#045 - Jack Raines (YoungMoney.co): The Fastest Growing Finance & Money Blogger On The Planet Right Now

I have an existential fear of getting a job, which means that I can put whatever the fuck I want.

Extremamente.

I don't know if we can use extreme language here. Absolutely, please. Yeah, I can use whatever the fuck I want.

This is our 3 values, one of them is authenticity.

I love it. Whatever you want. Like, there's no good content. I mean, everybody posting on LinkedIn is like an NPC. Like, it's all either you're just, you're either pretty much like self-congratulations about jobs or you're like a— Congratulations. You're a, yeah, you're like a sales bro, like jerking yourself off about like, yeah, like here's how you Seed. I commented, I was just like, did you seriously use your sick kid as a way to get LinkedIn clout? And then the comment got like 200 likes. I think the guy like deleted the post. Um, publishing house Harriman House that like did Morgan Housel's book, they've done Nick Majewski's Just Keep Buying. Um, like Morgan and Nick put me in touch with— or Morgan, Nick, and, um, um, Katie from Money with Katie. Like, I'm friends with all them, and they like kind of collectively put me in touch with a guy named Craig from Harriman House. So I talked to him and he was saying like, I've got a big enough list now where if I like wanted to do a book right now, they would take it. Like the magic number is about 10,000 subs.

How is it now? The volume from mine? Yeah, on here it looks good. On here it's—

yeah, yeah, it's all good. It's just your ugly face is ruining the camera shot.

Wonderful as always.

Right, we're kicking off, lads.

Are we recording?

Yeah, we're recording, man. Nice.

Perfect.

We live.

Cheers. All right, well, don't, don't talk too loud, you have no headphones. Uh, where do I begin? So as, as you know, Iman, there are— I was probably subscribed to over 40 newsletters this time last year, um, and I thought they were the best newsletters. And over time, as you try to, you know, this, uh, signal-noise ratio, whatever the tech bros want to talk about—

yeah, such a buzzword—

we want to talk about the signal-noise ratio. And, uh I have ended up unsubscribing from pretty much everything, and I only subscribe to maybe 3 or 4 newsletters now. And one of them is youngmoney.co. I highly recommend this domain. You'll check out, bookmark it, put it on your homepage, check it every day, youngmoney.co. And the first time I actually came, I think I saw a few tweets or articles, just, you know, retweets or whatever last year because it's been a meteoric rise. But a very consistent effort. And the first time that it really grabbed my attention was the ZeroHedge article titled "Fuck You, Money." And this is a topic I'm extremely passionate about and a shit ton of— this is like when we had Luke Burgess on the pod and we said this is all worlds collide. This is another all worlds collide. Funnily enough, our guest, I believe, has had dinner or lunch with Luke Burgess recently.

I got breakfast with Luke Burgess about a month ago.

Okay, this is too many worlds colliding in that case. And I saw this "Fuck You Money" article on ZeroHedge, one of many topics where we have in common that we're passionate about. And this article, I believe, was retweeted, quote tweeted by Professor Nassim Taleb, who, that's the highest praise or highest, it's, you've basically completed blogging. You can quit, you can retire in my view.

So typically with Taleb, anytime he interacts anybody on Twitter, he's telling them that they're— it's a really intellectual way to say that they're a dumbass. So by getting like a complimentary retweet was pretty big.

Yeah, for example, I used to call him Maestro, and, uh, he— a few weeks ago he told someone, please stop calling me Maestro. So now it's gone back to we'll call him just Professor.

Nice.

Um, but the guest today is none other than Jack Raines.

Welcome.

Humbled and honored to be here.

Tell us about last night. What'd you get up to?

Um, listen, I have this serious question here, literally says, to understand from first principles who you really are, what was your childhood like?

And I want to know about it.

We digress.

Okay. Yeah. No, last night I drank a lot of Guinness, a lot. Waxy O'Connor's in Soho, if anybody's familiar. Phenomenal place. Live music with a lot of good mates, as the Brits would say. It was very, very keen to delete some beers with them. Yeah. But so that's last night. What was the real question?

We're going to get to your travels shortly, which is the it's going to be the, the following question. But the first is, it's pretty cliché to just say, oh, tell me how you got here. People can hear about your background the last few years on the other podcasts you've done. We're curious to know about the first few years of your life, your childhood, pretty much your childhood, infant, teenage years, uh, just to understand who you really are, like what shapes this thinking, this mind that writes youngmoney.co. Um, who are you? What was your childhood like? And, uh, where were you always interested in finance and money?

So I'm from a really small town called Tifton, Georgia. It's your typical, like, we have— I don't know if you know what a Waffle House is. We have like 7 Waffle Houses and maybe 20,000 people in the town. So I think we probably lead the world in—

God bless America.

Yeah, in Waffle House per capita. The nicest restaurant in town was probably the Olive Garden, right? Or maybe the Chili's. Very cultured. Yeah, very. Let's see, I— yeah, I grew up down there, and then I was, I guess, your typical, like, Southern guy, grew up Southern Baptist, drove a pickup truck, played football in high school, um, made good grades, and then went on to play football in college at a like small school, Mercer University. We were Division I. It's kind of like whatever the opposite of the University of Georgia is for like American football standards. We're on the lower end of that spectrum, but we were still in the top division. Um, but yeah, I mean, I was always, I think, somewhat interested in finance or money or stocks. Like, I remember when I was a kid, my dad would like talk about the stock market. I thought it was cool that you own part of the company. As like an 8-year-old, I thought it was like I'm the boss of the boss is how I picture that in my head, which isn't at all how that actually works. But yeah, I mean, I always thought money was interesting. And then so I went to Mercer University, Mercer University, majored in finance, realized I was going to graduate early because we were taking summer classes every year with football. I liked college, didn't really want to graduate early, so I picked up Spanish as a double major. Um, did not even get close to being fluent, but I figured out you can make A's in Spanish classes without actually knowing how to speak the language if you can figure out how to say certain things over and over again. Yeah. Um, yeah. And then I got into Columbia Business School kind of as a fluke out of undergrad. They were offering Columbia, Harvard, a lot of the Ivy League schools were offering like deferred enrollment programs where you could apply as a college senior. And then if you got accepted, you would work like 2 to 5 years before you started. So basically you would go ahead and get in when you were 22, work the same amount of time you would otherwise, but then you already applied. Way easier taking the GMAT as a 21-year-old who's taking like finance classes than a 25-year-old banker who's then trying to remember how to study for a test again. Um, so yeah, my plan at the time was, all right, I got into Columbia, I'll just go work somewhere in some finance job and then probably go into consulting or banking or some other job that looks good on paper, pays me a quarter of a million dollars. And yeah, that's, that's kind of how it goes. Um, that isn't, that did not end up being what happened, but yeah, that's basically my background from like age 10 to 22. Small town, played football. Finance and Spanish. Worked in finance in Atlanta for like 2 years.

And let's fast forward a little bit where you're supposedly getting deported from Norway and you're living a life on the, uh, let's say, I was gonna say on the run, but it definitely isn't on the run, but living, living a life where you're, where you're actually going and seeing the rest of the world. So, so talk to us around how that came about.

Um, the, the deported from Norway part or the travel in general? Both. So the deported from Norway part, I was in Europe from like last August to December of 2021., and I was like traveling around by myself, but at different points I had friends fly over to like hang out for like a week or two weeks. And one of my friends, Devin, was meeting me in London and we were planning on going to Norway, Sweden, and then finishing up in Copenhagen, doing like a Scandinavia tour. He's 6'7", so he would fit in well there. Um, so he meets me in London and we're here for two days and then we fly to Oslo., and our plan was to go from there to Tromsø, like up in the Arctic Circle. And if you fly from Germany or France to Norway because they're in the EU, or I don't know if Norway's in the EU, but EU adjacent, you don't have to go through customs. It's like a domestic flight thanks to Brexit. It's like flying in from Iran or the United States, pretty much Argentina, and you have to go through the really tough customs.

I resonate.

I had a digital vaccine card, um, from when I was in Switzerland like 2 months earlier. I figured out, like, the pharmacist told me that if I just like paid 30, I guess like $30 or 30, um, euros. Yeah, well, they aren't the euros. What is, uh, francs?

They have francs in Norway?

No, no, no, in Switzerland.

Switzerland. Yeah, yeah, it is.

Yeah. Um, anyway, I paid like $30 and I got a digital vaccine pass that would like scan everywhere, which was nice. Norway was the one country in Europe that didn't accept the paper vaccine cards. And as you know, with America, we're really good at some things, but we're really bad at anything that's organized across the country, like public transit and in this case, digital vaccine cards, even though that'd be so simple to roll out. So my buddy Devin only has this paper vaccine card from the CDC. So we're going through customs and the customs guy is just like, yeah, you can't come in. And he was like, What? I'm vaccinated. We have the same vaccine, right? The only difference was I had a QR code and a piece of paper, and he only had the piece of paper, so he had to sign off on the sheet that said he was like a national security threat to Norway.

Oh my God.

It was wild. But the customs agent tried to tell us a loophole without actually telling us a loophole. He said, you guys could just go to Sweden. You have to leave, but you could go to Sweden. We were like, Well, we don't want to go to Sweden right now. And he's like, but you could. So anyway, we book a flight back to London. And while we're in the air, I was like, Devin, we could have gone to Sweden and then turn around and come back to Norway and we wouldn't have had to go through customs because Sweden didn't have that rule. He was like, dude, we fucked up. And we were over the North Sea or whatever. So at that point it's game over. But yeah, so we got to Port of Norway because the guy that I was traveling with had the wrong vaccine card. It worked out well though. I went back to Norway 2 weeks later after he left and it had started snowing at that point so I could go dog sledding and stuff up north. So it was actually a better trip because he got deported and we had to rearrange the order than what it would have been. But I just like having deported from Norway in all my bios because it's just a funny little thing because they're such nice people, right? Like, you shouldn't get deported from Norway. That's the last country anybody should get deported from.

But yeah, I want to also touch on, uh, in relation to all of that, vagabonding. Yeah, so, uh, this book had a sort of profound impact on me because last summer I went to Tbilisi, Georgia, which is a part of the world, uh, the country, not the country, right?

Yes. I've never heard of Tbilisi where I'm from.

Yeah, Tbilisi, uh, I, I generally recommend that region, but we'll talk about it after, but um, and there's a huge sort of digital nomad remote founder scene over there. A lot of co-working spaces, American Silicon Valley-funded bros over there working away. And, uh, someone I, I met out there who's probably listening to this is a guy called Joshua Owen. He is actually from the Midwest as well. Okay. And, uh, building a startup, raised a bunch of Silicon Valley funding, and just does the vagabonding thing. His work— his team is remote, and he sort of every 3 months, different location. And he was in Tbilisi at that time, and we met. Uh, funny enough, we became very good friends because pretty much every day was just feasting and talking shop and life and usual stuff. Um, and he recommended to me— while he said, you need to read vagabonding. He's like, you're traveling and you're doing all this because you know you haven't read it. I was like, not really. Uh, you seem to be doing the same. Traveling while having some sort of, let's say, side venture or blogging and making money from projects, et cetera. And it's the sort of classic Tim Ferriss and Rolf Potts lifestyle pretty early on. Walk us through this whole spiel. Like, what's the spiel basically?

So I actually read Vagabonding before I went on my vagabonding trip. That was like the final thing that pushed me to do it.

What is vagabonding for those like—

The book or the activity?

Just the activity generally.

It's like, from an American perspective, it's where you travel, but instead of just trying to cram your entire vacation into like 8 days where you try to see the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and the Colosseum, you actually go somewhere for an extended period of time and live there. Or you go to a lot of places for an extended period of time, but it's not like a checklist of tourist things. It's actually like seeing the world for what it is. Yeah, I think it's the, the better way to travel. Um, we have a— honestly, I think a lot of times when Americans travel it's almost like you like have this itinerary where you push so much stuff into a short period of time and then you stay at like a Four Seasons Hotel or Hilton that you don't actually go to another country. You're just like essentially going to a resort where they speak Italian or Spanish instead of English, but you're not really leaving America. You're hanging out with Americans and like just 8 hours away. Um, but yeah, it was like, it was summer of 2021. And I had enough money saved up thanks to a well-timed stock market play.

We'll get to that later.

Yeah. But I was sitting there, I had been working remote during COVID for 18 months and it was like most other COVID jobs. If you're working in finance, you're working remote. It's a lot of spreadsheets and Zoom meetings and it's just not a good way to live. And I think a lot of people can relate to that during that time. And I also knew I was going to business school a year later, so I was sitting there like, Okay, what do I want to do for the next 14 months? This isn't it. And I was honestly just going stir crazy being stuck in my apartment. You're just alone with your thoughts too long. It'll start getting to you. And the initial instinct is, well, I'm tired of being here. I just want to go somewhere else and go see stuff. And my roommate at the time, Chase, he was working in commercial real estate. He didn't have the same travel bug I did at all. But he did have that book Vagabonding. He read it in college. And like, I was just talking to him about all this stuff and he was like, you should just read this book. So opened it that night, ended up like staying up till 4 in the morning, read the whole thing. And at that point I was like, okay, if we get called back in the office, I'm just going to buy a one-way ticket somewhere and leave. And like a month later, um, I was working in corporate finance at UPS and I got this email that said, Hey, we want everybody back in the office in September. So I called up my boss, Anna, and I was like, hey, I'm quitting. She was like, which I'd actually told her a month before. I ran into her at an Atlanta Braves baseball game and I was like, hey, if they call us back in the office, I'm just going to quit. And she was like, all right, well, give me a heads up before you do that. And I was like, yeah, for sure. So anyway, when we got that email and I called her, she was like, you're totally about to quit, right? I was like, yeah. She's like, do you have another job? And I said, 'No, but I'm looking at Google Flights right now and there's this $350 flight to Barcelona, so I think I'm just going to go there.' And she was like, 'For how long?' And I said, 'I don't know, I'll probably come home for Christmas.' Oh my God.

But yeah, it was such a foreign concept to Americans. It really is. 10 days holiday per year.

Yeah, no, it is. But it was interesting. But yeah, that book was kind of like, it just really changed how I thought about travel, having been I did one study abroad and then I went to Paris for 10 days with one of my friends one time. But I'd never just gone without having a predetermined itinerary or goal. And what's interesting about it is you hype it up, you romanticize this wanderlust feeling, and then you get off the plane in Barcelona and everybody's speaking Catalan and Spanish and you're like, oh shit, I'm just on the other side of the world. I don't know anybody. And I just booked a hostel for a week and I have no idea what I'm about to do. Um, but it's good, you know, you figure out how to meet new people and make friends. But yeah, so that was kind of the background to my vagabonding journey.

And, and you've now got, some would say, a little bit of a love interest with Europe generally. Yeah. What, what— so, so walk us through maybe some of the trips you've been on and, and more importantly, what you've learned since you've been here from with that vagabonding perspective.

So I think, I think the biggest, the biggest difference between Europe and the States is like people are like, work is by far the primary thing in the US. It's like, it's a, it's, it's a career game, right? Like everybody's trying to win the status game. And in Europe, it's almost the complete opposite. We talked about this earlier. The UK is kind of somewhere in the middle, especially like London. Like there's a lot of similarities between London and New York.

Yeah.

But if you go to like Madrid or, um, Amsterdam or another like big city in another, even another Western European country, people just chill more. You know, there's like a 2-hour break in the middle of the day for a siesta or to grab a beer, grab coffee, whatever.

Um, or based on your tweet last night, was it yesterday or this morning? I can't remember. But you said that you were going, uh, you were on a bus and the French bus driver had to stop to have his cigarette.

It was, it was ridiculous. So it's this, um, shuttle. I was in, I was in Chamonix, France. For a ski trip last week, and I had a shuttle back to the Geneva Airport. My flight was at 1:30 and the shuttle left at 8:40, and it's only an hour to hour and a half drive. But thank God they picked us up early because the company had booked like 16 people in this 13-person van. The driver like picked up 13 people and he said, okay, we have 2 more. There's not enough storage room. We need some people to like sit with their bags in front of them. And everybody was like, there literally aren't any more seats. And he was like, Oh, the car's full. He had no idea how many people were in there. And then at one of the stops, we picked somebody up, and then he just gets out a pack of cigarettes and starts smoking in the parking lot, just talking to some random guy on the street that was French. And the other people in the car, I think some of them had a flight pretty soon, and they were looking— it was me, and then it was a lot of— a couple of British families and one Spanish family. And everybody was like, what the hell is this? We sat in the parking lot for 30 minutes. We didn't add anybody else. There was no point in being there. He was just chilling, smoking a few cigarettes. Yeah, we got back on the road. But yeah, so it's being on time. I mean, in Germany, everybody's on time. Pretty much everywhere else, it's kind of a, you know, it's like if the shuttle's picking you up at 9, it'll be there by 9:30. I don't know.

I think that's his time, by the way. He is literally like that. Today was the first day I think in 5 years.

I run on PST, Persian Standard Time.

I love that.

Yeah.

That and Ali Karpet's wedding. It was the only time you've ever been early for anything.

When I'm on time, like today, or Ali Karpet's wedding— is an Iranian dear friend— it means it's important.

Yeah.

So I hold you in high regard.

I'm glad that I made the— the actual on time.

Um, do you ever see yourself moving to Europe now that you've got this European bug?

I don't, I don't think I would move here. Like, I, I really like living in New York. Um, there's not another city that I would prefer to live in now, but I do like coming over here because it's just different. I don't know. It's just the lifestyle is a lot different and it's fun to just, especially now that I've met enough people from traveling, I have some friends in Madrid and London and Amsterdam. So there's the traveling where you don't know anybody and you're hostel hopping and stuff and that's fun. But if you meet people while doing that that actually live somewhere, it's fun to go back and actually go out with them and their friends and do stuff that isn't just museums and bars and pub crawls and all that, but actually just Once you, if you know people in the other cities or other countries, it's like such a better experience. Yeah. But I don't think I would ever move here. Like, it's fun to come over for a month or month and a half, but I like having like my life and my friends and like my, I kind of realized that last year after traveling a lot, like I like traveling, but I don't think I would want to just like be wandering around for 5 years. It's good to have a home base to go back to whenever you're tired of it.

Agreed. You, you touched on, um, the way in which you were able to afford a lot of your trips around Europe. Can we, can we go into a little bit of detail around, uh, your, your plays in the stock market and kind of how that's fed into your thinking around your writing and all of that good stuff?

Yeah. So, um, like every other young to mid-20-something-year-old male in like 2020, 2021, um, you're stuck bored at home and you think that you can be a stock market genius.

Yeah.

It's a, a real byproduct of a zero interest rate environment. It was a lot of fun.

As are many things, right? Such as DEI, ESG, and we could go on all day.

Oh yeah, for sure. I got in an argument with a British guy about ESG in Chamonix, actually.

Oh really?

Yeah. I asked him if he thought nuclear energy was green and he said no. And I was like, well, you're just kind of an idiot then.

As someone who's worked in the energy industry for 7, 8 years, I can tell you it is green.

Yes, it's actually the greenest. It's, it's greener than Including the explosions, it's still got less damage and deaths than pretty much anything.

Plus the whole supply chain. Yeah.

Um, but wait, what was the question again? Uh, oh, wait, no.

How you made your money as a result of what you learned.

Yeah. So I started trading SPACs, um, special purpose acquisition companies.

Shout out Chamath.

We have a whole special. We will link our SPAC special from 3 years ago where we called all the BS, but please continue.

I actually applied for his emerging managers thing after I'd made like 2,000% returns, largely from some of his SPACs, and I was a finalist for it.

Didn't get it.

Wow. Thank God. I would have hated like doing that. I would have lost so much money on the back end of that. If you would have given me a million dollars, I would have deleted it instantly.

You would have been a walking meme on Twitter.

It would have been hysterical. Um, I would have been like Cathie Wood, but just on the decline, not on the rise. None of the fame, all I love the bad stuff. But yeah, long story short, one of my buddies called me up and said, hey, DraftKings is going public through this thing called a SPAC. If you buy this stock, then you'll own shares in DraftKings afterwards. I didn't get it, but I read up on it and decided to just watch it. And it initially performed well at 2 or 3x after the merger, but the warrants that were attached to it, which are essentially 5-year call options, went up I don't know, like 15x. And once I saw how the redemption clauses worked with all of it, I realized the shares are pretty much risk-free before the merger closes, around $10, $10.50, because you can redeem it. And the warrants aren't risk-free. They could hypothetically go to zero. But right now you can just tell it was a bubble, right? And people are going to start throwing money in this. So this company called Nikola Motors, Went public through SPAC.

I have an essay on them.

It's hardly a company. Is Trevor Milton in prison right now? I know he— I'm pretty sure he got hosed in court, like 100 years worth of charges. But anyway, I mean, you could kind of tell it was BS, but also everybody wanted to find the next Tesla because Tesla had tripled over the last 6 months. So I had $6,000 in my Roth IRA, which is a tax-free retirement account in the States. So while I initially planned on putting that in index funds or Apple, I threw it all in Nikola warrants and it turned into $18 grand and then I sold it. And if I would've held it, it would've gotten like $70 grand. But still I was like, this is cool. Let's find the next one.

Yeah.

Ended up making like a subreddit for SPACs. They got big. And then some of the smarter guys in that group made like a Discord server. And we had a couple of coding guys who would built bots that could scrape the SEC sites when filings would drop. So as soon as trading halted, like, we would get a push notification on our phone so we could spend like 5 minutes skimming— this is so dumb— we would like skim the investor presentation, ask ourselves, like, could this meme? Like, are people gonna just throw money at this over the next 3 days? And basically, if it had to do with like sports betting, electric vehicles, or outer space, it was going to triple. So anytime that happened, we would just throw all of our money in the warrants and then sell like Once the stock hit like 15 or 20, sell. Sometimes they go to 60, sometimes they would stop there, but do that load in the next one. So I just kept trading warrants until I got to like $150K, and then after that I would just play like the shares because there was just like a lower risk in that. And if you make a 10% gain on like $150K, that's still $15,000. So like I went all in on Lucid Motors, like $11 a share because I just timed it right, sold it at $18, it went to $60. I would have I would've made a million off of that. Really, you know, really first world problem. Really unfortunate. But yeah, I got up to like $400K by February of 2021. And I was telling my dad about all of this. He thought it was pretty absurd. He was like, dude, you need to just like take out half and throw it in the S&P and keep playing with the other half. And I was like, I've said this in other podcasts before, but a direct quote was, I'm up 6,000%. If I go up another 150%, I'm a millionaire at 23 years old. I'm pretty sure I can get there. Yeah, if that's not the top, like the biggest screaming top signal ever. And that was literally like a week before the bubble popped. Yeah, but, um, I was like, because I was like playing shares, I didn't— I only lost like 10% on that, but the SPAC bubble wasn't working anymore. So I threw a lot of money in a company that used to be a SPAC, right? Buy now, pay later company called Catapult. I hate it so much. Um, I have like just utter disdain for the management team of that company. Because they like just grossly overexaggerated their earning forecast like every other SPAC. And anyway, I had all my money in it going into August earnings and lost like $157,000 in 3 minutes. Wow. And then I stopped trading SPACs. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, I was like, okay, well I still have 6 figures from $6K over the course of a year, year and a half. That's not bad. Yeah. I'm just going to throw this in like SPY, the S&P ETF, and never trade stocks again. So yeah, that was it. It was, uh, quite a roller coaster. Hopped off relatively unscathed. Um, the chart looks pretty ridiculous, but still up. But yeah, so that was how I basically funded my Europe trip. I had some money from that, sold my car, and I'm actually glad that I lost that money because like that trip would have been miserable. I would have kept trying to trade while I was in Europe if that hadn't happened because I was addicted to it. So it gave me a very good Hey, don't be a dumbass. Let's just like go have fun and like be a 24-year-old in Europe and quit trying to be Michael Burry.

So yeah, I have a tweet a few weeks ago about, um, just I guess buy now pay later charlatans of the highest order. Yep. So, uh, don't trust anyone that has, uh, Forbes 30 Under 30 in their bio, uh, swears by ESG, DEI, um, what was the other one? It was, uh, works in Binalpay later, doesn't read Taleb, and cannot deadlift at least 2x body weight for multiple reps.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's a good list.

It's a fair list, right? And then, uh, I finished off with, uh, uh, seeking, uh, avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance, Charlie Munger, which is where I want to kind of shift gears, uh, getting a little bit more serious, but, uh, about your essay, essay topics. So Taleb and Munger are pretty much my biggest inspiration. It's what— hence the name of the brand. They've, uh, a lot— sort of, I guess, similar to yourself, my early mid-20s, uh, mess around a bit with sort of trading, crypto, other shit.

I feel like— I feel like everybody goes through that phase and you have to— you either get stuck in it or you realize how much of a waste of time it is and you get out of it.

Absolutely. Um, you need to go through the phase.

That's— that's the difference. Yeah, you have to be You have to get smacked in the face.

You need to be bad. You have to get baptized by fire. It's the Southern American way of saying it.

So I came across— touching on Taleban Manga— came across a few of your essays. As I said in the intro, the one that caught my attention the most was the FU Money, because I've written about a similar topic called financial minimalism. It was the first real essay that kind of, uh, put our brand on the map or gained us some— the most subscribers we've gained in a small period. And Taleb retweeted your essay. I love the essay. Um, we're gonna throw it on the screen here if you're watching the video. If not, it's linked in the show notes. I highly recommend people read this. Can you— can we riff on this a little bit, this, this topic? Because I'm very passionate about this topic. And, uh, I'll read the first paragraph and then I'll let you sort of just riff on the general essay and the ideas behind it. So, um, In a 2018 Esquire interview, essayist and statistician Nassim Taleb gave the following description for the optimal amount of wealth. He said, money can't buy happiness, but the absence of money can cause unhappiness. Money buys freedom, intellectual freedom, freedom to choose who you vote for, to choose what you want to do professionally. But having what I call fuck you money requires a huge amount of discipline. The minute you go a penny over Uh, then you lose your freedom again. If money is the cause of your worry, then you have to restructure your life. Nassim Taleb. Well, let's— and then you wrote a masterpiece, in my view. This is what really made me subscribe to you. Uh, let's walk through, like, let's just riff on this topic. What are the ideas behind— what even made you understand these ideas at, I guess, such a young age? Because you are the youngest guest we've ever had on.

Um, so I think the, like, from my personal experience with the trading stuff As a— if you're 23 years old with like $400,000 in the bank, that's a lot more money than you should have, especially when it comes from just hitting buttons on your phone. And I sort of just felt like I was like a slave to that because I was so used to watching that number go up. It was like the only thing I really thought about. And then like after I got out of that, I took a step back and you can see it. Like I could just see it in people's careers. Like I had a lot of friends that were doing careers that just objectively they hated. But they're making a lot of money from it. Or the just general idea of I need to do this, this, this, make all this money and then I can do what I want. And I think when a lot of people go into that, if you want to do that for 2 years and get out, cool. But most people don't get out because you get so used to chasing that money.

Hedonic treadmill.

Yep. And then your spending goes up. Lifestyle creep is real and you can never really get off. And then you're making millions of dollars and still feel like you're spending all of it. So it was like a little bit of kind of expounding what I felt with like having a good bit of money and not being able to get out of it. I could see that in other people's careers. And then just seeing how, um, I don't know, like a lot of people like that are really rich or have a lot of power, like it looks like their lives suck. Like I would hate to be Elon Musk even though he has like, I don't know what his net worth is now. He's actually lost more money than anybody in history, but He says it himself.

He says, I don't want you to be me because it's not happy, basically.

Yeah, he had— it was either in that piece or another piece I quoted. There was like an interview with him about how he was sleeping in one of their factories, almost missed his brother's wedding. And it's like all these people with billions of dollars, it's like the top 10 richest people in the world or the top 10 richest men have like a combined 14 divorces. That's not a great stat. The average divorce rate is like 50% and they're at 140%. Um, thanks to Musk getting divorced like 3 times. But you just see all the stuff. Or also in that piece, I mentioned how John Cena had to like make an apology because—

this I want to talk about.

Yes. Yeah. So like he referred to Taiwan as a country and they were filming, I think it was for a Fast and Furious movie, and China was just going to ban it. So he gave— it was the weirdest video of all time, like apologizing in Chinese for calling Taiwan a country. And John Cena's worth, I don't know how much money, and he basically had to do that. So it's like you see all these people who are—

and sorry to interrupt that while you're on that point— Taleb then said something about China and, uh, he just didn't— you're right there, he's fixing that. Taleb said something about China and, uh, he then just stuck by it. He didn't have to apologize, which is the true meaning of fu money at the right level. Not, not being poor, but also not being so wealthy or having so many things tied to your name like John Cena.

Yeah.

Where you don't have to apologize, you just do whatever the fuck you want, which is the— as the name suggests, fuck you money.

He was referring specifically to Jamie Dimon, wasn't he, on the basis of JP Morgan?

Yes, that was the one, that was the one. Thank you for reminding me. Jamie Dimon said something I guess similar to John Cena maybe. Yeah. Um, and he had to apologize, and then Taleb just roasted Jamie Dimon. He said like, whatever, charlatan, imbecile, insert Taleb roast. Um, so yeah, but sorry, uh, I, I, I had to add that point.

Yeah, but yeah, it's just, it, it just became really apparent to me that like people who had so much money that they then had these either really powerful people or it could just be their own like, like public image that they're then like, like stuck having to keep up with constantly.

Yeah.

Um, and it just looked like it sucked. Like to me it's like, I don't have like a specific dollar amount that's perfect, but it's like if I have enough money where I'm not worried, like if I just quit making money for like 6 months, I would be fine. And if I can afford to just do whatever I want, whenever I want, That's perfect. And I don't think $100 million would make me exponentially— it wouldn't make me 50 times happier than $2 million, for example. But you're going to have to do a lot of effort to get that extra money. So I don't know. It just seemed like— I think a lot of people make a lot of money and they get really miserable, but then people who don't have any money are also miserable. So as long as you can just pay for the stuff you want and you don't have to do what somebody else wants you to do, It's like, it just seemed so simple after that, but people miss that.

As, uh, as Morgan Housel said, you know, the aim is to do what you want when you want with whoever you want, etc.

So, um, well, it's, it's the core concept of antifragility, right? So I know we've, we've talked Taleb to death on this, but, but the point is that the way in which you make your money should be antifragile, even if you do have enough money to call yourself, you know, to have a few money. That's, that's the core principle, and not enough people can Well, in today's day and age, I think that the opportunity for antifragile ways of making money are far higher. You're a great example. Um, but equally, I think enough people have made money over the last, what, a couple hundred years that have been completely antifragile in the way that they've been completely fragile in the way that they've made that money. And therefore, there's this, uh, societal pressure and an inability for people to understand how to make their money in an antifragile way. And I think a lot of that comes from teaching people which Taleb does, but I don't think Taleb is someone who, um, people can relate to very well. He's quite complicated to understand if you don't put the time and hours in. So having people like you explain stuff in the way that you do, which is really approachable, is actually really useful for that, in my opinion, with some stickman drawing, which really makes it approachable.

Yeah, no, so I got that, uh, what's the story behind the stickman drawing in all of your essays?

I thought Tim Urban was— I thought his drawings were hysterical, but he's also— I think he's the best blogger like ever, or at least that like I've come across. I love his stuff, but it was so funny because he'll like, he'll write about really detailed stuff about like the size of the universe, like the shortness of human life. Why do we procrastinate? Which is like his most viral one ever. But he always just draws like stick figures or pictures of like woolly mammoths that look terrible and you remember it. And it hit me that like, I'm not a like graphic design wizard. I can't make really good stuff, but I can draw really bad stuff. And I found this, this like drawing software, open source called FireAlpaca. If you go to the website and try to download it, it looks like it's gonna give your computer cancer. Yeah. Like it looks just like spam pop-up ads. LimeWire vibes. But no, exactly. But it's, it's super easy to use. So I would just like draw pictures that would like, they say a picture's worth a thousand words. Yeah. And it's like, you can really just draw like a picture of a stick figure thinking something or doing something and it gives the whole like theme of the article, but people recognize that it's like, oh, that, like, that's a really shitty picture, Jack Raines drew it, and it's perfect. So yeah, I literally just copied Tim Urban because he draws really bad pictures and I remember them. So it's, uh, yeah, I thought it was cool.

Cool. I think you've touched on this already, but you also write an essay about 6 types of wealth, right? Can we go into a little bit detail around what these are, um, and your thinking behind them?

Yeah, so it's I think money's the most obvious type of wealth because it's a very easy scoreboard, right? Even if not everybody knows exactly how much money you have, you do, and you can track if that's going up or down over time. And it's a good, it's a measuring stick, right? You can't really tell how much knowledge somebody has or this or that. But I personally think that money is good in that it allows you the ability to accumulate other types of wealth, which The ones I wrote about were stuff like knowledge, experience, relationships, but it could be, I mean, it could be anything. It could be accumulating other skills. It really is subjective from person to person. But to me, I think money as a form of wealth is only worth what other forms it allows you to accumulate. And if you think about it, most of the stuff that people actually care about in life, people take pride in building businesses, not in having a lot of money. Like maybe the money's a result of that, but people aren't proud of just having money for the sake of it. That's why a lot of trust fund kids are kind of miserable because they have the money that they didn't actually earn, their parents or grandparents did. Or like for me, I'm trying to learn Spanish. I think it's really cool that I have a lot of friends that are bilingual or trilingual and like people might not think about that as a type of wealth, but they can communicate with like 300 million more people than I can just by what language they speak. I think traveling to a lot of places, having memories of places that you've been to, or having a lot of good relationships with friends and family, those are all things that having more money gives you either the time or the flexibility to focus on that stuff. Because when your time isn't controlled by a salary, you can actually hone in on the other stuff. But that's the stuff people actually care about. That's the stuff you like talking about with your friends. That's the stuff that you look forward to. Like, people like getting that bonus because it allows them to take that trip to Greece, not because they like having the money in their bank account. They like what they can do with it. So it was just like an idea I've been thinking about, like, what, what is money actually worth? The other forms of wealth that allows you to accumulate. Um, and I thought it was a decent essay. I didn't know if it was like one of my best ones, but that's the one that's like, it's probably gotten like 100,000 views now circulating on the web because a lot of people have reshared it. And I think it's because It's one of those ideas that everybody intuitively knows, but people haven't really put it into words or fully formed that thought. When you read it, it's like, yeah, duh, this is obvious. I think that's the best type of stuff when everybody can relate to it, but they hadn't really thought about it before.

It's the intersection of philosophy and finance, which Morgan Housel does really well at exploring. But what's really interesting in what you said is, so I think there's a stat which is like um, 90% of wealth is lost within 2 generations. And what's, what's, you know, alarming about, about that is the point that you raised around if you don't make the wealth yourself, you're likely to lose it. But the second thing is using that wealth, using that money in a way to generate wealth in other forms.

You—

there's— I don't know if it's a depression thing, I don't know if what it is, it's an inertia thing that stops people from wanting to use that money in the right way. So do you think there's any type of correlation there that would mean that if you haven't made the money, you can't go and create these other forms of wealth or be able to create value in your life in other ways because you haven't made the money? Or do you just think that that's— there's something else going on there?

I feel like, um, I think if you can't— you don't respect money that you didn't make if it was just given to you. It's why, like, people who win the lottery oftentimes blow it. It's why, like, the Vanderbilt family is one of the most, like, famous examples of a family just squandered wealth. I think Housel has written about that as an example in a few of his pieces. But yeah, if I hypothetically make $100 million and then my kid has just basically a blank check to buy whatever, and you start buying that, you get in that cycle where you don't know what it's like to actually have to grind and make that money. Therefore, you don't respect it, you don't appreciate it, and it's just always there. And you also never really learn how to make money in the first place, which is why you blow it.

Um, how do you break that cycle?

It's the facing of adversity that's required and skin in the game. So earlier when I— when we were talking about, uh, FU money, yeah, and you said, uh, you kind of sort of gained clarity around that whole ideal notion from trading in the markets, getting slapped in the face, etc., because you had skin in the game. Yeah, you had— you put money in the market, went up, you were very invested, you lost it. Uh, I think it's, it's really just having a skin in the game and, uh, some sort of, uh, incentive structure in place, and also facing adversity. But that, that's my view. I'd love to hear what you think, from like family just losing wealth because the kids are spoiled.

But yeah, I, I don't, I don't know 100% because like, I mean, I grew up very well off, but I didn't grow up with like a family worth hundreds of millions of dollars, you know. Like I had a, I had a truck in high school, but I didn't have a private jet type of thing. Um, but I think it's, it's one of those things where you have to put the kids in a position where like they either have like personal risk where they actually understand risk reward, or they, they need to like have to work on something that just doesn't like, like money, put them in a position where money doesn't matter. Whether that's like, I don't like, I guess military service could be an example, you know, where you can't buy your way out of it. I don't think everybody has to like serve the military if they're a rich kid, but it's, you just have to get put in some sort of uncomfortable situation where like having a lot of money can't just like buy you entrance or status or something else. So you can kind of understand how the rest of the world works. And I think a lot of people that grow up really rich are just constantly in an environment where money got them into the college they want, then they go work in the family business because it was easy to get that job. And it's essentially like It's like in a video game where if you're just given like a cheat code, like in like Grand Theft Auto where you get the ultimate unlock and you have like unlimited lives, you can buy whatever. Yeah. You don't really understand what it took to like earn that stuff. Mm-hmm. It's like that in real life too, where if you speedrun all of the steps required to earn the money, then it's, uh, you're never gonna be able to appreciate it. So you have to go through some kind of like struggle where having a lot of money doesn't give you an advantage. And I think it's really hard to do that or to like put people in that position because money does give you so many advantages. So I don't like— in the abstract, that's what I think. I don't know what that actually is in reality. I think most people don't, and that's why so many people who grow up uber wealthy have so many like personal problems or blow so much money, because it's, it's hard to force a struggle that isn't real, you know?

Yeah. Um, I want to touch on another thing with regards to, uh, some of these ideas you hold. One of them is I, I spent a few months years ago, um, in the crypto space, sort of working in the space on projects, etc., and then left, uh, for multiple reasons. But one being that I guess, uh, the, the talent wasn't there yet, like we've seen maybe in the sort of Web3, which whatever even that means, we'll get to that. Um, and I left. And also just the whole space, pretty much 99% of the space is unethical players, right? Zero-sum, pretty much. Like, we've seen— these are my views, but like A16Z, uh, pretty much doing a shitload of pump and dumps in, in the past year, which has been well documented. And, uh, we'll pull it up on the screen and link some of the evidence there. But we know you have some strong opinions about crypto. My views definitely changed after years ago and what I just mentioned. We share similar views. Can you— can we riff on that a bit? Like, can you elaborate? Like, uh, I've seen you roast crypto a fair bit on Twitter.

Yeah, it's so much fun to roast because they get like— there's no group that's more—

but the laser eyes have gone now.

Have you noticed? Oh, 100%. Tom Brady gone because his money got deleted when FTX went under. My favorite one is the guys who used to have like Bitcoin in their bio, like Anthony Pompliano. I think he's a phenomenal marketer, but holy cow, like he went from like having hashtag Bitcoin to like entrepreneur, lifelong learner. Like the laser eyes are gone.

Yeah, sponsorships for the pod.

No more sponsorships for the pod.

Yeah, returned all of his LP money.

Yeah, I mean, he timed it well. He did. He did well. Um, and it's not like, it's not like a personal dig on like just him. That's, he's just one of the like most obvious players because he does have a big audience. But yeah, I mean, my, my, my whole take is like, I saw this as a joke the other day, but it was that ChatGPT, which people overhype that too, but it's an interesting tool. Like it's fun to play around with, but ChatGPT has more use cases in a week than crypto's had in a decade. And it's actually true though. Like the only use case for crypto is one, to give people something to talk about online. Yep. And two, to basically allow people who are earlier, or like if you have a crooked moral compass but you're smart, you can make a lot of money off of essentially like dumping your bags on other people. But like for example, and something that just annoys the crap out of me is when people are like, oh, well that isn't actually crypto. That was a centralization problem. And it's like crypto is the only space where fraud is the norm and everybody else says they're the exception versus like doing the right thing is the norm and the occasional fraud gets prosecuted. It's like you're more surprised when something bad doesn't happen in crypto, right? Um, and I think that there are things in crypto that do work, but it wasn't necessary. Like pretty much anything that you can do in crypto could be done as well, if not better, with lower risk, with higher insurance outside of crypto. But it's one of those things where people like having a narrative they can buy into, right?

Incel to have a sense of belonging.

Yeah, exactly. Jason, Jason, I think it's Jason Zweig. Jason Zweig. I don't know how to pronounce his last name.

Zweig, I think.

Yeah. So there's a story that he's told that his dad told him back in the day about how to make money. I might misquote this a little bit, but he said, if you lie to people who want to be lied to, you can become really rich. If you tell the truth to people who want to hear the truth, you can make a living. And if you tell the truth to people who want to be lied to, essentially they'll bring out the torches and pitchforks. And it's true. The people like this idea that, oh, the Federal Reserve is bad. Here's a solution. Or everybody's been keeping you down, but we're going to democratize this and get you rich. And people, that's kind of the ethos behind crypto. That's why people buy into it. It's like, it's our chance to get even. But the underlying thing is people want to believe that they don't have to do the work and they can just buy some magic internet money and then it'll go up and they'll be rich. And they tell themselves that, well, it's because they were smarter than everybody. They caught the paradigm shift or everything's collapsing. Bitcoin was the hedge and they were the ones who were smart enough to get in on it. But in reality, people are always going to be enticed by the idea that they can get really rich without doing the work that needs to be done to earn that money. And the people who are making a lot of money from this intuitively know that, and they just sell to the other people that are trying to get into it. Because when you see in 2020 people who bought Bitcoin in 2014 that made millions off of it, you want to buy it too. It doesn't make sense. Something that 1,000x probably won't 1,000x again, especially when its market cap is a trillion dollars. People buy it. And it really clicked with me because the exact same irrational behavior going on in crypto, it happened in SPACs, it was happening in growth stocks. The assets changed, but it's the exact same thing. People are trying to get as rich as possible by hitting buttons and they tell themselves they're not, tell themselves that they're doing their due diligence. But in reality, nobody should make like 10,000 times returns on a risk-adjusted basis ever. And people assuming somebody else did it, that they can do it too. Um, but yeah, crypto is just like a bunch of excuses that act like they're— it's solutions looking for problems, and somebody's getting rich off of it, and most people aren't.

That's my, like, it's very interesting that Taleb and Munger have very similar views on it. Um, and obviously everyone roasts Munger. They say like, this guy is 99, calling it rat poison, what does he know? Um, but I think he actually knows a fair bit. Um, and Taleb has a paper which we'll also link, is a 6-page research paper he wrote when he came out. And if you remember, he was pretty bullish on crypto years ago. There's videos of Taleb on stage with Naval Ravikant at a crypto conference. But then Taleb went and did a shit ton of research, published this paper, sold at the top. And there's this sort of meme where he's sort of laying back in his chair, it's like, Taleb sold at $69K or whatever. But the paper is called Bitcoin, Currencies, and Fragility. Um, we'll link it, people can read it. But that, that'll sort of I guess counter a lot of the Balaji camp who are trying to bring strong reasoning toward the need for it. And there is— I, I, I totally hear some of the things that Balaji says, but I think, um, echoing yourself and, uh, in, in further detail, this Taleb paper, I think there's a lot to be said for the counter argument.

So my, my biggest issue with like the whole biology camp is that it sounds really smart without saying anything. Like you can say really intellectual talk about like centralization, decentralization, this and that. But to me, the sign of like, it's a big red flag when you can't explain something in simple terms that a 6-year-old could understand. And the entirety of crypto is based on using higher level language that doesn't actually say anything. And that's just such a massive red flag. But it sounds smart, right? Because you always have an out because you can always say this isn't actually what that was, or this is a centralization problem. But no, if you can't write a 5-sentence paragraph explaining your thesis for why this will work, if you have to do a 12-hour podcast with, like, was it Lex Fridman?

Like an 8-hour podcast with Balaji.

Yeah, maybe if it takes you an entire—

Our poor dear friend Erik Jorgensen is writing a book on Balaji. I think he's going to— hopefully not, but he's going to age like 30 years biologically by the time he's done with that.

Yeah. Yeah, it's— if you have to overcomplicate something to make it sound good, it's probably trash.

So there's two things I want to pick up on. The first one is in the earlier part of the conversation, you were talking about sort of the madness and everything that was, that was moving forward with that. When we had Luke on the pod, and having read his book and some of Girard's work, not to sound all tech bro now, but it, it was literally pre-written. The script was pre-written for how the markets were going to turn, right? So everyone's just going to jump on the same thing. Crypto is the same thing. You find one model or idol that you place, place all of this supposed value on. And as a result of that model or idol, people start flooding into certain areas. Chamath might have been the idol for the SPAC market. Balaji might be one of those idols for the crypto market. Sam Bankman-Fried definitely was an idol. Yeah. And so what you end up getting is this mimetic cycle of people just following into the same thing. And I don't think that's different to anything else we've seen before or anything we'll see ever again in the future. It's just human nature. That's not an issue. What gets interesting is where you start talking about people like Balaji. So I have— I really like Balaji. I think the reason he's misunderstood a lot of the time, and a lot of this point around like an inability to communicate in simple terms, is one, the guy's a little bit on the spectrum. I mean, he's— he is like— he is— he is a genius in his own way, but his ability to communicate is maybe not his best trait. And, and that's probably why he's done a lot of long-form podcasts, is because he can't talk, you know, quite concisely. The second thing about Balaji is we spoke to Eric Jorgensen about this, is that you go from writing a book about Naval. So Eric was sitting with Naval writing his book on Naval, and you're talking to someone who used to be a management consultant who has this very top-down hypothesis-based problem-solving approach to solving any problem and thinking and structuring his thoughts. Then you go to Balaji, who is the complete opposite. He's sort of a technician, right? He's a person that's a computer scientist. He's fucking smart in that field. And he's able to think not top-down. So I don't form arguments on the basis of big complex things that then kind of boil down into smaller buckets. He creates them bottom-up. So he says, this technical solution is sick. Where does it apply to in life? Which is to your point around a solution trying to find a problem. It may be that in that space, that's the only way we're going to move forward because you've had a flooding of these types of people to enter the space and because the technical elements of it are so complicated. What are your thoughts on that?

I think there's this certain subset of people that I would put Balaji in. He's a genius. He's incredibly smart. So is Jack Dorsey. There's a lot of people like this that either, they either made a lot of money or established a brand in one of these very niche things. And I think you can be so intelligent or rich or just out of the day-to-day life of normal people. You get a little bit detached from reality where you have all these almost futuristic idealistic visions of the world and how stuff works that just doesn't apply to the average person. And I think if you get too far away from the people who are watching the Liverpool game on Sunday or who are just going about their 9 to 5s and this and that, you can have this futuristic idea of civilization that's just detached from what's actually going on. So that's my main thing. I think they're the overly Silicon Valley, higher academia, successful tech entrepreneur group of people that just aren't quite plugged into how the world's working at this point. It's like what you've seen Jack Dorsey do with the Square rebrand to Block. Square's a good payment company. Just keep sticking with that. Stop trying to force integrate all this Lightning Network stuff and all of that. Just let people send money to people. It's not that hard. And I also think it's once you've hit that home run once, whether it's building that big company or having that breakthrough idea, you're constantly looking for that next like, like 1000x return, whether that's financial or intellectual or whatever. And in reality, there might've just been one, but like, it's, I think you're constantly chasing that rush again. So you have to have these ridiculous ideas because like you had a ridiculous idea blow up. So you need another one because that was your thing. And that's, uh, It's the same reason, like, like people like Michael Burry or, um, I can't remember the other guy. It's, uh, he's from Texas. I can't think of his name, but the guys who made a lot of money in the '08 crisis and they're always calling for, um, it's Kyle Bass. He made a ton of money and then he called for so many, like, currency defaults that just never happened. He had one big home run. He's been flat on his returns ever since. Once you have one of those big ones, it's really hard to just step back from the game and chill, especially if that happened pretty early in your career, like in your 30s, you've got another 40 years where you're looking for that next thing. So I think there's a lot of these like hyper-intellectual successful people who are just constantly looking for that next thing. And I would throw— I think a lot of Balaji's ideologies kind of come from that, like really wanting that next big paradigm shift to happen.

Yeah, it's— yeah, you're 100% right. I couldn't agree with you more. We've written an essay on this, um, and it talks to what Balaji talks about, his three extant poles. So he's essentially said the world fits within 3 different poles. He's got, I think, communist capital, or CCP he calls it, work capital, which is NYT, and crypto capital, which is BTC. And he very firmly believes that he sits within that decentralizing BTC crypto capital bucket. But actually, life's a lot more complicated than that. And I think when you try to create these different, um, these buckets, you become forced to align to them, uh, even when you're thinking from a bottom-up perspective. When he does, you still end up you know, it's human nature. You end up moving towards that one specific, um, that one specific pole.

But it's interesting, like a lot of the stuff he says around the whole network state, these are very— a lot of it is logical, rational ideas that I agree with, but they're, they're not practical. You can't— I, I don't see them ever happening, to be honest. Yeah. Um, yeah, because there are a lot of side effects to those as well at the same time, though, unintended consequences, things we haven't experienced.

Yeah, I feel, I feel the exact same way. If you isolate the like cause and effect, A to B relationships by itself, it works. And then you try to plug into the real world and it doesn't.

Infinite variables.

Yeah. Like you could say like all the crypto blockchain stuff works, smart contracts work, but then like the entirety of human history shows that like stuff breaks. Yes. So it's kind of like, that's, that's my biggest problem with the whole crypto space. It's like, hypothetically, if you could remove banks from everything, cool. People would have a little bit more money, but I don't know how that would break, but sooner or later it's going to screw up. And that's why like things like FDIC insurance are good. Like it's good that we have these like kind of government backstops on stuff because crypto kind of hinges on the idea that you can fix like human problems that are just like intrinsically human. Like there's certain stuff that's just always going to happen. Um, so yeah, I think that's— it's just a little bit detached from reality. That's my biggest problem.

Let's move on to Young Money, but before we do, should we take a quick break?

Right, uh, thank you. Pee break done, and we're swiftly moving on to the Young Money brand. Uh, we're actually discussing during the break a little bit— I mean, however much you're comfortable to share, whatever. If not, no problem. But a lot of listeners here want to start, I guess, Substacks, blogs, yeah, now beehives or other things online. How do you monetize? What is your process of, let's say, getting sponsorships look like? Or maybe not even yours, what do you advise to people trying to earn, not maybe even main income, just a bit of side income from doing this stuff online?

So I think, and it's what we were talking about a second ago, but there's really, there's like 4 ways you can make money writing online, broadly speaking. You can either build a big enough audience that you can sell ads, and that could take a lot of different forms, but essentially people pay some money to like put their product, service, whatever in front of your audience. Um, you could do subscription model where people pay you to read your stuff. Um, if you have like your own business that you're basically using the blog to drive traffic to, that works where you're not selling anything, but you link your own stuff, your own business, your own like consulting service, whatever, and your content, or it could just be As you build an audience from writing stuff, there's opportunities that come from that, which is just where people reach out to you asking if you want to work for them in this capacity, whether somebody wants to literally buy out or acquire your blog. There's this girl Katie who writes Money with Katie and Morning Brew bought her out a year ago. Or it could be you getting one-off side gigs based off of your content because people like your stuff. There's a whole spectrum in there. Like for me personally, I sell ads on my blog. Like it's literally just some of it's like cold outreach. Some of it's people reaching out to me and then you like negotiate the price, whatever. Like I'd say I'm charging a little over $1,000 per ad right now. I'm about to try to bump those rates up. Um, there's that. And then also people have reached out to me either with help setting up a newsletter saying, hey, I'll pay you for your time. Or like people who want copywriting for like ads and stuff. There's just a lot of like just different ways to make kind of side hustle income. And as you get a bigger audience, like those just start flowing in. Like, I don't really reach out to anybody saying I'll help you with this, but I get enough people hitting me up. It's like, you get like $1,000, $2,000 a week here and there from random stuff. It's nice. Um, but yeah, I mean, the two broadest ones are either selling ads just from the content itself. You either sell ads or do subscribers. Um, the way I look at it is if you either have a very niche specific thing that benefits a specific group of people, subscriptions make sense, whether it's publishing short reports on stocks or like you were talking about, like the, like coding, more technically intensive one. Like if it's like very specific, like to-do coding stuff or whatever, um, there's a group of people interested in that.

Like Pragmatic Engineer, number one tech newsletter, just covers tech careers basically.

Yeah. There's, there's stuff that's like the more you niche down, the higher chance people would subscribe to it. For me personally, I kind of just like riff about whatever I'm thinking about. Like, I don't think my blog would be worth paying for. I wouldn't pay to subscribe to Young Money, but I like it enough that I would deal with the ads on it to read it. Is actually, that's just how I look at it. And the other thing is your reach is a lot higher if it's free where anybody can read it. So ads are almost a necessary evil to be able to make a living while also having more people read it. Because like, I just want more people to read my stuff. And at some point I'd like to write a book and do all that. And like the biggest way to de-risk how many books you sell is having a really big email list. So for me, it's like, if I sell ads, I don't have to get a job and I can focus on writing more and more people can read my stuff. So it's not even that like, oh, I want to make millions of dollars from selling ads, but it's that I can make enough money to support my lifestyle while growing my stuff.

When, when you said you make, let's say, for example, $1,000, $2,000 a week, some weeks here or there from like helping people with things. I guess some people may be curious to know how that would work. Is that on— as Naval would say, I don't know, you gain some expertise in an area and then people will come to you for your expertise in that topic to help with whatever. Hey, I'm trying to set up a blog. Hey, I'm trying to whatever, can you review or edit my draft or whatever? Like, am I thinking along the right lines?

Yeah, like I had some people that want to move to Beehive, like they're trying to get their stuff set up, set up perfectly, and they say, hey, like, I'll pay you $250 to hop on the phone with me for an hour to talk through this. Yeah, I'll do that. Or there's this guy Dickie Bush, him and Nicholas go on 30 for 30. So Dickie and I are friends and he hit me up seeing if I would want to help basically do consulting calls with some of their clients who are actually building up a— it's not just writing online, but actually building up a newsletter. And he was like, yeah, we'll pay you this rate for these calls. We agreed on a price and I'm going to do a couple of those a week. But these are all people reaching out to me just because they have seen my stuff. So it's, um, that wasn't a goal going into it. It's just been like a side effect of like building stuff online. People find you, come to you for stuff, and like they're essentially willing to pay money to expedite the process that I went through for free, which like if I would have had more expendable income a year, year and a half ago, I probably would have done the same thing. Like the best way to learn how to do something is like learn from somebody who's already done it.

So you're, correct me if I'm wrong, but you're coming up to 100,000 subscribers.

I'm at 30,000 right now. Okay. So the goal is 100,000 before I graduate from business school.

So 30,000 and how long it's been? It's not been that long, but it's been like 15 months, probably 16 months.

Wow. You're not even at the hockey stick growth yet. So you're— you're— that's really, really impressive, especially writing, because I know how difficult that can be when you're doing it on a weekly basis.

Yeah, it sucks.

You get better at it. Yeah. You want to reach 100,000 subscribers then, and then you've talked about releasing a book. I think it was— this was in your A Wrap for 2022 essay. Um, this is interesting to me because I always feel like writing a book basically has no monetary value to it unless you, you know, blow that book up and it becomes super, super popular. Why do you want to write a book?

Clout. Um, straight up, like, there's asymmetrical, right? The difference between being an author and being a blogger is just like the perception of it is massive. And I like— I have some ideas that I would like to just put in book form. And I've written enough blog stuff that a lot of it would pull from that. So it's not like coming from scratch. I have an idea for one about travel and then one about specifically that different types of wealth piece. I think that could be expanded upon to be almost like Morgan Housel-esque type of book where it's like, I mean, his is literally called The Psychology of Money, but actually about human behavior and money. But instead of just being about money specifically, expanding wealth into different concepts, And then I had another idea for one about essentially vagabonding, except Rolf Potts wrote that in his mid-30s, writing one as a 25-year-old who's still kind of that midpoint between the degenerate early mid-20s to the also adulthood, but just writing about one, why you should travel, the realities of traveling long-term alone, especially at a young age. And I think that that's something that would be very applicable to a lot of young people. It's just one of those things where you can put a lot more information in a book in one piece where people don't have to go through 25 blog posts to find all of it. There's the prestige factor of writing a book. And I think it's just a good goal to have something to accomplish. But the other thing is if you do write a book and it's like a New York Times bestseller, then you start getting speaking engagements and stuff too, where people literally pay you to talk about the content that you've written about, which I think is a phenomenal way to make money. Because I enjoy talking and writing. So that kind of combines those. But the biggest way to de-risk that is either be a celebrity or have a big email list. And I'm not a celebrity, but I have a pretty fast-growing email list. So, um, it was actually like the publishing house Harriman House that like did Morgan Housel's book. They've done Nick Majulis' Just Keep Buying. Um, like Morgan and Nick put me in touch with, or Morgan, Nick, and, um, um, Katie Flint, Money with Katie. Like I'm friends with all of them and they like kind of collectively to put me in touch with a guy named Craig from Harriman House. So I talked to him and he was saying, I've got a big enough list now where if I wanted to do a book right now, they would take it. The magic number is about 10,000 subs. But if I'm not in a hurry and can wait, it's just like the more people that read your stuff, the much higher chance of it hitting escape velocity when you hit publish. And I'm 25, I'm in no hurry to write one now. And if I wait 2 years and I have 100,000 plus, email subscribers. If they're subscribing to read my blog, they would probably buy my book, and that's a lot more people that might recommend somebody. And I also think I'll be a better writer like a year and a half from now than I am right now.

So I feel like I'm sitting in the Tim Ferriss podcast with, um, who was it? James Clear, the writer of Atomic Habits.

They just did it. I just listened to that one.

Yeah, it was good. So for those listening or watching this, this— that came out the beginning of 2023, and, uh, this is exactly what James talks about, right? He says having that email list actually de-risks that initial inertia that you might get with releasing a book. Um, and so he says, you know, the most valuable thing you could create as a content creator is an email list because it's Lindy, as we like to say, uh, it's timeless and it's not reliant on any specific type of platform like, you know, Facebook or, or Instagram or whatever. Um, one more thing I just want to pick up on what you said is what you didn't mention around writing a book was the distribution element of your writing. So what you get is an outsourced way of distributing your thoughts. And I think the hardest thing that we've come across in terms of our writing has been distribution. Yeah, getting people to actually get eyes on your essay. But in addition, you know, providing such content that they will then subscribe to that essay on the basis of your distribution. So how do you go about distributing? Like, you're fucking hilarious on LinkedIn, man, but like on Twitter, you've kind of got big dogs following you now as well. So how did you go about making sure that your distribution was on point.

So I like the LinkedIn one's funny. I'll go there first. I realized with LinkedIn, this is a whole topic in itself. Yeah, we can, um, I was actually on, um, the Not Investment Advice podcast with like, like Jack Butcher and all them. And we talked about the LinkedIn thing a lot. Um, that's, that was hysterical, but there's no good content on LinkedIn because people can't actually post real opinions because everybody's employer is on there or a future employer and you don't want to put anything that could keep you from getting hired or hurt you career-wise. I have an existential fear of getting a job, which means that I can put whatever the fuck I want. Extreme. I don't know if we can use extreme language here.

Absolutely.

Please. Yeah, I can put whatever the fuck I want.

This is all our 3 values are authentic. One of them is authenticity.

I love it. Whatever you want. I was like, the more extreme I can be on LinkedIn, the easier it is to stand out because there's a lot of extreme people on Twitter. Twitter's a lot tougher to stand out on. LinkedIn has 3 times as many active users as Twitter. It's never going to die. Twitter, Elon Musk could kill Twitter. LinkedIn, it's literally, it's basically Lindy because it's so career-oriented. I think it's probably the least risky social media platform there because people will always be working and they'll always need to get jobs. And there's no good content. I mean, everybody posting on LinkedIn is like an NPC. It's all either you're just, you're either pretty much like self-congratulations about jobs or like a—

self-congratulations.

You're a, yeah, you're like a sales bro, like jerking yourself off about like, yeah, like here's how you succeed. So it hit me that if I just make fun of that stuff, it would probably do well because most people think it's funny and they might not post about it, but they'll like or comment on my post because that's just not as big a deal. And some people will get pissed about it because they think I'm being serious and they'll call me out for like being an asshole. So every day or every few days, I'll either think about something that pissed me off and I'll go even deeper writing about that, or I'll just think of the most extreme thing possible, like a personal finance hack that would actually probably put you in prison or something like that and just roll with it. And, um, but there's a method to the madness, right? I've gone from like 1,000 to like 11,000 or 12,000 LinkedIn followers in a couple of months. And like the conversion rate on LinkedIn to subscribers, I don't know why, but like if I plug a blog on LinkedIn, more people subscribe from that than they do on Twitter. I don't know if the attention span is longer.

We've had the same. We've had the same.

But it's like, if you can build a big LinkedIn, that's freaking massive. It's, I think it's because it's a more like business-focused, like professional network. So there's a higher chance of people subscribing to like a blog or something from that.

Also, there's no one authentic on LinkedIn. So when they see that, they're like, holy fuck, who the fuck's that? I've been doing that on LinkedIn for like 2, 3 years where the reverse. Obviously it's not funny posts, it's just calling people out on their BS, like extremely authentic. Um, and yeah, that gets us a shit ton of subs, more than Twitter.

Whenever I see a viral post that's awful, like the one about the crying CEO, yeah, yeah, yeah, or there was one where this guy like posted this thing about his like sick son in the hospital and this and that, it was like a hustle culture post. I commented, I was just like, did you seriously use your sick kid as a way to get LinkedIn clout? And the comment got like 200 likes. I think the guy like deleted the post. But yeah, it's— I love calling out that stuff too. It's so freaking obnoxious. But yeah, as far as like just distribution in general, like Twitter's my biggest platform. LinkedIn would be second biggest. But early on, like you see the— like for me, some of the early guys that I followed that were kind of the finance writing bubble were Morgan Housel, Nick Majuli, a lot of the Ritholtz guys. And I was always trying to figure out, okay, how do you balance distributing and sharing your stuff but not being the guy who's like, hey, will you retweet this? Because I get a lot of those DMs now. There's nothing more annoying than somebody being fake friendly because they want something from you for free. That's not how this game works. That's actually a really good way to ensure that people won't like you. They might begrudgingly do it one time, but if you start off with trying to make a relationship transactional, you can't ever backtrack and make it authentic. So after I'd written 20 or 30 pieces, Nick posted some tweet about the benefits of just buying index funds and basically how active trading is almost a fool's errand because you essentially can't know if you're good or not until an extended period of time. There's a big opportunity cost of that. So I'd replied to it, said, yeah, I agree. I wrote this piece about blowing $150K in a day. Pretty good example of it. So he DM'd me and he was like, Dude, this is great. Do you mind if I share it? And I was like, no, like please share it. I got like 300 new subs that day and I had like 800 at the time. So that was nuts just from that. So then it hit me that I don't necessarily go like looking for ways to force your stuff in, but if you ever see where like somebody with a big audience is talking about something that you've written something really relevant about that would relate to it, just like reply and basically just do that. And don't like ask them to share it or anything. You can either DM it to 'em or reply to 'em and say, Hey, I thought this was interesting. Here's something I wrote about it. And sometimes they'll share that stuff. Like that happened with Paddy McCormick one time. It was like an organic thing, but very similar. And he like shared a piece I wrote. And then once people like that, that have like a blue check on Twitter with 100,000 followers share your stuff, it signals to other people, oh wait, like Nick Majuli likes Jack Raines's stuff. It's probably decent because I like Nick Majuli's stuff. And then once you hit like 10 or 20,000 Twitter followers, then you have that number and it signals people, oh, a lot of people follow him. He's probably relevant. It's kind of messed up that that's what determines relevance, but that's true. In fact, it's so real. Um, but yeah, early on, that's the best way to do it. Like, don't ask for anything, but just like share stuff with people. Like I've, I've shared other people's stuff just cause I came across it on Twitter that got them a lot of clicks. It's like the cycle continues. You just don't want to be somebody that's like spamming people like, hey, retweet this. Cause that's a good way to make everybody hate you.

Yeah. So for those listening, if for example, they write something and their hero has written something similar, they could, for example, just ping an email or a message, say, hey, I was always inspired by your writing, I've written something similar that actually gained me a few subs recently, thought you may like it if you have the time.

Yeah, I had a, I had a very, like, the way that I guess I kind of met Morgan Housel was something—

what's your pitch? Like, how do you pitch these? And also the Morgan Housel thing.

Yeah, so I, um, I literally, he'd written some piece that was like similar to something I wrote, and I just DM'd him, said, hey, like, Hey, one, I loved your book, Psychology of Money was great. Two, I also write a finance blog, I think somewhat similar to your tone. Here's something that I wrote that's similar to that. And I'd send him a couple of pieces. It wasn't like I would send him everything that I wrote, but a couple of times he would just like it or put a little fire emoji. And then one time I think he either commented on one or retweeted or something. And then I saw that he followed me on Twitter. So I was like, oh, this is sick. This guy's like, he's kind of, in my opinion, won the game of financial writing. He crushes it. He's my favorite. Finance writer of the current writers. And then we were, I guess, Twitter friends. You know where you have the people that you talk to on Twitter that you've never met? And then when I moved to New York, I just messaged him and said, hey, if you're ever in the city, I live here now. I would love to meet. And he was in town giving a speech or speaking at, I think, Citadel or big finance group in New York. And he brought me by the Collaborative Fund office and we were hanging out. And it's funny because like his online persona. I don't, it's not, it's not that it's stoic, but it's very short. Like he tweets short blurbs that are like pretty insightful and writes his blog. He's hysterical in person. Like he's like kind of a jokester, really funny. And, um, we were just like, we talked about writing for a little bit, but then we were both just like riffing about like making fun of the Thread Boys on Twitter and like how annoying that type of stuff is. Um, but like I didn't, I didn't realize he had read a good bit of my stuff, but he was asking me about traveling in Europe. He was like, pretty cool that you figured out how to make all this work at a young age. And he was telling me that he thought the best piece that I'd written was, I wrote a piece of my opinion on all the abortion stuff back when Roe v. Wade got repealed or whatever. And one, it was cool to me that he'd read that because that was like 6 months before that, which meant he'd actually read a good bit of my stuff. But two, he was saying that that was actually his favorite piece I wrote because it was just categorically way different from everything else. But he was like, it just gives you range when you show that you can write about something controversial and write about it well, that doesn't get you cornered in as being stock guy or finance guy. It's just you're a writer who focuses on this stuff. But we talked about that engagement thing too. And I was like, yeah, I was always worried when I sent you something that like you would be like, all right, like this kid's sending me too much stuff. And he was like, no, the biggest difference is you never once asked for any sort of promotion. You would just say, hey, I think you'd like this. And I did like some of them and I ended up following you because of it, but I never, like you were never asking for engagement. And he's like, once the bigger, like you get online, people, a lot of people, it's very obvious that there's like a transactional element to the relationship. So that kind of confirmed what I'd already been thinking, like, that matters a lot. And you grow a little bit slower, but it's so much better having, like, like, I have, like, an authentic relationship with him and with a lot of other people I've met through Twitter, largely because I've always just kind of, like, joked around with people on Twitter but never once tried to force anything.

Yeah, you're being authentic at the end of the day, and that's exactly what you, uh, what makes you endearing to people. And I think that's that you're young as well, right? So, so, like, people will want to help you when you're young as well. I think that's part of it. Yeah. Um, let's get into the meat and bones of things, which is the actual writing itself. You know, distribution's great, but if you don't have a product to distribute, it's kind of shit. So yeah, what's your writing process like? Do you do the, I don't know, Cal Newport approach of lock yourself in a room, put your phone away, and just write the fuck out?

I have such a bad— I don't have a process.

