Jack Raines: How to Avoid Wasting Your 20s l Trailblazers Podcast Episode 49

Happy to be here. Thanks, Erica.

Hit me.

Um, the thing you said about writing the book in the Bowery. So, that's — I had actually written most of the book pre that. So, context: I signed the book deal in September of 2024. Um, I was on the back side of business school. I graduated four months before that and I was working for Robinhood and realized that that was probably the wrong job. Um, I'd been kind of at this crossroads of: I like media, I like content, I like writing, I like investing, I like tech. What should I do for work? I was trying to land a book deal. I went with the media writing job. Realized once I got there, I would actually much prefer to work in, call it, the tech and investing world and keep all the writing, media, all that as kind of my own thing. Um, so for the first four months after signing that book deal, it was just job hunt, try to find a new job, joined Slow, and I moved to San Francisco for that job. And I actually live in New York now. I did move back a few months ago.

I love New York. It's the best city in the world. Um, but I moved out there in February of '25. Didn't know anybody and I had a book that was due in six months — or in five months at that point. So basically every weekend I was living in SF, it was just working on a book. And I had completely underestimated how hard writing a book is. It's like — it's not like 20 blog posts in a row where if one blog post is 3,000 words, okay, it's 20 of those and you have a book. It actually scales in difficulty exponentially. So I would say if it's 20 times longer, it's 200 times harder. And I was back in New York for the summer. We were remote and I was supposed to go on vacation with some friends in July — or end of June, early July — and I just didn't love the book draft. And a week before the trip, I was sitting there thinking, okay, do I still — I was going to go to Spain. Do I still go to Spain with my friends and then just, I don't know, don't drink, like bail on half the stuff and then write there? And I knew that I just wasn't going to get it done and I'd already taken the days off of work. So I just last second booked a room at the CitizenM in the Bowery and just didn't talk to anybody for two weeks and finished the book and then still didn't love it and then rewrote the first two-thirds of it. And all in all, I wrote about 35 or 40,000 words in 14 days, which is just a lot of writing to do. A month and a half later, editor goes through it. I then don't love it again and then start reworking it. But that specific sprint last summer was just really, really hellish. And it's fun — it's fun to be on the other side of it now. It's fun to do a thing to see that you can do a thing, but it really sucked in the middle of it.

It was — so, I didn't know, right? The way book deals work is I had an advance from Portfolio, one of Penguin's imprints, and they pay a quarter of it up front, a quarter of it when you turn in the first draft, a quarter of it the month the book comes out, and a quarter of it a year after the book comes out. And so I'd already received some of the money up front and like I could have probably phoned it in and turned in a version I didn't like, but that also didn't sit well with me. But I had also already been paid the first quarter of that. And then you've already paid taxes on that because of the year before and the agent had already taken their cut of that. So I was sitting there thinking, I'm probably going to owe back a lot of money on a thing that I got 80% of the way there and didn't love it. And I actually didn't know what I was going to do. And I just decided you just have to write 12 hours a day until you're happy with it — or at least until you get a draft done that once you take a month off, you can then spend the next four months getting it to the book that you want. But you have to get at least the bones and the structure right, because the first draft doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be legible. And then there's a lot of revisions that go into it after that. It just took several more iterations to get there than I expected.

17 chapters. I would say the version now is the first probably half — it's all loosely chronological, but the first half is loosely chronological basically from when I was 23 or 24 through 27, 28. Um, the first half is a little more like actually chronological, pulling from just this kind of, um, almost malaise I had toward work in my first job coming out of the pandemic and then, you know, traveling abroad for a year, business school, going through this career panic that I mentioned earlier. All of that is kind of in the first half of the book, and going through this feeling of I need to capture these stage-specific life experiences now before the moment's gone. Like the first three or four chapters are really: time is short, life is short, each stage of life is very short. And there are certain things that 24-year-old me wants to do that I won't be able to do later. So I need to lean into those now. And then it turns into the next version of that is, okay, you're getting into your late 20s. Your career matters more and more. You're starting to think about long-term like career progression, having a family at some point, all this stuff. And serious things starting to matter more. How do you put yourself on the career track to do that? And the whole overarching theme is life is stage-specific. How do you get the most out of the current stage you're at and then transition to the next part. The second half is a little more philosophical, um, talking about how people fall in what I call apathy traps or chasing status games, where those I think are the two biggest distractions that young people face as they're navigating their 20s. Um, the difference was the current book — the initial book was about 10 chapters of what is now the full second book, if that makes sense. And it was like 36,000 words and wasn't long enough. And then I tried to pull from five of the ideas I talked about and make almost like a standalone appendix, like extended blog post on those things. And in hindsight, it was really — I just hadn't quite gotten the book where I wanted, and it was also too short. And then once I looked back at it a month and a half later, I realized some of the ideas I started articulating in the first 10 chapters could actually be expanded from 3,000 to 10,000 words because there were just way more levels deep to go down. Um, I just had to get them fleshed out once, step away for a month, and then realize where there was more depth to add, and then also which stuff was just filler and fluff needed to be removed. Um, thankfully there were way more areas to go deeper than there were things I needed to remove. So the word count ended up staying around 60-ish thousand words. Um, but you almost have to write something that really sucks and then something that's fine and then you keep stepping away and coming back to it and then eventually you end up with a product that you like.

