You’re Not Lazy — You’re in the Digital Doldrums! (How to Feel Alive Again)

00:00:00.000 | All right. I want to try something unexpected here. I'm going to start with a little known

00:00:04.740 | story from the life of Walt Disney that I came across recently while reading Richard Snow's book

00:00:09.780 | Disney's Land. I am then going to connect this tale from the 1940s to our current moment in

00:00:18.280 | the 2020s, and I am going to extract from it a useful strategy for trying to combat that all

00:00:24.760 | too common sense that we are sleepwalking through life subservient to our screens.

00:00:30.940 | Okay. So let me set the scene for this story. It's the late 1940s. Walt Disney is going through

00:00:40.860 | a hard time in his life. So here's a timeline you got to understand. Sort of the apex of the

00:00:47.360 | first half of Disney's career was 1937. That is when Snow White and the Seven Doors comes out.

00:00:53.740 | It's the first full-length animated movie. It was the highest grossing movie of all time when it came

00:00:58.960 | out. So this was a phenomenon. But after that high point, his animation studio had begun to suffer

00:01:05.360 | financial difficulties, in particular because of World War II. So his follow-up films, which we now

00:01:10.880 | see as classics like Fantasia and Pinocchio, they struggled in part because there was no European or

00:01:17.700 | otherwise international market for these because of the ongoing war. Then we get in the early 1940s,

00:01:23.240 | this big animator strike at Disney Studios. This was really traumatic for Disney. Several of his

00:01:28.360 | biographers, including my favorite biographer of his, Neil Gabler's, talks about how this really was a

00:01:33.640 | period of emotional and creative malaise for Disney. He felt betrayed. He felt drained. So here we are,

00:01:40.860 | as the 40s wear on, the high point of the animation studio is down. They're struggling. They were having to

00:01:46.500 | do, I don't know if you've ever seen this before, Jesse, but they were doing propaganda videos on

00:01:51.700 | contract for the government, animated propaganda videos because they needed the money. So there's

00:01:56.300 | nothing really exciting going on. They were always short on money. He felt betrayed. He's not having a

00:02:02.120 | great time. Then came the trains. So Disney was fascinated with steam trains. This is not unusual for someone who

00:02:10.460 | was born near the turn of the 20th century. You have to imagine what it was like if you're Disney's age.

00:02:15.580 | When you were growing up in the 1920s, right? Steam engines were magic, right? Think about it. You had

00:02:24.360 | horse transportation. That's all anyone had ever known for centuries. And suddenly you have these

00:02:30.540 | massive machines. You've never seen something like this. They were blowing and hissing steam like a dragon

00:02:36.780 | of a size that you've rarely seen anything man-made that large. It could actually move.

00:02:41.560 | And they could rush across the landscape 60, 70, 80 miles per hour, pulling these massive lines of

00:02:47.860 | freight over giant trestle bridges. I mean, it was the thing. There was nothing else to be as amazed by

00:02:53.840 | in the period when Disney grew up than it was trains. So like many people from his era, he always had had

00:02:59.980 | a fascination with trains. He worked selling papers on a train for a while as a kid. And so he bought,

00:03:05.340 | he was 46 years old. It's 1940. He's not feeling good. He buys a Lionel train set. You know, the what

00:03:11.640 | do you call model trains you set up? He's like, oh, this is kind of fun. Then he discovers that one of his

00:03:17.680 | animators, Ward Kimball, was essentially building a full-size steam engine in his backyard.

00:03:25.520 | And this started to get Disney going like, well, wait a second, what are you doing here? And so he

00:03:29.760 | travels with Kimball. They go to a train show where I think I forgot exactly where this was. It might've

00:03:36.560 | been Chicago. It might've been, um, somewhere in the Midwest, but it was a train show where they were

00:03:42.640 | bringing together all these like great steam engines from times past. And it was like really amazing.

00:03:48.880 | And he saw that, uh, Ward Kimball was building like a fake set in his backyard to put the steam engine. And

00:03:55.540 | and Disney felt something that he hadn't felt in a little while, which was a spark of inspiration.

00:04:00.180 | And so he hatched a plan. He said, I'm going to build not a model train, but a 1/8 scale train. So

00:04:08.500 | to put that in the perspective, a 1/8 scale train, the, uh, engine is just big enough that like a full

00:04:15.940 | grown man, you could sit on it and you know, your legs would kind of be over the side, but so it's like

00:04:20.500 | the size of, I don't know. You think of it as like a wagon, right? So he was like, I'm going to build a

00:04:25.300 | train at that scale and I'm going to build a track to run this thing on. Now he didn't have enough room

00:04:31.540 | where they lived. So he bought a new house, right? This is 1949. Disney purchases a five acre plot in

00:04:38.900 | Los Angeles specifically because the land would be well suited for building this 1/8 scale train that he

00:04:44.420 | suddenly had come up with is like, this will be fun. He laid out nearly 800 meters of track for his steam

00:04:51.620 | engine, which he called the Carolwood Pacific railroad because it was on Carolwood Avenue.

00:04:55.620 | He ended up with a 46 foot long trestle. So that's a old school railroad bridge that was large enough

00:05:03.460 | that it fell under LA County's jurisdiction as a real bridge. They had to actually check that it was properly

00:05:08.660 | built, had loops and overpasses, a gradient, an elevated dirt berm and a 90 foot tunnel underneath

00:05:14.740 | his wife's flower bed. They engineered the tunnel at great expense to have an S turn so that when you

00:05:19.620 | went in one end, you couldn't see out the backs. You had no idea how long it felt like the tunnel was going

00:05:23.620 | on and on for a long time. We have some photos, I think, right, Jesse, of this track. So if you're

00:05:31.700 | watching this on YouTube, instead of just listening, we're going to see if we can pull up on the screen.

00:05:36.340 | Jesse will pull up while we're talking here some photos from an article I found that were pretty

00:05:41.460 | good. And so, yeah, so we see here, there he is on the train. So that's what 1/8 scale is. You see,

00:05:46.580 | he's riding on it, but close to the ground. All right, scroll some more, Jesse. That's the layout.

00:05:51.380 | Look at that. Oh, I'm so jealous. And then you see here, there's his barn. If you're watching,

00:05:58.100 | keep that barn in mind. I'll mention that in a second. I think there's like maybe one more photo on there.

00:06:02.340 | Yeah, there they are going by the flower beds. All right. So amid this circuit,

00:06:08.660 | Disney also built a barn where he could store and maintain his rolling stock. It was also the control

00:06:13.620 | room for the Pacific line as well. And as long as he was building it, he designed it to look

00:06:20.020 | like his family barn he had growing up in Marceline, Missouri. This also became a place for him to relax and

00:06:26.260 | the brainstorm about future projects. So he went all in on this. His biographers talk about him

00:06:32.900 | really coming alive once he was able to start working on this railroad, this project that he was

00:06:40.820 | spending more and more time on. He bought a house just to build, had nothing to do with his work,

00:06:44.980 | but he really began to come alive, which made it all the more surprising when in 1953,

00:06:51.380 | a accident happened. It wasn't a major accident, but he, he let someone drive the train, a young

00:06:56.260 | guy drive the train and he went too fast and it derailed. And some of the steam came out of the

00:07:00.020 | engine and a five-year-old girl got some minor burns. She was fine. But right after that accident,

00:07:06.020 | he's like, okay, I'm done. And he shut it down and they stored away the cars. The, the locomotive went

00:07:11.620 | back to, I think they had under a desk somewhere at Walt Disney. His friends and family were surprised,

00:07:15.860 | like, wait, you're just going to shut this whole thing down. But it was not a surprise to Disney

00:07:20.260 | because the Carolwood Pacific project had accomplished its purpose. It had reignited his

00:07:26.420 | ability to feel wonder and motivation to build things and do things that mattered.

