Episode 145 - Interview with anthropologist, neuroscientist and board game inventor Dr Paul Mason

Show notes

This week we were thrilled to chat with the wonderfully interdisciplinary Dr Paul Mason: anthropologist, neuroscientist, medical researcher, and inventor of a dung beetle board game. Paul cheerfully describes his own CV as looking "like a pizza with the lot" (with, somehow, even the pineapple on there). Paul is also a musician, dancer and capoeira practitioner who began his studies wanting to get into brain research, before realising he was far more interested in understanding the brain in context. That curiosity took him from laboratory internships at the Howard Florey Institute (and beyond) into a PhD in anthropology, and out into the world doing fieldwork with arts communities in Indonesia and Brazil, infectious disease patients in Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, and conservation education at Taronga Zoo.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Paul shares why he believes good science communication actually makes for good science, and how creative formats can carry serious ideas to the people who need them most. We talk about his award-winning children's book about tuberculosis (translated into thirty languages and distributed free in four countries) his dung beetle board game Hexcrement, and the surprising social magic of gathering people around a table to play. Paul also offers his best advice for researchers who want real-world impact: put in the work to ask good, well-structured questions, and always make it easy for people to help you - because kindness begets kindness, and communities of shared practice are where change begins.

You can follow Paul and learn more about his work here: 

Transcript

Jen (00:00:15)

Hello hello, everybody. I am Jen. And I am so delighted to welcome you to another episode of Let's Talk SciComm, my very favorite place to be, because as always, I get to hang out with my delightful friend and colleague, Dr. Michael Wheeler. G'day Michael.

Michael (00:00:31)

G'day Jen. I am very excited today, as you can tell, because I've given you a g'day, but also because...

Jen (00:00:37)

Always a good sign.

Michael (00:00:39)

Yeah, it's a good omen Paul. And Paul is our guest today. I'm very excited about that because we... if you remember back to season 18, we had Emma Donnelly on and Emma recommended that we have to, absolutely have to interview Dr. Paul Mason. And very impressed Paul, by finding out a little bit more about you.

So for the listeners, Paul has one of those CVs that you read it and you think how on Earth has one person done all of these different things. So he's an anthropologist, he's a neuroscientist, he's a medical researcher, he's a musician, he's a dancer, he's a lecturer, a capoeira practitioner.

And importantly, most importantly for our listeners, he is the inventor of a science board game about dung beetles called Hexcrement. You can hold up Hexcrement in there Paul, if you like. What a name!

So for the listeners, Paul originally trained in biomedical science and neuroscience at the University of Melbourne before completing a PhD in anthropology at Macquarie University. His research has taken him to Indonesia, Brazil, the Netherlands, studying music, movement, and martial arts across cultures.

Since then, he's worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, focusing on tuberculosis screening in Vietnam. He's lectured at Monash University, and he's currently a research fellow at Macquarie University.

And on top of all of that, Paul's written a children's book about tuberculosis that was translated into 30 languages and distributed in Vietnam, the Philippines, Tanzania, and the Marshall Islands.

He teaches primary school ethics. He's a composer and performer. He designs science board games, and he really is just a walking argument for the idea that science communication can take any form. So Paul, a huge welcome to Let's Talk SciComm.

Paul (00:02:51)

Oh, wow. Thank you for that very lovely introduction. I'm not all of those things all at the same time I should emphasise, I'm not dancing while I'm in the wet lab or anything.

Michael (00:03:03)

So Paul, you've got one of the most interdisciplinary backgrounds that we've ever come across on the podcast to be honest. I would just love if you could walk us through how on Earth you ended up involved in all of those things. Did you have a plan or is it more about you following your curiosity?

Paul (00:03:21)

So I... It's funny that you mentioned neuroscience because I haven't been in a neuroscience lab since 2003. And then I sort of wandered into psychophysics and a few other things. But when I did my first internship at the Howard Florey Institute, a quarter of a century ago now, I was there over summer doing some magnetic resonance imaging, really trying to wrap my head around it at the time, even though I was just a first year student. So I really struggled to sort of make sense of it at all at the time, but it was so great to be exposed to all this science happening around you and to be rubbing shoulders with people who had only just been teaching you the semester beforehand.

And one of the admin staff at the Howard Flory Institute sort of tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Paul, we run a young researchers program. We reckon you'd love to, we'd love to have you as a host of this program". And so I got to run, be a host for this young researchers program that every year, they would take high school students for a week, and they got to do all sorts of experiments across all the different parts of the Howard Florey.

