Finding Your Passion In Life | The Authors Unite Show - Mark Shaiken

All right everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Authors Unite show. Today I have Mark Shaken with us. He is the author of And Just Like That: Essays on a Life Before, During, and After the Law, tracing his path into and out of his law career. So welcome to the show, man.

Good to be here. Excited to talk to you, Tyler.

Grateful to have you on. Um, I'm excited to talk to you too. So I always like to start off the interview like this. So when you were younger, did you think that you would be a lawyer?

Oh, heavens no. The best answer I could give, no. You know, and younger would go through college. I never thought that being a lawyer, sitting behind a desk, wearing a tie, working in a large law firm was in my destiny whatsoever. Not at all. I went to law school because I couldn't figure out what else to do after having some different exploratory ideas of things to try after college and during college, such as driving a forklift and painting lines on the highway and the state highways in Connecticut. You can find my lines, they're not the straight ones. And, you know, eliminating things that I really just wasn't very good at. And I I went to law school to give me 3 more years to try to figure out what to do with my life. But even as I was in law school or taking the bar exam or starting my first law job, or for the 38 years I was a lawyer, I just never got around to thinking that being a lawyer was my destiny, which is unusual, I suppose, having done it for so long, you know, 41 years including law school.

Yeah, well, I mean, the pay is good, right? Is that kind of— Is that maybe a little bit of the trap in a sense, right? It's like the lawyer, doctor, like some people love it, right? But like, it's more of, you know, you, it's kind of the thing you would do to make your parents proud in a sense. Yeah.

Um, I wasn't as focused on making them proud, although they were, they were. Um, uh, and the pay, so that's interesting. When I got out, of course, for the 3 years in law school, you're, it's a reverse payment. You're in debt. So there's, there's really no, there's really no economic upside for the first 3 years. And for me, I got into the bankruptcy business accidentally. I started to look for a law job in my 3rd year, and one of the bankruptcy judges in where I was going to law school posted— this was before the electronic era, so he posted a 3x5 card that he was looking for a law clerk. And I thought, oh, what the heck, I'll go interview with him. I loved him. He tolerated or liked me. And, um, he hired me, but that was a terrible paying job. So you can extend the, the, the no pay for another 3 years. Um, uh, and I, I guess at some point, um, the pay was good, but, um, it took a while. Uh, and I, I just never honestly seemed to be all that focused on the pay.

Yeah.

Um, maybe it's easier to not be focused on the pay when you're making a comfortable wage. I, I, I'd certainly concede that. But yeah, you know, for me it was, you know, is this, do I have a passion to do this? Um, because, um, you know, I've read some of your interviews and you, you, you found your passion quick. I, I, um, went to law school for 3 years to try to help find my passion and it took 38 more years before I did it. So I stumbled around a lot more than you did. But Steve Jobs has this famous quote about if, if you don't have the passion, it, and my words, it ain't gonna work.

Yeah.

And I learned that, and that's true. If I had the passion to be in a large law firm, it dulled over time.

Gotcha. Over time. So what do you, family, kids, is that, was that kind of maybe like what kept you in it or?

So there's a number of things. Certainly family is extremely important to me. We have one kid, but, Very important. But my other passions really had nothing to do with being a lawyer, which I came to believe was a really good thing.

Yeah.

At least for me, being a lawyer wasn't something I wanted to do 24/7. I had to have a break at some point and find something that I could call the balance.

Yeah.

The other stuff. And for me, it was music and photography. Still is. Now, you know, the joke about a professional photographer is it's— the difference between a photographer and a pizza is a pizza feeds a family of 3. A photographer may not be able to do that, especially in the modern era when everybody has a camera in their phone. But at some point, as I sort of thought and dreamed and negotiated with myself about how much longer I was going to stay at the big firms, at some point, I guess I started to realize that what was important to me was to find something that I come home at night and I say, you know, I'm measuring myself in my life by what I gave, as opposed to what I got. So to your question about the pay is good, the pay is good, but you tend to start to measure your existence by what you're getting. And for me, that wasn't sustainable. It is for some, and the book isn't critical of those that find the passion in the law. But what's interesting about lawyers is that there's a whole bunch of lawyers that sort of don't glide gracefully into the career. They come to it as an answer to the question, well, what else can I do?

