Christian Bible Study Made Simple: Two Fish Podcast
The Two Fish Podcast, hosted by Nick and Aaron, is a Christian Bible Study, with a goal to go through scripture together while keeping it simple and having practical application to our everyday lives. Our prayer is that Christ takes the Two Fish and spreads it through out the world.
Christian Bible Study Made Simple: Two Fish Podcast
Reflecting on Growth and Gratitude: A Celebration of Community and Spiritual Nourishment on the Two Fish Podcast
Have you ever felt a wave of gratitude so powerful it stops you in your tracks? That's the heartfelt sentiment we're riding on as we reflect on the Two Fish Podcast's journey, and it's all thanks to you, our amazing community. From our first tentative steps in late 2020 to the growth that's spanned across a staggering 72 countries, we've been on quite the adventure. This episode is a celebration of that progress and the stories of personal growth that have come with it. We're blown away by how our episodes have traveled the globe, shared by word-of-mouth—proof that your support can truly work wonders.
Amidst updates and reflections, we also share a personal glimpse into the challenge of juggling family life with our passion for podcasting. This episode is about more than just numbers; it's about the spiritual nourishment we aim to provide and the inspiration we draw from the biblical tale of feeding the thousands. Looking ahead, we're excited to bring you a fresh perspective with a new series on the Book of Hebrews, diving into the text's richness and how its wisdom can shape our lives today. As we recount touching experiences and look forward to deepening our discussions, we're reminded that at the heart of it all is our unwavering gratitude for your presence on this journey.
welcome back to the two fish podcast. My name is nick, I'm aaron and this week we're talking about thanksgiving and gratitude. Specifically, you guys, the two fish community. That's where you go. We're going to figure this out at some point. We are, we were well. First of all, we haven't recorded in a hot second a very while. Yeah, we're guilty, we're guilty. We had a lot going on.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, yeah, you say that way too often we really do.
Speaker 1:We get ahead and then what you guys don't know is we're usually at least a week to two episodes hopefully ahead. So then we'll go oh, we got some in the bag to pull out, we're fine. And then we go two weeks not record, and then, well, we need to, and then life happens and we don't. So for us sometimes it's way over a month between recordings. Sometimes we jip our fans, yes, yes we really do.
Speaker 2:It's you guys that suffer.
Speaker 2:And then, uh, nick, and I feel guilty that is true for sure um, but that's part of the point of this episode here is, uh, to to reach you guys and to simply sit down and say thank you, yeah, and um, the the amount of gratitude and appreciation that we have sitting here recording and and seeing some of the things we see, um, as just beyond appreciative, even though I would say this last year especially, we we have not been consistent, we're struggled, but the one thing that has been consistent is our growth.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you guys have been consistent. We can look at numbers and see from week to week when we drop a new episode, like the numbers are consistent and they are growing, which tells us you guys are doing something on your end and it's reaching people, because we're not doing a lot of social media, we're not throwing money into advertising, we're basically just praying and sending it out there to you guys and you guys are doing what you do. And Nick and I are both kind of in sales and, as always said, the best kind of sales is the word-to-word, mouth-to-mouth type of sale, and I believe that's what we're seeing, uh, from you guys and we just man so appreciative of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely don't want to use this episode to say to hammer down, make sure you like and subscribe, cause we do that not all the time, we try not to do that every episode, but um, but you guys definitely have done that and we can see that we've doubled in growth, probably this year, Would you say we do that not all the time, we try not to do that every episode, but um, but you guys definitely have done that and we can see that I, we've doubled in growth, probably this year, would you say.
Speaker 2:Close it's close to doubled. It's it's been already this year to watch and like, we've had conversations, um, like man, we got to be consistent, our numbers are growing and like, so we'll do that, we'll get the two, three episodes ahead and then, like, life just comes in, hits us and it's like we can't get together and record and, um, but you guys consistently show up and it's just a huge blessing it is.
