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

Nat Eliason is the founder of GrowthMachine.com and the host of the Made You Think Podcast. Nat likes to read and think. Today we get to hear his five recommendations for books you probably won't have read, along with a description of his progressive summarisation system which he uses to note down and remember their key points. Also expect to learn Nat's thoughts on abortion, Trump, organic vs paid marketing, decentralisation and a lot more. Extra Stuff: Check out Nat's Podcast - https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com Nat's Company - https://www.growthmachine.com/ Follow Nat on Twitter - https://twitter.com/nateliason Check out Nat's website - https://www.nateliason.com/ Peak - https://amzn.to/2XZoK2l Endurance - https://amzn.to/2LEr3Bi Sovereign Individual - https://amzn.to/2K3dyrr Godel, Escher, Bach - https://amzn.to/2OhKpy7 The Denial Of Death - https://amzn.to/30VMZLL Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  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 Growth Machine.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 Growth Machine.com and how organic versus paid strategies in the online world are changing and developing

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  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 Bestsellers list. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Nat Eliason.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by the host of the Made You Think Podcast and the man behind Growth Machine.com, Nat Eliason. Nat, welcome to the show.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here.

• 1:35Chris 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 was a big, 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 what the concept behind it is?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, Made You Think started actually out of another podcast. So I had, had a podcast before called Nat Chat where I was-

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  Such a good name.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, great name, right?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I was interviewing people who had come out of college and done something sort of like atypical. 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. 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 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

• 2:59Speaker 01

  who felt like, oh, those typical career paths just aren't as exciting to me. So I did them, was doing that 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 Estee Lauder, and then went on to start his own like beer company, helping people create like custom brews, taking advantage of the unused capacity of breweries around the country. And we had a really good, like, three-hour-long episode, just talking about everything and how he ended up doing what he

• 3:43Speaker 01

  was doing. And people really, really liked how in-depth we went, 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, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb. And so we just got back on and talked about Anti-Fragile for two hours or so. And it ended up being, I think, the most popular episode of Nat Chat ever. And we kind of saw that and we're 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 of episodes. So we said, well, why don't we just try doing

• 4:25Speaker 01

  a podcast based on reading, you know, tougher books and then talking about the key takeaways from them. And so we did that and started putting out episodes about books that we were both reading and enjoying. And yeah, that was sort of the inception for Made You Think.

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I have to say that you're right. And one of the things that you touched on in the Robert Greene 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. I have a bunch of co hosts that I do the show with. The listeners will be familiar with Johnny and Youssef. And the episodes that I do with those guys by far outstrip the engagement that the ones that I do, even if I get New York Times bestselling author on. And I think it's something to do with the fact

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  that when you just have normal candor between a group of friends, 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 guys have tackled some pretty difficult books. Didn't you tackle, there's an episode I've got queued up, isn't it like some ridiculously difficult sci fi book?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Infinite Jest?

• 5:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  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 end notes. Like, most of it makes very little sense without 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. The episode came together surprisingly well. I wasn't sure exactly what we were going to 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. But

• 6:33Speaker 01

  it was fun to work through it. And honestly, I think the satisfaction is having finished it, not necessarily in all of the time spent reading it. So it's a good one.

• 6:44Chris 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 going to enjoy. But once you get across the finish line, it feels pretty good.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Everyone wants to have run a marathon, not to run a marathon.

• 6:56Chris 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 more common parlance, it would be, how do you remember the things that you read? I know that you have a an Evernote system and you also have like a a membership backend to your Evernote, which I think is really super interesting. So yeah, if you could talk to us about your process for remembering the things you read and then also explain to the listeners about your Evernote, your little Evernote hustle you've got going on.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  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 Forte Labs, like F O R T E labs.co, C O. And his blog is praxis.forte.labs.co. And he's really, I think, one of the only writers in the productivity space who's worth reading. Pretty much all productivity writing is just like the same trash being rehashed a dozen different ways. His is actually novel and interesting and ultimately much more useful than most everything else out there. So

• 8:12Chris Williamson?

