Hello, my friends, and welcome to episode 124 of Just the Zoo of Us.

On this week's episode, I got to hang out with science podcaster Ashley Hamer, who joined me to talk about the towering leaf eaters of the African savannas, northern giraffes.

We are going to talk about all sorts of cool stuff like how giraffes keep their tongues from getting sunburnt,

built-in compression socks, the perils of necking, and more.

So get ready to love giraffes even more than you already do.

Just the Zoo of Us presents Northern Giraffes with Ashley Hamer.

Music I'm I'm here, as usual, with just the Zoo of Us.

This is your favorite animal review podcast. And you guys are going to love

this because today I have a new friend. This is Ashley Hamer. Say hello, Ashley. Hi. I'm so excited

to be talking to you. We've been like Twitter buddies for a little while. Yeah, you're like one of my

favorite people on Twitter, I would say. Thank you. You're one of my favorite people on Twitter.

So it does feel a little bit overdue for us to actually speak. So Ashley, today we're talking about giraffes, but before we talk about giraffes, I just want to talk about you a little bit. Can you let our friends at home know what got you into science podcasting? What got you interested in this sort of thing? Yeah, it's a weird path actually because I started as a music major.

I'm a, and I still play music. I'm a jazz saxophonist.

Wow.

Yeah. And so when I was in school, kind of one of my side hobbies, I feel like it's kind of a mirror universe because I bet there are a lot of people who go to school for science and who are interested in music and do music on the side. And I was going to school for music and was interested in science on the side. So I read a lot of pop science books. I listen to, you know, radio lab and skeptics guided the universe and all these things about science. And I was just totally loved it.

So then when I got out of school, you know, music doesn't pay all of the bills.

So I was looking for side jobs.

And I started, well, on the side, I started writing for a blog that talked about the intersections of art and science.

So I talked about music and science.

And then also I got a real writing job. That writing job led to a science writing job, and that science writing job led to a podcast. So that is how, you know, I started at curiosity.com as a writer, and we started a podcast, and the rest is history. That's so cool. And such a perfect little intersection between the passion for art and the passion is history. That's so cool and such a perfect little intersection between the passion

for art and the passion for science. Because both of those are such passion driven things. You know,

you really have to be into it. It's not the sort of thing you just stumble into. Yeah. Yeah,

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