Hello, everybody. I thought I'd record a quick video intro off my phone because I'm out of town. I'm in Denver.

I'm here. I'm dog sitting for my assistant, Rihanna, who does all sorts of behind the scenes work for this show with social media and sometimes lining up past guests and managing emailed all sorts of

miscellaneous stuff that I am not good at at all. Here's her dog by the way, Darwin. If you happen to be watching this on video, you're in for a treat.

Vishlou, Cuddley Bud, get get into it. If you like Cuddlein or the dog, get a Vishlou. I wanted to do a little intro because we kind of didn't mention one one health initiative that much in this episode, but it is a one health initiative episode.

The one health initiative is just a large global kind of interdisciplinary initiative trying to do a just connecting a lot of human and veterinary health with environmental health and the mixing of all of these

these insane number of fields that go into the emergence of really important matters like global warming and so noses the continuing proliferation of the spread of disease in our modern life.

And the many, many, many things that is incomprehensible, the number of factors that we need to think about in determining this stuff, it's overwhelming quite frankly.

And this is a little way of giving a little window into that through one school, the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Here's the gist, here's how this happened. I was touring around with my show standup science before COVID had, you know, 200 different scientists on popping in and out of a city.

My show outside of Knoxville happened to have so fantastic guest Nina Fufferman theoretical mathematician doing working on kind of the epidemiology and evolutionary biology of pandemics.

And, you know, hit it off had a nice time at the show, moved on with my life probably never would have probably would have never even connected again, but then a global pandemic happened and she was one of the first guests that I had on to figure out what the heck is going on with this stuff.

And she knew about my enthusiasm in communicating science and I always ask and pass guests for future guest referrals and suggestions and references and that sort of stuff.

It was super helpful so much so that she thought, you know, maybe, maybe connecting with a dopey comedian with the science podcast would would be helpful in some way with this initiative and I'm always looking for awesome guests.

And so this is a this is just really a way that you can see so I'm having all of these different guests from the University of Tennessee and it's not about that it's not about it's just about raising awareness.

That's it what the one health initiative.

No one's really selling anything you can check out the site if you want. It's just about getting information out there to the public by any means necessary and because it's important stuff and and there's a disconnect between the sciences and the public.

And so I've been looking to do more stuff like this probably heard me express this in the past, but regular standup science that kind of initiated my early career just doesn't it's not as fulfilling as is a lot of the science communication stuff that I do.

It's great when I can combine both, but I just love this I love this this podcast started as a hobby. I love doing it so much.

I love hearing all sorts of different people that study things that I would have never thought to look into so many of the people that I have on including people with this one health initiative and and people at the University of Tennessee max bill that I've been trying to have on once.

So a lot of them have never even been on a podcast before a lot of them don't even have a social media account.

You wouldn't hear about their work any other way and you know I think if you I think if you told the average person about you know once very specific area of research people wouldn't really fully understand the importance of why that research is valid.

That research is valuable until you start seeing it all piece together and that's kind of what the one health initiative is trying to show and so I've been working with them boy what I I sure hope that I get to make more connections like this in the future and get to do more science communication and get better at it.

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