Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 364: Metrics 101

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

When Cal recently returned home from his time spent up in New England he set up a whole new set of daily metrics to track in the fall to keep him pointed toward the deep life. And they failed. Hard. In this episode, Cal dissects why metrics matter, why they’re easy to mess up (including the mistakes he made), and how to use them correctly (including how he corrected his own setup). He then answers listener questions and discusses a recent AI article that got him all hot and bothered.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Metrics 101 [2:10]How should I navigate the “grey area” when deciding to make a career change? [24:45]Do you have a framework for young people to develop deep critical thinking? [27:36]What should a father of 4 kids do for his next career move? [32:34]Can skills from a high-pressure call center carry over to a career in cybersecurity? [35:36]Should I have anticipated that my job was going to end? [38:36]CALL: Returning back to work after a summer break [43:14]CASE STUDY: Pursuing a hobby while combating digital doldrums [46:47]WHAT I’M (NOT) READING: Vibe Reporting on AI [55:52]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?nytimes.com/2025/07/28/arts/video-games-artificial-intelligence.htmlThanks to our Sponsors: vanta.com/deepquestionssmalls.com/deepshopify.com/deep1password.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for segment music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work, HQ, joined by my producer Jesse. Jesse, the restaurant below is rock and rolling. There's a storm going outside. This feels like time for podcasting. And you're back in D.C., baby. Back in D.C. I missed my studio, missed a thousand degrees humidity or whatever. I don't know how you measure that.

Actually, I do know it's due point. Let's be honest. Let's be precise. I missed a due point that was above the 71 or 72 market, which it shades into the oppressive range. I was pretending like I didn't know about the meteorology here. I know about it. Let me tell you what we're going to do today.

And this is just for Jesse and I. We're here some music today. We've had some more music to the show. Not because we think it's going to give you a better experience, but because we just like the idea of having more music in the show. It just kind of delights Jesse and I. Who's our man who hooked us up here? Kearon.

Kieran hooked us up with some music. We're going to have some fun today with some music. I think it keeps the energy going because that's the type of mood we're in. You know, it's trade deadline day in Major League Baseball. It's podcasting weather in D.C., so we are going to get rolling. We got a good show. I got a deep dive that is based off of a fail that I recently have and some lessons learned. We got some questions.

Final segment in the what I'm reading segment. Can't help myself, Jesse. There is an article I read on the topic of AI that once again kind of got me a little bit upset. So we're going to have a little bit of that going on later. But I want to get to the deep dive. For no other reason, we can hear some new theme music. I got to tell you about what happened to me when I got back for my nearly month up in New England.

You know, and our listeners know, that I'm a fan of metrics. My time block planner even has a space on it for recording daily metrics. So when I got back from New England, I said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a new set of metrics all ready to go for the fall season that's coming up. Let's go. What's important in my life? What am I focusing on? What are my goals?

I wrote out the metrics. I printed them out. I taped them out. I taped them under the cover of my time block planner so I could measure those every night and I got into it. And Jesse, here's what happened. I promptly failed. And I failed hard.

Right? Like you know, Jesse knows, I've been telling them. I've had a super busy week coming back from New England. A lot of things scheduled. I'm doing something like three to four interviews or talks. Some of them I'm giving some of them on the other side of. I was giving lectures where podcasting all sorts of stuff going on, super busy time. And I was getting there at the end of each night to write down the metrics of what I did that day.

And I was having one I could write down or maybe just like two that I could write down. I mean, I wasn't getting anywhere near making the progress on the stuff that my metrics would have me make progress on. Last night I finally just gave up and I actually wrote this. stress default. I'm not even going to bother writing one metric is too depressing. I'm stressed out about this. I'm making progress on nothing.

I'm declaring bankruptcy. I'm not even going to write down any metrics. So this is what I want to talk about today. The joys and sorrows of tracking metrics in your life. So I want to remind us like why I think metrics are important. I want to talk about what goes wrong with metrics, including what went wrong with me. And then I want to talk about in the third act, how to handle metric smarter. which will include how I ended up actually responding to my heart failure this week and sort of fixing my metric practice.

All right. So that is our goal. Today we're talking metrics. We'll start with Act 1. The promise of metrics. All right. So we've got to get into it. If you're not a long-time listener, you might be wondering what does he really mean by metrics?

It's a good question. These can mean multiple different things. So a lot of people, like the quantified life type people out there for them, metrics mean just gathering data about your day. that you will then later look back at for trends. All right. So health type stuff, health biomarkers, maybe wear a whoop strap, and whatever you do,

you're going to collect this data and you're going to look at it for trends. It doesn't have to be health. Jesse, remember we had David Dwayne on? What was that, like a couple months ago? Yeah. And he talked about he was tracking every day just how happy he was,

like how good of a day it is. So that's what some people think about with metrics, right? It's not what I mean. When I talk about metrics, what I mean about is short little coded sequences of letters that you use to track whether or not you did certain things or to what degree you did them. So it's not gathering data to analyze. It's tracking action. So here are some sample metrics.

These are of the binary nature. You either did them or not. I exercised or not. I stretched or not. I spent one-on-one time with, you know, one of my kids today or not. I practice my guitar, right? Those are sample things you could have metrics for. It's things you either did or you didn't it, and you have something you can write down to indicate that you did.

Some metrics are quantitative. So it's not just that I do it or not, but to what degree. So, for example, a step count. Here's how many steps I took today where you presumably maybe have some sort of minimum you're hoping to beat. Maybe the number of pages you read in the book is something else you might track. So it's not just that I read or not, but how much did I read. And maybe you have a goal of how much reading you want to try to get to most nights, but maybe sometimes you even go farther.

The goal with this style of metrics is to stay on track with the things that you care about. All right? Because this is a problem I think we face with time management and organization, that it's possible that you're super on the ball with your organizational tactics, right? Your multi-scale planning, you look at your week, you're fitting in your work, your time block plan, you're intentional about your time, you have shut down rituals,

you're tracking and organizing your tasks very careful in full capture-based task management systems. You are doing a lot of stuff and you're getting a lot of stuff done, but it's possible that the things you are doing, though making you very busy, are not actually moving you closer to your definition of the deep life.

You're doing stuff, but not the stuff that matters. This is where metrics can be very helpful because you run whatever time management organizational systems you want, but at the end of the day, you said, did I make progress on the things that really matter to me? And knowing that you'll be recording this day after day really influences the way that you go about your day. And you start putting a side time.

