Most people think you have to post a ton of video to sell a product online, but today's guest proved that is simply not true. Jack Brains is a VC, Twitter personality, and sub-tech writer whose recent book Young Money is climbing every single personal finance chart out there. We brought him on today to talk about how he's guerrilla marketing this thing, his favorite passages from the book, and what it takes to make the New York Times bestseller list. If you saw this tweet I put out, I took a picture walking up and said, the quote tweet got 600,000 views. It just blew up. Damn.
So Penguin comes to you and they say, you have this thriving Substack called Young Money. You're speaking truth to thousands and thousands of performative males across the United States and they need guidance. The most overlooked demographic in America right now is the young performative male. Completely underserved. Tell us a little bit about how the book deal came together. Obviously we've got Young Money here, which we mentioned in the intro. And yeah, I just want to hear how this book deal came together.
So I think it was May or June of 2023. I received an email from a woman named Lydia at Penguin Random House. She says, hi, I'm Lydia from Penguin Random House. Have you ever thought about writing a book? I like your Substack, blah, blah, blah. And I, one of my more long held takes as a writer who can now say that they're an author is if you're going to write blogs long enough, at some point you need to write a book. Otherwise, I wouldn't say you're LARPing, but you can't really call yourself a pro unless you're either doing a million dollars in newsletter revenue or you write a book. Otherwise, you're just hanging out. Right.
And I'd received a couple of smaller offers from smaller publishing houses that didn't give advances. Penguin is one of the big five publishing houses. They give legit advances. And I said, yeah, kind of, but let's talk about it. We ended up grabbing coffee. She's awesome. She's British, which makes the whole thing way more engaging because not only is she an editor, but she's British, which is just a really good combination. It's the most literate, easier pitch for sure.
And then I had to find a book agent. Didn't know how that would work. You guys probably know Nat Eliason, former Austin guy, now a New Yorker as well. He had signed a book deal the year before and introduced me to his agent. I had a couple of other friends who just signed book deals and met their agents. Nat's agent was the man. And we put together a 45-page proposal that was part writing samples, part my overview of what I wanted the book to be, and part what my platform is and why I'm writing this book now.
Pitched it. They really liked me. They almost liked the idea, but it wasn't honed in enough yet. The book now is, I say it's the defining decade for performative males, but it's a book about the opportunity cost of young adulthood and where you're early, have a lot of potential, don't have a lot of money yet, and you're trying to balance this sense of ambition with this sense of adventure. Like I want to do this fun stuff when I'm 24. I also want to make a lot of money. How do you balance both?
But at the time I didn't want to over niche down and only focus on young people. So I tried to make it about opportunity cost more broadly. Something that I learned is you should actually pick it. It's obvious in hindsight, but you pick a really narrow niche and triple down on it. And then people that don't fall into that will end up reading it and liking your story.
I refined the book proposal. We ended up pitching 20 different publishers after that. And then Portfolio, which is the imprint within Penguin that I signed with, they circled back and said, we want to preempt and make an offer. And then they went back and forth with my agent and signed me. Then I had a year to write a book. How long did that full process take?
So we had our first conversation summer of 2023. I put together the V1 proposal that November and then met with them in January. They liked me more than they liked the proposal and they liked my platform. And the feedback was basically you're getting there, but do more thinking on what you actually want the vision of the book to be. With fiction, you basically have to write a whole manuscript and then pitch it. With nonfiction, it's maybe one example chapter and then it's largely just pitching your idea. It's like a seed stage investment. You're basically pitching an idea with a little bit of proof.
That's interesting. Are the economics different on fiction and nonfiction? They're all about the same. At the end of the day, if you sign with the publisher, they pay you an advance on your royalties. Let's say that I earn, it depends on hardcover, softcover, ebook, whatever, let's call it $5 a book across all royalties. Then if you get a $100,000 book advance, you have to sell basically 20,000 books. And then you'll start earning more money on top of that.
Fiction, nonfiction, they're all set up the same way. Typically the bigger publishers will give much bigger advances with poor economics. The authors de-risk because you get more money upfront, but you'll get less of the upside on a mega bestseller. Smaller publishers typically give much more favorable royalty splits, but you get no money upfront. But the fiction, nonfiction, the deal structure is the same. You have to do more work upfront for pitching a fiction book. Yeah. What is that number of units sold that indicates it's a bestseller? And doesn't that happen in a certain week period, right?
It's all pretty variable, but a few numbers: one, the median book that's published with a big five publisher sells 3000 lifetime copies, which seems shockingly low, but it's actually really hard to sell books. I mean, I've been hammering the marketing and it's been going well, but people don't read anymore.
For the New York Times, the two lists that people care about are the New York Times and USA Today. With the Times specifically, they have weekly lists and monthly lists and the number that it takes to hit the weekly list just varies. It could be as low as 2000 books in a week. It could be 10,000 books in a week. It's all very variable. And no matter what, you still get the social proof of saying I was a New York Times bestseller. Even if you just made it one week where sales were down. Is that variable based off of what has gone live that week and what else is selling extremely high?
It's all books, right? Not just new releases. It's every book. Interesting. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson is still a New York Times bestseller. Mel Robbins' book. They don't have a separate breakout category. For example, Amazon does. I was the number one new release in personal finance for two and a half weeks. Cool. Fun screenshot to have. And then it was top 25 or whatever of all personal finance books for most of the first month. But then I missed the Times list on launch week by a couple of hundred copies. And then there were earlier weeks where, based on how the numbers shook out, it would have made it.
Right. So I don't think I can say the exact sales numbers, but mine sold at a level where it's still doing well now. Like people had sold fewer books than me in my category and hit it previously. And they'd sold more previously and not hit it, just depending on the week. Got it. That's the game. If you're like Dave Portnoy released around the same week I did and you're playing into a hot market, it happens. Right. Speaking of markets. So you're in self-help and personal finance. Do you have any insight on what niches of books are the biggest? Which ones are selling the most copies? Smut. Yeah. BookTok loves all the true crime and smut.
If you can have vampires having sex and stuff like that, it's just the smut romance book TikTok is crazy. I would say it's smut and then more smut. And they'd sold more previously, not hit it just depending on the week. Got it. That's the game. It's like if you're playing into a hot market, it happens. Right. Speaking of markets. So you're in self help, I guess in nonfiction and then personal finance. Do you have any insight on what niches of books are the biggest? Which ones are selling the most copies? Smut.
Yeah. BookTok loves all the true crime and smut. If you can have vampires having sex and stuff like that, the smut romance book talk is just crazy. I would say it's smut and then kind of smut. Self help used to be, but AI is honestly killing self help because people are now just talking to their LLM therapists instead of reading books. Tim Ferris had a really good blog post. He was one of the OG bloggers in the 2000s. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like he pronounced it dead. The Four Hour Work Week royalties have dropped off a cliff over the last year. He thinks it's because people will just ask ChatGPT what are the takeaways from the four hour work week instead of reading it.
I've a lot of takes on why that's probably bad that people are doing that, but it is nonetheless happening. Yeah. Correct. I mean, they're obviously not internalizing the information the way you would if you read something.
Right. Like, I don't know, my take in general on a lot of this social media plus AI is that whenever you're just on a laptop or a cell phone versus a book or even a tablet that's fully detached from social media, it's just way harder to focus on anything in general. So you can't really internalize the thing. It's books, essays. I've started moving my information diet to I'll bookmark stuff over the course of the week and then go back and reread the interesting stuff on an iPad that doesn't have iMessage, social media or anything because as soon as you read a paragraph, you have to digest a little bit and then you check Twitter, Instagram, text, email. It just doesn't work. That subtle nudge to get away from it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So over the last two years of building Nibble, shipping nearly 8,000 UGC ads and getting performance data on every single one of them, it became super clear. There are two types of brands: those that understand creative volume and those that don't. The core difference was what they focused on. Brands that focused on volume plus hit rate were never complaining that Meta changed the algorithm. Their stuff just worked. And anytime we did work with one of those savvy brands, it was always on the same platform: Motion.
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What's been cool about your book is your personal brand is primarily written. You're on Twitter, you're on Substack. Those are your primary channels and you've been able to generate a lot of interest in the book versus maybe someone who's more advanced in their career but doesn't have a personal brand. It would have been much harder to launch in this era. What are some of those things you would credit have gone really well with the launch of your book? Some of the growth hacks.
