Ep. 361: Do You Need an App Blocker?

26:11The question, though, is how do you find the people to hire? When I first hired Jesse, for example, and Jesse, you probably remember this, my approach, which felt like a smart idea at the time, was to put a copy of Deep Work on a net, which I had rigged with a trip wire so that if you touch the book, that net would spring up and capture whoever was underneath it. Well, look, a couple dozen false alarms and a couple dozen lawsuits and arrests later, it finally worked, and I captured Jesse, and he's been stuck in the HQ ever since. But it turns out what I should have just done was used Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

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27:25And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility if they go to Indeed.com slash deep. Just go to Indeed.com slash deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. This podcast is also sponsored by BetterHelp. One of the topics we talk about all the time on this show is the stress of the modern workplace. Now, I've written about many sources of this stress from the rise of the hyperactive hive mind collaboration style to the overload that is caused by our embrace of pseudo productivities.

28:10But those issues are systemic and not issues that you can fully solve anytime soon. So if in the short term you're experiencing workplace stress, regardless of what generates that stress, you want to make sure you're doing all you can do right now to find some relief. This is where therapy can enter the scene. Working with a therapist can help you learn positive coping skills as well as how to set boundaries. It will empower you to be the best version of yourself. This is an important point for my listeners. Therapy can be practical. It isn't just for those who've experienced major trauma or are suffering from a serious mental illness.

28:47Now, if you're considering therapy, you should consider using BetterHelp. With over 30 ,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient, too. You can join a session with a therapist at the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life, plus switch therapists at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10 % off their first month at betterhelp.com slash deep questions.

29:26That's betterhelp.com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our own questions. First questions from John. How do I make the transition from relying on my memory to sort and organize tasks to a paper Trellis system? I first tried David Allen's system and recently bought your time block planner. Whenever I try to switch, I tend to do both systems. How can I switch? Well, John, I think part of the problem here is that much of David Allen's system, at least the parts you're talking about, is focusing on a different component of time management than my time block planner. Now, if we think about time management as a system, like I'm doing this in my new book, I've really been trying to articulate in a clear general way how time management works.

30:14there's really three questions that you're trying to answer. It's what do I have to do? When do I have to do it? And why am I doing it? David Allen is really good for that first question. What do I have to do? And it's this idea that the tasks that you are committed to, things that are obligations in your life, need to get out of your head. They need to be in a, what he calls a trusted system, a place where you know you're not going to forget them and therefore freeze your head from trying to remember them inside itself, right? So it gives you that stress relief of I no longer have to keep this just in my head.

30:42the second question is when do i do the things i need to do that's where the time block planner comes in it's a planning tool it doesn't store tasks for you it's not a place for you to keep track of what you have to do it's a tool for making a plan for the current day how do i make the best schedule for the current day now you might consult your task storage when you make this plan just like you might consult your weekly plan you might control consult your strategic plan But it's basically a planning tool. Now, David Allen has his own answers to that question of when should I do the work? He thinks it should be based on context.

31:18I get into this in my new book a little bit more. You should basically have lists that are corresponding to the different physical context, like I'm on the phone or I'm at my computer. And then you look at that list for the context you're in to choose things to do. I have some issues with that approach in the modern workplace. But the key thing I want you to know is there's a division between storing things and deciding what to do with them. So you need a task storage system. Use whatever system is going to be the lowest friction and most natural for you. It could be a paper notebook. It could be a Google Doc.

31:45It could be Trello like I use. It could be a phone-based app like Todoist. I don't really care what you use. The goal there is to have something that you write things down in and you trust it once it's there that you'll see it again and not forget it. So whatever you're most likely to stick with, go with. And only after you're comfortable with that can you then move on to the question of like, oh, how do I make a good plan for my day? But again, that's separate from the question of how do I store what I have to do and the tools involved can be quite different. All right. Who do we got? By the way, I got to say, Jesse, I thought I have a whole chapter in my new book just on time management where I've had to distill 20 years of my thinking on this into like the big – here are the big picture questions.

