It was a slow process that had been documented by federal government scientists for decades. You know, there's data going back to the 1970s of scientists tracking and monitoring cod fishery, Haddock, all the major commercial species, especially ground fish species, because that's big on the east coast of Canada, and the ground fish, I mean any fish that eats off the ground or lives on the ground, so Haddock, halibut, cod are the three big ones. And I guess what would happen is the scientists would inform the politicians, they'd make reports, the politicians essentially ignored the scientists and kept saying, "Oh yeah, we can fish this amount," kept either raising the quotas or keeping them the same when the scientists were saying, "We are having a problem and the cod stocks are going down." The effort to catch cod is getting higher, which means it's harder to find cod, and the population, the abundance is actually getting lower, right? Makes sense, it's harder to find them because there's not as many around. To the point in 92 where they actually started saying, "Okay, no, we have to put a moratorium on it." Now the problem was is in Newfoundland, especially a lot of the economy was based on fishing and fishing for cod. So when there was a moratorium on cod, there were fishermen who had been fishing in their families for generations who had to stop fishing, they couldn't fish anymore because that's what they were made to do, they were made to do for cod. And there was just all hell breaking loose because people weren't going to be able to feed their families, and that was a big problem. So there's a moratorium, so a lot of people had to switch, they had to go into oil and gas production and all that kind of stuff and it's just been hell. It's just now starting to come back, and actually I just read an article today before I started recording this podcast where they said that the cod is actually sustainable again. They're going to be fishing, but I think they're actually fishing it, but they're doing it very sustainably in science, they're listening to the scientists. Finally, finally, they're listening to the scientists. So anyway, they talk about the story at the end of the line, the other story they talk about are the tuna, the bluefin tuna. And the bluefin tuna, especially in the Mediterranean, but all over the world, they're endangered. There's a big problem with them. They're getting fish because they're so huge, and they're getting, they're just getting fish to the point of extinction. Now I keep telling the story, so I'm going to tell it quickly. One of the examples they show in this movie in the line, the European Union, grab, get scientists to say, give us a quota of what would make fishing, the fishing quota good enough so that it would maximize the fishing yield, but it would minimize the impact on the fish. So at what level, how many tons of fish can we fish without making it go extinct in the future years? So making it sustainable. Scientists say 15,000 tons a year, and the politicians are like, no, we're not going to do that, we're going to do 30,000. Why? Because we know the fishing lobby want more than that, so we're going to give 30,000. So they go to the table, the fishing lobby, this is the European Union, and then the fishing lobby is like, no, we want 60,000. So the European Union say, okay, 60,000 tons, four times the amount that scientists said was sustainable. And they wonder why these fish are going extinct. To the point where the corporation Mitsubishi, that's right, the car maker, is actually behind fishing a lot of these tuna, and they're flash freezing them so that they last for like 20 to 25 years. They're storing them for 20, 25 years because they know eventually this fish is going to go extinct, the species is going to go extinct, and then they're going to come back and this is going to sell for a premium price. That is a dick move, sorry in my language, but that is a dick move. You're going to make a species go extinct knowingly. Keep it for a while, freeze it and keep it for like 25 years, and then sell it at a premium after it's been frozen for 25 years. So you're not even getting fresh fish, you're getting a fish that's extinct, but it's going for 20, you know, 20 to 25 years from now, it's going to be a big hot commodity and people are going to pay like, I don't know, thousands and tens of thousands of dollars, maybe even more, hundreds of thousands of dollars for a fish. That's a dick move, and like seriously, and that's why I'll never get a Mitsubishi, never once I found that out, I was like, wow, how can you do that? And still live with yourself, I don't know, that stuff pisses me off. But anyway, that's the story of the end of the line, the end of the line, it's a great movie to watch, I really encourage you to watch, this is a definite recommendation, it changed the way I think of fisheries, it really made me, when I looked at this, really made me look into fisheries, it made me go to look at the seafood watch app, Ocean Wise program, and really made me think about how I eat fish and seafood in the future, so it's a really good, really good movie. The next documentary, I'm trying to go by year produced, so I'm going to just look up the last two and see, yeah, okay, so the third documentary is Blackfish. Now Blackfish was massive, it took shark water to make it look like it did like just a small movement, like a local movement, which it wasn't obviously, it was a worldwide movement, Blackfish really tugged at the string, the heart strings of the public, probably because the public really attaches itself to whales and orcas in particular. Now you got to remember that orcas, I always find this funny, orcas are sort of an