I was very intentional about the influencer seeding of the book. If you sign with the publisher, they'll give you early copies to send out to influencers. It's a really interesting thing where you want to send them to a combination of people you know will read the book. You also want to send them to a combination of people that even if they don't read it, they like you and respect your work enough to know that the book is probably good, therefore they're willing to promote it. I personally received probably nine or ten early copies of books from people. I've probably read three of them. You just don't always, especially in the two weeks pre-launch when you don't have time to read all the early books you get. But if there's someone whose blog I've been reading for several years, they send me their book, I'm going to assume the book is good and I'm down to endorse it or shout it out.
If it's someone I like but don't actually know that I trust their writing, I'll retweet or engage with their tweet, but I probably won't independently endorse it. And so having been through the receiving side of that, I was like, okay, I definitely need to make sure I'm honing in on the people who, not just people with the biggest following, but which people do I think will really resonate with this? Where even if they have 20,000 followers and not 2 million, they will keep telling people about it, or the people who just really like Jack and therefore, ideally, everybody reads it. Obviously some people won't, they'll still post about it.
So I went through my full Rolodex—text, email, Twitter DMs, Instagram, LinkedIn—and kind of broke down very heavily Twitter focused, but then also Instagram. Like Michael Smoke, Higher Up Wellness, Jack Nassif, Jack's Day in the Life. These are some of my buddies from Georgia who now have millions of followers. Smoke, at least, I don't know if Jack has read the book. I know for a fact Smoke has because he keeps posting about it on TikTok and Instagram. So I probably need to get him some sort of extra deal. Yeah, I'd do that for this.
His audience is kind of lost young dudes looking for guidance and that's also the target audience for the book largely. So it just resonates. It hits. I know if he's talking about it, the conversion rate on that is so much higher than somebody who's totally detached. How many creators did you reach out to? I think I reached out to probably 150 or 175 and then we sent out like 130 something early copies and then maybe 60 or 70% of them posted about it. So pretty solid, but I filtered from an initial list of a couple thousand people. These are the most high-intent people I have in network. Did you track the views on that? On the 60, 70% that did post?
Not cumulative. Something that I've done that I think has been pretty clever is on launch day, I have a pin tweet about launch day, book coming out, whatever. And then I have constantly been quote tweeting that with every next marketing thing I do. I quote tweet that first one. And a lot of the people, at least on Twitter that are posting, are also quote tweeting that one. So I can see the cumulative engagement of the quoted tweet from that. And then it's also easy to track anybody who quote tweets—I can at least see the likes, replies, reposts, whatever.
So on the main artifact of engagement that I was trying to funnel the traffic to, yes, across total posts across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, no. And like, I'll search TikTok or Instagram occasionally because random people post about it every day or two. And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you haven't—this, none of this is paid stuff. No, I haven't. I actually—this is kind of all just grassroots. That's why it's interesting. Yeah, you're grassroots growth hacking, right? I've spent zero dollars on marketing.
Right, whereas your competitors, they're probably spending on Amazon ads. They're probably spending on PR, all sorts of different stuff. There's an entire underground book marketing market where because a lot of people are, most people, especially most fiction writers, do write their own books. Across total posts across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever. No. And I'll search TikTok or Instagram occasionally because random people post about it. Yeah. Every day or two. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you haven't, none of this is paid stuff. No, I haven't. I actually. This is all just grassroots. That's why it's interesting. Yeah.
You're kind of just grassroots growth hacking. Right. I've spent. Yeah. As of right now, I've spent $0 on marketing. Right. Whereas the other ones that are your competitors, they're probably spending on Amazon ads. They're probably spending on PR, all sorts of different stuff. There's an entire underground book marketing market where, because a lot of people are. So most people, especially most fiction writers do write their own books. Nonfiction less than half, maybe less than a quarter. And then particularly if it's a known famous person, there's almost a 0% chance they wrote it unless they had a prior life or arc as well. Yeah. So the ghostwriter market is massive too.
It's such a clout thing to write a book and hit the New York Times list. There's this entire underground economy of gaming the New York Times list where if I just bulk ordered 10,000 copies of the book through Amazon on my account, it would get flagged and it either wouldn't get listed or they put a cross next to books that they suspect were trying to game the system. There's people who go out there and will seed having people buy 50 copies of Young Money at the store in Wichita. And then at this place in Seattle where it looks like all this grassroots buying is coming in all over the country. And then by week two, the numbers tank, right? I'm looking at mine.
We're moving. It's five or six weeks post launch. I'm not posting that much now. And I'm still getting several DMs and emails a day. We're still at least on Amazon selling hundreds of books a day or hundreds of books a week, maybe hundreds a day, definitely hundreds a week. And it's sick. There's that. I mean, I did a big marketing push for like two weeks, but I care a lot more about whether I'm still moving books six months post launch than hitting any particular benchmark or award or whatever New York Times. I mean, I obviously want to hit the New York Times list. I think the odds of hitting it for me are higher in a couple of months from people buying it,
reading it, word of mouthing it, and it compounds than speed running the launch week game, which is typically how it works. I just don't want to spend a hundred thousand dollars or whatever. And that's on the low end of what people spend to try to game the list just to claim a title for a book that I had a ghost writer write for me. I care more about writing a book people want to read than being able to say I claim a title. I think it could be interesting to almost reverse what typically people do before a book release where they go on 10, 12 different podcasts, but doing that maybe two months, three months after the book has launched and then do the podcast tour.
I mean, as someone who did several podcasts in the lead up and now we're four and a half weeks post launch, it's way more fun now because there's just more real data that I can talk about. Like, here's what works with the marketing. Here's what didn't. The entire psychological wave of you spend two years waiting for a book to come out. You have no idea if it's going to suck, if people are going to like it, or you're going to have an ego hit if everybody hates it or if nobody reads it to begin with. And then you're having to go out there and promote a thing that hasn't come out yet. It's just weird versus now it's live. Well, you have a product to market, right?
Like you're actually able to tell someone to go buy it. You have several times at a bar. I've actually seen him pull it up on their Amazon just immediately click. Oh, it's a great bet. There's a picture of me doing this at Delta Charlie where Brian and I were with a group of four of us. We started talking to this group of girls in the bar and you know, what do you do? What do you do? Where are you from? And I think Brian was like, well, Jack just published a book. She's like, really? I said, yeah. She's like, what's it called? I said, open your Amazon app. She pulls it out. I said, you should buy it. She's like, was it sitting at number one too?
It was on the personal finance chart. Yeah. And top trending in self-help and she's like, oh wait, this is actually you. I said, yeah. And she was like, I'll buy it. And it's funny, a book is cheap enough that nobody is going to say no to buying it on the spot if the author's right there. So they'll always buy it. Probably the cost of a drink. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It depends where you're at in New York too. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. It could be cheaper than some drinks. You go to people's. Yeah. So I basically anytime I mentioned the book, I then tell the person I mentioned it to buy the book and I don't know, probably sold 50 to a hundred books. Yeah.
The hand to hand comment is up there. That's up there with the other tactics. Are there any good creators that have made any good UGC on it? Cause I'm almost thinking about is there a world where you could have find somebody that's made a viral video about Young Money, get them on a retainer to just hammer out content? I mean, the best one was Michael Smokes where he, and this is you all's friend that you were talking about higher up on this. Yeah. He's a big creator. Yeah. So he put out a video. He opens with like, I've only recommended three books ever. This is book number three, Young Money by my friend Jack Rains.
And he starts, he was a quarter of the way done with the book, but it was very detailed breaking down the first three chapters of it, why it hit, how it resonated so much with him based off career choices he made a couple of years ago. And it was authentic because one, it obviously wasn't a paid setup or here's a script. I asked for him to post about it. Sure. But it could have easily just been throw up a story. Could have been a story. Exactly. Yeah. He's posted like three stories and a couple of reels at this point.
There's a hilarious reel where he's talking about my book actually. And he starts referring to Jack and his editor had no idea I was a different Jack from his other friend, Jack Nassif. If you've seen Jack, Jack's day in a life, the get ready with me as a 26-year-old fitness guy in Atlanta. He's in Atlanta. He's like. Is that the Austin one? No, it's the same niche though. They're all like, there's 20 of these guys. Yeah. They just kind of all kept spawning for 2024. It's like copy paste over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. It's hyper effective content cause you stay until the end.