32:31Here's the big picture strategies. Here's your options for these different strategies. It was a really hard exercise, but I'm glad I did it. Is that some of the stuff you had to delete? Yes, I wrote a bad version of that. And then I figured out how to write a better version. The bad version was too specific. I was like, do this, do that, do this. And I was like, wait a second. Different people have different fits. So instead, I introduced this concept of bottom-up time management where you start with those big questions. Here are the things I want to answer. I give a major principle for each of those questions.

33:07Like here's the key principle for answering this question right. And then I go over a lot of different options. There's a lot of different ways now you can answer it. So start with something that works for you. Start with something simple. Get a system in place that works. Maybe it doesn't cover everything in your life, but you stick with it. And then slowly customize it to capture more of what really matters to you. I want you to build the system from the ground up. I will give you the top-down guidance. Answer these three questions, satisfying these three principles, and here's some options.

33:33but it's up to you to build and slowly evolve a system for you, that's more likely to stick than what most people do, which is in their time management books. I'm going to get so specific because I have a lot of pages to fill and pretty soon you're going to have 19 level hierarchies and task wheels that you connect this to the phase of the moon and then you build a Rube Goldberg machine. And if in the end the goldfish gets knocked by the ping pong ball into the target, that means that you're supposed to make a phone call. Things get complicated. this like here's an expert giving you a super complicated system it just doesn't work because it only takes a little bit of friction before you give up on it all together so i yeah i redid it it's bottom up i give you the big picture ideas you build it from you build it from scratch so i feel better about but took forever yeah it took that took a long time to write and then rewrite and then to cut and then to clarify but i'm really happy with how that is all right who's next next This is V.

34:28I'm a lecturer teaching actuarial science and have recently taken over as assessment lead for the undergraduate and postgraduate programs at my university. The May exam cycle is just finished and I'm feeling burned out. Please, can you suggest ways in which I can put boundaries on my administrative work so that it doesn't encroach all waking hours? It wants to do that as well. I know your pain, V, having my own off and on administrative positions in academia. it is a hard beast it's like a hydra try to cut off one head three more grow back out and all the heads are shaped like email requests for you to jump on calls i do have four things to suggest here that i think help you corral administrative work in a position like this all right one autopilot scheduling regular times on regular days for regularly occurring administrative work so it doesn't just exist otherwise if it just exists out there your mind will say if there's any work that people need me to do administratively, like I should probably work on it.

35:28Your mind is going to be like, my goal is to get to a place where there's nothing I need to do for this piece of my job before I'll work on anything else. But that never comes because as you finish some things, new things come in and this is how you get trapped in the cycle of always sort of just reacting to the new stuff. So with an autopilot schedule, these are the times I work on the major things. It's on these days and these times and these locations and that's when I do it. And if I'm not in one of those times, I don't think about the work. If you build your autopilot schedule correctly, you keep up with things.

35:59But you're freeing yourself from this impossible goal of finish everything before I can move on. All right, second idea is office hours. You really need to try to avoid unscheduled back and forth communication through email and Slack as your main way of collaborating with people. As much as possible, if there's questions or queries that can't be answered with a single message, stop by my office hours. You probably need to make those office hours every day, which is different than what a normal professor does. You need to defer people to it. Hey, just call me during my office hours next time you can.

36:28More and more defer things to quick synchronous conversation in these fixed times. It will save you from like constantly having to be in your inboxes. Number three, for everything else, have communication protocols. So if there's certain administrative work you have to do all the time, figure out this is how we're going to communicate about it. Here's the process. You put the form I need to sign into this shared document that I've linked to from the website shared folder rather, and there's two days a week when I go to that shared folder and I process the things. And then I move them into this other folder for you to take and to review, and then you have to get back to me on Friday if you have any issues, and then I will pass it off to be submitted or whatever it is.

37:08but you have protocols for how common work unfolds to try to save you from having to just have people emailing you attachments and files or saying, oh my God, this is due tomorrow, can you do it? So you put together communication protocols. My book, A World Without Email, gets into more detail about how to design those. Finally, my fourth suggestion, you might have to have a touch of the Feynman. What I mean by that, and I wrote about this in a few of my books, Richard Feynman famously said his strategy for not drowning in admin work as he became a higher and higher level professor at Cornell was to just not be very good at it.

