The PAPERs Podcast

Farewell to an Era: The Final Episode of the Papers Podcast

Dear Listeners,

After more than a decade of insightful discussions, laughter, and learning, we are both excited and a bit teary-eyed to bring you the final episode of the Papers Podcast. This isn’t just an episode; it’s a heartfelt celebration of our journey together. From our humble beginnings recording in hotel rooms to becoming a beloved source of knowledge and camaraderie in the medical education community, we’ve cherished every moment with you.

In this special farewell episode, join Jason, Jonathan, Lara, and Linda as they reflect on the incredible progress in our field, share personal anecdotes, and express their deepest gratitude to you, our loyal listeners. We’ve laughed, we’ve learned, and we’ve grown together, and now it’s time to reminisce about the highlights and the friendships that have made this journey unforgettable.

Whether you’ve been with us from the start or joined us along the way, this episode is a tribute to you. So, grab your favorite beverage, settle in, and let’s take one last stroll down memory lane together. Thank you for being part of our story. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Episode 80 transcript. Enjoy PapersPodcast as a versatile learning resource the way you prefer- read, translate, and explore!

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Episode notes

• Embracing Diverse Methodologies: We’ve learned that rigor in research isn’t about sticking to one approach. From deep dives into qualitative methods to exploring the rise of mixed-methods studies, our discussions have shown that a balanced, eclectic approach is key to truly understanding our field. 

• The Value of Collaboration: Whether it was overcoming early tech hurdles or celebrating breakthrough moments, every member of our team—from hosts to producers—has played a vital role. Our shared journey was made richer by our willingness to learn from one another, adapt, and even laugh at our missteps. 

• Challenging the Norms: We’ve had our fair share of debates about publication pressures and the evolving academic landscape. Our reflections have encouraged us—and hopefully you—to think deeply about quality over quantity, to be thoughtful about our contributions, and to push back when academic incentives miss the mark. 

• Growing Through Change: From the days of tape recorders in hotel rooms to today’s digital platforms, our podcast has mirrored the evolution of our field. We’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of innovation—and the importance of staying open-minded, ready to have our minds changed by new ideas. 

• Celebrating Every Voice: One of our proudest achievements is fostering an inclusive space where diverse perspectives—from the global South and beyond—have a seat at the table. Our journey reminds us that progress in education comes from welcoming all voices and engaging in honest, sometimes challenging conversations.

To our loyal listeners

Thank you for tuning in, for your feedback, and for allowing our conversations to be a part of your professional lives. While this chapter of the Papers Podcast comes to a close, the insights, friendships, and passion for advancing our field will continue to inspire us—and, we hope, you—in all that comes next. 

With heartfelt gratitude, 

The PAPERs Podcast Team.

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Transcript of Episode 80

This transcript is made by an autogenerated text tool and some manual editing by the Papers Podcast team. Read more under “Acknowledgment”.

Jason Frank, Lara Varpio, Linda Snell, Jonathan Sherbino.

Start

[music]

Jason Frank

Welcome back to the Papers Podcast. We have a tiny announcement we want to share with you today.

Jonathan Sherbino:

So, after years, after more than a decade, we’re hanging up our microphones as a crew.

Lara Varpio::

It is the end of an era, but it’s not all sad. In this, our finale episode, we pulled together some pearls for you. It’s our way of saying thanks for taking this journey with us.

And here’s what we have in store for you. Five things. First of all, we want to thank you all, our dear and loyal listeners.

Second, and importantly, we want to recognize our production team, who make us sound way better than we really are. Next, we want to celebrate the progress in our field over the last decade. Talk a little bit about what we’ve learned, and as usual, have some fun.

Jason Frank:

All right. So, the whole crew’s here. It’s Jason talking.

You got John. You got Lava. You got Linda.

And by the way, just as a little aside, we’ll get to the content in a second, but I mentioned to Lava today that I got this email about some world ranking of med ed scholars. She’s turning red. You can’t see her, but med ed scholars.

And guess who was number one? Med ed scholars amongst highly ranked medical education scholars on this very scientific, like she loves scientific scales, by ScholarGPS, not sponsored by them at all. In fact, I don’t know who they are.

It’s probably some AI somewhere. And so, number one in the universe was Lava, like number one scholar of like the last five years. Like huge, just huge.

Thank you, everybody.

