Ep. 364: Metrics 101

24:58Well, part of this, Louise, is not to think about a career change in the abstract or as a self-justified move. Hey, do I do a career change or not? Abstractly speaking, a career change is an action you make to serve a particular goal, which is to move your life closer to your ideal lifestyle. A career change should do so either. Here's the justifications. It does so either in like a really demonstrable way. hey, I make significant progress towards my ideal lifestyle with this career change. If it's just like nibbling around the edges, it might not be worth it. That's motivation number one for a career change.

25:34Or motivation number two is there's things about this job that like really clash with me, my values, or is making me unhappy. And so this is just about the piece of my ideal lifestyle where I'm not miserable every day. That's why you would do a career change. So what matters then, if you have a career change in mind that is going to either get you out of a bad situation or move you demonstrably closer to your ideal lifestyle. The only thing that matters is, do I have enough career capital to make this likely to succeed? And that's it. If you think you do, you go for it. And if you're not sure, then you build up more career capital until it's sure.

26:08Right? And that's it. Like, you don't have to identify some sort of mythical exact threshold at exactly this point I should do it or at this point I shouldn't. Like, if it's a good idea, and it's a good idea for those reasons I talked about, if you're confident you have enough career capital, go for it. If you're not sure, do more work until you're confident. Build up rare and valuable skills until it's like more demonstrably clear that you'll succeed. Now, if you want to know if you have enough career capital, we talk about this all the time. I think my book's so good they can't ignore you gets into this the most specifically.

26:36But use money as a neutral indicator of value. Is there a job offer on the table for this new job or someone is willing to hire and pay me? If not, then maybe you don't have the capital to make that turn. Don't quit and then start going job searching and hope it works out. If you're going to start your own thing, start it on the side. Are people giving me money for it? If not, maybe I'm not ready, right? So don't just jump out there in the world and try to harvest the temporary lift you get from making a change and then say I'll figure out, get started with what comes next. Do your work. Get evidence you have enough career capital.

27:09If you do, go for it. If you don't, don't. And if it's not a home run, then maybe you don't need a career change. There might be other ways for you to get closer to your ideal lifestyle. What I'm trying to avoid here, Jesse, is sometimes people just like the idea of the temporary high they get for making a change. It's like, oh, I want to make a change. Can I make a change yet? I always ask why. What is the change for? You need a reason for your change to sort of harvest the sustainable value out of it. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Craig. Do you have a framework or approach for developing deep critical thinking, particular for young people?

27:44I'm a father of young children and also a mentor of a group of young men, and I want to help them build the habit of thinking deeply. Well, there's a known formula that's been around for millennia. It's reading-writing. So reading builds new circuits in your brain. I've been working on this topic for a chapter in the book I'm working on about the deep life. Reading builds what are known as deep reading processes. the more reading you do of like hard stuff or stuff that challenges you literally builds new connections between parts of your brain it gives you a different brain it upgrades your brain from what we could think of as the pragmatic brain that we evolved for that's well suited for living in small bands in the paleolithic to what we can call the symbolic brain that is a brain that can do a lot more things so you got to keep it keep in mind reading is artificial right it's not something we evolved to do it was invented relatively recently and so it takes hard work but if you do reading of things that are hard, it literally changes your brain.

28:42And you go from pragmatic to symbolic, and that brain, it sees the world in technicolor. The ideas, the way you can process information, the things you notice, the opportunities, the gratitude and interest you can find in the world, so much stuff, your ability to navigate economically, the get ahead, so much comes out of having a well-honed symbolic brain. Reading is a foundational activity to do that. Reading, reading, reading, that's everything. I'm not very good at being a tiger parent. I'm not very good at, hey, you got to get A's on everything and do 100 activities. But there's one thing that I'm super, super clear on with my kids, reading, right?

29:18I've made them all readers. It's hard work, but I was like, that is, that's it. That's like being in good shape if you live in ancient Sparta. Everything else will be okay. You'll figure it out, but you better be a reader. Writing helps as well. So I think about reading establishes the circuits. It changes your brain. Writing is how you practice applying that new brain. So reading gives you a more sophisticated brain. Writing is how you practice putting that brain to work. It forces you to have to try to take thoughts and organize them in a way that then you assess to be logical. So writing gets you good at using what you develop through the readings.

