The New Rules of Money in Your 20s — with Jack Raines

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**Scott Galloway** (2:02)
Welcome to the 407th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we're sharing our live conversation with Jack Raines, Substack writer and author of Young Money, A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your 20s. If you don't want to miss our next livestream, which I'm sure you don't or other content exclusive to Substack, you can subscribe at profgmedia.com. That's profgmedia.com. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Jack Raines.
Good afternoon and welcome to our Prof G Plus livestream. Today, we're joined by Jack Raines, who writes the popular Substack newsletter, Young Money. His new book, Young Money, A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your 20s is out next week. Jack, thanks for joining us.

**Jack Raines** (2:51)
Scott, thanks for having me.

**Scott Galloway** (2:53)
Let's bust right into it. Our general advice here at Prof G is that for young people, the work-life balance is a myth and that there's only trade-offs.
Again, it's my way, it may not be the right way, but you think of your career as a projectile or a rocket. The majority of the fuel is expectorated trying to get out of the soupy inner atmosphere. And I feel that the same is true in your career. It takes a lot of fuel to establish momentum in your 20s and differentiate yourself and put your career on a trajectory such that once in space, you can cover a lot of distance with a little amount of thrust. And that is the first million is definitely the hardest or the first 10,000 is hard. And then the next 10,000 gets easier and then I think it gets easier.
So, and I would argue that some of those early tradeoffs early in life are worth it for the optionality and lifestyle it gives you later in life. Again, let me do my land acknowledgement, not for everyone. A lot of people decide they want to work to live, not live to work. Anyways, Jack, your upcoming book, Young Money, preaches pretty much the opposite. And that is young people should spend more time, save less, and chase the things they actually want to do now, travel, start a business, move on a whim. While they're still young enough to enjoy them, rather than banking on doing it once, they're comfortable. In other words, don't optimize for financial stability when you're young. Tell us why you recommend that path versus the one I took and how you came to the realization in your own personal life.

**Jack Raines** (4:28)
So I'll also make my own land acknowledgement that if you have a lot of debt, completely ignore anything I'm about to say. It's probably a bad idea, blah, blah, blah.
A lot of this comes from if you're in a place where you can do something differentiated or different. There's probably a lot of value in doing that. If you're young, if you're like $40,000 in credit card debt, $100,000 in student debt, you should probably pay off the debt. But to get to my main point there, I actually largely agree with you that setting the foundation for your career matters a lot in your 20s, and a lot of my advice for doing other stuff and taking other risks, isn't that different from what you're talking about in that, because your burn rate is lower, you probably don't have kids, you're probably not married, you just have a ton of optionality in what you can do with your time when you're young, and you can try and experiment with a lot of different stuff.