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

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

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 - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is a fellow podcaster. Natalyson 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 Eliasin. I am joined by the host of the Major Think Podcast and the man behind growthmachine.com, Nat Eliasin. Nat that welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on, excited to be here. So I am a big fan of your podcast, recently had Robert Greenon 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 what the major think podcast is and what the concept behind it is? Yeah, major think started out of another podcast. So I had a podcast before called Natchat where I was. It's a good name.

Yeah, great name, right? I love it. I was interviewing people who had come out of college and done something sort of like 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.

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 did the, 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 was doing. And people really, really liked how in depth we went and how much stuff we talked about. And then we thought it might be fun to do a second episode on a book that we both really liked, Antifragil by Nassim Taleb. And so we just got back on and talked about antifragil for two hours or so. And it ended up being, I think the most popular

episode of Natchat 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 a podcast based on reading 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, and that was sort of the inception for Meiji think. Yeah, I have to say that you're right. And one of the things that you touched on in the Robert Green 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 Yvesif, 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 an episode I've got queued up,

isn't it like some ridiculously difficult sci-fi book? Infant just, yeah. It's, I guess it's a sci-fi book technically, but yeah, it's a super, super weird, like, 1,000 page book with 200 pages of N notes. Like most of it makes very little sense without reading it very carefully. It's not quite like you let these level of confusing, but it's up there. So that was that was 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 it was fun to work through it. Honestly, I think the satisfaction isn't having finished it, not necessarily in all of the time spent reading it. So that's a good one. 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.

Yeah, exactly. Everyone wants to have run a marathon, not to run a marathon. 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 an Evernote system and you also have like a membership back end 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.

Yeah, and to be clear, 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 FORTE Labs.co, and his blog is Praxis.fortelabst.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

in a dozen different ways. His is actually novel and interesting and ultimately much more useful than most everything else out there. That's a big aculacate for Tiago. 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 newer useful to the discussion, but they're doing good work. So in Chris's at the forcing function dot com. Interesting. Yeah, we had to actually had Tiago on about three weeks ago. We had him on talking, oh, wonderful, 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 see what happens if we get into the trenches with someone who does progressive summarization, a pretty high velocity and that's you. 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 also sometimes highlight other things, mostly just as goal or sign posts 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 use later. So I'm going through and I'm highlighting the things

that are interesting and stand out. And then when I've done, I use a tool called 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 highlight highlight highlight highlight and new lines with no like weirdness that go the other apps. So I'll take it all into every note 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 all like add whatever other signposting I need. So whether that's section titles or chapters or however else I want 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, it's two to four layers of annotation to the note in order to make the highlights from the book even more useful. So, and it's base form, it's just your highlights. It's just the text 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 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. Like maybe I highlighted an idea early on in the book and then later on that idea got to explain better and so I'll keep the highlight from later and leave the 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've bolded. You're ignoring all the unbolded 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 part 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. 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 readigest what you took away from that piece when you're coming back to it. Now I do this differently 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 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. At least this is how I remember how he said he did it. What I do is I do it, I do it all up front 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 got into Tiago's work and learned about progressive 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 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,

anti-fraud, all of the ones on on Meiji thinks. 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 and they discover the page version of the notes. So it's a nice little like bit of side passive income. For sure. Yeah, 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 Tiago's course, then that became that formed the foundation for you to then build the podcast off because I'm going to guess when you're recording, maybe 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 of that. Also, you're driving traffic off that. It's like the ultimate evergreen content, I suppose. 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 that I want to quote for my articles. So it's really useful for creating other content as well. I got you. So how do you choose what you want to read? You've mentioned you've got 240 books, which is summarized. I'm going to guess you will have read more than that, which haven't been summarized. And you seem to read a pretty quick pace. How do you choose what it is that you're going to dedicate your time to?

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. Cause I know the biggest impediment to reading a lot will just be reading stuff that I don't wanna read because if I get into a book that I'm not that interested in, then I'll just get stuck and like do other things instead. So I just kinda go with whatever's interesting to me

at the time and read that. 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 finished books. I think Naval is 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's 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. 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 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, is it the trajectory is suggesting? But yeah, the getting bogged down in a book is a sure fire way to make reading an awful lot harder 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 reading and level up the difficulty as you go. You don't wanna be reading business e books, like James Altature trash for too long, but if you need to start there,

there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, and especially 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 in 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 more narrative-based stuff, I guess, to kind of just give your brain a little bit of a rest. Definitely. Yeah. So tell us about growth machine. I'm super interested to hear about that.