  That's a big accolade for Tiago.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, and I stand by that. I really him and Chris Sparks are the only two people who I read in the productivity space anymore. Everybody else is not really contributing anything new or useful to the discussion, but they're doing good work. So and Chris is at theforcingfunction.com.

• 8:35Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. Yeah, we had I actually had Tiago on about three weeks ago. We had him on talking

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Oh, wonderful.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Talking about the digital productivity pyramid. But the final question, I asked him the question about progressive summarization. And that was as his buzzer went that he had to go on to something else. So I thought, let's, let's see what happens if we get into the trenches with someone who does progressive summarization at a pretty, pretty high velocity. And that's, that's you.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I use it as a way to consolidate and make my book notes in particular more useful. So whenever I'm reading a book, I'll pretty much always read it on my Kindle and all the highlighting stuff as I'm going. So I'm just using the Kindle Highlight feature. Anything that looks kind of interesting, I'll highlight so that I can pull it out later. And I'll sometimes highlight other things, mostly just as goal or signposts for context when I'm looking back at my notes later. I read most nonfiction now with the notes that I'm going to take from them in mind. So it's very like strategic consumption to do it in a way where I know I'm going to get good notes out of the book that I can

• 9:46Speaker 01

  use later. So I'm going through and I'm highlighting the things that are interesting and stand out. And then when I'm done, I use a tool called Readwise, Readwise.com, that can take your Kindle highlights and then seamlessly export them to Evernote with all of the formatting and stuff coming out really cleanly. So it's just, you know, highlight, highlight, highlight, highlight in new lines with no like weirdness that you got the other apps. So I'll take it all into Evernote and then I've got this kind of like disorganized list of my highlights from the book. And then I'll go back through and first I'll like add whatever other signposting I need. So whether that's section titles

• 10:29Speaker 01

  or chapters or however else I'm going to structure the notes so that I can skim through them easier later. And then the progressive summarization comes in, which is going through and adding anywhere from three to four layers, I guess two to four layers of annotation to the note in order to make the highlights from the book even more useful. So in its base form, it's just your highlights. It's just the text that you pulled out of the book. Layer two is going through and bolding the parts of those highlights that is most important. So you might have, you know, part of each highlight that's most important. You might have some highlights that are less important. This is usually the phase where I'll go through and delete some of them too.

• 11:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Like maybe I highlighted an idea early on in the book and then later on that idea got explained better. And so I'll keep the highlight from later and delete one from earlier. So I do a bit of cleanup there. And then once you've gone through and bolded all the important parts, then you go through again. And you highlight the most important parts of the bolded parts. So you're only reading the text that you bolded. You're ignoring all of the unbold text and you're going through the bolded text and you're saying, "Okay, of this, what is the most important?" And you're highlighting that. So that now, when you skim through your note, you've got these highlighted callouts of the most important parts of the book that you can easily jump to, to pull out those ideas. And then there's another layer that I don't always do.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  I think Tiago does a better job of it. But if you keep coming back to a certain book or a certain note, you can create like a little executive summary at the top of the note. And so that's just like maybe three to five bullet points of the most important ideas from the book or from the article, whatever you took the notes from, so that you can really quickly redigest what you took away from that piece when you're coming back to it. Now, I do this differently from Tiago.[57.6 From Tiago where Tiago, his method or the way he does it is like as a book or an article gets resurfaced. So as he needs something for an article he's writing or it comes up in a

• 12:39Speaker 01

  conversation, then he might bring up the note and then each time he brings it up, he does another layer. So he doesn't immediately go through and bold things. He waits and then when it comes up again, he'll go through and bold it. Or at least this is how I remember how he said he did it. What I do is I do it. I do it all upfront after I've read the book because as you alluded to, I have a product on my site where I sell these notes. So I've been doing it and I was doing it in a rougher form before I discovered Tiago's work where I was just pulling out my highlights and organizing them and publishing them as pages on my blog, similar to what Derek Sivers does. And then as I, you know, got into Tiago's work and learned about progressive