Right. I mean, that's. I know. I mentally hate on the whole video, but I'm still there. It is the biggest hate watch of our times is all of these videos and Jack is a cool kid. I don't think there's thousands of comments saying that and he's just laughing all the way to the bank with a Nike deal or Brooks deal or whatever. I mean, it's good motion. You guys got me. But anyway, Smokes did post a reel where he was talking about my book and then he says Jack and then it cuts to a Jack Nassif hype video because his editor just assumed he was referring to a different Jack and I text Smokes. I was like, thanks for the shout out, but they put the wrong Jack in the video.
He said, dude, I actually can't watch it on Instagram right now because I'm in Russia. I mentally hate the whole video, but I'm still there. It is the biggest, it is probably the goaded hate watch of our times. All of these videos and Jack is a cool kid. There are thousands of comments saying fuck this guy and he's just laughing all the way to the bank with a Nike deal or Brooks deal or whatever.
It's good motion. You guys got me. But anyway, Smoke did post a reel where he was talking about my book and then he says Jack and then it cuts to a Jack Nassif hype video because his editor just assumed he was referring to a different Jack. I text Smoke. I was like, thanks for the shout out, but they put the wrong Jack in the video. He said, dude, I actually can't watch it on Instagram right now because I'm in Russia. And I was like, what? He said side quest maxing. He was like, I got that from your book. And I was like, I didn't. You didn't have to go to Dagestan, but that's fine. I think you took it too literally. That's hilarious. His video blew up and had 9,000 likes. He was telling me how many engagements, clicks, messages, sends it had. It popped off.
Other Jack gained 10,000 followers. For sure. 25 DMs, some girls in New York. But I do think people can tell when a review is authentic or not. And if somebody that they look up to authentically endorses a book, it's much more likely to move it. There are definitely ways you can gain and scale UGC. I'm sure that I could orchestrate a really good paid campaign to ramp it up. I just don't want to throw 50 or a hundred thousand dollars growing a book. If people are reading it organically and I keep posting about it, it'll keep going. It's an interesting conversation around creating that always-on marketing engine.
Because all the things that we talk about, in the past it was all about moment marketing. How can I get a celebrity to post about me at a capstone moment? And then hopefully I'm in people's memories from there. And now if you're investing constantly in creators, then you can have viral moments every day. If you have the right slideshow strategy, if you have the right testimonial strategy from these people, theoretically you could commission them. You could put this book on TikTok Shop, seed it to a thousand creators, and then roll out some sort of slideshow strategy where it's like, you've had. What's interesting about your approach is you actually do have a lot of data on what is resonating with people.
One of the things you've done is you'll put out a tweet and highlight a passage from the book. Right? And then say you did that 10 times. Out of the 10 tweets that you had, the top three in performance are objectively what resonated with people the most. That's the data. Right? So you could then distribute that exact strategy in a slideshow format to a bunch of different creators and say, you know, this passage changed my life. This passage made me rethink my twenties, this passage, whatever. And then it's a swipe to reveal. And then it's just the highlighted thing. Right? And you could just flood the zone.
My longer term plan on this is to do that. But there's a decent chance I will seed creators at some point on this, but in the name of I have a big Twitter, LinkedIn, and Substack following. I've been doing this on my own accounts on Instagram and you told me I should do the TikTok carousel thing.
Yeah, you were right. I have 25 followers on TikTok now, a couple thousand views on something I put up where you can see how the algorithm works. It's okay, thing works on Twitter. It works on Instagram. There's probably this needs to be repackaged per platform. That's it. But the same thing will work on TikTok. So using my own best hits over and over again to then grow on those platforms where I then own that distribution, which drives more book sales. I think once I hit some level of scale on those platforms, if there's a version of seeding creators, then also having my account tagged in that or collaborating or whatever makes sense. But proving out which things work on my own things first, and then also benefiting from the platform growth.
Something I was talking to this guy recently about, which is some free game for everybody, is on TikTok Shop. Typically there's a 5,000 follower criteria to become an affiliate. So you have to have 5,000 followers. The goal is to not let people buy accounts and you can't have infinite spam. You gotta have 5,000 followers. Speaking of Dagestan, there is a secondary market to buy these accounts from central Asian countries typically, but that going price around $350 for anyone that's curious. But you don't have to do that anymore because TikTok has done this. They allow you to take a Spark ad code, which is a code that goes behind a video and you can run it in an ad campaign. You can now run that on a TikTok Shop ad campaign called GMV Max.
So it used to be you would have to build this army of 5,000 follower creators and then send them a physical copy because they're real people. Right? But if I were you, what I could do now is do young money underscore quotes, young money underscore ambition, young money underscore whatever. And you build maybe 30, 50 accounts post every single day. You take those Spark codes, put them in the GMV Max campaign. You could run ads against your stuff without having to build a physical person, create an army. You could actually just have an intern spamming this content every single day, all day long. Just on a bunch of young money TikToks. Correct.
Interesting. It's an army of theme pages that you could essentially take the Spark ad codes from, post five times a day and just run this carousel method.
I'm very curious if that would actually convert to sales though. I'm sure it could give the eyeballs, but I don't know. I've been a little skeptical of TikTok just from talking to other people who've done nonfiction books. Book TikTok for specific smut romance, whatever, it moves books. It was not a massive, at least not nearly as big relative to that book talk for narrative nonfiction or whatever. So I am. It's worth dabbling with. I'm curious how well the engagement would be on that. We would have to check the charts. I saw a few things that were doing pretty well. I don't know if it was Subtle Art of Giving a Fuck or not giving a fuck, but it was something adjacent to that that had a pretty good moment. Right?
And based on some of the numbers that you're mentioning, I'm talking about these stores doing 300 to 500K a month in revenue. Yeah. So I think that's probably enough to clear into that bestseller range. For sure. The nice thing about GMV Max is you're running ads only at a fixed ROI threshold. So if you say I don't want to spend more than a 4X return on ad spend, then it just won't spend. Right? So it's not risk-free, but it is something that you could attempt and grow TikTok.
Now y'all already know we are super skeptical on this show about most AI tools promising the world. They have flashy demos, huge promises, and ultimately under deliver. But I do have to tell you about one that has blown me away and saved my team countless hours of time. And that's Rich Panel.
Imagine a 24-7 customer support engine that handles all of your tickets seamlessly, escalates anything requiring human intervention. And here's the best part: upsells your customers in the process. Their onboarding process is one of the craziest things I've ever seen. You input your brand and within 15 minutes it has full context on the latest drops, product information, and plugs into all of your apps. That's not even to mention the cost savings. They're three times more affordable than their competitors. I couldn't recommend this enough. Right. So it's not risk-free, but it is something that you could attempt and try and grow tech.
Now y'all already know we are super skeptical on this show about most AI tools promising the world. They have flashy demos, huge promises, and ultimately underdeliver. But I do have to tell you about one that has blown me away and saved my team countless hours of time. And that's Rich Panel.
Imagine a 24/7 customer support engine that handles all of your tickets seamlessly, escalates anything requiring human intervention. And here's the best part: upsells your customers in the process. Their onboarding process is frankly one of the craziest things I've ever seen. You input your brand in within 15 minutes. It has full context on the latest drops, product information, and plugs into all of your apps. That's not even to mention the cost savings. They're three times more affordable than their competitors. I couldn't recommend this enough. So if you're a brand looking to turn support into an asset, go check out richpanel.com and tell them we sent you.
So some free alpha for any aspiring writers on here: plugging your own Amazon affiliate code anywhere that you're pushing the book. I had this guy. He wrote his burner Twitter account was Goldman Sachs Elevator. This is an OG from like early 2010s. His name's John LaFerre. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but anyway, he wrote a bestseller about debauchery that he saw when he was working for Goldman. He DMed me and was like, "Hey dude, checking out your book. Stoked for you. Plug your Amazon code literally everywhere, because I don't know if it still works like this anymore, but apparently any items that get put in someone's Amazon cart within 24 hours of them also putting your book in their cart, if they use your code, you get an affiliate revenue on the entire cart. So on the basket." Yeah. So if you catch, you know, like this would be a really good Christmas book for the youngins out there and you catch some mom who's loading up on Christmas shopping on Amazon, you can get the whole thing. And he said he probably missed out on a couple hundred grand in just free upside for himself by not doing that. And I've made low thousands of dollars but have made some money from that just because my tweets and things that people see, they click that. And I don't know if any of those have been whale carts that drove all that or if it's book by book, but if you're already selling the book, you might as well get as much money as possible per copy.
Yeah. One thing I keep thinking about is: have you seen the Opal app? The what app? Opal. What is it?
