Is boredom your academic superpower?

Welcome to the first Youtube video version of the pod! 

Watch it here

Sorry for the sound quality for the first 10 minutes - promise it gets better when we remembered to turn the mics on! The filming/recording took ages, through many interruptions, and bad technical decisions... so much effort in fact, that we are not sure if we will do it again. Let us know if you like it and we might persist!

In this episode we talk about Boredom at work. Inger reads Jason in on the literature and floats her theory that the PhD is an exercise in training boredom tolerance.

Things we mentioned:

• Thesis Whisperer post about boredom in PhD study
• Savers - the thrifting superstore
• An academic affair - new romance book set in Australian Academia by Jodie McAllister
• The Dopamine Brain (book)
• Enshittification (book)
• One Battle After Another
• Tron: Ares
• Soul by Pixar
• Scispace AI

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

hi listeners. Look, this episode, I'm not gonna lie, it's a bit of a mess. We, uh, decided to try video and, uh, we're two old people fumbling our way around. Some rather nice new equipment. And for the first, I don't know, 10, 20 minutes, just forgot to turn the fancy microphones on. So look, the audio's okay, but it does get better, so.

Stay tuned for that, if that's in your ears and annoying you. And if you wanna see the video version, you can click on the link in the show notes and watch it on the YouTubes.

Inger: Recording. Okay. Sounding. You talk talk. Talkie. Talkie. Let's sit down talkie talkie and just sort of see how it looks. Talkie talkie. Talkie talkie. Welcome Tom, the reg. Welcome to On the Reg. You 

Jason: are driving the Jeep. I'm driving the damn Jeep and I don't have any noise. It's like, it's profesh. Hi. Welcome to On the Ring.

I'm Dr. Jason Downs and I'm here with my good friend [00:01:00] in case you've ever wondered what she looks like. This is the Thesis Whisperer, professor Ingham Newburn from the Australian National University, uh, better known as the Thesis Whisperer across the internet. Internet famous, and I'm a little bit jealous about that.

She's also director of research development at Anu Man about town I am. Or woman man. A woman about town. 

Inger: No. Table. Swift would say I am the man. You are 

Jason: the man. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: We are here for a video. I can't believe we're doing video. How did that happen? Uh, we are here for Avid. I I just do what you say. Yeah, that's right.

Um, we are here for a video episode of our podcast on the rig., And we talk about work, but, you know, not I Boring way. 

Inger: That's it. Bingo. This is a text. I'm guessing. I guess you've gotta say, what are you up to last week? 

Jason: What have you been doing? 

Inger: So we are gonna need to have our own laptop on our lap.

'cause this is gonna get a bit old, passing it backwards and forwards. Sure. You know, good to see you 

again. 

Jason: Yeah. Glad to be here. Cannot tell you where I've been over the last little bit. Yes. Perth, Brisbane. In the middle of that ac. CDC. [00:02:00] It's been hectic. 

Inger: I've been here and then I've not been here. And then I've been here again multiple times up 

Jason: and down the highway.

Inger: Complicated family circumstances. Do we like the Hume? Uh, I'm used to it. Okay. I call it the cut and paste highway. Oh really? Why No. Cut paste. Control C. Control V, control C. Control V. It pretty much looks similar-ish. Yeah. Um, yeah, but my kid finished uni all done, finished. 

Jason: Right. Is he gonna enroll in a PhD?

Uh, 

Inger: no, but uh, his last semester he got. Two hds and a distinction. 

Jason: That's pretty 

Both: good. 

Inger: And I said like, bloody hell. You got the hang of it in the very last semester. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like really? Yeah. I 

Could you? Yeah. Did you got it sooner? 

Jason: No, I, I remember my undergrad 

Mm. 

Jason: Last semester. 

Mm. 

Jason: And suddenly realized that I had to go out into the world and do shit, and I was like, shit, I better probably study.

Yeah, 

Inger: I know. I think it actually did really clear his and focus his [00:03:00] mind. So well done here. Yeah. Good. So, you know, it's going like proper job interviews and a suit and everything. It's weird. I've got a proper grown up. So that's, that's really weird. Um, uh, segue for you. Yes. Taylor Swift released her new album, life of a Showgirl.

Jason: This is my Do I care for Face? I do not get, just in case you were wondering, 

Inger: I just, I just want you to know, Jason, that I went along at nine o'clock in the morning right to the release film, which was bullshit, and I would pay it again.

But you've also 

had musical experience lately. 

Jason: I took number one son to ac CDC. Actually, I took the whole family, Kath, Jack, we all went. Um, uh, little ears. If people have got little ears in the vicinity, like now might be the time to go mute headphones in for a second, headphones in. Um, it was fucking epic.

Like I had a fucking outrageously good time. Like it was [00:04:00] amazing. These guys are in their seventies, right? 

Inger: Oh my God. Really? 

Jason: Right. I didn't, I did think like, mm, might have a heart, might see a heart attack on the stage sort of thing. Was 

Inger: there any No, no, no. Were they the kind of wry rockers, like Yeah. I've just kept it tight.

Yeah. And I haven't had the booze, haven't had the ciggie, like, 

Jason: and just has had all the booze and all the ciggy. Right. Still wiring. Just like killing it. Um, I, I was worried about Brian Johnson, the lead singer. I thought like, in your seventies, like it's gonna. The throat's gonna get a little bit wobbly.

You're gonna kind of run out of power. Mm. No way, man. He just pressed the big fuck you button and just drove it. The the concert was so loud. Yes. It measured on the seismic graph. Like the No, the earthquake people get out. Yeah. It was okay. 

Inger: Taylor didn't do that though. It was like, did they have exploiting fireballs at any point?

They 

Jason: had cannons.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They had, uh, they did have exploiting fireballs That kind of [00:05:00] shoots a flame that kind of went up in Yeah, they had a bunch of those. Yeah. Fireworks. Yeah. Um, you know, people worry about. AI and how much power it uses. Mm-hmm. I'm surprised Melbourne just didn't go dark. Like it just sucked. It sucked all the energy.

And there were lights, there was big screens. Like there were four stories talk. 

Inger: Yes. 

Jason: It was amazing. 

Inger: Yes. I was driving back in Melbourne at the moment. Obviously. Obviously we're here in cars towns. Yeah. I was driving back along, I think Victoria Street. I've lost my street names. Okay. It's been a while. And we're like, why is it like there's nothing, nothing, nothing.

Something. It's really busy and there's all these old people walking around in like Flashy demon. Yeah. And then I'm like, AKA dca, ac, Disney. That's it. 

Jason: So 80,000 people went there. I reckon 60,000 of 'em had those like flashy. 

Inger: It was a mixed crowd. I saw. Yes. There were like dads, there were kids. 

Jason: Well, there it was.

It was a bit funny. So we, we are sitting up in the, we're sitting up on the next level. The M CG straight shot, straight down to the, um, down to the stage. [00:06:00] Really good scenes. Um, and there was this guy in front of us. And so between the support act and ac DC coming on, there was this time break. And so this guy stands up and he's like right in front of us.

He's just blocking the view and all the rest of it turns around. He goes, sorry. He says like the hip.

He says, I just have to, I just have to stretch it. Like I'll, I'll sit down with the, when they come on, there's nothing going on at the moment. I laughed, I laughed and there was, um, as we were walking in there, there was this, a young girl, I don't know, mid teens, right? 

Yeah. 

Jason: And she just kind of lost track of the person.

And she's singing out Grandpa, grandpa,

like. 

This is too perfect. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like, um, okay. Yeah, that was an age. Um, it was, I was trying to do the maths. It, it was 30, roughly 35 years ago. It was the first time I [00:07:00] saw a CDC. 

Inger: 35 years. Yeah. I've never seen a C, D, C. Oh my God. Okay, next time, quick, if they're still alive, 

Jason: let's find out where they're, let's book a flight.

We've got flight credits. Let's send you to ACDs outright. Like I'm still smiling. I have, I, like, I spend a fair bit of my time trying to have fun, like doing stuff, 

right? Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: You do. I I mean you put effort. I do. I have not had as much fun for a very, very long time. My neck was sore 'cause I was dancing.

My throat just like gave out. I was deaf in one ear for like two days. I was. It'd go to Perth. Right. And I was like, if someone asked me a question, not sure I'm gonna hear 'em. Right. 

Like when you're talking to this year. 

Jason: Yes. 

This year was ac, CD, C. So you need to talk into this ear for me 

Jason: and if I shout the answer at you, it was bloody funny.

It was true. Have to 

Inger: work out how to put a CDC references into our teaching [00:08:00] materials now. 

Jason: Ah, sure. Best places. Yeah. Always. It was so good. Um, the, the, the little, yeah. Flashy things. Um, it's a reference to the album called Highway to Hell. And familiar with 

it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And on the front you've heard of it.

Yes. On the front 

Jason: cover, Angus has got like, there's double ones. 60,000 people would've helped, would've been wearing these things. Like the whole stadium was all flashy. Flashy. You 

Inger: did, you didn't have those wristbands. No. See what Taytay does, my girl Taylor. 

Jason: Mm. 

Inger: She, you have these wristbands and they've got like different colored LEDs in them.

And someone in her control booth plays the wristband. So you get these Ripple, these amazing kind of light shows. It's kind of like a drone show. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really amazing. They're fireballs. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. My 

Inger: girl robbed it. Yeah. Yeah. '

Jason: cause I can't help myself. I did a little bit of mental maths.

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: $30 for a pair of these. Oh 

Inger: man. Right. It's all about the merch though. 

Jason: It's all about the merch. You know, we 

Inger: really should have on red t-shirts, like we decided to do this. Are we test recording now? We're just gonna see [00:09:00] what happens with it. Is this what we're doing now? I 

Jason: think we're just, I hope that we've got a enough battery and you're gonna have to edit.

Now. 

Inger: I What are we might do team is pause, just play back. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Before we do another hour. Yeah. Yes. That's a good idea. Can't you pause it on your phone? Is that like what you've got now? Uh, this is very UNC unplugged. Thanks for bearing with us. I think first ever. I think I've got like a stop. Okay. Got.

We're just doing it Jason. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: Again, now we sound better 

Jason: probably because it looks like we've got more. 

Inger: Like there's Yeah, because like this little thingy. See this little thingy on here? We are like we, this thing about being old, you have the money to buy all this good gear, but do you have the technical prowess anymore, Jason?

No, but we did have time for you to get your laptop. Yep. So now we're not just like sharing a laptop 

Jason: and I'm just not guessing what's on the show notes 'cause I haven't had time to check. 

Inger: It's gonna be what it is. So you're driving the bus colleague. 

Jason: Um, so we have just finished talking about everything.

Ac CDC [00:10:00] Tay. Yeah. So we must be moving into the mailbag. 

Inger: We are moving into the mailbag. 

Jason: Excellent. Let's do it. Uh, mailbag session. This is where, um, good folk like you will write into us and we then take your mail, answer it, answer any of the questions that you've got. Um, you can write to us at pod at on the reg team.com.

That's our shiny new email address, which we've had for about a year now. So it should be kind of, it should work. But this time we're going to, before we get to mailbag, we are going to read some reviews that we've had because Inga has not figured out how possibly to get all of the reviews. And so she found a ton of them that we've not been reading out.

Yes. We've been like, how come people are not leaving reviews and. 

Inger: Yes. 

Jason: Apparently you have been So in's gonna do that. 

Inger: I, well I was gonna do it, but look, there's rather a lot of them here. Okay. So I thought I'd just like do like the summary of, and then read one. Okay. Because the other thing I realized is when I [00:11:00] screenshot them 

Jason: Yeah.

Inger: It's an incomplete amount of the review. 

Jason: You found them? 

Inger: I found them, but it had two options. You could download it as a spreadsheet, which you would do if you were a kind of organized non a h ADHD ish kind of person. Sure. But me, I'm like, ah. Just like screen. Grab that. Yeah, yeah. And then I'll go ble. 

Jason: Yeah.

Inger: Yeah. That's what I did. Okay. Um, and so I thought we could just shout out the names of everyone who's given us a review and say I'm sorry that we haven't read them out. 

Jason: It's fingers fault. 

Inger: I'm just gonna read out the name. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: I love West Life. Thank you for your review 

Jason: back in, uh, sixth, 6th of July, 2024.

Inger: Yeah, that's not the earliest one here. These are all from the United Kingdom. We've got EA 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I think that's a made up name. Jason, I don't think that's, I've got well, hard. 17. Yes. That's very British. I am gonna read out, well, hard seventeens review 'cause it's the shortest one and it is shown in full here.

