so today I want to talk about one of the most important skills you can have as a human something that I think mo most of the uh the most interesting successful and impactful people I know are very good at and I'm talking about thinking now this may sound stupid at first because we all think all the time our minds are worrying all the time if anything our problem is getting away from our own thoughts but when I say think here I mean something very specific i mean giving sustained attention to potentially complicated or ambiguous information with the ultimate goal of building a new conceptual structure that has value to yourself or to the world this is what I mean by thinking now here's the thing most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking the way most people go through their lives is as follows first they outsource any sort of normative or ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and approval i don't know what does my team think do they do they like this they don't like this what's going to get me not yelled at what's going to get me approved that's about as far as I want to go trying to actually build up some sort of framework for understanding what I stand for what's good and what's bad most people prioritize a sort of high energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions of real understanding and appreciation they want to just feel something and often their phone can give them that something quite easily they don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with something beautiful most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment towards checklist productivity just give me like a list of things I can follow where the the key here is that the information is scarce and I have a special list of things to do and then I'll be in great shape or then my web business will take off or then I'll make you know six figures per month just give me checklist i want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to produce things that are unambiguously valuable serious thinkers live differently they have a deep and evolving understanding of the world what's good what's bad and what it means to live a good life they appreciate the beautiful they appreciate the quality and they find inspiration in it their output is often slower but when it does come out it's more impact and it engenders more respect so if you're interested in the deep life serious thinking needs to be a goal that you are pursuing so here's what I want to do today is help you become a more serious thinker and I want to do that in a practical way i have five different practices each of these are concrete that I want to run through these are all things you can start doing right away in your own life that if you stick with them you will find after a month your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before after six months the experience of your day-to-day life is going to be notably different and richer and after a year or so you're going to find yourself actually able to uh produce ideas for yourself in the world that have real value you really are going to unlock major options so it's worth becoming a serious thinker let's go through five practices for how to do it i'm going to illustrate for those of you who are watching instead of just listening by popular demand I will uh I will illustrate what we're doing here so on the screen I'm going to put in the center my world famous picture of a brain so what we got here is the cerebellum and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain so I have a brain in the center and I'm going to uh illustrate around this i'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going to discuss all right so the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease the quantity of information that you consume so to illustrate this with an icon I'm going to expertly draw here the Twitter T i know they've switched to X but I sort of am boycotting that so I'm drawing a T and I'm putting a uh a circle with a line through it i'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information so what does this mean i'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things about the world stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow social media algorithms are bad curators their interest is not making you as informed as possible their interest is making you as engaged and possible to make you as engaged and possible they are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy it's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues i want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption so I want your news and information uh consumption to be divided over three scales daily monthly and seasonal and here's what I mean by that daily have a very small number probably just one sources of quality non-algorithmically curated news and information this could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters i like for example if you're a subscriber to the New York Times I think David Leanhart's daily news summary is a fantastic one i'm saying this mainly because they they featured my my profile from the New York Times magazine from last year they reffatured it recently in that newsletter so we know that's expertly curated it could be a daily news roundup podcast it could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered okay at the monthly scale you spend the time to go through a collection of let's say two to six in-depth long form magazine articles so now this is still relatively current but not day-to-day current this is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in the world and produce and have edited a long form piece now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on this is where for example you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home which is the New Yorker maybe you pull out some long form articles from the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or the National Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue whatever it is that you particularly follow could be print could be not print tablet magazine i'm just think of different things I've pulled from before and you're like "Here's my six articles I've gathered throughout the month 3,000 5,000word beast i'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere i've got these printed out let's just engage at this slower scale deeper understanding slower scale now we jump up to the seasonal scale and this is books when there's something going on in the world you care about you should get a book written by an expert someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic and you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two that is going to give you uh as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic uh as you're ever likely to get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself so you should at the seasonal scale have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going on in the world that is most