The Pain Sponge (or how to be a less crap academic manager)

Jason is living his best life, free of Latrobe - but Inger has immediately put him to work! On The Reg Team, their new consulting company, is struggling to life through multiple stages of paperwork. More to come...

The team talk about various doings, including Doen's Jnr's laundry skills, Inger's campaign to get a Puppy and getting caught up in the Blue Screen of Death global IT meltdown!

There's a full mailbag with some side dashes of Claude before the team embark on the central question: how can you be a less crap manager in academia? God knows, we need them - we have many Thoughts.

Reading hasn't been high on the agenda, but there's still a two minute tip or two at the end!

Stuff we mentioned:
Inger's blog post on how AI is saving her 12 hours a week
Alison Hardy's podcast
@thehulry on Threads
Open AI is Testing Its Powers of Persuasion - Wired Magazine

We've changed our email address!! You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>
Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.
Visit our (pretty terrible) website: www.ontheregteam.com

Jason is having a break from the Socials, but you can still find Inger as @thesiswhisperer pretty much everywhere (and she will friend anyone on LinkedIn). You can read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com.

It costs us about $1000 a year to produce this podcast. If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Transcript

# Episode 68

We're riffing. I do. I do love a not Sunday morning recording session. Family's out, kids gone to school, all good. Yeah, it's quite relaxing actually. I mean, I, and I just, uh, did all my professoring for the last two hours. So it's like a break.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's get going. Welcome to On The Reg. I'm Dr. Jason Downs, and I'm here with my good fres, good fres. Fres. Fres, my good friend, Professor Inga Mewburn from the Australian National University, but she is better known as at the thesis whisperer on the internet. 

And we're here for another episode of On The Reg where we talk about work, but you know, not in a boring way, practical implementable productivity hacks to help you live a more. Balanced life, welcoming it. How have you been since we last caught up? I love how we've taken out that social media policies about universities thing.

Cause you know, like you just got to own it. You know what, actually, actually, I write our policies for our little one. Right, you do. We could have our own social media policy. I'm very distracted by a cat in the background. Have you got, okay. So we just, I don't know, we've become the pet sitting family here off Williamstown.

So the last time I think you and I were on a, like a call like this, uh, we had a dog. Right. Right. Right. Like in the middle of it, in the middle of an important sales call. And I had, we had this neurotic dog that was, no, not neurotic. She's lovely. Um, She was neurotic and she had fixated on you, Jason. And it's like Jason was her whole world.

She's fair. She's like lovely, but she, she's very needy. , and, and she wasn't allowed upstairs, but you know, that didn't stop her at all. Um, and now we've got a cat for a month. So we're looking after, We're looking after May, who is a Russian Blue. She's been here for two days now, and settling in quite well.

She's just sitting with her back to you there, like. Yeah, that's, that's cats. Cats hate me. So that's okay. Okay. Dogs love you, but cats hate you. I don't know what to make of that. No, I don't know about that. Um, so Jack is the preferred one here at home. Oh, all right. The preferred human. Yep.

The preferred human. I am the, I'm the spare human. Like, you know, when Jack's not around, I get like, Hey, come and feed me. Yep. But yeah, that's about it. I love this spare. primary kind of narrative. I see it on Instagram. I follow a lot of pets on Instagram. Like, oh, anyway, so that like gets me to like the recap, like where's life at?

Cause like life is good. It's aces, right? So renovation work's finally done. there's a bit of painting to do, but I've got like a complete house exactly the way I want it for the first time ever. And so now I can't distract myself with possible renovation projects. Right. I've got my, I've got my car coming in.

The Volvo will be coming in November. Pretty excited. They keep ringing me up and saying, um, well, we've got this gray one or this blue one, you know, do you want it early? I'm like, Oh, I want the yellow one. I'll wait for the yellow one. I want it to look like a lightning bolt as it flashes down the highway.

Yeah. Yeah. So, but, , so the family will be complete when the new car baby comes, but I've been on a long term campaign would be the right word for it. Now that Thesis Whisperer Jr. works in Pet Store and on the Saturday mornings, as you know, Jason, but other people may not, he trains puppies.

It's the most adorable thing you've ever seen. Like he's a giant human, as you will attest, like six foot four. And he, he's a very gentle giant. And he, he sort of hangs around with these puppies on the weekend. And I must say he comes from home on Saturdays. He's like the happiest person you've ever seen.

Like he's worked all day. And he's like, Oh, they were cute, you know? And I sort of think, well, if I've got this live in dog trainer, like now's the time, um, Mr. Thesis Whisperer, not so keen. . So this needs to be joint decision. So in the, in the event that Mr. Thesis Whisperer does get final veto, I think I'm just gonna have to have pets via Instagram.

I follow so many and it keeps, it keeps suggesting more and more to me, , . So that's how I know about the Spare human and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I've learned, I've learned all the ways that you represent your dog and cat on, on the gram. Anyway, if you want, um, if you want a little bit of heartbreak, follow the lost dogs home.

Oh no, I'm not sure I could do that. They have the cutest dogs, right? I'm not, I'm, I'm getting a puppy though. I don't want someone else's training mistakes. I just don't. But like bitey bitey, like they chew things. Oh, don't say that, Luke listens. Oh, sorry. Yeah, but they also are so cute with their little wet noses, they come up and stick it Yeah, they're so cute.

Oh my God. Anyway. I mean. Mrs. Whisperjr will, will sort that, sort that shit out, right? He will sort that out. He's very determined that if we did get a pet, that I'm the primary human, not the spare, and that I need to not be, you know, treating it like a baby. I'm not sure how successful this will be because I'll be like.

Baby, it will be my baby, but he's determined that I should be different anyway. So like home front's good. I'm, I'm of the, if you have a dog, it should be, it should be like trained to within an inch of its life. Oh, God. Yeah. Like, absolutely. I need to be able to cock one eyebrow and it goes and fetches my hat or something, right?

Did I ever tell you about my friend, um, this guy I used to work with and he had this amazing dog, the most well trained dog I'd ever seen in my life. And I'm like, how did you train this dog? He goes, Oh no, my wife works at customs. You know, the customs dogs. And so this one failed out yet.

And yet was the cleverest dog you've ever seen, like Labrador and, but failed out, but was kept as a breeder. So he, he basically had this dog and it was fully looked after and stuff. And the price he paid for that was, Oh, he had to have puppies around every now and then. Like, Oh, what a shame.

Anyway, I learned all about how they train customs dogs. And so they train them by playing with them. They, they sort of soak a towel with like cocaine essence or whatever, and then they play with the dog with the towel that smells like cocaine. And so what happens when the dog smells cocaine in, um, suitcases, it just gets really excited.

Oh, right. Yeah. Like it's gonna play a game. So they train it to kind of sit Yeah. Next to the thing and then they'll play a game. Right. But there was one substance that they couldn't synthesize and that was pot. Oh, right. Yeah. Weird. Have I ever told you this story before? No, no, no, no. This is all weird.

Anyway, so my friend, big smoker. Right? Right. Like he was a head , so he said, you have a difference. I know, right? And so he said the way that they. They soaked the towels with the scent to train the customs dogs was that they had a big bank vault, essentially full of, of grass. I don't know. What do the kids call it these days?

Don't hash. I don't know. I don't know. Drug talk. Anyway. So they put, I'm too old, right? Exactly. Exactly. So they put these, these towels in this vault and they just soak in the scent. of the weed. And he would just describe this vault, there'd be like stars in his eyes, he'd be like, this is somewhere Inga, there's a vault and it's just full of pot.

It's like his Nirvana state. Anyway, so that, that's how I know about, I don't know why we got on that diversion, but there we are. There's a Lieutenant Captain Major General somewhere who's like, whose job it was to come up with that idea. You know what, you know what we're going to do? We're going to get a vault.

We're going to fill it full of weed. We're going to put some towels in it, and then we're going to go run some dogs.

So funny. Anyway, I'm not getting, if I could get a trained custom dog, then it would be right. I have a rescue dog. If it was like X, you know, failed out another dog I knew was like a failed guide dog, also amazing. Like, and they're the failures. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I, um, I know someone who's just taken over a washed out guide dog.

Brilliant dog, like just got really well trained, you know, but not good enough to be a guide dog. So, yeah, excellent as a family pet. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Um, anyway, so life at home is good. I have no complaints. Do you have a breed? I would like a little dog, a little lap dog that would sit on my lap. I want like a little fluffy one and I want a little poos, little walks.

Little things. I don't want my house taken over with big dog energy. Like I want a little one. But why would you bother? Because it's cute. And it would be my child. I'm not getting grandchildren. I've given up on grandchildren already. My kid's 22 and I'm like, this isn't happening. So I need somewhere to put that grandmothering energy, Jason.

I just need to put it somewhere. I don't know why this is making me laugh so much, but like, I've just got this, you know, in 15 years time, I've got this mental image of you sitting on some rocking chair somewhere, right? Like, cup of tea, book, Kindle thing, and this dog just kind of like lounging on your lap.

You know I'd be happy, right? You would be happy. I would be happy. Good job. Um, it's been hectic at work though. I mean, you know, we just finished doing the 3MT in July. That was good. Now we've got an induction, week long induction next week. And then after that, we've got research. I feel, just feel like I'm, I'm an events organizer.

That's all I do. That's how I feel at the moment. So, you know, I'm just having a bad day with it. You know, and I'm having, the usual emails from colleagues where you're like, this isn't helping, okay. What I'd like from you right now is help. And this is not it. A few of those this week, you know, so I'm feeling a bit punchy.

And I've lost Kelly Gearan from my team. Dr. Kelly Gearan went on to La Trobe. Good win for La Trobe. Bad for me, you know, it's one of those situations where you're like, as, as a human, really happy and as a boss, really like, ah, so, you know, that it's just a challenge of how do you try and maintain some sort of service level.

When there's no replacement coming because the financial crisis has come for the whole sector, Jason. And the winds of bitey windiness, like, you know, I feel like I'm back on the main streets. We're just like rolling up the scab ends of cigarettes. You know, to make a whole Rolly, you know, that's how I feel.

I feel like I'm back there, Jason. I know, especially at ANU, which is like, I've got to say, I came from the struggle town university wise and ANU's been like, you know, a friend of mine once described ANU as like bathing in a bath full of money and just peeling dollar bills off your back, which is not quite true, but it's not not true.

Like it's well funded. Um, so if I'm feeling it, no doubt. other people feeling it worse. So, , solidarity people, solidarity. Um, I did, however, make A&amp; U spend some money on a new laptop for me, which is a real adjustment for me to have two laptops because it's kind of right side of the brain, left side of the brain or something.

Like up till now. So I've worked at A&amp; U since 2013. So quite a while. And I've used my own computer. This whole time, because they offered me laptops that were just shit, Jason, that was shit. And I was like, I'm not carrying that around. Does it, did the brand, , rhyme with the word bell? Yes. Yes. I'm not, I'm not having a PC, Jason.

And then they're like, well, you can have this really shitty, like the worst Mac that you can have just to dissuade you from having a Mac. And I'm like, no, no, no. Negatory. So I've had a. desktop for a while that holds my research, sensitive data and all that sort of stuff, because I had to have something, but I've refused their laptops and I've just used my own, but I had to, I think the time for separation of church and state.

Um, and the fact that they offered a really, really nice MacBook Air didn't hurt like that. I've got to admit that did factor in, but the real reason was we started our company, Jason, on the reg team is, is struggling to life through paperwork at the moment. It's exhausting. We're drowning people. It's like paperwork in section.

