We recently reached our five year anniversary of producing these podcasts, and (in true meta fashion) thought we would celebrate by analysing why we recognise such occasions.

At the point of recording this podcast, there have been 241 episodes of the Cognitive Engineering podcast and nearly 100,000 listens. For some reason, though, we find it much more significant that this achievement has taken us five Earth years to complete. In this podcast we examine why humans are drawn to recognise the passing of the years and whether it is useful to do so.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Places with the least seasonal variations
• Javanese calendar

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

going to happen next? A group of young, fit, unshaven, unbearded youth sat down in the living room and recorded a podcast. With hope in their eyes. Imagine where we'll be in another five

years time. Indeed, yeah. Immediately after the listeners hear that they yawn and roll their eyes, that's what happens next. That's what we want. Well, they've been doing that for the last five

years, so that's good. I could give you loads of stats. I'm just going to give a couple. At the time of recording, this is our 241st episode. No way. Yeah, and we're just shy of 100,000 plays. People actually listen to the stuff that we go on about. Yeah, but that's me

listening to it over and over again to hear the sound of my own voice on a permanent loop.

Yeah, so there we go. But yeah, so it's our anniversary. Yay, happy birthday. What we want

sound very old. I mean, journals. How many journals were there in the world, you know, back in the 19th century? Yeah. But that's not mostly about theology. Anyway. Seventh-day Adventist General Conference session once every five years. The Lustrum. You remember the Lustrum, Fraser, you know, from Rome? When there's five yearly. This is sort of when they change. It's not

tribunes, is it? Tribunes was every year. But it's the census. And we've just had a census in

real life. So we should have a Lustrum. But it's a ritual sacrifice. And the couple of things, sort of, there was also the Quinquennia Neronia, which was this enormous festival held for Nero. But that only happened twice, because he was then obviously scrubbed from history by the Romans. And then the Quinquennial Visit ad Limina, which is apparently you have to go if you're a certain rank in the church, you've got to go and visit the tombs of the apostles every five years. So anyway, I wondered if there's any significance to five years, aside from those exciting things, and indeed, whether there's any significance to the year really, you know, as a way of measuring

stuff. It feels to me like things cyclically go, it seems to go, four years seems to be more, you know, you think Olympics, World Cups, US presidential elections.

What's that? Is it because then the maths is a little bit easier? Because you know, if it's oh, it's an even number, it must be the World Cup or the Olympics. But hold on. Yeah, I mean,

hold on before we even get into four years versus five years. Why a year? Now, in one sense, of course, we know why. But I mean, it's a good question, right? So I had a look at this.

Turns out the year is the length of time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Did you know? But the thing is, right? I because I thought to myself, look, I know, I'm pretty sure stop.

Interesting fact, right. So he's got a day on Venus is longer than a year. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,

so Nick, go on. Well, see, now I'm pretty confident that if I was a, you know, prehistoric man, I would pretty quickly get to grips with the day night cycle. I would get the hang of that. I'd notice it got light and then it got dark. But I'm not sure I don't have confidence that I would necessarily be able to spot the recurrence of the pattern of the seasons. You know, even in the northern hemisphere where it clearly gets kind of colder and then it gets kind of warm. You wouldn't

notice. You might not. But I think your DNA would. Yeah, that's right. You're right. Yeah. Without that, how would my DNA know? I think it's fairly fundamentally baked in this, the change of the seasons into all of all of life on the planet. But I wonder if you didn't have the clocks to measure

the length of the day, you might just sort of go, well, it's been a bit cold for a while and, you know, and it seems a bit darker. But I'm not really sure if that's the first couple of times

around. You might. But after that, I reckon you'd pick it up and you'll survive. There's something

going on here. Yeah. Well, anyway, I mean, look, calendars have been invented by lots of different civilizations, so we can assume that somewhat bright spark in the prehistoric age would have spotted it at some point. Obviously, megalithic structures suggest that, you know, you don't need the scientific method or modern astronomical tools to be able to discover the concept of the year, even if the explanation might have might have escaped us. But do you here's now do you know how seasons work in the equator? Because the northern hemisphere, obviously, we've got a hot and a cold season. Now you tell me how seasons work in the equator. I mean, it's not just a

question of latitude, though. But yeah, go on. Go on, Chris. Well, I was going to say, don't don't. Well, no, the kind of tropical regions have have three seasons, don't they? They sort of have a summer, a winter and a wet, a wet phase.