This is the theory. You start putting a side time for these things to make sure that you can mark it off on your metric tracking. It's a way of continually nudging your activity towards things that matter. This was a big breakthrough for me when my own practices. I got very organized. I've long been very organized. I'm good at managing my time. I'm good at keeping up at work and seeing what's doing.

win and making sure that I started early enough. But I was falling behind. I found this in my life. I was falling behind on things I mattered. I'm not reading as much as I should be reading. I'm not spending time, you know, with these people that's important to me. I'm not spending enough time with them. I'm not prioritizing this.

I'm busy but not doing the things that matter. Metrics made a big difference to me. That's why I include them. My time block planner, I talk about them in multiple of my books. I've talked about them. So that's what I talk about when I'm talking about metrics. So again, you would have for each of these things a short code. So did I exercise or not?

If I did, I write down X in the metric tracking block, my time block plot. Did I stretch? If I did, maybe I'll write STR. That's my code. One-on-one time with kid, kid. Step count, S-colon number for step count, right? And I actually will, this is what I said earlier and it's like, oh, I planned up my metrics for the fall. I actually have those codes written out.

I tape them on my planner. Here's the codes I'm using to keep track of this stuff. So it's a good idea. I think if you care about the deep life and not just being productive, it matters. But I failed. I had a really hard week and I sort of gave up temporarily on my metrics. Why did I fail? This brings us to act two when metrics go awry.

So there's four main problems people have with my style of activity tracking metrics. There's one big one, which I think is the most important. and it's the one that really I had issues with. I'll do that one last. Let me get with the three smaller ones first because these also pop up a lot as well. Vagerness is a big issue with metric tracking, right? You have a thing you're tracking with a metric that is so vague that either everything counts or nothing counts.

It could be either thing. Like, for example, you might have written down, like, I connect with my daughter. I mean, what does that mean? What does it take to actually write down to code for that? on your daily metric tracking. Does it count if you high-fived her in the hallway? Or does it require like you went to a father-daughter dance and shared a milkshake in a heartfelt conversation

before you allowed the market down? It's too vague. That's not specific enough. That's a problem a lot of people have. Is they're too vague? And then they're like, I don't even know what I can either put this metric down every day, I never put it down. I don't know.

And you kind of give up on it. The other side is it's specific, but it's impossible. that you just put something down, it's not really something that on an average day you're likely to get to. You put down like, yeah, I would have to bike 100 miles a day. That'd be great. You're like, oh, that takes long time.

It takes many hours to bike 100 hours. I don't normally have enough time to bike 100 miles every day. This is basically an almost always impossible to achieve metric, right? So you're unrealistic in the difficulty or time consumption of a singular metric. That's another big problem. Spreadsheet syndrome is a third one. then instead of just having a simple code you jot down, like in something like a time block planner,

you start putting into the spreadsheets. We know these type of people. I got to put the data into the whatever so that I can have the pie chart, and the pie chart's going to dynamically alter, and it's going to be really nicely color-coded. I made it a 3D pie chart, and I adjusted what the drop shadow is,

so it looks really good, and I'm looking for the pie chart to change. That's all friction, and it's going to eventually get annoying enough that it's been a hard day, and you're tired, and you don't want to open up, Microsoft Excel for 15 minutes and you stop metric tracking.

This is why I'm a big fan and you just have some couple letters. You jot them down. It takes 10 seconds and your metric tracking is done. So spreadsheet syndrome is another problem. But the biggest problem of all with metric tracking practices and this is what really stung me this week. Going with an inventory of what's important to you as opposed to a realistic plan for what you want to do on a regular basis.

These are not the same thing. So if you sit down, you say, okay, I want to list out what's important to me, and then I'll have a metric related to each of those things. Now you don't want to leave things out. I'm trying to list things that are important to you. They're like, well, I don't want to leave this part of my life is important to me. That better be on the list. Otherwise, I'm signaling to myself. It's not.

Well, this thing over here is very important to me. I should put that on the list too. I need a metric for that. And before you know it, your list of metrics, your tracking is an inventory of everything that's important to you. and the possibility for you to actually make progress on that many things on a regular basis is basically impossible. It's just too many things you want to make progress on. That's what happened to me. I went through an exercise and was up in New England where I checked back in as I do most summers after my birthday about what are the areas of my life that are important to me.

What am I trying to do with them right now? And I listed out all these different areas. There are six different areas. I ended up with actually many more than six metrics because I had at least, one metric for each of those six areas, but for the one related to health, I actually track four metrics for my health. It's exercise stretching step count, and then there's like a food and diet sort of like quality of the food I eat sort of thing. So it's 10 metrics. It was just too many. I mean, I've been busy. I had a busy calendar and I was like, I can't make progress on 10 things.

In fact, I could do maybe one or two of these things, maybe, and I was super stressed having so many things I wasn't writing down because what I had really done was inventoryed everything that was important to me as opposed to saying here is a reasonable mix of things I could make progress on on most days that would be important to me. So that's probably the number one problem. It was my problem as well. So how do we fix this? What's a smarter way to approach activity tracking metrics?

Well, that brings us to Act 3, making metrics work. There are four things that I did that. to help clean up my metric track. I did this last night. I wrote this all out after I get the stress default. I was like, okay, I got to fix this. And these, I think, are the main four tools you have to make activity-based metric tracking actually be sustainable. Number one, you can consider doing multiple choice metrics.

So what that means is you have multiple things that are important to you, but it's unreasonable, perhaps, to make progress on all of those things every day. It would be a real laundry list. What you do instead is you have a multiple choice approach to it, where you might say, for example, here's five things that are important to me. I have a metric code for each. I want to try to do one of these per day. So my goal is each day to write down one of these metric codes. If I can get to like one of these things each day, give a little bit of effort, I'll consider that as success. Now you get more reasonable.

You can have more areas you care about, but you're not trying to unreasonably make progress on everything every day. autopilot scheduling makes a huge difference as well. So many different metrics, if you're going to succeed in actually doing that activity every day, it has to be integrated into your schedule in a way that you don't have to think about it. We're using this with exercise. This is how I handle exercise. When we're in, out of the summer and during a normal semester, I know when I do my exercise.

