Before we get to this episode, I want to tell you about something I'm pumped ...
It's called the Arena.
“Great coaches want to surround themselves with other high achievers.”
Great coaches want to be in a group where high standards are the norm. That's exactly what the arena is, a private community of hungry driven, growth-focused coaches led by the Hall of Fame or Sherry Cole, Brook Cups, Garen Stokes, and Eli Liker. These are the people I personally go to to become a better leader.
Here's what's different this year.
We just finished our first full year. It was awesome. Lots of coaches from all over the country at every level, from high school to college to the pros across more than a dozen sports. Mike Powell with the Arizona Diamondback said, if you are looking for a group to push you out
of your comfort zone, give you the tools to become a better human coach and leader. This is the space, it's not comfortable, but you're going to grow and connect applications for the next cohort are open now. The arena might be for you if you are a high caliber, high character coach who is not afraid to be pushed and challenged and work on yourself to be better for the people you
are leading.
“If that's you, go to learningleader.com/arina to apply that's learningleader.com/arina.”
Welcome to the learning leader show presented by Yensite Global, I am your host Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcasts episodes go to learning leader.com. Now, onto tonight's feed shirt leader, Jack Reigns is a writer and investor at 24.
He quit his corporate finance job at UPS, but a one way ticket to Barcelona and spent the next year traveling through 25 countries while writing a newsletter that grew to hundreds of thousands of readers. Since then, he's earned an MBA from Columbia, helped Robin Hood build its media company and joined the venture capital firm Slow Ventures where he invests in creators.
His first book is called Young Money, a Field Guide to Finding Wealth and Purpose in Your
20s. During our conversation, we discussed why Jack's grandmother Ruth cooked Jack when he was 11 years old to Africa and how that trips shaped everything he believes about spending money on experiences then how we could all increase our surface area for luck and specifically with Jack does.
“We also talk about the best networking tool and then he shares what you can learn from studying”
how retirees spend their money super interesting. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Jack Reigns. I love your book. I love all your writing. You know, it's funny how quickly you became one of the few people who's every time you
publish something I read it. Blog, obviously your book now, taking that kind of Morgan Housel, Tim Urban, James Clear Realm of R.I. Jack just published something new. I'm going to read it. So, dude, I hugely don't see Chris.
There's really high comparison points.
It's like, yeah, they sold a combined like 100 million books or whatever.
So, I appreciate it. No pressure dude. No serious. Being too like you do a great job of being tapped into the age demographic right behind me.
But you write in a way that really entertains me. I do a weird thing with AI. I was not going to say this, but we'll say it anyway. Where sometimes I'll read something that's kind of confusing and I'll say to Claude, can you rewrite this like Jack Reigns?
Can you rewrite this like Morgan Housel? I love it. That's one of my favorite uses of AI because it kind of reites complex things in the voice of the writers that I like and it's kind of cool to learn about history or something in a way like that.
So, I appreciate you man. Listen man, that's like high praise. I appreciate you. Let's go back to when you are. This is where I was going to start.
When you were 11, I love reading about your grandma Ruth, Mama Ruth, and she offers to take you on a trip anywhere in the world. So you're thinking, I'll let's go to Rico or whatever you're not really sure. But she's like, no, no, no, anywhere. So, take me that moment, what you chose, and what you learn from both that trip as well
as her and her philosophy on how to spend money. So, as a kid, I was a massive geography nerd, like I, in fact, I still have around a corner of my apartment. I'm like a map of the world with like pens on like all the places I've been, but like as a kid, I have this massive map in my room and like I'd memorized the capital of like pretty
much every country on the planet. And when I was like really little, my grandma and my grandpa would take me on like board meetings around the U.S., like I went with them to San Diego, DC, like we'd fly over the place.
Yeah, when I was 11, I'm the oldest grandchild in my family.
She said, let's go on a trip for two weeks, anywhere next summer.
And I did not really know if anywhere meant anywhere, or like relatively close to the U.S. anywhere. So I initially said Costa Rica or like a couple of other places in kind of Central America.
“She said, we can do that, but like where do you actually want to go?”
The real answer was I wanted to go to Africa. I was such an animal planet nerd as a kid. Like I knew all about the Serengeti, I'm Gorgor, creator, Mount Kilimanjaro. I just thought, I've got 11 you knew about all this stuff? Yeah, I was like such a geographer, and also I was addicted to play Halo 3, which is
set in Africa, which in the future obviously, like, you know, there's like missions where you're driving around Mount Kilimanjaro, you're in like coastal Tanzania. So like, I had a lot of rounded touch points where I just knew stuff about Africa. And I thought that seeing like giraffes and zebras and lions would just be super, super cool.