It was a program run only for three years I think, sadly, but I was part of it for two years. And I think that's when I started realising that I love talking about science and I love taking science out of the lab and introducing it to people. And I think someone else saw that in me before I saw it in me because laboratory science is fantastic but it's not for everyone and it can be really arduous.

But also, what I found along the way is that good science communication also makes for good science. If scientists struggle to answer questions to the public, sometimes that's because they've borrowed so deeply into a topic that there's something that makes sense to them, but it's actually not addressing a real world issue or it's perhaps going in the wrong direction. And, you know, being a communicator means that we have to hold ourselves accountable to being able to talk about what we're doing, in a way that is meaningful to other people. And that's a good reality check, I think.

Jen (00:05:32)

You will not find us arguing with you there Paul. I mean, that's exactly what we talk about with our students all the time, that it's not kind of this optional fun extra. It's actually a core part of the work that we do, that we can explain that to other people, particularly if the research you're doing has been publicly funded and the taxpayers are the ones paying for that research.

Paul (00:05:50)

Absolutely.

Jen (00:05:51)

So yeah, couldn't agree more.

Paul (00:05:53)

Yeah, if we want to have continued funding, then absolutely we need to ensure that we're bringing people along with us, yeah.

Jen (00:05:58)

Yep, absolutely. Paul, I want to ask you a bit more about your anthropology background because I studied anthropology as an undergrad but it was part of my arts degree, not my science degree. But I studied quite a few different anthropology subjects and found it absolutely fantastic. And I think in another life, I probably stayed in anthropology rather than moving into zoology and the sort of behavioral ecology that I did with animals.

But I guess communication is fundamentally about humans and anthropology is this wonderful way of trying to look at humans and understand humans. Do you think there's something about the way that anthropologists are trained and the way they think and they observe that science communicators who haven't had that training could really learn from?

Paul (00:06:43)

I think that's a very good question because one way that I've pitched myself in various job interviews is to say, "Look, my training as an anthropologist has given me the flexibility to tackle various problems [by] putting humans into the picture." Whether it's been an ethics job and going, "Yeah, I can do the ethics, but let's put the humans back in the picture".

Or when I went for a job at Taronga Zoo, they started up just for a brief period of time a postgraduate conservation education degree. And I got into the interview luckily and just said, "I'm your man because conservation is ultimately an anthropology problem. It's ultimately a human problem because humans are the ones creating the problem. It's about solving the human dimension of this problem."

Jen (00:07:31)

Hmm, interesting.

Michael (00:07:32)

So Paul, what motivated you to make the shift from biomedical science to anthropology? Where did that come from?

Paul (00:07:39)

I was looking for units to do outside of the biomedical science degree. I got my foot in the door with a few psychology subjects and I got my foot in the door in my first medical anthropology unit called Keeping the Body in Mind. And I didn't even know what anthropology was. It was the first time I encountered it. We had to read five articles a week. It was a completely different way of making sense of the world.

And in that unit, slowly what I started to realise, and it took me a while because it was a completely different vocabulary, it was a completely different cosmology, different theoretical and methodological orientations. But it gave me a vocabulary to piece things together, to start putting the big picture together. And that was largely missing from my biomedical science degree.

And over time, I just found myself drifting more and more into reading more anthropology books, reading more literature about making sense of what humans do in the field. And realising that a lot of experimental studies, even though I have a great respect for them, lack ecological validity. They are coherent within the laboratory space, but you take them out of the laboratory space and they're no longer relevant to context.

And so you can study structure, you can study function, but anthropology gave me an ability to study structure and function in context. And that became really exciting for me and led me down the path of moving towards medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, and also science communication along the way.

Michael (00:09:19)

Yeah, and ultimately down the path of creating a fantastic board game, which you can probably tell that I was particularly excited about when I read the introduction. I am just dying to ask you about Hexcrement. So your science board game, it's about dung beetles.

Congrats on possibly the best name for a board game I've ever come across. How did all of that come about? What do players actually do in the game? And what do they learn from from playing the game?

Paul (00:09:52)

Yeah yeah. So it's called Hexagrammant because it's played, it's a game played on hexagon tiles. And so we put the 'H' in front just for a bit of a giggle. As you can imagine, it's full of puns. But in Hexcrement, up to six players get to enter the six-legged shoes of dung beetles in their search for smelly treasure.