Depends where. Well, apparently, if you're in the equator, it's this whole rainy season thing, which they always people always talk about. Oh, don't go to, you know, Bogota. It's the rainy season. And I just deep down, I don't really believe it. I mean, the stats are there. It's true. It's a fact. But how can it be rainy for a season? That doesn't make sense. Like, I just don't understand that. And but it is right. That's true. There are rainy seasons. But you know why? Not really. Does anyone know why that happens? Doesn't it strike you as weird that you can have a season made up of one type of weather?

My guess would be that it's when the earth presents to the sun the greatest amount of sea so that it's the atmosphere around the tropical regions is that is most saturated with water vapor.

Well, apparently, no, there is this. Yes. Well, there is a thing called the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which I honestly had never heard of. But it's a band of clouds and rain that circles the earth. But because of it is to do with the tilting. But this band moves up and down. So depending on where you are, you're going to move into and out of this band as the as the year goes around. But I saw some an interesting article that someone had written online about it. Are there any places with one season? And apparently there are a very select few places on earth you can go where there aren't really any seasons at all. And one of them is northern Brazil. Really? Yeah. Apparently, if you go to the rainforest. In fact, this is where rainforests are apparently sort of warm, moist places. And Congo and Indonesia, they don't really have have seasons. And so I was interested in this. And I thought, well, have people who live in Indonesia invented calendars. And so I looked at the Javanese calendar. It's mental. It's excellent. It's really good. It's got loads of different weird ways of adding up different things that all run out of sync with each other. But the most interesting thing to me was that the Javanese day is divided into 10.

So decadrons or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it is bringing us nicely back to the podcast. They've been listening to the podcast. Yeah, yeah. So there we are. It's all come full circle. Wait, hold on. Where were we going with this? Because now what we what do we want to discuss? I think what we want to discuss is what is an anniversary? How useful are anniversaries? Are there alternatives?

Is a year meaningful? Is five years or 10 years? Is it meaningful? Like, should we get should we? Is there anything we should in real life that is different? Because because the podcast has been going for five years? Yeah. Or five days if you're a Venusian. Yeah. Chris, you were going to say something.

I was just gonna say, I mean, the thing that interests me about, about celebrating an exact year, or in fact, calendars themselves, is, is why we moved from so, you know, the, the, for humans to operate in the natural world, you, you need to know when the seasons are, and you need to be able to predict when to do certain things. But by and large, you don't need to do it on the basis of an exact day. Right? So I still, you know, I know why this was, why calendars were, or why we wanted to keep track of years and why certain particular events like solstices, or, or equinox, you know, the equinox, were, were kind of key, key markers in that, that cycle of a year. But why you would want to know it was whatever it was, the 22nd of April, when we started our podcast, that's the bit, that's the bit that, that baffles me. I mean, I'm very, I'm very sensitive to the seasons, you know, I kind of fairly obsessively watch the sunrise move, you know, rounds and back again over the, over the year. You know, there's always that, there's always that day in September, you know, quite a quite a sort of poignant day when you know, summer is, summer is over. And likewise, that day in kind of March or April, where suddenly, you feel that, that, you know, buoyancy of, you know, the coming, the coming spring, and so on.

I think, I think the need, the need for precision boils down to something akin to when you were a druid, when you were going to organise your massive piss up on the summer solstice. Right, exactly. You need precision. So that's, that's a flippant example of like, well, when we started governing ourselves, when we started organising and planning ourselves, in order to coordinate, you need precision. And back in the day, days would have been about the right-

It is precisely that, it is, it is about, I mean, obviously, you know, the, the, the kind of the early anniversaries were all about deity celebration, right, or, you know, religious, religious festivals. And I guess, you know, you, if you wanted everybody to turn up to your village, you know, you'd better make sure it was the same, it was the same day. Otherwise, you know, people would overstay their welcome and you, you know, more nomadic cultures wouldn't be able to coordinate things. So, so I guess it boils, boils down to that. But, but in a sense, I think this is quite relevant because I think the very kind of, the reason to know specific days is probably related to, you know, the need to keep anniversaries of, of some kind or to be able to set celebratory events that, that multiple, you know, dispersed people turn up to.