So I said, okay, I want to go on a safari to Africa. She said, okay, let's do it, as she found this tour group, T.A.U.K. talk tours, booked in like three weeks later. She's like, okay, we're going in June, and you'll have to get like yellow fever shot and take like malaria medication in case you get bit by mosquitoes.
She's just have whole thing lined up, and we went to Africa for two weeks. And I was kind of like, I sort of knew it was a little bit crazy for like your grandma from South Georgia, just like classic, self-spoken, super drawn-out, Southern woman to take her grandkids in rural Africa. It didn't really click until years later when I was older that that was actually pretty
insane trip, but it was awesome.
“And she actually made me, which I think are for this, like, journal about like, I wrote”
this whole travel blog about 20s when I went on a backpacking trip, but that's really started when I was 11. I have this little journal called like Jackson Ventures in Africa. It should maybe write down everything we were doing. There was another family from New York that was there that had kids.
I've actually reconnected with them that had kids, my age that were there. And I was just writing down like all the random stuff we were seeing. And after the trip, years after the trip, and I was like in high school or college, I was like, why did you do that? And her take, which really stuck with me, was that my grandparents had like, they're in
their sixties pushing their seventies at that point, they made their money, they had plenty of money. And she was like, I can either spend the money on you and the rest of my grandkids now, or like, y'all and your parents are going to get it when we're dead. And I just don't think leaving all the money in our will is the best use in that money.
I was like, huh, it was the first time I heard somebody verbalize, thinking through, like,
how they once you spend money over the course of their lives. And at that point, I was still a student. And I hadn't really like had a career made money, so it just wasn't a thing I had to think about yet. But I think it was very formative on kind of how I think about like the relationship
between not just money in time, but money and like life stages. It was useful for me to hear that as like I'm 16 or 17 year old. We took a family vacation to Bahamas this year. And one of the topics that dinner was this is expensive. But this is part of the reason as to why we work really hard is to create fun tokens.
When I forget where I heard that phrase, I didn't invent that obviously. But the hard work creates fun tokens. And we are caching in our fun tokens for this week, while we're here like Bahamur and Jessica's and you know, water slides and good food and all that stuff. And that seemed to click with our kids of like, okay, okay.
And so my thing was like, let's work really hard. Let's create fun tokens. And then we're going to cash them in sometimes in addition to savings, low cost index funds, dollar cost averaging every month, all that stuff that's kind of boring, but useful. So how did that trip affect you now on your mid to now later 20s of how to best utilize money?
“So there's this, I don't, do you fall in the key to beer on Twitter?”
Yeah, he's now like the head of products of Twitter. It's crazy. I've seen you tweet with him. Yeah, yeah.
He's one of like a cohort of people that I'm like internet friends with, but I've never met.
He tweeted one time like there was some, there's always discourse about like how much money do you need to like be wealthy? It gets the the favorite talking point on Twitter and like, is $500,000 a New York poor or whatever. And he was being a little bit like speaking tongue and cheek, but I actually really liked his point where he tweeted that like every year of your 20s is worth $10 million, which
I thought was pretty interesting. I would have sacrificed in 25. I would have done a job. I really didn't like if I knew it was going to get $10 million from that. I would have taken less money than that.
So there's, I don't fully agree with that. But I do think this idea of like early adulthood years should really have a premium on like how valuable you put them because there's this like very finite window of time where you are like a fully independent adult, but you have it quite reached a lot of the like responsibility is that lock you in the certain life stuff.
For example, like, I'm not married. I don't have kids. I think kids are freaking awesome.
I'm not in the like Gen Z camp if I'm never having kids.
I'm like a big family guy. But I'm also aware that like there's a full subset of like life experiences and things you can do where you have maximum flexibility that you really should exploit knowing that that door closes.
“And then by doing that, I think you can more fully enjoy that next phase of life and your”
30s and 40s, like as you build a family and you like progress in your career and become a leader in your community. So how that relates to money and time is really starting a couple of years out of undergrad. I became very aware that there was this pretty short window of time where I was going to have really high optionality and there are a lot of like different life experiences
I could go after that you wouldn't cost that much money that would be highly enjoyable. That if I didn't do them at like 24 or 25, I just probably wouldn't do them or they wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable. And the example I give in the book and I've written a lot about this in like older blog post was I spent the better part of a year just like backpacking Europe in Latin America at 24
and 25.
“And you meet like two types of people when you're doing a trip like this.”