00:07:30.180 | Right. And in that barn he had built where he would sit after a day of working with his train,

00:07:36.260 | where he'd been working in there and brainstorming, he had been, it turned out, mulling an idea for the

00:07:40.660 | next chapter of his career, the chapter that would occupy him happily for the rest of his life.

00:07:44.980 | He had decided reinvigorated by that railway project that he was going to build a theme park.

00:07:50.340 | And that's where he then turned his energy. Now, Disney used this experiment to overcome

00:07:58.100 | the professional malaise, but I couldn't help think when I was reading Richard Snow's book recently,

00:08:03.540 | I couldn't help coming across this story that there might be a lesson in here that is relevant to people

00:08:09.540 | today who are suffering from what I think is a related condition that's at the same time,

00:08:15.620 | very of our current moment. Here's the issue I'm observing today that Disney's scheme might help.

00:08:21.940 | We spend all of our time on screens, right? At work, it's email, it's Zoom, it's web interfaces,

00:08:30.500 | it's on laptop screens and it's on our phone. When we're not in work, it's on our phone and it's text

00:08:37.540 | messages and it's social media. And maybe at some point it's on a TV screen and it's streaming media.

00:08:42.420 | And we're sitting here just swiping these things with our small motions of our hands. There's nothing

00:08:46.100 | wrong with a screen, but weird things happen when most of your life becomes mediated through these

00:08:50.740 | screens. And when we live in what is basically an artificial or abstract world, my conjecture is this

00:08:57.620 | dulls our nervous system. We begin to lose what it feels like to be a being that exists in the physical

00:09:04.740 | world, that is shaping that physical world, that is enjoying that physical world. So much of our nervous

00:09:08.900 | system, our senses, is built around experiencing the world. So much of our brain is built around projecting

00:09:15.780 | things into the world, imagining what's going to happen and finding satisfactions when they do happen

00:09:20.500 | as we expect. And we lose touch with all of that when our life is increasingly through this abstraction

00:09:26.740 | that we're seeing through screens. It's a digital grayness where we exist, where these real world

00:09:32.740 | sensations have been dulled and where we get our sensations from instead are these highly optimized and

00:09:37.620 | artificial pings that are delivered by memes and comments and highly produced videos that are squeezed on

00:09:42.580 | the glass. It's a sort of a fake or artificial version of the feelings we would have used to

00:09:47.540 | have being out there in the real world. It creates a condition I call the digital doldrums. And it makes

00:09:53.140 | life seem sort of listless, sort of like you're sleepwalking, not miserable, but not really fully all there.

00:10:00.340 | Now let's bring this back to what Disney discovered, which was the power of engineering wonder.

00:10:09.460 | Right? So if you take something that really interests you, like for him, it was trains,

00:10:12.980 | and that has no instrumental purpose, it's not like this is going to be good for my career,

00:10:17.700 | it's going to make me healthier, or it's something I can brag about because God knows

00:10:20.820 | Disney was not bragging about it wasn't that cool that he was building this weird train in his backyards.

00:10:27.460 | You find something that has no instrumental purpose other than you find it remarkably interesting.

00:10:31.940 | And then if you take that and you inflate your ambition for it to 10 times larger than what is

00:10:36.580 | reasonable, I think interesting things happen. Instead of buying the Lionel train, you buy five

00:10:43.140 | acres of land and build a 1/8 scale train you can ride. I saw a guy, to give some more examples of this,

00:10:48.420 | I saw a guy on YouTube once who had built a reproduction of the Haunted Mansion ride from

00:10:53.460 | Disneyland in his suburban backyard. I mean, the whole thing, he had built a dark room, he was using

00:10:58.820 | tarps to make the passages, and there was a track system and actual homemade doom buggies

00:11:05.940 | and prop controllers. And he really did the best he can. And this was like thousands of hours of work.

00:11:11.380 | My old hairstylist in Georgetown that I used to go see, he took me once to his house and showed

00:11:16.260 | me that he had built this commercial grade glass blowing studio, that he was building this wonderful

00:11:22.820 | art out of glass. The whole salon he used to work before he left had his custom glass creations hanging

00:11:29.700 | from the ceiling. God knows how much effort went into it, but it was really kind of incredible to see.

00:11:34.980 | I call this engineered wonder, and I think it is an effective way to free you from the digital

00:11:42.180 | doldrums. I think it works because it reactivates your actual analog world nervous system. You get used

00:11:49.940 | to what it feels like to be really engaged with something that exists in the real world, not just

00:11:53.860 | feeling these sort of artificial simulated emotions. You get used to having an intention in your mind that

00:12:00.180 | your nervous system then sees being made manifest in the real world. That's an incredibly powerful

00:12:06.420 | thing. We lose what that feels like when more and more our accomplishments have to do with numbers

00:12:10.740 | next to a thumbs up on a social media post. But it feels fantastic when you get back to it. We get used

00:12:15.380 | to how much better the analog settings to work in. We feel that it feels like to have actual authentic

00:12:19.460 | wonder for something and not just an artificially manipulated emotion delivered through a screen.

00:12:24.420 | And I think once all that's reinvigorated, that screens no longer seem so great.

00:12:29.300 | And you begin seeking other things you can do. Your version of Disney saying I'm now going to start

00:12:37.060 | Disneyland. Opening up new chapters of your life that really can be profound or meaningful in a bigger

00:12:42.900 | way. Now look, I know there's an irony that we're using Walt Disney, creator of Disneyland of all people,

00:12:50.900 | to give us a solution for escaping artificial worlds. But I still think there's something here in

00:12:57.700 | this notion of engineered wonder that can be an important part of building a bridge from a shallow

00:13:04.900 | life to one that's deeper. So there's my monologue. This was the thought I had when I encountered that

00:13:12.180 | story. And this is what it made me think about. So I need to go do something crazy, Jesse. My Halloween

00:13:18.980 | decorations are not nearly enough. Why did you come up with the term digital doldrums? Have you had it for a

00:13:24.420 | while? No, I came up with it earlier today. But it seemed about right. Because when I think of the

00:13:32.260 | doldrums, I think about the nautical version of the term, which is you're in a position in the ocean

00:13:37.940 | where you have no prevailing winds. And so your sailing ship is just sort of sitting there and

00:13:43.620 | drifting around. That's what it feels like sometimes, right? This life, this very screen mediated life.

00:13:48.340 | It's not just being distracted on social media. It's like work becomes this artificial,

00:13:52.660 | performative, pseudo-productive dance of busily answering emails and jumping off of Zooms. But

00:13:58.340 | all work is the same in this world. It's all just moving text back and forth and jumping under these

00:14:02.980 | small screens. And everyone's very busy and sending Google Docs back and forth, but nothing's really

00:14:07.780 | happening. So you're busy. It's like you're in the sailing ship in the doldrums furiously trying to

00:14:14.340 | adjust your sails and tack, but nothing's happening. And so that's what I thought about. It really is

00:14:19.460 | like the doldrums. I think we're sleepwalking. And when you realize what it's like to actually

00:14:23.220 | be back in the world again, this stuff on your screen, it doesn't seem so exciting anymore. At

00:14:29.060 | least that's the hope. So I like this idea of engineered wonder. I'm playing with this for my

00:14:32.420 | Deep Life book. So this is why I've really been thinking about it. But I wanted to test it out here.

00:14:36.900 | I'm interested in both examples and feedback. By the way, you can send those to Jesse

00:14:40.820 | at calnewport.com. I gotta say that guy who built the haunted mansion in his yard. I showed my kids that

00:14:47.380 | video. That's a full-time job. And I can tell you, I admire it. I think that guy has it all figured out,

00:14:54.740 | Jesse. Full-time. I think he starts working in June to get that thing set up.

00:15:00.260 | It's an amazing build. All right. Well, we got some cool questions here. Some of them a little

00:15:04.900 | bit more reasonable to get to. I'm excited for it. But first, Jesse, it's time to hear some ads.