29:53You kind of need both. You write a lot but don't read a lot. You're working with a lot less resources. So what you can produce is reduced. If you read a lot and don't write a lot, you might have built this really sophisticated brain. But when it comes time to think critically or use it or I'm going to come make an argument or try to come up with a strategy, you're like, oh, I'm struggling to actually harness this thing and pull together my thoughts into something that is reasonable and coherent. Now, there's some specific types of training you can do as well. I've been working on these for my new book, some of these rhetoric helps like, hey, young man, you're talking about you mentor young men.

30:31I want you to like make a case for this. gather information, put it into a coherent argument that doesn't have holes, make your case, react to counter arguments, like just practice making an argument. That's very helpful. Dialectical reading is very helpful as well. It's a fancy name for a simple idea, which is I'm going to take a topic that I care about that there's debate about. I'm going to read a really good book that's making a case for one side of this topic, and then I'm going to read another really good book that's making a case on the other side. Good case, good case. I'm not interested in this tribal thing of like, what do we believe?

31:06That's all I want to hear about. And anyone on the other side obviously has a brain virus and is probably like a week away from being a zombie and 28 days later. No, I want to hear arguments that are really good on both sides. Why? Because when good arguments clash, this was Socrates' idea, the root that grows down, it's a taproot of understanding. You become a much smarter understanding of what's going on. It's not going to trick you out of your beliefs. It's going to make you a much more sophisticated thinker. Dialectical reading matters. And then primary, secondary source reading. This is a good way to increase the sophistication of what you're reading.

31:41Really sophisticated books can be hard to jump into. If I just say, like, here is some Heidegger, go to town, you're going to read it for a while, and be like, I have no idea what those words meant. But if you read some secondary sources about Heidegger, who was he? What was his ideas? What's he arguing in this book? This language is weird. It's different. It's kind of mythological. Like what's going on here? Oh, I see what he's doing here. Now I'm going to read Heidegger. Suddenly you have, it's like you couldn't really see the words and you put reading glasses on. So it's a way to upgrade the level of challenge that you're able to handle.

32:11And that's going to upgrade again, those deep reading circuits and upgrade your brain from pragmatic to symbolic. So Craig, I like what you're working on and reading writing. That's the key. And then all these other things are just little glosses on types of reading or types of writing that you can do. But reading, writing, that is it in our modern world to getting a brain that's going to help you thrive. All right, who we got? Next up is David. I have four kids in K through 12. These are my options for my job. Stay in my current role, which offers stability, take an internal promotion with a dysfunctional team and toxic leadership, or leave for a high-paced consulting firm.

32:50What should I do? I know, Jesse, do you get a sense that he has an answer that he thinks is right here? It's probably not. I should probably go to the dysfunctional team that has toxic leadership or go to the high-paced consulting firm. I think it's pretty clear. I think he knows what he wants to do. Current role stability. Like a push-pull. He described the other things so negatively. So I think you know what you want to do, David. That's fine. But let's go through, like, the bigger exercise of, like, how do you make these type of decisions in general? Lifestyle-centric planning. If your vision of your ideal lifestyle and you assess each of these options through that vision.

33:28So probably the dysfunction and toxicity of that second option, you're like, wow, that lifestyle is not very, not very good. That doesn't really seem close to like my vision, like what my day is like, what my work is like. The high pace consulting firm, like this is where lifestyle planning might be a little bit more effective because it's, it's tempting to jump to that just because it might be more prestigious and more money. It doesn't really matter. Like day-to-day, unless you're Scrooge McDuck, you're not like actually interacting with your money. And there's not someone walking in front of you heralding the competitiveness of the job you have.

34:03What matters day-to-day for your overall satisfaction is the details of your lifestyle. What is my everyday like? And if you have this vision of this lifestyle where, you know, you're spending like a lot of time with your kids and like the family and you're like really into like athletic things. and you have hiking trails in the land behind your house and you're spending 30 hours a week on Halloween decorations. You have this big vision of, you know, you're sitting at the picnic table with the extended family with the cafe lights hanging from the trees as the sun goes down. And then you say, okay, working an 80-hour-a-week job, is that going to be closer or farther?

