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 med...

For forty years, across nine presidencies, America kept returning to the Middle East — convinced, each time, that this administration would finally get it right. It never did. In this episode, we dig into Grand Delusion, a fantastic book by Steven Simon — a former Reagan and Obama insider who had a ringside seat to four decades of foreign policy. The book traces a chilling pattern: each president...

We live in a time where information is endless, but clarity is rare. You scroll, consume, react… and still feel like you’re going nowhere. In this episode, I dive into Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs, a deceptively small book that quietly challenges how we read, think, and live. Jacobs argues for something almost unfashionable today: read old books. Not for nostalgia. Not for intellect...

What if learning did not have to lead to money, status or success? In this episode, I explore "Lost in Thought" - a fantastic book by Zena Hitz and its powerful argument for learning for its own sake. We have turned education into a transaction, constantly asking what it will give us in return. But what happens when you learn simply because you are curious? Drawing from Hitz’s ideas and examples f...

A reflective review of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa. Set in Tokyo’s famous Jimbocho book district, this episode explores heartbreak, healing and the quiet role books play in rebuilding a life. If you enjoy Japanese slice-of-life fiction and stories about bookstores, relationships, and slow personal transformation, this book is for you.

Most self-help books promise success. Scott Adams does the opposite. In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, the creator of Dilbert argues that motivation is unreliable, goals are overrated, and success often comes from building systems instead. In this episode of The BookJelly Podcast, I explore Adams’ unconventional ideas about failure, energy, skill stacking, and why execution ma...

Why do so many famous business books age poorly, while narrative and literary nonfiction continues to endure? In this episode of the BookJelly Podcast, I examine why business nonfiction struggles to remain timeless. Drawing from The Millionaire Next Door, Good to Great, and The Intelligent Investor, I argue that business books are bound to data, context, and systems that inevitably decay. In contr...

I avoided *The Millionaire Next Door* for nearly fifteen years. When I finally read it, three decades after its publication, I found a book that still delivers on behavior, but falls short on investing. In this episode, I unpack what the book gets right about quiet wealth, where it feels dated, and why it’s more a sociological study of millionaires than a practical guide to building capital.

Ten years after his passing, this episode revisits Umberto Eco, the novelist, philosopher, semiotician and one of the last true public intellectuals. From his childhood in Fascist Italy to The Name of the Rose, from Foucault’s Pendulum to essay collections like Inventing the Enemy, I explore how Eco studied power, propaganda, conspiracy, and the way meaning shapes the world around us. Eco believed...

In this episode of The BookJelly Podcast, I reflect on three days spent at the Kerala Literature Festival in Kozhikode - my attempt to understand what literary festivals are really meant to do to a reader. I begin with a quiet skepticism I carry into every literary festival. Not cynicism, but doubt. What exactly am I doing here? Are festivals meant to inform us, impress us, validate us, or simply...

Scott Adams is no longer with us. He passed away on January 13, 2026, at the age of 68, after battling stage IV prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. For many of us, Adams was more than the creator of Dilbert. Long before corporate life was dissected by management gurus and LinkedIn influencers, he was quietly documenting how organizations actually functioned, not as they claimed to. What...

In this episode of The BookJelly Podcast, I step away from my usual book-led conversations to respond to the moment we are living in. A recent US attack on Venezuela, carried out without UN approval or Congressional authorization, raised an old and uncomfortable question. How restrained is power, really? That question pulled me back to The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg. A book that exposes h...

In this episode of The BookJelly Podcast, I speak about arriving late to a writer. My first sustained encounter with Naguib Mahfouz came not through syllabi or reputation, but almost accidentally, via Salman Rushdie’s Knife. The Quarter, a posthumously discovered collection of short stories set in a single Cairo neighborhood, became my entry point into Mahfouz’s world. I reflect on hesitation towa...

In the concluding part of this book review, we witness how Alfred Lansing created, inadvertently perhaps, a moral parable for courage and leadership. We follow Shackleton’s men through their unimaginable voyage across the Drake Passage and end with the final, hard-won rescue.

What happens when human ambition meets the cold indifference of nature? In Part I of Endurance book review, I explore Alfred Lansing’s breathtaking account of Shackleton’s doomed Antarctic voyage: a story of courage, chaos and the thin line between civilization and survival.

In a world obsessed with maximizing every minute, we’ve mistaken motion for meaning. Our calendars are full, our minds are empty. In this solo episode, I explore how efficiency became the new theology and why silence, slowness and reflection are no longer signs of laziness but acts of quiet rebellion. From monastic scribes to modern “content creators,” from Archimedes’ bath to your own overstuffed...

In this episode, I explore The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israeli Defense Forces by Edward N. Luttwak and Eitan Shamir — a fascinating deep dive into how Israel turned scarcity, improvisation, and urgency into an engine of military innovation.