My wife knows when I do my exercise. It's part of my schedule. This is just when I do my exercise. So it's a regular part of my schedule. It's what we call autopilot scheduling. that makes sure it gets done. If I instead just started each day and said, I'm going to try to find time 45 minutes at some point today to exercise,

what's my hit rate going to be? 20% of days I happen to have enough time and enough energy to do it. So the more things you can actually find a regular time and day to do it, so an autopilot schedule, the more successful that'll be. So your metric should have a lot of autopilot scheduling going on. You really shouldn't have four or five things that you want to make. progress on every day that have no fixed time that you always do when you schedule no like i meditate when i first wake up i work out right before dinner uh you do not want a lot of things that aren't autopilot

scheduled the third thing to do to make metrics work is to eliminate combine and simplify it just say hey look uh there's a lot of things i can't work on all of these things i want a good sampling of things that i want to do regularly and the other stuff you know i will try to make progress on on it maybe a bigger time scale. If you're a multi-scale planner, you can make progress on it, like at the strategic plan schedule or the weekly scale. Like, you know, hey, do I have a day today that I could go, like, see my brother who lives nearby and we can, we can like get together and have lunch?

Like, okay, I do this week. I didn't last week I do this week, right? Maybe that's the right scale to be working on that thing that's important to you. So you might want to simplify or eliminate the stuff that you really are trying to track every day. That doesn't have to be everything that's important. You doesn't have to have progress. made at that scale. Combining means you might find a way to make progress on multiple things to report it in one step, right?

It's like walking my dog also gets me steps, and I always call my mom when I do it, right? And now you have like one activity that's handling multiple steps. Or you want to have like a hobby that's important to you, but you want to spend time with your kids. Oh, why don't we come up with something that I do with my kids? It's like a joint hobby. So you can do combining as well. The final thing is probably the most important is go sequential and slow down. I can't do all these things at the same time.

Okay, I mean, I want to hypothetically, like, learn to play guitar and I want to speak Spanish, and I want to learn how to program a computer, and like these three things, I think, would make my life richer. To try to make progress on all three of those things every day is crazy. To even try to do multiple choice on those three things is kind of crazy. Like, well, I want to work on one of these each day, and you're switching back and forth between these things. It's, you know,

this could be like way overkill. So maybe what you stay instead is like, let's just slow down. It's a slow productivity tactic. I'm working on Spanish right now. I'm just going to do that for the next four months or six months. And when I feel like I got to a good place, then maybe I'll have a season.

I'm working on like trying to learn some guitar. We'll see how that goes. Programming, I don't know, maybe next year. It's interesting, but let's just push that off. Take your time. Life is long. Sequential. I'll do this.

When it's done, I'll work on something else. So not trying to necessarily have everything that's important to you be active all at the same time. All right. So that's basically what I've done. My new metrics, I have a big multiple choice that makes things much simpler. I eliminated some things that I was tracking. I'm going sequential on some other things.

Like, okay, let me just work on this now. This other thing I'll work on in a different season. I moderated, Jesse. My goal was to spend about 30 hours a week on my Halloween. decorations and I moderated. That's now 27 and a half hours a week because 30 hours was just a little bit too much. But 27 and a half hours a week on my Halloween decorations. There we go.

So metrics are important, the right type of metrics. It really helps make sure that you're not just organized, but you're organized towards stuff that matters. But don't beat yourself up if you struggle with metrics because I kind of like invented this approach and I still completely screwed up last week. And then I had to remember my own medicine. All right. Let's get reasonable here.

It's a process. And also, hey, the fact that I had turned these off while I was away, like, that also is a thing. I was up in New England for a month. It's like, I don't want to track metrics every day. I come and I go, right? Like, this is all real talk. It's a useful tool. You're not running all the time.

You're going to get it wrong. And it's something that you keep working on over time. So hopefully you have some sort of metric tracking going, but you're not being too hard on yourself about getting it just right or having a Herculean collection of metrics that you're trying to do. There go. People ask about metrics, I think. You don't always quite know what I'm talking about. And then you should probably explain what the time block planner is.

Well, if you don't know that, then I don't want to know you. I actually have a planner. I think we created this during the pandemic. You can buy at Amazon or whatever books are sold online for doing time blocking. And it has the pre-formatted pages for time blocking, for capture, and for metric tracking. It also has a shutdown complete checkbox. You can do it. It's worth buying even for just the interoperative.

I mean, I have an extensive introduction in the planner where I explain all of my philosophies for how I manage my time using this. So it's actually like a mini Cal Newport time management book plus the tool to do it. So you should check that out. There's a website as well with a video. Yeah. If you got a timeblock planner.com, we filmed a nice video. That was with a nice camera too.

It was Rob's overhead. You used a fancy camera. I enjoyed that. So there you go. Metrics. All right. We got some good questions coming up. But Jesse, you know what we got to do now?

I think we got to do some ads. Let's do some music for the ads. Let's get into it. That's what I'm thinking today. We're in a musical mode. Oh, there we go. There we go. Does that put you in an ad mood, Jesse?

It does. I got to tell you a true story then, Jesse, because this has got me thinking about ads. This is true. I keep finding in our front yard at our front bush, this same orange-colored cat that's hanging around. There's a beautiful cat, like a ginger-colored cat. I don't know who's it is, but it kind of hangs around our house,

especially in the afternoon. It made me miss-hack. having cats. When we grew up, we had two Siamese cats. Their names were Singha and Nittanoi. Those are Thai names. My mom lived in Bangkok for a while. And they were great cats. I really liked having cats. We don't have them now because my wife is allergic to cats.

We don't have cats in the house. But seeing that cat in my yard got me a little nostalgic. And it led me to do, which I think is probably like the only natural response to this situation, Jesse, was I divorced my wife. All right, not really. But all this cat talk got me thinking about one of today's sponsors, Smalls cat food.

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It was like she was talking about her husband or something like that. And his fur is softer and more vibrant with higher contrast. Same with my cats. See what I'm doing there? I'm kind of riffing like she's talking about her husband, but really it's about her cat. Honestly, I wouldn't recommend anything else. You know what else I like about Smalls?

This is me now, not Jennifer M. They work with the humane world for animals. They've donated over a million dollars worth of food to help cats through the humane world for animals. And they even give you a chance to donate at checkout. You know what I don't like about them? They rejected my slogan idea, which was cat food so good you'll want to divorce your wife so you can buy a cat. They didn't like that one. I think that would be a catchy slogan.

Anyways, what are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve for a limited time only because you are a deep question's listener. You get 60% off your first smalls order plus free shipping when you head the smalls.com slash deep. That's 60% off when you head to smalls.com slash deep plus free shipping. Again, that's smalls.com slash deep. Jesse, I also got to talk about our friends at Vanta in today's fast-changing digital world. Proving your company is trustworthy isn't just important for growth. It is essential.