You meet people who are also kind of in my bubble of maybe they're taking a gap year after college, maybe they'd worked two or three years and took like four months between jobs to go do something fun or people who are just kind of running away from their problems. And it's kind of an age specific thing where as a general rule, the like early to mid 20 somethings are the we're having fun doing the hostile thing hanging out with a bunch of strangers
and like we kind of all know we're going to go back to the real world within the next year but what's have fun like sort of like your like Bahamas trip with a family but like the like younger more like just chasing thrills right and then there's people who are like 5 or 10 years older than me who just felt a little bit out of place and it's not a sort of they weren't having fun but they probably would have enjoyed it more than just fit
in with that lifestyle or type of trip better when they're younger. My like thought on it was okay if I want to do this like really cheap call it like backpacking trip where I'm like staying in hospitals with much random roommates. I should probably do it where I'm young enough that sleeping on a train and being hung over and miserable and like not really knowing what I'm doing is like fun and adventurous and
not stressful and that was why I did that trip and as a broader philosophy I from really
ages like 23 to probably 27 or 28 was very much of a camp of like always say yes to like
interesting experience don't be afraid to spend money on it knowing that this one of opportunities pretty short and also like I'm expecting my income to climb exponentially as I get into my 30s and 40s based off a path I put myself on so like I shouldn't worry too much about saving an extra 500 or $1,000 at the expense of like memories that could be really cool well I wonder to the influence your dad had on you because he talked
about this motorcycle trip right that he had wished he had gone on right there is law school there's life that happens your mom have kids right yep any he didn't do it right and so what role did that conversation with your dad had on you I love that you've read the book by the way I like the very point it's specific questions no it's interesting right so I
like I was 24 and my parents had very much pushed me to be ambitious but they never pushed me
to do a specific thing like my dad put fall in college I put fall in college he never pushed me to do that but he did when I expressed interest in ability pushed me to like try my hardest if this is a thing I wanted to do so I had for context I had gotten in a business school at Columbia out of undergrad but I had to work two to four years before starting it was basically getting out of undergrad you get working experience then you got a business school and I was about
a year out from when I was planning on going to school I've been working for 18 months and I just like really didn't light my first job corporate finance really boring it was also COVID it was doubly boring because I'm a pretty extraverted guy and I was stuck on zoom calls like this all day except I was looking at spreadsheets instead of you and I just like called my dad and I was like hey this is going to sound crazy but I'm thinking about putting my job and just I was like there's
one way taking to Barcelona for like 300 bucks and I kind of just want to send it and I don't really have a plan but like borders are reopening post-COVID I kind of want to go see a bunch of places
“I hadn't been and I think this like free business school window is probably the right time to do it”
and I had no idea about this until then but he was like I always wanted to do a motorcycle trip around
the continental US right after law school but then I met your mom during law school we started dating we got engaged and then I'm practicing law and he's like now it's you know basically 30 years later and he said I don't regret any of it obviously I wouldn't exist had he like done that trip and it didn't work out my mom or whatever but he was like I do wish I could have done that or something like that when I was in my 20s just to say I did it and it's like he's not retired now but it's like
He could like just say he runs his own business he could just go do it now if...
he's in his late 50s it doesn't want to do that now so his take was basically if this is a thing
“you really want to do you should go do it because you're not going to have a better window of opportunity”
but he also was very stern that he was not going to subsidize your pay for any other and if I ran out of money I was going to have to come up and figure it out he's like the things I will pay for for you are like your college and graduate school education I'm not subsidizing you like backpacking your upper partying or whatever which I I think is the right take I think like as a general rule parents paying for education is good but like don't enable uh he didn't
mistake behavior but it kind of like gave me the encouragement that okay he wanted to do this when he was my age and dead and still kind of wishes that he had done that I should probably just say like screw it take the trip and then I'll make money later that was the the calculus for me I also sense that for some reason that the the word luck has come up a lot recently I've interviewed people who've written books about luck I see articles I see you'll see you know it's out there
for something to my algorithm I guess yep and I feel like the guy like you who moves to where the action is who travels on a one-way ticket who's a social guy read the whole when you want to India for the wedding and stuff kind of blast I mean I feel like you're doing a good job of increasing your surface area to potentially get lucky by instead of just resting and chilling out you're like I'm going to go out there whether that's travel whether that's moved the New York
city whether that's go to Columbia whether that's moved the San Francisco and work with Sam and that team you seem like a series of decisions that you're continually increasing the potential for you to get lucky and so once I'm like well look at Jack he just kind of got lucky it's like well if you actually looked at his choices he has created the luck by going out there and doing the things it could be uncomfortable for a lot of people how do you view luck in increasing your surface
“area for luck with the decisions that you make I think like everything in life comes down to”
relationships and I I do think people over emphasize the importance of networking without thinking about like like I've you eight in network is a thing that like amplify here innate abilities where like if you've expressed ability to do well in a thing and you have a like high value network that opens opportunities you become the guy that can exploit those opportunities that works out well for you but having a strong network without you yourself being capable and competent
is just kind of useless it's like a million times zero is still zero but a million times two is
two million right so the thing like I've always tried to do is put myself in positions
either like do things that make me a more interesting person or do things where I am working with or surrounded by interesting people doing interesting things which is why like moving to I had a couple of different options for business school I wanted to be in New York City I came here for that I love living in New York I live in New York now I think it's especially for young people like in the first call 10 or so years in their career probably the best place to live off of
