Sean Toczko

Disclaimer

This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

The reader must be aware that memories of an event can vary between individuals and may evolve over time due to various factors, such as subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and personal emotions.

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Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Sean Tokzco by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 November 27, JAMSTEC Headquarters (Yokosuka, Japan). [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is November 27 of 2025. I’m Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I’m at JAMSTEC Headquarters in Yokosuka with Sean Toczko. Thank you so much. Can you please say your name, affiliation and position?

Sean Tokzco (ST): Sean Tokzco, I am working in MarE3 and JAMSTEC, and right now, my position is Deputy Group Leader of the Science Support and Operations group. Basically, what this means is, I’m now back in Chikyu operations department. With that means is, my main work is focused on Chikyu, IODP3 expeditions, and then also media and outreach related to IODP.

BMR: For how long have you been working in relation to ocean drilling?

ST: I first started working in JAMSTEC in 2007, and I was initially hired to work as an editor for the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, which had just started. Since then, I have been pretty much in a similar position, although the names of the groups that I’ve been in have changed.

BMR: Let me ask you about your background, and then I will ask you about your stepping in in JAMSTEC. So where are you from? What kind of childhood you had, what kind of things you liked to do?

ST: I’m from the US. My family moved a bit because, at the time, my father was working for, either he was in the Coast Guard or after he had gotten out of the Coast Guard, he was working as an engineer for the Department of the Navy. I was born in, Portland, Maine, which is the same place that Damian Saffer is from. And after maybe 1 or 2 years living there, we did a brief move to Virginia and then, soon after that, we all moved to Europe. So, we lived in Greece, for ten years. That is where I did really most of my growing up, preschool and elementary school. After that was done, we moved back to the US and we moved back into Virginia. I stayed there through high school, most of university…

I took a year, and came to Japan as an exchange student at Sophia University. Then, after I graduated… Well, I should back up. Before I went into university, I spent three years in the Army, so when I was in the Army, I was stationed in Fort Riley, Kansas. So, almost in the exact center of the continental US. A very remote location. After I got out, I went into university and, after I graduated from George Mason in Northern Virginia, I come back to Japan for what I thought would be maybe a year, maybe two years off, before I thought about what to do next. That was in 1997. Since then, I’ve never left.

BMR: So, almost 30 years in Japan!

ST: I did think about going back to the US for graduate school, and when I was kind of thinking about my options and how to do that, a Japanese professor that I knew here suggested, why not just try to sit to some exams to enter graduate school in Japan? And I was like, “Okay”. So, I went to a few different schools to kind of check them out, and one of the schools was the University of Tokyo. Met with some of the professors there and thought like, “Well, okay, I’ll just take the exam and just see how it goes”. I passed, and I was in. And that was kind of it.

BMR: Do you think you early background – your father being in the Coast Guard, living in Europe… kind of influenced your career path at the beginning?

ST: Well, my family has been involved in the ocean. My grandfather was in the Navy; my dad was in the Coast Guard… Growing up, we spent a lot of time at the beach, in the ocean. Especially when we were living in Greece. And I originally thought that I would like to be a marine biologist or an archeologist. I mean, living in Greece, you’re just surrounded by ruins of everything. That was kind of my first interest. And when we were living in Greece, that was kind of just after scuba diving had – not really taken off, but was becoming less of a science and more of something that was being popularized. At the same time, that was when it was being introduced into underwater archeology. One of the pioneers of under-archeology was in Greece at around the same time; my dad knew him. And that was also kind of an influence on what I was interested in. So, the sea was definitely something I’ve always been interested in but I never thought of it as a career. I mean, outside of being like a marine biologist or something like that, I didn’t think about becoming a sailor or anything like that. I think I wanted to do something with the ocean.

BMR: What kind of undergraduate degree did you undertake?

ST: In George Mason, I had a B.S. in biology. They didn’t have anything outside of environmental science as degree, so I took regular courses in biology, chemistry, organic chemistry… But, one of the things I did as kind of a student worker-slash-volunteer is, they had a long term research project looking at the fish populations in the Potomac River and Gunston Cove. I was involved in that, where I was operating boats and taking out other student volunteers to do fish surveys with [?] nets, trawls, and things like that. From that, I did a kind of a senior thesis on examining the effect of freshwater clams to see how they could filter and purify water. That was like a project that I did as my graduation, project.

BMR: Did that kind of spark your interest in continuing being a scientist, or did it have the opposite effect?

ST: I liked it. I like doing field work and collecting data. I’m not a big fan of writing things up, but that’s the important bit at the end. But it was very interesting to see and to learn about, like, how all of this got kind of put together as a whole package about being a scientist, of having a question and then, “Okay, how am I going to examine this question? What kind of tests am I going to do?”. I had to actually build something that was interesting. Yeah, it was a good springboard.

BMR: Why did you decide to come to Japan, among all the countries?

ST: It’s a good question. I was interested in Asia. When I first got out of the Army, I went into a community college. There is a Northern Virginia community college system, which is very good, but it’s a two year associate degree program. And when I went to apply to George Mason, one of the student advisors I talked to suggested, “Take a year, go to the community college, take these courses, and then come back. And then it’ll be easier to get in”. So, when I did that, one of the languages I took was Chinese. I spent a year studying Mandarin. I was actually more interested in going to China, but when I transferred to George Mason, nobody was offering a Chinese language course, but they had a Japanese one. So, I was like, “Well, I’ll take that”. That kind of started the ball rolling.

BMR: And when did you get in touch for the first time with this scientific ocean drilling world?

ST: Well, I mean, I was kind of aware of it when I was at the University of Tokyo, at the Ocean Research Institute. There was a Polish woman there by the name of Agnieszka who was the editor for Margins. I spoke with her a lot. There was another researcher by the name of Dan Kurewitz, who was also at the ORI at the same time, as a postdoc. He was kind of on the edge of it as it was being developed in Japan, especially when they were coming up with the plans of developing, launching, and operating their own drillship. When he finished his postdoc at ORI, he came over to JAMSTEC. We kept in touch because we were all living in Tokyo, so he would kind of talk about what they were doing, but I didn’t have any great like, “Wow, I want to be part of that!” mainly because my training was as a marine biologist, and I was kind of on the edge of what I was thinking about.

BMR: What was your research topic while at ORI? Maybe you’ve mentioned already.

