Why You Should Take More Risks in Your 20s (ft. Jack Raines)

0:00Welcome back to the rundown interview edition today. We are talking to Jack Reigns the author of a new book called Young Money. Jack and I have been internet friends for years now but this was actually our first face-to-face conversation we recorded about a couple weeks ago and honestly it barely felt like an interview it felt more like there's two guys chopping it up talking about money career risk taking all that stuff and we got into Jack's unusual career path from working a normal corporate job to writing a book we also talked about how Jack turned $6,000 into almost $400,000 trading spacks back in 2021 and we got into some of the ideas behind the book and how hard it is to write an actual book. One quick heads up though this conversation is more casual than our typical interviews and there were a couple of choice four letter words that started flying in the middle of it so fair warning if you're listening around the kids. That being said this was a really fun conversation I think you guys are gonna really enjoy it so let's get into it. Alright guys today we are talking to Jack Reigns I'm a big fan of Jack's work

1:03I've been a big fan of his work for a long time now he's an incredible writer he's an investor he's a professional shit poster he's now a published author Jack welcome to the rundown. Zay thanks for having me I like I like the accolades you gave me professional shit poster way better than author VC or anything else so I mean dude it's true though you are I mean that's kind of how you burst onto the scenes you're not gonna start there okay I mean like this this is why this is why I love your story man I've been I've been you know big fan of your work for a long time now so let's just kind of get into it you know before we talk about the book and anything else let's talk about like how you you know got to where you are today your career so interesting you know you started off just like I think a lot of people do you went to college you got a degree you got a normal finance job and then you started writing online you started shit posting online and then now you're again a published author new book out young money and you're you work for a VC from slow ventures so how did all that happen so there's a funny thing adventure capital where every VC won't so like they become a VC realize oh I should be a thought leader or build a personal brand

2:06they kind of inverted that where I was just addicted to posting on the internet when I was 23 24 25 and there there was initially no brand plan behind it other than I was just leaning into my dope mean addiction and it did hilariously end up leading to a book deal and job offer and it almost got me kicked out of business school at one point but no I mean that I I was very addicted to posting and it turns out if you're opinionated on the internet but somewhat know what you're talking about people like it and a lot of it was also just a newsletter group act where I knew if I could go viral online I could funnel some amount of that to a newsletter list get more subscribers have more people read my stuff so there was a little bit of methods of madness but it's just it's fun to fuck around with the internet people seriously like underestimated so like kind of walk me through so like you're so you just graduated college like you're working your desk job right and I think this is relatable to a lot of people they're doing their thing they're working they're learning a paycheck but like you just always had this decide thing that you were passionate about like so for you it was what writing online you had a

3:09blog that you started and then just from there like when did you start getting traction and when did you know that like the best way to like growth hack your blog was just to write funny stuff on LinkedIn triggering a lot of people so so to take a step back I had a burner reddit account called Bar Mellow Zanthony in 2020 and it was like a play on words for Carmella Anthony and Zanix Bar my entire fraternity chat have like edgy drug related like names nicknames that are group me and I made that my reddit name and the picture was one of the thumb the thumb thumbs or whatever from spikeheads really yeah so COVID hits like a lot of other 22 23 year old guys I was working remote corporate finance really bored and I started trading SPACs specifically I was trading SPAC warrants in my Roth IRA I know this is a somewhat investing podcast not investment advice do not trade SPACs in your Roth IRA but if you're going to actively trade and you do trade in a retirement account you don't have to worry about capital gains so anyway I'm doing that and I make a lot of money

4:12doing it but I'm also posting on my anonymous burner account on reddit like oh I put my entire portfolio in Apollo warrants because they changed the background on their website from oil rigs to windmills and I think they're going to take an ED company public and people are like you're retarded this is a stupid take and then they announced a deal with Fiskar Automotive and I make like a hundred thousand dollars it's like screw you guys it was degenerate that it was right so and then the crazy thing is I started in DM by other anonymous accounts we hop on a zoom call and it's like the CIO of hedge fund right where I've started posting about different SPACs and seeking alpha and sponsors of these SPACs are basically trying to get me to post about their company without telling me to post about their company because yeah I'm very legal 2020 back in the day right yeah right right so it's like a griff without it being a griff and I was just kind of mind blown that oh if you just put stuff on the internet people resonate whether find it interesting or useful you can just kind of you you can skip a lot of procedure or like career steps and just kind of talk to

5:14the shot collar because you have distribution so that was the first step of oh internet is leverage if used in areas with money okay so I that was like basically January 2020 through August 21 August 2021 rolls around I'm 24 I had made a lot of money and then lost some of that money trading SPACs I think you're under selling a lot of mics I remember I think you wrote a blog post about you like half a million I turned six grand and 400 grand trading SPACs for once in nine months and I was 23 making like 60K at the time so I'm like I was I actively sandbag three different promotion opportunities because I was making more money trading stocks that I would have it work and I had a really chilled jobs and analysts but if I got promoted to a supervisor I would have I would have if I got promoted to supervisor I would have had to actually do work so I just kept not getting promoted saying oh no like what should I do better when in reality I'm taking a decade a week just like hitting bye bye

6:14and your bosses have no idea like no richer than them they have no idea no no they're just they're probably thinking like he seems so smart why is he not driven and meanwhile I'm on Reddit like yo anybody looks into this like outer space rocket ship SPAC like what do we think is it gonna short squeeze so that was my life basically during the pandemic fast forward to 2021 I made money on SPACs SPAC game stops working because if there's an easy trade for too long everybody figures it out it stops I think I can make a couple of big aggressive swings I get from 400k to a million trading just other stocks than our SPACs again if you have an edge in one market exploit it but once that edge goes away you can't just assume you can bet it's like going from oh I was trading like S&P futures but now I'm gonna trade like wheat contracts no you're gonna get blown up it's not the same thing so fast forward I lose basically $200,000 in about a week 150k that a day I decided to stop trading which is the most mature move I could have made threw it in an index fund and I was like okay well I'm 24 I just

7:18broken up my girlfriend I knew I was moving to New York for a year for graduate school and I had like it's not like retirement money but you know if you're 24 and I'm a couple hundred grand and you're in Georgia you're rich so yeah it was like what do I actually want to do over the next year and the rational decision was well vaccine is out travels reopening travel is still really cheap because nobody really trusts going internationally yet I can fly to Barcelona for $200 a stainless host over 12 bucks a night so I called my boss and I said I'm quitting as she said did you take another job and I said no I'm just going to spend explainer that I what I've been doing over the last year she said I knew you're smarter than you're acting I said thank you I appreciate that so I I ended up backpacking Europe in Argentina for the next year the writing thing really comes in a play here where I really romanticize the idea of being like a travel writer or working for Morning Brew or one of these media startups their markets writer and I felt like I don't have credibility because I

8:20made money trade stocks that I could actually write about what was going on market nobody wants to hire me because you don't have journalism experience I'm just like shut up like neither does like I don't have journalism experience but your markets person doesn't have factory experience who's the real loser here I was like look everything I've written up reddit Barmelos Anthony is a very credible source so I just started writing my own sub stack it was like a spiked sub stack I was pissed off and nobody would hire me and just started gapping on the internet and then I was basically posting like a investing blog once you're twice a week the travel blog once you're twice a week of what I was doing in Spain or Poland or whatever and I was like okay well I need to make some money and I end up DMing a few Twitter accounts including liqueurity find its own page sure up front of the family I'm sure you know what pretty well of course and he was like yo dude I hire you to edit my newsletter and help sell ads there you go with like 500 bucks a week I said yep I am basically hostile

9:25hopping for the foreseeable future that more than subsidized my lifestyle so I'm working for him my newsletter is growing quickly we grow his newsletter from like 60k to 300k subscribers I was this set we were making tens of thousands of dollars a week and add revenue it was just like a really interesting exploration into how internet money works which brings me to the linkedin ship posting whatever I used to get a lot of news letter subscribers from twitter I realized that linkedin has three times as many people actively on it as twitter and nobody posts twitter is tough to get attention because there's so many people going after eyeballs but on linkedin nobody is posting anything except for the hustle culture hustle grow sale it's terrible right it's like that it's terrible yeah listen if you're showing a course of running a pyramid scheme linkedin is really looking for you so I was like huh if I can get attention on linkedin it's a way bigger audience it's way easier to stand out on that I can use the funnel to newsletter subscribers how do you

