Intro 0:00

Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status 1:51

Make Abundance for the World 7:00

Free Markets Are Intrinsic to Humans 10:39

Making Money Isn’t About Luck 14:37

Make Luck Your Destiny 19:41

You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time 24:16

Live Below Your Means for Freedom 28:55

Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get 31:15

The Internet Has Massively Broadened Career Possibilities 33:58

Play Long-term Games With Long-term People 38:36

Pick Partners With Intelligence, Energy and Integrity 44:36

Partner With Rational Optimists 49:20

Arm Yourself With Specific Knowledge 54:44

Specific Knowledge Is Highly Creative or Technical 1:01:04

Learn to Sell, Learn to Build 1:06:34

Read What You Love Until You Love to Read 1:12:09

The Foundations Are Math and Logic 1:16:57

There’s No Actual Skill Called “Business” 1:20:15

Embrace Accountability to Get Leverage 1:25:45

Take Accountability to Earn Equity 1:30:13

Labor and Capital Are Old Leverage 1:35:08

Product and Media are New Leverage 1:39:49

Product Leverage is Egalitarian 1:45:03

Pick a Business Model With Leverage 1:50:12

Example: From Laborer to Entrepreneur 1:55:57

Judgment Is the Decisive Skill 2:01:21

Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate 2:07:47

Work As Hard As You Can 2:11:31

Be Too Busy to “Do Coffee” 2:16:38

Keep Redefining What You Do 2:20:42

Escape Competition Through Authenticity 2:22:45

Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes 2:28:21

Eventually You Will Get What You Deserve 2:30:57

Reject Most Advice 2:35:04

A Calm Mind, a Fit Body, a House Full of Love 2:37:59

There Are No Get Rich Quick Schemes 2:42:05

Productize Yourself 2:46:46

Accountability Means Letting People Criticize You 2:48:40

We Should Eventually Be Working for Ourselves 2:52:17

Being Ethical Is Long-Term Greedy 2:56:42

Envy Can Be Useful, or It Can Eat You Alive 3:00:07

Principal-Agent Problem: Act Like an Owner 3:03:36

Kelly Criterion: Avoid Ruin 3:10:18

Schelling Point: Cooperating Without Communicating 3:11:59

Turn Short-Term Games Into Long-Term Games 3:13:39

Compounding Relationships Make Life Easier 3:16:20

Price Discrimination: Charge Some People More 3:18:49

Consumer Surplus: Getting More Than You Paid For 3:19:59

Net Present Value: What Future Income Is Worth Today 3:20:47

Externalities: Calculating the Hidden Costs of Products 3:21:49

Bonus Material: Finding Time to Invest in Yourself 3:23:31

Transcript: https://nav.al/rich

This is 1 giant mega-sode that collects every episode we've done on getting rich.

All of it based on his tweet storm of how to get rich without getting lucky.

I've collected them all here because we're going to switch topics to the new topic of happiness on the next episode.

We've published 1 of these giant megasodes before but this one's even bigger.

It covers all the tweets from the How to get rich tweet storm, plus all the Q&A that we did after that, plus 10 minutes of bonus material at the very end that we've never released.

The overall sound quality of this megasode improves a lot after the first hour.

You can find a link to a clean transcript in the show notes or if you go to the website NAV.AL.

You probably know Naval from his Twitter account And we're going to be talking about his epic tweet storm on how to get rich without getting lucky.

We're going to go through most of the tweets in detail, give Naval a chance to expand on them and just generally riff on the topic.

He'll probably throw in some ideas that he hasn't even published before.

He's also the co-founder of AngelList and Epinions.

He's a prolific tech investor in companies like Twitter, Uber, and many more.

And I'm the co-founder of AngelList with Naval, and I also co-authored the Venture Hacks blog with

Yeah, the how to get rich tweet storm definitely hit a nerve.

A lot of people say it was helpful reach across aisles and people outside of the tech industry, people in all walks of life, people do want to know how to solve their money problems.

And Everyone vaguely knows that they want to be wealthy, but they don't have a good set of principles to do it by.

What's the difference between wealth, money, and status?

Wealth is the thing that you really want.

Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.

