The Best Way to Read a Book (That Nobody's Doing)

Yeah, everybody wants it for all their ebooks now. Yeah, me too. >> And guess what? You can have it. >> Um, okay. I'll uh share mine then. Um, thanks Jono. That was super fun and it's interesting for me to see, you know, places of overlap and and difference. Um, so yeah, I used ho um gist to create my book uh directory. Um, I opened up the introduction and you know at the bottom of it um I was like I don't want to read the forward just yet. I'll skip ahead. So just summarize this for me. Um, it's like that wasn't much of a summary at all. I don't know. It's like, oh, it's a the blueprint. It's like, what blueprint? Anyway, uh, I had a I had a couple of backs and forths and got to a quite a a useful summary of um, of the forward. So then I um uh I actually ended up opening pose just as a dialogue um thinking I'd kind of edit things. I didn't end up editing much at all actually. But then what I did was I I grabbed that summary of that I created a bit more manually um and popped it in um here and um wrote that to a a file um called summary zero and then I just said okay go and look up stocks and create a summarized book which and you know should include the sample sum for in context learning use XML tags blah blah blah um and I don't know if I ended up really keeping anything much of that it's always nice to have a starting point so at least to go the imports Um, so read in chapter one. So I kind of like it gave me more of a allin-one thing when I split it into a separate bits and did it each one separately. So then my prompt was like example summary chapter. This actually seemed pretty fine. Um um and then I was like, okay, this kind of thing was just like, okay, stick that in a single gather to do it all at once for me is stuff I can't really be bothered with. So I just said, go ahead and write them all. I've done it a thousand times, which I don't need to do it again. Um so it went ahead and called that function for all of the chapters. Did them all together at once. This is a nice thing about LLMs. You don't have to use a for loop and wait for them. They can do them all at the same time. Um, I always forget this kind of thing. It's like, oh yeah, what do I do now? It's like I just called dot done. It's like, of course, it's not ready. So, again, pretty boring stuff with like just keeping dot every second or so until it's done. Um, it's like, okay, a minute later it's finished and I've got a whole bunch of summaries. Um, and then I took a look at one of them. Well, first of all, I've took a look at the chapter and then I look at the summary and then I find that models are better at reviewing things like this than they are at creating them. So I asked it to have a look um and uh yeah check the size of the reduction. Uh that's that great. Okay. So now summarize. So create a create put all the summaries together into a single string. Uh and now all right summarize part one. So it's much easier for it to summarize summaries I find than it is to summarize a book because it kind of now has the pieces. Um and again it's like okay look at your own summary. Um and uh yeah it identified that there's a whole missing piece around shareholder primacy which I actually agree now that I've read it was an important piece. >> Um so yeah I think I went back and made a few edits but it was basically I hadn't read the book at this point. So there wasn't much I could do other than just checking it looked sensible. Um, so I did a similar thing for part two and uh it showed me how we can check the percentage decrease in each time. So it's an 80% decrease in words for each. We did part three. Um, uh, great. Now take the three part summaries and create a single book summary. Um, I was like, I had a thing of things, you know, let's not actually say what the epilogue says. [laughter] I ended up writing my own epilogue summary. Um, and I was like, h, it's not a very good summary at all. Do it again rather than just a disconnected bunch of stories. And actually, the the new version it created was much better. And I appreciated that it left the uh epilogue just the way I said it. Um so then it kind of cool because now I could grab our entire um launch post and I um popped it in here and asked it to summarize that for me. Um so I was like, "Okay, summarize the launch post." And then um Eric last year flew to Australia and spent a couple of weeks with me. And the main thing we did was we recorded I don't know a dozen plus hours of discussions that we would kind of form as the philosophical heart of the company. Um for me and for him and for everybody else to look at from time to time as needed. So I grabbed some of those and uh uh summarized that as well. Um, so yeah, again went through a few versions of that. Um, and again did it in a similar way because this was a two-hour discussion. So I went through each part and then put the parts together. And so then from all that, um, I just did a bunch of ad messages. And so I've got, in this case, this is chapter one. I've got the whole