ST: It was midwater shrimp. So, basically the geographic distribution and the feeding patterns of shrimp, and krill and miacids throughout the North Pacific and Bering Sea. I spent a lot of time in the lab, dissecting and measuring shrimp and krill and miacids to figure out what they’re trying to eat, and their vertical distribution in the water column, and things like that. That was five years of work.

[stop at 16:29-17:11]

BMR: So, as I understand, you did a PhD in science, in marine biology, with this idea of becoming a researcher. At which point you decided to move to the more administrative side of things? I understand that, when you moved to JAMSTEC, it was under a position that was not to do research.

ST: The problem with marine biology, especially for what my topic was, is that there aren’t really a lot of jobs. Now, for me, research is fine. I like doing research. I’m not a big teacher. So, for joining a university and becoming a lecturer, and dealing with all of that, was not anything that I was interested in. For me, going to a lab, working at a lab, or some sort of research institute like this would be ideal. But there’s just not a lot of slots available. And a lot of times, people during their graduate career, they study one thing and then they end up having to do something else. I had actually applied and received an NSF postgraduate fellowship to work with a group in Oregon, post-graduation. But that was going to be studying rockfish. That eventually got put on hold, and then it just went away after a while.

I think, for me, the main thing was, I like doing research but I was not interested in really joining academia.

BMR: I understand it. So, can you tell me about your first steps in JAMSTEC, in relation to scientific ocean drilling?

ST: For me, it was being offered a job. As I mentioned before, Dan Kurewitz was working here, and at the time, because it was the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, JAMSTEC had to abide by a lot of NSF reporting obligations. That meant quarterly and annual reports, and that’s something that JAMSTEC was not prepared for. And when reality hit, they realized that they needed people to help them put all of this together. Dan knew I was looking for a job, and he said, “Hey, would you like a job?” And I was like, “Sure”.

But I was originally hired as temp staff, because there wasn’t a path at that time to actually be hired by JAMSTEC. So, I spent the first year working, editing different things, and doing all of that. And at the end of it, they came to me like, “Well, would you like to be hired?” and I was like, “Well, yes, I would!”. I made the switch from being part of a temp staff situation into being an employee, and after doing that for about 1 or 2 months, [Asahiko] Taira-san came up and was like, “Hey, listen, how would you like to be an Expedition Project Manager?” And I was like, “Okay” (laughs).

BMR: Was it actually a position that was already existing, or was it a new role within JAMSTEC?

ST: At that point, they had already done the planning and were just kicking off the execution for the first Integrated series of expeditions. The first actual plan was that JR and Chikyu were going to be working together, and drilling at the same time. But what happened is, JR got hung up in drydock, and eventually we realized that the schedule was not going to work. So, Chikyu went out and did all the bits that the JR was supposed to do.

We kicked off with [Expedition] 314, and I was on board that for a while as a, again, editorial person, to kind of help with the reports and the organization of all of that. That quickly rolled into [expeditions] 315 and 316. At the end of that, they were going to start the planning for the first – well, they had already started planning and discussion of the first riser hole. And, they essentially decided on a location that would be more of a test of the riser system, which they had already done during the shakedown, but various things came together and they decided they were going to do another test. So, for that expedition, it was going to be long. They already had Dan Kurewitz who was an EPM, and then they also had Moe Kway, from at the time CDEX, who was the first EPM. Dan was the third EPM, and Masago was the second.

So, Masago was on for the first coring expedition, Moe was onboard for the first logging expedition for Chikyu, and Dan followed up with another coring expedition. And these are all very new, so people were still kind of learning like how things were going to operate, and how tricky was going to do things. So, there was a long learning process about pretty much everything, not just for operations aboard ship, but like…

[stop 24:03-24:55]

We will still learning, in JAMSTEC and CDEX, at that time – the Center for Deep Earth Exploration – really on how we were doing things. Not just from the reporting side but also from the execution side. It was a steep learning curve. I think people came in with a lot of experience and expectations of how things were done on the JR; and the Japanese way of approaching things was not what they had expected. Particularly in the sense that the JR was like a very mature kind of operation, and all of the people involved in had been doing this for decades, and were very comfortable with making decisions on the fly. Whereas, for Chikyu, this is pretty much a kind of a national pride-type situation. And in a Japanese organization, the hierarchy and the rules dictate that you just operate differently, because they have their own expectations.

But I think one of the good things about this whole process over the last 25 years has been that they’ve evolved, and have been very flexible. I think where things are now is very different from when we started. Especially in terms of, from the operations side, how they approach things in relation to working with the scientists. That has been interesting to observe, and be a part of, and to kind of help push along in my own little way. But it’s been a very interesting journey.

BMR: How was it learning this learning process for you? I’m thinking especially at the beginng of your time as EPM. Although you mentioned that before becoming an EPM, you had already been onboard as an editor.

ST: I came on board for like a 2-week period. I wasn’t on board for the whole time, because that was also kind of the thing that we were working out. At that time, TAMU was still very much in charge of all of the editorial process, and they have their own way of doing things – which, I mean, has a system that has evolved over time, and it has also matured, and is very good. But for us, we were kind of learning how they were doing it. And for me (laughs) I spent two or three weeks in College Station, with the TAMU group, to just sit with each little group and to kind of learn how they did things, and then try to figure out how we were going to implement that back in Japan. One of the differences being that they had teams of people working on the production side, and on the editorial side, and then also for the layout side, and for the graphics and photographs… These are all people who have been doing this for a long time and know what they’re doing very well. And, in Japan, it was me.

One of the first meetings that I had, when I sat down with the head editor – and that time, Angie Miller in TAMU – is that she kind of gave a brief overview of how things were done in in TAMU, and then looked at me, because that was a trip that I had taken with myself and Shinichi Kuramoto. And she finishes her presentation and kind of goes, “Well, okay. Do you have any questions?” I was like, “Well, no, that was a lot of information”. She goes, “Okay, so, what is the CDEX policy going to be?” And Shinichi just kind of turned and looked at me and said, Sean?”. And I was like, “Wait, what?” (laughs) Because I had been on the job for a month. And it was like, what? You’re asking me to make the decision right now? Okay (laughs). That was kind of an example of… not really the expectations, but like Japan being kind of a very hierarchical place but at the same time, when there was nothing to follow, like no pattern to follow, we have to make one up. And, you know, being put in a spot like that was not something I was expecting.

