How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 080: Top 5 Most Downloaded SUFB Episodes
Since there are only 3 more days left in 2015, I thought I would dedicate this episode to list the episodes you liked most in 2015. I list the top 5 episodes and I hope there are more in 2016. What was your favourite SUFB episode in 2015?
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10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session80
Welcome to the Speak Up For Blue Podcast session 80. I can't believe we've done 80 episodes so far. We are two days away from New Year's Eve, so we're going to go through some countdowns. That's just going to be on today. Today we're going to go through the top five most downloaded Speak Up For Blue podcast episodes this year. This is in the last six months, so I'm looking forward to getting through these. Stay tuned for 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 am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder of Speak Up For Blue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed oceanpreneur. And I'm very excited because we have a new year coming up. We're coming to the end of 2015 and coming to a new year of 2016, which I'm hoping is going to be a big year for oceans and a big year for Speak Up For Blue.com and building its community. If you count today, we are three days from New Year's Eve, including the 31st, so it's the 29th today. Happy Tuesday, and I hope you're enjoying your holidays. If you're on holidays, if not, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season. This is always a fun thing to do because I always find Christmas time for me anyway, for my family. It's always about family and whatnot. And then the next, the second week we usually have off, which I don't have off. But when I was a kid, it was always about friends and getting together and celebrating the New Year and trying to come up with new things and remembering the past year. And then on the 31st, it's more of let's look at the New Year and see what's happening. So I have two episodes left to the New Year. I'm going to take Thursday and Friday off just to spend time with my friends and my two girls and my wife, and we're just going to have a good time just celebrating that. So I decided that the last two episodes of 2015 are going to be some countdown episodes, some episodes that we've, you know, this episode is really going to look at the five most downloaded episodes that we've had this year since the launch in June 22nd. And it's kind of cool. They're actually a variety of episodes in terms of the structure and stuff like that. So that's kind of cool to see. I'm going to tell you the first, the number one episode, I'm going to count down from five till one, the number one episode blew out all the other episodes. And I'm going to think I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you why I think that happened. But it's, it's, it's quite awesome. And I don't normally share the stats for the episodes. But as I'm looking at it now and then on the when I'm recording this, I have 14,000 downloads, which is awesome because for a podcast, I'm not sure if you know much about the way the analytics for podcast goes, this is off, you know, a lot of different, different streaming sites. But, you know, iTunes doesn't really release a lot of information for podcasts. Usually we, we don't know how many people subscribe. We know the, the, the hosts and the podcast producers usually know how many downloads you have. And so I have four at the time of recording up 14,205 downloads in six months. That is awesome for me. I'm very excited and it just keeps growing and growing and growing every week and every month, which that's awesome. I really enjoy that. I'm, I'm nearing almost a hundred downloads a day. And it's not just the episode that's released that day. It's episodes that go far, far back as, as in June. So that's awesome. So I'm really excited to see that happening. I'm glad you guys are downloading the shows and sharing it with your friends. There's a lot of people that I've talked to who are scientists who've said, Hey, we've been looking for podcasting for a while like this, an episode like this where you, where people cover the science and they cover the projects and it's all, you know, conservation and science oriented. And they actually said they abandoned podcasts before previously when podcasts first started coming up because they didn't have enough marine science. So I'm glad I can provide that for them. That's really kind of a cool thing to hear from me because that's my goal is to provide science in a very easy to understand way. I'm not going into all the math and all the statistics. I'm just really telling you what the science says and also what conservation projects are going on and what we need to do, you know, as conservationists or as citizens of the ocean really to get our pollution, our wasteful living under control. So that's my goal. And I hope that I can provide that to you in the new year. But first, let's go, actually before we go on to that speaking of the new year, my goal is to do this full time. I want to build not just this podcast, but I want to build an ocean science and conservation media entertainment company. Essentially I want to bring this stuff on a variety of different mediums, not just through podcasting, but maybe through video podcasting, maybe show some actual episodes where I go out on site and we document what people are doing, talk to some scientists, answer them. Really simple question that people have had and just the information hasn't gotten out in a very unbiased way. So that's my goal in the future and I hope to do that. And to help with that, you can support my goal in doing this and building this company with other scientists and other science