Ep. 364: Metrics 101

When Cal recently returned home from his time spent up in New England he set up a whole new set of daily metrics to track in the fall to keep him pointed toward the deep life. And they failed. Hard. In this episode, Cal dissects why metrics matter, why they’re easy to mess up (including the mistakes he made), and how to use them correctly (including how he corrected his own setup). He then answers listener questions and discusses a recent AI article that got him all hot and bothered. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: Metrics 101 [2:10] How should I navigate the “grey area” when deciding to make a career change? [24:45] Do you have a framework for young people to develop deep critical thinking? [27:36] What should a father of 4 kids do for his next career move? [32:34] Can skills from a high-pressure call center carry over to a career in cybersecurity? [35:36] Should I have anticipated that my job was going to end? [38:36] CALL: Returning back to work after a summer break [43:14] CASE STUDY: Pursuing a hobby while combating digital doldrums [46:47] WHAT I’M (NOT) READING: Vibe Reporting on AI [55:52] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?nytimes.com/2025/07/28/arts/video-games-artificial-intelligence.html Thanks to our Sponsors: vanta.com/deepquestionssmalls.com/deepshopify.com/deep1password.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for segment music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

• 0:21Cal Newport?

  So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer Jesse. Jesse, the restaurant below is rockin' rolling. There's a storm going outside. This feels like a time for podcasting.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  And you're back in DC, baby.

• 0:33Cal Newport?

  Back in DC. I missed my studio, missed 1,000 degrees humidity or whatever. I don't know how you measure that. Actually, I do know it's dew point. Let's be honest. Let's be precise. I missed a dew point that was above the 71 or 72 mark at which it shades into the oppressive range. I was pretending like I didn't know about the meteorology here. I know about it. Let me tell you what we're gonna do today, and this is just for Jesse and I. We're gonna do some music today. We've got some more music to the show, not because we think it's gonna give you a better experience, but because we just like the idea of having more music in the show. It just kind of delights Jesse and I. Our man, who's our man who hooked us up here?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Kieran.

• 1:10Cal Newport?

  Kieran hooked us up with some music. We're gonna have some fun today with some music. I think it keeps the energy going because that's the type of mood we're in. You know, it's trade deadline day in Major League Baseball. It's podcasting weather in DC, so we are gonna get rolling. We got a good show. I got a deep dive that is based off of a fail that I recently have and some lessons learned. We got some questions. Final segment, the what I'm reading segment. Can't help myself, Jesse. There is an article I read on the topic of AI that once again kind of got me a little bit upset, so we're gonna have a little bit of that going on later. But I want to get to the deep dive for no other reason than we can hear some new theme music.

• 2:10Cal Newport?

  Jesse, I gotta tell you about what happened to me when I got back from my nearly month up in New England. You know, and our listeners know that I'm a fan of metrics. My time block planner even has a space on it for recorded daily metrics. So when I got back from New England, I said, what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a new set of metrics all ready to go for the fall season that's coming up. Let's go. What's important in my life? What am I focusing on? What are my goals? I wrote out the metrics. I printed them out. I taped them. I kid you not. I taped them under the cover of my time block planner so I could measure those every night. And I got into it. And Jesse, here's what happened. I promptly failed. And I failed hard. Right? Like you know, Jesse knows, I've been telling

• 2:54Cal Newport?

  them, I've had a super busy week coming back from New England. A lot of things scheduled. I'm doing something like three to four interviews or talks. Some of them I'm giving, some of them on the other side of. I was giving lectures. We're podcasting, all sorts of stuff going on. Super busy time. And I was getting there at the end of each night to write down the metrics of what I did that day. And I was having one I could write down, or maybe just like two that I could write down. I mean, I wasn't getting anywhere near making the progress on the stuff that my metrics would have me make progress on. Last night, I finally just gave up. And I actually wrote this. Stress default. I was like, I'm not even going to bother writing one metric. It's too depressing. I'm stressed out about this. I'm making progress on nothing. I'm declaring bankruptcy. I'm not even going to write down

• 3:37Cal Newport?

  any metrics. So this is what I want to talk about today. The joys and sorrows of tracking metrics in your life. So I want to remind us like, why I think metrics are important. I want to talk about what goes wrong with metrics, including what went wrong with me. And then I want to talk about, in the third act, how to handle metrics smarter, which will include how I ended up actually responding to my heart failure this week and sort of fixing my metric practice. All right. So that is our goal. Today, we're talking metrics. We'll start with act one, the promise of metrics.

