Ep. 363: Escaping the Digital Doldrums  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 363: Escaping the Digital Doldrums - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b800f69f-7183-4b82-8935-29d4714e9680 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Escaping the Digital Doldrums** - Prolonged screen time dulls our nervous system, making life feel dull and listless, a "digital doldrums." - Engineering wonder via a large analog creative project reignites real-world engagement and motivation. Transcript: Cal Newport Here is the issue I'm observing today that Disney's scheme might help. We spend all of our time on screens. At work, it's email, it's Zoom, it's web interfaces, it's on laptop screens, and it's on our phone. When we're not in work, it's on our phone, and it's text messages, and it's social media, and maybe at some points, it's on a TV screen, and it's streaming media, and we're sitting here Just swiping these things with our small motions of our hands. There's nothing wrong with a screen, but weird things happen when most of your life becomes mediated through these screens. And when we live in what is basically an artificial or abstract world, my conjecture is this dulls our nervous system. We begin to lose what it feels like to be a being that exists in the physical world, that is shaping that physical world, that is enjoying that physical world. So much of our nervous system, our senses, is built around experiencing the world. So much of our brain is built around projecting things into the world, imagining what's going to happen and finding satisfactions when they do happen as we expect. And we lose touch with all of that when our life is increasingly through this abstraction that we're seeing through screens. It's a digital grayness where we exist, where these real-world sensations have been dulled, and where we get our sensations from instead are these highly optimized and artificial Pings that are delivered by memes and comments and highly produced videos that are squeezed on the glass. It's a sort of a fake or artificial version of the feelings we would have used to have being out there in the real worlds. It creates a condition I call the digital doldrums, and it makes life seem sort of listless, sort of like you're sleepwalking, not miserable, but not really fully all there. Now, let's bring this back to what Disney discovered, which was the power of engineering wonder, right? So if you take something that really interests you, like for him, it was trains, and that has no instrumental purpose. It's not like this is going to be good for my career. It's going to make me healthier. It's something I can brag about because God knows Disney was not bragging about it wasn't that cool that he was building this weird train in his backyards. You find something that has no instrumental purpose other than you find it remarkably interesting. And then if you take that and you inflate your ambition for it to 10 times larger than what is reasonable, I think interesting things happen. Instead of buying the Lionel train, you buy five acres of land and build a 1-8 scale train you can ride. I saw a guy – to give some more examples of this. I saw a guy on YouTube once who had built a reproduction of the Haunted Mansion ride from Disneyland in his suburban backyard. I mean the whole thing. He had built a dark room. He was using tarps to make the passages, and there was a track system actual homemade doom buggies and prop controllers. And he really did the best he can, and this was like thousands of hours of work. My old hairstylist in Georgetown that I used to go see, he took me once to his house and showed me that he had built this commercial-grade glassblowing studio, that he was building this Wonderful art out of glass. The whole salon he used to work before he left had his custom glass creations hanging from the ceiling. God knows how much effort went into it, but it was really kind of incredible to see. I call this engineered wonder, and I think it is an effective way to free you from the digital doldrums. I think it works because it reactivates your actual analog world nervous system. You get used to what it feels like to be really engaged with something that exists in the real world, not just feeling these sort of artificial simulated emotions. You get used to having an intention in your mind that your nervous system then sees being made manifest in the real world. That's an incredibly powerful thing. We lose what that feels like when more and more our accomplishments have to do with numbers next to a thumbs up on a social media post, but it feels fantastic when you get back to it. We get used to how much better the analog setting is to work in. We feel that it feels like they have actual authentic wonder for something and not just an artificially manipulated emotion delivered through a screen. And I think once all that's reinvigorated, that screen's no longer seems so great. And you begin seeking other things you can do. Your version of Disney saying, I'm now going to start Disneyland, opening up new chapters of your life that really can be profound or meaningful in a bigger way. ([Time 0:10:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bc7558e6-d52e-41a7-90f4-d5447415ecb6)) - **Build Career Capital First** - Prioritize building rare and valuable career capital before fully shifting careers like starting an art business. - Secure stable income from the business first, then focus on personal creative growth in optimal conditions. Transcript: Speaker 2 Question is from Natalie. I left a long software