apex predator, they're probably the top predator in the world, they eat sharks for breakfast and I'm not kidding, okay, they are the top predator in the world, they fling seals around just because they want to, they are the top predator in the world, and we love them, because there's never been an attack in the wild on people from orcas, we call them killer whales but now people are calling them orcas, because they call them killer whales because they're such a good predator but people don't want to personify them that way, and I like saying orcas anyway. But this movie documented, it followed the lifespan of one male orca named Tillicum, and it really is that he was taken from his family, from his pod at a young age and put into a park in Vancouver, and then that started his captivity, his life of captivity, he eventually, there was a death at Vancouver, and they blamed him for it, or he was involved in it, apparently he dragged down one of the trainers, and then they sent him off to SeaWorld, where he's been at SeaWorld in San Diego and he's been the star of their shows for a while, but there's been a huge problem, because he was involved in a lot of instances with trainers, and it got to the point, and I believe it was like 2011, and I'm going to say, where he was responsible for killing Don Brancho, who was a trainer, his head trainer, who worked with him daily, and he killed her, and then that kind of started a conspiracy or a cover-up at SeaWorld, and the whole movie talks about how, talks to trainers, talks to scientists, and really shows how orcas do not belong in captivity for many, many reasons, and it really compares the life of them in captivity to the wild, how they're supposed to live. I mean, even if you just think about it, you're looking at a massive animal that weighs in the tons, and you take them from the Pacific Ocean, and put them into a small, for him, a small size pool. You isolate him at night, and when he's not performing because the females, because normally what happens in the wild is the males stay on the outside of the pod, the females stay on the inside, so there's a lot of space between them because they're in the Pacific Ocean, but when they're in a pool and you put them together, they fight, and there was a lot of markings on telecom from the females who were around, who kept basically raking them with their teeth, and even have scratches and cuts and things like that, so they had to isolate them. So now you have a highly social animal that's massive, that's in a very small tank, and is lonely as hell, and he just swims in a circle all night, all night. You can't tell me that's not going to affect anything. They're known to be sensitive animals emotionally, they're known to have emotions, they're known to recognize themselves, they know what they're doing, and they go crazy, and the movie talks about him having psychotic breaks, where he actually, there's one really, really gut wrenching video of him taking a trainer, this is in a pool inside, taking a trainer and kept sinking them with his teeth, like he'd hold them in his mouth and sink them from his leg, and then he would bring them back up, and then he would go down again for a minute or two and bring them back up, and if it wasn't for the trainer of being completely calm and being able to hold his breath for that long, he would have been dead, and he almost was. He only got away, till he come let him go, and he swam away, but till he come trying to get back at him, and the guy you see him, he had to go to the hospital, he could barely breathe, he was having trouble breathing, it's just, blackfish really showed how orcas do not belong in captivity, and how SeaWorld was covering up a lot of these facts, in fact they were covering up the fact to the trainers that there were ever incidences, because the trainers said that they didn't know about other incidences, until dawn the trainer died, you know, and you talk a lot about these trainers, these trainers don't have a marine education, a marine biology background, a lot of them admitted that they didn't know how orcas survived in the wild, and these are the people educating other people, like the public, these are the people who educate them, and they don't have the education themselves, they don't know anything about orcas, other than what they know in captivity, and they can swim really well, they may love the animal, I'm not denying that, but they don't know a thing about them, right, so that kind of got me when I watched the movie, I was like you guys should have known better, you should have done your due diligence, now SeaWorld covered up a lot of things, they didn't show some of the incidences, they didn't have it on their occupational health safety, all this, and they got reprimanded for it from the board, to the point now, like blackfish blew up so big, so big, celebrities just like shark water, celebrities came out, politicians came out, organizations came out that have been fighting SeaWorld for ages, since they started captivity, came out and you just, it just blew up in SeaWorld's face, and SeaWorld kept fighting it, and fighting it, they would do personal attacks on the sciences who came out saying yes, all blackfish is right, first they started attacking blackfish saying no it's not right, the science isn't right, and this and that, there was comparisons of when they were supposed, how long they were supposed to live, and they said, you know, SeaWorld was saying they're actually living longer and captivity than they do in the wild, which was false on all sorts of things, it was going back and forth, it got really nasty for a lot of scientists out there who got attacked by this big corporation, but you know what