• 4:11Cal Newport?

  All right. So we got to get into it. If you're not a long time listener, you might be wondering, what does he really mean by metrics? It's a good question. These can mean multiple different things. So a lot of people like the quantified life type people out there for them, metrics mean just gathering data about your day that you will then later look back at for trends. All right. So health type stuff, health biomarkers, maybe where a whoop strap and you just whatever you do, you're going to collect this data and you're going to look at it for trends. It doesn't have to be health. Jesse, remember we had David Dwayne on, what was that, like a couple of months ago? Yeah. And he talked about he was tracking every day, just how happy he was, like how good of a day it is. So that's what some people think about with metrics, right? It's not what I mean.

• 4:55Cal Newport?

  When I talk about metrics, what I mean about is short little coded sequences of letters that you use to track whether or not you did certain things or to what degree you did them. So it's not gathering data to analyze, it's tracking action. So here are some sample metrics. These are of the binary nature. You either did them or not. I exercised or not. I stretched or not. I spent one-on-one time with, you know, one of my kids today or not. I practiced my guitar, right? Those are sample things you could have metrics for. It's things you either did or you didn't. And you have something you can write down to indicate that you did. Some metrics are quantitative. So it's not just that I do it or not, but to what degree. So for example, a step

• 5:40Cal Newport?

  count. Here's how many steps I took today where you presumably maybe have some sort of minimum you're hoping to beat. Maybe the number of pages you read in a book is something else you might track. So it's not just that I read or not, but how much did I read? And maybe you have a goal of how much reading you want to try to get to most nights, but maybe sometimes you even go farther. The goal with this style of metrics is to stay on track with the things that you care

• 6:05Cal Newport?

  All right, because this is a problem I think we face with time management and organization, that it's possible that you're super on the ball with your organizational tactics, right? Your multi-scale planning, you look at your week, you're fitting in your work, your time block plan, you're intentional about your time, you have shutdown rituals, you're tracking and organizing your tasks very careful in full capture-based task management systems. You're doing a lot of stuff and you're getting a lot of stuff done, but it's possible that the things you are doing, though making you very busy, are not actually moving you closer to your definition of the deep life. You're doing stuff, but not the stuff that matters. This is where metrics can be very helpful, because you run whatever time management,

• 6:47Cal Newport?

  organizational systems you want, but at the end of the day, you said, did I make progress on the things that really matter to me? And knowing that you'll be recording this day after day, really influences the way that you go about your day. And you start putting aside time, this is the theory, you start putting aside time for these things to make sure that you can mark it off on your metric tracking. It's a way of continually nudging your activity towards things that matter. This was a big breakthrough for me when my own practices. I got very organized. I've long been very organized. I'm good at managing my time. I'm good at keeping up at work and seeing what to do when and making sure that I started early enough. But I was falling behind. I found this in my life. I was falling behind on things that mattered. I'm not reading as much as I should be reading. I'm not spending

• 7:31Cal Newport?

  time, you know, with these people that's important to me. I'm not spending enough time with them. I'm not prioritizing this. I'm busy, but not doing the things that matter. Metrics made a big difference to me. That's why I include them in my time block planner. I talk about them in multiple of my books. I've talked about them. So that's what I talk about when I'm talking about metrics. So again, you would have for each of these things, a short code. So did I exercise or not? If I did, I write down EX in the metric tracking block of my time block planner. Do I stretch? If I did, maybe I'll write STR. That's my code. One-on-one time with kid? Kid. Step count, S colon number for step count, right? And I actually will, this is what I said earlier, and I was like, oh, I planned out my metrics for the fall. I actually have those codes written out. I tape them on my

• 8:15Cal Newport?

  planner. Here's the codes I'm using to keep track of this stuff.

• 8:19Cal Newport?