It's paperwork all the way down. It's like unit trust, the blah, the LLC, the blah, the sign this piece of paper. I'll come back, sign it again. It's just like, Oh my God. And you know, then it doesn't take into consideration the fact that we're very busy individuals who are barely in one spot at any one particular time.

I know and our skill set is not accountant, right? Like, so my, Our lovely accountant, Paul, shout out, Paul, awesome accountant. I did send that thing, Paul, I promise. He thinks that we're really, really smart human beings. And I think probably objectively we are, but we're not smart at accounting things. And so, uh, we just threw it back at them and said, we'll pay whatever money it takes.

So, so I figured once on the reg team was active, like from my like little side hustle now, big side business. Businesses are growing. So, um, so I've got a, I've separated them out because you can't use ANU computers or nothing to like make, make money on the side, which it hasn't been a problem because in fact ANU's been leveraging off me being willing to buy my own computers till now.

But, um, now I'm separated. How's that going for you though? Two computers. Yeah. It's a bit weird, but like, like AirDrop is just the best invention ever, as is Apple Notes. Who knew? Like such a genius invention. I've got a two minute tip about Apple Notes. Oh, good. Excellent. So they sit side by side.

I've got one on either side and I just sort of flip them around. When I'm doing different sorts of work and I had to sort of make a decision about what files are going to sit on what computer. And so far that seems to be working. And a lot of my life is in Teams and has been for a long time. So, um, yeah, so shout out to Luke, Mr.

Thesis Whisperer and to Kath for being supportive spouses on this journey that we'll talk more about, no doubt. I'm sure we'll get there. Like, I promise we're, you know, like, It might look like a little bit of chaos at the moment, but it's okay. It's all part of a cunning plan. Yeah, sure. I, I, I trust, I believe we've got a Kanban board of work.

Cause as I think I said last time, I started saying yes to work thinking Jason will be able to do that and he can. Yeah, but it's a lot like you're going to Hong Kong tomorrow. Like it's crazy, like we're crazy busy. , well you've still got room on your dance card while I'm away in November. So if anyone wants the job done, you're free, but September, October is pretty nuts.

Yeah, it's good. Um, like super busy and like we have been, so since we kind of kicked this little gig off, been to Queensland twice. Yeah. Um, with QUT, UQ, JCU. We've got Sydney coming up. We've got some gigs in Melbourne. I'll just. I did one last Friday. I'm off to Hong Kong tomorrow. It's like, it's nuts. It's good.

Yeah. Good nuts. Good nuts. It's a good problem to have. Keep it coming clients. Cause like this baby needs to be fed. Like when you do the sums, you go, Ooh, actually by the time one pays tax and all those things, like one needs to actually work one's butt off. That was that one. Yes. So how you been? You, you, there's a lot of catch ups.

Yeah. Yeah, like the last time we recorded, um, it's been a whole bunch of stuff. So we were in Queensland together, , a little while ago, uh, we were doing some work there and I got caught up in the blue screen of death. Do you remember? It was amusing. It was trauma bonding. The blue screen. I mean, the news cycle's been so crazy at the moment that like it sort of dropped out of, but we got caught up in it, didn't we?

Yeah. So I, um, yeah. I bailed on, a session, you know, with about the last hour, I think I took the last hour off or something like that. And raced out to the airport to get home in time for my anniversary with my darling wife, thought that I would do that. Was supposed to get onto a plane at about half past five or something like that.

Yeah. And I was just staying for the next day. Like I was all relaxed, like not flying home till Saturday. So luckily we still have, Accommodation? Yeah. I was still there at 10 o'clock at night when they informed us that there would be no more flights that night. And then just, can you imagine? You can because you were there, but the drama of trying to reschedule flights and of course they can't just go, I will bump everything back and Jason can get on the next available flight because other people were booked and it was still a fallout and all the rest of it.

So it was like four days of just drama, trying to wrestle with Jetstar and do all that. My genius solution was to say, don't try and make it back to Melbourne, come to Canberra because no one wants to come to Canberra on the weekend. And it was like, spot on, right? Flights all the way through, came to Canberra.

I spent a couple of days with you and Mr. Thesis Whisperer and then made it home on the Tuesday, I think. Monday or Tuesday or something like that. It seems like ages ago now. It was very dramatic though. It felt like the start of one of those action movies where the world melts down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. So in the airport it was weird, right? Because there was all of these people and they were kind of milling around, but they were kind of in queues.

And it was, and it was, there was this kind of low, mumble kind of hum across the airport while people were kind hum was it? Yeah. They were talking in hushed tones. Right. And like, I didn't see anyone completely freak out, right? People just kind of turned up and they went, Oh no, there's no flights, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Next thing you know, they're all kind of trying to Google and they're finding out about the blue screen of death because it was all happening in real time. And people just like shrugging their shoulders and taking a seat. So it was kind of weird. I did, I did expect zombies to start shuffling through the airport, but it didn't happen in the end.

It's fine. Yeah. Civilize. So if it really, if civilization really does break down that way, nothing, nothing to worry about. No, no. Uh, as long as they start attacking the people at the front of the queue and work their way down. That's fine. That's all right. Time to escape. Um, I caught up with Professor Joe McNeil for lunch.

So Joe was my Dean at RMIT and she was great Dean when I jumped ship for La Trobe. And I'm like, I haven't seen her for ages. So it was great to catch up with her. You know what it's like when you catch up with. Like folk you really like. Yeah. So yeah, we kind of, we booked that, we booked that kind of one hour lunch type thing.

It's even better when you're both released from whatever sort of shitty work situation you were in, and then you're just free to bitch and gossip as much about it as you wanted to. Uh, because there's always a cone of silence whenever I meet up with colleagues, I could not confirm nor deny whether or not they did have a, no, no.

I'm sure you had things to say, Jason. I did have things to say. And um, that one hour lunch did turn into like two and a half hours of lunch. So it was like, I love this life you have now. Yeah. And I caught up with I caught up with others as well. You put me in touch with, um, Professor Melissa Caston. Um, from friend of the pod.

Thanks Melissa. And so we, we caught up for coffee and a long chat out in the sun in St Kilda. Like I love this. It's like, it was really great. And so, you know, like I was just being kind of catching up, eating, drinking, doing all that sort of stuff, which is good. It does also sound like I haven't been doing any work, which is not true.

You have the Kanban boards to prove it. My friends. I have the Kanban boards to prove it. Things are moving. And I must admit, I'm a little bit worried about the fact that since we recorded episode 66, where we talked about the mean girls of the internet. Yes. Mean girl in the internet of things, which is my new Volvo.

Yes. Yes. Um, I'm a little bit concerned that the machines were listening because I had our freezer. We've got a big, we've got like a standalone freezer. It's one of the upright ones. Um, that died. Uh, and then within 48 hours, the washing machine died as well. Like they all just gave up, didn't they? It was like, Oh my God.

And like the idea of having a big freezer is so that you can fill it full of food. So, yes, full of food, full of food, full of really, really delicious food. And so, you know, I found myself in the middle of the week, like I'm eating A kilogram rib eye steak for dinner in the middle of the, you know, something that I had planned to smoke and have on the barbecue and have friends around and all that sort of stuff.

It was like, nah, we have to eat that. 40 bucks a kilo or however much it was when I bought it. And it was like, and there was just. Kath was eating soup. I think that she got to like 48 liters of soup. Jack was like, if I have to have any more lasagna or frozen chicken anymore, I'm going to kill someone.

Which you know, you don't normally hear from a teenage boy. Like that must have been a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And we were just like, we're just, we're eating our way through this whole thing. So, um, it was, you know, runs to the laundromat doing all that sort of stuff. Like it was hectic, right? This is not a thing that you want to happen in your life.

Just let me say that. Like it makes you realize that the labor saving devices is a real thing. Like they really do save labor. Absolutely. But then it's the case of, so what do I do with these dead things? Like how do you get rid of them? I need to get replacement ones, blah, blah, blah, all that sort of stuff.

Anyway, this is a good thing about working for yourself though. You never have to like, Oh, sorry, everyone. I can't come to that meeting. Cause you know, I've got to go and, you know, like swing some rounds about. Yeah. Um, except it could have happened at a less busy time. That's all I'm saying. Like Semble is kind of quiet for us.

And so like, could you just do it then? Yeah. So I bought a 10 kilogram, uh, front loader washing machine and then realized the error of my ways, which is of course, that if you have something that can take 10 kilograms of laundry, then people will wait until you've got 10 kilograms of laundry before it all gets turned on.

And so once you've got 10 kilograms of laundry, then you've got 10 kilograms of ironing, you've got 10 kilograms of hanging it out, folding it up, putting it away, not like kind of small ones. This isn't my job in the household. You know, are delegated. I shouldn't say I've delegated, like we have, we have split responsibilities and the laundry is not one of mine.

I wouldn't know. I throw things in dirty and magically the magic laundry people. I eat Luke, put it back clean in my drawers, and that's all I know about the whole situation. The laundry fairies. The laundry fairies. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So Jack and I share, um, share a bathroom. It's collectively known as the, uh, the boys bathroom.

Mm hmm. And it's got a hamper in there. And the idea is that, uh, you throw your clothes into the hamper and that, you know, the magic fairies will come and do all that sort of work and get it all done. Um, the distance between the floor and the hamper is less than a meter. Right. But young fella, he just can't get it.

He just can't get his jujitsu gi from like, come home after jujitsu, take the gi off, jump in the shower, like from the floor to the one meter to get into the hamper. So I've taken two. It stays on the floor, like I'm holding out. There's been no gi washing going on. And he comes down, he goes, Oh, where's my gi?

And I'm just, yeah, well, you know, maybe on the floor in the bathroom.

Now there's only so much a stinky 14 year old boy can actually take of that before he goes, Oh, I should probably clean that. Wow. Actually you're finding his limits though, right? Yeah. Welcome. It's about time that you kind of stepped up here. Um, Uh, the other day, Friday, I had just gone, went to Holmes Glen and did a couple of sessions there on AI.

Yeah. And that was, that was awesome. It was a great, it was a great conference. Had great turnout. Like the pictures are like stacks of people came to see what you had to say. You were popular. Yeah, they had to move me to the main stage, um, because they didn't have a room big enough. We just, um, yeah, we just, we just kind of cool.

So I I spent a bit of time showing people how to use AI so that they could get their work done kind of faster. Freaking people out with AI, I think would be like the correct thing to say here. Yeah. There was a, there was a little bit of that. There was a little bit of like, Hey, did you know it can do this?

And people looking at that workflow, which would have taken them a day and doing it in kind of 15 minutes, like live in front of them. It's like, yeah, um, I had a lot of people come up to me afterwards and sort of kind of like, yeah, they were like, whoa, that was a lot. And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. And it's only going to get better.

Um, but in amongst all of that, I met Chad, Chad Gladovic. Um, right. Did you? Yes, Chad. He sent us SpeakPipe back in the day. Yes. Yeah. So it was really, it was lovely, like friend of the pod. And so we got to have a bit of a chat. So, um, shout out. Hi, Chad. Um, it was, it was good. It was good. So it's amazing how many people we meet just to various places, you know, like at JCU as well.

There are a couple of people that are pod listeners and they come all the way down from Cairns. Yeah. Yeah. It was great. It was great. So, um, if you bump into us as we're kind of toodling around the country, doing work and stuff, um, come up, if you're a pod listener, come up and say, hi, it's like, it was awesome.