34:38Like, oh, man, that steps on so many parts of that vision. So, no, I'm not going to do that. But maybe this is not the situation. You're in a situation like if you're somebody who didn't have a bunch of kids, and you like want to be in the mix and you want to travel, you're like, I want to kind of like move around like the country and see things and have like a really cool apartment. And like, then I pay school to like, that's going to move me closer to these visions. Like I can't afford that in what I'm doing. That's going to get me closer. And I kind of like the lifestyle that leads to. So lifestyle strategic planning is how you make these decisions.

35:09In your case, David, I think you've already made up your mind. That's fine. That's good. If that matches your lifestyle, it just sounds like it does. And probably for kids makes sense to be stable. not super high-paced, not dysfunctional, not stressful, there's a perfectly valid reason to stay with something because your lifestyle is ultimately what determines your day-to-day happiness, not these more abstract properties like exactly what my salary is or how competitive my job was. People just don't care. All right, who we got? Next up is Amay. I've worked in a high-pressure call center for 11 years where I'm glued to the screen all day.

35:43I lack the traditional credentials but want to switch fields to cybersecurity is it possible to make the switch? Well, I don't know because I'm not in the cybersecurity field, but you should know by talking to someone in that field, evidence, evidence, evidence, that's what matters. Talk to real people in that field, real talk, not hypothetical, not wishful thinking. What is needed to switch to these type of jobs, like this specific job here that you just hired for? What would something like me have to do to get that job? You ask that real question and get the real answer. And you might like the answer.

36:18It might be like, oh, like we have training on site and this is what we're looking for. And like you could probably fit or it could be like we're looking for like at least two years of postdoctoral work on this and like an H index of 30. And you're like, oh, that's never going to happen. So it's off the table. Like you might not like the answer. You might love the answer, but get the answer. The worst thing to do in this situation is to say I don't want to confront the reality of what's required to make this switch. I'm thinking about I just want to go do something. because the thing sounds interesting and I want to harvest, like we talked about before, harvest the temporary contact high of change.

36:53And in this case, there's a lot of things out there that people will offer you like, Oh, come do this. This might help you. You don't know if it matters at all. They're just going to kind of like throw it out to you. Like you might end up dropping 20 K on some online only cybersecurity master's program, which is like essentially like a three card Monte game that has a lot more zoom. just taking your money thank you for your money don't just go do something just get the evidence talk to people in the field here are specific jobs you've hired for in the past look i'm not trying to get a job from you now i'm trying to learn what would you look for in that job what would i need to do to pass that if anything and just get the real answer confront that professional dragon and then you work from there that's how i became a book writer talked to an agent said i want to publish a book i'm 21 years old and i was 20 when i talked to her.

37:43What would really be necessary for me to do this? And she gave me the real answer. He's like, yeah, like there's almost no way you can do this at your age. There is like this path or that path or like the only two ways you could probably do this. And I looked at one of those two paths, like, great. Okay. Now I know I'll do that. And I executed it. And that's how I got my foot in the door of publishing. So you confront the reality of a situation when it comes to career moves. Don't tell yourself a story and don't just start doing stuff that generally so much of like grad school is based off of like i don't want to actually figure out what's needed for this job this sounds like a thing that people do let me go do that um and what happens is like professors like me just like great i'll just take that money and i don't know buy fur coats but mainly mainly what happens with uh low value master's programs is it's professors buying fur coats i don't know if that's well known but that's actually what happens all right we got one more we got one more it's from megan i got laid off after a 15 year career i'm now barred from entering this particular woodshed i had a sense this was coming should i have left this job earlier or do you think i it was an acceptable end kind of like an athlete's career ending due to injury i mean megan i don't know i don't know and i don't know that it really matters i mean i want to validate that i think this was rightly so emotionally taxing like you were laid off.

39:07You're barred. It sounds like it was not a happy ending. This sucks. Like it's going to feel really bad and it's okay to feel bad about it. You're going to feel literal chemicals when you think about it that are very negative, but I don't know that we need to ruminate on it. I don't think it's helpful to go back and, you know, Sunday morning quarterback or Monday morning quarterback. When is football played? September 6th, baby. But what's the expression? It must be Monday. Tonight is the hall of fame game. Okay. Preseason though. But what's the saying it must be monday morning quarterbacking because yeah football used to be played primarily on sundays but now it's played on basically every day right yeah okay yeah pretty much thursday morning wednesday morning quarterback there's still football played on wednesday or is there wednesday games well it depends on when christmas is now i think we need to spend the next 25 minutes getting into this i think last year christmas was on a wednesday to espn.com all right so what i'm saying here is like let's not ruminate on it let's look forward let's accept it sucks Let's accept you feel bad, but let's take our actual like rational internalized voice and aim it at what comes next.

