#737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas

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4:11 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then also do those questions. Now it's in the time. cybernetic organism living tissue over metal and those galaxy So Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers.

4:42 From every field imaginable to tease out the habits. routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply. And test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about. And past one billion downloads.

5:00 To celebrate I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites. From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these

5:14 The Super Combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks. But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider. Stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.

5:31 Perhaps They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests. You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo.

5:47 And now, without further ado. Please enjoy. And thank you. For listening. First up.

5:54 Naval Ravakant At Naval On AirChat and Twitter. Co founder of AirChat and Angel List. and host of the Naval Podcast.

6:05 I have a couple of core foundational values. They're not things that I explicitly develop. They're just sort of you can look back after the fact and say, Oh yeah, I won't compromise on those things. But now I realize how important honesty is. And I learned that from a couple of different places. One is when I grew up I wanted to be a physicist. And I idols Richard Feynman. I read everything by him technical and non technical that I could get my hands on.

6:28 And he said, You must never ever fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. The physics grounding is very important because physics you have to speak truth. You don't compromise, you don't negotiate with people. You don't try and make them feel better because if your equation is wrong, it just won't work whatever you're doing. So I think the science background is important in that.

6:47 A second is growing up in New York, I grew up around some really rough and tumble kids, some of who were actually the Russian mob, and I once had an encounter where I watched one of them threaten to kill the other. and the would be victim went and hid and then finally he let the aggressor into his house after the aggressor promised him, No, I'm not gonna kill you. Honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other They would take each other's word for things. It's sort of went above everything. And even though it was honesty in a mob context, I realized like how important that is in relationships.

7:19 And then as I get older in life, I realized that a lot of happiness is just being present. And whether you get this out of Buddhism or cognitive therapy or drugs or wherever, you realize that to live in the present moment is the highest calling. It's the source of all happiness. And When you're not honest.

7:35 With somebody else. Or when you even withhold something in your mind. What you've done is you've created a second thought process, you've created a second thread in your head. that then has to stay active, keeping track of what you've said versus what you're really thinking. And that takes you out of the moment and it brings you unhappiness over time. You will not realize it at that moment itself, but it will create stress and distraction.

7:57 So if you really want to be happy You have to be present and One of the core tenets of being present is to be completely honest at all times. There is a great short book. That had a huge impact on me on this topic called Lying by Sam Harris, which was just

8:13 phenomenal because it explored the impact not just of Lying in the way that most people think of it. but generalized deceit or even white lies that are intended to protect people. What are the things that you look for in founders or The

8:27 red flags that disqualify. An investment or a founder. So number one, intelligence. You gotta be smart, which means you have to know what you're doing to some level. And that's a fuzzy thing, but you talk to people and you kind of get a sense of Do they know what they're doing or not? Do they have insights? Do they have specific knowledge?

8:44 Have they thought about this problem deeply? It's not about the age, it's not how many years they've spent, but just how deep is their understanding. of what they're about to do. So intelligence is key. Energy.

8:55 Because being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time. And in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere. So if someone runs out of energy. Or if they're doing this in some hesitating preliminary way where they're looking for constant positive feedback.

9:11 Or if they're easily thrown off course. then they're not gonna make it to the end, especially in the highly competitive startup context. And then finally is integrity. Because if you have someone with high intelligence and high energy But they're low integrity, what you've got is a hard working, smart crook. And especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic, they're very fast moving.

9:30 People are very independent. So if somebody wants to screw you over, they will find a way to do it. And fundamentally ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. If being Ethical was profitable, everybody would do it. So what you're looking for is a core sense of values.

9:44 that rises above and beyond the pure financial incentives. So for example, if I'm talking to a founder and they offer to do something that is slightly unfair to another shareholder or employee or founder. In exchange for making me happy. That's a red flag.

9:59 Because if they can do it to them, they can do it to me. And integrity is the hardest one to figure out because it requires longitudinal relationships. Exactly. So I I've just become more hyper aware of that piece as time goes on. But those are kind of the three things that I look for. And then

10:14 A thing that isn't really about success, but is more just about personal time is When you invest in somebody or you work with somebody, you start a company with somebody you're signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them in your life. Right. And so you just have to make sure you actually genuinely like these people. You don't consider work to have to answer a phone call or take a meeting or spend time with them.

10:35 If it's exhausting, if they're downers, if they're negative, if they're difficult. No amount of money is worth it. You and I will both die with money in the bank. It's not about money at this point. It's about Do I want to spend my scarce time, resources, mental energy, spirit

10:50 interacting with these people. My favorite founders are actually the ones who I learn from. So every time they call me up'cause they need help with something, I jump on it because I know that walking around the block with them for an hour, I'm gonna walk out much smarter. What books or

11:05 People outside of the startup world. improved your ability to

11:13 Invest. Maybe broadly speaking, just resource allocate. That's a really good question. It's a this is a very deep question. It's gonna have lots of answers, but At the end of the day, I think You have to work on your internal state

11:27 until you are free of as many biases and and conditioned responses as you can be, and it will improve every aspect of your life, including investing. And I am a bookworm, so I read an enormous amount. I was raised essentially a library of the daycare center. And so I've just read so much that I know where to start, but If you work on your internal state, one of the things you start realizing is as an investor

11:49 Emotions dominate. Investors are very emotional, even though we act. We pretend to be very rational. For example, you'll decide in the first five minutes of a meeting usually whether you want to invest in the company or not. And if a company doesn't take your money in the first round, you get annoyed with them or you feel like they crossed you then you have to undo that emotional state so when the second round comes along

12:09 you can still be a positive force and continue helping the company and maybe have a bite at the apple a second time. And these kinds of skills are extremely hard to build. They're not things you're gonna build By reading one book. And then you're like aha. So I don't believe in the epiphany

12:23 Theory. of self development. Where you read some book, you have an incredible epit epiphany. You read one phrase, you're like, Okay, that's great. This changes my life and then you scroll it down a piece of paper and you keep looking at it or you put it as a backdrop to your computer screen.

12:37 Life doesn't work that way. what you kinda have to do is you have to build skills. And I think happiness is a skill, nutrition is a skill, diet is a skill, investing is a skill, self awareness is a skill. And skills get built up. over decades with feedback loops and just have to constantly keep working at it on it.

12:53 So the books that have helped me a lot I think There's a class of books that I would kind of put in the stoicism category. And I know you've been a big advocate of these in the past and I sort of discovered them independently, but they were very influential. So Seneca and

13:08 Marcus Aurelius. both stand out. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius was absolutely Life changing for me because It's the personal diary. Of the Emperor of Rome.

13:17 And here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on earth at the time where that he lived, and he was writing his own diary to himself. Not expecting it to be published. And when you open this book, you realize he had all the same issues and all the same mental struggles, and he was trying to be a better person. And so right there you figure out, okay. success and power don't improve your internal state. You still have to work on that. And so that class of books is very influential. I like to pay attention to what I consider the rational Buddhists.

13:44 Because a lot of Buddhism is drowned in mysticism and Hinduism and sort of worship this guru or do this ritual. It's I I don't pay attention to that. But I pay a lot of attention to what I consider rational Buddhists where they can make the case very intelligently with reasoning along the way. as to how you should train your mind to work or how you should observe your mind. Sam Harris, who you mentioned earlier, is great.

14:05 Jiru Krishnamurti, who's a lesser well known guy, but an Indian philosopher with the turn of the last century. is extremely influential to me. He's an uncompromising Very direct. person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all times. And so I have been hugely influenced by him.

14:22 Probably the best book of his, uh that I like is a one called The Book of Life. Which is sort of excerpts from his various speeches and books. That is stitch together. Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.

14:33 And uh Striking Thoughts is a book that is a good summary of some of his philosophy. But I could go on and on and on. I mean, there are you have to read hundreds of these things, literally. Blogs. The blogs are I feel an underappreciated resource. We're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook, we're getting sort of Yeah. And books are very difficult to read.

14:55 As a modern person, because we've been trained. We've got two contradictory pieces of training. One is our attention span has gone through the floor. because we're hit with so much information all the time that we want to skip summarise skip We wanna get to the T L D R cut to the chase too long didn't read.

15:11 you know, what's the hundred forty character version, what's the Instagram version. On the other hand, we're also taught from a young age that books are something you finish. Books are something that are sacred. That you treat books as a You know, when you go to school and you're assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book. So we forget how to read books or we get in this contradiction where everyone I know

15:29 It's stuck on some book. Everyone is stuck on some books. I'm I'm sure you're stuck on some book right now. It's like page three hundred thirty two. You can't go on any further, but you know you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while. Your Kindle or your iPad or whatever you use, or even your paper book is in a stuck state. That for me was a tragedy because I grew up on books and then I switched to blogs and then I switched to Twitter and Facebook and then I realized I wasn't actually learning anything. I was just taking a little dopamine snacks all day long. I was getting my little hundred forty character burst of dopamine and then I'd retweet and then I'd see who retweeted my tweet, then I get into an argument on Twitter. And you know, it's a fun, wonderful thing, but it's a game that I was playing. I wasn't actually learning anything. Usually with uh startup L Jackson is uh Yeah, I guess Startup L Jacks great character on Twitter.

16:17 Uh so uh I realized like I have to go back to reading books because When you're talking about solving old problems, the older the problem, the older the solution. So if you're trying to learn how to drive a car, fly a plane. Absolutely. You should read something written in the modern age because

16:33 This problem was created in the modern age. The solution is created in the modern age. But if you're talking about an old problem Like how to generally keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful of mind. What kinds of value systems are good. How should you raise a family? These kinds of things.

16:48 The older solutions are probably better. And they withstood the test of time. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered to a lot of people. Now it may have some stuff in it that we now know to be true, but the general principles are more likely to be correct. So if I want to learn the theory of evolution, which I kind of use as my binding principle whenever I'm trying to explain any human action. People read all kinds of blog posts and tweets on evolution. Everyone has a loose understanding how of how evolution works, but how many have actually read

17:17 The origin of species. I mean you can get it for five bucks on Kindle. And it's a very easy read. It's not a difficult read. And you can read the actual source and you can see the source of the brilliance and You can see how Darwin came up with stuff back then that we're still trying to figure out or statements he made that we're still trying to prove out. But there's very little that's incorrect in that book and it is a a source book.

17:37 So I wanted to get back into reading these source books. And I knew it was a very hard problem'cause my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook and Twitter and and these other bite sized pieces. So what I did was I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throw away blog posts or as bite sized tweets or Facebook posts.

17:55 And I felt no obligation to finish any book. So now any time someone mentions a book to me, I buy it at any given time I'm reading somewhere between ten and twenty books. I'm flipping through them. If the book is getting a little boring, I'll skip ahead. Sometimes I'll start reading a book in the middle. because some paragraph caught my eye and I'll just continue from there.

18:12 And I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. If at some point I decide the book is boring Or if it's got pieces of it that are incorrect and I can't trust the rest of the information in there, I just delete it. And I don't remember them at all. So I treat books now as other people might treat throwaway.

18:28 light pieces of information in the web. And all of a sudden books are back into my reading library. Right. And that's great because there's a lot of ancient wisdom in there. When you think of the word say successful Who's the first person or people who come to mind? For you.

18:44 Yeah, it's it's an odd answer because you know, most people think of someone as successful when they win the game. And it's whatever game they're playing. Right. So if you are an athlete You're gonna think of successful someone who is a top athlete and wins that game. Or if you're in business, then you're gonna think Elon Musk or

19:01 you know, someone of that sort. Or in in my mind, I would have answered that question a little differently a few years ago. I would have said Steve Jobs. Because he created something or he was a driving force, part of the driving force and the spearhead. For creating something that has changed the lives for all of humanity.

19:17 And that's the iPhone. You know, I think of Mark Andreessen is super successful. Not because of his recent incarnation as a venture capitalist, which is an interesting one. But because of the incredible work that he did with Netscape, he commercialized the web browser. Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in the sense that he created Bitcoin, which is this incredible technological creation. That will have repercussions for decades to come.

19:38 So in the classic sense, I consider those creators and commercializers successful. And of course Elon Musk just cause he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible. With modern technology entrepreneurship. But that said, to me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely. Who don't even play the game, who rise above it.

19:57 And those are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness that they need nothing from anybody else. So there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life. some older gentlemen that I like to kind of learn from and we mentioned our Polish friend earlier. I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody.

20:16 He is at peace, he is at health. And whether he makes more money or less money or where the next person over from him, does better or worse than him, has no Effect on his mental state and bearing. And historically I would say that the legendary Buddha

20:30 Or Christian Morty, whose stuff that I like reading, they are successful quote unquote in the sense they step out of the game entirely. winning or losing does not matter to them. There's some line that I read somewhere that

20:42 All of man's troubles arise. because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour. Right. And if if you could literally just sit, if you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy. You are successful. And I think that that is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there. Do you have a current Meditative practice.

21:05 I have a couple. Like most people, I talk about doing it but don't really do it. All that well. I think meditation is like dieting or where everyone is supposed to be following a regimen everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does it. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis I found are pretty rare.

