On August 13, famed football players Jason and Travis Kelce broke multiple records when their sports commentary podcast, New Heights, reached 1.3 concurrent livestream viewers — traffic so high that the livestream crashed at one point. In the days since, it’s garnered over 19 million views.
The reason for the staggering success? The episode marked the first time Taylor Swift joined her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, on the platform.
Despite the show’s reputation as a sports commentary podcast, the two-hour episode conversation ran the gamut from Swift’s new album announcement to breadmaking and — surprisingly — Kelce’s latest obsession: Sea otters.
“I want a wild animal,” said the younger Kelce brother, who plays tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. “I want a wild otter so bad. I just want to, like, find these little creatures.”
Swift cushioned his statement by saying that Kelce doesn’t want to separate a wild otter from its mother in the wild.
Instead, he envisions befriending one “whose life he saved.”
“He wants to see an otter, and the otter is, like, ‘My paw is caught in a shell,’ and he’s, like, ‘I got you,’” Swift said. “And then the otter is, like, ‘thank you forever,’ with its little paws.”
Swift conjured the image of a future kayak trip where an otter might swim up to them.
“That’s what he wants, and I want it too, honestly. I mean, who doesn’t?” Swift asked.
It was an admission that launched a thousand memes, as aquariums across the country photoshopped images of their respective otters in the likeness of Swift’s upcoming album: “The Life of a Showgirl.”
If anything deserves to “go viral,” it’s sea otters. The California sea otter is currently listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act, and the northern sea otter, off the coast of Alaska, is listed as endangered as well.
So Isabel Lara, communications director for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, saw an opportunity and seized it.
She told the San Francisco Chronicle that they reached out to Kelce’s team to offer a private tour of the site, which spans 143,748 square feet and over 200 exhibits.
“He’s joked about being his girlfriend’s plus one, and our person went along with the joke and said the invitation was for him but that he was welcome to bring a ‘plus one,’” Lara said.
Lara said that it would be ideal to partner with the famous couple ahead of Sea Otter Awareness Week, which runs from September 21 to 27.
“We know Kelce is busy with his day job in September,” she added, in reference to NFL season, which kicks off September 4. “But if they want to do a special episode … we’d be happy to send them information.”
The Monterey Bay Aquarium currently has four non-releasable female sea otters in their exhibit, who serve as surrogate mothers for rescued sea otter pups through the aquarium’s Sea Otter Research and Conservation program.
“This work is crucial because sea otters are an important part of healthy marine habitat, helping to restore wetlands and protect kelp forests,” the museum said of their conservation work in a press release.
As the aquarium awaits Kelce and Swift’s reply, otter lovers need not wait for an exclusive invitation to see the marine mammals — they can get a glimpse of Opal, Ivy, Ruby, and Selka on the aquarium’s live cam, which runs daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. online.
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Header image via YouTube / New Heights
