What does it take to be an entreprenerd?

Jason lost the annual Downs family hosted hot cross bun competition, but Inger's political team comprehensively won the federal election, so we figure we came out even. 

There's a bulging mail bag with lots of interesting questions from listeners - some of which we could even answer.

Then we chat about the first ten months of our business 'On The Reg Team'. What lessons has Jason learned about being an entreprenerd?   loyalty wont save your Higher Ed job... so how do you start your own thing (even if it's just a lifeboat for now).

Clearly we had a lot to say because Inger's AirPods gave up before the end! (Inger snippity doo dah'd over half an hour... Sadly, you don't get to hear about Jason painting his boat)

Things we mentioned:

• The first hot cross bun episode (where Jason accidentally bought secular buns)
• Guardian episode on Australia's obsession with sexy (!?) hot cross bun varieties
• Jason's pictures of the HCB off and trophy
• #DemocracySausage price list on Instagram
• Inger's pictures of her election day work for Pocock
• List of reading for nurses going into academia (thanks Sally-Anne Wherry!)
• Timing app and Co-Typist + our TextExpander book
• MaxQDA tailwind AI assistant and Consensus
• Goblin tools
• Do the work by Steven Pressfield
• Inger's enshittification post
• Xero and Paris Financial

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>

- Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

- See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at enquiries@ontheregteam.com

- Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com.

- 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

inger: [00:00:00] Do you know what time I went to bed last night? 5:30 

both: PM 

inger: 5:30 PM 

both: Good work. I 

inger: got home and I looked at bed. I thought that looks good. I'm gonna get into that. 

both: Yeah. And then 

inger: husband came home and he goes, so you're in bed?

I'm like, yep.

Oh, let's start, can we? Okay. 

both: Alright. That's 

inger: welcome to on the Reg. I'm Professor Inga Newburn from the Australian National University, but I'm better known as Thesis Whisperer on the internet. And I'm here with my good friend Dr. Jason Downs from the on the reg team for another episode of On the Reg.

There's a lot of on the reg 

Jason: there, 

inger: uh, where we about work. Actually, 

Jason: I'm gonna, no, I'm gonna call you up because the last time 

inger: Yes. 

Jason: You called me out on too many theses. 

both: Yeah. Like, 

Jason: as in Oh, did 

both: I do it? 

Jason: Did I do it? Yes, you did. You called, you called me out on a, and we had to rerecord it. And now this time you dropped in an extra, the.

inger: Did I 

Jason: You did Shall start. Sorry, I'm, I Start, start again. The MAs the master is being schooled by the student. That's all. I'm like, okay. [00:01:00] 

inger: 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. I'm not gonna do that again, Jason.

I'm just No, you're just 

both: moving right on by. No, I'm 

inger: just motoring through In this episode, we didn't put the foreshadowing bit in here, but I'm gonna foreshadow In this episode we're gonna talk about being entrepreneurs, entrepreneurialness, uh, which seems particularly apt in this era where it seems like everyone's losing their job, Jason.

both: Mm-hmm. Uh, that's it. I've got 

inger: two friends this week tell me they've lost their jobs inside the university sector. Damn. It seems like a good time to talk about going your own way, doing your own thing, making the money on the side, or fully just escaping the mothership as Jason has done. So we're gonna talk about entrepreneurship.

Mm. And fucking un 

Jason: an unvarnished version because Yeah. Yeah. You know, the reels on the, the reels on Instagram make it [00:02:00] all look. Pretty sexy. Yeah, 

inger: they do. But like there's lots of traps for young players. 

both: Oh yeah. 

inger: Um, and old players like we are. Okay. So Jason, but first of all, um, how you been since we last?

Jason: Yeah. 

inger: Like kind of good 

Jason: but mixed, if you know what I mean. Yeah. So there's some, some little bit of this and a little bit of that from some from column A. Something from column B. I'm plagued by pain in ga. Oh, that's great. I know, right. And I, like, I cooked my back and I talked about this last time, and then I went back to Jiujitsu and then I think I recouped it again.

Anyway, my close friends are telling me that it might be time to give up BJJ, like good close friends who have my best interests at heart. So I would be one of those. 

inger: I think I've been saying that Yeah. For a little while. But go on Jess. I'm glad, I'm glad there's a chorus of us. But you're ignoring us, aren't you?

Yeah, 

Jason: I am. Ears. Okay. Fingers in the ears. La la, la, la, la, la, la la la. So yesterday was a trip to the [00:03:00] osteopath. I've jacked up my hip. Um, oh, he works ma. He works magic. I'm not quite sure. Yeah, they're 

inger: pretty amazing people. 

Jason: I don't know. He like poked me and stretched me and did stuff and said, you'll for a couple days, but 

inger: they barely touch you.

They like, he was like, nothing happened. You're like, what did I pay for? And then you're like, the pain is gone. 

Jason: Yeah. So I went from not being able to walk up the stairs at home, like literally not being able to walk up the stairs to this morning, 50%. Reduced pain and I'm able to walk up the stairs. It still hurts a bit, but I was able to walk up the stairs, got another session booked for a couple of days time.

I suspect it'll all be gone by Saturday when I'll go back onto the mats, it'll be good. 

inger: Ah, okay. Yeah. Good. Well, you know what, what's you earn money for, but to pay health professionals to keep you. Correct. Correct. 

Jason: Um, we, what else did we do? Uh, since the last time we spoke, we closed, we took the decision and I think it was the right decision, a healthy decision.

Mm 

both: mm-hmm. To, 

Jason: um, close our business over [00:04:00] the Easter and Anzac Day period, which they came close together this year. So that gave us a, like a 10 day break just to be able to walk away from everything. I noticed that there, I put out of office on and all that sort of stuff, but other people did not take that break.

And they were emailing me, but I did not see any of those emails. Inga, 

inger: that is very healthy of you. Boundaries. 

Jason: I boundaries. Although I am gonna admit it was hard. I watched, I watched Cath in the Garden, like she did a whole bunch of work in the garden, and I looked at that and went, oh, that looks like hard work. So. Oh, so you, 

inger: you stood there and watched your wife do work in the garden? 

Jason: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I handed her tools with a cup of coffee.

Did 

inger: you like? Yeah, 

Jason: no, no. I was useful. I was like, maybe you should do this and have you seen that call? Oh, were 

both: you now? Yeah, that sounds very useful. Sure. Cat appreciated that. 

Jason: Oh, very much, very much. We get, because it is, you know, it's Down's Law that I have the blackest of black thumbs when it comes to the garden.

So [00:05:00] she doesn't want 

inger: you in there anyway, does she? To She does not require my 

Jason: advice. 

inger: I noticed there was very hot discussion on the hot cross buns chat this year. 

both: Yes. Um, 

inger: did you do I, I, I don't, I participate remotely by watching the sledging that goes on in the WhatsApp chat leading up to Hot Cross Bun Fest.

And, um, so what happened there? Give us a slow down. 

Jason: Uh, so bit of background for people who've not, we haven't talked about hot cross bun for a while. No. Ev every good Friday, there's a competition amongst a kind of a group of friends who can find the best hot cross buns in Melbourne. And it's a traveling trophy.

We've got this really. Gordy Trophy and, and I think I paid $2 off for it from some girl off Gumtree or something like that. It's terrible. Um, I think I need to link 

inger: back to all our previous hot cross bun discussions in the show note. Yeah. So that you can, you can understand that the true history of the trophy and I, [00:06:00] there's lots of explanations of how it came to be, but it it is pretty epic.

'cause you all add to it each time, don't you? And it's, it's got a, it's got a mask from the covid years and so Yeah. Like, yeah, it's pretty funny. 

Jason: So I, it was my job to add to the trophy this year because we won Right? Last year. Oh yeah. What did you do? And 

inger: so, 

Jason: so I went to Qantas Marketplace of all places and I bought the Matchbox cars equivalent of a Boeing 7 3 7 or something like that with Qantas livery on it.

Because in the last two, in the last year, it's been so long since I've done any travel for work in the last year. Of course. Yeah. It was a big thing, right? We transitioned to on the red team and then there was just a ton of travel and all the rest of it. So this was kind of my, I glue hot glued this thing to the side of this trophy and and that was my, this is how I'm improving this trophy.

It is getting pretty full now. However, after winning last year. We came wooden spooners this year. [00:07:00] No. Yeah, you went all the way 

inger: down the rankings. 

Jason: Yeah. Reigning champions two. You were actually last, 

inger: we were actually last. How did you manage that? Did you just buy cold thumbs or something? What did you say, Jason?

Were you too busy? You're letting upside down. 

Jason: Oh, also you would think, you would expect that we would do better than that because I actually do the scoring. Like I add up all the scores, so, you know, I could have, there was not offic a, a good scrutineering this year and I could have adjusted scores maybe, but, um, everyone's 

inger: too busy with the coffee to, to watch the vote's being counted.

The scrutineering was off. Right. 

Jason: Scru was off. However, this year's winner was Mick house, from family. Well done. M 

inger: well 

Jason: ick, well done. Mick. Homemade hot cross punch I think is 

inger: Mick. Mick listens to the pod. Is he the one that always says to me, I listen to you and Jason chatting, then I turn it off? 

Jason: No, I think he listens all the way through.

Um, oh, 

inger: okay. Thanks. But he does, 

Jason: I I think he does like, I think he does like the uh, uh, you little, the chat early part. Yeah, early part. Like 

inger: I [00:08:00] don't, after that I'm like, ah, 

Jason: yeah, this was the, um, this was the second time Mick had won this competition. So, uh, his go Mick, was it on bit of homemade 

inger: this time?

Jason: Homemade. And on top of that, Jess Morton. Also, made some homemade cross buns, gave Mick a bloody good run for his money. Hers were awesome. 

inger: So they up the game now, I'm sorry, like this is like really making it difficult because how do you beat a homemade hot cross buns if they're done? Well, they're, 

Jason: I mean, 

inger: I'm not sure you can, 

Jason: quality was very, very high, very, very high.

inger: Now I introduced a little bit of, , uh, in the chat I introduced the idea of the different flavors of hot cross buns that are now available, pointing out there are apple and cinnamon ones, there's gin and tonic ones, there's chip ones. Like there are so many varieties of hot cross funds. I was like, what are you drawing standards?

How are you gonna decide what actually [00:09:00] means a bum this time? Like, anyway, so was that resolved or no? No, no. We have no, 

Jason: we have rules and people just wanted to, and that was the funniest bit about this, I think is we've got these rules about hot cross buns and they can only be fruity hot cross buns and there's no chocolate involved in hot cross buns because I think chocolate in hot cross buns is the equivalent of performance enhancing drugs in sport.

Like, you know what I mean? Like if you have chocolate pretty much to anything, you're gonna win. Right. I know and they're 

inger: good. Look, honestly, I didn't need a single hot cross bun that was like hot cross bun normal this year. Yeah. I only had, I had Apple and cinema ones were really good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I was surprised.

Like, I was like just buying them as a bit of a like, oh, well we're talking about all these different varieties. I'm gonna have to go one of these. And there was a whole article in The Guardian about whole correspondence. Maybe I'll link to that about Yeah. Australia just goes to town on our little treatment.

That's so many phone calls. Sorry. Sorry people. There's so many things [00:10:00] ringing. Do you need to do anything? Oh, 

Jason: no, 

inger: no, 

Jason: no. I need to put it, I need to put it on Do not disturb. That's what I need to do. 

inger: And I'm being done bougie and I've got my cleaners here and they're vacuuming right outside my door. So if you hear a bit of that, 

Jason: can't, can't, can't hear them, which is great.

inger: Okay. That's good. That's a good side. 

Jason: Um, sorry. Circling back. Um, 

inger: yes. 

Jason: Did we resolve any of that? There was lots of debate. People were bringing their best, you know, the, the rules, can I interpret them this way? Can I interpret them that way? Kind of game, which was, I know 

inger: it was quite, it was quite off the hook in the WhatsApp channel.

Like I actually had to mute it at 1.1 day. Yeah. Popping up and I was trying to do a presentation at work and I was like, and someone said to, someone said to me, what's wrong in here? And I said, oh, we're talking about hot cross fun. And then we started talking about it in this, this presentation. Hot cross fun contagion.

Jason: It was a bunch [00:11:00] of fun. We had about 20 people turn up. I think there were seven entries all up. So there was a fair bit of try and as, as always Shane was there making coffee. We made coffee and we did all sort of, there was lots of talk and lots of bullshit and it was just fun, right? Yeah. 

both: It's 

Jason: fun.

Start starts at nine in the morning on, on Good Friday, finished by 11 because people have got places to go and things to do and that sort of stuff. Course still, it's a really good way 

inger: to eat cross hot cross buns. I think, you know, I should encourage, other people should start this 'cause it's, it's always looks like fun.

And I, this was maybe start one in, maybe I should start the Canberra version. 

Jason: Yeah. Canberra chapter. 

inger: Yes. Yes. Because I always end up on the hot cross bun morning going, oh, so he's okay. We've beaten them now. Like they were nice, but the sense of ation, 

Jason: yeah. 14 years we've been running alsothe 

inger: types who don't, 14 years.

It's amazing. 

Jason: 14 years this competition's been running and like, it's not serious. [00:12:00] It's in no way serious. Not even 

inger: remotely serious, but kind of be serious. 

Jason: Yeah. And I love that about it. Every year it brings me joy. 

inger: Yeah, it does. It does. Well there's been another election on Jason. 

Jason: Yes. 

inger: Yes. Which I participated in Uhhuh.

Yes. 

Jason: And were you voted into power. 

inger: We were so comprehensively voted into power that it's even not funny, like new records. Oh, awesome. Um, so as I said last time I worked on the Pocock team, I left the Greens. Sadly, the Green's got a bit of a shellacking this year. Like it's hard when his second team doesn't get, you know, it's like looking at it, texting my greens mates, going, I'm so sorry.

You know? Mm-hmm. A lot of sadness in the Greens camp, even though. Their vote kind of in percentage wise across the country was stable or even a bit increased. It, it's just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes you don't get the seats, you know, like, depends on Yeah. All the, because Australia's got, thank [00:13:00] God preferential voting and thank God compulsory voting.