21:23 And I've identified and tried at least four different forms of meditation. The one that I found that works the best for me is something called choiceless awareness or non-judgmental awareness. Where you essentially don't sit in a corner and don't stay quiet, you walk around. You're going about your daily business. But hopefully there's some nature around you're not talking to somebody else.

21:44 And what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you're in without making judgments. You don't say, Oh, there's a homeless guy over there, I better cross the street. you don't look at two people running by and say Oh, he's he's out of shape or I'm in better shape than him, or that person's better than me, or this one's better, or or I should go get a coffee or whatever. You just don't make any decisions. You don't judge anything, you just accept everything. If you do that, I find if I can do that even for ten or fifteen minutes walking around.

22:09 I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. And so that one works well for me. When those thoughts come up, right? When you see the guy with the bad hair doing you're like that guy has no No business having that. unmanageable hairdo, or whatever ridiculous thought comes to mind. What is the internal response to that?

22:27 What I do is for those of you who programmed I'm basically trying to run my brain in debugger mode. I'm trying to be very, very alert and watch my thoughts. Do not try to judge anything including your own thoughts. You know, there's a great definition that I read that says enlightenment is a space between your thoughts. Which means that enlightenment isn't this thing you achieve after thirty years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It's something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be certain percentage enlightened every single day.

22:52 So you wanna create as much space between your thoughts as possible. And the way you do that is by being aware of what your thoughts are and why you're having them. So if I saw the guy with the bad hair do a toupee. I would look at that and I would at first I'd be like, Haha, he has a bad hairdo. And then I'd say, Well, why am I laughing at him? Oh, to make me feel better about myself. And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hairdo, oh, because I'm losing my hair and I'm afraid it's gonna go away.

23:16 And what I find is that ninety percent of thoughts that I have are fear. Ninety percent are fear based. The other ten percent are probably desire based and As any It's a very tactful way to put it. Yeah, and as any as any Buddhists will tell you that desire is just fear by another name. It's the other coin. Oh, I thought you were talking about something else entirely. Lust. There's this lust. Yeah. There's this.

23:37 There's this cartoon. I don't know if you know who Harry Crum is. He has all of these very sort of profane comic strips and was very famous. And there's a great documentary about him as well. Wait, Harry Crumb, I think that's actually a comedy But R crumb. Maybe I'm I'm mixing it up in any case. Somebody can correct me in the comments, but There's this one cartoon of his. I think it's a single cell Kinda like the far side.

23:57 In its format. It's basically a drawing of people on the street in Manhattan and every Man has a thought bubble above his head with a vagina in it, and every woman has a thought bubble above her head with a penis in it and everybody walking. That's why the Adam and Eve story is there, right? Original sin is lust. It's a thing that makes you fall out of heaven.

24:15 the same way, uh uh maybe some of your readers have this read this book called Siddharsa, but it's a beautiful parallel story to the making of the Buddha by Herman Hesch. It's a great book. I highly recommend it. But even in that book, our protagonist is out there seeking enlightenment. And gets really close and the thing that drops him out of it. is lust. He meets a woman that he falls a he feels lustful towards and that sort of slowly becomes his undoing into everything. But anyway, so to to answer your original question, when I'm when I'm doing the choiceless awareness form of meditation.

24:43 Which by the way isn't as far as I can tell it's not taught in any school. It's something that I discovered mostly by reading enough of Krishna Morty's book and piecing together what he meant because he's a very He's not a very clear speaker at times. Or he is clear but not very Different kind of way. And then I realized that okay.

24:59 So The point of meditation is to clear your mind. And the way to clear your mind is yes, you can sit in the corner and struggle with it, which doesn't really get you the outcome, or you can do transcendental meditation, which is where you're using this chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts. Or you can just very keenly and very alertly Be aware of your thoughts as they happen.

25:20 And as you watch them, you realize how many of them are just fear based. And the moment you recognize it is fear. Without even trying it sort of goes away. And then after a while, your mind quietens. And when your mind quietens, you stop taking everything around you for granted. you start noticing the details of oh my God, I live in such a beautiful place. It's so great that it clothes on me. Yeah, I can go into a Starbucks and get a coffee anytime I want. How rich am I? look at these people, they're you know, each one has a perfectly valid and complete life of their own in their own heads that's going on.

25:49 It pops us out of a story, the dream that we're always in, the story that we're constantly telling ourselves. And if you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes. But if you stop obsessing over your own story for even ten minutes, you'll realize that we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And that life is pretty good.

26:08 What is a bad habit that you're working to overcome right now? So this is something that I learned through our Polish trainer friend Victor. Hi guys, just a quick note from present day Tim, the Polish friend and trainer in question is Jerzy Gregoric. And you can hear my conversation with Jersey. titled The Lion of Olympic Weightlifting, sixty two year old Jersey Gregorick, which also features Naval. Naval and I were working with him at the time we both co interview him. I still

26:38 work with Jersey and I just saw him just a few weeks ago. So to learn more about this amazing man, go to Tim dot blog slash Jersey J E R Z Y to listen to that conversation one more time. Tim dot blog slash Jersey J E R. Z Y at the age of whatever he is now, sixty seven. He can still do things that most twenty somethings cannot do. No. Back to the episode with Nival.

27:01 Habits are everything. Everything. I think that we are We are trained in habits.

27:09 including potty training and when to cry and when not to, and how to smile and when not to, and all of these things become habits. These are all behaviors that we learn And that we then integrate into ourselves. And then what ends up happening when we're older is that we're collection of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of habits are constantly running.

27:29 Subconsciously. and they're internalized and then we have a little bit of extra brain power in our neocortex for solving new problems. And so you become your habits. And what really brought this to light for me is our friend

27:43 our trainer gave me a routine to do every single day. And before that I had never worked out every single day. And it's a light workout. It's not Tough on your body. But

27:52 I did this workout every single day and I realized just the incredible astonishing transformation that it had upon me, both physic and mentally, because I think to have peace of mind you have to have peace of body first. So That taught me the power of habits. And after that I started realizing that it's all about habits. So at any given time now. within a six month period, I'm either trying to pick up a good habit

28:15 Or I'm discarding a previously bad habit. It takes time. So for example, if someone says I wanna be fit, I wanna be healthy, but right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat. Well nothing is gonna work for you in three months. It's gonna be sustainable. It's going to be a ten year journey.

28:30 At least. And in the ten year journey, what you're gonna do is every six months or every three months depending on how How fast you can do it. you're gonna break bad habits and you're gonna replace them or you're gonna pick up good habits. I think it is

28:42 All about habits. There is nothing else. Examples of habits I've picked up in the last twelve months or I'm still working on. I'm one of these people who wants everything. So for example, I'm not going to be able to If I want to stop eating bad foods, if I want to lose weight by fixing my diet.

28:58 I don't say These foods are bad, I'm not gonna eat them and then suffer. And then feel like I'm not eating tasty food. Instead what I do is I do some combination of changing my taste buds. to actually like the foods. that are healthier for me.

29:13 And substituting unhealthy tasty foods. with healthy tasty foods. So that I can sustain it forever. I'm not interested in anything. that is unsustainable or even hard to sustain. I want my life to be effortless. So once I've created a good habit, it has to be the kind of habit that I can sustain with no effort.

29:30 You're about to graduate. If you had to go back and give That Naval. Advice. You're already hooked on reading, so that seems to be covered. What advice would you give yourself?

29:40 Yeah, it's funny. I actually did this exercise recently where I sat down and I I didn't write it because it was in my head, but I I did spend some time thinking about What is the advice I would give my thirty year old self? And the advice was Along the lines of chill out. Don't stress so much, not so much anxiety. Everything will be fine.

29:58 And Be more yourself. Don't try and do what you think society wants or needs. Don't try and live up to other people's expectations. Self actualize, say no to more things. Protect your time.

30:10 'Cause it's very precious, you know. On your dying day you will give everything, everything you have for another day. So the discount rate, the marginal value of that extra day just goes up as you get older. So the advice was all along those lines. It was basically be yourself. Don't listen to other people. Don't worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you. And then I said, Well, what would my thirty year old self have said to my twenty year old self? And it turned out to be pretty much the exact same thing. And what would my twenty year old self have said to my 10 year old self? Pretty much the exact same thing. So I think my fifty year old self is gonna say, Chill out, relax, don't stress so much, live in the moment, it'll all be all right.

30:45 Less fear, more love. You know, and love people more. You know, love is one of those weird things. Like everyone wants to be loved. Everyone deeply needs to be loved. It's not something you can buy. No amount of money or power will bring you true unconditional love. But it turns out you can give love. It's free to give. So you can't necessarily get it.

31:03 But if you can get in the mindset of well, I'm just gonna give it. Eventually on a long enough time scale. You get what you deserve. The universe kinda sends it back your way. Yeah. Well, not only that, it's like if if you don't know how to make yourself happy, try to make someone else happy. And that Is sort of a as you said, kind of a recursive function and now I'm getting I'm using vocab, I shouldn't, but

31:24 It's uh it's a virtuous cycle. Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway. And just a brilliant older gentleman. His speeches are collected in poor Charlie's almanac and they're worth reading. But he was asked at one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, someone a basically asked him on the lines of like You know, how do I find a worthy mate?

31:41 And he said. Be worthy of a worthy mate. And I think that's absolutely right. You just work on yourself until you no longer need them and then they appear. I think that's what it this is then saying that says So when the student is ready, the master appears.

31:55 What that basically means is you have to work on yourself and be ready. And then Good things will happen to you. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it. What would it say? Where would you put it?

32:07 Uh I don't know if I have messages to send to the world, uh, but There are messages that I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I figured this out was that what is desire and desire is a contract you make with yourself.

32:22 To be unhappy. Until you get what you want. I don't think most of us realize that's what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long. And then wondering while why we're unhappy. So I like to stay aware of that.

32:35 because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time. And I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that's that's where I've chosen to be unhappy. So I think that that is an important one. Or even a simpler one is, you know, a lot of meditative, like you said, you did a transcendental meditation course, they give you a mantra.

32:58 The mantra is supposed to have actually no meaning. maybe the universal mantra, you know, that's been derived through the ages is om, where you kinda sit there and say om in your mind to yourself. It's strange. You can say it to yourself. all day long in your mind and it'll make you happier, more peaceful. You start chanting it out loud, they'll lock you up. But ohm uh ohm has no meaning, I think. But to me it has a meaning and the meaning is just accept. Just accept.

33:22 In any situation life. You only have three Options. You always have three options. You can change it. You can accept it.

33:30 Or you can leave it. Those are three options. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it. And not accepting it. So it's that struggle, that aversion.

33:42 That is responsible for most of our misery. So probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head. It is just tell myself one word accept. So any time I look at myself and I'm judging something, I just say accept. And it's only very, very, very few things that I will choose not to accept.

33:59 And if I don't accept something, it's for one of two reasons. Either I'm aware That this is something that I it's just so important to me right now that I can't accept it. And now I'm gonna put up with a mental battle for it. Or more likely. I've just lost control of my thoughts. I'm no longer present. I'm dreaming. I'm in a highly emotional state.

34:19 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals. Or your team faster. and for free. LinkedIn isn't just a job board. LinkedIn helps you hire professionals you can't find anywhere else. even those who aren't actively searching for a new job, but who might be open to the perfect role.

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35:29 Hire professionals like a professional on LinkedIn. And now you can post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash Tim. That's LinkedIn.com slash Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. I And now. Nick Coconus.

35:49 Instagram at Ncoconis Twitter. At Nick Coconus. Nick is the co owner and co founder of the Alinea group of restaurants. Which includes a linea.

36:00 One of only thirteen restaurants in the US to earn the coveted Michelin three star rating. Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Awesome to be here finally.

36:12 Yeah. Yeah, we have The benefit of having spent some time together. And I've been fed a lot of caffeine by you. And You're also of great help with the four hour chef. So I wanted to right off the bat.

36:25 Thank you for that. It was kind of a fun thing'cause I remember when you you sent me like a preview of the book and then you called me to say, like, hey, you know You want to say anything about it. And I was like on a chairlift and I was like by the time I get off this chairlift I will have a blurb for you. Uh with such pressure.

36:43 Which meant a lot. And pressure I think is The word. To describe So much about you and your Life

36:53 I wanna say trajectory, but I'm not even sure that is the right word. And I thought a fun way to kick off the conversation would be to share with people listening. Some of the back and forth that we had when we were brainstorming what a podcast might look like. Because Certainly.

37:11 I don't think of you first and foremost as a food guy. Per se. And we were having this exchange via text. And then via email. And

37:22 I thought I'd just read one of your responses as we were swapping different ideas. I'll probably Edit for space a little bit here, but not by much. And here we go. I'm a huge believer in radical transparency in business. I give numbers and burn bridges with big companies because I think that a lot of times people don't ask the basic questions in publishing. For instance, How much did that book cost to print?

37:45 How many did it sell? Oddly those numbers are very hard to come by. I dug from months years ago to do the Alinea book the right way. For bars. Why does a bartender wash dishes and talk to customers? We've redesigned the bar experience in one best bar in the world. For restaurants, why is it the only form of entertainment that has only a mutual promise to show up?