40:13And let's use some lifestyle centric planning. Let's use some career capital. You know, first thing first is like need a job, money, like let's make sure that we're not like in financial trouble. And then let's step back and do some lifestyle centric planning. Here's the silver lining. There is a big change. What can you do in changes? You can lean into it and change other things in a way that's good. Okay, there's a big chain situation, but hey, maybe this means I'm going to move somewhere else or take a different type of career. I got to move to a teeny house that I own in the Oregon coast and do this job remote that I already know about.

40:48It's not much money, but it won't be much money, and then I'm going to work on this, and I'm going to be near my uncle, and it's going to be whatever. There's so many things you maybe wouldn't have done when you're in this other job, which sounds like if you knew it was coming, it was probably not a happy situation. So let's not ruminate on what happened. Let's get excited about what could happen. And that's lifestyle-centric planning and making evidence-based moves to get you closer to that lifestyle. I think you could end up being way better off. I'm talking like three years down the line, you're like, man, that was a really good thing to happen to me because like look at my situation now.

41:20I don't know if I sold the best vision there though, Jesse, living in a teeny house next to your uncle. That's like both hyper-specific and like not very compelling. but what if i told you your uncle was a wizard see then that would be much more cool and he was going to teach you the ways of magic one of my uncles kind of lives in a teeny house yeah pretty cool as like uh because probably one of those like prefab houses it's not teeny but it's pretty small you remember that movement it was like a four-year period in the 2000s i don't know if you were in on these blogs but i was definitely in that world where building and buying a teeny house was like a big deal remember that because you could it was it was uh roughly fifteen thousand dollars like what it would roughly cost to get the materials you would build it on a trailer and like the idea was it was like a lot of millennials who were like coming through their 20s and it was a hard job market because of the the financial crisis and the idea was like oh i could just own this like no uh no mortgage you know no like expensive apartment i could just like own my house 50 i could raise fifteen thousand dollars like i could save and uh and so that became popular for a while so you have your teeny house the problem was when you live in a teeny house you're also always like three feet from a toilet and i think that's what probably killed the romance of it is like you would get in there with your like boyfriend or whatever and be like we have embarked on this mystical beautiful journey of minimalism uh and then your boyfriend is like yeah hold on a second.

42:49My lunch is in a green with me. Walks two feet away from you and shuts that little curtain. The magic goes away at that point. The magic. That's where it's no longer like you're in like the hut in Outlander and it's looking over the moors. It becomes real. So I think that's why the mini house idea, the teeny house idea kind of petered out. Also like teeny houses exist that work really well. They're called apartments. All right. Do we got a call? We do. All right. Let's hear this. Hi, Cal. My name is Amy. I am a tenure track professor of dance at a junior college. Longtime listener and reader. One of my questions was featured in the podcast several years ago when I was still in grad school.

43:34Thank you for your advice then, and I'm hoping you could help me now in my real job. I always find it very hard to return back to work after these long summer breaks. As you say, it's really nice as a professor to have this flexibility in our jobs, but it also means that transitioning back into work is very difficult for me mentally, physically, and emotionally. My question is, how can I make this ease back to work feel more comfortable? How can I schedule my time or my tasks leading up into this gradual entrance back into work? I want to take advantage of my summers and my winters, but at the same time, I don't want to be blindsided by all the work at once.

44:26Thank you, as always. It's a common problem. It's not a bad problem to have because it means you have slower seasons. But you're right. It can be pretty brutal. I was super stressed coming back from New England. Like that Sunday, we got back after almost a month. and my wife was like, this is like a hyper-powered version of the Sunday night syndrome, you know, where you get a little anxious, like Sunday night, like, oh, I have to deal with work again. Well, you have like three weeks worth of work. It gets much worse. So there are ways to deal with it. Like professors often think about slow Septembers, like, is it possible?

45:00I'm going to try to ease myself back into my work. So what does that mean? Well, there's things I have to do, like my classes. So I'm going to start prepping those classes slow and steady in August so that when I get to September, it's not, oh my God, I don't have a course website. I don't have a syllabus. I don't know where my classroom is. I haven't prepped anything, right? So when you get to the beginning of the semester, you're already up at full speed. I usually like to have three weeks worth of classes ready and prepped and up on the course website about a week out from the beginning of classes.