book summary. I've got the part one summary. And I've got the summary of the previous chapter and the next chapter. I've also got the summary of our launch post and of some of Eric and my discussions. Um, so you can see here is our summary of the launch post. So it describes, you know, Jeremy and Eric launched this thing and this is kind of the analogy and this is who we are and blah blah blah, right? Um, so founding principles. So this is all just the stuff that's been added. So Eric, at this point I'm just going to stop here for a moment and say and so then I also grabbed all the footnotes and I put them at the top so that way it can see it can see the footnotes when we get to them and know how to reference them. And then I was ready to start reading. >> So Eric, I remember your comment when I showed you this. You sounded a little surprised. You're like, "Wow, that's more, you know, >> yeah, complex setup than I was expecting." >> Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't I would it wouldn't have occurred to me like I I'm a big believer I definitely have found it's funny and obviously because we've been working together I have learned that the more context you give the LM the better the results you get and the more you tune the outputs that you want the so I know the principles that you're describing to get this output and yet even I was really surprised I was like oh I see that's a lot more effort than I would have put into preparatory work here instead what I would have done is done something like far easier gotten a halfway a good result, then tried to use it in context and gotten I would have gotten stuck downstream of this and then be like, "Oh, the LM's not good at this. Forget it." Instead of like really having dialed in like this is the information like a person would need >> to be able to help me with this test to be my partner in >> Exactly. That's a great way to think of it. Yeah. >> So, yeah, it was like and it's just so clear to me that most people who are using AI are just not giving the AI nearly enough context. And part of that is because the tools they're using are have are horrendous at context management. So this was it was it was very helpful for me actually to watch how you did it. And >> it's very different isn't it to the kind of standard claude code Gemini whatever thing where people are just like write a piece of software for me or whatever. It's Yeah, it's >> requires a certain amount of respect for the work you're doing to feel like >> and look, I mean, honestly, Eric, it didn't take me long. It was maybe two hours, you know. Uh >> oh, >> compared to time you're going to spend to read a book, it's like two hours to read like to make your reading of a book, you know, dramatically more effective is such a good investment. And yet even even now I'm like two hours that is sounds like kind of a lot, you know. I'm just like funny like if something's not two minutes I'm just like I don't is it really necessary? It's just like what are we doing? I I just Yes. Our attention spans collapse. Um the idea of preparing your workspace >> to do a task is becoming like inconceivable. It's crazy. It >> it feels like that's a a thing that I use Solit. I was explaining this to my housemate. He's like, "Oh, what is Sol?" like, well, the first thing you do in solit set it up as a workspace for the thing you're about to do often, at least for me. And for me, that's that's usually like I made some fast HTML widgets because I like doing that and I made sure the context was there and I put in some pictures of what I'm trying to do and I wrote down the plan. It's it's like the architect sharpening his pencils or Jeremy like preparing his canvas, you know, like it's you're you're putting in all the pieces to say, "Okay, now it's not solvent anymore. It's solid for reading Eric's book, which is a very customized experience that Jeremy's just crafted. >> And then the next time you go there, your desk's all set up. You know, you've got all those pieces. >> Um, and that little investment up front makes it a very different tool to the vanilla case. >> This in the next lesson, too. The level of tool customization, workspace customization that I've I've gotten used to now with Sol It is like really other people find it very extreme when I show it to them. I I I I will say and I I talked to Eric about this earlier today and I was almost embarrassed but he was great about it. So I will say at first I was like oh okay it it's a business book. I know how I read business books. It is a business book. It's a book about businesses. It's about business. And my normal way of reading business books including you know hands up the way I read the lane startup is you know read the first pair par paragraphs of a chapter try to get the general idea scan through to find the key idea keep scanning through to see if there's anything else of interest move to the next chapter or find one of those fivepage business book summaries and read the five pages. Um and the you know and I the lean startup was quite a