Ep. 363: Escaping the Digital Doldrums

26:39If that was possible without you needing a hard-won skill, guess what? Everyone would be doing it. First, it would be people, and then you would have private equity funds come in, and everyone would be, this is great. What an easy business. I don't need to know much about it. Anyone can just, if you have enough capital, you can have a retail convenience store do well and just buy three more. Everyone would be doing it. I'm always really wary if you don't have a rare and valuable skill being applied. I don't trust a person saying this thing is going to make you a lot of money. It just never works.

27:08The market is too efficient. The market of professional pursuits and rewards is very efficient. And if there's ways to do really well without rare and valuable skills, people move into it until it's saturated. Then people try to automate and systematize it. And then all the opportunity goes away. I think of it as like the efficient, I don't know what you call this, like the efficient job market theory. Now, I could be wrong here, but I know I've seen some books for some stores, including several stores in Tacoma Park. I know the owners. These are hard businesses. It's hard work. It's hard to scrape a margin.

27:38Almost certainly you're getting a much higher return on your time and much closer paths to autonomy and flexibility and being something like a business analyst with a specialty than you are running a retail convenience store. So all this is just to say, be wary. Now, that's not to say that this is not a bad business because I'm going to play devil's advocate for myself here, Vishal. There are some types of retail outlets that can be pretty profitable, like a good McDonald's franchise and a good location can do really well. And you could say, well, then why does anyone do it? Well, it's because McDonald's has a – if you want to be a franchisee, they have this rule that says you can't finance more than some small percent of the purchase price of the franchise.

28:20So you have to have – it depends on where you are, but many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of capital. Now, if you have that, it could be a pretty good investment. McDonald's are relatively turnkey how they run and you can scale them. And it's a situation where not everyone can do it because not everyone has$700 ,000 worth of capital to buy a McDonald's and Silver Spring or whatever it is. So there is some devil advocate here that if there's capital at play and that's what's keeping people out of the market or it's an unusually good location and you have an inside connection to it, maybe that helps.

28:52But I just want to make this general point regardless of the details of visual situation. I want to make this general point for anyone out there. if you think a deal is too good to be true, like, wow, I can just do this and make a lot of money. I don't know much about it. You're probably the sucker in the bet. Probably suck in the bet. So be very wary about career capital and be very wary, A, about things that require career capital and be very open to where can I take the career capital I already have, specialize it a little bit more in six months from now, have like a very big piece of leverage I can use in my life.

29:25If I'm a business analyst. Is there a new market emerging that has some complicated technical component that I can master and then go freelance and do this 20 hours a week or do this 40 weeks a year and take the other 12 weeks off? And if I change my living expenses, it can work. I can imagine many more potential paths to a deep life, building on the career capital you already have, than I can imagine building a retail empire being the way to get there. All right. So that's my sermon. I'm just very worried about anything where if I'm not leveraging a hard-won skill, I'm nervous about the idea that this is going to be a pretty good or easy or lucrative job.

30:07All right. Who we got? Next up is Doug. You've said before that the real way to improve as a writer is to write for publications. My niche is small. I've submitted pieces before, but the responses have always been no with no suggestions or edits. I haven't tried often because the process didn't help me grow. I also prickle at the prospect of using my precious limited writing time to do the non-writing that would come with searching for other avenues. How should I do this? Jesse, I feel like I'm in my curmudgeon mode today. Because I've got another curmudgeonly answer coming. I don't know. I'm sort of feeling like angry uncle today.

30:42Again, Doug, not knowing all your circumstances, and I don't mean to rant, but writing for publications how you get better now if you're if you're journaling for yourself if you're writing fiction just uh for the creative expression to share with your friends if you're your poetry because it just helps you get your feelings out of course don't mess it doesn't matter if you publish it or not and if it's a pain i agree with you don't waste the time but if you're trying to become a better writer like i want to get good at this maybe i want to have this be, if not a career, like a component to my professional life, something I'm known for, something I do at a high level.

31:18Writing for publications is how you get good. Yes, you've submitted some pieces, the response has been no. There's been no suggestions. That's because it takes a lot. It's hard to be a published writer. You know, it takes, if it was easy, everyone would be like, yeah, I'm going to spend four months and start publishing stuff and it's great. Yeah, it's a hard entry ramp, but it is worth Keep pushing yourself to get past that gate of being published. Stephen King, he writes about this in his book on writing. When he first started writing fiction and he was aiming in the short story market, there was a lot more short story magazines for horror and speculative fiction back then.