engineering career to start an art business while also learning to paint with the goal of becoming a full-time artist. I have a financial cushion to last for a bit. I'm weighing different strategies for balancing business growth and my creative ambitions. Typically, I have a large time block for the art business before lunch, a time block for marketing and admin for both pursuits after lunch, and then painting after dinner. How should I pursue these two different goals? Cal Newport Well, I think there's two things going on here, Natalie. There's the big picture question about what you're doing with your career, the sort of like the general deep life question. And then I think there's the tactical question about what's the best time to do art training. Let me start with the easy one first. Once you're in a steady state, you kind of have your art business going and you're like, okay, where is art training go into this? You probably need to let your internal creative rhythms take the lead. You own your art business, so you probably have, I don't know exactly what it is, but you probably have some autonomy about how this business, like when and where it happens. Like it's not you behind a counter at a store, I'm assuming. So you should decide when and where do I do my best artwork? When am I most inspired? Like what location, what time? Make that your time block for doing your painting and then run the art business other places, right? That's just going to give you a bit of a multiplier on your return of effort for working on a creative pursuit. Find the best time, best location, because I can. I'm going to get 20% more out of those sessions. That adds up over time. All right, let's go to the general question here, the harder question. Leaving a longtime software engineering career to start an art business. I'm a little bit worried. I know you have a financial cushion, but I'm a little bit worried about how much prep you did before making that change. The typical argument that I would make in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, is that you really want sufficient career capital in the new thing you're doing that that you can exchange It for success, right? That you're not coming into a new field where you have very little rare and valuable skills because that is a recipe for really falling behind. And one of the best ways, I talk about this in So Good, one of the best ways to check your career capital stores when it comes to a new professional endeavor is to use Derek Siver's concept Of money being a neutral indicator of value. That is running the art business on your side until the income it produces is enough to cover your needs. Now you have confidence that the business will work. Now you make your change. So if you made your jump before then, I guess it's all hands on deck with the art business until that income is coming in. And only if and when it feels stable would I really start prioritizing more time for the more personal pursuit of working on your own art. My concern is you're going to burn through this cushion and nothing comes of it because it's hard to run a new business if you don't have very invaluable skills. So really, I'm just going to say, put your focus on that until you feel comfortable and then do more time on your own art and do it when you feel like is the best time for you to do the art. ([Time 0:21:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dde25fbc-01e3-4dcc-872c-2b19b2599120)) - **Value Rare Skills in Career Moves** - Beware of career changes that lack rare and valuable skills, such as buying retail stores without expertise. - Leveraging existing specialized skills often leads to better flexibility, income, and career capital than starting unrelated businesses. Transcript: Speaker 2 Question is from Vishal. I've been a business analyst for 11 years and it provides stability and good balance. I have a chance to buy a retail convenience store. The expected financial returns are roughly equivalent to my current full-time role. This new potential role is a major shift from my current career capital. However, if successful, owning multiple stores could provide long-term upside. Ideally, I want to take three to four months off each year. Cal Newport So I think this question has a lot of related themes to the last question. And again, I have deep life alarm sirens going off. Because when I analyze how to use your work as one of the tools you have to construct a deep life. There is a clear formula. The benefits of a professional pursuit are directly proportional to how rare and valuable the skills involved in that pursuit are. This is just the way the market works. The more you're leveraging rare and valuable skills, the more you get back, either in terms of compensation or sort of like autonomy and flexibility. If you are really, really good at throwing a baseball with your left hand, you could get 20, 25 million dollars a year for doing that, right? Because it's an incredibly rare and valuable skill. You can leverage that to get a lot in return. If you are very, very good at writing dark fantasy novels like Rebecca Yaros, then you can have an extreme amount of flexibility in your life. You write one book every year or two. You make a massive amount of money. That's all you have to do. You can dictate when and where you work. More rare and valuable skills, the better. I get worried about things like retail convenience stores because where's the rare and valuable skill? If you don't have a particular hard-won skill in this field, then why do you think that I can just relatively easily