45:34So like you get rid of that scramble. And then other things you're like, I'm just going to take September slow. Like if you're doing research, like, okay, that's like an October issue. I'm going to get things ramped up again. I'm not going to have a bunch of research meetings right away. I'm going to be hesitant to jump on committees or do initiatives right away that are optional. Like let's get our legs stretched out. And so you could do it that way. Just be a little bit thoughtful. Let me start early on the stuff that has to happen. And the stuff that's optional, I'm going to start slowly turning that knob up over the first month or so so I don't get too stressed out.

46:07Have good plans. Weekly plan those first few weeks. Make sure that you're doing time block planning each day because otherwise you'll be like, there's endless stuff and I want to just work till midnight. Make sure that you still inject elements that you liked about the summer into your life as you switch back to September. Like make your first Friday a half day of the first full week of the semester. And then like that afternoon, go do one of the things you really love doing during the summer to kind of signal to yourself it's not a heartbreak. I can still kind of do this type of things in my life.

46:34I'm going for a hike on that first Friday afternoon. So slow September it. Get started ahead of time. Makes a difference. I mean, you know, I'm not super looking forward to that transition either, but I don't like super stressed. So I've been working on that quite a bit. All right. Not only do we have a case study today, but I think, Jesse, we need some case study music.

47:03All right. Today's case study is from ALOC, who says, recently I retired from academia. Congratulations. After a successful 38-year career, while many of the ideas you present are applicable to professional life, I've come to realize they are equally relevant to my personal life as well. Your work has indeed changed my perspective, and I'm looking forward to your new book, The Deep Life. During the past three months, June, July, and August, I have designated this time as my Think Summer, a period to reflect on the next phase of my life, which I envision over the next 10 years. As a curious individual with a penchant for building things such as research centers, curricula, field projects, and knowledge platforms, I felt compelled to create a Zen garden in my backyard to satisfy my creative impulses.

47:51This has become a sanctuary for my hands-on projects and a space for contemplation. After hearing your Disneyland story about the train in the backyard representing engineered awe, I realized that I am engaging in a similar act, a creative awe project. Inspired by your story, I am now even more excited to add something new to my garden, a zen metal sculpture. I even chatted with my walking partner, whose garage resembles a small hardware store, about welding or soldering to create some metal art for the garden. I remain intellectually engaged in reading, writing, and exploring new areas. And this engineering of awe sounds like a wonderful way to kill two birds with one stone, pursuing a hobby while combating the digital doldrums.

48:34Well, I love this case study. Engineered awe goes, or engineered wonder, however you want to say it, goes a long way towards meaning in life. And this is a great time to get into it. I think I have a suggestion for you if you want to know what type of sculpture to do. I think there's sort of a no-brainer here. Uh, Jesse, you can back me up on this, but I think what you want to try to sculpt out of metal is something that's like really clearly representing me doing an awesome karate kick, karate kid jump kit right into the head of Mark Zuckerberg. I think that would be a really cool piece of sculpture and people would definitely think you're well adjusted and that it made a lot of sense.

49:15We're definitely going to get emails about AI generations of that image. Someone sent me an AI generated image. Did I mention Jason Priestley on the podcast? Yeah, I got that as well. Okay. So I mentioned on the podcast Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills Nano 210. And someone is like, hey, Jason Priestley is a fan. I sent an AI-generated picture of Jason Priestley reading digital minimalism. The reason why we know AI is not going to take over the world, because I think this is egregious, AI, it was clearly Jason Priestley's face, but he was clearly wearing the outfit that Luke Perry's character would have worn on Beverly Hills 90210.

49:54He had a leather jacket, a black leather jacket, and a white shirt. That was Luke Perry's thing, right? I don't remember what his character was called. I don't know. Bilko? I don't know what the names were of the characters. What was Jason Priestley's name? I don't know. Was it Scott Baio? That's another actor. You're getting us way off task. Somebody else will email me about that too. Scott Baio is from Charles in Charge. No, so in Beverly Hills 90210, Jason Priestley and Luke Perry are the actors. We're going to get so many emails. Send these all to Jesse at CalNewport.com. He wants to hear as many times as possible the answer here.

