GERM
00:00:00.400 – 00:00:23.360
Wassaaaaap? My name is Germ.

WORM
00:00:23.600 – 00:00:24.560
I’m Worm.

GERM
00:00:24.560 – 00:00:41.500
Welcome to episode 100 of the Germ and Worm travel health podcast: Our century episode Reflections from the first 100 episodes episodes of Germ and Worm. It’s a big planet. See it in Good Health.

I’m Dr. Paul Pottinger, also called Germ. I’m a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Washington in Seattle.

WORM
00:00:41.500 – 00:00:49.820
I’m Dr. Chris Sanford, also known as Worm, Associate professor in the departments of Family Medicine and Global Health, also at the University of Washington.

GERM
00:00:49.820 – 00:01:13.710
Well, this is it. I am just so proud to announce that we are at. Chris, we turned 100.

I mean, I feel like I would never look forward to that, but we are 100 episodes old now. Super exciting. And for the last two years, you and I have produced a new episode every week. Like clockwork. We have not missed a single Tuesday. These half hours of scintillating question and answer on travel health from our listeners.

WORM
00:01:14.190 – 00:01:31.620
Today we’re going to talk about how the podcast came together, how two doctors in Seattle came up with the notion of sharing our thoughts on travel medicine, and how we put our initial concept into action. Some of the things we’ve learned as we’ve transitioned from physicians to part time talking heads.

GERM
00:01:32.010 – 00:03:34.610
As always, we start first with our disclaimer. This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain, but it does not establish a doctor patient relationship.

Before you travel, please see a qualified healthcare professional for recommendations specific to you and to your itinerary. With that in mind, that’s our usual caveat. Nothing has changed in the last 100 episodes because that’s all still true. Let’s talk about this.

Chris, you asked a good question. Where did this come from? This crazy Germ and Worm podcast. So the origins of this podcast go back some years.

You and I have talked about this over time. And Chris, I’m blaming you. This was your idea. As I recall, you and I are both big fans of a wonderful radio show on NPR called Car Talk.

Right click and clack. The Tapit Brothers. And I think that’s something we’ve been talking about since we’re old friends.

What would it be like if we had that same vibe of 2 friends, in this case, they’re old curmudgeonly brothers, but two friends who are talking about things, questions from the community. Not on car health, on human health, and not related to just anything, but related to travel.

We get so many questions about travel health and travel wellness in our clinical medical practices, and we give the same answers over and over again. Why not democratize it? Why not spread it around and create this podcast?

So the idea was a fun vibe that people can feel comfortable sending us their questions and we give them the best high quality answers that we can. Part of that comes from the idea that there’s so much misinformation that’s out there, isn’t there?

Pew Charitable Trust has said that about 54% of Americans get their news either sometimes or often from social media. And you know, that’s okay if social media is right, but so often it’s wrong.

And for us as medical professionals, this is a way for us to, well, take social media and verbal media and try to make it into something good. Or we can try to give a message of hope, of clarity, and also to do it in a way that’s fun. So that’s been part of the goal, isn’t it?

WORM
00:03:34.840 – 00:04:42.400
Right? Definitely. And at help. You and I have been doing things together other than the podcast really for decades now, for at least 20 years.

We have written textbooks together, we’ve edited each other’s prose, and certainly you’ve made my prose better with your edits. We’ve put on medical education classes together. And maybe the most intense, dare I say intimate collaboration was the East African course.

Paul and I both helped set up this big course for 60 students a year from all over the world in East Africa.

It was a three month course put on annually, and there were about 2 billion meetings and documents involved in setting up that course and running it every year, every year for a decade. Paul went to Tanzania and I went to Uganda to teach in this course. And through that I got to know you, Paul, really well.

And among your other virtues is you actually followed up on your commitments. You did what you said you were going to do, besides being smart and charming.

And so after all of that collaboration, when I had this notion of a podcast, really, my list of people to do it with consisted of your name only.

GERM
00:04:42.960 – 00:05:42.840
Well, I don’t know what I did to earn that trust, but it’s been such a fun experience for me. I’ve really enjoyed working with you on this podcast and it fits with our goal, right?

I mean, the ambition that I had first of all, it just attracted me, this idea, when you came up with it.

