Blue Collar White Coat: Meet the People Behind Ocean Science
Release Date: 08/14/2026
Can Bacteria Actually Eat Plastic?
How To Protect The Ocean
Bacteria that eat plastic sounds like the fix everyone's been waiting for, and Andrew gets sent videos about it constantly. So on this solo episode, following Monday's interview with Dr. Anja Brandon of Ocean Conservancy, he goes looking for the real state of the science. The short version: it's promising, it's roughly a decade of real research deep, and it is nowhere close to running at the scale the ocean plastic crisis actually needs. The bacterium that started this whole field, Ideonella sakaiensis, was discovered breaking down PET plastic in Japan in 2016. A 2025 breakthrough from NREL,...
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The 90 Percent Fix Hiding in Your Laundry Room
How To Protect The Ocean
Every time you run a load of laundry, your washing machine sheds plastic. Not metaphorically: synthetic clothing made from polyester, nylon, and rayon releases microfibers with every wash, and depending on the study, a single load can shed anywhere from a few hundred thousand to millions of them. Most of us have never thought about it, because unlike a plastic bag on the beach, you can't see it happening. In this episode, Andrew talks with Dr. Anja Brandon, Director of Plastics Policy at Ocean Conservancy, about the plastic pollution problem hiding in plain sight behind the more familiar...
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A New PBS Documentary Wants You to Care About Coral. Meet the Man Behind It.
How To Protect The Ocean
A new documentary called Descent – Into the Blue starts airing on public television stations nationwide on September 1, 2026. It's narrated by Peter Coyote, directed by Rory Fielding, and one of its central voices is Mike Goldberg, co-founder of the Florida Keys coral restoration nonprofit I.CARE and owner of Key Dives in Islamorada. Andrew sits down with Mike for the full, unedited version of the conversation this week's four solo episodes have been building toward: 30-plus years running a dive shop, more than 10,000 dives, and a front-row seat to watching the reefs he built his life around...
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Show Me the Receipts: Why I.CARE Monitors Every Coral It Plants
How To Protect The Ocean
Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they've planted, often around 20 to 30 percent, and report that sample as if it represents everything in the water. I.CARE checks on all of it. Every single coral outplant gets monitored at one week, one month, 90 days, then one, two, and three years, with no substitute and nothing left unaccounted for. That rule was built in by co-founders Mike Goldberg and Dr. Kylie Smith before I.CARE ever planted its first coral, and Mike frames it as a matter of fiduciary duty, the same obligation he'd expect from anyone handling someone else's...
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The Nursery Hack That Pays for Itself
How To Protect The Ocean
Coral nurseries need constant maintenance, and that maintenance is expensive and relentless. When Andrew talked to Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, his answer wasn't to hire more staff. It was to let paying customers do it for the fun of it. Mike owns a dive shop in the Florida Keys, so the paying customers are scuba divers, and over the years he's built a funding model so small that nobody has ever really complained about it. None of that makes sense until you understand what coral actually is. It's an animal, not a plant or a rock: what looks like one coral "head" is really a colony of...
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He Almost Quit the Dive Business. Then a Coral Reef PhD Student Walked In.
How To Protect The Ocean
Mike Goldberg had over 10,000 dives and decades running a dive shop in the Florida Keys, enough time to have seen the reefs at their pristine best. Then came a coral bleaching event in 2008, and a few years later, Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease, a still-unexplained outbreak that's killed coral tissue outright across more than 20 of Florida's roughly 45 stony coral species since 2014. At one point his wife told him directly: the reef isn't what it used to be, and it's not getting better. Get out of the business before there's nothing left to sell. He didn't know what to do about it. Then,...
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84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded
How To Protect The Ocean
This year, most of the coral on the planet went through heat stress severe enough to bleach it. That's not a rounding error: 84 percent of the world's reef area, across the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, and NOAA had to add three brand-new alert levels to its Coral Reef Watch scale because the existing one had no category for what was happening. In this episode, Andrew breaks down exactly where global coral reefs stand right now: how the fourth global mass bleaching event on record got declared, why NOAA waited until 2026 to confirm it had actually ended, and why every global bleaching...
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Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made
How To Protect The Ocean
Holly Koehler has spent almost thirty years in rooms most people never think about: windowless UN offices in New York, the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world," where countries hash out how the ocean actually gets managed. She's the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, chairing international fisheries negotiations. In this episode, she walks Andrew through how a grad-school...
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Inside the System That Makes a Seafood Label Trustworthy
How To Protect The Ocean
Between a fishing vessel out on the water and a can of tuna in your grocery cart, there is a complex, little-understood system working to verify whether you should trust what is on the label. In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean Podcast, host Andrew Lewin breaks down how that system actually works, and why the blue check mark on your seafood means something real. Andrew starts with the RFMO, a regional fisheries management organization: a treaty-based body where countries with a stake in a fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it is managed. He walks through where...
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The Ship Has Reached the Shore: The High Seas Treaty Explained
How To Protect The Ocean
There's a video online of a room full of exhausted diplomats breaking into applause after nearly 20 years of work. One woman brings down the gavel and says, "the ship has reached the shore." That moment, in March 2023, closed out a negotiation that had already failed once in public. It became binding international law this year, and the fight over what it actually protects is happening right now. In this episode, Andrew traces the full history of the High Seas Treaty, formally the BBNJ Agreement (Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction): from the idea first raised at a UN Oceans working...
info_outlineScience communication has a blind spot: it keeps putting the same faces in front of the microphone. In this episode, Andrew talks with Amy Weldon, host and executive producer of the podcast Blue Collar White Coat, about why she built an entire show around the people science coverage usually skips. Amy spent 15 years in science communications, starting at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, and now uses that background to track down the electricians, dive supervisors, ship repair technicians, and life-support operators who keep ocean and space research running.
The conversation covers why Amy chose podcasting over blogging or short-form video to reach people who aren't already interested in science, what changed between her first and second season of guest outreach, and how she gets nervous first-time interviewees comfortable enough to open up. Andrew and Amy also compare notes on the mechanics of podcasting itself: editing habits, the reality of "pod fade," and what Joe Rogan's career actually teaches other podcasters (hint: it's not SEO). They close with a preview of Amy's stacked second season lineup and a shared preview of November's International Marine Conservation Congress in Edinburgh.
If you've ever wondered who actually keeps a NASA clean room running, or why the person who cleans your aquarium's fish tanks might have a better story than the PhD next to them, this episode is for you.
Check out the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@BlueCollarWhiteCoat
Takeaways:
- Amy Weldon built Blue Collar White Coat to interview the people who make science and conservation possible without holding a PhD themselves — electricians, dive supervisors, ship repair techs, aquarium life-support staff.
- Podcasting appealed to Amy because it reaches audiences who aren't already interested in science, the way radio once did across demographics.
- The hardest part of running an interview podcast is logistics and scheduling, not content; the easiest part is that people are eager to talk once you make it easy for them.
- Pre-interview calls and sending questions in advance dramatically lowers guest anxiety, especially for first-time interviewees unused to a microphone.
- Season two of Blue Collar White Coat leans further into skilled trades, featuring NASA facilities staff, three different aquariums, and a Norfolk, Virginia naval ship repair yard.
- Andrew and Amy will both present at the International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC8) in Edinburgh, Scotland this November.
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