important to you so let's let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for a spin with a particular topic and let's compare it to what most people would normally do let's talk about fears about AI now what you could do which is what most people do is let me read a lot of tweets and hysteric YouTube videos and short articles on the online news sites they're all like "Oh my god Google Gemini is doing this chat GPT just did that sam Alman just said this." And there's this sort of just frenzied sense of uh I'm just like very uneasy and I don't know what's going on and and I'm kind of stressed all the time what would it look like to engage this topic with a multis-cale information consumption approach well you would be getting daily information when something important happened it would be covered in whatever your highquality non-algorithmically curated source of news would be when Sam Alman for example got fired and then rehired David Lee and Hart's newsletter covered that so you would get the main points you're subscribed to Axios's daily news roundup you would get the main points then on the seasonal scale you could actually say "Let me let me sit down with for example the New Yorker's recent AI issue and read some of these longer form pieces let me sit down and listen to uh you know Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently with uh Casey Kevin Roose and Casey Newuhof I think um and they just let's spend an hour and 20 minutes just sort of walking through what we know maybe you go back and finally read my New Yorker piece on the the guts of how chat GPT actually works this is not so frenzied this is more digested information like okay I'm getting some deeper sense of what's going on and on the scale of a season you say I'm going to read uh a book about artificial intelligence maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in society and now get like a really measured deeper understanding of it that is how multiscale information consumption works serious thinkers are going to consume information that way they have no interest for algorithmically curated social media information uh the same thing though applies i'm going to say this in improvement of quality decreasing a quantity we can think of this also applying to other types of information as well uh think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services to increase the quality of that simple heruristic one to one ratio fun smart if I watch a movie that is just pure fun I want to watch something that's going to challenge me either artistically this is a a a wellrespected movie or informationally it's a documentary on something that's complicated but I want to know about it uh onetoone ratio so that the quality of what you're engaging in the streaming media gets better you can do the same thing with podcast here's a fun podcast one to one ratio with something that I'm learning from etc all right practice number two increase your comfort with boredom so let's draw a picture for this one as Well I'm going to draw here is a rock all right there we go and uh sitting on this rock we see someone contemplating jesse appreciates my artwork increase comfort with boredom what is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices if your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored that when it lacks novel stimuli you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone or an iPad or a browser tab that's going to give you something emotionally salient in the moment it can't tolerate serious thinking because serious thinking requires you to keep your attention sustained this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic that's boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli your brain has to be comfort with boredom so by increasing your comfort with boredom you're just teaching your brain it's not that you're bored all the time it's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom it's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not and I'm comfortable with that state of boredom so how can you do this uh two things I'm going to suggest one actually have every day a particular outing or chore or task you do it can be short but a particular thing you do without your phone go to the drugstore go put in your laundry it doesn't have to be long taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear so you're like "Okay I'm just doing this activity it's there's novel stimuli here i'm just kind of having to be alone with my own thoughts." A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the weekends hour plus no phone so you can ramp that up over the weekend the other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method the idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live you keep your phone plugged in in one place if you have a house with a foyer it's in the foyer or it's in the kitchen if you have an apartment whatever but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place if you need to look something up you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there if you need to receive or text with someone you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there same with phone calls you have to go to where the phone is it is not where you are now this is going to be annoying at first but what you're doing here is severing this permanent accessibility of the distraction so now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own apartment you can't pull out the phone it's somewhere else you still have the benefits of I need to look this thing up but you have to walk 10 feet to go do it you're going to get more mini moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker all right third thing I want to suggest here third practice for becoming a more serious thinker cultivate your ability to pay attention so I'll illustrate this here you won't know at first what this means so provocatively what I'm drawing here is stopwatch is there something on the top Jesse i don't know let's do this perfect rendition of a stopwatch why am I drawing a stopwatch because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training so actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single target these intervals should be intense you only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration right so what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention so the previous practice getting a comfort for boredom we think of that as the uh table stakes the foundation your mind has to be okay with not having lost stimuli this practice now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus the actual activity of sustaining attention so you have to be able to do it and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like so with interval training you can do this with multiple activities could be a difficult work or school activity it can also be and I think this is critical a high quality leisure activity like watching a movie which a lot of people especially young people right now