I want to hear from Peter, but before I do, I'm not even sure, because I think, Chris, you really answered your own question there, which is you were talking about your own habits in watching the seasons go by certain things. And then Peter came in and said, yeah, well, sometimes you need it to be more specific. But I just think it's just a natural, I'm not sure it's that, I think that, that, that wanting a, that desire for a specific date is just a natural extension of what you're talking about, which is you want to know when stuff happens. And I'm, you know, I'm alive, I have many years, this happened at this time, and that, I just think it's fairly natural. Anyway, Peter, beyond what you said about the specificity, anything you want to weigh in with here?

I think our sort of appreciation of the seasons is probably pretty fundamental, as I mentioned earlier. So the, the, we've, we've evolved on a planet that's had seasons. So that's always been there as a constraint or an opportunity as species develop. So species behavior and their physiology will have adapted to maximize their chance of survival during any given season. So it's sort of, you know, look at trees, deciduous trees in, in northern and southern climates. They, they, they go through a physiological change every, every year. They, they drop their leaves and then they regrow them in the new year. And that's part, baked in part of their physiology. And if this took the seasons away, I think they wouldn't survive.

Well, that's all very well. But what are we going to do when we go to Mars? You're, you're a space engineer. Well, how are we going to fix this problem? How are we going to grow crops in Mars if it's got different seasons?

Well, there's a good documentary, which is The Martian. I suggest you watch that. It's brilliant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, no, it's an interesting question. I think it's an interesting question because certainly in terms of human physiology and things. Lots of experiments done on what happens if you take the day-night cycle away, if you take the sort of seasonal cycle away. And it does have pretty bad detrimental effects on people's ability to operate. And they go a bit, they go a bit potty if you keep the lights on all the time, it turns out. I imagine the same, there's probably similar research in kind of botany. How, how would you, how do you need to grow plants in an artificial environment? And I suspect they probably turn the lights off in order to give the plants a chance to have that night cycle that they need.

Yeah. Although, but that's not going to fix it for permanently, is it? I mean, what we want is crops to be growing outdoors in Mars. Yeah. I feel we're going slightly off topic. Anyway. No, I thought we were really going to be discussing Martian agriculture.

Yeah. And by the way, just to add to what I said, again, reference what you said, Chris, and actually just adding on to what I said, it's just a search for meaning. It's just a human psychological desire, isn't it? To make meaning of our own lives. I think that's what it is.

Um, no, wait, I want to pick you up on that because, um, I'm not sure the concept of the same day in different years is necessarily an intuitive one.

Like, say that again, say that again.

Well, the idea that, oh, today is the same day, but, but, but from last year, like this thing happened on this day, but last year, I don't find, I don't think now we've got, we've been inculcated to think like that, but I'm not sure that's an intuitively obvious idea. Like, it's a different year. So why would you be thinking that there was a similarity in the day? This specific day corresponds in some way to the same, to some of the same temperature.

I don't, yeah, well, exactly. Right. And I don't, I don't even think it's a helpful one. This is sort of what I was, this is sort of what I, what I was, um, you know, getting at, I suppose, indirectly previously is, is, you know, it quite often leads to, um, poor decision making. Right. Because, you know, you frequently have seen throughout the, um, throughout the pandemic, you know, on this day, you know, the death rate was, you know, so much higher than it was on the same day last year, or, you know, this day over, uh, you know, um, on average over five years. And, and that kind of direct comparison to it, it, it gives this false impression as, as Nick was saying that, um, you know, that the day itself is, um, is meaningful in some way rather than necessarily being representative of, you know, say days from that month.