Lara Varpio:::

Does that mean we have to bow? We have to bow and scrape before you? No, no, no, no.

Jason Frank:

Lara’s horrifying.

Lara Varpio:

It just goes to show how badly these scales are like desperately not valid at all, forever or anything.

Jonathan Sherbino:

Just not accurate. That means after more than 11 years, we stop right at the moment when Farbio gets on board with my five point scale. Yay for us.

Lara Varpio:

So Lara, you’re coming up to visit us in a couple of days, and I think I’m going to use this in my introduction. I really, really hope you don’t. I do take bribes.

Well, apparently so does this site, because somebody put some money involved to get these rankings like this. This is not accurate.

Jason Frank

All right. Speaking of bribes and influence, this is a celebration of our time together as a crew making podcasts for you about the med ed and health professions education literature. I’ve been tasked with kind of a quick snapshot of our history, which is really impossible to do in a quick podcast, especially without a producer to write good notes for me.

So this is where I invoke our previous little gag about how it all started. It was my idea, because we did have a gag at one point where all of us were supposed to say how it was our individual idea each. And I think this actually began when John and I were in residency together, and we were listening to an emergency medicine.

It was on tapes at first, then CDs, now it’s streamed. But it was a secondary source that looked at the emergency medicine literature. And I thought, wouldn’t that be amazing if we could do a secondary source for medical education?

Help us all keep up with the literature, have a few laughs, maybe force some PhD to use a scale they don’t like. It was all part of a conspiracy that goes back, John, I’m not even sure. Is it 15 years, 20 years?

I can’t remember when we started anymore.

Jonathan Sherbino:

It’s a long time. Let’s not enumerate ourselves too much and really make ourselves sound older than we truly are. But I do remember that we dragged Linda kicking and screaming into a fancy hotel bar, the library bar in Quebec City, where we tried to explain to her what a podcast was.

And, you know, after a couple rounds, she begrudgingly said, yeah, well, I’m in. I think you also had to explain what the literature was.

Lara Varpio:

Yeah, exactly. Well, I knew what the literature was. Thank you, Jason.

I just couldn’t spell podcast.

Jason Frank:

Fair enough. And then our first episode was in what city? Where did we record it?

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, because we happened to be there on a workshop or something like that. So our original podcast was called Key Lime for loyal listeners. We had a dispute with the former institution that helped us produce it.

And they’ve gone off and used the name and took down all of our hundreds of episodes, like more than a decade’s worth. And I got a few of you writing to us saying, hey, I use that episode for my master’s group or I use that episode for my journal club. How do I get it?

So that was the Key Lime years. We had a lot of fun. We had massive downloads and we were very, very thrilled.

We worked with a couple of long suffering staff who helped us. So a big shout out to Cynthia Abbott for helping us keep it in line and for on a weekly basis, Wendy Jemmett, who did her best to try and corral us into a logical podcast. When we left Key Lime, we looked around for what to do next.

And we had this wonderful conversation with Teresa Sörö. So Teresa from Karolinska Institutet, and she’s just this amazing leader in health professions, education and education technology in Sweden. And she brought her team to the table and we we jumped on and we’ve never looked back.

So what a wonderful team. I want to just take a moment to thank everybody we’ve worked with over the last three years. Teresa has been our executive producer.

Samuel Lundberg has been our technical producer. Lara to this day calls him Simon. I don’t know why.

It’s just a weird thing she does.

Lara Varpio:

So not true.

Jason Frank:

She’s still in denial about it. And then Media is Louise Gren. OK, how do I do this?

Gren show? Gren Que.

Lara Varpio:

Did I do it right? Gren Que.

Jason Frank:

Oh man, I’m really, I’m sorry, Louise. Webmasters were Andrew Maurer and Alex Anderson. And so what a wonderful team.

We’ve enjoyed you immensely and you’ve been good to us.

Lara Varpio:

You know, Jason, I don’t think you should be allowed to play hockey because those names to me all sound like hockey players. And if you can’t pronounce them, you should be barred from the rink.

Jonathan Sherbino:

It’s true. It’s true. So, Jason, I think about the history of our tech.

We started with a tape recorder around a desk in a hotel room, which is maybe the most awkward way to record this ever. So true. We advanced to a conference call system.

