Latest / The Unfiltered Engineer / Ep 2: Your Brain Is Lying to You feat. Kate Astrid

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Ep 2: Your Brain Is Lying to You feat. Kate Astrid · The Unfiltered Engineer

• Vishakha Motwani: Hello and welcome to the Unfiltered Engineer. My guest today is Kate Astrid. Kate is a senior product engineer at Cogram, where she builds front-end products. She speaks about cognitive biases in software development. Her talk is called Your Brain Is Lying to You. And what she cares most about is helping developers get unstuck. Today we are talking about the tiny mental shortcuts that shape our estimates, our refactors, and those moments. When everyone agrees a little too fast. Welcome, Kate. Kate: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. awesome. And I want to I want to ask you, where are you tuning in from? Kate: right now I am in Amsterdam. Vishakha Motwani: Awesome. Okay. I'm so glad to have you here. It's such a great thing to be learning from perspectives from developers in an other countries. I'm based in US, which is why I am so excited to have you as my guest. And my first question, honestly, to you is your talk is called Your Brain Is Lying to You. So when did you catch it? What was the moment you realized your brain was lying to you at work? Kate: So it actually started Far beyond the work. So I started to think about our brains and how we think and all of that. I think like something around like 15 or even more years ago. So I started to think about basically like what I'm thinking, who am I, what people are thinking about, you know, and why do they choose some specific things over other things. So it wasn't if like it was very interesting for me to think about that, and then I started to dive deeper. To learn how a brain works, all of the cognitive sciences they always excited me. And I found this thing which is called cognitive bias. And I was like, huh, this is very interesting. So basically, cognitive bias is something that our brain developed during evolution to help. itself to be more productive, more efficient, spend less energy on thinking and all of that. But at the same time, it of course it gave us a lot of costs that we need to pay attention to. So now I'm like incredibly curious about that and I know that there are something around 175 cognitive biases and there is no way we can change how our brain is wired. But what what we can do is we can be aware of them. And we can change our behavior and our thoughts based on that. Vishakha Motwani: my god, that is such interesting information. I've never heard about it put that way. But how do you bring this cognitive bias to your workplace when you talk about this brain is lying to you? In what terms have you thought about it at the workplace and the things that you're doing, and your everyday work? Because I'm assuming like there is a lot of going coding going on in your space, there is AI, but having Having all that too, I think this still applies. So where do you take it from here to the workplace? Kate: Yeah, basically every decision that we make is affected by this cognitive biases, be it choosing a library, talking to someone, thinking about what to say. And I can give you a couple of examples, like on f couple of my favorite cognitive biases that I think everyone has to be aware of. So for example, there is cognitive bias, which is basically the tendency to notice information that supports what we already believe while ignoring information that doesn't exist. So We all do that. For example, you think that I don't know, like we have some kind of belief that I don't know, like I am I'm sick, right? For example, like I'm sick and I have some kind of sickness, and you know, we Google something, and then Google tells us, yeah, you have cancer. Like every time we have cancer, everyone has cancer. And then instead of questioning this thought that maybe I don't have cancer, actually. Maybe this is just I don't know, like a flu or something. We're diving deeper and we become obsessed with yeah, my god, I have cancer, because this is the belief that we just caught from Google. And this is what we do all the time. Like, if we believe anything, for example, I recently like learned from one of my friends that they like lots of people they don't know that for example UV passes through clouds. So people don't apply UV cream, sorry, sunscreen cream when it's cloudy. And they don't do that because they believe that yeah, like it's cloudy. Like it protects you. And then when they try to search for this information, especially before LLMs, right? They try to search for this information and they found they find the information that supports this belief that, yeah, clouds actually protect you from UV, because we can find any piece of information out there. So the confirmation bias is about specifically about that. It was actually first. Studied, if I remember right, by psychologists in 1960s. and so in those experiments they found that people usually always try to confirm their ideas instead of looking for evidence. And this was like incredibly interesting, and it sh it showed that our brains naturally prefer information that agrees with existing beliefs because it's faster, you know, it's like it's an easy way. And It's mostly good in most of our cases, like in our lives, it's completely fine. We shouldn't