Okay. Yeah. So it's, you made me pull over is the heady [00:12:00] driving to work this morning, listening to you talk about dreams, scrolling, et cetera. I had to pull over and click the links immediately. You helped me get my working life sorted. Thank you. Oh, nice. Thank you. Well, hard 17. Uh, we've got Lucy Sweetman, your pal 

Jason: from, uh, well, hard 17 from March 14th, 2022.

Inger: Thank you. Well, hard 17 if you're still listening. If you're still listening, uh, Lucy Sweetman, your pal comm, your power. 2022. Thank you Lucy. Hi Lucy. We've got Isabelle Ks, we've got Dr. Matthew Jones. Oh yes. Also from 2021. 

Jason: Yes. Good. Thank you Matthew. 

Inger: Thank you Matthew. Um, we've got Kiki 1886, uh, December 9, 20, 21. Very early on in the game there. So yeah. Thank you to all our faithful UK listeners, but a couple here from New Zealand.

We've got Jenky. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Um, and I'm gonna read Jenky 'cause it's short. 

Jason: Yep. 

Inger: Love the new thumbnail. Had a small freak out thinking my favorite pod on the reger disappeared from my feed today. But no, it [00:13:00] was just the old red font thumbnail that has been updated. New Peak's. Awesome. Team. Looks like that shoot was really fun.

So that is actually referring to our current podcast cover. Yeah. Which is the shots of us. And I think you could compare that with our current video. That if you are watching us on video yes. You will see that we did get glammed up a little for that. We 

Jason: did, uh, although today did not. 

Inger: Yeah. But you've got Newport, JBJJ 

Jason: Corporate Juujitsu.

Inger: Yeah. Corporate Juujitsu. This is your style statement pretty much. We've got tune shifter. Oh yes. Who probably is our friend 

Jason: Dr. Martin Nemo, 

Inger: probably. Thank you. And one of the, hi. One of the reasons we sound better than we used to. Um, and guiding two. Um, thank you. New Zealand listeners, United States seven one MJH.

Mm-hmm. Who says this is the only review of a podcast despite actively listening to dozens. Yes, it is that good. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, we've got Lynn Gasaway. Oh, yes. Um, I've, who [00:14:00] said, oh no, is the, the heading of Lynn Gas Away's review. I'm like, Hmm, this can't be good. But I've gone and done it. I've binged our podcast now.

I had zero left in my unplayed. What am I gonna do with my life now? But that was August 31st, 2023. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Lynn, if you're still listening, hopefully you got to listen to plenty more. 

Jason: Yeah. I love the fact that these screenshots by country, they give you the like, number of stars at, you know, out of five. 

Yes.

Jason: Where, whereas like the top level one aggregates all of that. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 

Inger: yeah. 

Jason: So you can see which countries love us and which ones 

Inger: Exactly. Yeah. And we love you. Um, Brian Kii Parker. Kii Parker. Mm-hmm. Thank you. Thank you to our loyal United States listeners and one here from Germany. All the way over in Germany.

This is some Zap. Zap, yes. Great name. During Jason, I listened to several episodes today and on the way to and from the conference and constantly had a smile on my face. Wonderful show. Thank you to everyone who [00:15:00] wrote a review. Yes. Gonna do more of them in the next pod. Yes. Which by the way, we haven't had done a pod for, we've skipped a one kind of sort of, 

Jason: yeah.

Yeah. On the reg 

Inger: couple of things because it is a joke. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Um, couple of reasons for that. You've been super busy. 

Jason: Yeah, there's been a lot. Like end of end of the year is always busy for us 

Inger: doing the working Workshopy flying away. I like, where is Jason today? Queensland, Perth, Sydney, who knows. Yeah. Yeah.

Canberra when I'm not there. Yeah, 

Jason: yeah. 

Inger: You know, so that kind of thing. So there's been that. Yeah. And I've just had a lot. A lot. 

Jason: You haven't had a lot. 

Inger: I mean, you know, the vice chancellor resigning was big. Yeah. Been out to Parliament House a few times. Oh. Went to Senate estimates the other day. Oh yes.

That was a time. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So, you know, there's been a lot happening at work. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Um, so that was the whole thing. And then complicated family circumstances. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But all under control now I'm pleased to report. 

Jason: Good. Excellent. 

Inger: Alright. Uh, okay. Where are we now? 

Jason: We're at mailbag. Right. Um, and past. Jason has done a good job.

Inger: Good on past Jason. 'cause I came in this morning, listeners and [00:16:00] watches now. Yeah. I came here this morning, I'm like, Hey, gonna do a podcast quickly. Get the tripod, we're gonna do this, blah, blah, blah. I just came in and took control pretty much. And you're like, what? What? Hey, what? And then I said, it's okay.

Past Jason. Yeah. Has put the mailbag together. Yeah. Did an exemplary job. Past Ina had also done all these show notes on boredom foreshadow, which we forgot to do. 

Jason: Okay. Yeah. Uh, which is good because not always is it as no as professional as that, as you might have guessed. Um, here's one from Janet, Janet, Davey.

Um, and so Janet has written a few times before. Uh, 

Inger: hi Janet. 

Jason: Hi Janet. Um, this time she's written in about r and listening to text documents. Interesting combo. I don't know, what is RR? Some sort of statistics. It's a 

Inger: programming thing that does program your statistical things is okay. Alright. I know what it looks like.

Okay. Brendan has occasionally written me scripts in it. Yeah. Sometimes I get chat GPT to write me scripts, which I'll talk about at the end in that two minute tips. Okay, [00:17:00] sure. Um, and I put the scripts in there and then it doesn't work, and then Brendan fixes them for me. That's what I know about art does cool things.

Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. Look, I, I'm gonna confess it like in the next little bit, I'm gonna read out what Janet's written, but I don't understand any of it. So there's a big chance that I'm gonna stuff this up. 

Inger: But listeners will, and they'll write back to us and correct us if we get it wrong. So look like it's fine.

Jason: Yeah. Apologies in advance. 

Inger: Yeah, it's cool. 

Jason: Um, hi, Jason Meningo really enjoyed the discussion slash rant grappling with Gen AI in the latest episode of On the Reg, uh, the one where we talked about tiny experiments. 

Inger: Yes. We sold a lot of that book by the way. So many people have told me, boy, that's a good book.

I'm like, yeah, Jason read that. I didn't. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. It's good book. Plus all the usual tips and fuel opinions. Two things I wanted to share to add to what you spoke about r coding and listening to text documents. Number one, I'm definitely still an r novice, but one thing I love that might be helpful to you or your listeners is creating r markdown documents instead of R 

Inger: scripts.

Now can I just pause there? Sure. And say, this sounds like some sort of fabulous mashup. You know, when you find out [00:18:00] that Taylor Swift is actually going out with Travis Kelsey and there's like two big, big names colliding, making tray Cas or whatever they call, you know, like, right. Yeah. So I feel like, ah, and mouth down are two things.

I didn't know, like had a meld. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: So the perfect Venn diagram, is that what you're pretty nice? Yeah. Okay. Alright, cool. This way you can knit the code to HTML and then it can be navigated and also shared with people without needing to rerun the code to look at your data. This allows you to have a table of contents, big tables with hundreds of rows or figures, et cetera, embedded in the HTML document with all your notes and interpretations alongside, rather than trying to remember what was significant or why you did something in a particular way.

Janet sent in a screenshot. And it looks fancy. Mm. It looks like an actual website. 

Inger: Now. It look, future Inga editing this. 

Jason: Yes. 

Inger: Video listeners may put that image up on the screen. 

Jason: Okay. That'll, it'll be cool. No 

Inger: promises. Good. 

Jason: Yeah. Janet [00:19:00] goes on, I love data table from the DT package for this and Stargazer, which exports nice looking tables ready to insert into Microsoft Word document or wherever.

Another awesome package to pop in at the end of your document is grateful, which can generate bib bibliographic files I mentioned. Mm, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, of the r packages you used, which you can then import into terro. It can even generate a paragraph listing the citations in alphabetical order to pop directly into your write up.

See attachment two 

Inger: markdown file generated by grateful package in a PA style. 

Jason: So, okay. I, yeah. This is why I said I don't understand what's going on here, but it looks awesome. It does look awesome. 

Inger: That looks compliated and awesome. 

Jason: Yes. I, but I think the point is that you get citations at the end that are useful.

Inger: Yeah. I mean, I'm all for just not having to do that shit myself and that looks like it does that shit, so, yeah. Great. Okay, cool. Yeah. 

Jason: The second part that text to voice [00:20:00] tool Jason described sounds great. I use reader slash read wise for this and really enjoy being able to bookmark or email any document article, word page or PDF to myself and then be able to listen hands free or away from screens.

Inger: What was that voice to text? 

Jason: I will have to come back to you on that. Did 

Inger: AKA daka wipe your memory? 

Jason: Pretty much. It's the only thing I can think of at the moment. Mm. You won't be fooled. The voices are real humans, but they're fine. Mm. Uh you won't be fool. You won't be fooled. The voices are real human.

Inger: Mm-hmm. But they are fine. Got the prody right? Good. Yep. Yep. 

Jason: Pro tip, you can always watch, listen to YouTube videos with our ads this way. Oh. And get through website paywalls. Oh, oh, great. For, I've all worked. PhD students give up the great working conversation in these rough times. Janet. Thanks Janet.

Thanks Janet. That's awesome. Yeah. I like, we don't advocate that you get around. Of course, not large capital paywalls. Oh, 

Inger: we never, surveillance capitalism is not something we fight against with every breath in our body at all. Jason. Never. No, never, never do we do that. 

Jason: But it was an interesting, like, nice email.

All [00:21:00] we're doing is just reporting on the emails. We Yeah, absolutely. 

Inger: All care. No responsibility. Thank you Janet. So some people will be able to unpick that kind of ask stuff. I don't, I don't know. 

Jason: Hopefully when, if we provide screenshots, yes. Um, it will make more sense. 

Inger: But I am gonna talk about a tool at the end of the pod slash video.

This is an incentive for you to keep listening that kind of does the as script for you in a way that is really kind of under the hood. Ooh. 

As 

Inger: opposed to these kind of ways, which are awesome and are not against them at all. Because, you know, I don't always wanna buy tools and pay yet another subscription for $30 a month death by a thousand cuts.

Jason: Yes. 

Inger: The, the humble Ask script is a really, really good tool for doing statistical analysis, but there's a learning curve and who's got the time and some of us only do that as a little part of our thing. Yeah. So anything that makes that easy, like this sort of idea is awesome.

Both: Yeah. Yeah. 

Inger: I think Awesome. Also, who wants to format citations? 

Both: No one, 

Inger: no one wants to do that. Ever, ever. Evie's writing to [00:22:00] us asking for advice for people just starting out on their PhD. Jason? 

Jason: Mm-hmm. 

Inger: I'm reading this one 'cause it's in black. 

Jason: Correct. 

Inger: Hello, Ingram. Jason. Hello. Medium time listener here.

So does that mean we've been going for, what is this look like? This is 

Jason: our sixth season, so. Five and a half years kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Inger: Okay. Medium times like year, year and a half. Maybe. Got back into, before Martin wrote to us about the TT towel on the, on the table. Making our sound there by better.

Mm-hmm. 

Inger: Yeah. Maybe. Um, 

Jason: we started like, it was COVID, right? So it was like 20, yeah. 20 or something. Yeah. It was way back. Well, uh, 'cause 2021 was epic trip. 

Inger: That's true. Oh wow. So we hadn't been going that long when we did epic trip. 

Jason: No, no. It's the 

Inger: only other time that other people have been on the pod. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah.

Inger: Yeah. Um, so, uh, medium time listening here after my Janet recommended the pod and proud Cofi supporter. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the, that makes a difference. That little [00:23:00] cofi thing we set up. Yeah. Yeah. It actually paid for this little gadgety 

here 

Inger: thing that we are recording on. So just know that Cofi support goes through these things that like we can't really justify out of like budget, which needs to pay for food right adjacent.

Yes. Yeah. Where was IBA goes on to write? I'm getting in touch because there's been a few comments on the poll recently to the effect of I didn't discover X soon enough in my PhD for it to be useful. I've just received a RTP research training program for those not in the know, which is a government sponsored place for a PhD so you don't pay fees.

Um, so good on you. Um, and we'll soon be starting my PhD in September. So I thought this would be a good time to ask both of you this question. What are your top three tips to setting up success for commencing PhD students? I'm, 

Jason: I've got one. 

Inger: Yes. 