38:05 Then it goes into behavioral economics and in parentheses. I don't even know how to pronounce this last name correctly, Richard Thaler or is it Taylor? Yeah, Thaler, Thaler. Thaler is a friend and investor, just won the Nobel Prize, investing, been beating the market for nearly thirty years. Everything in all caps. is about asymmetric risk taking and information and yet people's perception Of risk.

38:24 Or of what I do is that it's risky, it is not. And uh in a separate Exchange. When we were talking about many of the topics you could talk about. outside of say restaurants, bars, and so on, even though that's been a big part of your life in recent history.

38:41 Many of these different experiments, explorations, portions of your career, topics that you could talk about. And then going into what you said, they come down to a single thought really. Wherever there is opaque information that should be obvious, run to that gap. So

38:57 I struggle with where to even begin with the twenty the twenty options. That we have here. But Maybe you could explain to me.

39:06 How behavioral economics And Richard Thylor. Fit into this. Just For

39:13 Curiosity's sake. I'll go back to the word you used options because I started out back in nineteen ninety two or three. studying options, trading, derivatives trading. And I think there's a huge misconception about what that is. Because of movies, because of the big short.

39:31 because of you know Wall Street and all that. It's a bit like playing a game of chess for a living or being the house at a casino, that sort of thing. It's about taking you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day. And pretending it's like a big decision tree.

39:47 And Any given decision is you know, if you're really good, forty eight percent chance of being wrong. So you have to be really, really good at constantly m being comfortable being wrong. But knowing that your overall number of

40:03 decisions that you're gonna be right more than you're wrong. I know there's like a big theme on a lot of the folks that you have on, like they talk about success or failure or how to measure those things. And I kinda don't look at it as success or failure with anything. I look at it as Just like Is my pattern of decisions correct?

40:20 And then getting back to your actual question with Professor Thaler and behavioral economics and I mean, essentially what they're looking at is decision making, what drives people to make certain decisions, what's rational about those decisions, what is mostly irrational or emotional, or what decisions do we make. that people don't even realize they're making a decision, which is often the case as well. And then if you think about it.

40:45 Every single form of what we do art, commerce. Science. You know, um Picking a mate, like all those things. comes down to a whole bunch of decisions that you make without

40:57 Often really thinking about The decision itself. Not that you can go around walking around going, Wow, I've just made another decision. But when you are doing

41:05 you know, business or starting a company or publishing a book or whatever it may be. You can be intentional about that. And realize that it's gonna be an iterative process. And so I think that's been not only the case for me in learning

41:19 how to filter things through that mindset, but Like when you said there isn't really a trajectory. I kinda look at everything I've done as the same in a way. Mm-hmm. Even though other people look at it and go, like, wow, you went from being a derivatives trader to owning restaurants. Like, that's weird. And I studied philosophy in college. So like people are like

41:36 How do you go from philosophy to finance? You know, and to me it was all the same thing. That particular Transition or Rather than progression, I suppose, from philosophy to finance is one that you and I haven't really talked about.

41:49 That one is interesting. I'd love to explore for a second and we're gonna go into a million different nooks and cranes. But do you feel like philosophy was studying philosophy undergrad was an asset that then later helped you, or was it just an interest you explored on route to other things? I can't remotely imagine having not not done that. And the way that actually I did it was really interesting. I I had no intention of when I got to college, I thought I'd study political science economics.

42:17 Pre law kind of thing, something like that. And my very Like second week. at Colgate University, uh wonderful professor. who just passed away last year at ninety four years old. Really great mentor to me, um Professor Drone Belmont.

42:30 was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost sixty years, pulled me aside, introduction to logic. Yeah, one oh one. And basically said, What do you What are you studying here? I told him. And he said, No, you're gonna be a philosophy major. I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna teach you how to think. There's this great scene in a ru River Runs through it where the dad

42:49 You know, every time the kid writes An essay like the young Fisherman kid. writes an essay and he brings it to his father to be graded, he gives it back to him and says half as long again. long before that movie ever came out, Professor Balmouth would

43:02 essentially assign a paper to the class and say it should be about fifteen pages and people would be like, Well how long? and he'd always say like you know, how long's a piece of string, like it's however long it needs to be. And then he would tell me, Yo can't be longer than three pages. And people would be like jealous, like wow, you only have to write three pages. If you take it seriously, that is a much, much harder thing to do. So he really

43:23 trained me as well as a number of other professors there to Be clear in thinking, succinct. Two. You know, understand what logic was to process information and really to look for parallels.

43:36 in different fields and different fields of thought. And so Man, like when I got out of school, I I went to law school for like a a day and a half. I'd gotten into Penn, like a joint JD PhD program at Penn. And as soon as I kind of knew who the other folks were and what their

43:52 Desires and trajectories were. I was like, Well, this isn't actually a good fit for me and I remember my future father in law. Told my now wife, then girlfriend, that I was in danger of becoming an intellectual bum.

44:05 Because I I I dropped out of I dropped out of law school before I really entered law school. And Yeah, I floundered around for a little while. But You know, if you grew up in Chicago you end up meeting people

44:16 who had this unusual lifestyle and that was back in the days Pre internet. pre-electronic trading, pre high frequency trading, where there was literally people on a giant trading floor thou shouting at each other. And you either were attracted to the I don't know, almost animalistic nature of that.

44:33 And for me it was like a huge challenge because there are people down there that Or had you know PhDs from MIT and then there was people who were like, you know, butcherers that went down there with a hundred thousand dollars and just kicked ass. And so it was it wasn't about your level of education or any of the stuff I already talked about. It was about can you show up every day and every day's game day. And be really disciplined.

44:56 And very clear headed with chaos around you. How did you get introduced to that world? You know, I if you grew up in Chicago, you know some of these guys. And some of them are flashy. And I can remember the exact moment. I'm not gonna name name here.

45:10 As you'll find out uh why in a second. But I I I was walking down the street, I was like You know, six months out of college, kinda didn't know what I was gonna do. And I was walking down the street and I bumped into a guy I knew in high school. And You know, he wasn't the best student. He didn't try the hardest.

45:27 And I was like, Hey, what are you doing now? And and he was like, Well, I'm just rehabbing these homes. And I I I thought literally, like, Oh, he's a construction worker. And I was like You know, what are you doing with them? He's like, Well, I just bought this block. Okay. And I'm turning this all over. This is the true story. I mean, this is so not like

45:43 You know, a good reason to do something. But I looked at him and I was like, What are you talking about? He's like, Yeah, I skipped college and I I started out as a runner on the floor of the Merc and Now I I you know, I own like twenty five condos and three townhomes and and I I trade.

45:59 And I kinda went like wow. I don't know what I knew a little bit about it. I'd been down on the floor before just visiting. But I was kind of like

46:07 That's fascinating. Like that is a truly fascinating thing. And You know, I I went down, visited the floor. I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction to get a job. True story. Like people lie on their resume all the time. I'm probably the only person that got rid of my degree and my academic awards and all that.

46:25 Because to get a clerk job on the floor, the last thing they wanted was someone with a good degree, five beta kappa, you know, Magna cum laude, all that stuff. So I faked my resume, got a five dollar an hour job and looked for a mentor. And I I found a guy named Frank Zarino. Oh. was at Chicago Research and Trading, who was which also was founded by a philosophy major. It's actually very common.

46:46 Why is that common? Yeah, I wish I knew the answer. I I don't know the answer. I I do know that there's three or four of the largest trading firms in the world. are run by philosophy majors. Yeah and If you look back at

46:58 Might class just of Yeah, there's a few professors in there. But there are people who make movies. There's a guy who runs an ad agency, a large ad agency. It's a really Interesting path.

47:10 It's not Just like studying physics. Like I know some great physicists. who are great in whatever they do. And

47:17 I think it's a similar discipline of abstract thought. Mm-hmm. Like I can't think of anything worse than studying business. Like.

47:26 It just seems like a terrible thing to study to me. Yeah, is that because it's like the surface of the waves in the ocean topically, it's just so n non transferable in a sense. And then as you go lower and lower to the kind of slower moving layers, that's just more multidisciplinary in terms of studying like the basics of how things work or how people think. Yeah, I think it's it's almost like it's how to do something or how to manage something, but not why to do it. And so

47:55 If you're taught And nineteen ninety two, if I went and got an MBA. I would have been taught a certain kind of management that Six years later what the internet would have gotten blown up.

48:05 Mm-hmm. And so for me it's like I always ask The why question. Yeah, we were mentioning like the book publishing or or a bar. You know, I just looked at some things and it's like, Why is that?

48:17 Why does it work that way? And oftentimes the people most entrenched in a system have no idea why. They're like the third or fourth generation. of person within that system. And they have no idea why a school bell rings in the morning, for example. Or why a bartender is washing

48:34 the dishes. And often I don't know the real answer, but I come up with alternative ones, at least that suit my narrative, I guess. Undervalued skill, by the way, in some cases, right? You gotta be careful, but Very, very, very, very interesting. I wanna pause here partially because I'm overcaeinated. I wasn't inspired by my nostalgia. Related to your double espresso. But

48:56 Why did the professor Pull you aside. What did that early undergrad professor in logic one oh one C in you, whether he explained it or not later, I don't know. That

49:09 Led him to take a special interest in you. I think I was Prepared in earnest. Because I was mostly terrified. You know, he had a reputation of being kind of like a

49:19 He is a Socratic method. Teacher, he was pretty harsh. Colgate was very small. classes than there was a class of, you know, eighty people, and he kinda wanted to whittle it down to a more manageable number. And his method to do that was just to kick your ass. And I I remember I mean he he probably as great as he was, he I doubt he would survive starting out at a

49:41 College. Campus now. I literally saw him light fire to someone's notebook once. When he was asking people like examples of how to put out a fire. And this one guy was just stuttering because he was so unfeared and so he just lit his notebook on fire and he stamped. And he stamped it. And the kid kid threw it on the ground, stamped on it. He's like, You could smother it.

49:57 Sure. He called everyone, he memorized every person's last name and it was Mr. and Miz and um I remember the specific day. He was literally back to the This is like right out of a movie. He his back to the class, writing out a chalkboard, some logic problems, symbolic logic.

50:14 And the guy next to me Had no shot. Getting it. None, right? He said his name. And I wrote on the paper on my desk so he could see it, like what the answer was.

50:26 And then without missing a beat or turning around, he was like Mr. Caconis, please do not help him. There is no way in hell he could possibly have done that without your help. And this is like two or three weeks in, right? And he spun around and he saw that I didn't have my book. And he said Mr. Kakonas, where is your book? And I said it's at my it's in my dorm room. Yeah, Professor, and he said, Well a lot of good it's doing you there.

50:49 I said, on the contrary, it must apparently be doing me a lot of good there. And he said, I'll see you after class. So I thought I was getting kicked out. And there was like a line forming to create office hours or to like ask to be transferred out or whatever. And when I got to the front, he said, Follow me and I followed him to his office. And I swear I mean he's running through the fall.

51:10 New English hall and I thought I was gonna get kicked out of the class. And when I closed the door I turned around, he has feet up on the desk and he said, Where are you from? What do you want to do here? And that was it. He took me under his way. I was very fortunate. I um

51:25 And you know, it's like I never knew here's the amazing part. I never knew the guy liked me until ten years after I graduated. And then I was treated like a member of his family at his funeral thirty years later. Huh. Right. So really fascinating person, really fascinating moments in my life where I don't know, someone saw something in me and kinda went like I'm gonna make an investment in this person.

51:46 They never asked for anything back. You know, ever. How did you not know that he liked you? Did he withhold in some way so that you wouldn't get a big head or something along those lines? Did you not want to get it overly attached to you, so you wouldn't express it. No, no, I I think I was nineteen years old and I didn't know that People you like you hold to a higher standard, probably. Right. And so consequently

52:10 he beat the shit out of me in a good way. You know what I mean? It's like if you have someone who's teaching you something and they invest their time in you and they think you have a chance of being good. They work you harder than the folks around you. So the people that I thought he liked, he was just being nice to because they didn't He didn't think they had a chance. Right, yeah. Yeah, he didn't care, he wasn't invested.

52:30 Yeah, and and so With me, I think it would be like He would be talking to my English professor without me even knowing and being like, That paper sucks. He can do a lot better than that. Give him a C on that one. I was like What's good about you had? Like all of a sudden that class got hard. I didn't know. I like I had no idea.

52:46 And uh it was just it was an interesting, lucky Fortunate. Place to be at that time. So we're we're gonna get back to the Merc, but before we do Philosophy

52:59 I'm endlessly fascinated by philosophy, but I'm also a nerd and kind of academic and pedantic and have spent a lot of time in school. For people who are listening to this who are, say, already in their careers, or maybe they're in their early twenties thinking of starting a company. But are entrepreneurially either involved or inclined. Would you suggest if they don't have any exposure to philosophy that they read any particular books or resources or explore it in any way, or would you say actually, you know what, that was an intermediate step to something else. You would probably be better off.

