All right, so we have another question here speaking of careers. This one is from Jeff. Jeff says, "Hi Cal, earlier this year, you were talking about how the principles of your book, 'So Good They Can't Ignore You,' don't really apply to lawyers because the more career capital they get, the more work they get, which leads to less freedom and less autonomy.

My question is, what should we lawyers in the audience do?" And he goes on to say that he is a six-year associate. Well, Jeff, what you can do is leave the big law firm job. And not to be stark about it, but career capital theory is pretty clear. You build leverage by doing rare and valuable things, but that's only really useful if you can then apply that leverage to shape your career towards things that resonate and away from things that don't.

Big city law firm jobs where you work your way up the associate ladder, you're a six-year associate, which means you're about to go up for partnership. And then after partnership, you go up for equity partnership. And then you work up a ladder of equity partnership until the very highest you could possibly get is named a partner.

And the money goes up with each of those levels. And the money is good if you're in DC, let's say, big city with one of these big firms. These numbers really vary, but we're talking about you're starting as a younger associate, you're already at $300,000 or $400,000 a year.

As a junior partner, you're probably talking six, $700,000. Equity partner, you're going to break at a big firm, like a Skaggan, you're going to break a Wilmer, you'll break seven figures. And then these more senior equity partners at a big city, the big firm, one five, one six, something like that.

So you make a lot of money, but it's incredibly time demanding. And it demands more and more of your time. There's almost nothing you can invest your career capital in other than getting more money and maybe some influence on what your practice is. You can kind of carve out your own practices, but you're not going to get more autonomy.

The other buckets, the non-craft buckets of the deep life, you're going to have a really hard time doing much of anything in any of those buckets, if you're going to work up that ladder. Now, for some, I don't know, they value the money, they value the prestige. For some, it's this money is going to allow a lifestyle that's good for my, the rest of my family, and that's my contribution.

And that's fine. But if it's not fine for you, if you feel overwhelmed by work, if it's stressing you out, it's making you anxious, you feel hemmed in, you feel miserable. And a lot of lawyers do in those situations. The answer is to leave the big law firm, do something else with your law degree, and it'll be a lot less money.

But so what? I don't know what's the good of the one six, if you only have six hours a week that you're seeing your family. So I usually am pretty radical about that. You have to go into a big firm law career with your eyes open. This is what it's going to be, and it's not going to get better.

And so many people stumble into it because it's just, this is the next step up. This is more prestigious than this. And it's not that there's not value in doing something competitive. There is. And it's not that it will make you feel better because it does. And it's not that you don't get pride out of having such a hard elite job.

You should. It's very difficult to give you someone to pay you seven figures for anything, right? That's hard to do. And there is some pride there. But if it is making you miserable, there's no way, there's no way to reconfigure your job at a big law firm that's going to get rid of that misery.

So I just like to put that option on the table of the proverbial big city lawyers. Know what you're getting into. And if that's not working, I can't give you a way out that's going to preserve that salary, that's going to preserve the house in Chevy Chase and the private school in the second house on the beach.

I can't give you a way out that's going to preserve all of that. It's going to be a pretty radical lifestyle change, a different type of law, something your own firm, something that you can control how many clients you take on or off. And that's basically what you're going to have to do, Jeff.

So look, this is probably the time to think about that before you go up for partnership. I hope I'm not the bearer of bad news, but I just think it's important to be clear. This is the reality of that job. And let's not pretend like it's not, or like it's going to be different somehow, different somehow for you.

You know, Jesse, I went down. The reason why I had those salary numbers on hand is for some reason I went down a rabbit hole of lawyer compensation. Because I know a lot of lawyers who are very stressed out and I was trying to compare. I was like, well, how much like do I make as a writer versus what they're doing and how much more flexible is my job?

And I went down this rabbit hole and you can like find a lot of these numbers. It's a big topic of discussion in the DC area. But I never know how people think about those jobs. Like when you hear those numbers, those salary numbers, did that surprise you as more than you thought, less than you thought, or about what you would have thought lawyers were making around here?

- About what I thought, I would say. - I find that people who live in the cities, like, yeah, that's what I'd expect. And people who don't, like, what? You get a million dollars a year to be a junior equity partner? What is that? - Yeah. It's also a weird perspective for me.

Cause I have a couple, like a few, like really good friends who kill it on the internet. So then I, you know, when I see those numbers, I mean, I'm nothing like any of that, but I see those numbers and I'm like, that's nothing, you know? - Here's the hierarchy, the elite job, the elite job hierarchy in terms of salaries, right?

So you have lawyers and like investment bankers, lawyers at big firms and investment bankers for firms like Goldman, right? So lawyers, you can, you hit seven figures when you get to the partner level, again, big firm, big company. If you're at something like Goldman Sachs, when you get to the managing director level, you're going to hit seven figures plus with bonuses, right?

