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.

Well, everybody and welcome to the here we are podcast today. I'm at the University of

Tennessee Knoxville with this beautiful scenery and my guest, Hall Armsworth, joining me

today. Paul, thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. So tell us what you do.

What's your title? What's your background? Give us the whole your whole life story. When

were you born? When what was your first memory? No one was the number of those things.

So first day I wasn't born. I was assembled. So I tell the family. And so I'm a professor

of ecology and evolutionary biology here at University of Tennessee Knoxville. I run

an interdisciplinary research group that focuses on how we can address biodiversity loss and

losses of ecosystem services. So we think about how to design more effective conservation

strategies and more effective conservation interventions. We try to inform natural resource

management decisions and of groups who sort of work in those topic areas, ours is perhaps

a bit unusual in that we specialize in bringing mathematical computational statistical tools

to bear to try to address those issues. So how can we bring those tools to bear to understand

better what's happening to the biota and to improve our ability both to live with the

biota and in the biota. So give us a little more of your background. How did you get

down this path? So I started out in mathematics. My undergraduate

training was mathematics. I did for my sins. I have two PhDs and the first PhD was actually

in math. Still aren't on sort of applied modeling work. But I found I didn't have sort of

enough of a handle at that point on the underlying biological mechanisms that were driving some

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