Jason: Read all the million words on the Thesis Whisperer blog.

Inger: There you go. There's a million of them that'll keep you. I give. Right. 

Jason: And just, you know, procrastination. Sure. It's, if you're gonna procrastinate, you might as well learn [00:24:00] something at the same time. Yeah. And Inga, if you've got a question about your PhD, chances are Inga has covered it. 

Inger: Or, and back in the day, like five years ago, I stopped doing this, but I also used to publish things from like a wide range of other people.

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So back in the back catalog, there's not just me, there's the whole community, you know, wisdom. 

Jason: Yep. 

Inger: And I just ran out of energy to be the chief editor for that. Really? Yeah. Frankly. Yeah. During the pandemic. Yeah. Yeah. Really, basically who could do anything. Yeah. There you go. Um, E's also Audi a DH.

Okay. Autistic, A DHD. So my ability to start and commit to new systems is variable we see and witness you. Mm-hmm. Um, but at the moment in my freelance work, I'm running with Trello as my task management system. You can claw it out on my cold, dead hands. I love it. I love passionate attachment. Yeah. See, I'm not gonna get in the way.

I'm not getting in between. And time blocking in my Outlook calendar for workflow management. Outlook is my brain at this point, and I cannot change it. Okay. Fair. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: I mean, at work Outlook [00:25:00] is my brain too, so I'm I'm with you on that. 

Jason: Yeah. But you're not using Outlook for tasks, 

Inger: right? 

Jason: No. 

Inger: Oh, like you're not, I'm not not using it.

Jason: You're not like letting your inbox dictate? 

Inger: No, no, no, no, 

Jason: no, 

Inger: no. Occasionally I pin a thing, I'm gonna Oh, I know. It's naughty. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Occasionally just if I'm dealing with something during the day and I'm like, yeah, I'll get to that. Right. I pin it at the top Right. But I never leave it pinned overnight. Okay.

A little bit of a hygienic habit around that. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: Rather than move it into OmniFocus and kind of temporarily lose sight of it. Yeah. Sometimes I just pin it in the channel. Okay. But I have been known to turn an email into a task. Oh yes. Because other, like people in the organization do work that way.

Yeah. So certain people, like my boss, I can do that 

Jason: and then just say, here's a task for you. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. Good. 

Inger: Um, so, you know, it's workflow management. It can work if you're all within the same, you know, if you're in the Borg 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. We are Borg. Yeah. Yeah. You will be Borg. Yeah. If you're in the Borg, you know?

Yeah. It does Borg things. 

Jason: [00:26:00] Microsoft is still shit though. 

Inger: So look, you had a moment with copilot, didn't you? 

Jason: I can't, like, Alex, if you're listening, close your ears. I can't tell you how like, professional death, copilot just like, it just stopped and it would not, I could not. It talked with you, didn't it? It did.

Yeah, it did. You were 

Inger: actually texting me, fucking Microsoft, 

Jason: and it smiled while it did it. It 

Inger: ah, so this is copilot. You bought it. We finally bit the bullet. We bought it for the, so this is how much it costs, right? 

Jason: Yeah. Mm. Um, we have withheld teaching copilot because every institution has a slightly different installation protocol.

Yeah. Right? 

Jason: Mm-hmm. So Melbourne unis is gonna be different to Quinland University technology, blah, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, in the end, we got a job and um, they really wanted us to look at copilot. Copilot. And I said, yeah, okay. Alright, fine. We'll get a copy of co-pilot and we'll do some copilot training.

Step [00:27:00] one, go and buy a copy of copilot. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Per person. 

Yeah. 

Jason: $3,564 per year. Per person. Per person. 

Inger: I mean, I've gotta say Microsoft get fucked, right? Because chat GPT doesn't cost that much and it is so much better. Yeah, yeah. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: Like it's not okay. Like you are paying for shit. 

Jason: Yeah. So that would've been, for us to buy, that would've been $7,000 for a year 

Inger: and we wouldn't have been feeling happy.

Wouldn't have been like, open my wallet, take my money. Like we always text expand or like, it's not surprise and delight territory, is it? No, it's not. It's just, and then you get in front of the classroom and what happened? 

Jason: It just like dies 

Inger: completely dies. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So that investment of what for the month to, to see how it goes.

Jason: Yeah. Didn't, didn't work. So yeah. So there I was, um, and I had to rescue a whole workshop on the fly. Fortunately past Jason. 

Yes. 

Jason: Had done [00:28:00] alternative. Workarounds and cheat sheets for Claude and Chat GPT. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Just in case it didn't work properly. Yeah. '

Inger: cause past Jason's a pro. 

Jason: It didn't work properly past I, Jason just got your back.

So let's just have a look at these ones over here that do work and how awesome they are. 

Inger: Yeah. And also, like I'm saying, you said professional death. People are judged me. I feel like an idiot. But I was saying to you on the text messages, I really think people are gonna plan co-pilot for this, not for you.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think that, I think the 

Inger: message came across loud and clear. Maybe not so great. 

Jason: Yeah. I had to unplug it and plug it back in again. Oh my God. Over lunch. Right. So, no, and that's stressful. It got working in the end, but it was like stressful. 

Inger: It's too stressful. Stressful. Let's go back to, sorry.

We've had our rant about the Borg. Um, I successfully use Terro in my master's thesis. Excellent. We'll continue this. Highly recommend. I have no notes on that. Soterra is the way to go people. Yep. I cannot be moved from that. Tried writing in scr. I couldn't stick to it 'cause it doesn't have a built in editor.

That doesn't suck. And I haven't worked out how to run Grammarly in it at this point, so I gave up on it. Trying again. [00:29:00] Now they have Grammarly working inside it. Yeah. So for those people who want, a lot of people run Grammarly inside web pages. They run them inside, um, word documents. They run Grammarly kind of at point of need.

Yeah. And yes, it would be frustrating if you were used to Grammarly and you didn't have it plugged into Scrivener. The reason I don't use Scrivener as much is because most people don't collab with Scrivener. Yeah. And also, I've never figured out how to plug Zotero into it without it bugging out. So I do still use it Okay.

For my own writing, but I must admit I get very similar kind. What I use it for is so can work in pieces and kind of sew them together. 

Jason: It's the best. Right. 

Inger: Yeah. And, you know, uh, our friend obsidian does that for me now. Yeah, 

Jason: yeah, 

Inger: yeah. So like, it doesn't have as many cool built in tools as scr. Yeah. Like, just put it this way, the whole world should use Scrivener, but because it doesn't 

Jason: Yeah.

You know, 

Inger: what are you gonna do like during 

Jason: my PhD that the ability to be able to take bits and move them around on that kind of corkboard? 

Inger: Yeah. You [00:30:00] you did your whole PhD Incr didn't you Did my whole PhD in. Yeah. 

Jason: And it was fucking awesome. Found it about halfway through. 

Inger: Uh, you're welcome. 

Jason: Yeah. Thank you.

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Um, 

Inger: it's one of the rare instances where I told you a thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Jason: Um, and the, the ability, because when, when. Once I'd finished kind of writing stuff and then I had to start thinking about structure. Mm. And then had to decide on a structure and all the rest of it. Then to be able to take chunks and move them around and then rewrite the transition between the chunks.

Yeah. Yeah. Holy cow. It made a huge difference. It does. 

Inger: It's, it's just massive. And for us, more visual people though, like as I've said many times before, people I love and respect IE Catherine Firth. 

Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. Doesn't like working in pieces like that. Oh, okay. Some people need to see the flow. 

Jason: Yeah.

Inger: Different brains. Okay. Um. Where was I in here? My very high achieving zerbe and very brilliant partner. Very nice partnering there by the way. Due respect, um, has been running an amazing craft plus Griffin plus all sorts of other very impressive things in our PhD tech stack and it makes me feel like there's [00:31:00] absolutely zero chance of me having a functional note taking and knowledge management system like that 'cause it's so much and I hate note taking when I read it breaks my flow.

I get distracted too easily. Any suggestions? I'm gonna hold on there. I've been working with my A DHD autistic nephew. Has a very similar problem in trying to take notes. Yeah. 'cause the problem for him is that as he's reading, he kind of forgets why he's there. A DH, adhd, his mind wanders, he gets very easily distracted.

He comes back, where was I? What was I doing here? And it's the speed of the writing. Like he can't translate his thoughts to text quickly enough to stay with the text. So what we did there is that we went into dictation mode in obsidian. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Inger: Brilliant. Worked Absolutely a treat. So I would explore that.

eBay very, very easy on a Mac. Dunno about a pc, but dictation on pretty much any piece of software now is so incredible. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. 

Inger: And it, it gets rid of the pauses. It sort of joins up. I mean, it, it's almost perfect. So [00:32:00] I would look at obsidian and I would look at doing dictation if a DHD and flow is a really, a big problem for you.

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Finally, ebe says, bonus question. Any advice for folks starting a PhD after working in a very autonomous employment situation is a free freelancer. Sole trader who doesn't have to do what anyone else says no. Is now transitioning into a context where you are very much the newbie slash trainee. Oh yeah.

I currently run my own training and consulting business and feel nervous about being the baby again, best and keep up the rage. Alright. To what do you think, you've had this, you've heard the kind of the reverse of that. Yeah. So you've gone from working in academia, hierarchical to running our business.

Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Thoughts? 

Jason: Step one, listen to your supervisor, but listen to what they say, not how to do it. I reckon, like I had to find in mine, I had to find what my writing rhythm looked like. Mm-hmm. And it turned out that my writing rhythm [00:33:00] looked like doing a little bit in the morning. Fucking around for most of the afternoon and then writing again in the evening.

Mm. Um, and then when it came to the really creative bits when I was real, like I'd done all the reading and I kind of had an idea where I was gonna go, I then had to go and do things like paint the house or baskets and baskets and baskets of ironing. 

Inger: So you've never been diagnosed with a DHD? 

Jason: No. 

Inger: One thing I have to know.

Jason: I've never asked the, they have never asked the question, though. Like, 

Inger: to be fair, one thing I've noticed that when you and I have to do like deep thinking, strategic thinking, we have developed this pattern over there in your kitchen. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Uh, where I sit down on one side of the bench and you are doing the dishes.

Yeah. 

Jason: I have to do the dishes. 

Inger: And you have to be doing things, I think, to be able to stay on some sort of abstract task. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. 

Inger: You know, and that, that is a bit of a tell. 

Jason: Well, it, I, it, I read something about, um, about this. Because I did, [00:34:00] I did a lot of reading, procrastination. What's that word that you used?

Procrastination. Well, strategic procrastination. Yeah. 

Yeah, yeah. 

Jason: Um, I did a lot of reading about that, kind of where do ideas come from? Creativity, blah, blah blah. And so this idea of doing a task that is just cognitively effortful enough that you have to pay a little bit of attention to it. Mm-hmm. But not that you have to really pay attention to it.

Frees up your subconscious to do this other work. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: So doing the dishes is like, we've done the dishes thousands of times. They do 'em by hand. You can, you can feel what you're doing. You don't actually have to pay attention to it. Plates get put away 'cause they're all in familiar places, blah, blah, blah.

But while I'm doing that, that's keeping the rest of my body kind of occupied while in the back of my mind's, like chugging away. And same with painting a house. Like you have to pay attention, but the. Uh, the activity is, it's still like, it's so boring. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: But you still have to pay just enough attention to be able to do it.

Yeah. 

Inger: The Hume Highway between Melbourne and Canberra. 

Jason: [00:35:00] Yeah. That'd be another one. Yeah. Is 

Inger: brilliant. 

Jason: Yeah. For 

Inger: me, like, I can think for six hours. Yeah. Listening to my girl. Yes, of course. Okay. Um, kill me now. When, when I'm, when I'm alone in the Yellow Tiger, which I've done a fair bit of times, but, you know, um, so yeah.

I, I dunno inside of all that, maybe Air Bay got some, 

Jason: yeah. 

Inger: Good knowledge. I'm looking at the time. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. You've got, I've gotta 

Inger: go and do a thing. You've 

Jason: gotta go into a thing and so 

Inger: should we, six 

Jason: minutes, 

Inger: shall we pause? Uh, and we'll, and just call it on the mailbag. There's more mailbag, but that can be the next episode.

Yep. Let's do that. Yeah. Alright. Alright. Okay. Um, so you just enjoy this, you know, fragmented, experimental, hey, this is what you come here for. This is the content you come here for. 

Jason: Right. 

Inger: Authentic. 

Jason: Yeah. Think that this is intermission. 

Inger: Am I gonna come back and we're gonna talk about boredom. 

