
How to get rich without getting lucky (2018) - yarapavan
https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich
======
mrnobody_67
Wealth = freedom to do what you want.

For some people with minimal lifestyles in low cost areas of the US (or living
internationally) that can be $30K.

I think the series does a good job covering principles such as leverage
(software, capital, labour) which are rarely taught in school.

Most financial planners only talk about cutting costs, not making more money,
because they don't know how... this is the opposite.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
> Wealth = freedom to do what you want.

I have a friend who is pretty wealthy. I've noticed he spends a fair amount of
time worrying that his money is secure. Seems like the ultimate first world
problem to me, but it's real.

~~~
gnicholas
Seems like the issue is having enough cushion so that your lifestyle is well
below your means, so you can invest very conservatively without having to
worry about your circumstances changing.

Of course, this can be accomplished by either dramatically increasing your
assets, or by dramatically decreasing your expenditures.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
Good points. In this case, I was attempting to refer to he's concerned he'll
get hacked, or a trusted associate w/ access to the money would run off with
it.

~~~
gnicholas
Did your friend come up with any solutions to the trusted associate issue?
Seems like there are two obvious approaches: the carrot (pay your employees
well above market rates) or the stick (a literal stick, in the extreme) to
encourage loyalty.

But there are presumably other ways to engineer your account permissions so
that one or two rogue associates cannot clean you out?

~~~
PopeDotNinja
It's kind of like buying a safe. You can always improve the quality of the
safe, but you can't always trust the safe is 100% foolproof. The more you have
in the safe, the more you worry there's that one thing you didn't think about
that prevents someone from walking away with all the money.

~~~
GuiA
You can put your things in many smaller safes, and spread them around a bit!

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"Divide your fortune into seven, or even into eight, for many are the
mischances of the world." \- Proverbs (in the Bible).

------
fzeroracer
This article honestly read like something out of a bullshit self-help book.
There's a lot of tidbits in there that sort of ignore the reality for most
people and how one small injury, accident etc can spiral out of control and
bankrupt someone, at least in America. But reading this part especially stood
out to me

> We all know people who are consistently pessimistic, who will shoot down
> everything. Everyone in their life has the helpful critical guy, right? He
> thinks he’s being helpful, but he’s actually being critical, and he’s a
> downer on everything.

> That person will not only never do anything great in their lives, they’ll
> prevent other people around them from doing something great. They think
> their job is to shoot holes in things. And it’s okay to shoot holes in
> things as long as you come up with a solution.

This is silicon valley in a nutshell. Silicon valley needs more pessimists,
people that understand the problems with all the nonsense they push in attempt
to solve problems while exploiting people along the way. It needs people that
are willing to question people and tell them to stop doing things that are
fucked up. Because these companies don't think about what will happen if they
fuck up and break things.

~~~
wwweston
> This article honestly read like something out of a bullshit self-help book.

There's a reason for that. That reason _isn 't_ that what he's telling you is
largely bullshit, because much of it is true enough to be useful at a first
approximation (although one could argue that some points aren't a fully
articulated picture of reality -- in particular I'd assert he's mixed the
concerns of _status_ and _values_ and that's going to make certain muddled
conclusions easier).

It's that part of what he's doing here is in fact playing a version of the
status games he defines, partly on a direct level (wealth creators are high
status on by a certain measure of values, critics are just downers for
competing values into the ring), partly on a meta level as the narrator who is
telling this revealing story to an eager audience who, if they take this
advice, will also almost certainly be successful because THIS is the mindset
of SUCCESS and of course there is no survivorship bias.

It's pretty standard if quality work in that respect, which is why it has a
ring of aspirational self-help.

One good response is to learn from what he's doing as well as carefully
weighing the merits and limits of what he's directly saying.

------
wwweston
There's a lot in this article that I'd endorse as a first-pass approximation
of the truth for orienting _oneself_ towards productive behaviors.

But...

There's a number of places where Naval is mixing the concerns of "status" and
"values." This isn't an easy distinction to make, because status essentially
exists by the standard of one form of values or another, but without this
distinction you can gather both ideas like "all property should be
owned/controlled by the state" or "taxation is theft" and "people should not
be property" or "some regulation can balance problematic incentives" under the
same umbrella of "status games", which makes certain muddled conclusions are
easier (problematic or useful depending on how you look at it).

Once you understand this, though, it's easier to note that _this piece is
itself a bid in a status game_ \-- it defines a set of values and sets them up
as higher than a competing set of values. And the set of values he's
advocating seems to be one by whose standards he would have a high status. ;)

This is distinct, by the way, from arguing that Naval is wrong (much less
totally wrong). He is in some ways, not in others, and I hope that saying as
much as I have makes the rest of that easier to work out as an exercise for
the reader.

Though that will probably prove to be mostly be the case where it affirms the
values a given reader already holds.