Speaker 1:I think we started this in 2020 um, probably september, octoberish 2020 and have I don't even know how many, I think the first episode was released in December?
Speaker 2:Did it? Yeah, okay, we might have started recording in September, yeah, but the first episode hit the airs.
Speaker 1:I think we had five or six maybe ready to go and the goal was just we're going to hit number seven, because that's where all podcasts fall off, and we've had I know it's over 200 episodes it might not say that because we've taken down a lot of the original ones because they stunk. The content was really good.
Speaker 2:We were not great.
Speaker 1:The sound was terrible, yeah. And so through this process, I feel like, for sure, our content has gotten way better. We've gotten way better at communicating and doing this and obviously all of that. You know the verse in Colossians do everything you do for the Lord, and I really think that that's what we want to do here on the Two Fish podcast and that's what we want for the Two Fish community. I can look at numbers. I don't actually look at numbers very often anymore. Um, I used to look at them like a lot you know, too much like.
Speaker 1:There were times where I'm like, oh, we haven't gotten a download, and that was my focus, rather than, hey, the content is what's important, and so I just looked it up right before we started. Um recording here. Uh, we we're in 72 countries throughout the world, which I don't know how many countries are in the world.
Speaker 2:I have no that was a uh question for the prophet google yeah and not aaron apple countries are there.
Speaker 1:There are 195 countries, so we've been played and not quite half not quite half a third, a third, yeah, about a third. A third of the of the countries have someone in them listening. And again, what we're trying to do here is not say, oh, look at the two fish podcast, we're so awesome, no man. Look at the way that the word of God is spread.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, once again, like we've, we have done very limited on Facebook and we I think we, partly because we're not very good at it Right.
Speaker 1:We are not good at it.
Speaker 2:Well, we are not good at it, but we've also like so. Other podcasts throw money in advertising and we're not doing that. We're paying for a couple of apps and doing a couple of those things, but we're not throwing money in advertising for us to show up on 72 countries.
Speaker 1:I think we advertised twice ever and it's probably been two years ago. Spotify, I think the one backfired and one we got before. I got 600 extra downloads more than normal on it like a day I'm like. This cannot be real it was some kind of fiverr thing. Good too good to be true. When you getting yeah so many extra for five bucks, I'm like okay, lesson no.
Speaker 2:That was not the way forward. But, yeah, to be in 72 countries. And those might not all be consistent all the time, but they show up every now and then. I know we are consistently in eight countries on every episode. I look at numbers more because I'm a desk jockey, um, so I get to look at them more and see those and, uh, seems like in the first day an episode drops like we got some people in germany, we got some people in australia, yeah, and then obviously people in the us that are immediately I don't want to say immediately, but in that first day they they show up as they have downloaded the new episode, which means they're subscribed.
Speaker 1:They follow whatever that button is on, whatever they apple apple podcast is the number one yeah um I think chicago is our number one city. Which we're not far from.
Speaker 2:Far from Chicago, so that could just be. However, the cell phones bounce off of towers.
Speaker 1:Chicago and our home area is the number one. But, the fact that it's more than just that is amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then the really interesting one to me is um, so we host on buzzsprout, which is a great podcast hosting website. Um, we have moved into the top 25 percent of podcasts with our numbers, which is just that blows my mind.
Speaker 2:It makes me think the numbers are wrong honestly because I just can't imagine that oh, I've asked the prophet google, like what, what are the numbers needed to be? Yeah, and as consistent so it it might not just be the top 25 percent of buzzsprout. It looks like the top 25 percent of podcasts. Yeah, now there's like three million podcasts out there. Yeah, so that puts us in the upper 700 thousands of podcasts and I I can look back to when we started, like you talked about, and we're like man we got 10 this month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, or I think. What can we do to get 25 downloads in a week?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What can we do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, what would get us to that number? And when we hit, it.
Speaker 1:we were so pumped that 25 people would listen to our horrible at the time podcast like oh, yeah, yeah, I'm not, yeah, we're not that great, who wants to listen to us?