That's why Vanta is here. Here's the thing. Running a company today that basically has, I don't know, anything to do with technology is going to eventually require you to be compliant with various standards. This can be a huge pain and take up a lot of time that you should be spending on making your business better. This is where Vanta enters the scene and makes this all easier. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO-27-O-1 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier. and more scalable. I'll tell you, and Jesse will tell you this is true, I pitched him a podcast episode idea

where I said, look, let's do like an hour 50 where I riff on ISO-27-001. You know what? Jesse said, and he was right, let Vanta handle that. And he was right about that. We shouldn't be thinking about that Vanta should for us. I mean, I fired him because no one says no to me, but it was a good idea.

Vanta is who should be dealing with these issues for you. you shouldn't be thinking more about them than you have to. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, so you win bigger deal sooner. The results, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slash over $500,000 a year in cost, and they're three times more productive. Establishing trust is an optional. Vanta makes it automatic. So visit vanta.com slash deep questions to sign up for a free demo today. that's V-A-N-T-A-com slash deep questions. All right, let's do some questions of our own.

All right. First questions from Louise. When looking to make a change in your career, how do you deal with that gray area where you have some career capital and the target job, but it's still difficult to decide if now is the right time to move?

Well, part of this, Louise, is not to think about a career change in the abstract or as a self-justified move. Hey, do I do a career change or not, abstractly speaking. A career change is an action you make to serve a particular goal, which is to move your life closer to your ideal lifestyle. A career change should do so either, here's the justifications. It does so either in like a really demonstrable way.

Hey, I make significant progress towards my ideal lifestyle with this career change. If it's just like nibbling around the edges, it might not be worth it. That's motivation number one for a career change or motivation number two. two is there's things about this job that like really classed with me, my values or is making me unhappy. And so this is just about the piece of my ideal lifestyle where I'm not miserable every day. That's why you would do a career change. So what matters then if you have a career change in mind that is going to either get you

out a bad situation or move you demonstrably closer to your ideal lifestyle, the only thing that matters is do I have enough career capital to make this likely to succeed? And that's it. If you think you do, you go forward. and if you're not sure, then you build up more career capital until it's sure. Right? And that's it. Like, you don't have to identify some sort of mythical exact threshold at exactly this point I should do it or at this point I shouldn't.

It's like if it's a good idea and it's a good idea for those reasons I talked about, if you're confident you have enough career capital, go for it. If you're not sure, do more work until you're confident. Build up rare and valuable skills until it's like more demonstrably clear that you'll succeed. Now, if you want to know if you have enough career capital, we talk about this all the time. I think my book's so good. They can't ignore you, gets into this to most specifically, but use money as an initial indicator of value. Is there a job offer on the table for this new job or someone is willing to hire and pay me? If not, then maybe you don't have the capital to make that turn.

Don't quit and then start going job searching and hope it works out. If you're going to start your own thing, start it on the side. Are people giving me money for it? If not, maybe I'm not ready, right? So don't just jump out there in the world that try to harvest a temporary, the temporary lift you get from making a change. change and then say I'll figure out, get started with what comes next. Do your work, get evidence you have enough career capital. If you do go for it, if you don't, don't.

And if it's not a home run, then maybe you don't need a career change. There might be other ways for you to get closer to your ideal lifestyle. What I'm trying to avoid here, Jesse, is sometimes people just like the idea of the temporary high they get from making a change. It's like, I want to make a change. Can I make a change yet? I always ask why. What is the change for?

You need a reason for your change to sort of harvest, the, the, the, the sustainability value out of it. Who do we got next? Next up is Craig. Do you have a framework or approach for developing deep critical thinking, particular for young people? I'm a father of young children, also a mentor of a group of young men,

and I want to help them build the habit of thinking deeply. Well, there's a known formula that's been around for millennia. It's reading, writing. So reading builds new circuits in your brain. I've been working on this topic for a chapter in the book I'm working on about the deep life. Reading builds what are known as deep reading processes. The more reading you do of like hard stuff or stuff that challenges you literally builds new connections between parts of your brain.

It gives you a different brain. It upgrades your brain from what we could think of as the pragmatic brain that we evolved for that's well suited for living in small bands in the Paleolithic to what we can call the symbolic brain. That is a brain that can do a lot more thing. So you've got to keep it, keep in mind, read. Reading is artificial, right? It's not something we evolved to do. It was invented relatively recently. And so it takes hard work.

But if you do reading of things that are hard, it literally changes your brain. And you go from pragmatic to symbolic, and that brain, it sees the world in technicolor. The ideas, the way you can process information, the things you notice, the opportunities, to gratitude and interest you can find in the world. So much stuff. Your ability to navigate economically, the get ahead. So much comes out of having a well-honed symbolic brain. Reading is a foundational activity to do that. Reading, reading, reading, that's everything.

Like, I'm not very good at being a tiger parent. I'm not very good at, hey, you got to get A's on everything and do 100 activities. But there's one thing that I'm super, super clear on with my kids, reading. Right. I've made them all readers. It's hard work. But I was like, that is, that's it. That's like being in good shape if you live in ancient Spartan.

Everything else will be okay. You'll figure it out. But you better be a reader. Writing helps as well. So I think about reading establishes the circuits. It changes your brain. Writing is how you practice applying that new brain. So reading gives you a more sophisticated brain.

Writing is how you practice putting that brain to work. It forces you to have to try to take thoughts and organize them in a way that then you assess to be logical. So writing gets you good at using what you develop through the readings. You kind of need both. You write a lot but don't read a lot. You're working with a lot less resources. So what you can produce is reduced. If you read a lot and don't write a lot, you might have built this really sophisticated brain.

But when it comes time to think critically or use it or I'm going to come make an argument or try to come up with a strategy, you're like, oh, I'm struggling to actually harness this thing and pull together my thoughts into something that is reasonable and coherent. Now, there's some specific types of training you can do as well. I've been working on these for my new book, some of these. rhetoric helps like, hey, young man, you're talking about you mentor young men. I want you to like make a case for this. Gather information, put it into a coherent argument that doesn't have holes, make your case, react to counterarguments, like just practice making an argument. That's very helpful.

Dialectical reading is very helpful as well. It's a fancy name for a simple idea, which is I'm going to take a topic that I care about, that there's debate about. I'm going to read a really good book that's making a case for one side of this topic, and then I'm going to read another really good book that's making a case on the other side. Good case, good case. I'm not interested in this tribal thing of like, what do we believe? That's all I want to hear about.