• 13:23Speaker 01

  summarization, I started doing that to all my book notes. So now I've got, I think, like 240 books in there and they're all annotated and highlighted and everything. So it makes it really quick for me to go back through and pull out the most important takeaways. Yeah, 241 books. So. And then I just sell that on my blog and you pay $50 and you get lifetime access to all current and future notes that go in there, which is pretty useful if you're trying to decide, you know, what book to read, or if you know you read a book, but you didn't take any notes and you want to go back and pull out some important stuff. I've got a lot of like the popular ones in there, including Laws of Human Nature, of course, and Anti-Fragile and all of the ones

• 14:05Speaker 01

  on Made You Think. So yeah, that's sort of how that all started. And then the other fun thing with it is since I publish a less annotated version of these notes on my site, my site actually ranks in Google for the titles of a lot of these books. Or if you search a lot of these books plus summary or plus highlights, you'll usually find my blog on the first page. So if you Google like 48 Laws of Power summary, I think I'm like in the top three that come up for that and that, you know, bring a lot of traffic to the site. And then people discover my other articles. They discover the paid version of the notes. So it's a nice little like bit of side passive income.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  For sure. Yeah, it's, it's cool that you've taken something, there's this sort of evolution of ideas or evolution of process that we've got here where previously you were taking notes, then you refined your process of taking notes through Thiago's course. Then that became, that formed the foundation for you to then build the podcast off because I'm going to guess when your 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 income stream off that. Also, you're driving traffic off that. It's like the ultimate evergreen content, I suppose.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, in many ways. And then obviously, when I'm doing my like other articles that might reference stuff in one of these books, I've got all of my highlights right there so that I can just go back and pull out whatever sections I want to quote for my articles. So it's really useful for creating other content as well.

• 15:42Chris 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 going to 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?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  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, because I know that the biggest impediment to reading a lot will just be reading stuff that I don't want to read, because if I get 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 I just kind of go with whatever's interesting to me at the time and read that.

• 16:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's bizarre that 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 Wikipedia and searching blogs for the rest of the night. But for me, personally, I find it's a bit of an open loop when I've got a book that so Thinking Fast and Slow is a perfect example. And it's like, it's so long as well. It's a monster to get through.

• 17:10Chris Williamson?

  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, there's something like, I don't know whether it's because I don't want to be defeated, and whether I just want to kind of grit my teeth and continue to read through it. But you're very correct. If there's listeners at home who are trying to develop a reading habit, I have been and continue to at the moment, over the coming years, hopefully that will get more and more easy for me, as the trajectory is suggesting. But yeah, the getting bogged down in a book is a surefire way to make reading an awful lot harder.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think that people sweat too much early on about, 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 want to be

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Business-y books, right? Like James Altucher trash for too long, but if you need to start there, like there's nothing wrong with that.

• 18:19Chris 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 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.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 18:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So tell us about Growth Machine. I'm super interested to hear about that.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Growth Machine is a SEO focused content marketing agency. So we work with 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 and Leaf, which is a e-commerce tea store. And then we've created the Cup and Leaf blog, talking about tea and managed to get in the top spots on Google for like best green tea, best do long tea, health benefits of jasmine tea, like all of those terms. And then that

• 19:38Speaker 01

  search traffic translates directly into sales that you're getting organically instead of having to buy ads on the terms.

• 19:45Chris 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 proponents of paid, fans of Samovans and of the guys behind ClickFunnels and that kind of, I guess, how would you call it, the more transactional approach to, to driving traffic. But I certainly agree. And I think that organic, if you can get it right, is such a powerful tool.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it doesn't have to be an either or.

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  You know, 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,

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  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 if you know what you're doing, start making, start making sales within a week.

