Farmer, you are working for a table full of bounty.
Speaker APainter, with each color you are teaching us to see.
Speaker BNurse.
Speaker AYours are the healing hands that touch the poor and broken.
Speaker AMay God's kingdom come on earth.
Speaker AHis will be done.
Speaker CEphesians 4, 25, 29 the Christian Standard Bible say, therefore, putting away lying, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor.
Speaker CBecause we are members of one another, be angry and do not sin.
Speaker CDon't let the sun go down on your anger and don't give the devil an opportunity.
Speaker CLet the thief no longer steal.
Speaker CInstead he is to do honest work with his own hands that he has something to share with anyone in need.
Speaker CNo foul language should come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear.
Speaker CIn the book of Ephesians, St.
Speaker CPaul is explaining what it means to be the church.
Speaker CAnd before this pericope, Paul wrote that the church is to work together in all of our different roles.
Speaker CHere, St.
Speaker CPaul insists that the church builds one another up in word deeds and he unties our occupational work with to this idea.
Speaker CDr.
Speaker CAndy Walsh, do you think the way we present ourselves in work ties into the idea of building one another up?
Speaker DSure.
Speaker DI mean, everyone you know who has some kind of employment or some kind of vocation.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DNeeds encouragement, needs support in that.
Speaker DAnd so, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker DI think that's part of being part of the body of Christ is enabling each other to live out our vocations.
Speaker BYeah, yeah, Good stuff, good stuff.
Speaker ACome be close to us Lord have mercy on us, Lord, please put your hands all night day by day.
Speaker BHey, guys, welcome to the Whole Church podcast.
Speaker BBack again with the Whole Church job fair.
Speaker BIt's gonna be a fun one.
Speaker BToday we're doing the encore, right?
Speaker BWe already finished the series up and you're all.
Speaker BWait, what?
Speaker BAnother one?
Speaker BYou guys know we do this with all of our series.
Speaker BI don't even remember when we started doing series, but it's a thing we do now, apparently.
Speaker BAnd after each series, we like to do like a crossover with our other podcast, Systematic Geekology, because we like that show and we want to sponsor them also.
Speaker BSo today we have a really special one.
Speaker BIt's going to be a lot of fun.
Speaker BOne of the other hosts of Systematic Ecology is here with us, Andy Walsh, the one and only.
Speaker BHe's the Chief Science Officer at the Health Monitoring Systems in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Speaker BHe's also the author of Faith across the Multiverse.
Speaker BAnd like we mentioned, he's one of the hosts of Systematic Geekology.
Speaker BAnd this episode is going to be cross posted over there too.
Speaker BSo you guys, if you're on systematic ecology, listening to this and you're like, whoa, what's this?
Speaker BYou can hear the rest of the whole Church Job fair series link down below.
Speaker BI think it's a lot of fun.
Speaker BSo, Andy, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker BWelcome to the show, man.
Speaker DYou're welcome.
Speaker DThanks for having me.
Speaker BYeah, man.
Speaker BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker BAnd of course, we couldn't have this show without the one who invented language.
Speaker BWe wouldn't even know the word show or podcast if it wasn't for the one and only T.J.
Speaker Btiberius Juan Blackwell.
Speaker BWelcome to your show.
Speaker CThanks.
Speaker CIf you're listening to this, you should check out the Onazzow Podcast Network website.
Speaker CThe link is below for shows that are like ours.
Speaker CAnd if you're already listening on the YouTube channel, hit, like hit subscribe pretty please.
Speaker BYeah, yeah.
Speaker BI mean, I think that's generally a good idea.
Speaker BBut another thing I think is a really good idea.
Speaker BMy favorite form of unity actually is it comes in the form of a holy sacrament, that which is silliness.
Speaker BSo we always start our show off with a silly question.
Speaker BAnd if you've listened throughout this series, we did the same silly question.
Speaker BWe got a definitive answer from Brandon Knight.
Speaker BAnd now we're going back to get a scientific answer, a very well researched answer to this question.
Speaker BYou know, when we asked our Facebook group, what are the biggest theological questions that the church and seminaries have been arguing about?
Speaker BSamantha Perez, a good friend of ours, threw out is the hot dog a sandwich?
Speaker BAnd a lot of people voted for her option, so we had to include it somewhere.
Speaker BSo here it is, part of our silly questions.
Speaker BAndy, please let us know.
Speaker BScientifically, is a hot dog a sandwich?
Speaker DWell, how do you follow up someone who's already given the definitive answer, being.
Speaker BMore definitive, you didn't hear it, did you?
Speaker CIf you didn't hear it, then I.
Speaker BDon'T even know what it was.
Speaker BFloors here, we haven't recorded that yet.
Speaker DWell, okay, so we're doing time travel, of course.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker DYou know, it's meat inside of bread.
Speaker DIf you want to call it a sandwich.
Speaker DI have no quarrels with that.
Speaker CGood answer.
Speaker CGood answer.
Speaker CIn what ways, if any, do you think this question could be relevant to your life?
Speaker DI don't know.
Speaker DI mean, whenever this comes up, it makes me think of the John Hodgman podcast, because that seems to be the question that launched that whole thing.
Speaker DSo, yeah, I don't know, maybe someday we'll all be called upon to make judgments on arbitrary questions that hinge on definitions and semantics rather than actual science.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BI mean, those are the important things in life, I think, perhaps.
Speaker BOr maybe the completely unimportant things.
Speaker BHard to tell.
Speaker BBut for the purposes of this series, we're not just doing a hot dog podcast, unfortunately, but what we are doing that I think is really cool, we are doing a series, or did a series now, on people's occupational work, their daily lives, to see whether or not this stuff that we're arguing about is actually important to regular people in their regular lives or not so regular people in their not so regular lives.
Speaker BYou know, however you want to take it.
Speaker BA lot of our listeners, though, they're pastors, theologians, church leaders, podcasters, and we think it's important for our church leaders to hear this stuff.
Speaker BAnd I think they can benefit from hearing and learning from people who are in other occupations.
Speaker BSo, yeah, that's why we're doing this for our core.
Speaker BWe decided to act like we knew our audience for once.
Speaker DYeah.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CFor church listeners that may not know you from Systematic Ecology, Andy, would you mind filling them in with your history with the church and your book, Faith across the Multiverse, and some of what you like about what our other podcast, Systematic Ecology, does?
Speaker DOh, sure.
Speaker DSo, short, easy question.
Speaker DHistory of the church.
Speaker DI mean, I grew up attending church pretty much, you know, for as long as I can remember in New Jersey and then other places.
Speaker DI've traveled mostly in Western Pennsylvania after that.
Speaker DAlso went to Christian schools from kindergarten through high school, and then was involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship as an undergrad and a grad student.
Speaker DSo, yeah, lots of.
Speaker DLots of history with the church.
Speaker DAnd then, you know, my science background studied biology as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon, studied molecular microbiology and immunology for my PhD at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Speaker DAnd after a postdoc in computational biology, I've been working at Health Monitoring Systems, a public health software company in western Pennsylvania, for over 16 years now.
Speaker DAnd Faith across the Multiverse was a book I wrote a few years ago now about the intersection of Christian faith, science, and particularly the vocabulary and the concepts of science and nerdy pop culture.
Speaker DAnd that's how I got connected with Will Rose and the Systematic Ecology podcast.
Speaker DWe were operating at very similar interfaces there of nerdy pop culture and Christian theology.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BPlus Will just needed another comic book friend that really liked the X Men.
Speaker BI think that was also a thing.
Speaker DYeah, I'm happy to apply.
Speaker CWell, see, the Problem is, Will is too young of a soul.
Speaker CAll the young comic book fans don't read X Men.