ability to make money and meet interesting people that will compound over time because it's just such a dense collection of like ambition but when I took my current job in venture capital of slow I had applied for a job initially in New York and then headed off with one of the partners in
“the fund and he was like you should move to San Francisco and I thought about it for probably 10”
minutes and then was like okay fine I'm in and you know I'd never live in the San Francisco but
the math was I'll probably learn way more way quicker if I'm in the same city as the guy that I'm working for and there's this whole cohort of like all the AI stuff is happening I know there were a lot of people that I knew virtually from Twitter newsletter whenever living in San Francisco building companies working in AI also in venture capital that I had met in person and I knew going in I didn't want to be there forever but I think it's a general rule doing uncomfortable
things that probably have high payoffs is usually the right decision over you know getting out of your comfort zone and just like avoiding complacency in general that was a move that I was not comfortable with but I knew it was probably correct and yeah it all for both broadening my network and just showing me how that part of the world worked how does the fundraising game out here work who's actually getting hired at these jobs also how much of what I'm seeing on Twitter is total
BS and some of these companies have no idea what they're doing and they're dumpster fires there's a lot of that there's a lot of performance stuff on social media and if you're not going in meeting with these companies in person and like interacting with these people you just don't really get how that world works where when I was in New York or initially it's business school everybody's going to banking and private equity and consulting and there's like this like
track and then you go to San Francisco and it's just out control people are throwing tens of millions of dollars at 21 year olds from Stanford to build AI for dogs I mean it is just
an outrageous world but it's awesome and it's like as someone who's always broadly been interested
In like tech and investing and kind of oscillating between like different ver...
super useful for me to like really be up close and personal just everything going on out there and
I still go back to San Francisco every month but I've always optimized for where will I learn a lot
and like where am I going to be able to have like contact with interesting people with strong
“trajectories I think if you repeatedly go for like high slope of learning and high slope of”
contact with good people whether that's in the real world or like hanging out the right parts of the internet there's aren't like mutually exclusive anymore there's just no way it doesn't work out well for you and create opportunities for you to take advantage of do you think you'll stay in New York long term let's say fast forward wife kids you think you'll stay there I'm very much of the camp of I would like to stay in New York until I have school aged kids like I have no
issue with having like a toddler New York city but then it gets into the I don't know how much money I'm going to be making let's say like realistically I'm 29 now it'll probably be 8 to 10 years
before I have the kid who's in the first grade and that's if I like meet somebody tomorrow we get
married in two years right so if I'm making enough money that I could have the lifestyle I wanted living in New York I would be down with that if it's a while I could make this work like can't save any money if I want to do the whole at private school blah blah blah it's probably moved somewhere else I don't really have anywhere that I have to live like if I met a girl from Georgia and she wouldn't have moved back to Atlanta I'm pretty cool with that or like Charleston South Carolina
I would be down to do the New Jersey Long Island Connecticut thing like I'm I want to be in New York and tell them at a point that like head school system starts to matter and then that's probably be like driving thing of where's the family support group it's also like I'm going to position where I have a lot of other young single or at least like pre-kids friends in New York but like as my broader social groups life circumstances change the value being Manhattan drops a lot once
my career is more established and what's the people I like hanging out with aren't here anymore so it's like while I'm in this phase I want to be here I actually think about it was going to really play it out I'll probably be in New York for the next 5 to 10 years and then would like to move back
once kids like colleges or at least like having apartment here come visit because I'd always like
spending time here but I don't know it could be a thing where like something goes right I'm 40 and it's like yeah let's have a penthouse and upper west side like I'm open enough for sure but I'm not so New York or nothing that like I would just not save money for the sake of living in Manhattan forever
“yeah one of the quotes the best measure of one's life is the sum of memories you make while”
you're alive and this is from the overall idea that memories compound faster than money this is where you're ahead of your time can you riff and talk more about this the best measure of one's life is the sum of memories you make while you're alive and how memories compound faster than money money is so fascinating because it's the one tangible quantifiable thing that like relates to everybody right like it's kind of the like lowest common denominator of like human
comparison points where you can ballpark guesstimate how much money people make based off of what they do for work or like within a standard deviation of like network based off of like where they went to school who their family is whatever the trap you can fall into is treating money as the scoreboard and therefore treating it as like the thing you were trying to achieve I am very pro making a lot of money I would much rather be very rich than very poor and I think that's a like
I think it's weird that people try to almost like vilify pursuit of money having money means you can just you have much more control of your life like that's a very good thing to want it means you can take care of your family you can take care of people you care about but the only purpose of money of end of the day is to like spend on stuff and that's not just like materialistic blow cash on like really expensive clothes or whatever it's like truly the end of the day you're either spending
money on yourself on people you care about or you're leaving that money to other people whether that's leaving it as an inheritance whether it's giving it a philanthropy like money it is literally just a like non on its own non-valuable asset and it's only worth the things that's at some point exchange for so the the thing everybody has to figure out is like how much of that money do I want to exchange for things now both physical goods experiences whatever how much of that money do I
want to invest so it can compound and grow over time to spend on things later and what I think it's pretty interesting is like my belief is that the amount of money it takes to like get a certain
“call unit of enjoyment out of life is probably a lot lower when you're young because you're just”
quality of life and your expectations of quality of life or lower for example I live in a like 500 square foot studio apartment in New York I have a fairly nice apartment it's also just one
Dude living here right if I was married with a couple of kids we need a bigge...