communicators by going to our crowdfunding campaign at SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon. Patreon is this crowdfunding source platform I guess, a crowdfunding platform where people who enjoy creators such as YouTubers and podcasters like myself can go and support the people they love to hear and they love the information that they're providing on a monthly basis. And that's what I've set up and I've set up a different levels of donate of support. So you can support with $1, $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $500 a month depending on what your comfort of support. But to be honest, any kind of support would be great and what we do is we can provide information privately to our supporters and our SpeakUpForBlue community. And essentially, this is just a call because I want to create this company because I've seen a lot of the big companies out there now who have just blown information out of the water in terms of they start coming up with mockumentaries and mockumentaries about mermaids thinking and making people believe that these are true and just getting away from the real issues of what's happening in the ocean and how we can really provide a good support system for the ocean from a human perspective. And also, document some of the real good projects that are going on, really interesting projects that are going on, people working their butts off, not making a lot of money by doing this, but looking at better and live for a better ocean and that's essentially what we want to do. So you can do that by going to SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon and support this podcast and hopefully support this larger company as we get bigger. So you can do that again at SpeakUpForBlue.com/patreon. So right now let's get into the episode of the five top downloaded episodes, download SpeakUp for Blue episodes of 2015. Now remember, we started this January or June 22nd, so it's really only been about six months as we've started. We've had 14,205 downloads as of recording this podcast and this is growing and growing, which I love to see. So let's go to the fifth one, the fifth most downloaded SpeakUp for Blue episode was actually episode number one. It was an interview episode, my first one with Judith Weiss, who was on the program to talk about marine pollution. Now Judith Weiss is a retired professor at Rutgers, who was at Rutgers University. She's still very active in marine conservation, marine science in general. She's actually the first supporter of my Patreon campaign, which thank you very much, Judith. And to be on her book about marine pollution was the reason why I wanted to have her on the podcast. And it's just fantastic. You know, sometimes when professors write books, I always worry because it seems like it's going to be a textbook and it seems like there's going to be a lot of jargon about marine pollution that maybe the regular public may not want to listen to. And when I picked this book up, I was actually, her publisher sent it to me, which was very nice of her. I've never had that done to me before, for me before, but I started picking up the book. I started reading and I was like, wow, this is targeted towards the public and it's fantastic. It breaks down every source of marine pollution imaginable and breaks it down on the history, what's causing it, the source of where it's coming from and how we can decrease it and how we can reduce it to the point of where we can eliminate it. And it's just, it's just easy to read. It's fun. You can pick it up anytime you want. It is available on Amazon as well, we'll put that Amazon link on the blog post, but, and we're going to put the link to each of these podcast episodes on the show notes, which will be speakerforblue.com/session80, but it's just a really fun book to read because it really makes you say, oh, okay, so this is what I need to do to reduce this pollution. This is where it comes from. And it's really interesting. It has a bunch of sections on oil and oil spills and what's the cause of it and the damage that it causes. It's just interesting to read and really get a good perspective of it. So, Judith did a fantastic job in writing this book and I had her on the program to talk about different types of marine pollution, which, to be honest, is one of the most searchable highest searches and when you look at marine science and conservation, marine pollution is one of the highest searched terms on the internet, according to Google SEO. So, it's something that was glad to, somebody that was glad to have on and a topic that was very important that we need to address in the future. So, that was a great episode. It was the first and that's why I made it the first because Judith is awesome. And I remember we had a little bit of technical difficulty getting on Skype and whatnot, but she was a trooper and she really came through. So, I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Judith, for that episode and we'll have her back on talking about a lot of different things. She's a salt marsh specialist and I want to have her on because I think I'm really intrigued by salt marshes and coastal ecology. Anyway, that's, that's, so that was the fifth most downloaded episode. Number four was actually a more recent episode and it was episode 65. It was, it came out number four. So, I'll tell you to download what each episode down, episode one with Judith was 117 downloads. To this date. And episode 65 had 128 downloads. And episode 65 was actually an Ocean Talk Friday. Normally, if you're not familiar with this podcast, this is your first time listening to it. Episode 65, or Ocean Talk Friday is every Friday I have a guest on. Usually, it's Nathan Johnson, who's also a writer on SpeakUpForBlue.com, who does a very good, a very good job at summarizing each podcast