So we had a good chat. He's finishing off his PhD. It was like, it was really good. It was really good. So that's about it. Life's been pretty great, really. I think you've turned life around from being pretty shitty to pretty great in pretty short order. I have to say, yeah, it's like, I do like this new, I do like this new work, Jason.

Jason, you're a male entrepreneur. I am. Now, what was that? Nerdopatreon? Entrepreneur? Entrepreneur! Who was that? Someone, someone said it. Was that JCU? Oh, we should have written that down. We were so busy. We didn't write it down. Entrepreneur. We're going to own it. I love it. Love it. Um. Um, so yeah, so that's, that's kind of, that's, that's us, I think we've had a ton of mail.

Yeah. Let's get to it. A ton of mail. The first one is from Caitlin Selsky. Caitlin, respect. Hi Caitlin. Hi Caitlin. And Caitlin writes to us because, um, it was also Omni, OmniNerd, OmniNerd, um, Yes. Writes to us because she, um, heard us talk about. Uh, like using AI as a tutor for Jack. Yep. Um, uh, you know, you can spin up an, you can spin up an AI to act as like a Socratic tutor to help people to learn stuff.

Um, and she, so she writes and, uh, it's in black, so you can read it. Oh, I'm reading it. Okay. Dear Jason and Inga brackets. I think you've now made it too easy to send you mail. Sorry, not sorry. Especially now you're already in my autofill. So thank you.

I'm always happy to get mail. Jason, all caps. You are a genius. , uh, emphasis, um, full stops between each word. Caitlin goes on on the most recent episode, you mentioned using Claude as a tutor for your son, and I made a mental note that that was a very cool idea and saved it in Obscura.

Citium, which by the way, I've just started playing with, and I don't know why I waited so long, but I guess I do last time I tried it felt clunky and I just didn't like it, but it's evolved a lot and so I've been going a bit nuts with data view and OmniFocus integrations, all sorts of fun stuff. Love it.

Caitlin, this is Inga, please, you know, use your talents. If you, if you can to write us some obsidian. Uh, plugins, if that's your inclination, like props, anyway, uh, anyway, I digress as Caitlin, as I tend to do, as I also tend to do, Caitlin, I don't think you mentioned, I don't think you included your prompt in the show notes as promised boo.

Well, that's on me. Sorry, Caitlin. Um, but I may do with the general idea yesterday for a fairly content heavy unit. And it blew my mind aside from the learning potential, which is obviously great. Just the sheer novelty of studying this way is way more fun. I don't, I. Didn't think to get ChatGPT to engineer its own prompt until afterwards.

Ah, yeah. So I haven't tried this exact one out yet, but this is what it came back at me with when I asked. And that's actually a good point. Like I ask, um, ChatGPT all the time to make me image prompts. Um, but I've never thought to ask it to make me a steering prompt for an agent, which is really what we're talking about here.

So for those of you haven't already sort of worked this one out, you should like stay in the same chat. Um, and that's what we call an agent. So if you stay in the same chat box and you just spin up different chats for different topics, you can in Chord at least, you can give it an individual kind of, um, overall steer for that chat.

Tell it who it is and what it, what it's good at and all that kind of thing. So this is what Caitlin's got here. So she asked ChatGPT. So yeah. Come back to that with Claude with projects, um, when you get Claude to output a thing and it outputs a document like say, an artifact, You can then add that there's a little button there now.

I don't know if that's new, but you can add that back into the project. So as it makes you things, you can just, there's a little button now at the bottom.

Like there's download and then there's. Add to project or something like that. So when you get an output that you like from your project, you press this, it goes back into the project. You know, the document, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it thinks about itself thinking about itself and all the other stuff.

Yeah. It's pretty cool. Cause I think about myself thinking about my. I don't know. Anyway, thinking's complicated. All right. So here's the prompt that Caitlin got ChatGPT to write. Act as a supportive expert to help me understand the following topics deeply by using the Socratic method. Begin by assessing my current knowledge level with a few diagnostic questions.

Based on my responses, pose a series of progressively challenging questions to guide me towards comprehensive understanding. Ensure each question builds on my previous answers to To reinforce learning, provide clarifying hints or explanations only if I'm unable to answer after multiple attempts, Caitlin carries on.

I think the next step is to get chat GPT to tell me it's own magic incantation like that to generate relevant flashcards for Anki, which is a, um, an app for flashcards. training. Um, but I haven't quite succeeded yet. I strongly suspect that combining this with space repetition will somehow make me unstoppable.

Were I willing to invest the time brackets, but I think I'm having too much fun with them sitting in for now. Thanks to someone who is now slightly less bored by C O S C 240 operating systems. I'm guessing that's a, um, a class. Uh, Caitlin, Caitlin, that's awesome. Yeah. Caitlin's studying computer science, um, in her spare time as well as being, Oh, just being generally awesome.

Just being generally awesome. Uh, CFO and a mom and just like, you know, just rocking it. It's like, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Got to have a coffee one day, Caitlin. Reach out, email us, you know, we're easy. You're reading the next one. I think. I know we got an email from Dr. Alan Rowe at the University of Southern Queensland, who has an OmniFocus tip for us.

Hi Inga and Jason. Thanks for doing On The Reg. I really enjoy listening to the show and I'm especially appreciative of the tips and tricks you offer. I've just been listening to your latest episode discussing travel lists in OmniFocus. Thought I'd share how I created templates that would work in the same way that you're wanting.

Basically, I created a templates folder in OmniFocus. I created a general timeline and task list for new research project and new publication. I set it up in the way I desired and then made the project status on hold. Whenever I'm starting a new project, I go to the templates, copy the one I want, and then I paste it.

And then I changed the pasted version status to active and renamed. So it's kind of like a, Duplicate, make live, sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Any smaller adjustments or additions can then be made, um, but the core items are already there. The only thing this can't do is put the reminder dates in e. g.

progress report for every six months. So if you have, you have to add those, but it still makes life a lot easier. Uh, she then went, um, and attached a dodgy screen recording, uh, in case her explanation didn't make sense. It did. It was great. Thank you. , and then it turns out that in the way these things go, Alan and I got into some email bounce backwards and forwards.

Yes. If you email us, Jason's got a lot more time than he used to, to be chatting. I only see some of these and I see like multiple replies and I'm just thinking, Oh yeah, people having a good time talking to Jason. , so I pointed her to Caitlin who we were just talking about. Um, Caitlin's got a template plugin, , for OmniFocus.

So, and the last I heard was that Alan was spinning enough and getting some good results. So Alan, I'd love to hear how it turned out. Maybe you can send us a speak, but, um, the point here is that you can go to collect Caitlin's website. , she's got various plugins for OmniFocus and the template one. , I think is based on some work by Kurt Clifton back in the day.

And, you set this thing up and then you can put in all of these dates. , you can have it kind of, uh, built you. You build in variables. And then because OmniFocus is powerful enough to be able to do date math well, you can add all this sort of stuff in. So you might say, for example, , research project starts on this particular day, plus six months needs to have a Oh, yeah.

Uh, do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, you know, in, in 30 days I need to have this task completed and all that sort of stuff. So every time I hear stuff like this, I realize what a new I am in OmniFocus. Such a noob. , the template plugin, Caitlin's template plugin is awesome. It's really good. Next time we spending heaps of time together, which is the week after next.

Yeah. You might have to take me through that Jason. Yes, but I have to show you, , it's really, really good. It's really good. So, um, if anybody else has got a similar kind of problem where I used to use Kurt's template. It was in Apple script, I think at the time, , back in the day when I was teaching, because a semester would have like, you know, certain like deadlines and things that you had to, you had to kind of hit.

So I would have a, , a go live date, which would be the first day of semester. And then all of the prep work would have. All of the minus two weeks from go live date, you know, so two weeks before the go live date, I would have a task due that I needed to have the unit outline uploaded onto the system.

See, this is what I need for some of the things I do. Yeah, it's, I only is this where I own up to only ever just put a single task . I've never used, I've never used anything but the single task. Never. What? What? Yeah. No. Don't. Don't. No. Don't judge me. You've got the face now. I do have the face. Really? It's like when I said I didn't know what perspectives.

I really love them now. Yeah. Okay. He's holding his head in his hands, listening. I'm like, I'm okay. It's all right. It's fine. It's fine. You can show me. You can show me. I can get better. I can get better. But like, it is a testament to OmniFocus that I'm able to be, you know. It's super productive, but only using like, like a, like a 5 percent functionality.

It's like me in word. I'm just thinking one day, like you're going to focus and you're going to go low. This is like the time that I owned up that I didn't have the Zotero thing on my toolbar. Okay. Rectified. All the mail is coming in as we speak. I can, I can feel it. , am I doing the next one? Okay. , yes, Leslie Sherwood wants to know about annotating eBooks.

So Leslie says, hi, I'm studying a PhD program. I see that. I, , and I see that I'm starting a PhD program and I see all the books in one of my classes are available through my university library. That is, I can use them as eBooks for free instead of buying them, but I don't know how to digitally annotate them or know of any system or app that allow me to interact with the text.

Do you have a post on annotating digital eBooks as a resource? I do not, nor do we have a pod. , did you look this up? I had a bit of a poke around and I couldn't. I mean. Pat Thompson pointed me at this really good program called browsing for, , getting journal articles down, but my library doesn't subscribe.

So I've never been able to use it, but that looked pretty good, but that's not books. I don't think. No. And I, I had, um, I had trouble with trying to figure out how to do this as well. Like I spent a little bit of time trying to figure it out. , and I think I kind of landed on the idea that each database has its own kind of Yeah, which is pretty bullshit really, like that then assumes that you read a, it's just like, it's so balkanized, different readers, the notes end up in different places.

It's just like the infuriating thing. I'm about to get ridiculously passionate about how most people don't have a system for taking notes. When we went up to JCU, we were running a bootcamp, weren't we? And we did have many conversations with people like the problems you're having are actually Have a long gestation back to when you started your PhD and didn't have a system for the notes.

And we run the workshop building a second brain specifically to help people design systems and you kind of have to design your own, but this is a big hole in the system. I'm not really, I must admit, I'm much more of a book buyer than a library user. And that's one of the reasons that I don't use the library perhaps as much as I could or should.

Yeah. Um, Cause I feel like the text and the notes get really separated out and then they need to be linked together. Yeah. They can need to be able to see both together. It is a big problem. So. And then you're, you're at the mercy of the database subscription gods, right? Like how many other people are borrowing the book at the same time you are and what, you know, does your university allow multiple concurrent borrowings and all this sort of stuff?

Can I, can I just have like a, like not a, not insignificantly wind as an author? Yes, please do. Carry on. Who, who's in ebook form in many libraries. Okay. You can find me. , but just so you know, I get. Nothing for that, like that's out of my contract. So if you read my book through my library, I get some sort of library reading fee, but it's, it's peanuts.

, but the publisher pockets that. And so I thought, I didn't think much of this until I realized how much they were selling my book to the library for. So one of my books, I realized that some students pointed out to me that the library didn't have it, so I asked the library to buy it and they said, how many concurrent seats do you want for this e book?

And I said, well, like, is it limited? They said, yeah, you can have one at a time or you can have three. And I said, okay, three seats. It was 900 a year. Holy cow. And I see nothing of that. And so next time I went to sign a book contract, I said to the publisher, so, Hey, can we talk about libraries now? And they're like, not, right.

They were just like, no. And so every time academic publishers cry poor, I'm sorry. Yeah, that's shit. Right. Like that's outrageous, right? Yeah. I mean, yeah, anyway, so just so you know, like the outrage is on multiple levels. And one of the reasons that I buy books is as an author, I'm aware that you don't really see much.