small book and it had a really important idea but it didn't take very long to get the hang of the idea. Um I don't think this approach to reading would have given me nearly so much if the other business books reading the lean startup but yeah Eric you said you're actually quite pleased to hear that my view is the new book it's dramatically different in in scope and approach and every time I found myself reading something I was like well that sound kind of interesting I wanted to dive deeper and by that stage you had moved on and I wasn't in the book And I wasn't ready to move on. I was like, "No, tell me more. It's solve it really. >> I don't know like it's taken me way longer to read the book with solve it than without because there's so much >> so many rabbit holes I'm finding that are fascinating. >> Yeah, this book took me dramatically longer to write than the lean startup and it required far more like artistic craft because there are numerous places in the book where I pass over in as little as one sentence. >> Yeah. a rabbit hole that you could spend a whole book on just that topic or >> Well, I can show you some I found. I mean, you've already kind of seen them in my book. >> It was really fun for me to watch the >> 300 off odd things, but I'll kind of share a few of them with our audience. So, um so here's chapter one. Um and I had never heard of Soul Price, the founder of FedMart. And but it was nice because Eric starts with a personal story of his experience at going to this shop. Um and after I read a bit, I just stopped and I was like, "Okay, again, I'm in learning mode. Start. Who Who am I? What am I doing? What are we doing?" Spit each paragraph up. I finished reading the first bit. I posted in this information. you know, uh, what do you think? Is this interesting? Like I I just thought I'd start with a pretty do you think this sounds like it's going to be interesting to me as the CEO of AI? And it's like, by god, yes, [laughter] it's almost eerie. Um, >> this dude got ousted. >> Eric's tried to stop you from letting that happen to you. Um but you know co-evolution philosophy of so it's so it's got enough information um and it's very authentic because it's like literally internal only discussions that Eric and I had in the in the context um so like what do you think about that parallel like yeah definitely very intentional uh and I can just I can do shorthand now it's like yes those experiences his thing and I don't need to explain them because it's all in that background. It's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, that I can see." Like, it's like talking to somebody who knows everything about my experience and has read and it's it's got the whole of the big uh the previous chapter, the next chapter, it's got the part summary, it's got the whole book summary. And then I was like, this is kind of fun. Like, what do you think about this approach to reading, you know? So, I'm a big fan of this guy called Peter Wnjak who created this incremental reading approach, this thing called super memo, reinvented what Anki is based on repetitive spaced learning. Um and uh yeah I came up with some ideas about other analogies. Um so I actually mentioned this book earlier how to read a book. This is the guy who is the chairman of of Encyclopedia Bratannica. Uh it's like yeah this is kind of normal though because you've given me the uncle all the context. Um, so then he was like, "It's also a bit like this Andy Matshack thing." I was like, "Oh, I know Andy. [laughter] Uh, do you think I should tell about this?" It's like, "Yeah, here's some connections." >> Um, so yeah, so that was kind of fun. It's This is kind of a new primitive um that's different. I think it it's probably something that just technologically wasn't possible until a small number of months ago. And so anybody working on and I was like yeah I've actually got 2,000 people on teaching this too. So [laughter] it's like is this generalizable back? >> Yeah it is. >> Would you like to you know [laughter] keep going this rabbit hole? >> Uh yeah. Yeah which is fine. I I you know it's uh it's all good. So, so folks in the course you're this is reminding me a lot of lesson one of fast AI the first time we ever did it where I was kind of telling people no one's ever tried to teach this to non-PhDs before nobody's ever done it this way before no one's ever focused on transfer learning before so we're like this is actually something quite so tell us how it goes tell us what you try it with tell us what else you mind. This is not the final version of how to do this. This is our current best guess, but um I think it's been great for me. So, one thing that's actually quite nice now is that I can hit F and these buttons are the colors of different types of green for notes, red prompt. So, I can click on prompt and uh that'll go away and find all the prompts. And so I can now scroll through the prompts. And there we go. Find the next prompt. Dismiss. Um, and so now, okay, so I was reading a bit about ethos and uh it's just talking I was