And anyone on the other side obviously has a brain virus and is probably like a week away from being a zombie and, you know, 20 days later. No, I want to hear arguments that are really good on both sides. Why? Because when good arguments clash, this was Socrates's idea, the root that grows down, it's tap root of understanding. You become a much smarter understanding of what's going on. It's not going to trick you out of your beliefs. It's going to make you a much more sophisticated thinker. Dialectical reading matters. And then primary, secondary source reading. This is a good way to increase the sophistication of what you're reading. Really sophisticated books can be hard to jump

into. If I just say, like, here is some Heidegger, go to town. You're going to read it for a while and be like, I have no idea what those words meant. But if you read some secondary sources about Heidegger, who was he? What was his ideas? What's he arguing in this book. This language is weird. It's different. It's kind of mythological. Like, what's going on here? Oh, I see what he's doing here. Now I'm going to read Heidegger. Suddenly you have, it's like you couldn't really see the words and you put reading glasses on. So it's a way to upgrade the level of challenge that you're able to handle. And that's going to upgrade again, those deep reading circuits and upgrade your brain from pragmatic to symbolic. So Craig, I like what you're working on. And reading,

writing, that's the key. And then all these other things are just little glosses on types of reading or types of writing that you can do. But reading, writing, that is it in our modern world to getting a brain that's going to help you thrive. All right. Who we got? Next up is David. I have four kids in K through 12. These are my options for my job.

Stay in my current role, which offers stability, take an internal promotion with a dysfunctional team and toxic leadership, or leave for a high-paced consulting firm. What should I do? I know, Jesse, do you get a sense that he has an answer that he thinks is right here? it's probably not, I should probably go to the dysfunctional team that has toxic leadership or let me go to the high-paced consulting firm. I think it's pretty clear. I think he knows what he wants to do. Current role stability.

Like a push-pull. He described the other things so negatively. So I think you know what you want to do, David. That's fine. But let's go through like the bigger exercise of like how do you make these type of decisions in general? Lifestyle-centric planning. If your vision of your ideal lifestyle and you assess each of the, these options through that vision.

So probably the dysfunction and toxicity of that second option, you're like, wow, that lifestyle is not very good. That doesn't really seem close to like my vision, like what my day is like, what my work is like. The high-paced consulting firm, like this is where lifestyle and planning might be a little bit more effective because it's tempting to jump to that just because it might be more prestigious and more money. It doesn't really matter, like day to day, unless you're Scrooge McDuck, you're not like actually

interacting with your money and there's not someone walking in front of you heralding the competitiveness of the job you have. What matters day to day for your overall satisfaction is the details of your lifestyle. What is my everyday like? And if you have this vision of this lifestyle where you're spending like a lot of time with your kids and like the family and you're like really into like athletic things and you're having trails and the land behind your house and you're spending 30 hours. a week on Halloween decorations.

If you have this big vision of, you know, you're sitting at the picnic table with the extended family with the cafe lights hanging from the trees as the sun goes down. And then you say, okay, working an 80 hour a week job, is that going to be closer or farther? Like, oh, man, that steps on so many parts of that vision. So, no, I'm not going to do that. But maybe this is not the situation. You're in a situation, like, if you're somebody to have a bunch of kids and you, like, want to be in the mix and you want to travel, you're like, I want to kind of, like, move around, like, the country,

and see things and have like a really cool apartment and like then high-paced consult you like that's going to move me closer to these visions like I can't afford that on what I'm doing that's going to get me closer and I kind of like the lifestyle that leads to. So lifestyle strategic planning is how you make these decisions. In your case, David, I think you've already made up your mind. That's fine. That's good. If that matches your lifestyle, it sounds like it does and probably four kids make sense

to be stable, not super high pace, not dysfunctional, not stressful. There's a perfectly valid reason to stay with something because your life. Lifestyle is ultimately what determines your day-to-day happiness, not these more abstract properties, like exactly what my salary is or how competitive my job was. People just don't care. All right, who we got? Next up is May. I've worked in a high-pressure call center for 11 years where I'm glued to the screen all day.

I lack the traditional credentials but want to switch fields to cybersecurity. Is it possible to make the switch? Well, I don't know because I'm not in the cybersecurity field. but you should know by talking to someone in that field. Evidence, evidence, evidence. That's what matters. Talk to real people in that field. Real talk.

Not hypothetical. Not wishful thinking. What is needed to switch to these type of jobs? Like this specific job here that you just hired for. What would something like me have to do to get that job? You ask that real question and get the real answer. And you might like the answer. It might be like, oh, like we have training on site and this is what we're looking for.

And like you could probably fit. or it could be like we're looking for like at least two years of postdoctoral work on this and like an H index of 30. And you're like, oh, that's never going to happen. So it's off the table. Like you might not like the answer. You might love the answer, but get the answer. The worst thing to do in this situation is to say, I don't want to confront the reality of what's

required to make this switch. I'm thinking about I just want to go do something because the thing sounds interesting and I want to harvest, like we talked about before, harvest the temporary contact high of change. And in this case, there's a lot of things out there that people will offer you. Like, oh, come do this. This might help you. You don't know if it wears at all. They're just going to kind of like throw it out to you.

Like, you might end up dropping 20K on some online-only cybersecurity master's program, which is like essentially like a three-card Monte game that has a lot more Zoom. Just taking your money. Thank you for your money. Don't just go do something. Just get the evidence. Talk to people in the field. Here are specific jobs you've hired for.

for in the past. Look, I'm not trying to get a job from you now. I'm trying to learn. What would you look for in that job? What would I need to do to pass that, if anything? And just get the real answer. Confront the professional dragon. And then you work from there. That's how I became a book writer. Talk to an agent, said, I want to publish a book. I'm 21 years old. And it was 20 when I talked to her. What would really be necessary for me to do this? And she gave me the real answer. He's like, yeah, there's almost no way you can do this at your age. There is like this path or that path are like the only two ways you could probably do this. And I looked at one of those two paths like, great. Okay, now I know I'll do that. And I executed it. And that's how I got my foot in

the door of publishing. So you confront the reality of a situation when it comes to career moves. Don't tell yourself a story. And don't just start doing stuff that generally so much of like grad school is based off of like, I don't want to actually figure out what's needed for this job. This sounds like a thing that people do. Let me go do that. And what happens is like professors like me, just like, great, I'll just take that money and I don't know, buy fur coats. But mainly, mainly what happens with low value master's programs is it's professors buying fur coats. I don't know if that's well known. But that's actually what happens.

All right. We got one more. We got one more. It's from Megan. I got laid off after a 15 year career. I'm now barred from entering this particular woodshed. I had a census is coming. Should I have left this job earlier?

Or do you think it was an acceptable end, kind of like an athlete's career? we're ending due to injury. I mean, Megan, I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know that it really matters. I mean, I want to validate that I think this was rightly so emotionally taxing. Like, you were laid off, you're barred. It sounds like it was not a happy ending. This sucks.