But there, but there is a, there, it is meaning, it would be meaningful to say, right, the number of deaths in this winter period this year is higher than last winter period. Correct. Because deaths are seasonal. So we have, we have seasonal flu and various other things that kill off people, uh, more in winter than in summer. So it is meaningful. So where, where's the line there? You know, is it a week? Is it a month? Is it a, is it a quarter? Where, where is, where does it become non-meaningful?

Well, it depends on what sort of size of number of days you mean, and also the, the rapidity with which, whatever you're measuring fluctuates, I, I, I guess, or changes.

Here's an idea, because I, I think Peter's talking about the natural concept that we have over winter, for example. And Chris was making reference to the day when a thing happens. Let's say, let's say we wanted to invent a subjective calendar. What would be the criteria? And so you're not allowed to use any measuring instruments. And that includes clocks, right? To decide when this thing has happened. What would be the, the, the things that would mark those days?

What would you choose? The cycle of the moon, for example.

No, no, because I don't even think you're allowed to do that. You're not really allowed to do much else other than kind of, uh, look at your immediate surroundings. So I was just thinking when you mentioned in spring, you know, the way that there is definitely, I experienced a feeling a couple of weeks ago, which I can only characterize as hope. And I hadn't felt that for a while. And the weather definitely helped and it was sunny. And I thought, hey, this feels different now. It feels like we've come out of something. And, um, and I, and I thought, well, that's, that might be quite a good one. Like the day of hope, which happens at each spring and the day of despair in September when you realize everything's going wrong. Well, it's not despair.

It's a, it's a sort of...

Melancholy.

Yeah, melancholy. Yeah.

The day that you decide, oh, I can put my winter boots away and get my shorts out. Then the day, the day of the sort of, uh, the switch. The day of shorts.

The day of shorts is definitely a good one. I think that, that, that definitely at some point, one day you wake up and you put shorts on and you keep them on then for, for weeks.

Just by the way, we're talking about something you posed, Nick, which was, you know, what would it be like to, to, to transfer from a place that has seasons to a place that doesn't have seasons? I think that's what you said. And of course I've done that. Maybe some of you others have, you know, cause I lived in Brazil for a couple of years and, and sure enough, don't get me wrong. I loved the hot weather. I liked the sunny and palms and all that business. But pretty swiftly, I did sort of get a bit sort of first discombobulated, but also a bit sad about where are the seasons, right?

And South Americans are from, they only moved there quite recently, right? The last 30,000 years or so. Yeah. And they're from, you know, well, the indigenous South Americans are from really sort of the North, very much the Northern hemisphere. And of course, even the sort of Spanish and Portuguese, they, they would be from, you know, from a temperate zone. So, so do, do you, do you think people living in Brazil now have a fight between the weather and their DNA? Is their DNA longing for winter?

Well, I think, I think like climactic, certainly in terms of temperature, physiological changes happen quite, quite quickly across, across people. So people, people who are, you know, come from one part of the world and are born in another part of the world, you know, kind of climatized differently than, you know, than people from the place that, that their ancestors came from quite, quite immediately.

And I think it makes sense if humans, if our, if those physiological changes in us that are seasonal happen, not because we've got a timer, but because they're in response to external stimuli, a bit like trees, you know, trees don't have a timer to decide when to come out in spring. It's based on, you know, changes in temperature that when they happen, the tree responds. And I guess maybe we're the same. Yeah, go on, Chris.

Well, I was just, I was just going to say that, you know, Peter's day of, day of shorts or whatever. This again, to me sort of speaks of that day of shorts. It's not always the 14th of April, right? You know, it's, it's sometimes it's, sometimes it might be late March. Sometimes it might be May till you, till you put your shorts on. And that's, that to me, like that practical calendar and that practical recognition of the year is more valuable. I, I'm, I'm quite, quite dispassionate about, about dates and anniversaries for that reason, because I don't think that, I think they feel arbitrary to me.

But isn't one of the important things about the great putting on of the shorts is that you can compare and go, ah, hold on this year. I'm doing this on May the 21st. But I see that last year it was at March the 4th. I nearly said March the 40th. March the 14th, you know, and so that comparison against, you know, a set date can be useful. Look, anyway, I think we're just kind of meandering and drifting. And I know what we all want to get onto is talking about us again. Is there anything else we want to say about anniversaries? Anything we want to round this up on?