BMR: I have a feeling that it was something very useful to have you, at that time – I mean, during all these years, but especially at the beginning because you could play this middle-role between Japan and the US side.

ST: Yeah [audio 2 starts], I mean, I guess one of the big questions that I was asked a lot by people coming from the US, especially from the US, was, “Okay, what is JAMSTEC really thinking?” You know, the general process here is one where someone would come over, give a talk or a presentation, or have a meeting and a discussion, and then JAMSTEC would have to think about it. And in some cases, people were expecting to have an answer immediately. Sometimes, would get frustrated when they expected to have that answer ready and JAMSTEC was like, “Well, thank you. We’ll get back to you, and we’ll tell you what we’re thinking later”. Or occasionally JAMSTEC would come up and say, “This is what we’re thinking, and this is what we want to do”. And then, from the scientist side, they’d be like, “No, no, no, no, no, we don’t want any of that. That’s not what we have in mind at all. We want this thing over here”. And then, there’d be kind of surprise on both sides.

I think my position was… I don’t know, maybe… Maybe I wouldn’t say I was like a Japan whisperer for the Americans, but I would say maybe I was more an American whisperer for the Japanese. Because they would come to me and be like, “What is happening? What do they want?” I was kind of getting it from both sides.

BMR: Has there been something particularly difficult for you to adapt? I’m talking generally about these years working in Japan.

ST: Uhm…

BMR: Or on the contrary, something especially easy and smooth.

ST: I mean, I was living in Japan for almost 15 years before I came to JAMSTEC. So, at that point, any of the surprises would have worn off. I think one of the things I learned to appreciate was the level of patience that people on all sides had in negotiations. There were some occasions where one side or the other would blow up but, in general, I think people would take like unexpected news more gracefully than I think I would have in the same position.

I think, also part of it, for me, I’m not a geologist. So, a lot of the times I would have to learn what people were talking about as they were talking about it, and then have to spend my own time trying to figure out, like, “What was that? What was that all about?” (laughs) And it’s not just from the geology side, but also from the engineering side. But I think one thing that I’ve picked up from my family, especially from my dad and my grandpa, is they were all very mechanically-inclined people. So, my dad was a civil engineer. My grandfather was not an engineer, but he designed and built a lot of things, and his approach to problem-solving was something that kind of rubbed off on me, to be able to look at a situation and understand that, “Okay, this is how it might work”, and I understand the mechanics behind it without knowing all of the engineering behind it.

For the geology side, it has been just a constant school. And I think one of the best parts about this job has been dealing with some of the top people in their fields, who come on board the ship and are, not just working with me, but also working with young graduate students and sometimes undergraduate students who are still learning the details of what it is that their profession, their specialty, is going to be. And I’ve been able to just eavesdrop and absorb what I can.

BMR: I want to talk more about your position as EPM, but before that, I want to ask you what was your first exposure to the international community of IODP? Not only talking about the ship, but also on these organization meetings.

ST: So it was full on, when I changed from being editor to being a project manager. It was like a switch was flipped, and it was intense, where I was suddenly being sent to these meetings all over the world. I remember I was traveling internationally once a month, essentially. And at first it was like, “Wow, this is great! I’m going to go to these places and meet all these people”. And after the first year, I was like, “I am tired of all of this traveling and trying to keep up and remember who all these people are”. But, I think, one of the things that really helped would be, some of the people that I met at these meetings.

One person that I really appreciated and learned a lot from was Tom Jannicek. Now, Tom at that time was working at the NSF, and he was kind of the background to a lot of these meetings. He always had a constant commentary running. But he understood the program to its smallest degrees, and he advised me and coached me on a lot of things that I was like trying to catch up on, as I was presenting at these meetings. And really, really helped understand a lot of the people and the dynamics of the program, and what was happening. But also, like, as a person, was eminently approachable; had this deep sense of humor, but also common sense. But also, despite some of the commentary that would be running at the background of some of these meetings, had always a very good diplomatic point to make. And was always, in my mind, working to make sure that we were doing the best job that we could.

[stop: 8’20-9:18]

BMR: You mentioned Tom understood the program to the detail, and you learned a lot from him. How different were the Japanese and the American views on the Integrated [Ocean Drilling] Program, as you perceived it?

ST: Well, I think the main difference was that, for the Americans – and this was a phrase that I would use all the time, ‘the Americans’ – for the Americans, they wanted to have like a very clear and easily understood explanation of the budgets. Because for them, especially for the NSF, one of their main things was managing the money, and that was one of the reasons why they had these reporting requirements, was because they wanted to say, “Okay, what is exactly happening?”, and they wanted to have the statistics behind everything. This is something that CDEX and later MarE3 has been trying to implement slowly, because we would get calls every so often from MEXT: “Okay. We want the stats of this kind of information for the past year or more. And we need it next week”. And we’d have to struggle to put it all together. So, that kind of requirement was kind of alien to JAMSTEC; where for them I think a primary motivation was, “Okay, how many high-profile papers can we get published? How many milestones can we announce?”. Whereas for the American side, it was like, “Alright, we need to have a running detail of operation time, versus downtime, versus money spent, versus effort gained, and results and outcomes”. And Japan was like, “Oh, you mean, do you need that really?” (laughs). That kind of difference really stood out.

And there seemed to be… I think the main thing was, for the community, for the science community, the mindset was on the same level. But they had these interesting questions and problems, and they were struggling to figure out how to grapple with them. And that they would have similar or maybe unique ideas, but they were definitely working together. But for the operations side, and for the management side, there was a huge mismatch on expectations. And that was, I think, the main cultural obstacle that needed to be kind of bridged.

[interruption]

BMR: Before this pause, we were talking about the different views on the program held by the US-side and Japan-side. The US were used to a level of reporting and detail that was kind of new here.

ST: That’s right. So, from JAMSTEC’s management perspective, that wasn’t very important, to have like that level of reporting, and follow-up of statistics, was not something that any of the departments has done. Like, for example, they have a database of publications coming from JAMSTEC researchers. And they have databases for cruises and things like that. But the kind of detail that IODP and NSF required was very different from what they were used to.

But this could almost be for most, I guess, universities or institutions of that level and complexity of an online database is different from place to place. And I think for what IODP has developed from ODP and DSDP is really kind of a gold standard, because there’s decades of research that is all easily accessible, and searchable, and usable. And, you know, JAMSTEC just wasn’t used to that kind of thinking.