just interested in the story talking about this guy price and his approach to building companies and it was like, oh, they have much less items. I kind of thought, well, isn't that like didn't work because Amazon stocks all the items? I was like, is that now not relevant? I like, no, no, no, no, no. Actually, this is what's turned out to be huge. You know, it's like, oh. So, it's kind of cool as well because as I read, I'm as Eric knows, I'm such a skeptical person. Even with Eric, I will often like, yeah, but really, Eric, and you know, it's great to be able to dig in and be like, no, actually, Jeremy, really? like, "Oh, okay. [laughter] Eric has a lot of interesting tidbits." Um, okay. So then, um, you know, he's talking about like a problem that happened and I I don't know if like Eric's just assuming the reader knows more than I do or what, but he's kind of talking about the problem with placing stock in the open market. It's like, why is that a problem? Um I like here we go. It's like okay that was exactly the right thing to ask and um again I was like I'm sure you know like some of these companies really did go against standard principles and succeeded anyway. So uh so I found it was helpful to be able to push back and it's like no no Jeremy this is actually proving his point. It's like ah okay. Um so I actually mentioned this to Eric and Eric was like and um Eric was like oh well there is an investment thesis here and it's actually also in the book. So [laughter] um but also it it it it knows what's coming up. Um so it's like yeah you're going to get some answers. Um, okay. So, I found it helpful to Yeah. dig into some more details. So, I'm interested in contemporaneous accounts. There's like I I want to understand what happened like cuz often I find when you dig into these things, it turns out there's kind of more nuance. You know, it's right there's not a bad guy and a good guy. And it was helpful to me to start learning more about what actually happened in this particular story, how things set up and going in deeper definitely made the book more interesting for me. Um, so you know sometimes author as an author one of the hardest things of something this is like there's certain people that love the narrative richness and detail of a story and some people are like yeah just get on with it. >> So you can't you can never give enough detail to satisfy everyone. You either do too much or too. >> No. Exactly. And so for me when you said here like driven by its new ethos of greed. It's like >> this is another of my like really Eric like you haven't showed an ethos of greed. It's like well is there any it's like well maybe some of it's greed some of it's not. And in the end there was this. It's like okay is this that's cool you know like I I enjoyed this. >> I was like it might be editorializing. It's like no it's editorializing. That's my job as the [laughter] as the editor of this document. It is my job to editorialize and say what is actually happening. Yeah. [laughter] >> Yeah. Um yeah. And again some of these things is like uh talking about this thing called the silent monitor of like colored wooden blocks and it's like >> this is awesome. >> Sounds horrible. [laughter] I was like, well, it's a bit, but it's better than corporal punishment, which is what the alternative was at the time. [laughter] >> So, it's nice to get this historical, you know, and it's like, oh, yeah, this is actually a famous teacher who has these traffic light cups where students >> put little colored blocks up and tell the teacher how they're going. It's kind of like, yeah, that's kind of cool. >> Um, >> I love this. I didn't know the Williams thing. So, I like I learned something by watching you read the book. It's really fun. So again I found each time I found something like this some story like happened was like tell me more you know and actually yeah so for me this kind of relationship with Jeremy Bentham was kind of interesting um there just a lot of stuff in here which is every time I drilled more into one of Eric's stories you know there was more and more and it turned out this whole Bentham connection Jerick told me he'd never really drilled into it either and it was kind of this weird with like two contrasting world views that ended up one a socialist, one a free market utilitarian. Um anyway, so that probably gives a sense of how I was reading this and then it helped me think more about like trying to find more quantitative approaches to thinking about this, you know, and I was thinking like, oh, can you like track ethical investing funds and their success. And it's like, well, these like ESG funds are kind of meant to be like this, but actually ESG investing in Eric's approach are pretty different. I was like, well, how do you like study this without cherry-picking? I'm not actually sure it's possible. Um, because actually you're thinking like maybe ESG funds don't really think about ethos and that. That's right. the G in ESG is actually often kind of ignored. Um, now this is fun. So then we've got code, right? So