It's funny. I've actually never read The Defining Decade, but it is the book I've gotten — the two books I've gotten comped against the most are The Defining Decade and Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. And Bill's book I have read, which I liked a lot. The difference is his whole philosophy in his book is that you actually should think as much about both accumulating money and how you want to spend it down. And he's big on consumption smoothing, like spending more money than you might think early in life because your income is going to scale faster. As long as your income outscales your spending, it's okay to spend a bigger percentage of your income in your 20s, right? And he uses a term called memory dividends, which I pull from in my book, basically explaining how things that you spend money on when you're young — even though you're spending money like as a cash outflow up front — you then get to benefit from the nostalgia of having those memories compound over time. Um, I kind of put myself in the middle. The difference between Bill and I is Bill was worth a ton of money when he wrote — like, he's Bill — he's rich, I'm still figuring it out. Well, he is an incredibly successful entrepreneur, hedge fund manager. Like, he is one of the coolest people out there, but it's also a little bit more reflective when, you know, he's a generation older than me, reflecting back on here are the things I did right and wrong about, called lifestyle construction, in his 20s and 30s. And in his first chapter, the thing he wished he would have done was take a few months and go to Europe with his best friend, who took a payday loan to go do that. And they came back and paid it off and had a blast. I remember reading that when I was in Europe at 24 and I was thinking, okay, this is, you know, this is good validation of what maybe I'm looking for validation. Um, yeah, I've gotten The Defining Decade a lot, too. And my thought on it is, one, I think guys mature a little bit slower than girls. And I also think guys have this real, especially in their 20s, kind of itch to go do different stuff. But then there's this other feeling of this panic or fear of if I step off what you call the golden path of, you know, right school, right job, right second job, right grad school — if you go to business school or law school or whatever — you don't want to fall behind the peers that you were in the previous stage with because you're going to keep comparing yourself to them. And the issue with that is, one, you reach a point where paths disappear. Like at some point around the time you're 30 probably, there's just no more next step. You end up just having to build off the experiences you have before that and going after what you think is the highest-leverage next move. But there's no real playbook anymore. And by the time you get to that point, there were probably a lot of things that you wanted to do in your 20s that you might have passed up on to keep accelerating at the career game or the status game, and you can't get those back. So I felt it — like I went to a, I would say, like fairly average undergrad school, Mercy University, played football there, had a blast, but I really felt this I need to catch up. And I got into a good business school, Columbia, which I viewed as my kind of prestige stamp of — I didn't work at Goldman out of undergrad, but my makeup is going to good business school. But I also had this whole other feeling of what about the fun reckless stuff I want to do now? Or just not even fun and reckless stuff, but just different experimentation I can do when my burn rate is low because I don't have a family yet. And I think a lot of young guys especially are kind of looking for some voice that says it's okay to feel like you want to do this stuff. You're not crazy for feeling this way. And you can have like periods of this in your life while still getting your career on track. Like it doesn't have to be an either-or. I think more than seeing how to do it, people are kind of looking for permission that you're not crazy for feeling this way. And it's actually a viable thing to do both. Um, and that was the thing I wish I could have heard when I was 23. Therefore, that's the target demo I'm really going after and trying to speak to.

