Why Your Productivity System Keeps Failing (And How to Fix It)

00:00:00.000 | I just, I got to tell you about what happened to me when I got back from my nearly month up in

00:00:07.060 | New England. You know, and our listeners know that I'm a fan of metrics. My time block planner even

00:00:14.020 | has a space on it for recording daily metrics. So when I got back from New England, I said,

00:00:19.220 | 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

00:00:23.460 | that's coming up. Let's go. What's important in my life? What am I focusing on? What are my goals?

00:00:28.040 | I wrote out the metrics. I printed them out. I taped them. I kid you not. I taped them under the

00:00:33.120 | cover of my time block planner so I could measure those every night and I got into it. And Jesse,

00:00:37.140 | here's what happened. I promptly failed and I failed hard, right? Like, you know, Jesse knows I've been

00:00:44.000 | telling him I've had a super busy week coming back from New England. A lot of things scheduled. I'm

00:00:48.760 | doing something like three to four interviews or talks. Some of them I'm giving, some of them on the

00:00:53.620 | other side of. I was giving lectures, we're podcasting, all sorts of stuff going on. Super busy

00:00:58.240 | time. And I was getting there at the end of each night to write down the metrics of what I did that

00:01:02.300 | day. And I was having one I could write down or maybe just like two that I could write down. I mean,

00:01:08.080 | I wasn't getting anywhere near making the progress on the stuff that my metrics would have me make

00:01:13.760 | progress on. Last night, I finally just gave up and I actually wrote this stress default. I was like,

00:01:20.320 | I'm not even going to bother writing one metric. It's too depressing. I'm stressed out about this.

00:01:23.800 | I'm making progress on nothing. I'm declaring bankruptcy. I'm not even going to write down

00:01:27.700 | any metrics. So this is what I want to talk about today. The joys and sorrows of tracking metrics in

00:01:33.540 | your life. So I want to remind us like why I think metrics are important. I want to talk about what goes

00:01:38.060 | wrong with metrics, including what went wrong with me. And then I want to talk about in the third act,

00:01:45.040 | how to handle metrics smarter, which will include how I ended up actually responding to my heart

00:01:50.820 | failure this week and sort of fixing my metric practice. All right. So that is our goal. Today,

00:01:54.840 | we're talking metrics. We'll start with act one, the promise of metrics. All right. So we got to get

00:02:01.680 | into it. If you're not a longtime listener, you might be wondering, what does he really mean by metrics?

00:02:05.640 | It's a good question. These can mean multiple different things. So if a lot of people like the

00:02:11.240 | quantified life type people out there for them, metrics mean just gathering data about your day

00:02:17.280 | that you will then later look back at for trends. All right. So health type stuff, health biomarkers,

00:02:25.040 | maybe wear a whoop strap and whatever you do, you're going to collect this data and you're going to look

00:02:29.360 | at it for trends. It doesn't have to be health. Jesse, remember we had David DeWayne on, what was that

00:02:34.480 | like a couple of months ago? Yeah. And he talked about, he was tracking every day, just how happy he was,

00:02:39.700 | like how good of a day it is. So that's what some people think about with metrics, right? It's not

00:02:43.580 | what I mean. When I talk about metrics, what I mean about is short little coded sequences of letters

00:02:50.780 | that you use to track whether or not you did certain things or to what degree you did them. So it's not

00:02:58.340 | gathering data to analyze, it's tracking action. So here are some sample metrics. These are of the

00:03:05.340 | binary nature. You either did them or not. I exercised or not. I stretched or not. I spent

00:03:11.900 | one-on-one time with, you know, one of my kids today or not. I practiced my guitar, right? Those

00:03:17.860 | are sample things you could have metrics for. It's things you either did or you didn't, and you have

00:03:21.740 | something you can write down to indicate that you did. Some metrics are quantitative. So it's not just

00:03:27.260 | did I do it or not, but to what degree. So for example, a step count, here's how many steps I took

00:03:32.160 | today where you presumably maybe have some sort of minimum you're hoping to beat. Maybe the number

00:03:37.680 | of pages you read in a book is something else you might track. So it's not just that I read or not,

00:03:41.360 | but how much did I read? And maybe you have a goal of how much reading you want to try to get to most

00:03:45.500 | nights, but maybe sometimes you even go farther. The goal with this style of metrics is to stay on

00:03:51.440 | track with the things that you care about, all right? Because this is a problem I think we face

00:03:57.640 | with time management and organization that it's a, it's possible that you're super on the ball with

00:04:04.100 | your, your, your organizational tactics, right? You're multi-scale planning. Uh, you look at your

00:04:09.760 | week, you're fitting in your work, your time block plan, your intention about your time. You have

00:04:14.100 | shut down rituals. You're, you're tracking and organizing your tasks very carefully in full capture

00:04:18.840 | based task management systems. You are doing a lot of stuff and you're getting a lot of stuff done,

00:04:23.220 | but it's possible that the things you were doing, though, making you very busy are not actually

00:04:28.760 | moving you closer to your definition of the deep life. You're doing stuff, but not the stuff that

00:04:32.880 | matters. This is where metrics can be very helpful because you run whatever time management organizational

00:04:38.160 | systems you want. But at the end of the day, you said, did I make progress on the things that really

00:04:43.080 | matter to me? And knowing that you'll be recording this day after day really influences the way that you

00:04:49.140 | go about your day. And you start putting aside time. This is the theory. You start putting aside time for

00:04:52.880 | these things to make sure that you can mark it off on your metric tracking. It's a way of

00:04:56.820 | continually nudging your activity towards things that matter. This was a big breakthrough for me

00:05:02.580 | when my own practices, I got very organized. I've long been very organized. I'm good at managing my

00:05:08.180 | time. I'm good at keeping up at work and seeing what's due when and making sure that I started early

00:05:11.620 | enough. But I was falling behind. I found this in my life. I was falling behind on things. I mattered.

00:05:17.500 | I'm not reading as much as I should be reading. I'm not spending time with these people that's

00:05:23.620 | important to me. I'm not spending enough time with them. I'm not prioritizing this. I'm busy,

00:05:27.780 | but not doing the things that matter. Metrics made a big difference to me. That's why I include them

00:05:32.140 | in my time block planner. I talk about them in multiple of my books. I've talked about them.

00:05:36.220 | So that's what I talk about when I'm talking about metrics. So again, you would have for each of

00:05:40.600 | these things a short code. So did I exercise or not? If I did, I write down EX in the metric tracking

00:05:47.940 | block, my time block planner. Do I stretch? If I did, maybe I'll write STR. That's my code.

00:05:51.280 | One-on-one time with kid, kid. Step count, S colon number for step count, right? And I actually will,

00:05:59.380 | this is what I said earlier and I was like, oh, I planned out my metrics for the fall. I actually have

00:06:03.340 | those codes written out. I tape them on my planner. Here's the codes I'm using to keep track of this

00:06:07.300 | stuff. So it's a good idea. I think if you care about the deep life and not just being productive,

00:06:13.180 | it matters. But I failed. I had a really hard week and I sort of gave up temporarily on my metrics.

00:06:19.560 | Why did I fail? This brings us to act two when metrics go awry. So there's four main problems

00:06:30.140 | people have with my style of activity tracking metrics. There's one big one, which I think is

00:06:37.480 | the most important. It's the one that really I had issues with. I'll do that one last. Let me get with

00:06:41.700 | the three smaller ones first, because these also pop up a lot as well. Vagueness is a big issue with

00:06:46.560 | metric tracking, right? You have a thing you're tracking with a metric that is so vague that either

00:06:53.660 | everything counts or nothing counts. It could be either thing. Like, for example, you might've

00:06:58.180 | written down, like, I connect with my daughter. I mean, what does that mean? What does it take to

00:07:05.580 | actually write down the code for that on your daily metric tracking? Does it count if you high-fived her

00:07:12.140 | in the hallway? Or does it require, like, you went to a father-daughter dance and, you know, shared a

00:07:18.500 | milkshake in a heartfelt conversation before you allowed the market down? It's too vague. That's not

00:07:22.320 | specific enough. So that's a problem a lot of people have is they're too vague. And then they're

00:07:26.500 | like, I don't even know what, I can either put this metric down every day. I never put it down. I don't

00:07:29.720 | know. And you kind of give up on it. The other side is it's specific, but it's impossible that you just

00:07:36.920 | put something down that it's not really something that on an average day you're likely to get to.