Like, it's going to feel really bad. And it's okay to feel bad about it. You're going to feel literal chemicals when you think about it that are very negative. but I don't know that we need to ruminate on it. I don't think it's helpful to go back and, you know, Sunday morning quarterback or Monday morning quarterback. When is football played? September 6, baby.

But what's the expression? It must be Monday. Tonight is the Hall of Fame game. Okay. But what's the saying? It must be Monday morning quarterbacking. Because, yeah, football used to be played primarily on Sundays. But now it's played on basically every day, right?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty much. Thursday morning quarterback. You still football played on Wednesday or so Wednesday games. Well, it depends on Christmas is now. I think we need to spend the next 25 minutes getting into this. I think last year, Christmas was on on Wednesday.

To ESPN.com. All right. So what I'm saying here is like, let's not ruminate on it. Let's look forward. Let's accept it sucks. Let's accept you feel bad. But let's take our actual, like, rationalized voice and aim it at what comes next. And let's use some lifestyle-centric planning.

Let's use some career capital. You know, first thing first is like, need a job, money, like let's make sure that we're not, like, in financial trouble. And then let's step back

and do some lifestyle strategic planning. Here's a silver lining. There's a big change. What can you do in changes? You can lean into it and change other things in a way that's good. Okay,

there's a big change situation. But hey, maybe this means I'm going to move somewhere else or take a different type of career. I got to move to, you know, a really low cat, a teeny house that I own,

you know, in like the Oregon Coast and like do this job remote that I already know about. It's not much money, but I won't need much money. and then I'm going to work on this and I'm going to be near my uncle and it's going to be whatever. Like, you're so many things you maybe wouldn't have done when you're in this other job.

It sounds like if you knew it was coming, it was probably not a happy situation. So let's not ruminate on what happened. Let's get excited about what could happen. And that's lifestyle-sitric planning and making evidence-based moves to get you closer to that lifestyle. I think you could end up being way better off. I'm talking like three years down the line, you're like, man, that was a really good thing to happen to me because look at my situation. Now, I don't know if I sold the best vision there, though, Jesse,

living in a teeny house next to your uncle. That's like both hyper-specific and, like, not very compelling. But what if I told you your uncle was a wizard? See, then that would be much more cool. And he was going to teach you the ways of magic. One of my uncles kind of lives in a teeny house. Yeah. Pretty cool.

Like, because you could probably one of those like prefab houses. It's not teeny, but it's pretty small. Do you remember that movement? It was like a four-year period in the 2000. I don't know if you were in on these blogs, but I was definitely in that world where building and buying a teeny house was like a big deal.

Remember that? Because it was roughly $15,000. Like what it would roughly cost to get the materials. You would build it on a trailer. And like the idea was it was like a lot of millennials who were like coming through their 20s. And it was a hard job market

because of the financial crisis. And the idea was like, oh, I could just own this. like no mortgage, you know, no like expensive apartment. I could just like own my house. I could raise $15,000. Like I could save and

and so that became popular for a while so you have your teeny house. The problem was when you live in a teeny house, you're also always like three feet from a toilet. And I think that's what probably killed the romance of it. It's like you would get in there with your like boyfriend or whatever and be like, we have embarked on this mystical, beautiful journey of minimalism. And then your boyfriend is like,

hold on a second. My lunch isn't agreeing with me. Walks two feet away from you and shuts that little curtain. The magic goes away at that point. The magic. That's where it's no longer like, you're in like the hut and outlander and it's looking over the moors.

It becomes real. So I think that's why the mini house idea, the teeny house idea kind of petered out. Also, like teeny houses exist that work really well. They're called apartments. All right. Do we got a call? We do.

All right, let's hear this. Hi, Cal. My name is Amy. I am a tenure track professor of dance at a junior college. Longtime listener and reader. One of my questions was featured in the podcast several years ago when I was still in grad school. Thank you for your advice then. And I'm hoping you could help me now in my real job.

I always find it very hard to return back to work after these long summer breaks. As you say, it's really nice as a professor to have this flexibility in our jobs, but it also means that transitioning back into work is very difficult. For me, mentally, physically, and emotionally. My question is, how can I make this ease back to work feel more comfortable? How can I schedule my time or my tasks leading up into this gradual entrance back into work? I want to take advantage of my summers and my winters, but at the same time, I don't want to be blindsided by all the work at once. Thank you, as always.

It's a common problem. It's not a bad problem to have because it means you have slower seasons, but you're right. It can be pretty brutal. I was super stressed coming back from New England. Like that Sunday we got back after almost a month. And my wife was like this is like a hyper-powered version of the Sunday night syndrome, you know, where you get a little anxious like Sunday night. Like, oh, I have to deal with work again.

Well, you have like three weeks worth of work. It like gets much worse. So there are ways to deal with it. Like professors often think about slow September. Like, is it possible? I'm going to try to ease myself back into my work. So what does that mean? Well, there's things I have to do like my classes.

So I'm going to start prepping those classes. slow and steady in August so that when I get to September, it's not, oh my God, I don't have a course website, I don't have a syllabus, I don't know where my classroom is, I haven't prepped anything, right? So when you get to the beginning of the semester, you're already up at full speed. I usually like to have three weeks worth of classes ready and prepped and up on the course website about a week out from the beginning of classes. So like you get rid of that, scramble. And then other things, you're like, I'm just going to take some of the course. And September slow. Like if you're doing research, like, okay, that's like an October issue. I'm going to get things ramped up again. I'm not going to have a bunch of research meetings right away. I'm going to be hesitant to jump on committees or do initiatives right away that are optional. Like, let's let let's get, you know, our legs stretched out. And so you could do it that way. Just be a little bit thoughtful. Let me start early on the stuff that has to happen. And the stuff that's optional, I'm going to start slowly turning that knob up over the first month or so so I don't get too stressed out. Have good plans. Weekly plan those first few weeks. Make sure that you're doing time block planning each day because otherwise you'll be like there's endless stuff and I want to just work till midnight. Make sure that you still inject elements that you liked about the summer into your life as you switch back to September. Like make your first Friday a half day of the first full week of the semester.

And then like that afternoon, go do one of the things you really love doing during the summer to kind of signal to yourself. It's not a heartbreak. I can still kind of do this type of things in my life. I'm going for a hike on that first Friday afternoon. So slow September it, get started ahead of time. Makes a difference. I mean, you know, I'm not super looking forward to that transition either, but I don't like super stress. So I've been working on that quite a bit.