• 20:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, start driving traffic. It is, it's, it's one of these things. I wonder what your thoughts are on this coming out from someone who does push 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 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.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  And I don't know, for me, there has to be diminishing margins of return is more and more people find, like more and more people read Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson or whatever, 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?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. Obviously, it's still Facebook, but there, people are getting better ROI on Instagram now because Facebook ads are kind of played out and maybe that will change over time. Like, maybe more will move into Pinterest or somewhere else, but I don't think it's ever going to 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 going to be ads.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  And if you're good, you're going to make a lot of money. And if you're bad, you're

• 22:50Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna lose a lot of money. Yeah, I totally, totally agree. So going back to the books and the content that you've been consuming over the last few years, some of the listeners may be thinking that I'm pretty interested in getting stuck in. Have you got a top five or so that you could run us through? It doesn't need to be of all time. It could just be what you've thought of recently or anything like that. But I think some recommendations might be cool. And then we could have a little discuss about each of the books, perhaps?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, top books.

• 23:23Chris Williamson?

  Or most read, what do you keep going back to?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I reread very rarely because I just take good enough notes the first time that I don't need to go reread it.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Of course you do.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  For the most part. So I'm gonna, I'm not going to pick the best five percent. I'm going to try to pick a few that maybe haven't been talked about on here as much because I can make some guesses about what has probably come up before.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  Awesome.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  So Peak by Anders Ericsson, Robert Poole is probably the best book on learning and skill acquisition. Way, way more useful than any of the like hacky learning stuff like Tim Ferriss style books that I think are more popular. I think Peak is actually a legitimately useful one for learning for somebody with a more long-term mindset.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  Is that a prescriptive book? Or I haven't, I haven't read it?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Uh, it's not prescriptive. I mean, the thing is they're not trying to sell you that you're going to be able to like learn a language in 24 hours. So they're much tempered in how they frame things, but it's very prescriptive if you know how to read and implement it.

• 24:37Chris Williamson?

  Got you. I've got Scott H. Young. I've got him on this week talking about Ultra Learning, which is his new book. And he references Peak in that. He references Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, who's been on this podcast as well, and Atomic Habits as well, I suppose. But yeah, the kind of desire for people to learn how to learn definitely identifies that most people don't know, which is bizarre, right? Considering almost everyone in the Western world is in full-time education for at least like 11 years or something.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but it's still a still a challenge. And I think the other thing too, that people need to be careful about is that all of this like learning how to learn skill acquisition stuff, a lot of it is sort of a get rich quick scheme in disguise. And

• 25:25Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Like the old, well, because people think like, oh, I could just like, you know, or one, they think that's the problem isn't that learning is hard. It takes a while. It's that I'm like doing it incorrectly. Right? And so instead of just continuing to make progress in the way that they probably should, they look for hacks and they look for shortcuts and like they get obsessed over the whole 80 20 nonsense and like think they need to over optimize their process instead of just like doing the work and getting good at the skill. Like skill acquisition is really simple, like it's not complicated, but people overcomplicate it like one to sell stuff and two, because

• 26:04Speaker 01

  it's more fun to like spend time trying to hack your learning than it is to do the boring learning stuff. Right? Yeah. Like you feel super productive rereading.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  You know, like an article on how to learn. And you feel like you're making progress, but it's like, no, you should probably just, you know, if you're trying to learn a language, like you should be speaking to someone in that language and literally anything else you are doing is a waste of time. Right?

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 100%. The principle of the principle of directness.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's just like, you gotta be careful with all of the stuff that is trying to sell you that you can learn things like crazy quickly, because nobody who's good at anything like learned it really quickly. And if you're trying to like find the 20% to get to 80%, well, anybody else can do that. So the 80% is really like 50% and it's not really good enough for anything besides writing about in blog articles.

• 27:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Like

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  It looks super sexy.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you do. And it's, I think as well, have you listened to the Naval and Joe Rogan podcast yet?

• 27:12Speaker 01

  No, not yet.

• 27:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, you got to get on it, man. It is like, I don't usually sort of fanboy over podcast episodes, but that one was was a real like just mic drop after mic drop throughout the entire podcast, really good. And in that Naval talks about the fact that people's desire to look clever is greater than their desire to be clever. And I think that what you've alluded to there, which is someone wanting to know enough to have a simulacrum of intelligence. And I find it in myself, right? Like, you know, I want to be on this podcast or I'm, I'm going to speak to Robert Green, New York Times bestseller, world renowned author. And I want to say stuff that makes me sound like I'm not a different species to him.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Like I want to sound like, you know, he's got, Chris has got some interesting stuff to say, but it, the lack of humbleness pulls you away from the actual thing that you're trying to do, which is just to understand stuff.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think that's very true.