be making the same money as a business analyst and then maybe buy a few Other stores. And then I could have a pretty good lifestyle business where I make a lot of money and I don't have to work three or four months a year. If that was possible without you needing a hard one skill, guess what? Everyone would be doing it. First, it would be people. And then you would have like private equity funds come in and everyone would be like, this is great. What an easy business. I don't need to know much about it. Anyone can just, if you have enough capital, you can have a retail convenience store do well and just buy three more. Everyone would be doing it. I'm always really wary. If you don't have a rare and valuable skill being applied, I don't trust a person saying this thing's going to make you a lot of money. It just never works. The market is too efficient. The market of professional pursuits and rewards is very efficient. And if there's ways to do really well without rare and valuable skills, people move into it till it's saturated, then people try to automate and systematize it, and then all the opportunity Goes away. I think of it as like the efficient, I don't know what you call this, like the efficient job market theory. Now, I could be wrong here, but I know I've seen some books for some stores, including several stores in Tacoma Park. I know the owners, these are hard businesses. It's hard work. It's hard to scrape a margin. Almost certainly, you're getting a much higher return on your time and much closer paths to autonomy and flexibility and being something like a business analyst with a specialty than You are running a retail convenience store. So all this is just to say, be wary. Now, that's not to say that this is not a bad business, because I'm going to play devil's advocate for myself here, Vishal. There are some types of retail outlets that can be pretty profitable, like a good McDonald's franchise in a good location can do really well. And you could say, well, then why does anyone do it? Well, it's because McDonald's has a, if you want to be a franchisee, they have this rule that says you can't finance more than some small percent of the purchase price of the franchise. So you have to have – it depends on where you are, but many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of capital. Now, if you have that, it could be a pretty good investment. McDonald's are relatively turnkey how they run and you can scale them. And it's a situation where not everyone can do it because not everyone has $700,000 worth of capital to buy a McDonald's and Silver Spring or whatever it is. So there is some devil advocate here that if there's capital at play and that's what's keeping people out of the market or it's an unusually good location and you have an inside connection To it, maybe that helps. But I just want to make this general point, regardless of the details of visual situation, I want to make this general point for anyone out there. If you think a deal is too good to be true, like, wow, I can just do this and make a lot of money. I don't know much about it. You're probably the sucker in the bet. Probably sucking the bet. So be very wary about career capital and be very wary, A, about things that require career capital and be very open to where can I take the career capital I already have, specialize it A little bit more in six months from now, have like a very big piece of leverage I can use in my life. If I'm a business analyst, is there a new market emerging that has some complicated technical component that I can master and then go freelance and do this 20 hours a week or do this 40 Weeks a year and take the other 12 weeks off. And if I change my living expenses, it can work. Like I can imagine many more potential paths to a deep life building on the career capital you already have than I can imagine building a retail empire being the way to get there. All right. So that's my sermon. I'm just very worried about anything where if I'm not, if I'm not leveraging a hard one skill, I'm nervous about the idea that this is going to be a pretty good or easy or lucrative job. ([Time 0:24:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/18f7e48c-0b66-4c27-902e-b368d45ea7ef)) - **Persist to Publish and Improve** - To improve writing professionally, persistently submit to publications to get past initial rejection. - Join writer groups for feedback and use rejections as fuel for deliberate skill sharpening. Transcript: Speaker 2 Said before that the real way to improve as a writer is to write for publications. My niche is small. I've submitted pieces before, but the responses have always been no with no suggestions or edits. I haven't tried often because the process didn't help me grow. I also prickle at the prospect of using my precious limited writing time to do the non-writing that would come with searching for other avenues. Cal Newport How should I do this? Jesse, I feel like I'm in my curmudgeon mode today. Because I've got another curmudgeonly answer coming. I don't know. I'm sort of feeling like angry uncle today. Again, Doug, not knowing all your circumstances, and I don't mean to rant, but writing for publications how you get better. Now, if you're journaling for yourself, if you're writing fiction, just for the creative expression to share with your friends, if you're poetry because it just helps you get your Feelings out, of course, don't mess – it doesn't matter if you publish it or not and if it's a pain. I agree with you. Don't waste the time. But if you're trying to become a better writer, like I want to get