Speaker BI feel like I'm old enough I should read X Men.
Speaker DI just don't.
Speaker CYeah, he did.
Speaker CHe, you know, was just.
Speaker CHe wants to connect with the young people, and the young people don't like X Men.
Speaker BThat's weird.
Speaker BWhy?
Speaker CI don't know what it is.
Speaker BYou know what?
Speaker BIt's because they watched the Hulu series Runaways and it was too good.
Speaker BNow they don't care about X Men.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker CThat's compared to the Fox movies.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CSo this is our whole church job.
Speaker CFair.
Speaker CSo before getting into, you know, the business, if someone never heard of what it is you do, Andy, how would you describe your job, and how would you address anyone interested in pursuing your job as a career?
Speaker DYeah, well, frankly, I'm always surprised when anybody has heard of what we do.
Speaker DSo I work for public health software company that provides software that does something called syndromic surveillance.
Speaker DSo we've all learned probably way more than we wanted to about traditional public health surveillance over the past five years, where people get diagnosed with something specific.
Speaker DAnd a doctor or lab or pharmacy that makes that diagnosis notifies the public health department, and they keep track of those people with specific diagnoses.
Speaker DSyndromic surveillance is about monitoring things at the population level before people are diagnosed.
Speaker DSo when you walk into the emergency department or your doctor's office, you know why you went there, you have a fever, you fell, and you worried you broke your arm, you were in some sort of car accident.
Speaker DYou know you were having chest pain, chest pains or pain in your arm, and you're not sure if you're having a heart attack or an anxiety attack or some other kind of thing.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DAll the different reasons people seek health care.
Speaker DThey know why they're there.
Speaker DThey don't know what they have.
Speaker DThat's why they're going to see a medical professional.
Speaker DBut they can describe something about what they're experiencing.
Speaker DSo we get that data, somebody has to type that up, that reason that you walked in the door.
Speaker DSomebody types that up, and we get it typically within five minutes of the person arriving at the healthcare facility.
Speaker DSo we're monitoring these things in real time, and we're adding up, okay, in the past hour, how many people came in with fever, came in with worries about chest pain.
Speaker DAnd if there are larger than expected numbers in a particular area, we'll notify the relevant public health department.
Speaker DAnd then our software provides them with tools so they can follow up and see is there something going on here that we need to worry about?
Speaker DDo we need to keep an eye on this further?
Speaker DIs this something that we already knew about, whatever the case may be, but they have then the tools to do their actual public health work, so we're trying to help support them, cut down on the manual work that they have to do, and also maybe hopefully identify things as early as possible, perhaps even before there's an opportunity to diagnose folks.
Speaker BYeah, yeah.
Speaker BAnd if somebody wanted to get into that kind of work themselves, where would they start?
Speaker DSure.
Speaker DSo that's a good question, because I don't know very many people who have jobs exactly like mine, but certainly there are lots of public health folks who use syndromic surveillance software.
Speaker DAnd so if you wanted to get into a career in public health, typically public health degree is a, is a graduate level degree.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo you might.
Speaker DThere's a variety of things you could study at the undergraduate level, biology would be one of them.
Speaker DBut other things, you know, public policy, some kind of pre law thing might even be relevant.
Speaker DYou know, public health sits at the intersection of science, but also public policy and politics and so forth.
Speaker DAnd so there's lots of those kinds of degrees that might be worthwhile as well.
Speaker DSome schools even have undergraduate degrees in public health that you can major in.
Speaker DSo something like that.
Speaker DAnd then, you know, typically you'll need to go to a school of public health for a master's degree, master's of public health or something along those lines, if you're looking to get into then working for the public health department.
Speaker DAnd there are public health departments in your state, certainly many counties or large municipal areas.
Speaker DSo someplace like the city of New York has their own public health department or the city of Los Angeles, it kind of depends.
Speaker DBut there are probably lots of public health departments in your general area.
Speaker DAnd so that would probably be the career path.
Speaker BCool, cool, cool, cool.
Speaker BSo I know we've discussed this several different podcasts.
Speaker BPlenty of places, plenty of other people, probably smarter people than me anyway, have been talking about this.
Speaker BBut how would you describe some of the challenges today when it concerns integrating faith and science and why so many people see them as polarizing in today's times.
Speaker DSure.
Speaker DSo I think right now there's several different reasons why folks see those things at odds.
Speaker DTraditionally there were concerns about, and I say traditionally, that's kind of a short horizon.
Speaker DIn the past hundred years in the United States and in Western cultures, there's been this concern about whether the findings of science in relation to geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, whether those conflict with the creation accounts in Genesis or not and other creation accounts in Scripture, and on questions like how old is the Earth and how old is the universe and what is the sequence in which things came to exist.
Speaker DSo those are kind of long standing issues, again, in that, by long standing, kind of in that past hundred, 150 years that folks saw as a source of tension, conflict, or at least discrepancy.
Speaker DMuch more recently, we've seen that conservative Christian communities took a very different approach to topics of climate change and public health responses to the pandemic than some other communities.
Speaker DAnd so there's just kind of that sense that the scientific world is trying to control us, take away our freedoms, take away our liberties, tell us how to live our lives at a very granular level, whether that's what kind of car to drive, what kind of food to eat, what to do with our trash, what to do with our faces, how to breathe.
Speaker DPeople feel like all of those things, they're being told what to do and how to do it and when to do it and where to do it and why to do it.
Speaker DAnd you know, there are a lot of reasons why you might object to that, but certainly it seems to have clustered around religious communities, probably, possibly also because of that long standing uncertainty about whether scientific institutions had their best interest in mind, and possibly also because some of the, you know, some of the restrictions came around gathering in churches and so forth.
Speaker CRight.
Speaker CSo has it, has it ever impacted your work personally?
Speaker DThat's a good question.
Speaker DYes and no.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DIt hasn't stopped me from doing my job or anything like that.
Speaker DIt is certainly disheartening to see the people in the community that I felt like I grew up in, felt like I was part of, take a very different view of these things, despite the fact that I got into this line of work because of the values that were instilled in me during those formative years.
Speaker DIn hindsight, it's interesting to think about the fact that when I told people that I wanted to get into public health and studying infectious diseases, sort of in that high school, pre college era, whenever I mentioned that to people in church, they're always like, why are you doing that?
Speaker DWhy wouldn't you go cure cancer?
Speaker DSo I don't know if there's anything to that that may have been just kind of a casual, like, I don't understand what you're talking about, but I know cancer.
Speaker DAnd so that to me that's important, or there might have been Something more substantial there as a kind of hint about how conservative Christian communities felt about public health and infectious disease prevention and so forth.
Speaker DCertainly discouraging at that point a little bit, and has only gotten more discouraging in recent years to see that kind of attitude.
Speaker DBut it doesn't, so far, prevent me from doing work.
Speaker DThat said, very recently, you know, through a chain of events, right.
Speaker DWe've.
Speaker DWe are having projects that work canceled and having to let employees go and having to see the public health departments that we work with change directions and shut down projects and let people go on their end as well, because we have, you know, made decisions at the national level about changes in priorities in public health.
Speaker DSo in that sense, you know, and that has, you know, has a lot of religious motivations, or at least people are citing their religious beliefs for why they have those priorities.
Speaker DSo, yeah, I guess in that sense, in a very, very recent sense, like in the past several weeks, it has started to have more of a tangible impact on my job.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CI think all of those people just really thought that you could cure cancer if you felt like it.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CLike, that's.
Speaker CTo them, you were just saying you don't want to.
Speaker CI think that's what happens a lot.
Speaker BOf the time, anyway.
Speaker BI don't think that's it.
Speaker BBut, you know, Andy's smart enough.