~~~
darawk
I like what I think you're trying to say...but:

> Once you understand this, though, it's easier to note that this piece is
> itself a bid in a status game -- it defines a set of values and sets them up
> as higher than a competing set of values. And the set of values he's
> advocating seems to be one by whose standards he would have a high status.
> ;)

I don't think this is actually true. As far as I can tell, Naval isn't setting
up any particular set of values as higher than any other. He's not saying that
you _should_ or must want wealth. He's speaking to you on the assumption that
you share this value. I don't think he's trying to justify that value being
better or higher than any other set of values.

~~~
awinder
I felt like this got very close to what the parent was talking about:

    
    
      Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and 
      what you work on are more important than how hard you 
      work.
    

Realistically if the who + what is more important than the specific effort, I
feel like the author is trending more into status/values because despite the
relative importance, the last-place component of success there is the lede &
focus here. I'd also contend that "work as hard as you can" is generally
crappy advice, "work as hard as the situation demands" will leave you with
more energy & the clarity that comes with understanding relative importance.

------
ggregoire
He was on the Joe Rogan Experience 2 days ago:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44).
He goes back on some of those tweets and talks about happiness, work, society,
social networks, AI, robotics, energy…

------
xapata
> Free markets are intrinsic to the human species

An anthropologist would disagree. Counter-examples are numerous. Ironically,
individuals inside a corporation don't interact with each other via free
market behavior. Friends, family, etc. Whole societies back in the day.

~~~
Reedx
He actually made that point on Rogan's podcast, referencing Nassim Taleb:

 _" I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at
the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist."_

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Unfortunately that's self-serving nonsense. You're either context-aware or
you're not. If you're trying to cherry pick the levels at which you're
context-aware, it means you're not context-aware at all.

The more complex social contexts don't stop operating just because you don't
believe in them.

~~~
Reedx
He's literally saying it depends on the context. That's the definition of
being context-aware.

------
darkmighty
> \- Earn as much as you can from your own work. Take a 2nd job, change to a
> higher paying job, ask for more responsibility and a raise at your current
> job, go back to school for a more lucrative degree, ...

I think that's a much better advice than any I found from a cursory read of
the article; at least with my limited experience with friends. Most of my
acquaitances doesn't seem sufficiently agressive with salaries -- they're
mostly worried about having a job, a "good enough" pay, and that this job
doesn't suck too much. That's ripe for exploitation -- if you don't actively
demand and seek the best deal, you're going to be paid the minimum you can to
just scrape by and definitely won't get wealthy. You don't _have_ to own a
business to be relatively wealthy (I'm taking 'wealthy' to be relative because
the threshold for wealth is indeed much higher in developed countries).

Also I think being wealthy is completely beside the point; it doesn't make too
much sense as an objective. The article tries to make the point for wealth
being ethical; but in any case ethical are possible consequences not the
accumulation of wealth. Health, general satisfaction (including from making
ethical choices) are what really matter. That does necessitate some wealth,
but in general any wealth threshold is not necessary nor sufficient for those
prime goals.

Those two points may seem contradictory, but it's not because wealth is a non-
necessary correlated variable that you should just leave it at the table. Get
all you can from your employer without compromising on what matters (and hence
obtaining the conveniences and securities of wealth while retaining life
satisfaction).

I'm not going to venture into defining life satisfaction, but I do think it's
good to ask yourself from time to time. For me it is having decent amounts of
free time, being able to help people, having fun socially, producing
beautiful/impactful work, etc. -- but it could include whatever you deeply
enjoy.

~~~
sombremesa
An interesting counterpoint is that I've purposefully relinquished
responsibility (read: stress) at my job and I'm paid less than I could be as a
result. I've done this because I'd rather use my time and energy to work on my
own business.

The abundance of contradictory points indicates that things aren't really cut
and dry in any sense and this advice boils down to the same thing all advice
boils down to: YMMV.

------
reducesuffering
"I started as a poor kid in India, so if I can make it, anybody can, in that
sense."

I agree with most of the advice and Naval's musing. But let's not pretend
opportunity is mostly equal. He attended Stuyvesant [0], one of the highest
acclaimed high school educations [1][2]. I'm sure that had a bit to do with
how the rest panned out compared to just anyone.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngelList](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngelList)
[1] [https://www.niche.com/k12/stuyvesant-high-school-new-york-
ny...](https://www.niche.com/k12/stuyvesant-high-school-new-york-ny/rankings/)
[1]
[https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Stuyvesant_High_School/](https://everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/Stuyvesant_High_School/)

~~~
pawanrawal
Also, started as a poor kid in India doesn't really present the whole picture.
He was lucky that his family moved to New York when he was 9 which broadened
the scope of opportunities he had.

From the Wiki article, "Ravikant moved to New York City with his family at the
age of 9".

I still think what he has achieved is great and love some of what he shares
but Naval can sometimes make things sound grander than they are.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And moving to the US with your whole family is not a cheap or easy operation;
it costs money, you need a job, a house, and from abroad, a working visa. I
find it hard to believe he was a poor kid.

~~~
deepGem
It is not an easy operation and neither cheap. However, in those days getting
a working visa was probably a no brainer. I really applaud his parents for
taking that route. Usually employers sponsor the airfare. Still, a very gutsy
move.