good at this. Maybe I want to have this be, if not a career, like a component to my professional life, something I'm known for, something I do at a high level. Writing for publications is how you get good. Yes, you've submitted some pieces. The response has been no. There's been no suggestions. That's because it takes a lot. It's hard to be a published writer. You know, it takes, if it was easy, everyone would be like, yeah, I'm going to spend four months and start publishing stuff and it's great. Yeah, it's a hard entry ramp, but it is worth keep pushing yourself to get past that gate of being published. Stephen King, he writes about this in his book on writing. When he first started writing fiction and he was aiming in the short story market – there was a lot more short story magazines for horror and speculative fiction back then. Up in his attic, he took a railroad spike and he knocked that spike into the wall above the typewriter where he was writing up in that attic room. And he said, that's where I'm going to put my rejection slips. Not a nail because a nail is not long enough. And he began filling that railroad spike with rejection slips. And you know the story he tells in on writing? Reminds me of you. At first, no. Rejections, no information. After a while, hey, this was kind of good, but it's not for us. Maybe a couple sentences of feedback. After a while, hey, I think this was close. You know, Stephen, I like this. This is close, but I'm not quite sure about it. Then stuff started getting in. And then he started messing around with novels. They weren't working. And then he had one that did work. It was about a young woman who had telekinesis, right? Had this power of telekinesis and what happened in a small town. And he sold it, hardcover. I think it was like a $2,000 advance. He was a teacher in Bangor to work summer jobs to cleaning industrial laundries, cleaning tablecloths from New England lobster joints and maggots on them. It's gross, right? But he needed the summer job to make the money. The book does pretty well, though. It catches some attention. It's starting to get some heat. He doesn't really know this. There's no internet back then. A call comes in to his agent. They've sold the paperback rights. $400,000. This is in the 1970s. Railroad spike filled with rejection slips before he made that progress, which is all to say, like, this is part of the rite of passage of writing. The key is when you're getting the no's, you say, like, well, how do I get better to try to make the next one not be a no? So even while you're waiting to get feedback from publication, have a writer's group. Work with other people. What's working here? What's not? Be brutally honest with me. Get the feedback. Try harder. Try a different format. Try a different style. What if I tried this? Maybe this is a better match. It's that hard work of trying to get accepted is the first major deliberate practice stretch that happens in the life of a professional writer. Once you're writing for publication, the next large deliberate practice stretch happens where you go from not bad to good, and then really cool stuff can go on. So don't write a story. If, again, if your goal is to be like a good writer, don't try to write yourself a story where it's all gatekeepers, they don't know what they're talking about, and you're just going to Do your thousand words a day because it's fun and you like the idea of it and you have your herbal moth AT and your Instagram photos of it. Don't write your own story about how you want the world of writing to work. The real story is it's hard, but that hardness is the edge against which the blade of craft is sharpened. And even that push to get past the simple no, if you're really pushing, if they anger you when you push back and you have friends and you have writers groups and you're trying and you're Relentless, that's when you start to get good. And so maybe my problem is I left off that first part, Jesse, that sometimes it's hard to even get into publications in the first place. ([Time 0:30:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/58aa9a65-9473-4e2a-bb64-2ce237f7df79)) - **Tame Email with Process Changes** - Manage inbox anxiety by reducing the volume of incoming messages rather than ignoring the inbox. - Use process-centric emailing to end endless back-and-forths and create protocols to handle recurring communication. Transcript: Speaker 2 We go. Hey, Cal, this is Catherine. You've written a lot about how we shouldn't be beholden to our email inboxes and the email that comes in should not set our priorities for the day, which makes total sense to me intellectually. But as a lifelong inbox zero person, I find it incredibly difficult to let go of the sense of control that comes from addressing everything in my inbox. Do you have any suggestions for people like me who want to reply to things and address things that come in? Are there half measures that you would suggest we take or kind of other strategies to lessen the stranglehold of the desire to keep on top of our inboxes? Thanks. Cal Newport Let me ask you this, Jesse. Do we still have the slow productivity theme music loaded up on that board? Because I think this will, I'm in a spicy mood. I think we got to calm things down. All right, that's putting me in the right mindset here. So I'm going to approach this question with calm. So I'm going to start by saying with calmness. I know it is a common thing people say about email. Don't stress what's in there. Don't make that be your priority. There's like more important things than it. These aren't