be questioning every belief that we have, every decision because we would go crazy. But when we're coding and when we're choosing a library, and we think that this library is a good library because we like it, and then we Google about this library and we are like, yeah, I found so many good evidences that this library is exactly what we need. And then people come to us and actually. It has some trade-offs, and I'm usually like, no, it's not. Because I don't want to believe that I'm wrong. Because being wrong is actually uncomfortable, right? Like accepting that we found something that might be like not correct is uncomfortable. So our brain is like, no, no, you're fine, you're fine. Don't think about that. So yeah, this is like one of my favorites, actually, and I see it all over the place. People always make these mistakes of falling down for that just because they are not aware. Vishakha Motwani: I love that because this is so important when you're doing technical conversations. It makes it it makes you wanna be open, like they're not challenging you, they're not going against you the when the people are talking about the trade-offs. It's just the fact that they might have done a little more research or they might have they're coming from a different background. So they might have a different perspective on things. Having said that, like trying to find evidence or trying to go after an idea, how do you propose that developers or I think any leader for that matter, any engineer or a leader for that matter, how do you propose that what are the things that we should challenge ourselves to explore more? Or how do we understand maybe like I decided that, you know what, I don't want to eat I don't want to use tailwind, but then let's say it's it's supporting my claims, but how do you kind of understand between those two things that yes, my decision is really right, like this is what I wanna be, this is where what I wanna go with versus trying to find something else? Kate: It's a really good question actually, and I think that this is one of the most challenging questions, especially as you correctly mentioned, leads might face. Vishakha Motwani: Yeah, yeah. Kate: because it's really hard to also fall for yeah, I'm just right. I am a lead here and this will be my responsibility. And it doesn't say anything bad about this person specifically, right? It's just about they them taking the responsibility after that. But what I think is really important in terms of like technical decisions and what we Should do, I would say, is that we should always remember that there are trade-offs and there are no perfect solutions, there are no perfect decisions anywhere in software development. So I personally I really dislike Tailwind, and it's really funny that you mentioned that because like I really dislike it. I it's my personal taste, and I I do not like it. But in my current company where I work, we use Tailwind, and I'm like, okay. There are trade-offs, and I understand why you chose Tailwind in the first place. And I understand why it's okay to have it right now, right? It the trade-offs that it has, we can live with them. And the advantages that it gives us, they are They serve us. So that's good. And we should always look for not only for what this technology brings to us, but also what it will take from us, you know, like what are the trade-offs. And I think this is one of the most important things because people usually they usually look for only good things. So only something that will be fantastic if they proceed with this decision, not something that will be bad, you know. this is also some kind of some somehow. Like a stoic view, you know, like when you pursue some stoic beliefs, you think that and you try to frame your thinking in a way that like everything will fall apart. Everything will fall apart, and you should be ready for that. You shouldn't be like anxious or nervous about that. You just should be ready. You just think you should think about every possible way how it will fall apart, and you will be ready for that. And if it won't, perfect. Nothing nothing nothing bad, but if it will fall apart, you are ready. So this is exactly the same. Like we should be ready for every possible outcome, negative or positive that will that might arise. Vishakha Motwani: Yes, I I love that you put it this way that we should be ready for it's almost like taking responsibility for the decisions that you're making and at the time you're making, right? And there are so many times we go back, like you said, about using tailwind or whatever technology for that matter you're using, you kind of sit down and you're like, Why would you use that? Like, why would somebody go and choose Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: that? But then you also need to give grace to that person who made the decision at the time. They might have thought that that's the best decision they've made. So if I bring it forward, let's say you did make a decision, you were aware of your trade-offs, you saw like three possible solutions, and it's a process of elimination, right? Like you keep a list of ten things, then you keep on removing. This is definitely not for us, this is definitely not for us, and you come back to like. Making a decision between two or three of these, and they have equivalent trade-offs, and you consider every