One of my uncles went to Carnegie Mellon on a full scholarship in the 80s.He
hailed from a village where education was the least priority. He was very poor
but figured his way out without any money. It can be done.

------
quickpost
Naval's original tweet storm is really worth reading (as is some of the
discussion around it on twitter):
[https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936)

~~~
sytelus
Thanks for reposting the source. Lots of great quotes like,

 _There are no get rich quick schemes. That 's just someone else getting rich
off you._

The most interesting part for me, however, is discussion of removing the
element of luck. Naval doesn't clearly elaborate on this but keeps making
assertions that anyone can be deterministically lucky. The only "insight" I
could gather is: specialize in something, start business and sell products.
Obviously, that's exactly where you need to get lucky: _right thing_ to
specialize in, _right product_ to create and run business over long enough
duration despite of million failure points.

------
JamesBarney
Anyone one of his thousand claims could be an interesting article.

For instance "equity is a better way to get rich than working". Is it, I bet
the average googler accumulates more wealth than the average start-up founder.

Or "how much start-up success is based off luck versus founder?"(from what
I've read it's more luck, and if you include the birth luck such as
intelligence, energy-levels, focus and health it would be almost all luck)

Or is capitalism natural? I'm not an anthropologist but it seems like a lot of
early human communities were probably not run capitalistically.

He talks a lot about risk, but a interesting article would be how to reduce
the risk of "product market-fit", "having the wrong skills in your startup",
"choosing the right niche to develop "specific skills"

I think the most reproducible way to achieve freedom is develop a high paying
skill and save your money. Or the most direct route is develop an in-demand
skill and a low cost way of living just structure your life so you have
freedom.

This guy seems like someone who has done very well and assumes that the cause
is because of some system of how he made choices. If that's true he could put
his money where his mouth is, teach this life skill, and everyone would be
fabulously wealth. And since he believes that all you need is a functioning
body and brain he could admin pretty much everyone.

~~~
nostrademons
I made a lot more money at Google than from various startups I've worked at or
founded.

I made a lot more money _from equity I got while working at Google_ than I did
in salary. The ratio when I started working at Google was about 3:1:2
salary:bonus:equity; the ratio as it stands 10 years later, after a 7:1
appreciation in the stock price, was about 3:1:20.

This is not inconsistent with "equity is a better way to get rich than
working".

~~~
vl
This is the exception though, you caught the end of the tail. People joining
Google now are not going to experience this. Moreover to be in the situation
you described even in the given time frame one had to be fortunate to be on
the "right" projects.

~~~
VRay
Man, that's a really good point. You can't get ahead at big companies by just
keeping your head down and working hard. You don't need to become a weasel,
but you do need to keep your eyes open and jump ship early when a project or
org starts to go sour in the c-suite's opinion

------
csomar
> We are the only animals in the animal kingdom that cooperate across genetic
> boundaries. Most animals don’t even cooperate. But when they do, they
> cooperate only in packs where they co-evolve together, and they share blood,
> so they have some shared interests.

Pretty certain that lots of animals co-operate. Dogs and Cats are two
examples. Dogs will "take care" of your babies. (not changing diapers but
primitive protection).

I thought humans used horses but it is more complicated than that when I
visited a farmer. He does have a genuine relation with his horses and without
co-operation the horse will throw you out of his back.

Still he is comparing different species to different races of the same specie.
Not quite a fair game.

~~~
EliRivers
_Pretty certain that lots of animals co-operate._

Oh yes, lots. Here are some really interesting ones betweens species.

[https://listverse.com/2015/02/23/10-amazing-cooperations-
bet...](https://listverse.com/2015/02/23/10-amazing-cooperations-between-
different-animal-species/)

There are many more.

As for cooperation "across genetic boundaries" within a species, I can think
of lots without even having to search. Vampire bats sharing blood with unlucky
fellow bats who didn't find anything comes to mind.

It seems that almost every time someone (often someone trying to make a point
about human exceptionalism without having bothered to actually check if
they're talking nonsense) makes a statement that "humans are the only creature
to exhibit behaviour X", a counter-example is only a websearch away. I've come
to strongly suspect that there isn't any special or unique quality humans have
that no other species does; we differ only on the scale of some of them and
perhaps got lucky with a few physical characteristics that lent themselves to
additional uses (although that's very speculative; we built ourselves a
society and a way of life perfectly suited for our shape and characteristics,
so of course that shape and characteristics look really helpful).

~~~
kjsbfkjbf
Almost invariably capitalists try to define capitalism as being intrinsic to
"human nature" or "society", and are always wrong. If you read the higher
upvoted comments -- that statement is believed and taken at face value.

If you have to take the time to defend that your accumulation of material
wealth is ethical when there are millions of people dying from a lack of
resources... I don't know what to say. I just hope HN grows to stop believing
the obvious lies.

------
temp129038
I listened to the Rogan podcast and was definitely confused by some of the
arguments he makes e.g. he claimed the celebrities are the "most miserable
people in the world" because they get a disproportionate amount of hate
directed toward them due to their status as public figures (or something). I
don't believe that for a minute.