00:15:10.340 | So as you know, I'm recording this ad up in New England, where my family and I have been staying

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00:15:53.300 | it's illegal for a 12-year-old to drive for eight hours. He doesn't know how to drive a car. He has

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00:17:20.420 | hydrated can be hard, especially for someone like me who spends a lot of time giving talks and recording

00:17:26.500 | podcasts and doing interviews, which is all very dehydrating. I do this. And at the same time,

00:17:32.260 | I also live in a city, Washington, D.C., that in the summer becomes a stupid swamp town where even,

00:17:40.020 | and Jesse, you can back me up here, even prehistoric jungle-adapted reptiles would likely

00:17:44.500 | rather go extinct and try to handle the humidity levels that we suffer down here, which is all to

00:17:48.900 | say I use a lot of Element. So what is it? It's a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling

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00:18:11.380 | or those other dodgy ingredients you find in popular electrolyte and sports drinks. Element is used by

00:18:17.780 | professional athletes like Bradley Beal. It's used by special forces team like U.S. Navy SEALs. There's a

00:18:22.100 | lot of Olympians that use it. And most impressively, MIT trained technology theorists like myself.

00:18:28.580 | Now I typically start my day adding some element to my water, and then I'll add some more after my

00:18:32.740 | workout or if I've had like a busy speech or podcasting. I'll titrate the amount I put in by

00:18:38.420 | just how humid or dehydrated I feel. There's a new flavor this summer that you have to try lemonade salt.

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00:19:04.580 | like it, you'll get your money back, but you will like it. I am a big element drinker. So go to drinkelement.com/deep now.

00:19:11.860 | That's drinkelementlmnt.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's move on with some questions.

00:19:18.340 | First question is from Natalie.

00:19:23.060 | I left a long software engineering career to start an art business while also learning to paint

00:19:28.100 | with the goal of becoming a full-time artist. I have a financial cushion to last for a bit. I'm weighing

00:19:33.780 | different strategies for balancing business growth and my creative ambitions. Typically, I have a large

00:19:38.980 | time block for the art business before lunch, a time block for marketing and admin for both pursuits

00:19:44.260 | after lunch, and then painting after dinner. How should I pursue these two different goals?

00:19:49.460 | Well, I think there's two things going on here, Natalie. There's the big picture question about

00:19:54.500 | what you're doing with your career, the sort of like the general deep life question. And then I

00:19:58.340 | think there's the tactical question about what's the best time to do art training. Let me start with

00:20:04.580 | the easy one first. Once you're in a steady state, you kind of have your art business going and you're

00:20:11.460 | like, okay, where is art training go into this? You probably need to let your internal creative

00:20:18.660 | rhythms take the lead. You own your art business. So you probably have, I don't know exactly what

00:20:22.980 | it is, but you probably have some autonomy about how this business, like when and where it happens.

00:20:27.060 | Like it's not you behind a counter at a store, I'm assuming. So you should decide when and where

00:20:32.020 | do I do my best artwork? When am I most inspired? Like what location, what time? Make that your time

00:20:37.620 | block for doing your painting and then run the art business other places, right? That's just going to give

00:20:42.260 | you a bit of a multiplier on your return of effort for working on a creative pursuit. Find the best time,

00:20:48.740 | best location, because I can. I'm going to get 20% more out of those sessions. That adds up over time.

00:20:53.700 | All right, let's go to the general question here, the harder question.

00:20:56.100 | Leaving a long time software engineering career to start an art business. I'm a little bit worried.

00:21:02.660 | I know you have a financial cushion, but I'm a little bit worried about how much prep you did

00:21:09.460 | before making that change. The typical argument that I would make in like my book "So Good They

00:21:14.340 | Can't Ignore You" is that you really want sufficient career capital in the new thing you're doing

00:21:21.220 | that you can exchange it for success, right? That you're not coming into a new field where you have

00:21:26.740 | very little rare and valuable skills because that is a recipe for really falling behind.

00:21:31.300 | And one of the best ways, I talk about this in So Good, one of the best ways to check your career

00:21:35.860 | capital stores when it comes to a new professional endeavor is to use Derek Siver's concept of money

00:21:41.780 | being a neutral indicator of value. That is, running the art business on your side until the income it

00:21:47.700 | produces is enough to cover your needs. Now you have confidence that the business will work.

00:21:53.700 | Now you make your change. So if you made your jump before then, I guess it's all hands on deck with

00:21:59.780 | the art business until that income is coming in. And only if and when it feels stable would I really

00:22:05.620 | start prioritizing more time for the more personal pursuit of working on your own art. My concern is

00:22:12.020 | you're going to burn through this cushion and nothing comes of it because it's hard to run a new business

00:22:16.900 | if you don't have very invaluable skills. So really, I'm just going to say, put your focus on that

00:22:21.060 | until you feel comfortable and then do more time on your own art and do it when

00:22:25.620 | you feel like it's the best time for you to do the art. But you know, I've got some alarm sirens going

00:22:31.220 | here, Natalie, and hopefully I might be missing context here where it's safer than I think. But I want to put

00:22:35.380 | out that fire before I worry too much about extending the proverbial house here. All right, who do we got next, Jesse?

00:22:41.860 | Next question is from Vishal. I've been a business analyst for 11 years and it provides stability and

00:22:48.180 | good balance. I have a chance to buy a retail convenience store. The expected financial returns

00:22:53.220 | are roughly equivalent to my current full-time role. This new potential role is a major shift from my current

00:22:58.980 | career capital. However, if successful, owning multiple stores could provide long-term upside. Ideally,

00:23:04.340 | I want to take three to four months off each year. So I think this question has a lot of related themes to

00:23:09.540 | the last question. And again, I have deep life alarm sirens going off. Because when I analyze how to use your

00:23:20.500 | work as one of the tools you have to construct a deep life, there is a clear formula. The benefits of a professional

00:23:30.020 | pursuit are directly proportional to how rare and valuable the skills involved in that pursuit are.

00:23:36.580 | This is just the way the market works. The more you're leveraging rare and valuable skills,

00:23:40.420 | the more you get back either in terms of compensation or sort of like autonomy and flexibility.

00:23:44.420 | If you are really, really good at throwing a baseball with your left hand,

00:23:50.740 | you could get 20, 25 million dollars a year for doing that, right? Because it's an incredibly rare

00:23:56.420 | and valuable skill. You can leverage that to get a lot in return. If you are very, very good at writing

00:24:03.700 | dark fantasy novels like Rebecca Yaros, then you can have an extreme amount of flexibility in your life.

00:24:14.500 | You write one book every year or two. You make a massive amount of money. That's all you have to do.

00:24:19.220 | You can dictate when and where you work. The more rare and valuable skills, the better.

00:24:22.580 | I get worried about things like retail convenience stores because where's the rare and valuable skill?

00:24:27.780 | If you don't have a particular hard-won skill in this field, then why do you think

00:24:35.780 | that I can just relatively easily be making the same money as a business analyst and then maybe buy a few

00:24:42.580 | other stores and then I could have a pretty good lifestyle business or make a lot of money and don't have

00:24:48.020 | to work three or four months a year. If that was possible without you needing a hard-won skill,

00:24:53.380 | guess what? Everyone would be doing it. First, it would be people and then you would have private

00:24:57.860 | equity funds come in and everyone would be like, "This is great. What an easy business. I don't need

00:25:00.820 | to know much about it. If you have enough capital, you can have a retail convenience store do well and

00:25:05.940 | just buy three more." Everyone would be doing it. I'm always really wary if you don't have a rare and

00:25:12.740 | valuable skill being applied. I don't trust a person saying this thing's going to make you a lot of

00:25:16.420 | money. It just never works. The market is too efficient. The market of professional pursuits

00:25:20.580 | and rewards is very efficient. If there's ways to do really well without rare and valuable skills,

00:25:25.460 | people move into it till it's saturated. Then people try to automate and systematize it and then all the

00:25:29.940 | opportunity goes away. I think of it as the efficient job market theory. Now, I could be wrong here,