BMR: Following up on your positions at JAMSTEC, I want to talk more about your role as EPM. How did you learn to be an EPM?

ST: We had a bit of – I wouldn’t call it training, but really orientation, from Adam Klaus of TAMU, JRSO. He had a lot of experience; he was the science manager for JRSO for a long time. And he had a very well thought out and organized approach to being a, what they called, a staff scientist. But which has kind of evolved into being called an expedition project manager. So, for their needs and requirements, the person is actually a staff scientist because they also conduct research on what was done on board. They take their own samples, their own data, and they perform their own research. We’d had that option, but we’ve never really pursued it, in any real depth. And I think part of that is because we get caught up in a lot of management duties, and we don’t really have the time or really even the requirement for our job evaluations.

BMR: How was the experience like, being for the first time an EPM on Chikyu?

ST: As I said, Adam Klaus had kind of the outline of how they approach things, and what they did, and what they expected, a bit different from the role that JAMSTEC asks of its EPMs. For me, the first time on board, or even the preparation for going on board, was extremely nerve wracking. Because I had never done it before, and we were also trying to do something new, which was a long-term drilling expedition. So, we were starting to have a four-month expedition. This was for Expedition 319, where we were going to have a very large science party to come on board, and do a swap over in the middle of that, and also trying to figure out the tools we were going to be using, and all the different groups that were going to be organized to do the different onboard measurements, and things like that. And the logistical, planning, and working out details with Marine Works Japan, which supplies all the lab techs on board… That was another big change from the JR, where the scientists were used to operating all the machines by themselves. Whereas for JAMSTEC on Chikyu, we have lab techs that do most of that work, if not all of it. But also, important to do the maintenance and all of that. So, that was another change that people had to get used to, and adjusted to.

The expedition itself… I was lucky that we had a very good team of co-chiefs, and when I was on board, I was paired with Damian Shaffer and Lisa McNeill, who I had sailed with before. And they are very well-organized individuals, but they are also very easy to work with in the sense that they have a very good sense of humor. They are very kind of understanding and flexible, and are just, you know, a joy to work with. But we learned a lot of things. One of them was how things didn’t quite work the way that we thought they would, when you had different groups coming on board to do different parts of the expedition.

Being away at sea for a while, from my family, was a little rough because they weren’t used to me being away for so long. So, that was a problem that needed to get used to, because at that time, we had two small girls. So, my wife was kind of left handling all of that on her own. And that was a big problem.

BMR: How often were you going offshore?

ST: This was a month on board. I mean, for JR you’re on board for two months, and you’re completely cut off and isolated. But this was a month on board, and it was a big change. But when you’re on board, it’s kind of entering into a different world. So, you get caught up in the rhythm of the daily life there, and there’s often kind of a mismatch between what’s happening on board and what’s happening on shore. Even for the office management, they’re operating on basically a 9 to 5 format, and for us, we’re operating 24 hours; where, for the EPM, they don’t really have a shift but they’re kind of on call. So, I ended up being awake for quite a while, to try and cover a lot of different things. And then, just being on call if anything happens. You have to be available.

Probably the most challenging bit is managing the different personalities that come on board. Many of the scientists have some experience with being at sea or being in the field, but some of them it’s a new experience for them, not just for early career researchers, but sometimes for some middle or even kind of fairly senior people, who might not have been to sea like that before. So, it’s been interesting trying to manage that bit, of having a group of up to 30 scientists with all very different personalities, and different levels of maturity, on board.

BMR: And what was the part you enjoyed the most of being an EPM?

ST: Well, so… it is exciting, even though… I describe it as a job that is the same every time but different, because the basic framework is the same, but every expedition has a different target, in different ways of going about to try and accomplish that.

I like working together with the different groups, to try to make sure that everybody is playing well together, and everybody can get along together, so that we can accomplish what we’re trying to do. And it’s kind of hard sometimes because – Nobu [Eguchi] would tell me many times, you know, “Don’t forget that you’re a JAMSTEC employee”, because I would try to be in-between the JAMSTEC drilling group and the science team, and sometimes the requests that would come from both sides have to be kind of managed in a way that everybody gets satisfied. I’ve always tried not to be just ‘the company man’, but understanding that I have obligations over here, but I also have obligations over here, and that they need to be balanced. It’s not often a problem, but it sometimes gets tricky.

But, I think, getting kind of caught up in the excitement of what is being accomplished is very fun. When things are not going well, it can be a challenge to manage everybody’s expectations, and to try to make sure that the morale is maintained. Because for the researchers coming on board, those scientists have dropped their families, and their work, and their research, to come onto this ship to, yes, accomplished research, but to dedicate themselves to this one project. If things aren’t going well, they’re essentially wasting their time. So, managing that has been a challenge. But, I think of myself as an optimistic pessimist. So, knowing that things will go wrong, it’s fine. Just try to look at it from the right angle.

BMR: What kind of things did you learn as EPM that were useful for other roles you’ve had in IODP or in JAMSTEC?

ST: I think organizational – having things set up so that you can access the information that you need easily; being able to deal with people has been a big thing. Also, at the same time, trying to be someone who is accessible for everybody on board. You know, some people might like to think of a manager is, “I have to make a decision, so you have to follow me; do what I say”. That’s not really my position at all. It’s… Like I said before, it’s not just managing people, but also expectations. So, I think that has been probably the biggest thing for me to learn, and try to constantly improve… Because I’ve come a long way, but I have a long way to go (laughs).

One of the other groups that we have to mediate between is the lab techs; because the lab techs, they’re professionals, and sometimes they feel like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place because we have kind of the greater targets that we need to accomplish, but some scientists will kind of decide that, you know, “This lab tech is kind of like my personal servant now, and I want to have these things done so I can just tell them to do it, and it should happen”. And if it doesn’t happen, they’ll be put out. So, the lab techs, their considerations need to be taken into account, and we need to be able to manage them as well – although they have their own lab manager, but still, we have to kind of negotiate with these different groups on board, to make sure that we’re making the most effective use of our time.

BMR: There are some other topics I want to talk about with you. Besides managing expeditions, I also want to talk to you about communication strategy and outreach, and on your views on the program in general. So, is there something else you’d like to add about this topic of expedition management? Some particular expedition you’d like to talk about?

