Today I sat down to read Naval.
Not a book of his. He barely has any. His tweets. Loose lines, written over the years, that I filtered by concept to see what was left once you put them together. What was left was a way of looking at the world.
There are three people who have truly ordered how I think. Taleb taught me to respect the tail, the improbable, the thing that breaks. Saylor taught me what hard money is and why almost no one understands it. And then there’s Naval.
A lot of people ask me why I don’t put Elon on that list. Elon does extraordinary things. But Elon builds an optimistic future that doesn’t have to arrive. He promised self-driving cars and a fully electric world, and although he sharpened electrification like no one else, that extreme he envisioned still doesn’t exist. Naval doesn’t promise you a future. He hands you a tool to think about the present.
I started with Bitcoin.
There’s a tweet of his that says, more or less, that if you’re a small country and you want to be the richest in the world by income per capita, all you have to do is buy as much Bitcoin as possible in 2014 and announce your adoption. He wrote it years ago. Saylor would say the same later. And no state has done it.
Think about it. Switzerland, Singapore, some tiny country with discipline and conviction. Today they’d be absurdly rich. The opportunity was right there, written down, free, in plain sight.
No one took it.
That’s the first lesson of Naval’s that haunts me: asymmetry is rarely secret. It’s available. What’s scarce isn’t the information. What’s scarce is the conviction to act before it becomes obvious.
There’s another tweet I already mentioned last Wednesday and can’t get out of my head. Naval says Bitcoin is a tool to free humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, disguised as a get-rich-quick scheme.
Read that slowly.
Most people see the price. Naval sees the mechanism. For him the point was never the number going up, but who loses power over you the moment you own something they can’t print, freeze, or confiscate. Getting rich is the bait. Sovereignty is the hook.
Then there’s the tweet I’d tattoo on myself.
In 2018 someone asked him what the asymmetric opportunities to get rich were. Naval answered with a short list: invest in startups, start your own company, write a book, create a podcast or a video, buy Bitcoin, or tweet.
That was 2018. Since then Bitcoin has done nearly 900%. And the other paths: building something of your own, leaving a trace, accumulating an audience, have created more new fortunes than any job on the planet.
How does he see that? It’s not magic.