Yeah.

And the, I think the book, as I was writing it and people heard that I was writing it, and based on the reviews that it's been getting, has, you know, strikes a chord. There's a whole bunch of lawyers that, that have this thing inside of them that said, you know, how did this happen? How did I get to be a lawyer?

Yeah.

And is this really what it's all about?

Yeah, I would find it At least for me, and you've listened to a few episodes, so, you know, like, I'm like a people person, so I can do this all day. But when I, um, like, when we're negotiating, let's say, contracts with a potential client, like, my favorite is always actually when a lawyer is not involved because it's so— like, our agreements are very basic. That's basically just like, depending on what service they were to do with us, we would be like, we'll, you know, help you get this result. If we don't do that, we'll give you a refund. That's like very basic, but like when a lawyer gets into it, we like— we— I've had occasions where it'll come back and now it's like 12 pages long and I'm like, and I don't understand what it says. I call it lawyer language because I, I don't— I truly am reading it and I'm like, I'm not quite sure what I'm signing. So I don't know, I'm wondering, is there a way— is there like a— is there a middle path to this that the layman can understand? What you guys are actually saying in the group.

There's probably translation dictionaries around that try to explain. And certainly the commercial bankruptcy world can drive people crazy because it's got its entire whole language. But there are straightforward, simple contracts that are appropriate. I know when I was writing the book, I was trying to figure out, do I want to find a publishing company? Do I want to self-publish? And I found a couple of publishing companies that might be interested. And so I said, send me the contract. And that's not a short, simple contract.

Yeah.

And I called back and I said, wow, this is pretty intense. Are you open to comments?

And they said yes.

And so I gave some comments and there was one of them that I think I gave, you know, 5 comments and they accepted exactly 0 of the 5. Including typos. And I, and I called back and I said, well, if you weren't going to accept any, why didn't you tell me to do this? Um, and some of that drove me to self-publish. It's just, it's more fun. It's, it's an educational process, to say the least.

Um, yeah, because I get it. I mean, I guess it's like there's protections the way that I kind of see things now. And then obviously we'll get back to the book. We're just talking lawyer stuff now, but like I think that we're in a world today that it's everything's so social. So it's like, if you were gonna, if you screw somebody else over, I just feel like you're gonna, it's gonna be known. Like, so my, my always thought process is like, I hope that that's enough for you not to do that to me, because if, if you did, it would be probably known. So, but I do understand there's all these like clauses, right? Like if this happens, then this happens. So I guess it's necessary, but it's— I always think to myself, if I were to set— just like you experienced, literally the same thing. If I were to, if I were to send a client like a 12-page agreement, if somebody did that to me, just by default, I kind of just turn my brain off. I'm like, I don't know. I'm like, I'm not sure, you know? And then, and then I got to get my lawyer involved, and then, you know, they go back and forth. It becomes like months of time. I'm like, was this even worth it?

That's right. There's actually a chapter in the book called Deal of the Decade where I was not a transaction lawyer, I was a courtroom person, but in bankruptcy you get involved in all kinds of deals and distressed deals because there's not enough money to go around. That's how somebody's company got into bankruptcy. And, you know, you get the deal lawyers involved and they have this entire language of their own. And they yell a lot. Not that bankruptcy lawyers don't, but you know, it's 11 o'clock at night, somebody is making an unreasonable request and tempers are flaring. And so I hear you. It's part of the game. And I know from talking to lawyers, there are lawyers who will say, my client expects me to do that. That's what they think they're paying me for. They expect me to get in there and fight for every word.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I'm curious, you might not be able to share some of this stuff, but like, can you share like what was one of the craziest cases that you like worked on? And maybe you can't provide names, I don't know, I don't know how that goes.