I was also a bit surprised by the discussion around questioning the truth
behind climate change. Yes, we should be scientific about validating
hypothesis about anything, but to nod along as Rogan said "there's no
evidence" was a bit shocking.

~~~
n4r9
I can easily believe that about celebrities. Wouldn't be at all surprised if
the rate of mental health issues is much higher than average in celebrities.

~~~
anthonypasq
probably more likely that only mentally ill people become celebrities.

normal people dont reach the .00001% of society

------
fallingfrog
In other words, own productive capital and live off the rent it generates.
Personally I think such capital should be owned by the workers at a business
so that they don’t have parasitic individuals like the author to support. It’s
nice for you if you have a lot of wealth and don’t have to work, but the rest
of us pay the price of that, and only a tiny slice of society can ever live
that way, for obvious reasons.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Parasitic?

Here's an airline pilot. They're not being paid for the full value they
produce, because some of it is going to pay of capital owners. And why should
they receive some of the money? _Because they put up the 70 million dollars to
buy the airplane._ The pilot didn't have that kind of money. And why does the
plane cost that much? Because there are 150,000 people at Boeing who also want
to be paid for the value that _they_ produce.

You seem to want those with capital to invest it in companies for no return.
That's... not likely to happen with the humans we have now. If you want the
tools, and you or your company don't have the money to buy them yourself, then
you have to make it worthwhile for the people who _do_ have the money.

~~~
fallingfrog
I’m not going to dismiss this concern out of hand because I feel like it’s a
good faith argument. But perhaps we can think a bit farther outside the box.
Now, capital is always going to be required for economic activity to take
place. Agreed. But I don’t think that whoever manages the allocation of
capital needs to be compensated above and beyond what any other laborer doing
an equivalently technical job needs to make. And they should be paid for the
labor, not for the leverage they have as owners of capital.

How that is to be accomplished is.. complex. But that’s definitely the goal.
But let’s not assume that we _need_ some class of people who have the
privilege of being the owners of capital.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Here's a tool that increases productivity. There are three people who need to
get paid: the tool maker, the one who buys the tool, and the worker who knows
how to use the tool. (The worker should be more productive with the tool, and
therefore worth more than the worker who does not know how to use the tool.)

If you're saying that the one who bought the tool and the worker who uses the
tool should profit equally from the tool, I might agree with that. (I'm not
sure; I'd have to think about it some more, but it's not a clearly wrong
position.)

Now here's someone richer than that. He buys two of the tools. If you say he
should get as much as the worker for the first tool, and as much as the worker
for the second tool, again I might agree. If you say he only gets as much as
any one worker, no matter how many tools he buys, I disagree. I even think
that you should disagree, for selfish reasons. We need these people to buy the
tools for the overall growth of productivity. If we have to bribe them with
returns on their investment, so be it. (The alternative is that the rich
person only buys one tool, and then stops, because they would get nothing from
buying the second tool. That may feel good, in that it doesn't let the rich
earn more than anyone else, but it doesn't help grow the economy. And growing
the economy is the only way that there's actually more for people, as opposed
to simply dividing the existing pie in a different way.)

------
b1daly
I agree with a lot of his points, and I would do well to embrace them.

When he gets into diving people into “makers or takers” that’s an arrogant and
ugly way to look at the world. Because “taker” has a perjorative element.

People are not one thing. Maybe I’m biased by living in the US but most people
I know try to be a positive member of society, even if they lack wealth.

Perhaps you could apply the “taker” label to the severely disabled, or to
pathological criminals. If ones criteria is net contribution to the worlds
wealth.

~~~
nostrademons
"Maker" and "taker" are also technical terms from trading markets. The "maker"
is the firm who puts a limit order into the order book and waits for someone
to accept the trade; the "taker" is the firm who enters a market order (or a
limit order that'll fill immediately) and accepts whatever the best bid is in
the market.

Not sure if he meant it like that, since the following paragraph seem to go on
to say that yes, he did mean "taker" in its pejorative sense. But there's an
interesting analogy there: the maker sets the terms of trade, while the taker
just offers their consent to the terms that are given. Similarly, in
entrepreneurial markets, the "maker" is the one who determines what the world
will look like, while the "taker" can merely offer their consent to one
possible vision that is offered by an entrepreneur.

~~~
godzilla82
He does define takers in the very next paragraph.

------
elcomet
Wow, I just discovered I'm rich according to his definition.

> The reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom. So, you
> don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have
> to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you
> don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all your productive hours
> away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.

I'm working as a researcher (pursuing a PhD), and this is exactly how I'm
seeing my life currently. So I'm glad to learn I'm already rich, even if my
salary is quite low!

~~~
onion2k
To be honest, that just sounds like he's repeating what more than 2000 years
of stoic philosophers have been telling us. Epictetus said "Wealth consists
not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” in about 100AD.

------
busymom0
> Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics,
> mathematics, and computers.