  It's a good idea. I think if you care about the deep life and not just being productive, it matters. But I failed. I had a really hard week and I sort of gave up temporarily on my metrics. Why did I fail? This brings us to act two, when metrics go awry. So there's four main problems people have with my style of activity tracking metrics. There's one big one, which I think is the most important. It's the one that really had issues with. I'll do that one last. Let me get with the three smaller ones first because these also pop up a lot as well. Vagueness is a big issue with metric tracking, right? You have a thing you're tracking with a

• 9:01Cal Newport?

  metric that is so vague that either everything counts or nothing counts. It could be either thing. Like, for example, you might have written down, like, I connect with my daughter. I mean, what does that mean? What does it take to actually write down the code for that on your daily metric tracking? Does it count if you high-fived her in the hallway? Or does it require, like, you went to a father-daughter dance and, you know, shared a milkshake in a heartfelt conversation before you're allowed to mark it down? It's too vague. That's not specific enough. That's a problem a lot of people have is they're too vague. And then they're like, I don't even know what I could either put this metric down every day. I never put it down. I don't know. And you kind of give up on it. The other side is, it's specific, but it's impossible. That

• 9:46Cal Newport?

  you just put something down, that it's not really something that on an average day, you're likely to get to. You put down like, yeah, I would bike 100 miles a day. That'd be great. And you're like, oh, that takes long time. Takes many hours to bike 100 hours. I don't normally have enough time to bike 100 miles every day. This is basically, it's almost always impossible to achieve metric, right? So you're unrealistic in the difficulty or time consumption of a singular metric. That's another big problem. Spreadsheet syndrome is a third one. Then instead of just having a simple code you jot down like in something like a time block planner, you start putting into the spreadsheet, see, we know these type of people. I gotta put the data into the whatever so that I can have the pie chart and the pie chart's going to dynamically alter and it's gonna be really nicely color coded. I made

• 10:30Cal Newport?

  it a 3D pie chart and I adjusted what the drop shadow is, so it looks really good and I'm looking for the pie chart to change. That's all friction and it's gonna eventually get annoying enough that it's been a hard day and you're tired and you don't want to open up Microsoft Excel for 15 minutes and you stop metric tracking. This is why I'm a big fan and you just have some couple of letters, you jot them down, takes 10 seconds and your metric tracking is done. So spreadsheet syndrome is another problem. But the biggest problem of all with metric tracking practices, and this is what really stung me this week, going with an inventory of what's important to you as opposed to a realistic plan for what you want to do on a regular basis. These are not the same thing. So if you sit down,

• 11:15Cal Newport?

  you say, okay, I want to list out what's important to me and then I'll have a metric related to each of those things. Now you don't want to leave things out. Trying to list things that are important to you, they're like, well, I don't want to leave, this part of my life is important to me, that better be on the list. Otherwise, I'm signaling to myself, it's not. Well, this thing over here is very important to me, I should put that on the list too, I need a metric for that. And before you know it, your list of metrics you're tracking is an inventory of everything that's important to you and the possibility for you to actually make progress on that many things on a regular basis is basically impossible. It's just too many things you want to make progress on. That's what happened to me. I went through an exercise when I was up in New England where I checked

• 11:58Cal Newport?

  back in as I do most summers after my birthday about what are the areas of my life that are important to me, what am I trying to do with them right now? And I listed out all these different areas, there are six different areas. I ended up with actually many more than six metrics because I had at least one metric for each of those six areas, but for the one related to health, I actually track four metrics for my health. It's exercise stretching, step count, and then there's like a food and diet, sort of like quality of the food I eat sort of thing. So it's 10 metrics. It was just too many. I mean, I've been busy. I had a busy calendar and I was like, I can't make progress on 10 things. In fact, I could do maybe one or two of these things, maybe, and I was super stressed having so many things I wasn't writing down because what I had really done was

• 12:42Cal Newport?

  inventoried everything that was important to me as opposed to saying, here is a reasonable mix of things I could make progress on on most days that would be important to me. So that's probably the number one problem. It was my problem as well. So how do we fix this? What's a smarter way to approach activity tracking metrics? Well, that brings us to act three, making metrics work. There are four things that I did to help clean up my metric track. I did this last night. I wrote this all out after I get the stress default. I was like, okay, I got to fix this. And these, I think, are the main four tools you have to make activity-based metric tracking actually be

• 13:24Cal Newport?

  sustainable. Number one, you can consider doing multiple choice metrics. So what that means is you have multiple things that are important to you, but it's unreasonable, perhaps, to make progress on all of those things every day. It would be a real laundry list. What you do instead is you have a multiple choice approach to it where you might say, for example, here's five things that are important to me. I have a metric code for each. I want to try to do one of these per day. So my goal is each day to write down one of these metric codes. If I can get to like one of these things each day, give a little bit of effort, I'll consider that a success. Now you get more reasonable. You can have more areas you care about, but you're not trying to

