Are we yes? Where are we here? Why are we here not entirely clear? We are misfits thrust into existence by random chance with no hints at all as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all. It's immensely bizarre. Here we are.

Hello everybody and welcome to the here we are podcast today I have a so a past guest of mine one of my favorite most popular guests been on the show several times Michael Garfield reached out to me. He's very enthusiastic science communicator that sometimes throws me suggestions for other awesome people that that I should have on and he insisted I have today's guests on.

For good reason has some really cool interesting stuff for me especially for being so early in her career from the Santa Fe Institute Elena Matan is joining me today Elena how are you? I'm good I got to that entral which is I had to I had what was that three takes we had three takes. Yeah I should have I should have.

I should include those one of these days like bonus bonus for a patreon just so listeners often get to hear me talk about how badly I screwed up intros over and over again but they never get to see it maybe I'll include that as a bonus sometimes.

Some kind of bluepers yeah for real exactly how are you today good good you're in Santa Fe yes which is why there's a son on one side.

Yeah not which is the window side yeah so the Santa Fe Institute it's kind of a it's it's sort of a like a non traditional

unique sort of institute right yes so it was really funded as a kind of almost experiment in terms of institution and trying to give freedom to people that are fairly early in their career stage to think about whatever they want almost kind of free to from the job market considerations and from traditional institutions like universities.

Yeah that's that's really interesting as it does that I mean this is some of the things that you talk about right and some and some of your work and some of the I saw you have a online course introduction to open science that is available for free for people at I'm not going to read that whole long

so it's included in the description of this show and yes so can you can you talk a little bit about that to start just because I talk about how much I love online courses to listeners all the time so I'm sure there's plenty of listeners out there that are interested in having some recommended.

Oh for sure so well part of my experience was I joined the institute just before covid started so it ended up being kind of a good time to have pet projects that are a bit different from usual and for me that was trying to get this thing that is a more teaching oriented materials.

And that came from during my PhD I used to already teach some kind of introduction to open science methods to incoming PhD students.

So I just wanted to offer kind of expanded version of it and the center of institute has this great platform for online courses called complexity explorer.

So this is basically an expanded version of what I used to give to incoming PhD students and it's a bit more for general audience so anyone was curious to know how do we make science more transparent and more open to everyone is like very welcome to see me talk about this for something like six hours of videos.

So what is what is open science.

So open science says a bunch of different definitions depending on who you ask and there's a port that is it's mostly a kind of social cultural movement where people really want to get scientific practice to be more transparent more open more inclusive.

And of this kind of almost a bit the hacker like ideology to science and there's also kind of more practical aspect which is open science is also this kind of laundry list of practices that actually help achieve this goal.

Can you repeat that last thing that does what with the goal.

Just help getting there basically so or tube your goals in terms of yeah just like making the scientific process something that people can actually see in a sense but also verify and partake into.

Interesting yeah it's within your talking about kind of letting letting younger people explore ideas outside of the typical job market that that resonated with someone i've never gone to college but I talk with a lot of professors I and I have some of my very good friends are academics and.

And so I go back and for you know I just have this I guess I have a little bit of a contrary and attitude with no matter who i'm talking to I tend to consider the opposite so when i'm talking with say a philosopher or something i'm like yeah but what are you going to do with that who even care and then when i'm talking with my academic friends sometimes i'll be sharing like some big idea about how I think.

Conscious this works or this or that i'm just like okay neat idea like I can't test that what and like if you can't test it and you can't write a paper about it why even be talking about such a thing so can you talk about that maybe a little bit is that is that is that's a little bit of of.

Of what the institute is doing is freeing people to explore something that maybe there's not the same clear academic or monetary path to.

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