53:31 studying X, Y, and Z. Is there like a starter kit or something you would recommend to folks who don't have the philosophy exposure? I think part of it is if you read a book in isolation. It's not as rich of an experience as discussing those ideas. Within that context. That said, if it's if if you're the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas, I mean there's hardly a better

53:55 Place. It's a matter of finding what you enjoy. I happen to love The Problems of Philosophy, which Bertrand Russell wrote sort of about Wickenstein's ideas, but before Wickenstein published. And It's written in plain language. It's not Hard to understand.

54:10 Certainly Nietzsche is more like philosophy with some Weird sugar coating of Something on top of it. And man, like as a young male, you know, reading Nietzsche the for the first time I was like

54:23 Fuck yeah. passive. Like I think people think of philosophers As like Zen monks sitting there quietly contemplating the universe. I think what it is is it's people grappling with all the same questions and curiosity that that we all have if you pause to think about it. And so

54:42 It's so big. It's not just, you know, Descartes, you know, I think therefore I am. It's kind of every little bit of that. Back to like you know, Read Lucreatus. He had the atomic

54:53 Could you spell that? Lucretius. Oh Lucretius. Lucretius. Yeah, Lucretius, yeah. I mean L U C R I T I U S. Yeah, I'm a terrible speller. So if it never ask me to spell it. We'll put it in the show notes for that. Yeah, right, right. But like you know, it's like You read read that or read this great book called The Swerve. Which is uh you know, about this.

55:13 This monk ages ago that sort of found that book. And then rewrote it and saved it for history. Like that reads like a murder mystery. Like you don't necessarily need to start with the philosophy. You can start with the things around it. I continue to

55:28 Find sort of the world I of ideas endlessly inspirational. And then by the way. Steal them and use them in whatever you're doing. They're there for you. Lucretius L U C R E T I U S

55:42 Titus Lucretius Curis is a Roman poet and philosopher. We'll put that in the show notes. The I want to second Bertrand Russell also. I haven't read Bertrand Russell in so many ages, but it is Very digestible. It is not dressed up. in ten dollar words when ten cent words would suffice. A lot of his writing is really powerful.

56:07 I also just wanted to mention for folks That and I just thought about this. Ages and ages ago, I felt like I had certain gaps. In my education after college and I ended up I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but somebody

56:23 mentioned that Stanford, UC Berkeley, these top tier universities all had extended or adult education classes taught by professors and junior professors. I mean these this is the same team who's teaching. And uh those are very readily accessible. Well and even MIT open courseware. Like so many colleges now have taken that model and put great, great

56:50 great classes online. Um And you know, I know that every now and then I'm surprised what I find on there. And get sucked into like an all nighter of taking some college class, you know?

57:03 that I know nothing about and it's so far over my head, but it it kinda refuels you again to go like oh like There are huge Gaps where I know nothing. And the older you get The harder it is to

57:16 start into something new, I find, at least. Because it feels like the mountain's too big, you know? I would actually uh not to pull a Nick. Actually, sir, on the con the contrary, on the contrary, sir. My book is doing me a lot of good in my dorm room.

57:32 That's right. I think one of your superpowers is That You ask the fundamental why questions about longstanding assumptions or conventional wisdom in different fields, and the more you have done that, the more obvious it is to you to do it.

57:51 As a starting point. In in a way. Let's go back to the Merc. We can go in any direction, of course, but You step into this Lord of the Flies slash Gladatorial Arena with butchers and PhDs and so on.

58:07 Then what? Like at what point is there a point when you're like okay I actually do think I could be good at this. No. No. Uh I I for real, no. I was down there and I I had made a fatal error of leaving school. And everyone told me it was a fatal error.

58:26 And this is leaving out uh the law school. Yeah, and and I I remember being down there and You know, what I was doing was so brainless. It was literally you take this piece of paper over to that guy and then that guy would yell at you and you would rip the paper out of your hand and then you go get another one. It was literally that brain dead. And I was desperately looking to learn what was going on around me.

58:48 And of course I bought books on finance and commodities and options and all that. And there are completely ridiculous and opaque and academic that and they looked like they had no relationship to what was going on there at all. I started taking classes that

59:02 were run at the Merc on mock trading and just learning the hand signals and things like that. Which were fine, but didn't really teach you how to trade. And I spent Yeah, time.

59:14 interviewing with big companies like Goldman Sachs and Societe General and whatnot, because I did have the academic background where I I would get the interview, I would be able to take the test, I would do well on their math and psychology tests. I would get offered a job as a trader. And then I would look at the contract. This is a key thing. People get out of college to get offered a job.

59:35 I I think I'm the only one who ever read the employment contract. And what it said in there was basically like they could do anything they want with me for three years. Like I don't even necessarily need to be a trader. Like I w that's what I was interested in doing. But they could they could ship me to France and have me do something totally different. I could be an analyst or, you know. God knows what.

59:52 And so when I would question that, they'd be like, Man, you should be really happy. Like we had, you know, three hundred applicants for this and we offered eight positions. Like just take it. And I was kind of like Totally your style. I I'd be remiss not to say that like my dad modeled My dad was an entrepreneur by necessity because his dad died when he was really young.

1:00:12 He fought both at the end of World War Two. He was drafted into the navy at the end of World War Two. Was dismissed. Honorably after sixteen, eighteen months because they were downsizing the Navy. And then he was barely young enough. to be drafted into the army for the Korean War.

1:00:27 And When he got out, like you know, he had no usable skills. So he went to work at the grocery store that he started working at when he was twelve years old. Saved up all of his money from the Army and the Navy and and bought the store. So as I was growing up

1:00:39 You know, my hero was my dad, who was not an academic, who was not what people would think of as like an executive in a suit or whatever, but did really well. He had bought property and real estate. He owned a temporary labor office that supplied unskilled labors to factories and conventions and whatnot. That was a really good business, you know? And he had a lot of common sense smarts. He was horrified that I didn't

1:01:03 Go to law school, you know. But meanwhile I was modelling what he did. And so When I got down there, I was like, You gotta own you have to own your own situation. And so when I was offered those jobs, I was like, Well

1:01:15 I don't really see myself working for someone else. And I found a guy um who also felt that way and he was working for a big company and they didn't want to make him traitor because he was too much of a quad. Like he was really well educated. He was really mathematical.

1:01:32 He wanted to prove them wrong. So he took a small amount of money and started trading currency options. And when I found him, I instantly knew that this was the right person. Because I Talk to dozens of people. And no one was like him.

1:01:45 And Then he said he doesn't Didn't want to hire me. Like you don't want to hire anyone. How did you meet him? Do you remember how you guys met? Yeah, I was I was just introduced to him through he was back then there were there you know, it's if you're a trader or even a trading company of a clearing firm like Goldman Sachs.

1:02:00 At the time there was a company called First Options and he cleared First options and back then you would literally have to take the elevator up. to key punch in all the cards into like a computer that was Seventeen floor. Well

1:02:12 Ancient times. I met him through uh being introduced to him there after talking to him I knew he was the sort of geeky intellectual that I that I needed. And then when he told me like that he didn't want to hire me'cause he just hired some clerk. I was like No no no like I will pay you to work for you.

1:02:29 And and he was he was like This is really strange, you know? And I I explained to him what I just said. It's like I've been here six months. I set a goal for myself of getting on a badge, it was called like leasing a seat and actually trading within a year. And I was like, I need to get going on this. Like I need someone that's gonna teach me options. And

1:02:48 It's fascinating because He then hired me for I mean, I wanna say it was four hundred dollars a week or something like that. You know, I stood right next to him all day, every day. And He taught me options theory from scratch.

1:03:01 Better than any college ever could. to the point where you're looking, you know, three derivatives in it's not just volatility curve, but the curve of the curve. And um You know, as soon as I started grasping this and going deeper down that rabbit hole the more I liked it as as a puzzle. It wasn't

1:03:19 Certainly the money had an appeal. But it was also Hey, here's this this giant competition. It's like being a huge multifaceted Chess game.

1:03:29 that no one's gonna get exactly right. But like I said earlier, it's about making hundreds of decisions a day. And Even when you get ten in a row that come up tails.

1:03:39 You know that the next one's fifty fifty. You know? And uh That discipline was interesting. That was more about teaching yourself the psychology.

1:03:50 of standing there while everyone told you You were wrong, or you were like physically small, or You were too educated. Or Too serious. I mean, you can't imagine how much of a fraternity house that place was.

1:04:04 Everything in Wolf of Wall Street. I have seen. I haven't lived. But I've seen it. Yeah. And I started

1:04:14 Hiring very shortly after I started trading and about a year later I left and started my own company with almost nothing. And I hired my first employee who became my business partner for the last twenty five years. And I taught him what I what I learned and I hired people that I considered corporate refugees.

1:04:33 People who Worked for companies. And decided that Independence. was better.

1:04:40 Why did you leave after a year? He was moving over to the Chicago Board of Trade. And I had Found a couple of awesome programmers. to help build this options analysis software.

1:04:51 And he sort of offered me up To run. some of the operations at the Mercantile Exchange when he went over to trade the bonds at the Board of Trade. And, you know, I mean, he was a really, really smart guy and he he made me a deal that when you analyzed it very carefully got worse over time. And I just kinda went, you know, I

1:05:11 It's been great. And I've learned a ton and we've made each other a bunch of money and it it's a win win. But I really wanted to do my own thing. Like I wanted to be the captain of my own ship, I guess. And uh Thankfully this guy Jim Hansen, who's still one of my dearest friends.

1:05:26 sort of had an option to To stay With that company or Come a completely underfunded company. I mean, thinking back, it was so stupid, you know, from a risk perspective.

1:05:37 But It was asymmetric. You know, I'm far more upside than downside. it worked out really well and and we spent most of our time as we hired people and and taught them. How to do this, it was mostly

1:05:50 Psychology training. It was mostly standing around after Hours. And saying what's seven times twenty eight? And screaming it at each other like a drill sergeant.

1:06:01 until the person couldn't remember what nine times three was anymore. Yeah. Wait, why did you do that? Well, you had to be quick you had to be quick on basic mental agility. I see. So if you bought if you bought four hundred and fifty contracts and it was a twenty delta You need it to be able to do What's twenty percent of four fifty, it's ninety.

1:06:20 But you need to do that. Precisely with Numbers that are not so round. Right. You need to be willing to not be perfect. And you need to make that decision instantaneously.

1:06:29 And realizing that it could cost you fifty to a hundred thousand dollars if you get it right or wrong. And you have to be really, really comfortable with that. And so What did we do? Well, we stood around and we turned people's brains into mush. Until like liter I've had people punch me, cry, run out.

1:06:45 No, I mean it sounds awful, but it was It's amazing training because The rest of the world moves much slower. So any other decisions that that I've made in business since then? Have felt

1:06:56 Glacial. In pace. Yeah. W there's also something to be said for making the trainer The training in some

1:07:04 or all respects harder than the competition, right? I mean the adage of the more you sweat during peacetime, the less you bleed during war time. I mean the Best competitors I've met in many, many fields. often strive to make their training and the toil of their

1:07:22 preparation harder than what they expect to face. It's why we love watching big Time sports when it matters. There are certain people that you know you can almost look at'em and go, Oh, that poor person's gonna fade. And then you you hope they don't.

1:07:37 Right. You hope all that training Pays off. When you see someone I I love golf for all the same reasons. It's like you know, just a And then so When you look at someone who

1:07:50 Who can pull that rabbit out of the hat? You know, at the exactly the right moment. It's pretty wonderful to see. And and I the thing I loved about my time down there, even though I burned out of it after ten years. Is that There were moments where I I did absolut I mean, I have friends that they'll listen to this and they'll be like, Oh yeah, I remember that time in the SP Pit, you really got this right, you know. But

1:08:10 I I made some completely stupid decisions. But mostly on on the measure. When things got crazy I was able to perform More than that. I remember like Green Span's irrational exuberant speech was

1:08:22 like a formative moment where I kinda went, Wow, I can actually I can not only hang in this environment. I can thrive in it. And you know, you get home soaking wet with sweat. It was a physical job. I guess of people it was really blue collar in a lot of ways. And

1:08:37 You know, it's like I got home that day and I was like That was what I prepped my last six years for. It was very satisfying. It it sounds like an awful It is an awful thing in a way, right? Like it's it's just about pure commerce. It serves a purpose of price discovery and and all that, but

1:08:53 Any individual person isn't really the one doing that, you know. So I think that there are negatives to the whole system as well, in hindsight. But man, at the time, it just felt like great mental training. What would you recommend to people who are listening and are having this flashback to the introductory

1:09:11 text exchange about beating the market over a long period of time. who are hoping to become better investors and you can take that anywhere you want, but are there any particular Tools, tools, mental models, any anything. That you would recommend. Really, really hard. I think the mental model is asymmetric risk.

1:09:31 Always look for something that the The upside is You know, three to four X the downside. Obviously Quantifying those is very difficult.

1:09:40 But That's the key. Everything I try to do is asymmetric. And then even though Nessum Talab is a bit of a pedantic Goofball on Twitter.