Think like, I really think it's the reason we have a stable kind of moderate politics here, that the system itself rewards moderation. 

both: Yeah. Which 

inger: is in this world is what you need. It's been frustrating me for many, many years that it's like that, but it actually, it's actually good when things go a bit crazy.

, So Team Pocock wronged home 43% of the vote unheard of in the Senate. Yeah. They have this quota system, which is basically a third or so I don't really understand it's complicated numbers, but like, that was crazy. Like normally you don't know for a week with the Senate. Yeah. They've gotta distribute all the preferences.

It was so clear on the night. We pretty much knew we were winning, um, within half an hour, which was Wow. Um, so I, I, last time we did elections, we made up the word exhausted. I. 

both: Yes. 

inger: You know, a combination of exhilarated and exhausted at [00:14:00] the same time. Yeah. Rated right through to yesterday. So I worked damn hard on this campaign, so I co-led the inner north team, which meant organizing lots of stalls and just bringing people together.

Lots of nights at the pub, lots of action questions, doing all of that for the team for the last six weeks or so, maybe nearly two months actually. 'cause the election kind of got delayed. And then on the day they asked me to be a rover. So what you do on the day in Australia is you have what's called a booth captain.

They have a big plastic box full of. Banners and how to vote cards. You've gotta decorate the booth at 6:00 AM and then you've gotta, you have rotating shifts of volunteers who come in and you've gotta lead them and make sure they're positioned right so that you could hassle people on the way 

both: in. 

inger: They have to run the gauntlet of all the how to vote.

Handing out, so I was what's called a booth rover. So my job was to travel between all the booths and just like, cheer them on, give them food, and if they ran [00:15:00] out of anything, I was meant to supply it. Right. I had extra how to boats. I had a mallet to bang in the steaks for the core flutes, like in my le kiss I, and a pair of scissors, like really heavy duty, scissors, cable ties.

I had like, you know, you were on on 

Jason: the tools. 

inger: I was on the tools. So I started, I, I couldn't sleep. I was so excited about it. I actually woke up at three o'clock in the morning, you know, sort of excited and, and also dreading it. I had breakfast at 4:00 AM and then Yeah. Good. I, at 6:00 AM I just started driving and I did rounds of all the booths. Um, yeah. And I had made, the last week before I'd made all this rocky road, homemade rocky road and I'd gone to Costco and I had tiny jetties and I had like, so I like made sure I got to every booth in the morning, gave them some food.

Yeah. Make sure they're okay. And then I was like rotating around. And so I realized at 11 o'clock we were in a good position because we ran out of how to vote cards. And then everyone was screaming at and look, we didn't have enough.

And then I was [00:16:00] distributing from quiet brew to other booths and I was like, so I legit started driving at 6:00 AM did not finish driving until 6:30 PM that night. Wow. Like, I, I just, and I reckon I sold so many Volvo ex thirties. You welcome Volvo. Because every time I pulled up at a booth, all the other, because I was there repeatedly.

Right. All the other team members are like, is that electric 

both: car? 

inger: Oh, can. Yeah, I, I must have sold fucking heaps of it. Anyway, so that was, that was really good. I did manage to cram in one democracy sausage. Oh yes. Along the way. Yeah. Uh, at Turner School, which like you had to pick the booze, but Turner School has very good democracy sausages for international listeners, it's tradition in Australia that we um, we have a sausage sizzle.

We just like make sausages and put them in bread for the local schools. And all the primary schools do it. The high schools don't. So top tips Australians, if you are like wanting to vote and you don't wanna wait in a queue, go to a high school, not a primary school. 'cause [00:17:00] the high school parents are too busy to do the sausage sizzle and the sausage sizzle boots four or five times as many people go to them.

So they're nuts. So Turner School, well done on the sausages. I've put a picture in there that someone put on Instagram and I'll try and find the original to link to in the show notes. I am 

Jason: shocked at the cost of living increase in prices for democracy sausages here. 

inger: Right? They are. I mean, talk about cost of living crisis.

It's right there in the democracy sausage. But yeah, there's this picture that someone posted on the internet. It's a picture of Bob Hawke. It's a poster from a school, um, and it's a picture of Bob Hawke with a sausage in his mouth. Bob Hawke being an iconic Australian prime minister and it's got the lists of the types of sausages.

And I thought this is very funny. You have your classic democracy sausage, which is six bucks. Which is like, which is just 

Jason: sausage and onion on a, in a roll. Like in a roll. Holy cow. In roll. And 

inger: then you've got, um, the second one is called the cost of living, which is just sausage without the onion in a roll for five bucks [00:18:00] money.

And then you've got the a g jp, which is the animal justice party. So you get vegan sausage on a roll. And then you've got pork Ferrell with egg, which is an egg and bacon roll. And then you've got the, how Newtown are you? 'cause this school's in Newtown, which is a very multicultural part of Sydney and it's a Lummi and egg roll.

And then my favorite the Toto, which is just a sausage for your dog. And for listeners who dunno, our prime minister's dog Anthony Alban's dog is called Toto. It's a cavoodle. It's very cute. I think it's a poodle actually. So you just get the toto, which is a sausage for dog. So sausage sizzle is a big thing.

Anyway, so I was I think the technical term is knackered by the end of the day. And then my friend ing had a birthday party. 

Jason: I love on the, the last thing on the, that list, uh, if you have a look at it, it's um, tariffs, AKA extras for your sausage 

inger: extras. Yeah. So you can buy a dollar each for onion, bacon, lummi, or egg.

That's hilarious. Right. You have tariffs is [00:19:00] the added extra. Oh, so funny. So yeah, so I was totally exhausted by the time I got home and I had to make a quick appearance at a friend's birthday party. Happy birthday John.

Happy 60th. And so I drove all the way across town, which in Canberra taste about 12 minutes, but still to his house. And then I was there for an hour and in my, all my cock gear and everyone else says, you know, we're having a party and it's a nice grownup party. And there I turn up in my like. Silk work wear and my, and my Pocock T-shirt.

Yeah. But luckily, like everyone votes Pocock now, so people were like, oh yeah. But anyway, and I got home and I thought, I cannot actually drive any further, but I wanna go and be with my people for the county. Yeah. Right? Mm-hmm. So I made Brendan my 23-year-old drive me to the party. Right? Yeah. He's like, he's not a party guy, he doesn't like them.

But he drove me to the party and there's 600 people at this party. Like damn, that's in a big ballroom. And they had two big screens of the election results and everyone had just dragged the quite comfortable [00:20:00] like, um, wedding venue kind of chairs.

Yeah. In a big circle. And some people were sitting on the floor and me and Brendan got a chair. We dragged it and we just sat down. And once I sat down, I couldn't get up. Like, I was like, I'm done. So I just made Brendan buy me white sparkling wine. Right. And he cut me off after a while 'cause he said I was drunk and I probably, I pretty much was, I was feeling no pain.

And then the results started to come in. And the good thing about being with those rugby folks. Jason. Yeah. They know how to fucking cheer. 

both: Yeah. Like 

inger: I, my last last party was at the Greens and like we were good cheerers, you know? Yeah. Was a lot clapping and, but we are more used to clicking our fingers at an open poetry night.

You know, we're not like, and no. When Peter Darton, who's the opposition leader, who went real Trumpy and deserved what he got. Yeah. 

both: Yeah. When 

inger: he lost the roar from the crowd was like, being at the football is like,[00:21:00] 

I've never heard anything like it. It was like, you know, where your ears start to pound 

both: anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Great. 

inger: It was great. That would've been so much fun. And at the end of the night, poor Brendan, he had, um, me on one arm. 

both: Yeah. 

inger: And Mary, Mary, who was one of my booth captains who's just turned 70 on the other arm.

And she was like me. We were both exhausted. And he's like, had us both on and we're totted back to the car and he poured me home. So, I mean, what do he have children for? But to take, yeah, that's, I wiped your ass all those years. You know, I bought your stuff, I looked after you. You can, the least you can do is take your old mom to the election party.

So yeah, that was it. Cheeky glass 

both: of sparkling. 

inger: All, all three. I'm just saying all three, like normally at those things I mingle. But I, I just, I just didn't mingle. I just sat there, um, and it was all I could do. Um, yeah. Anyway, so that's not all I've been doing [00:22:00] really is election.

So elections. Yeah. We're How far through are we? Oh, we're so far through. I'm gonna have to Snippety Doda. 

both: Snippety Doda. 

inger: It's while, since we've said that, probably a of that election ranting because I, you know, yeah. Anyway, I'm back at work. I, what is even work? I don't know. My husband's probably seeing me again.

He's happy about that. He's happy. 

both: He's happy. Your back. 

inger: It's like, oh, who are you? 

Jason: Hang on, hang on.

Stop, stop coming into my house. 

inger: Stop going. Exactly. Exactly. All right, mailbag. All right. Let's do it. Um, we love hearing from you all and this is our chance to share the interesting things our listeners have shared with us. Um, and there's a lot in our mailbag this week. Um, we have, and, 

Jason: and I'm still, I'm still trolling through the backlog, so I know, 

inger: and we're still like, we won't get through to the bottom of it this time, but we'll get, we'll do a good job of it.

Um, got a shiny new email address pod at, on the reg team.com. And also speakpipe.com [00:23:00] um, slash thesis whisperer.

You can also leave me a speak pipe there that's in the show notes. But our first email here is from Dr. Cory Williams from Griffith University, and she's writing about Google Notebook, lm, and it's in pink. So that's for you, Jason. 

Jason: That's for me. That's for me. Mm-hmm. Corey writes, hi, Ingrid. Jason. I'm a huge fan of the pod.

It helps me to get through my long commute, which, 

inger: I mean, there's a lot of chat there for you, Cory. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah. There's, you're, you're welcome. Here we go. It's like cross buns, painting boats, like you never know what you get. Yeah. 

inger: There'll be a bit more snippy, snippy and all that though, like Yeah. We still, I'll touch on all the main themes, but I, I just might have to Yeah.

Jason: Snippy. 

inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Good advice for PhD students as well, right? 

inger: Yes, the cutting room floor. 

Jason: Um, co writes. I recently saw Tiago Forte talking about the LM Notebook and wondered if either of us had had a go of it. Oh, yeah. It's [00:24:00] a Google based ai, um, but does something a little bit different. It, you can create your own personal podcast with the information uploaded.

I've uploaded it for something, a work process that I can't actually talk about, where I had a lot of different briefing documents and I really did not want to have to scour through them to find out what was new. In each document, it summarized the information as if it was a conversation in a podcast between two American presenters and has stuck in my head because of it.

You do need to get past the fact that they have modeled the podcast on the typical American ones where the presenters are overly excitable, uh, and the show notes could conceivably have an exclamation mark at the end of every second sentence. Um, it also does mind mapping timelines, briefing documents, and study guides.

I did a quick test of how it handles empirical research by adding five articles on a topic I know well, but I reached my limit on the free audio before I could assess it properly. I'm really seeing that there could be some potential here and thought it would be worth bringing to your attention if you haven't tried it already.

Thank you. Cory, you have? [00:25:00] 

inger: Yeah. Yeah. You have. Yeah. Like nailed. You have pointed your finger at one of Jason's favorite Google LM features. 

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And, um, just last week, uh, was running a workshop for the good folk at Melbourne University where I demonstrated this feature. And, um, like I've been using it for a while now, and it's pretty good.

You upload some documents and then in real time it takes a few minutes, but in real time it creates this podcast that actually sounds like real people having a big, long discussion about the information that you uploaded. It does a good job of synthesizing that information, um, and presenting that information back.

It's not just a straight, uh, it's not just a straight kind of regurgitation of the, they haven't just taken the main points outta the documents and then just bullet pointed at them. It's a, it sounds like a real conversation. It's amazing. Um, where I find it very, very practical is not uploading lots of documents, but only uploading one document.[00:26:00] 

So if you've got an article that you, uh, want to read but you're not sure about, if you upload it to Google lm get the podcast summary version of this, and then you download that audio file to your phone, you can listen to it on your commute on the way into work. Mm-hmm. Which means that by the time you get to work, you've, you've heard enough about this particular paper to help you to make a decision about whether or not you actually are going to bother reading it or not.

Like, is it, does it make the pile or not? Um, which is a really efficient way of being able to sort through information when you would've been doing something, you know, sitting on the bus or on the train or something anyway. 

inger: Really. Or at the gym or something like that. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. It's a, it's a really easy way to, um, to be able to get a, a, an overview of that particular paper.

Like, you still have to read the paper if you're gonna use it in your work. You do have to go back and read the paper. It's no, Hmm. Replacement for that. But it does a really good. It does a really good job [00:27:00] of, um, pulling out the, pulling out the interesting bits in that paper and presenting it in a way that's engaging.

And like Curry says, you tend to remember it just because of the way in which these two podcast hosts get all excited about, doesn't matter what the topic could be, could be text depreciation schedules. Right. 

inger: I know they do tend to make it, it, it's, it's that, but I think it's more than that. Like, um, there's some evidence that movement, and this is where I get my nerd on from my PhD.

Oh yes. There's some evidence that movement and memory are linked. Ah, like formation of memory is linked to movement. Okay. And in fact, this is foundational to indigenous knowledges, right? Right. Song lines, um, things like, uh, uh, so, uh, my friend Lynn wrote a book called The Memory Code, which talks about Stonehenge, um, and applies indigenous knowledges to Stonehenge and talks about how different patterns in stones and different [00:28:00] patterns of walking were ways to remember things.

So if you, and also the Greeks knew this. So this idea of the palace of memories that I think is what I, I can't, I'm gonna get it wrong and say it was Plato and it probably wasn't. But they talked about how, if you wanna remember something, you imagine that you're walking through a series of rooms and you mentally place the concept or an idea in a different place.

The same thing is indigenous song lines where you are walking across the landscape in a way of traveling the landscape. You know, you, you have memories of, you know, different places of water, food. Yeah. Um, spirituality, it was all sort of mixed together. So actually, um, voice and movement and memory are link.

So that's why like listening to an audio book while you're walking Yeah. Or at the gym tends to, or driving tends to be more effective than listening to it, lying in bed. If you notice that. Like, I can't actually hold onto the information if I'm just static. Yeah. If I'm moving and I'm walking around, I can remember it.