Yeah, um, so I don't really do that in the book for, for that very reason. I don't— it's not a call out anybody book. I don't take partners of mine to task or judges, God forbid, or, or clients, clients which you're not allowed to Yeah. So I have, you know, those are called war stories, of course. And, you know, I have some good war stories, but I tend to share them only with the other people that were working on the case. And I know that might be disappointing because I don't want to stray. And even if I sanitize it and don't explain who the client is, somebody will recognize.

Yeah, I get it.

What it was about. And I like to respect that. I think that clients, truly expect that. For sure. Yeah.

Was there a— I totally understand.

I had to ask though. No, no, it's a great question.

So what was the actual though? So you said you'd been feeling this for a while. Like, can you go back to the day that you decided to like leave the law firm? Like, what was that? Was there a breaking point or was it just like you knew? Like it was just—

It was like you knew. There's a famous Supreme Court opinion about pornography, although I won't get into the porno part of it at all, because that's not me either. But in that, the Supreme Court was being called on to decide if something was pornographic. This was in the 1960s. And they were being encouraged to define pornography. And Justice, Who was that? Which justice was it? Justice Potter wrote famously that he wasn't going to define pornography, but what he was going to say is he knows it when he sees it. And this was or was not. I don't even remember which way it came down. But that became sort of the famous thing. And it applies to a career as well. There isn't that moment, at least there wasn't for me, when the light bulb goes off. And, you know, oh, I must be a lawyer on the entry part, or the light bulb goes off and you must not be a lawyer anymore. It was more of a process. And, you know, for me, the part of the problem was a series of what I might call midlife crises, where I wake up one day and I say, okay, I don't really want to be in the big law firm anymore. And that probably started in my late 30s. And it started me thinking or even dreaming up things that I might be able to do that would be something other than the law or other things I could do in the law profession besides, yeah, at a big firm and trying cases.

Yeah.

And it, that was a healthy thing to go through that. It It's kind of what kids do. You know, they come up with these pipe dreams of things that they're going to do or people they're going to be. And, you know, part of growing up is eliminating the things that aren't going to happen. Like for me, my crazy kid dream was I was going to get bit by a radioactive spider and become the second Spider-Man swinging through Manhattan skyscrapers, you know, as an 8-year-old thinking that. And I grew up in Queens and Peter Parker is from Queens. And I thought, well, that's the way to go. It would have been the way to go, frankly. Kind of eliminated that as a viable option. And, you know, just a series of things that just didn't happen or didn't happen in a way that became a career change. Like sports photography, nothing that I was ever able to do full-time, but I ultimately was able to do it part-time as a professional sports photographer in Kansas City. Where I was at the time. And, you know, that was a good place to go when the practice of law was becoming a little overwhelming.

Yeah, that makes sense, the balance. And I'm curious with your wife, when you did decide— or wait, actually, before we get there, for the exit, was it a like clean exit out of law, or was it like a little— grumbled.

No, no, no. It was organized and it was smooth, and it may have been the smoothest thing that I've ever done as a lawyer. And certainly in the bankruptcy world, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And in the exit world from the law firm, it went surprisingly smoothly. The only part that wasn't smooth was the very last thing that happens when you leave a firm is, you know, something to do with your phone. In that, you know, in our firm, we owned our phones, but we shared them with the firm. And so on the phone are contacts and client confidences and all of that. And the only way to fix that is to do a remote wipe. And, you know, you get a little memo that says we're going to wipe your phone tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM. And you think, oh my God, wait a minute. The other stuff on the phone is mine.

Yeah.

So if you wipe the phone, I'm screwed. But you can't do that. And so you go through this, you know, all night attempt to back up everything, which I should have of course been doing all along. And then the wiper at the firm, who was a nice guy, but kind of reminded me of a gallows person from Blazing Saddles. He gets on the phone and he goes, we're gonna commence the wipe. You look at your phone and everything that you've ever had on your phone is gone. And, you know, in the modern era, that could cause you to break out in the big sweat bullets.

Yeah.

