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 very excited today because I have a return guest.

You guys know what that means. If I have a return guest, it's because they're good. I don't I don't have a return guest on.

I'm like, well, that was a dud. Better try that, better try that again. And in Jessica and I have, have been on this whole journey through COVID.

We've talked about this before because she was one of the first guests of what's cool about about my life for this podcast and my perspective is that most of how it comes together is a somewhat random sampling of things.

So because I was I was touring around every city I'd go to. I would look up a university. I would look through guests. I would quick like, OK, that sounds interesting enough. Maybe watch a video. OK, they know how to talk. All right, I'll get them on and kind of flying by the seat of my pants and one of the advantages of that is I don't really necessarily seek out a perspective.

And I think that's a valuable with things like sake COVID where where we might want to we might want to hear what we want to hear sometimes. And I think this happens a lot with some of the conspiracy stuff going on out there where you can certainly find whatever validation for any perspective that you want.

But if you randomly pointed at a map anywhere in the world and looked up the university there and randomly put together all of the epidemiologists and virologists and randomly pointed to a name and asked them if they were vaccinated.

My guess is Jessica, what would you say 99 out of 100 minimum. Oh, yeah, in the United States in the United States minimum. Where is if you want to find someone that hasn't been vaccinated. I suppose you could find that like and also they juggle on a tight rope. Like you can find anything. It's it's the internet and and so I just kind of randomly found Jessica.

We had this wonderful chat. I think she was recommended by a past guest that I randomly found. And we had this wonderful chat at the beginning of COVID. And she was she was she gave the longest timeline for how long COVID itself would be an issue. And so she was the most correct. By the way, that one that when we ended up by the time it was going to air.

So much changing stuff that we just re recorded. So I think the first time she was actually on the show that you can hear is in June.

But we've had a couple conversations since that time. And so now I'm having your back for a lot of reasons. And one is since we last talked the world is like really opened up quite a bit.

And and there's mixed feelings about that one way or another. And but it seems like as far as the public's concerned. It's like great. Everything's normal. And here we go. And so I wanted to have Jessica back on to talk about that because

and we have some other things we're going to talk about as well. One one of which is how much do scientists benefit from something like COVID if scientists are just loving that COVID's happening, which is like some of the more conspiratorial approach of thinking.

If you randomly picked those hundred places around the country. If you did that a hundred times.

And and they're all that one. What do you think they're getting a cut like every single person is just getting a cut of that sweet sweet vaccine money and two, which is not much money.

And to why would they take it themselves if if if if it was some manipulation. So these are the thoughts that I've been having a lot lately. And I've been dealing with with what I get yelled at at me on social media and stuff because people don't like hearing reality sometimes.

And so so anyway, welcome to the show. The longest intro I've ever done on this podcast. Sorry. I'm such a blabber mouth today. Jessica Brinkworth joining me. Jessica, could you introduce yourself for the the people that haven't had heard you on the show or just.

Yeah, sure. So I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne. And I study the evolution of immune system function with a focus on severe infections largely sepsis.

So that that includes things like COVID, but by and large I study a lot of bacterial pathogens.

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