Wealth is the factory, the robots that's cranking out things.

Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers.

Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses.

Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although that's probably a lower use of productivity of the land than actually doing some commercial enterprise.

So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.

But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you freedom.

So you don't have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck.

And rush to work and sit in commute traffic.

So you don't have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours into a way to a soulless job that doesn't fulfill you.

It's not to buy fur coats or drive Ferraris or sail yachts or jet around the world near Gulf Stream.

That stuff gets really boring and really stupid really fast.

It's really just so that you are your own sovereign individual.

You're not gonna get that unless you really want it.

And the entire world is working hard at it.

It's a positive some game, but there are competitive elements to it because there's a finite amount of resources right now in society.

And to get the resources to do what you want, you have to stand out.

It is the ability to have credits and debits on other people's time.

If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, ''Oh, thank you.

We owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past.

Here's a little IOU, let's call that money.'' That money gets debased because people steal the IOUs, the government prints extra IOUs, people renege on their IOUs.

But really what money is trying to be is it's trying to be a reliable IOU from society that you are owed something for something you or someone who gave you the money did in the past.

So really money is how we transfer wealth.

There are fundamentally 2 huge games in life that people play.

1 is the money game, because money's not gonna solve all your problems, but it's gonna solve all your money problems.

So I think that people know that, they realize that, so they wanna make money.

But at the same time, many of them deep down believe that they can't make it.

They don't want any wealth creation to happen.

So they virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise by saying, well, making money is evil and you shouldn't do it, blah, blah, blah.

But what they're trying to do is they're actually playing the other game, which is a status game.

They're trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying, well, I don't need money.

And then status is just your ranking in the social hierarchy.

Because you have a house doesn't take away from my ability to have a house.

If anything, the more houses that are built, the easier it becomes to build houses, the more we know about building houses, and just the more people that can have houses.

We're starting this endeavor to create this hopefully piece of art that explains what we're doing.

At the end of it, something brand new will be created.

Status, on the other hand, is a 0 sum game.

We've been playing it since monkey tribes and it's hierarchical.

Who's number 1, who's number 2, who's number 3 and for number 3 to move to number 2, number 2 has to move out of that slot.

Even sports is an example of a status game.

They play an important role in our society so we figure out who's in charge, but fundamentally you play them because they're a necessary evil.

The problem is on an evolutionary basis, like if you go back thousands of years, status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is.

You couldn't have wealth before the farming age, before farmers, because you couldn't store things, hunter-gatherers carried everything on their backs.

So hunter-gatherers lived entirely in status-based societies.

Farmers started going to wealth-based societies, and the modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth based societies.

But there's always a subtle competition going on between status and wealth.

For example, when journalists attack rich people or attack the technology industry, they're really bidding for status.

They're saying, no, the people are more important.

And I, the journalist represents the people and therefore I am more important.

The problem is that by playing these status games to win that status game, you have to put somebody else down.

That's why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person.

You're always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people that you like up.

But just realize that most of the times when you're trying to create wealth, you're actually getting attacked by someone else and they're trying to look like a goody 2 shoes, but really what they're doing is they're trying to up their own status at your expense.

They're just playing a different game and it's a worse game.

It's a 0 sum game instead of a positive sum game.

1 thing you mentioned before the interview that stuck with me was the idea that you think everyone can become rich and that perhaps some of the ways of getting rich or the idea of wealth is vilified by some people in other countries.

Do you want to expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, I think there's this notion that making money is evil, right?

It's like rooted all the way back down to money is the root of all evil.

People think that the bankers steal our money.

And, You know, it's somewhat true in that in a lot of the world, there's a lot of theft going on all the time.

The history of the world in some sense is this predator-prey relationship between makers and takers.

There are people who go out and create things and build things and work hard on things, and then there are people who come along and take it 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.

Even in nature, there are more parasites than there are non-parasitical organisms.

You have a ton of parasites in you who are living off of you, and the better ones are symbiotic, they're giving something back, but there are a lot that are just taking.

That's just the nature of how any complex system is built.

But what I am focused on is true wealth creation.

It's not about taking money, it's not about taking something from somebody else, but it's from creating abundance.