Anyone have any book recommendations for these? Any favorites?

~~~
whatamidoingyo
>Psychology >Persuasion

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a must read. Also, Robert Greene
books, such as the 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, etc. are really good as well,
but the 48 Laws of Power gave me a weird feeling. You should also read Edward
Bernays, as he's one of the fathers of modern marketing/media. (Disclaimer:
I'm not a psychologist).

>Mathematics

I like to go through text books, but my absolute favorite book that I've read
is The Motion Paradox by Joseph Mazur(brother of the great Barry Mazur) - it's
what really sparked my interest in mathematics. There's also Fermat's
Enigma(reads like a novel, really nice). I also have another book called
Problem Solving Through Recreational Mathematics, published by dover thrift
editions. It's a fun book, with a bunch of puzzles based on various subjects.
Also A History of Mathematics is a nice read too, mostly for reference, but
you could probably make reading a chapter a day a thing.

~~~
lars512
The 48 Laws of Power also gave me a strange feeling, it was hard for me to
express it at the time.

It seemed like a manual for operating in a world where you and everyone around
you is motivated by increasing their power, a zero-sum world of dominance.

That might be true locally for the environments in which some people operate,
but it’s not true generally for everyone, since luckily humans are equipped
with more complex motivations than only the desire to dominate others.

------
cryptica
>> Today, I would rather be a poor person in a First World country, than be a
rich person in Louis the XIV’s France.

This is bullshit and demonstrates a lack of empathy. A poor person today has
no spare time at all to enjoy life. Also, the modern medical system in many
developed countries is not much better at all than a few centuries ago if
you're poor... The only difference is that now the poor person knows ahead of
time that they're going to die of cancer because they can't afford
treatment... I don't think that's a good thing.

~~~
spopejoy
Agreed. I'm always surprised when people get away with this kind of blinkered
panglossian pap.

There is simply no evidence that as a species we're happier, more secure, etc
than generations past. Every advance we enjoy seems to come with a trade-off,
as evidenced by the new findings about loneliness/alienation, rich-poor
inequality, environmental degradation, what have you.

Even the elephant graph stuff can only talk about a time period that starts
centuries after a huge amount of the world came under the yoke of colonialism.

------
motohagiography
Saw him for the first time today on Joe Rogan, I've never seen my own ways of
thinking reflected so completely in one place.

I think he's wrong on the danger of AI, only because his case seems predicated
on AI replicating a human mind and that ML is limited to tightly bounded
problems - whereas it overlooks that causing extinction level events or
facilitating global slavery are also bounded problems.

Looking forward to reading and hearing more from him.

~~~
NetOpWibby
Nice, gonna watch his interview now.

------
mikeschmatz
> What do you think society would look like in 20 years? My guess is what
> would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do
> everything. We would all be living in massive abundance.

> We would essentially be retired, in the sense that none of us would have to
> work for any of the basics. We’d even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine
> driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are 100%
> automated. We’d have clean energy.

Do we really need to run a thought experiment? Haven't some of it already
happened to see the results? Doesn't look that rosy as this guy is describing.

------
vinceguidry
The title gives a connotation about the article's contents that is not
actually present in the article. While the article works just fine at giving
the broad strokes for _how_ to acquire wealth, it makes no effort at providing
direction for how one might do it in a _riskless_ fashion. Invariably any
attempt to get rich must interact with free markets, and while there are ways
to de-risk financial activity, you must be rich already to employ them.

------
dang
From last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17203304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17203304)

------
mlang23
Interesting. Small world. It is just a few hours ago that I listened to Naval
@ JRE:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44)

------
cryptica
>> It’s somewhat true in that, in a lot of the world, there’s a lot of theft
going on all the time.

Also there are two kinds of stealing; the obvious one which everybody knows
about and the non-obvious where even the person committing the offence doesn't
realize it because society itself hasn't caught up to the fact that it is in
fact stealing.

In my definition, any activity which takes value (or opportunity) from someone
deserving and gives it to someone less deserving is stealing. This happens
every day in every office, every industry and impacts everyone to different
extents. We are a society of theives. If most money is derived from stealing,
then it must be mostly evil.

It's no coincidence that Bitcoin is so valuable, even drug money is less dirty
than fiat these days.

------
tlrobinson
See also pg's essay "How to Make Wealth" (2004):
[http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

------
komali2
>We are the only animals in the animal kingdom that cooperate across genetic
boundaries. Most animals don’t even cooperate. But when they do, they
cooperate only in packs where they co-evolve together, and they share blood,
so they have some shared interests.

>Humans don’t have that. I can cooperate with you guys. One of you is a
Serbian. The other one is a Persian by origin. And I’m Indian by origin. We
have very little blood in common, basically none. But we still cooperate.

That's... kinda weird. I mean, humans are also the only animals on the planet
with language. Or like, the only ones that can associate abstract concepts
with value (so trading shells for food, etc). We can teach some of this to
other animals, but only for a single generation - none of them are
"discovering" it on their own.