Yeah. So growth machine is a SEO-focused content market 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, rant top of Google for everything related to their product and their customer's 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 ecommerce T store. And then we've created both Cup and Leaf blog talking about T and managed to get in the top spots on Google for like best green tea, best do long tea, health benefits, a 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. Yeah. So the organic versus paid debate is one that we continue to have on this podcast

north a lot. The two co-hosts are big proponents of paid fans of some of us and of the guys behind click funnels and that kind of I guess, I would you call it the more transactional approach to driving traffic, but I certainly agree and I think that organic if you can get it right is such a powerful tool. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be an either or. Yeah. You know, they usually support each other and organic is lower and more difficult and takes longer to kick in. But if you can get it right,

you can potentially be getting ongoing customers for almost free, right? Like 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 sales within a week. Yes, start driving traffic. 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. And I don't know, for me, the 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 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 are your thoughts on that? 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's 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. And if you're good, you're going to make a lot of money. And if you're bad, you're going to lose a lot of money and if you're bad, you're going to lose a lot of money. Yeah, 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. Yeah, top books. Or most rare. What do you keep going back to?

Oh, I read, read very rarely because I just take good enough notes the first time that I don't need to go reread it. Exactly. Of course you do. For the most part. So I'm going to, I'm not going to pick the best five per say. 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. Awesome. So peak by Andrews, Eric St. Robert Poole is probably the best book on learning and skill acquisition. Way, way more useful than any of the hacky learning stuff like Tim Ferristile 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. Is that a prescriptive book? I haven't read it. 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.

Got you. I've got Scott H. Jung. 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, considering almost everyone in the Western world's in full-time education for at least like 11 years or something. Yeah, but it's still a challenge. I think the other thing too that people need to be careful about is that all of this learning had to learn skill acquisition stuff. A lot of it is sort of a get rich, quick scheme in disguise. How so? Well, because people think like, oh, I could just like, you know,

or one, they think that the problem isn't that learning is hard and 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, I think 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 are complicated like one to sell stuff in two because it's more fun to like spend time

trying to hack your learning than it is to do the boring learning stuff. You feel super productive, rereading, an article on how to learn, and you feel like you're making progress, but it's like, no, you should probably just, if you're trying to learn a language, you should be speaking to someone in that language and literally anything else you are doing is a waste of time.

Right? 100%. The principle of directness. Yeah. I think it's just like, you got to 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 learned it really quickly. And if you're trying to 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. Yeah. Yeah, you are. It looks super sexy. Yeah, and I think as well. Have you listened to the Naval and Joe Rogan podcast yet? No, not yet.

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, Neval 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 around. 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. Like I want to sound like you know he's got so he Chris has got some interesting stuff to say but the lack of humbleness pulls you away from the actual thing that you're trying to do which is just to understand stuff. Yeah, no, I think that's very true. So yes, what have we got next? So peak up first and then is very good.

I'll say endurance by Alfred Lansing is very good. All right. So that's the story of Shackleton and his crew who were trying to do the first trans Antarctic crossing and and 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. Two years. And yeah, and everybody, like everybody outside of them, just assumed they were dead because they never made it to their check-ins.

And every single member of the crew survived the whole, like, expedition and rescue mission. It's an absolutely insane book. Wow. So that's highly recommend. That's probably my favorite biography I've read. It's really, really incredible. That's awesome. Have you read, it's going to,

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 the forgotten Highlander or the last Highlander I think it is by Alistair Erdogan. No I haven't read that. So this man if you if you 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 II, placed overseas in Japan, and then when the Japanese took, decided that they were going to invade and actually enter the war,

he was taking prisoner, he basically had dysentery for like four years straight, worked on bridge over the river quay Was left out in a hot tin box for two days with no food or water to basically cook in the sun Yeah, man. It's like it's like man's search for meaning but extreme then he gets taken to a different Completely different camp has to be hospitalized a number of times, they're not giving anyone any care, gets put on one of the death ships, which is basically a tin can floating out at sea, then starts working, gets transferred somewhere else, starts working on a new bridge, and gets hit by the blast of the bomb from Nagasaki and

survived that as well. And then 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 because there was the Germans were held to account, but I don't think the Japanese were so much, but as he's evident by Alistair's book, there's some pretty big, sort of scary things that went on. But yeah, that is like, 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 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. Yeah, it's a good one.