50:26They were actors in Beverly Hills 90210. I don't remember the names of the characters they played. So I'm just going to assume that Jason Priestley's character's name was Cameron and Luke Perry's character's name was Dr. Death because that'd be pretty cool, actually. I don't remember their names. But anyways, it mixed it up. It put Luke Perry clothes on Jason Priestley, which, I mean, I don't think, I don't want to go as far as to say, like, open AI should probably shut down, but, like, they might consider giving back their money to investors. If you're going to mess that up, what's the point?

51:04All right, we got a cool, speaking of AI, we have a segment coming up in which we are going to talk about something I read that kind of got my blood going a little bit, a little AI related, be warned. But first, we've got some ads. I like ads now because we got some real music. Keeps a little more interesting. Jesse, let me tell you something. I say this all the time. There's nothing small about running a small business unless the business is selling miniature furniture for a dollhouse. And then there is something small. But even if the thing you're selling is small and your business is small, the workload isn't small, and the thing is small is relative, which is all a very clear and expert way to say it's hard to run businesses.

51:47So when it comes to selling things, let Shopify take those efforts off your hands. I should be an ad copywriter. I'm a fantastic ad copywriter. I could sell a book about this. I'm going to call it Me Sell Pretty Words Good Now. And you know where I would sell that book? On Shopify. See what I'm doing there? Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail businesses. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to a thousand locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient, endless aisle, ship the customer, buy online, pick up in-store.

52:22All of this is made simpler so that customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close the sale every time. And let's face it, acquiring new customers is expensive. With Shopify POS, you can keep shoppers coming back with personalized experiences and first-party data that give marketing teams a competitive edge. In fact, this is all proven based on a report from EY. Businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22 % better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9 % uplift in sales on average relative to the market set survey. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify.

53:02Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash deep. Go to shopify.com slash deep, shopify.com slash deep. I also want to talk about a new sponsor, our friends at 1Password. Back in the old days, password management at companies used to be simple. You had maybe like one machine that each employee logged into and you just had to make sure they had a good password to use. In fact, that's how we run deep questions. Our whole operation runs on a custom system programmed in COBOL running on a 1960s era IBM mainframe. Costs us$75 ,000 a month to just cool it. Jesse walks around with a white lab coat and looks at those reel-to-reel tapes and writes stuff down on a clipboard.

53:51That's my memory of what old computers were like. Most people don't have that anymore. or the way most people run their businesses, that their employees are going to use a lot of web-based apps because they're convenient and powerful and help them get things done. But that is a lot of security to manage. This is where Trellica by 1Password can help. Trellica by 1Password inventories every app in use at your company, then pre-populated profiles assess SaaS risks, letting you manage access, optimize spend, and enforce security best practices across every app that your employees use. You can manage shadow IT, securely onboard and off-board employees, and meet compliance goals.

54:35TrelloCup by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance, and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users and over 150 ,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And maybe one day when we stop using a 1960s era IBM mainframe here at our company as well. They're securing more than just passwords with 1Password extended access management. It is 2701 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standard set by various authorities and is a leader in security.

55:18so when we move away from our 1960s mainframe 1password is exactly the type of service that we are going to need as well and it's probably what you need right now too so take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application even unmanaged shadow it learn more at 1password.com slash deep that's 1password.com slash deep that's one the number one password.com slash deep and type that in all lowercase for it to work I just say I love the music, but I think we need to move on to our final segment. Our final segment is where I like to talk about something that I read that either I liked or in some cases maybe caused some issues.

55:58In this case, it was an article that is featuring a technique in reporting on AI in particular that I want to call your attention to because it's something you should be wary of and I think it's something you should try to avoid. I'm going to load the article on the screen that I'm talking about here for those who are watching instead of just listening. This was in the New York Times, and it was titled The Unnerving Future of AI-Fueled Video Games. It started with this sort of interactive top where they're showing some characters in a video game. And they're showing in quotation marks what the characters in this game were saying.

56:30So this character here on the screen was saying, I need to find my way out of this simulation and back to my wife. Can't you see I'm in distress? Here's another scene from the game. There's someone else who's saying, I'm not just lines of code. I am Liam, a real person enjoying this city. And then we have a sort of subhead here that says characters in a video game version of the Matrix seem to be gaining sentience thanks to an AI program. Now, if we go on and read this article, what we see an example of is what I sometimes refer to as vibe reporting, which is something I think has happened more and more when it comes to talking about AI.