and he's going to be writing some more of his original articles on SpeakUpForBlue.com and in the, in the new year. And we discuss, usually what happens, we take a bunch of topics and usually about four and we just talk about them. We describe them and then we give our opinions on each one. And I thought it's a, I thought Ocean Talk Friday is a great way to get somebody else's perspective out of their mind. And I think it's, it's very interesting because it makes me think in different ways and in different perspectives, especially when you have somebody else on. So Nathan Johnson came on this episode, episode 65 and we actually didn't talk about four, four different articles that week. We actually talked about one big event that was happening and that was the COP21, the climate change talks in Paris. They were just kicking off that week, earlier that week and we wanted to kind of give like a breakdown of what the implications are of this, of this, of the climate change talks, what we're hoping to get out of it. What we expect to get at, what we expected to get out of it. And I don't know if we actually expected to get what actually happened where I described that later on in episode 71. And I gave a full breakdown of the agreement, the major points of the agreement. But I think it was, it was just a fun episode to talk about because we, we wanted to, we got a lot into the politics of things because it was huge news all around the world. Not only was it huge news just because of the climate change talks, but a few weeks before at a very tragic event, you know, where you had mass suicide bombers and mass killings of a lot of people living in, in downtown Paris, occurred, it was a terrorist attack and it was just very tragic. And then with this happening, when you have 195 leaders from countries all over the world coming in to talk about climate change in one area that just had a terrorist attack, a lot of press happened there. And, and luckily everything went off, went off without a hitch. But, you know, something always to remember with those terrorist attacks during that time and security was very, very tight, I'm assuming. And, but we got some very good agreements out of it, a very good agreement with a bit of holes, but overall was a great start now. The real thing is looking at action and will the countries that agreed to reducing emission levels back to, you know, a 1.5 degrees below pre existing pre industrialized era, will they be able to get it back down to that, that will be a very good question. And will we see some action that will be very interesting to see. But that was the second most downloaded speaker for blue episode this year. Number three was actually a special episode, and it had 168 downloads. And this was, it was interesting because I, this episode was during shark week, it was a third episode I did during shark week, so that was a third episode during that week. And if anybody's ever done a hosted a podcast or produced a podcast where you're doing interviews, it's very difficult to do three interviews that week during the week where people are watching, you know, we had these specialists on the shark specialists on who are watching the Discovery Channel's shark week and doing their own research, and we had them talk about both. And it's been very interesting episode shark week three was with David McGuire, who is the executive director of shark stewards base in San Francisco in the US. And he came on to talk about how he's, he's, he's not only a scientist, but he's a filmmaker. And he talks a lot about how on this episode, how sharks are portrayed in film, you know, jaws, obviously, and other films that where they're obviously depicted as predators and killing machines and how that transforms into their conservation, how the challenges that shark researchers and conservationists face when they see, when they have to deal with people who are not familiar with sharks only see these movies and only essentially, you know, relate to sharks as these human killing machines. So it was interesting to have them on and what more people can do to show that sharks are actually quite gentle and David's definitely started talking about how, you know, the plight of sharks, the obviously finning of sharks, sharks who are caught in bycatch because of overfishing. And it's just in the mismanagement of sharks around the world, not just in the US or Canada, but around the world and how we need to really kind of step up as people of the ocean and say, hey, let's make sure that sharks are protected because they are a very important apex predator. And one of the ways to do that is through documentaries. And he's been involved in a couple and he was actually the day that I interviewed him. He was flying out to another place, I forget where it was in the Indo-Pacific, where he was about to shoot a documentary on sharks and the value of sharks there as live animals and not as food on your plate or in your soup bowl. So it was very interesting to see, to hear his perspective on how sharks should be portrayed in the film industry or in documentaries and how it will be in the future. I think we're seeing a big shift in that sort of thought paradigm of sharks and as predators more as very important predators in ocean and less as human killing machines. So that was very interesting. So that 168 downloads, very proud of that. And of course, each of these episodes, they don't seem like a lot, but when you start to see these downloads happen, you actually get very interested in how many downloads happen and how they grow. These are growing every day, even the episode one is growing all the time. So that was kind of interesting to see. Alright, so episode two was another interview episode and it had 429 downloads. It was episode four, and it was with Alex Tilly, who is the