How To Read Books Fast With AI (And Remember What You Read)

So, a few weeks ago, I saw this tweet, and at first I was pretty upset. But now, I kind of just feel bad for this guy. And so, the tweet said, "Reading books is now a waste of time.

AI reasoning models can distill key insights and tell you exactly how to implement them based on everything they know about you. " And as you can see, the comments weren't that great. Now, there's some truth to what this guy is saying, but that's because most people in general don't know how to read and they don't know how to remember what they read.

And it's not because they're illiterate or anything, but because they learned how to read in a Prussian style education system designed to create obedient soldiers, compliant citizens, civil servants, and well- behaved workers. Now, I don't mean for this to sound like some kind of conspiracy theory like, "Oh, the Prussian style education system. " Um, but if you want to learn more about this, go read my new book, Purpose and Profit.

The PDF is free to download, so you can read that or buy the paperback. But this school system did this by focusing on mandatory attendance, training for teachers, national curriculum and testing, division of students by age, and the concept of grade levels. Reading to most people is a performative act.

They read to find specific information for a test, be it a school test or a life test. They read to show others that they've accomplished something. Like how people flex that they've somehow both read and retained information from 52 books in a year.

They avoid reading difficult books because if they don't understand it, what's the point? Now, here's the thing. You don't read to find a specific answer.

That's just stupid. Why would you waste 8 hours reading a book just to find a few steps to accomplish something when you can type a question into Google, Reddit, or now AI? If you need to figure out how to be more productive or start a business, a book is probably the last place you should look.

And that's if you're actually trying to learn rather than to feel as if you're making progress on being productive or starting the business by reading a book. Now, if you're trying to get the big picture to understand things of being productive or starting a business, then yeah, a a book is a good place to go. But I'd still argue that intelligent and calculated research is still a better option for that specific use case.

But that doesn't mean reading is irrelevant. In fact, if you want to become the type of person who is more productive, owns a business, or is in good health, not just a person who knows how to do those things, that requires behavior change, which requires a fundamental rewiring of your mind. And that doesn't come from searching for specific information.

Most people are missing out on the plethora of life-changing benefits that come from reading. So, now let's talk about why smart people read before we talk about the how. So, first is the elephant in the room, which is AI.

And yes, AI has all known information ready for you to access. Emphasis on known. And if we've learned anything about the rise of AI, it's that even if people have all information that they could ever want at the tip of their fingers, they still don't do anything with the information or even think to search for the information.

It's never been about how much you know. It's always been about knowing how much you don't know. You can only cook with the ingredients you have.

Now, you can already find all of the information that you need to make a million dollars or to build a great physique or to be in good health. But even if people knew what to look for, where to look for it, and how to implement it, they probably wouldn't do much with their lives because this isn't an information problem. This is an identity problem.

Your identity is reflected in your daily choices. And if you observe most people, they aren't trying to do anything by their own desire. They may search for new information, but it's not to make a change in their life.

It's to feel as if they are making progress by hoarding information to sound smart or look different without actually doing anything different. They were conditioned to go to school, get a job, repeat the same day for 45 years, and hope that one day they can retire happy. Those are the goals their mind is automatically trying to achieve.

Those are the goals that filter what information is noticed as important. They don't need to use new information because they don't generate new goals. They live in a subconscious fear that they will be cast out from the tribe if they don't conform.

So, they pursue the goals of others for the entirety of their life. And that's fine. But you're watching this because you don't want to be like them.

And that's where the importance of reading heavily comes into play. You don't read to find information that can already be found. You read to explore the unknown and pursue your curiosity.

You read to discover things you didn't know before and didn't even think about searching with Google or ChatGpt. You read to expand your mind to places you didn't know were there. You read to slowly reprogram who you are by exposing yourself to new ideas that can't be intentionally searched by an identity that didn't even think to search for them.

The statement that AI makes reading irrelevant assumes that everyone reads because they want to find information that is already known. That's also information that everyone else can find with AI or not. And that means you're replaceable if you're going after that information.

So, it's not about what information you have. It's not even about what you do with that information. It's about changing your mind.

Because your mind is how you interact with reality. It's how you make decisions that lead to a good or bad life. Your mind doesn't change with a few key points from a book summary or an AI generated summary.