• 28:11Chris Williamson?

  Um, so yes, what's, what have we got next? So peak up first and then.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  It's very good.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  I'll say

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Endurance by Alfred Lansing is very good.

• 28:27Chris Williamson?

  All right.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  So that's the story of Shackleton and his crew who were trying to do the first trans Antarctic crossing and end up getting stuck in the ice right at the beginning of the trip and have to survive for, I think, like almost two years in Antarctica with no additional supplies or anything.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  Two years.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And, yeah. And everybody, like everybody outside of them just assumed they were dead because they never made it to their check-ins.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  And every single member of the crew survived the whole like expedition and rescue mission. It's an absolutely insane book.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  So that's highly recommend. That's probably like my favorite biography I've read. It's really, really incredible.

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. Have you read, uh, it's gonna, it's so Man's Search for Meaning is one book, I guess, that kind of comes to mind with regards to that, like turmoil and people going through things, but, uh, The Forgotten Highlander or The Last Highlander, I think it is by Alistair.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  No, I haven't read that.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  Um, so this man, if you, if you, um, it need a new autobiography style book to read, I really highly recommend this one. So this guy was a Scottish recruit in the Highlanders Regiment, World War Two, uh, placed, placed overseas in Japan. And then when the Japanese took, uh, decided that they were going to invade and, and actually 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.

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  Um, yeah, man, it's like, it's like Man's Search for Meaning, but extreme. Then he gets, uh, taken to a different, a, a completely different camp, has to be hospitalized number of times. They're not getting, not giving anyone any care. Gets put on one of these death ships, which is like basically a tin, a tin can floating out at sea, then, 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, 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

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  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 real, it's an 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, 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.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a good, it's a good one.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So what's next?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  All right. So 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 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

• 32:32Speaker 01

  and the crypto economy. So it's really big in like the Bitcoin fanboy space. But it's like, it's a legitimately fantastic book and you will, uh, I think, think about government and individual sovereignty differently coming out of it.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  The, it's a little like dry and hard to read at times. So you may want to listen to the made you think episode first. Just to see if it's like interesting before you try to force yourself through it, but it's very good.

• 33:02Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Again, thinking about going back to the Naval and Joe Rogan podcast, you can tell I've listened to it twice in the last, the last few days. It's all I've got on my mind, but he's talking about, um, the future of social media and how the process for crypto, the decentralization of crypto has paved a way for future technologies to prove themselves against being taken down. And he talks about, he predicts that at some point in the future, you will have a 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.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  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. Or, sorry, I think on the surface, people say they want decentralized models for things, but the revealed preferences always trend toward centralized. Like, I'd 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, are prophesizing.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Because, like, you will inherently have disparities in power, and any, like, collection of power is going to result in, like, centralization of control within that power.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  And like-

• 34:59Chris Williamson?

  It's a communism problem all over again, right?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea that you would have, like, a perfectly communistic distribution of power and responsibility is just, like, kind of ridiculous. And I mean, people talk about crypto as if it's this super decentralized currency, but like, most of the power is controlled by, like, a few companies in China, right? Like, if they wanted to turn off all of the mining rigs, like, they could do that. And I'm sure that Bitcoin will survive, but it's not like it's this perfectly distributed thing. There's still a collection of power, and there will always be a way to get power. So, I'm skeptical that we're gonna have this amazing decentralized future. I think we're just gonna change who holds power like we always have.