Please dial three to be let in and your passcode is. And so that came with all of the excellent audio quality one might come to know and love from from conference calls. And then we went to various versions of digital platforms.

And then finally, more as podcasting has become more accessible and has really taken over the whole media market. We finally got into good tech with the thanks and support from Samuel and others. But I’ll tell you, if there’s one consistent theme in everything we’ve always done still to this day, none of you.

Well, three to the four hosts really struggle on the tech side.

Jason Frank:

Listen, I you know, don’t be so hard on yourselves. I am the one that does tech really well. And oh, and we forgot to mention that we replaced John with an A.I. about three years ago. I don’t know where John is today, but his A.I. does amazing.

Lara Varpio:

Yeah. And he does it in the in this little closet on his princess chair. I still haven’t seen the princess chair, although I’d love to one of these days.

Jonathan Sherbino:

The princess chair might go. I mean, not that we’re ever going to be inducted into any kind of media hall of fame, but if the Smithsonian wants some faux plastic pink leather, that is ideal for a five year old. I’m I’m more than happy to auction that off.

Lara Varpio:

Leatherette, I’m sure. So the in terms of the history, I can’t tell you guys how much how much I appreciated you reading the email. I cold call sent you once upon a time, suggesting that perhaps if you were going to do qualitative research reviews, that perhaps we ought to read a little bit more about qualitative research.

And then you very bravely and generously invited me on to this show. So being part of your being the fourth musketeer for the past, I don’t even know how many years it’s been, but it’s been such a hoot. And I just am ever so grateful for the opportunity.

Like, seriously, you guys just you all I did was come and have an extra opinion. You guys you guys carry the show.

Jason Frank:

So fun.

Lara Varpio:

So let’s talk a little bit about what we’ve learned as we’re sort of getting into this. It’s been somewhere around 500 papers. And I got to say, I think I started at a much more novice level than than John, for sure.

Jason, I’m not so sure about. But, you know, I had a lot to learn and did learn. And a couple of things I’d like to pull out first is and this has really been beaten into us by our friend, Lara, the link between methods and theories or paradigms where each informs the others.

And as the decade has progressed, more papers that explicitly mention their framework. I know Lara is going to talk about this. I reviewed all of the papers, abstracts.

Couldn’t get to the key lime ones. And I counted over three dozen methods, methodologies. This isn’t talking about the paradigms.

This is just how people do their their education research. And so I’ve certainly learned a lot about some of those weird methods. Not weird, a little bit less used.

We’ve covered a huge range of topics from critical theory to chat, which is cultural, historical activity theory, to commentaries or case studies or culinary medicine. Yes, I am trying to alliterate. And I could probably alliterate with many other letters in the alphabet as well.

The other thing is how much we draw from other fields, sociology, anthropology, the world of academe, leadership, economics, business, you name it. Medical education or health professions education really is a field picks on all of those other fields. And finally, and I’m really sorry, Lara and John, I have to say this though, Jason has the best titles.

Jason Frank:

It’s true.

Lara Varpio:

I don’t know, Jason, it’s no wonder you spend so long on preparing each podcast. I’m sure at least six hours of it is thinking about a good title.

Jason Frank:

That’s exactly right. I spend 10 minutes on the paper and then about the rest of the day thinking about the best title that would top anything John could think of. I think I succeeded, that’s just my take on it.

Goals.

Lara Varpio:

Titles are my nemesis. I don’t know if you all have noticed over the years, but I’m always pulling lines from movies or songs because I’ve got, seriously, my nemesis when it comes to academia is having a good title. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this to you, but I struggle so much with catchy titles that I accidentally once plagiarized myself by picking the same little pithy title front piece to go with a completely different paper, like two completely different papers and I picked the same little front.

I had to change it and beg forgiveness from an editor. Jason, I give you the best titles.

Jason Frank:

Thank you very much.

Lara Varpio:

I crown you deputy.

Jason Frank:

I’ve accomplished something in my life.

Jonathan Sherbino:

Well, I’m gonna think about what I’ve learned over, is it 500 episodes really? Is that where we’re at? We think it’s about 500 papers, just as a rough estimate.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I guess, I’m not sure if this is a phenomenon or just how I’ve observed the literature, but it’s interesting to see the shifts or the themes or the kind of the tides that happen in literature. But I was gonna reflect back more than a decade ago.