37:42He said, I actively cultivated a reputation as being irresponsible and then people left me alone. They want to give you as much stuff to do. Now, you don't have to be as much of a malcontent as Feynman attempted to be, but it's okay not to be great at the admin work. By what I mean by it's not dropping the ball and not by doing it poorly, but also not being like you're doing it on your own schedule. I have autopilot. I have office hours. It gets done. I'm not the fastest. It gets done well. But it's not – I'm not like amazing from other people's perspective, which usually means you're like very responsive and you're on things all the time.

38:21I do a passable job on things that aren't core to my success as a professor, but I don't try to do a great job on them. and like I say no more often and people kind of get upset at me and I get some evil looks sometimes but I do an amount of this work that I think is useful. It's okay. You don't have to please everyone. Your goal as a professor is not to be good at admin work. You're not rewarded for being good at admin work so you don't have to put your considerable intellectual gifts and skills towards that goal. Save them for things that matter more. So those are my four suggestions that hopefully tame a little bit of this.

38:52When you took on your admin role did you use a lot of those tactics? I try to use a lot of those tactics, yeah. And I'm still working on it now. The other tactic I have is insisting on the hiring of associate directors who can take on a lot of different work. My main problem recently has been the one associate director for my one admin role was on parental leave. So I had to take on a lot of that work. He's back. The other associate director in the other role just went on parental leave. So I thought I had a great system. And in both cases, I'm yet to have a situation where all the systems are up and running.

39:27But I'm working on this all the time. So I have a new academic year coming up. I'm going to update my systems before it gets rolling. And I think a lot of longtime fans know that you took on that role. It was for a couple of years or is for the duration of your... A couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. Did you know there's an end in sight? There's an end in sight. Yeah. And I'm doing a passable job. I am not dropping the ball. the work is getting done but i'm working at my own pace and i'm not volunteering for extra work let's just put it that way all right next question is from brooke i'm a medical doctor and a journalist from ethiopia twitter allowed me to start my journalism career in medical school however i don't have the app on my phone but i still use it daily on my computer essentially i can't stop tweeting even on my desktop how should i manage this look it sounds like it's a problem like you're having a there's benefits for this tool it helps you make some connections but you're having a hard time using it that sounds like a problem uh i would either do a high level of intensity app blocking like we talked about in the deep dive of the school show so if there's like some key tweeting you think is really necessary for your career i bet that can fit into 30 minutes a week, right?

40:47I'm yet to find someone. Well, okay, there's some exceptions, but there's almost no one for where the situation is. Like it really is key to my career that I check Twitter all the time. So either do high intervention blocking. If it's only on your desktop, this is not so bad because now you can use tools like cold turkey directly. You don't have to do these workarounds with sharing a password. Do that or just move on from Twitter. Like Lisa Wells, give it a few days and you're going to feel a sense of relief. If you're worried about your career, keep this in mind, people have become successful journalists.

41:16They've networked, they've met people, they've gotten opportunities. Even before Twitter became a popular service in the early 2010s, that wasn't that long ago. There are still ways to be successful in journalism without this particular tool, which in the history of journalism is very, very new. So you can look into that as well. But yeah, if you're on a computer, it's not so hard to block. So listen to that deep dive and see if that helps. all right who's next next up is tim i received several weekly newsletters including your freshly revamped one i find it difficult to read them how do you read newsletters jesse have you seen the revamped looking newsletter of mine oh yeah yeah we got for those who haven't followed up it i've been trying to take my newsletter more seriously it's once a week the type of ideas we talk about on the show um more i would say my newsletter has more editorializing, kind of more op-eds, more like commentary and critics, more so critiques than I have on the show.

42:11But I'm doing it every week now, and the new newsletter director, Nate, has cleaned up the act, literally. So the newsletter itself actually looks better. For those who haven't seen it, and Jesse can attest this is true, the newsletter is now a giant image of my face. And then as you click on different parts of my face, there's a flash animation. that brings across like text that's related to it. So what am I seeing this week? You click on my eyes and then like a bunch of flashing text goes by with something about that. And what am I listening to? You click on my ears. It does play like really disturbing sounds when you click the buttons.

