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01/23/2026

Asked about his experience of being homeschooled as a child, Oculus and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey replies:

“I was really lucky . . . there were [a lot] of things where I was interested for my own reasons and very good at self-directed learning. I read thousands of books before I was 13. Literally thousands of books.”
What kinds of books?

“Everything,” Palmer replies. “The classics, science fiction, The Art of the Deal — the entire gamut of everything that you would want. I was checking out lots of books from the library. Also lots of people gave me books. Everyone knew that Palmer liked to read so people would sometimes buy me new books but more often adult friends would just dump massive quantities of books.”

Palmer’s mom was also on Barnes & Noble’s registry for teachers:

“She had the educator’s discount for buying stuff from Barnes & Noble. I forget what the discount was but it was some extraordinary discount. Barnes & Noble did a lot for teachers — especially back then. And so I just read, and read, and read, and read . . . I loved science. I loved engineering. I loved chemistry. Math — like real math — I was never really a fan.”P

01/17/2026

“The general rule here is that we humans do more of anything that is made easier. So if the friction level gets reduced, we do more of that thing.”

This is why Jeff believes the Kindle is so important:

“I can tell you that the people who buy a Kindle read 4x as many books in the 12 months after they’ve bought the Kindle than they did in the 12 months prior to buying the Kindle. And the reason is we’re reducing the friction of reading”

He continues:

“I’m really excited about long-form reading because I think we humans learn different things from long-form than we can learn from short-form. When you read a novel or a biography, you actually do get to live another life, and you learn things that are unlearnable in any kind of short form — whether it be a movie or a TV show or a blog post or a song. You learn different things.”

01/17/2026

Expanding on his information diet, the a16z cofounder says AirPods have been the single biggest technological leap:

“They’re the unlock for me for audiobooks, podcasts, and interviews. I’m doing audio content probably 2-3 hours per day — getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, all the drive time . . . If nothing else is going on, I’m always listening to something.”

Text-to-speech has also been an unlock with apps like Substack, NaturalReader, and Apple’s audiobooks — “It sounds spectacular,” Marc says, “[AI voice technology] is really starting to work.”

Marc uses podcasts and YouTube interviews to go down rabbit holes on topics, but otherwise he’s trying to get back to audiobooks:

“I try to get back to audiobooks as much as possible, and the reason is audiobooks are my opportunity to really learn a new area that I probably don’t know anything about. And so if I can scrape aside 10-20 hours of audio time for a period of history or something like that, I can really go deep on it.”

Marc generally tries to barbell his information intake:
“It’s either stuff that’s super current or it’s stuff that’s timeless. I’m basically trying to not read anything that’s from yesterday through like 10 years ago. I’m trying to be super current, and the form of being super current is talking to people who are currently experts or it’s Twitter. Then for timeless, that’s almost all books, but I kind of go back and forth between these modes.”

He continues:

“I’m either listening to a book that’s usually on history or a biography or something like that or some new domain that I’m trying to learn. Or I’m up to the minute on what’s happening in AI today.”

01/12/2026

“I’d encourage people to read a lot of books. Basically try to ingest as much information as you can and develop good general knowledge so you at least have a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape. Try to learn a little bit about a lot of things. How would you know what you’re really interested in if you’re not doing a broad peripheral exploration of the knowledge landscape? . . . Then try to find an overlap of your talents and what you’re interested in.”

01/09/2026

28 year old Steve Jobs predicts the future of books

“When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers,” Steve begins. “And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was books because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote and I didn’t have an intermediary in the way.”

He continues:

“A book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. But the problem was that you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think as we look towards the next 50-100 years — if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around — maybe if he or she carries around one of these machines with them his or her whole life and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone, we can ask the machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.”

Introducing Perch, the first reading app for the internet.Download on iOS or Android via perch.app to dive into your fav...
02/20/2025

Introducing Perch, the first reading app for the internet.

Download on iOS or Android via perch.app to dive into your favorite blogs and newsletters - completely free!

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