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I have to say, I think there's too much reptilian brain in a lot of humans for this idealistic future to occur. In my opinion, I would agree with you. I wonder whether people- Deep down, perhaps, like the idea of that centralization, because the way that they've grown up is with a trust in the institution. You grow up and you have trust in school, you have trust in your teacher, you have trust in the education system that moves you on, you have trust in law enforcement, you have trust in government. And really, no matter how much, no matter how much of an anarchist people someone may claim to be, I think, deep

• 36:25Chris Williamson?

  down, we all would much prefer government to work the way that government's supposed to work, and education to work the way that education's supposed to work. I don't know whether that's because people don't have the ability to see outside of that box, or whether big picture, sort of, blue-sky thinking's just, just pretty tough, or something else. I don't know.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's like, you know, Plato's Republic, right? The, the ideal government is a philosopher-king. Democracies are messy and extremely slow, and most people really shouldn't be making political decisions for other people, right? But it's like, the best-worst system. And a, you know, a purely, a super benevolent, hyper-rational dictator would be a far superior form of government than, like, what we have in the States. But since we can't guarantee that anybody you put in that position is going to be that, like, hyper-rational, reasonable person, you need all of these other, like, checks and things.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And so I feel like that's sort of what happens with the whole centralization, decentralization argument, is you'll get these rapid swings in either direction, where the internet started out, super decentralized, and kind of a free-for-all Wild West, and then power started, you know, coming into certain areas, right, like Google, Facebook, whatnot. And now, we're seeing the extremes of that, and saying, like, all right, this is too much. And so it's going to swing back in the other direction, and, like, maybe we will get this, you know, internet 3.0, crypto net, whatever, that people are asking for. But that, too, I think, will be temporary. And something about that, you know, because, like, here's the thing with

• 38:12Speaker 01

  total decentralization, is like, stuff needs a plan, right? Like, you, if you imagine, like, laying out a city, or designing the streets by committee, and just, like, completely ad hoc with no planning, right? Like, it'd be a mess. You want a... Powerful body for certain things.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  So it's, I think that, you know, we'll, maybe we'll swing towards decentralization and then that will be dissatisfying in its ways and we'll swing back towards, you know, concentrated power again, like we're just always going to be in those kinds of cycles.

• 38:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think so. The grass always tends to be greener as well and people presume that the future is going to make some sort of improvement if they just make a drastic change, which I don't know, it doesn't seem to be the case. You touched on something there about the benevolent, single dictator thing. And I always think about how crazy it is that, I know that you, you're right, there's checks below Donald Trump or the, the prime minister, or whoever it might be, the head of any particular state, there are checks and there's people around that are culpable to and processes they need to follow. But at the end of the day, the person that presses the button that nukes another country is just a guy. And like, that person is completely at the mercy of all of their biases and all

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  of their prejudices and everything that they've got. And the fact that we've got seven billion people on the planet at the mercy of that. Like, I know that it is the, you know, it would appear to be the system that is the best at the moment, but looking at it totally objectively, it, it makes me laugh and also be terrified in the same sentence.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I would have felt more that way three years ago, but I actually think that Trump has been really good for the like, American sense of democracy. Because if anybody like sits down and tries to make a list of all the ways their life is worse with Trump being president, it's going to be a very short list, right? Like, I really can't come up with a few things that are the direct responsibility of like, Trump policies that have affected me on an individual level. And like, the country is still going pretty well, right? Like, I would agree that international policy and, or like international relations and things like that have taken a hit, but I think everybody was like so

• 40:36Speaker 01

  terrified of what would happen with this, you know, seemingly insane person being in power. And the answer is like, not much, right? Like, the, the tariff stuff now kind of sucks because, I mean, like, we sell tea, right? And our tea prices went up 25% importing of China, but like, These are all kind of like edge casey things, right? It's not like we got into some crazy nuclear war with North Korea. It's not like, you know, there are Nazis marching in the street like I think some people legitimately thought might happen, right? Like, president has actually remarkably little influence on our lives and that should be kind of refreshing for how much we allow ourselves to get wrapped up in the insanity of some of that political stuff.

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right. Do you think that people are very quick to personify these roles? Obviously, their main actual problem was with Donald Trump's personality. I think there was a NBC or maybe one of the more, maybe like a Vice News article or something, a video that they did online where they went around before the election and they were showing particular campaign objectives or particular policies, that was it, to voters from the opposite side and saying, this is what, this is a Hillary policy, blah, blah, blah. And they're going, yeah, yeah, brilliant, classic Hillary, classic, love it, love it. And then at the end they go, actually, all of those are Donald Trump.