I don't think we've said anything about anniversaries really, but we've had fun.

Yeah.

Gone on a journey together.

Let's cut to the chase. There's still a while to go on this. Um, I want to, let's get back to, um, um, talking about our anniversary, our fifth anniversary. Um, and I've got a question for you, which you've all pre-prepared unusually, because usually I just chuck the questions at you. Which is, I want to talk about what our favourite, individually, what your favourite episode is from the 200, from that archive, that prestigious archive of 240 episodes. Everyone's sort of stretching and yawning. I'm a bit, a bit worried about this. Does anyone want to launch into this? And I wonder if any of them are the same. Does anyone want to go first to venture an opinion?

Well, I think they've all been equally terrible. I mean, excellent. I mean, for me, for me, any of them that we criticise Gavin Williamson is going to be a good start.

Yeah, but that's about half of them.

Yeah, that's about half of them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, uh, including this one now. Yeah, Optimised Fruit was quite fun. Um, that, that gave listeners a sort of glimpse into Aleph Insights, where, you know, what it's like to work here, where we have heated debates about complete trivia. Um, but I think the early, so that was one of the early ones, that's a fairly early one, but the really early ones, like AlphaGo, the first one we did. Yeah, the very first. Um, I think they're quite fun to listen to. Well, for me, for us, they're probably quite fun to listen to, because it shows we have definitely, we definitely, we have definitely found our feet after, after those ones. You know, we are different. The way we approach this is much different than those early ones.

We've learned that no one, we've learned that no one really cares and no one's going to pick us up. So we can just pretty much, as long as we're not too controversial, we can say what we like.

Yeah. I think the fruit one is great, because it shows, it shows, you could, I mean, I sort of think, how would you answer the question of what's the best fruit without doing it like that? Like, it's one of those, which I'm perennially coming up against, you know, in projects and things where you think, how, how would people go about answering this if they weren't doing it like this? It seems so obvious to us that you would want to at least try and define what we think the metrics are that define the goodness of a fruit and then start collecting data on them. But also, what I liked about that was at the end, we all, after having heated arguments about how annoying a mango was, at the end, we all came together and designed the perfect fruit, which I think was a cube, which contained eight different combinations of sort of sweetness and citric acidity. And yeah, and I still occasionally find myself hankering after that fruit.

Yeah, no, quite right. But I still get angry about that one. Come on, science, get on with it. Yeah, I still get angry about that one, your weird obsession with grapes. But was it strawberries? I can't remember. Strawberries came top of my list. Yeah. Let's not reheat, let's not rake over that again. Chris.

Yeah, I think my two favorites. We did one about whether or not you should put peas in a bowl. I think it was called peas on a plate. But the reason I liked that one was because it was basically a broader discussion. We took something utterly trivial and almost nonsensical. But from it, I think we had a broader discussion about how do we know which things go together. So I thought that was quite typical of the structure that we have. The other one I liked was Stupid Flies, Stupid Humans. That was about... Random Bounce Method. About Random Bounce Method, yeah. And because it largely...

Which is not a kind of prophylactic sort of thing. Family planning technique. Yeah.

No, no. Although it is rhythmic. But yeah. Yeah. Because that felt to me like a kind of a bit of a metaphor for my life, really. Sort of bouncing around in a conservatory, trying to find the window. So yeah. Yeah, so those are my two.

Yeah, I think for me, yeah. Also for me, what stands out is the Optimized Fruit one. And I had also noted down the Random Bounce, the fly one. I like that one. Dust as well.

We didn't know what to expect from that one, and it turned out quite fun, I think.

And then, do you know what, though? I'm quite susceptible to whatever happened most recently to me, or whatever I heard most recently. And I've, I mean, as all you know, I edit the podcast as well. And I've just finished editing some episodes. And we've had some really good ones lately. And so I think a highlight is, you won't have heard it, and our viewers may or may not have our listeners, rather, which is Tom Spence's masterful imitation of a dolphin. And so that's a sort of, you know, that's a little jewel.

Well, we may not release that one by the time this one goes out. And if we haven't, then, you know, you've got that to look forward to.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something else I want to ask. I mean, what do you think?

