Modern WisdomThe Five Best Books You've Never Read | Nat Eliason
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
100 min read · 20,315 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(wind blowing) Hi, friends. Welcome…
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blowing) Hi, friends. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom podcast. My guest today is a fellow podcaster. Nat Eliason is the host of Made You Think and also the man behind growthmachine.com. I had a few things that I wanted to speak to Nat about today. His ability to retain the information that he reads in books through a progressive summarization method is pretty impressive, and he takes us through that today. He also explains how he's managed to essentially monetize his passion by selling access to his own Evernote. We talk about growthmachine.com and how organic versus paid strategies in the online world are changing and developing over time. And finally, he gives us his five favorite books that you probably haven't read. So stay until the end and find out exactly what Nat thinks you should sink your teeth into as your next read which you might not have seen on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Nat Eliason. (upbeat music) . I'm joined by the host of the Made You Think podcast and the man behind growthmachine.com, Nat Eliason. Nat, welcome to the show.
- NENat Eliason
Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.
- CWChris Williamson
So I am a big fan of your podcast. Recently had Robert Greene on talking about Laws of Human Nature, and your guys' summary of that, uh, was a- a big, (laughs) a big help in prepping. It's a big old book, and what you guys do on the podcast really, really helps to condense stuff down. Would you be able to explain sort of what the Made You Think podcast is and- and what the, uh, concept behind it is?
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. Uh, Made You Think started, uh, actually out of another podcast. So I ha- had: (clears throat) had a podcast before called Nat Chat where I was-
- CWChris Williamson
Such a good name. (laughs)
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. Great name, right? (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
I love it.
- NENat Eliason
I, uh, I was interviewing people who had come out of college and done something s- sort of like atypical. Uh, and by atypical I meant, you know, not gone to do what I saw a lot of other people from top tier schools doing, like, working in finance, or consulting, or going to work at one of the FAANG companies, things like that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
So talking to a lot of young people who either went entrepreneurial routes, or were doing like contract work, or ended up being an early m- member in an agency. Things like that that you don't hear about as much when you are going to some of these schools and trying to get more of those stories out there for people who felt like, "Oh, those typical c- career paths just aren't as exciting to me." So, uh, did th- did, was doing Nat Chat for a while and interviewed one of my friends, Neil, who ended up doing like a whole bunch of different things right out of college and eventually became sort of like a internal innovation consultant for Estée Lauder, uh, and then went on to start his own, uh, like beer company, helping people create like custom brews, taking advantage of the, uh, unused capacity of breweries around the country. Um, and- and we had a really good like three-hour-long episode just talking about everything and how he ended up doing what he was doing. And people really, really liked how in-depth we went and how much stuff we talked about. And then we said or we thought it might be fun to do a second episode on a book that we both really liked, uh, Antifragile by Nassim Tallek. And so we just got back on and talked about Antifragile for two hours or so.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
And it ended up being, I think, the most popular episode of Nat Chat ever. Uh, and we s- kind of saw that and we were like, "Well, this is clearly a sign that there's something interesting here." And I was getting a little tired of doing the interview style, uh, of episodes. So we said, "Well, why don't we just try doing a podcast based on reading, you know, tougher books and then talking about the key takeaways from them?" And so we did that.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
And started putting out episodes about books that we were both reading and enjoying. And, uh, yeah, that was sort of the inception for- for Made You Think.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, yeah. I- I have to say that you're right. And one of the things that you touched on in the Robert Greene, uh, podcast, you guys said that flipping over to the interview style... Or maybe it was one of your other recent ones. Flipping over to the interview style of podcast was something that you think there's enough people doing that in that space already, and I have to agree. Um, I have a bunch of co-hosts that I do this show with, that listeners will be (laughs) familiar with: Johnny and Yusuf. And the episodes that I do with those guys by far outstrip the engagement than the ones that I do even if I get New York Times best-selling author on. And I think it's something to do with the fact that, um, when you just have normal candor between a group of friends, th- a big proportion of people who are into podcasting just like that kind of voyeuristic fly-on-the-wall type stuff. But you're right. You- you guys have tackled some pretty difficult books. Didn't you tackle, um... There's a episode I've got queued up. Isn't it like some ridiculously difficult sci-fi book?
- NENat Eliason
Uh, Infinite Jest.