And the idea was to have, you know, no nonsense, no bs, the best evidence that we could possibly have to share with our audience, but also to have fun. And Chris, for you and me, just to reconnect, that course in East Africa has. Has ceased to exist. Which I’m sorry about. Very sorry about.

And one of the reasons I am sorry about it, of the many, is it meant that I had less time to spend with you. So this has been a fun way for us to reconnect and just keep the friendship going and talk about fun travel topics each and every week.

So tell me a little bit about this. Why don’t you share with the audience? How the hell did we do this? We’re academic medical doctors. We are not podcasters. Shocking.

I’m sure our listeners are shocked to hear that we are not actually professional podcasters. So how did we actually do do this? What are, what are the steps if one of our listeners wants to get their own podcast going?

What pearls of wisdom would you share?

WORM
00:05:43.080 – 00:09:59.440
You bet. Well, I actually made a list. You know, as an academician, I love turning out academic products.

And after you’ve decided to do it, I did this PowerPoint. And in fact, listeners, I’ll send it to you if you email us and ask for it.

Germandworm@gmail.com and so, 25 steps how to set up a medical or other podcast. Number one, know something about something.

And this is probably not mandatory if you’re unusually charismatic or beautiful, apparently, but for us mortals, you gotta know something about something, whether it’s rubber stamps or cinema or what have you. So, you know, Paul and I really didn’t have a lot of choices for what we’re experts on. But we know travel medicine.

We’ve been doing it for decades, clinically. We’ve both written books together, edited books both for lay people and for docs on this. So you gotta have a region of expertise.

Number two, find a bud. I could have done this on my own. Paul could have done it on his own. But it’s way more fun doing it with somebody.

There’s more ideas or somebody to laugh at your jokes. You can edit each other’s ideas, you can split costs, and of course, that brings additional expertise.

I think it helps that Paul and I are not the same specialty. Paul’s infectious disease. I’m family medicine. And each of us bring our respective training to the podcast. Number three, Preliminaries define goals.

What are you trying to do? Maybe even I Hate to use this phrase, it’s a little wonky, but write a mission statement. What are you trying to do?

And Paul and I did that and basically we’re trying to disseminate evidence based travel medicine in an entertaining way. Define your target audience, research your competition.

One plus that Paula and I have is there’s not a lot of docs that I found who are doing travel medicine on social media. Also, if you can come up with a catchy name. And Paul’s exactly right.

But decades ago, when I heard the name Click and Clack, I thought it was the most brilliant, genius name ever for a couple guys talking about cars. And also lastly, on preliminaries, I’d recommend that you keep it small and contained and demarcated and finite.

If Paul and I were talking about the health of people everywhere, that just would be so fluffy and nebulous as to be near meaningless. But we have our little niche, our little travel medicine niche that we know something about and I think that’s a strength.

Number four, draft a long timeline. So Paul and I, we were working on this way before we started it. I think I brought up the idea maybe a decade ago.

We finally got around to hiring a media coordinator. August of 23, we started weekly meetings. Then we started recording in my basement weekly meetings or weekly episodes rather.

January of 24, half a year later we started posting them. July of 24. Then May of 25 was our 50th episode. And now we’re at number 100. Number five, bounce ideas back and forth.

A lot of ideas, crazy ideas, nutty ideas. Paul and I throw out ideas. The other one says, oh, that’s good, oh that’s bad. But that helps decide which platforms you’re going to be on.

You know, we’re on Apple, podcasts and Spotify, among others. Also decide which social media platforms you’re going to be on. We’re on Facebook and Instagram, but not on all of them. Number six, make lists.

What are your priorities? What do you got to do today? If you have a finite amount of money, which we all do, what is top priority? What to do first? Establish a budget.

Number seven, speaking of which, have some money, spend some money. The more your diy, the lower your expenses are going to be.

So for example, if you can make websites and the graphics yourself, you’re going to save money.

Paul and I, due to a lack of expertise, have actually hired people to make the website and we have a graphics person who I’ll mention in just a minute. Speaking of which, number eight. Hire a team. We had a media coordinator for over a year.

We still have a graphics person and actually I mentioned her now and thank you, Val Evdemon. Val lives in Miami. We’ve been working with her since the very beginning. She makes those beautiful graphics for us that are turned out every week.