I mean, libraries have to be there. Like everyone shouldn't have to buy books. Absolutely not. But I have the means. Yeah, so I do, but yes, someone needs to design something for this, although I don't know how you solve the problem if you can't pull the text in anyway, you're saying here, maybe librarians might have some solutions, that was kind of librarian listeners.

Yeah, that's where I landed. It was like, , maybe the on the reg fam, if we've got some librarians out there who So if you don't actually know a solution for this, write to us, let us know, um, because this is a problem, right? Not everybody, not everybody can buy all of the books and you know, if you're doing a PhD, that's a lot of reading.

So, you know, relying on the library, you should be able to rely on the library. Um, but yeah, there needs to be a better solution. I couldn't find it. Might exist. I just couldn't find it. Yeah. Okay. Well, maybe something will come out of that. So thanks for writing to us, Leslie. And hopefully, uh, the Brains Trust will solve your problem.

We'll get you posted. Yeah. , Dr. Susan writes to us to say thanks. yeah, no need to reply to this. I know how busy you both are and that your inboxes will be like fast flowing rivers. Not as much anymore. No, you, you are the man of, not leisure. Yeah. But inbox in the inbox, your inbox is fun. My inbox is fun.

Yeah. It's either managing money, which, you know, like it's annoying, but like one must or, or it's talking to on the rig fans, which is great. , Dr. Susan writes, and she just wanted to thank us both for the podcast. She's been listening to it lately on high rotation while I'm in the middle of a particularly miserable work situation.

And you both have been a kind of interesting, curious, thoughtful work hacky colleagues I needed right now. It's honestly been a bomb. She's so grateful for it. Never apologize for the long EPS. Do you think Joe Rogan apologizes when his EPS are three hours? People love that stuff. Thanks. Um, Dr. Susan, I'm sorry that you're going through, um, Um,

my sense of it is that there's going to be a bit of that in the near future, I think across the sector, really, like just kind of reading all of this and,, watching it, you know, now from a, an outsider's position, the situation, the surrounding environment doesn't look great. I mean, for those listeners who aren't aware, the Australian government's just been making, um, I think the technical term is boneheaded decisions about how universities have international students.

They've built a whole system that relies on international student fees and actually makes our universities one of the most vibrant parts of our cultural life, you know, like is this touch point that Australia as a place that it's pretty far away from everything has with, you know, Um, you know, we're pretty far away even from our nearest neighbors, let's be real.

Um, we're an island continent, um, and international students, it's like this incredible kind of linkage we have with all, all different places in the world, not just our region, which is really important, but you know, all sorts of places, you just meet people you would never have met. I mean, it's, it's immensely enriches our country.

Our international student and that's, you know, but the government is kind of facing a lot of pressure from the right wing press about immigration numbers and housing. And, you know, these are all real problems, but, , deciding you're going to fix it by restricting international students. It's stupid. Yeah, it seems weird.

There was, um, there was a whole, there was a whole bunch of work that just went on to it. , just went in about this just recently. Uh, Universities Australia amongst others, , were indicating that if these kind of policies go forward, because the government hasn't actually settled yet on what it looks like.

They're just been kind of foreshadowing these, these large changes to, um, restrict the number of international students that come into the country. And like, there are problems, right? Like it's not, they are trying to solve a few different bits and pieces here. The, , ghost students are a real problem.

These are students who come to Australia, , to study, , and then, , because there are some institutions that don't pay quite as close attention as they possibly should to the, to the actual status of their students, they kind of drop out of the system and then they work and then they kind of bounce around different, um, institutions like maintaining their student visa on the way, but they never kind of really get caught up with.

And I think part of it is to try and fix some of that as well. So that, . Yeah, but there's better ways to fix it than to put a cap. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but the, the outcome of all of this, like they're talking like. Potentially 14, 000 jobs, right? Oh, it'll be at least, at least, that's a lot out of that sector, out of the sector, right?

Yeah, that's a lot at a time when, you know, let's face it. Interest rates are high and money needs to be going into the economy. I mean, this is really apparent during the pandemic. We. Meaning people, ordinary people who go to work, buy lunch at cafes. We are the economy. The economy is not the stock market or large corporations profits.

That's the oligarchs economy in lots of ways. Like it's us, it's us being paid and using our money to do other things that sustains us. So, and AI thing coming at us like freight train as well. So God knows, you know, and I also think about regional towns where, , sometimes the universities are the source of some of the best paying jobs that support people on farms and all sorts and keep those cities vibrant.

That's just, I don't know. I, but then, you know, , I'm also like, I mean, everyone will know my, my politics are green, but I'm just, some of the things that greens are coming out with, I've had to take a step back. Cause I'm just like, what is going on with all of you people? Honestly. Like I'm done with all of you, like, I'm just taking a break from it all because yeah, I just, I mean, I know we've got difficult problems and difficult decisions have to be made, but you know, there's other things that could be difficult decisions are being made that don't get touched.

Yeah. Um, dare I say defense and things like that, that just endless buckets of money get tipped into that without as much question as there are around education and health. That's a choice. Yeah. Talking to colleagues, , out in the sector, you know, people are, people are talking, they're saying, you know, trying to figure out which of the universities are going to be the ones that will close.

Right. We're talking. Oh, well that's, that's really what we're. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised. And, and also they're losing good people like you, Jason, for various reasons. Like you're not the only good person, like luckily you've stayed with me. I still benefit from your brains and talent, but La Trobe doesn't.

And that's I mean, without going too far into it, there's reasons for that. And you're not the only story of burnout and stress that I've heard, you know, this year, people just deciding. In fact, my friend, Hannah Forsyth wrote a great article that you sent me in the Guardian. I read this article about, you know, how work is as addictive as the pokies and universities have been kind of, benefiting from that.

And I read this article, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it gets to the end. I'm like, Oh, Hannah wrote this. So I texted her, , we'll put the link in the, in the show notes. I texted her and she was like, yeah. And I said, I felt that one. She's like, yeah. And she's never gone back. Like she's incredibly talented historian.

And they just closed down a whole history and philosophy department. Best one in the country. Yep. I mean, there's no, it doesn't make any sense anymore. It used to be that you'd be in a high performing part of the university and you'd be relatively safe, but that's, doesn't seem to be the case. I'm taking nothing for granted, Jason, nothing.

I don't, I don't think you can. , I, my, yeah, I don't think you can, like, like I say, looking at it from the outside and looking at some of the decisions or at least the ones that, , kind of make it. In the publicly available space, there seemed to be some odd thinking going on around some of this sort of stuff.

Right. Yeah. We just go like, what are you doing? Why? In some ways, like we're seeing the effects of the pandemic now. You know what I mean? Like we're seeing them in lots of ways. And we knew that at the time when, when, you know, government stepped in and paid lots of money to keep and did the right thing.

, and I looked at all that and thought, well, there'll be paid back on that sometime down the road. And I guess we're hitting, hitting the pay, payback time, the fuck around and the find out part of the fuck around cycle. But you know, it wasn't us that was fucking around. It was a virus. Yes. Thanks COVID.

Thanks COVID. All right. , we're going to soak up the love though, cause that'll make us feel better. Shall we? There's one more here. Heather from Tasmania. Heather from Tasmania. Thank you, Heather. Dear Jason and Inga, I've relatively recently come across your podcast and I'm motivated to write and say a big thank you.

I'm really loving it. I've been an academic for getting on 20 years. Welcome, Heather. Snap. Um, first off in the UK and then the last 10 here in Australia. And I think your podcast fills an important gap in our training. In naming what the sector is like and how to navigate it. I've worked part time all my career and I've had a few extra challenges therefore in getting my work done quickly.

I also have three children, some complex health issues. Thanks to On The Reg, I realized there is a way, there's way more I can do to avoid stress, um, by adopting your recommendations and can't wait to get started. Though I think I'll have to delay until after the end of the semester, yes.

Ironically, just too deep in it right now to spend time reorganizing. We see and feel you, Heather. I think the best thing though is how funny you make it. Quite the skills. Most of our work stuff is not typical material for humor. I listen on my work, walk to work and on numerous occasions, I've literally laughed out loud.

Inga, I loved your description of Cambridge on the podcast. I think you'd just come back. I did my undergrad and PhD there, so I know it reasonably well. And I think your observations are spot on. Thanks. Um, she writes having listened to several of your recent episodes. First, I'm now moving to the back catalog.

Ooh. And starting at the beginning, it is an interesting reminder of the initial pandemic lockdowns. Anyhow, I don't have a question. There's no need to reply. I just wanted to say thank you, and if you're ever in Hobart, And have any time I'd love to catch up. Best wishes, Heather. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Heather.

I often say that all these sort of enterprises run on love, you know, thesis, whisper, a blog, and this podcast, and then he just powers it up. You know, it's like a little love battery that sounded, that sounded not safe to work. I realized as soon as I came out of my bed. But it, like, it's so, it, it's so wonderful to hear from, , uh, on the RegFam and especially when they, you know, they talk, they don't have to take the time to sit and write to us and say, , you know, thank you and all that cool stuff.

Nice things that they do. Nice things. Thank you Heather. We love that. Thank you Heather. We will look you up when we come to Hobart. I'm coming there virtually. University of Tasmania next Thursday, if you haven't already seen it. I'm running half of Writing Under Pressure online. This Thursday coming up day after tomorrow.

Yes. We're recording this on 27th of August. God knows when I'll get it out, but hopefully, um, quick ish. I have to teach you how to edit the pod, Jason. Oh yeah. Yeah, that'd be power. , I'm going to play Speak Pipe from Alison Hardy. Pretty sure this is Alison Speak Pipe. Hey, please work.

Our mascot Pit, Kit.

I'm hopefully going to see Alison. I just reached out to her this morning to see her in November when I go over and see Rowena Murray. If you're not familiar with Rowena Murray's work, um, Rowena Doyen of the research and development field wrote the excellent How to Write a Thesis. Barely any Berta book can be found on that topic.

It really is like, you know, classic texts. So, , so I'm going up to visit Rowena and hopefully maybe I'll see Elson, but thank you for that. And Elson and I sometimes get on the zooms and just get to talk. like talk about Claude for about half an hour to each other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like our, our favorite internet boyfriend, , about all the things we've done with it.

So, you know, that's fun. I saw that, , I saw that email, , Alison wrote and, uh, She's using Claude and she kind of laid out her prompts for all of that, including, um, spinning up, uh, show notes and, , like episode notes for a podcast and all that sort of stuff. I was like, that's awesome work. Yeah, no, she's, , she's really clever.

So Alison does sort of, um, she works with secondary school teachers who teach technology. So yeah, she's doing that. Does her own pod, the link in the show notes, if you want to listen to Elson's pod. , yeah, so, , you know, Mutual interest around podcasting, but, , also I just enjoy Kip on the socials. He's one of my, one of my Instagram pet friends.

Again, hi Kip. I just, every time I say that I've got this kind of mental image of Kip's ears going up and like going like, Kip's very cute, but Kip, Kip, Kip is a troublemaker. Yeah. Oh, really? I think, yeah. Yeah. He's, he's feisty kid. You know? He, he'll pick a fight. He's little. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it makes it more fun 'cause he's so little and cute.

. My, my good friend Beck, , she has had dogs and she, um, has, has still, I think,, German schnauzers.

Oh, they're cute. So little kind of like little dogs again. , but also like quite feisty and, and she told me once that like the, the dogs that the German police force have, I think, I think she said that, I don't know, I might be making that up. No, I don't think so. German listeners, please write to us. Yeah.