00:25:38.180 | but I know I've seen some books for some stores, including several stores in Tacoma Park. I know

00:25:43.540 | the owners. These are hard businesses. It's hard work. It's hard to scrape a margin. Almost certainly,

00:25:49.140 | you're getting a much higher return on your time and much closer paths to autonomy and flexibility

00:25:54.900 | and being something like a business analyst with a specialty than you are running a retail convenience

00:25:58.820 | store. All this is just to say, be wary. Now, that's not to say that this is not a bad business,

00:26:04.980 | because I'm going to play devil's advocate for myself here, Visho. There are some types of retail

00:26:11.140 | outlets that can be pretty profitable, like a good McDonald's franchise in a good location can do really

00:26:16.740 | well. And you could say, well, then why does anyone do it? Well, it's because McDonald's

00:26:21.060 | has a, if you want to be a franchisee, they have this rule that says you can't finance more than some

00:26:27.380 | small percent of the purchase price of the franchise. So you have to have, it depends on where you are,

00:26:32.260 | but many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of capital. Now, if you have that, it could be a

00:26:36.900 | pretty good investment. These are, McDonald's are relatively turnkey, how they run, and you can scale

00:26:42.820 | them. And it's a situation where not everyone can do it because not everyone has $700,000 worth of

00:26:47.940 | capital to buy a McDonald's and Silver Spring or whatever it is. So there is some devil advocate

00:26:51.940 | here that if there's capital at play and that's what's keeping people out of the market, or it's

00:26:56.420 | an unusually good location and you have an inside connection to it, maybe that helps.

00:27:01.220 | But I just want to make this general point, regardless of the details of Visho's situation,

00:27:06.820 | I want to make this general point for anyone out there. If you think a deal is too good to be true,

00:27:13.940 | like, wow, I can just do this and make a lot of money. I don't know much about it. You're probably

00:27:17.860 | the sucker in the bet, probably the sucker in the bet. So be very wary about career capital and be very

00:27:24.020 | wary, A, about things that require career capital and be very open to where can I take the career capital

00:27:28.980 | I already have, specialize it a little bit more and six months from now have like a very big piece

00:27:33.780 | of leverage I can use in my life. If I'm a business analyst, is there a new market emerging that has

00:27:38.340 | some tech complicated technical component that I can master and then go freelance and do this 20 hours

00:27:44.660 | a week or do this 40 weeks a year and take the other 12 weeks off. And if I change my living expenses,

00:27:49.780 | it can work. Like I can imagine many more potential paths to a deep life building on the career capital

00:27:58.100 | you already have than I can imagine building a retail empire being the way to get there.

00:28:02.420 | All right. So that's my sermon. I'm just very worried about anything where if I'm not,

00:28:07.460 | if I'm not leveraging a hard one skill, I'm nervous about the idea that this is going to be

00:28:13.220 | a pretty good or easy or lucrative job. All right, who we got? Next up is Doug. You've said before that

00:28:21.300 | the real way to improve as a writer is to write for publications. My niche is small. I've submitted

00:28:26.100 | pieces before, but the responses have always been no with no suggestions or edits. I haven't tried often

00:28:31.540 | because the process didn't help me grow. I also prickle at the prospect of using my precious limited

00:28:36.340 | writing time to do the non-writing that would come with searching for other avenues. How should I do this?

00:28:41.700 | Jesse, I feel like I'm in my curmudgeon mode today question because I've got another curmudgeonly

00:28:46.180 | answer coming. I don't know. I'm sort of, I'm sort of feeling like angry uncle today. Um, again,

00:28:52.580 | Doug, not knowing all your circumstances, and I don't mean to rant, but writing for publications,

00:28:59.460 | how you get better. Now, if you're right, if you're journaling for yourself, if you're writing fiction,

00:29:03.860 | just, uh, for the creative expression to share with your friends, if you're your poetry,

00:29:08.900 | because it just helps you get your feelings out, of course, don't mess. It doesn't matter

00:29:13.060 | if you publish it or not. And if it's a pain, I agree with you. Don't waste the time. But if you're

00:29:16.660 | trying to become a better writer, like I want to get good at this, maybe I want to have this be,

00:29:20.740 | if not a career, like a component to my professional life, something I'm known for something I do at a

00:29:27.060 | high level writing for publications, how you get good. Yes. You've submitted some pieces. The

00:29:32.660 | response has been no, there's been no suggestions. That's because it takes a lot. It's hard to be a

00:29:37.060 | published writer. You know, it takes, if it was easy, everyone would be like, yeah, I'm going to spend

00:29:42.660 | four months and start publishing stuff. And it's great. Yeah. It's a hard entry ramp, but it is worth

00:29:47.380 | keep pushing yourself to get past that gate of being published. Stephen King, he writes about this in his book

00:29:53.540 | On Writing. When he first started writing fiction and he was aiming in the short story market, there

00:29:58.180 | was a lot more short story magazines for horror and speculative fiction back then. Up in his attic,

00:30:04.100 | he took a railroad spike and he knocked that spike into the wall above the typewriter where he was

00:30:10.660 | writing up in that attic room. And he said, that's where I'm going to put my rejection slips, not a nail,

00:30:15.220 | because a nail is not long enough. And he began filling that railroad spike with rejection slips.

00:30:21.700 | And you know the story he tells in On Writing? Reminds me of you. At first,

00:30:25.300 | no. Rejections, no information. After a while, hey, this was kind of good, but it's not for us.

00:30:33.700 | Maybe a couple of sentences of feedback. After a while, hey, I think this was close. You know,

00:30:38.580 | Stephen, I like this. This is close, but I'm not quite sure about it. Then stuff started getting in.

00:30:44.020 | And then he started messing around with novels. They weren't working. And then he had one that did work.

00:30:48.180 | It was about a young woman who had telekinesis, right? Had this power of telekinesis and what

00:30:55.460 | happened in a small town. And he sold it, hardcover. I think it was like a $2,000 advance. He was a

00:31:01.940 | teacher in Bangor having to work summer jobs to cleaning industrial laundries, cleaning tablecloths from

00:31:10.740 | New England lobster joints and maggots on him. It's gross, right? But he needed the summer job to

00:31:15.380 | make the money. The book does pretty well, though. It catches some attention. It's starting to get

00:31:19.860 | some heat. He doesn't really know this. There's no internet back then. A call comes in to his agent.

00:31:24.900 | They've sold the paperback rights. $400,000. This is in the 1970s. Railroad spike filled with rejection

00:31:32.100 | slips before he made that progress. Which is all to say, this is part of the rite of passage of writing.

00:31:36.580 | The key is when you're getting the no's, you say, well, how do I get better to try to make the next

00:31:40.180 | one not be a no? So even while you're waiting to get feedback from publication, have a writer's group.

00:31:44.580 | Work with other people. What's working here? What's not? Be brutally honest with me. Get the feedback.

00:31:50.340 | Try harder. Try a different format. Try a different style. What if I tried this? Maybe this is a better

00:31:53.860 | match. It's that hard work of trying to get accepted is the first major deliberate practice

00:31:58.660 | stretch that happens in the life of a professional writer. Once you're writing for publication,

00:32:02.820 | the next large deliberate practice stretch happens where you go from not bad to good and then really

00:32:08.660 | cool stuff can go on. So don't write a story. If again, if your goal is to be like a good writer,

00:32:16.020 | don't try to write yourself a story where it's all gatekeepers and they don't know what they're

00:32:19.860 | talking about and you're just going to do your thousand words a day because it's fun and you like

00:32:23.620 | the idea of it and you have your herbal moth AT and you Instagram photos of it. Don't write your own

00:32:28.180 | story about how you want the world of writing to work. The real story is it's hard, but that hardness

00:32:33.140 | is the edge against which the blade of craft is sharpened. And even that push to get past the simple

00:32:40.980 | no, if you're really pushing, if they anger you when you push back and you have friends and you have

00:32:45.540 | writers groups and you're trying and you're relentless, that's when you start to get good.