So there's something [00:29:00] going on there. Um, it's been investigated in various different ways. Gesture research has got a bit about it, so I, I think that's a really like profoundly useful tool. Like, and it isn't just, I'm absorbing it differently. There's actually something cognitively going on there. I think that's very interesting.

Um, yeah, so if you haven't tried it out, what you are suggesting is, I think a really good idea, Jason, that single paper. Um, yeah, it might be a, I've tried that with, when you, you told me that and I was like, oh, that's a good idea. I tried it with a paper that I just found difficult to read. 

both: Mm-hmm. And 

inger: what it, what it did was also, um, unpacked it in a bit more of a simple, straightforward way than was in the paper.

Like paper. It would take the Jargonistic terms and it would actually translate them and it wasn't bad at that. Yeah. Like, it's extraordinary technology. I mean, what a world we'd live in. I know It's 

Jason: the future, the how long future before it 

inger: cost you stacks and stacks of money and like, it's amazing that it's free at all.

Jason: Yeah. Uh, won't be forever. We know that. No, you know. No way. It's coming. It's [00:30:00] ification 

inger: is coming. Yeah. Yeah. Um, we've got another letter here from Gina. From Gina. Thank you, Gina. She's riding with a suggestion for Jack Downs. If you're listening Jack Downs, which you aren't. Um, he might be in the car sometimes, 

Jason: sometimes for managing 

inger: time.

Sometimes he, 

Jason: hi. The last time he, we recorded he was in the house and he was like, I hear you talking about me. 

both: Oh cool. In that 14-year-old way. Yeah. Dare you kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, certainly are son. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

inger: yeah. Your, your podcast fodder. Um, that's 

both: it 

inger: G Gina writes, Hey Ingrid and Jason. I listened to your latest pod yesterday.

It connected with me where I'm at and all the thoughts swirling around in my head on so many levels. That's good when we do that. You're welcome. Gina writes, thanks so much for sharing, especially the deepest stuff about struggling to find balanced family and more individual values like mastery. It's a bloody hard juggle.

Mm-hmm. And I certainly don't have it right [00:31:00] yet for a number of reasons. Family has always pulled hardest for me and has left me frustrated career-wise. Anyhow, just a suggestion for productivity app for Jack. Great. Eight kid here. So have this parallel too. If he happens to use a Mac or iPad for school.

We have found at school assistant to be very helpful for a 13-year-old who refuses to use any form of physical diary to track what is due when. Oh my God. Yeah. Our struggles so far have been more around basic organization and use of, this hasn't been a hundred percent diligent, but far more successful than anything else we've tried.

Your situation might be quite different. Thanks for the work. Feel opinions and love you put into the pod. Gina. Thanks Gina. That's a nice letter. Thanks. It's so nice when we know, you know, it's so validating to hear. Um, that, um, you appreciate these digressions and that that did get quite raw and honest last podcast, but you know, that's what we're here for.

Um, what do you think it, did you have a look at school assistant? I 

Jason: did. I did. Yeah. Um, I had a [00:32:00] look at it, downloaded a, it does look awesome. It's got like over 500,000 downloads. It's free, which I couldn't believe given the 

both: amazing how sophisticated, 

Jason: yeah, how sophisticated this particular thing is really.

It has a, yeah, it has, um, you can sign into your Google classroom if your school uses Google Classroom and Jack School does, you can sign in and it'll pull all of the materials, schedule all of the stuff that's in the Google classroom stuff into this app. It's kind of a mix of, uh, a calendar reminders. It lets you know when you've got upcoming assignments, all this sort of stuff.

Um. For people going to university, it would be invaluable. 

both: Right. Oh, wow. Okay. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, under, I'm thinking undergrads here, uh, yeah, more than anything else, but, um, unbelievable. It looks really, really good. Uh, a couple of things. Uh, Jack's school blocks the integration between this [00:33:00] piece of software and Google Classroom, so they're probably 

inger: doing that for privacy reasons.

Jason: Uh, yeah, maybe, I'm not quite sure. So I'm, I'm going to get in touch with the school and see whether or not I can get this one whitelist for him. Um, I did, I did show up to Jack and we had a look at some examples, uh, online, and his eyes did light up a little bit. He did kind of nod and think that this would be a good thing, but yeah, frustrated by the fact that the school says no access.

Um, yeah, I might end up having to fight with the Department of Education and oh, around, I fought with the Department 

inger: of Education and can I say I won, but, oh, good. You've gotta be prepared to write lots of letters. Yeah. Yeah. And be bang in the ass. 

Jason: What's cool? Um, it's really, really good. The, as you can imagine in a school, each little subject, they teacher does it slightly differently.

Um, they have different kind of ways of engaging with Google Classroom and all the rest of it. What this does really well is, [00:34:00] um, aggregate that stuff in a, in a way that is. Uh, temporal in terms of you can see what's coming up and, and from across all of those different classes and, you know, access to resources and all that sort of stuff.

It's really, really good. Gina, thank you so much. Um, I'm sorry we haven't been able to get at work at this end yet, but I am going to persist. Um, uh, it does look like an amazing piece of software and I've included the link in the bottom of the show notes for the indie developer. Um, but it's also available on the Mac, uh, app store as well.

Amazing. If you wanna go through that one. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. A really, really amazing piece of, uh, software 

inger: and not probably from a parent, I would be guessing, who was like, ah, this is shit. Um, you know, parents also complained to me that they need stuff for excursions and like we used to just have forms that, you know, ended up under a banana, squash banana at the bottom of a bag.

Yeah. Yeah. You wouldn't find until you cleaned out and then you're [00:35:00] like, what's this? Yeah. And now I, and now I hear from parents that schools are bypassing the kids and they're going straight to you with emails and WhatsApp groups and like, apparently it's a bit of a nightmare. So maybe the parents need some sort of parent form of it or something, I don't know.

But it seems to me to make sense to put it somewhere where the kids are used to and like being, which is their phones. And this is also like a workplace skill to use. Um. Calendars and diaries. Like, it's amazing to me that they still don't really teach it as a skillset. Yeah. But if you, I mean, you are teaching your kid an amazing skillset and I taught my kid that skillset.

Mm. And he's like quite offend with the reminders and the calendar and the mm-hmm. You know, like he trotted off down to the chemist 'cause he set a reminder for himself to have a flu shot. 

both: Yeah. 

inger: Because he works in retail and you don't want, in retail, you wanna have a flu shot. Yeah. Too many bugs. Um, amazing.

Um, I think you've got the next one. Thank you, Gina. Thanks [00:36:00] again. Um, but which one's Yeah, from 

Jason: Joel? Um, it's been, the mail back has been so interesting. Um, hi Jason. An Ina I'm continuing to love, continuing to love the pod as a loyal listener from episode one, 

inger: Joel represent. Amazing. 

Jason: The amazing discussion of the, of the cutting room floor sparks some thoughts about leftovers, um, bracket.

Same word in Australian English. 

both: Indeed. Indeed. Bracket indeed. Yes. Yep. 

Jason: Uh, in the writing process, and I thought I'd share in a somewhat unconventional way using obsidians plugins, share notes and peer draft, I've created a note that also contains a link to a file that can be edited in a web browser or mind explosion ex emoji added to your own obsidian vault.

If you have peer drafts installed, here you go. And feel free to share. There's a link. Um, I've included that link in the show notes, so, uh, anyone will be able to click onto it. Uh, Joel goes on to [00:37:00] write. Huge fan. Thank you, Joel. Uh, PS have you tried co typist yet? Um, there's a link there. Seems like something you'd both be all over or, or hate intensely.

inger: Okay. I love how i's not quite sure how way that would go. I, I only read this, this, this morning, so I haven't tried that obsidian yet, but that's 

Jason: immediately on my list. Right. And so it should be, so think about, um, a, it's Google Docs for obsidian. So, yeah, you can, more than one person can edit this thing.

It, it shares back to your obsidian vol. Uh, you can see somebody else. Um, Joel and I, we, uh, got into an email conversation and then I, like he was typing into this note in real time, and I could see his little cursor, you know, where Joel was typing and all the rest of it. It's really, really good. Uh, you, it would be great for people who are work, who are working on a vault together on maybe a project or something like [00:38:00] that, as we 

both: do, 

Jason: as we do it.

I am not sure. Yeah. I did have questions around the way in which we have implemented GitHub. I didn't know how it would play with that. 

inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Um, but that's, that's, I don't think 

inger: we wanna muck around too much with it until we have, you know, no. Some adult supervision. 

Jason: Yeah. But that's a, that's a very specifical, very specific installation protocol that we've used there.

Yeah. Um, but this looks, looks amazing. Um, and the fact that you can share these notes with others and import them directly into Europe, obsidian vault with that formatting and all the rest of it, just like 

both: amazing's. Brilliant. Right, right. Um, 

Jason: co typist is a piece of software from Daniel. You know, our friend Daniel who, um, writes the or, um, timing app.

You know, from Germany. Really? 

both: Daniel. Really? Yes. Daniel. 

Jason: Daniel. Hi Daniel. Still using timing app, Daniel? Still loving it? Oh yeah. Still loving 

inger: it. Yeah, 

Jason: still loving it. Um, I've only 

inger: got it on one computer [00:39:00] now though, because I can't have it on my work. Mac sad face. 

Jason: Oh 

inger: yeah. So I've got a, I've I'm only tracking on the reg time now.

Jason: Oh dang. Um, co typist, uh, from Daniel. Um, it's excellent. So what it does is it uses AI and you know how you get the auto com auto complete on your phone or, and it's now sort of top turning up in Gmail and other places as well where you start typing a sentence and it suggests the next two or three words.

Um, co typist does that but on steroids, so it will suggest. Very large strings of text. Um, and then as you continue to type it in real time, adjust those strings of text until you kind of get to something that you think might be useful. And then you, you can auto complete that sentence sort of stuff. It's, um, when I first saw it, I didn't really think that there was a solid use case for it because [00:40:00] Gmail and those sorts of things already do it.

You know how they predict two or three words out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is predicting 15 to 20 words out. 

inger: Really. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. So how are you doing 

inger: that? Is that an LLM somewhere in the background? 

Jason: Yeah, somewhere in the background. It must be drawing on an LLM and it's just in real time making predictions about what it is that you think you're gonna type, um, presenting them on your screen for you to make a decision about whether or not you accept it.

Um, does this kind 

inger: of do text expand? Kind of like does it learn what you do? Oh, I, I, 

Jason: I don't know. Next generation, um, useful if you need to type a lot and need to type fast, I think, uh, yeah. But yeah, I haven't dug into it more than I. Uh, more than just that, uh, I didn't think that I would have a use case for it in our business because mostly, mostly what I'm trying to do in our business is, um, [00:41:00] reduce the amount of variation in, in the sorts of things that we do, um, so that we, and so I don't need a tool that's going to potentially suggest more variation around, I've got other types.

However, 

inger: if you're, if you're writing, like writing books and stuff, like I am maybe, yeah. 

both: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it could be. 

inger: And it does really raise interesting questions about what is the line between AI and human writer. Like, I think already the discussion moving on and on past, like cutting and pasting out of chat GPT, like if it's actually in your workflow like that as you write, like, yeah.

And we're not just talking about predictive text that you get in a Google document. We're talking about something much more sophisticated than that. Yeah. It's kind of learn from 

Jason: you. 

inger: That's, that's kind of next level. 

Jason: Yeah. I'm not sure if it's learn from you. I don't, I don't know. I, like I said, I didn't go into, I want it, 

inger: I immediately want it to learn from me.

Jason: Well, 

inger: maybe it does because, 'cause my, my chords that have got lots of my writing in it are [00:42:00] so fucking useful. Like my business Whisper Alaw is incredible. 

Jason: Maybe we can reach out to Daniel and ask some questions and see what he says. Right. And we can report that. Yeah. Why don't we, 

inger: that sounds like a good thing we could do on behalf of the community.

Jason: Yeah. I mean, I'm sure he felt like, and if he's not doing 

inger: that, can he please do it? Yes. 

Jason: He, um, Daniel Daniel's an awesome independent developer. We love timing, got app. Um, and he's always super responsive and timing, got app, constantly getting upgrades. It's, I know, and it's, 

inger: it's just fucking great. Like I'm, yeah, I'm DevEd about how they've locked my Mac down, 

both: but, you 

inger: know.

Yeah. 

both: Yeah. 

inger: Um, I have just have two Macs and that's how I live now between the two. And I try and reduce the amount of stuff that I do on my work, Mac to just work, but it's very hard for me because, is it writing a book work or not work? Right? 

both: Yeah. 

inger: Yeah. Who's paying for that time? 

both: Yeah. I, 

inger: I tell you what, it's not a NU because I've never managed to squeeze all my book writing into my work time.

So [00:43:00] therefore, should I do it there, should I do it over here? You know? So it's very hard for me to kind of separate, um, work, but some things are very clearly work. And they sit over here, including my research. Yeah. So I actually wrote to the ethics committee and said, okay, I wanna use ai. And they're like, 

both: really?

inger: And I'm like, yep, let's talk. 

both: Of course I do. It's like, I can't believe that you're surprised at this question. Yeah. Like, I've got 

inger: this, I've got this survey with 1200 responses, and I, I like, I've got no team. I have to do this myself. Mm-hmm. So like, I, I need ai. And they were like, oh, okay, well, you know, and they, they're like, here's our questions about it.

And they gave me like six really good questions about privacy, um, you know, confidentiality, blah, blah, blah. Do you know what I did with those questions? Jason 

both: stuck em straight into Claude. 

inger: Yes I did. 

both: Yes you did. You what Claude did. 

inger: I'm not even kidding. I changed two words. 

both: Yeah. 

inger: Yeah. And you actually, no, I tell a lie.

I did this in chat, GPT and if I could just [00:44:00] digress a moment on chat. GPTI don't know what's happened to chatty, but chatty is fucking good. Ooh. It's like now my preferred, I go there before I go to Claude. I feel like I'm cheating on Claude, like I'm having an affair. Oh away from my work husband. Oh my God.

I still go to cord when I really want deep like thinking. 

both: Yeah. 

inger: But chatty for most things, particularly for editing work. Fucking awesome. Needs very little priming compared to what, you know, we teach our priming methods and stuff. Yeah. Seems to need very little of that. Like catches the end of the rope really quickly.

both: Yeah. 

inger: So I actually put this in and said, hey chatty, you know, like this is what the ethics committee asking and it could go out. For instance, I wanted to use Max QDA, which is my analysis tool. It's got a product called Tailwind, , but I haven't used it because I know that it means sending stuff to chat GPT right.

