PlotFrom: Engaging Book Discussions

I’ve always believed that the most powerful way to grow is to set ourselves “impossible” challenges—and hold ourselves accountable year after year. In 2020, I challenged myself to read a book a week for a year. Not only did I hit my goal, but the sheer volume and variety of ideas sparked something new: What if I could use AI to capture and share the essence of every book I read in a way that’s accessible to everyone?

Fast-forward to October 2024, when Google released the experimental audio deep dive feature of Notebook LM. I experimented with, gathering interviews with authors, extracting key discussions, and piecing together a book’s narrative through the authors public discussions. I realised this was the perfect tool to power a new podcast: deep-dive summaries and conversations that bring great books to life for listeners on the go.

A month ago, I wrote about my foray into Vide Coding with the creating and release of vic20sounds.com. Over Easter I vibe coded PlotFrom.com, along with setting up a GitHub repo to perform pull requests into the code base myself to avoid "vibe debugging"—the result a website that hosts my book-summary podcast series. Each episode blends AI-summarised insights obtained from author interviews and their public posts about the content of their books. It doesn't train off the books themselves so as not to infringe copyright. This way as a listener you can get straight to the ideas that matter most to the author.

I have recently finished reading Rowan Simpson's excellent book How to Be Wrong, that is making waves across the New Zealand startup community and is a must read for anyone working in a startup (I purchased a copy for the whole team at Vivara). Rowan’s “Crash Course in Startup Success” flips the script on failure, showing how embracing mistakes is the fastest route to real progress. Check out our episode and written summary at: PlotFrom: How to Be Wrong by Rowan Simpson.

Other recent episodes:

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People is a memoir by Facebook's former Director of Global Public Policy, chronicling her journey from idealistic diplomat to disillusioned insider. She exposes Meta's “growth at all costs” mentality—from secret efforts to court the Chinese government and tool up for censorship, to knowingly targeting vulnerable users with ads—and details a workplace culture that shielded executives' own families while fuelling real-world harms. READ MORE ->

The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt

Jensen Huang transformed a $600 startup into AI giant Nvidia by betting on overlooked research markets and pioneering parallel computing—a strategy detailed in Stephen Witt's “The Thinking Machine,” based on six interviews with Huang and conversations with 200+ insiders. The book reveals his blend of empathy and rigor, first-principles engineering mindset, and rejection of AI “doomsday” narratives in favor of unprecedented technological progress. READ MORE ->

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know it by Kashmir Hill

Journalist Kashmir Hill's “Your Face Belongs to Us” exposes how startups like Clearview AI secretly scraped billions of public photos to build a facial-recognition database sold to police worldwide, trading “ethical arbitrage” for a tool that can link anyone's face to their identity and history. Hill warns that without robust privacy laws, pervasive face search tech—from law enforcement surveillance to private venues—threatens anonymity and demands urgent societal and regulatory debate. READ MORE ->

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li's science memoir, “The World's I See,” weaves her journey from immigrant to AI pioneer with the story of ImageNet's creation—a milestone that taught computers to “see” and sparked the modern AI revolution. She advocates a human-centered AI guided by dignity, agency, and community, urging ethical governance to address bias, privacy, job disruption, and disinformation. READ MORE ->

I’m excited to keep pushing boundaries—both in my own reading goals and in the way we share and learn from the world’s best authors. If you’re curious about a book you’ve been meaning to read (or re-read), head over to PlotFrom.com and join the conversation or subscribe to our podcast on Spotify or YouTube.