It's basically an app to help you get off your screen, right? Less screen time. But the funny thing is, they have two separate accounts. They have the Opal app, which is the main account on IG, but then they have this separate account. This is why I asked about the creator, or if you have a creator that works well. They have a completely separate account called Olivia Unplugged. She has this dedicated Instagram to basically helping people live better lives off their phone. She has this one set that she uses where it's just her with a dry erase board. She has a theme for every piece of content. You know, it's like "seven things to do," you know, X, Y, Z. Right.
I think about this. I think about the fact that there's such an opportunity to do the same thing with these lessons, have a dedicated page to the young 20-year-olds where you're taking lessons from the book. There's one creator that's forming all of those episodes. That account grew to 170,000 followers off of a hundred pieces of content. It's not expensive to pull off. The way the algorithms are shifting, especially on Instagram, it's so interest-based. If you can have a more niche account or an account dedicated to a specific topic, it's always going to perform better. It's always going to grow better than a very broad account. That's why even big creators have these sub-accounts that are based off specific topics. But looking at the chapters in here, there are so many different angles that you can take with so many different episodes. The problem with "someday," like "seven reasons why to never choose someday." There's so much content that lives within these chapters.
Yeah, it's like layering on common formats, common hooks, all this different stuff into each chapter. Then you have an entire content calendar. And the thing that's also nice about what Alex was saying is that it's so clustered right now on the algorithms. Once she has, or he, if it's a performative male, which probably should staff it with your demographic. If one video hits, then it'll snowball five more videos to that same viewer. Right. And that's the importance of posting volume and compounding it. You already have all of the material. It's just formatting it for Instagram and turning it up.
And that's the thing: the beauty about Instagram is what you were saying earlier, where if one piece of content hits, it's all about getting into the remainder of the other formats that are working on Instagram. And it will continue to work. Right. So if it works as a green screen video or it works as a talking head or a yap, it's like, cool. How do I get into a one-shot video, 10-shot video, yap video, a carousel? There are so many different ways to skin it where one piece of content can accumulate five to 10 million views over one topic. Right. And if the whole page is dedicated to the book, it's built off the base of the book. It's an entire funnel that you can retarget. When you do get into paid and all that, you're in an interesting place where you could almost look at the different interest clusters and make targeted ads towards each interest cluster, just because that account is dedicated to this specific book.
You know what we should do? We should make Jake Mazai be the UGC performative male.
We absolutely should. I don't know if you saw this tweet I put out last week or the week before. I was on the West Side Highway running and I see this guy. He was my best friend, former roommate, posted up. This kid Jake is the peak performative male of New York. Goes out several nights a week. He plays really, he played D-one soccer, still super competitive, and he shredded. I don't know, he receives constant comments about his biceps. Nurses love him because there's nobody in the world as vascular as this dude. It's ridiculous. It's annoying. And there's this socially acceptable distance within the West Side Highway where it's okay to be shirtless, but then you're firmly back in civilization and should put a shirt back on. He just won't put a shirt back on. He will be walking through Times Square shirtless. And anyway, he's seated in a park over there. I didn't know he was going to be out there and I didn't realize he was going to have my book. He was sitting there looking at his phone with the book just on his knee like this. I took a picture walking up and said, "A farmer spotted on the West Side Highway." The quote tweet with my book tweet got 600,000 views. It just blew up. I was like, okay, the entire existence and reality of the performative male is really having a moment where it's between the run clubs and just dudes trying to do stuff for attention and just peacock and get girls' attention. It's a curated Instagram feed of a guy.
Yeah. I don't know when the phrase "performative male" became a thing, but it describes a thing that's existed forever better than any phrase has ever described anything. So I am planning on doing a performative male book signing event on the West Side Highway.
And he was sitting there looking at his phone with a book just on his knee like this. And I took a picture walking up and said, or a farmer spotted on the West side highway. And quote tweeted my book tweet with that the quote tweet got 600,000 views. It just blew up. I was like, okay, there's the entire existence and reality of the performative male is really having a moment where it's between the run clubs and just dudes trying to do stuff for attention and just peacock and get girls attention. It's a curated Instagram feed of a guy.
Yeah. I don't know when the phrase performative male became a thing, but it just describes a thing that's existed forever better than any phrase has ever described anything. So I am planning on doing a performative male book signing event on the West side highway, where I got another 25 copies of the book from the publisher and I'm going to put together a party and just throw it all over social media and say, Hey, like next Sunday, first 25 dudes to show up shirtless, sign copy of the book. And if you already have one, you show up shirtless outside it, but no chicks allow, they have to stay across the street and they're going to rip just a meat market of dudes over there.
Yeah. But there's the social proof of putting that tweet out and it just hitting escape velocity immediately. And then throw it on LinkedIn. Guess what? It rips on there. Instagram rips on there. It's just so obviously a fun inside joke. And the entire internet is in on it 100 percent. Well, and also once you understand that the algorithms like patterns, you can repeat those patterns. So you could do this with every one of our friends, you could basically throw on the West side highway with the book in a similar candid position, continue to just quote tweet your original post and then snowball it from there. And it becomes a meme almost like you create the meme.
My favorite bit was a couple of years ago, the performative male was the fake liberal Bushwick male who walks around with a tote bag and has the Fault in Our Stars in the bag and posts up just reading like this in a cafe, except we've now come the full opposite way where the modern day version of the performative male is like the giga chad who wants to be seen in the scene where it's almost gone full opposite whiplash of the feminized fake barista to the people need to think I played a sport in college. Even if I didn't, like the high rocks male is the new performative male. Yeah. Those guys just run on the West side highway.
What are some of the pieces of the book that have resonated with people the most? So before getting into the pieces, something that's been very funny is the amount of people who just aren't like the subtitle is literally a field guide to wealth and purpose in your twenties, which says, Hey, this is for young people. And the amount of 42 year olds who've hit me up saying, man, I get that you're marketing it toward 20 somethings, but I found it to be very valuable or at least just interesting to see somebody else's take. Because so much of it comes from my life story from my twenties.
But I think the things that really hit people were in the back half of the book, I dive into status and apathy. I think that people falling in apathy traps or chasing status games are two of the biggest psychological problems, especially facing young people today, where if you've seen that picture of Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid, at least in America and like high cost of living cities, everybody's kind of at the top fighting for self-actualization at this point. People are making money. If you feel like you're not making enough money, it's usually just in comparison to your peers, not an actual net reality. And you're kind of getting pulled back and forth between this constant anxiety of, I'm not making enough money or not getting promoted fast enough, or I'm not on the career track or my friend joined the hot startup. They sold their company. They're flying up the investment banking ladder. And you just start sprinting, trying to chase every one of those, not because you independently want that thing. It's just you're seeing people have these outward signs of success, and then you keep redirecting your life off of that. Or you get so overwhelmed by seeing all this mass optionality and success that you just mock out. I've seen this play out a ton, particularly I've lived in New York for four years and I've seen both sides of hyper competitive striver that can achieve those goals that perpetually burn out. And then people who just kind of tap out and quit because they're exhausted from putting themselves in a mental rumination loop.
So I go super deep on it because I'm like, I've been susceptible to both of those different times in my life. And I just kind of dig into what it feels like going through that and in real time. And then also my thoughts on both high level, like why this is, you are quite literally wasting your life when you're stuck in one of these. Like every year that you spend in one of these cycles is another year that you can't get back.
But also how they're inherently self-defeating. And there's a lot of life advice books out there that hone in on how to make the most of your career or they do the opposite where they say screw the corporate ladder, you should go do what you love. And both of those are just really detached from reality. And I think when you start reading this initially, it's like, oh, is this a personal finance book? It's much more of a psychological book than anything else.
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I don't know how you viewed your twenties, but I viewed my early career as an opportunity to accumulate experience and get my hands dirty and actually build skills and I sacrificed a tremendous amount of financial security during those early years, because I was like, all right, I'll take an under market deal to figure out how to run Facebook ads. Like I literally don't know how to do it. So you actually shouldn't pay me a lot. And then you eventually kind of get good at it. And at the same time, I didn't want to sacrifice my youth and not travel and not go out and not learn experiences. And I feel like that's really the mentality that you pitch in this, where it's like, there isn't just this finite amount of, or there isn't an infinite amount of time either. Right? Like the value that you assign to spending time in your twenties is much more valuable than the value you should spend time on your forties.
Yeah. Like that was something that I really liked about the book where it's kind of like, okay, maybe a weekend in your twenties is more valuable than a weekend in your forties. Right? Like it's going to be more fun. These are experiences you can't get back. They're at least different. And so it's not just grind set all the time, go sacrifice every day. It's like there's other things, other inputs that matter.
I think a lot of people early career keep, there's this lie that you can fall into a loop of telling yourself, particularly if you start your career in a fairly high earning job, like say that we're in New York, some investment bank. And it's probably the highest earning hyper-competitive job for 23 year olds. You go into that, you're making like close to a couple hundred thousand dollars pretty early out of school. You're not going to touch that money. You're risk adjusted. You're not going to touch that money doing anything else at that age. So you start doing this game of, okay, save up a couple of paychecks, leave, do something else. Then you're 24. You get promoted to associate. Now you're making more money. Do it again. Now the VP promotions up and you're 27. All right. Well, now you're making half a million plus. And on the flip side, because you've only done this thing forever, your market rate doing anything else is way lower. Right? So you can kind of sleepwalk into this game of, I will make, once I hit a little bit more money, I'll jump off and do the thing I want. And there's an opportunity cost associated with that, where you did the inverse where you did something else.
of school. You're not going to touch that money. You're risk adjusted. You're not going to touch that money doing anything else at that age. So you start doing this game of, okay, save up a couple of paychecks, leave, do something else. Then you're 24. You get promoted to associate. Now you're making more money. Do it again. Now the VP promotions up and you're 27. All right. Well, you know, now you're making half a million plus. And on the flip side, because you've only done this thing forever, your market rate doing anything else is way lower. Right?
So you can kind of sleepwalk into this game of, I will make, once I hit a little bit more money, I'll jump off and do the thing I want. And there's an opportunity cost associated with that, where you did the inverse where you didn't make that much money from 22 to 25. But then once you figured out the entire marketing Swiss army knife skillset, that's really high leverage when you're good at it. And you were then able to start your own business and so on.
I think you can lean one of two ways in your twenties, where you should either speed run accumulating capital quickly and then take your foot off the gas or speed run building up social capital and skillsets that are high leverage later, where your earnings power inflects a lot going into your thirties. Right? I think having high earnings power matters a lot more than having a set net worth at 29, 30. And there's a lot of ways to get there where you'll probably have more leverage going your route and just figuring things out.
But to your point about how you can't get those experiences back when you're older, even if you make $5 million and now you're 33, 34, you can take your foot off the gas and want to do some stuff. All the things that 23 or 24 year old you wanted to do, you can't go back in time. You can buy the thing, but you can't buy the decade younger version of you doing the thing. There's certain life experiences when you're pre-marriage, pre-kids, pre-home that are both more accessible and also more fun. My version of this was I spent a year hostel hopping in Europe and Latin America when I was 24.
That's a really good year to do that because one, it's objectively fun. Sleeping on trains, sleeping in hostels, just getting drunk with strangers all the time. I was still kind of a kid. There was no real career risk or trade off. There was so much time to recover on both the professional and personal life front that if I took the same trip now it would actively blow up momentum in a lot of spheres in my professional and personal life. It also kind of looks like a cry for help. If you're pushing 30 and you're staying in a bunk bed, at that age you should be making enough money that you can just get the hotel or the Airbnb.
So there's a lot of weird, funny adventure stuff that you can do when you're young and you can't do later. And what I think a lot of people underrate is the 35 year old that's hiring you when you're 25 will probably think you're way cooler if you're living somewhere abroad, starting your own company, even if it flames out. You just become a more interesting person. And that social capital actually gives you a massive competitive advantage in the professional world down the road. It's just really hard to see that if you're 24 and you're making 60K and your buddy's making 150K. But that gap is kind of peanuts in the grand scheme of things.
It's just tough to zoom out when you're still at the front end of your career. I don't think I'm at where I'm at now if I didn't do all the crazy stuff that I did when I was 21 to basically 24, because when I stopped playing, my goal was to make it to the NFL. So from 12 roughly to 21, it was just football, no party, no nothing. Where did you play in college? FIU. Nice. What position? I think it's an easy guess. I would say fullback. Well, you were stocky. It's a different time, you know? I was going to say I can't tell how beefy you were back then. I would guess linebacker or strong safety. No, running back. Okay, that fits the same body. It fits the bill.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It fits the bill. But that was my entire life. When I stopped playing ball and I moved to Texas, I had this moment of, okay, what are we going to do with life now if we didn't make it to the league? And this was kind of peak YouTube, peak travel YouTube. I don't know if y'all remember that era of the Jay Alvarez, the beautiful destinations, et cetera. It was crazy. You wouldn't believe what these photos are. Yeah, it was crazy. It was insane. You want to talk about mogging? It was insane. And so I had been bartending in college, saving up a good amount of money.
And then going on long trips to Europe. But the reason I say I don't think I'd be here now is because I picked up a camera to learn photography. But okay, I'm going to start making some content. I'm going to start dabbling into this world. I picked up the camera, took it to Europe, started making videos in Europe. And all of a sudden, that was the genesis of when I came back. I was like, can I start what I'm doing in Europe? Can I start doing that here in Austin? Can I start going to a business and be like, hey, I'll make your content for you?
And all of a sudden, a few years later, I have this little social agency that's working with 12 brands. And then it continues to spiral, continues to get bigger. But it all started because of the curiosity to go to these places, do the crazy stuff, whatever. And then when I was needed to focus, I'd focus. I was consuming the pods. I had other things that I was doing, but there was an information diet from the different podcasts, the different YouTube channels as I was still going. But I think that was one of the most important times of my life because now I do have a three-year-old. Now I am married and do we go to Europe and do those trips?
Yeah. But my partying, no. You know what I mean? Like I'm going to Disneyland and it's in Paris. You wouldn't want to do that. No, I don't want to. But you're glad you did it then. Yeah, 100%. Like the stories that I have that I'm able to talk to people about of being in Tanzania and going in the Serengeti. Ngorogoro Crater is a goated location, by the way. Say again. Ngorogoro Crater in Tanzania. Did you go there? No. Oh, you should. That is one you can do with the family. I went to the Serengeti too with my grandma back in the day, but anyway, total side arc. Tanzanian safari is probably the all-time best trip you can take. So that's sick that you did that too.
Best trip I've ever taken. But yeah, a lot of who I am now is because of this four or five year stretch that I had in my early twenties. And the skillsets that I built during that time helped me speed ramp my income from 25 to 30. Right? Because similar to you, it was like, do you know how to run paid ads? Yeah, I know how to run paid ads. Goes home and looks up YouTube videos on how to run paid ads. I was on those Udemy courses. Yeah, exactly. You can just ask AI how to do the thing now versus having to find a course or having to find a book or something. It's just the speed at which you can get up to speed on stuff now.
However, I would actually push back because I think the thing that people pay Alex and I for is sauce. It's the war story.
Who I am now is because of this four or five year stretch that I had in my early twenties, and the skillsets that I built during that time helped me speed ramp my income from 25 to 30. Because similar to you, it was like, do you know how to run paid ads? Yeah, I know how to run paid ads. I go home and look up YouTube videos on how to run paid ads. I was on those Udemy courses. Exactly. You can just ask AI how to do the thing now versus having to find a course, a pre-course, a book or something. It's the speed at which you can get up to speed on stuff now. However, I would actually push back because I think the thing that people pay Alex and I for is sauce. It's the war story that is associated with the recommendation. I know you do that all the time where it's like, this is why you should shoot the campaign in this way because we did this with Malibu. All of a sudden there's social proof, credibility is stacked with your recommendation versus if you just give it. It's the same reason why everyone could always learn marketing from HubSpot. They had a million free articles, perfectly optimized for SEO on how to run, how to write copy. Those are not like the drop shipping demons on Twitter that are teaching you. I do love those guys. They're psychopaths and they run the world. The ECOB mafia is phenomenal. Those guys are great. So layering the experience with the actual tactic is typically what makes it a high income skill. Dude, tell them where they can get the book. Tell them where they can find you on Twitter, everywhere. Jack Rains, every single profile or every single platform I have a cowboy hat on. So Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok now with a small fledgling but loyal following. Look up the cowboy hat guide, Jack Rains. The book is called Young Money: A Field Guide to Wealth and Purpose in Your Twenties. My Substack is also called Young Money. So basically look up Jack Rains and Young Money. You can find me anywhere. You can get the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, ebook on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, whatever.