31:53Up in his attic, he took a railroad spike and he knocked that spike into the wall above the typewriter where he was writing up in that attic room. And he said, that's where I'm going to put my rejection slips. Not a nail because a nail is not long enough. And he began filling that railroad spike with rejection slips. And you know the story he tells in on writing? Reminds me of you. At first, no. Rejections, no information. After a while, hey, this was kind of good, but it's not for us. Maybe a couple sentences of feedback. After a while, hey, I think this was close. Steven, I like this. This is close, but I'm not quite sure about it.

32:32Then stuff started getting in. And then he started messing around with novels. They weren't working, and then he had one that did work. It was about a young woman who had telekinesis, right? Had this power of telekinesis and what happened in a small town, and he sold it hardcover. I think it was like a$2 ,000 advance. He was a teacher in Bangor having to work summer jobs to cleaning industrial laundries, cleaning tablecloths from New England lobster joints and maggots on them. It's gross, right? But he needed the summer job to make the money. The book does pretty well, though. It catches some attention.

33:10It's starting to get some heat. He doesn't really know this. There's no internet back then. A call comes in to his agent. They've sold the paperback rights. $400 ,000. This is in the 1970s. railroad spike filled with rejection slips before he made that progress, which is all to say, like, this is part of the rite of passage of writing. The key is when you're getting the nose, you say like, well, how do I get better to try to make the next one not be a no? So even while you're waiting to get feedback from publication, have a writer's group, work with other people. What's working here? What's not?

33:38Be brutally honest with me. Get the feedback. Try harder. Try a different format. Try a different style. What if I tried this? Maybe this is a better match. It's that hard work of trying to get accepted is the first major deliberate practice stretch that happens in the life of a professional writer. Once you're writing for publication, the next large deliberate practice stretch happens where you go from not bad to good, and then really cool stuff can go on. So don't write a story. If, again, if your goal is to be like a good writer, don't try to write yourself a story where it's all gatekeepers.

34:09They don't know what they're talking about, and you're just going to do your thousand words a day because it's fun, and you like the idea of it, and you have your herbal moth AT, and you Instagram photos of it. Don't write your own story about how you want the world of writing to work. The real story is it's hard, but that hardness is the edge against which the blade of craft is sharpened. And even that push to get past the simple no, if you're really pushing, if they anger you when you push back and you have friends and you have writers groups and you're trying and you're relentless, that's when you start to get good.

34:40And so maybe my problem is, I left off that first part, Jesse, that sometimes it's hard to even get in the publications in the first place. And that's okay. That is the first step of getting better. I have my total read that. We're going to revisit Doug too in the case study. Oh, okay. Excellent. Is that the same Doug? It's the same Doug. Yeah. Oh, interesting. And the case study is having a great time. Yeah. All right. This will be interesting. All right, Doug, stay tuned. We're going to revisit listeners Doug's story. In the case study, he says like, Hey, I just sold, I went around trying to write for publication and an editor just showed up at my house and said, Hey, I just happened to see this on your computer screen through the window.

35:17We're just going to give you this giant check right now. I'm glad you didn't waste your time writing submission letters. Doug actually has a cool story. So I look forward to returning to that. All right. Do we have another question from someone with a name that starts with a D? Because that's what I really want right now. Daniel. And Daniel says, companies investing in AI see a tool that should decrease time to value. Knowledge workers should now be able to produce faster in the company's view. How should we argue to companies that the long-term benefits of allowing slow, friction-laden skill building outweigh the shorter-term benefits of faster project completion through AI assistance?

35:57So, Daniel, I don't have this argument with your company. Executives are acting kind of delusional about AI because it's this, we don't understand the technology. We don't really understand exactly how it works, but we're seeing on our phone all these like crazy headlines from Fortune articles. And so I think if you get a chat GPT description, what I can tell here is it'll automate all of your work in about 17 minutes. Wow. So we should just do that. So executives are like, we use AI. And if you're not using AI, then we don't want you here or whatever. But honestly, it's pretty narrow still. And we'll get into this more in the third segment, but it's pretty narrow still the niches in which there are significant productivity improvements happening from AI.