00:32:49.540 | And so maybe my problem is I left off that first part, Jesse, that sometimes it's hard to even get in the

00:32:54.340 | publications in the first place. And that's okay. That is the first step of getting better.

00:32:58.340 | Mm-hmm I had my tour. We're going to revisit Doug too in the case study.

00:33:02.500 | Oh, okay. Excellent. Is that the same Doug? It's the same Doug. Yeah.

00:33:06.980 | Oh, interesting. And the case study is having a great time. Yeah.

00:33:10.900 | All right. This will be interesting. All right, Doug, stay tuned. We're going to revisit listeners,

00:33:14.500 | Doug's story in the case study. He says like, Hey, I just sold. I went around trying to write for

00:33:20.180 | publication and an editor just showed up at my house and said, Hey, I just happened to see this

00:33:24.420 | on your computer screen through the window. We're just going to give you this giant check right now.

00:33:29.380 | I'm glad you didn't waste your time writing submission letters. Doug actually has a cool story.

00:33:35.220 | So I look forward to returning to that. All right. Do we have another question from someone with a name

00:33:39.540 | that starts with a D because that's what I really want right now? Daniel. And Daniel says,

00:33:44.660 | Companies investing in AI see a tool that should decrease time to value. Knowledge workers should

00:33:51.620 | now be able to produce faster in the company's view. How should we argue to companies that the

00:33:57.380 | long-term benefits of allowing slow friction-laden skill building outweigh the shorter-term benefits of

00:34:03.620 | faster project completion through AI assistance? So Daniel, I don't have this argument with your

00:34:09.940 | company. Executives are acting kind of delusional about AI because it's this, we don't understand the

00:34:17.780 | technology. We don't really understand exactly how it works, but we're seeing on our phone, all these

00:34:24.420 | like crazy headlines from fortune articles. And so I think if you get a chat GPT description is what I

00:34:32.180 | can tell here is it'll automate all of your work in about 17 minutes. Wow. So we should just do that.

00:34:38.980 | So executives are like, we use AI. And if you're not using AI, then we don't want you here or whatever.

00:34:43.780 | But honestly, it's pretty narrow still, and we'll get into this more in the third segment, but it's

00:34:47.780 | pretty narrow still the niches in which there are significant productivity improvements happening from AI.

00:34:52.740 | So you have to kind of just tune out the almost delusional exuberance of the executive class

00:34:59.300 | right now. Look at what you do. If you see people using AI in what you do in a way that seems really

00:35:06.500 | helpful, then say, hey, teach me about it and use it. It might help some. But that's kind of it. And if you

00:35:12.180 | don't have a useful way to use it, you know, tell your boss, yeah, I have my chat GPT description and

00:35:18.340 | just go on and do the hard work of getting really good and so good they can't ignore you.

00:35:21.380 | There is a lot of energy that right now is kind of rootless and disconnected from reality right now.

00:35:27.860 | So you are not probably missing out on some way that AI was going to fully automate your job. So

00:35:33.700 | keep an eye on it, but just look at the people around you. Hey, are you using this? Are you finding

00:35:37.860 | any use in it? And after like, I don't know, I'm like having conversations with it for 45 minutes a

00:35:41.780 | day before I write my email to make sure that I feel good about it. You can be like, that's great. And

00:35:45.700 | you're doing good. And that's a really good idea. And then you can go back to your desk and just do

00:35:48.820 | the work. But if there really is something that's helping, then use it. But I think most people right

00:35:53.220 | now, there's not a major, it's okay. You're not doing something wrong if you don't have like a

00:35:58.020 | major productivity boosting use case for AI. It's not your job to figure out how to use their products.

00:36:02.500 | It's their job to convince you that the product is indispensable. So no matter how excited your boss got,

00:36:09.140 | because he watched a YouTube interview of Dario Amadei saying all jobs are going to be automated

00:36:15.060 | within 19 minutes. Keep doing your work. Keep doing it well. All right. Who do we got?

00:36:20.180 | All right. Next up is Amy. Naval Ravikant in his podcast with Chris Williamson says that

00:36:26.340 | inspiration is perishable. He argues that there is value in doing things spontaneously instead of having

00:36:32.500 | scheduled time for it. You won't be in the mood to do that thing when the time arrives. He also mentions

00:36:37.300 | that being able to do something that you want at the moment you want it is liberating.

00:36:41.780 | He does embody the removing the unnecessary overhead part of where he has no meetings,

00:36:48.820 | etc., but says that the overly scheduled life is not worth living. Does this contradict with the deep life?

00:36:55.620 | I mean, not to be spicy and like every one of my answers today, and maybe it's this New England air,

00:37:02.660 | but Naval is basically describing the life of like an 18th century aristocrat. Yes. If you're a moneyed

00:37:14.660 | gentleman. We can play it if you want to play the clip. Do you have a clip of it? Well, I think you

00:37:19.300 | captured it. I think that captured the main things. Okay. If you're the type of person that would come

00:37:25.140 | calling in a Jane Austen novel. Sure. It's probably right. This is like a great way of living, right?

00:37:33.940 | Because our income comes from our investments and we have freedom of time and we want to use the time

00:37:39.940 | in the highest ways. And to have a day that's overly scheduled, it probably is like not as life-affirming

00:37:46.100 | as sort of taking the interest as it arises and pursuing it. And it could be the, you're like,

00:37:51.460 | uh, I don't know, like, uh, Jason Priestley. Not Jason. I just said Jason Priestley. Jason Priestley is

00:37:58.580 | from Beverly Hills, 90210, Shannon Doherty's brother. I'm thinking about someone who's very similar.

00:38:10.660 | Joseph Priestley, I think. Let me just get this name right. Jason Priestley. You need to be like,

00:38:16.340 | uh, Luke. I don't remember this guy's name. Jason Priestley. All right. So who I am thinking about here

00:38:23.300 | is Joseph Priestley. I'm pretty close, Jesse. Yeah. Uh, similar to Jason Priestley. Joseph Priestley

00:38:30.740 | was a gentleman scientist from the 18th century contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, who he crossed

00:38:35.620 | paths with, who helped isolate oxygen because he just like ran these experiments because

00:38:40.100 | today I shall horse ride tomorrow. I shall work on experiments. And I agree. It's like a,

00:38:44.900 | it's probably a really interesting day-to-day way to live. But Naval Ravikant is an incredibly

00:38:50.740 | successful seed level investor who had early money in Uber and all these other types of companies and

00:38:55.300 | has a lot of money and doesn't have to, um, like a gentleman aristocrat of the 19th century can just sort

00:39:02.500 | of like let his day unfold. The rest of us, however, if we want to master a craft that's going to be

00:39:08.100 | meaningful and profitable takes really hard work. It's diligence. Diligence, not just to return to

00:39:13.060 | that craft day after day and push yourself deliberately, but the diligence to say no to

00:39:16.900 | other things that are more interesting in the moment because crafting that skill requires repeated time.

00:39:22.580 | You want to produce something that the market respects to produce something that matters to have

00:39:27.140 | leverage, create leverage in your life through the value you produce. Like that is hard work. It's

00:39:32.340 | diligent work. You have to time block. You have to work with your motivational systems. It's not always fun,

00:39:37.380 | but it can be really fulfilling. I'm sure Naval went through all this when he was an early stage

00:39:41.460 | investor making his moves early on and trying to understand the market and get in on these early

00:39:46.180 | startups. He was involved and it was hard work, but it was probably also really satisfying in that

00:39:49.860 | stage of life. So anyways, I'm sure Naval is right that, uh, it is very liberating not to have a schedule.

