It’s been a busy few months for The Deep-Sea Podcast. From hosting the legendary Bob Ballard in our Neurodiversity in Science episode to being listed in the best podcasts of the week in the Guardian, we’re having a great time riding this wave!
Our second deco-stop episode takes off
This March was a particularly monumental month for the podcast. Alongside our regular episode and PRESSURISED releases, we also released another episode in our Deco-Stop series: Neurodiversity in Science. These bonus episodes focus on the humans behind the science, which allows us to delve deeper into topics adjacent to deep ocean research. In our jam-packed episode, we spoke with several of our friends and colleagues about navigating their careers in science alongside being neurodivergent.
One of our guests was deep-sea royalty, Bob Ballard: a deep-sea explorer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic and hydrothermal vent ecosystems as well as developing telepresence and the submarine Alvin. He accredits many of these achievements to his ‘superpower’ of dyslexia. It was such a privilege to be able to speak with Dr. Ballard about his journey and to gain such inspiration from his outlook on being neurodivergent. If you haven’t had chance to check out our episode on neurodiversity in science you can listen here.
Oceanographer Bob Ballard. Image courtesy of the Ocean Exploration trust.
The deep-sea podcast community has begun!
Next on the list of big achievements; we started a patreon account and started to build our very own community of supporters. We have long been looking for a way to make this project sustainable, as it’s so fun to make, but it certainly takes a lot of time! We made our patreon page live, hoping that maybe they’ll be a few people who’d like to help us out, but wow, we were blown away by the number of people who wanted to support us!
In our first month alone, we have a whole community of deep-sea advocates who are keen to help us share our show. A part of becoming a patron means you get exclusive access to our deep-sea podcast community on discord, where we’ve been talking about all the latest in deep-sea news, what Dr Thom and the professor have been getting up to, and chatting directly with our listeners. We’re still so proud that this community is getting off the ground, and it certainly feels like a huge milestone to reach.
Best podcast of the week and 100k downloads
One completely unexpected achievement this month was being listed in the Guardians best podcasts of the week! We were listed in the top 5 podcasts about Planet Earth, which we’re pretty pleased about. And finally, we hit the big one… 100k downloads of The Deep-Sea Podcast! It’s been a long time in the making but it feels like such an achievement to get to this point. We’re very grateful for the recent boost in attention, and we want to thank all of you for continuing to share our little show!
Here’s to even more future successes in our journey to making the deep sea accessible for all!