- CWChris Williamson
Infinite Jest. Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. It's-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
... it's, uh, it's... I guess it's a sci-fi book technically. But yeah, it's a super, super weird like thousand...... page book with 200 pages of endnotes. Um, like most of it makes very little sense. So without (laughs) reading it very carefully, it's, it's not quite like Ulysses level of confusing, but it's up there. So that was, that was a journey, getting through that book. Uh, the episode came together surprisingly well. I wasn't sure exactly what we were gonna talk about. I don't think either of us were, because like nothing really... there's no like huge plot driving the book. It's, it's really a character novel. Um, but it was fun to work through it. And honestly, I think the satisfaction is in having finished it, not necessarily in-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
... all of the time spent reading it. So (clears throat) it was a good one.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I guess that's probably the same as doing a marathon. Like there's big bits of a marathon that you're probably not gonna enjoy, but once you get across the finish line, it feels pretty good.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah, exactly. Everyone wants to have run a marathon, not to run a marathon.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Perfectly correct. So one of the first things that I wanted to ask you about was your approach to progressive summarization. That's what Tiago Forte would refer to it as, or I guess in a, a more common parlance, it would be how do you remember the things that you read. Um, I know that you have a, a- an Evernote system and you also have like a, a membership sort of, uh, backend to your Evernote, which I think's really super interesting. So yeah, if you could s- talk to us about your process for remembering the things you read and then also explain to the listeners about your Evernote, uh, your little Evernote hustle you've got going on.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. And to be clear, you know, I didn't come up with this system at all. This is Tiago's invention. And if anyone isn't familiar with Tiago's work, you should check it out. It's at, uh, Forte Labs, like F-O-R-T-E labs.co, C-O. Uh, and his blog is praxis.fortelabs.co. And he's really, I think, one of the only writers in the productivity space who's worth reading. Uh, pretty much all productivity writing is just like the same trash being rehashed a dozen different ways. His is actually novel and interesting and, uh, ultimately much more useful than most everything else out there. So-
- CWChris Williamson
That's a big accolade for-
- NENat Eliason
... uh-
- CWChris Williamson
... for Tiago.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. No, and I, and I stand by that. I, I really... him and Chris Sparks are the only two people who I read in the productivity space anymore. Um, everybody else is not really contributing anything new or useful to the discussion, but they're doing good work. So, and Chris is at, uh, theforcingfunction.com.
- 15:00 – 30:00
Yeah. Yeah, in many…
- CWChris Williamson
for you to then build a podcast off. Because I'm gonna guess when you're recording Made You Think, all that you really do is go back through your notes for the particular book that you're talking about and move through there, and you've got that as your reference. And then you've created a, uh, income stream off that. Also, you're driving traffic off that. It's like the ultimate evergreen content, I suppose.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. Yeah, in many ways. And then obviously when I'm, uh, doing my, like, other articles that might reference stuff in one of these books, I've got all of my highlights right there, uh, so that (clears throat) I can just go back and pull out whatever sections that I wanna quote for my articles. So it's really useful for creating other content as well.
- CWChris Williamson
I got you. So how do you choose what you want to read? You've mentioned you've got, you know, 240 books, which are summarized. I'm gonna guess you'll have read more than that which haven't been summarized, and you seem to read at a pretty quick, quick pace. How do you choose what it is that you're going to dedicate your time to?
- NENat Eliason
Uh, it's sort of just whatever I'm interested in or if it's Made You Think related, it's whatever Neil and I want to do an episode on. There's not that much science behind it, honestly-
- CWChris Williamson
Got you.