All right, not only do we have a case study today, but I think, Jesse, we need some case study music. All right, today's case study is from ALO, who says, recently I retired from academia. Congratulations. After a successful 38-year career. While many of the ideas you present are applicable to professional life, I've come to realize they are equally relevant to my personal life as well. Your work has indeed changed my perspective and I'm looking forward to your new book, The Deep Life. During the past three months, June, July, and August, I have designated this time as my think summer, a period to reflect on the next phase of my life, which I envision over the next 10 years.

As a curious individual with a penchant for building things, such as research centers, curricula, field projects, and knowledge platforms, I felt compelled to create a Zen garden in my backyard to satisfy my creative impulses. This has become a sanctuary for my hands-on projects and a space for contemplation. After hearing your Disneyland story about the train in the backyard representing engineered awe, I realized that I am engaging in a similar act, a creative awe project. Inspired by your story, I am now even more excited to add something new to my guarded, a Zen metal sculpture. I even chatted with my walking partner, whose garage resembles a small hardware store about welding or soldering to create some metal art for the garden. I remain intellectually engaged in reading, writing, and exploring new areas. And this engineering of awe sounds like a wonderful way to kill two birds with one stone, pursuing a hobby while combating the digital doldrums. Well, I love this case study.

The engineered awe goes or engineered wonder, however you want to say it, goes a long way towards meaning in life. And this is a great time to get into it. I think I have a suggestion for you. If you want to know what type of sculpture to do, I think there's sort of a no-brainer here. Jesse, you can back me up on this. But I think what you want to try to sculpt out of metal is something that's like really clearly representing me doing an awesome karate kick, karate kit right into the head of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that would be a really cool piece of sculpture and people would definitely think you're well adjusted

and that it made a lot of sense. We're definitely going to get emails about AI generations of that image. Someone sent me an AI generated image. Did I mention Jason Priestley on the podcast? Yeah, I got that as well. Okay. So I mentioned on the podcast, Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills, 9-210. And someone is like, hey, Jason Priestley is a fan.

And it sent an AI-generated picture of Jason Priestley reading digital minimalism. The reason why we know AI is not going to take over the world, because I think this is egregious. AI, it was clearly Jason Priestley's face, but he was clearly wearing the outfit that Luke Perry's character would have worn on Beverly Hills, Not 2-1-0. He had a leather jacket, a black leather jacket, and a white shirt. That was Luke Perry's thing, right? I don't remember what his character was called. I don't know Bilko

I don't know what the names were the characters What was Jason Priestley's name? I don't know Was it Scott Beow? That's another actor Oh You're getting us way off talk

All way off task Somebody else email me about that too Scott Beaux is from Charles in charge No so on Beverly Hills 9-210 Jason Priestley and Luke Perry are the actors We're getting so many emails Send these all the Jesse at Calnewport.com He wants to hear as many times as possible

The answer here They were actors in Beverly Hill 90210 I don't remember the names of the characters they played. So I'm just going to assume that Jason Priestley's character's name was Cameron

and Luke Perry's character's name was Dr. Death because that'd be pretty cool actually. I don't remember their names. But anyways, it mixed it up. It put Luke Perry close on Jason Priestley, which I mean, I don't think, I don't want to go as far as to say,

like, Open AI should probably shut down but like they might consider giving back their mind to investors. If you're going to mess that up, what's the point? All right, we got a cool. Speaking of AI, we have a segment coming up in which we are going to talk about something I read that kind of got my blood going a little bit, a little AI related, be warned. But first, we've got some ads. I like ads now because we've got some real music.

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I just say I love the music, but I think we need to move on to our final segment. Right, a final segment where I like to talk about something that I read that either I liked or in some cases maybe cause some issues. In this case, it was an article that is featuring a technique in reporting on AI in particular that I want to call your attention to because it's something you should be wary of and I think it's something you should try to avoid. I'm going to load the article on the screen that I'm talking about here for those who are watching instead of just listing. This was in the New York Times and it was titled The Unnerving Future of AI Field Video Games. It started with this sort of interactive top, where they're showing some characters in a video game.

And they're showing in quotation marks what the characters in this game was saying. So this character here on the screen was saying, I need to find my way out of this simulation and back to my wife. Can't you see I'm in distress? Here's another scene from the game. There's someone else who's saying, I'm not just lines of code.

I am Liam, a real person enjoying this city. And then we have a sort of subhead here that says, characters in a video game version of the Matrix seem to be gaining sentience thanks to an AI program. Now, if we go on and read this article, what we see an example of is what I sometimes refer to as vibe reporting, which is something I think has happened me more and more when it comes to talking about AI. In vibe reporting, what you do is you cover a bunch of different things that when you kind of put them near each other, imply like big, deal distressing things. But you're not actually making the claim that these big distressing things are happening, but you're sort of just putting things next to each other that the reader will naturally

sort of combine in their mind and come away with the impression the vibe that something really big or dire is happening, even though if you look much closer, nothing like that at all is actually happening in the article. I think that's what happens in this article here. So I'm going to use it as just a case study so we can be a little bit wary about vibe recording. I'm going to read some stuff from this article. Okay. So early in the article it says, The citizens of a simulated city inside a video game based on the Matrix franchise were being awakened to a grim reality.

Everything was fake. A player told them through a microphone and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like chat CPT, the characters responded in panic disbelief. What does that mean, said one woman in a gray sweater. Am I real or not? the unnerving demo released two years ago by an Australian tech company named Replica Studio showed both the potential power and the consequences of enhancing gameplay with artificial intelligence. All right. So clearly you kind of read these things. You combine it with the big pictures they had of like actual people from the game and with these distressing quotes next to them. If you're just a casual reader and not a technical person reading the Times, you're thinking like, are video game characters they kind of come in alive?

Like, is this the problem? Because it sort of has that vibe of like, yeah, like it's this weirdest distrusting its Synthians. Of course, that's not at all what's happening. This was a demo that a company ran where all they did was use chat chpT to calculate to generate dialogue for characters in a matrix simulation. What is chat ch pt really good at? Hey, talk about this in this particular type of form.

So if you say in your prompt, which I'm sure the demo was, respond to this as if you were a character in the movie of The Matrix, it will be very good. at giving text back as if you're in a character in The Matrix. If you had changed that prompt to say, respond to this as if you were in a world in which a super intelligent chicken was like threatening to remove your toes unless you said certain words every once in a while, it would do a great job of having those MPCs. The text in their mouths do that as well. That's what Chat TPT does. It has nothing to do with sentience or things coming alive in video games, but you get that vibe reading it. They never come out and say that, but they say it's uncomfortable.