Sounds good. Yeah, so what's next? Okay, so that's two. Let's see, next. I'll say sovereign individual by James Dale Davidson and William Reesmog. That's really, really, really phenomenal books. It's really, really phenomenal book. 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

and the crypto economy. So it's really big in the Bitcoin fanboy space, but it's like, it's a legitimately fantastic hook. And you will, I think, think about government and individual sovereignty differently coming out of it. The, it's a little like dry and hard to read at times, so you may want to listen to the major think episode first, just to see if it's interesting

before you try to force yourself through it, but it's very good. Good, 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 few days, it's all I've got on my mind. But he's talking about 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 talked about he 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 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 stick, right? And he's sold like millions of books off the back of that this year. 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 very surprised if we actually get the Hyper-D centralized world that a lot of the crypto community, and it sounds like Naval, are prophesizing because you will

inherently have disparities in power, and any collection of power is going to result in centralization of control within that power. And the idea that you would have a... Yeah, the idea that you would have a perfectly communistic distribution of power and responsibility is just kind of ridiculous. I mean, people talk about crypto as if it's this super decentralized currency, but most of the power is controlled by a few companies in China.

If they wanted to turn off all of the mining rigs, they could do that. I'm sure that Bitcoin survived, 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 going to have this amazing decentralized future. I think we're just going to change who holds power like we always have. 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 of an anarchist people at someone may claim to be, I think deep 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 is just pretty tough or something else, I don't know. I think it's like, you know, Plato's Republic, right? 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 checks and things. 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, all right, this is too much. And so it's going to swing back in the other direction. And maybe we will get this 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 total decentralization

is like, stuff needs a plan, right? Like, if you imagine like laying out a city or designing the streets by committee and just like completely ad hoc with the planning, or like it'd be a mess, You want a powerful body for certain things. So I think that maybe we'll swing towards decentralization and then that will be dissatisfying in its ways and we'll swing back towards concentrated power again. We're just always going to be in those kinds of cycles.

Yeah, I think so. The grass always tends to be greener as well and people presume that the geach 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 write there's checks below Donald Trump or the prime minister minister or whoever it might be the head of any particular state there are checks and there's people around the culpable to and processes they need to follow but the end of the day the person that presses the button that new to another country is just a guy. And like that person is completely at the mercy of all of their biases and all 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. I know that it is, you know, it would appear to be the system that is the best at the moment, but looking at it totally objectively, it makes me laugh and also be terrified in the same sentence.

Yeah, I would have felt more that way three years ago, but I actually think that Trump has been really good for the American sense of democracy, because if anybody 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 the international policy and or like international relations that things like that have taken a hit. But I think everybody was so terrified of what would happen with this seemingly insane person being in power. And the answer is not much. Like the tariff stuff now sucks because we sell tea. Our tea prices went up 25% importing them kind of but like these are all kind of like edge casey things right it's not like we got to some crazy nuclear war with North Korea it's not like you know they're

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. 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 and particular policies. That was it to voters from the opposite side and saying, 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. And you could see the cognitive dissonance occur if people, when they're like, I like the policy, but with the NPC programming just like triggers. So is that because we've got the bachelor and 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? Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think two, humans are inherently tribal and we need some tribe to feel a part of. And also importantly, I think we need some tribe

to be an enemy of, right? And I actually think that it's a useful exercise to think about what tribes you choose to identify with, and then which tribes you choose to like fight against, you know, 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's going to be like your enemy, then your friends or your community, or like whatever news you let through your filter is gonna 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 in the same way that, you know, you'll just shit on the other like sports team and you're like no, but almost nobody argue about politics has any impact in the political sphere at all, right? Everybody getting up to you 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 going to like you're like you're not going to do anything you're not going to run for office you're not going to, like, you're, like, you're not going to do anything. You're not going to run for office. You're not going to go, like, petition at the local court house or whatever to get something changed. You're just going to, 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 what tribe you're in