Speaker 1:a couple guys that aren't theologians, and yeah um, I think the hard thing for our space, religious space, is there's a lot of message sermons. So churches, whether they're mega or local, they download their. My church even does it. They download their sermon as a podcast and so that's not what we're doing and so I feel like we're competing with these churches, some of them huge elevation, I think has the number one church podcast. It's just his message interesting yeah.
Speaker 1:So that's what we're competing against, versus. I feel like if it were to narrow down into two separate groups. Hey, here's a, here's a group. You're going to get the message from last week that you missed because you didn't go to church, or whatever. You want to listen to it again. And then there's another bible study category. I feel. I feel like we'd do so much better if we were weeded out of that. Yeah, but to again to be at 25 overall, yeah, that's all that's not amazing, that's not christian podcast.
Speaker 1:That's all podcast, uh, but I just it's an. It's incredible and we're so thankful and we're not, we're're not, we're not charging any money for this, we're not trying to get paid for this. It was funny, though. Aaron and I were talking just today on Marco Polo. I'm going to throw out Marco Polo. If you don't use Marco Polo, you need to get it, cause it's an awesome communication device. It doesn't have all the extra social media part. Um, that's how aaron and I mostly communicate, but we were talking about I just completely lost my train of thought while we were talking we were talking about quitting our jobs.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Full time man I wish we could, because we just get so busy and it's like gosh. I wish we could just podcast full time and not have to worry about the monetary you got to do life. Obviously, we're nowhere near that and we're not necessarily looking to do that. We're not necessarily looking out there trying to make money. We're still pretty far in the black to be able to win.
Speaker 2:We're in the red for sure. Oh yeah, red, not black.
Speaker 1:You know, we do have monthly subscriptions that we put Buzzsprout costs us money. There's another AI subscriptions that we put buzzsprout costs us money. Um, there's a another um ai. It helps us write our descriptions. Um. There's one that makes videos, helps make shorts and stuff for youtube or instagram or tiktok or whatever, which we pay for and we really don't use. We need to get back to using because it costs like ten dollars a month. So, but we do do a couple things that help make our lives easier as we do this, but it's.
Speaker 2:Which was meant to help us stay more consistent right, yes. And it has but life just like. We both have young kids and a family, and this is truly a hobby.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:One that stretches us in our walk, and we greatly enjoy what you guys do as fans in the two-fish community, but it is a hobby at this point.
Speaker 1:For sure. And hobbies cost money yeah, so yeah.
Speaker 2:For us to to sit here in a we record in a basement room yeah, right, like you, look at joe rogan, he's got a whole production studio and yeah, um, for us to sit here in a basement that we, we kind of built a studio and right now we had to get out of that and we're just sitting in a couple chairs recording, right, yeah, for us to be that high up the food chain called a food chain, if you will, but is is remarkable and um, our gratitude for that is basically like our prayer for the podcast was it would be similar to the story of jesus taking the two fish and the five loaves and feeding the five thousand, yeah, and we're literally seeing it play out, because we're not.
Speaker 2:We're not throwing money at advertising and gaining additional listeners. We're putting money into keeping our life a little bit simpler as we edit the podcast and try and get.
Speaker 2:we want to get facebook back incorporated. We started out with facebook lives and recording the podcast and we went away from it. We want to get back to that to and we're trying. We'll get there, but we're paying for some things to make our lives easier so we can stay more consistent for you guys and just keep an episode coming every two weeks is our goal, which we just missed it. But I was out in the mission field, as nick puts it. Yeah, even though I wouldn't consider it.
Speaker 1:You were, you were in a ministry, uh, you went to arizona a men's retreat kind of thing and and uh, I think you said a guy it's a small group, but a guy gave his life to the lord.