- NENat Eliason
... uh, 'cause I know the, the biggest impediment to reading a lot will just be reading stuff that I don't wanna read.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- NENat Eliason
Because if I get, you know, into a book that I don't, that I'm not that interested in, then I'll just get stuck and, like, do other things instead. So, uh, I just kinda go with whatever is interesting to me at the time and, and read that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, it's bizarre, that, um, kind of inertia that occurs when you are reading a book that you don't want to read. I know that Naval and Joe Rogan on the podcast that they did recently spoke about the fact that neither of them actually finish books. I think Naval's, like, notorious for just picking up a book, reading a page, finding something he likes, and then going down a rabbit hole on, like, Wikipedia and, and searching blogs for the rest of the night. Um, but for me personally, I find it's a bit of a, an open loop when I've got a book that... So, uh, Thinking Fast and Slow is a perfect example, and it's like, it's so long as well. It's a, it's a monster to get through. Um, I just, I've really struggled to get through that book and I keep on trying. I keep on picking it up, keep on picking it up, and every time I do, my overall reading for the week goes down because I just, uh, there's something (laughs) ... Like, I don't know whether it's 'cause I don't wanna be defeated, um, or whether I just wanna kind of grit my teeth and continue to read through it. But you, you're very correct. If there's listeners at home who are trying to develop a reading habit, uh, I d- have been and continue to at the moment over the, the coming years. Uh, hopefully that will get more and more easy for me as it, uh, the trajectory is suggesting. But yeah, the getting bogged down in a book is a surefire way to make reading an awful lot harder.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah, and I think that people sweat too much early on about, uh, you know, reading good books or challenging books, but it's like, get in the habit of just, like, reading anything first and then you can level up the difficulty as you go. Right? You don't wanna be reading...... businessy books, right, like, James Altucher trash for too long. But if you need to start there, like, there's nothing wrong with that.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And especially before, before bed sometimes for me, if I do end up reading something that's too kind of go-getter and upward mobility, uh, focused, I end up going to bed with my mind absolutely buzzing. So, I think there's definitely a place in there for people to read, I don't know like, autobiographies or fiction or, you know, more narrative-based stuff, I guess, to, to kind of just give, give your brain a little bit of a rest.
- NENat Eliason
Definitely.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Um, so tell us about Growth Machine. I'm super interested to hear about that.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah, so Growth Machine is a SEO-focused content marketing agency. So we work with, uh, e-commerce and tech companies to take over a decent portion of their blog and their content strategy, to get them, you know, ranked top of Google for everything related to their product and their customers' interests. So, we'll, you know ... I think the best example of this is our work on our own site, Cup & Leaf, which is a e-commerce tea store, and then we've created the Cup & Leaf blog talking about tea and managed to get in the top spots on Google for like, best green tea, best oolong tea, health benefits of jasmine tea, like all of those terms, and then that search traffic translates directly into sales that you're getting organically instead of having to buy ads on the terms.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. So the organic versus paid debate is one that we continue to have on this podcast an awful lot. The two co-hosts are big, uh, proponents of paid ... fans of Sam Ovens and of, uh, the guys behind ClickFunnels and, uh, the ... that kind of, uh, I guess ... how would you call it? The more transactional, uh, approach to, to driving traffic. But I, I certainly agree, and I think that organic, if you can get it right, is such a powerful tool.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah, and it doesn't have to be an either/or.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
You know, they, they usually support each other. And organic is slower and more difficult and takes longer to kick in, but if you can get it right, you know, you can potentially be getting ongoing customers for almost free. Right? Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
... it, it can work very, very well if you know how to target the right things. But it's much harder, especially in the early days, to build a business on, because again, it is so slow, whereas you can just turn on ads tomorrow and-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
... if you know what you're doing, start making-
- CWChris Williamson
Such-
- NENat Eliason
... start making sales within a week.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, start driving traffic. It is, it's, it's one of these things. I, I wonder what your thoughts are on this, coming out from someone who does push, uh, to the optimization of SEO. My concern with the proliferation of paid media at the moment, or paid advertising, is that essentially, anybody can do it. If it's just a formula, and Rory Sutherland was on the podcast talking about this as well, and he said that he thinks Silicon Valley sees everything as an optimization problem, and that-
- NENat Eliason
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... they presume that if you get the correct combination of numbers on a spreadsheet, the output will be a black figure at the bottom of your balance. Um, and I don't know, for me, there has to be diminishing margins of return as more and more people find ... like, more and more people read Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson, or whatev- whatever their bible of choice for online advertising is. That particular strategy will get rinsed and rinsed down to the point at which so many people are doing it that the market won't respond anymore. What, what are your thoughts on that?
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. Uh, maybe. I mean, ads, I think, have always been here and always will be here, and they will just change how they're being presented to us. Like, most of the money now is going into Instagram ads instead of Facebook ads. Um, obviously it's still Facebook, but there, you know, people are getting better ROI on Instagram now 'cause Facebook ads are kinda played out, and maybe that will change over time. Like, maybe more will move into Pinterest or somewhere else. But I, I don't think it's ever gonna get so saturated that it no longer works. You just have to keep getting better at it, and there will probably always be interesting new areas to check out. But I think it's just like, as long as people are selling things online, there's gonna be ads, and if you're good, you're gonna make a lot of money, and if you're bad, you're (laughs) -
- CWChris Williamson
You're gonna lose a lot of money.