Obviously there's not a finite number of jobs or a finite amount of wealth, otherwise we would still be sitting around in caves figuring out how to divide a piece of the firewood and you know the occasional dead deer.

So most of the wealth and civilization, in fact not most, all of it has been created And it got created from somewhere.

So this idea that it's stolen is, I think, this horrible zero-sum game that people who are trying to gain status play.

And we can see that by seeing that in the first world, everyone is richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago.

200 years ago, nobody had antibiotics, nobody had cars, Nobody had electricity, nobody had the iPhone.

So all of these things are inventions that have made us wealthier as a species.

Today, I would rather be a poor person in a first world country than be a rich person in Louis XIV's France.

I'd rather be a poor person today than an aristocrat back then.

And that's just because of wealth creation.

The engine of technology is science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance.

So I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy.

And the thought experiment I want you to think through is imagine if everybody had the knowledge of a good software engineer and a good hardware engineer.

If you could go out there and you could build robots and computers and bridges and program them, let's say every human knew how to do that.

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 and 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 like machine driven hospitals, we'd have self driving cars, we'd have farms that are

So at that point, we could use technology breakthroughs to get everything that we wanted.

And if anyone is still working at that point, they're working as a form of expressing their creativity.

They're working because it's in them to contribute and to build and design things.

It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities.

It gets hijacked by improper deals where you have corruption or you have monopolies.

Overall, capitalism is intrinsic to the human species.

Capitalism is not even something we discovered.

It is innate to us in every exchange that we have.

When you and I exchange information, I want some information back from you, I give you information, you give me information.

If we weren't having a good information exchange, you go talk to somebody else.

So the notion of exchange and keeping track of credits and debits, this is built into us as flexible social animals.

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.

It's because we can keep track of debits and credits.

So I strongly believe that it is innate to the human species and we are going to create more and more wealth and abundance for everybody.

It is merely a question of education and desire.

But don't try and put down the people who are playing the game because that's the game that keeps you in a comfortable warm bed at night.

That's the game that keeps a roof over your head.

That's a game that keeps your supermarket stock, that's the game that keeps the iPhone buzzing in your pocket.

So it is a beautiful game that is worth playing ethically, rationally, morally, socially for the human race, and it's gonna continue to make us all richer and richer until we have massive wealth creation for anybody who wants it.

And it's not just individuals secretly despising wealth, right, there's countries, groups, political parties that overtly despise wealth, or at least seem to.

That's right, and So what those countries, political parties and groups are reduced is playing the 0 sum game of status.

And the process to destroy wealth creation, they drag everybody down to their level, which is why the US is a very popular country for immigrants because it's the American dream.

Anyone can come here, be poor and then work really hard and make money and get wealthy, but even just make some basic money for their lives.

Obviously the definition of wealth is different for different people.

A first world citizen's definition of wealth might be, oh, I have to make millions of dollars and I'm completely done.

Whereas to a third world poor immigrant just entering the country, And we were poor immigrants who came here when I was fairly young to the United States.

It may just be like, I don't have to work a manual labor job for the rest of my life that I don't wanna work.

But groups that despise it will essentially bring the entire group down to that level.

If you get too many takers and not enough makers, society falls apart.

You end up with a communist country, look at Venezuela, right?

They were so busy taking and dividing and reallocating that people are literally starving in the streets and losing kilograms of body weight every year just through sheer starvation.

Another way to think about it is imagine an organism that has too many parasites.

You actually need some small number of parasites to stay healthy, and you need a lot of symbiotes, like all the mitochondria in all of our cells that help us respirate and burn oxygen.

These are symbiotes that help us survive.

But to me, those are partners in the wealth creation that creates the human body.

But if you just were filled with parasites, if you got infected with worms or a virus or bacteria that were purely parasitical, you would die.

So any organism can only withstand a small number of parasites.

And when the parasitic element gets too far out of control, you die.

So you know, again, I'm talking about ethical wealth patient.

I'm not talking about mispriced externalities like the environment.

I'm talking about free minds and free markets, small scale exchange between humans that's voluntary and doesn't have an outsized impact on others.