1:09:50 His book Fooled by Randomness is awesome. Yeah. Um that was the one that preceded Black Swan. And um I think Black Swan's great. It's fine. But Fooled by Randomness is I think the better of of all his books because it It just encapsulates everything that people price things incorrectly.

1:10:06 It's a walk through a casino. Yeah, you walk a casino and you see everybody pricing Their outcomes incorrectly. The entire city is built on that. You know, if you could get in your head literally. Literally. Literally. Yeah, literally. And I I don't take any pleasure like people like Oh, you must of you must love gambling or whatever. And it's like I would never sit down to a blackjack table because I know that, you know, there's a forty nine and a half percent chance that I'm gonna win and

1:10:31 That's the wrong way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The the Fool Randomness has has come up a number of times. I haven't read it in ages because it is one of his earlier books. But uh you know, Howard Marks also brought this up recently when I was chatting with him and It is an exceptional book, I think, for

1:10:50 Developing a new lens on life, not just investing. When you are investing for yourself now. How do you think about risk? Because this is a word that has popped up a few times. How do you personally think about risk in your life.

1:11:04 Do you, for instance, like some startup founders look at the risk as the various early stage startups, restaurants, bars and so on that you're involved with and then you play it safe in your other kind of asset allocation. How do you think about risk in in your life or in investing. That's

1:11:23 Pretty difficult question. I think that I yeah, I I think that If you look at everything that I've I've done business wise. Everybody would say That

1:11:35 the failure rate is super high in what we do. So trading they used to say one out of a hundred people that goes down there breaks even their first year. And fewer out of that one. Take another hundred of those ones and less than one in a hundred of those becomes a millionaire.

1:11:52 And I went, Great. It's like the old Jim Carrey. So you're saying there's chance, you know. Right, you know. And and and and then uh And then you go to the restaurant business and people Oh yeah, ninety five percent of all restaurants go out of business in their first two years. And I'm like going great. Yeah, now that's that's perfect.

1:12:12 Why do you why do you have that response? Is it because I'm yeah, so I and that and then I'm gonna start I'm doing uh software startup now. Dave, go for it. So The higher the smaller the hoop. The more Interesting it is to figure it out.

1:12:26 And once you're up there and you know how to Jump up through that little hoop. There's fewer people playing that game. You know? And

1:12:34 And the other thing is I remember right when I was gonna start building Alinea with Grant, I was talking to a restaurant owner. And by all accounts he was pretty successful. He had four or five restaurants. And one of them I really liked a lot and we'd go there a lot and I kinda got to know him a little bit. And he said, So, you know, what are you up to? And I said, Well actually I'm building a restaurant now. And he looked at me and said, Oh.

1:12:56 It's a terrible business. You don't want to do it. Like Incredible failure rate. Terrible. And I was like, why did you build the next four? Yeah, what do you respond to that?

1:13:08 You know, no one does. That's kinda like with you know, we'll get to it, I'm sure, but that's like the way I was with the publishing thing. It's like Hey man, people keep printing books. And yet I can't figure out any of the information and yet they're gonna give me like three or four hundred thousand dollars to write a book. Some things.

1:13:24 remiss here. Like you know what I mean. I've never written a book before, but yet someone's gonna write me a four hundred thousand dollar check. There must be a lot of money on the other side of that bet. And so consequently, like I always try to look for the high small hoops. And then I spend my time learning as much as I can and then I jump through that hoop. It's both more interesting.

1:13:41 I think. And I also think Getting back to the asymmetry of risk. Those are the ones that Yeah, you might have a Well, first of all, do you really have a ninety five percent

1:13:50 Failure rate if you put in all that effort. Yeah. I I don't think so. You know, so I think they priced it wrong, so to speak. And then second of all. Man, that's That's where the fun is. That gets you up in the morning and and going to work.

1:14:02 Yeah. Yeah. This is this is where, among many, many other places Averages can be very, very misleading. Right. And I always

1:14:13 End up in Public Q and A's and uh things of this type hearing. Various numbers and stats thrown around, many of which I think have no basis on any data whatsoever, but there's the we only use 10% of our brands, not true.

1:14:28 There is the nine out of ten startups fail within the first year, or whatever the stat is. And The first question that occurs to me with a number like the uh the latter or I guess a ratio is Well, is it because the model is difficult? Is it because startups are inherently that high risk.

1:14:50 Or Are there other plausible explanations? Is it that nine out of ten people who attempt to start a startup? Don't do any of the necessary due diligence. Correct. Yes. Yeah. I've been on a couple of uh Like graduate school.

1:15:04 Yeah, entrepreneurship. You know, contests and whatnot. And one of the things that always happens there is what I call like the time machine. Someone comes up with a business plan that is like, you know. Yeah, I'm gonna build a time machine. Now, of course it's not really a time machine.

1:15:18 But I have seen ones that defy the laws of physics, for example. Um or you know new pipeline technology, but they have no idea, like it's just a pipe dream. They've done none of the engineering. So you you kind of look at that. And you go You haven't really done the homework yet at all.

1:15:35 And then there's a lot of people I come to meet and they've spent Like six months doing their logo. And then the name of the company. But they don't actually have a piece of software yet. Right. I'm just gonna hire someone to to build that for me. Or I'm an app. Uh yeah, I get so many apps pitched to me.

1:15:52 And Yeah, they don't know how to build an app. But they've got a logo and an idea. And I was like, that's a good way to blow a half million dollars on a consultant. Oh man. I I we're all you must get that fifty times worse than I yeah. I mean what what I tend to get, and this is part of the reason why I stopped all the startup stuff.

1:16:13 couple of years ago is it got to the point where ninety percent of the pitches I received, which were unsolicited. would be along the lines of Hi, comma, like not even a first name, or be like Hi Tim or Hey Tim, even better. I am the CEO or co-founder of X. We are raising this at this valuation. We are oversubscribed, but we could squeeze you in for twenty five K if you're really interested because we admire ABC.

1:16:39 Hear the docs attached. Yeah, right. Like let us know if you're interested in the next sixty minutes. Which might end up my default response to anything like that where people are pressuring me for a fast decision is no. Like it's just uh it's like I've I've lost very little money uh saying no to those things. But coming back to the the examples that you were giving and what we were talking about. Bridging over to Restaurants and food. You're being told

1:17:06 How Restaurants are an awful business. Food is an awful business. And I remember someone told me long, long time ago, they're like, Yep. If you want to lose money, go into magazines or restaurants. And At what point

1:17:20 I have a little bit of the backstory, but not all the details. Like at what point do you decide to go into or get involved with restaurants and why? I left trading in about two thousand two. Two thousand one. Who was it?

1:17:33 Yeah, tough year between Nine eleven, which was my father died in February of that year. I was burnt out after, you know, going really hard for so long. And yeah, we built up a pretty good size company too, and I merged with a firm New York. And I just I kinda needed a break, but didn't know how to

1:17:50 How to really take one at the time. Um and so I left I left trading. And I immediately kinda panicked because here's something that I I really genuinely enjoyed. But didn't Kinda know what I wanted to do next.

1:18:02 And started doing consulting for, you know, a small hedge fund and and then Just didn't know what to do and I I had, you know, an awesome wife and a young son and and things were good, you know, but I I was kinda panicked. I was I was playing golf with like You know, ex athletes,'cause who else is thirty four years old and can play golf on a Wednesday afternoon?

1:18:21 And so It was just a weird thing and I kinda looked at them and I'm like, Oh, they don't really seem all that happy, even though they're they've got this lifestyle. And so I met Grant Akitz, the chef.

1:18:32 Yeah. Dwell dining at Trio. Um went to uh a lunch there one afternoon. That's some friends set up. And it was A transformative

1:18:41 experience. It was artistic. It was intellectual. It was thought provoking. Most of all it was emotional. And Those are all things that I would never have associated with. Eating a dinner? Right.

1:18:53 And so from From a perspective of like great art experiences, like seeing a great movie or a great play or going to an amazing museum opening. We Kept drawing back there. Like we kept going back.

1:19:07 And we would go back so frequently that it was absurd because Yeah, it's a big meal and it wasn't cheap. And Every time we'd go somewhere else, we'd go like wow, why are why is no one else thinking this way? And as I got to know Grant a little bit, I think like sometimes people bring

1:19:22 Yeah, the chef some wine or beer or whatever, and it's like that's kind of sand to the beach, you know. I would I would bring him books. And I didn't figure he had a lot of time to read. So I would put Like a post-it note on a page of an old book. So I remember I I brought him this book called The Peregrinations of an Epicure.

1:19:40 Hold hold on a second. The peregrination like a peregrine falcon. I don't even know what that's like. No, no, no. A peregrination is like a wondering about war two by an ex serviceman. He kind of goes around Paris, I wanna say maybe late forties, early fifties, I can't recall exactly. And uh there is a chapter in there on La Parmide, uh, which was a very classical Restaurant, kinda the best in the world at the time. And he described a meal there in emotional terms.

1:20:09 That resonated with what Grant was doing, even though his technique, his cuisine, everything was completely different. And so I literally just highlight Like a couple lines in there. And give him this book, which was out of print at the time.

1:20:23 We kind of developed this Email relationship back and forth where He would sort of try out some new food on us. And

1:20:31 I would give direct, honest feedback, but not like oh it was delicious. It was more like It was more like The you know You're going for a provocation there, but if you know

1:20:42 And we would go back and forth and he wrote uh at the time on a On a forum called E Gull It. And I went on there and his spelling and grammar not with withstanding, I mean, it was like reading someone who's just really thinking hard about what they were doing. Everything we just talked about Here was this young twenty eight year old chef from Michigan who looked like Captain America.

1:21:01 who would come out not stare you know, he was like Hollywood in the sense of like he was good looking and very driven, very clean cut. But he didn't look like You know, the stereotype central casting of a chef. Right, you know chubby, gregarious guy. He was really quiet, introspective, shy. But then you read

1:21:18 And you know, these which are still up. Uh you know, I you can still Google it. And you'd go like you know, he'd go on for like four pages about bread service. Wait what's the point of bread, you know? And this is a guy that I could wrap my you know, wrap my head around. And so

1:21:32 I remember on on January twentieth, two thousand four Uh it's my my wife's birthday. And She said, Yeah, I I wanna go back there and we'd never been in the kitchen before. And they have a table there, but we we'd never eaten in there.

1:21:45 And I remember I emailed him and said She's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese. Who loves Thai food, good fucking luck. And I knew exactly what that would do to him. That would put him into ten days of pure health.

1:22:01 Because if you would research. Latvian food. He would have to redo like he would redo a whole menu, twenty courses, right? And I didn't know they were gonna put us in the kitchen. And they put us in the kitchen.

1:22:14 I mean, it sounds like a a jerky thing to do now, but we we did have a relationship. A little bit at the time. And He served us like The most amazing meal of my life, you know.

1:22:25 And it it started out with Latvian sorrel soup with braised handbox. And you know, it had flavors of the sea, which was a Japanese dish. It had it Thai dishes, but it was all in his style. And so it was his own, and yet it had elements of all these things. And at the end of that meal. He said to me, Well, what do you think? And I had watched the kitchen and it was like a watchmaker shop.

1:22:48 He was not screaming and yelling. It is it is just as uh sorry to interrupt. It is so unlike anything that the vast majority of people listening to this would possibly expect. Right. Yeah, it's like Gordon Ramsey. It's like Gordon Ramsey. Yeah. It is just Complete silence. It is like a watchmaking factory. It is uh it is really something else. Anyway, sorry to to jump into it. Yeah, no no no it's it's that's totally fine.

1:23:14 And so at the end I said, You know, I doubt anybody anywhere in the world had a better meal tonight. And he was like, Well well, thank you. And I said, What are you planning on doing with yourself, you know? I mean I I was like kind of I had a lot of wine. And I can look I kinda looked at him, you know, he sat down with us. And I said, What you what are you gonna do?

1:23:31 And he goes, Well, what do you mean? I said, Well, you're not gonna be here forever. And he said, Well, I I wanna build my own restaurant. I said I'd be happy to help you. Do that. He said, Well what kind of restaurant do you want to build? I said, I don't know. I've never built a restaurant before.

1:23:45 That was it. And then like a week later, I got an email with his business plan. I invited him by my house. And a year to the day later of that, that was May fourth. We went back and forth on email. May fourth, we held a dinner at my house for potential investors. And on May fourth, two thousand five, we opened Delinea. Um that is nuts in terms of we didn't know each other. Can you put that in perspective for people? I actually did not realize that.

1:24:08 Was the the time frame. Yeah. I mean, can you just in the context of like normal restaurant world. Like so we didn't really know each other very well. You've said we didn't know each other very well. What did you know about each other? None the less that gave you guys the push, like the impulse and the

1:24:29 a sufficient level of trust slash excitement to actually Pursue it, right? There had to be something there. It couldn't just be nothing. So what was it? You didn't know each other well, meaning maybe you didn't know the full scope of each other's background. Yeah, I I mean actually study that like that I actually knew I knew the facts, you know? And I knew what he was putting in front of me.

1:24:50 But I didn't know. Him, the way you know someone that you're gonna become a business partner with. And I think he just thought I was rich. Uh be serious.