We hired someone to make a website. We also hired a trademark attorney.

So if you’re thinking of calling yourself Germ and Worm or making coffee cups that are German Worm, make us an offer.

GERM
00:09:59.440 – 00:10:03.680
Make us an offer. We’ll entertain. And any incoming that’s right for a.

WORM
00:10:03.680 – 00:15:32.080
Small cut, we’ll give you permission to do it. Number nine. Regular meetings and make agendas.

This is a little tedious, but I subject Paul and Paul subjects me to agenda items because there’s always stuff about money and social media and all these other details that we’re still learning about. And these can be either in person or Zoom or Microsoft Teams. 10. Buy some gear.

Not a lot, but we’ve bought microphones in this gizmo little box called the audio interface that goes between your microphone and your laptop and lighting. Number 11. Learn an audio recording program. So currently we use GarageBand, which comes free on Apple computers.

We’re thinking about switching to one called Hindenburg 12. Practice recording. Paul knows more about this than me. But you don’t want a real echoey sound. You don’t want a bad sound.

So learn about mics and booms and audio interface and this is important sound treatment of recording area. 13. Create a website. Decide what you’re going to have on it.

Have downloadable content on it, and learn all of the acronyms like SEO, Search Engine Optimization and CTA Call to Action that are relating to a website. 14. Get onto social media. So we’re on, as I say, Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and threads and Blue sky and learn the lingo.

I had to learn the difference between a post, a reel and a story, all of which have very specific meanings within the Instagram world. Number 15. Decide what you’re not going to do. You can’t do everything. You can’t be on all platforms. For example, we are not on X.

We were, but then I won’t get into it. But let me just allude to our lack of fondness for the guy who makes electric cars. So we’re off X now.

Formerly Twitter also, and I’ll touch base on this later in the show. But our podcasts are audio only for now, but that’s going to change. 16. Watch some tutorials.

YouTube is a beautiful university and I’VE gone to it again and again. You know that somewhere someone has made a video on sound treatment. How not to get an echoey sound.

Someone else has done something on lighting for videos, which is a technical area. How to edit a video.

So Paul and I have watched a heck of a lot of YouTube videos getting basically education for free since we don’t have the money to hire a studio somewhere. Number 17 hire services. And I won’t say what all of these do again.

Email me if you’re curious, but among the services that we’ve hired are Captivate, GoDaddy, Wix, Bluehost, Mailchimp, Anytime, Mailbox, Bitly, and Descript. And these all do little pieces of the electronic magic that result in a episode coming out every week. 18. Record a bunch of podcasts first.

Don’t like record one and release it because you want a reliable schedule. I’m told that listeners like reliability. So Paul and I recorded for months and got a big fat backlog before we started releasing them.

And that way if we had a little life event it was we couldn’t record for a few weeks. We still could have one come out every week like clockwork because we had a bit of a backlog. 19.

Don’t forget to be entertaining Paul and I could make this stuff really tedious and boring and in fact most education of medicine in my experience is tedious and boring. But we’re trying to be entertaining. So tell jokes, be silly, tell anecdotes, reveal a little bit of your personal self number.

20 Make a release schedule and publicize it and post the first podcast episode.

Currently we upload to a place called Captivate and they distribute it so that we’re on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Stitcher, listen Notes, Refonic, Amazon Music pod, Bay, Player FM and elsewhere. 21 Contact everyone you’ve ever met.

So you know, Paul and I had only a minuscule advertising budget and so we’ve been interviewed by reporters over the years. We have friends, we have professional associations, we have alumni groups, we have families.

And so we basically sent out mass mailing email and others saying hey, we’ve got a podcast. Some of these people we ended up interviewing consider hiring advertising number 22.

So we’re not doing a lot of that, but we did spend a little money on Facebook and Meta is Facebook and Instagram and also we’re paying a little bit on YouTube to advertise. 23 Get feedback. Listen. We’ve gotten some great ideas from listeners.

Like one listener, my friend Mike in Palos Verdes said, hey, why don’t you at the top of every show, say what you’re going to say? And I thought, great idea. That never occurred to us. So ask for feedback, ask for questions. 24 Monitor metrics.