But I think that kind of wealth creation, if a society does not respect it, if a group does not respect it, that society will plunge into ruin and darkness.

Obviously, we wanna be wealthy, and we wanna get there in this lifetime without having to rely on luck.

A lot of people think making money is about luck.

It's about becoming the kind of person that makes money.

You know, I like to think that if I lost all my money and if you drop me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within

to 10 years, I'd be wealthy again, right?

Because it's just a skill set that I've developed and I think anyone can develop.

You know, in a thousand parallel universes, you wanna be wealthy in 999 of them.

You don't wanna be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky.

There's really 4 kinds of luck that we were talking about.

Mark, Mark Andreessen wrote a blog post about it.

The first kind of luck you might just say is like blind luck, where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened, you know, that's fortune, that's fate, et cetera.

Then there's luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion, which is when you're just running around creating lots of opportunities, you're generating a lot of energy, you're doing a lot of things, lots of things will just get stirred up in the dust.

It's almost like mixing a petri dish and seeing what combines or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines.

You're just generating enough force and hustle and energy that luck will find you.

A third way is that you just become very good at spotting luck.

So if you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field and other people who aren't attuned to it won't notice.

So you become sensitive to luck and that's through skill and knowledge and work.

And then the last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, but that's what we want to talk about, which is where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, where then luck finds you.

For example, let's say that you're the best person in the world at deep sea underwater diving and you're known to like take on deep sea underwater dives that nobody else will even attempt to dare.

And then by sheer luck, somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast they can't get at.

Well, their luck just became your luck because they're gonna come to you to get that treasure and you're gonna get paid for it.

Now that's an extreme example, but it's just showing how like the person who got lucky by finding the treasure chest, that was blind luck, but them coming to you and asking you to extract it and having to give you half, that's not luck.

You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck or to attract that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.

So when we talk about without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic.

Do you want to elaborate a little bit more on the idea that in a thousand parallel universes you want to get rich in?

I think some people are going to see that and say that sounds impossible Sounds like it's too good to be true?

I think that you may have to work a little bit harder at it given your starting circumstances.

I mean, remember, I started as a poor kid in India, right?

So if I can make it, anybody can in that sense.

Now obviously I had all my limbs and I had my mental faculties and I did have an education.

So there are some prerequisites you can 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.

And I've encountered plenty of bad luck along the way.

First little fortune that I made, I instantly lost in the stock market.

The second little fortune that I made or I should have made, I got cheated by my business partners.

It's only the third time around has been a charm and even then it has been in a slow and steady struggle.

And I haven't made money in my life in 1 giant payout.

It's always been a whole bunch of small things piling up.

So it's more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses and creating opportunities and creating investments.

It hasn't been like a giant one-off thing.

My personal wealth has not been generated by 1 big year.

It just stacks up little bit, chips at a time.

More options, more businesses, more investments, more things I can do.

Same way, someone like a DeNod, Elisirdis, he's building his brand online, he's building videos.

It's not like any 1 video is going to suddenly shower him with riches overnight.

It's going to be a long lifetime of learning, of reading, of creating that's just going to compound.

So we're talking about getting wealthy so you can retire, so you have your freedom.

Not retire in the sense that you don't do anything, but in the sense that you don't have to be anyplace you don't want to be, you don't have to do anything you don't want to do, and you can wake up when you want, you can sleep when you want, you don't have a boss.

So we're talking about enough wealth to get to freedom and especially thanks to the internet these days those opportunities are massively abundant I in fact have too many ways to make money.

I don't have enough time I literally have opportunities pouring out of my ears and the thing I keep running out of his time There's just so many ways to create wealth, to create products, to create businesses, to create opportunities, and to as a byproduct get paid by society that I just can't even handle it all.

I think it's pretty interesting that the first 3 kinds of luck that you described, there are very common cliches for them that everybody knows.

And then for that last kind of luck that comes to you out of the unique way that you act, there's no real cliche for it.

So For the first 3 kinds, there's dumb luck or blind luck.

The second kind of luck, there's the cliche that fortune favors the bold.

See all Naval transcripts on Youtube

How to Get Rich