And there's an ecological lesson here because not all dung beetles have the same favourite flavours. Dung beetles have their preferred flavours of dung. In fact, there's some fascinating stories about dung beetles here in Australia. You know, there's dung beetles that will stick to the backside of kangaroos and then leap onto the poo as it's departing the kangaroo.

Michael (00:10:34)

Really? Wow.

Paul (00:10:34)

And there's a few other marsupials with their own preferred... you know, dung beetles that specifically like the dung of that particular animal. And so the interesting thing about dung beetles is they tend to stick to their preferred resource a fair bit. But if they don't find their preferred resource, they can still make use of it. It's just that they might need more of it in order to be successful evolutionarily or reproductively.

So in the game, If you're the green dung beetle, you're looking for the green dung to bring home and lay your eggs in. If you're the purple dung beetle, you're looking for the purple dung. But if you can't find your preferred dung, you might be able to steal it off another player who has found it by a roll of the dice, because dung beetles do fight with each other over dung. Or you can find two or more of your non-preferred colors of dung to roll home in the hopes that no one else steals one of those dungs off you. So it's an interactive game, it's competitive.

There was a few things that really propelled me to put some energy behind this game. I'd just been working at Taronga Zoo for four or so years and I came up with this sort of... I used to make board games with my kids. Rather than just playing board games that we'd you know, bought, we used to make them together. And then I came up with this sort of floral design of where you could go around a dice tray. I wanted to put everything in the middle, a bit of user experience design as a parent who just, I just want to pack up everything into the middle of a controlled space where I could play with my kids.

And the first time we played this, my son was just under five years of age and we were playing it for 20 minutes. And it was just the first, it was a very rough design of the game. I was like, Oh, 20 minutes is a fair chunk of time. And he just lost his poo. And I thought, Oh, no, game's over now. That's it. He's lost his... And he tears up the hallway. It's not a very big hallway, but he tears up the hallway. He goes, "Noooo..."

And he comes back to the board game. And I was ready to pack up. I was almost about to pack up. And he goes, "All right, how do I get my poo back?" And he was really strategising about what he's going to do next to get his poo back. And I thought, Oh, ooh, it's just the right amount of tension to keep this interesting and not so much that he's going to be thrown off if he doesn't get his way. And so I thought, Okay, I'm going to put some energy behind this.

The game was named actually by one of our play testers who was a GP. And we got lots of recommendations along the way by playing it with diverse groups, diverse families. And my wife is actually the entomologist. So she's the dung beetle specialist. So she helped with the logic behind dung beetles and having them chase the poo. And I think we play tested it with almost over 400 or 500 people.

But one of the really telling moments for me at a university workshop that I was delivering one day was, um, I wasn't really in a good space and I thought, you know, I need just to buy myself 30 or 40 minutes out of this three hour session with students. Just so I can just get myself into the right head space as an educator.

And so I brought my prototypes of the game into the game, into the room and I ran about four or five games with the 20 plus students in the room. And the really cool thing at the end of this workshop... And I've been teaching now 20 years, and the really cool thing at the end of this workshop was I saw these two students turn to each other and go, "Hey, that was really fun. Do you want to go for a coffee after this?"

Jen (00:14:13)

Oh, that's nice.

Paul (00:14:15)

And, you know, it's been such a long time since I've seen that. I haven't seen that for, you know, over a dozen years, students turning to each other and say "Hey, do you want to catch up afterwards or let's socialise?" And I realised, Wow, the value of this game is more than just the ecological lesson. It's actually, it creates a structured space where people can have a giggle. They get to say the word poo around each other and feel a little bit naughty. You know, it crosses just the right taboos to make it a bit of a laugh.

Jen (00:14:42)

So Paul, it's, like it's really obvious that there's huge social benefits from everything you've just described, this kind of semi-structured space in which games can happen. But do you think games are also a powerful way of communicating about science and allowing people to engage with scientific ideas when they wouldn't otherwise?

Paul (00:15:00)

Absolutely. I got to playtest a game here at Macquarie University called Remediate!. It's about synthetic biology. And the game was incomplete when I play tested it with my kids and a few friends. But we all walked out of playing this game Remediate with a better understanding of what synthetic biology is and what it aims to achieve, which is you know, you can create cells that can do works for you to complete certain tasks, which is part of the game mechanism.

And in fact, I'm working on a game at the moment with... Well, a couple of games, a few games at the moment, one for anthropology to help teach anthropological concepts. Another for, and another two for the Fresh Produce Bioactives project that I'm working on at the moment.

