We may be getting fixated on these slight differences between a state policy leader,

a federal policy lead, but in reality it's just better to have somebody lead.

Right? You know, the economist can tell you what makes sense, you know, economically,

but if there's just political issues going on, then that may be the last hurdle that the economist

hasn't figured out how to get over yet. 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. We have a fantastic guest,

another guest from the University of Tennessee sponsored by the One Health Initiative,

all about kind of getting information out to the public about one health policies,

and all of the interdisciplinary efforts between so many different fields to talk about the

intersection of humans and animals and the environment and and zoonosis and biodiversity

loss and all of these topics that we've been sharing about once a month or so through much of this

year. And so we've been getting a lot of great feedback on these episodes. I'm glad you're enjoying

them. And my guest today is Charles Sims. Charles, can you introduce yourself to the good people

listening? Yeah, hi, everybody. Charles Sims, I'm an economist by training, so I have a

appointment at the economics department at the University of Tennessee. And I also have another

appointment in the Baker Center for Public Policy, where I spend a lot of my time taking my economic

toolbox and applying it to public policy questions, some of which are about one health and then some

of which are about other issues related to energy or climate change and things like that.

So how did you get involved in this in the first place? Because we've been having different people

in different fields. This is definitely a novel one, as you kind of research a lot of the

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