• 42:01Chris Williamson?

  And you could see the cognitive dissonance occur in people when they're like, I like the policy, but with the NPC programming just like triggers. So is that because we've got, you know, like The Bachelor and like pop idol equivalents and stuff like that where everything's personified and it's all about the person's narrative and story and that often can actually detract away from the objective measures?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. I think too, like humans are inherently tribal and we need some tribe to feel a part of and most, and also importantly, I think we need some tribe to be an enemy of, right? And if you, and I actually think that it's a useful exercise to think about your, like what tribes you choose to identify with and then which tribes you choose to like. Fight against intellectually or emotionally, like what will you allow yourself to be triggered by is kind of a worthwhile exercise because if you don't pick what you're, what's going to be like your enemy, then your friends or your community or like whatever news you

• 43:12Speaker 01

  let through your filter is going to pick it for you. And like, politics is just the easiest one, right? It's super easy to hang out with all of your liberal or conservative friends and like shit on the other team.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  In the same way that, you know, you'll shit on the other like sports team and you're like, no, but almost nobody arguing about politics has any impact in the political sphere at all, right? Like, everybody getting up about the news, like, it doesn't affect your life. Like, it's not going to change how you behave day to day. Like, you're not going to go do anything about it. Like, this thing that you're getting so pissed about, it's not gonna, like, you're, you're like, you're not gonna do anything. You're not gonna run for office. You're not gonna go like petition at the local courthouse or whatever to get something changed. You're just gonna like bitch about it on Facebook. So, it's like, it's, it's just a fun bonding thing more than anything, right? And it's a way to show that you're a member of the group because everyone's always trying to feel out what tribes all the other people around them are in. And a really easy way to show

• 44:11Speaker 01

  what tribe you're in is like how you feel about political stuff.

• 44:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Because downstream from that, it suggests that there's more implications people can draw about your personality. I was speaking to Caleb, Caleb Jones the other day, who's a massive non-monogamy advocate. And he said, you know, non-monogamy, leans left, lots of libertarian friends, but doesn't smoke weed, doesn't drink. And for his other friends, that's like, what, you don't smoke? Like, they can't believe the fact that he doesn't smoke weed because it doesn't fit the profile.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Chris Williamson?

  Which is hilarious.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  People aren't comfortable with that.

• 44:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, again, I was talking to Robert Greene, he was saying about how not allowing people to put you in a box and not allowing people to categorize you 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, multifaceted, interesting individual. I don't think anyone wants to look back in their life and feel like it was a trope or like a cliche. My life was really good. I was a caricature of myself.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and if you can tell anybody one or two of your political beats and they can accurately infer all of the other ones, 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? 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, like things to design policy

• 46:11Speaker 01

  around because they both require drawing sort of an arbitrary line in the sand 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 going off of what your group is supposed to believe.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think. 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 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 a personal choice.

• 47:19Chris Williamson?

  So the, the actual discussions aren't, the questions that each side opposing to each other aren't even the same one. They're talking from-

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I think they're actually, 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? Like, that, to me, seems insane if you're surrounded by people with guns and you want to 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? That seems crazy. And then in the abortion case, it's not even, I think, about the late term choice.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  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. 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 like, this is something that I think about a lot. Like, I don't know where the rules on it should be. Like, I'm very, I'm very pro-choice, but I don't have like a good-

• 48:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:11Chris Williamson?

  I agree, yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  And I like.

• 49:14Chris Williamson?

  Having watched.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  It's tough.

• 49:15Chris Williamson?

  Having having watched Ben Shapiro's anti-abortion 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 just, 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.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  And unfortunately, you can't even really talk about this.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  There's no room for new ones at all, is there?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  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? 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.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  And, you know, on the same side, if you like, tell a super conservative group that like, oh, well, I actually think that, you know, there is some reasonable allowance for, you know, abortion in certain cases, like, the same thing's gonna happen, right? Like, then you're obviously a murderer who wants to like, kill babies. And that's not fair either. Like, we've just sort of lost the ability, I think, to talk about these things, or to risk talking about them in polite discussion. It's like, just not worth it anymore. So we talk about Game of Thrones.