Again, it might’ve been what I was paying attention to, but it felt like we were looking at surveys and we were looking at experimental elements and we were looking at a lot of simulated environments to test and we used a very kind of experimental lens that we’re using a post-positivist approach to these kinds of elements. And now it seems that we probably really, or at least I struggle, because I’m always trying to find that experimentalist bent to compliment the heavy subjectivist and orientation that we’ve had with many of our papers. And they usually turn out to be those are the best papers of the year.

So it’s not that I really don’t think that it’s a feature of necessarily as try to hold to one orientation, but that what you’re seeing as a methodology to address these more rich and complex questions are going there. But now I’m also starting to see the move into mixed methods research, as we’re trying to bring in new disciplines and new methodologies into us as a field. So that’s exciting to me to see these kinds of changes back and forth.

I think at one point innovation was kind of a dirty word in the health professions education literature. And it felt a lot like show and tell, I did something and I’m gonna show you that I liked it. And that was sufficient as a marker of innovation.

And now we’re seeing very complex evaluations of innovations. I think of some of the work around eco-normalization as a framework. I think of the whole adoption of implementation science into much of the type of literature that we’re seeing in HPE.

And so it’s not a sense of maturity, but it’s a sense of continued growth. Because I think as a field, we are a mature field. We have a number of generations of scholars in this field and the type of production of scholarship we’re producing is excellent.

But I guess the challenge of course, is that I’m always surprised when I find out in completely new journal that has relevance to us. And that’s been one of the kind of the Easter egg moments for me in doing this podcast. No matter what, there’s always a new journal for me to discover.

Didn’t we cover something on one of the holiday episodes about journals for medical humor, or like there’s an actual legitimate, but then there’s regional versions of these types of journals. Like I continue to be astounded by what’s out there, reminding me how much a challenge it is to wrap your arms and maintain some kind of currency with what’s coming next. So I guess the biggest thing is that meta piece about the excitement that there’s always more to learn and the excitement by how we continue to advance the scholarship by drawing in new methodologies and that there are these ebbs and flows about here’s our approaches that we’re using.

I guess the counter to that is I would, I’m kind of secretly glad that the archive is gone because I’m not sure if I’d ever want to go back and listen to what I believed or thought 10 years ago.

Linda Snell:

Yeah.

Jonathan Sherbino:

Thank God that I’ve changed my mind. I very much kind of held to that motto, strong convictions loosely held. I really want to draw opinions on this podcast, but I’m quite prepared to have my mind changed.

And my God, there’s I bet you a few things back in the day that have really changed my mind. The most notable example for me is my poo-pooing of narrative review. Boom.

I have changed my perspective. Thank you to Javid Sukera. So you can stop cheering Lava, but he wrote a paper around narrative review that really made me go, ah, now I get it.

And so I’m glad that things continue to evolve. I’m glad that I continue to have my mind changed. My strong opinions are very loosely held.

Jason Frank:

John, that is such a good segue because I’ve made a list of all the times you were wrong in those 500 papers. This is gonna be a two hour episode, right? This may take a few minutes.

I’ll just skip over that. You go ahead Lara.

Lara Varpio:

I was just gonna say, I appreciate so much when you say the dangers of listening to what you thought or said 10 years ago. Have you ever read some of your first manuscripts? Some of the oldest ones?

It was very cringeworthy.

Jonathan Sherbino:

It’s terrible. Very cringeworthy.

Lara Varpio:

And to the point, just because we’re reflecting on careers here. One of my earliest manuscripts has the number of pages of transcripts data I had because the journal said that my work wasn’t legitimate without some quantification of the data set itself. There’s no comment about font size or double space.

It could be one word on every page, but it was going back in time and looking at or listening to the things you once wrote. If that doesn’t make you stay humble in the face of all the scope and breadth and depth of the things that we have to learn, I don’t know what will.

Jason Frank:

Wow. You just reminded me, Lava, you think we’ve come a long way with qualitative papers in our field. I was working with somebody, one of my colleagues, Stella Yu, and she submitted a qual paper to a clinical journal.

And they wrote back just classic 1990s comments. We really enjoyed the quotes, didn’t understand the methods. Sorry, we can’t accept your paper.

Boom. We’re back in the 90s. Lava, you got reflections?

