Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Hey! Jason will be in the UK in Late April. If you'd like to chat to him about the trip and possibly having him visit you, email us on [email protected]

Watch this episode on YouTube

The banter section of this episode is lost to history because Jason forgot to hit record! After a short intro by Inger, the team go straight into the mail bag. Let's face it, this is the good stuff anyway - who needs Tinny and puppy news?

In our work problems segment, we discuss the appearance of ChatGPT as a referrer to the Thesis Whisperer blog and what it might mean for researcher visibility. How does an LLM decide on what is an 'authoritative source' on the internet? Is this a new form of 'research impact' and what should researchers do about it, if anything?

This episode also ends abruptly when Inger gets a phone call - the next episode will be much more polished, we promise!

Things we mentioned:

• Tiago Forte's PARA book
• Blooms Taxonomy
• Amazing Marvin app
• Click up app
• Be visible or vanish book
• The Enshittification of Academic Social Media

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

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

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Jason has been living his best life, travelling NZ (where he did not touch boiling mud, as much as he was tempted to) and having excuses to eat pepper steak pies. Meanwhile Inger has been having a shit time at work and waiting for her puppy to arrive.

After a confession during the mailbag segment, we hear all about Jason's star keynote at the ASPIRE conference, which led to... well, a bit of a rant on Inger's part at least. You get the picture!

Things we mentioned:

• ANU Vice Chancellor resigns
• Jason and Ginger Cat
• Blossom - puppy mum to be
• Rich Academic / Poor Academic
• Little National Hotel Newcastle
• Perplexity AI
• Slides: How to think about AI in the workplace
• AI as thinking partner framework
• AI as verifier framework
• AI as Information Processor Framework
• How I used Claude as a ready-to-hand technology to help me build a Structured Dialogic Thinking Bot
• Inger's structured dialogic inquiry bot (free to use)
• Black Hawk Down
• Free Time by Jenny Blake
• The EMyth
• Breakneck - China's quest to build the future
• AI as normal technology

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Inger is in town, so Jason took her to a pod casting studio as a treat for episode 80 (can you believe it?!). The sound is very nice on this one folks, but This is a Studio in Prahran can take ALL the credit.

There's a fair bit in the mailbag, leading to discussions about the book Inger wrote with Narelle (and Claude) Rich Academic / Poor Academic and a little bit of Text Expander and Omnifocus talk (because naturally).

In our work problems segment we talk about Analogue Productivity by Curtis Hale and ask "is this book bullshit?". We conclude it isn't, but Inger tells Jason he doesn't have to read it. 

Stay tuned for more about what we are reading and two two minute tips (for a change). We were on the clock for this episode, but maybe it's a good think because it's pretty tight and chock full of productivity goodness! 

Links to stuff

• In Bed with the Right (podcast)
• Soak bath house Brisbane
• Omnishow episode 144
• Lynne's post on BASB for teaching
• How to: Power Automate
• Old ep: trusting the meat computer
• Monsters: a fan's dilemma by Clare Dederer
• Think Again by Adam Grant
• Hard Fork Podcast and Mechanize
• Tiny Experiments book
• OTR linkedin Page

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

In the depths of Canberra winter, no one can hear you scream about AI... except for Jason, who had to hear ALL of Inger's feelings. 

Come for the promise of a 'Is this Book Bullshit?' style review of 'Tiny Experiments' by Jason, stay for the Big Rant about how Inger's anti-AI academic friends now think she is a Republican... it's a lot.

Things we mention:

• Pop Canberra (for the stickers)
• Fated Mates romance podcast stickers
• Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab
• OmniFocus
• On The Reg Mind Sweep Bot
• Getting Things Done (book)
• Ben Kraal's OTR episode with Inger
• How to Make Notes and Write (book)
• Literary Theory for Robots (book)
• The Utopia of Rules (book)
• Evelyn Frost books 
• Analogue Productivity (book)
• Rethinking Repair (paper)
• On the reg Structured Dialogical Inquiry Bot
• Tiny Experiments (book)
• Listen Later (app)
• On The Reg on Linkedin

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

This one's a bit overdue folks - that's Inger's fault, don't blame Jason! 

After a long catch up, where we bemoan the state of the higher education sector, and a very full mailbag, we talk about AI powered research workflows. 