In the back 

both: end. 

inger: Mm-hmm. So I wanted to be honest with the committee, not just use it. 'cause I know a lot of people using it and not being [00:45:00] honest, but I need to be honest in research integrity, I'm kind of in charge of teaching that at anu. Yeah. So that Aus that, you know, even if it wasn't just a thing, I'm really scared of getting done on research integrity.

Like the fear of losing my job and stuff is very high. Right. Yeah. And I think it's important. So I just thought, no, I've gotta write to them. I've eventually just gotta do it. But that Max QDA had a lot of information on the internet Of course. Because they're the product, right? Of course I do. So I got Chatty G to go find.

I said go and have a look at what they say about tower wind. And so it looked and went, oh, it says blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, what about Claude? So I wanna use Claude to develop my code books to talk to it. Yeah. And to give it samples and help it develop me, uh, help get it, to help me develop a coding regime.

And then I want to actually implement that in Max QDA. So it read all the documents. We had a conversation about the documents, and then I said, can you write me the case? It bang changed two words. Yeah. Wow. Which were dear ethics committee pretty much.

Right. And I wrote, and they wrote back to me almost [00:46:00] straight away and said, oh, that was really good. Thank you for such thoughtful engagement with our questions. Yeah. I'm like, 

both: you're welcome. 

inger: What 

both: I thought about 

inger: so much like 

both: the, 

inger: I thought about it zero. 

both: The thinking I did about this was, how can I get a AI to help me here?

inger: That's the thinking, 

Jason: which is the first que, which is the first question. Right. Can AI help me with this? Right, 

inger: exactly. Oh, well, that's always the first question I ask myself. You know, how can I use ai? How can AI help me with this? But like, honestly, that was a 10 minute job. Yeah. If I'd had to go and do that, like this is where I'm getting this 12 hours a week back from like, it's still working for me, but right now, that's 12 hours a week.

Thanks for nothing. Australian higher education sector. 

both: Yeah. And 

inger: how much extra work I have to do. Because we're all poor. Yeah. It's fucked. Yeah. So fucked at the moment. Like I'm not the only one, but my team's cut in half. I'm run running the in inbox, you know? Yeah. Like it's legit fucked. Yeah. So like it's actually the only way I'm coping [00:47:00] at the moment is ai.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly what I didn't wanna have happen. 

Jason: And that's becomes only normal, right? Right. Like it's no 

inger: longer the 12 hours where I was saying I can give all these to coffees and stuff. Yeah. Maybe I've got half a day back now that's still kind of sitting in excess and I can, but I have to do less of that now because the sector's just, and we're all doing it.

We're all using it. Well the ones of us who are not going absolutely star raving mad are using it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rest of them are just like dying. 

both: Yep. 

inger: Yeah. It's not good enough. Anyway, sorry, I got on a rant there. It's really angry about it. I have to anger issues. 

Jason: It'll be interesting to see. 

inger: I thought of the government when they got reelected was suddenly saying, oh, we need to do something about university debt.

I'm like, yes you do. Yeah. You need to bail us out. Yes. We need bailouts. Yeah. We need to start again with the shit, because our debt from Covid is so insane. 

Jason: I, my so [00:48:00] prediction, I don't know, you know, I shouldn't do this, but my prediction is that you will, we will hear very, very quickly from Jason Claire about the review of the education sector.

Because they've got, I hope so. They've got three years. Right. It needs reform and that's not gonna go easily. So no, there, there will be pain. And my prediction is that this will be one of the very first things that come out of the new term of the Albanese government. 'cause they'll want put it in the past behind them before they get to the next election.

inger: I hope so. I 

Jason: pre predicting pain in the next six months. 

inger: Yeah. I They're gonna have to merge universities. Yeah. And they're gonna have to really think about putting us in competition with each other is not working. 

both: Yeah. Yeah. It's 

inger: just, it's stupid actually. Yeah. Anyway, we we're foreshadowing our entrepreneur segment, which at the rate that we are going, we're not gonna have time to talk about.

So, um, we've got another letter here and this one's from Graham McClellan who wrote to us last time and [00:49:00] asked us questions about how to manage transition from industry into academia as a second career. Um, well it turns out actually there's a bunch of research on this and our friend s Ann Wary. Hi S Ann.

Hi. I'll see you this year when I visit, um, wrote to let us know that and she said I'm listening right now. And was this one of the ones just to the Buzz Sprout? 

Jason: Um. 

inger: Yes. Uh, yeah. Okay. 

Jason: Yeah. So Ally Ann goes on, she, she texts us in the middle of the sentence in the podcast, and then I have to try and remember what we're talk, what we talked about across that two hour.

So I had to go back to Graham's letter to find out what we were talking about. And this is the one where he is transitioning into academia from a, 

inger: ah, from outside, right? 

Jason: From a, like a, into, from a clinical career into, into academia. , And it was the one where I said, carer versus career. You. Oh, that's right.

Yes. Yeah. I screwed all that up. Yep. So, [00:50:00] okay. 

inger: That's the context for this. 

Jason: That's the context, Sally. Yep. Sally Ann. 

inger: Um, Sally Ann says, I'm listening right now, but your clinical academic is a story we see a lot in nurses moving into academia. And yes, I've seen it a lot and got a lot of friends who are nurses moving into academia.

Uh, there is research, but also she should look at better for the move. Here is a load of other things that you wanna pass on my email and happy to give peer support. That's very kind of you, Anne. She included a long list of articles that might be of use, and if this is something that interests you, please reach out to us at pod at on the reg team and we'll send you the bibliography that she put together.

Or maybe, yeah, maybe we just link it to a Google document that we can pop in the show notes. 

Jason: Yeah. Okay. I can do 

inger: that. Yeah. Um, it, it 

Jason: was an extensive list of articles to choose from. It was, 

inger: that's, that's good. You wanna Yeah. Very, very general nerd at the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, so I've just made a note here.

Nurse's article in Google Doc, please. And link. And link. Yep. I'm making notes as I go. Okay, great. Thank you, [00:51:00] Sally Ann. Um, next one we've got is from Alyssa, Janice. Um, 

Jason: yes. Alyssa, Janice. And she writes, dear and Jason. And 

inger: Jason, yes. You're doing this one? 

Jason: Yes, yes. Go on. Uh, it's ping. I'm still loving the pod.

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Last time I emailed you, I was sending you pics of my academic Bojo spreads. That was from a different email address then at the time. And she loves that we're using entrepreneur and she's like, let's make this a thing. And so what she's included is a a screenshot from where I think entrepreneur was invented, which was on looks like Twitter.

inger: No, that's Threads. 

Jason: Threads interface. 

inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Um, from way back in August 24. So, yes, but 

inger: I think that we said it on the show because someone at James Cook University said it to us. Remember? Okay. Yeah. They said it to us. We were standing in the corridor and they said, oh, you're entrepreneurs. And we both laughed.

Do you remember this? No. [00:52:00] We laughed so hard. And then we said, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what, and we were so, we laughed so hard that, that we didn't stop to take note of the person who said it to us. Yeah. And then we've been using it ever since, which we apologize for. If you're listening to the pod and you were at the JCU bootcamp last August and you remember telling us that, please get in touch so we can give you due credit.

Yeah, yeah. But I did say I love this at, at the end. 'cause I think when she sent that thread to me, it reminded me that we said it. Yeah. And I don't know if we intended to say it, but thank you for reminding me, Alyssa. I think you were the person who ran it home for me that yeah. That we should make this into a thing.

And that was, um, on threads. Uh, anyway, go on. You've still got some more letter to read out. 

Jason: She does. She has a work problem that she hopes we can help her with. She says that I have shifted research areas, as you often do in post PhD. While I'm trying to get a handle on this area, I'm also trying to work out which journals I need to focus on for my publications.

I. Are there any online sites or tools for managing journals like [00:53:00] this that is tracking the impact factor, whether it's a Q1 journal, word limits, citation style, average article turnaround time, and a link to the four authors page? I'm currently using a spreadsheet with all this information, but I wondered if there's an easier way to manage this.

Are all academic, sitting in their own little bubbles and creating spreadsheets with this information? There has to be an easier way. How do you do this? Yes. 

both: Um, 

Jason: she did find a site that has a journal finder, but I don't, but she doesn't think she needs all the fancy, high powered tools. It has. , And this will let this link into the show notes but it's AI tools for research and expect publications, services, researcher life.

Is the site. What she's after is the ability to attract a way to track selected journals of interest, automatically updated metrics and requirements, special issue alerts based on keywords. Mm. And ability to generate comparison tables. Keep up the amazing works. Cheers. Alyssa PS I work at a [00:54:00] nonprofit and I'm jealous of the universities that can hire you to train their employees.

Are there any options for people like me to access any of your 

inger: training? We are working on it. 

Jason: We are, we are. Like Alyssa, you are not the first person to have asked this. Yes. And more and more people are asking. Questions like this. So we are looking at ways that we can expand our footprint and make training more accessible to people who are outside of the university sectors.

inger: Yeah, we are kind of trapped in a good, we've got one of those good problems where we are so busy meeting meeting How much, I mean, not to say that we don't want more, 'cause we always want more, but more like we in fact, I think I sent you that Star Wars g yesterday. It was funny. Yes. 'Cause we, I mean frankly we need the money.

'cause Jason's gotta be kept in the style to which he's become accustomed. 

both: Yes. So, um, 

inger: you know, you are totally making your, you are living off this [00:55:00] business and it needs to pay the mortgage and that to make cheap 

Jason: and my osteo bills. 

inger: Right.

And your osteo bills, right? Yeah. And like, I mean, I, I haven't taken any money outta the business yet. I'm just waiting till tax time to see how much there is, anyway, um, so yes, we are working on it. To go back to your question, I'm just gonna throw that out to listenership because maybe someone has solved this problem.

Yeah. I suspect there's quite a lot of us sitting in our individual bubbles of pain with spreadsheets. Google Scholar has. Some has some interesting, like Google Scholar would be the people to do this, um, for us. 

both: Like, 

inger: you know, but like, we kind of almost need a school assistant style app that plugs into Google Scholar.

Like that would be what to do. So business opportunity for someone who knows how to do these things. 'cause like you've totally nailed a problem that we all have. Librarians who listening might know as well. Yeah. What to do. But yeah, I, I don't even go as far as spreadsheets. Like I have my one or [00:56:00] two journals.

I'm a bit boring like that. And I just go back to say ones who I know will publish me. Yeah. Which is a bit pathetic, but there you are Really like, I I haven't got time to do all that comparison shopping, so we're too exhausted. I'm exhausted. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so exhausted. So, um, we'll stick a pin in that, Alyssa, and hopefully someone will come back to us as something.

Awesome. What do you think, Jason? 

Jason: Yeah, yeah. Um, I couldn't, I immediately think of anything that would solve that particular problem, but it did. Like you, it struck me as. This is would be a killer app for the Yeah. Think of all of the universities all around the world who would just go like, yep, oh, that's good for my people.

inger: Or even something like, and I've been using consensus. Um mm-hmm. That's a listener. Recommend, I've got two literature reviewing tools. 'cause I teach literature, reviewing elicit and consensus. And they're both good for different things. They both take a slightly different approach to the problem, but I think consensus is edging out, elicit, to be honest with you.

Okay. It's like [00:57:00] fancier and it, it shows all these sort of dashboards and metrics. Like, you ask it a question and it sort of gives you a, a, like a, a red line and a green line about how answered the question is in the literature and stuff. It's really good. Um, uh, it's, it's my preferred one now. If I had to spend money, I'm spending my own money on consensus.

I haven't asked a NU to pay for it yet. I will, but Yeah. But it. Yeah. Consensus if they got onto something like that, that would be frequently awesome if you're listing people from consensus or tell them Yeah. But, you know, you've already got a bit of the apparatus there in terms of dashboards and displays and things like that.

And clearly links into the database. But you know, what's happening is that the problem with tools like Consensus and Elicit, if I may digress slightly Mely Sure. But I know this is what people come to the pod for. They're, they're super fucking awesome, but they're not plugged into all the same gaping.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the balkanization of our, our, our [00:58:00] journal system. Like the, they're owned, they're pay walled. So our universities are paying a shit ton of money. And so you can go into consensus and you can ask a question, does a bloody great job, but, mm. I also know that I have to go into Eric and have a look in Eric because there'll be things that aren't in consensus that Eric has got stuff.

Yeah. So it's almost like we need to all get together and put all of our knowledge in one huge pile of repository. 

both: Yeah. And 

inger: then plug these tools into it. But it won't happen because we've like, we've totally sold out our infrastructure and it's, it's people making too much money off it. And there's, there's no way it's gonna happen except illegally.

both: Yep. 

inger: And at this point, you know, what's illegal? I just ask. Yeah. Because you know, this whole Thank you. Fucked. I've said so fucked so many times. I'm in a mood, 

Jason: late stage capitalism. 

both: We appreciate it. 

inger: Thank you. Late stage. Thank you for nothing. Late stage capitalism. Yes, that's it. Thank you for nothing.

Thank you. Thanks Alyssa. We'll get back to you hopefully. Some fan mail from [00:59:00] Karen. Hey, Inga. During late stage capitalism. Oh, that was, was going like speaking of late stage capitalism. Yeah. Yeah. You spoke about Po Potter esque military dragons novel that you want Jason to read. I'd love to know the title author, please.

I'm keen to read it. Many things. I love the pod. Karen, um, Karen, this was one from a little while back, I think, and hopefully you did listen to our pod and it's called The Fourth Wing. 

Jason: Yes. 

inger: Yes. And Jason did read it. 

Jason: I did. Like and he'll never get that 

inger: time back. 

Jason: No. 

inger: Like, 

Jason: However I did, I found a, we'll talk about this a little bit later, but I found an article in The Guardian for earlier in the year, top 10 books you should read.

Yeah. Um, you know, over summer or something, something, something. I don't know. I can't remember. Fourth Wing was on the list for that. Okay. They called it out.

both: Yeah. 

