The Five Best Books You've Never Read - Nat Eliason - #088

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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. 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.

**Nat Eliason** (1:27)
Thanks for having me on, excited to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
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 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?

**Nat Eliason** (1:55)
Yeah. Made You Think started actually out of another podcast. So I had a podcast before called Nat Chat where I was- Such a good name. Yeah, great name, right?

**Chris Williamson** (2:09)
I love it.

**Nat Eliason** (2:12)
I was interviewing people who had come out of college and done something sort of atypical. And by atypical, I meant 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 fan 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 who felt like, oh, those typical career paths just aren't as exciting to me. So I was doing that chat for a while and interviewed one of my friends, Neil, who ended up doing a whole bunch of different things right out of college and eventually became a internal innovation consultant for Estee lauder, and then went on to start his own beer company, helping people create custom brews, taking advantage of the unused capacity of breweries around the country. We had a really good three-hour long episode just talking about everything and how he ended up doing what he was doing. People really, really liked how in-depth we went and how much stuff we talked about. Then we thought it might be fun to do a second episode on a book that we both really liked, Anti-Fragile by Nassim Taleb.
We just got back on and talked about Anti-Fragile for two hours or so. It ended up being, I think, the most popular episode of Nat Chat ever. We saw that and we're like, well, this is clearly a sign that there's something interesting here. I was getting a little tired of doing the interview style of episodes. We said, well, why don't we just try doing a podcast based on reading tougher books and then talking about the key takeaways from them? We did that and started putting out episodes about books that we were both reading and enjoying.
That was the inception for Made You Think.

**Chris Williamson** (4:38)
Yeah. I have to say that you're right. 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 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 a episode I've got queued up. Isn't it like some ridiculously difficult sci-fi book?