Lara Varpio:

I do. So, you know, in preparing for today’s episode, I found myself thinking, if you have only two rants left, Lara, what do you want to rant about? So I have two.

And the first one, it touches on some of the things that you mentioned, Linda. The idea that our field exists because of the variety and diversity of voices that are here to me is one of the most important things about health professions education, about the field of health professions education. And the fact that we signal our paradigmatic orientations now, as opposed to once upon a time when I first came into the field, we surely didn’t.

I’m so grateful that we do that because it allows us and enables us to think explicitly about the diversity of our perspectives and to really hold on to and wrestle with the fact that if we’re going to understand these really tricky phenomena that are part of the science and the art of medical education, then we need to bring all the tools of the scientific table to bear on those questions. And that means that we need to be paradigmatically promiscuous and just embrace it. And in fact, one of the things that I find, found myself thinking as I was preparing for this, and John, I’m gonna say this and then I’m gonna like deny that I ever said it even though it’s recorded, just, you know, whatever.

I hope our field continues to do rigorous and thoughtful quantitative and qualitative research. In fact, yeah, no, you can stop cheering. Oh my goodness, you should see for the, you know, everybody’s mouth is, jaws are dropping here.

But I think the qualitative research we do is excellent and so is the quantitative research. And like any field, we see swings. We see swings in the way we think about topics or ways we conceptualize phenomena.

Same thing with methodologies. I, sometimes I worry a little bit that our methodological swing on the qual side, you have to know I love it, but I want to encourage our field to continue to be paradigmatically promiscuous. Let’s swing back on the quant side too.

Let’s keep the tension that is so productive of different orientations and different ways of thinking. Let’s signal our paradigms and let’s be eclectic because that, my friends, is just the fricking gold of what we do. Because I feel that way.

Number two, my second rant that I, I pause a little bit just because what I’m about to say might make some people angry, but that’s never stopped me before. So why would it stop me now? In having looked at our journals every year, every edition for years and years now, I’ve come to start to reflect on the quantity and quality of the manuscripts that we produce and publish in our field.

We have published lots of things and the quality of those things that we publish can be highly variable. And I want to encourage all of us to continue to think about what is our responsibility as scholars to marshal the publication space. And that’s not just for us as authors, it’s for editors, it’s for associate editors, it’s for publishers.

We need to have a diversity of things. We need to be studying a diversity of phenomena from a variety of ways, but we also need to be thinking about how much we’re putting out there. Because as we just said earlier, it is getting near impossible to keep your arms around our field.

It is getting near impossible to keep track of what’s being said by whom, where, and then also having to be critical of the methodologies. We need to be thoughtful about our publication space and not inundating it with quantity at the sake of quality, because the quality is highly variable and that’s a problem. And this brings me to my last point in the second round, because it’s about the many degree programs that have become ever so popular in our field, master’s and PhD programs in health professions education.

There is a place for all of them. There is a place for each of them to be a little bit different. And I am a big believer that if you’re gonna do research, if you’re gonna do scholarship, you have to be thinking about how do I share this in a way that’s meaningful for our community?

But what I do worry about is that some of these programs are starting to look like paper mills. The whole point is just to put out another paper and it doesn’t matter what the quality of that manuscript is. I hope that everybody in our field is worried about that.

I hope that every senior author who’s listening, any senior scholar who’s listening has a question to themselves about when they should not be on a paper, when a paper should not be in existence, when they should get out of the way, because their thinking is holding things back because we need to be more thoughtful about the quantity and quality of the papers we put out there. So let’s do ourselves a service. Let’s keep our eclectic paradigmatic tensions.

And let’s also have a thought before we hit submit about whether this is good enough. Is it making a substantial contribution? How do I make sure that I’m doing rigorous work?

You know, Laura, I agree with you. And you said earlier on what’s the role of editors or editors-in-chief and associate editors, et cetera. The trouble is that there’s a tension there with academe, with deans, with promotions committees, with people who say you, I mean, when I came up for promotion, the first thing my chair did was start counting the number of papers I’d written.

I was, I don’t know if many of our listeners know this, I was turned down for promotion to full professor four times because of the number of things, of whatever it was, criteria wasn’t being met. It’s a problem, absolutely. But we are the field.

We are the editors. We are the ones sitting on promotion and tenure committees. And if it’s gonna start to change, it’s gonna take more than one of us fighting back.