1:25:00 Like like everyone else. Wanted this is this is really true'cause he has said this to me. Everyone else wanted to offer him A restaurant. that they had already built or wanted to build.

1:25:13 And I actually answered that question correctly. The I don't know is an awesome thing to say like ninety percent of the time of your life, right? And so When he said what kind of restaurant do you want to build, I could have waxed on about some dream I had or just made some bullshit up at the time.

1:25:29 But I just said like I have no idea. Like we got that's a big question. We need to sort that out. I think that was the right answer for him. I think that's all he needed to know was like Okay, the guy's got an open mind. He seems to have done well in business. He knows apparently how to build something. What was really funny is that the stuff that I was concerned about, which was like Architecture, design, plumbing.

1:25:49 You know, building lease. All of that? He was like The word oblivious is not too strong of a word. You know, I'm this is not a criticism of him either, right? It's just like he came to my house and he was just like, Yeah, I you know, I want Martin to design everything. Martin Kastner, who is a genius designer

1:26:06 has crucial detail, which we've we've been involved with for fifteen years now. He's a a designer. He's like a uh an artisan. Like he built plateware and and he won the Bocusta ore for the platter he designed for Thomas Keller. Danielle Ballud's team for the team USA and all that now. But back then, like

1:26:23 I mean this guy's not gonna design plumbing or electrical. So I would just look at him going like well, no, he can't we need an architect and you need to get like city stamps and all that and all that. So I think Grant was just like, Yeah, you find a place, you put tables in it, and you you know, build a kitchen and you go. In terms of like obviously he knew there were health inspectors and all that, but the process of all this

1:26:42 Just about. You either were gonna not build it ever. eight weeks in because we would have hated each other. Well, we were the kind of people that figured everything out. Yeah.

1:26:54 We just talked it out, like right down to What kind of tables? What kind of glassware? What kind of this? Like We wanted to rethink the why again of everything. Like, why do you put a candle on a table? Why is a candle romantic? That's a question we asked. Do we need candles? That's kind of like why is that romantic? Why do people put a little

1:27:12 Bud vase on a table. Why shouldn't that be an edible thing? That'd be cool. So we did all that and we designed the experience. to create emotional responses from the moment that you walked in the front door. So we didn't have the podium.

1:27:25 We went what is a good greeting feel like? Not just If you're at someone's house, what does that feel like? If you're at a restaurant, what shouldn't it feel like? Well, it shouldn't feel like a computer in front of your face. Saying what's your name, you know, and all that. So we

1:27:40 We went through every aspect of that and Yeah, I lost almost twenty pounds that year, not in a healthy way. Just Like G Cing the construction. I laid tile in the basement like three days before we opened. Let me pause for one second. So the why question that comes to mind for me is

1:27:57 After the finance, after battling it out on the front lines and going through two thousand one. Why this as your next thing? Why why was this the thing that captured your imagination? Because you had to know on some level once you started getting into the details. Like Fuck. I mean this is gonna be Yeah, it's all in this is gonna be a big this is gonna be all my chips.

1:28:20 Yeah, energetically. So why why this? You know There are occasional times when you wake up in the morning And That thought comes back to you that

1:28:31 Hey um really sucked into this. Right, you know. And for about three or four months without telling anybody, even you know, Degmara, like even not telling her, like

1:28:42 Telling no one. I kept going like I should build a restaurant with this guy. It would be the best restaurant in the world if it was done all the way. And

1:28:51 I recognized my inner voice. Saying that's a really dumb idea. You know, and you don't know what you're doing. I'd never worked a day in my life in a restaurant. And and I also recognize, and this is also critical. I recognized that

1:29:05 So many people built their living room after they made some money. So they went like Oh well I know how to host a good dinner party. Yeah. And I know could wine, so I'm gonna build me a restaurant. And then they sit there like it's their living room.

1:29:18 And that's not good. Like I didn't want to be that that deucey guy that built a restaurant. because my ego was was needed to host a party. And so Whenever

1:29:30 I would kind of later on broach that subject and people would say, like, well, you know, I could almost hear their brain whispering. Well, of course that's what he's gonna do. And so That was

1:29:40 Again, not the best of motivations in the world, perhaps, but the honest one. That was hugely motivating. Eventually. But when we first started It was this nagging thing like

1:29:50 I'd wake up in the morning and I would go, You know, I'm not really into what I'm doing right now. And I've just met somebody who's the best in the world at what they do. And no one knows it yet. That's probably happened to me. I'm really fortunate that that's probably happened to me seven or eight times in my life.

1:30:05 And when it happens and I meet that person, whoever it may be, no matter what they're doing. I pause, I kind of acknowledge that directly. And then I just go like Can we Grab a glass of wine or or coffee or something.

1:30:18 And that's something worth marking and going like wow, this person's really invested in something. And Grant had every aspect of being being that at twenty eight years old. And In hindsight.

1:30:31 Like it looked smart, but I gotta tell you it was years before it felt smart. You mentioned just now that you've met these people seven or eight times who are Best in the world. Or potentially the best. Yeah, among them. But the key

1:30:48 point that jumps out for me is And the world didn't know it yet. So my question for you is That sort of brings to the forefront, in my mind at least, the question of Wick seeing or feeling.

1:31:03 That other people are not. So could you talk to that? I mean wick w is there a feeling or a particular type of observation, a particular type of detail that you notice in these people. That allows you to scout the talent. Where other people might miss it.

1:31:18 or not pay enough attention to it. Yeah, I mean I think you've written a couple of books about about that. It's definitely intangible. I think it's different in every case. But It's interesting because

1:31:32 You can tell when someone is fully committed. I guess. to their craft or their art or their business or whatever it is that they're doing. Their sport. And it's not because they s they talk it about it all the time, though of course

1:31:46 If you push a little, they're happy to do so. But It's more that like If you look around. Like the vast majority of people are not fully committed.

1:31:55 To whatever. And I think part of what you do is you try to steer people to find those things that they can commit to. Or you can try to lower a barrier to show them like hey, the commitments Not as hard as you think in this particular area, right? Right. But these folks are like

1:32:10 They're all in. They're ninety nine percent in. That's what they do. often to the detriment, frankly, of other aspects of their lives. And I guess you get better at noticing them. And

1:32:24 I mean now like that's Like Oh, I live for that. Like I love meeting people. That

1:32:31 Even if it's not something I'm interested in. Mm-hmm. That are all in. That's an interesting Weirdly, I've never really thought about it that way. But like It was just very clear to me that Grant was all in. If he wasn't gonna do it with me

1:32:43 He was still gonna do it. Yeah. I was a a helper. I you know, over time I certainly Contributed. Yeah, a great deal to it. Not just He contributed a great deal to business and then I also contributed to the art.

1:32:55 But that took time. You know? But I could tell that he was all in. And and that was fun. I mean it's fun to work with somebody who

1:33:03 is basically like okay, man, if you're not in, like get out of the way'cause I'm still going. Mm-hmm. And for for anyone who has the opportunity, I don't even know if they would have the opportunity, but to watch observe grant even for

1:33:20 Sixty seconds. Well Chef Stable on Netflix is Chef's Table. Yeah. Right. Perfect. So everybody should uh have the experience of observing Grant. Working.

1:33:32 And focusing. It is I've s I've met a lot of people who are good at focusing. Who have abnormal focusing abilities and Spending the time that we did together in Chicago and the time that I the Had

1:33:47 to observe grant is It is a next level of focus. It's it's really hard to encapsulate in words. So Chef's table fantastic. People should check it out and just watch. the level of Focus that is

1:34:03 Permeates. the appearance, the air, the atmosphere. It's really something else. To that point, focus. One of the My favorite aspects of

1:34:14 And having conversations is the questions that you raised. Candle, not just should we have candles. Like that's maybe a good question, but it's probably not the right first question. Like Why do Restaurants. Use candles in the first place. Furthermore, why are candles considered romantic? Right, like kind of

1:34:30 Stepping basic. Basic stuff. Yeah. What are other questions that you asked related to a line or Yeah, you could certainly bridge to other Yeah, I think it makes sense to to chat about aviary as well. But what are some other questions that you guys asked?

1:34:45 That People might might not think to ask. Yeah, I mean it you know, Grant set the tone for that. in our first meeting, not really knowing me and We started talking, but we didn't even know where to start.

1:34:57 Right. And he said, Well, I I know one thing, I I wanna have wooden tables. Like I want to have bare wood tables. And I said, Why? He said, Well why do tables Why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths?

1:35:08 They literally call it a white tablecloth restaurant, if it's fancy. Why? And I couldn't really I came up with dumb answers like oh it it feels good or absorbs like a spill or whatever it may be.

1:35:21 And he said, No, it's because the table underneath is a piece of shit. Yeah. He goes, and you know that. Like as soon as you say it. Everyone goes, Oh yeah, I knew that. You've been at weddings and stuff where you feel under the table and you're like, Oh, it's plywood.

1:35:36 Right. But if you go to like a really fancy restaurant and you feel under the table, guess what? Also plywood, just a little thicker. And he's like, You know, when you rest your arms on the table Even if it doesn't come forefront in your mind, you kind of subconsciously know that they're kind of fooling you. And he's like

1:35:52 Why can't we just have like Black. Beautiful tables. It'll show the food great. It'll show the plateware great. And then I kinda went like, well, yeah, but The health department doesn't let you put in Chicago doesn't let you put silverware.

1:36:05 right on the table. And if you put a glass there, the condensation will form a little ring. And then you have a aware issue. But you'll save seventy thousand dollars a year in laundering Linen's. And so we started going like well, how do we solve the water problem? Well

1:36:19 You create a fridge that's just above the dew point. Forty four degrees, you know, in the winter, maybe a little warmer in the summer because it's higher humidity in Chicago. And you just give it advice. So You have these cascading decisions.

1:36:33 That become part of the art of the place. That some of them start from like a really practical thing, like, hey, we want to have a quality table. And then all of a sudden you need a little pillow that the silverware goes on.

1:36:45 That Martin designed. Because you can't put We did want to have placemats. That's too cheap. So

1:36:51 All of a sudden we had to design like A silver holder. So It just became this cascade of like interesting little art projects. That were there for good reasons.

1:37:02 And really created a unique atmosphere. And it was like one of those things like we never tested it. until the day we opened. Like you couldn't test those things. And the very first guy Through the door was is now a famous chef, Chef Sean Brock.

1:37:17 Of Husk. Oh fantastic. Yeah. So he was not he was not yet a chef then, two thousand five. And he was the first guy through the door. And he wrote this giant blog post on e Gullit with pictures and everything, you can go see it. And every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional

1:37:33 trigger an emotional reaction. It's almost all there. Like I remember going home and seeing that the next day and going, wow. That shit actually worked. And you know. And it's like right down to the front hallway that was, you know, a reverse perspective, and you know stolen from Shark Cathedral and and and inverted, you know. Um so all of my interests of architecture and art and Science and all of Grants.

1:37:58 You know, food and all that. Like all came together in like a year long conversation on how to do something. And we really fought with the architect and designers and and all that because people would Tell us the practical reasons. Why you needed to do this or that.

1:38:13 And we would just go, Nope, no host in. Like you know. We want to greet people in a in an open way. And so just Little things like that.

1:38:22 And then we've taken that on, you know, through everything that we've done. Where we took You know. seven years, six years to to build our next place because We didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again.

1:38:35 And so You know, when we did, then we did it. And I think Editing yourself. And each other is i in an open way is really, really

1:38:45 Painful. Really, really important. And Going back to something you mentioned. Related to the living room.

1:38:53 The well off. Yes. Who then create, say, an art project that is not maybe beautiful. But is most often not a viable business.

1:39:06 How did you apply those questions and Rethink. the business model to make any of this work. Financially. Yeah, well I mean you don't wanna be a diltop.

1:39:18 Right. Yeah, my biggest fear is that It would work. In an artistic Way.

1:39:23 But wouldn't work. As a business. And so The answer is at the beginning. I didn't do much.

1:39:30 I handled All of our Marketing and PR. Like I wrote. Everything, you know, myself.

1:39:37 Really thought. About open sourcing The building of the restaurant? You can still go on line and and see the the original business plans and

1:39:47 what logos we were considering using and the the test kitchen, which was in my house. You know, we didn't tell anyone at the time, but that was my house at the time. And and see the development of this restaurant. And I felt like the open source movement in that way was a good model for what we were trying to to accomplish.

1:40:05 And part of that was people would say like a restaurant like this can't make money. And you know, I I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the Universal Restaurant Calculator. And can people find that online? No, no, no. But it's but it would be very unimpressive if they could. But it was It was basically like how many covers per night? I mean, this is back of the envelope stuff.

1:40:25 How many covers per night can you do? What's the check average for food, check average for beverage, what are your food costs, beverage costs, labor costs? What's insurance cost, you know, your lease, your rent, like all those things, right? And I had enough experience with most of those things to at least give good estimates to it. And so what I started doing is I started modeling other restaurants using the universal restaurant calculator.