expensive or a few years ago the whole backpacking Europe thing I was at a bunk bed of like 10 random
strangers and you have like a locker on your daddy put your stuff in so people don't rob you it was kind of hilarious being with like there's like a French guy there and some of them were co-ed it's like a French guy Swedish girl a bunch of like dudes that were at like four to run study abroad it's like a really funny setup I would find that just so annoying and just terrible and I'm still my 20s but I'm like five years old and that's just not what I want to do like I'm just going to
get a hotel or an Airbnb right so when you're really young like a few years on a college it just doesn't take that much money to like find the same level of enjoyment that it'll take later
“which makes sense because also you make more money as you get older and you should be investing money”
so compounds and grows over time exponentially so there's this like constant tug and pull of how much money doesn't take to create those experiences that become memories now how much money do I need to put back or how much work do I need to put in my career to increase my earnings should be able to maintain that level of enjoyment satisfaction what you want to optimize for is hitting like a pretty high level of life satisfaction your 20s and being able to like maintain the call like an
eight out of ten maintain that over the course of your life but the amount of money it takes to maintain that goes up a lot probably peaks in your late 40s then as your kids grow up and start going to college it flattens out and platos until you die right so like how much money do you need to both earn and invest and like have expendable to be able to like keep that quality of life satisfaction is the thing people should be optimizing for but because it takes more and more money to keep hitting
that people start focusing on money as the output they're optimizing for rather than money as
“step one with step two being the things you should put that money toward so that is the jackarans”
philosophy on life cycle of money okay in chapter five you have how to be stable from a financial perspective all this out the bullets and maybe you can riff on these because I mean they seem pretty obvious but they're not if you actually follow these I think you're good one spend less than you make two build an emergency fund of six months living expenses take your companies full for a one k-match it's free money contribute to your IRA don't gamble on individual stocks stay invested
stay employed don't go into credit card debt and don't get divorced talk to me more about
these bullets from chapter five yeah I mean to be clear I've never been married nor divorced
my mind is static I'm seeing other people that have his life divorce looks like it really sucks and it takes like all of your time have your money and like I'm a huge Tom Brady fan but man his like post divorce like go on like maybe w w you know all this stuff is just like tough to watch
“do what's going on now this is a little bit time sensitive and we're both on Twitter 24/7”
but yeah oh my goodness it hurts me man I love yeah I'm a quarterback like yeah what's going on dude it's like watching watching his retirement our versus Peyton Manning or Tony Robo who have just liked and done a great job of like they're making some investments they're talking on TV versus Tom Brady like viral clips of him like flicking off the Paul brothers and like fake slapping them I don't know if you were old enough that you have like five-year-old kids and you want to be seen
at Michael Rubens all-white party come on man like what what what do we do anyway the happens for people with their 20s get out of there at least that version of it so I don't know Tom Brady's mid-life crisis needs to be studied that's my my main take on this and I hope he gets through whatever he's going through because it's like I'm not even a Pat's fan I'm just somebody who respects like
dominant performance I really wish I just never saw anything about Tom Brady post retirement because
he really went out on top with a Super Bowl debux that's just like dude even if he's making money from this you're just like ruining your legacy and like I don't know if it's because he like wants to be a billionaire and he's like being through performant chasing these things or he just wants to be in the scene it like kind of sucks though I agree I hope LeBron James doesn't have a similar arc is the the other kind of goat of this generation but we'll see yeah sorry I took you off
track from the financial stability thing now you're good I can riff on the downfall Tom Brady forever I mean like I'm a I'm a Falcons fan so after what he did does in the Super Bowl several years ago he kind of deserves it that's the end of my talk track I'm Brady yeah but what about those rules you you know spending less emergency funds 401k's IRA don't gamble on individual you're not smarter than I mean most of us are not stay in vests stay employed don't go into debt where you're out there
my take on personal finances is actually like incredibly simple to compound wealth over time in the US will bear just like max out your 401k or at least get the company mid-match and then like don't spend more money than you make literally just track your budgets if you have credit card debt paid off immediately and then say for retirement have it be like automatic contributions so that way you don't have to think about it it's just you have like if it's a thousand bucks a month two
Thousand bucks about five hundred bucks a month just like have that going in ...