So that's in the elite jobs, actually, this is going to be at the bottom of our platform. Then the next thing you have above that is, all right, so then the more elite jobs are, I'm trying to see how I order this. I guess I would order it next, maybe like venture capitalists.

If you had a really big venture capital firm, where you can get a cut of the returns, now you can jump above that low seven figures and get that good, healthy mid seven figure type payouts. And then you have this big leap where you get to the tech sector, like your friends, and then the tech sector, because you can have businesses that are bought, that's where you start to get eight figure or low nine figure paydays.

So now it's okay, I've started a tech company and I netted 30 million in the sale. So now we're at that eight figure level. And then the people who lord over it all is the hedge fund managers. Because now when you're a hedge fund manager, they laugh at everyone else because they can do eight or nine figure income every single year, because they're getting their carry cost of these really big hedge funds.

And so then they look at the tech people and say, look, you're laughing at the Goldman guy who makes one five a year because you sold your company for 30 million. But that took you five years to sell your company for 30 million. And I pull in 150 million a year, every year for my hedge fund.

And then the very top hedge fund people will bring in a billion dollars a year plus. So there's your hierarchy of like crazy amounts of money that elite jobs. Notice nowhere in that hierarchy that I say author podcasters, we don't land on that hierarchy, unfortunately. Professor podcasters don't land on that hierarchy.

But that's a whole interesting world, like the super big money job world. CEOs are in there too. CEOs of big companies land where the tech people are, seven, eight figure salaries. So- Have you seen the new show on Showtime, super pumped I read the book. It's about- Is this on Uber?

Yeah. Yeah. It's about Travis Kalanick. There's a episode two just was released this week. And there's a good scene in there where the VC brings him to the airfield where there's all the private jets. And he's like, what do you need to say to me? He goes, are we going somewhere?

And then he was like, so-and-so. And then Travis is pretty brash, pretty confident guy. And he was like, I started, he had a couple of lines about like Elon Musk and Bezos and stuff, like owning like 40 of those planes and like, what do you really want to do?

What I really want to do is own all of those planes. Not go on net jets. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. We're getting there. We have a couple more steps before we're buying the Deep Questions private plane. So we are- You got to get it before the 200th episode so we can go to South Africa.

To go to that, yeah. For that main episode. Yeah. So we're almost there. We want to get like a boom arm for our computer monitor so we can move it. So that's first. I want to get longer cables for our video switcher so that when we have guests, we can bring the video switcher so you can switch video for us.

That's two. So boom arm for the computer monitor. That's number one. Longer cables for the video switcher. That's number two. Private jet. That's number three. Number four, I'm thinking we should have our own coffee maker because we buy a lot of coffee. And so those are the things we're working on.

I think with that sweet workable money and grammarly money, we'll have that private jet right after we get those longer cables. That's depressing thinking about big money people. But I got to say, those people must all be incredibly stressed out. That's all stressed out. I think the sweet spot I still think is genre novelist.

So you produce one thing a year, but you don't have to win book. It doesn't have to be literature because there's too much stress if you're a literary novelist because you live and die by the reviews. But no, you're writing like a Jack Reacher book. It doesn't have to be literature.

You have your formula, one book a year. No one expects you to do anything else. Lee Child doesn't have a big social media presence. He doesn't podcast. You just have to write a book. They don't expect you to do anything else because people are just used to buying your book.

You make a good amount of money. Like Lee Child, he bought the apartment above their apartment for writing. So he could get there pretty quickly. But it's not Travis was his name money. He's not flying around in private jets. But they have a writing house by the beach and very little is expected from them.

That's the sweet spot. You have a lot of money, but not a crazy amount of money. But it's the money to anxiety ratio. I think that's got to be the, if we put the other way, anxiety to the money ratio. That must be the lowest anxiety to the money ratio you can find, in my opinion, is successful genre novelist that produces one novel a year in a successful series.

That's the sweet spot. Like it. Yeah. So I got to start writing. So I'm going to announce my new detective series about a suave computer scientist who by day solves theorems and by night fights international terrorist rings. Well, you know, fighting off the women who fall in love with them.

And then when you do the audio version, you need to have some character in there with the voice that you used last week. That was classic. And that French character. Yeah. That French character will be in there. We got a note from Tim Ferriss, his chief of staff, who runs all this podcast.

And he sent us a note saying that he really appreciated the accent. Oh, it was great. I was dying. So that character will be in there. And the character will obviously be me. We'll call him Kevin Newhouse, but it'll clearly be me, but I'm going to have David Goggins voice him.

So he's going to have this really aggressive, deep, awesome voice. And the audio books are going to have a lot of musical interludes, like action musical interludes while I fight. And then I'll buy the house next to mine to be a writing house. And well, there we go. So it's all mapped out.