So on Captivate and Spotify, I can tell you how many downloads we have per week. I can tell you what country the downloads are in. So I know now that roughly 80% of our listeners are in the United States.

But actually, I think we’ve had downloads Now, Paul, in 107 countries, which is kind of fun to see. And then number 25 later, maybe think about monetizing. Paul and I have not done that yet.

You may notice we have no sponsor, we have no pharma involvement, which is kind of nice because we can say whatever the heck we want. But realistically, most podcasts don’t make money. And so even if we never monetize, I’m still having fun doing this.

So the final part of this is don’t quit the day job. So that’s my take, Paul, in 25 steps. And like I say, if anybody wants this PowerPoint, drop me a line and I’ll send you the whole thing.

GERM
00:15:33.200 – 00:16:05.080
Well, there it is. I mean, our entire two year odyssey in 25 steps. I love it. Yes, folks, podcasting is a 25 step program.

So let me say this in the immortal words of C. Montgomery Burns, life is not all hams and plaques. I mean, we have a lot of challenges too, don’t we, Chris?

And one of them is the fact that we’re often not able to get together physically in the same time and place to record. In fact, right now, I’m coming to you from the new German Worm world headquarters, which is in the basement of my house in Seattle.

Where are you calling us from, Chris?

WORM
00:16:05.560 – 00:16:33.730
Well, just today, my better half and I took the ferry from the toe of the boot of Italy to Messina on Sicily. And now we are at a farmhouse. It’s an Airbnb on the lower slopes of Mount Edna, active big volcano in eastern Sicily. And it’s lovely.

We look up from this farmhouse and there’s this massive snow covered volcano looming above us. So luckily, thank you, Zoom. We’re able to record this in different places.

GERM
00:16:34.130 – 00:19:24.110
Yeah. So Chris Sanford md Walking the walk and doing the travel thing and that.

Which is amazing and also fun and endlessly vexing from a technical standpoint because we’re here trying to, you know, podcast for all you folks and we never miss a Tuesday, no matter what happens, travel to the boot of Italy. In my case, cruising to Antarctica. Being on sabbatical, breaking my ankle. We’ve both had deaths and losses in our families as well.

So joys and tragedies come up, life goes on. And how do we accommodate that? Part of it’s just having a buffer of episodes that are, that are in the can.

But we don’t want to do it too far in advance. We want this to be timely and topical. So we try to get this ripped from the headlines as much as we possibly can.

Neither one of us is trained as an audio recording expert. I have taken on most of that work. I do all the editing. Yep. Those sassy sound effects, that’s all. That’s all. That’s all coming from me.

And learned a lot about audio engineering and such, and I still have a long way to go. Another big challenge for us has been the algorithm. This thing you’ve heard of, it’s called social media. And what the hell is up with that?

I mean, why is it that one of our social media posts will get more than 100,000 views and the next one gets 12? It’s just been so capricious. And if there’s an algorithm, we haven’t hacked it.

We have not hacked the algorithm for trying to get slipping into your DMs or anything like that. So that has been strange and vexing and likewise, we haven’t figured out how to make money at this.

I mean, truth be told, like you said, Chris, we haven’t tried. But if there is a way to make these profitable, we haven’t figured it out.

If you want to know how to do this and invest money instead of lose money, come talk to us. We’ll talk to you all about that.

So we do have a plan to convert this content that you’re getting each week that will become a physical manual germ and worms guide to healthy travel. And we’re hoping that’ll come to bookstores in 2026, stay tuned, we’ll talk to you about that. But otherwise, yeah, we have not sold out.

We have not advertised. That may have to change in the future. If so, we’ll try to do it in the best way we can, but that hasn’t happened yet.

And finally, what’s also interesting is that what is topical and timely may not actually be that important to our listeners.

I’m thinking about the hantavirus question here we are in early May 2026 and unfortunately there’s been a tragedy with some loss of life aboard a cruise ship down in Antarctica due to haunt of pulmonary syndrome. Stay tuned. We’ll Talk about this coming up. I’m happy to. You’re not going to catch hantavirus if you cruise to Antarctica.

I’m just telling you right now. I mean, we have millions of people who do this. It’s happened exactly three times. So we’ll talk about that.