urgent. People should have better expectations. I know that's a common response to inbox overload. I don't agree with it, though. I actually think you should deal with what's in your inbox. You should be able to deal with everything in your inbox. And the solution is not to pretend like your inbox isn't there. It's not to pretend like people's expectations are wrong for emailing you. It is to reduce the amount of those emails that arrive in your inbox in the first place. I'm also an inbox hero person. I get very stressed by it. It's social stress. We talked about this in the context of text messages in the last week's deep dive. So I wrote a whole book called The World Without Email. It came out in 2021. And the whole premise of that book, well, I guess there's two premises. The premise is having a lot of back and forth communication is terrible for us. It makes us stressed out. It doesn't make us more productive. But the main idea of the advice in that book is we can re-engineer how we collaborate in a professional context so that we're not so dependent on unscheduled messages that require responses. That's the thing that creates an anxiety-producing inbox full of messages that have to be dealt with, is that you have a dozen or two dozen ongoing virtual asynchronous conversations Unfolding with messages being bounced back and forth. So any moment you look in your inbox, 75% of those conversations have the next message waiting for you. And you kind of have to answer those pretty quickly because when you bounce it back to them, they'll bounce it back to you and you'll bounce it back to them. And you're doing this game where you're trying to get to an asynchronous conclusion before too much time goes on. So you have to check that inbox and you have to get down to zero. And by the time you get down to zero, there's 24 more messages arrive because they just bounced them back to you. The key then is not to ignore that. It is to stop there being so many proverbial ping pong balls coming in your direction. And the whole second half of that book, how to become, or what's it called? A world without email. I was going to say how to become an email superstar, which is another awesome title, but a world without email. The whole second half is saying when you get emails that are part of a conversation, so not something you can just either informational or something you can just answer with a single Message, when they're part of a back and forth conversation, ask yourself, what is this conversation about? Like what type of thing is this trying to bring us to a resolution about? And then you have a short-term and long-term solution here. Short-term, for that particular conversation, say, how can I respond to this email that is going to move this out of unscheduled messaging from here on out? And that might mean spending more time on that particular email. They say, okay, here's the decisions we need to make. Here's the way I think we should do it. You finish this draft by Wednesday, put into this Dropbox folder by close of business. I'll pick it up first thing Thursday morning. I'll annotate it. I'll have any of my annotations in that Dropbox version by noon. You can pick it up anytime after noon on Thursday to act on those. By the way, we have a meeting on this unrelated thing Thursday afternoon. So any unresolved questions, let's just chat real quickly after that meeting. But otherwise, whatever you have in there at the end of day Thursday, I'm going to send on to the designer. We'll have that report put together. That email is more of a pain to write than just answering the current email with like, yeah, I think so, but when are you available? It takes more time to write, but you have just cauterized the wound of all of those back and forth messages. That conversation will no longer generate new messages that require a response in your inbox, so the effort was worth it. So we call that process-centric emailing. You respond to ongoing chains in ways that breaks the ongoing chain. That reduces the pressure in your inbox. That's the short-term solution. The long-term solution is you say, what is the general type of work that this responds to? Like, is this conversation about something that I do again and again? Is there like a type of report we put out? Is there agenda planning we do for this weekly meeting? Is there a client issues that come in that are kind of complicated to figure out? You know, what is the regularly occurring work-related process that this email conversation is related to? And you can step back and say, let's put in place a different protocol for dealing with this type of thing. Here's our process for how we produce reports and we synchronize it. We don't need unscheduled messages. Here's our process for dealing with clients. There's three days a week where they can call at this time if they want, they don't have to, if they have nothing to talk about, but we will be there and we will answer and chat with them about Any question you have. We'll have our intern take notes. We'll send them a summary of the notes right after and about all the things we've committed to doing. And when they next call, we'll tell them how it's going. And there we go. We now have a way of dealing with clients that don't require back and forth messages. So the long-term solution is creating protocols for regularly occurring business processes that are right now generating these unscheduled back and forth conversations. That is the killer of inboxes. Back and forth conversations consisting of unscheduled messages that require relatively timely