- NENat Eliason
... you're gonna lose a lot of money.
- 30:00 – 45:00
... it's- …
- CWChris Williamson
took, uh, decided that they were going to invade and, and actually s- enter the war, he was taken prisoner. He basically had dysentery for like four years straight, worked on Bridge over the River Kwai, was left out in a hot tin box for two days with no food or water to basically cook in the sun, um-
- NENat Eliason
... it's-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, man. It's like, it's like Man's Search for Meaning but extreme. Then he gets, uh, taken to a different, uh, uh, completely different camp, has to be hospitalized number of times. They're not g- not giving anyone any care. He gets put on one of these death ships, which is like basically a tin, a tin can floating out at sea. Then (laughs) , then starts working, gets transferred somewhere else, gets, starts working on a new bridge, and gets hit by the blast of the bomb from Nagasaki, and survives that as well, and then stays silent for-
- NENat Eliason
Wow.
- CWChris Williamson
... stays silent for 40 years. And it's kind of I guess like a memoir. It's also a call-to-arms to, a call-to-account the Japanese government for the atrocities, 'cause there was, the Germans were held to account but I think, I don't think the Japanese were so much but, as is evident by Alistair's book, there's some pretty big sort of scary things that went on. Um, but yeah, that is like re- It's a easy read as well. It's very narrative-based, but like if you ever want to have contrast in your life and just to think like, (laughs) "I'm so, I'm so fortunate to just have a drink whenever I want a drink and two legs that work and, like, bowels that stay inside of my body," like... (laughs)
- NENat Eliason
(laughs) Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It's, um, it's a good, (laughs) it's a good one. So-
- NENat Eliason
Sounds good.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Uh, so what's next?
- NENat Eliason
Oh yes, that's two. Uh, let's see. Next, I'll say Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. Uh, that's a really, really, really phenomenal books, uh, it's a really, really phenomenal book. Uh, I think, like, it will change how you think about government and individual autonomy, so it, and money-
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting.
- NENat Eliason
... and power and a lot of things. It's, I think when it came out, it didn't get that much play, but it's having a moment now because it basically predicted a lot of stuff that's going on in crypto and the crypto economy.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- NENat Eliason
So it's really big in like the Bitcoin fanboy space.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
Um, but it's like, it's a legitimately fantastic book and y- you will, uh, I think, think about government and individual sovereignty differently coming out of it. Um, the, it's a little, like, dry and hard to read at times so-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
... you may want to listen to the Made You Think episode first (laughs) -
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- NENat Eliason
... just to see if it's like interesting before you try to force yourself through it-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
... but it's very good.
- CWChris Williamson
Got you. Again, thinking about, uh, going back to the Naval and Joe Rogan podcast, you can tell I've listened to it twice in the last, uh, the last few days, it's all I've got in my mind.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But he's talking about, um, the future of social media and how the, uh, process for crypto, the decentralization of crypto has paved a, a way for future technologies to proof themselves against being taken down, and he talks about, he, he predicts that at some point in the future you will have decentralized social networks where it can't, there's no one site, or there's no one host, and it can't be taken down and it will be a little bit more like the Wild West and, and stuff like that. So I think people thinking forward to this sort of stuff, to understand individual sovereignty and obviously that's Jordan Peterson's whole shtick, right? And he's sold like millions of books off the back of that this year.
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. You know, I hope that's right, but I think that humans tend towards collectivization and monopoly and centralization, not decentralization. Like, I think that deep down people would prefer decentralized models for things. Uh, or sorry, I think on the surface people say they want decentralized models for things-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
... but their revealed preferences always trend toward centralized. Like, I, I be, I'm kind of, I'd be very surprised if we actually get the hyper-decentralized world that a lot of the crypto community, and it sounds like Naval-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
... are prophesizing.
