Are we, yes, where are we here? Why are we here not entirely clear? We are misfits

thrust into existence by random chance with no hints at all as to how we're supposed

to make sense of it all. It's immensely bizarre. Here we are.

Hello, everybody and welcome to the Here We Are podcast. I'm Shane Moss. Today I'm talking

with Melanie Martin and we're going to be talking a lot about favorite topic on the

show and we haven't talked about it in a minute. Childhood development stuff. Something

that's super interesting to me, even though I'm not a parent, never planned to be a parent

and I still just cannot get enough of this subject matter and I know listeners like

it as well. So you're in for a treat. Hello, Melanie. How are you?

Hi, I'm good. Thanks. I wanted to a little flustered. I screwed up our time. I'm running

late. And then for some reason, I keep on calling you by the wrong name, which my listeners

are used to, by the way, I do it with every guess. So don't take it personally, but your

name is truly Melanie and not whatever else I was saying before in the five times that

we re millennial. I say millennial. That would be a great name for somebody.

I'm probably genetics definitely not millennial. Tell the audience a bit about yourself and

your background. Yeah. So I am an anthropologist of more specifically in the field of what we

are called biological anthropology. I am currently an assistant professor at the University

of Washington, Seattle. So living in Seattle, Washington, I, I did my PhD at the University

of California, Santa Barbara. And my PhD work, what I worked with an indigenous population

in the Bolivian Amazon, the Chimane. And I worked with mothers and infants studying how

they fed their infants, how they made, how they decided to change feeding at different

stages of infant development and how that affected the infants' health and mothers when they

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