Speaker 2:So yeah, we so there's there's a team, and then there's guests, and there are like 16 guests and most of them were involved in the church to a degree. But there was one guy that had kind of just started going to church and it's a really cool story. He ended up giving his life to Christ and where we were, there were names on the rooms. Like every room had a name, and I don't remember the name of his room, but he had gone into that room with his table and they went in there to pray and he had commented like oh, this name of the town I was born in, well, he ended up giving his life to christ in there and, like nobody had thought about it. And then he thought about it later and told somebody oh, I was reborn in that town too.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, like, and the just the coincidence in that is is all god like I don't know why, like that would happen, but, um, for whatever reason that triggered something in that guy that like, hey, that's my hometown and that's where I got saved, and it'll be quite the memory for him. Um, but to me I looked at it and like no man can orchestrate that.
Speaker 1:No, like no man can orchestrate that because you knew nothing about the guy coming in.
Speaker 2:No, half the people on team were from Indiana and this guy's from Arizona, yeah, and then like the people planning the event like there's no way they knew that guy was even coming and he was born in that town and like, yeah, it's awesome. And just God used that as a good reminder for us on team that I'm real and I'm here. Yeah, because look at what I just look at what I just did yeah, and I think that I really want to go back.
Speaker 1:You had started to kind of set it and and I think this can fit in that god can use anything, whether you know it or not. He's a work straight and stuff behind the scenes and he'll use anything. The two fish podcast when we were trying to figure out the name for this thing, my wife threw that out there. She's like, you know, the five loaves and the two fish, jesus, and we tell our wives they should start a podcast called the five loaves podcast yeah, it's already trademarked.
Speaker 1:Don't, don't try and take it but in luke, jesus said the disciples said hey, send everyone away. They're hungry. And jesus said you feed them and they're like we didn't have anything. They weren't expecting to be there that long, like they were. Jesus said figure it out. And all they had 5,000 men, not including women and children. All there were was five loaves and two fish. There's no way that can feed potentially 10,000, 12,000 people. No way Possible, Zero chance.
Speaker 1:I think you might each get a lick before it disintegrated and went away and God prayed over it and started breaking it and breaking it. He didn't, it wasn't advertising, it wasn't saying look what I'm doing. He just kept praying and kept breaking and at the end the kid went home, which is another miracle. Who knows, the kid's situation could have been his last loaves and bread, who knows. And he went home with 12 baskets full extra and I. That was probably a whole nother miracle in those people's lives anyway yeah and so god can take anything.
Speaker 1:God can take two guys who really, again, not theologians and that's what I love about having done this for the past four years is I'm reading scripture differently and you and you get to understand. Having a conversation the other day about it's like you can go to a church and the preacher can preach the sermon and you can get some good stuff in it, but if you don't go and dig in yourself, you're going to miss it. You're going to probably miss the point of the message. You're going to miss the point of what God's got for you in the Bible. So, taking those small things, two guys who you had barely become saved. Not very long after that, we started this if'm that's, yeah, correct, and I just wanted something to do, like I wanted to, um, produce some. I wanted to do something, whether it be youtube or this. We settled on this, but and that's all we had and a bible, here we are yeah, didn't you?
Speaker 2:you bought this equipment and this is really funny like if you want to go down a rabbit hole you can search for this video. But nick bought this equipment and he was getting dog collar shocked yeah, shocked by his son for answering questions wrong my, one, of my, my- oldest son and I decided we're gonna start a podcast.
Speaker 1:We didn't even get to seven episodes. We were one of those failure podcasts.
Speaker 2:But one of the. You got electrocuted. One of the one there was.
Speaker 1:There's a radio show on in our area and they ask trivia questions and whoever's wrong or something, they get a shot caller and I thought that's hilarious. We'll do that, and cohen and I co Cohen didn't have a great reaction, but right in the middle of me talking he's shy. It's funny. I don't know if the video is still out there or not, but I bought all this stuff for a podcast that we didn't. I didn't even know I wanted to do something. And then we connected, and here we are.