My general take is the thing you want to avoid is apathy. And the only difference between adventure and ambition is one of those, particularly in a career sense. Ambitious career, you make more money. Adventure, you're probably spending money. But both things are active choices you're making to go after something. And if you find yourself in a spot where you're just going through the motions, life is driven more by inertia than your own decisions and your own willpower and, you know, your own actions, um, then you're probably doing the wrong thing. And that can also be a career thing. If you've made the money and you can't stop chasing the money to actually do what you want, that's no longer ambition, right? Like, if it's you striving after the thing because you want to strive after the thing and you're in control, great. If that means making a lot of money, great. If you're no longer getting satisfaction from that, and especially if you no longer really need that — like if you've reached a high enough plateau of financial capital and career success where you can actually afford to take your foot off the gas, do something else, and then step back in if needed later — and you still choose to keep accumulating, you know, financial capital over everything else, then it's — I wouldn't even call that ambition anymore. It's just career inertia because you already proved out the ambition thing. Um, on the adventure side, you know, I spent the better part of a year living abroad. It was a blast. I also knew it was a very finite thing because I was going to business school a year later and I viewed that as the pivot point of then, you know, redirecting my intentions toward career goals. Right? So the through line on all of it, I think, is being really intentional with how you're spending your time and not letting inertia drive it. And most people think of inertia or apathy as this I'm sitting around and doing nothing, which it is. And I like — I think of if apathy and status, they're both bad in their own ways. At least if you're chasing status, you're doing something, versus apathy, you can just sit there in your head and ruminate, not get anything done. Um, but as a — I mean, my kind of like guiding principle on what should you be doing is: are you going after the thing that you're actually going after versus taking what's the easiest obvious path? You know, you have enough career success, inertia could actually just be continued success past the point of needing it. So it's just really knowing yourself and being intentional with how you're spending your time.

One, I think New York's the best city in the world. Like that's one of my strongest held opinions is I want — and I think in general it is. I also think in this particular stage of life where I went to grad school here, a lot of my friends are here. A lot of my friends from the southeast have moved up here. It's kind of — if you're from Georgia and you turn 26, you either get married or you move to New York, those are the two options. So the friends who didn't get married are now moving up here. I view that I have this maybe three to five year period now where I have a lot of friends in New York and then people are going to start leaving the city as they're having kids and then kids start getting school age. So I think the place that I — and New York and San Francisco I think are the two most important cities both career-wise if you're into the tech investing world in the US, if not the world. So I think by default I was going to be in one of them. New York is the more fun one for me personal life-wise because I have so many friends that I'm close with that live here and I'm from the east coast, like south part of the east coast, but it's a lot closer. Um, but to your question of like how do you look yourself in the mirror and redirect in the career sense, I think a very good motto or very good mantra to follow is look at your boss or the person who's five years ahead of you in your career path, and if you don't like what you see, you probably shouldn't keep doing the thing you're doing. That's not just a career thing, though. If you're, you know, the vagabonding, traveling, whatever — when I was 24, it was really fun to hostel hop and be in bunk beds with strangers, but then I would see someone who was in their 30s doing the same thing, and it feels like they were just running away from something, and I didn't want to be that. So, as a general rule — but when I was 20, you know, and I was seeing somebody right out of college doing something like that, I thought it was like really cool and desirable. So I think it's always keeping an eye out on who's a few years ahead of me doing this thing and what does their life look like, and then knowing that if I keep doing what I'm doing, I will turn into them. If you like what you would turn into, great. If you don't like what you would turn into, you should be thinking of an off-ramp, right? And that's a very age-specific, stage-specific thing. 20-year-old you and 30-year-old you will have very different ideas of what they want the next version of themselves to look like.