Speaker BHe probably could if he had a little bit of free time.
Speaker CThat's exactly what I'm saying.
Speaker BYeah, that's true.
Speaker BThat's a good point.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BNo, but more seriously, I think when we get at some of this tension, a lot of it, I think, goes back to the Scopes Monkey trial in the US which was all constructed for the sake of being polarizing, more or less.
Speaker BLike, if you actually look into it, the teacher even said, like, I'm not sure, I might have taught evolution.
Speaker BThey just wanted to have a legal case about what we could or couldn't teach in schools.
Speaker BThat that's all the whole reason that happened.
Speaker BAnd what's interesting is if you go back before the Scopes trial, even in America, the fundamentalist Christian documents, they're like the most conservative documents, like, Possible.
Speaker BSome of the authors there were Christian evolutionists.
Speaker BSo it really wasn't until that legal case came up that some of this tension started being felt.
Speaker BSo a lot of this is pretty recent.
Speaker BLike you mentioned, Andy.
Speaker BAnd then I think there's also something underpinning it a little bit further, where people, in their faith, interest in life in general, they want to just have solid, clear answers, and a lot of conservative pastors preach this kind of idea of the Bible where it is completely authoritative and completely literal, inerrant, you know, all that stuff.
Speaker BAnd they say this is the answer.
Speaker BIt's all black and white.
Speaker BWhereas science doesn't do that, which I don't think faith does that either.
Speaker BBut if you grew up in that kind of faith, you want everything to be that way.
Speaker BScience usually does this thing where, like, here's what we think right now, but we're going to keep testing it, and if it's wrong, we're going to say it's wrong and come up with a new hypothesis.
Speaker BAnd a lot of the times it comes up with stuff like, hey, a lot of what we've been doing is harmful to the earth.
Speaker BA lot of this is like.
Speaker BAnd people don't want to feel bad and people just want to clear answers.
Speaker BAnd that's just not how life works.
Speaker BSo I think maybe it's less qualm against science and more qualm against reality.
Speaker DPerhaps, or at least complexity.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DIn the.
Speaker DIn the ways in which reality is complex.
Speaker BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker BBut speaking of that kind of polarization stuff, I think it's interesting because also on our other podcast, this Medic Ecology that all of us are a part of, we have a theme this year on polarization, and you contributed a lot to the different episode ideas we've been doing over on that show this year, such as the Magic versus Science, Jackie Chan versus Bruce Lee, other ideas that haven't even been released yet.
Speaker BWould you mind telling our listeners a little bit more about that series and some of the ideas that you came up with regarding that?
Speaker DSure.
Speaker DI think there is, in fandoms there's a long tradition of these kinds of you have to pick this or you have to pick that kind of thing.
Speaker DAnd I think it comes from a zero sum mindset that's very easy to adopt when you're perhaps younger.
Speaker DWe associate a lot of these fandoms perhaps with young people.
Speaker DAs we talked about before, people a certain age read X Men at a certain time in their life and not at other times.
Speaker DOr perhaps you've got your Star Treks versus your Star wars and, you know, Jackie Chan versus Bruce Lee.
Speaker BRight.
Speaker DA lot of these things, I feel like, come up among young people who are still trying to kind of figure out their place in the world, at least in the sense of feeling like you have to pick one or the other and you have to feel very strongly about your choice.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DWe can, we can all have conversations about the Relative merits of different things.
Speaker DAnd people approach that a lot of different ways.
Speaker DAnd, you know, nuance and relative values and priorities, you know, those are all perfectly good things to talk about.
Speaker DBut I do think there is a certain kind of mindset that's perhaps an immature mindset, perhaps just haven't had a lot of opportunities to deal with complexity or nuance mindset.
Speaker DBut that feels like people have to make a choice between one thing or the other and then feel very strongly about that and so very strongly against the other.
Speaker DAnd so I was just kind of reflecting on some of those things that I've come across.
Speaker DMagic and science being a big one that covers a lot of different categories.
Speaker DAnd to the point they'll even see characters within the stories sniping at each other about, well, I'm a scientist and so therefore all your magic nonsense is nonsense, or I am a wizard and I think your technology is awful and ruining the natural order of things and so forth.
Speaker DSo that one's a fairly common one both inside and outside of stories.
Speaker DYou know, as I talked about on the podcast, Jackie Chan vs Bruce Lee was something that I was confronted with in junior high.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThat I had to in high school.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThat there were some kids that were into one and some kids that were in the other and you had to choose and you couldn't fathom liking one or the other.
Speaker DThe same kind of thing with Star Trek and Star wars, you know, and.
Speaker DYeah, so just trying to kind of think about what I had encountered.
Speaker DBut yeah, I actually don't find myself being pretty particularly strident on any of those topics.
Speaker DPerhaps the magic in science one is a little trickier because I have no problem with stories that use magic in interesting ways.
Speaker DIt gets a little bit trickier when you talk about, well, what do we really mean by magic in the real world and so forth.
Speaker DI don't quite know what people mean by that all the time, but generally speaking, I think that it's more interesting to see the merits of various things and to find ways to.
Speaker DFor them to complement each other rather than taking this kind of zero sum approach of anything that's good for me is bad for you and vice versa.
Speaker CYeah, I think it's.
Speaker CI think it's just more fun when you're younger to like attach yourself to one side of a mostly pointless argument.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BThen you just have a hot dog.
Speaker BYeah, that'd be a perfect polarizing question.
Speaker BNo.
Speaker BAnd.
Speaker BBut all the things that Andy said is also the series, the flagship series for that theme over on systematic Ecology, we actually named Finding the Good.
Speaker BSo what we're doing in this episode largely is picking a side and then talking about the merits of the other side, rather than just bolstering our own perspective kind of deal.
Speaker BThat's kind of the goal.
Speaker BI think it's a good exercise, even if you're not into the nerdy stuff, because it helps you kind of understand better other points of views and care about what other people have to say.
Speaker BWhich is good for church unity, perhaps, too.
Speaker CYeah, I think I do.
Speaker CI think magic and science is a particularly.
Speaker COne, like, particularly interesting one.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker CBecause it seems to get brought up in media a lot recently.
Speaker CAnd like, you got Reed Richards, and he just blatantly doesn't believe in magic.
Speaker CHe's one of the smartest people, friends with the Wizards.
Speaker DYeah, right.
Speaker DHas met actual vampires and was.
Speaker DWas questioning whether vampires exist in the.
Speaker DThe blood Untapped event.
Speaker DIt's like a.
Speaker DI feel like we've taken this one step too far.
Speaker CYeah, it's so funny.
Speaker CBut that's not what we're here for.
Speaker CWe're here for the job fair.
Speaker CSo, Andy, what are some things that are normal in your occupation now that others might not often think about?
Speaker CFor example, you know, we.
Speaker CJosh and I both work in a restaurant.
Speaker CWe've got front of the house versus the back of the house, opening shift versus night shift.
Speaker CYou know, we've got these rifts that people might not often think about.
Speaker CYou know, when customers come in at night and say, why don't you have this?
Speaker CA lot of the times the answer they'll get is because they didn't do it in the morning.
Speaker CBut is there anything like that for you that we might not think about?
Speaker DThat's a good question.
Speaker DAgain, I suspect that people have learned way more about public health in the past five years than they ever wanted to know.
Speaker DAnd so it's maybe a little bit harder to think of what people don't know or aren't familiar with.
Speaker DYou know, I think people might be surprised to see and to know how much public health is a very.
Speaker DThe word that they like to use in the public health community is siloed activity.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo people are in their different.
Speaker DTheir different silos, and they don't really get out of those silos.