co-executive director and co-founder of Talking Oceans, and Ness was a fun episode because I had spoken to Alex, I met him at a conference, a notion conservation communication conference where we talked about how to communicate ocean conservation online. So once he found out that I was doing this podcast, and I asked him to come on as the fourth interview, he was very delighted to do so. We did the interview while he was in Columbia, and it was just, it was very interesting. We had some technical difficulty, but he was a trooper and we kept calling back and stuff and I had to edit a couple, I don't usually edit the interviews, but I had to edit a couple spots just so it made it easier to listen to because there's a lot of dead space or a lot of he got hung, he got cut off or I got cut off and whatnot, but he, his Talking Oceans organization is very interesting, he focuses on the Caribbean, and he works with a lot of small communities in the Caribbean, in Columbia and everywhere else, and they do two things. They do a lot of science work with these communities, local communities, local communities, contact them, they say, hey, we're having a problem, say with fisheries or say with pollution, and they go in and Alex and his wife, Julianna, go in and they start talking to them and finding out what's happening and they try and help solve the, they try and help solve the problems with the community, not just a scientist coming in and saying, this is your problem, this is what we're going to research, we're going to research it, go back, get a paper out of it and not share our research, but they share the research, they work with them to find solutions to the problem, and then they work with them to actually implement those solutions. On the other hand, they also do a lot of communication work, science communication online, plus they put on some movie festivals, they did one in December of last year of, of 2014, and it was a great, it was a great success, it was a movie festival for very different documentaries on fisheries and marine related conservation projects, so it was kind of a cool thing that they do. So they do both and actually we were talking to him during this episode and he says he's taking his work and he's going to Myanmar, which has never really been the sky, never really been explored, so he's hoping to see a lot of different things, he had no idea what to expect and we're probably going to have him on in 2016 to find out what his first trips were like and what he saw and the quality of reefs in Myanmar and what they're like. So I think that would be an interesting episode, so we're going to try and get him back on in 2016. So that was number two, the top most, the second most downloaded episode of the Speaker for Blue podcast, number one blew all the other episodes out of the water and this was a huge surprise for me. So this actually is not only is it the highest download site, but it actually accounts for half of all of the Speaker for Blue downloads, believe it or not. It actually has 7,251 downloads, which I was very surprised when I first released it within the first week, it had 5,000 downloads. It was episode 17, it was an episode I did talking about how celebrities influence coastal conservation and it was interesting because the way I came up with the idea to do this as a podcast is that on my Speak Up for Blue Facebook page, we share videos and stories all the time and there was a video that came out that, and actually it was a picture, sorry, it was a bunch of pictures that came out that Carl Safina posted on his page. Now if you don't know who Dr. Carl Safina is, he is a, I would say a celebrity in the ocean conservation field, very good researcher, he's executive director of the Carl Safina center. You do a lot of stuff on fisheries and communication and working with local groups to better conservation, very big advocate of marine conservation, but also he's realistic in conservation and knows that it helps to work with different stakeholders. Fishermen, he's actually an avid fisherman, but also other groups, but to make sure that they're still doing things for the ocean and make sure that the ocean is protected. Anyway, he was doing, I guess like a press, a PR thing, a press release thing for the great barrier, a great bear forest in BC. That's British Columbia, Canada, one of the provinces in Canada where I live on the west coast and he was, he was with a bunch of people doing a documentary and also in attendance was a celebrity. This celebrity happened to be Miley Cyrus. Now, we all know Miley Cyrus, most of us know Miley Cyrus from her times at Disney and she's always in the news, lately not necessarily in a good way, but because of her, the way she carries herself, the way she does her projects, very, very sexual, very prolific in what she does. Some people have called her Raunchy and whatnot, but I think she's a great singer. Anyway, that's my opinion, but whatever. When I posted it on, though I posted the album on speaker for Blue Facebook page, I get a lot of engagement and I get a lot of people commenting and that one especially commented because I said, isn't it great that you see celebrities like Miley Cyrus who have a very good following, they have a very big following and loyal following that they're doing something great to show off something like the great bear forest and the species that are in there and how important it is to protect this area. And the comment I got is how dare you put something up with Miley Cyrus because, and one person even said, I'm going to unlike your page because you're saying that Miley Cyrus is a good role model, which I never actually said she's a good role model. I said, it's actually cool to see celebrities take part in this type of project where they're showing their followers. And like I