It’s gonna take all of us saying the markers of success need to evolve.

Jason Frank:

LeeAnne looked at ScholarGPS where you’re number one, that’s clearly the problem with your department heads. All right, I’m gonna pick it up from there. So I’ve always tried, since we’ve been together, to try and bring a clinician educator’s view or a clinician teacher’s view of all these literature that we’ve been looking at.

And I know I’ve driven you crazy with some of the choice of my papers, but I’ve just been fascinated by that high, that breadth of our field and all of these people working away from their own perspective and their own environment and trying to share their own scholarship with all of us. Here’s kind of my take home, so just reflecting on those 500 papers we did together. The first, I just have to say, all of our conversations about epistemic alignment have really changed my practice.

I really think about that now. I really coach people that I work with now. Linda, you wanna jump in on that?

Lara Varpio:

Yeah, I just wanna say that 10 years ago, you couldn’t even spell epistemic, let alone- I still have trouble spelling epistemic alignment, but that’s okay.

Jason Frank::

I now understand what it is. Here’s another take home from all of our episodes. If you listen to our episodes, you will hear repeatedly key references for a given methodology.

And there are just some classic, classic references that we’ve recommended repeatedly because they capture the current zeitgeist for a methodology. That doesn’t mean that they’re mandatory, but they are probably helpful for a lot of people. And they’re part of that rising tide floats all boats thing that Lava was talking about.

Here’s another take home. I think there’s an imbalance of voices from the Global South. We’ve started to deliberately look for voices from Global South when we choose papers.

And we try to get those voices to the table and they have some different things to say because of different settings and backgrounds and so on. Having said that, I think there’s a journal for every paper. I think there are people out there whose voices we wanna hear.

And for those who are struggling to get papers published, there’s probably a different community that you need to target. And here’s my last thought. And this one’s a little bit more serious.

And that is, are we really advancing our field? We read a lot of papers that are so specific, don’t reference prior work. Sometimes I wonder if every issue of a journal is advancing our field.

And that’s my reflection. What do you guys think of that thing?

Lara Varpio:

I don’t disagree. And in fact, I think one of the things that we need to be, as I mentioned, one of the things that we need to be thinking about really hard is what contribution does my manuscript make? And just because, I can cite work, there’s a great opinion piece by Jeff Norman about salami slicing and all those sorts of things or about what’s really relevant research if it’s only affecting left-handed individuals from some corner of a small universe far, far away.

But I think you raise a point, Jason, that I’ve reflected on too. We just, what do we actually, how does this paper advance us? What’s the real contribution?

And you know what the good news is? If you’re sitting there going, maybe it doesn’t, it’s okay because it just means you gotta push a little further. You gotta think a little harder, find another way of orienting yourself because I guarantee you there is a new angle there.

There’s a contribution in your data set and your way of thinking. You just gotta push it a little further. One of the things you mentioned, Jason, was the imbalance of voices from the Global South.

I think we have to remember that we’ve been looking at journals in English. There are fill-in-the-blank country Journal of Medical Education in multiple languages, multiple countries. And they are producing stuff, yeah, okay, they’re perhaps a little bit more local, but they are relevant to the context that they’re in.

And many of them, unfortunately, if they aren’t translated, but even if the abstract was translated, it might reach a broader audience. So I think we have to start thinking about how people can get published, not only in English. I was looking at a number of applicants for our master’s degree program, many of whom had multiple publications in whatever their first language was.

And clearly knew the field, but I couldn’t tell anything more about it, unfortunately.

Jason Frank:

All right, hey, those are our anecdotes, our reflections, our thoughts on all of us collaborating for you about trying to bring you the literature on a weekly basis. So now it’s our time to sign off. And so I’m gonna throw that to the team.

Lara Varpio:

Well, I’m gonna start by just saying the podcast has stopped, but it’s not like we’re leaving the scene. We’re around. We will see you at conferences and calls.

And I look forward to interacting with all of you as listeners as time goes on. Thank you so much for being part, willing to listen to us on a regular basis. Not always sure, we always had words of wisdom, but hopefully maybe once or twice, we may just smile.

And I started saying something during COVID that I think bears repeating here as the only non-clinician on this podcast. To all of you who are clinician educators, who are working in clinical spaces, who are teaching and doing all the hard work of moving our field forward from somebody who doesn’t have a clinical degree, thank you. Thank you for what you do.