I don't buy that this is a argument for the "naturalism" of capitalism.

~~~
GVIrish
>We are the only animals in the animal kingdom that cooperate across genetic
boundaries. Most animals don’t even cooperate. But when they do, they
cooperate only in packs where they co-evolve together, and they share blood,
so they have some shared interests.

I mean, this is outright wrong. There are many species that cooperate with
other species for common goals. There's many symbiotic relationships, there's
cases of cooperative hunting between species, there's interspecies
friendships, the list goes on.

Humans may be better at collaboration but it is by no means an exclusive
trait.

~~~
sombremesa
Correct, for example, many, many plants can't reproduce at all without certain
insects to pollinate them - the survival of their species depends on an
organism they share no 'blood' with.

------
RickJWagner
"when journalists attack rich people, or attack the technology industry,
they’re really bidding for status"

There's a lot of that going on these days.

~~~
wwweston
Yep. In fact, when rich technologists fire back with comments like his, they
are also bidding for status.

(Or, more politely, engaging in a public conversation about values.)

------
dhfromkorea
It would have been more interesting if they could share deeper, nuanced
arguments for setting wealth as the objective function. Sure, wealth past a
certain point admits a lot of freedom---but what next beyond that point? But
the utility function over wealth (x: wealth, y: utility) is sub-modular in
nature. When the curve gets flat, what metric must one use to measure her
life's worth? Is there even one as such? Having followed their opinions for
quite some time, I know they must have some good opinions on these...

~~~
karmakaze
I imagine when you get to that point you focus in transforming x into y or
just produce y independent of x.

~~~
gowld
Usual not, though. People get stuck on X, or just squandering it on expensive
luxury.

------
5440
Is there a relationship between the timing of this post and the fact he was on
the Joe Rogan show this week?

------
darth_skywalker
>> But then of course Uncle Sam show up, and basically say, “Hey, you know
what, you just made a lot money this year. Therefore, you’re rich. Therefore,
you’re evil and you’ve got to hand it all over to us.”

The government doesn't tax rich people because they're evil - they tax rich
people to provide food, education, and security for society. Progressive taxes
are useful because they help fight poverty and allow the very poor to
participate in the market (extreme inequality and the resulting poverty is
regarded by most economists as a market failure).

This guy mentions the importance of education, but does he realize that K-12
education is payed for by taxes? Unfortunately, inter-generational wealth
mobility in the US is quite low, much lower than in most of Europe, where
taxes happen to be much more progressive. You could argue that progressive
taxes lead to wealth mobility; they provide the funding for education and
other services that give poor folks the means to acquire wealth.

~~~
curo
> inter-generational wealth mobility in the US is quite low, much lower than
> in most of Europe

I was surprised by this so I looked up a few sources. Not saying it's not true
but we must be looking at different sources, here's a chart on
"intergenerational earnings elasticity and with only a couple European
countries (Italy and UK) slightly above the US:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#/media/File:Th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#/media/File:The_Great_Gatsby_Curve.png)

~~~
the_gastropod
I think you're misreading the graph. The Y axis is _immobility_. In other
words, Italy and the UK have lower mobility than the US. Every other European
country on the list has greater mobility.

------
aiscapehumanity
Its not very helpful in a specific way. Little business aphorisms. Same dude
with a poor argument against UBI from literally an entrepeneural perspective

~~~
tomcam
How is his argument flawed? And is it intrinsically flawed because he comes
from “literally an entrepreneurial perspective”? If so what should the right
perspective be?

~~~
aiscapehumanity
A perspective grounded in the reality of the gradience of intelligences and
inginuity. Posts screams to me of an optimism bias, same dude probably thinks
making a startup is hard is a myth created by the shortsighted. Not saying i
have a grand perspective but the socioeconomic timeline (to come, is
<be>coming is more complex, more nuanced, and we have not yet fathomed the
depths to this accelerating future yet. UBI is a reactionary utilitarian
policy thats like a big net to compensate. What naval promotes is not even
that.

------
closetCS
While I see the point of being financially independent and generating
positive-sum wealth, some parts of this argument are bullshit. Most people I
have talked to attacking those with lots of money do so because the money
gained was made by depriving others of an opportunity to achieve their own
wealth. I also disagree with his idea of a journalist reporting for the people
being a "status game" and a "nessesscary evil" when he is attacking those who
made money illicitly.

~~~
rmdashrfstar
> because the money gained was made by depriving others of an opportunity to
> achieve their own wealth