So one of those games is to... is not really a full complete game, it's just an add-on to people who enjoy playing role-playing games with their families or with their friends. And instead of a roll of a dice to get a boon for your player, you have to actually physically eat a carrot or an apple in order to give boons to your player in the role playing game. So if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons or the Cosmere or whichever is your favorite RPG from big pocket press or whoever, then you can give your character night sight by getting them to eat a carrot or you can give them extra speed if they eat a tomato and they get the lycopene from tomato. And so matching those boons to vegetables and fruits so that they can... It's a very simple way that parents can then run a role-playing game with their kids and quietly get them to eat some healthy vegetables.

Michael (00:16:41)

Yeah, yeah.

Paul (00:16:42)

The last game is, it's using a lot of the mechanisms from Hexcrement, but it's more about resource management and plant foods. And it's called Free Radicals, and it's about avoiding antioxidant deficit. So you have to every turn make sure that you've eaten enough fresh food or found it and explored the board, made use of those resources in season to avoid going into antioxidant deficit and losing the total number of turns left you have for your character.

So it's a little bit more complex. It's got some deck building in there. It's got a few other things in there but at the end of the game, you have to... To win the game, you need to have 30 or more plant foods in your inventory. And the whole reasoning behind that is that we found that bioactive diversity in your diet, eating more than 30 or so plant foods in a week, it actually leads to a healthier gut microbiome.

And we know that from biobank studies and from other clinical RCTs and observational studies that eating a diversity of plant foods in your diet is really healthy for you. And so the number 30 there is there just as the marker of you need to get to 30 in order to be a winner. And hopefully, that'll be enough to sort of encourage people to think differently about how they go about getting their diversity at the supermarket. And just to put everyone's mind at ease, you know, coffee does count as a plant for you.

Michael (00:18:20)

Yes! That is fantastic news.

Jen (00:18:21)

Phew.

Jen (00:18:23)

You made Michael's day.

Michael (00:18:25)

That was my next question. Thank you. It's really interesting hearing you describe those board games. It really makes me think that they're an underused resource for communicating science. You know, they've got all of these components of education, interaction, family dynamics as well, which is really interesting.

And I just wonder whether you had kind of seen the benefits in terms of family dynamics from those board games. And was that part of the reason why you then decided to write a children's book? Because I suppose, you know, that's about parents and, and kids interacting but it's just a different medium. You know, you did that about your tuberculosis research at the Woolcock but it's been translated into you know, 30 different languages. How did that project come about and you know, what made you decide children's book is the medium I'm going to target here?

Paul (00:19:26)

When I was doing field work in Indonesia, over 20 years ago, I was living with a family. I was renting a room out from, well, sort of a hut, in a village in Padang Panjang, about an hour away from Padang in the capital of West Sumatra in the highlands. And whenever I went to the city, I'd always just buy some books, like mostly graphic novels but you know, there were nonfiction comic books for the children of the family that I was living with.

And what I noticed was that the parents were reading these books, not just the kids. And so because I noticed that the parents were reading these graphic novels, then they could get away with it. They didn't have to buy it for themselves because someone else had bought it for their kids. But I just happened to be there and I would see them flicking through it.

I thought, Oh wow, that's really interesting. Like if you want communication materials to get into the home, you don't need to write something specifically for the parents. You can write it for the kids and the parents will just make use of it. Maybe read it for their kids or maybe read it themselves. And that was just a little observation that stuck in the back of my mind.

And when I was in Vietnam doing research on tuberculosis, there were a few things that I started to notice. With my research assistant, we interviewed well over 70 tuberculosis patients. Some people didn't understand what they had when they were diagnosed with tuberculosis. A lot of people didn't understand that it was treatable. That it was going to be, you know, give it six, eight months of treatment, you'll be clear of this disease. And you can go back to... Well, you know, as soon as you're on antimicrobials, technically you're not infectious and you'll be able to re-enter family and social life again.

And so people can resist that diagnosis because they are afraid of the social stigma, the social death that can come from being diagnosed, which is really preclusive to someone seeking treatment and seeking a diagnosis, seeking treatment and completing that treatment. Because if you're seen going to the clinic every day, people are going to start asking questions. "Oh, that's interesting. Why is Harry going to the clinic every day to get treatment? Hmm, clearly something's wrong and he hasn't told us. So it must be so serious that he doesn't want to tell us."

So I needed something that would lower everyone's anxieties about tuberculosis. (a) Here are the tests that you do. You can get an x-ray, a sputum smear and whatever other technology is available in that particular area to triangulate what lung problem you may have. And in high burden countries like India, China, Vietnam, you know, the likelihood of it being tuberculosis is quite high.