Jason: Alright. Bye.

Okay. We're, and we're live. 

Inger: So Jack moved our camera 

Jason: [00:36:00] also, I've just done an hour and a half of teaching 

Inger: and like, and I, I went up to Savers in Footscray and I had a great time up there. I charged the car. Yeah. Came back. You fed Jack. 

Jason: I fed Jack. He 

Inger: moved our camera. You changed your t-shirt.

Continuity era. And we're back. 

Jason: We're getting into our work problems because I'm driving the bus. Yeah. Goodo. And our work problems is in this part, in this segment, we focus on one aspect of work. And while we kinda like nerd out on it we sometimes tackle problems that we have at work. Mm. Or we discuss themes, uh, suggested by a listener.

Mm. Uh, today, Inga, you've bought the boredom. Boredom. 

Inger: Uh, this is a problem I have at, had at work. 

Jason: Your problem or? Yes. 

Inger: I'm bored. 

Jason: Okay. Maybe I've been 

Inger: doing the same job since 2008. Okay. No, 2006, more or less. Dang. Different versions of the same job. 

Yeah. 

Inger: So I started working as a research fellow in researcher development in [00:37:00] 2006.

Yeah. Part-time through my PhD. Uh, and then I became full-time, and then I moved to a NU and like, I've been doing this for, well it's what, over 20 years? 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So 20 years you get really good at your job. 

Jason: Yes. You do 

Inger: also. Nothing new really happens. 

Jason: Okay. Researcher development is Researcher development. 

Inger: Yeah.

Like, I mean, it's a very complicated field. 

Jason: Mm-hmm. 

Inger: People have all sorts of conflict. I had to teach myself writing, but like after 20 years 

Jason: mm-hmm. 

Inger: Like same, same but different. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Um, and then so couple that with terrible, terrible morale at a NU over the last year getting better. Thank you. A u management sorting your shit out.

Is it though? It, well, uh, I'm choosing optimism. Okay. Okay. I feel it's getting better, but I'm just [00:38:00] tired. 

Jason: Mm. 

Inger: And when I sit down and I go to do things I know have to be done, it's like the overwhelming feeling I get frequently is boredom. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: And Boredom's just a killer for creativity. It's a killer for morale.

It's a killer for everything. I think. I think we need to own up to boredom being a factor in work. Okay. You know, there's research on pilots being bored in cockpits on long haul flights. 

Jason: See, that feels bad. Sure. Right? Like of all the people I want concentrating, not being bored is pilots. 

Inger: Yeah. So they've done a lot of work on that.

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: Right. To make sure like, how long can they fly on autopilot before they're so bored that they just don't wanna do it anymore? Yeah, yeah. So like, so boredom's like an area of research. Right. So we need to sort of make a difference between sort of boredom is contextual. Right. Okay. So in the [00:39:00] pandemic, I was terrified.

Some of it, a little bit of it scared. But mostly I was bored. 

Jason: Oh my God. I was just exhausted. 

Inger: Exhaust. And the boredom and exhaustion kind of coupled together, you know, like the tedium of the every day, you know, the masking on the kind of, but interspersed with moments of terror. 

Both: Yep. 

Inger: Yeah. And even the terror didn't really get to you after a while.

Like boredom, watching Netflix. Same. Same. I think was sort of an endurance. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Aspect of the pandemic. 

Jason: Might I just say Victorian here? Mm. Most lockdown of all people in the world ever. 

Inger: Mm. I know you have like the most boredom sucked. Yeah, it sucked. Still psychological scars. Mm. And I would say that PhD itself as a three year project of something very, very niche is a test of your boredom thresholds.

Oh, okay. And perhaps I would say endurance training in being bored at work. I reckon it sharpens your capacity, you know, [00:40:00] spend hours and hours with data that's going nowhere to read. Really boring things. Written in really boring ways. 

Jason: Yeah, yeah, 

Inger: yeah, yeah. 

Jason: Oh yeah. 

Inger: So like, I've been thinking about, you know, what's the value of the PhD in an era where apparently we have PhD agents now, PhD level, it's often called up as this signifier in the AI thing about super, super smart people.

What have we got over ai? Well, AI's kind of tireless. Yeah. Yeah. And its memory is pretty like better than ours. Yeah. More ac like more accurate. Recall it bullshit's like we bullshit. Yeah. Like, um, but we can get, we can sort of tough it out through boredom. Yep. Right. Presumably soak in a machine. So, but although 

Jason: Claude does get tired, 

Inger: Claude does get tired and so does chat.

GPT and other ones sort of time out, time you out basically. Yeah. I call it tired, but it's, you know, you run outta tokens. So the other thing that got me thinking about boredom was I read, um, Johan Hari's book Stolen Focus. 

Jason: [00:41:00] Yes. 

Inger: Which I should be having holding up here now that we're on video. Yes. But you're, but I've forgot to bring it.

Jason: You're in my house, not your house. 

Inger: Well, I did actually bring it all the way down from Canberra. Oh no. With the plan to video and hold up the book and then hand the book to you. But you'll have to just imagine the book Stolen Focus. Very, very good. Book. Book. Um, so I think why boredom matters for us as knowledge workers, you are an entrepreneur and me an entrepreneur and academic, is that we hit boredom walls and we have to get through them.

Like boredom is part of our job and trying to be mentally engaged, even when we don't want to be, is something that we have to learn to do. And, um. You know, smartphones. Yeah. Um, tech. Oh, smartphones. I'm showing my age, you know, phones. Yeah. Right. Technology generally has sort of eroded our capacity to be bored.

Like when you're stand in a queue, you know, somewhere instead of just sort of staring there and just having [00:42:00] a moment of boredom. We go to our phones. Right. 

Jason: Actually, I've been doing a study on this. 

Inger: Oh. 

Jason: Not a formal study. Yes. Just kinda like a casual what's going on here Yeah. Kind of study. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Um, I, I spend a lot of my time in those kinds of situations where I recognize that you would like, what you would do is bring out your phone mm-hmm.

Watching what other people do. Mm-hmm. Because that, that alleviates my boredom. 'cause I'm like, huh, what are the other people doing? Mm-hmm. And 90 times, 99 times outta 10 they're pulling out their phone. 

Yeah. 

Jason: So, situation I was, had in a conversation with a teenager, not my teenager. Sure. We with a different teenager and we were mid-conversation and that teenager had finished their part of their conversation and so they took their phone out of their pocket while I was engaging in my part of the conversation.

Inger: Damn 

Jason: right. Yeah. 

Inger: Damn 

Jason: right. So like I had all the feelings about that. 

Inger: Yeah. Like because say clearly I'm bored by your conversation now. Right. I'm just gonna go to my phone. I'm just 

Jason: gonna pull my phone out. 

Inger: I've told you what I want to tell you. Yeah. 

Jason: And [00:43:00] so I did. I did what all good teachers do. 

Inger: You'd silence.

Teacher silence. 

Jason: Teacher silence. That's like, I'll just stop talking then. 

Inger: If you've never done teacher silence before, it's pretty simple. You just shut up. 

Jason: Just stop talking. 

Inger: It's amazing. Yeah. Like if you've got a class full of people and you want them to talk to you. Just be silent until it's super awkward and you've just gotta have the capacity to outlast them.

Yep. And you just sort of stand there. It it works. Every single, every single time 

Jason: worked like a charm. On this particular teenager, they were like, looked up from their phone, like, what's going on? Oh, it's my turn. 

Inger: Damn. Parents got a bit of training to do. I think 

Jason: that's the ex, like that's the extended version, extreme version.

But yeah. Carry on. Sorry. 

Inger: So Johan Hari in his book, so he's talking about his own struggles. It's like, it's a great book. Okay. Right. It's like deeply. Personal. 

Mm. 

Inger: But just brings the research in. There's some criticisms of that, which I'll get to at the end. Okay. But there are extensive notes and he's published corrections sometimes where he had to and [00:44:00] stuff.

Like he's taken that shit serious. Yep. Because in the past he's had a bit of a kicking for not doing his work properly. Ah, right. And he got publicly kind of canceled for that. Oh. And so he's sort of, this is, he's, he's, he's done his best to do due diligence, I would say. Okay. Yeah. So, um, so he sort of starts off with his own stories about how he couldn't pay attention and he took himself on a digital detox too, like Sure.

You know, a seaside low car. Mm. Turned everything off. Mm. And so to talk you through that process, so he starts at the individual level with his own struggles, but he ends up at the kind of society level 

Jason: Yeah. 

With 

Inger: it. He's sort of talking about like the collapsing of sustained book reading.

Ever shorter cycles of media and attention. Yep. Um, things like TikTok, I don't know. It sort of talked about video and stuff, he says that our tensions have been so eroded by the best people in the world working for years on how to sell a shit. Yeah. And takes steal our attention from us [00:45:00] that we are collectively developing an inability to tackle long, difficult, boring problems like climate change 

Jason: or the Godfather movie.

Three hours. Ah, can you sit through the whole thing? 

Inger: No, not Godfather. It's a Godfather three where it's basically an Italian. 

Jason: I don't know. 

Inger: I just couldn't, yeah, I tried. Um, first one's great. It's still three hours. Go to the mattresses. Right. Anyway, so he pushes really hard back on the idea that it's your fault.

Just be more disciplined about it. Right. Which is an interesting take. 

Jason: Mm-hmm. 

Inger: And, uh, and he's got a lot of interviews. You know, he goes around the world talking to the scientists that have done the research, blah, blah, blah. It's sort of persuasive narrative rather than academic work. And I just wish more academic work was written like 

this.

Jason: Yep. 

Inger: Because it, it, like, I picked it up in a bookstore. I thought, ha ha ha, if I can't get past page three, um, I won't buy this book. Yeah. 'cause, and it just grabbed me like that and grabbed me by the neck. Read it in like three [00:46:00] settings. Um, great. 

Jason: Do you know who I think does that really well? Mm. Naomi Klein, 

Inger: she's fantastic.

Jason: Yeah, yeah, 

Both: yeah. 

Inger: She understands the grab the reader by the throat. 

Both: Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. If you haven't, have you read Doppelganger? 

Both: No. Oh. I've got a copy though. Somewhere. Good. Someone's given me one. 

Inger: Oh yeah, it's good. 

Both: Is it? 

Inger: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, so he's got about 12 main things that he talks about in this book, and not gonna lie, chat.

GPT did this summary for me. Course I did. Good. 

Jason: You're too bored. 

Inger: I just didn't have time, Jason. Right. Okay. As I said, complicated family circumstances. Okay. Everything is fine. It's just complicated. Yeah. And requires a lot of my time and attention. Gotcha. So, um, so he talks about switching information overload.

He talks about loss of deep work, of flow states. He talks about sleep deprivation a lot, actually. He talks about chronic exhaustion and stress. Mm-hmm. He brings in all the research on sort of burnout, all that kind of stuff, and he goes deep into sort of surveillance capitalism. 

Both: [00:47:00] Good. 

Inger: You know, and the economic drivers for stealing our attention and monetizing our attention.

He talks about, you know, unstructured offline time, like daydreaming, walking, staring out a window, that kind of thing. He talks, you know, the standing in the queue with your phone. He talks about how that's sort of gone. Um, he talks about diet, he talks about pollution. He talks about sort of physical factors, the link with mental health, educational and parenting practices.

Okay. He goes right through everything, you know? Yeah. How do we bring up our kids? So, you know, your, your young jack. Has a dumb phone, dumb phone, you know, instead of a smart one. Now we've just had the social media ban. Yeah. About to click in. So there's been some interesting articles in the paper with teenagers trying, trying it, and then going, what do I do now?

Yeah. Like, literally, what do I do with my time? Um, and he talks about, um, 

Jason: Jack Jack's answer to that is more jujitsu. 

Inger: Well, you know, look, at least he's getting his exercise right. Yes. Um, and sort of workplace structures, [00:48:00] you know, busyness, theater, uh, you know, email, meeting culture, um, open plan offices, the lot.

Right? 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So I really enjoyed it. I've recommended a couple of people. I've recommended it to have read it and said they really liked it. Yeah. So, Holly Noble, shout out to Holly Noble. She, she enjoyed it. I just wanna go the criticism just briefly. He's been dinged a bit, so academics have reviewed the book.

Right? Right. And they've said. Because of course their research has been used. Right. And then they've said, oh yeah, look, it's engaging. But he kind of gl he surfs over the top of things and stuff because of course he does. Yeah. Because he's trying to keep your attention. Um, and so sometimes may it maybe overstates or simplifies findings a little bit.