external environment variable that you have, you pick one. Now, you said that we want to be ready for everything if it falls apart. How do you bring that conviction to your decision? And I asked that from a place of making decisions as a senior engineer. Where I know there is a lot at stake, right? Like I want to be able to defend my decision in some way, but also not regret choosing what I chose. how do you balance these two things? Like, are you defending your decision or you just boulder into it? Like, okay, this is what we have chosen, let's give it our all, let's let's give it a shot, right? So that could be like angular, you chose React. And like whatever happened at the end of the day, sticking with it and being able to defend your decision, how do you go about that? Kate: Yeah, it's also a good question, and I would say that it all goes down to the team you're working with, right? Because if you have a lot of people who are usually disagreeing with you, in this case, obviously you need to protect your decision, need to defend that, but in a way that they like that your team understands what exactly you are fighting for, let's say, right? And it should be like a real fight, of course. It shouldn't be like lots of conflicts, but We should speak, like, for example, I and my team we should speak the same language. Otherwise, we wouldn't understand each other, right? And I should understand why they are, for example, against or why they might be against in the future, versus why they prefer something different. And in the example that you mentioned, that for example, there are like let's say two libraries, let's say libraries, right, they have the same trade-offs, and I don't have any preferences between these two, and I didn't work with With any of those, I will ask my team because I think that in the end collaboration is what is really important, and if we collaborate, we all win. And if I am alone and I am just like free radical doing my old stuff, in this case, obviously I would fall, I would fall for something that I just personally like, maybe syntaxes wise or I don't know, like Maybe I do like documentation of this specific library if I don't have any other preferences and if I think that trade-offs are valuable. but also sometimes it's important to also understand in which state are we right now. So are we startup, are we scale up, what is our two-year horizon, or like what our C level people think about? Because it's also really important, right? So yeah, I think there are lots of things that should be taken into consideration, but what your Team things I think is very important also. Vishakha Motwani: absolutely. I think this kind of hopefully this helps people to understand that, you know, you're not in this alone. You have people around you that you can pull from their experiences and learn from them as well at this point, even if you're the one making the decision, taking responsibility of that decision, right? If we were to go a little bit in a different direction in saying that you you said that we need to understand where you're at, what's your starting point. Yeah. At the level that we are, or how does somebody get a big picture? Because when I hear about that, like what could go wrong, or where am I at? Like, that's a lot of information to process for one person. And as you said, like there could there would be collaboration, but ultimately it kind of comes down to even when you're contributing to another decision, you want to have that big picture view or an eyes on the Price, how Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: do you navigate, get collecting this information and being present in a meeting where I think you rightly said, like everybody agreed a little too fast. And at that point, if I had five people in the meeting and everybody almost agreed, it would I would almost be sitting back and being like, I don't think my like the different idea that I have is actually worthy of being presented here because of the things that I saw differently. So yeah, how do we collect these pieces of information? And the second part of it would be how do you present it in a way that gives a different perspective to other people? Kate: So there are two different questions and I would proceed with each of them separately. So first of all, speaking about how do we collect the information, right? I think it's also really good question. Thank you for asking that. Because we can always go too far. We can overthink things, and we tend to overthink things, especially when we are When we know a lot. The more we know, the more information we feel that we're missing, because there are lots of different areas where like, okay, maybe this is something that's important, maybe this is, and also the deeply you're involved into the product you're working with is also tightly connected to how much information you have, right? And how much information you think you need. So I would say that there is always like a sweet spot, some kind of balance. that we still need to cut some of the information that might come to us. but I think what is really important is in the end, why we are all doing this is we're doing this for our customers. And this is like one of the most important things. We wouldn't be doing software development if and like any software if there were no customers, right? So in the end, it