ST: Again, not being a geologist, I have to kind of learn on the job about what the different groups are interested in, and what’s important for them. And when I look back at the expeditions I’ve been on – I’ve been on logging expeditions, I’ve been on coring expeditions, I’ve been on expeditions that have installed what we call the LTBMS – Long Term Borehole Monitoring Systems –, and I’ve also been on some quite a few deep riser expeditions. And, when I look back at them, I feel accomplishment in: we were successful, we got that done, maybe we got things done much faster than we anticipated and we had all this extra time, so we could do a lot of extra stuff. There’s been times when that was not the case at all where, you know, pretty much anything that could go wrong did go wrong, in like new and unexpected ways.

But, for me, having been part of all those different things and enjoyed being on them, and being with the different big names, and big thinkers, I think one of the things that sticks with me most is places where… I haven’t done as good of a job as I should have of, or… I’m not sure I muffed that up really well, to kind of take that and to move it forward, and try not to repeat those same mistakes.

I think one of the hard things to keep in mind is, as I mentioned before, when you’re at sea, you’re kind of in an enclosed world and in a bit of a bubble. But for us, we often have groups and teams of scientists that are off the ship, and adequately transferring the information that we have on ship, off the ship, has sometimes been a challenge for me. Because you do get wrapped up in what is happening and then, there’s also a case where we’re trying to be open about what we’re doing, but at the same time, we have to be careful about what we talk about, because we need to make sure that we maintain kind of like the scientific integrity of the data and the samples we have within the ship, so that that team can do the work that they need to do. But we do have like an obligation to share important information with people off the ship. And it’s been sometimes a challenge.

BMR: How would you evaluate these almost twenty years of expeditions with Chikyu?

ST: I mean, in many cases I feel like I’m an impostor because I am, again, I’m not a geologist and I don’t have any formal training, and I’ve had the occasional class. In fact, I can remember the first time I encountered the term ‘subduction zone’. And this is back when I was at George Mason, and one of my best friends from high school was taking a Geology class at Northern Virginia Community College, NVCC, and he had this professor who had this very strong Spanish accent. And they kept running into this term, and nobody could understand what he was saying. And he finally asked me, “Could you just come to the class and sit in it? And when he says this term, see if you can figure out what he’s talking about, because nobody else can”. And we sat there, and he’s like up on the board, drawing a diagram, and he has the typical, “Okay, you have plate that comes here, goes down; and then you have the other plate, that’s over here and that’s overriding it. And so, you have…” and he said it in such a strange way, that it almost sounded like ‘seduction song’. And… He said it and it struck me, and I just said out loud, “Subduction zone!” (both laugh). People looked at me like, “Ooh, okay”. But I had no idea that I would eventually be deeply involved in it (laughs).

BMR: Actually, automatic transcription of Adobe Premiere transcribes it as ‘seduction zone’ (both laugh). So, besides expeditions, you’ve also been involved in communication. I guess you have been kind of observing from the outside and involved from the inside.

ST: This is, again, something that the program has kind of struggled with forever – that getting information out about what we do is a problem, because we have the community of people who are directly involved in scientific ocean drilling; we have kind of a group outside of that that are connected to those people, and they’re pretty well tied in. So, we’re very good at talking to the people that we know, but we have a big problem in trying to get out of that bubble, and into like the greater public. So, for the time when I was an editor in CDEX, that was like one of the sections that we were always dealing with, the outreach. And at that time, there was there was supposedly a unified team that was working on it, and go to meetings and conferences, and have press releases, and things like that. But, for somehow, despite the effort of all those talented people, it’s like, how do we how do we break out of this clique?

For me, I’ve kind of slowly edged into it because… From the beginning, I’ve kind of tried to think about what we could do, to broadcast Chikyu and what we do. We’ve had groups from NHK, the Japanese national broadcaster, come on board and do things; we’ve had different film crews from Europe and from Japan, from other areas, come on board and do things; we’ve had photojournalists come on… And there’s always been very hit or miss. And then, we looked at some of the recent work that JR was doing, and what they have done is they’ve always brought special, what they call ‘outreach officers’, and they put them on the ship. So, they’re on for the entire expedition. We haven’t really done that, mainly because the just the way that Chikyu operates, we just hadn’t thought about it in that way. But we’ve had people come out for shorter terms, like maybe a couple of weeks.

And then, JR started doing a series of videos through this company in the Netherlands called Science Media NL. And the guy who runs it is a guy by the name of Dan Brinkhuis, and his brother, Henk, has been intimately involved in scientific ocean drilling for a long, long time, at a very high level. And the quality of the movies that they put together, just really kind of blew away what we had seen from other groups. Some of them have been pretty well done, but the level of detail that they were able to get across, and the presentation, it just made such an impression on us that we started bringing them on more and more expeditions. Dan is the kind of person who is always like, “Okay, great, we did that. But that’s not enough. We have to do more. More has to happen. We got to do more”. So, he’s always like trying to push the boundaries of what happens in terms of getting the word out about what we do. 

What really changed it was for JTRACK (IODP Expedition 405), where we came into a situation where a lot of things were happening at once. One was that we were going back to the same area off of Tohoku, that we drilled with JFAST for the Tohoku mega earthquake, and that was kind of a milestone, that we’re going to come back after over a decade has past, and revisit the site and see what changes had been going on in the meantime. It was also going to be the very last International Ocean Discovery Program; the last avatar of the IODP. The JR had already stopped operating, so this is going to be the very, very last operation. And we talked with our other partners, USSEP, ANZIC and ECORD, and we were like, “This is a great opportunity to kind of go out with a bang”, right? Even though there’s been discussion that IODP will continue, that was still very much in development and not much have been fixed yet. So, as far as that program coming to an end, we figured we should get as many people on board as we as we can. We decided to kind of take a few tricks from the JR’s hat, but instead of having just 1 or 2 people on board for the entire expedition, we were like, listen, we’ll go to all of our partners, get a bunch of applicants from them, and hopefully we can have a good mix of different kinds of science communication or outreach viewpoints and talents, and bring them on board, and see what we get. We had a very large pool of applicants. We ended up going, I think, with ten people, and had them board at various different times, so that we had at least two on board almost every part of the operation. They produced some really amazing stuff. We discovered a lot of very talented people and very creative people. It just worked so well, that we were like, “Wow, we should do this again”.