said, Miley Cyrus has a very loyal following that the great bear forest means a lot to herself like Miley Cyrus and it should mean a lot to other people and is probably a following base that we or fan base that conservationists don't really get to get in front of a lot of time and maybe not really have that much of an effect as much as Miley Cyrus would have an effect on her own fans. So you know, I went back and forth with this person and say, look, the idea of the post was to make it look like it was a celebrity thing. Miley Cyrus is obviously popular and very controversial, but I still stand by my statement in saying that, you know, this person, Miley Cyrus has a big loyal following and her fan base will do what she says a lot of the times. And I think it's great to see that she's doing something positive. And anyway, she didn't, the person that kept commenting didn't really believe in my views and I said, well, you can like or unlike the pages as much as you want. This is what I'm posting because I think it's important. When I posted it as an episode, I actually did it that Monday, I actually did an episode on it and it ended up just blowing up and people started listening to it and people continued to download it. And I haven't got comments on the actual website or I haven't gotten a lot of emails saying that it was a bad post. And I'm thinking it got a lot of downloads because Miley Cyrus was a key term in that in those posts. So I'm thinking it's a lot of SEO thing that just caught and it went a little bit virtual or a little bit viral, which is kind of good because it still brings a lot of people over and hopefully we got some subscribers out of it and people who listen to other episodes from it. But I still think it's a very important post because celebrities, there are a lot of celebrities out there who do some great work. You've got Adrian Grenier, who does fantastic work, who I covered in an episode this year, who does a lot of, who's doing it right now, a documentary on a specific whale, they call the documentary The Lonely Whale, I think it's Whale 51 or something like that. Where they actually go out and they're actually looking for this whale who emits frequency sounds at a very different frequency than other whales. And the idea behind it is that it's a very lonely whale because no other whale can understand it. And they're searching for this whale to find it and with the behavior and how it lives on its own compared to a social structure that whales normally find and live in. So it was, there are other people who are doing great things, other celebrities. There's another one now, it's his name, oh shoot. Oh, he was in Titanic, can't remember his name, I can't believe he's a big celebrity too. I'm going to look him up and of course my internet is anyway, there are a lot of other celebrities that are doing very well and who are doing some very popular celebrities who are doing great things for the ocean, they're using their celebrity status for the ocean. And I think it's one of those things that needs to be done, it has to be done. And it's just, I think Leonardo DiCaprio, that's where it is, I was looking up while I was saying that. Leonardo DiCaprio has a foundation just for oceans and just for species at risk. And he is donating, I think he said $4 million to oceans and actually his time to raising awareness of what's happening in the ocean. He actually went out and said, he was at all these celebrities that go that are involved in the ocean, they're involved in the environment, went to COP21, the climate change talks to try and influence people and politicians to say, let's get an agreement going. And this is what they do. So I'm happy that they're actually going out and they're doing these things. I think it's a great thing that these celebrities are doing, they have a very big following. And with that following, they do some great work and they have the potential to reach a lot of people that ocean conservationists who are not celebrities may not have the potential to reach. So I think it's fantastic that it does this and it was the most downloaded episode and I really do think it's because I mentioned Miley Cyrus and it just kind of hit. But that's just what happens on the internet, you never know and I'm hoping I got some people out of it that will subscribe and that will listen to other episodes because they're interested in this kind of stuff that are part of Miley Cyrus, this fan base. So anyway, those were the five most downloaded episodes. I hope next year more and more episodes will be included in this, whether it be last year or next year, in 2016, we're going to continue to do the five days a week podcasts. And once we get in the full flow of things, we've got Mondays are essentially going to be what was big news, Tuesdays is a species, Tuesdays, normally obviously this week is a bit of a special week, Wednesdays are going to be an interview episode, Thursday is going to be research Thursdays where I take a research paper and I talk about it, then Friday is going to be an ocean talk Friday. So we're going to segment those. So we're going to see what you guys like, let me know what type of episodes you guys like and what type of species or research you want me to cover and I will do so. So thank you very much and always keep in contact. And I'm glad you guys are downloading and keep downloading these episodes and listening to them and letting me know how you feel about them because I really do appreciate that. So that's all for the episode. That's it for this that we this Tuesdays episode and the countdown of the five most downloads, pick up for blue episodes of 2015. I really appreciate you guys listening to me. So you've been listening to speak up for blue podcast, I am your host Andrew Lewin. Happy Tuesday, happy conservation.