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How AI Can Actually Help Your Critical Thinking, not Hurt It

Jan 19, 2026

Join Christian Ulstrup, an Applied AI practitioner and consultant, as he dives into the intriguing intersection of AI and critical thinking. Christian argues that AI, rather than dulling our intellect, can enhance our thinking by compressing digital exhaust into actionable insights. Discover his innovative Walk and Talk Framework, which helps users provoke deep thought through AI-generated questions. They also tackle the potential of AI in education, advocating for project-based learning to adapt to a rapidly changing world.

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INSIGHT

Writing Is Mostly Thinking

Writing is primarily thinking, not typing, and quality comes from original thought.
Use AI as a compressor and thought partner to distill your own raw material into higher-quality output.

ADVICE

Compress Your Digital Exhaust First

Gather your digital exhaust (transcripts, emails) and feed it into a large-context model to compress themes.
Ask the model for extremely precise, hard-hitting questions and use them to surface transformative insights.

INSIGHT

Models Pull You Toward The Known

LLMs are a compressed representation of prior data and will pull you toward the known center of that distribution.
Venture to the frontier with unmediated thinking first, then use AI to refine what you discovered.

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I’m deeply worried about humanity losing our critical thinking skills. We’ve seen it degrade in the social media era, and now we’re seeing people wholesale outsource it in the AI era.

But what if we can actually enhance our critical thinking with AI? I’m too much of a skeptic to tackle this topic on my own, which is why I brought in Christian Ulstrup, who’s doing some truly interesting things in the AI space.

We talk about how AI is changing the education space, how we work, and why we should look to classic philosophers, like Aristotle, for the answers to how we should approach AI.

The Walk and Talk Framework

Want a great way to use AI? Use Christian’s Walk and Talk Framework:

Gather Your "Digital Exhaust": First, collect the raw data you've already produced.
The AI Prompt: Copy and paste your text into a large-context model (like Google AI Studio) and use this specific prompt:
1. "I want you to pose to me three extremely precise, very hard-hitting questions, all of which are independent and have different coverage, that if sufficiently answered, would yield some kind of transformative, genuinely novel, impactful insight. Please make reference to the primary source material where appropriate in the context of the question."
The "Thinking" Phase
1. Don't look at the questions yet.
2. Copy them into a mobile notes app and go for a way
3. Read only the first question.
4. Open a Voice Memo and monologue your answer. Don't worry about being polished—mumble, ask yourself follow-up questions, and grapple with the idea until you feel you've reached a breakthrough.
5. Repeat for the remaining questions.
Distill the Insight

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