responses. That is the productivity poison that has to be neutralized. And in this sort of medical analogy, the activated charcoal that you would use here, and I'm really stretching this analogy, is being smarter about process and protocol. So I don't think we should ignore inboxes. This is, by the way, why I think most advice about inboxes fails, because it ignores the psychological reality of having messages waiting that require a response. And when you tell me to batch, when you tell me to don't check email first thing in the ([Time 0:43:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/044b440d-dfbf-4548-9138-06e2ed59e2a3)) - **Writing Energy from Routine** - Doug found creative energy writing his blog in a serene university library, walking through nature to fuel focus. - This routine made writing deeply satisfying without pressure to publish, embodying lifestyle-centric and engineered wonder principles. Transcript: Cal Newport I gave my son that same sermon, by the way. I made him read on writing the Stephen King nonfiction book. So I'm already fired up about it. Doug, let's hear your case study because I think it's going to make me chill out a little bit. All right. So Doug says, I'm a public school teacher in Atlanta, and I also write a blog. You talk often about how time and place affect creative energy, and I've leaned into that more than ever this summer. The routine I've settled into has been, one, I do most of my writing in the nearby university library, which is only about a mile and a half from my home. It is beautiful, inspiring, and mostly empty over the summer. Doug, I've been doing the same thing here this summer. I did a lot of work at Dartmouth, and I was in the tower room again today. It's empty. It's motivating. I love it. All right, two, I write there in the mornings, usually for 90 minutes to two hours. I don't set a timer. That's just about how long I usually maintain a flow state session. Three, to get there and back, I willingly walk even in the Atlanta heat. I choose a route that takes me through a nature preserve on the grounds of the university. And then through the prettiest part of campus, it takes about 30 minutes each way. That whole routine is incredibly productive for me without feeling like work whatsoever. The time, place, and mode of transportation makes it feel like an indulgent choice of how to spend my time rather than work. This deep summer has been incredibly satisfying. It's funny. Everybody I know is worried about me. I haven't done any of the things teachers usually do over the summer, so people are worried that I'm bored and depressed, and they're surprised when I tell them it's been one of my favorite Summers ever. All right, mea culpa, Doug, you say here that the writing you're doing is for a blog, which I think might be exactly one of those cases I was talking about where you don't necessarily have To worry about publication. You are enjoying the craft of writing, you're getting better on your own pace, and you're, you're your creative circuits. This reminds me a little bit of the engineered wonder we talked about in the deep dive, right? I mean, it's a little bit over the top, which is what's good. 30 minutes, beautiful library, two hours, isolation, flow state. I mean, I think you're getting benefits right now that might be completely unrelated to the writing. And then you add on top of that the benefits of having a creative outlet during this quiet season in your year. So I am OK that you're saying I don't want to right now waste a lot of time trying to get better with publication because your goal here is not I want to be a published novelist or like a well-known Columnist. So my rant before doesn't apply to you, Doug, but does apply to other people who heard that and were thinking like, yeah, I want to be a professional writer, but I shouldn't have to submit Things. That takes too much time away from my writing. That's who I was talking to. But Doug, your deep summer sounds delightful. A great example of lifestyle-centric planning and a great example of engineered wonder, that idea that we talked about in the show's opening. ([Time 0:51:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fc4b8517-3480-49af-9b1b-2589f25a89b6)) - **Uncertainty About AI Impact** - Conflicting AI narratives show no one truly understands AI's real impact yet. - Tune out sensational headlines; focus on tangible AI changes relevant to your work, as companies exaggerate AI's current automation abilities. Transcript: Cal Newport We usually in the final segment talk about something that I am reading. Today, I want to talk about something that I'm writing. This is an email that went out to my newsletter at calnewport.com last week. It was called No One Knows Anything About AI. If you're not subscribed to my newsletter, calnewport.com, each week I have an essay about the type of ideas we talk about here on the show. So I wanted to read a couple excerpts from this essay, because it gets at a topic we talked about a couple times already briefly in the show in recent months. So I began this essay by saying, I want to present you with two narratives about AI. Both of them are about using this technology to automate computer programming, but they point toward two very different conclusions. So the first narrative that I emphasize in this article is the idea that computer programming is very well suited for large language models because programming is basically well-structured Text and models are good at producing that. It's also easy to train models on it because you can compile the code that it outputs. And