57:07In vibe reporting, what you do is you cover a bunch of different things that when you kind of put them near each other imply like big deal distressing things. But you're not actually making the claim that these big distressing things are happening. But you're sort of just putting things next to each other that the reader will naturally sort of combine in their mind and come away with the impression, the vibe that something really big or dire is happening. even though if you look much closer nothing like that at all is actually happening in the article i think that's what happens in this article here so i'm going to use it as just a case study so we can be a little bit wary about vibe recording i'm going to read some stuff from this article okay so early in the article it says the citizens of a simulated city inside a video game based on the matrix franchise were being awakened to a grim reality everything was fake a player told them through a microphone and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world empowered by generative artificial intelligence like chat gpt the characters responded in panic disbelief what does that mean said one woman in a gray sweater am i real or not the unnerving demo released two years ago by an australian tech company named replica studio showed both the potential power and the consequences of enhancing gameplay with artificial intelligence all right so So clearly you kind of read these things.

58:29You combine it with the big pictures they had of like actual people from the game and with these distressing quotes next to them. If you're just a casual reader and not a technical person reading the Times, you're thinking like, are video game characters kind of coming alive? Like, is this the problem? Because it sort of has that vibe of like, yeah, like it's this weird, it's distressing, it's sentience. Of course, that's not at all what's happening. This was a demo that a company ran where all they did was use ChatGPT to generate dialogue for characters in a matrix simulation. What is ChatGPT really good at?

59:03Hey, talk about this in this particular type of form. So if you say in your prompt, which I'm sure the demo was, respond to this as if you were a character in the movie The Matrix, it will be very good at giving text back as if you're a character in The Matrix. If you had changed that prompt to say, respond to this as if you were in a world in which a super intelligent chicken was like threatening to remove your toes unless you said certain words every once in a while, it would do a great job of having those NPCs, the text in their mouth do that as well. That's what ChatGPT does. It has nothing to do with sentience or things coming alive in video games, but you get that vibe reading it.

59:43they never come out and say that but they say it's uncomfortable it feels like they're coming alive this is like a disturbing thing this is disturbing these characters it gives you a vibe of something really big and dire is happening where the reality is someone ran a demo where they said what if we use chat gpt to generate npc dialogue and guess what the company had to shut it down because it's expensive to do chat gpt queries and so it's not a very uh cost effective thing to do. There's other things in this article as well, unrelated to this sort of sentience argument that I also think is an example of Vibe recording.

1:00:19Let me read some more from this article here. As video game studios become more comfortable with outsourcing the jobs of voice actors, writers, and others to artificial intelligence, what will become of the industry? As the pace, the technology, at the pace, the technology is improving large tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are counting on their AI programs to revolutionize how games are made within the next few years. There's some text here that talks about some demos at a recent conference of sort of beta level tools that like one day might automate certain parts of game developing.

1:00:53And the article continues, these were not the solutions that developers were hoping to see after several years of extensive layoffs. Another round of cuts in Microsoft's gaming division this month was a signal to some analysts that the company was shifting resources to artificial intelligence. It goes on pretty quickly to say, most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. You put this all together, what's the vibe you come away with?

1:01:23Oh, these video game companies are starting to lay people off because they're shifting over to AI tools. This industry is sort are going away now they never come straight out and say that but you're talking about demos of tools that automate you're talking about industry executives saying that like everything's going to be automated and you're talking about layoffs you put this all together in your head now what's the reality here those tools are speculative they are not tools that are designed to like oh this will just make a video game for me that we have always used computer aided tools to help with video game design.

1:01:58These are like tools to help like with 3D modeling and the help get models built quicker and other things like this. And yes, the video game industry is contracting, but has nothing to do with AI. It just the market got big. They're not getting the same return on their AAA games that they used to get. So now the market is contracting, not because people are being replaced with AI, but just because the numbers are down. And so it has to contract. This is similar to some of the other reporting i saw about microsoft's layoffs right where it would it would it would say microsoft laid off this many people they cited ai advancements and then they talked a lot about like potential ai automation and you get the vibe of like oh microsoft replaced all these people with ai that's not what happened what they meant was we're cutting back on less profitable areas to save that revenue to invest in our ai areas like the ai data centers people weren't being replaced by AI.