And sometimes that’s something that we’re torn between what’s topical and what we think is important. We’re trying to walk that fine line and bring you information that we think could be helpful to you.

It may not necessarily be what you think you need to hear.

WORM
00:19:24.750 – 00:20:31.910
Another fun thing we’ve done is interacted with other podcasters and there’s a very smart gynecologist named Karen Tang who’s very active on social media. She has a recent book out that’s excellent. And we interviewed her and then we can cross support. So she does publicity for our podcast and vice versa.

Another smart doc who we interviewed is Zach Rubin. He’s an allergist. Again, very active on social media. He has a book out also.

But I think it has helped our numbers that we work with these people because they get to know us, we get to know them, and the whole network gets stronger. Another doc we’ve interviewed is Greg Davis, who’s an ENT in the greater Seattle area. Also, we’ve had some theme episodes which has been super fun.

In fact, our very next episode is our annual Malaria.

When we talk about malaria for an entire episode, another one we do that’s fun once a year is Tick Tock, also coming up in a couple episodes where we talk for a whole episode about tick spread diseases. So these are some ways that we have done entire shows on one particular theme.

GERM
00:20:32.070 – 00:21:37.720
All right. And you know, the heart and soul of our enterprise here is receiving questions from our listeners and answering them to the best of our ability.

They’re amazing. It’s. I’m just so impressed with the diversity of questions, Chris. I just want to reflect back.

I mean, when we started this process, you proposed it and I was skeptical because I said how many questions could there possibly be on travel health? We’ll probably have two, three months worth of content, then we’ll flame out.

Here we are two years later and there is absolutely no shortage of new questions that are coming in. And, and by the way, we would love to answer your questions.

If you’re listening on a future episode, just send them to us, germandworm@gmail.com or visit our website, germanworm.com we’ll share whatever information you choose to share with us and nothing more.

But the point is, there’s just endless curiosity and questions around travel health, and that has been fascinating, and it has also led to some very fun and hilarious questions over time. One of my favorites. Well, let me. Hold on that. Tell me your favorite. What’s been your favorite question out of these last 100 episodes?

Which, by the way, ends up being about 800 questions that we’ve heard.

WORM
00:21:38.120 – 00:22:02.570
Well, here’s one I didn’t expect. Our friend Jeb from Federal Way had his famous. I won’t go into details. I’ll just tell you the title of it.

But should I tase a sight of a venomous snake bite on my person? The answer is spoiler alert. No, never tase yourself.

But I was amused and delighted to receive a question on self tasing as treatment for a venomous snake bite.

GERM
00:22:02.730 – 00:22:05.930
Yeah, please don’t tase yourself or anybody else.

WORM
00:22:06.090 – 00:22:06.890
Yeah, no joke.

GERM
00:22:06.890 – 00:22:07.170
Paul.

WORM
00:22:07.170 – 00:22:08.330
What. What have you liked?

GERM
00:22:08.330 – 00:23:00.170
Yeah, thanks.

One of my favorite questions came into us from a listener called Alana who said that she had snogged a camel, kissed a camel square on the lips, and then got terrible diarrhea. And could these things be linked? And the answer was, yeah, maybe. Kinda was probably whatever she ate or drank on the way to or from the camel.

I didn’t want to implicate the poor old dromedary down in Morocco who gave her this illness, but I thought that was great because it was just a reminder that when we travel, Would somebody normally kiss a camel in their daily routine? Probably not. Would you kiss any other farm animal? Probably not.

But you’re traveling and so your guard is down, and so they’ve got these luscious lips that I guess she found alluring. And this turned out to be a. Turned out probably to be a mistake, but I thought that was really fun.

And again, I appreciate the candor that people are willing to share with us their foibles so that other people can learn from their misgivings and their misadventures.

WORM
00:23:00.410 – 00:23:08.290
Well, now, wait a minute. In. In Alana’s defense, I don’t think she kissed the camel. I think you’re exaggerating. I think the camel kissed her unexpectedly.

GERM
00:23:08.290 – 00:23:19.540
Oh, this is an unwelcome advance of the dromedary style. I hadn’t realized that that could actually be. All right, so when you travel to Morocco, look out for the unwanted advances of the camel.