all goes down to the customer. So So I think that this is the most important piece, and all of the decisions we should make, how it affects customers, and all of the information that we gather should be around that. And after that, going down, we can discuss different libraries, different decisions, different infrastructure, architecture, all of that, but it all should be connected to customers. And I think this is what is like the most important thing. And speaking about how do we present the information, it's also a really good question because, yeah, as I mentioned before, lots of people yeah, we should speak the same language, right? And there is the term that I also really like from cognitive sciences, which is called inferential distance. And this is basically a distance in terms between two people. So, for example, I can use a word and you can use a word, but we can think that these words have slightly different meanings, you know? And for example, there is one. Person who knows a lot about this topic and another person who doesn't know anything. And they might use the same terms, but they can understand completely different things from the conversation just because they don't know what they are knowing at this point. So to break this inferential distance is really hard because sometimes you just don't know what other people know or not. So when I try to present the information to my team, for example, I'm always thinking about what they already know. And I'm trying Trying to go extra miles sharing some extra information, some extra terms, extra data. Maybe they already know that. I'm asking them, okay, guys, if you know, just like tell me, we will cut this. But if they don't, it's really important for them to understand. So, yeah, I think this is the most important thing, like speaking the same language. And if we speak the same language, after that everything is clear. Vishakha Motwani: That Natalie. even the the part about like speaking the same language, when you said like be you could be speaking the same term, but it could mean two different things for you. at that time it's just more, in my opinion, being open to other persons' views and taking in what they might have to say or understanding their concept and like why, what's your reason for supporting this or not supporting this claim, whatever, right? I I think this comes down to something that we spoke about it in your intro that you help get developers unstuck, which is you hinted it a little bit in your previous answer that you kind of give them more information or help people try to speak the same language. Is there more to helping the developers getting unstuck that you've seen in your real life? Kate: of course, of course. like developers are people, right? And people have feelings and most of the developers unfortunately don't know what to do with those. Like they feel something and they don't know what they feel and how they feel and like like lots of people I met throughout my career, they even find it hard to communicate with each other just because they are from different cultures, they're from different backgrounds, and they don't even know how to I don't know, speak to each other like properly, you know, like with respect and how to understand that Someone if someone says something, it has nothing to do with me, it has something to do with them. And this is one of the most important. learnings I would say I took from psychology in general that my feelings and my thoughts are about me, and your feelings and your thoughts are about you. And I faced it so many times that developers could be stuck not only because of some technologies, right? Or misunderstanding the docs, or yeah, just some some software things, but also because they don't know how to communicate. And this is also what I'm usually helping people with. I organize some. Some, of course, like some knowledge sharing sessions and some retros all of that. But what is really important for me is to give people a room to speak, you know? And when they have this time, and when they are not like put on the spotlight, but just like kindly asked, could you please share what do you think about this or that? And they feel secure and they feel that this is the room for them, and they are. open they become open and they wanna share, they wanna talk. And in these teams I see that the Atmosphere becomes much better, much healthier. And I feel that this is what is really important, you know, because technology in the end, yeah, like of course there are lots of things that documents can be written really poorly, and this is 100%. SDK might fail, and this is also 100%. But if we don't know how to communicate with each other, all of that doesn't matter because we won't be even able to read through these docs without getting, I don't know, like So I think this is what comes yeah, what what's really important for me to be honest. Vishakha Motwani: I feel so called out on this world because there are times when I have taken people's comments or questions in a way that, do you think that I I cannot do it well? Or like something that I would have presented, but it takes time to realize that now it's not about you. It's because they've seen a different world. Or maybe more well, they might have had more experience. And this specially comes down to like some I found this gap in communication, especially