Yep. And, um, leans pretty heavily on secondary summaries, don't we All, you know, um, and generalizing from small to big, you know, I, I found some of the stuff around parenting and around diet to be like, really? 

Jason: Yeah. [00:49:00] 

Inger: Kind of seemed to be over salting that one. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: But we still really, what I really enjoyed about it was that he didn't, he moved it beyond that individual.

You just don't have enough discipline 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: To, um, broader society. And I think he's, he's his basic through line is attention isn't a trait. That we have or don't have in different amounts. It's a capacity that we bring to bear. And that's shaped by systems and societies and cultures. Right? Yeah. So we're all sort of stuck in the matrix in a way.

Yeah. So, um, I'm just wondering, like, what makes you bored, Jason? Like 

Jason: at work, I'm not, 

Inger: God, I mean, let's say at work, but you know what, what, what's your boredom? 

Jason: So the switch to make me go and do something else, 

Inger: I don't know. Just like, what's your experience of boredom? Like mine is, I just like, I go and I just, 

Jason: you know, I don't, I look, I'm, I'm struggling with this one because I, you don't get 

[00:50:00] bored.

Jason: I, no. If I stop doing a thing, like if I tired, I'll go and lie down because I'm tired. 

Yeah. 

Jason: And then when I'm no longer tired, I get up and I do something. 

Right. 

Jason: And then I just move from thing to thing to thing. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Um, and I try not to do things that don't have some sort of outcome attached to them.

Inger: Yeah. What about before you were entrepreneur? Did you have any parts of your job that you found boring? I,

Jason: uh, sometimes reading, like dealing with policy. 

Inger: Yeah. Do you Right. Like reading a big, thick policy document? Yeah. 

Jason: I mean, the times that I ever got really bored were when I was reading journal articles and it wasn't clear that I was gonna get to the answer that I needed to get to. You know, and you get to the end of that and you're like, I'm never gonna get that part of my life back.

Inger: Yeah, yeah. Frustration. Yeah. 

Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I found it hard to keep concentrating around that sort of stuff. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: That like my mind would wander around that. Yeah. 

Inger: I get, I get bored with [00:51:00] difficult, like if something just, even if in my mind I've. Built it up to be more difficult than it is. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Boredom is like a defense mechanism that kicks in and I'm just like, ugh.

You know, like anything else, like give me email. 

Jason: Oh God. Do you know what 

Inger: I mean? Yeah, yeah. But then mostly email bores me. Bores me. Yeah. I get bored by email. Oh my God. Like tedious. You don't want to do it. 

Jason: If there are any clients watching at the moment, not your email, I don't get, I don't get bored with your email, other people's email.

Where can I get bored at the early stages of a project? I can get bored. So you would think naturally that you would be excited about the early stages of the project. Mm-hmm. But often I'm at the stage where I don't know enough about it, and so I'm reading around a lot and not quite like clicking here and clicking there and reading this and reading that.

Like I can get through a bunch of stuff, but until it starts to come together and I've got a really clear view about what the next steps are. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: [00:52:00] Stage I find pretty boring. 

Inger: Yeah. So for you, boredom and frustration are really linked together. Yeah, I think 

Both: so. 

Inger: Yeah. For me, boredom and, and difficulty. Yeah.

You know, so, so it's very rarely boredom on its own, but I was bored with my PhD by the end. Oh my God. Oh, really? Like the editing part of it. Yeah. I found that was really hard going. And the way that I got myself through that is I, I had to do it in the evening because I'd, you know, gone back to work.

Jason: You do it. 

Inger: Uh, so I, I, I ended up sort of like sitting down at 7:00 PM and going, I have to do at least an hour of this copy editing business. Yeah. And I can't, you know, stop doing it before an hour. And if I'm at the end of that hour, I'm still feeling like, mm, okay, I'll do another hour. But never more than two.

Jason: Right. Yeah. And 

Inger: by putting a time boundary around it, I could get through the boredom. Yeah. Pretty well. 

Jason: Like not. The only time I could probably get bored would be when I'm watching someone else do something really boring. So [00:53:00] I used to be the person, not always, but I would take Jack to when he was in swimming squad and he was being trained to be like a competitive swimmer.

And so they would do five kilometers of breaststroke and then five kilometers of backstroke and just going up and down and up and down and up and down. Like I would lose interest in that, but I would be paying attention to it. Does that make sense? Yes. I can't, like if I'm there to watch him do swimming 

Yeah.

Jason: I watch him do swimming. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Even though this is not interesting and it's not helping me in any way. So like, 

Inger: because you didn't want him to look outta the pool and see you on your phone or computer. Right. Whereas I did my email. Right. Which may or may not be connected to the fact that my kid no longer swims.

Jason: Right. 

Inger: I, I, you know. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: I don't know. 

Jason: Yeah. I don't know. I find I find other things to do when that boredom kick the potential slowing down kicks in. 

Yes. 

Jason: I, I will [00:54:00] find other things to do. So, um, an example, um, cath and I don't necessarily always want, wanna watch the same thing. She doesn't like, go figure.

Big explosions, fast cars, drug dealers getting shot by rogue cops. I wonder why she 

Inger: doesn't like that. Yeah. I can't think of why. 

Jason: Yeah. And I don't like the documentaries on, you know, nurses who kill. So, so as much as I love her Sure. I'll sit here and I'll watch. 15 minutes of nurses are killed. Yes. And then I get up and I go do something else.

Inger: Right. Right. So I 

Jason: don't let boredom kind of, 

Inger: yes. 

Jason: Hang on. 

Inger: Yeah. I don't 

Jason: know. It's weird. I've never really thought about 

Inger: it. Yeah, no. It's one of those things that is like, well, you know, there is research on it. Right. So we'll get into the research. Other people 

have thought about 

Inger: it, but I thought you'd like a fun fact about boredom research first.

Sure. Um, fun fact, there was a boredom conference and it ran nine times before they got bored of it. They stopped it in 2023 because I, I found it and I'm like, oh my God, I have to go to this. Like, 'cause boredom [00:55:00] studies is cross multidisciplinary, you know, and I was just like, this is the best thing I've ever seen.

Yeah. I'm gonna go and, no, they stopped in 2023. So, boredom conference organizers, please. I'm begging you do it again back because I will come. Um, so, so would you like to know more about what, what US researchers have worked out about? Right. Um, so there's causes, yeah. Boredom in knowledge work. So repetition and routine.

So you've already talked about repetition in swimming and so on. Yeah. But you know, coding endless survey responses for me. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: You know, like that coding part where you just feel like hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer. Yeah. So text coding particularly, which is usually done in something like Max QDA, where you highlight the bits of text in a different color Yeah.

To match to different code. And you do that endlessly. Yes. Yes. Hi. Hello. Hello. We're not recording. 

Jason: We're 

Inger: we're, 

Jason: we're on video these days, 

Inger: so I reckon there's just no [00:56:00] way to make a neat transition. 

Jason: No, let's just. Say, let's just say what happened in our, like, in our, like between yesterday Yeah. When we did this.

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: For 20 minutes. Yeah. Before we got interrupted. Then how did we get interrupted? So Kath came home. Kath came home. 

Inger: Yeah. And, and so she was like, oh, oh, you're recording. We're like, we'll stop recording. Yeah. Which we did. Yes. And then we're like, oh, we only have another like 20 minutes. Yeah. And we turned it on and we'd left it standing there the whole time you were teaching And there was no battery?

No battery. No. 

Jason: No. 

Inger: Uh uh. And then, you know, it was night. Well also Jack came home. Jack came home too before that. And you cooked in some crispy chickens. I did book night book. 

Jason: Um, and he moved our camera. And so all that's right. All of our staging and everything was just all wrong. Yeah. And it was just a disaster.

Inger: Yeah. The whole thing. Like we families, 

Jason: welcome to the Downs household. Yeah. Then I went to Jit Jiujitsu. 

Inger: Yeah. So I talked to the people in Sweden. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: I, um, and then, you know, I, I 

Jason: bled on other people last night. Did you? Oh, gross. Yeah. Is that really [00:57:00] gross? Well, yeah. They, they deserved it. Okay. So now we're back.

Um, this morning I've done some teaching. 

Yes, 

Jason: you've done stuff. 

Yeah, I did errands. 

Jason: Errands. 

Yeah. 

Jason: And, and we're here again. I paid attention to continuity from yesterday. Yeah. So I'm still wearing the same stuff he did. Ino, on the other hand, he did not, 

Inger: I didn't even think about it. I just got dressed. 

Jason: You know what we need?

We need like a whole production team. 

Inger: We do need a production team. But at the moment, the production team is kind of us. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Mostly me. 

Jason: Yes, mostly you. 

Inger: And I just wanna add that like I, you know, on the way to picking up my niece and doing all sorts of things this morning. Yeah. I dropped by Savers in Greensboro.

There's one in Greensboro. If you don't know about Savers, uh, listeners slash watches, 

Jason: Google it. 

Inger: I'm an absolute obsessive, Jason knows this. Uh, and I go there at every opportunity and I picked up this jumper for $3, 

Jason: which, what the one you're wearing? 

Inger: Yeah. Bargain. Total bargain, right? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you [00:58:00] know, so continuity was not on my mind.

No. 

Jason: $3 bargains from Savers was. That's 

Inger: right. It's just like, totally. Anyway, I remember where we were up though. Up to though. 

Jason: Okay. I think we were up to the deep dive. 

Inger: We were, and we talked about what you consider boring, what I consider boring. I've had 12 hours to think about that. And since 

Jason: then, and, well, I, I don't, I think the last time I was born was when I was a kid.

Wow. Yeah. Like I, I genuinely can't think of a time where I've been like, flat out bored. I just, I move on to the next thing. Like I find a way to occupy myself. 

Inger: Yeah. You are actually pretty good at that. 

Jason: It's like, oh, okay, that needs fixing. Or like, I, I'll read a book or like, I'll do a thing. 

Inger: You must've been lucky in your work life though, because like, there's just some stuff in my work life where I'm like, oh, do I have to really?

And for me it's avoidance. Right, right. Like, 'cause I know I'm just gonna be like, like, like eating dry toast. During my PhD I had to code many, many hours of video footage. 

Jason: Yeah. That'd [00:59:00] suck. 

Inger: And it was just, oh my God. I was only step my eyes out with a pen. Okay. But 

Jason: I, I go like, Ugh. Okay. Zen become a coating king.

Inger: Oh, okay. So, yeah, no, I never did that. Oh, okay. And, and my examiners could feel it too, right? Like, one of them said something like, yeah, that 30,000 words was like eating dry toast. And I was like, Ooh. Ouch. Ouch. But he said, yeah, in a PhD you'd have to do it. You'd never put it anywhere else. Right. Okay. You'd never do that much of that Boringness.

That's what a PhD is for. Right. And so hence my theory about PhD being a kind of boredom threshold, boredom tester. Oh yeah. You know, it's part of the, the hidden curriculum, if you like. Like, okay, what does a PhD teach you that it doesn't overtly set out to teach you? 

Jason: Right. 

Inger: But does it by accident? 

Jason: Right.

Inger: And boredom coping strategies with data is one of the things I think it does. So, so I looked into boredom a bit. Yep. I wrote a blog post about it. 

Both: Yep. 

Inger: In fact, I think it's the last blog post that's up on the blog. 'cause I've [01:00:00] been a bit slack this year, to be fair. There's been a lot going on, lot going on, like a lot, lot.

So sorry people. I will get back to it next year. And also just sometimes you need the ground to just lie fellow. Mm-hmm. A little bit. So I looked into boredom and you know, what causes it, right? Mm-hmm. So, um, hence the conference on boredom and the papers about boredom. I have a whole lot of, bit of my terro library about boredom.

Yeah. I've had this interest in boredom for, I'll admit quite a while. Right. Um, so repetition, routine, as we've said, like coding lots of, like, that sort of coding that I'm talking about is one of them. Low autonomy, so not having a lot of control over what you do can make you bored with it. So if you think back to some of the service jobs that you've had.

Yeah. Or, you know, um, and for PhD students. People who are stuck in someone else's project or a micromanaging supervisor. So you've got that kind of data boredom piece, but then on top of it, you don't feel like you've got any control over it. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So that can feel kind of endless and terrible or, or just a lack of [01:01:00] meaning in the work.

Um, uh, and sometimes of course, you're, you have expectations about what something's gonna be like, and it's not like that. 

Yeah. 