1:02:52They were just doing a shift of focus. We're going to put less focus here and more focus over there. But the vibe of those type of pieces gave you the sense of, oh, yeah, people are being replaced left and right, right? This is a big problem. I think there is a lot of vibe reporting like this happening around AI right now, where you put enough things next to each other that they blur in the reader's mind, and they come away with the vibe that distressing things are happening right now. And if I think if you grab like the average news aware person and said, like, how do you feel things are going with AI right now?

1:03:27They'd be like, yeah, a lot of stuff is happening. People, it's like jobs are disappearing. No one's hiring anymore. Whole industries are beginning to automate. The vibe they create is like the wheels have started turning and we're seeing the few first things. But when you look deeper at these vibe reported articles, the reality is often way less interesting. Like here's my summary of this article here if you just did straight reporting of this is what's going on. There was a demo where a company used Genre of AI to generate character dialogue in a video game about the matrix. It allowed the characters to say the types of things that people in the matrix would say.

1:04:00There was also, there have been people working on AI tools to automate parts of video game development. Most of these tools aren't being used yet, but we imagine in the future we'll have better tools because of AI. The video game industry, unrelated, has been struggling recently, and many of the major studios are reducing their size. That's the fact-based article. I read that article to you. You don't come away upset. You're like, oh, it's kind of interesting. I don't know much about video games. I mean, I don't really care that a company put ChatGPT to do dialogue for a character and then said this demo is too expensive, but it's kind of interesting that maybe there'll be new tools in video games.

1:04:35Actually, it's not that interesting at all, but the Vibe report is way more interesting because you come away from that saying, I kind of remember that video game characters are coming alive and the whole video game industry is being automated by AI. So be very wary of I reporting. There's a lot of it out there. Insist on actually, if you're going to read these things, drill down to the actual statements being said, man, this happens a lot. I'll give you another example. The Atlantic article about computer science majors reducing, which they are right now. Computer science major numbers are down.

1:05:05It heavily gave the sense without actually like straight up saying it that it's because ai that people are saying why study a why study computer science ai is going to take all these jobs it strongly implied that ai advances was in the subhead of the article it had quotes in there like statements from the reporter saying things like what's the point just putting this thought out there what's the point of not quoting someone but like what's the point of you know training for a job that's going to be automated in the future here's all these reductions in ai jobs that are happening here is like kind of unrelated things about people talking about programming and AI and programming and how like it's, you know, making entry-level jobs maybe are going to be less important.

1:05:45We'll put all of these things next to each other so that you'll come away with the vibe that computer science majors are disappearing because there's no need for them anymore. At the very end of the article, you get to the truth. Oh, there's no evidence that that's why people aren't majoring in computer science. In fact, what is happening is the tech sector is contracting because it overgrew during the pandemic. And in every last contraction of the tech sector computer science major numbers went down and then went up to be higher than before after the sectors were covered that's at the end of the article you finally get someone saying that and you realize like oh what are the actual statements here there's no evidence that this is why people aren't majoring computer science there's no like here's hard evidence of all these people have stopped hiring entry-level people it's this manager said i couldn't imagine I know a guy who knows a guy who said, why hire new people?

1:06:33So anyways, vibe reporting is big because if you can give someone the sense that something big and dire is happening, it's a more profound article. They'll remember it. They'll share it. But these things aren't necessarily happening. So the best we can do is put things next to each other. We're reading quickly. It melds it in our minds. So be very, very wary of super dire coverage right now of AI. It's an important story. It's an important technology. but there's some reporting going on about it that's getting out ahead of its skis. So if it gives you a bad vibe, say, before I just accept that vibe, say, what really did this article say?

1:07:10And a lot of times, like in this recent article, you realize it didn't really say much that's that interesting to you at all. There you go. Vibe reporting, Jesse. I don't know. I don't like that. A lot of it with AI going on right now. All right. Well, speaking of which, that's all the time we have for today. I hope you liked our sort of musical explosion. I had more fun. I think ads are more fun when we got some music going. Yeah. You know, like you can kind of get into it. I like it. I like it. And you know what? You know what ad companies like when they want sponsorship? They want their product being the cause of divorce.

1:07:42So I think we did a really good job with the ad reads. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, you got to go back and listen to the ad reads. All right. We'll be back next week. I'm so happy to be back in the studio. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep.

1:07:58Hi, 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.

1:09:02Thank you.