The BookJelly Podcast is an audible extension of what I try to do at BookJelly — explore books, ideas and the curious ways they shape how we live and think.
While my reviews dissect what’s on the page, the podcast looks beyond it. The medium allows for detours: a stray idea, a passing contradiction, the unpolished thought that never makes it to print. It goes into the larger questions that never fit neatly into a blog post. It’s where I allow my curiosity to wander without an agenda.
The Golden Age of Literature: Why Books from 1870–1930 Still Predict Our Future – The BookJelly Podcast
Marc Andreessen, in 2024, claimed in an X post that there is "so much alpha" in books written between 1870 and 1930. Is he right?
In this episode, I explore one of the most extraordinary periods in literary and intellectual history – a time that gave us Dostoevsky, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, Thorstein Veblen and many others.
From artificial intelligence and social media to status signalling, consumer culture, morality, ambition and technological disruption, these writers wrestled with many of the same questions that define our lives today.
Why do books written more than a century ago still feel startlingly modern? And what can they teach us about navigating an increasingly chaotic world?
- The Golden Age of Literature: Why Books from 1870–1930 Still Predict Our Future
- Grand Delusion | The Book That Reframes 40 Years of American Folly
- Why Reading Old Books Might Save Your Mind
- Lost in Thought: Why Learning Doesn't Need a Payoff
- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop Review
- Scott Adams Was Right: Goals Are for Losers | How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big
- Why Business Nonfiction Ages So Poorly
- The Millionaire Next Door Review
- Remembering Umberto Eco – The Man Who Knew Too Much
- KLF 2026 and My Reflections