with maybe leaders or people who've had a little bit of more experience, even sometimes with junior engineers too. Like, you know, that's something that they're just not aware of, and you'd be like, why? Why didn't I think of saying that, like making that upfront, that this is an assumption you can make? But in that case, how do you close that gap? Because I when you said that about articulating your answers or the topic that you're discussing, I found that I was articulating it well. However, there was some context around it that I was missing or or I wasn't able to maybe sometimes speak the product language or the design language. So those gaps, how can you work towards closing them? I know you cannot be all perfect overnight, but there are some things that you've done, you've read some things that would have helped you get to that point, get to that same level of understanding. Kate: Yeah, first of all I want to say that like I myself I experienced so many moments when I also was like my god, I what did I'm so stupid? why did I say this? Why did I react this way? They didn't mean anything. I read the room completely wrong, and all of those moments when I was ashamed or felt guilty or like embarrassed, I was like, all of those moments they taught me basically how to react and how to be with other people because. Regardless of how much information we know, we're still shaping ourselves only when we are with other people, only when we are inside a team or in a community or something like that. So answering your question about, like, for example, product terms that you don't know, right? I think we if there is a context that you are not aware of. There is no way you can get it out. There is no way you can find it if you have no idea that there are some things that you don't know. Because there are things that we know. There are things that we know that we don't know. And there are things that we don't know that we don't know. And this is the most like the scariest part, the part that it's really hard to grasp because we have no idea that we don't know that, right? So as soon as like how I pursued that, as soon as, for example, during the meeting, like I joined a new company, right? And there is a meeting and there are lots of people speaking and there is a lot of information and I don't get something, I am trying not to interrupt them right away, but I write everything down and then I reach out to a specific person who I think might be involved with these terms or in this context, something like that, and I'm like, hey man, girl, I don't know. you please elaborate what was that and what is what I found most challenging is to overcome this fear of Like of being misunderstood and considered stupid, you know, because I'm like so they like in my previous company, they used to say the word entity, and they always said entity, entity, entity, and the like the term entity is kind of clean, I understand that, but I had no idea what it meant in their context. And it took me, I'm not lying to you, eight months to understand the term entity. Because in the beginning I was just too afraid to ask. I saw that other people who also joined also were kind of confused with Entity? What is that? What is that? What is that? Then I went to the Mission Impossible movie. I think it was the second or the third one. I don't know, I don't remember. And there was also an enemy which is called which was called Entity, and I was like, my god. It's like universe is speaking to me. I have to ask. I have to understand. And of course, after that, it was like, okay. Breathe in, breathe out, I will ask. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how they think about me. But if I don't understand that specific term, my job Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. Kate: might be useless, you know? So like Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. Kate: just just go for it. Just ask it. Don't be afraid to feel stupid. To like Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. Kate: it doesn't matter. Vishakha Motwani: Absolutely, I resonate with this so much and I found that as soon as I join a new company, I'm like, hey, these are my questions. I don't understand Kate: Mm-hmm. Vishakha Motwani: these basic things, maybe that I heard the terms, but the sooner you ask, the it's the easier it gets to keep on asking, but also then sharing it with other people. I remember I was onboarded on a new team. at the end of December, and I had another person joining, and it was so easy for me to transfer that knowledge. to tell them that this is how we sign up, this is how we log in, just in the product, and this is what the repositories are called. And when somebody says this, you you can expect that they're talking about a repository and not the product and things like that. So I completely agree with this idea of that if you don't understand something just put your I don't know ego pride aside and have the courage to ask this question in the I think even if people judge you, that's okay. I let's get over it because Kate: That's fine, yeah. Vishakha Motwani: anybody, everybody will someday somehow judge you. So let's get over that. Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: So now that we've talked about like how you can go about being aware of your own biases and researching and presenting that information, even understanding that we delved a little bit into communication and speaking up in meetings or outside of it, just it's just means of gathering information, right? And use that information in the best way possible in your current work environment. If we were to tie it back to the Cognitive bias, I bet that there are some new biases you're forming every time you collect a new information or you learn something new, right? And I'm assuming that this never ends. Like it's always a process of learning and discovering. So, in your time, like how do you what's been give me an example? Like, what has been your most recent experience? experience with something that you thought was like the best thing ever or you were against it and then you kind of changed your opinion towards it and said that you know what, this was my cognitive bias. Kate: You know, at some point, like it's really even hard to say was it my cognitive bias or was it just my wrong assumption? Because sometimes it's really hard to distinguish between these two. But I can say that a couple of years ago, like one of the biggest things that I remember, right? a couple of years ago I was so against microservices. I was so against that because before I didn't have this experience. I was working I think maybe in three years ago, I was working mostly with Monorepos, with Polyrepos, and I was like, Yeah, this is the way to do things. You have one repository, it's everything there, clear and right, perfect. But then I entered the company that had something about like 50 microservices, and I was like, my god, guys, why are you doing this? And I felt so frustrated every time when I needed to work with them, you know? And like I I felt these different feelings in me, and they were incredibly unhelpful for me to first of all work with new environments, work with new people, understanding new product. And I was just like so angry. I was like, Why did you choose this? This is so bad. Bad, you should my god, but then it took me some time and some realization inside of me that yeah, I have these feelings, it's fine, they are showing me something, but they're not against me, they're mine, you know. and then I found My way of understanding why did they choose this technology in the first place. And even if I still was slightly disagreeing with this specific approach that went up to a degree, yeah, like to so many microservices, I got the idea. Because if even if sometimes like There was a decision made, as you mentioned also in the beginning, someone made a decision sometimes in the past. And we maybe don't even know this person right now. We didn't know, we don't know like why did they make this choice? But maybe, maybe, just maybe, they were under some kind of pressure. There was some kind of incident. And that's how also like when we face legacy code, right? I'm like, my god, how? Uh-huh. But then you run git blame and it's all with me, you know? So like because There w there was a pressure. There was pressure that we didn't see. We don't see right now. And so Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. Kate: we should be kind to ourselves and we should be kind to other people. But yeah, like this microservices versus monary was my my yeah my challenge. Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. my gosh. I bet you learn from it, but this is so crucial for people listening to this, even for me, that you know, when somebody's throwing a new thing at you or if they're asking you something, just shift that moment into curiosity instead of judgment and go in one level deeper. Hey, what could be what could possibly have made them driven them to make this choice and you'll start to see yourself opening up a little more. It's almost like finding your five why's why did this happen? And you'll get to Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: be learning more from other people, other decisions, and especially at org levels, there are so many factors that we can't even like count on the fingertips. So Kate: Course, yeah. Vishakha Motwani: that I I love that example. Thank you so much for sharing. And okay, we are Kate: Course. Vishakha Motwani: at the part of the show that where I ask every guest the same three questions. So Kate, if someone remembers only one thing from this conversation, what would you want that to be? Kate: I think that the main idea I wanna share is that we should be kind to ourselves and to each Vishakha Motwani: Cells. Kate: other. And this is one of the simplest thing, but at the same time one of the most tough and difficult thing to pursue because we Vishakha Motwani: Honest. Yeah. Kate: don't know when we should be kind, how we should be kind, and how we should do that. Vishakha Motwani: We should be kind. Yeah. Kate: But we should be kind. This is really important. Vishakha Motwani: And that's that goes without saying, like, once you're kinder to yourself, you can be kind to others as well. But people often see it the other way that I need to be kind to others, but you know, it was my mistake. I should be ashamed, like I shouldn't have looked that stupid or anything like that. But that's that goes to say like once you find kindness for yourself, you'll have it to give to others, and that goes in your Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: personal and work life. And it'll just make your