10:28go viral on linkedin either be cringe or sit here and make fun of the cringe which is somewhat cringe but also funny so I started like testing it out and I was like okay I should just start basically doing terrible rage they personal finance advice on linkedin I was unemployed I was going to grad school I didn't have to worry about getting fired for ship posting on a networking site and I just went boss the wall ship posting with the end goal being get a bigger and bigger linkedin following and funnel some of it to newsletter subscribers by putting if you like this piece check out my newsletter for more so for about three months every day I would add every recommended connection on linkedin manually and someone I couldn't do it anymore to get the biggest basically see the biggest following possible and the ship post so it ended up on people's speeds like none of these people knew who I was I didn't care right and you know like a year later I had 40,000 linkedin followers on the back of just rage baiting the internet there was awesome and I think that's where I discovered you I think I so I think I started seeing your stuff

11:31from like the rate the linkedin post would then go viral on Twitter so I would post a Twitter and stuff on Twitter he's Twitter yeah as a smarter audience than linkedin so I would post something on linkedin people would freak out in the comments like you're a bad person or you should go to jail I would post on Twitter and say linkedin is going crazy about this and I would get a Twitter following from that so it became this ship post pissed off people on linkedin build following make people on Twitter laugh and the idiots on linkedin build following there it became the supply wheel of everybody laughing at like five people my leads in comment section it was so brilliant because I remember seeing those posts on on Twitter they were going viral and I'm like who is this guy in the re would read yourself like this guy is hilarious and then I would you know I would read your blog and I'm like this guy actually like is really is a really good writer is that perspective yeah you know he's actually has opinions he has like a really good perspective on what it's like to be young and you know like go you know build wealth and go through like some of the the mistakes that you made early on so it was like a genius way where like you knew what would get you attention and then people kind of went into the Jack Reigns funnel realize this is actually

12:34a smart guy and he has like interesting takes and then and then you know now you turn it into a full on career I want to bring up one specific linkedin post I think it's probably your clear claim to fame and I think probably how I discovered you the one where you where you hacked how to get free food and Manhattan right where you said that you would go around to every hotel and just hit the breakfast buffet and never have to pay for food and and that post got you in trouble at your at your school right at Columbia yeah so I will read the post right here it's not too please three years ago for the last two months I haven't paid for a single meal in New York City how is that possible you ask it's simple free hotel meals New York has 36 hundred hotels and many of those offer complimentary breakfast by walking in and acting like you're supposed to be there you can simply grab bacon eggs and toast and any hill that are married out in the city the real trick is securing free lunch or dinner to do this address of a bit nicer and heads the restaurant order

13:34whatever you'd like enjoy the occasion when the waiter comes he's going to ask hard credit or charge to a room you say charge to the room then you write down a random room number name and make sure you leave before the payment process with 36 hundred hotels you can do this for 10 years without double dipping follow me for more personal finance tips hashtag wealth hack comment comment section scam artists's profession is short lived uh wait when did you post that was at 2022 yeah 2022 let's see oh my god it sounds like Columbia Business School is spewing out thieves and crevices those these days who openly admit the wrongdoons on link 10 the world is so incredible I've never seen a thief so proud and then some people really like it the sort of penniness we can get behind especially with inflation so some people I think people get it you know it's like this is funny like this is this is what you know let's have a good time and then and then what someone someone called the dean like what happened yes or somebody emailed the dean oh wait there's a funny comment here somebody tagged the New York City but I didn't I missed this the first time

14:36at New York City Police Department cared a comment on an open admission of theft of services under NY penal law section 165.15 um good call I just commented on it right now three years later anyway I hope that guy's doing well he's a business tech consultant and extension I'm sure he's doing great thank you so somebody somebody screenshots this and they sent it to our dean of students some epic shapses and I get an email from her that night and it says hey Jack I'm Dean Shapses Dean of students at Columbia I've received I've received I forgot how she worded she basically said she'd received concerning emails about my LinkedIn content from concerned parties and lightning to come by her office and discuss and I said happy to and I didn't screenshot her email and posted on Twitter and said all right who snatched and then that blew up so Ryan Peterson the CEO flexed for like multiple email logistics company DMs me he says hey I go hey Rive he says so I

15:44went to Columbia Business School like 12 years ago and I never signed the I never signed the honor statement or whatever I thought it was stupid you said if if they try to make you take anything down or change anything or apologize don't do it and if they kick you out of school over this I'm gonna hire you and we're gonna speeder on the press for you I was like please kick me out of school like that's the thing happened in my career I go in our office and I say well you shitting yourself or you like oh my god like what is going on I was thinking I sort of consider rage baiting because I had like a boy but I sort of have an employment offer on the table with a cast company and I walk in and I was like I didn't shafts just I'm Jack she goes hi Jack and I said this has to be one of the more interesting student run ends you have she said well you appear to be one of our more interesting students it appears to the last month you've not only been stealing hotel breakfast but you got vaccinated a thousand times is a side hustle to make a hundred grand and you called Joe Biden on the cell phone and said you want more student loan debt and not

16:49less because you have that dog in you and it will make you grind harder I said yeah I did say on that that's correct she said you're either the most socially out of where student we've ever met into the school or a marketing genius and I said I don't think those are mutually exclusive but I said I lead toward the latter she said this is a newsletter growth hack I said yeah how you figured out she said because every time you say if you like this share up my newsletter from more of the link to subscribe to your newsletter she's like pretty smart isn't working I said it is crushing you have no idea and once you realize that I actually wasn't committing petty theft but I was just acting like I had she was kind of fine with it she said I was like do I need to remove Columbia stuff from my page she said now just don't say anything racist or misogynistic and don't actually steal stuff I said okay yeah I can I can probably stay with those lands but that mean that I mean like look what that did for you though like that puts you on the map you got it's billionaires hitting you up on the DMs and just and I think that's like a good story right there

17:52is like you took a shot obviously you put yourself out there you did something unconventional and I mean you know it maybe you know it was funny most people weren't doing that most 25 year olds wouldn't do something like that right and then that landed you all these different opportunities it kind of brings I was gonna say it directly it direct you're out of the book it actually directly got me the book deal from a LinkedIn ship post that's not hyperbole I so tell me I so tell me how those dots connect how did you go from a LinkedIn shit post to now having being a publish author and getting a book deal so I want about a year in the working on my like writing my blog I kind of have this idea that I should write a book at some point I think if you color yourself a writer and you're putting out a system concept nobody really remembers a blog poster newsletter people remember a book and if you're writing long form content the goal is always to publish a book I kind of knew that writing a book and suck I underestimated how much the process of suck until doing it but I was aware enough even at 24 that if somebody gave me a decent book deal I would do it but I probably like wait I had a few different publishers reach out at different

18:56points that were like smaller publishing houses but I was always waiting for like a pink random house Simon and Schuster Harper college to reach out so summer 2023 I get an email from Lydia Yadi at Portfolio which is an imprint at pink with random house you said hey Jack really like your sub stack I'm an editor at Portfolio with a lot of the chat to see if you're interested in writing a book I said yeah let's chat so we grab coffee kind of talk through the process and start high level kicking around different book ideas fast forward a year later after a couple of revisions in the proposal we've been to some different houses I actually ended up signing with her with Portfolio in summer 2024 after signing the contract I asked her how did you even find me in the first place she said well you have this linked in post without getting vaccinated a thousand times that I thought was hilarious but I also didn't know if it was actually funny or if you were just insane and I sent in our team's slack chat it said is this funny or am I crazy and a lot of the team said that's hilarious and then I found your sub stack from that so LinkedIn ship post

20:00like meme of Indian guy pushing domino LinkedIn ship post yeah what deal with people in the rabbit house is literally how I would know well I want to learn more about the book so like you know you talked a lot about this on your blog right like you know experiences in your 20s and it's kind of unconventional from what a lot of people say where it's like hey save all your money in your 20s because you're compounding that money and it's going to lead to you know more money in retirement you kind of go a little bit different you you know you on you know what you were like traveling through Europe backpacking through Europe in your 20s you quit your job to do all that stuff living off of what three four hundred bucks a week so you know who did you write this book for and what are some of the messages that you want people taking away after reading this book so a message to all the haters when I went on Scott Gall always podcast if you look at the Spotify comments everything says this guy's detached from reality and he's a nepo baby unfortunately I'm from tiffton Georgia and had not heard of trust fund until I moved to New York I was 25 I'm not a nepo baby I did make some money trading stocks but not enough to touch trust fund levels um the