If someone's got a persistent cough for over three weeks, perhaps with a bloody sputum and a night sweats and a few other symptoms, not always all those symptoms. We need people to realize that you don't need to fear being around someone with tuberculosis. You don't need to fear being around someone with tuberculosis on treatment. You don't need to fear getting it yourself because you can get treated. And the treatment in most countries around the world is free. And the World Health Organization and other institutes work really hard to make sure that it's for free.

And so first of all lowering anxieties, making sure that people are aware of the diagnostics and the treatment and that you can go back to regular life after you've been treated, hopefully. And when I say hopefully, it's just you know, there can always be tough cases or you know, people with late diagnosis.

So writing that children's book first and foremost was, it was written with Vietnamese children. We tested out the messaging with kids in sort of like a – co-design might be putting it too strongly, but just making sure that they made sense of it. And if they didn't, we would rephrase it so they would make sense of it. And then we tested it out on a school group. We had 100 school children read the book and then complete a 10-question quiz. And I think most of the students got 8 out of 10 of those questions about tuberculosis correct. And I think, I can't remember the statistics, but most of them got like 8, 9 or 10 questions correct out of [10]. None of them got less than eight questions wrong, eight questions correct on that quiz, which was really promising.

And then we... So it was actually developed first in Vietnamese before we developed it in English and before we translated it back into English. And the English version in Australia at least was really circulated for free online only to get people aware of the fact that tuberculosis is not a disease that has gone. It's just because we don't see it a lot in Australia, but there might be about a thousand cases a year. Just because we don't see it in our everyday experience in Australia doesn't mean that it's gone away in other countries around the world.

And so it was a really important fundraising tool. So we crowdfunded the publishing of the Vietnamese version of that game. I think it was seven and a half thousand dollars or thereabouts at the time. And we achieved our goals, which was really great. We got to print and distribute that book through the Woolcock Institute to I think 120 villages in the south of, southern parts of Vietnam, which was fantastic. And then other people around the world started requesting copies and they were like, "Do you mind if we translate a copy for our clinic patients here in Tanzania?"

And there was a colleague who went to the Philippines and brought copies to distribute to schools over there. And then also the Global Young Academy came on board and all these scholars from the Global Young Academy said, "Oh, I can do a Malayalam translation for you". And there was a Russian colleague who did a Russian translation. And like it just blew me away how much people really helped out to translate that book into so many different languages. And it's free online. You can download it still online.

But it went into print in several countries and was physically distributed to tuberculosis patients. But in Vietnam, it went to families in 120 villages which was promising. Because it's great to know that people will hopefully have lowered their anxieties about this disease and feel much more forthcoming about going to a doctor if they've got some symptoms, and also understanding what tests that they will expect if they go to the doctor.

Jen (00:26:06)

It's such a powerful example of effective communication having real world impact in a you know, in a very important context I think, Paul. So we will definitely link to the book in the show notes so that people can have a look. We need to jump into our quickfire questions in a second Paul.

But just before we do that, I'd just love your thoughts on... I feel like everybody listening is like, "Oh my gosh, Paul's done a million things in a million places". You know, you've done a lot of different things.

For anyone listening who would love to communicate their work beyond academia and has this real sense of you know, I want to have real world impact, do you have one piece of advice of where somebody could start?

You know, is it thinking about the big picture goal? Is it thinking about the audiences that you want to interact with? What would be your piece of advice for someone who has this sense of I want to do more than write papers and go to conferences and talk to other researchers?

Paul (00:27:05)

Tenacity, perseverance and leveraging. And don't be afraid to ask. Something I tell my kids a lot as well is make it easy for someone to help you. Like if you make it easy for people to help you, it'll just make it so much smoother to get something running on the ground.

And if you... Ask for help, but also make it really easy for someone to give you that help. For example, when students come to me with questions, I had a lot of questions as an undergraduate student and what I had to learn very quickly is that I benefited the most when my questions were really well structured, when I identified what it was that I didn't know.

Michael (00:27:59)

Yeah, oh, that's fantastic advice Paul. And, you know, you're talking about excellent, well-structured questions there. And I'm really curious to think what you think of these next set of questions. So we have reached the point in the podcast now Paul where we're going to move to our quick questions. So quick questions, quick answers.

Paul (00:28:18)

Quick, sorry, I apologise.