• 14:05Cal Newport?

  unreasonably make progress on everything every day. Autopilot scheduling makes a huge difference as well. So many different metrics, if you're going to succeed in actually doing that activity every day, it has to be integrated into your schedule in a way that you don't have to think about it. We're used to this with exercise. This is how I handle exercise. When we're in, out of the summer and during a normal semester, I know when I do my exercise. My wife knows when I do my exercise. It's part of my schedule. This is just when I do my exercise. So it's a, it's a regular part of my schedule. It's what we call autopilot scheduling. That makes sure it gets done. If I instead just started each day and said, I'm going to try to find time, 45 minutes at some point today to exercise, what's my hit rate going to be?

• 14:49Cal Newport?

  20% of days I happen to have enough time and enough energy to do it. So the more things you can actually find a regular time and day to do it. So an autopilot schedule, the more successful that'll be. So your metrics should have a lot of autopilot scheduling going on. You really shouldn't have four or five things that you want to make progress on every day that have no fixed time that you always do in your schedule. No, like I meditate when I first wake up. I work out right before dinner. You do not want a lot of things that aren't autopiloted scheduled. The third thing to do to make metrics work is to eliminate, combine, and simplify. Just say, hey, look, there's a lot of things. I can't work on all of these things. I want a good sampling of things that matter to me that I want to do regularly.

• 15:34Cal Newport?

  And the other stuff, you know, I will try to make progress on it and maybe a bigger time scale. If you're a multi-scale planner, you can make progress on it like at the strategic plan schedule or the weekly scale. Like, you know, hey, do I have a day today that I could go like see my brother who lives nearby? We can, we can like get together and have lunch like, okay, I do this week. I didn't last week. I do this week, right? Then maybe that's the right scale to be working on that thing that's important to you. So you might want to simplify or eliminate the stuff that you really are trying to track every day. That doesn't have to be everything that's important. You doesn't have to have progress made at that scale. Combining means you might find a way to make progress on multiple things that are important in one, one step, right?

• 16:17Cal Newport?

  It's like walking my dog also gets me steps and I always call my mom when I do it. Right? And now you're, you have like one activity that's handling multiple steps. Or you want to have like a hobby that's important to you, but you want to spend time with your kids. Oh, why don't we come up with something that I do with my kids? It's like a joint hobby. So you can do combining as well. The final thing is probably the most important is go sequential and slow down. I can't do all these things at the same time. Okay. I mean, I want to hypothetically like learn to play guitar and I want to speak Spanish and I want to learn how to program a computer and like these three things I think would make my life richer. To try to make progress on all

• 16:59Cal Newport?

  three of those things every day is crazy. To even try to do multiple choice on those three things is kind of crazy. Like, well, I want to work on one of these each day and you're switching back and forth between these things. It's, you know, this is, this could be like way overkill. So maybe what you stay instead is like, let's just slow down. That's a slow productivity tactic. I'm working on Spanish right now. I'm just going to do that for the next four months or six months. And when I feel like I got to a good place, then maybe I'll have a season I'm working on like trying to learn some guitar and we'll see how that goes. Programming, I don't know, maybe next year. It's interesting, but let's just push that off. Take your time. Life is long. Sequential, I'll do this. When it's done, I'll work on something else. So not trying to

• 17:40Cal Newport?

  necessarily have everything that's important to you be active all at the same time. All right. So that's basically what I've done. My new metrics, I have a big multiple choice that makes things much simpler. I eliminated some things that I was tracking. I'm going sequential on some other things like, okay, let me just work on this now. This other thing I'll work on in a different season. I moderated, Jesse, I was, my goal was to spend about 30 hours a week on my Halloween decorations and I moderated. That's now 27 and a half hours a week because 30 hours was just a little bit too much. So 27 and a half hours a week on my Halloween decorations. But there we go. So metrics are important, the right type of metrics. It really helps make sure

• 18:22Cal Newport?

  that you're not just organized, but you're organized towards stuff that matters. But don't beat yourself up if you struggle with metrics because kind of like invented this approach and I still completely screwed up last week and then I had to remember my own medicine. All right, let's get reasonable here. It's a process. And also, hey, the fact that I had turned these off while I was away, like that also is a thing. I was on, I was up in New England for a month. It's like, I don't want to track metrics every day. I come and I go, right? Like this is all real talk. It's a useful tool. You're not running all the time. You're going to get it wrong. And it's something that you keep working on over time. So hopefully you have some sort of metric tracking going, but you're not being too hard on yourself about getting it just right or having a Herculean collection of metrics that you're trying to do.