He's asking because we go back and forth on this. Uh, I'm very much Cal Newport. I cannot write unless I have an idea in my head and I've bookmarked a few things and research pieces. I go to a coffee shop, noise-canceling headphones, 3-4 hours deep work, done. He's the opposite. He's like, I've been thinking about this thing. He goes and just flies away on the keyboard, goes back to it in 2 days, then goes back to that, and he just does it in bits. And he has like 50,000 notifications going off. I'm like, my phone is off, like no one even talked to me. Like, what's your process like?

So I think it's kind of I actually wrote a piece called How I Write that breaks it down pretty well. It's changed a little bit since then. That was a few months ago. But my like writing process is pretty chaotic because my writing journey was starting around the same time I flew to Barcelona. Right. And there couldn't be a worse environment to like try to establish your brand as a writer than like hostel hopping for 4 months, being drunk 5 days a week and like having a lot of pretty people around you. That's exactly right. And like sleeping in bunk beds on trains. I'm pretty sure I got dysentery in Krakow. There's not a good— that's an overexaggeration. I had a stomach bug that was the result of just going out too much. But I had established kind of two rules myself going into that trip. One, because it'd be very easy to just go on a 4-month bender where you just go way off the deep end. So I was like, I'm going to write a travel blog while I'm traveling, which will force me to do something constructive, disciplined, like every 5 days, just write about where I've been, what I'm doing, send it to all my friends and family. And I just wanted to keep Young Money going because I don't know, I just wanted to keep riding it. So I was like, I'm going to have to put out a piece on Young Money every Monday, Thursday, and I'm going to have to write at least one travel blog piece a week. And because I never really knew where I was going to be, I couldn't get a rhythm in. But sometimes I would get back from a club at 2:00 AM, I'd grab my laptop, I would be half cross-eyed and I'd sit in the lobby. Here's what I did today, blah, blah, blah. Met these guys from Spain. We drank a lot.

I've read some of those. Wonderful.

It's on the travel blog. It's the most fun thing that I write. But yeah, so my process is I just kind of intuitively know how long it'll take me to write something. And I have a lot of blog posts that are half baked where I have an idea and start writing about it, knowing that I can expand on it later. But I mean, sometimes I'll write like 4 posts a week and then be like a week ahead. Other times if I have a piece due Tuesday morning, I'll be up until like 5:00 AM Monday night writing it, take like an hour and a half nap, proofread it. There's probably still some typos in it. Send. So long story short, I don't have a process at all. It's just, I know I have to get some stuff out and I write it. Stephen King has written about and on writing his writing process. Nah, that's just not me. It's pretty chaotic. But like, I'll, I kind of like that. Like I like having just when the inspiration hits, you write stuff. So like my deadlines are disciplined, but the actual time that I write before that isn't, if that makes sense.

Do you feel like some of the stuff you do release as a result isn't as good as you'd want it to be when you press like publish?

I don't think so. I, I don't know. I think if I tried to, um, if I tried to overly, like if I try to make myself write from like, like 8 to 12 or 9 to 12 every day, like sometimes I just wouldn't have anything to write then. So it almost feels I think it would be better to schedule some time to edit and revise a little bit, but at least that initial first draft, I think you just have to write it when you write it. The one thing that I have done is got this app on my phone and my laptop called Focus, or called Freedom, sorry, where I can block any app or whatever. So I'll put my phone on do not disturb and then block Twitter, Instagram, all of that.

I was going to ask about this. So you use Freedom app and that's pretty much it.

Yeah. And it's super useful. I think you can overly try to make a perfect system where you don't actually write. For me, it's how do I just eliminate all the distractions for a block of time? And I can just do that. The problem is if I get done writing early and then realize I need to message somebody back on Twitter, I literally can't for like 2 hours. But there's rarely anything. I usually keep Instagram unblocked because I'm not addicted to that. I'm really just addicted to Twitter. And sometimes I do like have to message people on Instagram because that's just like medium of communication. But yeah, I mean, I block pretty much everything for if I need to write or if I'm trying to like, like study Spanish or if I'm just hanging out with friends and don't want to be checking my phone, I'll just like turn it on for a few hours.

Instagram for the ladies, I'm assuming.

Yeah, obviously.

Well, we'll get to that shortly in the, in the live portion. Um, I guess In terms of— is there anything else you want to ask about the writing stuff?

I want to understand who your best, uh, examples of writers— I know you said you love Morgan Housel. Yeah, but like, why? And like, what inspires— what about them inspires you to be a better writer?

From the writing itself, he is one of the only people that writes— takes a really qualitative approach to a quantitative field. Like, most finance writing sucks. It's just boring. It consists of either like somebody trying to tell you what's going to happen in the stock market when they don't know. It's somebody telling you, like, giving, like, personal finance advice and stuff, which is useful but not that appealing to me. It's like there's levels to, like, how much you kind of understand money or understand yourself determines, like, the stuff that you're into. Um, there's people just giving general commentary about what's going on, like Matt Levine. Phenomenal. I also love him a lot. It's just like His stuff is very current events based. Like, I think him and Morgan Housel are the two best, but it's two completely different things.

But also with Matt Levine, like, I don't know how he sends that podcast out, uh, that, uh, essay out for free. Like, I just don't understand how you can do that on that consistent— I know he has a little team with him, but he's still the one writing every single day, and it's complex shit, man.

Extremely detailed, lengthy, and everything is like, again, go back, like, it's, it's signal, high signal.

I think part of it is he literally writes the most conversational tone ever. He actually includes like, um, and I guess so, but he'll be flaming people where he'll say, like, I guess Elon Musk is probably just the worst, but then he'll break down complex structure about how the Twitter deal actually works. Exactly. It's, he's one of the only people that can do that because he worked, I think he was, uh, he worked at a law firm that dealt with either M&A or securities or something. So he just has a much stronger knowledge base. So it takes him less time to understand what's going on because of his background. I couldn't do that because I never worked in that, but because he blogged for a while and he worked in that, it's just he can do it faster than other people can.

Who else are some of your, I'd say, GOAT writers?

So I used to hate Mark Manson because I thought his stuff was cringe. And then I read some of his old blog posts about travel and life stuff and realized he's actually really, really good and just figured out how to use the corny language which is something that stood out in the era that he was going. But I actually think he's a much better writer than I used to think. Um, his, especially his old blog posts, they're phenomenal. Um, I'm reading Anthony Bourdain's, um, shoot, I can't even think of the name of the book now, but it's phenomenal. Um, the one where he's going around the world trying to find the perfect meal.

Yeah. It's a Netflix series as well. Um, I've forgotten the name.

Is that A Chef's Tour?

Yes.

Uh, that's, that's actually going to piss me off now. Cause I'm literally like reading the book. But I'd never read any of his stuff and he is so good with words. Like he's so, his use of like adjectives and detail and like, um, he'll be telling like a beautiful soliloquy and then he'll say, this is fucking brutal. Like is the next sentence. Like he's so good at just describing stuff. And I think it's because he was like honestly a pretty like tortured dude with some demons. And I think that's part of what made his writing good. Um, but yeah, he's phenomenal.

World Travel? Kitchen Confidential?

No.

Um, A Cook's Tour. A Cook's Tour. Yeah. That, that's the one. Um, but that's great.

Oh, that was one of his older books.

Yeah. Yeah. It's probably like 20 years old or something. Cause he wrote that in his like earlier mid-forties. Um, yeah, he's really good. I don't know. I think J.K. Rowling, I'm a huge Harry Potter fan and actually want to go back and read those now that I'm—

Cancelled. You're cancelled.

Sorry. And all of her controversial opinions on Twitter. Yeah, I mean, I jump all over the place. I started reading like The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway because I realized he was kind of a degenerate vagabond and I was like, I bet he wrote good stuff. And he has.

So, you know what else Hemingway loved? A good Cuban cigar, which is also what we love.

Yeah.

Nice. But yeah, so it jumps all over the place. I don't only want to read finance stuff though, because I think that makes you boring. I think it's good to read like a wide variety of stuff.

Well, Sapiens is a new meme, but, uh, I don't—

I've never even read Sapiens.

Have you read any of Harari's books? No. So it's— in English we say it's bare bait, bruv. His work is just really, really bait.

Like, it's so obvious.

It's like obvious. Like, everyone's like, oh yeah, okay. But actually it's fucking good stuff. Like, it's, it's quite generic and it's quite easy to understand. They're quite lengthy, but actually it's quite useful.

Mike Solana had a tweet, was it recently? He said, you only hate Harari now because everyone's read it.

Yeah. No, that's literally what it is though, right? It's like once something, like it was a good book initially, too many people read it. And because it was on Lex Fridman's list of books, he wasn't on his list. It was probably on his list. That's hysterical though. I don't even know what I think about that. I just think the fact that it was a controversy is itself kind of dumb, whether or not you like it or hate it.

But yeah, wait, wait, wait, so hold on, let me quiz you on that because, um, uh, Taleb called out Lex for basically a list of books that he posted, and Lex wanted to do videos and do reviews of these books and reread them, and Taleb was like, shut the fuck up, kid, like, just go and read something.

And then Peterson came, he's like, you idiot, you shut up as well.

Yeah, so Peterson was on—

I believe Taleb said, you like imbecile moron, stay out of this. The adults are arguing, Jordan Peterson like, Fuck off.

But then you were quite like, you were balanced, but I thought you took, from reading your tweets on the matter, and we'll pull them up on screen, you seemed more on Lex's side than Taleb's side.

Yeah, I mean, I think you shouldn't shame people for the books they read. I will say I get what like Taleb said where some of those books are so lengthy, you can't try, if you try to force it in a week, it's not good. But I also think there's this like aristocratic sense of like, oh, I appreciate literature more than you, you're not reading it right. Like don't tell people like how to, like it's a book. You can just read that book how you want. And if you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't. But I just don't like the snobbishness of, oh, you're not reading right. Or you're not appreciating this book the right way. Like a book is, there's no one way to read. Like it's very much the reader's interpretation of what they think. So you shouldn't force, I mean, I get that you might think that a book a week is cheesy, but also I think just shitting on people in general for something like reading, when most people don't read is pretty lame. But I also get that. I mean, I don't know Lex Fridman. It could be like, like really just like a fake engagement thing of like, I'm going to do this book thing. Like he could have like an ulterior motive, but I don't know. I just think he's reading books. It's a kind of weird list, but like, who cares?

He's actually started publishing videos weekly on each book he reads on his YouTube channel, like a 1-hour review of the book. But I, I, I hear both sides of the argument, but I think the Taleb camp, the point they're trying to get at is Lex is basically a robot. Some of these, some of these books, you have to let the— you have to let it marinate in your— like, the ideas, you have to digest them. You have to— it takes time. Um, and he's just trying to do one week, one week, one. It's like very robotic, like everything else he does, like one meal a day. And yeah, uh, just a bunch of others. No criticism of him.

It's the Tim Ferriss approach to life.

Yeah, Tim Ferriss approach is great to many things like learning languages, but when you're trying to apply it to everything in life, extremely robotic, it's just—

what's, uh, what's funny about it is every time somebody gets like outraged about Friedman's thing, especially somebody like Taleb, it just gives him more like virality. Like you're actually making the problem worse by trying to dunk on him. More people are seeing his stuff and a lot of them are probably gonna like it.

If you're Middle Eastern like us, so we're Iranian, If you're Iranian, you always know that there's one uncle who's just going to be excessively racist and in the corner saying his shit. So just let man live. Like, you can tell him as many times you want, but he lives his life, man.

So, yeah, there's a lot of people who love his books but just have unfollowed him on Twitter.

My goal in life is to get insulted by him on Twitter. Like, I think I would love to just get out.

The problem is you get blocked as soon as you get insulted. He just blocks you. Yeah. And then that's it.

I mean, you've had the praise from him, so, uh, we'll leave it there.