for the amount of like podcast newsletters whatever they're giving personal finance advice
up until you have like several million dollars that you're really optimizing for like taxes or a
state planning or whatever you can spend ten minutes of chat GPT and figure out like how do I make sure my money is compounding at eight to ten percent a year what I think is like much more interesting is like people don't spend enough time thinking through I highly want to spend that money
“again it's not the personal finance is it important like you should have that foundation set or”
it's like I don't think about the money going into my 401k right for all the all the stuff I say about don't pick individual stocks I do still sometimes pick individual stocks and I both made a lost a lot of money I was twenty four really aggressively picking stocks but I'm like aware that that's probably not the optimal use of money or like brain power yeah my like broader take on that is like it just isn't that hard to put yourself in a position where assuming you remain employed
and are competent at your job like you have a few million bucks saved up for retirement your
sixties just by doing the boring thing right over and over and over again and it's actually like user error can interrupt compounding way more than like you need to use like second and third level thinking to figure out how to make more money we we just like over complicate personal finance you should spend a little bit of time figuring out what's the like lowest left hands off way
“to benefit from compounding and spend a lot more time thinking about what's that structure set up”
how and where do I want to be like spending this money and like you model out how much am I going to save up over time okay what am I going to use that for is like the the much more interesting question because you also cite some of Nick but Julie's work yep that retirees basically they spend their whole life saving it and then it they retire and they don't spend it because they're like in this mode of save save save save save save save and this is a good problem right but save save
and then all the sudden it's time to start taking it and they they don't really do it can you talk more about that research some in Nick's work as well as maybe what we can think about now before we get to those days right because I get on the generation right ahead of you those days are they're not close yet but they're going to get here and like how to better think about that so Daniel Coneman has really good studies on like humanities propensity for like loss of version where
two like really really quickly summarizes work on this the pain you get from taking a loss like financially is about twice as strong as the joy you get from like again where if you make $100 you get like five feel good points if you lose $100 you get negative 10 feel good points and because of that like people really wired to not want to lose money which means that when it comes to like saving for retirement most people will really optimize for I need to keep stacking money
because I do not want to be in a position where I lose money and granted like the older you get the higher chance of like a health scare or there's a natural disaster that messes up your home or like the just over time the number of things that can go wrong that could really screw you financially increase exponentially so it's like it's not an ungrounded fear that you could think I need to have such a big nest egg that like nothing can touch me but go at a next point like next the COO
at Holt's wealth management I would say he's probably the one of the if not the best just pure play like personal finance guys out there right now and he pulled a bunch of data over the last I don't know what the time period was 30 years or whatever of like retirees and his findings with that like most people they don't ever touch the principle of the money like put their retirement account meaning like their gains are compounding faster than they're spending it down what in reality
“I don't think you should try to optimize for like I spend down all of my money in retirement”
because you actually just don't know how long you're gonna live you should always keep a margin
for error where you can keep compounding like if you retire at call it 70 with like $10 million and then you die at 90 with $25 million that actually probably wasn't the optimal amount of like you probably should have spent more money sooner where like you still have money to leave to your kids and grandkids or whatever but how much utility do you just like leave out there on the field that you didn't take advantage of when you were alive because you were you had a scarcity mindset
so the way I think about it is like if you're that person who they couldn't spend another retirement if they tried to because the other thing is when you're in your 40s or even your 50s you're burn rate is probably way higher than it's gonna be when your kids are out of the home and they're self-sufficient and the amount of money you're spending on your kids and like high school and college of like sports and tuition and all this stuff maybe like helping them out right out of
school by the time they're 30 they say they're 30 you're 60 they're probably like totally self-sufficient at that point but you were gonna be anchoring to while my burn rate when my kid was 21 was this and you think you need to keep hitting that when actually as you get closer
To retirement you're just gonna spend less money you have less energy to do s...
