Mission

The best education in the world is free. Nobody told you because no one profits from it.

I did everything I was supposed to do. I went to a competitive high school, worked for the grades, and got into Stanford. For three years I kept doing the same thing: the right classes, the right assignments, the right exams.

Then I realized I wasn't learning. I had become good at school: studying what would be tested, writing what would be graded, and moving on when the quarter ended. What I knew was useful in exactly one place, school. Outside it, almost none of it applied to the decisions that actually mattered: money, people, my health, what to do with my life.

So I took my education into my own hands. I started choosing my own books, on how to think, how markets work, how power works, the body, and how to live, and following each one to the next. Nobody assigned them and nobody graded them, and they taught me more than any test I ever studied for.

I quickly fell in love with the leverage of books. A great book compresses decades of someone's work, sometimes a whole life of it, into a few hundred pages you can read in two days. Nearly every idea worth learning was first written down by the person who worked it out, and almost all of it is available to anyone, for almost nothing. Nothing else I had found returned so much for an hour of attention.

Books let me learn from other people's mistakes without having to make them myself. And because I was reading across disciplines, I started to see the strings connecting them: the same idea turning up in psychology, investing, war and medicine under different names. It works the way AI does. Give a model enough data and it starts to find connections no single example contains. Reading does the same for your brain, except that your brain is far better at it: it connects ideas from much less, and it can tell which connections matter.

Reading also taught me to question things. School had trained me to find the expected answer and give it back. The books argued with each other and with much of what I had been taught, and each one made me ask what I had accepted without checking: whether a confident expert was right, whether a convincing story was evidence, whether a rule I followed was true or only familiar. A degree certifies time spent in a place. It doesn't certify understanding, or the habit of asking why.

I wanted a curriculum that took that leverage further. A serious reading list takes years, and most books spend three hundred pages on thirty pages of ideas. If a book compresses a life into two days, a guide can compress the book into minutes. Each guide states the book's argument, the ideas that change decisions, the evidence behind them, and where they fail, because knowing where an idea breaks is part of understanding it. Nothing stays unless it carries an idea, so you can start where the best thinkers left off and go further.

The list is short and ordered. Books are chosen for how much they change the way you think, not for how popular they are. I have read every book on it myself.

Here's to a new generation of thinkers.