Author JL Collins sat down with comedian Hasan Minhaj to discuss a broad range of topics ranging from why so many people are bad with money to going all in on Nvidia.
The three rules Collins gave Minhaj for building wealth
Minhaj opens by confessing his own financial illiteracy: when he moved to LA to start comedy, he kept his entire net worth, about $3,200, in a box of cash in his apartment, until a roommate asked whether he had a checking account, a 401(k), or a Roth IRA. That question started what Minhaj calls his Google journey, which ended at Collins’s book. The conversation then walks through the three rules from The Simple Path to Wealth.
Rule one is spend less than you earn. When Minhaj jokes, “so you’re saying be cheap?”, Collins pushes back on the deprivation framing. Saving, in his telling, is spending money on the single most important thing: your freedom. He calls the resulting cushion “F-you money,” enough saved to walk away from a bad job or take time off without borrowing. For Collins, that freedom, not any purchase, was always the point of the money.
Rule two is invest the surplus in a simple low-cost index fund, specifically Vanguard’s VTSAX (see how to start investing in index funds). Minhaj plays devil’s advocate with the obvious objection: why settle for the market’s long-run average when going all in on Nvidia would have returned enormously more in a decade? Collins’s answer is that nobody knew in advance which stocks would be the winners. Many of today’s giants had peers that went to zero. With a total market index fund, you own the winners automatically, and even a far more conservative return compounded over decades builds serious wealth. You do not need to pick the right horse when you can own the whole racetrack.
Rule three is avoid debt. Collins says he has never had a car payment: his father bought the cheapest car available, then made monthly “car payments” to his own bank account, and bought the next car in cash. On houses, he is blunt: a house is a place to live and a lifestyle choice, not an investment, and confusing the two leads people to overextend.
The conversation keeps returning to market crashes, and Collins has lived through three drops of more than 50 percent: 1974 to 1975, 2000 to 2002, and 2008 to 2009. Each time, he says, everyone was certain the world was ending, and each time the market recovered and climbed higher. His advice is to tie yourself to the mast during the storm and buy while shares are on sale, the way Warren Buffett describes rainy days when it rains gold and you want to be outside filling your buckets.
Winchell House 
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