1:40:45 And I had Again, this goes to the transparency of data. I had Real data for only two restaurants. And from those two, I would then make assumptions about restaurants like the French laundry where Grant used to work. Well one of the greatest restaurants in the history of America, certainly.

1:41:02 And You know, I came up with a number that Grant with there's no way their revenue's that high or they make that much money. That's impossible. And it was really funny'cause years later, you know, I now work with Chef Keller and he's he's a friend all these years later. And I I literally pulled that out one day with Grant.

1:41:18 be there and we're like how close am I on this back in two thousand five And he's like, Oh, you're within like two or three percent, you know. And it's I'm we're talking about back of the envelope stuff. And so you know, you ask like where can people start to start a business? Start in the back of an envelope.

1:41:33 Like one of my favorite exercises is to Shit in a restaurant or a small business of some sort. And just literally do the back of the envelope. That is the kind of calculation my dad called it the two shoebox method. put me through college, right? Like money coming in in one shoe box.

1:41:48 Money going out and the other. Whatever's left is profit. Yeah. Start that basic. And we did that. And I didn't really think about

1:41:57 The We did well. But we didn't make a ton of money. A linea cost of two point two million dollars to build. I put up a little over a quarter of that myself.

1:42:07 And found investors. For the rest, all of whom I knew. And You know, in the first year we did Yeah, we made about four hundred fifty to five hundred thousand dollars.

1:42:17 on four or five million dollars in sale. Not a great return. Not a terrible return. Well you Then one, you know.

1:42:24 Best restaurant in America from Gourmet Magazine. And I was horrified that we won that, frankly. I remember Grant called me. And said, Yep, I just got a call from Ruth Reichel. And like we had some stated goals. Of like

1:42:37 How would we know if this is A success. And one of the things we wrote down was Ruth Reichel declares it the best restaurant in America. And we wrote that because in nineteen ninety seven she wrote The most exciting place to eat in America is the French laundry. And Grant was there and cooked that meal and said that the energy

1:42:54 of having someone that he respected so much. Because Ruth is just a great writer. She's one of the unimpeachable food critics in the history of America. And Having her write that in New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status. I think that can't happen nowadays.

1:43:10 Honestly. For other reasons. But This is kinda pre Internet, free Yelp, all that.

1:43:16 And Then all of a sudden we got that and I was like horrified. Because You know, one of the goals was completed so early. We would have we wouldn't have our like our lodestar, you know. Mm-hmm.

1:43:28 And so He was like, Dear God, can you let me enjoy it for like a minute? Yeah. To you. Yeah, yeah. He was getting really mad at me. I was like, That's terrible. I was happy, but I was also like, Oh no, now what do we do? We need to find another artificial construct here. And enough of this ha I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of that out of my ha out of my face. Yeah, no, it's about I really do believe that actually that it's often The process is so rewarding that when you get something done, it it can be a letdown.

1:44:00 And um I wanted that process to go. And then unfortunately, six months later, Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And given six months to live. And so Weirdly, that was the moment. Where after he was going through treatment where I started

1:44:15 going into the restaurant at night,'cause remember, I'm not a service professional. I was running the business of the restaurant. I was like going in at night and asking really dumb questions again. And You know, weirdly

1:44:27 Our goal was to keep Alinea open. for when he came back. And mind you, he only missed like You know, twelve days, fourteen days of service during Really intense chemo and radiation.

1:44:39 But he was given six months to live. And When People are in that situation and their livelihood is tied to this restaurant. Even despite

1:44:49 Their loyalties oftentimes they just need to find another job. 'Cause they're like, Hey, in four months this place is gonna be closed. And in the midst of that, we decided to do our first book. Really to chronicle. what he had accomplished.

1:45:01 Because for him, he felt like that would be his legacy. He thought he was going to die. He was told he was going to die. So In the midst of managing a self created self published book.

1:45:14 And trying to do that differently and then keeping A dwindling staff motivated trying to let him know that it would still be there when he got well, all that. I started going, This place is run in strange ways, man. This industry is

1:45:28 is is not run right. And I started asking like Basic questions. Like if we have a wait list for a hundred people on a Wednesday. Why do we do seventy four people on a Wednesday but eighty six on a Saturday? And the answer was because

1:45:42 Our incentives were misaligned. You know, the service industry as a whole can't run it a hundred percent every single day of the week. Unless they're incentivized to do so. And you could go like, Well, yeah, but every server they'll make an extra hundred bucks a night or whatever. But they're kinda going like, look if every night was Saturday, I'd be dead.

1:46:00 That's really hard work. You know? So you need to figure out ways of load balancing that. and making every day the same and you end up way ahead. So from a business perspective, that's when my

1:46:12 Sort of self education. In this industry. came forward. And it came forward in a way that I think I was less patient with everything because we were also going through this really difficult emotional Time.

1:46:25 And so consequently When I didn't get answers. that made any sense instead of being diplomatic about it, I would just be like, Well that's stupid. You know, and which which cut Some of the normal social filter off and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to to be around. Anybody?

1:46:42 But I also think it was accepted within that environment at that time because everyone knew what we were going through. And so when we Yeah, you're years later when we finally like were kinda like, Hey, we've got some ideas to build next and the aviary. That's when I kinda went like, Well, we're gonna do things totally differently here.

1:46:59 And anyone who's not on board, even though they work for us, like if you're not on board all the way in Like on getting rid of normal reservations on not using telephones on doing all these things. I'm not you know, we don't have a place for you here. And man, it really works. You know.

1:47:15 That was the basis of you know, I talked to Every software company in the industry asking for their API is asking to build Essentially what's options pricing software. on top of reservation systems. And Open Table told me no.

1:47:30 And the POS systems told me no. I called theaters and went like what ticketing system do you use? And and all those told me no. So I heard a single programmer. And he and I in six weeks built a really rudimentary booking system, but the first day we turned it on, we sold five hundred sixty two thousand dollars of tickets to a restaurant for the first time. Okay, so pause here for No No No, this is great. This is great. So a few a few things for folks who are not familiar, API app application programming, it's how you can effectively link into someone else's

1:48:01 Software POS point of sale, not piece of shit. And it is a piece of shit. Oh, it may also be a piece of shit. What were the design specs? that you were looking for. In other words Before you Get to the five hundred thousand plus

1:48:16 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The snap of the fingers. Like what were you trying to fix or what were you trying to create? So I I get a lot of grief for this for saying this in the industry and in the press, but basically Whenever you make a restaurant reservation, one of the two of you talking is lying to each other. If you think about it, Northern Industry

1:48:37 Form of entertainment. Uh, which dining out is a form of entertainment. I know it's sustenance. I know there's so much culture embedded in it and all that. But you could eat at home. Right. No other form of entertainment.

1:48:50 You just call them up and say, Hey, hold a seat to the Bears game. Or the Cubs game. Or the opera. And I'll show up around seven thirty.

1:48:59 And then they tell you, Yeah, yeah, we'll have a seat ready for you at seven thirty. And then when you get there they go, Oh, you know what, go wait over there for thirty or forty minutes'cause we're running a little behind tonight. You know? The reason that they're running behind is because they overbooked because about fifteen to eighteen percent of the people just don't show up. So they overbook.

1:49:15 They also know that if they tell you that they'll really seat you at nine And you wanted to need fifteen, you'll just go to the restaurant down the street. from them that will lie to them. Right. Right. So they do that.

1:49:28 And Ultimately it's just bad all around. It's bad for the restaurant. It's wasteful for food. And It's bad hospitality. There are so many

1:49:38 pop culture references and and entire sitcom you know, episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant, right? It's absurd. It's completely absurd. And Yeah, I looked at our no show rate at Alinea.

1:49:52 data driven, tracked it. I looked at our what we call short seated tables, like the number of tables That were four people but only two showed up. And the dirty secret there is like people would go, like, Well, what do you have available?

1:50:04 Oh well I've an eight thirty for four. Okay, we'll take that. And they never intended to bring the other two people. Well that's just as bad as a two top no shot. We only have seventy four people in there.

1:50:15 And so it's a yield measure or seventy four seeds. So it's a yield management problem. And so What you Five to eight percent of our revenue every night was was being lost. to that transaction. That was a non transaction.

1:50:27 And so I wanted to figure out ways To do two things. One What to figure out ways to make it transactional. Because again, you asked about Professor Thaler, one of the key tenants is there's a little bit of skin in the game. Right.

1:50:39 Uh when when people have small vested interest in something and the outcome of something, or even if I gave you a pencil as a gift. And then thirty minutes later, I want to take it back. You will get so mad even though you didn't care about that pencil. Right.

1:50:53 Right? And you're like, what was that? Yeah. Dude gave me a gift. Now he's pulling it back. Yeah, it's like the expected it's like the expected value of a mug if you uh ask them how much they would spend to buy the mug versus giving them the mug and saying how much will you accept to sell it. You know, the differential. Yes, huge. So you know it That came to me one day because I I my kids wanted to go see a movie at night that I did not want to go see. And I was really, really like

1:51:17 I would have easily paid fifty bucks to not go to this movie. Yeah. And then My wife basically says, Hey, well let's go to that movie. So I go on Fandago, I buy four tickets, sixty bucks, whatever it was. And at like five thirty night it's pouring rain and everyone's napping.

1:51:33 And they're like, Yeah, I don't want to go. And I'm like, get your asses in the car, we're going to the movie, man. Now I would have easily paid that sixty dollars to not go to the movie. But once I had the sunk cost. Of paying for the movie. My psychology totally flipped. And and I was like, we're going to this movie that I don't want to go to. And I literally irrationally

1:51:55 made everyone go to the movie. Like which weirdly cost you know, I mean, from an emotional family standpoint. All bad all the way around, right? So I I thought about it and I was like wow, what if people Put down a small deposit on

1:52:09 Times when demand exceeds supply. Like, right? So Saturday night, eight o'clock. Great. That's a that's The best seats at the opera house. Let's see if people prepay for that or put down twenty bucks for it.

1:52:20 That's fully credited at the end of their meal. It's not a cover charge. I'm not trying to squeeze people on the actual cost of the meal. I'm just trying to go like Yeah, let's see if people make a commitment. And everybody told me No, no one's gonna do that.

1:52:33 Like this is not the way it works. But if you look back historically. This is the interesting part. Again, it's about like digging in deep on something. If you look back historically

1:52:42 Restaurant reservation started with the telephone. And at the time that we were Starting to do this, the telephone was dying. And I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, that was eight years ago. But

1:52:54 I have a computer in my pocket. And if you ring me and I don't know your number, I don't want to talk to you. I don't answer it. I'd much rather receive Like a little piece of text.

1:53:03 Letting me know what's going on. Than a phone call. Um similarly, like calling a restaurant is an antiquated thing to do at this point. But long before the telephone People got room and board.

1:53:15 And what Rumenboard was literally it was like You go to an inn. And you you get a room for the night. And then do you need food? Okay, well, you get a board of food. That was literally it. And you'd prepay for it.

1:53:28 Mm-hmm. And so There was hundreds of years of that long before There was a telephone and people called and said, Yep. I'd like to eat at your restaurant. Sure, it will let you in.

1:53:38 And so as The technology for the telephone is morphed into Yeah, what we all have in our pockets now. I just wanted to update that whole transaction. And so

1:53:49 I also wanted to acknowledge that Tuesday nights should be cheaper than a Saturday night. So it has to work in both ways. I always thought Uber could have fixed their They're surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Like just move pricing in two directions.

1:54:05 And if you move pricing in two directions, then like That whole argument goes away. Right. So we did that. We priced out different prices by day of the week.

1:54:13 And time today. So five PM on Wednesday at Allinia is still cheaper than eight PM on a Saturday. By a lot. by eighty to a hundred dollars a person. Well.

1:54:22 And you know what happens? And this is now we have You know, hundreds of restaurants doing this on our software called Talk. What happens is people buy the most expensive seeds first. And the cheapest sees first.

1:54:34 Which is exactly what you'd expect, actually. Right. Because there's some people who are price conscious and go like, Wow, this is a really expensive meal, but holy cow, I don't really care if I eat at five o'clock on a Tuesday. Great. Like I can save four hundred bucks. And then there's some people that go like I only eat at A PM on Saturday.

1:54:50 Okay. It's fine, pay a little more. Or they're attracted to the fact that it is the most expensive. Sure. That happens too.

1:54:57 And then there's there's a whole bunch of tools that Over time we built on top of that to sell wine pairings or sell books. You know, we sell twenty Linear books a day. on checkout with the booking process.

1:55:07 Mm-hmm. That's all ton. 'Cause we're not gonna exit through the gift shop at Alinia. It's a Michelin three star restaurant. So like we would subtly have like one book like near the restrooms that people could peruse, but it didn't say like buy the book or anything like that. So typically we'd sell like one or two per night. Now on checkout

1:55:25 When you book. Alinea, it says, Hey, would you like to buy an Alinia book? Personalized. And twenty People at night get it.

1:55:32 That is four hundred thousand dollars in revenue a year. Yeah. That's incredible. Crazy, right? And it's amazing to me that no one did that beforehand. Because ultimately

1:55:41 People can't buy what they don't see. And people don't want to be upsold. Inside of a restaurant. There's nothing worse in my mind. Then Yeah, some places that today's special is today's special and it's real and you you kinda know that.