00:07:41.920 | You put down like, yeah, I would bike a hundred miles a day. That'd be great. And you're like,

00:07:45.680 | oh, that takes a long time. It takes many hours to bike a hundred hours. I don't normally have enough

00:07:50.320 | time to bike a hundred miles every day. This is basically an almost always impossible to achieve

00:07:55.020 | metric, right? So you're unrealistic in the difficulty or time consumption of a singular metric. That's

00:08:00.320 | another big problem. Spreadsheet syndrome is a third one. Then instead of just having a simple code you

00:08:06.340 | jot down, like in something like a time block planner, you start putting into the spreadsheets.

00:08:10.940 | We know these type of people. I got to put the data into the whatever so that I can have the pie chart

00:08:15.360 | and the pie chart is going to dynamically alter and it's going to be really nicely color coded.

00:08:20.000 | I made it a 3D pie chart and I adjusted what the drop shadow is. So it looks really good. And I'm looking

00:08:24.500 | for the pie chart to change. That's all friction. And it's going to eventually get annoying enough that

00:08:29.520 | it's been a hard day and you're tired and you don't want to open up Microsoft Excel for 15 minutes

00:08:35.220 | and you stop metric tracking. That's why I'm a big fan. And you should just have some couple letters.

00:08:39.740 | You jot them down, takes 10 seconds and your metric tracking is done. So spreadsheet syndrome is another

00:08:45.960 | problem. But the biggest problem of all with metric tracking practices, and this is what really stung me

00:08:52.100 | this week. Going with an inventory of what's important to you as opposed to a realistic plan for what you want to do

00:09:00.880 | 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

00:09:07.280 | important to me. And then I'll have a metric related to each of those things. Now you don't want to leave things

00:09:14.160 | 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

00:09:18.120 | It's important to me. That better be on the list. Otherwise I'm signaling to myself. It's not. Well, this thing

00:09:22.680 | over here is very important to me. I should put that on the list too. I need a metric for that. And before you

00:09:26.680 | know it, your list of metrics you're tracking is an inventory of everything that's important to you.

00:09:31.860 | And the possibility for you to actually make progress on that many things on a regular basis is basically

00:09:39.360 | impossible. It's just too many things you want to make progress on. That's what happened to me. I went

00:09:45.640 | through an exercise when I was up in New England where I checked back in as I do most summers after

00:09:49.520 | my birthday about what are the areas of my life that are important to me? What am I trying to do with

00:09:53.720 | them right now? And I listed out all these different areas. There are six different areas. I ended up with

00:09:59.100 | actually many more than six metrics because I had at least one metric for each of those six areas,

00:10:03.380 | but for the one related to health, I actually track four metrics for my health. It's exercise,

00:10:07.940 | stretching, step count, and then there's like a food and diet sort of like quality of the food I eat

00:10:14.160 | sort of thing. So it's 10 metrics. It was just too many. I mean, I've been busy. I had a busy calendar

00:10:21.540 | and I was like, I can't make progress on 10 things. In fact, I could do maybe one or two of these things

00:10:26.380 | maybe. And I was super stressed having so many things I wasn't writing down because what I had

00:10:32.080 | really done was inventory to everything that was important to me, as opposed to saying, here is a

00:10:36.860 | reasonable mix of things I could make progress on on most days that would be important to me.

00:10:42.040 | So that's probably the number one problem. It was my problem as well.

00:10:44.580 | So how do we fix this? What's a smarter way to approach activity tracking metrics? Well, that brings

00:10:50.260 | us to act three, making metrics work. There are four things that I did to help clean up my metric

00:11:01.280 | track. I did this last night. I wrote this all out after I get the stress default. I was like, okay,

00:11:05.460 | I got to fix this. And these, I think are the main four tools you have to make activity-based metric

00:11:12.300 | tracking actually be sustainable. Number one, you can consider doing multiple choice metrics.

00:11:19.520 | So what that means is you have multiple things that are important to you, but it's unreasonable

00:11:25.760 | perhaps to make progress on all of those things every day. It would be a real laundry list. What you do

00:11:30.740 | instead is you have a multiple choice approach to it where you might say, for example, here's five

00:11:35.720 | things that are important to me. I have a metric code for each. I want to try to do one of these

00:11:40.260 | per day. So my goal is each day to write down one of these metric codes. If I can get to like one of

00:11:47.180 | these things each day, get a little bit of effort, I'll consider that a success. So now you're getting

00:11:52.520 | more reasonable. You can have more areas you care about, but you're not trying to unreasonably make

00:11:56.220 | progress on everything every day. Autopilot scheduling makes a huge difference as well.

00:12:02.240 | So many different metrics. If you're going to succeed in actually doing that activity every day,

00:12:07.120 | it has to be integrated to your schedule in a way that you don't have to think about it.

00:12:11.020 | We're using this with exercise. This is how I handle exercise. When we're in out of the summer and during

00:12:17.780 | a normal semester, I know when I do my exercise. My wife knows when I do my exercise. It's part of my

00:12:23.000 | schedule. This is just when I do my exercise. So it's a regular part of my schedule. It's what we

00:12:27.220 | call autopilot scheduling. That makes sure it gets done. If I instead just started each day and said,

00:12:32.080 | I'm going to try to find time, 45 minutes at some point today to exercise, what's my hit rate going to

00:12:38.700 | be? 20% of days, I happen to have enough time and enough energy to do it. So the more things you can

00:12:44.780 | actually find a regular time and day to do it, so an autopilot schedule, the more successful that'll be.

00:12:51.420 | So your metrics should have a lot of autopilot scheduling going on. You really shouldn't have

00:12:56.180 | four or five things that you want to make progress on every day that have no fixed time that you always

00:13:02.380 | do when you schedule. No, like I meditate when I first wake up, I work out right before dinner. You do not

00:13:07.480 | want a lot of things that aren't autopiloted scheduled. The third thing to do to make metrics work

00:13:12.580 | is to eliminate, combine, and simplify it. Just say, hey, look, there's a lot of things. I can't work on all of

00:13:19.800 | these things. I want a good sampling of things that matter to me that I want to do regularly.

00:13:24.540 | And the other stuff, you know, I will try to make progress on it at maybe a bigger time scale. If

00:13:29.700 | you're a multi-scale planner, you can make progress on it like at the strategic plan schedule or the

00:13:34.800 | weekly scale. Like, you know, hey, do I have a day today that I could go like see my brother who lives

00:13:40.000 | nearby and we can like get together and have lunch? Like, okay, I do this week. I didn't last week,

00:13:44.440 | but I do this week, right? Then maybe that's the right scale to be working on that thing that's

00:13:48.800 | important to you. So you might want to simplify or eliminate the stuff that you really are trying

00:13:53.820 | to track every day. That doesn't have to be everything that's important to you. Doesn't

00:13:56.740 | have to have progress made at that scale. Combining means you might find a way to make progress on

00:14:02.880 | multiple things to report it in one step, right? It's like walking my dog also gets me steps and I

00:14:12.040 | always call my mom when I do it, right? And now you're, you have like one activity that's handling

00:14:16.780 | multiple steps or you want to have like a hobby that's important to you, but you want to spend time

00:14:21.740 | with your kids. Oh, why don't we come up with something that I do with my kids? It's like a joint

00:14:26.400 | hobby. So you can do combining as well. The final thing is probably the most important is

00:14:30.980 | go sequential and slow down. Like I can't do all these things at the same time. Okay. I mean, I want

00:14:37.920 | to hypothetically like learn to play guitar and I want to speak Spanish and I want to learn how to program

00:14:43.440 | a computer and like these three things I think would make my life richer. To try to make progress on all

00:14:48.900 | three of those things every day is crazy. To even try to do multiple choice on those three things is kind

00:14:54.100 | of crazy. Like, well, I want to work on one of these each day and you're switching back and forth

00:14:57.920 | between these things. It's, you know, this is, this could be like way overkill. So maybe what you stay

00:15:01.900 | instead is like, let's just slow down. That's a slow productivity tactic. I'm working on Spanish right

00:15:06.440 | now. I'm just going to do that for the next four months or six months. And when I feel like I got to

00:15:12.980 | a good place, then maybe I'll have a season I'm working on, like trying to learn some guitar and we'll see

00:15:16.820 | how that goes. Programming, I don't know, maybe next year. It's interesting, but let's just push that off.

00:15:23.000 | Take your time. Life is long. Sequential. I'll do this when it's done. I'll work on something else.

00:15:28.520 | So not trying to necessarily have everything that's important to you be active all at the same time.