So, my take on books in general is I think that if you call yourself a writer, whether that's blog, newsletter, whatever, a book is the only form of writing permanence that somebody can buy and pick up as a standalone object. And I think that if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, there's exceptions — like Matt Levine at Bloomberg never has to write a book. He is like a one-of-one financial columnist. But for the most part, it's a thing where people don't really remember blog posts. They might remember liking your writing style or whatever, but if you write a book, it's a permanent thing they can point to and say, I read this and this mattered to me because of this reason, and they can tell someone else to go buy it. They can say, Google this, buy it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, whatever. So I think it gives you a level of credibility and it also just like creates this concrete version of what you were thinking that distills — it's like your magnum opus for me of what I've written for the last five years all put in one place. So it's — once I started writing a lot, I always wanted to write a book. How I actually got the book deal is pretty hilarious. Um, I just got an email from a woman named Lydia who works at Portfolio who she said she found my Substack, she liked it, we should talk about a book. And I said okay. So this was three years ago. We grabbed coffee on the Upper West Side. Fast forward a year, I work on a proposal, pitch it a couple of times. It just wasn't — it was too abstract. And I started off really broad on talking about like opportunity cost and people are bad at managing their time. I really honed it in focusing on how 20-somethings are spending their time. I think it's still broadly applicable, but you need your target market to be a thing that you can point to and take a stance. And once I refined it, repitched it, Lydia came back, they made an offer, and we accepted. After that, I asked her because I was curious how I ended up on her radar in the first place. She said, you had a really funny satirical post on LinkedIn like a year ago and I saw it and I couldn't tell if it was a real post or not. And I sent it in our team Slack chat and said, is this really funny or am I just an idiot? And her boss said she thought it was funny. And then she clicked on my name, found my Substack through that, the actual post. Um, I used to write a lot of satire content on LinkedIn as basically a growth hack to get more people to subscribe to my newsletter. LinkedIn is full of the whole hustle culture influencers that are like, oh, like if you take your ice bath at 5 a.m., you'll make a million dollars and every derivative of that. And those are the worst people on the planet and they're all just selling courses. Um, I was basically making posts making fun of that. In this particular instance, I had claimed to have gotten vaccinated a thousand times in two weeks as a side hustle when they were paying people to get the vaccine. And I said I made $100,000 in two weeks. Follow me for more tips. And it went so funny. It went like mega viral. The comments are crazy. Some people were saying, you're the reason why minorities can't get vaccines and there's a shortage. And I was just like, I don't even know what that means. There's not a shortage here. And okay. And then some people really understood the bit and they said, you missed out an opportunity to scale this. Instead of you getting paid $100, you should have gotten a lot of kindergarteners and first graders to also go do it and then you would take a revenue split with them or you could have scaled your vaccine business, right? Basically make a pyramid scheme out of the vaccine hustle. So for obvious reasons, this thing blew up and went nuclear on LinkedIn and then that indirectly led to a book deal.

I think you get a longer and longer leash to post. Either one, when you're not in a place where credibility matters at all. So when I was just a kid backpacking Europe, it didn't matter what I said. I was just some dude on the internet. Or once you've stacked enough wins where the resume speaks for itself that you're a serious person. Therefore, if you say interesting off-the-wall things, people are like, okay, they're saying all this, but obviously they have real credibility, so it doesn't matter. So for me, I work for a real venture fund and I went to a good school and I signed a book deal. Therefore, I have longer leash to be funny on the internet, but I've still seriously dialed back the just pure play. I'm going to post and rage bait or whatever. I like being very sarcastic on the internet because I like being very sarcastic in person. And I think that Twitter and LinkedIn are filled with people who are doing Claude slop or ghostwriting. Like the amount of VCs that I just take their X articles and put through Pangram and then it's just obviously AI generated. I don't even know if they know it's AI generated because they definitely pay a ghostwriter $10,000 to write this stuff and it's just Claude. But everybody sees it and thinks it's just so obnoxious. And I actually think the amount of brand deterioration that's come from VCs trying to be thought leaders is just stupid because also as a VC you can't know everything about every market. It's not possible. So trying to act like you're the genius every other day — this is my thoughts on nuclear, this is my thoughts on fintech. Yeah. It's like, oh sick dude. You think open source matters now? Great. Like cool. You know OpenRouter might get bought for $10 billion. So you're a little late to this one. Um, so my take has always been this stuff's just annoying. Just cut through the noise. But the two things I don't do: I try not to make stuff targeted at individuals. I try to make fun of like the current moment, except for occasionally Chamath because he's a very fun one to like crack jokes about. And he gives it back to you. That's funny. People that like — or Keith Raboy, same thing. We've gone back and forth on Twitter like I — they're good sports. I love how much of a Keith Raboy is on Twitter. I respect the commitment to the bit. I think it's great. People who will fire back and forth on the timeline, cool. I'm good with that. But in general, it's can I make fun of the bit in a way where like — humor, I think humor is actually a very good tell of intelligence where like if you can deliver a — if you can make people laugh, that takes two levels of: you have to understand the thing and then you have to present it in a way that it disarms other people for them to think it's funny. So it's actually like a very useful way to connect with people. It's risky because if you try to make a joke and it falls flat, like the obvious version of this is trying to be way too edgy and then you offend somebody because you say something that's like comes off as racist or sexist or misogynistic or whatever. So like it's probably good to avoid that type of stuff. But being able to make fun of the current moment or everybody thinks a thing is kind of ridiculous, but nobody's saying it, and then cracking the joke that implies the thing tends to work well. And it's also a good filtering mechanism for people I want to work with, both in my job and founders that you want to work with. If they like your sense of humor and think it's funny, it's actually easier to win deals because they like you and they're familiar with you. And also, if they really hate what they see from what you post, or they're actually someone you want to partner with for 10 years — like, venture capital is a somewhat serious game, but it's also very much a human relationship game, particularly at the early stage. So I think it's a — there's actually too many companies to look at and talk to literally everybody. So it's a pretty good filtering mechanism for would we get along? Okay, let's engage.