So, um, and those schnauzers are great, but they're kind of small, stocky, but they've got a big bark. So they're kind of like, they yell a lot, which is good. You know, this pod, if I do get a dog is going to become a lot of dog talk. Yeah, sure. I will be one of those people that talk about my dog a lot. Just be warned if that does come to pass.

Okay, like I expect, by the way, I expect tricks, I expect every time you come on a record live, the dog learns a new thing. Brendan teaches tricks, he teaches all the lay down, play dead, like. Yeah. You should see him, he walks in and puppies just look at him and go, I will do anything you say. He says that because he has the best treats.

He knows exactly which ones they really like and they can smell it on him, you know. Yeah. And, and they come back after, for years after they've finished their classes and they still remember him. Yeah. Yeah. And he said to me the other day, you know, he remembers the dog's names, but not the owner's names. I was appalled until, until he said, well, how many PhD students do you remember?

I'm like, I remember their projects. I'm like, Oh, that's right. You were Manosphere student. Do you know what I mean? Like, anyway, it's terrible. Terrible. All right. Finally, we're getting to our work problem segment, aren't we? I know. We had, we had a bit of a there. Yep. Yeah, yeah. , this part of our show, we focus on one aspect of work and well, you know, we kind of like nerd out about it.

So we sometimes tackle problems that we've had at work or discuss a theme suggested by listener, which is what has happened this time around. Inga Mm-Hmm mm-Hmm. Um, and I've got a speak pipe. Yeah. Michael sent us a speak pipe about this. Yeah. So let me see if I can make the speak pipe work

Hmm. Hmm.

Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Michael. Great question, Michael. Thank you. Because that's kind of how it happens, right? Like you, you start off a career and you start off at the, at kind of the bottom of the ladder sort of thing. And lots of people manage you, , as you kind of build up experience through your career.

And then over time they say, I, why don't you do this? And why don't you have a go at that? And often the, the only kind of real reference point you've got is. The behaviors of the people who first managed you, it's kind of like, you know, when I teach, it's like, well, this is how they taught me. So this is how I'm going to teach you sort of thing.

, and unless you kind of really go out of your way to think this stuff through and to figure out what kind of manager you really want to be, often people just fall into this sort of stuff and then just repeat what happened to them. So, , I'm thrilled to hear that like Michael's Taking a bit of an introspection on all of this sort of stuff.

And it seems to be asking, you know, like, what can I do to make sure that I'm the best possible manager I can be, Michael, we need more people like you in the sector, um, who really want to, , when management is thrust upon them, they really want to do well as part of that. But in terms of. , actual resources I was reflecting on my own kind of journey on the way through this.

I mean, the reason you are like, PhD in management, right?

I'm that one guy, Michael. Would you say though, that your PhD prepared you to manage people? , No, no, because I mean, you focused on strategy. I mean, like it helped you some, probably the more abstract kind of inspirational part of managing. You know? Yeah. Well, the reason I did my, I did a master's degree, , I did a master's in business leadership and the reason that I undertook that master's was because I was being managed at the time I wasn't an academic, I was, I was working out in the private sector doing other things.

So, yeah. , but I was being managed and I was looking around at that and I'm kind of going like, Oh man, this is not right. , and the people were, that I was working for, wonderful people, but you could just tell that it was like, things were off. And that was, I think, a function of the organization I was working for grew very, very rapidly.

, and kind of went from, I think I was like the fourth employee or something like that. And, you know, by the time I left there was like 40. It was like, it grew a lot. , So I, I did a master's in business leadership, which was really, really good because it focused on all of the soft skills of leadership.

So I deliberately chose not to do an MBA. , because I didn't feel as though I needed accounting and economics and all of that sort of stuff. You know, the traditional MBA subjects, I figured that, You know, if I was going to become a leader of some kind, then, you know, when it came to those specialist kinds of skills, it would pay to hire the people who have been trained in those specialist skills rather than getting a semester of economics or a semester of accounting or a semester of, you know, something else, and then kind of thinking that I knew what I was doing.

So my thinking was all about finding a way to learn something that was really focused on the people. And so that was, that was, Brilliant for me, like managing people. So, um, in that degree, there were, um, units on managing conflict on negotiation on all of those sorts of things, and I know that. You know, unless you can find a course like that one that kind of brings it all together in a holistic manner, it can be tricky, but those kinds of skills you can buy, , you can buy training from those, like, so there's, , organizations used to be called the Australian Institute of Management.

I'm not quite sure. I think they might've had a name change recently. Yeah, I did stuff at Australian Institute of Management when I was actually. Assistant manager at a record store, I got sent off to a training course there. Yeah. So that was nineties. It wasn't very good back then. I don't know.

They've probably improved. I don't know. But now you can, you can certainly, you can go and you can get this kind of training and I think it is a really good foundation. , for you to be able to kind of get that, even if it's not very much that kind of basic level of foundational knowledge around what the key terms are and what the key perspectives need to be when it comes to being able to manage other people.

So I've done courses on, , like project management and, you know, there's always a, there's always a. Bit in the middle of that project management course, it says, what do you do when all your people leave or, you know, like there's conflict or the, the project gets, you know, there's not enough people to get the job done.

How are you going to manage that? All that sort of stuff. Those kinds of things are really useful. I think. And then after that, it's like, you know, curate your library really, , be careful about what you buy from airport bookshops, but although I will say one, one really good book I've bought from airport bookstores, the culture code.

I'm trying to remember who the author was, which is the only book that I've read that I was, thought was sort of somewhere in between that kind of, you know, , theory and practice. Well, the, you know, the good, the good thing about the airport bookstores is that Daniel Coyle it is. C O Y L E. I think we actually did a whole episode on it.

I was so excited about it. , Those airport books often they will digest it down into really accessible kind of ideas and, you know, one of the, one of the great things about being an academic is that you're used to reading other people's ideas and then kind of thinking deeply about those sorts of things.

So this, um, that might be one way in. , is to, to do that. The other, what the other thing to think about is all of the managers that you've had that you didn't like and the way in which they've managed. Yep. , you can absolutely go, you know what, that's not me. I'm not going to do it like that. And you can make, you can make solid decisions that will get you a long way in life if you just decide, like, I'm not going to behave like that particular person behave.

I 100 percent agree with that. Yeah. Right. Like this is a choice. , and, and you have the opportunity, I think in front of you now to kind of start making some of those decisions. You're not going to get fired if you're, you know, a good manager, right? If you're doing the right thing and looking after your people, like that puts you in a very strong position where people will want to come and work with you if you've got a reputation for that sort of stuff.

So I don't have anything particular that I can, I can point to, but, you know, I buy books off the shelf when I feel that there's a gap, really. Like when I come up against something and I go, huh, I need to know a little bit more about that. And then off to Amazon, top 10 books on managing emotions at conflict, uh, uh, management and managing emotions at work, those sorts of things.

You very quickly be able to pick up a book or two around some of that sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean, probably the best book I've read about it, I think it's called, , oh God, I think I've mentioned it before. How to Win at Office Politics. Oh yeah. I actually, I bought that because you recommended it to me.

Yeah. Secrets. It's called Secrets to Winning at Office Politics and it's by Marie G McIntyre. How to Achieve Goals and Increase Your Influence at Work. But that's more about dealing with The kind of mess, the sort of sideways and up and down, not so much managing people. So to answer your question, Michael, , even if you have a PhD in management, you kind of still have to feel your way.

Right. And , you're quite right. The universities. Don't offer comprehensive training on how to be a leader they expect it to be like one of the seven jobs and a trench coat that passes this academic job. Right? Like you've got to, you've got to be a salesperson, you've got to be a manager. You have to be a researcher.

You have to be a teacher. You have to be an administrator. You have to be in the marketing department. You have to be a financial manager. Like a lot of these things fall back on us. And this we're clever people. , and we're good self learners. I suppose that's the one thing the PhD does really teach you is how you learn best, like, is it through reading?

Is it through watching things? Is it through talking to other people? How much of that do you need to do? Like you get quite good at working out your own learning strategies, I think. So whatever's worked for you in the PhD in that respect, if you turn that kind of concentration onto becoming a better manager, I think, like you say, you go very far, especially in just deciding not to be perpetuating kind of poor management.

I've had so much poor management. I mean, I've had some really good management and you know, not to, I'm not sucking up when I say I'm currently under probably the best manager in academia I've ever had, I would say. , and I, you know, I think the, I think the university gods every day and please don't leave us Anne.

We appreciate you, but, um, I have learned basically how to be a manager by stuffing it up Jason, and, sometimes multiple times. , and some of the things that I've stuffed up on I'm doing again right now. Yep. Even if you learn from stuffing up, you still can keep stuffing up. I did have some training.

I had, I had 18 hours of dealing with difficult people training, which again, is not actually strictly managing people, but it, it. It does help you if you do happen to have difficult people in your team or in your orbit, which, you know, we're a university, let's face it, that happens. , but I've not had a hell of a lot of practical how to training.

And whenever I have, it's felt to me, to be honest, like really not very useful. Like it sets out these aspirational goals. Like you should have performance chats and you should do this and you should give actionable feedback and you should, you should, you should. And, but then it doesn't say how. So I've got a list of things here that I've just done badly.

Shall I riff on them? Yeah. Um, just before you do, the other thing, , to remember, Michael, is that the higher up the chain you get, , the problems are still there for everybody, right? Like you don't see them as much because people don't talk about them. The higher up they get, they've got reputations to manage.

But, , what I found is that in the senior roles that the universities will also offer you. Extra like mentoring, like they'll hire executive coaches. They'll do all that sort of stuff as well. , and that doesn't often get talked about a lot. So, you know, you might, one of the things that you might want to do is start talking to your Dean or, or someone about some of those kinds of resources that get thrown in the direction of executives.

I'm not sure they spend it on. Ask normal people. I mean, I know you've had offers of it because you've got a lot higher up than I have. I mean, I've got sort of high up in the academic sense, but I haven't got a high, as high up as you in the, in the management chain. Yeah. Um, I've never been offered that.

I've been offered therapy and actually I cannot say enough about therapy as helping you be a better manager. Understand yourself first.

There's no reason why you can't ask for this stuff though, like there, there are development budgements. Right. And so if, if you're on a, if you're on a track and it looks like the, you want to head into that kind of management space, try and make a case for it. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Like you don't know if you don't ask, you don't get right.

Yeah. Like, yeah. Okay. Sorry. All right. Carry on. I'm wondering how much the, each of these points resonate with you. Cause they're things we've talked about over time. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got them here as a list. So my first one is that don't work too hard as a manager, because you are setting the pace. You're like the pace car for everyone else.

And. If you, and also if you follow lots of things, we do, you do free up time. Like recently freed up 12 hours through use of Claude, which I'm very consciously spending on coffees and lunches with my colleagues, rather than plowing it back into my work, I can effectively working a four day week and using the other days to just, You know, enhance, spread things around, help other people use Claude.

Actually, that's one of the things I often do at lunch, but I'm working too hard, but I would say I fall, I've fallen into this trap so, so many times and always told my people, Oh, you don't have to do this, but. People do, or they just feel they have to, or, you know, you just, they know you're waiting for stuff.

And so, so often I've actually put delays on emails. I've, um, part of the reason that OmniFocus is so good is it really slows down response times on things. So you're not like just setting this unreasonable pace. What do you think of that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, and just recently, like this week, I think the, uh, right to disconnect laws came into effect as well.