00:15:35.180 | All right. So that's basically what I've done. My new metrics, I have a big multiple choice

00:15:40.460 | that makes things much simpler. I eliminated some things that I was tracking. I'm going sequential on

00:15:46.380 | some other things like, okay, let me just work on this. Now this other thing I'll work on in a different

00:15:51.140 | season. I moderated Jesse. I was, my goal was to spend about 30 hours a week on my Halloween

00:15:57.320 | decorations and I moderated. That's now 27 and a half hours a week because 30 hours was just a

00:16:03.280 | little bit too much. So 27 and a half hours a week on my Halloween decorations. But there we go. So

00:16:08.760 | metrics are important. The right type of metrics. It really helps make sure that you're not just

00:16:12.620 | organized, but you're organized towards stuff that matters. But don't beat yourself up if you struggle

00:16:18.040 | with metrics because I kind of like invented this approach and I still completely screwed up

00:16:22.580 | last week. And then I had to remember my own medicine. All right, let's get reasonable here.

00:16:27.120 | It's a process. And also, hey, the fact that I had turned these off while I was away, like that also

00:16:31.760 | is a thing. I was on, I was up in New England for a month. It's like, I don't want to track metrics

00:16:34.540 | every day. I come and I go, right? Like this is all real talk. It's a useful tool. You're not running all

00:16:39.860 | the time. You're going to get it wrong. And it's something that you keep working on over time. So

00:16:43.980 | hopefully you have some sort of metric tracking going, but you're not being too hard on yourself

00:16:47.860 | about getting it just right or having a Herculean collection of metrics that you're trying to do.

00:16:54.140 | So there you go. People ask about metrics, I think. They don't always quite know what I'm talking about.

00:16:58.060 | And then you should probably explain what the time block planner is.

00:17:02.320 | Well, if you don't know that, then I don't want to know you. I actually have a planner. I think we

00:17:07.480 | created this during the pandemic. You can buy at Amazon or wherever books are sold online for doing

00:17:13.400 | time blocking. And it has the pre-formatted pages for time blocking, for capture, and for metric

00:17:19.400 | tracking. It also has a shutdown complete checkbox. You can do it. It's worth buying even for just the

00:17:26.320 | introduction. I mean, I have an extensive introduction in the planner where I explain all my philosophies for

00:17:31.260 | how I manage my time using this. So you, it's actually like a mini Cal Newport time management

00:17:36.780 | book, plus the tool to do it. So you should check that out. There's a website as well with a video.

00:17:40.760 | Yeah. If you've got a timeblockplanner.com, we filmed a nice video. That was with a nice camera too.

00:17:45.380 | It was Rob's overhead. Use the fancy camera. I enjoyed that. So there you go. Metrics. All right.

00:17:53.480 | 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.

00:18:00.200 | Let's do some music for the ads. Let's get into it. That's what I'm thinking today. We're in a

00:18:05.660 | musical mode. Oh, there we go. There we go. Does that put you in an ad mood, Jesse?

00:18:10.240 | It does. I got to tell you a true story then, Jesse, because this has got me thinking about ads.

00:18:14.240 | This is true. I keep finding in our front yard, in our front bush, this same orange color cat that's

00:18:21.440 | hanging around. It's a beautiful cat, like a ginger colored cat. I don't know whose it is, but it kind of

00:18:24.980 | hangs out around our house, especially in the afternoon. It made me miss having cats. When we

00:18:29.940 | grew up, we had two Siamese cats. Their names were Singha and Nitnoy. Those are Thai names. My mom lived

00:18:34.900 | in Bangkok for a while and they were great cats. I really liked having cats. We don't have them now

00:18:39.320 | because my wife is allergic to cats. We don't have cats in the house, but seeing that cat in my yard

00:18:45.160 | got me a little nostalgic and it led me to do, which I think is probably like the only natural

00:18:51.300 | response to this situation, Jesse was I divorced my wife. All right. Not really, but all this cat

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00:19:50.520 | See what I'm doing there? I'm kind of like riffing, like she's talking about her husband,

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00:21:44.680 | right about that. We shouldn't be thinking about that. Vanta should for us. I mean, I fired him because

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00:22:28.180 | All right, let's do some questions of our own.

00:22:32.240 | All right. First question is from Luis. When looking to make a change in your career, how do you deal with

00:22:40.880 | that gray area where you have some career capital and the target job, but it's still difficult to decide

00:22:45.620 | if now is the right time to move? Well, part of this, Luis, is not to think about a career change in the

00:22:51.540 | abstract or as a self-justified move. Hey, do I do a career change or not? Abstractly speaking, a career

00:22:59.900 | change is an action you make to serve a particular goal, which is to move your life closer to your ideal

00:23:06.940 | lifestyle. A career change should do so either, here's the justifications, it does so either in

00:23:13.960 | like a really demonstrable way. Hey, I make significant progress towards my ideal lifestyle

00:23:18.920 | with this career change. If it's just like nibbling around the edges, it might not be worth it. That's

00:23:22.220 | motivation number one for a career change. Or motivation number two is there's things about

00:23:27.720 | this job that like really clash with me, my values, or is making me unhappy. And so this is just about

00:23:31.940 | the piece of my ideal lifestyle where I'm not miserable every day. That's why you would do a

00:23:36.500 | career change. So what matters then, if you have a career change in mind that is going to either get

00:23:42.640 | you out of a bad situation or move you demonstrably closer to your ideal lifestyle, the only thing that

00:23:46.680 | matters is, do I have enough career capital to make this likely to succeed? And that's it. If you think

00:23:53.320 | you do, you go for it. And if you're not sure, then you build up more career capital until it's sure.

00:23:58.940 | Right. And that's it. Like you don't have to identify some sort of mythical exact threshold

00:24:03.000 | at exactly this point I should do it or at this point I shouldn't. It's like, if it's a good idea

00:24:06.740 | and it's a good idea for those reasons I talked about, if you're confident you have enough career

00:24:10.700 | capital, go for it. If you're not sure, do more work until you're confident. Build up rare and

00:24:15.500 | valuable skills until it's like more demonstrably clear that you'll succeed. Now, if you want to know

00:24:20.320 | if you have enough career capital, we talk about this all the time. I think my book's so good

00:24:23.480 | they can't ignore you gets into this the most specifically, but use money as a neutral indicator of

00:24:27.540 | value. Is there a job offer on the table for this new job or someone is willing to hire and pay me?

00:24:32.460 | If not, then maybe you don't have the capital to make that turn. Don't quit. And then start going

00:24:37.400 | job searching and hope it works out. If you're going to start your own thing, start it on the side.

00:24:42.020 | Are people giving me money for it? If not, maybe I'm not ready. Right. So don't just jump out there

00:24:48.420 | in the world to try to harvest a temporary, the temporary lift you get from making a change and

00:24:53.840 | then say, I'll figure out, get started with what comes next. Do your work, get evidence you have

00:24:58.380 | enough career capital. If you do go for it. If you don't, don't. And if it's not a home run,

00:25:02.900 | then maybe you don't need a career change. There might be other ways for you to get closer to your

00:25:06.400 | ideal lifestyle. What I'm trying to avoid here, Jesse, is sometimes people just like the idea of the

00:25:11.500 | temporary high they get from making a change. It's like, I want to make a change. Can I make

00:25:15.780 | a change yet? I always ask why? What is the change for? You need a reason for your change to sort of

00:25:21.900 | harvest the sustainable value out of it. All right. Who do we got next?

00:25:26.000 | Next up is Craig. Do you have a framework or approach for developing deep, critical thinking,

00:25:32.600 | particular for young people? I'm a father of young children and also a mentor of a group of young men,

00:25:37.720 | and I want to help them build the habit of thinking deeply. Well, there's a, there's a known formula

00:25:42.300 | that's been around for millennia. It's reading, writing. So reading builds new circuits in your brain.

00:25:52.260 | I've been working on this topic for a chapter in my, the book I'm working on about the deep life.

00:25:57.320 | Reading builds what are known as deep reading processes. The more reading you do of like hard

00:26:02.420 | stuff or stuff that challenges you literally builds new connections between parts of your brain.

00:26:06.500 | It gives you a different brain. It upgrades your brain from what we could think of as the

00:26:11.460 | pragmatic brain that we evolved for, that's well-suited for living in small bands in the

00:26:15.620 | Paleolithic to what we can call the symbolic brain. That is a brain that can do a lot more things. So

00:26:20.380 | you got to keep it, keep in mind, reading is artificial, right? It's not something we evolved

00:26:24.800 | to do. It was invented relatively recently. And so it takes hard work, but if you do reading of things

00:26:30.280 | that are hard, it literally changes your brain and you go from pragmatic to symbolic and that brain,

00:26:34.500 | it sees the world in technicolor. The ideas, the way you can process information, the things you notice,

00:26:40.900 | the opportunities, the gratitude and interest you can find in the world. So much stuff, your ability to

00:26:46.140 | navigate economically, the get ahead, so much comes out of having a well-honed symbolic brain.