21:04I have a lot of unconventional financial advice the there's a caveat to it if you have student loan debt credit card debt you have dependents who like rely on you for income you should probably at least from the finance financial vice specifically ignore everything I'm about to say um if you come from middle class or higher background and you're on a good career track even if you don't have much money saved up if you don't have debt I do think what I have to say is particularly useful and interesting and the book is really geared toward college graduates of medical debt that feel this like these competing desires for fun and adventure and risk and career accomplishment and achievement and call it like striving for a really good career um the entire point of the book is thinking through making the most of the opportunity cost of different stages of life and specifically your 20s I'm 29 so I can't really tell you how to live your 40s I do think there's some universal truths to life is very stage specific you should be thoughtful about what

22:06you want to get out of this stage in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s when you're single when you're married when you have kids um but in your 20s specifically you can have a lot of fun for not a lot of money you have a ton of optionality and your flexible to do basically anything like older people who like your energy are willing to give you a shot and higher you on a whim if you've done the prep work you can kind of pick up and move to a new city whenever you want you can take high-paying jobs low-paying jobs you get grad school you just have max optionality that's only once you get close to 30 the stakes really start mattering so it's not that um it's not that you know you should join a startup for travel abroad or work for a big company is that you should be really aware that early adulthood high optionality really short window high optionality how do you get the most out of the certain part of life before it's gone for me I wanted to go backpack Europe and was well it's a forego making money doing that but with the knowledge that hey I'm going to a good business school next year realistically most of the money I make is going to come from the

23:09ages of 28 plus after I leave business school then it is a 24 so if I want to do fun stuff now and it means for going 60 thousand dollars I need to work really hard on the back side of business school to like compensate for that lost income but I'm only going to be 24 once I should go do fun stuff and then figure out the money on the back end so my kind of two pieces of personal finance advice if you don't have debt and you don't have dependence and you have fun stuff you want to do it's okay spending a higher percentage of your income and your 20s to do fun stuff and stack up memories assuming that you are aggressively going after a career path with a high payoff it's like you can only cut costs so much you can always make more more money so be intentional about making more money over your late 20s and 30s and 40s and do the fun stuff when you're young right because you when you get 100% when you get to be 40 you're actually not going to give a shit about if you put back an extra 10 thousand dollars in your in your like retirement accounts of 24 but if you miss out on a kick-ass trip your friends you're always going to wish it's okay is my general philosophy in life

24:14that that's so true man I mean I'm 34 now I have two kids and what what I when I look back in my 20s and I you know it's one of those things where I'm like I wish I took more risk you know I started do making videos itself online at 29 so I kind of caught the late end of my 20s but I think about if I was 24 in making videos where would my career be today and so I think you're absolutely right when you're in your 20s especially if you don't have any dependence on you like you can take so many more risk that's why I don't really worry about like you know people talk about how you know 18 year olds are trading penny stocks or or like you know day trading I'm like this if you're doing that at 18 19 20 it's the best time to do it yeah you can use that much like exactly if all you have is five or 10 thousand dollars that you blow that it is going to scar you but guess what you're not going to risk your mortgage when you're 35 because you know how that feels like when I was trading stocks 24 even if I've made and lost all of it that would have really sucked but it just wouldn't impact my life that much and it's I like I don't have that much of a desire to speculate now because I know what it feels like to make money and to lose money at high levels

25:16like it's it's so useful to do dumb stuff when you're young so it doesn't ruin your life when you're over I think that people don't talk about that enough I think you're 100% right and and yeah the everyone gets like vilified oh you shouldn't be you know doing day trading or this and that and I to me and like if you're gonna do it do it when you're 18 do it when you're in your early 20s so you can learn the lessons from it yeah I rather have you do it then then when you're 36 and have a mortgage and then you're like you know buying zero day options and like you know gambling your Roth IRA don't do it then because then the consequences are so much larger so you can make up for it when you're in your 20s so have a hot take here you know how um yeah um Trump has rolled out I forgot what he called is it called the Trump accounts yeah so good there's whoever whoever's the next president should roll out like the degenerate version of the Trump account wherever 18 year old is giving a thousand dollars to trade however they want but they owe the government that money back like a load if they blow it and just like like like force 18 year old to speed rod the like gambler way because like at the end of the day we have you can trade stocks you can you can just lie on robin and trade options like all the KYC stuff