Speaker DSo if, you know, a silo might cover a particular area of public health, like chronic disease or a specific chronic disease or a specific collection of chronic diseases, infectious diseases, sexually transmitted infections, environmental health, occupational health, workplace exposures, the actual ways that things break down might vary a Little bit from health department to health department, but there are some pretty traditional ones.
Speaker DAnd so you might have folks that work at your state health department who would physically sit next to each other, Their cubicles are connected to, are attached to each other, and they might never really have occasion to interact professionally because they're working in different domains, right?
Speaker DOne might be a chronic disease person, another might be an infectious disease person.
Speaker DThey might interact socially.
Speaker DIt's not that they're not nice to each other, polite to each other, but they just have no reason to interact professionally.
Speaker DWhereas they might work very closely with the person in the next state over who is in their same state silo who does the same works on the same disease that they do.
Speaker DAnd so they know exactly what that other person is doing, even though they're several hundred miles away, but they don't really know what's going on in the cubicle next to them.
Speaker DThe one that I was most surprised by, I mean, I had some notion of that going into this because I had public health training, and I have some notion of it from working here.
Speaker DBut the one that I came across about 10 years ago that I was really surprised by was there are folks in public health who work on drug overdoses.
Speaker DBut drug overdoses actually split into two very different silos that don't interact very often.
Speaker DOne are.
Speaker DAnd the dividing line is intentional versus unintentional.
Speaker DSo there are folks who are concerned about intentional overdoses that are essentially suicide attempts.
Speaker DAnd so that falls under kind of mental health or behavioral health or something like that.
Speaker DAnd the unintentional ones are considered, like, a public safety issue.
Speaker DAnd so they fall under an entirely different category, at least in some departments of public health.
Speaker DSo that was a challenge for us when we started working on drug overdoses with our data, was trying to figure out.
Speaker DWell, when people come in, they're not exactly forthcoming about whether they intended to overdose or not.
Speaker DIn fact, they may not even be conscious and forthcoming at all about their situation.
Speaker DSo how do we differentiate between those two things?
Speaker DBut that was an important priority to those folks because while I work on this particular kind of drug overdose, and it, you know, and it's not by substance, it's by what the person's intent was.
Speaker BYeah, man, crazy stuff.
Speaker BBut I.
Speaker BWe also want to ask just like, about the language you.
Speaker BSo, like, whenever we're trying to get to understand different.
Speaker BBecause there's like, all these different worlds, even within our own communities, because people live different lives at work than at home sometimes.
Speaker BAnd we want to ask like, is there any different language that's unique to your profession?
Speaker BSo like when I, when I worked for Shutterfly, you know, is image comp validation.
Speaker BYou know, we kind of said this stuff all the time.
Speaker BWhereas like in real world we hear about image composition.
Speaker BLike what?
Speaker BOr you say validation, it's like, yep, the image is there.
Speaker BWhat do you, what do you mean?
Speaker BAnd even, you know, I won't get into it, but there was even some, some racial stuff because like you, you knew when certain colored people were up.
Speaker BPhoto editing technology isn't as geared towards some people groups than other people groups.
Speaker BSo yeah, you had a lot of language that you're trying to like communicate this stuff.
Speaker BIs there anything unique in the language for your job that maybe isn't normal language for everybody else?
Speaker DYeah, that's a good question.
Speaker DThe first things that are coming to mind are more, because we're a software company and so there some of the jargon from the software engineering world.
Speaker DSo things like Sprints, there are different ways, different philosophies and different ways to organize how developers do their work.
Speaker DAnd one method is called the Agile method.
Speaker DAnd so development efforts are organized into Sprints and nobody's actually running.
Speaker DThey're sitting at their desk typing.
Speaker DJust as you might imagine software developers do.
Speaker DBut they are sprinting towards a deadline.
Speaker DEssentially.
Speaker DThey're trying to work in short, fast bursts of writing code.
Speaker DRather than we're going to spend six months on this project or you know, it's more like, let's spend six days or a couple weeks.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker DWhat else?
Speaker DTrying to think if there's any kind of public health.
Speaker DI mean, like, you know, we talked about silos, right?
Speaker DSo those, you know, it's a metaphor from farming.
Speaker DIt's not the physical object, but I think the, the concept translates pretty clearly.
Speaker DI mean there's certainly all kinds of disease terminology, right?
Speaker DThe med, you know, the medical terminology, you know, there's all kinds of lingo there, technical terms, so forth.
Speaker DI'm always fascinated by.
Speaker DWe have in the English language there's a lot of medical terms that have both a Latin derived version and a Greek derived version.
Speaker DAnd it's interesting to see which communities use which one versus the other.
Speaker DSo things like adrenaline versus epinephrine, that's Latin versus Greek for, you know, above your kidney.
Speaker DOh, and the other one, since we're talking about drug overdoses, an interesting language challenge that comes up is that, you know, so we're getting this text data that people are typing very quickly, so they often use abbreviations.
Speaker DAnd shorthand to try to just get down what the patient said as quickly as possible so they can get on to actually treating for them, treating them.
Speaker DAnd so oftentimes, if somebody overdoses, they'll just type OD for overdose.
Speaker DHowever, there are some doctors and clinicians that like to use OD as an abbreviation for right eye for.
Speaker DAgain from the Latin.
Speaker DAnd so, yeah, it's an interesting challenge to try to figure out from context.
Speaker DIs this person talking about a drug overdose or talking about someone with a problem in their right eye?
Speaker CYeah, I never would have thought about that.
Speaker CThat's exactly what that question was for.
Speaker BWeird, though.
Speaker BYeah, I also would have never thought of that.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CCool.
Speaker CSo for the meat of these episodes or job fair, we want to walk through 12 big theological topics that often get debated by theologians or podcasters or pastors, and to see how these ideas actually impact people's everyday lives, career wise, specifically.
Speaker CSo we're going to go through 12 topics that our Facebook group voted on as the biggest theological hot topics of our time.
Speaker CAnd like, it's multiple choice.
Speaker CWe just need you to tell us if you find the topic somewhat relevant, not relevant, really relevant, or if you've never heard of it.
Speaker CSo pretty easy.
Speaker CYou've got four options for each of our 12 topics, and then later we'll go back and highlight a couple to talk more in depth about.
Speaker CDoes that sound like something you're good for, Andy?
Speaker DI will give it a try.
Speaker CAll right.
Speaker CThat's all we can do, right?
Speaker CYou can do our best.
Speaker CSo the first one is gonna be.
Speaker DCeteriology, and the question is if that is relevant to my job or not.
Speaker CMm.
Speaker CIf it's relevant, somewhat relevant, not relevant, or if you've never heard of it.
Speaker BJust say one of those four.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DI know, I've heard of it, but I'm not totally confident I'm gonna say not relevant.
Speaker CAll right.
Speaker CFree will versus predestination.
Speaker DYeah, not really relevant.
Speaker CAtonement models.
Speaker DYeah, not.
Speaker DNot really relevant.
Speaker CContinuationism versus cessationism in regards to gifts of the Spirit specifically.
Speaker DYeah, I mean, I suppose it's a little relevant.
Speaker CAll right.
Speaker CChristology.
Speaker DI mean.
Speaker DYeah, it's hard.
Speaker DI'm not seeing where that's relevant.
Speaker CAll right.
Speaker CAnd God's nature.
Speaker DYeah, I'm not.
Speaker DI'm not too.
Speaker DI feel like.
Speaker DLike I'm doing very bad at this.
Speaker DI mean, you know, I'm not saying these are not relevant topics, but, like, in terms of how I actually do my job day to day.
Speaker BWell, it doesn't Be about your job.
Speaker BJust you while you're doing your job, you know, for you.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DYeah, yeah.
Speaker BWhatever you say is the right answer because it's your opinion.