Jason: And there was nine others one of which I bought and thoroughly enjoyed. So 

inger: there you go. But you didn't thoroughly enjoy the Fourth Wing, but you did read it.

I did read all [01:00:00] 600 pages, didn't it? I know, and you didn't have to, like, the thing about that book is you didn't really have to slog through it. Like you were like, Hey, I was doing the same as me. I was kind of hate reading it by the end. Yeah. But 

both: I 

inger: could not stop.

Jason: What's gonna happen next? I I have, I have you read the next one? 

inger: No, 

Jason: the, the follow up one? Not yet. 

inger: Um,, you know, I, I haven't had time to read pretty much anything. Okay. Okay.

We've got a Speak pipe. I'm Sylvie Loma from the uk and I'm gonna play it.

guest: Hi Jason, it's Sylvie from the uk. Hi. I was catching up on some of your late 20, 24 episodes because apparently Spotify forgot that I love you guys. Um, and I really appreciated the Gen AI episode and I thought I would share a tip or a tool that I didn't hear you guys mention. Um, it's called Goblin Tools and it's a website and a free app and it's got a couple of the things in built that you've been [01:01:00] talking about, like the judge, whether I'm being progressive.

Um, and help me to change the tone of this email. And it also does things like estimate the time that tasks are gonna take and help you to break your big jobs down into smaller and more manageable tasks. Um, it's designed for neurodivergent but hugely useful for academics. So that's number one. And Ingar, if you need a romance recommendation, um, I've just finished her night with the Duke by Diana Quincy, um, and I really enjoyed it.

Thank you both. Keep going with the good work. 

inger: Thank you. Very recommend. I haven't read that one. I will downloading immediately. Sylvie, 

both: I saw you grab your pen and write that down.

inger: I have come across goblin tools 'cause Zoe friend of the pod showed it to me, but I didn't know there was an app, so that's good. 

Jason: Yeah. Um, this one's been popping up, uh, [01:02:00] randomly into my space for a little while now. Um, which suggests to me that it must be pretty good. I've had a look at it. It's great for taking a project and say, break this down.

It's got a little slider that you can go break this down. Like how fine detail. You want it to break the Oh, right. Yeah. The task down. So it's really good for step-by-step instructions on how to complete a thing. Mm 

both: mm. 

Jason: Um, I saw University of Queensland. I saw a YouTube clip from their student support area or something like that.

Yeah. Where they were talking about it. Yeah. And how it was really, really useful. And, and they also said for neurodivergent folk, it's really helpful. Um, yeah. So yeah. Really worth having a look at. I showed it to Jack. 

both: Yep. 

Jason: Um, and because he can like all of us 

both: Mm. 

Jason: The task can sometimes feel overwhelming. 

both: Mm.

Jason: Especially if it's a big thing that you need to get done. Um, and I like showed him how the, the, [01:03:00] I was really after the concept. Right. The concept is that you can take a big task and you can break it down and if, and you can then, you know, work your way through it pretty quickly. Um, this does it automatically.

It's really good. 

inger: Yeah. Amazing. And that's, um, by the way, yet another example of neurodivergent, clever neurodivergent people who are all clever by the way. Just the stuff that's going on in America about making lists of autistic people is really upsetting me. Just like. It's so eugenics. I just can't even Yeah.

But like, and also also like besides and the fact that it's fucked again, I'm just gonna have to tick the explicit box. It's also wrong because these people are very clever and when they solve their own problems, they often make things that solve everyone's problem. Yeah. Actually, which is what motivated this survey research that I'm doing around academic working habits post covid, which is the one that I've got the permission to do the ai analysis on.

'cause we've got so many responses. Thank you. And I know a lot of people from [01:04:00] the pod filled it in and like 

both: it's, 

inger: I've got so many responses from neurodivergent people, they represent a large part of the sample enough that I can split the sample in half and compare those people who have a diagnosis or think they have traits with people who don't think they do.

Wow. And so you can see these quite clear differences starting to emerge. Yeah. In, in, but, but one thing that we, we do know is that when uh, when they do make tools, like the bullet journals, A DHD. Yeah. So when they do make tools, they're really awesome and useful for everyone. So one of the papers we are writing from this data is an inventory of mm-hmm.

Um, types of approaches. Like we, one of the last questions was what, what strategies have you found useful? 

both: Mm. 

inger: And uh, so we're just making a strategy inventory and That's fascinating. We need to write a whole paper. We think just on noise canceling headphones. Wow. Yeah. Like people talk about that. Like, it's quite an interesting, elaborate practice [01:05:00] of creating a boundary for yourself, right?

Yeah. Like there's a lot of this stuff in here is how do you make boundaries and, and breaking down a work task is making boundaries, you know, smaller boundaries inside a large task and make boundaries are just critical for getting things done. Yeah. And so, yeah. So that's really great. Thank you for reminding us of that, Sylvie and goblin tools.

We'll put the link in the show notes and we'll go on to the next segment now, because I'm in charge of time and it is now one hour 23 minutes. Yes. We tracking. Well, we're tracking. Well, I said that, I mean, it came just 

Jason: slash s for sarcasm. 

inger: Ah, we should just like let this one go. Like, and then go, Hey Jonathan, you're still listening now, Jonathan.

It's like, yeah, yeah. Two and a half hours. This one. Yeah. Enjoy. Look enough people tell us they have long commutes or gym time or whatever, so, you know. Yeah. This one might be a long one. Leaning in 

Jason: might be a long one. Yeah. I tried to keep it short in the show notes, but, and I did. Yeah. [01:06:00] Last night I went to bed.

I was like, I've got plenty more to say. I'm just kind of trust, I'm kind of trusting here in go. I like, I've. Given bit of a smattering of some of the things, but I think that both of us got lost to say here. So yes, I thought that we would, we would be able to nater on for some time. 

inger: Um, work problems. Is the second work problems?

Yes. In this part of the show, we focus on one aspect of work and we nerd out about it. Sometimes we tackle problems we've had at work or we discuss the themes just by listener and we always try to be practical, sharing our own tips, hacks, and feel opinions. That's opinions and feelings at the same time.

Feel opinions they're valid. And this week the topic of conversation is in these uncertain times. Mm-hmm. What does it take to become an entrepreneur? Go Jason. Go for Jason. Go 

Jason: for Jason. So as at the start of the pod, you talked about, you know, people are losing their jobs in the sector. They might be thinking or feeling unsafe.

It would not be the first [01:07:00] time someone has confided in us across universities that they're not sure that their jobs are safe, although they don't have any, um, hard evidence to suggest that they're not, not safe, just, but there's plenty of people 

inger: whose jobs are lost. Like, yeah, let's say I've multiple friends and there's nothing about how good you are or not.

Yep. Thats that. It's just like the hammer's gonna fall. Yeah. Your silence doesn't save you about it. No. Because it doesn't matter how loyal you are, how good you are at your job. I'm talking some of the best people I know at the moment. Like I'm shocked Yeah. That universities are, are losing this talent.

Appalled. Yeah. Partly wide said fuck so many times in this. Anyway, go on. 

Jason: Um, this episode was a little bit inspired. You texted me and said that you'd passed on a copy of Stephen Pressfield's book, do the work to a PhD student of yours or a PhD student? Well, not of mine, but, but 

inger: yes. Someone I was having lunch with.

Yeah. 

Jason: Um, [01:08:00] to, uh, who's getting near the end of their PhD. I understand. And, you know, thinking about what's next sort of thing. Um, oh, I think 

inger: more along the lines of like, I'm bored with this.

Um, which happens towards the end. Like, how do I keep the motivation up? And I, I found it quite a good motivational text when I read it years ago. You gave it to me and then you forgot. I 

Jason: forgot that I'd done that. Um, because so many books. So many books. Um, yeah, I, so I, my plan was to reread Do the Work by Stephen Pressfield and I did get kind of about halfway through it and then use that for a foil for our conversation today about our first 10 months as our little business partnership here at, on the Reg team.

Inga. 

inger: Mm. Can you 

Jason: believe it's been 10 months? 

inger: It's like, I can't actually, I'm a bit shocked. I'm sitting here with that. How did that happen? 

Jason: Whipped by. Yeah. 

inger: We don't hate each other. 

Jason: No. Which is good, 

inger: right? It's a, it's a good sign. 

Jason: Remember our accountants or like warned us [01:09:00] when we were signing the partnership d documents, like, you know, going into, going into business with the friends can be fraught.

Hi Paul. Still? Yeah. You could see him 

inger: looking at us like, yeah. Are you sure? 

Jason: Yeah. Still here, Paul. Doing well, thanks very much. 

inger: Yeah. Yeah. We're fine. Paul, thank you for, 

Jason: uh, there's lots written in this space about how to be an entrepreneur as opposed to an entrepreneur. Yes. And the simplest, like my Yes.

They're different. 

inger: They're different. 

Jason: They're different. My survey of Instagram in three o'clock in the morning is, there seems to be an ev awful lot on there that shows all the bright and shiny of starting a business and how successful you can get. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. Yachts and learjets and parties and stuff.

Yeah. Maybe, yeah. I read Pressfield's book years ago, and like you, I found it very, very motivational. He uses very evocative language in this book. Um, and I, I, I am a sucker for that sort of stuff. Like the rah rah books. On one [01:10:00] hand, I hate it. Like, it's just like, oh, can you stop? But on the other hand, I'm like, right, I'm going business and change the world.

Look Zuckerberg, here I come. Uh, this book, uh, I mean, there are some criticisms around this book, uh, especially in the way in which he portrays he being Steve Pressfield portrays the idea of resistance as this kind of evil, malevolent force that Yeah. Kind of, you have to battle. Don't listen 

inger: to the haters.

Yeah. You know, everyone's gonna tell you not to do it. And I'm like, that is just a recipe for disaster in the wrong hands. However, yeah. I'm the same as you. It sucks me in. I'm like, yeah. 

Jason: It's like, it is a constant fight. It is. Other people trying to keep me down it, like, you know, the, I cannot tell you Hi.

Hi, mom. If you're listening, which I know you're not, but that's okay. [01:11:00] Um, when I told mom that we were, uh, going into business together, she was like, are you sure? Do you think, like, are, are you gonna make any money? Like, and it was all coming from a place of love, but I, I was taken straight back to Pressfield then, and I'm like, yep, no.

This is the resistance. Yeah. 

inger: And it's not, it's not so much an evil force to be battled as he puts it, but it, there is always resistance, um, to change from, people want you to stay the same. It feels safe to them, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so they will question your decisions, and, and they should. If they love you and they're coming from the right spot, then yeah, you should listen.

But you shouldn't always do what they say. That's what I, 

Jason: yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I thought before we dump into our full opinions on this starting our own business and then looking to grow it. Mm-hmm. I thought, uh, you could give us a bit of a backstory. Inga, you've got deep experience of starting businesses.

This is not your first 

inger: No. 

Jason: Um, business that you have started. Uh, and so I thought w [01:12:00] we might just quickly given time, go back over. Yeah. I, the birth of the thesis broke. I'll be quick and I've got 

inger: like a bunch of notes here, but like, I'll be really quick. I'd suppose it's just for context really. I mean, yeah, yeah.

Daughter of small business owners. That was forced on my parents, uh, because the eighties there was a stock market crash. There was also de-industrialization at the same time they removed tarts. Mm-hmm. And we started globalization and my parents were caught up in that in really bad ways. So my father lost his job as an industrial chemist in a die house.

Luckily he'd been mucking around with these new things called computers. Yeah. And he became a computer programmer. And, and there were no, there was no business to hire him. 

both: Yeah. So 

inger: he started his own to his credit and it didn't make very much money and it failed. 

both: But 

inger: I think during that process he learned

how to actually be a, a computer programmer. So it was worthwhile. And he get, went, continued on to make his living outta that for the next 30 years. So he, he did all right, um, in the end, but it [01:13:00] was tough watching them have a business and the business failed. Um mm-hmm. And my mother went back to work.

She'd wanted to be the stay at home mother and she, um, so she went back to work, but then she also needed to make extra money. She used to do things like re rein, computer tape cartridges that you used in printers because they used to be so expensive and they could be recycled. So she had a little business doing that.

They ran a courier company. I'm never quite sure how they got the courier company, but I used to be a courier driver. Well, the courier company that used to deliver computer parts and stuff, I dunno how that happened. Briefly, they had a florist shop and that failed because my mother was not a florist and had no skills in how to be a florist.

But I don't know how that happened. But yeah, 

Jason: technical skill, market alignment is important. Important, 

inger: that's what I learned. You should at least have deep skills of what you're doing business in. Um, my dad then was a solo freelance contractor, so I've got to see that up close. Um, and then I, my husband's father [01:14:00] was a builder, a solo builder.

He ran his own business his whole career. Um, and he's actually, how I know Paul, our accountant. So he was, um, okay. He was Steve's accountant. Um, and um, Steve is the sort of builder that puts the receipts in a shoebox. So I knew Paul was the accountant for me, used to handle everything then, um, and I had one period of working for myself in the, in the late nineties as a rendering in the animation artist.

And that was my previous career as an architect. And that failed. Um, and that failed because I couldn't be cheap enough. And that was because we were beginning to see, you know, rapid uptake of technology that could do this for you, even back then. And also outsourcing to China and stuff in that kind of space.

'cause it's sort of international started to happen. And I just got out of it really quickly. I figured out like, if you're gonna fail, fail quickly. That's what I learned. Um, so all these failure cases, there's obvious to me in hindsight why they failed. Um, the biggest value case of recent's [01:15:00] time is post a and that was a small business.

I started inside the university. I do not recommend. Um, and we developed a product called Post A that was helping PhD students find employment, um, powered by an algorithm and we sold this product to other universities. Another thing I do not recommend university selling things to another. You can't even imagine lawyers at 10 places.

It was just 

both: Oh yeah. 

inger: Terrible. The paperwork, the payment systems, everything was like trying to run. I've run small businesses as I've established and I know how to read a spreadsheet and to run a bank account and all that sort of thing, but you had to do that with like a freight train track strapped to your leg.

'cause you've gotta work with the systems, um, that are just designed to slow everything down. And the key problem though, in that was that management wanted me to actually do the job they paid me for, 

both: not 

inger: do the entrepreneur stuff that they encouraged me to do. We want academics to be entrepreneurial.