have a very hard time doing for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone it's going to be a high quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity could be reading a book even anything that requires focus you start with an interval that you're comfortable with keep it small at first maybe even just 10 minutes you use a real timer set that timer it might as well do it on your phone by the way because you want your phone right there in timer mode so you know for a fact if you use your phone because you've left the timer mode on your phone set that timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task watch that movie or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster zero checks of anything screened outside of your target until that timer goes off if you break that concentration and say "I just have to check Twitter uh I just have to see what's going on my text messages." You have to start that timer and start it over it doesn't count once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration you increase it by 10 minutes okay so this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at sustaining attention on cognitive tasks the absence of stimuli sustaining the attention you gota just train your brain what that you got to train your brain what that feels like okay uh another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your uh ability to pay attention is more passive which is care about ritual care about environment set up this is where I go to read and it's it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV i've set up like a very special chair and I have this light here and it's it's by like a warm radiator in the winter this is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email i have a separate part of my house i went up to the attic and I've renovated an eve there and that's where I go to do deep work and it's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are i have a ritual I do before uh you know I watch a hard movie i I I do a thing to get my mind into that mode should I listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode combine that with interval training all right let's go to our looking at my list here let's go to our fourth our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker our fourth practice I should say and this is going to be strengthen your working memory so I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking jesse loves my art and this person is thinking about all sorts of things why am I drawing a person walking because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation it's an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book Deep Work with productive meditation you take a professional problem or it could be a complicated personal problem but a clear complicated problem you go for a walk and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head the walking helps you do this if you're just sitting and thinking it's much more difficult but the walking actually quiets some noises in your cognitive circuit so it's a little bit easier to focus and every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make progress on in your head you notice that wandering and you move your attention back to the problem this forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head and trying to manipulate it and generate new information based on it you can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise this is directly increasing your working memory strength your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold on to them in your mind's eye this piece but also this piece and this piece is over here here and how do these things relate and then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before working memory is at the core of deep thoughts most people have a bad working memory however because we're not used to holding a lot of stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye productive meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this problem it gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here all right we got one more practice to help you become a a serious thinker let me draw one more picture so this final practice I'm going to say it this way practice being intellectual and so let's see let's draw our stick figure person here so how do we know this person is intellectual um oh wait it's not going to work i'm going to draw him in a turtleneck but he needs a neck Jesse that's the problem so let me give him a neck my stick figure person there we go give him a big neck here french accent i probably will give him a beret as well and a pipe yeah so there you go turtleneck because he's an intellectual all right uh beret because he's an intellectual and a pipe there you go practice being an intellectual now I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe because intellectual is often used in modern uh conversation as a porative term but there's also a very specific and positive meaning here it's a stance towards the world of information in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety you're also seeking out integration of information into complex understandings that you already have so to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information trying to master it and integrate it now if you do this for a living like I do if you're a professor they teach you how to do this i mean this is what you do for a living but we don't talk enough about everyone else how do you practice this intellectual stance an intellectual approach to the world of information i'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do and it's going to make you literally seem much smarter the first is pairing primary and secondary sources pairing secondary and primary sources okay here's what here's what this means it's most obvious with books so you want to read a great book let's say I want to read the Odyssey uh I want to read Joyce i want to read Apsilon Absilon the typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have which is flawed because they forgot their own training is they say just read it just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life but that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance and complicate it what you should do instead is say okay let me now get before I read this hard book a secondary source now secondary source mean it's a book about the book so here is a book about why Faulner is important or why Absilon Absilon is important here is a book about the the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote the Odyssey and why this is such an important book i'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself you're now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it what you're looking for what's important about it and this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level you might not understand everything you saw in a secondary source and and you might not come away saying "I completely understand