David is a legend in the online ocean conservation world, but that doesn’t mean he’s a legend of style. Everywhere, in every picture, he wears these:
Let’s be clear: these sunglasses, if you can even call a second pair of glasses worn over his normal glasses that, are ugly. Really ugly. Distractingly ugly. In an non-parametric, multivariate analysis of his outreach effort, David is 7% less effective* at disseminating ocean content than he should be, given his follower base and content stream. I believe that the majority of this deficit can be directly attributed to his sunglasses.
It’s time to change that.
Buy David Shiffman a less ugly pair of sunglasses.
David Shiffman has spent his life saving sharks. Isn’t it time he did so in style? I think so. And I hope you do too. Let’s buy him some sunglasses that reflect how cool his shark conservation work really is. Support our efforts to buy David less ugly sunglasses on Indiegogo.
Wait, really? Yes. I really do want to buy David Shiffman some nicer sunglasses.
That’s it? Pretty much. There’s some nice, small rewards to your right that might interest you, but nothing too fancy.
Really? Really?! You bet. Though, if by some fluke of incredible luck we go over, we do have some stretch goals in mind that would help support existing, partially-funded projects, including: covering the cost to take an underserved Title 1 school on a shark tagging field trip, lab consumables and technician time for a conservation genetics project investigating the consequences of overfishing on three shark species, and building a custom drone for marine science and conservation studies.
But really, I just want to get my colleague, co-author, and good friend some cool shades.
So, I can’t help but notice the date… Fair enough. Every April 1 we do something silly. What we don’t do are pranks. So yeah, we’re serious. We’re going to buy David some new sunglasses, and if we somehow go over, we’ll kick it back into other ocean conservation projects, but mostly, we’re going to have fun and do something weird, quirky, and whimsical as a launch pad for talking about ocean issues.
*Yes, really, kind of, pending more data and better statistics, but, like, we’re actually doing this analysis for Team Ocean.