42:49And it is unfortunately configured in such a way that you can't mute your phone or stop the sound. So it can be a little bit embarrassing to use in public, but I think it's better. You know, it cost me$300 ,000 to program that too. So I think it was worth it. No, but it looks nice. So I'm a writer. I realize newsletter used to be a big part of my life. I want it to be a big part of life. I'm again, so calnewport.com to subscribe. All right, let's get back to the question. How do you read newsletters? Here's what I think you should do. Curate your newsletters, right? Like here's newsletters where I like these writers.

43:25We're in a golden age of newsletters right now where really good writers are writing really good newsletters that are either free or cost a small amount of money. I think this is a great thing. So you can have a curated selection of newsletters you really like. I think you should consume newsletters like a magazine, like the best magazine you've ever subscribed to because it is super bespoke to exactly your interest. So what does that mean? Have a folder or a label for newsletters. When they come in, you can just throw them into that folder or apply the label to if you're using Gmail. and then on a semi-regular basis, like once or twice a week, you can go through there and read those newsletters like you're flipping through a magazine.

44:05You can print them out. You can put them on an iPad and bring them to a coffee shop or bring your laptop to a bench outside your office. Like I'm going to read through three or four of these at a time. And you see it as like this is a magazine that a bunch of writers I like all are contributing to every week. So I think that's the right way to do it. Consolidate and read like a magazine. it really is a golden age of content because there's so many of these good newsletters and they're so cheap or free you can really piece together a really cool weekly experience of reading good content as opposed to like kind of just reading it reactively as things come in for my newsletter i do though appreciate if like what you should do is have it chiseled in the stone so that you can have like a really permanent relationship to the text all right who do we got next next up is arjun what are your thoughts on polyphasic sleep to prepare for deep work it's basically multiple sleeps in a 24-hour period look you people have to sleep different people need more sleep than others but you can't really hack it just sleep i mean people especially in silicon valley they love this idea especially in the 90s they love this idea that leonardo da vinci was a polyphasic sleeper and there's a way to sleep like a couple hours at a time and never like more than that.

45:19And you'll have all these more waking hours or whatever. And in the end, you get really tired and upset because we are evolved. Our species is evolved. They have a period of sleep and a period of wakefulness and all of our hormones and chemicals are oriented around it. And that's just what you have to do. And you have to try to get as much sleep as your body typically needs. And if you're finding a hard time doing this, like you don't have enough time to get everything done you want to do, do fewer things. But sleep is not something, it's like trying to get around eating. You kind of just have to do it the way we're evolved to do it.

45:45So no, I'm not a big believer in hacking sleep in any sort of significant way. All right, so let's move on to a case study. These are where people write in to talk about how they've applied the type of advice we talk about on the show in their own situations. Like today's case study comes from RGJ, who says, I work as a software engineer at a tech startup. About five or six months ago, my boss started requiring us to post updates on our work in a Slack channel once a day. We use a ticketing system similar to Jira to track work, so the updates are just a couple of bullet points about our progress on our self-assigned tickets.

46:21While I do think this is a little heavy-handed and smells like micromanagement, I managed to spin this into a positive in my working life with some of your deep work principles. Thanks to your advice, I recognize an opportunity to set up some habits that have helped me excel in my work. I spend the last 5 to 10 minutes of each workday documenting what I did that day in a little journal note on my computer. This has become a clear shutdown ritual for me, something I'd never been able to maintain before. I've been pleasantly surprised with how much peace of mind it gives me on my commute home and in the evening.

46:51Also, each morning, I copy what I wrote in the journal, edit it a little, and post it to the Slack channel. This morning ritual gives me something to do right as I start work and gives my brain a little bit of time to warm up before jumping into the day's deep work session. The only downside is that I have to open Slack in the morning, which can at times be distracting. At the bare minimum, I plan on carrying the shutdown ritual wherever I work, regardless of whether there's a mandate or not. Thank you again for codifying and sharing your heart and wisdom with the rest of us. Well, I appreciate that case study because shutdown rituals are fantastic.

47:20Giving your brain some closure each day on what you did or didn't do and making sure you're not leaving any open loops or urgent things you're not dealing with gives you peace. You get so much more relaxation and recharging, but also just enjoyment out of your non-work time. if you take 10 minutes to really shut down your work time properly. So I'm sorry you have some micromanagement in your job, but I'm glad that it led as a side effect to you having a shutdown ritual inserted into your life because it seems like it's doing a lot of good. We've got a good final segment coming up. We'll talk about what I'm reading.