00:39:56.740 | And actually you would enjoy a lot about your life in the moment, but most of us don't have that

00:40:01.380 | opportunity. But more importantly, and I think this is maybe the contrarian stance here,

00:40:06.420 | is it really better? Again, when are people alive? When are they fulfilled? When they have a purpose

00:40:14.340 | they're pursuing? When they're able to take their energies and to shape them with discipline and

00:40:22.820 | motivation to creating something that makes the world better or it's interesting? What deeper satisfactions

00:40:28.660 | outside of those of community you get? And actually that type of motion, that type of movement towards

00:40:34.100 | making your intentions manifest concretely in the world, to borrow the Matt Crawford phrase.

00:40:39.700 | And that's often hard. Crawford talks about that in "Shop Class of Soulcraft," the deep satisfactions of

00:40:46.820 | commercial electrician work, bending those contuant almost like art so that all of the wires can fit

00:40:52.820 | into the commercial junction box and it just works. That's hard. You're bending pipes. I watched our AC

00:40:59.460 | guy bend like two pipes a few months ago when we got a new AC involved. That's hard work. You're heating it

00:41:04.500 | up at the soldering thing and you're bending it. But he was pretty satisfied when he was done because he made

00:41:09.220 | that thing work and the machine turns on and the house gets cold. So I don't know. I'm sure it's fun.

00:41:14.580 | I'm sure it's fine in the moment. I'm sure it is liberating to not have a schedule, not be pushing.

00:41:20.020 | But when you're pushing on the right things, sometimes that's even better.

00:41:23.940 | All right. Hopefully our call today, Jesse, doesn't get me fired up anymore. We need something to...

00:41:29.700 | I don't know what it is, but we need something to calm me down. So if this is a call that says,

00:41:35.860 | how could I find time to deep work when I am on a submarine in charge of the nuclear reactor and it

00:41:43.220 | requires 18 hour shifts and my child is with me and I'm doing childcare on the submarine while I'm doing

00:41:48.980 | that. When am I doing my deep work? I hope it's not a call like that. I hope it's something that's going to

00:41:52.420 | call me. All right. Here we go. Hey, Cal, this is Catherine. You've written a lot about how we

00:41:58.980 | shouldn't be beholden to our email inboxes and the email that comes in should not set our priorities for

00:42:05.060 | the day, which makes total sense to me intellectually. But as a lifelong inbox zero person, I find it

00:42:15.140 | incredibly difficult to let go of the sense of control that comes from addressing everything in

00:42:21.860 | my inbox. Do you have any suggestions for people like me who want to reply to things and address things

00:42:31.540 | that that come in? Um, are there half measures that you would suggest we take, um, or kind of other

00:42:38.900 | strategies to lessen the stranglehold of the desire to keep on top of our inboxes? Thanks.

00:42:47.220 | Let me ask you this, Jesse. Do we still have the slow productivity theme music loaded up on that

00:42:52.740 | board? Because I think this will, I'm in a spicy mood. I think we've got to calm things down.

00:43:02.260 | All right. That's putting me in the right mindset here. So I'm going to approach this question

00:43:09.940 | with calm. So I'm going to start by saying with calmness. I know it is a common thing people say

00:43:19.140 | about email. Don't stress what's in there. Don't make that be your priority. There's like more important

00:43:25.540 | things than it. These aren't urgent. People should have better expectations. I know that's a common

00:43:31.380 | response to inbox overload. I don't agree with it though. I actually think you should deal with what's

00:43:39.700 | in your inbox. You should be able to deal with everything in your inbox. And the solution is not

00:43:44.580 | to pretend like your inbox isn't there. It's not to pretend like people's expectations are wrong for

00:43:48.980 | emailing you. It is to reduce the amount of those emails that arrive in your inbox in the first place.

00:43:53.940 | I'm also an inbox. You're a person. I get very stressed by it. It's social stress. We talked about

00:43:59.140 | this context of text messages in the last week's deep dive. So I wrote a whole book called The World

00:44:04.900 | Without Email. It came out in 2021. And the whole premise of that book, well, I guess there's two

00:44:10.020 | premises. The premise is having a lot of back and forth communication is terrible for us. It makes us

00:44:15.220 | stressed out. It doesn't make us more productive. But the main idea of the advice in that book

00:44:20.180 | is we can re-engineer how we collaborate in a professional context so that we're not so dependent on

00:44:26.820 | unscheduled messages that require responses. That's the thing that creates an anxiety-producing inbox

00:44:32.180 | full of messages that have to be dealt with is that you have a dozen or two dozen ongoing virtual

00:44:38.500 | asynchronous conversations unfolding with messages being bounced back and forth. So any moment you look

00:44:44.100 | in your inbox, 75% of those conversations have the next message waiting for you. And you kind of have

00:44:50.180 | to answer those pretty quickly because when you bounce it back to them, they'll bounce it back to you and

00:44:54.020 | you'll bounce it back to them. And you're doing this game where you're trying to get to an asynchronous

00:44:57.380 | conclusion before too much time goes on. So you have to check that inbox and you have to get down to zero.

00:45:02.100 | And by the time you get down to zero, there's 24 more messages arrive because they just bounced them

00:45:06.020 | back to you. The key then is not to ignore that. It is to stop there being so many proverbial ping pong

00:45:11.700 | balls coming in your direction. And the whole second half of that book, or what's it called,

00:45:17.860 | a world without email. I was going to say how to become an email superstar,

00:45:21.460 | which is another awesome title, but a world without email. The whole second half is saying

00:45:28.980 | when you get emails that are part of a conversation, so not something you can just either informational or

00:45:35.620 | something you can just answer with a single message. When they're part of a back and forth conversation,

00:45:40.260 | ask yourself, "What is this conversation about? What type of thing is this trying to bring us to a

00:45:46.340 | resolution about?" And then you have a short-term and long-term solution here. Short-term for that

00:45:51.860 | particular conversation, say, "How can I respond to this email that is going to move this out of

00:45:57.700 | unscheduled messaging from here on out?" And that might mean spending more time on that particular email.

00:46:02.660 | They say, "Okay, here's the decisions we need to make. Here's the way I think we should do it.

00:46:06.820 | You finish this draft by Wednesday, put it into this Dropbox folder by close of business. I'll pick it up

00:46:11.620 | first thing Thursday morning. I'll annotate it. I'll have any of my annotations in that Dropbox version by

00:46:16.580 | noon. You can pick it up any time after noon on Thursday to act on those. By the way, we have a meeting

00:46:22.340 | on this unrelated thing Thursday afternoon. So any unresolved questions, let's just chat real quickly

00:46:27.540 | after that meeting. But otherwise, whatever you have in there at the end of day Thursday, I'm going to

00:46:32.820 | send on to the designer. We'll have that report put together." That email is more of a pain to write

00:46:37.300 | than just answering the current email with like, "Yeah, I think so, but when are you available?"

00:46:40.900 | It takes more time to write, but you have just cauterized the wound of all of those back and forth

00:46:46.340 | messages. That conversation will no longer generate new messages that require a response in your inbox,

00:46:51.620 | so the effort was worth it. So we call that process-centric emailing. You respond to ongoing

00:46:57.460 | chains in ways that breaks the ongoing chain. That reduces the pressure in your inbox. That's

00:47:02.100 | a short-term solution. The long-term solution is you say, "What is the general type of work that this

00:47:09.380 | responds to? Is this conversation about something that I do again and again? Is there a type of report

00:47:14.980 | we put out? Is there agenda planning we do for this weekly meeting? Is there client issues that come in

00:47:23.300 | that are kind of complicated to figure out? What is the regularly occurring work-related process that

00:47:29.780 | this email conversation is related to?" And you can step back and say, "Let's put in place a different

00:47:35.300 | protocol for dealing with this type of thing. Here's our process for how we produce reports,

00:47:41.620 | and we synchronize it. We don't need unscheduled messages. Here's our process for dealing with clients.

00:47:47.300 | There's three days a week where they can call at this time if they want. They don't have to if they have

00:47:51.940 | nothing to talk about. But we will be there, and we will answer and chat with them about any question

00:47:56.100 | you have. We'll have our intern take notes. We'll send them a summary of the notes right after and

00:48:00.420 | about all the things we've committed to doing. And when they next call, we'll tell them how it's going.