36:43So you have to kind of just tune out the almost delusional exuberance of the executive class right now. Look at what you do. If you see people using AI in what you do in a way that seems really helpful, then say, hey, teach me about it and use it. It might help some. But that's kind of it. And if you don't have a useful way to use it, tell your boss, yeah, I have my chat GPT description, and just go on and do the hard work of getting really good and so good they can't ignore you. There is a lot of energy that right now is kind of rootless and disconnected from reality right now. So you are not probably missing out on some way that AI was going to fully automate your job.

37:24So keep an eye on it, but just look at the people around you. Hey, are you using this? Are you finding any use in it? And if they're like, I don't know, I'm like having conversations with it for 45 minutes a day before I write my email to make sure that I feel good about it. You can be like, that's great and you're doing good and that's a really good idea. And then you can go back to your desk and just do the work. But if there really is something that's helping, then use it. But I think most people right now, there's not a major – it's okay. You're not doing something wrong if you don't have like a major productivity-boosting use case for AI.

37:50It's not your job to figure out how to use their products. It's their job to convince you that the product is indispensable. So no matter how excited your boss got because he watched a YouTube interview of Dario Amadei saying all jobs are going to be automated within 19 minutes, keep doing your work, keep doing it well. All right, who do we got? All right, next up is Amy. Naval Ravikant in his podcast with Chris Williamson says that inspiration is perishable. He argues that there is value in doing things spontaneously instead of having scheduled time for it. you won't be in the mood to do that thing when the time arrives he also mentions that being able to do something that you want at the moment you want it want it is liberating he doesn't body he doesn't body the removing the unnecessary overhead part of where he has no meetings etc but says that the overly scheduled life is not worth living does this contradict with the deep life i mean not to be spicy and like every one of my answers today and maybe it's this new england there.

38:53But Naval is basically describing the life of a, like an 18th century aristocrat. Like, yes. Uh, if you're a moneyed gentleman and we can play it, if you want to play the clip, do you have a clip of it? Well, I think you captured it. I think that captured the main things. Okay. If you're, if you're a, you know, the type of person that would come calling in a Jane Austen novel. Sure. It's probably right. This is a great way of living because our income comes from our investments and we have freedom of time and we want to use the time in the highest ways. And to have a day that's overly scheduled, it probably is not as life-affirming as sort of taking the interest as it arises and pursuing it.

39:40And it could be the, I don't know, like Jason Priestley. I just said Jason Priestley. Jason Priestley is from Beverly Hills 90210. Shannon Doherty's brother. I'm thinking about someone who's very similar. Joseph Priestley, I think. Let me just get this name right. Jason Priestley. You need to be like Luke I don't remember this guy's name. Jason Priestley. All right. So who I am thinking about here is Joseph Priestley. I'm pretty close, Jesse. Yeah. Similar to Jason Priestley, Joseph Priestley was a gentleman scientist from the 18th century, contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, who he crossed paths with, who helped isolate oxygen because he just like ran these experiments because today I shall horse ride, tomorrow I shall work on experiments.

40:33And I agree. It's probably a really interesting day-to-day way to live. But Naval Ravikant is an incredibly successful seed-level investor who had early money in Uber and all these other types of companies and has a lot of money and doesn't have to like a gentleman aristocrat of the 19th century, can just sort of like let his day unfold. The rest of us, however, if we want to master a craft that's going to be meaningful and profitable, it takes really hard work. It's diligence. Diligence is not just to return to that craft day after day and push yourself deliberately, but the diligence to say no to other things that are more interesting in the moment because crafting that skill requires repeated time.

41:13You want to produce something that the market respects, produce something that matters, to have leverage, create leverage in your life through the value you produce. That is hard work. It's diligent work. You have to time block. You have to work with your motivational systems. It's not always fun, but it can be really fulfilling. I'm sure Naval went through all this when he was an early stage investor making his moves early on and trying to understand the market and get in on these early startups he was involved. And it was hard work, but it was probably also really satisfying in that stage of life.