Thank you for the time you invest. Thank you for the support you provide to others. And from the other side of the bed, just thank you.

And then to the three of you for being my friends, for demonstrating to me time and again what a real friend looks like and how you stand up and uplift each other and others and me. These conversations have been some of the best I’ve ever had. To everything there is a season.

And it’s time for the Papers podcast to come to an end. But of course our friendship does it. But more than anything, I just want to say thanks for all the laughs and all the fun.

Jonathan Sherbino:

Well, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. So, so far, so good. I’m also pleased that our last episode is not like the last episode of Seinfeld where Kramer almost crashes the plane and they all go to jail.

So I’m pleased that we’re all alive and none of us are incarcerated. It’s not over yet. My tag, fair, fair.

My tagline has always been thanks for listening. And I mean that legitimately. This has been an act of love for the four of us done off the side of our tables, trying to fit into busy schedules, sometimes conflicting with important personal or professional activities at the same time.

It’s amazing to me that people have listened and that they’ve been so encouraging. When we get letters from you, some of them we get the chance to read, but some of them we just don’t have the capacity to read them all. When we get someone who comes up and says, you know what, this has been helpful or this has been influential, or this was, the podcast was a reason for me to try something different in my professional life.

Those things are really treasured. When I’ve played the podcast in my car with my kids, they’re like, what is that? Get that off.

This is horrendous. So it has been quite lovely to have people encourage us for this work. And I think that’s the greatest piece.

But I would echo what Lara said and what we’ve all said off mic, which is working with the three of you has been a great privilege. I’m so glad that we continue to work on other projects. And so glad that I won’t have to be troubleshooting your technology anytime soon.

Lara Varpio:

You know you’ve got all this time now, yeah?

Jonathan Sherbino:

It’s like, what would you do for a living if you’re not helping us? AV repair, I have a whole career coming. But I guess for the last time, thanks for listening.

Jason Frank:

All right, and I’ll close this off. I also wanna say thanks to our listeners. We’ve enjoyed doing live episodes with you and hearing your laughter, hearing your banter, shouting out why John’s wrong, all those kinds of things that are really important.

We’ve had a couple of people come up to us and say that one of our episodes inspired them to do a career in med ed or a master’s in med ed. And that’s really humbling to hear that. We’ve had lots of you say that you use our episodes in journal clubs and in master’s classes and so on.

We’ve had a bunch of you say you disagreed with some of the things we said and we get it and that’s okay, that’s part of the discourse. And all of it’s been rewarding. Thank you again to the KI team for doing just amazing, amazing work in producing this podcast.

High quality, you are professionals and we appreciate you. And speaking of appreciations, I just try to think of an appreciation for each of you who I’ve enjoyed working with and I think of you as family. Linda, I know that you’re a morning person because when we record really late in the day, you yawn during episodes and not just when John’s talking.

And so we’ve learned, because you get up early for swimming. I appreciate that you bring your breadth of experience. You’ve been an education dean in every category and you’ve always got anecdotes about that.

Lava, you know I love you like a sister and I really do think that you are a giant. Scholar GPS is onto something. All of your papers I use and they influence me heavily and I hate to admit it, but it’s totally true.

You are a genius in our field. And John, you are actually the smartest guy I know. You’re my brother.

I don’t know a lot of guys, but you are the smartest guy I know and you’re my brother from another mother and I appreciate, man, all the things that you know and you bring to our table. You humbly bring all your intellect to this podcast. And on that note, I wanna say take care, everybody.

Goodbye, farewell.

Linda Snell:

Bye-bye.

Jason Frank:

You’ve been listening to The Papers Podcast. We hope we made you just slightly smarter. The podcast is a production of the Unit for Teaching and Learning at the Karolinska Institute.

The executive producer today was my friend, Teresa Sörö. The technical producer today was Samuel Lundberg. You can learn more about The Papers Podcast and contact us at www.thepaperspodcast.com.

Thank you for listening, everybody. Thank you for all you do. Take care.

That’s a wrap.

Acknowledgment

This transcript was generated using machine transcription technology, followed by manual editing for accuracy and clarity. While we strive for precision, there may be minor discrepancies between the spoken content and the text. We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to refer to the original podcast for the most accurate context.