• 19:05Cal Newport?

  There you go. People ask about metrics, I think. They don't always quite know what I'm talking about.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  And then you should probably explain what the time block planner is.

• 19:12Cal Newport?

  Well, if you don't know that, then I don't want to know you. I actually have a planner. I think we created this during the pandemic. You can buy at Amazon or wherever books are sold online for doing time blocking. And it has the pre-formatted pages for time blocking, for capture, and for metric tracking. It also has a shutdown complete checkbox. You can do it. It's worth buying even for just the introduction. I mean, I have an extensive introduction in the planner where I explain all of my philosophies for how I manage my time using this. So it's actually like a mini Cal Newport time management book, plus the tool to do it. So you should check that out.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  There's a website as well with a video.

• 19:51Cal Newport?

  Yeah, if you go to timeblockplanner.com, we filmed a nice video. That was with a nice camera, too. It was Rob's overhead. He used a fancy camera. I enjoyed that. So there you go. Metrics. All right, we've got some good questions coming up. But Jesse, you know what we got to do now?

• 20:08Cal Newport?

  I think we got to do some ads.

• 20:11Cal Newport?

  Let's do some music for the ads. Let's get into it. That's what I'm thinking today. We're in a musical mode. There we go. There we go. Does that put you in an ad mood, Jesse?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  It does.

• 20:21Cal Newport?

  I got to tell you a true story then, Jesse, because this has got me thinking about ads. This is true. I keep finding in our front yard, in our front bush, this same orange colored cat that's hanging around. It's a beautiful cat, like a ginger colored cat. I don't know whose it is, but it kind of hangs out around our house, especially in the afternoon. It made me miss having cats. When we grew up, we had two Siamese cats. Their names were Singha and Nitnoi. Those are Thai names. My mom lived in Bangkok for a while. And they were great cats. I really liked having cats. We don't have them now because my wife is allergic to cats. We don't have cats in the house. But seeing that cat in my yard got me a little nostalgic. And it led me to do, which I think is probably like the only natural response to this situation, Jesse, was I divorced my wife.

• 21:06Cal Newport?

  All right, not really, but all this cat talk got me thinking about one of today's sponsors, Smalls Cat Food. This is the cat food I wish I had back when we had cats and I would recommend it to anyone who does. Smalls Cat Food is protein packed. It's made with preservative free ingredients that you'd find in your fridge, like good ingredients. It's delivered right to your door. That's why cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. You can get 60% off your first order and free shipping if you go to Smalls.com/deep, but that's only for a limited time only. Don't take my word for it. Here is a real review from a real customer. Jennifer M. said, "After every feeding, he gets this burst of energy and starts running around the house.

• 21:51Cal Newport?

  My cat does too." Kind of a joke, Jesse. It was like she was talking about her husband or something like that. "And his fur is softer and more vibrant with higher contrast." Same with my cats. See what I'm doing there? I'm kind of like riffing, like she's talking about her husband, but really it's about her cat. "Honestly, I wouldn't recommend anything else." You know what else I like about Smalls? This is me now, not Jennifer M. "They work with the Humane World for Animals. They've donated over a million dollars worth of food to help cats through the Humane World for Animals, and they even give you a chance to donate at checkout." You know what I don't like about them? They rejected my slogan idea, which was "Cat food so good, you'll want to divorce your wife so you can buy a cat." They didn't like that one. I think that would be a catchy slogan. Anyways, what are you waiting for? Give your cat the food they deserve. For a limited time only, because you are a Deep

• 22:36Cal Newport?

  Questions listener, you get 60% off your first Smalls order plus free shipping when you head to Smalls.com/deep. That's 60% off when you head to Smalls.com/deep plus free shipping. Again, that's Smalls.com/deep. Jesse, I also got to talk about our friends at Vanta. In today's fast-changing digital world, proving your company is trustworthy isn't just important for growth, it is essential. That's why Vanta is here.

• 23:07Cal Newport?