Inger: So for me, the whole of my architecture career was like that. I, I just thought it was gonna be, you know, waning around in black skis. There was a certain amount of that. Yes. Um, and there would be, you know, like a drawing with a pencil stuck behind my ear, you know, fancy 

Jason: pen.

Inger: Fancy pens. Yeah. Rulers. Rulers. Yeah. Coloring in. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because I used to love to color in. Yeah. Uh, there was very little of that actually. And when you did draw something, it used to be like tile set out. I remember the first client meeting that anyone took me on we went to a very rich person's house renovation.

Yeah. And we had a very long conversation about the position of the toilet, which involved her hovering over the toilet, you know, doing that kind of, you know, and demonstrating that we'd put the toilet roll holder too far for her to reach. And I was like, really? This is what I signed up. This is what I did five years of education for.

Jason: I reckon we can [01:02:00] move that, I reckon. Like gimme a screwdriver. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

Inger: So, uh, you know, like, you know, we were also, I think with academia, you know, we're promised the life of the mind. 

Both: Yes. 

Inger: And we get the life of administration really. And emails a lot of the times. So, you know, that. So you, you know, there are parts of your job that you really intensely like, but then there's lots of it that maybe are very tedious.

I find committee meeting is extremely tedious. 

Jason: See, I have this constant critic in my head. Like, so I'll be sitting in a committee meeting. I, I won't mention where Sure. I have done this though. And like in my head I'm screaming at everybody that's in, at, at the table. Like, this is fucked. Like, let's move on now.

So 

Inger: I'm not So you're imagining the Brazilian jiujitsu moves that you need to take, right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. 

Jason: You know, if I have to No. Like violence is never right. Yeah. Never, never. But imaginary in the space 

Inger: and no one ever has to know it's fine. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Yes. Um, 

Jason: [01:03:00] the, yeah, like I just, I go, I go into critique mode.

I get angry. 

Inger: Yeah. So I'm not bored. 

Jason: I'm actively eng Okay. Yeah. I'm actively engaged in now it's like 

Inger: your brain has like a, some sort of boredom switch that it goes No, we don't do boredom. I guess it doesn't like it. It doesn't like it. Ooh. I guess it doesn't like it. I guess it doesn't like it. Let's not explore that too closely.

Um, and then boredom can be a kind of, I think this is just my, in theory, uh, um, it's a kind of brain noise. Like I have, I have food noise until I take my drugs. Took my drugs this morning. Talked to my endocrinologist today actually. Yeah. Yeah. My liver is perfect. We both applauded for my liver. In fact, I did a little chair dance 'cause my liver did not use to be perfect and now just top-notch liver.

But you know, we, I had a lot of food noise before I started taking GLP hormones. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: And I don't have that anymore, so I can focus my attention on other things. But I think boredom can sort of be a form of brain noise. Like, okay, that, you know, you. Maybe you've got the opposite [01:04:00] of that, where like your brain goes, I don't do boredom, I'm just gonna give you noise of any sort to avoidant.

Yeah. Maybe you're boredom avoidant. Maybe I'm, yeah. 

Jason: Um, so, so I'm just finished reading the dopamine brain. Oh. I think maybe, did we talk about this on the last podcast? I think 

Maybe not. 

Jason: Sure. Dunno. Um, and the point there is that often that's a dopamine response. Oh. And, and so what happens is you get bored.

Yeah. And if you have figured out ways to alleviate that burden in your dopamine response, drives like behavior, but it also drives movement towards the thing. Oh, so like physical movement towards the thing? 

Yes. 

Jason: Um, and so what you end up doing is you end up of course, reinforcing that thing. This is where addictions come from, 

right?

Jason: Right. So if you're bored and the way in which you avoid that is eating too much or smoking too much or Right. Thinking too much. Yes. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Jason: Like that can be problematic. Yeah. Which is why it's so hard. Um, it's one of the reasons why it's so [01:05:00] hard to get out of addiction because what you end up facing is potentially 

Both: boredom.

Oh, potentially no one wants the feeling. 

Jason: Well, I don't. 

Inger: Yeah. Well, let's get onto how it feels. Okay. Because that, you know, you foreshadowed. Oh, good. So, so how does being bored feel, you know, sort of relentless, frustration, time dragging. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: You know, that just that feeling that something will never end. And our sense of time as human is real is really kind of bad actually, because we, when we're excited and engaged in something, time passes quickly when we are not, it passes slowly.

It's the same amount of time. So if you anticipated task is going to be boring, you'll probably also think it's gonna take longer than it will. Yeah. And I, this is me in spreadsheets. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Pretty much. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: And so I'll often put off a spreadsheety kind of task that isn't data spreadsheet, data spreadsheets, I love.

Right, right. I love a feeling of power in a data spreadsheet. Like, I'm gonna make you my bitch. Okay. Uh, there's gonna be a pivot table or something. Oh yeah, something's gonna happen in here. We love a pivot and it's gonna be exciting. But when it's like. [01:06:00] Budget spreadsheets. It's just like, oh. And so I think it's gonna be more boring, therefore I put more time than I really need in my diary.

Therefore I'm like, oh, I don't have time for that right now. And so I don't do it. Oh. So that's the dynamic I get into with boring tasks. But, you know, so, and then of course there's sort of deferment activities or a kind of a masking of the boredom. So you, you know, you might actually pretend to be busier than you are to your colleagues, you know, to avoid, you know.

Yep. Yeah. Um, doom scrolling. Yeah. Is is one sort of boredom fighting strategy that people have? Email. Email, absolutely. Yeah. Yep. And I think people get a sense that they're actually doing work with email. Like it feels like work and it is work to some extent, but it's also not really in lots of ways. 

Jason: Yeah.

Maybe that's why. 'cause if I think back to like, particularly towards the end of RMIT, there where that job was manic and. Like it [01:07:00] was COVID and like, you know, it was just like a tsunami of work. Mm-hmm. Um. That I would dive to email when I kind of got tired or mm-hmm. So maybe that's, maybe I was getting a little bit bored with stuff.

Yeah. And I was like, but it just didn't, never showed up. Right. Like it never showed up to me as boredom. Right. It showed up to me as email. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Maybe that's what's going on. And 

Inger: a tendency to do, I mean, when you become attentive to what is, why am I doing this thing that I actually don't wanna do? Yeah.

Via email. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Um, why am I doing this? Or I'm doom scrolling or say getting into fights about AI on LinkedIn. Actually, 

Jason: I have seen you do that. 

Inger: So, you know. Why am I doing that? I actually objectively don't enjoy myself in this moment. Yeah. What am I trying to say? And again, dopamine, right? Yeah. You're like, you're looking for anything to avoid the feeling, just feeling flat.

Um, and of course all those feelings can contribute to mistakes, hence 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: The amount of literature about pilots and boredom and long haul flights, which is scary. Don't read it if you're about to go on a long plane flight like I am. Okay. Right. And then I [01:08:00] started to think, lots of boredom and then lots of the coping strategies to deal with boredom.

If a lot of that is going on, and this has been happening to me a lot this year, uh, for whatever reason, you know, it's just like been a tough year. Um, I kind of just get underwhelmed by everything and then I'm just kind of like, it's not burnout. I know what burnout feels like because that to me feels like electricity in my body.

Uh, kind of weird dizziness. Um, definitely a diff difficulty. Um, putting cognitive tasks in the right part. Like I know what burnout feels like. This isn't burnout. I'm calling it Bore out. Bore out. Yeah. Just sort of on we Okay. You know, it kind of like can't be fucked. Yeah. That kind of thing. So bore out 

Jason: and so that 

Inger: bore out is, it is, you know, it's, it's burnout, but it's the boredom variety of it.

Jason: I can see that turning into like a pretty bad cycle. 

Inger: It can, I reckon. 

Jason: Right? Like if you are bored and so you end up with this bore out thing. Yeah. And then you can't be fucked. 

Inger: [01:09:00] Yeah. And then, and then you'll do all the deferment activities that don't give you any joy actually. Yeah. Like they're not good things objectively that you wanna be doing, but you're just trying to avoid the feeling of restlessness and time dragging so your brain goes to do something else.

You know? So I actually think it is a bad vicious cycle. And anyway, I wanted to give it a name 'cause as my therapist says, Jason, name it to tame it. Yes. Um, so why might we be bored? Like, why do humans have this capacity? Because other animals are too worried about, you know, fighting off tigers or whatever.

Boredom. Like doesn't, like a cat is never bored. And yet objectively the cat never does anything. Like our friend Ginger. Is Ginger here? 

Jason: No, Ginger's out out. Yeah. Like asleep somewhere. Yeah, exactly. 

Inger: Exactly. Like 

Jason: not doing anything. 

Inger: So, and yet Ginger and Ginger's friends. Have not dominated the world and become the apex predator, right?

Not yet. So maybe boredom. No. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. Um, but maybe boredom [01:10:00] actually pushes us to seek novelty because it's pushing us always to do that deferment activity or to do something else or to avoid the feeling. Maybe that's part of humans sort of psychology that's actually evolutionary and advantageous, maybe, potentially, 

Jason: or maybe cuts a border, but they've just got.

A greater tolerance for it. 

Inger: Maybe they just lie, they, they're not really bored because they're in their own mind. They're scheming about how to kill you. 

Jason: Yes. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: If only we had opposable thumbs, like, I'm not worried about AI rising up and taking over. I am worried about ginger laing me in my sleep. 

Inger: Oh no.

I would be worried about ginger. That thing about Ginger if she's very inconsistent. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, I, yesterday in between all the, trying to get this podcast done. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: I was like, hi Ginger. And she's like, meow. You know, doing that kind of cute ginger flop. Yeah. In front of me where she flops on the ground and then wipes her face with her little po and then she's like, you know, rubbing against me and I'm like, oh, I'm in for some ginger love.

And I went to Pat and she like, 

Jason: yeah. Right. Yeah. Welcome. You'd never quite know. You [01:11:00] never know. You've gotta be on your toes. Yeah. Mm. Back away slowly. Yeah. Don't break eye contact is my best. 

Inger: That's right. That's right. That's right. Um, and so coming back again to this sort of PhD as boredom tolerance training.

Yes. Is this sort of an obsolete skill in the AI era? I don't know. Like this is a career capital as my, my friend and colleague Dr. Lindsay Hogan calls it career capital, developing the ability to, you know, leverage your smarts, whatever towards your career. Yeah. You know, is sport and endurance valuable or is it like the new handwriting where you, like we train it up in people, but actually they don't need it anymore?

'cause things with AI take quicker. Yeah. It's quicker to get through those things, you know? And actually it's a novelty seeking or curiosity, that's probably the thing we need to train for rather than boredom, endurance. I mean, we have this thing in academia. I mean, we are 800 years in the current kind of way that we do it.

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: And thousands of years before, as far back as you can look, there's something that's kind of academia [01:12:00] flavored in our human history. We've always had spaces for people to be nerds and do stuff, right? 

Jason: Mm-hmm. 

Inger: So, and those spaces, what's characterized them is that they tend to. Train a skill much longer than you need to train it for.

Mm-hmm. And so will do we need to keep doing the PhD in the same way as this kind of boarded, because if the hidden curriculum of the PhD is sort of, part of it is boredom training. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Do we need to keep doing that? It's like, do we need to keep teaching, teaching handwriting? Do we need to keep teaching typing?

Do we need, you know, so that's, this is the thing us educators ask ourselves quite common, like often is do we need to keep doing this or do we need to do something else? And a lot of what I see around AI is like, there's a lot of anxiety around that conversation about what, if anything, we should stop doing.

Yeah. But the PhD is kind of an invented tradition, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it feels a lot older than it is. Yeah. The first one we handed out in Australia was in 1950 odd. Wow. 

Jason: That blows my 

Inger: mind to a woman, by the way. Yeah. Good. Yeah. [01:13:00] Rocking it. Yep. Anyway, so, uh, so, you know, I suppose, and, and Chatt PT gave me this future facing question Oh.

Which I thought was. Interesting. It said, if AI can strip out the boring task, does boredom tolerance stop being useful? Or do we actually need it more to survive the tedium that machines can't solve? So, I don't know if you've noticed something about ai. 

Jason: Mm-hmm. 

Inger: Is it'll often do something that you, if you did it by hand, is tedious, but interesting.

And yet you still have to do the tedious but boring stuff. You know, prepare and clean up data to give it, 

Jason: yeah. 

Inger: Take things from it, clean it up and put it in another program. You know, there's a lot of cleaning. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: And sometimes I feel like the robot did the, the interesting part and I'm doing the kind of housekeeping around that.

Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. Uh, that's the boredom. 