But, and it's only at that moment that you learn whether the backup worked or not. But other than that, you know, unexpected incident, it went fine. I think people were surprised would be the main reaction that I had, to the point where about, you know, I don't know, a couple of months after I left the firm and the practice of law, and moved on to the next round of things that I was going to do that I'd finally figured out was in my passion, I had lunch with one of my better friends at the firm who in all seriousness said, "Okay, now that you finished this wild hair, are you going to come back?" I said, "No, I'm not coming back. I'm done." It would take a very large event for me to come back and I don't, know what that event would be.

So yeah, no, I got you. And, and so then when you did step out, was it like, did you have like a bunch more free time, obviously? And like, what, what did your wife— what was that transition, I guess? Because I'm sure it was much different, I would imagine.

Yeah. So what I learned about me, and which helped me then to start to be better about figuring out how one leaves the practice of law, is I really didn't want to retire. I don't even like that word. Either.

I'm with you.

I wanted to be as busy as I was as a lawyer for as long as I'm healthy. I just don't— I didn't want to go to court anymore. I didn't want partners at a law firm anymore. I didn't want clients anymore. I didn't want judges and opposing counsel and things, you know, all the things that make up the practice of law, I was done with. But then that's a pretty big void to fill. Pretty big void. And when I started to focus more on how would I fill the void, and a lot of this is discussed in the book, I became much more productive in deciding what would I do? What do I like? Well, I love art. I love music. I love photography. I love art. And, and, um, you know, I grew up in an inner city. Um, and what can I do to make the lives of kids better in the inner city through art?

Yeah.

And there is no end of wonderful organizations that have that as their mission. And if you can find a good match in that, you can get very involved in that organization. And it's remarkable how many things in the world you can do when you don't go into the interview and say, how much do you pay? Yeah. And the other passion I have is putting people into homes. I've done work for Habitat when we were in Kansas City before we moved to Denver. My home building days are probably in my rearview mirror. But there's other ways to help Habitat and anything that I could do to help Habitat to put a family into a home interestingly achieves the same purpose. So, the studies show that kids that— so, if you want the Habitat talking points, which are absolutely true, you know, if you want to solve the drug problem, solve the housing problem. If you want to solve the education problem, solve the housing problem. If you want to solve the gang problem, solve the housing problem. And, you know, you can't have 5 people living in a 1-bedroom apartment and have those 4 kids or 3 kids then expect that they're actually going to finish high school and get on to college. If you put them in a home, the statistics are, are boggling, that the, the rate of high school graduation might go from the 60s to the, to the 90 percentile rank, and the number of kids that then go off to college, very high. And interestingly, it's the same thing with introducing young kids to art. It's almost a way to trick kids how to learn to read and how to learn math as well. And introducing kids to art at an early age bumps up the graduation rate from high school and bumps up the entry into college rate dramatically. It's the same idea. And both of those are pretty hard to do in the current environment, even before COVID Yeah. COVID has not made this at all easy with kids not in school anymore, how do you deliver art to them?

Yeah.

But both of those, which I could talk about for hours, are things that I realize, okay, if I can— all these organizations will take as much time as you have to give them.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, I'm not driving my wife crazy because I'm not home.

Yeah, yeah, no. Well, I, I love the retirement thing because that's— I feel like the whole retirement thing is broken in a sense, like, because at least for me, and I work on many different things, I'm kind of a little sporadic with businesses and stuff like that, but I just— retirement, I feel like I'm not sure what I would do if I fully retired. It might not be good things, you know, like, I don't know, like I might get into trouble or something. I need to stay focused.

But I will say when I, when I did end my career. My secretary gave me a hug and everybody congratulated me. And of course they were all using the retire word and I wasn't, but I walked out. It was a snowy day in Denver. And if you know Denver, there's 16th Street Mall is a pedestrian mall that our office was on. And I left the building for the last time with my little box under my arm. I walk out into the snow and I felt like, the 3 guys that escaped from Alcatraz must have felt when they, if they made it to shore in San Francisco, you know, always looking over their shoulder for that marshal, the US marshal that was tracking them. And I thought, well, there's got to be some partner that's going to be coming after me, dragging me back into the law firm because this is the only life I've known. So it can't be this easy. But it turned out that with planning and with the sort of new mindset, which took me 38 years to figure out how to gain that mindset, it was easy. And I, you know, I kind of felt like I was gliding a couple of feet off of the 16th Street Mall as I walked.

Yeah, you're hovering, floating a little.

Exactly.

So there's— I was looking through the chapters of your book. There's a few that I want to ask you about that.

Curiosity.

So the first one is learning not to say fuck you.

Tell us about that one. Yeah, so, ordinarily not a particularly vulgar person. And when I wrote that chapter, there was a doctor that my wife knew that had learned at a cocktail party that I was writing the book and asked to see a sample chapter. And so I let him see the ones I had written already, and there was that one, and he asked to read that one.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I held my breath. It's, it's an easy read, and the title pretty much explains what the chapter is going to be about. And, uh, you know, he came back and he says, I can't believe lawyers talk that way, doctors don't. And I said, well, you've never been in a big law firm. You know, there's a great population in law firms that, you know, swear like sailors. And, uh, Well, yeah, you wouldn't know that.

I, I feel like when I was younger, I— there was like a saying, like, a lot like construction workers, and like, they, they swear a lot. Like, one of my uncles is in, uh, real estate, and he builds homes and stuff, and he's like, you have no idea the things that my workers and I say, like, during, you know, when we're working. And I was like, yeah, I was like, I don't. But you wouldn't think lawyers would be Well, not with their clients around, maybe privately or with clients around, depends on the client.

Depends on the client, yeah, but definitely privately. But the actual theme of the chapter is, is that, you know, while they all, all lawyers say it and all lawyers think it, what you really, what their skill really is, is to absorb it and not say it, you know. So you're on the phone call at 11 o'clock at night with some opposing counsel that is just off the charts screaming at you. And very effectively. And what you want to say is the F-bomb and then hang up. But you know, the better answer is, yeah, thank you for your thoughts, and you hang up on them.

I appreciate your thoughts.

And I actually first came upon this as a very young associate down in Houston, which is where I started my legal career. And it was an oil and gas deal where the partner I was working for, who I really loved, was in this knockdown, drag-out negotiation with a company that was going under. That was why I was in the room. And he and the other guy were going at it. And the other guy, who was a large guy smoking a cigar in the room, said to my boss, you obviously don't know the first thing about securities law. And my boss, you know, could have dropped the F-bomb, but he was more Texas elegant. And his response, which I will never forget, was I said, "That may be true. On the other hand, I don't know anything about proctology, but I know an asshole when I see one." And that ended the meeting, which was a good time to end the meeting. But it is a vulgar practice, and there is a lot of stress. And there are moments when, you know, you feel like saying something vulgar in response, because that seems the appropriate thing to do. The better play is to learn how not to say it.

Yeah, makes sense.

As a lawyer. And certainly you wouldn't go to court and say something like that.

So I got two more, and I'm bringing up the ones that look like they're problem-related. The second one is damage control.

What's that one? Yeah, so the second venue where I practiced law after Houston was Philadelphia. My wife is a veterinarian and she got to do her residency at Penn. So off we went from Houston, which we loved, to Philadelphia, which I loved and she didn't. But in Philadelphia, I joined another large firm that was great, Deckard. And there were things going on in the entire practice of law, wasn't just Deckard, of course, where there was a recession in the late '80s, and that hit the corporate lawyer world pretty hard, 'cause it hit the corporate world pretty hard. And there had been a lot of associates hired to beef up the staff, to do lots of work that then wasn't there. And this is something that happens in the practice of law pretty regularly. And the good big firms try to figure out a way to hold on to everybody. And repurpose them, which the firm I was at certainly did. But at some point, you know, the economics are that people have to be let go. And there were some firms in Philadelphia, not necessarily my firm, that were letting people go with this elaborate, you know, sort of scheme, I'll call it, of denying that they were letting people go, 'cause the local business papers were trying to get ahold of this and write a business story. And so they would give interviews and make it worse and say, you know, No, we didn't really fire anybody. People were just sort of moving on. There was one story of a firm that let Bill go. And the next morning, Bill doesn't have a— there's no plate on Bill's former office that says Bill anymore. It's just blank. And somebody comes in and says, where's Bill? And they deny that Bill was ever there. They never had Bill. There was no Bill? Yeah. Didn't handle it well. They didn't really think through what happens when you're having to let go a lot of people. And, you know, you could argue corporations do it a little better because maybe they do it more often. But damage control refers to the process in which management is desperately trying to come up with a story and a spin that will sell to the public who become interested and to all the associates that haven't been let go yet but are panicked. That, you know, at 4 o'clock today they're going to be told this is your last day. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I— that was the one thing, you know, there's that quote out there that's like, uh, 9 out of 10 businesses fail. And, and I remember when I first started my journey and starting my own business, like, it kind of scares you a little, but I always felt— and thus far in my life, I feel just more comfortable having my own things rather than being at the will of like 'Cause you don't know, right? Like the owner of a company, a big company like that, like not all the employees know exactly the standing that the company— like it could be bankrupt, but they're not telling everybody yet. So I don't know. I just find it scary a little bit, but it is, it is scary.