way less expenses on like your families you're probably not supporting your kids anymore so you probably should have spent more money on stuff when you were younger because like the burn rate
“is not gonna be that high later again I think running out of money in retirement is a way worse”
problem than having too much money like I do not think you want to be like destitute and like a burn on your family in your 80s but having way too much money at a point in life where you don't have the energy to do anything with it is like a completely self-induced problem that like shouldn't happen so I think the thing about is like actually like look at the data of like people in your income cohort of what their burn rates are actually on retirement to realize that
okay what I'm spending at 45 or 50 is actually probably higher than what it will be at 70 and then thinking about okay you might have like 10 years of retirement where you're still high energy maybe in your 70s where you want to go do stuff and that's gonna like slow down a lot your 80s where should I be spending while I actually have the ability to do it because I don't think people really internalize how much their mobility and energy drops with age especially like old age
and what you get at that point like when you're 85 you can barely see or walk there actually isn't that much you can't spend the money on to do other than just health care related like staying alive stuff so versus you're 60 you still have a ton of energy your kids are probably out of the house like you should probably take me like I don't know I have like a great uncle and great not just twice now they've just sailed around the world they're getting too old now where
they can't really do it anymore they took a mini retirement their 40s and just like sailed to Australia in New Zealand which is like kick ass it's my grandpa's sister and her husband they did that my uncle went down and visited them when he was in high school or college and then they did it again in their 60s and it's like yeah take a mini retirement you made all that money your 20s and 30s and early 40s it's like 25 years of making money take a year off and go
do a sabbatical then come back to it if you need to I just the whole idea of I'm gonna save all my money over the most valuable parts of my life to then try to spend it and be like least valuable
“part of my life is just a really stupid trade where I think it comes down to either people aren't”
really running the numbers on it or my more like meta philosophical and perspective take is like people really don't like contemplating their own mortality and aging and just like the like called depreciation their physical self where to fully understand that you need to capture the moment now you also have to accept that like you're fighting against the clock it's almost easier just ignore that reality and then if you're ignoring that reality just keep focused on making the number
go up so my my like this is my like crazy young person take on a lot of this is that a lot of people's problems just come from like they don't want to deal with the fact that they're going to die one day and if you actually internalize that you would probably be a lot more intentional about how you spend your money in your time have you talked to Bill Perkins that died with zero guy
we had never talked in person but like we've chatted on Twitter before a few times we think of them
“so one I think Bill Perkins has I think he is the perfect type of rich dude where I don't know”
as far as he made a lot of money as a trader and running a fund he's also a pro poker player he's produced movies he's best selling author I don't know I follow him on Instagram him and his wife and new kids and we have it in great time just like bullying around on their boat or whatever he made the money and knows how to spend it but he's still like he started a couple of venture back companies he's like still a super active entrepreneur businessman like runs a fund but his
philosophy like die with zero and like spend now the money over the course of your life I think is rightly if you put yourself in a position where you're at the top of your game what do you want to
do with that but what's really interesting about him is in the first chapter of his book he talks
about how his best friend in his first job took a few months off and just went to Greece and just like hung out in Europe it took a payday loan from a loan shark because they were only making like 20k a year at the time and then hadn't which was even then that was nothing and just what a year for three months guess what he came back and he was a successful energy trader in Texas him and Bill had very similar career paths the difference was one of them had way more fun
at 24 than the other one and like one of Bill's regrets was that he didn't really do a trip like that until he was 30 and by then that window of like crazy young guy I go on journey he had some story about like meeting some Greek girl like falling in love or some fleeing like he just didn't get all those random things at 24 and he was like I could have done that and still have the same career so Bill's whole take on like the usefulness of money I'm like pre-line with you just retweet this
one thing right before we started somebody's advice basically here it is this is for young people I
just think I disagree I think it's for people I think you could cut out the young part experiment as much as possible don't feel like you're wasting time the only real risk is not
Doing anything again we're increasing the potential you mentioned this earlie...
opportunity in life literally every single one of them comes through a person yeah and
“that comes through a person you probably have some sort of a relationship with and the only way I think”
to develop an actual real relationship with a person is to go out there and be with them to see them to increase the odds that you'll actually touch shoulders you know going out they're doing things so I think the only risk is not doing that and I feel like this is kind of the mode we're year at yeah so that that retweet was a Steven Wop the company's called Wop it's like a e-commerce company hilariously a joke that they're like the the Shopify for course froze but they're like the
e-com platform for all the like college nz people doing weird e-com sort of scanny stuff Wop is a real business I don't know if a single one of their customers have real businesses or not but they've built like a sick platform it's funny there's this whole subset of advice that like like Steven's probably not my and she looks like he's in his 20s there's this whole subset of advice like young people give that probably applies to everybody but you don't want to be the 28
year old who's like initially giving advice to the 50 year old because you're not there so you say this is for young people that's kind of like my book like the holding it I have gear that's where people in their 20s and reality a lot of the like time and money and opportunity cost and status game stuff is like pretty applicable to anybody but I can only like with confidence say like I know what it's like to be a 25 year old dealing with this stuff because I have been a 25 year old