Now, I got involved in it because even though I’m an EPM for JTRACK, I didn’t sail. So, Lena Maeda and Natsumi Okutsu were onboard EPMs. I was stand by and shore support in case [start audio 04] I needed to go out and replace them for some reason. But, since I was onshore, it was like, “Okay, you manage these people, you manage all of the outreach officers”. That was really my first time of doing something like that because, again, I’m not a media person. I like to think of myself as being kind of creative but, compared to these people, no, not at all. The thing that I enjoyed about working with all of these people was that they were not just creative, but also very sharing, and very collaborative, and they would see an opportunity and then rope in other people to kind of exploit that, and get the best coverage that they could do. And it kind of expanded beyond even their abilities by bringing in the other people that were on board the ship.

So, since that worked well, they were like, “Okay, you can keep doing that”. We’ve kind of continued it with the latest series of Chikyu expeditions. With the start of the new IODP³ program, we have two partners, ANZIC and ECORD, and from those groups, as well as Japan domestic groups, we decided to open another call for what we call, this time, “science communicators”. We’ve been successful with bringing so far six people on expedition 502E, which was looking at the sensors that were just in placed by JTRACK, just about a year ago. And then 502, which just ended this past weekend. Then we got 503 with three more science communicators on board. And, again, you can just kind of see how different people are approaching it from a different angle can create something that is unexpected and unusual. And we’re hoping that the ultimate outcome of all of this is expanded interest in Chikyu, scientific ocean drilling, IODP³, and I kind of been given this hat to wear as well going into the future. So, this is going to be a new challenge.

BMR: I want to ask about a couple of things you mentioned. The first one is the difficult question – why do you think it’s so difficult to go out of the bubble of people who already cheers scientific ocean drilling?

ST: I think, one, it’s just a natural human thing that we’re good at talking to the people that we know. I know that effort is being made to kind of expand this, but probably I think one of the main – and, again, not an expert, but it seems to me that one of the main stumbling blocks is that you really need to have a professionally funded and staffed group that is just dedicated to pushing those frontiers. We have dedicated and professional people. We don’t have the budget. Because to do a serious media campaign, as I’ve been learning working with these other professionals, is that you have to have a sustained campaign. So that campaign has to have like a good beginning, a middle, and the end is not just the end, it’s kind of a springboard into the next thing. And we’ve always kind of looked at it as a start to finish. We did this expedition. Great. Close up shop, and then we think about for the next time. And that’s kind of a challenge.

I think that the program itself has a lot of very useful things about it that don’t really get out into the greater world. And, just looking at it scientifically, the way that the entire process has been created and grown, so that you have this beginning series of workshops to figure out ideas, to then have those in a system that can then produce a proposal, and there’s another system that takes those proposals, and evaluates them critically – not just from the science, but also from the technological viewpoint and from an environmental impact position –; that again goes into a scheduling and then implementation phase, and then you have the actual execution phase, and then you have a follow up. And at the end of that, all of the data and all the samples that have come out of this are put into repositories that are open to everybody. And this is something that the scientific world has been becoming more aware of, for the last decade or so, that open science needs to be a thing. We’re not just pushing out results, but the raw data have to be available for other people to use for their own research; and that those data can’t be gatekept. They have to be available for anybody to use, especially if we look from the standpoint that we’re funded by taxpayer money, and that money goes to support everything that we do, but the results that come out of this, then, are now given back to the public. So, anybody can go in and request data or samples, pretty much.

That’s something that is different from many other research programs. And the way that it has been maintained over such a long time, that there’s been lessons learned and it has evolved to a position where that system needs to be preserved and, if possible, applied to other kinds of scientific fields. But, again, it’s a funding thing. So, if you have money, you can do anything.

BMR: Do you have any program or type of science in mind that could be a model for IODP³ in terms of communication for people outside?

ST: Everybody points at NASA, because NASA has from the beginning recognized that public relations drive policy and funding. But, I mean, they’re a unique organization because it’s this group that’s been developed to do just that. And the things that they do are highly photogenic. For us, well, we have the drillship, we have the labs… But most of what we do happens at or below the seafloor.

[interruption 8:15-9:17]

BMR: Yes, we are not too photogenic… The sub-seafloor can’t be seen as cooler as planets or stars.

ST: No. And when we do see it, it’s flat grey mud. So, it’s a thing. But the cores that we get, again, sometimes they are featureless grey mud (laughs), and it’s like, why is this different from this? Is this grayer than that is? (laughs) But, not always. One of the things I remember from JFAST is something that was encountered again during JTRACK, because we were drilling essentially in the same environment. We hit certain areas where we go through, and the cores are brining up these clay sections, these cores, that look like [?] ice cream. You have pinks, and greens, and whites, and blacks, and reds, and browns… It’s like, wow! We actually called them “ice cream cores”.

BMR: I was talking to someone recently who said that the things that what we do with ocean drilling requires explanation, for people to understand and get excited about. Whereas some deep sea creatures or outer space things don’t require explanation for someone to get excited about.

ST: Yeah. If you are looking at photos of Europa, for example, even galaxies and dust clouds in space, it’s very pretty. And because it’s a very pretty picture, you don’t need to understand it to appreciate it.

BMR: Something that has struck me since I began to kind of learn and understand how this ocean drilling works, is that that you find that there are different groups and strategies for communication. So, there’s ECORD, IODP3, JAMSTEC… and probably others, ANZIC. We were talking before about the JR having its sort of strategy. DO you have any thought of why there has not been a unified communication strategy or team?

ST: I think part of that is because each group has their own public that they’re trying to reach. So, for ECORD, they are international because they’re dealing with all the different member nations of the EU that are members of ECORD – plus Canada. They’ve got to communicate with all these different groups, so they have got a little bit more of a wider view, a wider lens for what they want to communicate.

For the US, for JRSO-TAMU, their focus is on the American community, the US. And then, for Japan, we are focused on Japan, of course, and outside, because we want to get better understanding and appreciation of what Chikyu is doing and what it can do. But, again, I think it comes back to, even though all those different groups talk to each other and try to align or collaborate on efforts, that those are kind of piecemeal efforts and not like a grand, organized effort that kind of covers everything, like an umbrella organization would. That’s an issue.

BMR: I’m thinking on an interview with someone in JAMSTEC Public Relations, Hasebe-san. He was there at the first years of Chikyu, and there were some big campaigns – Chikyu appearing on some TV drama, besides NHK coverage. I have the feeling that… Well, how expectations or attention has changed in these 20 years, and why?