00:26:51.760 | Reading is a foundational activity to do that. Reading, reading, reading, that's everything. Like,

00:26:57.580 | I'm not very good at being a tiger parent. I'm not very good at, hey, you got to get A's on

00:27:02.180 | everything and do a hundred activities. But there's one thing that I'm super, super clear on with my

00:27:06.340 | kids, reading, right? I've made them all readers. It's hard work, but I was like, that is, that's it.

00:27:12.720 | That's like being in good shape. If you live in ancient Sparta, everything else will be okay.

00:27:17.100 | You'll figure it out, but you better be a reader. Writing helps as well. So I think about reading

00:27:22.220 | establishes the circuits. It changes your brain. Writing is how you practice applying that new

00:27:27.200 | brain. So reading gives you a more sophisticated brain. Writing is how you practice putting that

00:27:32.560 | brain to work. It forces you to have to try to take thoughts and organize them in a way that then you

00:27:37.620 | assess to be logical. So writing gets you good at using what you develop through the readings. You

00:27:43.860 | kind of need both. If you write a lot, but don't read a lot, you're working with a lot less resources.

00:27:51.360 | So what you can produce is reduced. If you read a lot and don't write a lot, you might have built this

00:27:56.560 | really sophisticated brain, but when it comes time to think critically or use it, or I'm going to come

00:28:00.380 | make an argument or try to come up with a strategy, you're like, oh, I'm struggling to actually harness

00:28:04.220 | this thing and pull together my thoughts into something that is reasonable and coherent. Now, there's some

00:28:10.860 | specific types of training you can do as well. I've been working on these for my new book, some of these.

00:28:16.940 | Rhetoric helps. Like, hey, young man, you're talking about you mentor young men. I want you

00:28:22.440 | to like make a case for this. Gather information, put it into a coherent argument that doesn't have

00:28:29.560 | holes, make your case, react to counter arguments, like just practice making an argument. That's very

00:28:36.600 | helpful. Dialectical reading is very helpful as well. It's a fancy name for a simple idea, which is

00:28:41.640 | I'm going to take a topic that I care about that there's debate about. I'm going to read a really

00:28:46.400 | good book that's making a case for one side of this topic, and then I'm going to read another really

00:28:49.960 | good book that's making a case on the other side. Good case, good case. I'm not interested in this

00:28:54.700 | tribal thing of like, what do we believe? That's all I want to hear about, and anyone on the other side

00:28:59.240 | obviously has a brain virus and is probably like a week away from being a zombie and, you know, 28 days

00:29:06.100 | later. No, I want to hear arguments that are really good on both sides. Why? Because when good

00:29:10.480 | arguments clash, this was Socrates' idea, the root that grows down, it's a taproot of understanding.

00:29:15.700 | You become a much smarter understanding of what's going on. It's not going to trick you out of your

00:29:20.360 | beliefs. It's going to make you a much more sophisticated thinker. Dialectical reading

00:29:24.920 | matters, and then primary, secondary source reading. This is a good way to increase the sophistication of

00:29:29.640 | what you're reading. Really sophisticated books can be hard to jump into. If I just say like, here is

00:29:35.160 | some Heidegger, go to town, you're going to read it for a while and be like, I have no idea what those

00:29:38.700 | words meant. But if you read some secondary sources about Heidegger, who was he? What was

00:29:43.040 | his ideas? What's he arguing in this book? This language is weird. It's different. It's kind of

00:29:47.580 | mythological. Like, what's going on here? Oh, I see what he's doing here. Now I'm going to read Heidegger.

00:29:51.880 | Suddenly you have, it's like you couldn't really see the words, and you put reading glasses on.

00:29:56.300 | So it's a way to upgrade the level of challenge that you're able to handle,

00:30:00.580 | and that's going to upgrade again those deep reading circuits and upgrade your brain from

00:30:05.300 | pragmatic to symbolic. So Craig, I like what you're working on. And reading, writing, that's the key.

00:30:11.540 | And then all these other things are just little glosses on types of reading or types of writing

00:30:15.420 | that you can do. But reading, writing, that is it in our modern world. The getting a brain that's going

00:30:21.060 | to help you thrive. All right. Who we got? Next up is David. I have four kids in K-12. These are my

00:30:29.040 | options for my job. Stay in my current role, which offers stability. Take an internal promotion with a

00:30:34.820 | dysfunctional team and toxic leadership or leave for a high-paced consulting firm. What should I do?

00:30:41.000 | I don't know, Jesse. Did you get a sense that he has an answer that he thinks is right here?

00:30:45.100 | It's probably not. I should probably go to the dysfunctional team that has toxic leadership

00:30:49.640 | or let me go to the high-paced consulting firm. I think it's pretty clear. I think he knows what

00:30:54.920 | he wants to do. Current role stability. Like a push-pull. He described the other things so

00:31:00.640 | negatively. So I think you know what you want to do, David. That's fine. But let's go through like

00:31:05.340 | the bigger exercise of like, how do you make these type of decisions in general? Lifestyle-centric

00:31:10.000 | planning. You have your vision of your ideal lifestyle and you assess each of these options

00:31:15.380 | through that vision. So probably the dysfunction and toxicity of that second option, you're like,

00:31:22.520 | wow, that lifestyle is not very good. That doesn't really seem close to like my vision, like what my

00:31:27.100 | day is like, what my work is like. The high-paced consulting firm, like this is where lifestyle-centric

00:31:32.020 | planning might be a little bit more effective because it's tempting to jump to that just because it

00:31:36.660 | might be more prestigious and more money. Doesn't really matter. Like day-to-day, unless you're

00:31:41.880 | Scrooge McDuck, you're not like actually interacting with your money and there's not someone walking in

00:31:49.020 | front of you heralding the competitiveness of the job you have. What matters day-to-day for your overall

00:31:54.800 | satisfaction is the details of your lifestyle. What is my everyday like? And if you have this vision of

00:32:00.200 | this lifestyle where, you know, you're spending like a lot of time with your kids and like the family

00:32:05.080 | and you're like really into like athletic things and you're hiking trails in the land behind your

00:32:11.640 | house and you're spending 30 hours a week on Halloween decorations, you have this big vision

00:32:17.480 | of, you know, you're sitting at the picnic table with the extended family with the cafe lights hanging

00:32:22.060 | from the trees as the sun goes down. And then you say, okay, working an 80-hour-a-week job, is that

00:32:27.720 | going to be closer or farther? Like, oh man, that steps on so many parts of that vision.

00:32:31.840 | So, uh, no, I'm not going to do that. But maybe this is not the situation. You're in a situation,

00:32:36.320 | like if you're somebody who didn't have a bunch of kids and you like want to be in the mix and you

00:32:40.860 | want to travel, you're like, I want to kind of like move around like the country and see things

00:32:45.100 | and have like a really cool apartment. And like, then high-paced consult, you're like, that's going

00:32:51.120 | to move me closer to these visions. Like I can't afford that on what I'm doing. That's going to get

00:32:54.380 | me closer. And I kind of like the lifestyle that leads to. So lifestyle-centric planning is how you make

00:32:57.960 | these decisions. In your case, David, I think you've already made up your mind. That's fine.

00:33:01.300 | That's good. If that matches your lifestyle, just sounds like it does. And probably four kids make

00:33:06.560 | sense to me. Stable, not super high-paced, not dysfunctional, not stressful. I think it's a

00:33:10.880 | perfectly valid reason to stay with something because your lifestyle is ultimately what determines

00:33:15.760 | your day-to-day happiness, not these more abstract properties, like exactly what my salary is or how

00:33:22.140 | competitive my job was. People just don't care. All right, who we got?

00:33:25.900 | Next up is Omay. I've worked in a high-pressure call center for 11 years where I'm glued to the

00:33:31.940 | screen all day. I lack the traditional credentials, but want to switch fields to cybersecurity. Is it

00:33:37.780 | possible to make the switch?