It feels like they're coming alive. This is like a disturbing thing. This is disturbing these characters. It gives you a vibe of something really big and dire is happening. Or the reality is someone ran a demo where they said, what if we use chat GPT to generate MPC dialogue? And guess what? The company had to shut it down because it's expensive to do chat GPT queries.

And so it's not a very cost-effective thing to do. There's other things in this article as well, unrelated to this sort of sentience argument that I also think as an example of vibe recording let me read

some more from this article here as video game studios become more comfortable without sourcing the jobs of voice actors writers and others

to artificial intelligence what will become of the industry as the pace the technology is improving large tech companies like Google, Microsoft

and Amazon are counting on their AI programs to revolutionize how games are made within the next few years. There's some text here that talks about some demos at a recent conference of sort of beta-level tools that, like, one day might automate certain parts of game developing.

And the article continues, these were not the solutions that developers were hoping to see after several years of extensive layoffs. Another round of cuts in Microsoft's gaming division this month was a signal to some analyst that the company was shifting resources to artificial intelligence. It goes on pretty quickly to say most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial So intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. You put this all together.

What's the vibe you come away with? Oh, these video game companies are starting to lay people off because they're shifting over to AI tools. This industry is sort of going away. Now, they never come straight out and say that, but you're talking about demos of tools that automate, you're talking about industry executives saying that like everything is going to be automated, and you're talking about layoffs, you put this all together in your head. Now, what's the reality here?

Those tools are speculative. They are not tools that are designed to, like, oh, this will just make a video game for me. We have always used computer-aided tools to help with video game design. These are, like, tools to help, like, with 3D modeling and the help get models built quicker and other things like this.

And, yes, the video game industry is contracting, but has nothing to do with AI. It just, the market got, big. They're not getting the same return on their AAA games that they used to get. So now the market is contracting, not because people are being replaced with AI, but just because the numbers are down.

And so it has to contract. This is similar to some of the other reporting I saw about Microsoft's layoffs, right? Where it would say Microsoft laid off this many people. They cited AI advancements and then they talked a lot about like potential AI automation and you get

the vibe of like, oh, Microsoft replaced all these people with AI. That's not what happened. What they meant was we're cutting back on less profitable areas to save that revenue to invest in our AI areas like the AI data centers. People weren't being replaced by AI. They were just doing a shift of focus. We're going to put less focus here and more focus over there. But the vibe of those type of pieces gave you the sense of, oh, yeah, people are being replaced left and right, right?

There's a big problem. I think there is a lot of vibe reporting like this happening around AI right now. where you put enough things next to each other that they blur in the reader's mind and they come away with the vibe that distressing things are happening right now. And I think if you grab like the average news aware person and said like, how do you feel things are going with AI right now? They'd be like, yeah, a lot of stuff is happening. People, it's like jobs are disappearing.

No one's hiring anymore. Whole industries are beginning to automate. The vibe they create is like the wheels have started turning and we're seeing the few first things. But when you look deeper up these vibe reported articles, the reality is often way less interesting. Like, here's my summary of this article here. If you just did straight reporting of this is what's going on. There was a demo where a company used dinner of AI to generate character dialogue in a video game about the matrix. It allowed the characters to say the types of things that people in the matrix would say.

There has also there have been people working on AI tools to automate parts of video game development. most of these tools aren't being used yet, but we imagine in the future we'll have better tools because of AI. The video game industry unrelated has been struggling recently and many of the major studios are reducing their size.

That's the fact-based article. I read that article to you. You don't come away upset. You're like, oh, it's kind of interesting. I don't know how much about video games. I mean, I don't really care that a company put Chat-CTP to do dialogue for a character and then said this demo's too expensive.

But that's kind of interesting that, like, maybe there'll be new tools in video games. Actually, it's not that interesting at all. all. But the vibe reporting is way more interesting because you come away from that saying, I kind of remember that video game characters are coming alive and the whole video game industry is being automated by AI. So be very wary of vibe reporting. There's a lot of it out there. Insist on actually, if you're going to read these things, drill down to the actual statements being said, man, this happens a lot. I'll give you another example. The Atlantic article about computer science

majors reducing, which they are right now. Computer science major numbers are down. it heavily gave the sense without actually like straight up saying it that it's because AI that people are saying why study a why study computer science AI is going to take all these jobs it strongly implied that AI advances was in the subhead of the article it had quotes in there like statements from the reporter saying things like what's the point just putting this thought out there what's the point of not quoting someone but like what's the point of you know training for a job that's going to be automated in the future here's all these reductions in AI. jobs that are happening. Here is like kind of unrelated things about people talk about programming and AI and programming and how like it's it's, you know, making entry-level jobs and maybe are going to be less important. We'll put all of these things next to each other so that you'll come away with the vibe that computer science majors are disappearing because there's no need for them anymore. At the very end of the article, you get to the truth. Oh, there's no evidence that that's why people aren't major in computer science. In fact, what is happening is the tech sector is contracting

because it overgrew during the pandemic. And in every last contraction of the tech sector, computer science major numbers went down and then went up to be higher than before after the sector's recovered. That's at the end of the article, you finally get someone saying that and you realize, like, oh, what are the actual statements here? There's no evidence that this is why people are major in computer science. There's no, like, here's hard evidence of all these people have stopped hiring entry-level people.

This manager said, I couldn't imagine. I know a guy who knows a guy who said, why hire new people? So anyways, vibe reporting is big because if you can give someone the sense that something big and dire is happening, it's a more profound article, they'll remember it, they'll share it. But these things aren't necessarily happening. So the best we can do is put things next to each other. We're reading quickly. It melds it in our mind. So be very, very wary of super dire coverage right now of AI.

It's an important story. It's an important technology. But there's some reporting going on about it that's getting out ahead of its skis. So if it gives you a bad vibe Say before I just accept that vibe Say what really did this article say And a lot of times like in this recent article You realize it didn't really say much

That's that interesting to you at all There you go vibe reporting Jesse I don't know I don't like that A lot of with AI going on right now All right well speaking to what's that's all the time We have for today I hope you liked our sort of musical explosion I had more fun

I think ads are more fun And we got some music going Yeah you know Like you can kind of to get into it. I like it. I like it. And you know what, you know what ad? The companies like when they want sponsorship, they want their product being the cause of divorce. So I think we did a really good job with the ad reads. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you got to go back and listen to the ad reads. All right. We'll be back next week. I'm so happy to be

back in the studio. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep question, podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered

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