47:52But first, let's hear from another sponsor. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler?

48:25How do you choose which internet service provider to use? The sad thing is that most of us have very little choice because ISPs operate like monopolies in the regions they serve. They then use this monopoly power to take advantage of their customers with things like data caps and bandwidth throttle. You know, that list goes on. But here's the worst of it and something most people don't realize. ISPs have and use the ability to log every website and service you use. They can then sell this information to third parties or use it for their own purposes. This is why you need a VPN, because a VPN can prevent them from doing this.

49:09Here's how it works. When you use a VPN, instead of just directly talking to a website or service, which allows anyone like your ISP to see what those websites and services are, it's right there in the header of the packet, you instead encrypt the message you want to send to the website or service you are interested in. You send that to a VPN server. the VPN server unencrypts it and then talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response and sends it back. So what is your ISPC in this case? Only that you're sending messages to a VPN server. They have no idea what the actual sites and services you're using.

49:41Your privacy is protected. Now, if you're going to use a VPN, use the one that I recommend, which is ExpressVPN. Here's some of the reasons why I like ExpressVPN. First of all, it's easy to use. You can fire up the app by just clicking one button and now all of your apps and sites you're using will be going through the VPN. So it's very easy to use. It works on all your devices, your phones, your laptops, your tablets, and more. So you can stay private, whatever device you're using or wherever you happen to be. And people like it. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge.

50:17I'm always reluctant to use the internet if I don't have a VPN and if I'm going to use a VPN, the one I trust is ExpressVPN. So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S vpn.com slash deep. And you can get an extra four months free when you go to expressvpn.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tutor, T-U-T-O-R. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founder, for many years. and he is my go-to guy for fitness advice. His company, My Body Tutor, is a 100 % online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is a lack of consistency.

51:01They do this by simplifying the process into practical, sustainable behaviors and then giving you daily accountability and support to help you stick with your plan. Here's what Adam says. I'm quoting him here. In fitness, knowledge isn't the problem. Everyone I talk to already knows what to do or they struggle with turning information into action. But My Body Tutor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support. So if you know what to do but haven't been able to do it, Adam and his coaches at My Body Tutor are the best in the world at delivering you highly personal accountability and coaching.

51:35Now, here's the good news. If you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners$50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention my podcast. When you join, go to mybodytutor.com to learn more. All right, Jesse, let's move on now to our final segment.

51:56All right, so this is a segment where I like to talk about things I'm reading that either I'm enjoying or I'm finding interesting or challenging things that I'm thinking about. I actually wanted to share, this is maybe a first for this segment, two tweets that were brought to my attention. and I didn't discover them myself, but they were brought to my attention. They're both on the same topic. And I think they present an interesting, and I wouldn't say challenge, but more of like a bit of a course correction on a current theme that's getting a lot of coverage in the tech media. And that is using AI, the computer program.

52:34So this idea of vibe coding that you can just tell an AI model what you want a program to do, and it will produce the code to do what you want it to do without you really having to learn to code or use the code is a topic that's being talked about all the time in the media. I mentioned this in a recent episode. There's a lot of things that aren't due to AI that are being ascribed to AI because of this narrative. So we have the post-pandemic tech industry contraction, which is leading to some layoffs and reduction in jobs at tech companies and computer science majors going down, a lot of reporters are credulously just jumping in and saying, this is because AI is taking those jobs because AI can computer program now.

53:15It's not true. That's not why those jobs are going away. We got into that. But this is a really popular theme right now that we're moving up the ladder of complexity of computer programs that AI can just do. This brings me to these two tweets that were recently brought to my attention. I'll give a hat tip here to Gary Marcus on helping to identify these. All right, so the first tweet, this comes from Agilia, and let me read it. Alas, just the other day, I tried vibe coding a non-trivial Unity shader, and after hours of trying to make it work, I went back to human-made tutorials and started writing it again from scratch to get the desired result.

