Call the F**king Vatican
A framework for learning, understanding, and finding the truth.
Post summary
We live in a world where its easier than ever to get information (think Google and ChatGPT).
That’s great overall—but easy information is often inaccurate, lacks context, and is easily forgettable.
If you want to learn and understand something deeply, there’s a better framework. I use it in my work and break it down here.
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The post
It’s easier than ever to get information. This has many upsides—but easy information also has downsides.
I experienced how effortless information can give us an incomplete picture of reality when I worked Esquire magazine in my early 20s.
This was around 2010. A senior editor pulled me into the conference room to teach me how to find better information.
That editor had given me a strange reporting assignment. I was to find out how much money the Pope makes.
So I dove in on the project. I searched around the internet and read a few stories, then I emailed my editor the research file so he could pass it off to a writer.
I got an immediate email response. “Meet me in the conference room in five minutes.”
It was the end of the day, and my editor was sitting at the head of a long table. I could see down the barrel of 8th avenue as I entered the glass-walled conference room in Midtown Manhattan.
I took a chair. My editor took far too long to speak.
Before I tell you what he said—which has shaped my thinking and helped me get better information ever since—let’s consider information and how it’s changing.
On Monday, we learned how humans are wired to explore.
I see exploration as a search for information that can improve our lives. One Harvard scientist told me that humans are “informavores: creatures that search for and digest information, just like carnivores hunt and eat meat.”
We used to have to “go there” to get information. We had to see things in person, have experiences, and speak to others. Today, however, how we get information is changing—and not always for the better. We’ll cover:
Just how much information we now consume (the numbers are … wow).
The upsides and downsides of having so much access to information.
A framework that’s helped me get better information and make better decisions.
The Age of T.M.I.
Here’s a stat the stopped me in my tracks: Some scholars estimate that in one day the average person is now exposed to more information than a person in the 1400s encountered in their entire lifetime.
It sounds unfathomable—until you consider that the average person spends 12 to 13 hours engaged with digital devices.
Even up to 200 years ago, information was still relatively scarce. It largely came from our immediate environment and what our senses could take in, in person, in the present moment.
If we wanted new information, we had to get it through a mind-body effort.
But we can now search for information and advice anytime, any place, up to the second, and get the information we seek in a millisecond in a more controlled, comfortable, inactive, mediated setting.
Google spits out answers to any question we can dream up. There are millions of hits for diet and exercise, productivity and personal relationships, what products we should buy and what stocks we should invest in, and where we should go to dinner and what movie we should watch.
The phenomenon extends to our most profound questions, like how we can avoid death and why life exists.
But it also oozes down to the most mundane details of life and dumb questions that bounce about our neurons. Here’s one of my favorite (super dumb) examples: