“How To Get Rich” 2025 Update - Naval Ravikant

is there anything that you'd add to the how to get rich thread is there anything where you thought like just one if I could go in and edit and add one more in or or No there's like 10,000 things i could talk about that topic forever to

be honest like that that that thread was so short and it was so limited and it was so like you know crafted in a sense although I wrote it very spontaneously um it left so much on the cutting room

floor that I could just talk about that topic for days but it's all contextual right business is very very very contextual like you have to look at the particular business and understand

what's being done and why it's being done and how it's being done and then you can tear it apart or you can re and then reassemble it properly um and I like to think that that is actually where I have specific knowledge and expertise my specific knowledge

expertise is not in happiness not in philosophy not yes my life is very hacked to be very unique but I don't think that's where my specific knowledge is my specific knowledge is in being

able to analyze a business especially a technology business and take it apart at the seams and predict in advance what is likely to work and what is not likely to

work clubhouse notwithstanding um because you're still going to be wrong most of the time it's like playing the lottery but you know one or two of the tickets numbers in advance you only have to be right a few times or even

just once to to get the big score m um you know Peter Thiel started PayPal but he made all his money on Facebook right and now he's done more since then obviously but that was the big winner and that's true in any power law

distribution number one is going to return more than two through n put together two will return more than three through put together you're operating in a highly leveraged intellectual domain so the outcomes are going to be

nonlinear um so I I know a lot about that topic but it's highly contextual it makes a lot more sense if there's a specific business in front of me a specific entrepreneur and I can take that apart and I can say you know so

there are certain companies where I'll say "Oh this is not going to work because you the entrepreneur are doing this for the wrong reasons you're you're doing A so you can get to B just go to

B." Or "You're doing this to make money

B." Or "You're doing this to make money when really the person who's doing this because they love the product is going to beat you or you're raising money from the wrong people who are in it for the wrong reasons or your co-founder is not

in it for the right reasons or you don't have the right kind of co-founder or your vesting schedule is wrong or you're starting the business in the wrong place or you're approaching it from this angle instead of that angle and and of course

I'll be wrong too but I've just seen a lot of data I have my theories around it uh and that's where I feel very comfortable operating the problem is when I have to talk about how to create wealth and how to get rich is a

clickbait title deliberately but when I talk about how to create wealth talking about it in the abstract act is very difficult because then you just want to speak truth you have to just say the

timeless stuff you have to be right in almost every context and so it really limits what you can say the lack of specificity makes it Yeah correct it's back to philosophy but when I if I can get specific about it you know that's

when that's when the real knowledge counselor for people yeah part of the reason why I started doing podcasts and you know this is ego at play so I'll admit it freely when I was tweeting you

know I kind of pioneered philosophy Twitter if you will or a certain kind of practical philosophy Twitter where in 140 characters I would try to say something true in an interesting way that was insightful to me at the time

but then that got copied there's thousands of us now right thousands of people spitting it out chat GPT trying to create these things all day long um although I like to say I like to think that my stuff is incompressible i'm

saying it in the tightest way possible mh um which is kind of a little failed poetry background um but what I realized was if you truly have a deep understanding of something then you can

talk about it all day long then you can rederive everything you need from that understanding no memorization required you can get to it from first principles and every piece of what you know is is

like a it's like a Lego block that just fits in and forms a steel frame it's solid it's locked in there and so on a podcast I can unload much more deeply about some of these topics um so for

example we can talk about any business you like but it has to be in context it has to be real it has to be an actual problem then we can solve it i I just really love that heristic of if you're

having to memorize something it's because you don't understand it you don't understand it that's right if you if you if you have to memorize something it's because you don't understand it and if you understand something you don't have to memorize it

yeah i again you know just to sort of call out a lot of what I tried to do this redemption arc thing of if I sound smart

that's like being smart right you go well chat GPT has memorized the entire internet good luck competing with that you're not going to beat it in memorization you're not even going to beat a library at memorization you're

not going to beat any 10 books in memorization so memorization is not the thing understand the value of memorization is going down by the day it's already so low understanding is a

thing being able to being able Judgment is the thing taste is a thing um and understanding judgment taste these come out of having real problems and then solving them and then finding the