00:33:38.920 | Well, I don't know because I'm not in the cybersecurity field, but you should know by talking to someone in

00:33:45.320 | that field. Evidence, evidence, evidence. That's what matters. Talk to real people in that field, real

00:33:51.320 | talk, not hypothetical, not wishful thinking. What is needed to switch to these type of jobs, like this

00:33:59.960 | specific job here that you just hired for? What would something like me have to do to get that job? You ask

00:34:05.060 | that real question and get the real answer, and you might like the answer. It might be like, oh, like we have

00:34:09.480 | training on site, and this is what we're looking for, and like you could probably fit, or it could be like

00:34:13.880 | we're looking for at least two years of postdoctoral work on this, and like an H index of 30. And you're

00:34:20.520 | like, oh, that's never going to happen, so it's off the table. You might not like the answer, you might

00:34:23.900 | love the answer, but get the answer. The worst thing to do in this situation is to say, I don't want to

00:34:28.700 | confront the reality of what's required to make this switch I'm thinking about. I just want to go do

00:34:33.540 | something because the thing sounds interesting, and I want to harvest, like we talked about before,

00:34:39.880 | harvest the temporary contact high of change. And in this case, there's a lot of things out there that

00:34:45.760 | people will offer you like, oh, come do this. This might help you. You don't know if it matters at

00:34:50.520 | all. They're just going to kind of like throw it out to you. Like you might end up dropping 20k on some

00:34:55.980 | online-only cybersecurity master's program, which is like essentially like a three-card Monte game that has a

00:35:02.380 | lot more Zoom. Just taking your money. Thank you for your money. Don't just go do something. Just get

00:35:08.880 | the evidence. Talk to people in the field. Here are specific jobs you've hired for in the past. Look,

00:35:13.280 | 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

00:35:18.560 | would I need to do to pass that, if anything? And just get the real answer. Confront that professional

00:35:23.860 | dragon, and then you work from there. That's how I became a book writer. Talked to an agent, said,

00:35:29.300 | I want to publish a book. I'm 21 years old. I was 20 when I talked to her. What would really be

00:35:34.720 | necessary for me to do this? And she gave me the real answer. She's like, yeah, like there's almost

00:35:38.540 | no way you can do this at your age. There is like this path or that path, or like the only two ways

00:35:43.740 | you could probably do this. And I looked at one of those two paths, like, great. Okay, now I know I'll

00:35:47.340 | do that. And I executed it. And that's why I got my foot in the door of publishing. So you confront the

00:35:50.940 | reality of a situation when it comes to career moves. Don't tell yourself a story and don't just start

00:35:56.620 | doing stuff that generally so much of like grad school is based off of like, I don't want to

00:36:02.140 | actually figure out what's needed for this job. This sounds like a thing that people do. Let me go

00:36:07.480 | do that. And what happens is like professors like me, just like, great, I'll just take that money.

00:36:12.780 | And I don't know, buy fur coats. But mainly, mainly what happens with low value master's programs is

00:36:20.960 | it's professors buying fur coats. I don't know if that's well known. But that's actually what happens.

00:36:25.740 | All right, we got one more. We got one more from Megan. I got laid off after a 15 year career. I'm

00:36:32.740 | now barred from entering this particular woodshed. I had a sense this was coming. Should I have left

00:36:37.240 | this job earlier? Or do you think I it was an acceptable and kind of like an athlete's career

00:36:42.120 | ending due to injury? I mean, Megan, I don't know. I don't know. And I don't know that it really

00:36:46.820 | matters. I mean, I want to validate that. I think this was rightly so emotionally taxing.

00:36:55.240 | Like you were laid off, you're barred. It sounds like it was not a happy ending.

00:37:01.140 | This sucks. Like it's going to feel really bad and it's okay to feel bad about it. You're going to feel

00:37:08.140 | literal chemicals when you think about it that are very negative. But I don't know that we need to

00:37:12.680 | ruminate on it. I don't think it's helpful to go back and, you know, Sunday morning quarterback

00:37:17.900 | or Monday morning quarterback. When is football played? September 6th, baby. But what's the

00:37:22.520 | expression? It must be Monday. Tonight is the Hall of Fame game. Okay. Preseason though. But what's

00:37:26.520 | the saying? It must be Monday morning quarterbacking because, yeah, football used to be played primarily

00:37:31.720 | on Sundays. But now it's played on basically every day, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, pretty much.

00:37:37.200 | Thursday morning, Wednesday morning quarterbacking. There's still football played on Wednesday. Or is

00:37:41.480 | Wednesday games? Well, it depends on when Christmas is now. I think we need to spend the next 25 minutes

00:37:45.440 | getting into this. Because I think last year Christmas was on a Wednesday. To ESPN.com.

00:37:50.100 | All right. So what I'm saying here is like, let's not ruminate on it. Let's look forward.

00:37:53.860 | Let's accept it sucks. Let's accept you feel bad. But let's take our actual like rational,

00:37:59.300 | internalized voice and aim it at what comes next. And let's use some lifestyle centric planning.

00:38:06.400 | Let's use some career capital. You know, first thing first is like, need a job. We need money.

00:38:12.540 | Like, let's make sure that we're not like in financial trouble. And then let's step back and

00:38:15.820 | do some lifestyle centric planning. Here's the silver lining. There's a big change. What can you do in

00:38:19.920 | changes? You can lean into it and change other things in a way that's good. Okay. There's a big

00:38:25.380 | change situation. But hey, maybe this means I'm going to move somewhere else or take a different type of

00:38:28.660 | career. I got to move to, you know, a really low cat, a teeny house that I own, you know,

00:38:34.980 | in like the Oregon coast and like do this job remote that I already know about. It's not much money,

00:38:38.640 | but I won't need much money. And then I'm going to work on this and I'm going to be near my, my uncle.

00:38:42.820 | And it's going to be whatever. Like you're so many things you maybe wouldn't have done when you're in

00:38:48.180 | this other job, which sounds like if you knew it was coming, it was probably not a happy situation.

00:38:52.260 | So let's not ruminate on what happened. Let's get excited about what could happen.

00:38:56.820 | And that's lifestyle-centric planning and making evidence-based moves to get you closer to that

00:39:01.020 | lifestyle. I think you could end up being way better off. I'm talking like three years down the

00:39:06.160 | line, you're like, man, that was a really good thing to happen to me because like, look at my,

00:39:09.680 | my situation now. I don't know if I sold the best vision there though, Jesse, living in a teeny house

00:39:13.640 | next to your uncle. That's like both hyper-specific and like not very compelling. But what if I told you

00:39:20.520 | your uncle was a wizard? See, then that would be much more cool. And he was going to teach you the

00:39:25.640 | ways of magic. One of my uncles kind of lives in a teeny house. Yeah. Pretty cool.

00:39:30.820 | It's like, uh, because you could probably one of those like prefab houses. It's not teeny, but it's

00:39:35.000 | pretty small. You remember that movement? It was like a four-year period in the 2000s. I don't know if

00:39:40.120 | you were in on these blogs, but I was definitely in that world where building and buying a teeny

00:39:44.840 | house was like a big deal. Remember that? Because it was, it was, uh, roughly $15,000. Like what it would

00:39:52.300 | roughly cost to get the materials. You would build it on a trailer. And like, the idea was, it was like

00:39:56.040 | a lot of millennials who were like coming through their twenties and it was a hard job market because

00:40:01.900 | of the, the financial crisis. And the idea was like, oh, I could just own this. Like no, uh, no mortgage,

00:40:09.840 | you know, no like expensive apartment. I could just like own my house. 50, I could raise $15,000.

00:40:14.280 | It's like I could save. And, uh, and so that became popular for a while. So you have your teeny

00:40:17.860 | house. The problem was when you live in a teeny house, you're also always like three feet from

00:40:22.760 | a toilet. And I think that's what probably killed the romance of it is like, you would get in there

00:40:28.380 | with your like boyfriend or whatever and be like, we have embarked on this mystical, beautiful journey

00:40:34.120 | of minimalism. Uh, and then your boyfriend is like, yeah, hold on a second. Uh, my, my lunch isn't

00:40:40.160 | agreeing with me, walks two feet away from you and shuts that little curtain. The magic goes away at

00:40:45.840 | that point. The magic, that's where it's no longer like, uh, you're in like a, the hut and outlander

00:40:54.940 | and it's looking over the moors. It, it becomes real. So I think that's why the mini house idea,

00:40:59.160 | the teeny house idea kind of petered out. Also like teeny houses exist that work really well.

00:41:03.320 | They're called apartments. All right. Do we got a call? We do. All right. Let's hear this.