00:48:04.340 | And there we go. We now have a way of dealing with clients that don't require back and forth messages.

00:48:08.260 | So the long-term solution is creating protocols for regularly occurring business processes that are

00:48:13.780 | right now generating these unscheduled back and forth conversations. That is the killer of inboxes.

00:48:19.300 | Back and forth conversations consisting of unscheduled messages that require relatively

00:48:23.620 | timely responses. That is the productivity poison that has to be neutralized. And in this sort of

00:48:29.620 | medical analogy, the activated charcoal that you would use here, and I'm really stretching this analogy,

00:48:35.620 | is being smarter about process and protocol. So I don't think we should ignore inboxes. This is,

00:48:41.300 | by the way, why I think most advice about inboxes fails, because it ignores the psychological reality

00:48:47.940 | of having messages waiting that require a response. And when you tell me to batch, when you tell me to

00:48:51.700 | don't check email first thing in the morning, when you tell me to tell people to have new expectations

00:48:57.540 | for when to expect a response, none of that works when you have dozens of messages that really do need

00:49:02.980 | to be replied to quickly for you to be a useful collaborator in your company. There's too much social

00:49:08.820 | stress around it. So we got to prevent those messages from getting to the inbox in the first

00:49:12.580 | place. Read a world without email. More people should read that. I mean, it's not that that book

00:49:16.500 | did poorly, but it probably came in a little bit under the radar in 2021. There's a few other things

00:49:20.580 | happening in the world, and people weren't thinking that much about reengineering their business processes.

00:49:25.380 | So check that book out. If you're curious about the type of things we're talking about, I don't know

00:49:31.060 | if the theme music really called me down, Jesse, but I tried. It's good to hear it again. Yeah. All right.

00:49:36.980 | We got a case study here from Doug, who I sort of gave a sermon about Stephen King and a railroad spike.

00:49:42.980 | I gave my son that same sermon, by the way, I made him read on writing to Stephen King nonfiction book.

00:49:48.020 | So I'm already fired up about it. Doug, let's hear your case study because I think it's going to make me

00:49:53.860 | chill out a little bit. All right. So Doug says, "I'm a public school teacher in Atlanta,

00:49:58.820 | and I also write a blog. You talk often about how time and place affect creative energy,

00:50:03.700 | and I've leaned into that more than ever this summer. The routine I've settled into has been,

00:50:07.940 | one, I do most of my writing in the nearby university library, which is only about a mile

00:50:14.420 | and a half from my home. It is beautiful, inspiring, and mostly empty over the summer." Doug, I've been

00:50:19.380 | doing the same thing here this summer. I did a lot of work at Dartmouth, and I was in the tower room again

00:50:23.940 | today. It's empty. It's motivating. I love it. All right. Two, I write there in the mornings,

00:50:29.540 | usually for 90 minutes to two hours. I don't set a timer. That's just about how long I

00:50:33.460 | usually maintain a flow state session. Three, to get there and back, I willingly walk even in the

00:50:38.820 | Atlanta heat. I choose a route that takes me through a nature preserve on the grounds of the university,

00:50:43.780 | and then through the prettiest part of campus. It takes about 30 minutes each way.

00:50:47.700 | That whole routine is incredibly productive for me without feeling like work whatsoever.

00:50:51.700 | The time, place, and mode of transportation makes it feel like an indulgent choice of how to spend my time

00:50:56.980 | rather than work. This deep summer has been incredibly satisfying. It's funny,

00:51:03.220 | everybody I know is worried about me. I haven't done any of the things teachers usually do over

00:51:06.900 | the summer, so people are worried that I'm bored and depressed, and they're surprised when I tell

00:51:10.900 | them it's been one of my favorite summers ever. All right, Mia Culpa, Doug, you say here that the

00:51:16.100 | writing you're doing is for a blog, which I think might be exactly one of those cases I was talking about,

00:51:21.620 | where you don't necessarily have to worry about publication. You are enjoying the craft of writing.

00:51:27.460 | You're getting better on your own pace, and you're reactivating your creative circuits. This reminds

00:51:33.540 | me a little bit of the engineered wonder we talked about in the deep dive, right? I mean, it's a little

00:51:37.300 | bit over the top, which is what's good. 30 minutes, beautiful library, two hours, isolation, flow state.

00:51:44.020 | I mean, I think you're getting benefits right now that might be completely unrelated to the writing,

00:51:49.380 | and then you add on top of that the benefits of having a creative outlet during this quiet season

00:51:54.900 | in your year. So I am okay that you're saying, I don't want to right now waste a lot of time trying

00:52:01.460 | to get better with publication, because your goal here is not, I want to be a published novelist

00:52:05.700 | or like a well-known columnist. So my rant before doesn't apply to you, Doug, but does apply to other

00:52:11.540 | people who heard that and were thinking like, yeah, I want to be a professional writer, but I shouldn't

00:52:16.660 | have to submit things. That takes too much time away from my writing. That's who I was talking to, but Doug,

00:52:21.780 | your deep summer sounds delightful. A great example of lifestyle-centric planning and a great example of

00:52:27.540 | engineered wonder, that idea that we talked about in the show's opening. All right, we got a great final

00:52:35.460 | segment. We're going to talk about an article I recently sent to my newsletter that I want to bring

00:52:39.460 | to your attention. But first, Jesse, let's hear from another sponsor. So here's the thing about aging.

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00:55:46.340 | with custom automations to reduce shipping errors. And you can do this all at a fraction of the cost.

00:55:51.860 | If we ever add an e-commerce piece to our business, Jesse, we would 100% use ShipStation so we could

00:55:59.780 | easily track our orders, print labels, and enjoy discounts. With ShipStation on board, the only thing

00:56:05.300 | standing between us - I was thinking about this, Jesse - but if we had ShipStation, the only thing

00:56:10.740 | standing between us and a business fortune would be, and it's a small thing, our complete lack of any

00:56:16.420 | viable idea for a product to sell. But if we solve that problem, ShipStation would help us become very

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00:56:46.900 | small e-commerce business seem like it's one of the major players. For example, if you use ShipStation,

00:56:52.100 | they can do automated tracking updates that they send to your customers with your company's branding

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00:57:11.060 | There's no credit card or contract required, and you can cancel any time. That's ShipStation.com/deep.

00:57:18.580 | All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. We usually, in the final segment,

00:57:24.260 | talk about something that I am reading. Today, I want to talk about something that I'm writing.

00:57:28.340 | This is an email that went out to my newsletter at CalNewport.com last week. It was called "No

00:57:34.180 | One Knows Anything About AI." If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, CalNewport.com. Each week,

00:57:40.020 | I have an essay about the type of ideas we talk about here on the show. So I wanted to read a couple

00:57:47.060 | excerpts from this essay because it gets at a topic we talked about a couple times already briefly in

00:57:54.660 | the show in recent months. So I began this essay by saying, I want to present you with two narratives

00:58:00.980 | about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming,

00:58:05.860 | but they point toward two very different conclusions. So the first narrative that I emphasize in this article

00:58:14.420 | is the idea that computer programming is very well-suited for large language models because

00:58:19.380 | programming is basically well-structured text, and models are good at producing that. It's also easy

00:58:24.900 | to train models on it because you can compile the code that it outputs, and if it works, give it a good

00:58:31.780 | reinforcement learning signal, and if it doesn't, a bad. So it's really the best-case scenario for training

00:58:37.460 | language models. And so this one scenario says it's doing great and programming is basically

00:58:42.820 | being taken over by AI. Here's a few quotes I put to support that narrative. The CEO of the AI company

00:58:50.100 | Perplexity said that new AI programming tools have cut the time for his engineers to complete tasks from

00:58:56.420 | three to four days down to one hour. He now mandates that all of his employees use it. An article in Inc. said,

00:59:01.860 | "The world of software engineering, AI has changed everything." Another article says the tech sector

00:59:07.460 | has seen 64,000 job cuts this year due to AI advancement, and they point out Microsoft in

00:59:13.380 | particular had many thousands of those cuts because of AI advancements. There was a big new splashy

00:59:19.460 | Atlantic piece that said the computer science bubble is bursting. This is my academic home because AI,

00:59:25.300 | it says in this article, is ideally suited to replace the very type of person who built it,

00:59:29.060 | so why bother learning computer science? So you read these type of things. There's dozens of these

00:59:34.500 | articles every day. And you say, yeah, okay, computer programmers are rapidly going in the way of the

00:59:38.740 | telegraph operator. This is the first place where AI is having a huge seismic disruption.