26:21oh yeah I was trading I was doing call and put options and triple-ever ETFs before I had a full-time job because they don't make care of right oh let me go on polymarket that's like or sorry cows you just polymark you can't trade in the US but everybody's a VPN so they can cows she's like oh like these are you know searching for truth and the truth happens to be Josh Allen over under 250 more than passing yards yeah right so so I'm I'm very big on the cab of the it's we're never gonna have like there's zero friction to speculating at this point you should probably just like like force-induced speculation on 18 year olds so they blow money and get scarred by it it's like exposure therapy um that's a great take that's a great take policy take for 20 years I mean dude I remember losing I got I remember I saved up a thousand dollars over the summer when I was 18 open I'm kind of older than you so I opened up a scotch trade account immediately started trading penny stocks at 18 years old immediately lost or doubled the money one day lost it all the next day learned my lesson and then I started doing a

27:24little bit more due diligence lost more money but by the time I was like in my mid 20s I kind of knew what to do and what not to do it's the best lesson you can learn for a thousand bucks a couple thousand bucks it's the best lesson at that age and I think you're right more people don't talk about it enough and in fact there's like the opposite effect where you're like feel a fight oh you should always be saving and putting away 10% for retirement and I think that that that vise to start applying as you get closer to your late 20s and early 30s but I guess where do you draw the line though there has to be a line somewhere right like I guess where is the line where you don't completely go off the deep end in in no when you're making mistakes in your early 20s yeah so it's like I don't draw a condition right like like you should not get addicted to cocaine and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be bad you should probably not go 100k and credit card debt on draft games which does have a people there's probably to amount of money that's like the like you know like there's a portfolio efficient front tier of how to allocate your money there's probably an efficient frontier of dollars lost to speculation at like

28:2821 that's good and if it's below that you don't quite do it enough and if it's above that you're risk ruining your life maybe it's $7,852 when you're in college I don't know yeah I'm just like making stuff up I don't know but yeah I like and I do not know how you find that I do think in general having like minor financial setbacks from your own youthful stupidity is very useful for preventing you from having catastrophic setbacks from financial stupidity when like you have kids 100% and look a lot of our audience is younger that a lot of people that we listen to this show are in college I think this book is a fantastic week for them Jack if I'm being perfectly honest I haven't read it yet but I have read your other writing right and you're you're a fantastic writer so that's the other thing not only is there a lot of I'm sure a lot of good stories in here but like Jack's writing style I really like it so I think if you're in your 20s right now you're gonna like reading this book you're probably gonna take away a lot from it I want to end with this question like just the writing process I mean how like what does it take to write what is like a couple hundred page book like

29:32what what what is that take are you grinding away like is it like a do you grind for a week and then take a break you just go grind for a three months like what does it take to write like a long book like this well you just open clawed and say right I'm not going to make no mistakes here's my blog no no what I would say what's funny about the whole the whole book writing thing I did not realize how many like best selling books are written by ghost writer in the nonfiction space until getting in here so really yeah like 70% of nonfiction books either use or have heavily rely on a ghost writer so there's the people I know who've actually written their own books I have like a ton of respect for I to be clear I wrote my own book there was there was no ghost writer or AI involved okay good to know but anyway for people who have come through the process themselves and through all the ghost writers in the background keeping the industry going kudos to you writing a book is hard actual process I signed this deal in September of 24 I was then recruiting pretty heavily to trust what jobs

30:35that fall so I didn't really start working on the book until February I joined I joined slow the venture fund I'm at in January of 25 moved to San Francisco for a year so that February I was like okay I have to write a book I have published about a million words online and blog form the blog is about 2000 words the book is 60 thousand words I thought it was just going to be writing 30 blogs it's actually more like writing 300 blogs because the complexity scales like exponentially with the link the book because all of a sudden everything has to connect and this sounds really good standalone but it doesn't flow well with the rest of the book and I basically was grinding on it I would get all four on Friday and I try to write the four and after work but I I write better I have like a six hour block where I can just crank on words at least when working on a book and the only way to do that was just Friday through Sunday nonstop so do that every weekend for five months oh my god reading the manuscript and I hate the whole thing I'm like oh my god and I owe the first