Speaker DFair enough.
Speaker CSocial justice.
Speaker DYeah.
Speaker DSo that one comes up a lot.
Speaker DSo I would say that's very relevant.
Speaker CThe doctrine of imago dei.
Speaker DYou know, I would say that that's relevant to how I think about my job and how I think about the people that we are helping, hopefully through the da.
Speaker CThe nature of scripture.
Speaker DThat one I don't think is relevant.
Speaker CEcclesiology and missiology.
Speaker DYeah, I don't think that's relevant.
Speaker CDemonology and angelology, again, maybe a little relevant.
Speaker DAnd, you know, depending on how one thinks that causally intersects with people's health.
Speaker CAnd eschatology, the study of the end times.
Speaker DI'm hoping that that is not relevant to my job.
Speaker BYeah, yeah.
Speaker CEspecially on your side of things.
Speaker CIt's like, yeah, I hope that's not what.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DBut if it would be very relevant.
Speaker CRight.
Speaker CYeah, it's good.
Speaker CYou're going to have to add a whole new silo.
Speaker DYes.
Speaker CWith demon fatalities.
Speaker BOh, man.
Speaker BSo with that, if you, Andy, if you had to pick two of those above 12 topics that we mentioned that you think are relevant to your day to day life just to talk a little bit more about, they don't have to be the two most relevant, just two that you would want to talk about that you think are relevant.
Speaker BWhat would they be?
Speaker DI mean, you know, I think the imago DEI and the social justice ones kind of stood out.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BOkay.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BYou want to just riff about that for a little bit?
Speaker BWhat stands out to you about those that impacts your life?
Speaker DSure.
Speaker DYou know, I mean, in terms of social justice.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DWe again talked a lot in the last few years about how the categories that we create for people, race, gender, even various, you know, social and community affiliations, you know, have an impact on people's health, you know, and they.
Speaker DBeyond whatever biological correlation there happens to be.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo we've known for a while, for example, that, you know, there are certain health outcomes that are worse for black people in the United States than they are for other groups.
Speaker DAnd that is not, you know, and the evidence does not suggest that that's because there is some genetic feature of that population that means that they have worse outcomes.
Speaker DYou know, things like blood pressure and diabetes and so forth.
Speaker DThere are obviously one example that people might go to is sickle cell anemia.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo the genes for sickle cell are more prevalent in certain populations.
Speaker DAnd that does have to do with the intersection of sickle cell anemia and malaria protection.
Speaker DAnd so people coming from places where malaria is endemic.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThat is there.
Speaker DThere is some biological, genetic connection.
Speaker DBut a lot of these other health outcomes, we have not been able to find any biological explanation or genetic explanation.
Speaker DIt has to do more with access to healthcare, education, communities, approaches to treating different things.
Speaker DIt even comes down to knowing your health outcome may depend on did you grow up in a community that knows when to go to a doctor?
Speaker DFor what, and what doctor do you go to?
Speaker DI'm always a little bit surprised by how much you have to know as the patient about which.
Speaker DWhich doctor to see for what kind of condition.
Speaker DYou always have to halfway diagnose yourself before you figure out which healthcare professional to see.
Speaker DAnd so if that knowledge is not part of your community, part of your education and your upbringing, you might delay care.
Speaker DYou might not get care at all.
Speaker DYou might not know this is something that needs to be treated or something that could be treated.
Speaker DA lot of people suffer with things because they don't think there's anything that could be done with them.
Speaker DAnd so, yeah, so that intersects.
Speaker DAnd we've made some efforts in the past using our data to try to identify.
Speaker DWe don't get a lot of data about specific people.
Speaker DWe're not getting your full name and address and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker DWe're trying to look at things at an aggregate level.
Speaker DSo there's limitations to what we can do.
Speaker DBut we have made some efforts to try to identify issues that might correspond to socioeconomic categories or just geographic regions.
Speaker DI've seen public health folks who have access to more granular data.
Speaker DYou know, they've been able to identify specific housing developments where there are specific healthcare problems or healthcare issues because of access to healthcare and different issues.
Speaker DSo that definitely intersects with what we do a lot.
Speaker DAnd we talk a lot about how do we provide the best care for everyone and to make sure that public health is definitely concerned with things like education, access to resources.
Speaker DWe're not necessarily treating each individual people.
Speaker DThat's more on the medical side.
Speaker DBut, you know, if there's an issue with a particular neighborhood is too far away from the nearest pharmacy, the nearest grocery store with fresh produce, the nearest emergency department.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThat's a public health issue in terms of how do we identify those communities and those needs.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BAnd I just want to lean a little into that.
Speaker BDo you think there are any ways that the church can actually help be part of the solution here?
Speaker BBecause, like, what you're Mentioning is it's not something that maybe science can solve on its own.
Speaker BBecause what we're seeing is a lot of these issues aren't just genetic.
Speaker BIt's people's access.
Speaker BIs there a way the church can step in there?
Speaker DYeah, you know, there are certainly things that churches can do.
Speaker DI think part of, you know, the first step in some church communities may just be grappling with and recognizing that systemic issues exist and that not all problems are caused by individual choices, that there are things that operate at a system level, at a community level, at a neighborhood level, at a county level, or what have you that have to be addressed at that level in order to be able to make a contribution to the solution.
Speaker DChurches can be a source of better education on these issues.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DYou can have folks in your church who maybe provide their expertise on.
Speaker DOn healthcare issues.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DHow do I.
Speaker DWho do I see for this?
Speaker DIs there a doctor that can help me with this problem?
Speaker DWhen do I call?
Speaker DWhen do I go to the er?
Speaker DWhen do I go to my primary care physician?
Speaker DSome people just need help with those kinds of questions.
Speaker DThere may be issues depending on where your church is located.
Speaker DThere might be issues of transportation, so the church could maybe.
Speaker DI know there are churches that provide transportation to various things that could include taking folks to healthcare appointments or even.
Speaker DAnd this obviously gets into confidentiality issues and so forth.
Speaker DBut sometimes folks might even need somebody to go in and talk to their doctor with them about what is going on.
Speaker DMaybe there's language barriers or maybe there's just unfamiliarity with things.
Speaker DAnd obviously, again, that has to be navigated very carefully with each individual with respect to their pregnancies, privacy and so forth.
Speaker DBut that might be a place where folks could help.
Speaker DSome churches operate food pantries, just kind of paying attention to what food are we stocking?
Speaker DWhat kind of nutrition is available through this food?
Speaker DIs it all just calories?
Speaker DAre there plenty of micronutrients?
Speaker DIs there plenty of protein, plenty of fiber?
Speaker DAll those kinds of things.
Speaker DAnd so maybe even rethinking about asking what you ask for donations for the food pantry might be something that the church could do.
Speaker DAnd if you don't have one, maybe, you know, starting one or starting something like that.
Speaker BRight.
Speaker DHelping to deal with issues of food insecurity, food access.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker DI mean, you know, there's probably a whole long list of things that could be done, but those are just some of the ones that kind of popped onto my head.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BI'm asking one other thing, and then TJ will be annoyed at Me, but it's okay.
Speaker BI think.
Speaker BI don't think he hates me yet.
Speaker BOne of the things you said somewhat, too, is what I'm actually curious of the angelology, demonology, and how people think that might impact their health.
Speaker BGrowing up Pentecostal, I know a lot of people who blame diseases and stuff or mental illnesses on demons.
Speaker BIs that kind of what you were getting at or is there something else?
Speaker BI'm just curious.
Speaker DYeah, I think that's part of it.
Speaker DSome people absolutely have that mindset that some element of mental illness and some, sometimes even physical illnesses are spiritual in nature.