It changes when new ideas, actionable or not, fill in missing pieces, challenge old beliefs, or give you a new angle to view a situation from. No single person reads a book and gets the exact same lessons out of it. Each individual has their own beliefs, goals, problem, story, and interests that shape how they perceive the information in the book.

Book summaries have been around for forever. A lot of the greatest books, the most helpful books, the the books that will make you millions of dollars are in book summaries. But that doesn't mean that people go and read them.

And that also doesn't mean that the people that read them actually do anything with it. And it also means that the people that do do something with it always get results because the book summaries are missing what makes it work. And one last point here is that the obsession over actionable steps and bulletoint summaries is just another manifestation of cheap dopamine and distraction.

You think that you're focused because you want everything condensed down into a a set of actionable steps, including my long videos. That's not going to get you anywhere. You have swapped brain rot scrolling on TikTok for brain rot I need actionable tips on YouTube.

Read more books. Read longer books. Read books that have nothing to do with what you're trying to achieve.

Read the books that people wouldn't even think about summarizing with AI. That's where the gold is. Now, that's a bit counterintuitive of a statement because we're going to learn how to read with AI in a more impactful way, but we're not going to do it in a way that summarizes the book and just spits out actionable steps.

So, let's talk about that. How to read deeper with AI, which is just another layer on how you can read in the first place. It just enhances and enriches the process more because AI doesn't have to be this thing that comes and strips everything of its depth.

So a quote from Aristotle to start. The purpose of knowledge is action not knowledge. Smart people read in two layers.

The first layer is consumption. They soak in the information to the point of overwhelm and struggling to understand. Layer two is digestion.

They study deeper, right? To systematically reflect on what they learn and attempt to connect the dots together through action. So those are the two layers.

and understand that these layers, it's not like you read a book all the way through once in the first layer consumption and then read a second time through uh for digestion. Although you can do that, but I'd recommend spacing out how often you read a book uh by like a year, two years because once you've gained more experience in life and you come back to the book that initially changed your life or didn't mean anything to you, you actually didn't want to read the book, when you come back to it from a lens of new experience, you tend to get a lot more out of it. A good piece of advice is to read the books that changed your life over and over again rather than jumping to a bunch of new and different books that don't do anything for you.

The first problem is that very few people read. The second problem is that when they read, they don't remember any of it. The third problem is that people don't like discomfort, so they don't read difficult books.

The fourth problem is that since people don't increase the complexity of knowledge they can make sense of, they aren't able to take on more challenging situations, the ones that lead to more than superficial and short-lived success. They turn 50 years old with the intellectual maturity of a 15-year-old. Now, AI can't read a book for you.

Sure, it can read the book and spit out a summary, but it can't read the book for you. But it can help deepen your understanding as you read. One thing I've realized recently, because with Cortex, with AI, I'm using it a lot.

I'm building solutions with it. I'm trying to somehow bake it into my writing process. And the more I do that, the more I realize it just can't write for me.

I don't think it ever will be able to. Not because it can't write exceptionally well. It really can.

But because when I read over what it wrote, it's it's just not me. It's not my ideas. I didn't come up with it.

And I don't like putting things out that I don't come up with. So that got me thinking and I was messaging Matt, the co-founder of Cortex, because we're trying to figure out, okay, how is AI actually useful and how do we actually implement it really well? And we kind of both came to the conclusion that it's very useful for learning.

It's useful for getting information for going through large swaths of information and giving you what you need. It's intelligence, right? You have access to intelligence.

That doesn't mean creativity. That doesn't mean anything else but intelligence. Intelligence can aid in those things like creativity, other other other traits, but intelligence itself is not those things.

So for writing specifically, I found that AI is very good at giving me information that can spark the ideas that I want to come up with. It can create outlines. It can create potential posts for social media.

It can create YouTube headlines. It can give me summaries from information that I can include while I'm writing like I would search with Google search. But ultimately I feel with writing that I have to come up with the idea that goes into the writing.

But if I come to that idea from the information connected by AI, then that's fine and can lead to a lot better results. I see the information from AI as a way to trigger more thoughts and ideas in my head. So that's kind of sort of how we're going to use it for learning.

So step one, consumption. This is using AI as a reading partner. Most people read to memorize as much as possible because that's how they were trained to read in school.

They don't know any other way. But here's the thing. You don't read to remember every single sentence in a book.