Yeah. We want you to start businesses. We want you to be the engine houses of the economy. Okay, then I did that. Yeah. Now you [01:16:00] like, don't wanna give me time to do that because you've employed me to do a job. And the only option they offered us was to actually leave our jobs and spin out a startup. And like, I, I wasn't prepared to do, I, I knew what a failed business and I could already see that, like why I didn't wanna run this as a business myself.

I've just only now got my IP back. Um, so we could use that IP in this business if we want to, but we've got other stuff to do. So do not recommend if you're gonna develop IP inside the university, and this is a whole different podcast. Make sure you understand how IP works, what they own, what they don't own, how to keep it safe from them.

And I'm now developing IP in another project that I'm doing with the same people, but I'm being super careful to not do that with the university. If anything good comes out of that, it's coming through on the reg. I'm not even gonna walk down that road again. So coming to Thesis Withrow, which did not start as a small [01:17:00] business.

I didn't start it with that intention at all. I started it to showcase my expertise on the blog as a researcher, developer, people didn't know what this job was about. There was no way to explain it to other people. And it was sort of became a way of advertising myself to potential new employees. And it worked.

I went from RMIT to A-N-U-A-U rang me up and I got that job, sort of, you know, through who you know, um, yeah. And I didn't know these people, but they knew me. And that's what, doing a podcast or doing a blog, that's the ideal use case. Not sure you could still do that today with the algorithms actually.

Yeah. Um, I've written about that on the blog. That post is about in notification. I'll link to it. So eventually what happened with Thesis Whisperer, that was though very, very early on, people started saying, would you come and speak at a keynote? Would you come and run a workshop? Would you come and do this?

And eventually I settled into this pattern of just enough side gigs to slide underneath the GST threshold cutoff, which was $30,000 at the time. And what that did was it provided [01:18:00] me with an extra 30 grand or so of income. I bought phones, I bought computers. I traveled a lot. I had Foldy money. Yeah, on the side of my academic job, I bought books, I bought equipment.

Um, I went to conferences that my universities were too sgy to pay for. Um, and I was able to boost my academic career without digging into the family money to do that. That's, yeah, 

both: what 

inger: Thesis Whisperer became, and it was quite how I did a bunch of projects. Sometimes they failed as well, but you know, it was, gave me some play money and I managed it pretty simply with Paul.

Thank you Paul. Paul Bunting. We love you. Thank you Paul. Paul, please don't leave us. Paul. Paul, he's starting to get old and wanna retire. No doubt. Um, uh, and I ran it simply with zero and um, this business, uh, was like based on the brand I guess, and um, and it was, it's very bare bones. You saw it and then we rolled it into OTRT, which I'm not gonna talk about a business structure 'cause I don't actually really quite understand it to be honest.

I trust [01:19:00] that it's been done in a way that's advantageous and all that sort of thing. But I think we can say that when on the reg team, we started that 10 months ago, we hit the ground running. In fact, we're more like we are parachuters that, you know, in, in a war zone where you hit the ground, you don't have time to even unpack the parachute.

You're like, cut the cords. Yeah. Where's my gun? I'm running for, you know, because, um, because we hit the ground running hard. So that, that probably provides a base for you to then talk. I'll just leave it to you now. Like that's kind of, I think some understandable background for what we're doing now. So we just sort of went with it.

We built from there. 

Jason: We built from there. So it was a solid base. Um, the work that you were doing with under the thesis Whisper brand and, and that business that you were running there had a solid customer base which was great. And you had repeat work and you had established a reputation in the marketplace for delivering, had some 

inger: processes, sort of not really had some processes 

Jason: sort.

They were 

inger: hard. You were, you would come in and when you went, what is going on [01:20:00] here? You know, I had 

Jason: some, um, which was really interesting for me because uh, for me to step in. So we made the decision that we would go into business together in, um, maybe June last year. May, we talked 

inger: about it. June. We actually, it August we did the paperwork, I think.

Jason: Yeah. Um, July. , But you had already, you had work lined up for, you know, the rest of the calendar year.

Uh, and for me it was like stepping into a fast moving river. And then having to try and build structure for growth around that. So there are, there are a few constraints around the model that you had which include your time and the ability to be able to, like, you're still a professor at a NU there, there's lots of stuff that meant that there was natural limits to the sort of growth that was possible with your business.

But when I came on board, those, those limits started to fall away a little bit because now all of a sudden there was another person [01:21:00] who could do some of this work and not be constrained by the limits of the, of a NU and your time constraints. Total 

inger: game changer. I mean, you know Yeah. In terms of what I, what I thought the business was worth and what you've been able to capitalize on it, it is just extraordinary to me it's a 10 x, it's in terms of size of operation.

Jason: Yeah, it's been amazing. And some of that has been around, we have to be clear that we both have a skillset, right? And my PhD is in management and organizational structures and systems and processes and, and both of us are love systems and processes and making things efficient and thinking things through and fast failing and, and kind of not worrying about that and recognizing sometimes that we're gonna put something in place and we're gonna abandon it.

Six months time because it's not gonna be fit for purpose anymore, but kind of bootstrapping this sort of stuff up. It's a bit of fun, right? Like it's been fun doing that sort of [01:22:00] stuff. So what I thought I might do today is just talk about some of the things that I've found really important from lived experience of setting of working with Inger and setting this business up.

And we are, we're not ashamed to admit that we're positioning this for growth into the future. What that looks like. Maybe we're not a hundred percent clear on that yet right now, but we do know the direction that we want to go with this business. 

inger: And for context about why listeners, I think just for context for you listening, you've got a bunch of skills as well, right?

And so you may be thinking, what's my future? Or do I even just wanna make a lifeboat? Yeah, because what what happened is I was always making a lifeboat just because of the experience. Experiences of my parents in the eighties was scarring. We lost our house, you know? Yeah. We lost, my parents had a lot of marital troubles, like they stayed together.

But I saw that close up really traumatizing for me. Like I felt unsafe financially for so many years. And so I've, my whole life has been been predicated around [01:23:00] how do I build a lifeboat, never trust. And then I went into architecture, which is just such a shit profession in terms of like continuity, employment and all the rest.

I mean, I, if you think academia's bad, it's got nothing on architecture for precariousness and terribleness. So like, so I've always, always seen small businesses as the lifeboat, 'cause that's what it was to my parents, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, and so I've always built this lifeboat and kind of towed it behind me.

And sometimes I've thought to myself, why did I do that? You know, do all these side gigs and sometimes it's just be exhausted. And my husband would, right, he was really supportive of me doing this stuff 'cause he could see the value of it, but sometimes he'd be like, Hey, slow down. You know? Yeah. You're really tired, you're gonna burn out.

And I, and it was contributing to burnout and I was trying to also do research at the same time, you know, and progress in academic career as well as being small business and they're related skill sets, but they're not completely overlapping. And so I suppose I built my lifeboat and you stepped into it.

It's not, [01:24:00] not what I anticipated happening because when you decided to leave, and so this is like, I suppose there's a few lessons in this, like, um, you doing it alone, you can do it, but doing it with someone else you trust is like completely different. Yeah. And, and you might be building lifeboat and someone else might use it, and that might be the most awesome thing that ever happened because now it's like a little motor yacht.

Like Yeah. You know, with, with pretensions to be something else. You know what I mean? Anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. Like, so when you're talking about what you've learned here, I think, uh, I think it's really valuable to people, even if you don't intend to leave academia and you think, this is never gonna be for me.

Think about lifeboats. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yes, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And if, if you do decide that you are going to work with somebody else, um, it's been, it's been interesting since we, since OTRT has kind got under the stage a little bit. A lot of 'em, a few of my friends have come to me and gone, oh, I wouldn't mind starting a little [01:25:00] business.

You know, I can see that it's working for you. How did you go about doing that? I've got this idea, that sort of stuff, which has been really interesting. So the first thing that I tell them if they's, if they're thinking about working with somebody else, is that trust is everything. Like, we could not run this business if we did not have.

I don't know whether it's unusual levels of trust between us, but it's, it's built on a foundation of 15 years of knowing each other and, um, 

inger: and this pod, this like, and this po the amount that we talk to each other pod. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. You know, we're into our sixth year of this podcast and there's been plenty of opportunities for us to display to each other our abilities to be able to get things done or our ability to fix things if they don't get done quite right.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like just to Yeah. Yeah. And you have to trust the people that you work with. And I, I can't overplay this enough. You need someone, I think, to be able to bounce [01:26:00] ideas off of, to understand that when you have an idea, they need to be able to look at you square in the eyes.

Okay, Jason Uhuh, don't think so buddy. Right. Or, that's fucking awesome. We should, 

both: should do that. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. Right. 

both: Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. 

Jason: And you need to be able to go, I don't want to have to rethink this or re prosecute this argument again later down the track or any of that sort of stuff. I need to know that there's if we agree to a thing, that there's a commitment there and that that person's going to follow through on that commitment in whatever capacity that they have within that business sort of thing.

both: Yeah. 

Jason: It's so incredibly. Valuable. And I imagine that it's probably reasonably rare too. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so probably, 

inger: I mean, you can do it on your own, like, and then you're just trusting yourself, but the same principles still applies if you're gonna get the accountant, you have to trust them. Yeah. If you're gonna work, if you're gonna do collaborations, clients, you have to trust your clients.

Like, yeah. It, it's still that basic principle is there. And if you, you get the ick [01:27:00] from something, just don't do it. 

Jason: Don't do it. Yeah. The other, the other, I guess the flip side of that is that you have to present yourself as being trustworthy as well. Yeah. So your clients have to trust that you're going to deliver, like you say you're going to deliver, or your business partner, when you say you're gonna do a thing, that person needs to be able to sleep well at night because they, you said that you're gonna do it and it's gonna get done.

Yeah. So, it's not only just the other people or person needs to be, uh, you need to have trust in them. It's like you have to. You have to demonstrate that you are worthy of their trust as well. It's a two-way street, I think. Mm. Um, the other thing that I, I still get tripped up by this every now and again is that you look around and you realize that if I don't do the work, then it's not gonna get done.

inger: Which I mean is, it's, in one sense, it's obvious, but when you are used to working in a large bureaucracy, you go, yeah, you, [01:28:00] this is you and my shoulders, giants, you know? Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: Someone should put, someone should put all of those things into a calendar so that we can see clearly what works coming up into the future.

And then I've managed, managed to share 

inger: my calendar properly with you today, by the way. Oh, did you? Instructions see you. And that was on a classic, it's a good case of it, right? Like, I went to all this trouble to, uh, we were having trouble with syncing calendars. I thought, well, the best way to do this is just to put in my calendar that you can see, which I thought you could see.

Yeah, my availability, so you don't have to like see my a u diary because it's a hot mess. And, um, it's a hot mess. Oh my God. You're like my way anyway. Then you realized, oh, Inga needs some help with this, right? Like, I was just like, I can't, I can't. I tried.

I can't, I don't know how, why doesn't it automatically share with you? Don't we own this thing together, this Google thing? Like, and then you have to, you send me a PDF. We step by step. And I didn't do it till this morning, but you know, you realize that wasn't gonna get done unless you told me how to do it.

[01:29:00] Right? Yeah. 'cause I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like low priority for me, but it's high priority for you. And I, I didn't wanna let you down, but at the same time it was just like so many things flying by my face. It was just one of those things I just couldn't problem solve. And it, and you were, you were realizing, oh, you're waiting for me to do it.

Waiting for, and sometimes you like, I can't do it. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And, 

inger: and, and unless you helped me, I wouldn't have done it. 

Jason: And, you know, it was working, it wasn't super easy. We, we had to keep circling back on calendars. Um, and yours is dynamic, right? Like, let's be fair, things can pop up for you. That means that things have to shift and, and that's just the nature of the work that you do outside of att.

Yeah. Um, but, you know, eventually I knew we were gonna get there and I, I couldn't speed that up, like banging on and sending you text messages and saying, have you shared your calendar with me yet? Was not gonna help the situation. Right. Yeah. Like, we talked about it. We talked about it once and 

both: yeah, 

Jason: like after that it was over to the trust [01:30:00] gods.

Like eventually it'll happen. So, yeah. Yeah. Um, looking around and going, oh my God, something needs to happen here. And you realizing that it can be anything from really small, boring stuff to the really big, exciting stuff that when you're first starting out, it's all on you. Like if we want to have a set of clear processes and documentation that we can point a new person at as we onboard, more people say who's gonna write that stuff?

Like, Claude's awesome. But Claude doesn't know how to, doesn't know our business that well. And even though Gemini's hooked into our Google backbone, even then still we've got so many interesting things going on between different pieces of software to support our processes. Like it requires a human. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, I, many of the time I've looked around and gone, oh god damn, I wish someone would write this thing for me. Right? Like, [01:31:00] because this is in effect, our ip, the way in which we go about doing our business is something that is, is our own particular iot. Um, IP prioritization is difficult, although I thought about this a little bit more last night.

One of the benefits of being an academic is that largely time is, is your own. 

inger: Yes. 

Jason: Um, and that's how I can sit 

inger: and do this podcast Tuesday morning because I'll time shift this to evenings or the weekends. Um, you know. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. And the, the, this is where Steve Pressfield comes into I think a little bit.

Mm. Um, is that you have to take control of your time and then you have to do things with that time. And it's. Difficult. I find it difficult sometimes to prioritize when you've got multiple things on your plate all at the same time. All of them feel a little bit urgent. All of them feel very, very important to be able to figure out which one of [01:32:00] these things you're gonna work on.

So how do you do that?

How do you make sure that you've got the right priorities? Um, all the time. There are lots of different ways that, and I think lots of different people will tackle this differently. Um, the way in which I like to think about this is quarterly roadmaps that are clear enough for direction, but not so super detailed that I get caught up in.

Breaking these things down into 158 steps that I need to complete. Yeah. Because that leads to overwhelm, 

both: right? Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, and then for me personally, it's a bouncing between the digital interface, which is our business and the BuJo, because the bojo is the piece that provides me bullet journal 

inger: for new listeners.

Bullet journal. Bullet journal. Yeah. Go on. 

