A few weeks back, I was down near Phoenix and swung out to talk to the Chicago Cubs and the Arizona Diamondbacks who were in the middle of Spring Training.
These are elite athletes. Preparing for the talk, I was thinking about just how hard it is to do what these professional baseball players do. Hitting a baseball almost defies physics. The amount of time you have between when you decide to swing and when the ball crosses the plate is almost nothing. It is nearly physically impossible. That’s why so few people can actually do it. And even the people who can do it can only do it maybe three or four out of ten times. It is one of the hardest things in sports.
But it struck me, as I was sitting in the cafeteria after, helping myself to a prepared, perfectly portioned, macro-balanced plate of eggs with turkey bacon and fresh fruit, and chatting with some of the players, that while they spend enormous amounts of time thinking about their diet and nutrition and they have some of the best people in the world helping them optimize what they put in their bodies, they think a lot less about what goes into their brains.
In fact, many of them—like the rest of us—are injecting straight garbage on a daily basis.
We are, after all, flooded with more information than entire civilizations could have produced, let alone imagined.
The key practice in the modern world is not how to consume all of it, but how do we decide what not to consume? How do we stay informed about what’s happening without overwhelming ourselves with distractions? How do we manage our information diet with the same discipline that we would put towards our actual diet? Because just as what we put in our bodies matters, what we put—or fail to put—in our minds matters too.
Presidents of the United States face this problem most acutely. The president famously gets what is known as the Presidential Daily Briefing, typically three pages of top-secret information about international developments and concerns, delivered, as the name implies, daily, with in-person explanations and summaries. The best presidents listen intently, ask questions, and then apply what they’ve learned to their day-to-day decisions.
But we live in a world where the President doesn’t read this carefully curated document assembled by intelligence agencies and experts, and instead prefers to get his news from social media…and not just any social media network but one made up of his biggest, more ideologically zealous fans. If this bubble were not enough, there are also reports that he employs a special assistant whose job it is every day to bring him printed-out positive articles about himself to keep his spirits up.
Elon Musk is another example of how what you consume can warp you. He went from reading rocket manuals and reasoning from first principles to obsessively refreshing his Twitter feed. A man who could pay for a daily briefing rivaling even the most powerful heads of state instead mainlines information from trolls and pundits and conspiracy theorists.
This mirrors the problem we all face. We have access to the kind of information that emperors could have only dreamed of. This is real power, but as always, power corrupts and disorients and distracts. We have more information than emperors could have dreamed of. We are also subjected to moremisinformation than they could have conceived of in their worst nightmare.
Audio. Video. Text. It comes at us at incomprehensible speeds.
It takes discipline and wisdom to manage your information diet properly, to be a discerning and selective conduit for everything that’s coming at you.
Almost certainly, your information diet has too much real-time information in it. The news. The feeds. The notifications. Almost certainly, you would be better off if you read more books. If you focused on information with a longer half-life.
Personally, I prefer a steady diet of books about history and human nature (here’s a list of timely books I put together for 2026). They’re not all fun and sunshine—there’s plenty of darkness, too—but I learn far more from that than from endless scrolling. I’m deliberate about which chats and texts I participate in and who I spend time with. In programming, there’s a saying: “garbage in, garbage out.” I try to let in the opposite of garbage, because that leads to the opposite of garbage out.
“The art of not reading is a very important one,” Schopenhauer said of avoiding popular rubbish. It’s not how much you know, but that you know the right things. It’s not that you read, it’s what and how you read. “Do not be eager to know everything,” Democritus reminded himself in the fifth century BC, “lest you become ignorant of everything.”
Go straight to the source when you can. Check sources always.
Choose quality over quantity.
Find experts you can trust. Verify them first.
Favor information that has staying power over what is “developing” or “just in.” Try to get the big picture. Try to make connections between what’s happening now and what has happened before.
Seek out things that challenge you. Hear what the other side has to say.
Pay attention to where misery, negativity, dysfunction, and chaos sneak into your life. Ask yourself, when was the last time X or Instagram left you feeling informed. Reddit? Cable news in an airport? If it isn’t leaving you calmer or wiser, maybe it’s time to cut it off at the source.
You don’t have to be uninformed—just be intentional about what you consume and who you engage with.
The best hitters in baseball will tell you that what separates the good from the great, at the highest level, is plate discipline. It’s the ability to lay off pitches. To not swing the bat. To be discerning.
That skill applies here too. The feeds. All the hot takes. The notifications. The group chats. The breaking news. Most of it is designed to get a reaction out of you, not to make you wiser or better informed. You need to cultivate the discipline to lay off the junk. To not take in everything thrown on your plate. To discern what’s worth your time and what’s designed to get a rise out of you. To swing only at the right pitches.
Because you are what you eat. And what you read, what you watch, what you let into your information diet.
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