Speaker DBut there's also, you know, the element of, you know, on the flip side.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DDo I think that, you know, angels can be a source of healing or a source of relief from these things?
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo I think that there's a kind of practical public health issue of being aware of people's beliefs in those kinds of areas and helping navigate them.
Speaker DAnd whether you, as a healthcare provider or a public health professional, share those same beliefs or not, you might have to still navigate how a person approaches those kinds of questions and be respectful of where they're coming from and provide solutions in a way that is consistent or complementary to how they approach things.
Speaker DAnd that may be another role for, you know, for the church.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DFor the church leaders to be able to help navigate those.
Speaker DThose intersections.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DAnd help maybe some of the congregation being a positive force for.
Speaker DHey, you know, there's a way that this medicine or that, you know, this health care procedure or mental health, you know, treatment can sit alongside of your belief in, you know, God's healing rather than being at odds with it.
Speaker DSo, yeah, that was.
Speaker DThat was kind of what I had in mind.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker CYeah, I mean, I get it.
Speaker CAnd they're right.
Speaker CDemons do cause all bad things.
Speaker BNo.
Speaker CYep, that's what that is.
Speaker CSo is there any one of the topics that we mentioned that you think is particularly irrelevant to your life?
Speaker CLike, specifically, I mean, to my life.
Speaker DIt's a whole lot, you know, not necessarily, but, you know, thinking about, like, how I conduct my.
Speaker DMy job day to day.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DI, you know, I'm not, like I said, you know, a particular model of the end times, a particular model of atonement.
Speaker DMaybe I'm just not a good enough theologian, but I'm not really sure how I would do my job differently under different circumstances.
Speaker DI guess there's a certain nihilism that comes with a certain very extreme view of eschatology that I might just not do my job if I didn't think that there was any way that I could positively impact the world or something like that, but that's a fairly extreme view that I'm not sure anybody seriously holds to.
Speaker CRight.
Speaker CDo you think, or what would you rather our church and like our pastors, theologians, focus on just, you know, more to cater towards people like you?
Speaker DYeah, I mean, so, you know, as a person like me, I see, you know, value in theology of all kinds.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DAnd as somebody who is enthusiastic for basic science and curiosity driven science for the, for its own sake, I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anybody from curiosity driven theology for its own sake.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo even if the question of, you know, what, what actually happened on the cross, what was the model of atonement or the question of what's coming in the future for all of us, even if that might not change what I'm practically doing from moment to moment, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a, it's not a worthwhile investigation.
Speaker DDoesn't mean it's not interesting academically, intellectually and so forth.
Speaker DSo I, you know, I don't want to, I wouldn't want to dictate, you know, anybody's particular theological preferences or directions and so forth.
Speaker DI think those are all valid topics to explore and, you know, learning more about God, knowing more about God and who God is and what God is like, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't discourage any of that, you know, I think.
Speaker DBut, you know, thinking about myself as a public health person, as a scientist and what might cater to me specifically, you know, I think that what I would like to see is when there are intersections with science, you know, being willing to engage with people who have technical expertise and technical knowledge.
Speaker DI have, I have sat in sermons and heard people preach on biology and heard people preach incorrectly on biology and tried to explain afterwards, you know, if you wouldn't go up in front of the church and say, look, I know we have these fantastic musicians in our church and they can sing and they can play the piano well and all these different things, and that's great, I'm glad that they're here, but we're gonna do worship now and I'm going to sit down at the piano and play and sing and that will be fine.
Speaker DAnd then, you know, know go through and, you know, provide an off key, you know, rendition.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThat wouldn't, we would never do that.
Speaker DThat would be, we would know that that would be so insulting to the talented musicians who have put years and years of practice into being musicians.
Speaker DBut When I try to explain that, I just kind of got like, you know, dead looks like.
Speaker DBut of course, it's not the same thing because I didn't sing.
Speaker DI talked about science.
Speaker DAnd that's, you know, everybody's allowed to have their.
Speaker DTheir thoughts and their opinions about these topics.
Speaker DOkay.
Speaker DBut, yeah, I mean, that's.
Speaker DThat's how I've felt in the past, for what.
Speaker DFor whatever that's worth.
Speaker DAnd I would like to see fewer people feel like that in the future, if that's at all possible.
Speaker BYeah, yeah.
Speaker BNo, I actually.
Speaker BI really love that.
Speaker BI.
Speaker BAnd we've had Frank Viola on our podcast a few other times, so check him out if you guys will.
Speaker BHe's a little bit more conservative, but he helps write a book called Pagan Christianity where they kind of show how the church somehow became this place where, like, it revolves around one person doing a speech and it's like a show, and that's not what the church started off as.
Speaker BSo I like this idea of more people participating in different ways, whether it be our scientists to talk about scientific issues rather than someone who maybe doesn't have expertise in that field.
Speaker BOr, you know, like you mentioned pastors preaching about biology, not knowing anything about it.
Speaker BYour pastor's preaching the Bible.
Speaker BAnd I'm like, I kind of wish you would stop at exalt a Bible expert first, because even the stuff that's, like, maybe seems inconsequential that you get wrong.
Speaker BI'm like, no, that's just incorrect.
Speaker BThat's not actually what it says.
Speaker BOr, you know, I'm like, I don't think you read this other passage that says Saul's name, who was also Paul.
Speaker BThat's the thing, they get wrong a lot, right?
Speaker BWhere people, like, when Saul's name changed, like, it didn't stop preaching.
Speaker BThat Bible doesn't say that.
Speaker BAnd it's just stuff like that.
Speaker BOr even, you know, when preachers preach about, like, the Buddha and how he's their God.
Speaker BAnd I'm like, he's not, though.
Speaker BYou know, like, we expect our TV shows to go to scientific experts, religious experts for philosophy, people on hand so that they get stuff right.
Speaker BBut for some reason, when a preacher gets up to tell a congregation what is truth, the same expectation isn't put on them, that's on our entertainment of simply just getting stuff right, you know, I don't know.
Speaker BThat was just a little bit of a side tangent, I guess.
Speaker BAnyway, each of us see the world through different eyes, right?
Speaker BLike something we talked a lot about on this series is, you know, you as a scientist and how you live your daily life, you see the world differently than someone like me who works in food.
Speaker BHow we see the world going through our life.
Speaker BIs there anything in your work that you think that you see that our pastors, church leaders, theologians, might benefit from seeing for themselves or learning more about that maybe they don't see in their regular daily lives?
Speaker DYeah, I had occasion to talk with Will a little bit about this, and it was kind of actually even exploring a little bit as we were talking and hadn't quite articulated it in this way before, but one of the things that I have to do for my job periodically is, you know, we get this text data of why do people go to the hospital?
Speaker DAnd we have to identify new categories in that data and find new things that we hadn't been looking for before.
Speaker DYou know, for example, drug overdoses.
Speaker DWe didn't used to work with those, but, you know, became a bigger and bigger concern.
Speaker DAnd our data was able to provide up to date information at a time when that was harder to get.
Speaker DAnd so, you know, it was a new thing that we had to take on.
Speaker DSo periodically I have to go through this text data and I'll look through tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these short little descriptions of why people went to the hospital.
Speaker DAnd by and large, what I'm getting is a very, very concentrated dose of everybody's top five, 10 worst days of their lives, right?
Speaker DThere are some people, obviously, that go to the ED more often that are experiencing chronic illnesses.
Speaker DAnd there are some trips to the ED that are not that big of a deal.
Speaker DYou had a small injury or a little bit of a fever and you'll be fine.
Speaker DBut by and large, if you're in the emergency department, that's one of the worst days of your life.
Speaker DYou've been in some kind of bad car accident, you're having some kind of health crisis.