environment better, I think, when you work with people with that attitude. So I love that. second question that I have for you. Do you have a book, a show that you find yourself recommending to others over and over? Anything, a podcast Kate: yeah. Vishakha Motwani: book or show? Yeah. Yes. Kate: I do actually I do, yeah. So there are actually two books, but they are all by the same author. which Vishakha Motwani: Mm-hmm. Kate: is this is a book by Elisier Yodkowski. This is he was born in Poland and he's initially a Polish mathematician, but now he lives in the States and he is AI researcher. So he has two books. I think he might have more, but these two are really important to me. First of all if you I know that there are a lot of people who love Harry Potter and they read, they watched movies and all of that. And Elise Rutkovski has a book which is called Harry Potter and Rational Thinking or Methods of Rational Thinking, which is basically a book about like it's in the same universe with the same characters, main characters. But what if these main characters, meaning Harry, Hermione, and Malfoy, Would be rational, or would at least try to behave rational, you know? So it's it has the same magic, all of that, but in the end it has a completely different ending just because of this different assumption in the beginning that Harry Potter was born in Vishakha Motwani: So Kate: a family who loved him and who were physicists. So and Vishakha Motwani: no. Kate: it goes to a completely different story in the end. It's so interesting. And this was exactly the book that ignited this excitement about cognitive biases in me and about cognitive sciences in general. And there is a second book also by the same author, which is called Rationality from artificial intelligence to zombie. And this is more scientific book about statistics and cognitive biases and how we think. It's really thick, it's really hard to read, but it explains so many things in our brain, in our judgments, not from a biological perspective or like neurochemical, but from thinking processes. So why do we choose certain things? Why do we believe in certain things? Why do we, I don't know, choose this s like washing machine over this washing machine how market manipulates us. So it's like it's really interesting but it's really hard to read. But I Vishakha Motwani: Yeah. Kate: advise it to everyone all the time. Vishakha Motwani: I love it, I love it. I'm definitely going to start with the Harry Potter because I used to be a reader, but now I have kind of lost touch with reading. So I start with smaller, more feasible books that I can read and I finish so that it gives me a sense of accomplishment. But thank you for sharing that. And the last one is when the laptop closes, what do you do to actually switch off or disconnect? Kate: I have so many hobbies. one of my favorite which actually takes me out of my work routine like this is quantum physics. I have teacher and we do quantum physics lessons almost every week. And we all we do that After my work, so like it's 7 pm. I close my laptop, I open my home laptop, and we go to this lesson. And even if I'm super tired, I don't know, I had like really bad day. After five minutes of quantum physics lesson, I'm like, yeah, let's do more. It's some heavy math, some like integrals, something about waves, particles, and all of that. And I'm all the time so excited. And then I I go to my friends and I understand that there are no one around. me I can talk about that Vishakha Motwani: Get Kate: just because it's like it's so specific. My friend just called me nerd like you ain't nerd like that's it that's like Vishakha Motwani: Yes. Yeah. Kate: but this is something that really drives me crazy. I am so excited about that Vishakha Motwani: my gosh. I love that because I'll tell you like recently my daughter started a math class and she's been doing those word problems and things like that and I just sat there and was like, it's been so long that I haven't done these Kate: Yeah. Vishakha Motwani: and when I was solving that it was like it really puts your brain to work but in a way that's gentle. you are doing a lot more complicated stuff, but I love that I might be one day physics is not my thing really but I do love the idea of solving something that is out of my comfort zone and like just sitting with it and doing the thing focused. this is one of I I think people might want to create hobbies like that. My personally mine are very low effort. It's like journaling and like doing things that are more creative, painting and colours that gets me so excited. But I hope that people are able to find that even if you have a hobby like this, like as long as it takes you in the world where you want to be in, it helps you disconnect. It's completely okay. You don't have to have like a hobby that's acceptable or that you find somebody. I think you can find your own thing, find your own instructors, whether it's like going outdoors, going swimming, whatever it works for you and your body. I think that's so important for you to realize. But that's all I had for you, Kate. I am so thankful that you're here and this was the conversation that I hoped it would be. It was exactly like that. And thank you for coming to Unfiltered Engineer. See in the next one. Bye. Kate: Thank you so so much. Have a nice rest of the day. Bye bye.