Naval

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

Stuy is New York’s most prestigious high school because it admits the highest-performing students as determined entirely by scores on an objective, unbiased test. Seats at Stuy are not allocated by race. They are not given out through a subjective process that can be influenced by politics or favoritism or money. The kids who got in did the best, and the kids who did not do the best cannot get in, no matter how much rich parents or woke politicians want to corrupt the fair and objective admissions competition. People like Lincoln Restler think Stuy is prestigious for reasons other than the fact that it has a rigorous objective admissions standard. He thinks the prestige these kids earned through their excellence can be redistributed to the students who are not the best that he would prefer to pretend are the best. But these students are not prestigious because they go to Stuy; Stuy is prestigious because these students go there. And if different students — inferior students— went there, then Stuy would no longer be the school that is a magnet for the smartest kids in New York and its prestige and reputation would dissipate rapidly, just like the University of California system’s has. Or maybe Restler knows this, and he just wants to destroy Stuy, because he wants to prevent these students’ talent from being measured and identified, so they can be scattered into low-performing schools where they will languish instead of having their talent cultivated. Regardless, his ideology of racial grievance and destruction is a monstrous evil masquerading as “social justice,” and it will not be tolerated.

Read the article you referenced Congressman @RoKhanna. It refutes you. Barzar earns $32.90 an hour, has over $1 million in his 401(k), $15 co-pays, a house with a pool, and had every one of his wife's three brain surgeries covered in full. Costco gave him this. Not Congress. Not a wealth tax. Not you. A private company, freely, because paying and keeping good workers is good business. That's the whole point you keep missing. Costco proves the market rewards productive labor without a single mandate. Their stock is up 2,000% doing it. The "living wage" you want to force already exists where value is freely traded, and it was built by the very system you spend your days attacking. So what's your actual purpose? Barzar isn't bitter. He's grateful, and proud, and he built a good life. You'd rather teach the man with less to resent the man with more, when Costco shows there's nothing to resent, only something to aspire to. The producer earns his reward. Envy earns nothing. Stop selling grievance and let the market you fear keep lifting men like Tony Barzar.

You won’t get rich just working hard, but if you don’t work hard, you won’t get rich.

🇪🇺 Chat Control has passed 😔 They can and will now legally scan any person's messages, emails and photos you send without a warrant The way they passed this law when the majority of the European Parliament was against it will shock you: They waited until most EP members were on holiday so only a few were present and then created an "urgent" vote for it to pass it through There's nothing democratic about any of it and big powerful forces are behind this that can manipulate the EU for whatever they want Democracy in Europe died a bit today 😔

.@naval on Tech Education: “Technology is a form of leverage—and it's the ultimate form of leverage. If I'm a programmer, what people don't realize is that I have a million robots working for me. If I come up with an idea, I code that idea up, and now a million robots carry that idea. They're just sitting in a data center—for heat, efficiency, and space reasons—loaned to me by Amazon through AWS, who takes a small cut. That leverage means that if I decide on the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do, I can make $100 million—or zero. It's a very wide swing. Someone who isn't leveraged through technology doesn't have that force multiplier. Someone working in a traditional industry doesn't have that same advantage. When we talk about the distribution of capital, we're used to thinking of money as the main source of capital. Before that, the main source of capital was people. How many people are working for you? That's why older generations tend to be impressed by how many employees you have. People who are a little more savvy ask how much money you're managing or how much revenue you're doing. But the correct question is: How many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you? Because those are the ultimate force multipliers. So I believe the way forward is through technology education. Where technology education falls down is that it's really popular to preach education for kids. Everybody wants to educate kids—because kids can't talk back. They have no choice. Go to school. Sit down. Shut up. Learn. But what about adults? We have this myth that adults can't be educated. That adults either self-educate or they can't be educated at all. We believe that if you're 45 years old and you lose your job because your factory shuts down, you're done. Your only options are: Society has to bail you out because you're destitute. Or we artificially preserve your job through tariffs, trade barriers, or tax breaks—even though the world no longer needs that job. Instead, I think we need a culture of adult education. Imagine a model where every four years it was socially acceptable—and financially supported—for you to go back to school for a year. You'd say: "This is my school year." Maybe this year you're going to learn electronics. You spend a year learning electronics. You could be 54 years old and learning electronics. That should be a normal part of society. We need continuous education built into society because the leverage you're craving is actually permissionless. It's available to everybody. But it's knowledge-based. The gate isn't a banker sitting on a pile of money. The gate is knowledge. It's building of that knowledge. And the sharing of that knowledge.”

PSA: There is a nasty impersonation scam going around with USVC at the moment If you get an email from me or @naval asking about your USVC investment, it's likely fake: 1. Naval will never email you. He's allergic to email. 2. If it's from me or someone else from the USVC team, check the domain of the sender before responding. We'll only ever email from a usvc or angellist domain Be careful out there

If you get an email from me, it’s fake.

@dika_success @ankurnagpal Scammer.

If the child loved the parents as much as the parents loved the child, their passing would be intolerable.

The problem with truth is, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Every founder in tech would have to leave the state. This is what they want. We have to fight back.

Happy Birthday America, Land of the Free. Don’t give up on the First, Second, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments. They’re unique, and your freedom - and the worlds’ - depends on them.

Our goal is to capture how founders really talk when no one is watching.

@ZubyMusic 😞

The UK and USA are both amazing countries. The crazy thing is, they could be SO much better if their governments stopped doing stupid stuff at scale. I wonder what these countries would look like if most of the political leaders were genuinely on the side of their citizens.

Apple: apple.co/4v7TsRi Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0rLGnF… YouTube: youtu.be/6m-ZZBCiiEE Substack: open.substack.com/pub/naval/p/li…

New podcast with @garrytan, @farbood and Daniel Francis. Live in the Future! 00:00 Guest Intros 02:35 Live in the Future 03:58 Will AI Outsmart us? 07:43 In the Anthropic Breadline 09:59 The Tech Genie Is Out 12:33 We Invested in COVID?! 14:25 Good Writing Is Novelty 18:50 Living Like It’s 2028 24:32 Truth dot ai 30:18 Does China have the Weights? 35:38 Everyone has AI Anxiety 39:32 Have Your Agent Talk to My Agent 42:01 What if Open Source takes the Lead? 44:03 The Sun is Setting on Google 48:00 Ride the AGI 50:46 Will There be Startups? 54:05 Defending Taiwan 1:00:05 The California Empire 1:01:26 If the U.S. Falls 1:03:11 Universal Basic Robot 1:06:01 Humans as AI Handlers

@alive_ Communists in diapers.

A socialist is a communist who doesn’t yet have the nerve to execute people.

As the elites get kicked out of each party, we are going from Republicans vs Democrats to Nationalists vs Socialists.

If AI is doing the writing, it should do the reading too.

Great products are not so much invented as discovered.