Speaker DEven if it's just kind of that emotional, like something is going on with my body that I don't get.
Speaker DThat's a tough day.
Speaker DAnd so getting that concentrated dose of tens of thousands, hundreds, thousands of people's worst moments, that's a tough thing to deal with kind of emotionally, mentally.
Speaker DAnd so, you know, but it's.
Speaker DAnd thinking through that and thinking about that, it's given me opportunity to reflect on, you know, the experience that God must have of having a much more, you know, than just a little text blurb awareness of what people, you know, both the joys and the happiness and the, you know, top 10 days, positive days of people's lives and the, you know, the top 10 worst days of people's lives that we're all going through all the time.
Speaker DThere's always, you know, I don't know how many millions of people experiencing their worst day of their life at any given time right around the world.
Speaker DAnd you know, how God experienced that exactly?
Speaker DLike I said, I don't really know for sure.
Speaker DBut, you know, scripture testifies that to some extent, you know, in some fashion, God is aware of our suffering and our joys and, you know, is sensitive to those things.
Speaker DAnd so what, you know, what must that be like?
Speaker DAnd again, not trying to say that I'm experiencing something the same way that God has, but it's a different kind of human experience that maybe helps us to think a little bit differently about what God's perspective might be like.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BAlso for those wondering, he mentioned Will, that Pastor Will Rose.
Speaker BHe's my pastor.
Speaker BWe also mention him every episode now, apparently.
Speaker BAnd they will.
Speaker BAnd Andy did an episode, a YouTube exclusive for systematic Ecology, talking about Andy's book.
Speaker BSo I think that's kind of where they got into some of that if you guys want to check it out.
Speaker BHopefully I remember to put that link in the show notes, but I'm bad at that, so don't count on it.
Speaker CYeah, yeah.
Speaker CAll right.
Speaker CSo are there any questions that we might have missed that you think people might want to know about you or your work as a public health official?
Speaker DYou know, I think, I think we've touched on the basics of what I do.
Speaker DYou know, it is a very unusual kind of job, as I've kind of hinted at.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DIt's at this intersection of software and software engineering and statistical analysis and data engineering and data science and also public health and biology and, you know, so it.
Speaker BYou guys are basically hitting multiple jobs at once.
Speaker DYeah.
Speaker DJust so you know, when I, when I applied for this, for this job, they told me, well, we didn't really have an opening for somebody like you because we didn't know that somebody like you existed.
Speaker DYeah.
Speaker DBut, yeah, so, you know, it's always.
Speaker DThere's always something new going on.
Speaker DThere's always something interesting to work on.
Speaker DBut yeah, hopefully folks have a little better awareness that this is.
Speaker DThere's a whole community of people who are sitting out there at a second kind of level removed from your doctors.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DObviously you've got doctors and nurses and other clinicians who care about your specific personality, health and well being.
Speaker DBut then there's this whole Other level of people that are trying to think about how do we.
Speaker DHow do we make things better for whole groups and communities and neighborhoods and states and counties and, you know, hopefully that that's a positive thing to think about, that, you know, that these folks, you know, they may not always achieve it in the.
Speaker DTo the best that they.
Speaker DThey want to or the.
Speaker DTo the degree that they want to, but they are trying to figure out how to make things better for all of us, how to improve our health, how to improve our environments and our communities so that we can all flourish a little bit more.
Speaker DAnd.
Speaker DYeah, you know, and it really kind of grieved me a bit when, you know, to see these folks get demonized so much and, you know, the idea that, like, oh, they don't want us going out and hanging out in restaurants or getting together.
Speaker DI'm like, if only you knew you could talk to some of these people, like, they would be the first person to go to you with a bar, have a drink with you, chat with you.
Speaker DThey would love nothing more than to see you get to socialize and be happy and would gladly do it with you if you were so inclined.
Speaker DBut, yeah, I think there are a few people that I've met more who are more just kind of thinking about how do we make things better for everybody all the time.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CI do have one question.
Speaker CAs the chief science officer, do you get, like, a big fancy desk?
Speaker BYou got a name for gimbal?
Speaker DSo I got the job title that I have.
Speaker DMy boss said it was about 60, 40 between it was appropriate promotion in the sort of corporate advancement sense and wanting to give me a job title that was the same as Mr.
Speaker DSpocks on Star Trek.
Speaker BYes.
Speaker BSo fantastic.
Speaker DWe are a small software company and, well, we don't have to go there, but, yeah, we are a small software company.
Speaker DWe've been about the same size the whole time that I've been there.
Speaker DSo, you know, I'm not in some fake fancy corner office.
Speaker DI don't even have a door on my office.
Speaker DThis private suite kind of thing.
Speaker DI do have, you know, a nice.
Speaker BYet you don't have it yet.
Speaker DYet.
Speaker DMy desk is bigger than.
Speaker DMy desk in my office at work is bigger than other desks that I've had before.
Speaker DSo I guess I would say there's a big desk, but it's not like, you know, it's certainly nothing, you know, one of these, like, solid wood kind of.
Speaker CRight.
Speaker DYou know, those aren't real.
Speaker CNo one has that.
Speaker DYeah.
Speaker BI'm literally recording on that desk right now, a solid wood, big desk.
Speaker CYeah, but it's not that solid.
Speaker CIt's broken.
Speaker BI mean, that's true, but that's because I moved it several times and I broke it.
Speaker BI'm just that powerful.
Speaker BThat's different.
Speaker BAnyway, the, you know, one thing we usually do on this show before wrapping up is to ask our guests if they could provide a single tangible action for those listening that they could go to help church unity, you know, whatever.
Speaker BBut instead, for this series, we've been asking people, people, if someone in the church or the church itself could do something to help you specifically or like someone like you or in your career that works with public health, what's something the church could do that would be beneficial to people like you, Andy, or someone in the church?
Speaker DYeah, you know, I think that, you know, something that public health folks could always use is just a little more encouragement and appreciation or gratefulness.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DSo when you're, when you're a physician and you help somebody get better, right.
Speaker DYou see that you have some direct connection to, oh, look, that person is now healthy because I, you know, gave them this medicine or performed the surgery, what have you.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DThe best that I can do working in public health, and especially since I'm kind of like even one step removed from frontline public health is, well, hopefully like 100,000 people are like 1 point or zero 0.1% better off today than they were last year or whatever.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DAnd so maybe hopefully that all those, you know, little.00001s add up to something.
Speaker DBut it's very abstract, it's very indirect and diffuse.
Speaker DAnd so, yeah, just kind of saying to somebody, hey, I know that I don't know what exactly you've done done to help me personally, but I know that you're working hard to help people and I appreciate that and thank you for that.
Speaker DYou know, if you know somebody who works in or around public health and obviously also, you know, healthcare, frontline healthcare workers and all those folks, you know, deserve all the thanks and appreciation that we can give them too.
Speaker DBut yeah, if you know somebody in public health just, you know, every once in a while that, that little, hey, I'm glad that you do what you do, and obviously everybody would, would benefit from that.
Speaker DBut just kind of, I think public health, because of that abstraction, because of that removal from any kind of tangible, direct results, it's always, it's always needed.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BWell, we do appreciate you and what you do, for the record.
Speaker DWell, thank you.
Speaker BYeah, it's true.
Speaker CAnd what do you think we would see change in the world around us if everyone started doing that?
Speaker CYou know, just being thankful to our local or not local public health officials?
Speaker DWell, I mean, I think we would maybe develop a greater collective appreciation and understanding for what public health is and does and has been doing and why it's been one of the best investments we've made over the past century and why it would be worth continuing to invest in and continuing to have people pursue.
Speaker DYou know, I think we're kind of at a low point at the moment of why would anybody want to get into this job that, you know, when folks aren't even gonna listen to what you have to say or what have you?
