The Five Best Books You've Never Read | Nat Eliason

(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.

Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here.

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?

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-

Such a good name. (laughs)

Yeah. Great name, right? (laughs)

I love it.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.