WORM
00:23:20.100 – 00:24:07.230
Another thing we’ve both really enjoyed is we’re learning a ton, because even though we are specialists and we’ve traveled a ton, we don’t we haven’t been everywhere.

We don’t know all the issues, and we get questions from places we’ve never heard of, situations we’ve never considered, and even medical issues we didn’t know about. And for example, we got a question from, I believe it was Lucy and I in the UK about weaverfish, which I had never heard of.

In fact, at first I thought it was a bogus topic, but I read about it and it’s totally legit. There’s these little fish called weaverfish in the uk and they’re in shallow, sandy water, but they sting and it hurts like crazy.

And there’s stuff you can do. But that’s just one example of the many things that I’ve had to read about to answer questions.

It’s made me even a little more knowledgeable in this area.

GERM
00:24:07.800 – 00:25:13.540
Let me put it this way. I mean, yes, it’s true. The reason I do this is to hang with you, Chris. And I’m also proud of the product that we’ve got. I love the website.

I love the fact that people are charmed by our. By our content. The real reason I do it is to learn.

I mean, every single week, as we put together our responses to these questions, I learn something new. I would say that’s true for, for most doctors. It’s most definitely true for every ID infectious disease doctor I know the world is changing.

It’s very dynamic. The body of literature and knowledge is ever growing. The germs evolve, and so do we.

So that’s one of the reasons I have been attracted to this career in academic id. And it’s definitely why I love doing this podcast. I learned every week. Yeah, the weaver fish. Never heard of a weaver fish.

Now, of course, I’m slightly paranoid to go barefooted along the stony shores in the uk. By the way, the water is cold there. Why would you do it? But anyway, yeah, that’s one example. And every single week there’s more like this.

So as we learn, certainly as I’m learning here, Chris, and from you more than anybody else, my hope is that our listeners are learning too. And that’s a shared journey of growing knowledge.

WORM
00:25:13.700 – 00:25:29.780
Just preparing for next week’s show, Malaria. I was reading about topics I thought I knew all about, and it’s changed.

It’s changed in the last 12 months, you know, in terms of the distribution of malaria and other aspects. So, yeah, I love being prompted to stay up to date on all this stuff.

GERM
00:25:29.940 – 00:25:35.060
Yeah, agree. Now, here’s another one of the dark narratives again. It’s not all Hams and plaques.

WORM
00:25:35.860 – 00:25:36.340
Yeah, yeah.

GERM
00:25:36.340 – 00:27:23.020
We live in the United States in 2026.

And for anyone with a heart and soul and brain or any one of those three, you have to realize that we are living in dark times where the federal government’s executive branch is trying to make us into a fascist state. And so that sucks for a whole bunch of reasons.

And that political side of things, inevitably it has to creep in to our listeners questions about travel safety. We want people to be healthy when they travel, and yet what if they can’t fill in the blank. What if they can’t get a vaccine?

What if they can’t get access to medications? What if they can’t be tested? What if they can’t be treated?

All of the things that our current Health and Human Services director is doing to erode health because he’s crazy, you know, that bleeds into our content. And this is something you and I have struggled with a bit, Chris. Right.

Because I think our listeners know and agree that the current state of affairs is not sustainable and it’s not good. We’re all on the same page. So we don’t want to dwell on that. We want to give people alternatives, but we can’t ignore it either.

So we don’t want to be doom and gloom as we shouldn’t be. We’re going to take back the government. Everything will be okay in the long term. But meantime, we have to get through this.

And my ethos has been let’s get through it together in a way that’s no nonsense, where we can also acknowledge that things are really unnecessarily rotten with respect to the state of public health here in the United States, which bleeds into world health as well. So I, you know, we’ve struggled with that.

And actually if you think we’re doing too much commentary on RFK Jr. For example, or too little, you know, let us know. That would certainly be welcome. I can only tell you we think about it every time. We’re trying not to do too much of that.

And my hope is that we’re also not doing too little.

WORM
00:27:23.490 – 00:27:48.780
Yeah, politics should not intrude into medicine, but it has. And so now they’re on my turf.

And I guess Paul and I feel obliged to speak up because we have non medical people trying to dictate national policy and making some very bad, harmful decisions. So I almost feel like, look, I wouldn’t have brought this up if you hadn’t come into my house and made a lot of bad calls.