Yeah, the, uh, there's two people that an insult from means a lot. There was my defensive coordinator when I played college football, Coach K. He once told me he was gonna, I think it was, rip your balls off and shove them so far up your ass, you'll be able to taste your kids coming out of your mouth. It's like, you can't even take an insult like that seriously.

Like, it's very Midwestern.

Just tell me, like, to go fuck myself or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, he's from Ohio. Okay. His wife lived in Ohio while he lived in Georgia, which I get. Um, but yeah, him and then Taleb would be the other one.

Okay, as we, uh, start to wrap up in the next 10-15 minutes, and we want to wrap up on the topic of life before we get to some other things, one thing I wanted to touch on is the Opportunity Cost of Everything essay, uh, which— and also you have an Investing Is Why Investing Is Hard essay, but more so the Opportunity Cost of Everything. Let's quickly, I guess, discuss these and generally the topic of how to invest personal finances, which you, you've already kind of touched on, we've touched on, is pretty much the Morgan Housel of just throwing in an index fund. You're not gonna call anything. But more importantly, what I want to discuss here is how one should aim to live life, um, and values and decisions, etc., which is the, the two things I'm trying to get at here is how do you define enough you've touched on and the opportunity cost of everything, uh, as, as we start to wrap up here, like, your thoughts on those.

Yeah, so I think the, I think the opportunity cost one is interesting because that's like, I think opportunity costs kind of drive everything, like literally everything. Like things you do spend money on is the equivalent of all the other things you didn't spend it on. Like the people that you date or marry, you're choosing them over like everybody else. The place that you live, the people that you hang out with, like every single thing is a trade-off. And I think the biggest opportunity cost is time. You're going to die. So everything that you do before that is you're choosing that over everything else that you could do. And I haven't really fully fleshed out how I feel about this, but I think a lot of the stuff that people do is just almost like a distraction or diversion from the fact that they're going to die. It's like if people actually came to terms with that, I think a lot a lot of people would do different careers. They would treat people differently. They would spend a lot less time just mindlessly doom scrolling on TikTok or Twitter, or they wouldn't be arguing about stuff like politics all the time. But yeah, I think if you actually internalize that fact that you have a very limited time, it makes it a lot— you have a lot more clarity in, okay, what do I actually want to do? That's why to me, the idea of doing a career that I didn't like for, say, 8 years to make as much money as possible, It was pretty lame because I'm 25, I'm not going to be 25 again. There's certain stuff you can do as a 24, 25-year-old that you either won't want to do or it's just like you just shouldn't do as a 35 or 45-year-old. So as far as how to live your life, I mean, that's a subjective thing from person to person, but I think it's, you need to be very aware that you only have certain opportunities to do certain things and you should maximize what those are. And you need to have enough money to ensure that you can do those things and be able to keep doing those in the future. But after that, it's like money has diminishing returns, right? So if you're at a point that you're making the money you want, use that as leverage to do the things that you want. It's like, I look at that in relationships, like I'm a single 25-year-old. That's cool. I enjoy being a single 25-year-old. I also don't want to be like a 45-year-old going to the club. You know, that's like weird. So like there's, there's like, there's like trade-offs in everything though. It's also why like I'm trying to travel a lot now and I plan on traveling over the course of my life, but the fun, like hopping around, hostel hopping, like meeting a bunch of random people, that's fun now. But that also sets the stage for like 20 years from now traveling with my family or having friends in other countries that I can visit. Um, it's just like, I think people need to be more aware of like how limited the opportunities are to do stuff. It's not like a nihilistic, oh shit, I need to go do a bunch of drugs and like just screw around and do whatever. But it's like, you should like maximize how much interesting stuff you do for the sake of doing it because you like, people constantly, like in Vagabonding, there's the story about the 3 desert priests who can't leave the, um, like can't leave the monastery. So they tell themselves every summer we'll go in winter and then every winter they tell themselves they'll go in the summer. And then after 40 years they're dead. Like, you don't want to be that guy. So like, if you have the stuff you want to do, like, go do it.

That's most of society though. We're laughing, but it's—

Yeah, no, it is. It's real. People just like— like when I did the travel thing, and granted, like, I was like financially able to do that when a lot of people aren't. But people have, whether it's travel or starting a business or just anything, oh, it's too risky to do it now. I'll do it later. But I look at it like, No, the more time you have left, the less risky it is because if it goes wrong, you can still adapt. But when you put that off 20 or 30 years, then the way bigger risk is just never actually taking those risks in the first place. And that's kind of the underlying way I look at the world now.

100%.

To take it in a different direction, you're doing an MBA.

I am.

So do you feel that that is contrary slightly to some of the things that you said, or do you feel like there is other value that comes from doing an MBA?

So I almost didn't do it. Um, and if I hadn't— like I said earlier, I got into Columbia out of undergrad, so if I, I probably would not apply for an MBA now just where I am because I don't really need it. But last May I was seriously thinking about just bailing on it because I'd kind of hit escape velocity. Like, I was confident that either way I would make enough money. Yeah. But if I didn't do it, I would probably be like, just like screwing around in Southeast Asia or Australia or something right now, which it would be fun and it sounds fun, but I didn't want to be like the guy who was just like basically traveling indefinitely for a decade. And I also knew that being in New York City would benefit me a lot. It's just like kind of the center of everything, especially like finance, media, whatever. And I was not going to be able to like make, like, ground myself there unless I had something that forced me to go there. It's like the, the paradox of choice, you know, or when you have too many choices, it's like, it's almost worse because you can't commit to anything. Yep. Business school off the bat was something that would, like, force me to be there somewhat for 2 years.

You'd have to be, uh, well, you'd have to be there in person or not?

Yeah, it's in person. And then I was thinking about it more, and I only had a few friends in New York, right? So business school would essentially give me, like, a 700-person social group off the bat. Like, it's a lot harder to make friends as an adult. School is the easiest environment to make friends. So I didn't know how the actual business school part would benefit me career-wise, but like, I was confident I would make enough money over the course of my career that the cost, the financial cost didn't really matter. Um, I knew it would give me like a lot of friends there and it would force me to be in New York and like, I would still be flexible enough that like, like I've been in Europe for 3 weeks now. It's not like I can't travel, but I don't, really want to do the indefinite, like 2 or 3 year traveling. It was fun for a year, but that was like a year. But since then I've realized other stuff. One, just the benefits of, I have a really, really fun class, but they're also driven, intelligent people. So it's kind of like being in college again where it's fun, you're going out, you're going on trips, but you're also with people who are all going to be very successful, make a lot of money that are just very It's just a much smarter, more interesting, elevated group, like people from all over the place that have worked everywhere, that speak multiple languages, and we're all just hanging out. Like, you literally can't get a higher quality group of friends than you can at a top MBA program, like easily, where you have just the odds of that working. And on the business side, like if you write about finance, having an MBA from Columbia is a lot better signal than having a bachelor's degree from Mercer and like just being a kind of bum traveling around. And if I do write a book and it does well, you can get on the speaking circuit. And the people that I was skiing with in Chamonix in 10 or 15 years are going to be the ones that are like paying people to come speak at conferences with their companies. So there's a lot of long-term like career benefits from it, just being friends with all these people. And it's just fun. Like there's like not a more fun way, I think, to spend your 20s than in that business school environment. Especially I'm not dealing with the stress of recruiting for investment banking or consulting. So I get all of the benefits. I enjoy like being in a classroom, like engaging with professors. It's just like academic environments are fun to me. Um, so I'm basically getting all the upside of business school without the downside of like that career pressure kind of cutthroat thing. So it's, it's been fun. I've had more fun this semester than I actually had probably at any point traveling last year, and I had a blast last year.

It's one of the few cases where I think an MBA makes sense. And as you said, if you had gone, if you tried to make the decision a few months earlier or later, probably wouldn't have worked, but you're at the right time with everything in the right place. And I totally agree. Like, me, 25, I didn't do the hostel backpacking thing. I probably should have. But now that I'm 30, unless it's like a 4-star hotel, 5-star, whatever, I'm not going.

Yeah.

So it's like, I totally agree, time is, uh, precious. You have to— I mean, it's very cliché, right? But it's Buffett's Talks about this every day, that time is your most valuable asset. And so makes sense.

It's funny that everybody says it, but most people don't believe it. It's kind of like, I don't know, from a religious aspect, it's like everybody grows up in a church, says they're Christian or Muslim or whatever, but most of it's like lip service. It's the same way with time is precious, time's more valuable than money. If you actually believe that, you probably wouldn't waste it so much, but most people do.

Exactly.

And the paradox of choice you mentioned, and how much optionality is dangerous actually, which I, uh, totally agree with.

There's, um, there's from that same, uh, Tim Ferriss episode which we were talking about earlier with the Atomic Habits guy, um, there's one quote in it which I can't remember properly, but it says if you were to judge someone, judge them not by what they say but what they've done. So if there's a combination of things that people are saying or doing or it's contradictory, just look at what they've done. And that'll give you the answers.

Yeah. Uh, I guess as we wrap up, I have two questions. Firstly, I think you maybe know what's coming. Um, the first question is, what are, in no particular order, 2, 3, 4 books that you've just really enjoyed that have shaped your worldview, that have really helped you in life?

Um, Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, that one. Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey. I Kind of had low expectations going into it, but I liked his movies, bought the book. I thought it was one of the best, most well-written just thoughts about life from anybody. And you were talking about judge people by what they've done, not what they've said. I mean, he's lived a ridiculous life, both super successful and just done a lot of crazy stuff. And Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Great choice. Yeah. For anybody who doesn't know the background, Frankl was He was an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust. Whole family died. He was, I dunno if you call him a psychologist, psychotherapist, but he was like a doctor in Europe at that time. And it was just half of it's his experience in the concentration camp and then his thoughts on how people can find meaning despite their circumstances. So yeah, those 3 books, Vagabond and Greenlights, Man's Search for Meaning.

Great choice. And the last question, I guess, is you document your travels very well., and you document other parts of your life very well. How does British Hinge compare to the US version of Hinge?

Oh, it's hysterical. I love British Hinge. So like British people and especially girls are just a lot more sarcastic than Americans. And it's hysterical. As you would say, there's a lot of witty banter, but it's funny. I've got a date on Tuesday, so we'll see how it goes.

Nice.

Good luck. Thank you.

Might marry her. Well, I, I would marry a British girl. I think the accents are pretty cool.

Well, let's see when this comes out if you guys are still dating, then, uh, we'll be able to see if that'll be the road.

Yeah, we'll see how it goes.

Cool. Well, uh, any, any final thoughts, messages you want to leave people with? Where can they find you? I mean, youngmoney.co is the obvious one. Yeah, yeah, everything.

Yeah, youngmoney.co, that's my blog site. Um, there's also backpacking.blog, it's like I believe it's actually backpacking. I left the G off because backpacking.blog is already taken. So it's like the Southern slang backpacking.blog. Or you can find me on Twitter at Jack_Raines, R-A-I-N-E-S. Jack Raines, make it rain.

We will link everything below. And it's been an absolute pleasure, mate. So we will— I think you're leaving in a few days, but Thursday we'll— I'm We'll discuss after, but we're all gonna either have a Persian feast or a round of Cuban cigars at some point, either this trip or on your next trip. And, uh, at this point, you should, uh, they should just give you British citizenship.

Yeah, honestly, I love fish and chips. Um, Liz Truss, wish she was still in charge. I miss Lizzy. Shortest, shortest term ever.

Yeah, cool. Ladies and gents, Jack Raines.

It's a pleasure. Thanks, guys.

Cheers.