Jason: Um, provides me with a space to do the thinking, right? I don't know what it is about that. Whether I'm literally sitting at my desk and doing it. I can switch [01:33:00] off from the work and I can switch into a new, huh. I'm thinking about things now in my bullet journal.

Whereas when I'm in a obsidian or I'm in OmniFocus, a task manager I'm really thinking about the doing. Whereas I am in bullet journal for some reason, I'm thinking about the why of our business and, and what it is that we're trying to achieve. That's the, the kind of mix for me, and that provides a clear enough vision for what we wanna achieve, um, and helps me guide sort of decisions and that I make on a day basis.

So do you 

inger: notice that thinking through collections, do you think a journal sense like collections being pages that are just related to a single topic or a project? 

Jason: Yeah. And weirdly, Anna, I dunno why I haven't been able to do this before. I've, what I, I've always. Decided to start a new page with a new idea, right?

So mm-hmm. And if I've got a page, [01:34:00] say page 90, and I've only got three or four lines on page 90, and then I have a new idea, I'll flip to page 91 and I'll start again. Right. And start like a new collection. Mm-hmm. But what, what, what happens is that's a, that's a burst of energy and initial thinking, and then that dies off.

And then over time what happens is, I have random thoughts about this topic again, as time goes on. Mm. You know, as it fits into maybe one of my 12 questions. And the problem there is that I start a new page each time I do this sort of stuff, and I have to keep the integrity of the collection together.

And it turns out that you don't, so what I've been doing recently is just ruling a line, you know, where I move on to, I'm picking up that idea again. If it's, if it's halfway down, page 90, it's halfway down, page 90. Like, I don't need a new page for this. And it's been really, no, you don't. No, I know, right? I, this is really obvious.

And if you read Ryder's book about bullet general head, it tells you all this sort of stuff and 

both: it's really, really, that's kind of the point [01:35:00] that you can go. Yeah. That because you know where the gaps are. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. And so bullet journal's been really good for me that I've been carrying around even more now.

And it's, I just write into wherever it is in that bullet journal. Then go back to the, I actually, 

inger: um, I actually yesterday where I took a picture of my, my goals diary slash bullet journal that I've got, 'cause I put it on Insta. 'cause I was, um, I was like, all right, I'm back from the election. I did get my arms around the rest of my life now, you know, and I had a picture of the, my goals diary slash bullet journal.

M-I-G-O-A-L-S, my goals. Oh, okay. Because my goals with an mi. Um, but it has double I would say that as me 

Jason: goals, me, 

inger: goals. Goals, me goals, me goals. It has this built in monthly spread, right? Yeah. So it's got so good like, and and down the bottom it's got my goals, things to do and notes and, um, and then each spread, um, you know, this doesn't [01:36:00] translate very well to the podcast, but you can see that each day Yeah.

Yeah. Is just like about a quarter of a page. Yeah. And you can only fit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 things on a, so my daily logs are now all in this. Like that. Daily logging of things to do and migration and stuff. And my, my bullet journal proper is just collections. Okay. Yeah. Now, so, and that's, and um, I, and I saw that our friend Melissa Castin wrote to me is like, I've been looking for something like that is a good Yes, Melissa.

It's very good. And being trail broker is that a creator's friend. And I've got one of those as well, Ben. But this one is, um, is um, my goals and I like, so the bullet journal, just being one of those really helpful systems to, but I don't know what it is about that shifts your thinking into different space, maybe introduces more, I don't know.

It's just brilliant 

Jason: though. It has. Activity and thinking back from heading down rabbit holes and [01:37:00] doing things that are probably not all, that, not adding value in the, at the speed or at scale that I want 'em to add value. Yeah. It brings my mind back to them and it allows me to go, I know that's really, really important, but I'm actively choosing here to do this other thing that is also really, really important.

both: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, and sometimes you, you have to do the things, the maintenance work of the business in order to keep the business working, uh, so that you can free up some space to do some of the bigger things that we've been talking about. But maybe pushing back a little bit, I've, I've been pushing back a little bit sort of thing.

Oh, 

inger: I feel like we're pushing 'em back all the time. It's kind of frustrating, but like, you know, we get there eventually. 

Jason: Yeah. 

inger: Do we know? 

Jason: Yeah. Well we will, we will. It's all right. I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting clearer. It's okay. 

both: Alright. Um, 

Jason: time is yours to leverage. That is one of the huge lessons here. You can either leverage it or waste it, and I put that in inverted commas.

People talk about the [01:38:00] grind or the hustle. I don't think that. That that's actually healthy. I think that, like I had plenty of grind and hustle in my last job, and that did not end in the way in which I thought about it. The grind and the hustle promotes this idea that if I just had a little bit more time, and if I just work a little bit harder, I'll get success at whatever it is.

That thing is that's right in front of me that I'm trying to do. It is a strong siren call that, and you do need to be, if you are going out on your own you know, if you don't, if you don't so the wheat and then harvest the grains and then pound it into flour, you're not gonna get to eat bread.

Right. Like that. Yeah. That's, that's kind of the, that's the model, right? If you don't do it, you don't get paid. And that can lead to this idea and, and. Support this idea of kind of toxic product productivity. Yeah. And you can get caught by, you can get caught by that trap. [01:39:00] And I'm not immune to it as much as anybody else is.

I get, I get sucked into this thing. I mean, like last night I know that we had scheduled to record this pod this morning and it was like we needed pod, we needed show notes. It was on me to get these show notes up, um, so that we had something to talk about this morning. So last night it was, you know, it was reasonably late.

It was up past 10 by the time I got home, uh, by the time I finished the notes last night. As such as they are. Um, and you know, that's not what I normally like to do. So to balance that, you need to be able to find some time to get your head right around things like family have those kind of supports in place.

They're incredibly, incredibly important. Do some exercise if you can. Yeah. That sort of stuff. Strong interpersonal skills are necessary for building relationships with customers, suppliers, that sort of stuff. And Inga, I'm sure you've got lots to say about this, but someone needs to be good at sales.

It is [01:40:00] really life. I think we're both both good at 

inger: that, but I love how good you are at it and how much you enjoy it. 

Jason: It's, it's fun. One of my, um, early memories of going to Hong Kong when I was working for RMIT was going there with, uh, a colleague, Nigel, hi Nigel. And Nigel would take me to the ladies market, which is was a tourist market where you could go down and you could buy all sorts of cheap knockoff stuff like dresses and shoes and like, if you could think about it, it was there, right.

You know? Yeah, yeah. Nothing, nothing more than five bucks. Right? Like it's nice, amazing, super cheap. But the store holders there, they they like to negotiate and it was just accepted that there would be negotiation on price and they used to treat it like a blood sport. Right. And I used to love, I was in Hong Kong so much, I used to love it.

I'd go down and I'd go through and even if I wasn't really looking for things to buy, I would buy things just to be able to have the negotiation with the people because it was like, it was just so much fun. [01:41:00] And I sometimes bring some of that with me to the sales process that we have here as well.

There's sometimes you need to have that ability to be able to forge a good relationship with the person that you're talking to but still be able to get to a deal that everybody's happy with. And, and if 

inger: one's gotta be happy and that's, yeah. That's what you know. If you know that you're selling something and people are gonna be happy with it.

Yeah. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to not take the first idea that they're coming at you with. Yeah. Like you have to listen to what their real needs are. Yeah. And you know, you've got more in the pantry. Right. Like I had one of these calls yesterday, not, not a money call, like a pro bono job, and Yep.

And I still do a lot of that, by the way, if you're listening, I, that's, I consider that part of my service work at a NU is to go and give lectures to students and stuff. And I don't charge for it generally, especially if I'm not traveling. It's just part of my job. And I, I find that, that that process of like, well, okay, you came to me thinking you wanted this, [01:42:00] but really what I'm hearing from you is this other thing.

And let, let's explore that together. Like, what's that look like and how can I help you with that? Or not? How can I put you onto someone else, maybe that, um, that might better serve your needs? That's always been my philosophy, right. And so I've always handed lots of work over to other people. Now I'm seeing the extent of it now that it's all landing with you, and I'm not doing that as much.

I'm not, um, how much, I was probably conduit for quite a few other people because I go, oh, well this person can do that, or this person can do that. And I would always trust in that, that that would come back to me. And that wasn't, those people aren't my competitors. We're all in an ecosystem, right? Yeah.

Where some people can provide things and just, it just happens that as you've come on board, a couple of those people have stepped back from doing freelance work. So I haven't got anyone to refer anyone on to anyway, right? Yeah. So, um, so I would've been stuck, but that working out what that broader ecosystem that you're working within and how to actually call in other people when it's more [01:43:00] appropriate for them, um, that comes back to you.

Like people remember that. Yeah. It creates good vibes. 

Jason: And, you know, one of the hard things can be when, especially in the early days when every sale matters, right? Like you, you really feel that. I really felt that when we first started, I was paying very close attention to every sale that we had. Every dollar that was coming through.

I really needed to understand, and I'll talk about this a little bit in a minute, I really needed to understand what was happening within those sales. Mm-hmm. , But it was equally important. Sometimes a client would ring, it would sound like a really promising sales call at the start, and you'd be listening to them, and then you get to a point and you go, I don't think we can help you here.

Mm. 

both: And 

Jason: having the ability to be able to trust that your product and service is good enough, that somebody else is going to wanna pick up that, and so that you can let that one go is really, really, really important. Yeah. I had any discussions 

inger: earlier with that. I was sort of trying to reassure you that, um, 

both: yeah, 

inger: it's, it's [01:44:00] a And you and you then did it back for me as well at times as well, which is like, yeah, we could do that.

Yeah. But would that be good for them or would that be good for us? Would that relationship, would that end up creating just like an un like not a great experience? 'cause you like to surprise and delight 

Jason: clients. Surprise and delight and 

inger: Yeah. And, and if, and if they're not gonna be surprised or delighted by how good we are, then then we shouldn't be in that business.

'cause that, that that would not create good reputation. You know? You've only got one to lose. Yeah. Yeah. And, and 

Jason: it, our reputation is so important. Um, you've gotta enjoy 

inger: sales though. You have to enjoy it. Yeah. Like, and it, and, and if you don't, you need to team up with someone who bloody loves it. 

Jason: Yeah. 

inger: Like, it's the only way some, someone has to do it.

And we're just lucky that we both love it. 

Jason: Yeah, I think it's fun, right? Yeah. But again, we've got good product, we've got independent reviews of all of our work. You know, we get an NPS at the end of every workshop. We, [01:45:00] you know, net promoter 

inger: score, by the way, just so people know what NPS means. Yes. Yeah. 

Jason: And, and we know, would you recommend 

inger: this to other people?

It's a very good sales testimonial technique is to Yeah. Um, to ask your clients, you know, did you enjoy it enough to recommend it and then to tell future clients what you got on those scores? Yeah. And they, and they do. They do. And you send me the little graph every time still. Yeah. Like, they love that.

And it's like 9.8, you know, which is extraordinary because anything above a seven is, is top class. So, you know, and we can, we can tell just from that simple measure that we're doing our job properly. 

Jason: Yeah. And so tracking that sort of stuff is really important. And including the financials, you need to have a really strong understanding of your financials, because look, cash flow management, knowing what's coming down the pipe when you are gonna get paid, because our clients pay often and on 30 day terms, which means we do the work and then if we're lucky, we get paid in 30 [01:46:00] days.

Some of our clients will do the work. They will not pay us in the same month that we do the work. They'll wait a month and then they pay 30 days after that. 

inger: So 

Jason: it can be 

inger: universities 

Jason: for, fortunately it's not very many. Um, most, most universities pay within kind of that 30 day window, but there's a few.

And that can, if it's a big job and it makes, you know, it's a lot of work, having to wait somewhere between 60 and 90 days to get actual money in the bank really matters. 

both: Yeah. 

Jason: Um, you need to have a good understanding of what that means in terms of your expenses. It's top line, it looks good in terms of the revenue.

Ah, that's great. You know, we charge X for this particular piece of work and that looks really good. But underneath that, there are significant amount of expenses, including wages and flights and accommodation. And then there's all the time that you spend in actually building the product for the client.

We try and make that as easy as possible for ourselves, [01:47:00] but at the end, end of the day, nearly every workshop has some bespoke material in it because the client wants 

inger: something. Yeah. So like we try to sell people on something like workshops we've already designed, but like more often than not, we end up kind of having bits of this and bits of the other.

And actually everything's kind of bespoke in the end. So what we try to do is just have bundles of content that can, we can mix and match together behind the scenes. So yeah, that's a really. Interesting. Evolving part of the business, isn't it? 

Jason: But, but when you're doing that, you're not doing anything else, right?

Like your time is spent on putting those bundles together in a coherent way. And you still have to, it's, you can't, it's not like if it is like Lego, it is like blue bricks that are long skinny ones and red fat short ones and like they don't quite all fit together neatly. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you have, that's right there is that you have to put it together in a particular order if you're gonna get something coherent and meaningful out of the end of it.

both: Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, [01:48:00] so yeah, you need to be completely familiar with that. I had to learn zero the accounting software from scratch. Yeah. I just did not know anything about it. And now pretty good at it. And uh, yeah, you are. 

inger: I've completely delegated. I'm not even going in there. I don't want to know. 

Jason: So yeah, we're at the point now where that's able to spit out management reports so that we can start to look at where our money's coming from, who are our slow payers, all of that sort of stuff, and start manage that a little bit more.

Sophistic, sophisticatedly, 

inger: I have to tell you, I accidentally threw out an email from you where you told me the analysis, like I just saw the word now I was this going through and like, sorry, sorry, sorry. And I think I accidentally threw that one out. So you have to send it to me again. Oh, you did all his analysis in Xero and you're clearly very proud of it.

And then I threw the email out, just so you know. 

Jason: Oh, okay. Um, yeah. Uh, I'm gonna work with, I dunno how I 

both: managed, you know, yeah. 

Jason: I'm gonna work with [01:49:00] our accountant and get a little bit more sophisticated at that, and so actually start outputting actual reports and that sort of stuff, rather than me doing kind of the analysis based on the data in there.

But it's an, it's an incredibly important skill if you don't have that skill. You need to find that person who does do that stuff and who can, or learn 

inger: it. You're smart. 

Jason: Yeah. 

inger: It's not that hard actually, is it? No, not 

Jason: really. I mean, 

inger: I, the systems support it pretty well once you learn them. 