Eric sent me this message. It's like, well, there is, you know, this chapter 15 reference. And I was like, okay, go read the chapter. Come back and tell me what it says. So it's nice that you can, you know, code and read at the same time. Um, and then it's like sounds like a potential answer opportunity. [laughter] Thanks. >> Uh, yeah, this is kind of interesting because then he was like, "Okay, let's talk about some shitty things that have happened." And I was like, "Oh, this shitty thing. I vaguely remember this shitty thing." And I was like, "Wait, wasn't that the guy where the CEO somehow made buck by destroying it?" It's like, "Oh, yeah, that's the guy." He was worse than I remembered. C was the CEO, chairman, transaction partner, landlord, and banker at the same time. And it ended up making over a billion dollars by destroying the company. Um, so yeah. So these are all fun. >> Polaroid was interesting. Yeah. I I thought these were all fascinating. >> People utterly forgotten the Polaroid story, but >> yeah. But then I was like, well, there's lots of companies that have been horrible, but still succeeded. Mhm. >> Um >> Lord's list of naughty list companies. That what that was there? >> Yeah, there's a few of them here. You know, then I picked my own one like [gasps] Yes. Henry Ford, uh Goon Squad. >> Yeah. >> Uh Thomas J. Watson. [laughter] Um and again, this is helpful, right? is just to talk through like well does this invalidate Eric's thesis and it's like no actually it doesn't because actually Eric's just saying that it's possible to create a company that doesn't suck and when you do people try to make it suck and there are things you can do to stop that from happening but you can still create a company that sucks and try to get rich doing so anyway I found uh chapter one very interesting Um, oh yeah, it reminded me of like when Ford created a whole South American city. Have you guys heard about this? But you never even visited. >> Um, yeah. Um, [snorts] okay. So yeah, this is helpful to like, okay, let's just summarize what what's actually being claimed in the book and what's not being claimed in the book. And I was like, and then Eric said, well, maybe you should read the introduction. So I was like, okay, I will read the introduction. So I went back and read the introduction. >> Um, so this is close reading, you know, and um I >> Oh, this was interesting. Yeah. So I kind of checked this. So sometimes figures just seem a bit crazy to me and I just checked them. It was kind of nice. So, I went and grabbed the It helped me cuz when you say search, right, it puts the little Well, there's also stars things for here for where Eric had a link >> in a footnote. >> We turn them into links. Yeah. Which is really handy. So, I organized that for us. Um, and so I went and check. Um, so anyway, so it's it's nice again. It kind of get helped me get over my skepticism, recognize what exactly the facts were. Um, so this is great. Eric then asks some questions in the book. I was like, well, does your organization have an ethos? Like, I'm pretty sure we have an ethos. Is, you know, I'm not sure I could say it in a sentence, but I'm pretty sure we have an ethos. I say, yeah, you guys seem to have an ethos, you know, here. But there seems to be a lot of bits of it, and it's kind of helpful. Uh, I ended up thinking through this. I ended up going through these three questions. I then was able to talk to my co-founder who happened to be the author of the book and said like, I've gone through your questions. Here's what I found. Um, yeah. So, Eric, what what strikes you about this process so far and what I am getting out of the book as it pertains to answer AI, etc. Well, I think it was really um you you are a both you are like a highly skeptical but also good faith reader which I find to be a very um unusual combination. So you're going to get the most out of it because if you're credulous and you just believe everything that the book says, you know, then you're not actually really going to learn a lot. Um so it's good to have a certain amount of skepticism. It's like I want to understand what's going on. Yeah. Like when you you are willing to say when you don't understand something, you're willing to ask about it. Um, I think that's going to give you a lot of you're gonna get a lot out of that um that fact, but then you're a good faith reader. Like there were a lot of places I could see in your dialogue where you were like, "This doesn't make sense to me. I think it's wrong." And so it would kind of gently push back and be like, "Here's some additional information." And you' be like, "Okay, that makes sense." Um, so that's I think that's like the the intellectual curiosity that is necessary for close reading. But in if you go if you had if you tried to get a humanities degree at a you know elite university the other thing required for um close reading before AI was a level of erudition that required years and years and years of study because the books like this are packed with references and and links to