You don't want to hear what my favorite podcast was.

Oh, did I not ask you? No, you did ask me, but you never waited for the answer. Oh, well, it's because you went on and on, like, like you have done for five years. Just, you know, go on then, Nick. Let's hear it. Well, I made a note of a few things.

He's ranked them all in order. And he's now going to go through his list. He's got 17 criteria.

So, well, I have all sorts of, actually. I've pulled out some key themes that I think crop up a lot.

And yeah, just an answer would do, you know, but never mind.

You know what, you know what happens? Yeah. One thing that comes up actually is the availability of information that comes up a lot. Like the fact that we're talking about something and we can't find the right data on it. And all the data existed and it's been lost or it was on the internet and it's not anymore. And so data availability, that's one of the key themes. But what I really like is when the data that we found contradicts the narrative or tells you something totally different to the narrative that is in the news. I think that's one of my favorite things is when you sort of go, well, everyone thinks this, but actually, look, it's not true.

The more or less moment.

The issues about fixing things, like when we talk about decision making and that sort of how we should think about economic efficiency and how that often contradicts, you know, what we actually do and how we behave. We're always talking about natural units, just like this one, like what's a good way of measuring this thing and how should we divide up a scale into chunks? And talking about metric design, like the fruit one, you know, where we sort of try and work out how we would measure something a bit abstract. But putting all those together, my favorite episode, I think, because it was fun. It was topical. It was Tinder lies, which we were talking about, you know, what people said on Tinder compared to what was true about them. And I love that because we've managed to find quite a few bits of data that where people had analyzed, you know, people's behavior on dating sites and discovered that, you know, humans, all the things we say we do on dating sites and all the things that we say we find attractive are completely belied by all the data, you know, about what people what people do.

And Nick's been able to change his profile accordingly. And now, look, he's got a baby.

So I like that. I like the fact it's a very human topic. But, you know, we then look at data about it and produce something quite iconoclastic at the end, which is that's that's my favorite type of episode, I think.

I mean, I just like it when we argue a lot about stupid stuff. Yeah. And and the and often those ones where we argue a lot are also, I think, the ones where

we push the boundaries of human knowledge furthest.

Yeah, well, we did actually do. There is an episode called Cultures of Debate, which where we look at, you know, the fact that some people have a family where just debating is is is part of life and isn't considered to be, you know, in any way negative or an attack on anyone just because you're disagreeing with them. And I think we definitely are that kind of culture. I think we're that family culture of agreement. Yeah, yeah.

At least that's what I'm going to say here. And so, look, before we finish off, just one more question. I was going to ask, what do you think we're good at in our podcast and what do you think we're not good at? I don't we've kind of already sort of covered that a little bit, but I could ask, you know, what do you think you have? Have you learned anything either from the content or the process of of these of producing these podcasts? I think that might be a more interesting question. Are we up for that? And then that'll round us off. Yeah, so that's my question. Who wants to leap in? Have we learned anything? Have we taught the world? Have we learned anything?

Well, it may not look like it. Listeners probably don't realize this, but I do actually do research for the podcast and I try and admittedly don't normally have time to do that much. I try and do about an hour per episode of just looking up key facts and thinking, you know, so I feel like I've learned a small amount, about 250 different things. And I and I love that. I think that's what I really enjoy about it is that these are things I would never look into. But you actually unearth all of these interesting facts. And then I find myself recycling them in other conversations, you know, where you kind of you might be talking about about, you know, which fruits are calorific. And you think, well, I know that because I've because I've researched it and happens an awful lot. So, yeah, I feel like what I've learned is lots and lots of different interesting things. Yeah. Chris?

Yeah, I think I think for me, I've sort of learned a how how these kinds of discussions are actually like a mental your own internal mental process, because I find, you know, when I when I'm when we've got a topic or something and I get some time to have a think about it and look at it, I invariably end up, you know, as the internet kind of lends itself to going down some totally irrelevant tunnel, right, where you you sort of think, oh, that's quite interesting. And then you get sidetracked. And I think these debates work or these podcasts work in a similar way in that, you know, ostensibly, we think we're going to be, you know, talking about some particular issue. But invariably, we we we go down some some rabbit hole. But but the rabbit holes are actually interesting and informative places to to end up in.