So, I think a lot of people are going after this and like I have a lot of friends at a16z. They have — they're the most like forward-facing, we are doing the new media thing. Mhm. If they — what they're doing will probably work because they can afford to put so many resources into it that they're going to get attention on — like the primary purpose of what they're doing is to get attention on their portfolio companies and it's basically a marketing arm called media. But a lot of people, myself included, feel like some of the stuff feels a little bit corny or whatever, but people know who their companies are and they talk about them. What you don't want to fall into is what I call the kind of like valley in the middle of either like pure individuals or brand machine that's very good at it, where you kind of try to lean into the like, oh, we're going to do new media and do a podcast and this and that, but nobody really knows what your angle is or what your take is and you try to — the entire thing is so obviously just used to like puff — write puff pieces on portfolio companies, but the content isn't great and it's also — So like a16z floods the zone. They put out so much stuff and you're not really flooding the zone. It's just kind of a waste of resources versus we're a pretty small fund. We manage in active funds 300 and...

Something million dollars. Total capital raised around 1.2 billion. And our take on this is, you know, if individuals have voices, you'll attract people that you want to work with. And you know, don't embarrass the fund. And we have LPs and like we are at the end of the day a serious fund. But being able to like throw stuff out there and see what sticks as an individual matters a lot because at the end of the day, you know, maybe with an A16Z you just want A16Z on your cap table, but basically any other fund you care a lot about the individual that you're working with, like the partner on that investment team or whatever. So being able to show not how Slow thinks about things, but how like Sam Leon thinks about things or how Yonyi thinks about things matters a lot because at the end of the day, like they're doing individual deals, right? So in an aggregate, if you have enough individuals at the fund whose personalities are out there, people figure out that fund's vibe based off of what they're seeing from the individuals online. So I think you can go two ways. You can either go, we are going to give people free reign to be themselves online, or we're going to do the brand thing. But we aren't the only ones who do this. Like Andrew Reed at Sequoia is one of my favorite Twitter follows. And he's really sarcastic on Twitter, but like I wouldn't call him a total poster, but he sarcastically makes fun of the current thing all the time. And Sequoia is like the most famous venture fund out there. So it kind of works at any level. It's just, you know, the opinionated thing works, but if you're going to do that, you have to like win good deals and at some point make money. Otherwise, like you're allow you get a longer and longer lease the more that you're winning. Like people let winners do weird stuff, but then you know if you have like a couple of FTXs or stuff like that, it doesn't look good anymore.

Most of most of the Twitter sphere is either people at funds or people who are operators at real companies. I agree with that. And then even the Twitter burner verse, there's a lot of actual hedge fund analysts who for compliance reasons can't have their face out there. But the smartest stuff you'll ever read comes from burner 123 and their bio just says long short in New York and they have gone way deeper on like GPU unit economics than anybody out there. Right. So yeah, Twitter is the smartest of the social media. I mean my my take on it is because a lot of the audience on TikTok and Instagram also isn't in the like founder investor LP world. It's just kind of a lot of noise. I don't I don't know. I spend a decent amount of time on Instagram, not as much on TikTok. But my take is the actual cost is to the person doing it and like trying to build the brand around this thing that isn't actually real because they they'll probably make some ad money in the short term or whatever, but people who are actually doing the thing can recognize somebody who's doing a performative version of the thing and they're not going to want to work with them. So, it's it's much harder to actually do the thing and then build your brand on top of it. It's easier to build a brand without doing the thing. And it's also easier to do the thing without building a brand because they both take time and effort. It's much better to do the thing and not have brand and just be good at your job. I actually think the worst possible thing is building a personal brand and there's no substance under it. Like there's building a personal brand is really in vogue and everybody wants to be a creator these days. I think it's actually a career negative to do that because you just have nothing serious to point to and you're just trying to monetize attention. So, it's one of those things where like people actually in the arena, I think, can detect when somebody is just kind of larping.

which is the better way to do it. And also if you a lot of people have done the thing, started making content and then the content starts making as much money as the thing they go all in on the content. It can work, but the risk you run is when once you spend two or three years outside of the operating seat, you just aren't at you're just further from where the sausage is made and it's tougher to remain relevant in that. You even see it like a lot of a lot of VCs talk about it how you do have an advantage as a VC with operator experience or ex-founders can just go a level deeper with connecting with founders than people who haven't started companies. But technology changes so fast that your priors just have to adjust really really fast. Otherwise, your view of what's right and wrong. Like if you were a call it pre-IPO going mainstream operator and then AI happens, the way that SaaS companies used to make money and how you would think about their cost structure just changed a lot, right? And a lot of takeaways you would have considered law from your time as an operator no longer apply. So like even within the people who have done the thing once they get removed from it you just really have to work very hard to stay on top of your game. The people who have never done the thing and have never even worked the fund but are just making the content about the fund. Unless you're trying to do unless your play is to actually build a media company with newsletters, podcast, whatever, that's fine. Like if that's the if if you are building a media business, I think it's totally fine. Disregard everything I said. But if you're trying to do the I will go TikTok and Instagram to launching fund, unless you were Harry Stebbings and you were just a machine and like that guy was just he's cranked out thousands of podcast episodes and he was hustling in his like early 20s. Outside of people like him, I don't think it's going to work.

I mean, the one right now like the short-term focus is the book. I like it has momentum now. It's doing well and it's also I just spent two years working on this thing. So, I really want to put my foot on the gas while I'm here. But it's cool. I mean, the book's been out and like at the time of this conversation, it's been out for one week exactly. And the amount of inbound I've gotten just from interesting people because they heard me on a podcast and checked out the book and liked it is so much like the velocity and quality are both so much higher than I've been writing online for years and people have hit me up and thought stuff was interesting but book as a calling card and status signal are just like cool items. So the the short answer is I kind of want to like poke my head up in a month or two and see where the world's at. The longer answer is like I I don't I think it's I think you can run a risk of trying to over like overarchitect your career and the world changes really quickly. I know that I am very I like the game of investing and it is cool and fun and interesting and I think there's a ton of fascinating stuff happening in like tech shifts and AI and you have a lot of companies that started in SF that are opening New York offices. So, I'm not going to I'm not making a prediction on what am I going to be doing in 5 years. Like, I don't even know if I'll be in like a VC seat or an investing seat or an operator seat as much as I think this whole world's pretty malleable. So, I'm just trying to keep my eyes open for what are the highest leverage opportunities for me at any given point and don't stagnate. But you know, as far as like with Slow things are going great. I spend my time across our seed fund, our creator fund and it's very cool as like as someone who is kind of a creator like seeing how we build out that investing practice to like invest in creators and then having never been in an investing seat before and living in San Francisco last year basically speedrunning meeting with all of the AI founders out there and just like seeing how that game is working out there has been fascinating. So, I don't know. I basically I basically had no time to think for the last year because it was just you're working during the day and then you're working on a book and there's no time to have bandwidth to actually process anything. So, I'm kind of looking forward to this fall actually being able to, you know, think through options and go from there.

Yeah. And the best part about our job is you can think about all the ripple effects. So, like if what you're saying is true, which I believe to be true, then do people actually buy more insurance because they think that they're more likely to be sued because legal system is easier and like you just think about everything totally differently with all these assumptions. And that's the real fun part of our job. It's like you go all the way down that spiral.

Uh, book in hand.

It's funny. I'm not a big like I don't have a single podcast I listen to religiously. I will listen to specific episodes where there's a topic I care a lot about or a person I want to hear speak about something, but I'm much more of I used to be a big Kindle guy. Now I'm back to the I'd buy books and read physical books and I just think they look better. So

So much better. It's also I in my new apartment I got an IKEA bookshelf that I built and now I'm trying to like fill the whole thing with books and it's one of the big like 5x6 or 6x6 cubes. So you know if you have one Kindle it doesn't really fill in a bookshelf well but if you have a few hundred books it does.

Exactly. Yeah.

Oh that's an interesting question. I'm like a huge reader and I'm like pushing I I kind of fell off the reading bandwagon for a few years. I just feel like work has been so crazy.

But I'm back into it and I'm trying to do books before bed and then like books at certain point like like nail appointments and stuff like that.

I'm not into it.

At all. I I do I I'm like training a lot right now and so when I work out I do podcasts. I've tried to read while working out which doesn't work well.

Or when I wind down and then podcast when I'm working out.

Just it's not for me. I don't know why. It's just not for me.

You went to one of those like booths and like to put on the

You should like constantly be eating. It's like every hour you need something.