ST: One of the things that JAMSTEC has tried to do with Chikyu is bring its visibility higher in public conscience. So, the movie you mentioned, a movie called Japan Sinks – which was not just Chikyu focused, but also used the Shinkai 6500 and the Shinkai 2000 submersibles. It was a horrible movie, in my opinion. Like, I’ve seen it and I just get angry watching it. It’s… I guess I would call it like the Japanese equivalent of The Core, which is an American movie that was made about similar geological disaster that needed to be fixed by going to the core.  And it was just like… And JAMSTEC has done other things like that. So, for Splatoon, we had JAMSTEC and other vessels as kind of background in some of the playing fields. I thought a much better idea would have been to make Chikyu the actual playing field, because that would have really gotten people more interested in just seeing something off in the background.

And there’s been other efforts as well. I think… I don’t really know if the visibility of Chikyu has increased over the past 20 years, in the public eye in Japan. It’s hard to tell because, right now, Chikyu is kind of based out of Shimizu, in Shizuoka Prefecture. In that area, people are very well aware of Chikyu. When we first started using that port as staging area, for the first couple of years people were just kind of unaware. But gradually, it’s become more and more visible in the public consciousness that, you know, I can go in different parts of Shizuoka Prefecture now, and I mentioned that I’m working with Chikyu and people are like, “Oh!”, they know exactly what I’m talking about. But, again, away from that, who knows?

I don’t know what the best answer is of how to do this, but I think it’s an effort that… we’re working hard at getting it. When we have open ships, we get a lot of visitors. I mean, there is a lot of interest. But then, we also have a lot of repeaters who come through, so there’s definitely like a hardcore Chikyu fan group, but we’d like to get it kind of more visible.

BMR: And a couple of more general questions about the program. How have you witnessed the evolution of the program, including the community in Japan?

ST: Well… Japan is in a bit of a crisis right now – and it’s not just Japan, it’s kind of a global thing where a lot of universities are kind of downsizing, or shutting down, or merging geology departments with other groups. We have a constant struggle to find micropaleontologists because they’re very important for dating, and a lot of the work that the researchers do is contingent on dating the sediments that they’re looking at. We’re having trouble finding enough people to do that. The logging community in Japan has also been kind of struggling to find enough people – there’s still enough, but it’s kind of like there’s fads in different disciplines, and on one era, you’ll have a lot of people who are heavily into seismic research and seismic images; and then you have a lot of people who are interested in structural geology, and then maybe people who are interested more in climate-related fields. So, it’s almost like it goes through fads.

But, for the program… The program is already pretty well developed. I think, in terms of Japan, is that we’re getting more confident about being in kind of a leadership position. And especially true right now, that the US program has kind of hit a – not a barrier, but it’s kind of hit a soft spot where it spent decades as being the lead and the mover of the entire international program, and now they’re kind of out of it. So, now we have ECORD, ANZIC and Japan, and now China is stepping up in launching kind of their own version of the same program. So, we’ve really had things kind of diversify out. And I think one of the good things about the international collaboration in terms of the science is that even with this kind of fragmentation, that all the groups are still very concerned about, “Okay, how can we maintain relationships and how can we all move together forward, to support each other on this research?”.

BMR: What has been the toughest period for the program that you have experienced?

ST: For JAMSTEC, we’ve always been in a bit of a disadvantage because operating Chikyu is much more expensive than operating JR. So, to maintain a level of activity requires investment from the national government; it requires any kind of funding that we can get by doing outside projects for commercial industry or for other projects; and figuring out how to do that has been a struggle.

I think that was one of the things that kind of brought about the dissolution of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, was that we weren’t at a stage where we could carry that much weight on our own. And I think the NSF felt that, “Let’s just be friends” kind of thing. So, for us, we had a period where, from when we had our last expedition for IODP in 2019, which was [Expedition] 358, we really didn’t pick up again until 405. We had a long gap where Chikyu wasn’t doing much in the International Ocean Drilling Program. And you would look over across the Pacific, and the JR is like heavily active, doing like three or four expeditions a year. Super-productive. We did find a way to contribute to the program without Chikyu. One of the things that we did is look at ways of using some of the other facilities that we have in JAMSTEC that could operate like the European model, like an MSP (Mission-Specific Platform). So, we were able to use the RV/Kaimei for an ECORD expedition off of Japan, in the Japan Trench. And that worked very well – if you take the whole Covid 19 situation out of discussion, because we were ready to start moving and implement the cruise, and then Covid hit and we had to postpone it several times. But in the end, we were able to accomplish that. And that was a very successful expedition using, you know, not a drillship, but something that was able to get the samples that the researchers needed. And we’ve been looking at doing things with our seafloor drill, which the MSP has also used in several expeditions. So, we’ve been trying to be more inventive about using the facilities that we have in different ways.

But the hardest was that, that big gap between IODP expeditions, because there was intense pressure from outside and from the community about, “When will Chikyu is going to be able to do something?”

BMR: How that gap affected you – and by “you” I mean, people who was full-time working on Chikyu expeditions?

ST: There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, even if you’re not at sea, drilling. Still, there’s proposals that are coming through that need to be managed. And for those proposals, you have to come up with time estimates, and cost estimates, and things like that. You have to think about, “Is it possible to implement this?” You still have meetings to discuss what could be done; you’re just not in a position to be able to take that next step and actually do it. So, we had a lot of meetings where we were discussing like, “Okay, when we can figure out when we can get something done, how do we prepare for that? And how can we get ready for when those windows open up?”

[stop audio at 27:44]

[second part]

BMR: Let’s pick up where we left. You have checked the transcript, so is there something you wanted to add, to what we talked about?

ST: I think, one of the main things I had been talking about was how the program has been kind of a flagship for its overall treatment of data, of samples, publications… Keeping track of the publications that come out of the samples and data. But also, the mentoring of the scientists involved, that it really gives everybody this opportunity when they sail, to meet and work on the same level with established experts and senior scientists, and things like that. And that they also get to look and kind of identify up and coming talent.