Both: That is the boredom, yeah. The boredom 

Inger: question. We may not have legs in it as a question, but I thought it was kind of interesting. Maybe not [01:14:00] solvable or answerable. Perhaps, 

Jason: yeah. I'm struggling. Uh, yeah. I'm gonna have to go away and think about this one.

Inger: Yeah. See, chat. GPT gives you Interesting, yeah. Questions. 

Jason: Yeah. My sense of it, my kind of gut check sense of it is that we

we're not stripping the, we wouldn't be stripping the, the boredom inducing parts outta the PhD. Like we still have to read. 

Inger: Yes. Right. Which can be boring. 

Jason: Which can be boring. We still have to code data. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Or if we're not coding data, we have to check the data. Yeah. It's been coded properly, right? Yeah.

Inger: Which is somehow worse. Yeah. 

Jason: But, but it's still the most valuable pieces of that. Yeah. Yeah. Like the 

Inger: checking the machine's done its job bit Yeah. Can take longer than just doing it. Yeah. And be less fun. 

Jason: But replacing all the semicolons in my thesis with 

Inger: roboticize, 

that shit 

Jason: totally right. 

Yeah. 

Jason: [01:15:00] Yeah.

Just like make it happen. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Um, yeah. I, my gut sense is that your PhD, the boring bits of the PhD will survive. I, 

Inger: yeah. The boring bits of human existence will probably survive cockroaches, which will survive everything else. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we bored of boredom now. Yep. Yeah. Good job. Great. What have you been reading?

Oh, I'm taking over. You are driving the bus? 

Jason: I'm driving the bus, yeah. Um, what have I read? I, I will talk about, I can't remember if we've talked about this. Have I talked about, um, the dopamine. 

Inger: Well, you mentioned it just before, 

Jason: but No, but not, yeah. Prior to that we haven't had a conversation about it. I don't think 

Inger: so.

Not on the pod. Okay. Because we haven't been podding. Okay. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, so I read the dopamine brain. I will have to quickly Google who the author is. Yes. 'cause the copy is upstairs. 

Yes. 

Jason: Um, I really enjoyed it. It was written by an Australian, um, psychology, a psychologist. Oh, Anastasia. Um, and it was a [01:16:00] dead easy read.

Right. So this was in response to my, um, getting on planes and then buying remarkably thick books at airport lounges and realizing that I don't have time to read a 600 page book. 

Inger: No, 

Jason: no. So let's, let's buy a smaller book. Oh, right. Um, and she's got a uniquely, well, not uniquely, she's got an Australian Turner phrase through that.

Yeah. Like the Australian humor comes through, um, which is pretty good. Bits of it I didn't like. Um, because she wouldn't, it wasn't in always internally consistent, the writing that she would did. Um, and so she would set up a thing and she would say, you know, person A did this and this was problematic for person A.

And you go, oh, okay. Right. And then person B did this other thing and this was problematic for person B. And what they needed to do was do this other thing. And here's an example of when I did that other thing. And then she'd give the example and the example wasn't consistent with the kind of setup of the other two things.

Mm. Do you know what I mean? [01:17:00] So like, I, every now and again, I'd, I'd get stopped by that and like, oh, at least tidy your bloody examples up. 

Inger: Yeah. Better editing. 

Jason: Better editing. Yeah. And that's, that's what that is. That's like editing 

Inger: good editor goes what? Really? 

Jason: Yeah. The logic doesn't work here. Mm-hmm. Um, but it was, that's a minor glitch in what I think otherwise was a pretty good book.

First part of it really just explains kind of what's going on inside your brain with dopamine. Do you wanna know that? Uh, uh, dopamine when you, when dopamine dumps into your brain, what it does is it sits between. I'm working from memory. So all the neuroscientists out there who listening to this Yeah.

Don't judge us. Don't judge him. Don't at me. Yeah. Read the book. Um, the space between the bits that fire off in your brain. Mm-hmm. Um, dopamine acts like a superconductor for that. Oh yeah. 

Right? Yes. Yes. And 

Jason: so the little electrical or signals 

Yeah. 

Jason: That get fired off. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Um, all of a sudden, like, which Yeah.

So 

Inger: like a [01:18:00] speed, speed racer kind of, right? Yes. 

Jason: And so, you get a pleasurable response from that, right? Right. And so your brain is constantly looking for this and so it's trying to make associations between what just happened. Yes. So that it can go back and it can repeat that, right?

Yeah. It would like more please. It would like more. Please. Uh, so the example that she uses in her book is, delicious donut store at the bottom of her building. She walks past it, she walks past that donut store all the time, doesn't buy a donut, like it's fine. And then one day she walks past, buys a donut, 

Inger: has a good time with her, and goes, 

Jason: oh my god, donut.

And then she does it again, buys another donut, and it starts to kind of form this neuropath 

Inger: Oh, what? Fires together. Wires together, as they say. Yeah. 

Jason: And so then it's a case of she explains how this, uh, affects your judgment, but also affects your movement. And so she finds herself walking past the ca like it's difficult to walk, to work, not going past the cafe.

Oh. '

Inger: cause your brain just wants that. 

Jason: Yeah. And it's kinda like it just goes through Donuts Road. Yeah. 

Inger: Right, right, 

Jason: So she does a very, she does [01:19:00] a good high level general reader kind of explanation of that. And then also does a, like a pretty technical scientific reason, talks about dopamine.

Re-up. Reinhibitor uptake. Re-uptake. Re-uptake. Inhibitors. Inhibitors. Which I think, 'cause I'm not medical. Yeah. I had to, I had to sit with that for a little while. 

Yes. 

Jason: I think what that means is dopamine brain. Yes. Dopamine dump. 

Yes. And 

Jason: then there's a re-uptake inhibitor. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Which would stop the dopamine going away.

Going back away. Right, right, right. So keep it there. You keep it in the bath of dopamine. Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. Right. I've had those drugs. Previously to the GLP. Oh, okay. Yeah. To stabilize anxiety basically. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think, I think, I dunno, no serotonin re-uptake inhibitor. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Different. Okay. Maybe still like drug brain drug.

Jason: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. 

Inger: Your own brain's drugs for itself. Yeah. And did you talk about A DHD much at all? No. 

Jason: Um, because 

Inger: dopamine's real big in the A DHD [01:20:00] theories around A DHD. Yeah. No, I don't, I don't recall that because there's a lot of dopamine seeking behavior that, that that tendency in us as all humans is maybe exaggerated in people with P-A-D-H-D.

Okay. That novelty seeking that we are talking about there. Yeah. We like not diagnosing you at all that the brain seeks, seeks out dopamine as I 

Jason: have my fourth coffee today. Yeah, yeah. Yes. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Um, no. What she, what she does do though, she warns against all of the TikTok Instagram stuff on, you might have seen this, like a dopamine detox.

Oh yeah. Like do a 24 hour dopamine detox. 

Inger: Oh, right. Bullshit, she says, calls it out. Calls the bullshit. Yeah. 

Jason: It takes longer than that. And you have to be, you know, probably you need some help. 

Yeah. Around doing all of that sort of stuff. 

Jason: The second half of the book tackles what that means for addiction in various forms.

And so she spends a fair bit of time explaining, uh, what if [01:21:00] you can modulate your dopamine, then you've got a, some, a better chance of being able to. Reduce some of your addictions. I found it a little bit simplistic. Um, 

Inger: but to be fair, it was a thinner book. 

Jason: It was a thinner book. Yeah. And so I've given it to, I've given it to Kare.

Inger: Right. 

Jason: Um, because she understands addiction way better than Yeah. I 

Inger: mean, she's, she's the person, 

Jason: right. So who you call. Yeah. Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: So I'll be interested to see what she's got say about it. Yeah. From that end. But yeah, I, I enjoyed it. It was a good read and I've recommended it to a few friends.

Inger: Yeah. Yeah. It's good. You might benefit from it. 

Jason: Yeah. I, yeah. Sometimes I like reading a book that's written by a psychologist, psychiatrist type person. 

Inger: Like a practitioner, yeah. Rather than an academic, like 

Jason: you can do this sort of things. There's a couple of activities in there that I thought were quite useful.

One of them was figuring out what your values are. You know, I've talked about this kind of on and off over time. Yeah. Yeah. So she's got an activity in there where you, she guides you through trying to figure out what your values are so that you can then start to assess your behavior against those [01:22:00] values.

Oh. So you might say. For example, that you wanna live a healthy life and you know that being an athlete or physically fit is really important to you. Yes. But then you might also find yourself mainlining Big Macs. Mm-hmm. And so there's a problem there. Yes. And so that's where it kind of like the back half of the book is you probably need help around some of 

Inger: this sort of stuff.

Right. It's good book. A good advertisement for therapy. 

Jason: Good advertisement for therapy. And I'm like a fan. I'm here for therapy 

Inger: mate. 

Jason: It's like having a like an expert coach. 

Inger: Totally. It's brain. It's the best. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: I've been reading. Mm-hmm. You bought me Joanie McAllister's an academic affair. 

Jason: Oh. And then 

Inger: Anitra took it off me.

My sister Anit. Uh, we were sitting by the pool on her rooftop. She's moved to a new place. They have a pool on the roof. It's very bougie, very nice, nice. And you know, you have to take a book up there. Mm. And she took, she said, oh, I don't have a book. And I said, oh, this one that Jason gave me. And she was snatched it out of my hands.

And then she giggle, snorted for the two hours we were sitting by the pool. [01:23:00] And, um, then she showed me it the other day was dogeared all the way through. And she kept reading bits out and then sending me bits of it. So I've asked her to do a, a voice memo review, which she hasn't done yet. Okay. I hustle her again tonight.

Okay. Um, but I will get a chance to read. I enjoyed the first chapter very much and I'm like, you might enjoy this. And she's like, I'm keeping it. 

Jason: Wow. 

Inger: So, um, take that. Okay. Uh, romance readers of, of the pod, 

Jason: does it feel like it's got the, you know, romance novel structure moves and steps? 

Inger: Yes, she said it conformed.

Okay, good. Uh, to the genre. Yeah. Um, what I really enjoyed about the Bit that I read before she snatched it off me, uh, it's Australian, which is okay, just great. And when it talks about academia, the union figures in it, ah, early and often. And I'm like, I'm here for Union Talk in a romance novel. How great is that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, no, I, I, I enjoyed what I read, so, and she loved it. Yeah, I loved 

Jason: it. Like I said, I did not even look at it. I know, just like I saw the title, you've 

Inger: got a bit of stick online from, from some of some of my mates. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: [01:24:00] Whatever. Which I thought was hilarious was because I'm like, I don't read.

He has read one. Yeah. Like he's not, he's not just making some man. I've read, I've read two. In fact, you've read two because I made you two. Yes. Um, I won't make you read this one. Okay, thank you. But apparently it's very good. Okay. Um, I've been reading Corey Doctor's in Ification, which has got a turd emoji on the cover.

I know. In fact, it got the hard cover and I have a lot to say about it. I loved it. Ah, but I think we have to do like a whole pod on it because Oh, okay. We are going on long now, so, yeah. Um, highly recommended, uh, Luke and I on Sunday night, we're here in Melbourne for the week. Yep, yep. Uh, we did something we very rarely do, which is we went to the movies.

Oh. And a lot of people had told me to go and see one battle after another. Yeah. Can I just say. I hated watching it. I hate watched it all the way through. 

Right. 

Inger: Uh, Leonardo DiCaprio. Um, it's about sort of present day America, sort of maybe a little bit in the future, a bit more extreme. Kind of like running civil war, organized resistance to authoritarian regime.

Like their [01:25:00] moment, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then it skips to 15 years in the future where he's, um, trying to find his daughter all the way through it. It annoyed me. It was kind of pretentious filmmaking techniques, Pliny plonky kind of, um, soundtrack that made the dialogue hard to listen to for your over 50 year olds.

Um, so like, I can't say that I enjoyed watching it, 

Jason: right. But 

Inger: then when I tried to tell my sister about it I realized I had a lot to say about it. Right. A lot of thoughts and feelings. Okay. And I've actually had to come to the conclusion that it was probably a good movie, but I hated watching it.

Okay. And not my thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Just the stylistically not my thing. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. I don't really go for indie movies as a general rule. Yeah. Like I, you know, prefer, prefer I went to see Tron Aries as well, 'cause Oh, did you? Because Luke had a voucher. Right. So these are the two movies that we've used the voucher for.

Jason: Yeah. And 

Inger: Tron loved it, really loved it. I've heard of shit. It's shit. Oh, 

Jason: okay. Good. 

