Cal Newport

smart books written by smart people that took a long time to write.

That's your calisthenics for your brain.

It literally changes.

You're a smarter person if you do that versus if you don't.

And the frameworks of understanding are shallower just because it's less time to establish them.

So like in a subset, it's not a bad thing, but what can you do?

You typically have like one idea and like here's something that supports that idea and here's maybe like a different idea and here's why that doesn't work.

And if that's all you're consuming, that becomes your mental model for how knowledge is gained.

And I think we see a lot of this.

I mean, think about internet culture now is much more

And conspiratorial, and I don't mean in the like sort of grand conspiracy theory, which it is, but not just in like the grand conspiracy type of thinking, but in the confidence.

There's this quick jump to confidence where you're like, that's wrong because of this, and boom.

And you think that like this is like the slam dunk case or something like that.

That's a result of not reading a lot of books.

You read a lot of books, you're like, okay, this is way more complicated.

And there's probably a clear truth here, but clear truths are more complex.

Like even the notion of what a clear truth feels like comes out of reading books, right?

Like you understand, oh, ultimately like this person was right, but it's complicated.

And like, yeah, this was not so clear cut.

And this is like a compromise.