  Here's the thing, running a company today that basically has, I don't know, anything to do with technology is going to eventually require you to be compliant with various standards. This can be a huge pain and take up a lot of time that you should be spending on making your business better. This is where Vanta enters the scene and makes this all easier. So whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. I'll tell you, and Jesse will tell you this is true. I pitched him a podcast episode idea where I said, "Look, let's do like an hour 50," where I riff on ISO

• 23:49Cal Newport?

  27001. And you know what Jesse said, and he was right? "Let Vanta handle that." And he was right about that. We shouldn't be thinking about that. Vanta should for us. I mean, I fired him because no one says no to me, but it was a good idea. Vanta is who should be dealing with these issues for you. You shouldn't be thinking more about them than you have to. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, so you win bigger deals sooner. The results? According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slash over $500,000 a year in cost, and they're three times more productive. Establishing trust is an optional. Vanta makes

• 24:26Cal Newport?

  it automatic. So visit vanta.com/deepquestions to sign up for a free demo today. That's V A N T A dot com slash deep questions. All right, let's do some questions of our own.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  All right. First question is from Luis. "When looking to make a change in your career, how do you deal with that gray area where you have some career capital in the target job, but it's still difficult to decide if now is the right time to move?"

• 24:58Cal Newport?

  Well, part of this, Louis, 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 just 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. Or motivation. Number two is there's things about this job that like really clash with me, my values, or is making me unhappy.

• 25:41Cal Newport?

  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, tell it's sure. Right? 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 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.

• 26:24Cal Newport?

  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, but 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 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 to try to harvest a temporary, 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. If you do.

• 27:10Cal Newport?

  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 from making a change. It's like, 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?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Next up is Craig. Do you have a framework or approach for developing deep, critical thinking, particularly for young people? I'm a father of young children, also a mentor of a group of young men, and I want to help them build the habit of thinking deeply.

• 27:51Cal Newport?

  Well, there's a, 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 my, 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've got to keep it, keep in mind, reading is artificial, right? It's not something we evolved to do. It was invented relatively

• 28:36Cal Newport?

  recently. And so it takes hard work. But if you do reading on things that are hard, it literally changes your brain. And 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. Like, I'm not very good at being a tiger parent. I'm not very good at, hey, you got to get As on everything and do 100 activities. But there's one thing that I'm super, super clear on with my kids, reading.

• 29:18Cal Newport?

  Right? I'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. You kind of need both. If 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.

• 30:03Cal Newport?

  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. I 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.

• 30:47Cal Newport?

  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? That's all I want to hear about. And anyone on the other side, uh, obviously has a brain virus and is probably like a week away from being a zombie and, you know, 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.

• 31:32Cal Newport?

  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. Really 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. And that's going to upgrade, again, those deep reading circuits and upgrade your brain from pragmatic to symbolic.

• 32:16Cal Newport?

  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. The getting a brain that's going to help you thrive. All right, who we got?

• 32:34Speaker 01

  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. What should I do?

• 32:51Cal Newport?

  I know, Jesse, did 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 let me 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 you're vision of your ideal lifestyle and you assess each of these options through that vision. So probably the dysfunction and toxicity of that second option, you're like, wow, that lifestyle is not very, not very good.

• 33:35Cal Newport?

  That doesn't really seem close to like my vision, like what my day is like, what my work is like. The high-paced consulting firm, like this is where lifestyle planning might be a little bit more effective. Because it's tempting to jump to that just because it might be more prestigious and more money. 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. What matters day to day for your overall satisfaction is the details of your lifestyle. What is my everyday like? Have you got this vision of this lifestyle where you know, you're spending like a lot of time with your kids and like the family

• 34:15Cal Newport?

  and you're like really into like athletic things and you're hiking trails in the land behind your house and you're, you're spending 30 hours a week on Halloween decorations. If you have this big vision of, you know, you're sitting at the picnic table with the extended family with the, 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? Like, oh man, that steps on so many parts of that vision. So, uh, 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 high-paced good soldier.

• 35:00Cal Newport?

  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. In 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 four kids makes sense to me. 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?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Next up is Amei. I've worked in a high-pressure call center for 11 years where I'm glued to the screen all day. I lack the traditional credentials, but want to switch fields to cybersecurity. Is it possible to make the switch?

• 35:50Cal Newport?

  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?

• 36:08Cal Newport?

  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. It 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.

• 36:53Cal Newport?

  And 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 works at all. They're just going to kind of like throw it out to you. Like you might end up dropping 20K on some online only cybersecurity masters 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.

• 37:37Cal Newport?