Speaker DSo, yeah, I think if, you know, if we could foster a little bit more appreciation, awareness of just what it is that public health does and why they do it, then, you know, maybe we'd have a.
Speaker DWe'd be in good shape for the next generation of public health workers.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker CAll right, so before we start to wrap up here, we like to do what we call the God moment, and we ask everyone to share a moment they saw God in recently, whether that be a blessing, a challenge, a moment of worship, what have you, what it may be.
Speaker CI always make Josh go first to give the rest of us enough time to think about a good moment where we saw God recently.
Speaker CSo, Josh, do you have a God moment for us this week?
Speaker CYes.
Speaker BIt's going to be weird and maybe a little awkward.
Speaker BI don't know.
Speaker BMy God moment this week is just like approximately an hour and 10 minutes ago.
Speaker BI was thinking about how thankful I am for this guy named tj, Tiberius Vaughn Blackwell.
Speaker BHe just does a lot for different podcasts that I'm involved with.
Speaker BYou know, I produce, I edit, I do all this stuff, and sometimes TJ is just like, he's the ground man, right?
Speaker BLike, he's, hey, we need somebody to jump in here.
Speaker BAnd he's like, yeah, I could do that.
Speaker BYeah, I know enough to talk about that.
Speaker DSure.
Speaker BAnd TJ says sure to so many wild, crazy ideas I have or just things that I need help with, and he makes my life a lot easier.
Speaker BAnd just think about how thankful I am for him and how I just don't say that enough, probably.
Speaker BSo being on this podcast and getting the opportunity to thank TJ is.
Speaker BThat's going to be my God moment.
Speaker BSo thank you, dj.
Speaker CYeah, you're welcome.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CSo for me, my God moment, it's.
Speaker CIt's a.
Speaker CIt's a.
Speaker CIt's a weird one, it's a different one.
Speaker CI've been so caught up in, like the cultural zeitgeist of, you know, just everything that's going on really, and how much attention has been diverted away from environmental health recently because of the pandemic and seeing it come back into the spotlight.
Speaker CEspecially for us here in South Carolina, where we've got, you know, wildfires for the first time, like ever.
Speaker CNot actually ever, but definitely for the first time since I've been alive, it's been pretty eye opening to see people around me start to grapple with the idea of environmental health.
Speaker CAnd especially because I just the other day I found out, and this is.
Speaker CWell, I've always been such a big advocate for making your kids go play outside, but now it's just not all that safe.
Speaker CMy roommate was going for a walk out behind our apartment complex.
Speaker CJust walking out down there because he likes to look around and see old stuff.
Speaker COld, you know, rotted out buildings and stuff.
Speaker CAnd he found a chemical spill in our creek.
Speaker BOh, yeah?
Speaker BWait, what kind?
Speaker CNot sure yet.
Speaker CBut now that's under investigation, so.
Speaker BInteresting.
Speaker BYeah, that is not what I.
Speaker BWhere I expected this to go, by the way.
Speaker CIt's not, is it?
Speaker BYeah, that's wild.
Speaker CBut, you know, these other problems still exist.
Speaker CYou know, it's nice to be out there, you know, community.
Speaker COur country would fall apart if we weren't.
Speaker CEveryone wasn't trying to look out for each other at least a little bit.
Speaker CAnd I think that's kind of what's happening.
Speaker CSo.
Speaker CWell, you know, do your part.
Speaker BIs that a blessing or a challenge?
Speaker BLike a blessing.
Speaker BWe remember that.
Speaker BThere's.
Speaker BThere's other problems other than just Donald Trump.
Speaker CYeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker CHe's the president.
Speaker BThe only problem in the world.
Speaker CThere's chemicals in my creek.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CBut that's getting dealt with.
Speaker CSo, Andy, do you have a God moment for us this week?
Speaker DSo we're making plans.
Speaker DMy wife and my daughter and I are making plans to visit my parents for Easter weekend coming up.
Speaker DAnd kind of out of the blue, my daughter was asking me, hey, does grandma still run the Sunday school at her church?
Speaker DI was like, yeah, I think so.
Speaker DOr, you know, she's still involved, like.
Speaker DOkay.
Speaker DAnd you asked this because she's like, oh, yeah, because I wanted to, you know, see if she needed my help with Sunday school when we go see her.
Speaker DAnd, you know, in light of just, you know, without getting into all the details.
Speaker DRight.
Speaker DBut my family and my daughters had, you know, some complicated relationships with church activities in recent years.
Speaker DAnd so just hearing that, oh, you know, she was still thinking about that.
Speaker DShe was thinking about how to help my mom, how to help these kids, how to be involved at church when we go out there to this other church that she's not familiar with.
Speaker DEspecially because my parents church is meeting in a different building.
Speaker DThey had a fire like a year and a half ago.
Speaker DI think now it is.
Speaker DAnd so they've been meeting in another church's building and so that, you know, this will be our first time there in this other unfamiliar setting.
Speaker DSo that, you know, she was not like, oh, you know, I don't want to go.
Speaker DI don't want to be involved.
Speaker DI don't want to.
Speaker DI just want to kind of hide.
Speaker DBut she was like, no, how can I help?
Speaker DHow can I be involved?
Speaker DThat was encouraging and positive to see.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BAll right.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CAnd if you like this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend.
Speaker CShare with an enemy, Share with your cousins.
Speaker CCheck out the store we run through Captivate.
Speaker CIt's comfy, it's nice, it's reasonably priced.
Speaker CThere's no reason not to unless you don't have any money.
Speaker CBut if you want me us to buy you the merch, you know, that still goes down as a merch sale for us.
Speaker CSo let us know, we'll see what happens.
Speaker BYeah, it wouldn't be the first time weirdly enough, but yeah.
Speaker BAlso check out our other shows.
Speaker BYou know, this is a crossover we're doing.
Speaker BWe're doing some cross promotion with systematic ecology with our encore episode here.
Speaker BSo check them out.
Speaker BBut you know, check out all the shows on the Unazile podcast network.
Speaker BYou can check out trying to think some ones.
Speaker BI don't usually say the homily with Will Rose.
Speaker BYou can check out Friday Night Fright with Christian Ashley or the Bible After Hours with the foul mouth preacher.
Speaker BAll those are, are fun and I think worth worth taking your time checking them out.
Speaker CYeah.
Speaker CAnd we hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker CNext week we will be off for a week.
Speaker CIt's gonna be crazy.
Speaker CWe're gonna do probably nothing and realistically probably a lot actually.
Speaker CBut the week after that we're having a round table of pastors and professors join us to reflect on this, our job Fair series.
Speaker CAnd after that we're going to be doing some episodes to hype up the Ology beer camp.
Speaker CBut this year in St.
Speaker CPaul, Minnesota.
Speaker CAnd we hope to have Reverend Shayna Watson back on soon to discuss her time pastoring an international diverse faith community at the Anglican Trinity church in Washington D.C.
Speaker Cat the end of season one, of course, will be Francis Chan.
Speaker BYeah.
Speaker BHe doesn't know, though, so someone does have to tell him.
Speaker BStill police.
Speaker CYeah, we're currently.
Speaker CWe're going for, like, the world record.
Speaker CLongest first season.
Speaker BYeah, something like that.
Speaker BBut I think, yeah, it's got to be close.
Speaker BI don't know.
Speaker BI've never checked the stats.
Speaker BI have no idea.
Speaker BGuinness let us know.
Speaker CRight.
Speaker BTill next time, though.
Speaker AOn us, Lord Please put your hand on us day by day, Lord.
Speaker DLord.
Speaker AHave mercy on us, Lord Please put your hand on us day by day.