Michael (00:28:25)

First question I'd like to ask is what is your favorite way to switch off after a long day?

Paul (00:28:32)

Oh, long bath. Yeah, really long bath. Hot.

Jen (00:28:37)

Ooh, I can relate to that. Excellent response.

Paul (00:28:40)

A bath, a book and salts. Yep. Next.

Jen (00:28:42)

Next question. If aliens landed here tomorrow, what part of your work would you want to show them?

Paul (00:28:50)

Are you kidding me?

Michael (00:28:54)

Could happen.

Paul (00:28:55)

I'd be more like um, can I just tag along and just like watch what you're doing for a bit? And like, is it okay if I just, yeah... I wouldn't, I would, I'd be asking more questions rather than wanting to show them, yeah. I mean, come on. They've come across the galaxy to arrive here. I've got questions. I don't have...

Jen (00:29:14)

Great, great response.

Paul (00:29:17)

Music, I would show them music. I would show them music.

Jen (00:29:20)

Okay.

Michael (00:29:20)

Yeah.

Paul (00:29:21)

Okay. Sorry, next.

Michael (00:29:22)

Great. All right. What's a hill you're willing to die on in your field?

Paul (00:29:27)

The hill that I'm willing to die on is that normal is not a concept. It is a God.

Jen (00:29:35)

I feel like we need more even though it's got to be a quick answer. We need one more sentence.

Michael (00:29:35)

You need to expand on that. That sounds intriguing.

Paul (00:29:41)

Yeah, so I've interviewed a lot of people for a YouTube interview series called Idioms of Normality. And I've spent over a decade researching the concept of normality in my free time and in whatever spare time I can scrape together.

And I've come to the realisation that normal is not just a concept. It's not just an idea. It is a veritable God who whispers in our ears and you know, it tells us "nothing to see here" and it protects privilege.

And it, it is, it enforces forms of discrimination that we pay for and we don't even realise that we're you know, contributing to it with our daily ablutions, our coin at the shopping center, our, our time at the gym. Normal is a God, and we don't realise it.

And because of that, we don't realize how the God whispers in our ears and changes our actions and behaviors and choices.

Jen (00:30:42)

I want to get you back for a whole nother episode to have that conversation Paul. I think that is a very powerful, important idea.

Michael (00:30:50)

All right Paul, I've got a final question here. What is your very top tip for communicating effectively about science?

Paul (00:31:00)

Make sure the science makes sense. And I, you know, that sounds flippant. But you know, you look at Alzheimer's research, you look at food research as well. Like a lot of food research was communicated well before it actually made sense. And that has had huge ramifications.

In Alzheimer's research, it has had huge ramifications for where the funding was being sent. In food science research, it's really undermined people's trust in nutrition science because, You know, hang on, you're telling me that eggs were bad, but now you're telling me they're good. Can I have avocados? What's a healthy fat? What's a unhealthy fat? You know, it becomes really confusing if you share the science too confidently before there is actually certainty established in the field, it can actually do damage.

And I think make sure the science actually makes sense before communicating it. We all want to be the next Nobel Prize winner, but if you rush to the press without also communicating the uncertainty of the knowledge that we're building, then down the track you risk undermining public trust.

Jen (00:32:11)

Yeah, I think that's a very very useful thing for all of us to remember. And Paul, I am certain that we need to have another conversation with you at some point. I feel like we've touched the tip of many many icebergs today and we could have gone deeper in lots of different ways.

But we're just hugely grateful to you for making the time to chat with us, to share information about some of your incredibly varied experiences with us. And I so need to go out and get Hexcrement now, because what could be better than a board game about poo and dung beetles?

Paul (00:32:42)

Available at Mindgardens, Melbourne.

Jen (00:32:44)

Okay, excellent. For all Melbourne listeners, I'm guessing available online for anybody not in Melbourne.

Paul (00:32:49)

As well, yep.

Jen (00:32:50)

But thanks so much, Paul. That was a really interesting conversation. We really enjoyed talking to you.

Paul (00:32:53)

Oh, you guys are lovely.

Paul (00:32:55)

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed chatting with you both.

Michael (00:32:55)

Thanks, Paul. It's been a pleasure.

Michael (00:33:15)

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, we'd love you to tell a friend about the podcast or leave us a review. And you can reach out to us on social media.

And we're very excited to announce that we're launching a new newsletter called the ChitChat. Check out the link in the show notes or our posts on Instagram.

And also a big thank you to our production team, Steven Tang and Madeleine Kelly.

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