Jason: Yeah. So that's, that's kind of a bit of an overview.

Things that matter. Financial management, sales, absolutely critical. You have to have trust in the people that you're working with which is an absolute, you know, it's a killer. And having a deep understanding of margin and what that leads to and where you're gonna spend your money. It comes into all sorts of places.

Marketing, marketing spend is a spend and that has an overall impact on your overall margin at the end of the year. And you need to understand the relationship between markets and marketing and sales. And you have to be, [01:50:00] you have to be the early stages, a Jack or a Jewel or um, a Joey of kind of all things really.

Uh, you have to be willing to pick stuff up, run with it. Build it, fail fast at it, throw it away, keep what was good, fold that into the next bit and keep, and keep doing like mini experiments on your way through. It's not only, this is why I a strong 

inger: of doing, doing it on the side of your job. Yeah. Um, at least initially because then you, it's low stakes.

both: Yeah. 

inger: Right. If you fail at it, you're not gonna starve. And you learn just a lot from going, well, what is it in my academic work that's actually people would pay for? And the market will tell you that. Yeah. Like people will start offering you money for things if you're Yeah. If you're out there enough with your work and you're communicating it.

So like writing things for the conversation or writing articles for the guarding. It's mostly writing in which we can convey our [01:51:00] skillset to other people. But it can also be, you know, going to meetups and talking to different businesses around town. Mm-hmm. 

both: Or, 

inger: you know, contacts that you have through your teaching.

Like, start to think if someone offers to pay you money for something, that's a sign that you've got a business. So just be alert to that. Yeah. Like you may say no to it or like, that's a bit of an odd offer, but think about what, what motivated that person to ask you. Yeah. Um, for it, what is it that they're looking for?

How is it that maybe you could sell it to them? What's the sort of price setting prices is really quite tricky. Um, yeah. So you know what other people are in this. Part of business? Or are they charging, you know, um, there's ways to just let, like looking for those opportunities. I think sometimes people tell me they get offered that and I just dunno what to do with it.

People often come to me with that. Like, someone wants to pay me for blah. And I say, well, first thing I say is, have you got an A, BN, an Australian business number? Like, that'll be different in different countries. Yeah. They'll be like a wallet. I'm like, it costs you 40 bucks. Yeah. You just [01:52:00] then claim it on the side of your tax and that's the Yeah.

Narelle and I wrote Rich, academic, poor Academic, and I'll put another link to that just to sort of cover some of that. But we've been talking for a while that you need to write the annex to that book, which is all this stuff like, it's zero structure and business process and stuff because it's, it's documentable.

Right. 

Jason: And, and just don't underestimate things like opening a bank account, a business bank account. 

inger: Oh my god. 

Jason: I cannot tell you. We're a 

inger: first name basis with your bank manager now. 

Jason: Hey Corey, are you listening? Hi 

inger: Cory. Old mate. 

Jason: Old mate. He, he solved a lot of problems, but oh my God, it was so hard. And it took months, didn't it?

inger: Yeah, we had to get, it was ridiculous. I thought universities were bad, but turns out like NAB. Oh my god. No. Bueno. You really need to look at it. 

both: Yeah. And I banked with 

inger: them for years. I banked with them for so many years. I'm like, oh Jason, this'll be easy. We'll do you know, we'll do it. And it was [01:53:00] not. 

Jason: It was not easy.

Terrible. We had to get like certified accountants, documentation and like all this sort of stuff. And all we wanted to do was just like, give them money. But they were, they meant it incredibly hard and so, and 

inger: then they, they stuffed up a few times with things. Yeah. And like fixing those things has been a nightmare.

You've gotta have a good accountant and like an accountant. Accountant like they, that just knows their way around like tax and, and structuring your business and stuff. And so big shout out to Paris Financials. Yeah. They don't pay us to spook them, but they're bloody good. 

Jason: They're bloody good. 

inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah.

And you know, there are constraints that you'll bounce up against that you don't anticipate. So we couldn't get, we can't get, even though Inga has banked with these people in as thesis whisperer for a long time and has a credit card underneath that 15 years. 

both: Yeah. 

Jason: 15 years of that. 

both: Mm-hmm. We 

Jason: could not get a business credit card for 12 months.

They wanna see 12 months of our audit reports. And I'm like, 

inger: there's [01:54:00] 15 years over here. You can look at your own records. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, so you have to fund everything from cashflow then, right? 

inger: Yeah, that's right. Or your own private business credit card and take the risk, you know? 

Jason: Yeah. So don't under don't, 

inger: they're more likely to give you a credit card as a private individual than they are as a business.

It's ridiculous. 

Jason: I'm sure they'd probably give us a mortgage on a house. Right. More likely than they were to give this bloody $5,000 credit card. It's not like we were asking a hundred percent. It was 

inger: easier to get a mortgage. It was easier to get a mortgage than that. I've done that multiple times and that's easier.

Yeah. 

Jason: Mind you closing the 

inger: mortgage. Not so easy. 

Jason: They don't like you leaving early, do they? 

inger: No, they don't. They make it hard. It's two hours, 15 minutes, Jason. We're like doing well. So into uncharted territory now. Um, that I kind of let it, so when you thought of this meandering kind of thing, what would you like us to talk about more?

Do we put together a little ebook for you? What do you want? Because we Yeah. Would love to [01:55:00] help other people. Do you wanna workshop on this? Because we like this stuff is, you know, we'd love to save you the pain because lifeboats are important. 

Jason: Yeah. Black boats are important. You never know when you'll meet one, unfortunately.

inger: And it kind of can be fun as well. Like, and it gives you some, you know, if you're having hating your job like day to day, sometimes I've had really hard, tough times at work, not gonna lie at the moment. And, um, you know, you and I have had talks and, and we've just talked about the Volvo slash dog money that I need and you know, whether the business will support that.

And you're like, well, oh, make it work if we have to. And I'm like, that's alright. It's just knowing it's there. Yeah. It's just such a psychological boon for me some days. Yeah. Because I know that I'm choosing to work at a NU now. 

both: Yep. 

inger: Yeah. But that's not an imperative. I'm choosing it. 

both: Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: I wouldn't, I don't have to.

Jason: And the other thing about this that I don't wanna underestimate at all, and I think is the, one of the biggest positives, is [01:56:00] that you get to choose to all the horrible things that could go wrong in a small business and minimizing other people's experience around this. But you get to choose about how much fun your work is, right?

Like it's, it can sometimes be busy. 

inger: Wait, wait. Something's gone terribly wrong with my headphones. One thing. Oh, cool. , I think they ran outta battery. We've, 

both: we've been too long, too long. 

inger: I think one of them's run outta battery and the other one's Okay. Okay. Yeah. Is it still working? Yeah, it is in one ear.

So let's, uh, that's maybe a sign that we should wrap it up. Hey. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah. Carry on. You get to choose how much fun work is and partly that is fun, Inga, because I really enjoy working with you. Like it's that bit of it is fun. You make me laugh a lot. But if it's a, I have worked for some shit places and this is not a shit place and I have some agency in ensuring that it is not a [01:57:00] shit place.

And so that cannot be underestimated that, you know, you can walk around and be proud of the kind of work that you're doing and make it fun for everybody else as well. 

inger: Yeah, I think so. I think that's like one of the key things is just that feeling of autonomy and control that you can have. It's, it's, it's really amazing.

But, you know, the trade offs are you've, you're making your own lunch, you know, there's no one gonna do it for you. I'm gonna make an executive decision based on my headphones being on their last legs to skip the reading. Although I'm very intrigued by what you have there. Um, I don't, 

Jason: I, I finished a book.

People will have to talk about it next time, but I'm just saying prop props to me. I finished a book, an actual whole book. 

inger: Yeah. And a fiction book with, I, I think it's an achievement in these dark times. Um, two minute tips, uh, to this segment is in honor of David Allen. He's classic getting things done. Um, Allen argues if a task would take less than two minutes to complete, you should just do it then and there, 'cause it'll take longer to put it in your [01:58:00] task system.

But really this is just our chance to share a hack idea that we think helps other podcast. Jason would put this at the start of their podcast, but we put it at the end 

Jason: retreat. That would, that would be a mistake on the, on their behalf, putting it at the start. But that's, you know, you do you. Yeah. 

inger: There you go.

There you go. I, my two minute tip for this episode was actually connected to the reading segment where I shared that I'd been reading techno Feudalism by Ya Fu. Which is a very interesting book, but not my area. International global trade, labor relations, et cetera, not my area, I would say.

Fair to say. And some of the words, Jason, were big. 

Jason: Why did you pick this book up? 

inger: Uh, someone on, when I was on a stall doing a pocock thing, got talking to me for like 20 minutes about it and raised, and so, oh, okay. And it's, it's actually really good, like really interesting, especially with all the tariffs and all that, that fucking guy in the United States that we don't mention on this pod.[01:59:00] 

Um, all the stuff that's happening there, it doesn't make any sense to me, but reading this book actually put a real fresh spin on it actually. But it was, it was compliated. 

both: Mm-hmm. 

inger: And, and so what I did was lying in bed at night reading this paper book, I'd be like, oh, I couldn't press on a word to see what the word meant the way I would in my kindle.

Like legit, there was some words in there I'd never seen before, and so I just, I fired up chatty g on my phone, like the app. And I'm like, chatty, what does this word mean? And it goes, oh, it gave me a good explanation. And it kind of didn't say why you were asking, but it kind of did like, 

both: yeah. 

inger: And I'm like, oh yeah, well I'm reading this book.

Have you heard of this book? You know? And it such way goes, oh yes, I've heard of him. And then I'm like, so I don't understand how that concept relates to that concept. It's like, well, let me tell you about the Brett Woods agreement. I'm like, tell me chatty. And so I like Chatty would tell me all this stuff and then I'd go back to reading the book and I read a bit more and then be like, I'm stuck again.

I don't understand. And then we had this long discussion. It went over [02:00:00] days where I came, came back to the same chat. 'cause it knew I was reading this book. Yeah. And it then could put in context what we'd said before about it and what we'd said after. And then it's like, oh yes, no, you've seen that connection there and that like it was the most helpful.

Side discussion. It was like having an expert and like, I don't know how much to believe it, but you know, I just believed it for the sake because I don't know. Yeah. Like, it seems to make sense. 

Jason: Are you the, are you the smartest human in the room? Hmm. 

inger: I'm not, it was made smarter than me. And also it would like point me at websites and stuff.

That's the advantage of chatty being connected to the web, right? So I could go and check things. 

both: Yeah. Yeah. 

inger: Um, and so I, from the checking that I did, and then I watched a YouTube clip or two that kind of, so I think it actually was guiding me pretty, and this is like well established stuff on the internet.

Like this isn't like fringy nichey stuff. This is like, there's a lot there that it's learned about. It clearly knows enough. And so, it, and at the end of it, when I had to prepare for the pod, you see that little like, like paragraph up there [02:01:00] 

both: that I've got about the 

inger: book? It's like, yes, he argues the powers moving away from markets and governments towards pla tech platform that shape what we want, how we work, and even what we believe this new digital feudalism resistance isn't about storming the palace.

It's about quiet, quitting gaming the algorithm, or refusing to give our attention away. And that actually, that wasn't necessarily in the book, that was in our discussion about the book. Right. Oh, right. So it was able then at the end to sort of. Make it a little paragraph about what my takeaways from this book was through these kind of reading notes that I've got.

Yeah, yeah. Somehow do that with every paper book I read now, um, because it's such a valuable, like it's a sort of interpretation, but it's also like, I wanna talk to someone and sometimes about that idea and just like, is this a weird idea I've got in my head, chatty that resistance. There's no palace anymore if all these billionaires own this cloud capitalism used to be that you could just go storm the palace and like put people's [02:02:00] heads in a guillotine and we can't do that now.

So is resistance quite quitting? Like is that what's happening? Is that why we are seeing resistance to power? Yeah. Like so we had this whole discussion about it that was not necessarily in the book or was inspired by the book. Yeah. But it allowed me to think all sorts of new thoughts about that book that I wouldn't have thought with me and a piece of paper alone.

both: Yeah. 

inger: It's like a reading companion or something anyway, which be just people try it, see what, yeah, yeah, 

Jason: yeah. Just as an aside on the jujitsu mats, there is a move called the guillotine. So you can legitimately still do that in these modern times if you need to. I just got, if you could get, 

inger: oh, you could get Zuckerberg on the mat.

Zuckerberg Guillotine News Zuckerberg. I run outta power. Power on my headphones. 

Jason: Oh no. Oh no.

inger: Hello listeners. Now this pod was even too long for us.

Because my headphones failed, and then it just created all sorts of technical problems there for [02:03:00] Jason. So it's me, it's Inga, I'm by myself. Jason's on mute just watching me talk and I'm gonna do the outro now. So. We love reviews. If you wanna leave a review on Apple Podcast, we promise to read it out.

Just scroll down in your podcast player and get typing. While you're there, leave us a review, five stars only. And if you want your question featured on our show Mailbag, you can email us pod at on the reg team.com or on speakpipe.com/thesis whisperer. Now, Jason's having a break from the socials he didn't even know.

That picture that I showed him was from Threads. That's how off the socials he is. But you can still find me. I'm Inga at Thesis Whisperer everywhere except that burning Nazi trash fire that they call X. And of course you can see all my writing on thesis whisperer.com. You can also find us on the web, by the way, as on the reg team.com.

If you wanna look at our workshops and our offerings. It costs us about a thousand dollars a year to produce this [02:04:00] podcast, and we really appreciate the support that we get from our cofi members. You can join for riding the bus just $2 a month and it helps us pay our rent here on the cloud for Buzz Sprout.

Now, um, Jason's meant to put since the last episode, the following people have supported us, but he hasn't done that yet. So I'm just gonna leave that blank. Um, but I wanna thank you so much for your contribution to keeps the wheels, wheels of the bus turning. Now Jason is sitting there, I can see him, um, but you can't hear him.

Um, he would say goodbye, wave your hand Jason. So give us a wave. He's waving. But I'll just say goodbye from us and we'll see you next time. And hopefully this will be a slightly shorter than an hour, two and a half hours, but maybe not as short as it could be. All right see you next time. Thanks everyone.