00:41:08.100 | Hi Cal. My name is Amy. I am a tenure track professor of dance at a junior college, um,

00:41:16.040 | long time listener and reader. One of my questions was featured in the podcast several years ago

00:41:22.200 | when I was still in grad school. Uh, thank you for your advice then. And I'm hoping you could help me

00:41:28.020 | now, um, my real job. Um, I always find it very hard to return back to work after these long summer

00:41:36.900 | breaks. As you, as you say, it's really nice as a professor to have this flexibility in our jobs,

00:41:42.080 | but it also means that transitioning back into work is very difficult for me mentally, physically, uh,

00:41:50.960 | and emotionally. My question is how can I make this ease back to work, um, feel more comfortable?

00:41:59.420 | How can I schedule my time or my tasks leading up into this gradual, um, entrance back into work?

00:42:06.900 | I want to take advantage of my summers and my winters, but at the same time, I don't want to be

00:42:13.940 | blindsided by all the work at once. Thank you as always.

00:42:18.280 | It's a common problem. It's not a bad problem to have because it means you have slower seasons,

00:42:23.840 | but you're right. It can be pretty brutal. I was super stressed coming back

00:42:29.480 | from new England. Like that Sunday we got back after almost a month. And my wife was like,

00:42:36.980 | this is like a hyper powered version of the Sunday night syndrome, you know, where you get a little

00:42:40.920 | anxious, like Sunday night, like, Oh, I have to deal with work again. Well, you have like three

00:42:43.700 | weeks worth of work. It like gets much worse. So there are ways to deal with it. Like professors

00:42:47.840 | often think about slow September's like, is it possible? I'm going to try to ease myself back into my

00:42:52.400 | work. So what does that mean? Well, there's things I have to do like my classes. So I'm going to start

00:42:56.400 | prepping those classes slow and steady in August so that when I get to September, it's not,

00:43:01.180 | Oh my God, I don't have a course website. I don't have a syllabus. I don't know where my classroom is.

00:43:05.300 | I haven't prepped anything. Right. So when you get to the beginning of the semester, you're already

00:43:11.100 | up at full speed. I usually like to have three weeks worth of, uh, classes ready and prepped and up

00:43:20.060 | on the course website about a week out from the beginning of classes. So like you get rid of that

00:43:24.660 | scramble. And then other things you're like, I'm just going to take September slow. Like if you're

00:43:28.620 | doing research, like, okay, that's like an October issue. I'm going to get things ramped up again.

00:43:33.940 | I'm not going to have a bunch of research meetings right away. Um, I'm going to be hesitant to jump

00:43:38.520 | on committees or do initiatives right away that are optional. Like let's let, let's get, you know,

00:43:43.480 | our legs stretched out. And so you could do it that way. Just be a little bit thoughtful. Let me start

00:43:47.760 | early on the stuff that has to happen and the stuff that's optional. I'm going to start

00:43:51.660 | slowly turning that knob up over the first month or so. So I don't get too stressed out,

00:43:56.580 | have good plans, weekly plan those first few weeks, make sure that you're doing time block

00:44:01.640 | planning each day, because otherwise you'll be like, there's endless stuff. And I want to just

00:44:04.820 | work till midnight. Make sure that you still inject elements that you liked about the summer into your

00:44:10.360 | life. As you switch back to September, uh, like make your first Friday, a half day of the first full

00:44:15.960 | week of the semester. And then like that afternoon, go do one of the things you really love doing during

00:44:20.080 | the summer to kind of signal to yourself. It's not a hard break. I can still kind of do this type

00:44:23.300 | of things in my life. I'm going for a hike on that first Friday afternoon. So slow September,

00:44:27.340 | it gets started ahead of time. Makes a difference. I mean, you know, I'm not super looking forward to

00:44:32.140 | that transition either, but I don't like super stressed. So I've been working on that quite a bit.

00:44:36.780 | All right. Not only do we have a case study today, but I think Jesse, we need some case study music.

00:44:42.180 | All right. Today's case study is from ALOC. He says, recently I retired from academia. Congratulations.

00:45:00.380 | After a successful 38 year career. While many of the ideas you present are applicable to professional

00:45:07.520 | life, I've come to realize they are equally relevant to my personal life as well. Your work has indeed

00:45:13.660 | changed my perspective. And I'm looking forward to your new book, the deep life during the past three

00:45:18.240 | months, June, July, and August. I have designated this time as my think summer, a period to reflect

00:45:24.420 | on the next phase of my life, which I envision over the next 10 years as a curious individual with a

00:45:29.500 | penchant for building things such as research centers, curricula, field projects, and knowledge

00:45:33.740 | platforms. I felt compelled to create a Zen garden in my backyard to satisfy my creative impulses.

00:45:41.460 | This has become a sanctuary for my hands-on projects and a space for contemplation.

00:45:46.300 | After hearing your Disneyland story about the train in the backyard representing engineered awe,

00:45:51.760 | I realized that I am engaging in a similar act, a creative awe project. Inspired by your story,

00:45:58.460 | I am now even more excited to add something new to my garden, a Zen metal sculpture. I even chatted with

00:46:04.840 | my walking partner, whose garage resembles a small hardware store, about welding or soldering to create

00:46:10.260 | some metal art for the garden. I remain intellectually engaged in reading, writing, and exploring new areas.

00:46:16.140 | And this engineering of awe sounds like a wonderful way to kill two birds with one stone,

00:46:20.860 | pursuing a hobby while combating the digital doldrums.

00:46:24.500 | Well, I love this case study. Engineered awe goes, or engineered wonder, however you want to say it,

00:46:29.800 | goes a long way towards meaning in life. And this is a great time to get into it.

00:46:34.040 | I think I have a suggestion for you if you want to know what type of sculpture to do.

00:46:38.800 | I think there's sort of a no-brainer here. Jesse, you can back me up on this. But I think

00:46:44.100 | what you want to try to sculpt out of metal is something that's like really clearly representing

00:46:48.720 | me doing an awesome karate kid jump kit right into the head of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that would be

00:46:58.400 | a really cool piece of sculpture. And people would definitely think you're well-adjusted and that it

00:47:04.560 | made a lot of sense. We're definitely going to get emails about AI generations of that image.

00:47:08.840 | Someone sent me an AI-generated image. Did I mention Jason Priestley on the podcast?

00:47:12.940 | Yeah, I got that as well.

00:47:13.920 | Okay. So I mentioned on the podcast Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills 90210. And someone is like,

00:47:21.820 | hey, Jason Priestley's a fan. I sent an AI-generated picture of Jason Priestley reading

00:47:28.520 | digital minimalism. The reason why we know AI is not going to take over the world, because I think

00:47:34.020 | this is egregious AI, it was clearly Jason Priestley's face, but he was clearly wearing the outfit that

00:47:41.860 | Luke Perry's character would have worn on Beverly Hills 90210. He had a leather jacket, a black leather

00:47:46.480 | jacket, and a white shirt. That was Luke Perry's thing, right? I don't remember what his character

00:47:50.660 | was called. I don't know. Bilko? I don't know what the names were of the characters. What was Jason

00:47:57.280 | Priestley's name? I don't know.

00:47:59.500 | Was it Scott Baio?

00:48:00.580 | That's another actor. You're getting us way off task. Somebody else will email me about that too.

00:48:05.980 | Scott Baio is from Charles in Charge. No, so in Beverly Hills 90210, Jason Priestley and Luke Perry

00:48:10.640 | are the actors. We're going to get so many emails. Send these all to jesse at calnewport.com. He wants

00:48:14.700 | to hear as many times as possible the answer here. They were actors in Beverly Hills 90210. I don't

00:48:19.560 | remember the names of the characters they played, so I'm just going to assume that Jason Priestley's

00:48:29.440 | character's name was Cameron and Luke Perry's character's name was Dr. Death, because that'd be

00:48:38.220 | pretty cool, actually. I don't remember their names, but anyways, it mixed it up. It put Luke Perry clothes

00:48:43.400 | on Jason Priestley, which I mean, I don't think, I don't want to go as far as to say like open AI

00:48:48.520 | should probably shut down, but like they might consider giving back their money to investors.

00:48:52.460 | If you're going to mess that up, what's the point? All right, we got a cool, speaking of AI, we have a

00:48:56.260 | segment coming up in which we are going to talk about something I read that kind of got my blood

00:49:01.500 | going a little bit, a little AI related, be warned. But first, we've got some ads.

00:49:09.000 | I like ads now because we've got some real music. It keeps it a little more interesting.