studies and mentioned things mentioned in passing that you just are supposed to just know that stuff or go to a library and look it up. So to be able to like in the way that you go just on your way be like that seems odd. Like I don't know I think in your dialogue you had one where you're like is this a is this a grammatical error or something else? And it's like no this is a litary reference >> not yet past. >> Yeah. To the not yet. I love that made me so happy because that's you know if you >> if you know that if you know that reference then this you get a then the the passage is more um is more valuable to you. You get more richness out of it. And if you don't, I tried to pick things where if you don't, you wouldn't be so egregious that now you're like completely lost and confused. So, it rewards those who are willing to to put in the energy. And and some one of the biggest things I I've learned in in this is that some ideas have to be communicated in this like multi-dimensional way. There some ideas that just cannot be stated as a series of thesis and consequences and like really linearly explained. And so like closed reading is one of our civilization's oldest and most powerful technologies for trying to communicate the gestalt of a thing, the overall holistic understanding of it more than just what can be communicated in language because languages are limited. And to me it's so interesting philosophically that it's a large language model somehow is able to help with that when all when the only thing it has at its disposal is language and learning about language. like what what a trippy postmodern theory this is going to turn out to prove correct. >> I there's another one here, Eric, which I'm sure you'll remember because I mentioned it at the time, which is I um started reading the next chapter. So, chapter one I was just like that was awesome. I just I found it really easy to read. It took me hours to read it, much longer than normal because I read so many other things because I found it fascinating. And then I started reading the next chapter. I was like, it's not quite falling for you know great for me at the moment. So, and so I was like, so I I wrote to Eric and I said, Eric, as a sequence of messages like, Eric, this chapter is not really working for me so well. Uh, Eric, I guess that wasn't at all helpful. Sorry. [laughter] Not actionable feedback. And then I asked Slen, it's like, uh, different to me. Is it different? >> So, I gave it the tour and it's like, okay, here's what I see. you know, this this this this versus this this this this. It's like this this. It's like does that sound? It's like ah that's it. It's like really interesting to me that it was able to take a vague sense I have and it did this a few times and uh there was one particular one later where I had like three or four prompts where I was just like yes yes let's dig into that. Yes, let's dig okay what about writing style? What about word length? What about sentence length? And it really is. It's very good at this literal kind of glittery analysis, don't you think, Eric? >> Oh, yeah. It's great. It's it's super helpful. And yeah, and it helps you put into like we always say that like LM's like the thing that they're the very best at is summarizing. So like to to summarize a vague thing and make it more concrete like this is just something that's so it's so good at better it with the tiniest hint of what you're trying to say. It is way smarter than if you just ask it to do an analysis on its own. Like just given like it's an attention mechanism. So given the slightest hint that this is where you should put your attention, you know, it's like one of those like spot the difference puzzles >> where it's like I tell you spot the different or like where's Waldo? It's like so hard like where's Waldo but he's standing next to a tree. >> You're just like now I've just cut your search base down by like a thousandx. You're going to solve the puzzle in no time. >> Very much like that. >> Um I will say though this chapter 2 just went crazy. It was so cool. Um, so, so again, I just encourage people read this book and go deep, right? Because there's stuff about Boeing, and I'm sure we're all very interested about Boeing. 3M is a company I've admired for a long time. Um, and I just didn't know about this connection that between Boeing and 3M and basically a guy who screwed up 3M then went on to screw up Boeing and got CEO of the year. But with these things, it's very easy, I find, to just be like, "Oh, people in the past sure were dumb, weren't they?" It's like, "Hey, this is not long ago." When B, they're the same people. >> So, I kind of like to be like, "Okay, what? >> Let's get our generous perspective like what actually happened." >> Yeah. And what actually happened was well, they're financial performance improved and they made all this money. and his, you know, they had these scandals and, you know, um, the very things that ended up screwing them up, you know, hollowing out the engineering culture. One professor now says he's