You read to change how you view the world by adding a few nodes to the web of ideas that compose your mind, helping you see situations in a new, more complex and meaningful light. I forget what the actual quote is by Richard Fineman I think but uh he he mentioned somehow that that physics deepens his appreciation and the meaning of nature around him because he understands a deeper layer of how it works. So so many people by not understanding the complexity of a thing sure you can find uh appreciation of something like a plant but when you understand its inner workings then it starts to deepen your appreciation for it and that can happen for so many other domains in life for literally any topic or domain of knowledge.

Okay. So we're going to read digitally here. So the first step to this is going to library and being able to download the PDFs of books.

Now, this sucks because one, Amazon is getting more uh constrained with Kindle. They're not allowing you to download books, and it was very difficult to use those digitally in the first place. And with physical books, you can't really have AI digest those things because you can't reference the information that's in the actual book.

So, my advice here is use something like Z Library or their Telegram bot. I'll leave a description for how to actually install that in the description, but be able to download the PDF of whatever it is that you are using. I would recommend you go and purchase the PDF, I mean the paperback if you decide to download the PDF just to support the author themselves.

This is a catch22. This probably isn't a smart thing to do, but I would recommend just supporting the author when you can if you download their PDF. Okay.

So, we're going to hop inside of Cortex or you can use any other AI tool that can reference uh PDFs, but we're going to go to learn. We're going to go to be my reading companion. And then you're going to replace all of this text with you.

You can follow this along if you'd like to if you already have a PDF inside of your library. But we're just going to say uh what was it? Help me understand this as I read it.

And then you're going to drag in uh the actual PDF that you're trying to reference. So you can drag it in here or you can drag it in to the entire workspace and it will create uh a PDF with it. And once it's added to your library, you can reference it with at.

But we're just going to say this for now. Uh send it. You can also use different AI models.

Um, I'll use Gemini Flash here just because it can handle larger amounts of information and it's a lot faster just for the sake of uh tutorial. All right. So, what this did is it first spat out some clarifications, some concepts inside the book, etc.

, etc. And what you do inside of this chat is you just come back to it as you're reading. So, it says here, please feel free to share your thoughts, notes, or anything else that comes to mind.

Also feel free to send your own notes in the chat. It said that twice. Okay.

But as you're reading, whenever you reach a point where you lack understanding or you want to dive deeper, you can just type it in here or you can copy paste from the actual PDF. Purpose and profit PDF. Open that here.

Start reading. I can read it here if I'd like, but I can go to the specific part of it and I can just say, "Hey, I'm having trouble understanding the concept of deep generalism or whatever it is. " You just ask your question.

You take notes inside of here. You send it each time. And then all inside of this chat, you'll have this long context window of you conversing back and forth with the book itself.

And this just helps give you a deeper understanding of the book as you read it. Now, I want to just give you a few tips on reading in general. If it doesn't interest you, you probably won't learn anything, so you can drop it.

You're not in a race to finish the book. In fact, the slower the better. So, take a year or two to finish if you need to.

And you can put it down or pick it up anywhere in between. We don't need to have this rigid structure because that's just not how digesting or consuming information in your mind works, right? If you hit an idea that is very important to you, you may not want to continue reading because all of the the information after that idea that you want to retain and think about and digest and talk to AI about.

If you keep going past that, the information may take over and you may forget about it completely when you don't want to do that. And then you don't take anything from the book. If you take one idea from the book, one life-changing idea from the book, that is worth all the time it took to actually get that idea.

The next tip is that you can read multiple books at a time. I often have three books in an audio book that I bounce between, and you'd be surprised how many connections you make between them, especially if they're on similar topics. I remember I was reading a book on systems thinking and flow and evolutionary psychology and then I was listening to something on spiral dynamics and just in between I don't have to read a full chapter.

I don't I can just sit down and read a book. I have these books like spread out throughout my house. So whenever I'm bored I just pick it up, read for 10 minutes.

I get something out of it. I go on a walk. I munch on it.

I put on another book. Boom. I'm getting all of these ideas.

I don't like reading linearly. So that's just something for you to try. and it may make you enjoy reading that much more because you don't feel like you have to commit to an entire book when 80% of it isn't something you really care about.

So for the consumption layer of reading, you're trying to focus on just getting to an idea that really makes you want to stop and think and then you transition to digestion and you turn off if you're listening to an audiobook, turn it off. Put your bookmark in the actual book that you're reading. Start talking to AI with it.