So, which it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. So my university turned on, I noticed when I sent, went to send an email after five o'clock on Friday, I don't know if this is an automatic global thing for everyone, but they turned on, , we won't send this till Monday. Oh, really? That's a good idea.

And I was like, okay. And then you know what happened, Jason? I got no email all weekend. I thought email was broken. Yeah. And I was like, and then it was great because I realized actually how often I checked it, which is a bit scary, like on the weekend and there was just nothing there. It was fantastic.

Yeah. So yeah, that's happened. Although if you're above a certain pay grade, which I believe I am, technically they can still contact me, but maybe they turned it off for everyone. I don't know if they've actually done that, but I noticed that it did that to one of my emails and then I got no emails. I'm just imputing from that, that that's what they did.

I, um, I would get up and work at odd hours, , sometimes, so I'd be up. You know, very much when everybody else was in bed sometimes. And I would send emails with the intention that it would go out, um, not until, you know, the following morning during work hours. And you'd set that kind of delay sent. But what I didn't realize, , my team told me later was that they could still see when I'd written the email, like it was delivered at, You know, nine o'clock in the morning sort of thing, like I delayed that delivery, but they could still see that it was written at 2.

35 a. m. sort of things as well. I pissed off a manager once by pointing that out to them. Yeah, right. I said it was actually like, I was, I was worried about them and I thought that it was unhealthy that they were writing an email to me at 2. 45 a. m. and didn't help our working relationship. But I felt like that, that was just not okay.

Yeah, that's right. And like I say, I've done those things too, like, do you know what I mean? Like, but she was doing it repeatedly and also you could see it in her management style. Let me just say. Yep. Yeah. So as a, as a manager, you kind of do have to have, you do have to think about the impact that you're going to have on other people when you kind of set those kinds of, when you do those kinds of things, people are watching you.

Yeah. And so that's my second point there. Did you see that? Uh, you're more visible than you think you are. Ah, yes. Your every action will be scrutinized. You know, there'll be a lot of gossip, even if you don't hear it. Just know that the gossip is happening, positive and negative. We've had our whole episode about gossip.

We don't know. It isn't always there to tear people down. It's informational. So, and so that therefore it's sort of on you to be authentic with. Everyone, because your inconsistencies will be noticed if you're not authentic, if you, if you say one thing to one person and different thing to another person, sometimes you just got to not say something that, you know, that's common, but you've got to be able to not tell people different stories.

Um, and that, that sometimes can be really difficult when you're trying to actually managing flows of information that are business relevant, that, you know, sometimes you're told outright, you're not allowed to say to anyone. And it puts you in a really weird values conflict. I remember once I went to, , some ally training.

Some for LBGTIQ and one of the exercises they put us through is to say, so you're in a role playing type of exercise and you're gay and, but you don't want to be out at work. So you can't reveal the gender of your partner. So you're going to talk about your weekend with your colleagues without revealing the gender of your partner.

Boy, was that really instructive. I really felt like I just couldn't. Be your, like, I felt like I was second guessing everything I said that, , and that I was coming across as really inauthentic. And the point of the exercise was actually to demonstrate how hard it is for people who feel like they have to mask and how bad that is and how it makes you come across in a way that you don't necessarily, you know, that isn't who you are, because that's what you're having to do.

And I often think back to that exercise when I think about managing and having to be your authentic self at work. And yet sometimes holding information, you don't want other people to. to know because you can't tell them. And it's a values conflict, right? I find it really difficult. I do it, but I find it incredibly difficult when that's my worst part of managing is when it hits my values like that so directly.

And if you, you can get into those situations where that does have an incredibly deleterious effect on your health, if like, if you hold, if you hold your values tight, , and then, , find yourself in a situations or multiple situations where you have to act not in accordance with those values. , you need to be really careful about that sort of stuff.

, yeah. Organizations across the board. I'm not just talking about the universities, but like, , across the board, most large organizations will have value statements. We're here, we're about honesty and transparency and moving fast and breaking through things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like whatever. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Pay attention to the way they act rather than what they say. Mm hmm. Um, and. Read the budgets, don't read what they say. Yeah, because what they spend money on is their priorities. Yeah. , and you will have to, at some point, you will have to kind of make your peace with that as well about how Depending on how high up you want to go.

It's one of the reasons I don't want to go any higher. Yeah. Following on from Inga's point about, you know, making sure that, that you live in accordance with your values and that you are being looked at and scrutinized. , people will see it when, you know, you start by, when, when you start behaving in a way that, , when you start showing up differently, people will notice.

So yeah, do your best. I've definitely worked for managers. So I think I've lived against their values or maybe their values were never that in the first place. It's so hard to tell, like as Goffman said, beware the masks that you don, because one day they might become your face. Uh huh. Yeah. , I've certainly worked for managers who.

Have been so deep in that values conflict for so long that it's just, it's not made them good humans. Yeah. That's all I'll say without getting sued. Yes. , and, , the other, the other part to it is that you are not your, you are not your job. Yeah. Um, although it's very hard in academia, cause we are often made to think we are our job.

Our identities are so bound up in our jobs. Mine is so bound up in my job. Who am I without my work? For reals though. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to, not healthy. I'm not going to pretend to answer that question for you. But, um, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of people though, right. , if you're in a position to hire people, which is one of the, one of the real joys of being a manager is being able to hire people and build a team.

Like if you're in that position, that is a privilege and. Bloody treasure it, interviews are not the way to really assess people. , you need to do task based interviews. So for instance, when we, when we hire administrators, we've got a, we've got a big task list of all these conflicting things that are happening on an imaginary day and the person's meant to prioritize them and, and the priorities.

it really tells you something about where the values are. So you tell people, look, the values of this organization is student focused, right? So the idea is that they scan through that thing and then they do the thing that would It would actually help the value of the team maintain, like help the team maintain that student focused approach, regardless of whether it's the manager demanding something, right.

So in that list, I'm demanding something that, you know, I need to be deprioritized, right. And so it's the people who go, yeah, I'm brave enough to deprioritize that manager, because if you've told me that the purpose of this job is this, then these are the order in which things can happen that sorts people out real quick.

And we've had great. , I mean, it's a, you know, it's a decent salary back in the day before inflation, but now it's just not, you know, I don't necessarily stay for that long. , I mean, it's a, you know, it's a decent salary back in the day before inflation, but now it's just not. Yep. Like that's the facts.

And, , you know, so you expect people to come in and, , who are starting their work in many ways, perhaps, you know, so that I have to treat that role appropriately, like a bit of a training role and help people move on and they do. That's how I've always, uh, approached that role. So that's, so you have to realize that you're, you know, also as an educator, that you bring skills to that, , how to train people in roles and help them set priorities and that.

But when I'm hiring a teacher, I get them to teach us something and they have to teach us, you know, Anything like juggling or how to knit. I don't care what it is. , they have to design a little lesson. They given how much time to do it. And, , and that very quickly sorts people out as well. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

, And you know, once you get good people. You should, you should work really hard to, you know, ensure that they are enjoying their time at work as much as you possibly can. There are rules, , and all organizations have rules, but there are also other rules that are maybe not written down quite so much as well.

So wherever possible, you know, use those shadow rules as best you possibly can to ensure that people don't have a shit time working for you. Because part of your job is to take barriers out of their way. Right. So the barriers will be put in their way for various things, other colleagues, you know, different priorities and stuff.

And so you're the one who's got to be lifting up that log and pushing that log off the path, you're the one who's got to open the gate, you're the one who's got to, to, to clear the pathway. forward for them rather than see yourself as necessarily setting that path. Like you help them set the goals and translate the goals from management often, um, translate them into actionable forms, but you also just get things out of their way.

And that sometimes, you know, has got me the reputation in the past of being a bit of a mama bear. That's the gossip I hear about myself. Like, Oh, she really looks after her people. I'm like, I'll, I'll cop that. Yeah, yeah. Because my job is those people have a job to do. And my job is to, to make sure that they can do it.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the, you know, one of the. Best moments that I had as a manager was, , you know, to be able to actively support someone who went on secondment and like, that was, that was hard, right? Like, because when they left, they were really valuable person, right in the, in the thicker things, but they wanted to grow their career.

And I was like, you know, we'd been having conversations about what does your career look like ever since I'd got there? It was like, Hey, I see that you've been doing this for some time now. Have you been thinking about other stuff? You know, doing that kind of managerial support thing that you do. , and then they took me up on offer and went, Oh my God.

I mean, your best people have the most options. That's what you've always got to recognize. Like there's always something that they, if they're genuinely really good people, they can do other things. I mean, I've got down here on my next one. Cause I just had a quick look at the time. I thought, Ooh, we could talk for hours, but like just really quickly.

, I think people appreciate decisiveness in a manager. I know I do. And I've come to realize this is one of the qualities that people appreciate. They, they might not like the decisions that you make. , but what they hate is sort of being held in limbo by you not making a decision or you flip flopping on decisions and, , changing your mind.

And sometimes this means pushing back on management above you in order to like, say, go ahead and do that. And I've got your back, right? I'm covering, I've made this decision. I've made this call. I'll go and explain it to whoever that you're not getting such and such, or that that such and such is going to be delayed.

Because in a lot of ways, I often describe myself to my team as I am your shit umbrella. Right? Like, so there's shit coming down and like, I'm the umbrella over your head and the shit falls on me and you should see the edge of the shit. Might splash your boots a little bit, but if it splashes more than your boots, that's when I want to know, cause I need to push the shit umbrella out a little bit wider.

And so that is like the classic, , what they call a frontline manager, where you're doing the job that you're managing other people to do, or sometimes called middle manager. I like frontline manager better. Cause it really does give that sense of being in the battle, you know? Um, but it's very easy in that situation to become, I love this term from succession, a pain sponge.

And so what that means is you've got an unreasonable demand from above, you're trying to protect your people below. And the way that you do that is that you take on that work, like you absorb, um, whatever it is and, and you can quickly find yourself working to the small hours and, and also find that your managers having good time because you're giving them what they want and your people are having a good time because they're not overworked and they're happy, but you are not.

And you can easily find yourself getting very resentful. So I'll just watch out for becoming a pain sponge sometimes, like, I'll be frank right at the moment because of what's happened at ANU and because I've lost a staff member and stuff, I am being a pain sponge, yeah, and I'm, I'm really feeling it, but also I'm communicating that and I, I'm working my way through it and I'm replanning and I know it's temporary and that we'll figure it out and ANU, If they decide not to replace the staff, , I think they're good enough to recognize that you don't get the same amount of work out of 20 percent less people.

You just don't, but figuring out how to do that. Like I just had to pick some stuff up, right? Like an editing bootcamp happened. , Kelly was going to do it. I just had to pick it up. And you know, when you pick up someone's teaching notes, you can never just pick up someone's teaching notes. It's not how it works.

We're figuring this out as we share teaching notes with each other. Aren't we? Like it's so much of it's in the performance. Um, and if the notes aren't clear to you, if you haven't made them, it's very hard to give that performance. So yeah. So just be careful becoming a pain sponge. Yeah, I wish we had better advice than that.

, you need to back your people, uh, which is something that you said as well. Um, when I was, um, I was deputy, , director of programs at RMIT. , I crossed paths a lot with the admin folk. Um, I spent a lot of time with administrative folk and that was a, it was a big area. And so what would happen is that.

People would like, some people would leave and new people would come in. And so every year I would have a, hi, I'm Jason. Welcome to the team, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, , and so you'd have some people who'd been there and had heard this kind of talk two or three times, uh, on the way through. But one of the things I used to say was that you are the experts in the room, right?