- 45:00 – 56:06
Yeah. Well, and if…
- CWChris Williamson
people to put you in a box and not allowing people to categorize you, uh, sort of one dimensionally is one of the best things that you can do, not only to hedge your personality, your interests in life, but also just to come across as a bit more of an enigma and a bit more of a multi-layered, multi-faceted, interesting individual. I don't think anyone wants to look back in the life and feel like it was a, a trope or (laughs) like a cliche. "I, I... My life was really good, I was a caricature of myself."
- NENat Eliason
Yeah. Well, and if you can tell anybody one or two of your political beliefs and they can accurately infer all of the other ones-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
... then you probably haven't thought about what you believe in very much, right? You've just sort of accepted like the package set of ideas that come with one group and you're running with them, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
And I think like, you know, there's all of these... there's a lot of really hot button issues that I think most people don't think about very hard. Like guns and abortion are the two big ones where if you actually sit down and think about them, like they're really, really tough, uh, like things to design policy around because they both require drawing sort of an arbitrary line in the sand-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
... that's not based in, you know, really anything beyond your emotions or your like philosophical religious background. And I think people like to think that they're super cut and dry easy things, but the only way you would think that is if, again, you hadn't thought about them very hard and you were just like-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- NENat Eliason
... going off of what your group is supposed to believe.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I think, um, people often talk past each other with these issues as well, right? Like on the topic of gun control, one group is talking about school shootings and, uh, people who are on SSRIs and the other side is talking about an armed militia against a government, a tyrannical government. Or on the topic of abortion, one side is talking about protecting a woman's rights if she's been raped and the other side is talking about late term, you know, 20 weeks in abortions with no, no reason other than personal choice. So the, the actual discussions aren't... The questions that each side are posing to each other aren't even the same one. They're talking from completely different-
- NENat Eliason
I, I think they're actually... I, I think they're actually harder than that. I think that you can be a lot more generous to the other sides in both of those arguments, right? And I think that the most generous way to frame the gun control debate is like why or how can you say that a poor single mother living in the slums of Chicago is not allowed to defend herself, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
Like that, to me, seems insane if you're surrounded by people with guns and you wanna tell these law-abiding citizens who are living in terrible areas that they can't have an equivalent weapon with which to defend themselves, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
That seems crazy. Um, and then in the abortion case, it's not even, I think, about the late choice... Well, it's, it's partly that one side is saying this is a choice debate and so they're saying that anybody against abortion is against women having rights, which is insane. And then the other side is saying this is a life discussion and anybody who's pro-abortion is pro-murder, right? And that's also kind of like an insane framing.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
And so if both sides continue to like talk past each other, it doesn't get anywhere. But until somebody sits down and they say like-... you know, either at this date or at this line, a fetus becomes a human, and then it's no longer okay to abort. That's the only way you can be okay with, like, abortion at some level. And I, like, this is something that I think about a lot, like, I don't know where the rules on it should be.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- NENat Eliason
Like, I'm very, I'm very pro-choice, but I don't have, like, a good, I think, backing up for that position. It just feels like emotionally right that the, the right to choose is more important than the philosophical discussion about when life begins. But I also recognize that, like, I don't have a super solid backing for that, right?
- CWChris Williamson
I, I agree, yeah.
- NENat Eliason
And I w-... Yeah, it's, it's tough.
- CWChris Williamson
Having watched, uh, hav- having watched Ben Shapiro's, uh, anti-abortion, uh, debate videos on YouTube, I found myself putting myself on the other side of the fence, trying to put my point across to Ben and finding that I was getting absolutely annihilated. Like, I, I just-
- NENat Eliason
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... I didn't have an awful lot of comeback other than sort of, her body, her choice, I guess, and yeah, this arbitrary line in the sand of "when life begins" in quotation marks.
- NENat Eliason
And unfortunately, you can't even really talk about this-
- CWChris Williamson
There's no room for nuance at all, is there?
- NENat Eliason
... in most groups. Yeah, no, because the minute you say that there could be a reasonable argument for the other side, you're, like, labeled as, you know, a terrible person. It doesn't really matter which side you're doing that to, right?
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- NENat Eliason
Like, if you've got a group of super liberal people and you say, like, "Well, actually, I can see why somebody would think that life begins at conception without religion," like, the immediate reaction is that, like, "Oh, you don't think women should have rights," right? And, like, that's such an insane mischaracterization of what someone's trying to say that it closes the door to any discussion.
Episode duration: 56:06
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