Inger: [01:26:00] It's so shit. But like it's just color and light and motion. Yeah. Yeah. The plot's really easy to understand. Yeah. There's beautiful people in it. Yeah. There's evil people. There's like lots of explosions. 

Jason: Yeah. And 

Inger: like, I'm here for that.

Jason: That does sound like my, I couldn't tell you 

Inger: a thing about it now. Okay. I can't remember anything, but I remember kind of everything about one Bail after another. So clearly our good movie. Okay. But did not. Enjoy watching it. Okay. I dunno. That's weird. It's a weird review. 

Jason: Can I just like jump in just for a moment?

Mm. If you are a Daft Punk fan, which I am the soundtrack for Tron Legacy Best was produced by Daft Punk. 

Inger: Yes. 

Jason: Air Pick. 

Inger: I know we have it on repeat in the car. Yeah. When we do that long drive on the Heren. It is just fantastic. I can't 

Jason: get it outta my head. 

Inger: And actually, I've gotta say the soundtrack to Sean Aries like, yeah.

Was good too. That's 

Jason: nine inch Nails, 

Inger: isn't 

Jason: it? I 

Inger: know. Yeah. Like he actually does really, Luke's a big fan of his. Okay. He does these like beautiful melodic kind of soundtracks. Like he did the soundtrack to Soul [01:27:00] by Pixar. 

Jason: Oh, okay. Which is 

Inger: a beautiful film that made me cry at the end like a lot. I was like, what is this wet thing coming outta my eyes?

Oh. Like, anyway. Okay, good. We're nearly the end. Oh my God. We finish this podcast still like such a fucking achievement. 

Jason: And if we wait three minutes, Jack will come in and interrupt the last little bit of it. Let's do it. All right. What are we up to? We're up to a two minute tip. Uh, this section is in honor of David Allen in his classic Getting Things Done book, where he argues that if a task is gonna take less than two minutes, you should just do it.

Get after it. Yeah. Uh, because it'll take longer to put it into OmniFocus. Mm-hmm. Schedule some time to do a figure out, like mark it off in OmniFocus, blah, blah, blah, blah. Choice. So, um, we normally, we put this at the end. Others would put this at the start, like, and deliver value upfront. We don't do that.

We think they're wrong. Um, but, uh, we try and find two minute tips, uh, to like hips, uh, hacks, tips, tricks. Yeah. Really from anywhere that's gonna make your life just a little bit [01:28:00] better. Um, I don't have one. 

Inger: I have one. Okay. I tried SI space. SCI. Yes. Space. I may never recover. I've seen the future and. I like it.

Okay, so it is an interface which is plugged into clearly an LLM. Yeah, probably open ai. It has a number of buttons. I've only played with some of the data visualization buttons, but there's many, many more buttons. Okay. The difference between this and just going straight to chat GBT is that, um, it will.

If you say to it, here's a spreadsheet, I want you to tell me about the relationship between neurodivergence and gender in this spreadsheet, for instance. Yeah. It's the kind of work that I was doing in there. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: And it goes in and it, it looks at the spreadsheet and then it creates some R code, or Python actually creates Python code and it does the Python code as you watch, like it like matrix style.

Right. Um, and then, then it runs [01:29:00] the analysis and then it, it writes it up for you as a markdown file and then it makes the visualizations for you. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Right. And then it gives you three different files. So you've got the Python script, you've got the markdown text. Yeah. And then you've got the visualizations.

Yeah. The visualizations are not pretty. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: But they're accurate. 

Jason: Right. 

Inger: Um, and as it does it, it, it sort of like makes a little movie. 'cause it shows it all, it shows all it's working and all it's thinking. 

Jason: Mm. 

Inger: So you can watch it work and you can scroll backwards and forwards and look at bits of it's analysis.

Like it, it shows you the process. Um, while you drink a cup of tea, 

Jason: do you have to, um, do you have to know Python? Like to be able to go That looks dodgy. 

Inger: Yeah. Probably. 

Jason: Okay. 

Inger: But like, 

Jason: do you know Python 

Inger: ish? 

Jason: Okay. Are you confident that the relationship between neurodiversity and No, but the 

Inger: thing with the Python script is it usually just does well, well the thing is you can go back and you can [01:30:00] actually look at the, the hard figures against your original spreadsheet.

Jason: Um, watch, pause. Pause. We're gonna have to pause. Do you want be 

Inger: on camera, Jack? No, thank 

Jason: you. Sure. Come. 

Inger: I'm, I'm very sure 

Jason: Jack, come join us. No. Alright. We we're talking about interesting things. He's very 

Inger: embarrassed that we're gonna be on YouTube. 

Jason: I am. You can be on YouTube too. 

Inger: Well, I don't want to be Well, if you keep talking, I'll have to cut you out so you, yeah.

So how about 

Jason: quiet while we just, while we just, we're just 

Inger: finishing 

Jason: if you can please. We're doing 

Inger: the readout now. 

Jason: Thank you. Appreciate you. 

Inger: We appreciate you. 

Jason: Appreciate you. No, you doing the readout? Who's ginger? We're we're reading out right now. 

Inger: Everything's happening. We're 

Jason: coming to the end. There's the cat.

That's Ginger. Yeah. Hello Cat. 

Inger: Hey. Come on. Come and No, no, 

Jason: no, 

Inger: no. She's not here for, uh, 

Jason: okay, so you don't need to know Python. You do need to know Python. 

Inger: Well, the thing is, if I knew Python, I could look at it and know whether it was screwing up. Yeah. But the thing about it is, is that at least it, it doesn't get the LLM to do the [01:31:00] processing.

It goes and writes a script to do the processing. And the thing with scripts is they either work or they don't. Okay. Kind of thing. So what I've been doing is I've been using chat GPT to kind of look inside a spreadsheet, look for relationships, and I've been asking it to write the R code. And then I've been trying to run the R code.

The R code doesn't work, and then I get Brendan to help fix it. Get you to get chat GPT to debug the R code. Right? Do you know what I mean? So. The golden retriever mode of research analysis, which I've been doing lately, is like you just get it to kind of fumble around in the dark until it sees something interesting and then verify it.

Yeah. And do it by hand. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: So this is the doing it by hand bit. Okay. Yeah. So like I can look at variables in a Python script. Yeah. And go, oh yeah, it's peaking up the right column and it's, it's doing like so I can, so I just went back through and I just had a look at the R script enough to go, oh yeah, it's pulling that from there and it's pulling that from there and it's pulling that from there.

But the point is that if you think about an [01:32:00] LLM as a non-binary computer, it's a fuzzy computer. Yeah. Which gives you almost Right things. Something like R or Python is binary. It's yes or no. Yeah. It's zeros a one. It's right or wrong. Yeah. Right. So, oh, hello, ginger. 

Jason: A dare to pick her up. 

Inger: I'm not picking her up.

Come up here. Come on. 

Jason: No, 

Inger: no, no. You could be a superstar. Ginger. 

Jason: That's it. Ginger, you can 

Inger: be our mascot. 

Jason: No, we've got Kip. 

Inger: Oh, we have Kip. 

Jason: Yes. 

Inger: We could have a dog and a cat mascot. Anyway, it's um, it's an interesting glimpse of the future. Okay. My only, and I was like, this is awesome. I pull out my, where's my wallet?

I open my wallet, take my money, and then it was like, oh, you've reached a token limit. Do you wanna pay like a lot of money for that? And I'm like, well, I don't know. We, I'm gonna use this again. Do I wanna pay $90 a month? 

Jason: Oh, dang. 

Inger: Like, it's a lot. Yeah. I mean, on the other hand, if I was doing a lot of this kind of [01:33:00] work, I could see myself using it all the time.

So if I was like a full-time researcher. That would be worth it because, and this is where it will take research assistants jobs. Yeah. It is exactly the kind of thing I want from a research assistant. It can do a thing that I can't do. 

Jason: Yeah, 

Inger: it can do it quickly and cheaply. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: I can't, to be fair, like I can't afford to hire a research assistant.

Yeah. So I'm not taking anyone's job at the moment. Yeah. Me personally. Yeah. But for other people it will. Yeah. Like, this is, so the, the thing that LMS that I've been reassuring myself about is that, okay, well it's not accurate. Yeah. You want accuracy, you go to a human. Yeah. But that ability to sort of play it back and look at it and sort of see what it's doing.

Game changer. 

Jason: Oh wow. 

Inger: It's kind of built going, oh, what would researchers be anxious about? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'll fix that. We'll fix that. Yeah. 

Jason: It's that unasked question, right? Yeah. Like it's just anticipated surprise and delight, Jason. Yeah. Surprise and delight. 

Inger: Um, okay. That's for us. 

Jason: Yeah. Thanks for [01:34:00] listening and slash watching.

If you are watching this thing, I'm trying to convince Inga that putting this on the YouTubes is a bad idea. We're, we're still having, we're going 

Inger: YouTube 

Jason: vigorous debates about that. Vigorous debates. 

Inger: All the pod people are doing it now. Are they though? Cross platform man. They're not. They are though, are they?

Everyone's doing it. God, 

Jason: thanks for listening folks. Yes. Um, we love reviews. Uh, we will, now that 

Inger: we know where to find 'em all. We'd still be reading them out in the mailbag section. Yeah. Yeah. By country. Um, and we might permanently review, move reviews up there. Okay. That might be good once we get through all these ones.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, if you leave a review on Apple Podcast, we promise to read it out, even if 

Inger: it's four years later. Yeah. 

Jason: We got there though. We, we keep our promises. It's a bit like mailbag. I've still got a few from like, I'm still dredging the bottom of the mailba. It's like the Tardis. I know there's 

Inger: the infinite numbers of mailbag.

I 

Jason: keep going back and I'm going like, but 

Inger: they're all so good as well. 

Jason: I had a system. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: And how come my system has [01:35:00] failed me? I'm not happy. 

Inger: Okay. I feel a bit better about that 'cause I failed to have a good system and now you know, you're the systems man and you are having trouble with it. Yeah. I feel, I feel fine.

Okay. Everything is fine. 

Jason: Um, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, most do, um, scroll to the bottom. Uh, leave a review, just type away five stars only please. I be five stars. Let's, you know, let's be good people. 

Yeah. 

Jason: Out there. Yeah. Um, if you want your question featured on the mailbag, you can either leave us a message at www dot.

Speak pike.com/thesis. Whisperer. Whisperer. 

Yes. 

Jason: And that'll give you three minutes of recording Glory. 

Yeah. But 

Jason: knock yourself out. Have at it. Have at it. Um, or you can email us at pod at on the reg team.com. You could 

Inger: send us a voice memo there too. You could, if you wanted to. You 

Jason: could. Yeah. Um, you wanna 

Inger: talk for more than three minutes?

Jason: Yeah, 

Inger: we're open. Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, I am taking a break from the socials. I like, I'm only on LinkedIn at the moment. Um, and do you know what? My life's a better place. 

Yeah. 

Jason: As a result. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: [01:36:00] I'm just like, you know what? I don't miss any of it. 

Inger: It's fine. 

Jason: Yeah. 

Inger: Yeah. 

Jason: Other people can tell me about what's on Facebook.

Yeah. Yeah. Cost us about a thousand bucks a year to run this pod. Sometimes we spend more than that. Um, like with Fancy Gear? 

Inger: No. That costs us nearly a thousand. 

Jason: Yeah, I know. But like, then on top of that, we've got all of the hosting. Oh yeah. We've got all the subscription stuff. It does that all like. So, yeah.

Inger: And we are a small margins business. We 

Jason: are. Yeah. So without CapEx, because I'm thinking this is CapEx, right? Yeah. CapEx. It's still like operating expenses about a thousand 

bucks a year. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. 

Jason: Um, if you wanna subscribe, you can. Um, and we would, we would love you forever. Love you. A long time.

Yes. Um, you can join our riding the bus membership on Cofi Coffee. Cofi? Not quite sure. 

Yep. Um, 

Jason: one day they'll figure that out there. A link not on the Red Cofi site. 

Yep. 

Jason: You can go there. You can join for like $2 a month. 

Yeah. 

Jason: You can join and just follow along. 

Yeah. Just showing your love. Yeah. Yeah. 

Jason: But if you wanna spend $2 a month and that will help us to get this and keep this on the go.

Yeah. Um, and so that's it really. Yeah. Thank [01:37:00] you so much. Yeah. Everyone. 

Inger: Awesome. Um, 

Jason: this has 

Inger: been fun sort of ish. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. Thanks for staying with us. 

Bye. 

Inger: Bye.