if it works, give it a good reinforcement learning signal. And if it doesn't, a bad. So it's really like the best case scenario for training language models. And so this one scenario says it's doing great and programming is basically being taken over by AI. Here's a few quotes I put to support that narrative. The CEO of the AI company, Perplexity, said that new AI programming tools have cut the time for his engineers to complete tasks from three to four days down to one hour. He now mandates that all of his employees use it. An article in Inc. Said the world of software engineering AI has changed everything. Another article says the tech sector has seen 64,000 job cuts this year due to AI advancement. And they point out Microsoft in particular had many thousands of those cuts because of AI advancements. There was a big new splashy Atlantic piece that said the computer science bubble is bursting. This is my academic home because AI, it says in this article, is ideally suited to replace the very type of person who built it. So why bother learning computer science? So you read these type of things, there's dozens of these articles every day, and you say, yeah, okay, computer programmers are rapidly going to weigh a telegraph operator. This is the first place where AI is having a huge seismic disruption. But as I point out in the article, there's a completely different narrative out there, depending on what articles you read and what experts you're quoting. So for example, just a couple of weeks ago, the AI evaluation company Metr, M-E released the results of a randomized control trial where they took two groups of experienced open source Software developers and they said, great, here's a bunch of tasks, programming tasks for you to do. Group A, use AI tools. Group B, don't. And guess what? I'm going to quote the paper here. Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without. AI makes them slower. Meanwhile, we're getting all these quotes from experienced developers who use these tools. We're like, yeah, they're useful. But this idea that they are, like the tech leaders are saying, about to take over all programming jobs, like this is preposterous. Simon Willison said, quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw. The tech CEO, Nick Ky, said the following, responding to the claim that the number of people required to produce software is drastically reducing. He said, I feel like I'm being gaslit every time I read this, and I worry it makes folks early in their software development journey feel like it's a bad time investment. Okay, but what about like Microsoft firing 9,000 people because now the AI can do their jobs? Not what happened? Take a closer look at their press release. What's going on? Yes, they cut a lot of jobs across many different divisions, not because they were replacing those jobs with AI automation, but because they were trying to free up funds to invest in Their AI divisions, in particular, to invest more money into the help pay for the huge expense of running these AI data centers. So yeah, technically speaking, it's correct that Microsoft fired 9,000 people due to AI advancements, but not because they were replaced by AI, but because their work on AI advancements Is so damn expensive. Same thing with the computer science major bubble bursting. Later on in that same Atlantic article, they noted there's another reason why those majors might be down. The tech market started contracting after the pandemic because there had been a lot of spending in the tech industry during the pandemic, and now they're cutting back. And as a professor said in that Atlantic article, enrollment in the computer science major has historically fluctuated with the job market. And prior to clients have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than when they started. This was my first exposure to computer science when I was a young computer science undergraduate in the early 2000s. The 2001.com boom had happened. Money was contracting. And you know what happened to computer science majors? Everyone was worried, like, oh, my God, where all the majors go? And then they came back, and then they went down again during the Great Recession. Then they came back. It just goes up and down. So what's the point here? Let me read my conclusion. I'm not trying to bow, like, hey, which of these is right? Here's what I want to say about there being two completely different narratives on the same topic, all from the same two or three weeks I'm pulling these quotes. When it comes to AI's impacts, we don't yet know anything for sure. But this isn't stopping everyone from pretending like we do. So here's my advice for the moment. Tune out both the most heated and the most dismissive rhetoric. Focus on tangible changes in areas that you care about that really do seem connected to AI. Read widely and more importantly, ask people you trust about what they're actually seeing. That, follow AI news with a large grain of salt. All this is too new for anyone to really understand what they're saying. AI is important, but we don't yet fully know why. So there you go, Jesse. I just thought it was really interesting that I could find a huge number of articles saying one thing and a huge number of articles saying the other thing. And it's not like these are sequenced. We used to think this and now our opinion changed. These are almost all from the same two week period. Right. So headlines are getting out of control when it comes to AI. ([Time 0:59:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9dd42337-c4cc-426c-a03d-2adbb6ec0c86))