53:56I would love to just vibe code, but doesn't work past Hello World examples. LLM-enabled autocomplete is helpful for boilerplate to avoid rewriting the same thing 100 times. So what Agilia here is saying is she had a relatively straightforward thing she wanted. A Unity shader is like a bit of code that helps impact how Unity does shading. It's a 3D engine for making video games. And just asking AI models to work didn't work. But she makes the point at the end, LLMs are still useful for coding, But in the autocomplete setting of like they help you fill in boilerplate code so you don't have to remember like exactly what function calls are, what parameters functions have, or how to access different libraries.

54:39But in her experience, creating code from scratch wasn't working well. Let me read another tweet. This one comes from Stuart Winterter. Actually, no, he's retweeting this from someone else. This is actually coming from a Reddit thread. All right, so let me read this Reddit thread. I am giving up. I just want to say that I'm giving up on creating anything anymore. I was trying to create my little project, but every time there are more and more errors, and I'm sick of it. I'm working on it for about three months. I do not have any experience with coding and was doing everything through AI, but every time I want to change a little thing, I kill four days debugging and other things go south.

55:19So I don't have any more energy in me to work on this. It is hopeless. AI is just so stupid and will fix one thing but destroy 10 other things in your code. I am really sad because I was enjoying it in the beginning, but now it is just pain and rage. Hat down for those people who can create something and it's working without coding knowledge. All right, so here's the point I want to make. How is AI helping computer coding? There's two ways. One, if you're a serious software developer, there's tools like Cursor or Github Copilot that help you create your code by preventing you from having to go look things up.

55:53So again, I mentioned this before, but you might want to call a library in your operating system and you don't quite know what the call is or what the parameters are. It'll just kind of give you a sample code for how to do that, and then you can edit it as needed. Or you want to create a new function for an event handler and you forget exactly what the format is, it can fill that in for you right away. So it is a very useful aid to your coding on the scale of when Google became big. It was a big quantum leap for computer programmers because now they could Google things from forums like Stack Overflow instead of having to go to reference books.

56:24Then there's this thing called Vibe Coding, which is where you basically just ask AI to create a program from scratch. This is really cool, but the things that I think these tweets make clear is that it has a variable success rate. If you're careful and you know a little something about coding and the thing you're coding is at the right level of complexity, it can really help you save some time. A friend of mine, for example, was telling me about how for his kid's school, they were having some sort of fundraising charity auction. And he was thinking like, hey, if we had like a little website and we could do this to a web interface, it would be much easier than people like filling stuff into a shared spreadsheet or just emailing their bids.

57:05He told me like it took a few hours. He's not a great coder. And he used AI and it kind of helped him figure out what services to use and write the code. He's like, this is cool. And I don't think I would have done this if I had to go out and do it from scratch. It's a great example of vibe coding working. There's other examples where I think Kevin Roos had an example where he was able to get a Tetris game to work right away just asking AI. That's less impressive because just those games exist, and so it was basically just taking code that already existed. But as seen in these tweets, it's not a magic wand.

57:35and if you don't know enough about coding or what you're doing is complicated enough or just the AI models on the cranky side of the bed that day, it can be really frustrating, right? It is more fickle than people think. So on one hand, we have these conversations about whole software industries are disappearing. Every job loss or lost computer science major anywhere is due to AI. We have this idea that it can already handle coding up to this level completely and now it's going to get to the next level. The reality is more complicated. It sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. It depends on your comfort and what you're trying to do.

58:09A lot of people are struggling with it. My point here is I think coding is one of the areas, like I talked about in my big article on this last month, where AI is going to be very useful and has been very useful. But it is not yet a magic wand or panacea. So even in this area where there is perhaps no better of target for the capabilities of a large language model, we're still in a sort of uncertain phase in terms of the rewards and success we're having. So progress is being made. There's these two tweets show, be very wary about people that are overly confident in talking about how much AI can do from a coding perspective.

58:44It really depends on the person and the context, and it is not yet a general solution to a whole class of type of programming efforts or jobs. All right, so there's my AI rant of the week, Jesse. And I guess I will leave it there because I got to go outside because it's nice up here. I'm in an undisclosed location, New England, and it's not a billion degrees outside. And I can go for like a nice walk and not be hot. And I'm going to do that now. So thank you everyone for listening. Be back next week with another episode recorded up here in my undisclosed location. And until then, as always, stay deep.

59:17Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. So if you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at CalNewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:00:18Thank you.