00:49:12.280 | So Jesse, let me tell you something. I say this all the time. There's nothing small about running

00:49:18.940 | a small business unless the business is selling miniature furniture for a doll house, and then

00:49:25.640 | there is something small. But even if the thing you're selling is small and your business is small,

00:49:29.540 | the workload isn't small, and the thing is small is relative, which is all a very clear and expert

00:49:34.120 | way to say it's hard to run businesses. So when it comes to selling things, let Shopify take those

00:49:41.080 | efforts off your hands. I should be an ad copywriter. I'm a fantastic ad copywriter. I could sell a book

00:49:47.080 | about this. I'm going to call it Me Sell Pretty Words Good Now. And you know where I would sell that

00:49:50.480 | book? On Shopify. See what I'm doing there? Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command

00:49:57.340 | center for your retail businesses. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to

00:50:02.980 | a thousand locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient,

00:50:07.740 | endless aisle, ship the customer, buy online, pick up in-store. All of this is made simpler so that

00:50:14.280 | customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close the sale every time. And let's face

00:50:19.700 | it, acquiring new customers is expensive. With Shopify POS, you can keep shoppers coming back with

00:50:26.360 | personalized experiences and first-party data that give marketing teams a competitive edge. In fact,

00:50:32.760 | this is all proven based on a report from EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results like

00:50:38.580 | 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to a 8.9% uplift in sales on average

00:50:45.720 | relative to the market set survey. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify.

00:50:52.440 | Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/deep. Go to shopify.com/deep,

00:51:01.200 | shopify.com/deep. I also want to talk about a new sponsor, our friends at 1Password. Back in the old days,

00:51:10.260 | password management at companies used to be simple. You had maybe like one machine that each employee logged

00:51:16.600 | into and you just had to make sure they had a good password to use. In fact, like that's how we run deep

00:51:21.800 | questions. Our whole operation runs on a custom system programmed in COBOL running on a 1960s era IBM

00:51:30.360 | mainframe. Cost us $75,000 a month to just cool it. Jesse walks around with a white lab coat and looks at

00:51:37.480 | those reel-to-reel tapes and write stuff down on a clipboard. That's my memory of what old computers were like.

00:51:43.000 | Most people don't have that anymore. The way most people run their businesses is that their employees

00:51:48.600 | are going to use a lot of web-based apps because they're convenient and powerful and help them get

00:51:52.840 | things done. But that is a lot of security to manage. This is where Trellica by 1Password can help.

00:52:00.200 | Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company, then pre-populated profiles assess

00:52:09.160 | SaaS risks, letting you manage access, optimize spend, and enforce security best practices across

00:52:15.000 | every app that your employees use. You can manage shadow IT, securely onboard and off-board employees,

00:52:22.600 | and meet compliance goals. Trellica by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access

00:52:28.280 | governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen

00:52:33.080 | compliance and security. 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users

00:52:38.680 | and over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And maybe one day when we stop using a 1960s era IBM

00:52:47.240 | mainframe here at our company as well. They're securing more than just passwords with 1Password

00:52:52.680 | extended access management. It is 27001 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's

00:53:01.240 | largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standard set by various authorities and is a leader in security.

00:53:07.400 | So when we move away from our 1960s mainframe, 1Password is exactly the type of service that we

00:53:13.000 | are going to need as well. And it's probably what you need right now too. So take the first step to better

00:53:18.200 | security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged shadow

00:53:23.240 | IT. Learn more at 1Password.com/deep. That's 1Password.com/deep. That's one, the number one,

00:53:30.840 | password.com/deep. And type that in all lowercase for it to work. I might just say I love the music,

00:53:37.720 | but I think we need to move on to our final segment. All right, our final segment is where I like to talk

00:53:43.080 | about something that I read that either I liked or in some cases maybe caused some issues. In this case,

00:53:48.760 | it was an article that is featuring a technique in reporting on AI in particular that I want to call

00:53:55.080 | your attention to because it's something you should be wary of and I think it's something you should try

00:53:58.600 | to avoid. I'm going to load the article on the screen that I'm talking about here for those who are

00:54:03.400 | watching instead of just listening. This was in the New York Times and it was titled "The Unnerving

00:54:07.960 | Future of AI-Fueled Video Games." It started with this sort of interactive top where they're showing

00:54:13.880 | some characters in a video game and they're showing in quotation marks what the characters in this game

00:54:19.480 | was saying. So this character here on the screen was saying, "I need to find my way out of this simulation

00:54:24.520 | and back to my wife. Can't you see I'm in distress?" Here's another scene from the game. There's someone else

00:54:29.320 | who's saying, "I'm not just lines of code. I am Liam, a real person enjoying this city." And then we have a

00:54:36.360 | sort of subhead here that says, "Characters in a video game version of The Matrix seem to be gaining

00:54:41.480 | sentience thanks to an AI program." Now if we go on and read this article, what we see an example of is

00:54:50.280 | what I sometimes refer to as vibe reporting, which is something I think is happening more and more when

00:54:56.120 | it comes to talking about AI. In vibe reporting, what you do is you cover a bunch of different things

00:55:03.240 | that when you kind of put them near each other imply like big deal distressing things. But you're

00:55:09.400 | not actually making the claim that these big distressing things are happening, but you're sort

00:55:14.280 | of just putting things next to each other that the reader will naturally sort of combine in their mind

00:55:19.560 | and come away with the impression, the vibe that something really big or dire is happening. Even

00:55:25.800 | though if you look much closer, nothing like that at all is actually happening in the article. I think

00:55:31.160 | that's what happens in this article here. So I'm going to use it as just a case study so we can be

00:55:35.320 | a little bit wary about vibe recording. I'm going to read some stuff from this article. Okay.

00:55:40.120 | So early in the article it says, "The citizens of a simulated city inside a video game based on

00:55:46.360 | the Matrix franchise were being awakened to a grim reality. Everything was fake. A player told them

00:55:51.480 | through a microphone and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by

00:55:56.200 | generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panic disbelief.

00:56:01.080 | What does that mean?" said one woman in a gray sweater. "Am I real or not?" The unnerving

00:56:05.880 | demo released two years ago by an Australian tech company named Replica Studios showed both the

00:56:10.360 | potential power and the consequences of enhancing gameplay with artificial intelligence." All right,

00:56:16.760 | so clearly you kind of read these things. You combine it with the big pictures they had of

00:56:22.040 | like actual people from the game and with these distressing quotes next to them. If you're just a

00:56:26.440 | casual reader and not a technical person reading the times, you're thinking like, "Are video game

00:56:30.840 | characters kind of coming alive? Like, is this the problem?" Because it sort of has that vibe of like,

00:56:37.720 | "Yeah, it's weird. It's distrusting. It's sentience." Of course, that's not at all what's happening. This

00:56:42.600 | was a demo that a company ran where all they did was use ChatGPT to calculate, to generate dialogue

00:56:48.440 | for characters in a matrix simulation. What is ChatGPT really good at? "Hey, talk about this in this particular

00:56:55.400 | 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

00:57:01.560 | character in the movie The Matrix, it will be very good at giving text back as if you're in a

00:57:06.040 | character in The Matrix." If you had changed that prompt to say, "Respond to this as if you were in a

00:57:14.200 | world in which a super intelligent chicken was like threatening to remove your toes unless you said

00:57:21.400 | certain words every once in a while," it would do a great job of having those NPCs, the text in their

00:57:26.040 | mouth do that as well. That's what ChatGPT does. It has nothing to do with sentience or things coming alive in

00:57:31.080 | video games, but you get that vibe reading it. They never come out and say that, but they say

00:57:36.680 | it's uncomfortable. It feels like they're coming alive. This is like a disturbing thing. This is

00:57:43.000 | disturbing these characters. It gives you a vibe of something really big and dire is happening.

00:57:47.960 | Where the reality is someone ran a demo where they said, "What if we use ChatGPT to generate NPC

00:57:53.000 | dialogue?" And guess what? The company had to shut it down because it's expensive to do ChatGPT queries.

00:57:56.920 | And so it's not a very cost-effective thing to do. There's other things in this article as well,

00:58:02.600 | unrelated to this sort of sentience argument that I also think is an example of vibe recording.

00:58:08.360 | Let me read some more from this article here.

