Naval treats life as one continuous game rather than series of transactions. Infinite games reward delayed gratification over clever tactics. This is the ultimate leverage: time itself becomes your ally. You play to keep playing, not to win.
“All the benefits in life come from compound interest. Whether it’s in relationships, or making money, or in learning”. This requires selecting the right framework: iterated prisoner’s dilemma instead of single-move games. Evolutionary biology explains why: survival rewards cooperation when you’ll meet again. “But that only works in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in another words if we play a game multiple times”.
Naval’s core insight: “You have to be able to play a long-term game. And long-term games are good not just for compound interest, they’re also good for trust”. Trust becomes code that executes automatically in human networks. This solves the cooperation problem by creating repeated interactions where reputation matters more than individual wins.
The transformation matters more than the strategy. “If someone is taking advantage of you in a negotiation, your best option is to turn it from a short-term game into a long-term game”. This rewrites the code of incentive structures entirely. Suddenly social capital matters. Equity in relationships dwarfs immediate gains. Future payoffs become your meditation practice: staying present while thinking decades ahead.
Naval psychologically commits to infinite games through curated relationships. “I only want to be around people that I know I’m going to be around with for the rest of my life”. This isn’t strategy; it’s the death of desire for short-term validation. When you genuinely believe the game continues forever, you optimize for different variables: building systems over achieving outcomes, acquiring wisdom over winning arguments, internal scorecard over external recognition.