happened, the power of social media, the power of technology, the power of the passion of the people who continued to work for these organizations and say no, blackfish is right, this is wrong, what we're doing, we've got to release these orcas, or we've got to stop making them do shows and all this, and stop breeding them in this, it blew up in SeaWorld's face, this year they lost so much money that they finally stopped their breeding program, they got mandated to stop their breeding program, and now they're stopping their shows as well in 2017, they're not really, they're saying they're not releasing the animals, but they're also not doing anything with them, so this movie really stops SeaWorld, really stops SeaWorld, you will never see a new captive orca again at SeaWorld, that is massive, the people took down a major corporation, that doesn't happen a lot, it doesn't happen a lot, and I'm sure a lot of corporations now are shaking in their boots who have been doing some bad things, because although it took a long time, you know, blackfish really was that catalyst to help people get over it, and that was amazing, and I loved it, it's quite, if you haven't seen the movie, it can be quite dramatic at times in terms of what you see, you're going to be like awish, struck in, there were a couple of times, like especially that one, we're telling almost taking that guy to the bottom, you know, you're watching a man slowly die by this orca, now I must say that there's never been an attack from an orca on a human in the wild, in fact there have been plenty of videos where orcas are kind of playing around with dogs, orcas are bow riding, just like dolphins do, there's a lot of good things that you see in the wild, and you haven't seen a documented attack on humans, so that tells you something, right, anyway that's blackfish, again trailer will be on the website, speakupforblue.com/session142, the last one in this one is sort of, this one was the most impactful for me as someone who has met this person before, I'm talking about the movie Mission Blue, and it's really a documentary on the life of oceanographer and environmentalist Sylvia, Dr. Sylvia Earl, this woman I've met, she's probably five two, but the passion and energy of this woman make it feel like she's seven two, this woman is unbelievable, if I had, as a marine biologist, marine ecologist, marine conservationist, this woman is like a mentor to me, she is, I don't know her personally, I've met her a couple of times, but I look up to her, I definitely look up to her, because she is relentless in terms of bringing science to the forefront, bringing exploration to the forefront, to the mainstream media, traveling the world, sometimes even on her own dime to, you know, to talk to people and make them aware of what's going on, talk about protection of the ocean, talk about her hope spots, all this stuff, now this is what I knew better before the movie, this movie documents her entire life growing up as a marine biologist, becoming a marine biologist, an oceanographer, an environmentalist, a national geographic explorer in residence, and it's unreal, especially, I mean, she's now in her set late 70s, and so at that time, as she was growing up, it's not as if women in the workplace were around as much, you know, like women in the workplace was sort of, was getting kind of new, and there was a lot of harassment, there was a lot of discrimination based on sex, women weren't taken as seriously, there are more sex objects, I mean, you still have people coming out now, older scientists coming out now saying women should not be in the lab because they're just a distraction, you still see that sexism, but it was more open, it was a lot to be more open back then, and she broke down all the barriers as she's growing up, this woman was just unbelievable, as a father who has two young children, I tell them about Sylvia Earl all the time, just because she's done so much and she's stayed so strong throughout the entire process, and this movie talks about how, you know, growing up in New Jersey and then moving down to Florida, how she was always in the water, she learned a scuba dive, when scuba diving first came around and invented, she was always in the water exploring different places, she became a scientist, an oceanographer studying plankton, then she started to see, as she started to get older, she started to see the changes in the environment that were happening quickly in Florida and the Gulf of Mexico is where most of her research was done, she started to really see that, and that's what this movie is, it's her journey through life, as she came, became to be the director of Noah, she was the director of Noah, a woman in the 70s director of Noah, that bottles my mind because that was not normal, not only did she get to that position, she could have settled in and just been like this is the status quo, we're going to do this, but when she would go to meetings with like the tuna fishery industry, and she saw how degradated this fishery was becoming, and she said this is what we have to do to bring it back, fishery, the fishing lobby said no way, and she's like fine, she stepped down as a Noah director because they told her to be quiet in those meetings, or maybe she shouldn't even go to those meetings, she was the director, she had a right to go to those meetings, she had a duty to go to those meetings, and then they told her not to go to the meetings, but she did anyway, she said screw you, I'm doing it, not in those those kind of words because she's much better than that, then what she did, she said well if you're going to tell me to be quiet, I can't stay on this job, she resigned, resigned from one of the top positions