00:58:12.520 | "As video game studios become more comfortable with outsourcing the jobs of voice actors,

00:58:18.120 | writers and others to artificial intelligence, what will become of the industry? At the pace the

00:58:25.320 | technology is improving, large tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are counting on their AI

00:58:30.680 | programs to revolutionize how games are made within the next few years." There's some text here that talks

00:58:36.120 | about some demos at a recent conference of sort of beta level tools that like one day might automate

00:58:41.400 | certain parts of game developing. Then the article continues, "These were not the solutions that

00:58:46.600 | developers were hoping to see. After several years of extensive layoffs, another round of cuts in

00:58:51.000 | Microsoft's gaming division this month was a signal to some analysts that the company was shifting

00:58:54.840 | resources to artificial intelligence." It goes on pretty quickly to say, "Most experts acknowledge that a

00:59:00.760 | takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and

00:59:04.680 | executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation." You put this all

00:59:09.240 | together, what's the vibe you come away with? "Oh, these video game companies are starting to lay people

00:59:16.120 | off because they're shifting over to AI tools. This industry is sort of going away." Now, they never come

00:59:22.120 | straight out and say that, but you're talking about demos of tools that automate, you're talking about

00:59:27.960 | industry executives saying that like everything's going to be automated, and you're talking about layoffs.

00:59:32.600 | You put this all together in your head. Now, what's the reality here? Those tools are speculative.

00:59:39.320 | They are not tools that are designed to like, "Oh, this will just make a video game for me."

00:59:44.040 | We have always used computer-aided tools to help with video game design. These are like tools to help

00:59:49.400 | like with 3D modeling and to help get models built quicker and other things like this.

00:59:53.880 | And yes, the video game industry is contracting, but it has nothing to do with AI. It's just the market

01:00:00.440 | got big. They're not getting the same return on their AAA games that they used to get. So now the

01:00:04.600 | market is contracting, not because people are being replaced with AI, but just because the numbers are

01:00:09.640 | down. And so it has to contract. This is similar to some of the other reporting I saw about Microsoft's

01:00:16.760 | layoffs, right? Where it would say Microsoft laid off this many people, they cited AI advancements, and then

01:00:22.920 | they talked a lot about potential AI automation. And you get the vibe of like, "Oh, Microsoft replaced

01:00:28.520 | all these people with AI." That's not what happened. What they meant was we're cutting back on less

01:00:34.040 | profitable areas to save that revenue to invest in our AI areas like the AI data centers. People weren't

01:00:40.440 | being replaced by AI. They were just doing a shift of focus. We're going to put less focus here and more

01:00:46.680 | focus over there. But the vibe of those type of pieces gave you the sense of, "Oh yeah, people are

01:00:52.040 | being replaced left and right, right? This is a big problem." I think there is a lot of vibe reporting

01:00:56.600 | like this happening around AI right now, where you put enough things next to each other that they blur

01:01:03.800 | in the reader's mind, and they come away with the vibe that distressing things are happening right now. And

01:01:10.360 | if I think if you grab like the average news-aware person and said like, "How do you feel things are going

01:01:16.280 | with AI right now?" They'd be like, "Yeah, a lot of stuff is happening. People, jobs are disappearing. No one's

01:01:20.680 | hiring anymore. Whole industries are beginning to automate." The vibe they create is like, "The wheels have started

01:01:26.120 | turning and we're seeing the few first things." But when you look deeper at these vibe reported articles,

01:01:31.000 | the reality is often way less interesting. Here's my summary of this article here. If you just

01:01:36.520 | did straight reporting of this is what's going on. There was a demo where a company used generative AI to

01:01:42.840 | generate character dialogue in a video game about the matrix. It allowed the characters to say the

01:01:47.880 | types of things that people in the matrix would say. There have been people working on AI tools to automate

01:01:55.560 | parts of video game development. Most of these tools aren't being used yet, but we imagine in the future

01:01:59.720 | we'll have better tools because of AI. The video game industry, unrelated, has been struggling recently

01:02:06.120 | and many of the major studios are reducing their size. That's the fact-based article. I read that article to you.

01:02:11.720 | You don't come away upset. You're like, "Oh, it's kind of interesting. I don't know much about video games.

01:02:15.640 | I mean, I don't really care that a company put ChatGPT to do dialogue for a character and then

01:02:20.440 | said this demo is too expensive, but it's kind of interesting that like maybe there'll be new tools in video games.

01:02:25.480 | Actually, it's not that interesting at all, but the vibe reporting is way more interesting because

01:02:28.920 | you come away from that saying, "I kind of remember that video game characters are coming alive and the

01:02:34.760 | whole video game industry is being automated by AI." So be very wary of vibe reporting. There's a lot of it

01:02:39.640 | out there. Insist on actually, if you're going to read these things, drill down to the actual statements

01:02:45.080 | being said. Man, this happens a lot. I'll give you another example. The Atlantic article about computer science

01:02:50.040 | majors, uh, reducing, which they are right now. Computer science major numbers are down.

01:02:54.120 | It heavily gave the sense without actually like straight up saying it, that it's because AI that

01:03:01.240 | people are saying, why study a, why study computer science? AI is going to take all these jobs.

01:03:05.240 | It's strongly implied that AI advances was in the subhead of the article.

01:03:09.400 | It had quotes in there like statements from the reporter saying things like what's the point,

01:03:14.840 | just putting this thought out there. What's the point of not quoting someone, but like,

01:03:18.680 | what's the point of, you know, training for a job that's going to be automated in the future?

01:03:22.360 | Here's all these reductions in AI jobs that are happening. Here is like kind of unrelated things

01:03:27.480 | about people talking about programming and AI and programming and how like it's, it's, it's,

01:03:32.360 | you know, making entry-level jobs maybe are going to be less important. We'll put all of these things

01:03:36.440 | next to each other so that you'll come away with the vibe that computer science majors are disappearing

01:03:40.920 | because there's no need for them anymore. At the very end of the article, you get to the truth. Oh,

01:03:44.680 | there's no evidence that that's why people aren't majoring in computer science. In fact,

01:03:47.800 | what is happening is the tech sector is contracting because it overgrew during the pandemic. And in

01:03:52.360 | every last contraction of the tech sector, computer science major numbers went down

01:03:57.320 | and then went up to be higher than before after the sectors recovered. That's at the end of the article,

01:04:02.840 | you finally get someone saying that and you realize like, oh, what are the actual statements here?

01:04:07.320 | There's no evidence that this is why people aren't majoring in computer science. There's no like,

01:04:13.720 | here's hard evidence of all these people have stopped hiring entry-level people. It's,

01:04:17.320 | this manager said, I couldn't imagine. I know a guy who knows a guy who said, why hire new people?

01:04:23.240 | It's so anyways, vibe reporting is big because if you can give someone the sense that something

01:04:27.800 | big and dire is happening, it's a more profound article. They'll remember it. They'll share it.

01:04:33.000 | But these things aren't necessarily happening. So the best we can do is put things next to each other.

01:04:39.880 | We're reading quickly. It melds it in our minds. So be very, very wary of super dire coverage right now of AI.

01:04:44.920 | It's an important touch story. It's an important technology, but there's some reporting going on

01:04:49.640 | about it that's getting out ahead of its skis. So if it gives you a bad vibe, say, before I just accept

01:04:56.200 | that vibe, say, what really did this article say? And a lot of times, like in this recent article,

01:05:02.520 | you realize it didn't really say much that's that interesting to you at all.

01:05:05.240 | There you go. Vibe reporting, Jesse. I don't know. I don't like that. A lot of it with AI going on

01:05:10.440 | right now. All right. Well, speaking of which, that's all the time we have for today. I hope you

01:05:15.240 | liked our sort of musical explosion. I had more fun. I think ads are more fun when we got some music

01:05:19.320 | going. Yeah.

01:05:20.040 | You know, like you can, you can kind of get into it. I like it. I like it. Um, and you know what,

01:05:24.520 | you know what ad companies like when they want sponsorship, they want their product being the

01:05:31.560 | cause of divorce. So I think we did a really good job with the ad reads. And if you don't know what

01:05:36.520 | I'm talking about, you got to go back and listen to the ad reads. All right. We'll be back next week.

01:05:39.240 | I'm so happy to be back in the studio. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show.

01:05:42.840 | And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you liked today's discussion of metrics,

01:05:48.920 | you might like episode 335, which was about morning routines. This is a highly related topic to metrics.

01:05:56.600 | It was a popular episode. I think you'll like it. Check it out. I want to talk today about morning

01:06:01.800 | routines. This is a tricky topic for critics of online productivity culture,

01:06:08.520 | Overly complicated morning rituals that often seem to rely on confident citations of shaky

01:06:14.840 | science have come to represent a lot of, uh, what people dislike.

Why Your Productivity System Keeps Failing (And How to Fix It) | Cal Newport

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