00:59:43.060 | But as I point out in the article, there's a completely different narrative out there,

00:59:49.860 | depending on what articles you read and what experts you're quoting. So for example,

00:59:54.900 | just a couple of weeks ago, the AI evaluation company METR released the results of a randomized

01:00:01.380 | control trial where they took two groups of experienced open source software developers,

01:00:04.900 | and they said, great, here's a bunch of tasks, programming tasks for you to do. Group A, use AI tools.

01:00:10.980 | Group B, don't. And guess what? I'm going to quote the paper here. "Surprisingly, we find that when

01:00:17.140 | developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without. AI makes them slower."

01:00:25.700 | Meanwhile, we're getting all these quotes from experienced developers who were using these tools.

01:00:30.180 | We're like, yeah, they're useful. But this idea that they are, like the tech leaders are saying,

01:00:36.020 | about to take over all programming jobs, like this is preposterous.

01:00:39.620 | Simon Willison said, "Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting

01:00:44.980 | carpentry as a career, thanks to the invention of the table saw." The tech CEO, Nick Kami, said the following,

01:00:50.740 | responding to the claim that the number of people required to produce software is drastically reducing,

01:00:57.300 | he said, "I feel like I'm being gaslit every time I read this, and I worry it makes folks early in their

01:01:02.260 | software development journey feel like it's a bad time investment." Okay, but what about Microsoft

01:01:09.460 | firing 9,000 people because now the AI can do their jobs? Not what happened? Take a closer look at their

01:01:16.260 | press release. What's going on? Yes, they cut a lot of jobs across many different divisions,

01:01:21.620 | not because they were replacing those jobs with AI automation, but because they were trying to free up

01:01:27.460 | funds to invest in their AI divisions, in particular to help pay for the huge expense of running these AI

01:01:35.380 | data centers. So yeah, technically speaking, it's correct that Microsoft fired 9,000 people due to

01:01:41.140 | AI advancements, but not because they were replaced by AI, but because their work on AI advancements is so

01:01:46.900 | damn expensive. Same thing with the computer science major bubble bursting. Later on in that same Atlantic

01:01:52.740 | article, they noted there's another reason why those majors might be down. The tech market started

01:01:58.660 | contracting after the pandemic because there had been a lot of spending in the tech industry during

01:02:04.340 | the pandemic, and now they're cutting back. And as a professor said in that Atlantic article,

01:02:09.300 | "Enrollment in the computer science major has historically fluctuated with the job market,

01:02:15.140 | and prior to clients have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than when they started."

01:02:19.540 | This was my first exposure to computer science when I was a young computer science undergraduate

01:02:24.020 | in the early 2000s. The 2001 dot-com boom had happened. Money was contracting. And you know what

01:02:30.260 | happened to computer science majors? Everyone was worried like, "Oh my God, where all the majors go?"

01:02:35.140 | And then they came back, and then they went down again during the Great Recession. Then they came back.

01:02:38.740 | It just goes up and down. So what's the point here? Let me read my conclusion. I'm not trying to

01:02:46.740 | battle like, "Hey, which of these is right?" Here's what I want to say about there being two completely

01:02:51.860 | different narratives on the same topic, all from the same two or three weeks I'm pulling these quotes.

01:02:57.460 | When it comes to AI's impacts, we don't yet know anything for sure. But this isn't stopping everyone

01:03:04.420 | from pretending like we do. So here's my advice for the moment. Tune out both the most heated and the

01:03:11.700 | most dismissive rhetoric. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem

01:03:18.020 | connected to AI. Read widely, and more importantly, ask people you trust about what they're actually

01:03:23.140 | seeing. And beyond that, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All this is too new for anyone to

01:03:30.500 | really understand what they're saying. AI is important, but we don't yet fully know why."

01:03:36.820 | So there you go, Jesse. I just thought it was really interesting that I could find a huge number

01:03:41.700 | of articles saying one thing and a huge number of articles saying the other thing. And it's not like

01:03:45.700 | these are sequenced. We used to think this, and now our opinion changed. These are almost all from the

01:03:51.380 | same two-week period. So headlines are getting out of control when it comes to AI. Wait until you see

01:03:59.060 | the stuff you do is being affected and then talk to actual people who are being affected and say how,

01:04:04.100 | because the headlines will drive you crazy. You're either going to start digging a bunker

01:04:08.100 | and doing the pull-ups on the bar from Terminator 2 that Connor has to start doing when she's in the

01:04:18.020 | mental asylum because she knows that the Terminator war is coming because she's seen the future

01:04:22.980 | and she's trying to prepare for it. I don't remember her first name. Man, I'm getting so old.

01:04:26.980 | Connor. John Connor is the son and, well, whatever. She got really ripped. The actress who was playing

01:04:34.020 | John Connor's, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Uh, so you're either doing that, like preparing to,

01:04:40.580 | she, I think at some point, John Connor's mom can fire. She's firing like an M60 from like a shoulder

01:04:46.180 | crook. So you can prepare to do that. Or on the other hand, you can be shorting all tech stocks because it's

01:04:51.460 | all like at a crazy inflated bubble scam. Or you could say like, I'm not going to follow those

01:04:56.420 | headlines right now because most of them are crazy. And it's not my job to figure out what's useful

01:05:02.420 | about these products. It's their job to tell, show me indisputably, this is vital for your life. That

01:05:08.500 | was clear to me when I first saw Google. That was clear to me when I first saw email. That's been clear

01:05:13.220 | to a lot of computer programmers when it comes to some of these new programming tools in terms of like really

01:05:18.020 | speeding up the time of figuring out how to write boilerplate code or figuring out library calls.

01:05:22.500 | When it's clear, it's clear. And if it's not yet clear, you don't have to go sifting through headlines

01:05:27.140 | to figure out why. It's the product's job. It's the company's job to figure out why they're useful.

01:05:31.460 | Don't trust the headlines. Grain of salt. No one knows anything. Everyone pretends like they do.

01:05:36.420 | That's basically my summary of AI. I would say, Jesse, this is one of the spicier episodes we had in a while. But

01:05:41.940 | again, I think it's this cool new England air. I mean, it's like 72 degrees right now, Jesse. I don't

01:05:47.620 | want to make you jealous. Yeah. And there's like almost no humidity. Oh, we got to just build a

01:05:53.300 | compound up here. That's the plan. We need a deep work compound to just escape and have me just do rants

01:05:59.860 | about writing habits and AI. That's the goal. All right. Speaking of which, that's all the time

01:06:05.220 | we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode, God willing, recorded from the

01:06:09.940 | Deep Work HQ. I'm looking forward to that. But until then, as always, stay deep. If you enjoyed today's

01:06:16.100 | discussion about engineered wonder and you want some more sort of philosophical fare, check out episode

01:06:22.180 | 357, which was titled, What Worries the Internet's Favorite Philosopher? I actually wrote that script

01:06:29.860 | at Disney, so it all connects. Check that out. I think you'll like it. In a New Yorker profile

01:06:36.340 | rather that came out earlier this year, he was named the internet's new favorite philosopher.

You’re Not Lazy — You’re in the Digital Doldrums! (How to Feel Alive Again) | Cal Newport

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