Speaker 2:I think I tried to write a song which, just so you know, I got kicked out of band because I can't keep a beat. I know nothing about music. After being saved, like I knew I was supposed to do something, I didn't know what it was, and then, somehow or another, we ended up on a podcast, which has been great. You were sharing the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000, and I just thought of that, as I'm thinking of that, like the underlying message in that that I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk about is that we are to feed the people now. We are to give them the spiritual food, and I think, like that was a large display of that, jesus was feeding them, but he was doing it with his disciples. He was passing the bread to his disciples and they were feeding the people. His disciples have passed the bread to the people and the people are now supposed to be feeding the world. Right, and that is what we're supposed to be doing, and I think that is the prayer for our podcast is that we are giving people spiritual food. That at least stretches you and makes you have a conversation with a friend we often campsite fire right Sitting down and just opening up your Bible and discussing it with somebody is such a huge blessing and a big part of what we get from this for ourselves is just that the accountability of opening the Bible, reading it and talking through it.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you can open it and you can read it and like not have a clue what you just read, right, but you're like, oh, checked, I read the bible today. Um, but when you sit down read it and discuss it, I'm not one that can like memorize songs or remember movie lyrics and I can't read the bible and memorize scripture. But a lot of times if I end up in a conversation, I can be like, oh man, that's somewhere in James. I can't tell you right where it's at, but I can tell you it's in James because we sat down, we read it and we discussed it. I know I've read this Give me like five minutes and I'll find it right has been huge for my walk, as Nick shared, like 2018 is when I truly gave my life to christ and I became a christ follower and I was like what do I do with this and this is part of my story is this podcast and how it helps stretch me yeah, overall shorter episode.
Speaker 1:What we want to do is just say thank you. You guys have tremendously, tremendously helped us to help scripture spread, and we're not always going to get it right and if we get it wrong we're going to correct it. Thank you for being around on this ride with us. The verse go out into all the world and preach good news to all creation. We're over a third there and that is because of the two fish community. You guys have been sharing, following, subscribing, passing it around, um, telling your friends word of mouth, yep, so we want to thank you so much, seriously, from the bottom of our hearts. Um, I guess business here. Again, make sure you're sharing it.
Speaker 1:Um, you can go to twofishpodcastcom. You can listen to the most recent episode. If this is the first one you're hearing, go there, click on the newest episode it'll probably be this one and um, hit that follow or subscribe button and share it and you can sign up, for we have an email list you can sign up for that. There's not a lot that comes through there. Again, we're not great at the back end, we're great at recording. We love sitting down and recording together. So, hey, if there's someone that wants to help us reach out to us. I think the email is two fish podcast at gmailcom. Two fish podcast dot com is the website. There's fan mail now on buzzsprout. If you got some fan mail, give it to us. We love reading the encouraging things. Every once in a while you'll see me a screenshot of something that someone text or saw on facebook or something, and I'm like man, that is so encouraging oh yeah, I just I just recently had.
Speaker 2:I mean, we're worldwide, so maybe people won't realize but I just had an amish guy come up to me and was like, man, I listened to your guys's podcast, it's so good.
Speaker 1:I just appreciate what I'm like for people that don't know. Amish don't use electricity, so I'm like I didn't know we were coming across on the telephone but oh my goodness, I'm guessing he listens to it at work somehow.
Speaker 2:But um, it is a huge blessing to get those emails or or even a facebook messenger thing. So we greatly appreciate it. Um, our gratitude and our thankfulness for you guys is unmeasurable and, uh, we, just we appreciate you tuning in and continuing to stick with us even though we struggle yeah, I man, I think back when we did an episode a week, I think how in the world did we do that? We just have to pray for kovat to come back.
Speaker 1:But yeah, thank you so much, seriously, from the bottom of hearts. Thank you to fish community, thank you for being a part of the community and that's it. Make sure you stay tuned and we'll have another. I think we're starting hebrews. Hebrews is where we're going, which is and I started. We started reading ahead and started studying it, and it's a different book than the ones we've done before. So, yep, we're super excited about it. Stay tuned, thank you guys.