It’s really kind of a crucible because you’re kind of given an opportunity, you’ve made your case, you’ve sent in the application, and you’ve been selected, but now it’s on you to actually perform and to show what you can do. Some people get distracted and don’t really get into it so much. Other people just flourish and do really well. So, yeah, it’s really kind of a unique system, especially when you look at the fact that it’s been a devolved program. It’s not unified under one umbrella as it had been during the first part of IODP-MI (IODP Management International, 2003-2013), but it still kept that spirit, even as the different operators went their own way; the different modes went their own way… We still saw the value of working together, and working towards the goal designed and laid out in the science plans.

BMR: Now we are in this transition, different situation… JR has retired, Chikyu is still there, the MSP is the new operating mode… Do you think it is important to have dedicated scientific drillships?

ST: Yes and no. For the yes, when you have a dedicated ship, that makes things a bit easier in terms of operations, because then you don’t have to make adjustments and changes depending on the new vessel that you’re on, whatever that platform might be. You can maintain equipment, you know how things are laid out; the people that are working on them have been maintaining them consistently. A lot of equipment is really delicate, so when you shut it down and restart it, it doesn’t really like that very much. It tends to have additional wear and tear on the instruments. And it’s good to have an established laboratory with the lay out and just use that continually.

But on the other hand, I mean, having the flexibility of everything in a container, where you can move it to and frow, adds value. But as we saw during the pandemic, one of the hazards with that is, once you let your containers go into the shipping world, you’ve got no control, really, over what happens. If I recall, ESO (ECORD Science Operator) had a problem where their containers were on board Korean shipping company’s vessels and they went bankrupt, and they couldn’t find them. There was a huge pain in the ass to actually pull these things off the ships and get them back to them. And during that whole time, they’re not being looked after, they’re not being maintained… It just starts all these problems that ordinarily you wouldn’t anticipate during the planning and execution of an expedition like that.

So, there’s pros and cons, but I think having your own ship it’s kind of like having your own house. You could do more with it than if you’re constantly traveling around and living in AirBNBs, or hotels, or rentals.

BMR: Same goes for Chikyu, I guess. It’s like a house, it’s convenient and you can do more with it, even if that means more cost sometimes.

ST: Oh, yeah, it’s expensive. I mean, not just for Chikyu. The JR was the same way for a long time. The only real problem with that the JR had was that it was old. It was old when they got it, so they kind of pushed it to the limit. They did some major refits and refurbishments that let them use it a lot longer, but eventually you reach a point where you can’t do anything to make it go anymore. And it’s time to find something new. So, I think, whatever it is, having a home for the lab equipment, and for the scientists, and for the drilling equipment is kind of important. But if you’re operating on a case where you don’t have a huge budget, then using a containerized system and rental platforms is the next best option.

BMR: And also, following with the current situation, where do you see scientific ocean drilling going in the next 10, 20 years?

ST: Well, that’s a good question. It’s really hard to judge… The Europeans are very committed to the MSP model, and it seems to be sustainable for what they want to do. Chikyu is there, and it’s been pretty successful at getting contracts to support the scientific side of things. And the ship itself is 20 years old at this point, but was built really on spec. So, compared to say, an industry ship, which is built to be used and disposed of, from conversations with the crew on Chikyu they are very impressed, and have been maintaining it. So, I’m not worried about that going forward.

 I really don’t know what’s going to happen in the US. I don’t think anybody does. And it could go anywhere. It’s very unpredictable. And then, for the Chinese, they have established their own program that they’re at this point just starting. They have the infrastructure installed and they’re ready to go. So, they’re in a position, I think, where they could kind of outpace everyone else. But then, again, it depends on how we can all work together, especially in terms of developing science programs and proposals that are ready to be drilled; that are things that the community wants. That’s going to be a challenge.

BMR: So, no hopes in the short term of a unified program.

ST: I don’t see it being unified like it was during IODP-MI, especially in terms of what I’ve seen with the US side where, at this point, they’re kind of in a struggle to maintain the reduced levels that they’re at now. But, I mean, things could change. I don’t know really what will happen in the new year (2026). I don’t think anybody does. I’d like to be positive, and it’d be good to see a change.

As I said, for the Europeans, they’ve got a model and it seems to be something that they can sustain. I think that’s good. And for Chikyu, as I said, we’ve been pretty good at getting these other contracts to kind of help maintain the ship and also provide some funds that were able to go and do the drilling. So, that’s positive.

BMR: This will be my last question. What’s the most important, the most valuable you get from your involvement in scientific ocean drilling?

ST: Oh, boy… That’s a good question. What is the most important or valuable thing I’ve gained from being part of this? I think, on one hand, being part of a large international effort, where it’s important that I’m not just interacting with groups from other nations, but that we’re actively working together for the accomplishment of a shared goal. Because, you know, living in Japan, it’s very easy to kind of get a very narrow tunnel vision and just focus on what’s happening right in front of you. And the rest of the world kind of just falls out of vision, and you just aren’t really aware of what is really happening.

But because of this community and working with all of these different people, the different kinds of talent and capability from the other people that I’ve met and I’ve worked with, has been very inspiring. Being on Chikyu, on an expedition, and talking with the co-chief scientists on what we’re trying to do for the expedition, but also with the other scientists who are on board, who all have their own specific kind of narrow field, research targets, and hopes, has been very interesting.

And then, I think, personally, the personal development that I’ve kind of seen is hopefully someone who is more professional, and more – I want to say – driven, and also more interested in learning more about not just the science, but some of the things around the science. So, not just how we do science, but how we treat the data that come out of that. Because there’s not just the drilling data, and the measurements that are done on board; but there are other kinds of metadata that come out of this that are important. And that kind of data, as well as the statistics that you can play with to tease out kind of important trends and important variables, is also something that has been very interesting, and still ongoing. I think that kind of sums up the most valuable lessons I’ve gotten.

BMR: Great. Is there something you want to add that I have not asked you, or you wanted to talk about?

ST: I don’t know… I started all of this is editing, and what you learn being an editor is that no matter how many times you look at a manuscript. Every time you go back, you find new things that are wrong, or have been left out, or something that needs to be changed and updated. And this goes for writers as well, people whose career is a writer in science fiction or whatever, every time they go back, there’s always something that they didn’t realize there, no matter how many times you read through it. So, maybe in the same way, I’m sure there is; doesn’t come to mind now, but I’m sure in a week or a month later, it’ll pop into my head, “Oh, I should have mentioned this!”. But for now, I think I’m good. Thank you.

BMR: Thank you, I enjoyed it.