How to Get Rich Without Luck
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
- Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
- Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people. The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet. (Dominic Frisby advocates ensuring that your children avoid the risk of career obsolescence by learning how to code, and he's probably right.)
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. An army of robots is freely available – it's just packed in data centres for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
- If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
- Information is everywhere but its meaning is created by the observer that interprets it. Meaning is relative and there is no objective, over-arching meaning.
- The real struggle isn't proletariat vs bourgeois. It's between high-status elites and wealthy elites. When their cooperation breaks, revolution.
- Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zerosum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.
- If the primary purpose of school was education, the internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing.
- The Efficient Markets Hypothesis fails because humans are herd animals, not independent rational actors. Thus the best investors tend to be antisocial and contrarian.
- Crypto is a bet against the modern macroeconomic dogma, which is passed off as science, but is really a branch of politics – with rulers, winners, and losers.
- Objectively, the world is improving. To the elites, it's falling apart as their long-lived institutions are flattened by the internet.
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom...[we live in a world with] paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. But the last of these need not be a bad thing, all things considered."