Inger talks Jason through her new AI enabled process for doing literature reviews, analysis and writing research papers. The crew muse on the shift in working practices how you might take advantage (or not) in your own work. 

The team are looking at a teaching slide deck as they talk, which Inger stupidly altered, so you can't read along... (doh!). But you can see the final version of it, as delivered, here. The pre-print version of the paper about AI that Inger wrote can be retrieved here.

Things we mentioned:

• Reading like a Mongrel
• Text expander for academics (ebook)
• Bullet Journal (BuJo)
• Speechify
• The art of procrastination (book)
• Microsoft power automate
• Migoals journals 
• Mind on Paper (book)
• Cabells Analytics (for finding journals)
• Consensus
• Elicit
• Semantic Scholar
• MaxQDA Tailwind
• The importance of being intereresting (blog post)
• Cognition in the Wild (book)
• Patter blog (Home of the Queen: Pat Thomson)
• Johnny Saldana's coding manual
• Tiny Experiments (book)
• Amphetamine (app)

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

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

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

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

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

Things we mentioned:

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

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

We're back! It's been six weeks - sorry about that!

Jason was finally struck down by covid... for the first time. Yes, really! Now he finally understands what everyone is complaining about. There's a lot to catch up on: the election, a digression into 'Married at first sight' and what happens to a sander when you use it for 6 hours straight on your boat hull. 

We get half way through a very full mailbag, before getting on to our dissection of chapter one of Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This is the third time we've talked about this book, and we're only now doing Habit One: proactivity ... look, we have a lot to say! Check out episode 17, where we discuss how the book is really Mormonism pretending to be productivity, and chapter 38 where we talk about chapter three.

Be warned - it gets very deep and meaningful. In fact, we get so into it that we forgot to do a two minute tip! We'll make it up to you, we promise.

Things we mention

• Previous discussions of 7 Habits: episode 17 and chapter 38
• Academic Mean Girls 
• Inger reckons Andy Kirk is your go to for Data visualisation
• Back to Zero - the paper 
• Book: The voices within: the history and science of how we talk to ourselves
• Book: Team Dog
• Book: The presentation of self in everyday life
• The Valley of Shit (blog post about Jason when he was doing his PhD)
• Book: Striking Ore: the rise and fall of union power in the Pilbara
• Book: Enemy Fe

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Longtime listeners who have been asking for Jason to read another romance novel: Inger has delivered! Jason reads Rebecca Yarros's 'The Fourth Wing' and only throws up a little bit in his mouth :-)

After a bit of mail bag, we go deep on the subject of reading: how much of it there is; how tedious academic reading can be; how tired this reading makes us; the feelings of Guilt when you read for pleasure; and the myth of 'keeping up with the literature'. 

Finally we talk about how many books we own: how much is too many and when/how should you slim down a collection? Inger feels better about her massive collection when she compares herself to Umberto Eco, and Jason has a mild panic attack at the idea of putting together a display shelf.

We finish with a tribute to the late, great Professor Peter Elbow (one of Inger's most beloved writers about writing) and a two minute tip about buying study aids.

Note, we were going to try to put out a video version of this one - but there were technical problems. Hence the references to showing the camera books. We will try again next time.

What we talked about

• Cornell template technique
• Note taking Matrix instructions
• Umberto Eco in his 50,000 book library (video evidence!)
• Marie Kondo's life changing magic of tidying up
• Rebecca Yarros - The Fourth Wing
• Writing without Teachers

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Inger and Jason have been on summer holidays. Jason's family acquired a 10 year old ginger cat, while Inger has committed to #puppyproject and put a deposit on a dangerously adorable, small fluffy puppy. Prepare for a lot of pet talk this year!

In the mailbag there's a good description of a workflow with Todoist and a lively discussion of bullet journals. The work problems segment was produced with the help of Inger's work Husband, Claude who (it seems) has a frighteningly good grasp of the problems of late stage capitalism. We're talking about the pressures of the sector, work burn out and health, so if you'd rather not listen to that, skip to our reading segment where Inger convinces Jason to read another romance novel!

We close out with a brief chat about Omnifocus (again!)

Things we mentioned:
Coton De Trulear (dog breed)
Tofu Eating Wokerati comment
Migoals daily planner
Todoist
Zoe Podcast
Generative AI for academics

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

- 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 [email protected]

- 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