41:41So anyways, I'm sure Naval is right that it is very liberating not to have a schedule. And actually, you would enjoy a lot about your life in the moment. But most of us don't have that opportunity. But more importantly, and I think this is maybe the contrarian stance here, is it really better? Again, when are people alive? When are they fulfilled? When they have a purpose they're pursuing, when they're able to take their energies and to shape them with discipline and motivation to creating something that makes the world better or it's interesting. What deeper satisfactions outside of those of community do you get in actually that type of motion, that type of movement towards making your intentions manifest concretely in the world?

42:27To borrow the Matt Crawford phrase. And that's often hard. Crawford talks about that in Shop Class of Soulcraft, the deep satisfactions of commercial electrician work, bending those contuant almost like art so that all of the wires can fit into the commercial junction box and it just works. That's hard. You're bending pipes. I watched our AC guy bend like two pipes a few months ago. We got a new AC involved. That's hard work. You're heating it up at the soldering thing and you're bending it. But he was pretty satisfied when he was done because he made that thing work and the machine turns on and the house gets cold.

43:03So I don't know. I'm sure it's fun. I'm sure it's fine in the moment. I'm sure it is liberating to not have a schedule, not be pushing. But when you're pushing on the right things, sometimes that's even better. All right. So hopefully our call today, Jesse, doesn't get me fired up anymore. We need something to, I don't know what it is, but we need something to calm me down. So if this is a call that says, how could I find time to deep work when I am on a submarine in charge of the nuclear reactor and it requires 18-hour shifts and my child is with me and I'm doing childcare on the submarine while I'm doing that, when am I doing my deep work?

43:41I hope it's not a call like that. I hope it's something that's going to calm me. Here we go. Hey, Cal, this is Catherine. You've written a lot about how we shouldn't be beholden to our email inboxes and the email that comes in should not set our priorities for the day, which makes total sense to me intellectually. But as a lifelong inbox zero person, I find it incredibly difficult to let go of the sense of control that comes from addressing everything in my inbox. Do you have any suggestions for people like me who want to reply to things and address things that come in? Are there half measures that you would suggest we take or kind of other strategies to lessen the stranglehold of the desire to keep on top of our inboxes?

44:35Thanks. Let me ask you this, Jesse. Do we still have the slow productivity theme music loaded up on that board? Because I think this will – I'm in a spicy mood. I think we've got to calm things down.

44:55All right, that's putting me in the right mindset here. So I'm going to approach this question with calm. So I'm going to start by saying with calmness. I know it is a common thing people say about email. Don't stress what's in there. Don't make that be your priority. There's like more important things than it. These aren't urgent. People should have better expectations. I know that's a common response to inbox overload. I don't agree with it, though. I actually think you should deal with what's in your inbox. You should be able to deal with everything in your inbox. And the solution is not to pretend like your inbox isn't there.

45:37It's not to pretend like people's expectations are wrong for emailing you. It is to reduce the amount of those emails that arrive in your inbox in the first place. I'm also an inbox hero person. I get very stressed by it. It's social stress. We talked about this in the context of text messages in the last week's deep dive. So I wrote a whole book called The World Without Email. It came out in 2021. And the whole premise of that book, well, I guess there's two premises. The premise is having a lot of back and forth communication is terrible for us. It makes us stressed out. It doesn't make us more productive.

46:07But the main idea of the advice in that book is we can re-engineer how we collaborate in a professional context so that we're not so dependent on unscheduled messages that require responses. That's the thing that creates an anxiety-producing inbox full of messages that have to be dealt with, is that you have a dozen or two dozen ongoing virtual asynchronous conversations unfolding with messages being bounced back and forth. So any moment you look in your inbox, 75 % of those conversations have the next message waiting for you. And you kind of have to answer those pretty quickly because when you bounce it back to them, they'll bounce it back to you and you'll bounce it back to them.

46:45And you're doing this game where you're trying to get to an asynchronous conclusion before too much time goes on. So you have to check that inbox and you have to get down to zero. And by the time you get down to zero, there's 24 more messages arrive because they just bounced them back to you. The key then is not to ignore that. It is to stop there being so many proverbial ping pong balls coming in your direction. And the whole second half of that book, how to become, or what's it called? A world without email. I was going to say how to become an email superstar, which is another awesome title, but a world without an email.