  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. What 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.

• 38:19Cal Newport?

  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 low value masters programs is it's professors buying fur coats. I don't know if that's well known.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  But that's actually what happens.

• 38:36Cal Newport?

  All right, we got one more.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  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?

• 38:53Cal Newport?

  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, you'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?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  September 6th, baby.

• 39:32Cal Newport?

  But what's the expression? It must be Monday.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Tonight is the Hall of Fame game.

• 39:35Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Preseason though.

• 39:36Cal Newport?

  But what's the saying? It must be Monday morning quarterbacking.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Monday morning quarterbacking.

• 39:39Cal Newport?

  Because, yeah, football used to be played primarily on Sundays. But now it's played on basically every day, right?

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:46Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 39:47Cal Newport?

  Thursday morning, Wednesday morning quarterbacking. There's still football played on Wednesday or is it Wednesday games?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on when Christmas is now.

• 39:54Cal Newport?

  I think we need to spend the next 25 minutes getting into this.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Because I think last year Christmas was on on Wednesday.

• 39:58Cal Newport?

  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. And let's use some lifestyle centered planning. Let's use some career capital. You know, first thing first is like, we need a job and we need money. Like, let's make sure that we're not like in financial trouble. And then let's step back and do some lifestyle centered planning. Here's the silver lining. There's 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 change situation. But hey, maybe this means I'm going to move somewhere else or take a different type of career.

• 40:39Cal Newport?

  I got to move to, you know, a really low cat, a teeny house that I own, you know, in like the Oregon coast and like do this job remote that I already know about. It's not much money, but I won't need much money. And then I'm going to work on this and I'm going to be near my, my uncle. And it's going to be whatever, like you're 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, 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 centered planning and making evidence-based moves to get you closer to that lifestyle. I think you could end up being way better off. I thought 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, my situation now. I don't know

• 41:21Cal Newport?

  if I sold the best vision there though, Jesse, living in a teeny house next to your uncle. That's, 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.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  One of my uncles kind of lived in a teeny house.

• 41:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Pretty cool.

• 41:41Cal Newport?

  It's like, uh, because you could-

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Probably one of those like prefab houses. It's not teeny, but it's pretty small.

• 41:45Cal Newport?

  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? Cause you could, it was, it was, uh, roughly $15,000, 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 twenties. 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 $15,000. Like I could save. And, uh, and so that became popular for a while. So

• 42:27Cal Newport?

  you could 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. And then your boyfriend is like, yeah, hold on a second. Uh, my, my lunch isn't agreeing 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, uh, you're in like a hut in Outlander and is looking over the moors. It, it becomes real. So I think that's why the mini house

• 43:08Cal Newport?

  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?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  We do.

• 43:16Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear this.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  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. Thank 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,

• 43:58Speaker 02

  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. Thank you as always.

• 44:30Cal Newport?

  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 hyperpowered 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, I'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

• 45:15Cal Newport?

  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.

• 45:27Cal Newport?

  Ready and prepped and up on the course website about a week out from the beginning of classes. So 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 gonna 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 let, let's get, you know, our legs stretched out. And so you could do it that way. Just be a little bit thoughtful. And we 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. Have good plans, weekly plan those first few weeks. Make sure

• 46:10Cal Newport?

  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. I'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.

• 47:04Cal Newport?

  All right. Today's case study is from Alok, 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

• 47:46Cal Newport?

  To create a zen garden in my backyard to satisfy my creative impulses. This 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,

• 48:31Cal Newport?

  pursuing a hobby while combating the digital doldrums. Well, 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. 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.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  We're definitely going to get emails about AI generations of that image.

• 49:19Cal Newport?

  Someone sent me an AI-generated image. Did I mention Jason Priestley on the podcast?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got that as well.

• 49:24Cal Newport?

  Okay, so I mentioned on the podcast Jason Priestley from Beverly Hills 90210. 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. He 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.

• 50:03Cal Newport?

  Well, I don't know what Bilko. I don't know what the names were, the characters. What's Jason Priestley's name? I don't know. Was it Scott Baio? That's another actor. You're getting us way off, way off task. Somebody else emailed 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 getting so many emails. Send these all to [email protected]. He wants to hear as many times as possible the answer here. They 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 Doctor Death.

• 50:48Cal Newport?

  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 OpenAI should probably shut down. But like, they might consider giving back their money to investors. If you're gonna mess that up, what's the point? All 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.