the worst CEO in history. So, I I don't know. It's like it's easy to be overly beused by this kind of thing, but I think it helps to >> I had to take that quote out of the book because people felt like it was I was being so over-the-top critical >> and I'm like I didn't even say that. >> Yeah, people still couldn't handle it. But yeah, but because people can't believe like most people would not sacrifice even a single human life for moderately better shareholder returns over a short-term period, let alone hundreds of lives. Yeah. >> So they can't imagine that if somebody did that >> um you know that they're they're anything more than a cartoon villain. >> Yeah. No, exactly. >> And it's complicated. Like I'm not and to be clear, I'm not saying that he killed he's not like a murderer. He didn't kill somebody with his bare hands. In fact, by the time by the time the crashes happened, he didn't even work there anymore. >> But if you read the reports of people who have like tried to aortion accountability for what happened, >> this is not history. This is the not even past. Like this is not some ancient history. Like this is a direct causal connection. >> Yeah. No, Eric, I really did try to dig into this. It's like it's so he wasn't being malicious, you know, he was using the GE playbook. He'd been successful for 19 years. These methods had worked in certain ways >> and he had had this successful business background and he didn't have any indication of poor judgment. um the process adopted by the head of GE and I was like okay I I want to learn more about this right like so I I kept like okay well what about Welch because that was interesting because for me Welch was a CEO at at at GE at a time when I was in management consulting and you know and uh and I've met Jeff Eml one of you know his successor and had dinner with him and didn't think he was an impressive guy to be honest but that's that's that um but Welch everybody was like welch was like what an amazing great guy and it's like yeah you know he took a company from GE from 15 billion to 594 billion 2500 shareholder return percent shareholder return um whatever but yeah actually um the company ended up falling apart um eventually >> that doesn't even exist anymore today. They're now three separate GE companies that it's been split up into. >> Yeah. And none of them No, you can't buy a GE microwave. My best ever microwave was a GE microwave. They don't make GE microwaves. Like they literally don't do the things that were good. And I was like, well, by the way, there was another Welch buying. >> And it's like, well, actually, four of the 13 unsuccessful >> Welch mentee CEOs were all at Boeing. And the more I went into it, the more I was just Boeing's board faced with a 737 Max disaster hide. Another Welch disciple. I say, "Wait, who was on the board?" Ah, well, uh, a Welch disciple, [laughter] uh, who was, um, uh, head of private equity at Blackstone. Oh my god, it just Yeah. So, the more I dug in, >> the more I saw all these connections. Um, so anyway, that was >> and what's very hard for contemporary readers to understand is how much praise all these people were getting constantly as they absolutely topic discuss in a future chapter. >> Now, what happens then? Okay, I didn't mention this at the end of chapter one is um I'll show them actually because they're so cute. Um, chapter one read one. I want to show you some of the logistics of how to make this all work. Um, so at the end I said, okay, we're done. I'm going to start a new chapter. That means a new LM, new version of you. Uh, so please write a long detailed careful explanation of everything the new you will need to know. I said I'm going to give it the same summaries uh but explain how this everything's, you know, going to work. So it wrote all this which is great and this is adorable. Good luck future me. [laughter] [gasps] Um, it's kind of funny to see it's like summary of what Jeremy's like. [laughter] Um, so then I said at the end of this one, okay, add more handoff notes. I'll be added into the previous handoff notes. Um, and I added these a little bit. And so then I opened up um, so the way I did it then was I opened up well I I I grabbed chapter uh, three. It's actually what I did is I duplicated chapter 2B. I called it chapter 3B. I then opened up chapter 3 and actually it's quite convenient because um there's one H1 at the top. So I hit left and that um sum that creates a single elapsed heading and then I hit C and then I opened up my 3B and I hit V and it pasted into the right spot and I hit delete below for the bits that was previously the 2B. And so that ended up with it takes like less than five minutes now, like maybe two or three minutes to create, you know, to start each new chapter. Um, so I end up with all the same stuff at the top. For the summaries, I have these commented out bits. So I just change the two chapters to be the next one and the previous one. Delete the previous two. Rerun this message. um add my handoff notes. Um and then start reading again. Um so that's