For example?

~~~
closetCS
Just how some criticize Bezos and Zucherburg for building massive fortunes
with either terrible workplace practices or the invasion of privacy of
millions of people. not all wealth was gained this way, some was gained
through honest hard work, diligence, and prudence, but you also can't blame
some for being overly cynical about whether most of those with great fortunes
did so be committing great crimes.

------
inertiatic
This is one of the most absurd pieces of writing I've ever read and I'm only
half way through.

I had to check again and see whether there was some sanity in the comments
before continuing through it.

>Then there are people who come along with a sword, or a gun, or taxes, or
crony capitalism, or Communism, or what have you. There’s all these different
methods to steal.

What a gem. Taxes, guns, both about the same. Your "wealth" was obviously
created in a vacuum, society contributed nothing to it.

>Overall capitalism [meaning free markets] is intrinsic to the human species.
Capitalism is not something we invented. Capitalism is not even something we
discovered. It is in us in every exchange that we have.

And this makes it more clear that this is about some form of religion.

>I started as a poor kid in India, so if I can make it, anybody can, in that
sense.

Wish I could find an expression to accurate capture this sentiment...

>Now, obviously, I had all my limbs and I had my mental faculties and I did
have an education. There are some prerequisites you can’t get past. But if
you’re listening to this video or podcast, you probably have the requisite
means at your disposal, which is a functioning body and a functioning mind.

Casually insulting people missing a limb, those obviously wouldn't be
listening to a podcast about making it anyway, right? Those guys are f __*ed.

>If you’re a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term thinking deal maker,
then when other people want to do deals but they don’t know how to do them in
a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give
you a cut of the deal or offer you a unique deal just because of the integrity
and reputation that you have built up.

In the words of Mark Wahlberg spoken in The Other Guys: "Oh my god, you were a
pimp".

>Warren Buffett, he gets offered deals, and he gets to buy companies, and he
gets to buy warrants, and bailout banks and do things that other people can’t
do because of his reputation.

Yes. The main reason I'm not asked to bail out banks is I don't have the
reputation for it. The process is obviously: -"Who could help us bail out a
dying bank and make billions in the process?" -"I think I know a guy who's
trustworthy, Warren I think is his name." -"Are there any prerequisites to
offering him the opportunity to help?" -"I don't think so Jim. It would help
if he had some cash on hand but we'll figure things out if he doesn't!".

------
cryptica
>> Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Everybody in the world can have a house.

This is false and the people who say this tend to be in elite circles so they
don't see the scarcity which is obvious to everyone else.

The fact is that there aren't going to be enough builders to build houses for
everyone. Why? Because those people are too busy building mansions, building
yahts, building private jets, mining gold, making jewelry, mining diamond,
working on useless rich people startups, etc... Rich people create scarcity
through their consumption. Also rich people pay better for the same work.

And yes, investing in a useless startup is not real investing; it's
consumption; the real purpose of most startups is to bring pleasure to a rich
person and their friends when the startup gets acquired, not to serve society.

~~~
0x8BADF00D
> And yes, investing in a useless startup is not real investing; it's
> consumption; the real purpose of most startups is to bring pleasure to a
> rich person and their friends when the startup gets acquired, not to serve
> society.

And yet it is the very same startups that have improved your standard of
living exponentially where luxuries reserved for the rich like private
chauffeur (Uber/Lyft), matchmaking (Tinder/OkCupid), and private island
vacations (Airbnb) are accessible to normal people.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. In fact, I can prove this to you right now. Go
look at the consumer price index during the end of WW2 era up until the gold
standard was abolished. Compare it to today's CPI. It's not the "rich" who are
evil, it is central banking by fiat which is the real evil.

~~~
cryptica
Except that I don't care about Uber, Tinder, or AirBnb. I would happily pay
more for regular Taxi and regular Hotels if only I could afford what I really
want; to live in my own house in a place I actually want to live in. Now
because of the job market, I am forced to live to a big city where all the
rich people have their toy startups and houses are too expensive.

As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for rich people. I wish they
would just give me the money for free so that I could create real value
working on my open source projects.

~~~
kjsbfkjbf
There is a better argument than yours imo.

If we diverted the funding and manpower in Uber into public transportation...
what happens? If we provided more affordable housing/tourist accommodations
such that people did not _need_ to rent out their places in AirBnB, what
happens?

The Tinder problem/solution is a weird one. It's in itself both and harmful
and beneficial.

------
warp_factor
I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack
the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little
fluffy sentences that would get retweeted and make him look like a wise man
with the ultimate truth about everything.

Now I see him as a huge hack. Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley.

~~~
JamesBarney
I think you nailed it with the term "parody" of every piece of self-help
advice out there. This post reads like a buzzfeed article "21 ways to get
rich". Here's a thousand soundbytes that very aren't actionable or who knows
if any of them are right.

~~~
enraged_camel
Is there _any_ such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable?

Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and
does not account for (or give credit to) luck.

~~~
JamesBarney
There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure
out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little
as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or
investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU
rich.

The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and
then keep on rolling the dice.

There is real estate as well which is somewhere in the middle.

Each path has a lot of specific advice about how to achieve it, but they're
all hard and require varing degrees birth luck and blind luck.

~~~
tomhoward
As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled
specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income
is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale
linearly with their income.

Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing
practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a
successful chain of clinics then sold it to a large heath service provider.

You're doing a lot of picking holes in his points (much of critique seems to
come down to luck being more important than anything else). But consider that
this is always going to be easy to do for something like this that is
specifically designed to be a set of simple, broadly-applicable rules of
thumb.

Of course there will be limitless numbers of exceptions or domain-specific
variations. The world is infinitely complex.

But there are still patterns than can be observed and principles that can be
applied that will give people a better chance of a successful outcome than had
they not applied those principles, and that's what he's seeking to share here.