Yeah. They, they just kind of all kept spawning for like all of 2024. It's like copy paste over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. It's hyper effective content cause you stay until the end. Right. I mean, that's. I know. I, I like mentally I'm hating on the whole video, but I'm still there. It is the biggest, it is actually probably the goaded hate watch of our times is like all of these videos and Jack is a cool kid. Like I don't. There's like thousands, there's thousands of comments saying fuck this guy and he's just laughing all the way to the bank with like a Nike deal or Brooks deal or whatever. I mean, it's good motion. You guys got me.
Um, but anyway, smoke did post a reel where he was like talking about my book and then he says Jack and then it cuts to like a Jack Nassif hype video because his editor just assumed he was referring to a different Jack and I, I text smoke. I was like, thanks for the shout out, but they put the wrong Jack in the video. He said, dude, I actually can't watch it on Instagram right now because I'm in Russia. And I was like, what? He said side quest maxing. Um, he was like, I got that from your book. And I was like, I didn't, you didn't have to go to Dagestan, but that's fine. Like, I'm like, I think you took it too. Literally. Oh, that's, that's hilarious.
No, I mean, he like his video blew up and had like 9,000 likes. He was telling me how many like engagements, clicks, messages, sends it had, it popped off. And I think it's, I think it's. Other Jack gained 10,000 followers. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 25 DMs, some girls in New York. Yeah. Um, but I, I do think people can tell when a review is authentic or not. And then if somebody that they look onto says something like authentically endorses a book, it's much more likely to move it. Like there are definitely ways you can gain and scale UGC. Like I'm, I'm sure that I could orchestrate a really good like paid campaign to ramp it up.
Um, I just don't want to throw 50 or a hundred thousand dollars, like growing a book. If people are reading it organically and I keep posting about it, it'll keep going. It's an interesting conversation around like creating that always on marketing engine. Right. Because like all the things that we talk about is so in the past, it was all about moment marketing. Right. Like how can I get a celebrity to post about me at a capstone moment? And then hopefully I'm in people's memories from there. And now if you're investing constantly in creators, then you can have basically viral moments every day. Right.
If you have the right slideshow strategy, if you have the right testimonial strategy from these people, theoretically, you know, you could commission them. You could put this book on TikTok shop, seed it to a thousand creators, and then roll out some sort of like slideshow strategy where it's like, I mean, you've had, what's interesting about your approach is you actually do have a lot of data on what is resonating with people. So one of the things you've done is you'll put out a tweet and highlight a passage from the book. Yeah. Right. And then say you did that 10 times. Well, out of the 10 tweets that you had, the top three in performance are objectively
what resonated with people the most. That's, that's the data. Right. So you could then distribute that exact strategy in a slideshow format to a bunch of different creators and say, you know, this passage and changed my life. This passage. Made me rethink my twenties, this passage, whatever. And then it's a swipe to reveal. And then it's just the highlighted thing. Right. And you could just flood the zone. So my longer term plan on this is do that. But instead of like, there, there's a decent chance I will seed creators at some point on this, but in the name of like, I have a big Twitter, LinkedIn, and Substack following.
I've been doing this on my own accounts on Instagram and like you told me I should do the tick tock carousel thing. Yeah, you were right. Like I have 25 followers on tick tock. Now a couple of thousand views on something I put up where, and then two people DM me like, yo, I just bought your book, blah, blah, blah, where you can see the, how the algorithm works. It's like, okay, thing works on Twitter. It works on Instagram. There's probably. This needs to be like repackaged per platform. That's it. But the same thing will work on tick tock. So using my own best hits over and over and over again to then grow on those platforms where
I then own that distribution, which drives more book sales. It's like the, I think once I hit some level of scale on those platforms, if there's a version of like seeding creators, then also having like my account tagged in that or collaborating or whatever makes sense. But like proving out which things work on my own things first, and then also benefiting from the platform growth. So something, something that, uh, I was talking to this guy recently, which is some free game for everybody is on tick tock shop. Typically there's a 5,000 follower, uh, criteria to become an affiliate. So you have to have 5,000 followers.
The goal is to not let people bought accounts and you can't have just, you know, infinite spam, right? You gotta have 5,000 followers. So speaking of Dagestan, there is a secondary market to buy these accounts from, you know, central Asian countries typically, but, uh, that going price around $350 for anyone that's curious, but, um, you don't have to do that anymore because what tick tock has done is they allow you to take a spark ad code, which is like a code that goes behind a video and you can run it in an ad campaign. You can now run that on a tick tock shop ad campaign called jmv max.
So it used to be, you would have to build this army of 5,000 follower creators and then send them a physical copy because they're real people. Right. But if I were you, what I could do now is do like, you know, young money, underscore quotes, young money, underscore ambition, young money, underscore whatever. And you build like maybe, I don't know, 30, 50 accounts post every single day. You take those spark codes, put them in the GMV max campaign. You could run ads against your stuff without having to build a physical person, create an army. Like you could actually just have an intern spamming this content every single day, all day long.
Just on a bunch of young money, tick tocks. Correct. Interesting. It's like an army of theme pages that you could essentially take the spark ad codes from post five times a day and just run this carousel method. I'm very curious if that would actually convert to sales though, where like, I'm sure it could give the eyeballs, but I don't know. Like I, I've been a little skeptical of tick tock as just from talking to other people who've done like nonfiction books, again, book talk for the like specific smut romance, whatever, it moves books. It was like not a massive, at least not nearly as big relative to that book talk for call it like narrative nonfiction or whatever.
So I am, it's worth dabbling with. I'm curious how well the engagement would be on that. We would have to check the charts. I saw a few things that were doing pretty well. Like, I don't know if it was subtle art of giving a fuck, but, or not giving a fuck, but it was something adjacent to that, that had a pretty good moment. Right. And I mean, based on some of the numbers that you're mentioning, like I'm talking about these stores doing 300 to 500 K a month in revenue. Yeah. So I think that's probably enough to clear, obviously get into that bestseller range. Yeah, for sure. The nice thing about GMV max is like you're running ads only at a fixed ROI threshold.
So if you say like, I don't want to spend more than a 4X return on ad spend, then it won't, it just won't spend. Right. So it's not like risk-free, but it is something that you could attempt and kind of try and grow tech. Now y'all already know we are super skeptical on this show about most AI tools promising the world. They have flashy demos, huge promises, and ultimately under deliver. But I do have to tell you about one that has blown me away and saved my team countless hours of time. And that's rich panel. Imagine a 24 seven customer support engine that handles all of your tickets seamlessly, escalates anything requiring human intervention.
And here's the best part upsells your customers in the process. Their onboarding process is frankly, one of the craziest things I've ever seen. You input your brand in within 15 minutes. It has full context on the latest drops product information and plugs into all of your apps. That's not even to mention the cost savings. They're like three times more affordable than their competitors. I couldn't recommend this enough. So if you're a brand looking to turn support into an asset, go check out richpanel.com and tell them we sent you. So some free alpha for any aspiring writers on here, plugging your own Amazon affiliate code anywhere that you're pushing the book.
I had, um, there's this guy, it's, he wrote, um, his burner Twitter account was Goldman Sachs elevator. This is like an OG, like early 2010s. Yeah. Um, his name's John LaFerre, LaFerre. I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but anyway, wrote a bestseller, um, basically about, like debauchery that he saw when he was working for Goldman and he, um, he, he DMed me and he was like, Hey dude, like checking out your book stoked for you. Plug your Amazon code literally everywhere, because I don't, I don't know if it still works like this or not, but apparently any items that get put in someone's Amazon cart, um, within 24 hours
of them also putting your book in their car, if they use your code, you get like a, basically like an affiliate revenue on the entire cart. So on the, on the basket, if you, yeah. So if you catch, you know, like this would be a really good Christmas book, for example, for the youngins out there and you catch some mom who's loading up on like Christmas shopping on Amazon, you can get the whole thing. Young money book, get the whole thing. And he, he said, he said he probably missed out on a couple of hundred grand and just like free upside for himself by not doing that. And I've made like low thousands of dollars, but have made some money from that just because
my tweets and thing that people see, they click that. And I, I don't know if any of those have been, I don't know if I've had any like whale carts that drove all that, or if it's like book by book, but it is, um, I don't know if you're already like selling the book, you might as well get as much money as possible. We can per copy. Yeah. One thing I keep thinking about is have you seen the Opal app? The what app? Opal. Opal app. What is it? It's basically an app to help you get off of your screen, right? Less screen time. But the funny thing is though, they have two separate accounts. They have the Opal app.