my process and then um yeah I was kind of like kept on kind of trying to address some misconceptions I had along the way and also tried to make sure that I was regularly say like saying like help me think about how this might apply in my situation. Uh, >> you know, I think that's something that's under underrated in this in these dialogues is how well it was able to come up just with like interesting things for you to think about. >> Exactly. They were they were they were they were not always at all things that I was thinking. So, this particular one was about financial gravity. So, Eric, what's a quick summary of financial gravity? >> Financial gravity is the pressure we all feel to conform to the values of whoever has more resources than we do. Um, so in this book especially, it's about the the pressure that the financial system exerts on organizations to make them conform to a certain set of values that may not be the or the values of the people who run or even own that organization. And I found this quite fascinating that you actually linked it up by to evolutionary roots. Um, fascinating enough that I actually wanted to learn more about it. It turns out there's quite a bit of academic literature here in a whole area that I just wasn't very familiar with. I mean, I'm quite familiar with some evolutionary psychology, but there's stuff about evolution of prestige and conferred deference and dominance psych. This is all new to me. So, lots of uh interesting papers to dig into. But yeah, so when I was thinking about that, it's like, yeah, you know, some of this external gravity, you'll probably be fine. You know, Eric's designed your governance, you know, but yeah, have you thought about these things? So like subtle pressure for people to not along. >> We've seen that. >> Mhm. For sure. Um, you know, will your evolutionary reflexes kick in anyway? Is there a chance these third parties could influence things? Uh, yeah. So, that's as far as I'll go with with all this, but I mean I um I don't know like this is one of the absolute best reading experiences I've ever had. Like I'm I'm trying to think is it the best? >> Mhm. >> It would be up there. Like I've had a few, right? So, I remember the first time I read Richard Dawkins, that was 30 years ago, and he started out with a chapter describing how he wrote a computer program on his Macintosh computer to evolve pictures of butterflies, and I'll never ever forget it. I remember reading the Mathematica book like 25 years ago where Wolram basically takes you through so much stuff in like six or 700 pages. There's a few books I've read where the reading experience has been amazing and this is up there and I think part of it is because you've put so much time and effort into this book and it's an interesting subject but I think also yeah you know it's um this way of reading I think you can you can tackle books that are more deep in a more deep way than you otherwise could. What do you [snorts] think Eric? Oh, I I listen I as the as the author, it's incredibly rewarding. I now the test will be, you know, we just turned 2,000 people loose on this, so I'm very curious to see [laughter] how people respond to it. So So I know we're I know we're go going way over time here and I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna miss my flight if I don't. >> All right, get going. >> But no, but I just think this is so riitting to me. I'm really glad we got a chance to do it. And and um I think we've only scratched the surface of what is possible here. like when we look back on this video a couple years from now, we're just going to laugh at how primitive it seems because I think this is there's so much more to be done here. So very excited for people to pioneer and play around and try new things. And I'm just ever grateful to everybody who's taken the time to do it. >> Thank you so much, Jon O. Thank you so much, Eric. >> Thanks, everybody. And have a good flight, Eric. >> We'll talk about how to make such books. >> Bye, gang. Take care. Look forward to it.

Watch Jeremy Howard close-read a chapter of Eric Ries's latest book in a way that was impossible until a few months ago. Using an LLM, Jeremy sets up necessary context and shows how to create handoff notes to maintain continuity across chapters. He follows rabbit holes that interest him, seeks counterexamples when skeptical, and asks how the principles from the book can apply to his own startup. Jeremy shares his process with Eric and they both reflect on the experience. 00:00 - Context engineering 02:30 - Hierarchical context 07:00 - Curiosity-driven exploration 12:00 - Personalized application 17:30 - Following the thread 25:00 - Skeptical verification 33:30 - Good-faith skepticism 35:00 - Session continuity 39:30 - Concept exploration 42:30 - Meta-reflection This was part of a lesson in the How to Solve It With Code fast.ai course. Find out more here: https://solve.it.com/ Eric Ries's upcoming book, Incorruptible: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Incorruptible/Eric-Ries/9798893311860