And he deserves to be listened to, given that he's said he started
learning/refining/applying these principles from a young age, and credits them
for his own achievements, which are formidable and far from accidental (see
the story of how he sued two of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley after
they tried to screw him out of what he was due for his stake in the first
company he helped build).

As for luck: nobody, least-of-all Naval, claims that it is immaterial to many
people's success or opportunities.

But it's also uncontrollable, so you may as well forget about it, and focus on
what you can control: making decisions that increase the probability of
getting the outcome you want.

~~~
JamesBarney
My overall critique is it's a lot of fluff. I'm sure Naval is a very smart guy
who has a lot of incredibly valuable business experience but he didn't share
any of it here. He shared a bunch of not particularly useful self-help advice.

~~~
tomhoward
By “not particularly useful”, do you mean that if someone were to apply it to
the greatest extent possible, it wouldn’t work (on average)?

Or just that it’s obvious?

I mean, good advice often seems obvious to the point of banality, yet is
heeded and properly applied by very few.

Paul Graham has said the same thing about his advice to YC-funded founders.
He’s joked he could have been replaced with a bot that just repeatedly said
“make something people want” and “talk to your users”.

It sounds banal, yet so few actually do it, and the ones who have done it are
the ones who have succeeded.

~~~
JamesBarney
The article is really long so I could easily pick advice that I was uninformed
social commentary(the first couple), good but not novel(don't spend money),
not actionable(8. Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get), or I'm not
convinced is right and I don't he think's he done any research on(equity is a
better to pursue than money).

I thought "27\. Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate" was particularly interesting,
somewhat actionable, and I hadn't seen before.

But maybe it would easier if you told me the key insights you gleamed from the
article that were novel(somewhat), actionable, and right.

~~~
tomhoward
Thanks for sharing your perspective here.

I think it reveals that each of us has different expectations when reading
something like this. I don't read this kind of thing needing/expecting it to
be completely right or wrong (I mean, if you already had a settled opinion on
that, you wouldn't need to read it/think about it to start with), or
"actionable" (which seems to be a euphemism for needing precise instructions,
which is never possible with general principles, in which context will greatly
influence the optimal application of those principles).

I'll just read something like this and consider whether it aligns with what
the writer has done in their own life (this seems to be true), and whether it
has led to positive outcomes (this seems to be true), whether other people who
have lived by similar principles have achieved comparably good outcomes (this
also seems to be true). For what it's worth, it also broadly rings true of my
own life, of having spent the earlier part of my adult life not living by
these principles and getting bad results, then embracing some of these
principles (having come across these ideas from several other people including
Nassim Taleb, well before Naval articulated them), and getting much better
results.

I don't see anything in here that needs to be strongly agreed with or
disagreed with. People can think about them and take them or leave them, given
their own situation.

I find it interesting that the root commenter to this subthread, whose comment
you strongly endorsed, said they used to "follow that guy religiously" but now
see him as "a huge hack... Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley." That
just looks like a pendulum-swing from one unhealthy extreme to another, and
places far too much importance on any one individual's perspective. (It's also
flawed, given that much of Naval's career has been spent challenging the
Silicon Valley establishment, by suing some of its biggest VCs and starting
AngelList which democratised things for both smaller investors and founders,
and that he is very vocal in expressing points of view that are starkly at
odds with the Silicon Valley status quo, most notably, lately, about general
AI.)

Part of me thinks it's silly to spend time debating people who see things that
way, but another part of me feels it would be such a terrible shame if
someone, like myself of 10-15 years ago, who could gain great benefit from
reading and thinking about Naval's perspective, were to read these casually
dismissive comments and be put off by them.

In response to the objections you raised:

> uninformed social commentary(the first couple)

His positions are debatable, of course, but it's false to say he’s uninformed;
he's been deeply researching these topics from a young age.

> not actionable(8. Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get)

It can't be ”actionable”; it's entirely context-dependent. Yet it's true of
almost every hugely successful company.

> I'm not convinced is right and I don't he think's he done any research
> on(equity is a better to pursue than money)

From what he said on Rogan, he's been researching it since he was an early
teenager, and applying it since the earliest stages of his career.

And are you asserting that people who focus on salary or hourly-rate income
(including all those who aren't lucky enough to have a highly-paid job or
skill) are - all else being equal - better off than people who invest in
businesses that passively generate income and growth? Can you share stats or
examples?

Consider, also, that the position relating to this that you've repeated
several times is that it is easier to get rich by getting a job at Google than
investing in a successful tech company, but this fails to acknowledge that
being able to get a job at Google is highly luck-dependent (relating to
location, education, inherent aptitude, job availability among many others),
and the entire purpose of Naval's principles - written right into the very
title, is to be able to succeed without relying on luck.

I think that's enough from me. No doubt you'll stick with whatever point of
view works for you, but when you're writing comments that seek to contradict a
piece like this, rather than low-effort dismissals, please try think about how
you could do it in a way that is helpful to someone who is looking for
pointers on how they can get better results in their life.

By all means, present an alternative point of view, but try and do it with
evidence and with useful (even actionable!) alternatives, rather than just
negativity.

Thanks for the discussion.