That's like the main account on IG, but then they have this separate account. This is why I asked about the creator, or if you have a creator that works well, they have a completely separate account called Olivia unplugged. And like, she has this dedicated Instagram to basically helping people live better lives off of their phone. And so that she has like this one set that she kind of uses where it's just her with a dry erase mark or like dry erase board. She kind of has like a theme for every, every piece of content. You know, it's like seven things to do, you know, X, Y, Z. Right. I think about this.
And I think about that there's such an opportunity to be able to do the same thing with this, those same lessons, have a dedicated page to the young 20 year olds where you're taking just lessons from the book. And there's one creator that then is forming all of those, those episodes. That account grew to, I think it was 170,000 followers off of a hundred pieces of content. And it's, it's like not a hard, like, it's not too expensive to, to pull off. Um, because like the way the algorithms are shifting to, especially on Instagram, it's so interest-based where if you can have a more niche account or a, an account dedicated to
a specific topic, the better it's always going to perform better. It's always going to grow better than the very broad account. That's why I even seem like kind of creators have these sub accounts that are based off specific topics. But I feel like looking at like the chapters in here, there are so many different angles that you can take with so many different, different episodes. Um, the problem with someday, like seven reasons why to never do, you know, choose someday. Yeah. Like there's, there's so much content that lives within these chapters. Yeah. It's like layer on con common formats, common hooks, all this different stuff into each chapter.
And then you have an entire content calendar. And the thing that's also nice about what Alex was saying is like, it's so clustered right now on, on the algorithms. Like once she has, or he, if it's a performative male, which probably should staff it with your demographic. If one video hits, then it'll snowball five more videos to that same viewer. Right. And so that's the importance of posting volume and compounding it is like, you already have all of the material. It's just formatting it for Instagram. And just turning it up. And that's the thing, like the, the beauty about Instagram is kind of what you were saying
earlier, where if one piece of content hits, it's all about them getting into the remainder of the other formats that are working on, on Instagram. And it will continue to work. Right. So like, if it works as a green screen video or it works as a talking head or a yap, it's like, cool. How do I get into a one shot video, 10 shot video, yap video, a carousel? Like there's so many different ways to skin it where one piece of content can now accumulate five, 10 million views over one topic. Right. And then if it's the whole page is dedicated to, to the book, right. It's like built off the base of the book. It's an entire funnel that then you can retarget.
It gets, when you do get into paid and all that, it's like, you get into an interesting place where you could almost look at like the different interest clusters and then make targeted ads towards each interest cluster, just because like that account is dedicated to this specific book. You know what we should do? We should make Jake Mazai be the, be the UGC performed a male. We absolutely should. I don't know if you saw this tweet I put out last week, the week before, um, I was on the West side highway running and it's, I, I see this guy, he was my like best friend, former roommate posted up. This kid, Jake is the peak performative male of New York.
Like goes out several nights a week. So plays really, he played D one soccer, still super competitive and he shredded like, like, uh, uh, I don't know, like, I mean, he receives a comment about his biceps. Nurses, nurses love him because nobody, there's nobody in the world was vascular as this dude. It's ridiculous. It's annoying. And he, there's like, there's a socially acceptable like distance within the West side highway where it's like, okay to be shirtless, but then you're firmly back in civilization. Should put a shirt back on. He just won't put a shirt back on. Like he will be walking through Times Square shirtless.
And anyway, he's, he's seated in like a park over there. And I didn't know he was going to be out there and I didn't realize he was going to have my book. And he was sitting there looking at his phone with a book just on his knee like this. And I took a picture walking up and said, um, or a farmer spotted on the West side highway. And like quote tweeted my book tweet with that the quote tweet got 600,000 views. It just blew up. I was like, okay, there's the, the entire like existence and reality of the performative male is really having a moment where it's like between the run clubs and just like,
just dudes trying to do stuff for attention and just peacock and get girls attention. It's it's, it's just a curated Instagram feed of a guy. Yeah. Like, I don't know when the phrase performative male became a thing, but it just describes a thing that's existed forever better than any phrase has ever described anything. So I am planning on doing a, a performative male book signing event on the West side highway, where I just, I got another 25 copies of the book from the publisher and I'm going to put together a party full and just throw it all over social media and say, Hey, like next Sunday, first 25 dudes to show up shirtless, sign copy of the book.
And if you already have one, you show up shirtless outside it, but no chicks allow, they have to stay across the street and they're going to rip just a, just a meat market of dudes over there. Yeah. But there's the social proof of like putting that tweet out and it just hitting escape velocity immediately. And then, okay, throw it on LinkedIn. Guess what? It rips on there. Instagram or rips on there. It's just so obviously like a fun, it's like an inside joke. And the entire internet is in on a hundred percent. Well, and also once you understand that, like the algorithms like patterns, you can repeat those patterns.
So like you could do this with every one of our friends, you could basically throw on the West side highway with the book in a similar candid position, continue to just quote tweet your original post and then like snowball it from there. And it becomes like a meme almost like you create, you create the meme. My, my favorite bit was the, like a couple of years ago, the performative male was the, the, it was like the fake liberal Bushwick male who like walks around with a tote bag and has like the fault in our stars in the bag and posted up just like reading like this in a cafe, except
we've now come the full opposite way where the, the, the modern day version of the performative male is like the giga chat who wants to be seen in the scene where it's almost gone like full opposite whip whiplash of the like feminized fake barista to the, like people need to think I played a sport in college. Even if I didn't like the high rocks male is the new performative male. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys just run on the West side highway. Um, what are some of the pieces of the book that have resonated with people the most? So before getting into the pieces, it's something that's been very funny is the amount of people
who just aren't like the, the subtitle is literally a field guide to wealth and purpose in your twenties, which says, Hey, this is for young people. And the amount of like 42 year olds who've hit me up saying, man, like I get that you're marketing it toward 20 somethings, but I found it to be like very valuable or at least just interesting to see like somebody else's take. Cause so much of it comes from the, like my life story from my twenties. Um, but the, I think the things that really hit people were the, in the back half of the book, I dive into status and apathy. I think that like people falling in apathy traps or chasing status games are like kind of two of the
biggest psychological problems, especially facing young people today, where if you've seen that, like the, the picture of, um, Maslow, Maslov's hierarchy of needs pyramid, whatever, at least in America and like high cost of living cities, everybody's kind of at the top, like fighting for self-actualization at this point, people are making money. If you feel like you're not making enough money, it's usually just in comparison to your peers, that it is like a net actual reality. And you're kind of getting pulled back and forth between this just constant anxiety of like, I'm not making enough money or not getting promoted fast enough, or I'm not on the career
track or my friend joined the hot startup. They sold their company. They're flying up the investment banking ladder. And you just start sprinting, trying to like chase every one of those, not, not because you independently want that thing. It's just, you're seeing people have these outward signs of success, and then you keep redirecting your life off of that. Or you get so overwhelmed by seeing just all this like mass optionality and success that you just mocked out. Like I've seen this play out a ton is particularly I've lived in New York for four years and I've seen both sides of like hyper competitive striver that can achieve those goals that perpetually burn out.
And then people who just kind of tap out and quit because they're exhausted from putting themselves in like a mental rumination loop. So I, I go super, super deep on it. Cause I'm like, I've been susceptible to both of those different times in my life. And I just kind of dig into what it feels like going through that and like real time. And then also my thoughts on both high level, like why this is, you are quite literally wasting your life when you're stuck in one of these, like every year that you spend in one of these cycles is another year that you can't get back. Um, but also how they're just like inherently self-defeating.
And, uh, you know, there's, there's a lot of life advice, a lot of life advice books out there that hone in on like how to make the most of your career or they do the opposite where they say like, screw the corporate ladder, you should like go do what you love. And both of those are just really, really detached from reality. And I think, I think that like, when you start reading this initially, it's like, oh, is this a personal finance book? It's much more of like a psychological book than anything else. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, you know, I don't know how you viewed your twenties, but I thought I viewed
my early career as an opportunity to accumulate experience and like get my hands dirty and like actually build skills and I sacrificed a tremendous amount of like financial security during those early years, because I was like, all right, like I'll take an under market deal to figure out how to run Facebook ads. Like I literally don't know how to do it. So you actually shouldn't pay me a lot. And then you eventually kind of like get good at it. And at the same time, like I didn't want to sacrifice. My youth and like not travel and like, you know, not go out and not kind of like learn experiences.