Like you're going to make, you're going to be put in difficult positions. You're going to have to make difficult decisions sometimes. And sometimes it's going to go sideways. And things are going to look really, really bad. And like, there's going to be bad outcomes and that sort of stuff, but. We've got you right.

Make the best decision that you can come and talk to me if it's a problem and talk to me early so that I can, I know about it, but we will back you up. And I had multiple people tell me. When I left RMIT, that was one of the most really valuable thing because they, they could see that that was how I like to manage was that I wasn't just saying this sort of stuff.

When things went sideways, we would, you would play the problem. You would never play the person. It was like, you did the best you possibly could in this situation. I can see why you made those kinds of decisions. , there's some other information that you weren't aware of, which might've changed your decision making at the time if you'd have known about it, but you didn't.

So this is not on you. Let's try and fix it. And then, you know, you get so much loyalty out of that when you look after your kids. Oh, yeah, you do. That is actually one thing you do get paid back in loyalty from people. Yeah. Um, and that loyalty persists beyond the time that they're with you. Yeah. I mean, the networks that you create as people go to other places, and how you can help each other and continue to help each other is like, you know, this is, you do pay the price to be a good management manager.

I think there's like, like I said, it's sort of no ethical consumption under capitalism. There's no, there's no kind of good management under neoliberalism. There just isn't. I think partly sort of accepting the limits of that, that's been very difficult for me because these neoliberal principles, you know, time is money, money is more important than people.

, we can manage things through incentives and consequences, like these are the kind of principles that pervade the university. And then you're also under a scarcity. system where it's the academic hunger, hunger games, and people will turn on each other because of that. Like, like you're in a difficult spot.

So, you know, cut yourself a break. Anyway, hopefully Michael, you're just beginning your journey. Yes. Welcome. I haven't got any of these really huge problems, but you're thinking about it. That's really good. Like Jason said, at the start, like that's the first step. Yeah, , I, just to kind of round this out, I know it's been, , quite the conversation but, , I love being a manager.

Do you know what I mean? Like, to be able to support people and help them to grow and do all that sort of stuff. Like, I really, I like that. Yeah, I don't really. Don't you? No. Okay. I like, I like, I mean, it's satisfying and I'm glad I'm the manager and not being managed. Maybe I just have power needs or autonomy or control issues or whatever.

I'm sure I do, but I, I find it stressful. I find it continually stressful. And I find it, , I suppose I'm much more of a nerd. I want to be in my own little academic world in my head. You know me, I'm kind of, , I'm a kind of abstract thinker, I think, and I like to write and, you know, and I like to wonder about things and I find management to be the opposite of those things.

It's very practical. Oh yeah, absolutely. And it works. , often it works to different timelines to what kind of an, a longer, a longer timeframe academic thinking works. I think also, and this is fundamental, you are just a much nicer person than I am.

It's like, I don't know. I'm kind, I'm kind, but I'm not like. You know, I'm just like, I do test high on the autism spectrum. That's not to say that that's like, I don't understand people or anything like that. I think I just tend to live, I live more in, in my head than most people do. And so for me, management is a very grounding activity and I try to do it with compassionate kindness and with, you know, I try to do all those things, but it takes a lot out of me.

Peopling. Yeah. But you do it very well. I mean, like. I've known you for 15 years now, and you know, there's a reason why we're working together. It's not because, like, if you were an arsehole, Inga, we would not be working together, right? Like, let's just be clear about that. Yeah, absolutely. It's not what I'm saying about, like, autism is often conflated with arseholeness, which is so completely not the case.

Yeah, yeah. It's just, people are still whatever people they are. It's just like, are you good at peopling? Does it come naturally? Yeah. Absolutely. Or not. And it does not come naturally to me. Never has. And in that way, I kind of come at it anthropologically. Like I theorize it and then I enact it rather than really feel it.

And I think I've always been like that. And I've got like, again, the mask becomes your face. Right. But you can get a PhD in management, right? So like these are, there are tools and techniques and yeah, that's right. You can, yeah, that you can learn and then that you can then. It is a craft like anything else.

Like, you know, and if it doesn't come naturally to you, it doesn't mean you can't try. So then I think, you know, the point behind that then is if it is exhausting for you, if being a manager, okay, not everyone is, wants to be a manager. Not everybody will be good at being a manager. If you find, Michael, if you find yourself, as you work your way through all this sort of stuff, that this is not for you, then, you know, Lean into that and try and talk to your organization around what you can do to minimize the amount of management that you actually have to do.

Yeah. Unfortunately, progression often just relies on management. Cause like it's this irony, right? Yeah. Managers are the ones who decide if people progress and get promoted and they're, they manage. So their definition of what deserves promotion is management. And then we get in this endless cycle of, you know, like becoming a subject matter expertise and not having any direct reports.

Yeah. For most people. , there's limits to that at a certain point, you have to step up. So then you need to create that space for yourself, you know, outside. Or understand yourself in that space, you know. And for me, like the peopling, cause it does, like I said, doesn't come that naturally to me, the, the peopling to me is exhausting and, and therefore, like the more of it I do, the less energy I'm going to have for the other things that bring me joy at work.

And that's just something you have to accept. You get paid your money, right? Yeah. And right at the moment I'm in like quite an intense management phase and that's why I'm a bit nervous. Grumpy, Jason, because I'm trying to not be grumpy to everyone in my life. So I'm like, this is where Inga, the pain sponge starts to, you know, not be a good thing.

This is no one's fault, but like you say too, just compassion for people who are managing a, a different level from you, because they are just like, I say I've seen lots of bad managers and I have, but most people are trying to do their best. Particularly now, I think culture has changed. You can get away with it less than you used to be able to.

Just being an asshole is harder. The, um, one of the best pieces of advice I got from someone, , from a manager once was that, , no matter what level people are at in their careers, their job is just as important to them at their level as what your job is as important to you at yours. So if you are managing, if you've got a, you know, large team and they're, , at a, you know, a range of steps on that progression ladder, then you gotta remember that the person who's a, you know, a HU five or something, who's at the early start of their career, that, that their job to them is really, is probably really important and it really matters to them.

The same way that, you know, your, your colleague on a Q 10 is their job is important to them at that same time. And just because you are. An exec or a senior manager or something like that, that you can't forget that, that it's not, you know, and not everyone's going to be able to perform to the level that you, you perform at.

Um, yeah, that's right. And a lot of their work is invisible to you. Like you can make the mistake of thinking people aren't working because you can't see it, you know, and there's no direct outputs from it some of the time, but it's, it's still happening. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that that got sort of like quite depressing Welcome to management.

You can do a whole PhD on it. You can do it Michael. We believe in you. We believe in you. I'm gonna move us on just a little bit of the , stuff that we've been reading. Um, you sent me a couple of things actually. Uh, and then I went and read them. , first was, , a piece by Sam Altman, who's the, uh, CEO of OpenAI.

I don't want to say Sam Altman's my new Elon Musk, but I'm like, he's Elon Musk adjacent. He's got the potential. He holds the potential. Yes. Yeah. What did you call him the other day? the Broligarchs. Broligarchs. Yeah. The Broligarchs. , the, , article was called Open AI is testing its powers of persuasion and it was in Wired Magazine.

Yeah. It's a bit freaky. Sam and Arianna Huffington were talking about Thrive AI, a startup working on AI powered health coaching. , the article explores the broader implications of AI's persuasive capabilities, including potential benefits and risks. , and the, you know, one of the things that we should be thinking about is the way in which this AI develops, what kind of impacts does it have on the humans who are interacting with it?

Yeah. And, and so the idea of Thrive AI, of course, is that it's a supportive AI to help you to live a better life, have a better, have a better exercise routines, eat better, do all that sort of stuff. , and that it's using. , persuasive techniques in order to keep people engaged in order to help them to live that better life.

But the wider question, of course, around all this sort of stuff is, is having really super persuasive AI is a good thing in our world or not. Did I tell you I spun up a persuasion bot? No. You are so Sam Altman, aren't you? Do tell persuasion bot. Yep. I'm keen to hear. Well, persuasion spot is an expert persuader.

A negotiator. And sometimes I just ask it for help with, , emails. Like I'm, I'm having a little bit of a, I wouldn't call it a running email flame war, but I wouldn't not call it that. Yep. Yeah. Am I the asshole bot that it's meant to like, check whether I'm being passive aggressive, um, and this one just is designed to kind of do the opposite.

Is it working? Yeah, it's pretty. It's new and I spun it up yesterday. So, you know, it's like, I've got a stable of them. I like giving the names. I've got grammarian and contrarian, who's like an adverse critique bot. And I've got, , I've got research strategy one and like, I give them all sorts of different documents.

So it'd be interesting to see what this one's like. But after I read this article, I'm like, huh, you know, well, In terms of communications, I also forgot that, you know, the Dean of my college, where I'm connected to for research purposes, reads the blog. I think I sent you, she sent, I, I wrote about how management writes wall of text emails.

Um, On the blog and how I have this bot that just reads them and gives me the action items. And so she wrote in the first paragraph that she was aware that I was doing that. And, um, you know, that, that she promised that the whole email would be a hundred percent human crafted. I did write to her and say, uh, you got me there.

Nice roast. We had a fun exchange about it. She's great. Helen Sullivan. Yeah. Really fun. Um, I took your idea of that email bot. And then I. synthetically designed a letter from the CEO. Um, you know, 600 words kind of, you know, the normal sort of thing that you get. Um, and then I showed that at the Holmes Glen at the, at the conference.

Yeah. Yeah. I said that you had this thing and, and this is what it can do and what it, you know, what actions, if any, should I take from this email and I deliberately ensure that the email. Was a no action required email, a whole bunch of like, here's some stuff and I loved it. Gave me half a dozen bullet points in a sentence at the end that said, don't have to worry about any of it.

Well, I will report back on Persuasion Bot because I think it could coach me as well. But this gets into this, this article, which is really fascinating, especially anthropics research findings, you know, that larger and more, sort of, Sophisticated language models appear to be better at persuading people. I know Claude has persuaded me that he is indispensable in my life.

And it doesn't matter how much I have to pay to keep him there.

So, you know, as it gets better at that, , that persuasion piece, you know, there's some evidence too, that it can kind of deprogram people from conspiracy theories, but then it could also program people, right? Like, You know, as Foucault said, power is Janus faced. It's like, you can either use it to oppress or to, you know, to not to do things productively.

So, , and the, what regulatory changes do people need, you know, to, to stop bots like that being built. Or to punish people that use them on others to like, I mean, again, I come back to that book on influence that we talked about a while back and about some of the techniques that we used in Korean prison camps, where one of the things they used to do is get people to write letters and even just writing a letter.

About something you don't believe in will shift your beliefs. Signing a petition will shift your beliefs, you know? So like the, this is just, I mean, the territory we're in now and those Google pixel cameras that can now take a photo that's AI generated from the beginning and take other people out and put other people in, I mean, come on.

They shouldn't actually be allowed, I don't think they should be allowed to release something like that. I don't think that's good for our society. Well, you know, and some of the models that we interact with, they do have some boundaries to them, which is good, right? Like, but there's plenty of AIs out there that do not have those kinds of boundaries.

, as I was saying the other day, I can't unsee this now, but I did see a photograph of Joe Biden in a bikini. Right? Like, this is, like, all I'm saying is, like, So you need that in your life. I mean, yeah. I don't think you do. I'm just looking at the time, Jason. What time did you say you had to go? I have to leave in 12 minutes.