47:17The whole second half is saying when you get emails that are part of a conversation, so not something you can just either informational or something you can just answer with a single message. When they're part of a back and forth conversation, ask yourself, what is this conversation about? Like what type of thing is this trying to bring us to a resolution about? and then you have a short-term and long-term solution here. Short-term for that particular conversation, say, how can I respond to this email that is going to move this out of unscheduled messaging from here on out? And that might mean spending more time on that particular email.

47:53They say, okay, here's the decisions we need to make. Here's the way I think we should do it. You finish this draft by Wednesday, put into this Dropbox folder by close of business. I'll pick it up first thing Thursday morning. I'll annotate it. I'll have any of my annotations in that Dropbox version by noon. You can pick it up anytime after noon on Thursday to act on those. By the way, we have a meeting on this unrelated thing Thursday afternoon. So any unresolved questions, let's just chat real quickly after that meeting. But otherwise, whatever you have in there at the end of day Thursday, I'm going to send on to the designer.

48:24We'll have that report put together. That email is more of a pain to write than just answering the current email with like, yeah, I think so, but when are you available? It takes more time to write, but you have just cauterized the wound of all of those back and forth messages. That conversation will no longer generate new messages that require a response in your inbox, so the effort was worth it. So we call that process-centric emailing. You respond to ongoing chains in ways that breaks the ongoing chain. That reduces the pressure in your inbox. That's a short-term solution. The long-term solution is you say, what is the general type of work that this responds to?

49:00Is this conversation about something that I do again and again? Is there a type of report we put out? Is there agenda planning we do for this weekly meeting? Is there client issues that come in that are kind of complicated to figure out? What is the regularly occurring work-related process that this email conversation is related to? And you can step back and say, let's put in place a different protocol for dealing with this type of thing. here's our process for how we produce reports and we synchronize it we don't need unscheduled messages here's our process for dealing with clients there's three days a week where they can call at this time if they want they don't have to if they have nothing to talk about but we will be there and we'll answer and chat with them about any question you have we'll have our intern take notes we'll send them a summary of the notes right after and about all the things we've committed to doing and when they next call we'll tell them how it's going and there we go we We now have a way of dealing with clients that don't require back and forth messages.

49:58So the long-term solution is creating protocols for regularly occurring business processes that are right now generating these unscheduled back and forth conversations. That is the killer of inboxes. Back and forth conversations consisting of unscheduled messages that require relatively timely responses. That is the productivity poison that has to be neutralized. And in this sort of medical analogy, the activated charcoal that you would use here, and I'm really stretching this analogy is being smarter about process and protocol. So I don't think we should ignore inboxes. This is, by the way, why I think most advice about inboxes fails, because it ignores the psychological reality of having messages waiting that require a response.

50:40And when you tell me to batch, when you tell me to don't check email first thing in the morning, when you tell me to tell people to have new expectations for when to expect a response, none of that works when you have dozens of messages that really do need to be replied too quickly for you to be a useful collaborator in your company. There's too much social stress around it. So we've got to prevent those messages from getting to the inbox in the first place. Read A World Without Email. More people should read that. I mean, it's not that that book did poorly, but it probably came in a little bit under the radar in 2021.

51:10There's a few other things happening in the world, and people weren't thinking that much about re-engineering their business processes. So check that book out if you're curious about the type of things we're talking about. I don't know if the theme music really called me down, Jesse, but I tried. It's good to hear it again. Yeah. All right. We got a case study here from Doug, who I sort of gave a sermon about Stephen King and a railroad spike. I gave my son that same sermon, by the way. I made him read on writing the Stephen King nonfiction book. So I'm already fired up about it. Doug, let's hear your case study because I think it's going to make me chill out a little bit.

51:47All right. So Doug says, I'm a public school teacher in Atlanta, and I also write a blog. You talk often about how time and place affect creative energy, and I've leaned into that more than ever this summer. The routine I've settled into has been, one, I do most of my writing in the nearby university library, which is only about a mile and a half from my home. It is beautiful, inspiring, and mostly empty over the summer. Doug, I've been doing the same thing here this summer. I did a lot of work at Dartmouth, and I was in the tower room again today. It's empty. It's motivating. I love it. All right.

52:17Two, I write there in the mornings, usually for 90 minutes to two hours. I don't set a timer. That's just about how long I usually maintain a flow state session. Three, to get there and back, I willingly walk even in the Atlanta heat. I choose a route that takes me through a nature preserve on the grounds of the university and then through the prettiest part of campus. It takes about 30 minutes each way. That whole routine is incredibly productive for me without feeling like work whatsoever. However, the time, place, and mode of transportation makes it feel like an indulgent choice of how to spend my time rather than work.