commonalities what is philosophy everyone you live long enough you'll be a philosopher philosophy is just when you find the hidden generalizable truths among the specific experiences that

you've had in life and then you know how to navigate future specific experiences based on some heristics and you create a philosophy around that any subject pursued deeply enough will eventually lead to philosophy mastery in anything

literally anything will lead you to being a philosopher you just have to stick with it long enough and generalize the truths back out and these are universal truths it's back to the unity and variety you can find you can find

unity in anything if you go deep enough and that's why the trit stuff unfortunately sort of keeps coming back around you're like well look this is cliche for kind of a reason it's cliche for reasons uh but you know sometimes

you learn new things sometimes you do figure out new things too uh even even in philosophy for example science has advanced as science has advanced it's actually expanded our boundaries of

philosophy um when we used to think that uh you know the earth was the center of the universe you would actually have a different philosophical outlook than when you think the universe is vast and

we're infantestimally small it will give you a different philosophical outlook uh the same way if you think that uh the nature is driven by angels and demons

and gods versus if there are laws of physics that are computable and understandable that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook uh if you think that knowledge is something that is passed down from above and

through generations versus something that is created on the fly and then tested against reality that will lead you to a different philosophical outlook if you think humans are created by God

as opposed to humans evolved from some you know unicellular organism yeah it still doesn't solve the original problem who created that but at least it takes you further down the down the road even sim theory is an attempt at

reformulating philosophy based on what we know about computers even though it kind of leads to a lot of the same conclusions as you know creator but it it it is at least philosophy that is

informed by technology and by science so philosophy can also invol evolve moral philosophy involves right uh there was a time when every culture practically that was a conquering culture practice

slavery now almost all cultures abort slavery that's moral philosophy having evolved um you know there was even like this sounds too ludicrous to be true and I don't know if it fully is true but

there were a a fairly large group of doctors based on studies who believed until the 1980s that babies couldn't feel pain and so even to this day I think circumcision is done without anesthesia and because under the theory

that you know very young children babies don't feel pain and that's ludicrous and there was a study that came out in the 80s that said no no no they do feel pain it's like oh yeah of course right so people can be stuck in bad philosophical

traps for a long period of time so even philosophy can make progress and uh as an example one of the realizations that I had and this is thanks to uh David Deutsch and my friend James Pierce and

also thinking it through a little bit is that there are these timeless old questions that we run into where the answers seem like paradoxes so we stop thinking about them so an example is free will do you have free will or does

anything matter is there a meaning to life and there and and we get stuck in them because for example is there a meaning to life like yes life has a meaning because you're you're right here you

create your own meaning this this moment has all the meaning you could imagine it's all the meaning there is on the other hand you're going to die it all goes to zero heat death the universe has no meaning right so which one is it well

the reason why it seems paradoxical is because you're asking the question of a human here and now at a certain scale and a certain time and then you're answering it from the viewpoint of the

universe over infinite time so you pull the trick you switch the level at which you're answering the question and questions should be answered at the level at which they're asked so if you

ask the question is there meaning you Chris are asking that question yes yes to Chris there is meaning there's meaning right here this is the meaning you can interpret any meaning you want onto it um don't ask the question as

Chris and then answer it as God or as the universe that's the trick that you're playing that's why it seems paradoxical the same way you can say do I have free will people debate free will all day long this the question is

answered at the wrong frame so they ask the question is do I as an individual have free will hell yeah I have free will my mind body system can't predict what I'm going to do next the universe is infinitely complex i'm making a choice in my mind and I'm doing

something there's my free will so answer at the level at which you were asked of course I have free will because I feel like I have free will and I treat you like you have free will and you treat me like I have free will we have free will the problem then is you start trying to

answer the question as if you're the universe you're like well on the universal scale big bang particle collisions no one makes any choices you know how could you be any different than the what the universe wants you to be and it's all one block universe so you

don't have free will don't answer the question at the level at which it wasn't asked so if God asked the question is there free will no there is no free will the universe asks a question there is no free will but if an individual asks a

question right now then yes there is free will so a lot of these paradoxes resolve themselves philosophical paradoxes that people have been struggling with since the beginning of time when you just realize there you're you're answering them at a scale and

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