Hello and welcome to serious inquiries only. This is episode 490. I'm your host Thomas Smith.

It has been way too long since we've talked to Dr. Brian Gillis, astrophysicist, to the stars. I would always say that if I were an astrophysicist, although it's kind of redundant, I guess. But we're not talking about space, we're not talking about stars, as much as I love doing that. Brian wanted to talk about problems in academia, both why people are leaving, why certain demographics of people might be leaving, might not be able to get ahead. What's really

unfortunate in this day and ages, not only there's so many attacks on academia from the right,

there's also ways that just fundamentally it's not doing what it needs to do. So there's

legitimate criticisms from the left as well. Pair that with the vicious and completely

unreasonable attacks from the right. And it feels like yet another thing that who's going to fix this and how. But the first step is always identifying the problems. And that's what Brian wants to start doing here today with us. So I'm excited to get to it. Let's take our first break and avoid that break by going to patreon.com slash serious pot. Thanks so much to those who support the show. And after that, I'll be on with Dr. Brian Gillis.

Dr. Brian Gillis, been way too long.

How are you doing today?

I'm doing well today.

How are you, Thomas?

Pretty good. Although I guess I'm a little sad we're not learning any space stuff per se today.

How's space doing? Is it okay? Yeah, well, here's one thing I can teach you is that we now have

pretty solid evidence that aliens haven't visited the U.S. as if they had visited, we would certainly

have learned about it in the past few months as an attempt to distract from the Epstein files. Yeah, I think they used that one once before and it's just like, whatever. Okay, well, is space talked about me at all? Or has it asked about me? Or is it okay? Is it okay? It misses you, Thomas. Oh, good. Okay. I don't want to seem

desperate, but... Yeah. It's kind of been disappointed with the quality of visitors. It's been getting lately. It used to be we sent the best of the best. Now we're sending the worst of the worst. So, uh, yeah. Yeah. Well, we're not learning about space. What did you want to talk about today though. Yeah, so I wanted to just talk about basically what's been

going on in my life since the year or so since we spoke last. I've left academia and moved on to

an academia support role. So I'm working as a research software engineer, which basically means I do

all the programming and stuff to support academics who maybe aren't as specialized in it.

But given that, I have a strong background in academia, I know how they research, how they like

to work, and have an understanding of the science they might want to do and I'm able to develop

software to support that. But what I wanted to talk about today is the process of leaving academia,

and a lot of things I've realized in the meantime that need to be discussed about the structural

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