52:49This deep summer has been incredibly satisfying. It's funny. Everybody I know is worried about me. I haven't done any of the things teachers usually do over the summer, so people are worried that I'm bored and depressed. And they're surprised when I tell them it's been one of my favorite summers ever. All right, mea culpa, Doug, you say here that the writing you're doing is for a blog, which I think might be exactly one of those cases I was talking about where you don't necessarily have to worry about publication. You are enjoying the craft of writing. You're getting better on your own pace, and you're reactivating your creative circuits.

53:23This reminds me a little bit of the engineered wonder we talked about in the deep dive, right? I mean it's a little bit over the top, which is what's good. 30 minutes beautiful library two hours isolation flow state i mean i think you're getting benefits right now that might be completely unrelated to the writing and then you add on top of that the benefits of having a creative outlet during this quiet season in your year so i am okay that you're saying i don't want to right now waste a lot of time trying to get better with publication because your goal here is not i want to be a published novelist or like a well-known columnist so my A rant before doesn't apply to you, Doug, but does apply to other people who heard that and were thinking like, yeah, I want to be a professional writer, but I shouldn't have to submit things.

54:08That takes too much time away from my writing. That's who I was talking to. But, Doug, your deep summer sounds delightful. A great example of lifestyle-centric planning and a great example of engineered wonder, that idea that we talked about in the show's opening. All right. We got a great final segment. We're going to talk about an article I recently sent to my newsletter that I want to bring to your attention. But first, Jesse, let's hear from another sponsor. So here's the thing about aging when you're a guy. Guys don't think about their skin. Not in the way that women know they should be thinking about it.

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59:01There's no credit card or contract required, and you can cancel any time. That's shipstation.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. We usually in the final segment talk about something that I am reading. Today, I want to talk about something that I'm writing. This is an email that went out to my newsletter at calnewport.com last week. It was called No One Knows Anything About AI. If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, calnewport.com, each week I have an essay about the type of ideas we talk about here on the show. So I wanted to read a couple excerpts from this essay because it gets at a topic we talked about a couple times already briefly in the show in recent months.

59:47So I began this essay by saying, I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. So the first narrative that I emphasize in this article is the idea that computer programming is very well suited for large language models because programming is basically well-structured text, and models are good at producing that. It's also easy to train models on it because you can compile the code that it outputs, and if it works, give it a good reinforcement learning signal, and if it doesn't, a bad.

1:00:24So it's really like the best case scenario for training language models. And so this one scenario says it's doing great and programming is basically being taken over by AI. Here's a few quotes I put to support that narrative. The CEO of the AI company Perplexity said that new AI programming tools have cut the time for his engineers to complete tasks from three to four days down to one hour. He now mandates that all of his employees use it. An article in Inc. said the world of software engineering, AI has changed everything. Another article says the tech sector has seen 64 ,000 job cuts this year due to AI advancement.

1:01:02And they point out Microsoft in particular had many thousands of those cuts because of AI advancements. There was a big new splashy Atlantic piece that said the computer science bubble is bursting. This is my academic home. Because AI, it says in this article, is ideally suited to replace the very type of person who built it. So why bother learning computer science? So you read these type of things. There's dozens of these articles every day. And you say, yeah, okay, computer programmers are rapidly going in the way of the telegraph operator. This is the first place where AI is having a huge seismic disruption.

1:01:35But as I point out in the article, there's a completely different narrative out there depending on what articles you read and what experts you're quoting. So for example, just a couple of weeks ago, the AI evaluation company Metr, M-E-T-R, released the results of a randomized control trial where they took two groups of experienced open source software developers and they said, great, here's a bunch of tasks, programming tasks for you to do. Group A, use AI tools. Group B, don't. And guess what? I'm going to quote the paper here. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19 % longer than without.

1:02:13AI makes them slower. Meanwhile, we're getting all these quotes from experienced developers who were used to these tools. They're like, yeah, they're useful. But this idea that they are, like the tech leaders are saying, about to take over all programming jobs, this is preposterous. Simon Willison said, quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The tech CEO Nick Kami said the following, responding to the claim that the number of people required to produce software is drastically reducing. He said, I feel like I'm being gaslit every time I read this, and I worry it makes folks early in their software development journey feel like it's a bad time investment.