Yeah. You know, lawyers, I guess, have the same choice that you made. Do I want to be in business for myself or do I want to be in a big firm? And some of that depends on your practice area and whether what you want to do can be sustained in a solo practice.

Can you do both or is that not a lot like if you, or is it kind of frowned upon? Like you're not like, no matter what the client needs to come through the firm if you work for that firm?

Yeah, correct. It's okay. It's a 100% allegiance model. Yeah.

Okay.

And there's a lot of good reasons for that. You wouldn't want somebody out doing work on the side and then trying to remember which client is their client, which client is the firm's client.

True. That makes sense. Um, so the last one I wanted to— oh man, I'll let you— either pain in the ass or bridge burning. Um, which one do you want to share?

Bridge burning is, um, is, is interesting because, uh, uh, it, it, it— a lot of the stories that I have in this, in the The section of the book that discuss what it's like to be in a law firm, some of them are sort of parables, you know, Aesop's fable based on some things that happened to make a point. And the point there is that oftentimes, you know, the associates gather up in venues to talk about how difficult this job is, the one that they didn't know what they were getting into because law school doesn't prepare you to be a lawyer. They supposedly teach you how to think like a lawyer, and then that's the end of their job. And law firms don't do a great job of educating a law student as to what it's going to be like to be at a law firm. It's a shock to the system. So, there's a program that law firms have, the summer associate programs that all the big firms have. But it really doesn't teach that law student what it's going to be like to live a law firm kind of life. And it's probable in my thinking as it's evolved that, you know, while it would be nice for law schools to be more like med schools and let the lawyer know, like the doctor knows, what it's like to be in a hospital when they do their internship and their residency, It would be nice if the law school could do that, but they don't, and they never have, and probably never will. And it would be nice if the law firm could figure out a better way to give a realistic picture to a law student as to what they're getting into here. It would have been nice if I got that.

Yeah.

But they don't, and there's a lot of reasons for that. There's a joke about that, but— and I'll come back to that because it's a good joke, but there's The bridge burning sort of is, well, what happens when you gather up all these 20-somethings who have gone through law school, which is really difficult, and succeeded well to get into the big firm, and, you know, things aren't going as they expected. And there's a lot of people in this group. They talk to each other. And when somebody leaves, oftentimes the others will come and say, you know, you've got to let the management know how much this sucks. Because, you know, you need to help on the exit interview the rest of us that are being left behind. And, you know, the— of course, that leads to the bridge-burning notion in business. If you do an exit interview and you toast your former employer, it doesn't just end there. You know, it gets out. And you'll never be able to go back to that law firm. And so, that chapter is actually two associates talking, one about to leave and the other saying, you need to let everybody know for the betterment of the rest of us who are being left behind in this prison. And they have this debate about whether that's the appropriate thing to do or not.

Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. Cause yeah, I mean, I'm sure like once you're whatever it is, 6, 7 years, I mean, you probably rack up a decent amount of debt. So it's like, You're— unless you got a scholarship or something. So you're kind of like, whether you want to do it or not, you kind of got to do it. Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know. It's probably 6 figures of debt if I had to guess over the—

The modern law student comes out on average with a bunch of debt. You know, back in '78 when I started law school, it was a different structure completely. Luckily for my wife and I, we had some debt. My wife and me, but we had some debt, but nothing like what the kids are forced to incur. And, you know, if you— there's different ways to manage that, you know, state schools will cost less than an Ivy League school if you're lucky enough to get into an Ivy. But, you know, if you're going to a top-notch school, you could come out of debt, out of law school with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt.

Yeah.

And that's a whole bunch of money to owe.

Yeah, I know. That's the stuff that I think should be taught to kids too before, like, that should be in high school before you choose college. Because, um, like for, for me, I don't know, I came out with $80 grand in debt when I dropped out 2 years in. And like when I went into it, I was thinking to myself, oh well, I'll start out with like, you know, $70 grand a year salary. This is when I thought I was like still going to work for a corporation or something. And I was like, so in 2 years, that's $140K. I'm going to have— if I finished college, it'd be $160K in debt. And so I was like, I think I'll be able to pay it off in like 3 or 4 years.

Yeah. Yeah.

You forget about taxes, living expenses. I had no clue, man. It's, it's scary how little I knew about it. Um, so either way, it would just be nice if that they educated you, like what does $80,000 of debt actually mean when you, when you add in interest and like all these other things.

So yeah, and it's, it's hard to do due diligence, you know, when you're, when you're graduating from, when you're going to college and when you're graduated from college and you're looking for additional education. All of those steps, it's real hard to, to get, um, finite analysis, you know, kind of analysis. Okay, if I'm going to spend $160,000 and to go to college, and that's how much I'm going to owe when I come out, plus interest. And then I have living expenses, you know, what would my personal budget look like? And would it be a decade or two decades or never?

It's not a few years.

Yeah, it's not a few years.

Typically not, at least.

And how do I sustain myself? What's my life going to look like? But we were lucky. We didn't, you know, this is something The whole cost of education is something that's exploded, of course, in the last 15 years or so. And I predate that by a lot. I went to a great undergraduate school on a scholarship, and then I went to a state school for law school. I had debt, but nothing like kids are carrying.

Yeah, not like that. Yeah. No, I got you. So look, I want to really— I want— the floor is yours. Like, I think, um, you know, I would think a lot of people listening are interested in reading the book now. So if you like, if there's anything else you want to share, please do. And then like, uh, website, uh, where to get the book, and any anything else, social media that you're on.

Sure. So the book is And Just Like That. It's, you know, available for purchase on all the usual Amazon, Barnes Noble, iTunes, and in some bricks and mortar stores, bookstores, to the extent that they've reopened.

Yeah.

It's very interesting to go live with a book during COVID by the way.

Yeah, it definitely changes the game.

All of my dreams of how I was going to promote the book got flushed down the toilet. It's been very interesting to try to get the book into bookstores when you can hardly find somebody at the bookstore to talk to. Yeah. But it's available in all those places. Websites, I'm on LinkedIn. So you just search for me, and that's LinkedIn and Facebook are my main social medias.

Okay.

Search for Mark Shakun, and my website is markshakunauthor.com.

Okay.

You know, the book is, the book is not a how-to book. It's, it's just the way I see it book.

Yeah.

It's been rewarding to see, you know, the reviews that it does seem to have touched a chord with lawyers or friends of lawyers or colleagues of lawyers or people thinking of going to law school. It's been very interesting and some people find it funny and some people find it sad. So, yeah, well, I think I'm okay with either.

That's what I would do with the marketing then is find like groups that have a lot of lawyers in them, whatever those might be.

Right.

Because I think that would be the way to start it. And then once it kind of hits the whole lawyer market, then you can get out. Cause it's kinda, it kinda seems more like a memoir in a sense.

It is. And in fact, that was one of the, you know, on Amazon you get to pick two categories of keywords and that was one of the categories that I chose. Although, you know, it's a memoir of somebody that's not particularly famous. So, um, yeah.

Um, well, awesome, man. Thank you again for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Yeah, this is great. Um, best of luck. I enjoyed