Yeah, rabbit and many rabbit holes make a warren.

That's right.

Wise words. Granddad used to say. Peter.

I don't know why a warren is necessarily a good thing. Yeah. Well, I've learned that the whole world of web publication, podcast and metrics and web hits is utterly baffling and opaque. That's what I've learned. So the mechanics behind the show are actually quite simple. If you want to set up a podcast, it's not that complicated. But the mechanics of getting. Fraser looks absolutely aghast. Even Fraser can manage it, frankly. Even Fraser can manage it. Fraser now does it all, which is great. But the yeah, the whole the world of like how you list a podcast is is baffling. There's like there's no kind of standard. Well, there's a standard way of doing it, but there's no standard place to do it. So you have to do it kind of everywhere. But I'm sure we've not optimized it.

I think I do. It is worth saying, Fraser, that you I think you are an epic podcast host. And I know that the whole podcast was your kind of your idea a little bit. And you kind of had to poke us into doing it. But I really enjoy it. And I think, you know, the fact you really make the editing and everything look easy. You know, it really does. You can't tell. You can't see the edges. You can't tell how much crap there is that's edited. What people don't realize is the recordings are six hours long. That's right.

And yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm like a swan, right? As in so many things in my life. I'm just like a swan, which is like aggressive.

You hiss a lot. Yeah.

Eats grass. Yeah. Lives in a river. Covered in covered in white plumage. Indeed. And very tasty.

Yeah. Well, only the queen can eat me. But anyway, that's a whole other thing. Yeah. Well, thank you for those kind words, Nick. Yeah, look, I think what I've learned is that two things. I think, first of all, actually, for me, it's about meaning and meaningful work. Because as we've sort of, I don't think, as we've talked about, not necessarily in private, but off podcast is, I've certainly mentioned it to you, Peter, is that, you know, of all the work that I do in my life, I think this podcast is actually about the most meaningful that I do.

Oh, my God. I'm sorry. Poor Fraser.

But I would like, you know, in 100 years from now, you know, if my one of my grandkids sort of listens to this, and I think they will get a really good, I think this will stand up. You know, I think it has, you know, I think it's got integrity to it. That's what I think. Right. Because most of the work I do is about, you know, producing films to make.

Well, there's a thought, Fraser. Maybe this will be being listened to in 500 years.

Yes. Now, how's that for an anniversary?

But it won't be listened to by a person. It'll be an AI algorithm that's doing a troll for some history project.

There might be a whole religion spring up interpreting our words. You never know.

Almost certainly. No, but the other thing is that I think, I don't know if it's something I've learned, but something I note is that I think I'm different from you three. And I wish I wasn't in some ways. But yeah, I don't know what my, I think one of our podcast guests, which was, was it Chris Lear or Mikey? I think it was Chris, was talking about the differences. This was after the podcast, the differences between us. Basically, you were a bunch of like techie geek type people. And I'm not. But I kind of wish I was a bit more techie geeky because then I could have more intelligent conversations.

Well, we accept you one of us.

Yeah. So I don't know. But I think I can also see the value in being a bit like me as well, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Um, yeah, that's, that's kind of it really. Um, I mean, Peter, you need to stop crying. You know, it's, I know that we will be doing more of these. Yeah, this is, you know, I know it's an emotional moment for all of us. Um, yeah.

Well, there's someone we haven't thanked and that's our listeners. Yes. So for staying with us for five years. God, it is getting a bit cringy though. It's awful, isn't it? Should we stop?

Yeah, I think we need to stop. It's getting a bit self-referential. So, you know, we're not thanking our listeners, right? Let's just be clear about that.

Yeah, they're privileged, frankly. Yes. They should be thanking us. Right.

Yeah, they should. Yeah, exactly. All right, we'll stop there. Um, okay. So as always, thank you for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, Nick, what should people do?

Just, uh, stick the finger on that like button. Indeed.

And follow us on your chosen streaming service. Thank you as always to listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Chris Wragg, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.