in the Noah, it's the top position, you can't get any better in your career, she resigned based on principle, because she couldn't voice her opinion, she couldn't do what she thought was right, what she needed to do for the ocean, so she resigned, and then became an environmentalist, unbelievable, there are not many people who would have the courage to do that, she's not doing it, she got paid well, it's her career, everybody respected her in her career, and then she could stay there for her rest of her career until she retired, she decided not to, I'm going to resign based on principle, and I'm going to speak up for the ocean, and she was one of the people after I met her, the idea of speak up for blue came to be, and now she's going around the world, and a lot of times the money's not necessarily there, she's supported by national geographic, which is great, and she gets a lot of funding elsewhere, but it's not always there, and she's traveled on her own dime to some places, because she's so passionate about this, not only that she's known for her deep sea diving in terms of ROVs and manned or woman vehicles, and she, I think she's the, she's the only person to go down in a specific vehicle to like 1,000 feet or 2,000 feet manned, she was the first person to do that, first woman to that first person to do that, she was part owner and a company who created these these devices, these, these machinery, these robots back in the 60s and 70s, you know, she's, she is amazing, she's the real deal, and she's still at it, in her late 70s, still at it, doing what she's doing, and making changes, and talking to people, and educating people, and we should all look up to her, whether, you know, especially being a biologist, but even more so being a woman biologist, because they talk about a personal life in her, in her, in the movie, and they talk about, she was married a couple of times, and you know, they, I don't know exactly what happened with her, their relationships, and I don't want to go too much into it, but she was married a couple of times, and a lot of the times she left the person, because they weren't ready for her to be out, like she is doing, traveling a lot, and that kind of thing, she sacrificed her personal, her personal life for her career, which is an amazing thing to do, I mean, men do, men are known to do it all the time, and it's like, you know, people don't think of anything of it, when a woman does it, they think even more so, because, oh, well, she should be bearing children, she should be doing this, she should be doing that, she did that, and she had a great career, she still has a great career, I love this woman, I've only met her once or twice, but I love this woman, and she's just amazing, she should be somebody that we all look up to, and Mission Blue really documents her journey on trying to educate people and making sure that they are actually going to, that we're actually going to do something, the next generation is going to be educated enough, and had the, have the urgency to do something of what we left them, and I think that's just amazing, so, those are my top four movies, or top four marine conservation documentaries, that I think have made the biggest impact now, Mission Blue, I believe has made a big impact with a lot of people, especially in the science world, who have watched Sylvia, who have met her, they are her hero, they are our hero, and it's just amazing, it's on Netflix, I think it was released just on Netflix, and it's something that you should watch, there's no doubt about it, this is, out of all four, this is something that you should watch, because it's probably the underdog of all those movies, but one of the best movies, because it shows not just a particular, you know, species, or not just a particular habitat, it talks about the entire ocean, the entire world, and how that's changed, and how we need to do something about it, and I think it encapsulates, it encapsulates the passion that we all have, and she really just takes that to the next level, so those are my top four movies, what do you think, let me know, all the trailers are going to be on speakupforblue.com/session142, on our show notes, you can watch them, most of these episodes are on Netflix, I don't think Blackfish is on Netflix, this, by the way, this movie was released in 2014, Mission Blue, Blackfish was 2013, end of the line was 2009, and Sharkwater was 2006, and then released on DVD in 2008, but all these movies are great to watch, and I know end of the line, and Mission Blue are on Netflix, Sharkwater, you can watch on YouTube, it's now on YouTube, and it's for free, and Blackwater, I'm not sure, other movies I didn't really go into were The Cove, that made a big, a big splash, I just didn't have time to go through it all the time, these were just the ones that I think have really made the biggest impact, so anyway, what do you think, let me know in the comments on the show notes, speakupforblue.com/session142, I want to hear what your favorite Marine documentary is, it doesn't have to be necessarily conservation focused, it could be like a BBC, it could be Planet Earth, it could be a National Geographic, it could be even Shark Week, or any of those, let me know what your favorite episode, or your favorite documentary is movie-wise, I'd really like to know, I'd really like to know what that is, I think it would be kind of a fun conversation starter, so anyway, you've been listening to Speakup for Blue podcast, I really appreciate your listening, I am your host Andrew Lewin, happy Wednesday, when this releases for these a little bit late, sorry about that, and happy conservation, see you later. 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