Not too many hours after this interview, NBA player Jaylen Brown will talk at MIT’s Media Lab. (It’s his second time.) He’s also spoken across town at Harvard Education School. That’s because, when he’s not on the court for the Boston Celtics, the 22-year-old is finding ways to satisfy his probing curiosity. On this day, it’s innovation and tech. On any other day, it could be playing piano or chess, tearing through a book, or tweeting koans.

“I think it's always been a part of me to ask questions and try to figure out why things are,” says, Brown, who has used a mental skills coach in an attempt to give him an edge. “As early as I can remember, I've always been inquisitive and not afraid to ask questions or to stand alone against a dominant idea.”

Since I spend a fair amount of time asking about books, social media, smartphone use, and the future, I wanted to ask Brown for his thoughts on these things—not just because he seems like someone who is deeply thoughtful about them, but because he has to navigate them while also being a famous basketball player. And sure, that on court job is interesting enough in itself: Brown is the first guy off the bench for an insanely-talented Celtics team that, come the NBA playoffs, will be a title contender if they can get past the sometimes underwhelming play and locker room drama that has shadowed them seemingly all season. But it turned out that his thoughts on everything not-basketball-related were far more interesting—like why we should all try to be more like a frog than a dinosaur, why we can be optimistic about social media, and why his favorite chess opponent is... himself.

Do you remember the first book that had a profound impact on you?

Man, the first books that I fell in love with were the Magic Tree House books. These kids go into a magic tree house and go on these crazy adventures—they're in the Red Sea fighting serpents, they go back in the past two or three thousand years and they're battling sorcerers. It was super dope to me, to be able to read books like that to help take your imagination other places.

What are you reading these days?

I just finished a book called Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito. He is the director of the media lab at MIT. I've spoken at the media lab once before, and I'm actually speaking today as well.

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I've seen you talk about a difference between education and application, and how you have to know how to apply the ideas you learn. What's your process of actually applying a book like that?

I just finished the book last night, after the game, so I've probably got four to five pages worth of notes: stuff I liked, and stuff I'm curious about. They're all in my iPhone. My iPhone and my iPad are linked together, and so even when I type in basketball notes—like my mental notes of how I'm thinking, how I'm feeling at the time—all my notes are in the same note file. You scroll past your MIT notes or your Harvard notes, as you're going through your basketball notes. You'll see all the categories will be there.

What are you talking about at the MIT media lab today?

Basically, one of the topics in the book is emergence over authority. A lot of the time, we accept positions rather than the emergence of creativity that surrounds us. There has to be a top-down type of leadership—like, the queen of the ant farm is the most important [member]—but, in reality, the queen and the worker ants are [equally] important. They both need each other for the pack to survive.