Start thinking deeper. Start questioning it. Start taking notes.

Really sit and think about the idea. That will aid you so much more than continuing reading to because you feel like you have to finish it when you don't. So talking about layer two, which is digestion.

We're going to use AI for reflection and exploration. So we use this first AI chat to take notes and understand concepts deeper. that allows you to keep going through the book while maintaining clarity.

Right? You don't want to continue going through the book if you don't understand what the book said. Now, the thing with digestion is that fully digesting a book's ideas takes much longer than reading the book over a weekend.

Some ideas even take years to make sense of. There have been many times in my life where the insight didn't strike until I had enough experience for it to click. And that's just it.

Most people remember very little of what they read because they don't see how it applies to their life. They can't integrate the lessons in a way where they don't need to remember every sentence of the book because it reflects in their daily actions. Listen to that part again.

You don't need to memorize lines if it's a deep part of who you are. So for the digestion layer of reading, we have a few options. The first is to explore connections of a topic to deepen your understanding of it.

Because as a reminder, the purpose for reading is behavior change through identity change. When you spot the connections that lead to the book's lessons clicking in your head, that's when positive behavior change happens. All right, so we are back inside of Cortex and we're going to go to this new AI workflow that I recently added because it was missing is make sense of a topic or idea.

And the purpose of this is to give you a bunch of different connections and how it relates to your life, how what you can do, how you can integrate it into your life through actionable steps. So here I'm just going to say I want to explore uh the concept of deep generalism from at purpose and profit uh from the sources. We'll just go to the PDF and how it relates to my life.

And again I'm going to use Gemini Flash, but you can use any of them especially even the new ones GPT 4. 1 Gro 3. We just added those.

Uh but any of these Claude, actually I'll use Claude. I like Claude better. I I don't know why I have this thing with Claude.

So now what it does here when I ask this question is it asks me five clarifying questions. So what aspects of deep generalism particularly resonated? How do you describe your current approach to learning and developing skills?

What are some of your primary life goals? Do you feel any tension between specialization and generalism? What specific challenges do you face?

So I'll fill this out and then we'll come back and I have a few more tips. So I put in my answers to the questions and then it spits out the topic exploration which gives a brief overview of what deep generalism is from that chapter in the book purpose and profit. And then the cool thing is that it goes over personal connection.

So it it helps you ground what could be this abstract idea into what you can potentially do with your life based on that thing or how you can integrate it into your life. So, education, freedom, digital creation potential cuz I said my goal was becoming an internet writer or creator. Uh, AI proof career path.

Your intuition about AI making specialization risky is wellounded. Pure specialists in coding, writing or graphic design are already seeing aspects of their work automated. The human advantage will be in connecting diverse knowledge and providing coherent vision.

They're pretty cool. Uh, entrepreneurial advantage. The tension of choice.

Your struggle with choosing one thing isn't indecisiveness. It's recognition that artificial constraints don't serve your goals. Cool.

Success doesn't require complete specialization. And then practical in integration. So developing T-shaped knowledge, which is cool.

I don't think I ever I don't think I even brought up the concept of T-shaped, which means uh you have breadth across many domains and then you go deep into two to three areas as it says here, which is pretty cool. synthesis projects, project-based learning, build a learning system, find generalist mentors, habit integration, daily connection, cross-disciplinary, really cool. I I feel like you should go through this and do this yourself, of course, on whatever it is that you're reading so you understand how to integrate that idea you love into your life so it becomes a part of you.

Now, what this does is this adds a completely new layer to learning that is rarely taught or talked about. even further, you can save a response from the last AI chat as a document and reference it in this new chat to help make sense of it. So, what we mean by that is if I go back to my chats, I go back to the reading companion and I take my notes in here, I ask questions, I can save any of its responses as a document here, new document, and just name this like notes.

Name it whatever you want. But then if we go back to the exploring a specific concept inside of learn and make sense of a concept of idea I can just say I want to explore at notes and that contains the document that you want to reference right there. I don't know why it isn't entering right now but whatever it it works right or I can add it here.

Let's see uh notes. Yeah, adds there. So just do that.

Now the second point for the digestion layer is using knowledge for action not knowledge as Aristotle said because most people don't need more motivation. They need more clarity. You already have goals and ambitions but you never pursue them because point A where you are and point B where you want to be need a bridge of smaller goals and actions you can take to trek between the two.