• 51:19Cal Newport?

  I like ads now because we got some real music. Keeps it a little more interesting. So 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 doll house, dollhouse. And then there is something small, but, 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. So 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 gonna 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?

• 52:04Cal Newport?

  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 1,000 locations. Imagine being able to guarantee that shopping is always convenient, endless aisle, ship the customer, buy online, pick up in store. All of this is made simpler so that customers can shop how they want and staff have the tools to close the sale every time. 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.

• 52:46Cal Newport?

  Businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to a 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. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. Shopify.com/deep. Also want to talk about a new sponsor, our friends at OnePassword. 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.

• 53:30Cal Newport?

  In fact, like 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. That's my memory of what old computers were like. Most people don't have that anymore. The way most people run their businesses is 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 Trelica by OnePassword can help.

• 54:11Cal Newport?

  Trelica by OnePassword 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 offboard employees, and meet compliance goals. Trelica by OnePassword 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. OnePassword's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users at over 150,000

• 54:50Cal Newport?

  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 OnePassword Extended Access Management. It is 2701 certified with regular third-party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. OnePassword exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. So when we move away from our 1960s mainframe, OnePassword 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.

• 55:34Cal Newport?

  Learn more at onepassword.com/deep. That's onepassword.com/deep. That's one, the number one, password.com/deep, and type that in all lowercase for it to work. I might just say I love the music, but I think we need to move on to our final segment.

• 55:52Cal Newport?

  All right, final segment where I like to talk about something that I read that either I liked or in some cases maybe caused some issues. In 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-filled 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 was saying. So this character here on the screen was saying, "I need to find my way out of this simulation

• 56:34Cal Newport?

  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 is happening more and more when it comes to talking about AI. In 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

• 57:18Cal Newport?

  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

• 58:03Cal Newport?

  code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panicked 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." Alright, so clearly you kind of read these things, you 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, they kind of coming alive? Like, is this the

• 58:43Cal Newport?

  problem?" Because it sort of has that vibe of like, "Yeah, like it's 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 calculate, to generate dialogue for characters in a Matrix simulation. What is ChatGPT really good at? "Hey, 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 in a character in The Matrix. If you had changed that prompt, just say, "Respond to this as if you were in a world in which

• 59:25Cal Newport?

  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 that text in their mouths 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. They 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 ChatGPT to generate NPC dialogue?" And guess what? The company had to shut it down because it's expensive to do ChatGPT queries, and

• 1:00:07Cal Newport?

  so it's not a very 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. Let 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 of technologies 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

• 1:00:48Cal Newport?

  of beta level tools that like one day might automate certain parts of game developing. And 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? Oh, these video game companies are starting to lay people off because they're shifting over to AI tools. This industry is sort of going away.

• 1:01:31Cal Newport?

  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. We have always used computer aided tools to help with video game design. These are like tools to help like with 3D modeling and to 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.

• 1:02:14Cal Newport?

  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 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. They were just doing a shift of focus. We're going to put less focus here and more focus over there.

• 1:02:58Cal Newport?

  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 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? They'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.

• 1:03:43Cal Newport?

  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 Gennova 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. There 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

• 1:04:25Cal Newport?

  video games. I mean, I don't really care that a company put chat GPT to do dialogue for a character and then said this demo is too expensive, but it's kind of interesting that like maybe there'll be new tools in video games. Actually, it's not that interesting at all. But the vibe reporting 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 vibe 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. It heavily gave the sense without actually like straight up saying it that it's because AI

• 1:05:10Cal Newport?

  that people are saying, why study AI? 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, it's, it's, you know, making entry level jobs. Maybe you're going to be less important. We'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

• 1:05:54Cal Newport?

  truth. Oh, there's no evidence that that's why people aren't majoring 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 recovered. 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? It's so anyways, vibe reporting is big because if you can give someone

• 1:06:36Cal Newport?

  the sense that something big and dire is happening, it's a more profound article. They'll remember it. They'll share it.

• 1:06:45Cal Newport?

  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 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? And 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

• 1:07:28Cal Newport?

  are more fun when we got some music going. Yeah, you know, like you can, you can kind of get into it. I like it. I like it. And you know what? You know what ad the companies like when they want sponsorship? They want their product being the cause of divorce. So 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.

• 1:07:58Cal Newport?

  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.

• 1:09:21Cal Newport?

  You