31:36draft on July 1st to ping-win and I was supposed to go on vacation with a couple of buddies to spend like a week and a half the day before I bailed on the trip and I locked myself in a hotel room in the citizen end of the Bowery in New York and just like didn't leave until I was pretty happy with the first draft I wrote I think I wrote to mind 42,000 words in 13 days I lost 15 pounds and I just like oh my god it was it was like pretty traumatic it was it was a very good forcing function to get it done though because when you get a book advance you owe them a manuscript and you don't turn it in they've already given you some of the money and they can call the money back so I was shoot I should I should yeah so get that turned in I get the book back after a month and a half and I was like I still hate this but it's much easier when you have a full manuscript that you don't like to then edit revise restructure until you like it then it is going from blank page to shitty manuscript and you have to go through that process like every other author I've talked to

32:37is that a similar you write a chapter you hate it and then you get all the chapters that you hate together you have a manuscript that you hate you edit it one time and it's like fine and then after several rounds of that you end up with a book that you're excited to publish and for me it was like the whole spring was trying to get that first thing done finally have something serviceable and then August 30th December was getting into the point that I wanted to take it public and like now I'm very happy with the book and judging from Instagram DMs emails Twitter other people seem to like a lot too which is good um the writing book you got Morgan How's all did you got Morgan How's all the guy giving you a the goat he's been on the podcast by the way so Morgan How's all is even given a thumbs up and and yeah I mean look I'm really excited to dive into the book I'm gonna read it over the next couple days and yeah I just wondered like what that process is like because like I mean I've thought about writing a book myself but I think I'm gonna stick to kids books if I ever do write a book it's just gonna be like a like a 10 page kids books my kids can read it I don't know if I can ever do like a 40 thousand work I also I tried every shortcut on those fees it sucks so bad that I try to do the oh well typing non-stop sucks can I get the first draft or at least like

33:42rough draft chapter ideas out using whisper flow or like a voice text thing but you like for getting scrambled notes out from email it's fine for writing a book because so much of the writing process is you've been sentenced and it pulls you to another idea you you can talk faster than you can think therefore the voice to text actually just doesn't work at all for book drafts so eventually I realized the only way to do it was I have to sit in a room and put my phone in a box and just write for six hours and then you get through you sit back down and you write for another six hours and you're asleep and that was kind of yeah for oh my god that's brutal well I mean look I'm happy that you did it though because I mean I think a lot of people are gonna get some value out of this and once the sequel coming out I don't know at 39 you're 39 you got I guess in 10 years I'll do one I'll do one of the end of every decade until I die oh man that's actually a great idea that's a great idea this is this is this is sign you up for that right now yeah Jack I'm so happy we did this man so happy you came on we we we got a chance to do this and uh is there anything else you

34:44want to plug um listen young money that's the name of the book young money a field guide to wealth of purpose in your 20s a sub stack newsletter also young money um you can follow me on any social media and the cowboy hat on and my profile picture across all platforms so young money is the book and the newsletter Jack Reigns is my name on basically everything that's awesome I'm surprised Lil Wayne hasn't reached out to that you know I look to this I was like can I get sued for this and apparently um copyrights and trademarks work in different verticals but a record label can't press charges against a book title and also book titles can't press charges against other book titles Kevin Rus from the New York Times had a book called Young Money that 10 years ago about day in the life of investment making analysts turns out that any like multiple people can use the same book title so somebody else can write young money next year it's totally fine okay guy that's good to know yeah maybe we'll get one of the low way after your for your for your children's book you can call it young money I'm gonna call it young money oh younger money or something like that

35:47young this money yeah exactly well look guys uh is this on amazon and I'm sure all the books are really awesome awesome that sounds good man I appreciate it again and and uh we'll have you on in 10 years uh to be perfect too can't wait for the sequel it's there appreciate Jack well all right guys hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jack or ains I thought that was a super fun one it was just great talking to Jack and hearing about his backstory I'm still working my way through his book I'm about a third of the way through and yeah I think it's a great read for someone in their 20s let me know what you guys thought about today's conversation and do you want more casual interviews like that drive your thoughts on Spotify and YouTube and why you're out of it consider giving us a five star rating as well you know all that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find a show thank you guys so much for listening watching and commenting shout out to Mike for all the work behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here on Tuesday