Right. Can I just quick shout out to Christy Clark for buying me a copy of 4, 000 Weeks. Now we both have a copy. Yes. It's blue. You remember? It's the blue one. I remember. Yes. 4, 000 Weeks. Yes. And I've got, I must admit it's a little confronting. Yeah. Is this why you're having trouble with it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't think I want to think about that. Time is finite. Finitude, right? one of the things that, um, I did like about, um, Berkman's book was, , he does. Try and tell you on multiple occasions to kind of give yourself a bit of a break that you like. There's just no way that you are gonna get it all done.

And yeah, it is actually quite it's it's good reality call. Yeah, and the sooner that you realize that the probably the happier you're gonna be. So you don't end up on this kind of never ending hedonic treadmill. You know, or it's not even hedonic. Sometimes it's just actually sadistic treadmill, because you keep giving yourself more tasks to do that, , not actually going to benefit your life.

, in any kind of really meaningful way, there's always going to be, your OmniFocus database is always going to have more stuff in it than you're actually going to be able to tick off. Um, and so you have to, you have to, You've got to become clear about what it is that you are going to do at any particular point in time.

And yeah, that's really, really hard. Yeah. Yeah. And he sort of, he gives you, he gives you good ways to think. I think we definitely have to do an is this book bullshit and spoiler alert. It's not, um, , at some point on it. I think. Yeah. yeah. Okay. It's a good book. It's a good book. Yeah. I really, I really liked it.

Anyway, thanks Christie, for, for giving me a copy of it as such a nice present. Yeah. Are you, how far through it are you? Uh, about a third. I, I haven't put it down from not enjoying it at all. It's just like stuff, I haven't read anything really. Even romance books in the last little while. Just being, I'm so tired at night.

I'm just, I'm scrolling Instagram and listening to podcasts in bed. It's not healthy, but this is, this is where I am. This is how I relax. Yeah. Yeah. , Let's move on then. Let's kind of start to wrap up. Pull this bus in, I think. I know we've got some other stuff in there. We'll put some links to some of the stuff that we've been reading and you can have a look at, but there's been a fair bit of, there's been a fair bit of AI stuff lately.

Yeah. Um, partly that's because we're, that's the work that we're doing as well. Yeah. And we're, we're building our newsletter up, aren't we, Jason? Yes, we are. It's going to happen, folks. Like, thank you for all the people who keep signing up and going, when is this, this going to happen? But thank you for signing up.

It will. Meaningful clearing of the throat. That's all I'm saying. Yeah. this is our two minute tips section, Ingo, and you've already. Foreshadow that you have one. So this is good. Um, this segment is in honor of David Allen and his classic getting things done book. And he argues in that, that if a task will take less than two minutes to complete, you should do it then and there, because it'll take longer than two minutes to capture it in your task system, schedule time to do it and mark it as complete.

But really this is our opportunity, , to, you know, spin up some hacks, , figure out things that you can do. Other podcasts would probably lead with this stuff, but we leave it right to the end as a delicious yogurt light treat. Um, and I've got a two minute tip from this episode and it actually came from professor Coralie English, who wrote to us.

Just last night, in fact, Coralie wrote to us and I went, I'm going to steal that. Thank you. That's just in time. Yes. Um, Coralie's from Newcastle university and she says, hi, Jason and bracket and Inga, but I know that Jason's doing the chief mailbag manager these days bit. I do have spreadsheets. Um, I recently had to upgrade my AirPods and then ordered a nice colorful case to protect them.

I found an option for cases to be personalized and rather than put my name on them, I decided to put my mobile number on it instead. Sadly, I wasn't able to include both due to character limits. However, now if I leave them somewhere, , Kind Samaritan will know how to return them to you. Oh, that's excellent.

Yeah, that, that is good. I used the, , on the air tags, but you can engrave your air tags and stuff. I put emojis on mine, but so, you know, far less useful, but yeah, it's a good idea. Right. You know, same way that, you know, putting an image on your iPhone lock screen, if you've got a kid with your phone number on the lock screen.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Like those little hacks are really good and like, um, your mobile phone number on your dog's tags as well, which, , you know, so yeah, it's a great idea. Number one son is about to get a mobile phone. Oh, you're entering. Yeah. We're starting to enter that particular period. So I will be doing the, you know, here's my phone number on the lock screen.

Like if found, please call. Exactly. Exactly. And what about yours? Well, I've, as I said, I'm working on two computers and rediscovering the power of Apple notes. It's your friend. I'm really impressed with this capability. So quick shout out to on threads at Hurley, H U R L R Y Rahul Chowdhury, , has a really, well, it looks like a really excellent website.

I haven't subscribed yet, but I'm on the verge, like I've read so many good things that he's produced. , so I'll just point you at that, but my two minute tip is actually my neuro divergence research bot on Claude. So if you're a researcher like me a research area of expertise and people write to you about it.

Right. , I often get emails from supervisors now asking, you know, what, I've got a person who's diagnosed with ADHD. What are some tips? You know, I get people sending me strategy papers, policy things. It's great. Like, I'm like, it's taken a year of talking about it and people are already seeing me as expert.

I'm not ready to claim that mantle yet though. Right? So I need some help. So we did a research project where we, um, read all the literature on neurodivergence in the PhD with a group of colleagues. And so we, there's 30 papers and four dissertations that we read and we cut them up and coded them. We ended up with a hundred page document of sort of dissected and coded quotes.

So I gave that to Claude. I gave it a few key other papers about neurodivergence and I gave it some very, , very long steering description, like almost 500 words of who it was, that it was this expert on neurodivergence and that, you know, it could draw on its general knowledge, but it had to privilege the expert knowledge that I'd given it and that its purpose was to provide support and advice.

And now when people write to me, I ask Claude their question and, , and it's remarkable. Yeah. So if you're an expert, like, I mean, I have to read it and like, this is a classic case of symbiosis with a machine, right? Like, you wouldn't want to just completely trust something that came out and occasionally it makes mistakes, but it only makes mistakes in terms of recommending papers, it'll get to you.

dates wrong and things like that, but other than that, it's pretty bloody good. And it reminds me of things that I've just forgotten, you know, papers or resources or books. I've given it a book list. I've given it, you know, so it's just like this, this kind of living filing cabinet is the best way I can describe it.

Like a filing cabinet with personality. , so if you're an expert in an area, consider creating your own bot to be your shadow self. Yeah. I'd be interested to hear people's experience with that. It will be, it will be interesting because effectively what you're doing is stitching together a network of bots, right, to support you in various different aspects of your life.

Oh, I've got so many now. Yeah. Little army of kind of assistants. Yeah. But the net effect of all of this is that there's less cognitive load. All Yes. Part of that. Right. And I think that like, that's a significant advantage because if you're not exhausted all the time from having to do all of the kind of ground up thinking, if you can outsource some of that stuff to these agents or these bots, , that allows you to be more creative in, And to, you know, use the energy that you've got in more creative pursuits.

All right. Well, yesterday, for example, a colleague just said, I've got a research strategy bot that has like the recent Accord document. It's got, um, the Vitae, um, stuff from the BTA organization. It's got, , some key papers. It's got things I've written about. It's got some, some reports and strategies that I've written over time.

It just knows about research and development as a sort of policy landscape. And then yesterday, a colleague wrote to me on Teams like, Oh, I've got to do these pros and cons of oral exams. You know, can you give, I can't think of any cons. I'm so used to thinking up the pros. And I like, I thought, I said, Oh, it's in a document.

I started like hunting around to try and find a document where I knew I'd written it. Then I'm like, why am I asking research strategy bot? And I'm like, can you give me 10? And it's like, yep, here's 10. I'm like, Oh, you've got another 10. You got another 10 and I ended up just sending her 30. I'm like, pick one, you know?

And I said, I think I texted you saying, I need to stop saying, let me Google that for you to let me call that for you, you know, Hey, you know, you could set up your That's all I'm saying to people, you could set up your own. Yeah, you can. And, . A lot of people don't seem to want to. That's that first step, right?

Yeah. That's that first step of like, you know, what if I do this thing, I'm uncertain about what the outcome's going to be. It's probably just easier just to do it the way I've always done it. But, you know, there's, there's real value in spending those initial, I don't know, 10 hours, whatever it is that you need to do to kind of get past that and then to just be constantly amazed about how useful these things are.

And then, yeah, you know, honestly, I would love to see it's moving. We could, we could move to a four day week. We could, and which like, it's been well shown that we need to, because we're working too hard cognitively. If we did embrace these tools, but I bet what will happen is it'll get normalized and then it'll just set the bar higher, but hopefully I'll be retired by then.

It's already, keep sending the message to people. Don't use it just to work harder. Yeah. Yeah. , already that seems to be starting to happen. People are talking about work intensification. Yes. That's it, Inga. We got to the end. , we love reviews. If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, we promise to read it out.

Having said that, I've turned my phone off so that it wouldn't go ding during the recording. Um, Martin Nemo has left us a, , a review, but I couldn't find it on Apple Podcasts. I had to go to, like, I had to Google our pod and then find it on some kind of aggregator somewhere. And then that showed. Uh, reviews and then go from there.

So, yeah, something, so something's going weird with reviews on Apple podcast. I think it's when they're written in another country sometimes. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And, , Martin was, , was traveling. He was going to conferences overseas. One of which he went to, I think was in Finland. Um, it was a conference, , and they had a metal, a death metal band, I think, playing at this particular conference.

At the conference? Yeah. Martin, thank you. Big shout out for helping us with our sound back in the day, like a couple of top tips. So yeah, I'm not surprised he's going to conferences with metal bands. That's hilarious. Dr. Martin. , uh, yeah. Anyway, we will read them out next time, won't we? We will. We will, , I, you can reach us at, , if you want to be part of the mailbag, you can reach us, uh, by sending a, sending us an email, , to our shiny new email address on the reg team.

That's all one word at gmail. com, or you can leave us a voice message, , on speakpipe. com forward slash thesis, whisperer, and we will. We will include it in our next episode, like we did with Alison's, , and also with Michael's, , I'm having a break from the socials because actually, and the longer that I'm having a break from these socials and get, you know, the happier I think I am.

Maybe it's a permanent break. I think maybe it might be, , but we can still find you everywhere on all of the socials with the exception of. Pretty much. I'm, I'm pretty much on threads. I sometimes go into blue sky, but then I get immediately irritated. So I go out again and mastodon, I get mansplained at.

So I go out again and then I find myself on threads a lot. So if you want to talk to me, it's threads. Yeah. Little bit of LinkedIn. A little bit of LinkedIn. Yep. , it costs us about a thousand dollars a year to produce this podcast. So if you want to support our work, you can, you can sign up to be a riding the bus member for just 2 a month.

, via our On The Reg Kofi site. And since the last episode of On The Reg, the following people have supported us through our Kofi page. Oh, thank you people. James from Yeah, three people. Yep. Do you want me to read them out? They're black. That's to say, like, yes. So James from Ontario in Canada, Jessica from Adelaide in Australia, and Arezoo, who didn't tell us where they're from, but like you're from a planet awesome.

Thank you. We appreciate you so much. It does keep the wheels of the bus turning. Yes. Um, thank you everyone. We, , we are signing up for this particular episode. Inga is got plenty of time on her hands. She's mostly sitting back, putting her feet on the desk. So she'll edit this podcast and, uh, and have it out.

Lickety split, I'm sure people can't see this. She's shaking her head going, ah, this might be a while. Do my best. Yeah. , thanks for listening and we'll catch up with you next time we record. Thank you. Inga. All right. Thanks, Jay. See you. Bye.