Public Health with Personality: A Conversation with Dorian Johnson, the "PHuncle"

So I want to start at the beginning and talk about your journey into public health as a practitioner, as an educator yourself.

Looking back at your public health journey, what first inspired your interest in public health? Was there a specific defining moment for you when you realized, yes, public health is the thing for me, that that's how you wanted to make an impact? What was that journey like for you?

Yeah, so the journey was not linear at all.

I will say that.

I started as a personal trainer back in 2015, actually.

So that was very 1v1.

I was telling people to squat and eat broccoli and drink water.

And joker, that's not all it takes to be healthy.

At

the time, I was like, okay, how come some people are struggling with this and other people are able to get it? So from there, it really started to broaden just the perspective of, well, this person might not be able to afford healthy groceries.

This person might have one income in their household and they're caring for aging parents.

It just really offered more of a holistic perspective on why people can and can't do something.

And I was like, how can I help these people with what I'm doing? Because this isn't enough.

And that kind of just opened the whole thing of public health for me.

And I still don't even know public health by name until even years later.

So it's just like, you never know how people get into public health.

And I feel like it's always something.

But I'd say recognizing that some people, even in the same geographic area, have more advantages or more access to things that could help them.

I'm like, something's not adding up here.

That's so interesting.

And I think that is the kind of the antithesis of our This is Public Health campaign, which I know you're familiar with, because we started kind of naming things that are public health, that public health is everywhere around us, but we don't even necessarily realize it because To your point, one individual may have access to something that another individual may not, and that is public health right there.

Just something as simple as having access to clean drinking water is public health, but we don't always have the words for it.

And so you being able to recognize that and then saying, oh, this is affecting the way I'm able to provide care in my personal training is really interesting.

So what a neat perspective.