is like how you feel about political stuff. Yeah, because it's downstream from that, it suggests that there's more implications people can draw about your personality. I was speaking to Caleb Jones, the other day, who's a massive non-monogamy advocate, and he said, non-monogamy le and he said, you know, non-monogamy leans the 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. Yeah. Which is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is 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 on their life and feel like it was a trope or a cliché. My life was really good. I was a caricature of myself. 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, 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. Yeah. 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, because they both require drawing an arbitrary line in the sand that's not based in really anything beyond your emotions or your philosophical, religious background. 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. 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 reason other than a personal choice. So the actual discussions on the questions that each side opposing to each other aren't even the same one.

They're talking from different ways. 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 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 wanna tell these law-biting 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.

Well, 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 in anybody whose pro abortion is pro murder. And that's also kind of like an insane framing. And so if both sides continue to 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 this is something that I think about a lot. Like I don't know where the rules on it should be. I'm very pro-choice, but I don't have a good backing up for that position. It just feels emotionally right that the right to choose is more important than the philosophical discussion about when life begins. But I also recognize that I don't have a super solid backing for that. I agree. Yeah. And I have it.

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 come back 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. And unfortunately you can't really talk about this. There's no room for you to hold this. Yeah, no, because the minute you say that there could be a reasonable argument for the other side, you're labeled as a terrible person.

It doesn't really matter which side you're doing that too. Right? Like, you've got a group of super-liberal people and you say, well, actually, I can see why somebody would think that life begins a 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. And, you know, on the same side, if you like tell a super conservative group, they're 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 going to happen, right? Like then you're obviously a murderer who wants to like kill babies.

And that's not fair either. Like, yeah, we've just sort of lost the ability. I think to talk about these things, uh, or to risk talking about them in play discussion. It's like just not worth it anymore. So we talk about game of thrones. Yeah, we do. We, and then people just riff on game of thrones and they say that the most recent things. And if that was shit.

Um, so final two books, not we'll do click fire. Rick fire, uh, final two books, uh, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, I would say. I'm sure I find a good one here. With 240 to choose from, I imagine that's probably not actually that easy of a choice. Yeah, yeah. I feel like having a point of view, one of your favorite children. I've got to pick my favorite kid here. So I've got all of my notes ordered by rating up on my site. If you go to natalice.com slash and you can see them all. All throw at go to Lesherbock is amazing. It's a go to Lesherbock by Douglas Hofstadter.

He was one of the early pioneers in terms of thought in the AI space. And it's one of the most intellectually challenging books I think I've ever read. The writing is very easy, right? It's not difficulty written, but it requires grasping and trying to work with ideas from math, physics, logic, biology, and also these like tricky philosophical ideas about what is a brain, what is a mind, like, is there an eye all of that?

And it's written in this extremely beautiful style that emerges artwork by MC Escher, narrative little fables in the style of like Lewis Carroll, and then 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. 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? 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 it gets like, there's, so a lot of the ideas in it,

come back to this idea of extreme 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 kind of would be really hard. Yeah, I got you. And then last one I'll throw out would be denial of death by Ernest Macker.

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 these pyramids, these sculptures that will outlast us in our feeble attempts at immortality. So. I was speaking to Carl C. Dostrom. Do you know Carl? He was the guy who did, he optimized one area of his life every month through a year.

He basically immersed himself in the life hacking world. And he optimized one month with sex, one month with money, one month with productivity, one month with relationships or fitness or whatever it might be. And 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 thoughts about death. And it sounds, it's such a morbid, like, bottom

line to put to a book. But I do think that 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 generally over the course of our revolution a pretty good thing to have. Right. Now in a world of abundance, it leads to some odd thought loops occurring. Yeah, seriously. That's a good one for ruminating on that thought. Awesome. I can't thank you enough, man. It's been awesome. If you will give us a lot of fun. Give us the time in the future. Maybe we can get you back on

do another top five 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 Amazon Shopfront. 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 them 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, Let's talk more soon.