And without the clarity bridge anxiety and overwhelm start to seep in. Now, many of you are familiar with the simple life reset planner that I've given out before, which was like a a template that breaks down your average day, your anti-vision, your vision, your hierarchy of goals, your priority tasks, and then it gives you like a planner every day. Now, you can still go through that and do that.

And when you sign up for Cortex, that's automatically put inside of your workspace. But the problem with templates, especially when they're like contemplative templates, is that most people just get stuck because it's a blank page. It's difficult for people to guess what they want out of life and what their goals should be because that's in the future.

So the best thing you can do in my opinion is to get the at least get the first iteration of your vision and goals out on paper so that then you have an anchor so when you go about life you can decide okay yes I do want this I don't want this and you can refine it with time. So what I did is I turned this into a the life reset map inside of Cortex. So, all you do is you press this, you press enter.

It's going to take maybe 10 minutes of interview questions. And once you're done with those interview questions, it will spit out a message that you can then add as a document to keep this inside of your cortex. And whenever you want to reference this and something else that pertains to planning or your goals, you can just type at my life reset map and it will pull the information from this.

So, it starts with my vision statement, and you can read through this as we go through it if you'd like, but then it breaks that down into a hierarchy of goals based on career, location, relationships, lifestyle, living situation, personal growth, etc. , etc. , based on my vision and what I told it.

It gives me a skill and knowledge development plan. So, basic digital creation skills, self-management for independent work with different resources and books to read. So if you don't know what to read for all the steps we talked about previously, this is a good way to come up with those personal growth skills, my daily structure.

So it gives me a potential way to uh a potential routine to start and then it has an implementation strategy that works up uh to more difficulty, which is awesome. And then has accountability methods, next steps, so on so forth. And then you can go through the be my clarity coach next if you need help with this which this is actually fun.

We'll go be my clarity coach my ideal life vision. Uh I'm just going to say we already have all of this. So I'm going to say break down at my life reset map and guide me through it.

And what this should do is give me a challenge at the end of this output. So, it gives me some recommendations, a challenge, reflection, and then I can refer to this every single day. So, I can refer to the reading partner when I'm reading something to take notes, and I can refer to this clarity coach to help guide me, and I can ask questions or overcome procrastination or limiting beliefs as I act on my day.

Now, step three in the digestion layer is to synthesize the ideas with writing to reflect on what you learn. The reason behind this is the Fineman technique which is a learning method popularized by physicist Richard Fineman. And in short, it's about deeply understanding a concept by explaining it in simple terms as if you were teaching it to someone with no prior knowledge.

So you choose a concept. So you select the topic you want to understand. You teach it.

You explain the concept in simple language as if you were teaching it to a child. You identify gaps. So when you struggle to explain something clearly, identify the areas where understanding is weak.

and then you review and simplify. So you go back to the source material, relearn the concepts, and then try explaining them again in even simpler terms. Now, the best way to do this is to write because I'm assuming you are studying something because you are one deeply interested in it and two want to integrate it as some part of your life.

Now, you can do this inside of the reading partner chat or just inside of a document or a note or whatever it may be. But this becomes so much more powerful when you teach in public, when you have feedback, when it's tied to your work. So when you teach what you know in public, aka writing on the internet or social media, because that's the new media, that's how you build any form of audience or distribution for any type of creative work or work in general that you want to do independently.

You open up the possibility for a few things there. The first is that you learn much much faster because you have a forcing function for understanding. Two is you attract an audience of people with similar interests and these people are your network and future customers.

The third is that you build leverage going into a future of job replacement. The creator economy is one area that is proving to not be replaced even though everyone screams there will be an overabundance of content. Now, we've talked about this before in plenty of videos, so go watch those, the oneperson business playlist and other things.

And because of that, I'll spare you the description here, but I just wanted to present that as an option. So, writing to reflect on what you learn. You can do it in private inside of your chats that we went over for the reading companion, or you do it in public if you'd like to.

So, I hope that was helpful. I hope it helps you read deeper and organize your life in a better way. If you want to try out Cortex or you want to get the two-hour writer course or the oneperson business launchpad or read my latest book for free with the PDF, you can find all those links in the description.

With that, I'll see you in the next video. Bye.