I've never been like a 40 year old with kids but yeah I'm going back to like that take itself I mean
I when I push back on you a little bit is like I agree that like being like very like experimental taking shots and trying stuff is basically like say like having high agency and the ability to like be uncomfortable is a useful lifelong skill I think you have a lot more leverage on it when you're
“young because like the older you get the more you have to have like proof of work for people to take”
you seriously versus when you're young I talk about this in my book but your potential gets valued at a premium in your 20s and then like as you hit your 30s and older proof of work matters more and more being heavily experimental and trying a lot of stuff when you're young just speedruns the time and which like you can make contact with interesting people and a lot of different domains and also like you're learning curve accelerates because the more that you're experimenting
when you're young the more you can like go up these like proficiency curves and different vectors and you can develop a feel for like what you actually like doing and where you want to spend your time so by the time you hit your 30s and 40s and you're really want to see those bets compounding you have like a very good sense of self right it's like you're experimenting a lot
when you're young you develop a skill set to experiment and take shots versus if you never really
“take shots I think it's much harder to start being risk on at 35 if you were never risk on in your 20s”
right so it's a lifelong skill but like anything else the ability to do things in the compound compounds but you want to take a lot of weird interesting shots when you're young so like you can figure out which of those pads you want to double down it reminds me of um I have this section most recent book that's just called the best networking tool and in my opinion the best networking tool is doing great work yep which is what you're talking about like competence
not just experimenting but I mean one of the examples it's a little bit crazy and it's not a perfect example because her dad's famous but like how does Gracie Abrams get on the airs tour as an opener I saw her open as one of the shows I went to and with my daughters and um she did it because she worked really really hard and wrote beautiful great music and some people's eyes I like it yep and Taylor noticed and Taylor called people who she noticed was really really good so how
did Gracie get in front of Taylor she created great work she was very competent at her job right she's good at being a musician and Taylor said let's go that her dad and all that helped probably yes right but if she wasn't good it doesn't matter that's not happening it's I think part of it is the best networking tool in the world by far is doing great work other people will then notice and then that creates the opportunity for you to meet and then
it's on you to make the most of those opportunities but the best networking tool is creating great work yep yeah totally agree with that one question more before we go the champagne question comes from my friend Jason Gainard it's a year from now you're surrounded by all the people you love friends family and you guys are poppin bottles like crazy you're celebrating I'm curious what are you celebrating I mean hopefully my book blew up like at the time of
recording this this will come out in two weeks I guess like when it actually like comes out it will be right around bot stay I mean the like you've been through the book got a few times now this
Is my first time going through it it's like there's so much you can do it's w...
book do well but at the end of the day you write the best thing you can you do you can you know get
“people to know about it and care about it and then ultimately like it either travels word”
of mouth or it doesn't right so like I'm less concerned with the oh I need to get big marketing pop and I want this to be a thing that like a lot of people do that speed on the launch find I wanted to be a thing that a year from now people actually care about and have like told other people about and whether that's like I don't know like I'm not going to put a set number on number sales
or it's a New York Times list or whatever but like for what I wrote to be a relevant thing people
are talking about a year from now and they're being some milestone or bit smart that I hit a year from now probably that yeah I love it book it's called young money a field guide to wealth and purpose in your 20s as we just said though it's certainly applies to people beyond that look at
“that the hard cover I think looks a lot better the colors look better in the soft back”
it looks good they sent me one of the soft ones the early ones I got to get the hard cover too
but it's really well done dude like your other writing it's obviously I love a big fan of your work
man and certainly we're gonna continue our dialogue as we both for us man hundred percent thanks to get for having me it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club if you are send me a note Ryan at learningleadard.com let me know what you learn from this great conversation with Jack Reigns a few takeaways from my notes get the boring stuff on autopilot spend less than you make build the emergency fund take the full 401k match
and automate the contributions dollar cost averaging every month no matter what set it up once so you can stop thinking about it and spend your attention on the decisions that actually change your life at the boring stuff on autopilot next spend on the things that expire some experiences only work at a certain age some of this comes from Bill Perkins and I was zero meaning if you're gonna go hiking do it now if you go skiing do it now maybe later in life you won't
be able to so like in Jack's case sleeping in a hostel with your best friends is an adventure at 24 but you don't want to do that at 40 so what's something you want to experience right now but haven't done it yet take this as a nudge to do that thing right now much like Jack's grandma they're taking him to Africa when he was 11 years old and spending on experiences and then the best networking tool do great work the most reliable way to meet people worth knowing is to do something
worth noticing Jack has created some life changing relationships for himself because he's had the guts to publish his work online and it's really good and he's amassed a big fan base which is led to all of those great opportunities so how can all of us network with others do excellent work once again I want to say thank you so much for continuing the spread the message and telling
“a friend or two hey you should listen to this episode of the learning leadership with Jack Reigns I”
think it'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify and Apple podcast and you subscribe to the show and you rate it hopefully five stars and you'll leave a thoughtful review by doing all of that you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love in a daily basis and for that I will forever be grateful thank you so so much talking to you can't wait