And I feel like that's really sort of the mentality that you pitch in this, where it's like, there isn't just this finite amount of, or there isn't an infinite amount of time either. Right. Like the value that you assign to spending time in your twenties is much more valuable than the value you should spend time on your forties. Yeah. Like, and so that, that was something that I really liked about the book where it's kind of like, okay, you know, yeah, maybe like a weekend in your twenties is like more valuable than a weekend in your forties. Right. Like it's gonna be more fun. These are experiences you can't get back. They're at least different.
And so it's not just grind set all the time, go sacrifice every day. It's like, there's other things, other inputs that matter. I think a lot of people early career keep, there's this lie that you can fall into a loop of telling yourself, particularly if you start your career in a fairly high earning job, like say that we're in New York, some investment bank. And it's probably the, the highest earning hyper-competitive job for 23 year olds. You go into that, you're making like close to a couple hundred thousand dollars pretty early out of school. You're not going to touch that money. You're risk adjusted.
You're not going to touch that money doing anything else at that age. So you start doing this game of, okay, save up a couple of paychecks, leave, do something else. Then you're 24. 24. You get promoted to associate. Now you're making more money. Do it again. Now the VP promotions up and you're like 27. All right. Well, you know, now you're making half a million plus. And on the flip side, because you've only done this thing forever, your market rate doing anything else is way lower. Right? So you can kind of sleepwalk into this game of, I will make, once I hit a little bit more money, I'll jump off and do the thing I want.
And there's an opportunity cost associated with that, where like you did the inverse where you didn't make that much money from like 22 to 25. But then once you figured out like basically the entire call it like marketing, Swiss army knife skillset, that's really high leverage when you're good at it. And like you were then able to start your own business and blah, blah, blah. Um, I think you can lean one of two ways of your twenties, where you should either speed run accumulating capital quickly and then take your foot off the gas or speed run building up social capital and skillsets that are high leverage later, where your earnings power
inflex a lot going into your thirties. Right? Like I, I think having high earnings power matters a lot more than like set net worth at 29, 30. And there's a lot of ways to get there where, you know, you'll probably have more leverage going like your route and just figuring things out. Um, but to your point of like, you can't get those experiences back when you're older. Even if you, you know, say that you make $5 million and now you're 33, 34, you can take your foot off the gas and want to do some stuff. All the things that 23 or 24 year old you wanted to do, you can't go back in time.
Like you can, you can buy the thing, but you can't buy the decade younger version of you doing the thing. There's certain life experiences when you're pre marriage, pre kids, pre home that are both more accessible and also more fun. My version of this was I spent a year of hostel hopping in Europe and Latin America when I was 24. That's being 24 is a really good year to do that because one it's objectively fun, like sleeping on trains, sleeping in hostels, just getting drunk with strangers all the time. There was, there was, I was still kind of a kid. There was no real career risk or like trade off.
Like there was so much time to recover on both the professional and personal life front that I took the same trip. Now it would like actively blow up momentum and a lot of, and a lot of spheres in my professional and personal life. It also kind of looks like a cry for help. If you're pushing 30 and you're staying in a bunk bed, like at that age, you should be making enough money. You can just like get the hotel or the Airbnb dude. So there's like a, a lot of just like weird, funny adventure stuff that you can do when you're young and you can't do later. And what I think a lot of people underrate is the 35 year old that's hiring you when you're 25
will probably think you're way cooler. If you, it can be like living somewhere abroad, starting your own company, even if it flames out, you just become a more interesting person. And that social capital actually gives you a massive competitive advantage in like the professional world down the road. It's just really hard to see that if you're 24 and you're making 60 K and your buddy's making 150 K. And, but it's that gap is kind of peanuts in the grand scheme of things. It's just, it's tough to zoom out when you're still at the front end of your career. I don't think I'm at where I'm at now. If I didn't do all the crazy that I did when I was 21 to
basically 24, because when I stopped playing, my, my goal was to make it to the NFL. So like from 12 roughly to 21, it was just football, no party, no nothing. Where do you play in college? FIU. Nice. And, and so like that was, what position do you think you played? I think it's an easy guess. I mean, I would, I would say fullback. Well, it was your stocky. It's a, it's a different time, you know? I was going to say, like I was, dude, I, the thing is, I can't tell how like beefy you were about then. I would guess like linebacker or strong safety. No running back. Okay. Okay. So that, that fits the same body. It fits the bill though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It fits the bill.
Um, but that was my entire life. When I stopped playing ball and I moved to Texas, I had this like, okay, what are, what are we going to do with life now if we didn't make it, make it to the league? Um, and this is kind of like peak YouTube, like peak travel YouTube. I don't know if y'all remember that era of like the Jay Alvarez, the beautiful destinations, et cetera, where it's like all that. You would not believe what these photos are. Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. You want to talk about mogging? It was insane. It was insane. And so I had where I was just like bartending in college, saving up a good amount of money.
Um, and then going on like these long trips to Europe. Right. But the reason I say, I don't think I'd be here now is because I picked up a camera to learn photography to, but okay, I'm gonna start making some content. I'm gonna start dabbling into this world. Picked up the camera, took it to Europe, started making videos in Europe. And all of a sudden, like that was the genesis of when I came back. I was like, can I start what I'm doing in Europe? Can I start doing that here in, in Austin? Can I start going to a business and be like, Hey, I'll make your content for you. And all of a sudden, a few years
later, it's like, I have this little social agency that's working with 12 brands. And then it, it continues to spiral. It continues to, to get bigger. But it all started because of like the curiosity to go to these places, do the crazy shit, whatever. And then when I was needed to focus, I'd focus. I was consuming the pods. I was like, sure. I had the that I was doing, but I was, there was like an information diet from the different, from, uh, uh, from the different podcasts, the different YouTube channels as I was still going. But I think that was like one of the, the most important times
of my life because now I do have a three-year-old now I am married and, and do we go to Europe and do those trips? Yeah. But my partying, no, my, you know what I mean? Like I'm going to Disneyland and it's in Paris. You wouldn't want to do that. No, I don't want to. But you're glad you did it then. Yeah. 100%. Like the stories that I have that I'm able to talk to people about of like being in Tanzania and going in the Serengeti and like. Ngorogora Crater is a goaded location, by the way. Say again. Ngorogora Crater in Tanzania. Did you go there? No. Oh, it's well, you should,
you should, that is one you can do with the family. Um, I, I went to the Serengeti too with my grandma back in the day, but anyway, total side arc. Tanzanian safari is like probably all time best trip you can take. So that's sick that you did that too. Best trip I've ever taken. But yeah, a lot of who I am now is because like this four or five year stretch that I had early twenties, you know, and then, and the skillsets that I built during that time helped me speed ramp my, my income from 25 to 30. Right. Because I, similar to you, it was like, yeah, like, do you know how
to run paid ads? Yeah. I know how to run paid ads. Goes home and like looks up YouTube videos, how to run paid ads. I was on those Udemy courses. Yeah, exactly. That's that you can just ask AI how to do the thing now versus having to find a course or pre-course having to find like a book or something. It's just the, the speed at which you can get up speed on stuff now. However, I actually, I would actually push back because I think the thing that people pay Alex and I for is like sauce. It's like the war story that is associated with the recommendation. You know, I mean, I know you do that all the time where it's
like, yo, like this is why you should shoot the campaign in this way because we did this with Malibu. Right. All of a sudden there's social proofs credibility is stacked with your recommendation versus like, if you just give, it's kind of the same reason why everyone, you could always learn marketing from HubSpot. Right. They had a million free articles, perfectly optimized for SEO on like how to run, how to write copy. Right. Those are not like the drop shipping demons on Twitter that are teaching you. I do love those guys. I mean, they're psychopaths and they run the world. The ECOB, the ECOB mafia is freaking phenomenal. Those guys are great.
Yeah. And so, you know, I think the layering the experience with the actual tactic is, is typically what makes it a high income skill. Yeah. But, um, well dude, tell them where they can get the book. Uh, tell them where they can find you on Twitter, everywhere. Um, Jack rains, every single profile or every single platform I have a cowboy hat on. So Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, I guess, tick tock. Now the, of small fledgling, but loyal following, um, look up the cowboy hat guide, Jack rains. The book is called young money, a field guide to wealth and purpose in your twenties. Um, my sub stack is also
called young money. So basically look up Jack rains and young money. You can find me anywhere. You can get the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble ebook on Spotify, Apple podcasts, audible, whatever. you have that Amazon affiliate in the you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put you put Thank you.