• 50:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we do. And then people just riff on Game of Thrones. And they say that the most recent season of that was shit. So, final two books, Nat, we'll do quick fire.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Quick fire, final two books. I would say.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Sure to find a good one here.

• 51:15Chris Williamson?

  With 240 to choose from, I imagine that's probably not actually that easy of a choice.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  Does it feel like having to pick one of your favorite children? I gotta pick my favorite kid here.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Well, if so, I've got all of my notes ordered by rating up on my site. So if you go to like nateliason.com/notes, you can see them all. But I'll throw out, Gödel-Escher-Bach is amazing.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  What was that, sir?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  It's a Gödel-Escher-Bach.

• 51:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  By Douglas Hofstadter. He was one of like the early pioneers in terms of thought in the AI space. And it's, it's one of the most intellectually challenging books I think I've ever read. The writing, writing is very easy, right? It's not difficultly written, but it requires like grasping and trying to work with ideas from like math, physics, logic, biology, and also these like tricky philosophical ideas about what is a brain, what is a mind, like, is there an I? All of that. And it's written in this extremely beautiful style that merges artwork by M.C.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Escher, narrative little fables in the style of like Lewis Carroll, and then more, more like descriptive nonfiction writing that brings it all together. It's a very cool book. There's really no other book quite like it.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. That sounds really, really cool. Would you recommend, is Kindle sufficient for that? Or does it need to be the physical copy?

• 52:48Speaker 01

  I think there is a Kindle version. And if there is, I wouldn't recommend it. I would definitely read the physical version so that you get all of the art laid out properly. So because like there's, so a lot of the ideas in it come back to this idea of like strange loops and recursive relationships between ideas or functions in a computer, things like that. And so some of the narratives are themselves recursive and nested in these odd ways that require you to see the physical layout in the book to totally get what's going on. I think on a Kindle would be really hard.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  And then last one I'll throw out would be Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. That's another super interesting one. It's basically just about what it sounds like that almost everything we do is about or is in some way related to our uncomfortableness with death and trying to create, you know, these pyramids, these sculptures that will outlast us at our, in our, in our feeble attempts at immortality. So.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  Ah, I was speaking to Carl Sederstrom. Do you know Carl? He was a guy who, guy who did, uh, he optimized one area of his life every month for a year. He basically immersed himself in like the life hacking world. Um, and he optimized one, one month with sex, one month was money, one month was productivity, one month was like relationships or fitness or whatever it might be. And, um, his sequel book, which was about happiness and he said, he was pretty much certain the overarching principle between both books was that the reason people are trying to optimize their life so hard and the reason that people are searching for happiness is in an effort to stave off their

• 54:32Chris Williamson?

  thoughts about death. And it sounds, it's such a morbid like bottom line to put to a book, but I do think, I do think that our fear of the end drives so much of what people do. I mean, obviously like that maximizes evolutionary fitness, right? Like being afraid of death is, is generally over the, uh, the course of our evolution, a pretty good thing to have. Um, but now in a, a world of abundance, it leads to some pretty, uh, some odd, um, some odd thought loops occurring.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, seriously. But that's a good one for ruminating on that thought. So.

• 55:09Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Nat, uh, I, I can't thank you enough, man. It's been awesome. If, if you will.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

• 55:15Chris Williamson?

  Give us the time in the future. Maybe we can get you back on, do another top five or, or something like that. As always, the links to everything that we've spoken about today will be in the show notes below. I'll also make sure that I add every book that I can find from, that Nat's gone through today and I'll put it on our Amazon shop front. Just follow the link and you can support the podcast at no extra cost to yourself through that. Also links to Made You Think Podcast, Growth Machine and Nat's socials will be down below as well. So make sure that you go and check him out. I highly recommend Made You Think. It's a fantastic podcast. Nat, today's been sick, man. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks Chris. Talk more soon.