this book or has changed my life but you've practiced reading multiple layers below the surface." See when we just tell people read the great books go to the the museums and you'll just be inspired we really are selling them short because that ex that experience of inspiration requires you seeing multiple layers below the surface and you got to practice that secondary sources first same thing with museums i do not like this idea when parents have of like all that's important is that we expose our child to art museums and then they'll love art they're not going to come away from that loving art what you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of an art museum so they'll seem cultured if they're around other people staring at paintings does not make you a lover of paintings reading about those paintings who was this artist why was this important what was happening when before when this artist came along what was the historical context or turmoil created by this painting and then you go and see the artifact you have a completely different relationship with it so you could teach kids even let me give you some basic information who was Jackson Pollock like what was going on with the abstract expressionist like what was what were they fighting against why was this so exciting if you lived in uh Soho in 1942 like what was happening here and then you see this artifact and it's uh it's a different experience it's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's uh ruby slippers what's exciting about the ruby slippers is not just they're shiny but it's like those were the things in Wizard of Oz that was a really important movie and this was this famous person wore them that context helps so you get in the habit of doing this you can do it with art you can do it with books you can do it with movies i do this all the time let me read a uh five reviews about this movie not like contemporary but people looking back it's a great movie let me people looking back and writing essays about this movie uh Roger Eert did a lot of this later on he went back and wrote this series of essays about the great movies the Guardian over in the UK does a lot of this they'll they'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier and then you go and watch the movie it's a completely different experience it could be modern movies could be older movies you read about for example center focusing and then you watch George Miller's uh Mad Max Fury Road it's a completely different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on without that type of knowledge about the cinematography secondary sources paired with primary sources this is what academics do during their training they read and write their own secondary sources based on these primary sources so it becomes second nature seeing levels below the surface on all sorts of things but if you're not going to a doctorate program you're not getting this training you have to do it yourself really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual maintain idea documents these are actual documents you maintain like a Microsoft Word file just in your own personal files or if you're a good handwriter you could do this in journals and you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own worlds of your be words of your best understanding of that topic now these can be just general sort of timeless topics like I'm interested in stoic philosophy and I have this document I build out and add to about what stoic philosophy is who the thinkers are what their thoughts major thoughts are your current summary of how you're thinking about stoicism being in your own life you are through writing consolidating information structuring information now again this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally but you have to practice it so writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it you can do the same thing with current event topics as well there's something going on in the world that you care about you're like I don't know this this scares me or interests me or just it feels important to me create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why this is a fantastic way to free yourself from the uh emotional ping-pong game of just let me expose myself to social media or algorithmic content let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad about the other tribe it gets you out of that trap and allows you to begin building your own understanding of things you're worried about AI start building out this document like here's what's going on here's the main types of AI here's where things are here's a list of thinkers and like where they stand and this thinker is against this thinker organize your thoughts you're uh really worried or upset or conflicted or or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East build out a document shut down Twitter build out a document here's what's going on i mean this is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here i really worry about this but this I don't know how this is making me feel bad as well and there's this argument doesn't quite work and here's why you're talking about arguments and where it falls short for me where it resonates build idea documents as a way of structuring to write is to think so to write about what matters is to help you think about what matters and your brain gets used to organizing information in the conceptual structures so you actually have to practice being an intellectual all right so if you do these five things all of which I've uh beautifully illustrated here you begin uh improving the the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information that you consume you get comfort uh comfort with boredom you do interval training for just maintaining your concentration you do particular training to strengthen your working memory and you actually practice engaging information as an intellectual you can become a much more serious thinker it's not something you just choose to do it's not something you're just born to do or not it's something you cultivate and hopefully if you're a listener of the show you do agree that this is worth cultivating because I think it is you see someone who's doing something cool they're probably a serious thinker you see someone who's done really well for themselves they probably have the way to do serious thought and in this case maybe it's applied to a business issue an a strategy but there's serious thought going on there you see someone who just has a really interesting engaged life they're probably a serious thinker they appreciate this they can go to the movies and and and love the experience they have things they're deeply engaged then your brain is your number one portal to the world then if you train that brain to be a serious thinker your experience of the world changes the techno color the font gets smaller the uh clarity gets much increased it's just a different sort of improved experience with life so train it train that thinking and you will get better at