So I almost feel forced into to.

GERM
00:27:48.780 – 00:27:55.900
This That’s a good way to say it if people think we’re on their turf. Well, they started this. They stepped on our toes and we’re going to kick them in the shins right back.

WORM
00:27:55.980 – 00:28:59.330
Yeah. Now let me talk a little bit about some future plans and one exciting development. For a couple years we’ve been recording shockingly low tech.

We’ve actually, truth be told, in my basement, we record at a card table surrounded by blankets hanging from the ceiling next to a ping pong table. So it was kind of whatever we had that was cheap and easy.

But Paul and his wife Julie have just done a major remodel on their house in the Seattle area. And Paul has constructed a studio in his basement that has sound treatment and it looks really spiffy.

We haven’t recorded there yet, but I think we’re going to start soon when I get back to the States and big news, we’re going to start filming them.

So we’ve been audio only to date, but we’re actually going to try to move to a place like YouTube in addition to the other stuff will still be audio only. So if that’s how you listen, you can still do it that way.

But I think that within a few months, if all goes well, we will be doing this video as well, which we’re kind of anxious about but also looking forward to.

GERM
00:28:59.570 – 00:29:30.160
I would say this is going to be a grand experiment in answering the ultimate question that every broadcaster has. Is my face meant for radio? We’ll find out together and I’m excited to work on it with you. Yeah, the.

This is my home office and it’s also going to double as a recording studio. So we’ll see how that goes. I got to tell you, I have really enjoyed these last hundred episodes.

Doing it in the blanket fort in your basement, it feels like we’re kids again and it’s just been super duper fun. Let’s see if we can revive some of those good vibes here in this new high tech space we’re building.

WORM
00:29:31.120 – 00:29:31.920
Sounds good.

GERM
00:29:32.960 – 00:30:15.770
Folks, here’s what I would leave you with. Happy times. Good vibes. The last hundred episodes are possible because of you. We are really grateful to our listeners.

We know that you’re out there, we know you’re listening to us. And some of you are also sending us your questions. That’s welcome and wonderful.

And if you are a longtime listener, first time questioner, that is totally okay too. Please send us your questions on travel, health, travel, wellness.

If you have tips or comments on something you’ve heard or you want a correction or clarification on something that you’ve seen here previously, just let us know germandwormmail.com or visit our website germanworm.com we are excited to continue the journey with you. If we’ve done 100 episodes so far, let’s commit right now Chris, at least 100 more.

WORM
00:30:15.770 – 00:30:16.290
There you go.

GERM
00:30:16.290 – 00:30:23.570
At that point we can reassess our life choices and see how we’re doing. But I’m down for another couple years with you. Yeah, I think it’s going to be great and I’m looking forward to it.

WORM
00:30:23.570 – 00:30:28.130
Yeah, well too. Maybe we can retire after a few more hundred and all the money we’ve made from this.

GERM
00:30:28.450 – 00:30:36.850
If that is your retirement plan. Kris, we need to talk. I’ve got a financial planner I can connect you with. He’s a great guy and you’re going to enjoy that conversation, I’m sure.

WORM
00:30:37.220 – 00:30:37.460
Foreign.

GERM
00:30:44.260 – 00:31:09.670
Thanks for joining us here for episode 100 of German Worm. Please do reach out to us or Visit our website germanworm.com with questions or concerns and if you’ve enjoyed this episode.

As you can tell, we would really appreciate your subscription. Rate us favorably on your device and spread the word with friends, family and on social media. Those are free ways to support this podcast.

We’re hoping you’ll join us next week for episode 101, Malaria 2026. Your questions on Malaria answered in the month of May.

WORM
00:31:09.750 – 00:31:13.750
I’m Germ, I’m Worm. It’s a big planet. See it in good health and we’ll.

GERM
00:31:13.750 – 00:31:34.060
See you next time.

This podcast is designed to inform, inspire and entertain, but it does not establish a doctor patient relationship and therefore it should not replace your conversation with a qualified healthcare professional. Please see one before your next adventure.

The opinions in this podcast are Dr. Sanfords and Dr. Pottingers alone and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the University of Washington or UW Medicine.