1:02:57Okay, but what about like Microsoft firing 9 ,000 people because now the AI can do their jobs? Not what happened. Take a closer look at their press release. What's going on? Yes, they cut a lot of jobs across many different divisions, not because they were replacing those jobs with AI automation, but because they were trying to free up funds to invest in their AI divisions, in particular, to invest more money into the help pay for the huge expense of running these AI data centers. So yeah, technically speaking, it's correct that Microsoft fired 9 ,000 people due to AI advancements, but not because they were replaced by AI, but because their work on AI advancements is so damn expensive.

1:03:38Same thing with the computer science major bubble bursting. Later on in that same Atlantic article, they noted there's another reason why those majors might be down. The tech market started contracting after the pandemic because there had been a lot of spending in the tech industry during the pandemic, and now they're cutting back. And as a professor said in that Atlantic article, enrollment in the computer science major has historically fluctuated with the job market, and prior to clients have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than when they started. This was my first exposure to computer science when I was a young computer science undergraduate in the early 2000s.

1:04:15The 2001 dot-com boom had happened. Money was contracting. And you know what happened to computer science majors? Everyone was worried, like, oh my God, where all the majors go? And then they came back, and then they went down again during the Great Recession. Then they came back. It just goes up and down. So what's the point here? Let me read my conclusion. I'm not trying to battle, like, hey, which of these is right? Here's what I want to say about there being two completely different narratives on the same topic, all from the same two or three weeks I'm pulling these quotes. When it comes to AI's impacts, we don't yet know anything for sure.

1:04:53But this isn't stopping everyone from pretending like we do. So here's my advice for the moment. Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI. Read widely and more importantly, ask people you trust about what they're actually seeing. And beyond that, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All this is too new for anyone to really understand what they're saying. AI is important, but we don't yet fully know why. So there you go, Jesse. I just thought it was really interesting that I could find a huge number of articles saying one thing and a huge number of articles saying the other thing.

1:05:35And it's not like these are sequenced. Like we used to think this and now our opinion changed. These are almost all from the same two-week period. Right. So headlines are getting out of control when it comes to AI. Wait until you see the stuff you do is being affected and then talk to actual people who are being affected and say how because the headlines will drive you crazy. You're either going to start digging a bunker and doing the pull-ups on the bar from Terminator 2 that Connor has to start doing when she's in the mental asylum because she knows that the Terminator war is coming because she's seen the future and she's trying to prepare for it.

1:06:15I don't remember her first name. Man, I'm getting so old. Connor. John Connor is the son. And, well, whatever. She got really ripped, the actress who was playing John Connor. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. So you're either doing that, like preparing to – I think at some point, John Connor's mom can fire – she's firing like an M60 from like a shoulder crook. So you can prepare to do that. Or on the other hand, you can be shorting all tech stocks because it's all like a crazy inflated bubble scam. Or you can say like, I'm not going to follow those headlines right now because most of them are crazy.

1:06:49And it's not my job to figure out what's useful about these products. It's their job to show me indisputably this is vital for your life. That was clear to me when I first saw Google. That was clear to me when I first saw email. That's been clear to a lot of computer programmers when it comes to some of these new programming tools in terms of like really speeding up the time of figuring out how to write boilerplate code or figuring out library calls. When it's clear, it's clear. And if it's not yet clear, you don't have to go sifting through headlines to figure out why. It's the product's job.

1:07:19It's the company's job to figure out why they're useful. Don't trust the headlines. grain of salt. No one knows anything. Everyone pretends like they do. That's basically my summary of AI. I would say, Jesse, this is one of the spicier episodes we had in a while, but again, I think it's this cool New England air. I mean, it's like 72 degrees right now, Jesse. I don't want to make you jealous. Yeah. And there's like almost no humidity. We got to just build a compound up here. That's the plan. We need a deep work compound to just escape and have me just do rants about writing habits and AI. That's the goal.

1:07:53All right. Speaking of which, that's all the time we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode, God willing, recorded from the Deep Work HQ. I'm looking forward to that. But until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. 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.

1:09:12Bye