1:55:55 But sometimes it's just the old fish. Ha Right. Uh huh. Sunday night.

1:56:03 Yeah, but we all know these things. I think no restaurant wants to like raise their hand and go, Yep, that's all true. Like we were aligned to our customers and and we're not gonna really see you at eight fifteen. And so I think when I said that, like you can look back through some articles, I remember that there's an article, I think it was in GQ. that they interviewed like a grizzled veteran, you know, and I've he didn't use his name and said, Overbook and a bar to wait in has always worked for me.

1:56:30 And I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, there's so there's so many Systems that have

1:56:42 similar overbooking Load balancing issues, right? You look at airlines, you look at hospitality, you know. Yeah. I I have a great dentist. They only do it via phone call or email. And so I have to play a guessing game.

1:56:58 It's like going into clothing store and going like, Yeah, I'm looking for a blue V neck. Cashmere sweater. Like nah, don't have one. Guess again.

1:57:08 Like it's like Put this shit on display, man. Like just tell me what day you could clean my teeth. Show me. And I'll just go online and hit the button. You know? When you then debuted The ticketing option, if I'm labeling it properly. How did you prime the pump for that? Was there anything uh did you need to prime the pump?

1:57:30 to have this what seems like certainly a windfall Well we did. Yeah, we did a A video. Where

1:57:38 Yeah, next Restaurant was about a restaurant that's always new. Essentially. Like what's what's one of the big problems? Well, when you open a new restaurant, doesn't matter what it is, people are gonna show up for like Five or six months.

1:57:51 And then after that you know, you gotta struggle to like get regulars and and Find new audiences and all that. But people like the new quote unquote. The other problem is is that our own staff and chefs We're the kind of people

1:58:04 who I said to Grant one time he cooked this amazing French dish for me at Linia right in the middle of his sickness because I had Driven down from Michigan. I've never eaten before after in the Alinia kitchen, but he whipped up this little French dish for me of duck. And I was like, Man, let's open a French restaurant some day and he went, Like, we'll get bored after six months. Then I was at one of our chef's homes on a day off Tuesday and he made he loves Thai food and he made this amazing Thai meal. Amazing.

1:58:32 And I was like, Wow, I had no idea these guys were so versatile, you know? And then it made sense. Hey, these are passionate, amazingly talented people. And it kinda dawned on me like Let's change the restaurant every four months. Like. Yeah, let's let's do and then we dwelled on that for like a year.

1:58:48 thinking like it was kind of impossible. To do. And then I said, Well, like let's start with the French menu. He's like, Well, what does that mean? Like there's

1:58:56 Southern France, there's Loire Valley, there's France that's Nouvelle Cuisine, and then there's France from like You know, a hundred years ago. Totally different. And I was like, Yep, Paris nineteen oh six. I don't need to explain to you what that is. You'd want to eat that.

1:59:10 If I just said like if someone said, Hey, new restaurant opening, what's the menu? It's Paris nineteen oh six. I'd go like cool. Like I wanna do a little time travel and see what that was like. And so as soon as we had like a city and a time. We instantly knew.

1:59:24 That was the idea that kept us up at night. You know, where we went like wow, look at all these different places we can travel. And what does that restaurant look like? And how do you create a kitchen versatile enough? to make all these different cuisines and and how do you make it not feel like Disneyland where one time you have a theme of Paris and the next time you have a theme of Japan. So you have to go with like an austere minimalism, you know?

1:59:44 Is there particular reason why you chose the year nineteen oh six? You know, um doing some research And I may get the exact date wrong'cause this is eight years ago I did the research, but I believe the Seine flooded in nineteen oh eight. Somewhere around there.

1:59:57 And so Scoffier, like the father of French cuisine. was at the writs then. And that was kind of like the height of that. Era of cuisine. And then after the sun flooded, that's where you got sort of your brossays and bistros.

2:00:13 Because they had to kinda go to a more casual It opened up for more people. It took the price point down. It made it more approachable. And it wiped out.

2:00:24 dozens of these fancy restaurants. And so like Rank got cheap and all of a sudden like hey, like We're gonna get this new style of restaurant. That's roughly as I recall it. Somebody's gonna listen to this and tell me I'm all wrong, but that's where we landed because we could do this as Scoffier menu. And boy, we argued about that too. Like didn't have blenders then.

2:00:41 So like electric blenders. So I mean We did like a so you so you wanted to mimic the production Well I did. Grant did not. We were I remember we were at a we invited the press to a practice funeral. It's like hey pal, you don't have to make the food.

2:00:58 Should we make it intentionally worse than we can? Ha Yeah. Because the recipes were really vague. They didn't call for salt. Yeah. So in the middle of this press dinner where we had like the New York Times there, we had all sorts of these people there.

2:01:12 Which we I'll never do again, right? That was just a a genuine error. Like And We are still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be. And then we served dinner and and we were like openly argued like he'd come out of the kitchen. And we would openly argue about it.

2:01:28 You know. And this is at the press dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember he brought the soup out and it was like I was like oh they they must have used the actual blenders, right? Like modern blenders, because it was like the mouthfeel was like perfect. And so I was like, Oh, you use the blenders, you know? And he's like

2:01:46 The recipe didn't call for salt either, did it? But I should I have not used that and had it taste like shit? And and then I was like, Well, maybe you don't know that they didn't have refrigeration then either, and they packed The vegetables in salt as a desiccant. And so they were almost all pre salted by the time they get to Paris. And that was it. Like people were just like, these guys don't like each other at all. But but that was that was that's our method. Like that's what we did, you know?

2:02:12 And I mean to the day we opened. We had those arguments. And then you know, in terms of the software, like Man, like I didn't sleep for a week. We set it up on rack space. It didn't work right. I had never done anything like that before. It was like No one would help.

2:02:28 Yeah. I think like Nobody would help. No one would when you say nobody would help, you mean competitors, potential, uh I don't even know what you're doing. Allies, potential like these are people I got it. Speep why wouldn't they help?

2:02:41 In the case of Open Table, they had a monopoly. Right. So why that makes sense to me. That makes sense. Um in terms of everyone else, I think they didn't just didn't get it. But even people within my own company thought this was a fool's errand. Grant for sure. Like he will fully admit this now. Thought it was a terrible idea. Why did he think it was a terrible idea?

2:02:59 Because it's not hospitable. Mm. It's not hospitality. It's not it's not it's not h it's low touch, not high touch. Correct. And hugely the case where all of a sudden the price is different every day? Like are people gonna get that?

2:03:12 And I just kept looking to other industries and I'm like, No one has a problem with it when they go to a baseball game. They're they're not sitting on the Above the dugout. And then like the guy who's in the third deck back row looks down and goes, Oh, that guy, like he totally stole that ticket from me. Like two different price points, you know. Yeah, yeah. And I just feel like people inherently get that without having to explain it to them. If I may, how far in advance of the opening. Were you pl were you hoping to launch the software and when did you end up launching the software? I launched it about seven hours before the first dinner. Holy shit.

2:03:45 I hope to have done it. Four to five weeks ahead of that. It was literally One man operation plus me, like one programmer and me. When we launched it.

2:03:57 Rackspace. This is two thousand ten. I'm not saying anything bad about rock space. It was I didn't I probably set it up wrong. Uh two thousand ten. It did not like it's supposed to auto load correct.

2:04:07 And self propagate. And it neither happened. I was expecting we had seventeen thousand people on our email list that had signed up on the website to like be notified when their bookings went on sale. And I was expecting maybe, you know, seven hundred. Show up. Like should be fine.

2:04:24 And something like eight or nine thousand showed up and everyone just kept hitting the refresh key. And here's another fatal error. Of stupidity and and this is not the way our software is built now because we have professionals here. But basically my admin login was on the very same server as Everybody's Public access.

2:04:42 So I couldn't even go into configure Hop. So I I and but the good news on this is that I couldn't answer like Hundreds of angry emails all at once. So I created a Facebook group.

2:04:54 For the business, which in two thousand ten, not very many people did. And so if you go back and scroll all the way down to the beginning of that. You'll see me going like, Hey, if everyone could please stop refreshing. I can sort this out. And what was really cool is that people felt

2:05:10 Part of something. They felt like wow, holy shit, this guy is actually doing this himself. were part of this experiment. And were on the inside of it. I got a lot of empathy from the customers, even though they were the ones that were unable to Get what they wanted.

2:05:23 And then when it finally started working I mean, I literally not showered in five days. I had pizza boxes linger, it looked like a bad movie startup thing. I had a beard. I was

2:05:33 Yeah. Just strung out Manic. And I remember I called Grant. And it was opening day and he said, How many should I prep for? And I said, Prep for full. Like'cause

2:05:41 If not, we'll turn on the phones. What I didn't tell him was that I didn't order the phones'cause I didn't want to have Fail safe. Exactly. You'd burn the ships. Yeah. I yeah, I I would I just wanted to make sure it

2:05:52 I I forced myself to work. So we had no phone line. And When it started working. I would double click, you know, one of the functions was I could double click on a table. If it was

2:06:03 Yellow it was held, the public couldn't see it. I could make it available that by double clicking it, it would turn green. And then when it was sold, it would turn red. But the first time I did that

2:06:13 Inventory out. And clearly things were working. It turned red so fast I thought it was broken. Yeah. And so then I went into the credit card processing.

2:06:23 And saw Oh my gosh, someone bought that that fast. And I called Grant and I said, Dude, you gotta come to my house. And He was like Uh, we're opening a restaurant in like six hours. What's going on? I said

2:06:34 As the guy who helped save your life, get in a fucking taxi and come over here'cause I need to show you something. And He looked at me and kinda went like What is wrong with you, right? And

2:06:46 And I took him upstairs to my office. And I said I explained what I just To him what I just explained to you. And I said, Click on one of those and make it available.

2:06:53 He said. Which one? I go. Any one in the next month. And he clicked like three weeks out at nine thirty and it instantly turned red. And in another window I had the credit card thing up and I go, look, Mr. Jones bought that. And he went Really?

2:07:08 And I'm like, yep, there are, you know, four thousand people waiting for you to do that right now. And that was the moment at which I I was basically like, this is the best thing I've ever built. Yeah.

2:07:21 Because be because it was it was it was It was functionally different. Then any way that anybody was doing this. It wasn't novel.

2:07:31 It was just applied in a novel way. And so You know. What was interesting is that of course the software itself sucked. But as a proof of concept, it was awesome. Yeah. Quick question on that, if you're comfortable answering. How much

2:07:46 money had you put into developing the software. At that point. Yeah, yeah. Roughly. I'm gonna say a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. Yeah. Okay. So in your mind, were you completely confident it would work or

2:08:00 And there's it doesn't have to be A or B, there could be C D E F Or were you like, you know what, for a hundred and fifteen K or whatever it might be, even if you budgeted for less and it overran Even if there is a twenty percent chance that this works is it is worth risking the hours and time because it will so completely transform what we're doing. And if it fucking fails, who cares?

2:08:23 Correct. Yeah. The latter one. Yeah. Again, it's about the asymmetric risk, right? It was also about this thing that As I dug into how a linea ran.

2:08:32 There's like things that you can Fix and control. And there's things you can't. Right. And this was the one that

2:08:39 You know, I would answer phones at a linea. And I would It was like being a therapist. People would go like I would like to, you know, make a reservation on my anniversary

2:08:49 You know, seven weeks from now on a Thursday and you're like, I'm really sorry, sir, it's totally full. And Hundred percent of time they thought you were lying to them. Right. And and and so consequently, like I realized that we were saying no to people more than we were saying yes.

2:09:05 And that Even when we said No in a nice way and took ten minutes to do so. People thought That

2:09:12 We were lying. Or that they weren't important to us or any of those things. And so I felt that transparency Was actually more important. than the actual money.

2:09:23 And uh the actual yield management. I felt like Like Allowing people to see the entirety of the inventory was the most important thing. And

2:09:33 Same thing with You know, the trading markets, they've moved to more and more and more transparency. More and more speed. This is true across every industry. And I just felt like wow, this industry I I found myself in was so backwards.

2:09:47 And so I just wanted to make the whole thing more transparent. And so Even if it didn't go beyond my own restaurants, I was totally fine with that. In fact, I didn't do anything with it for four years. And I I didn't really intend on making it

2:10:02 Yeah, like a software product, I intended on fixing my own problems. And I think Often that's where That's where good ideas come from. Oh, super often. Yeah, the scratching of your own itch. At least you know you have a market of one.

2:10:15 Yeah. And I I also want to point out when we were talking about asymmetric risk earlier, and you're like, Well, I want to stand to make three to four X what I stand to lose. And if you run the math, and I'm I'm sure I'm missing a lot of subtleties here, but when you said we booked five hundred and X, thousand dollars and it cost one hundred and fifteen. Like we're kidding. Very much within the ballpark of that. Yeah, but I didn't even like I mean, well, I mean since then it's like We've taken our margins at our restaurants from ten to twelve percent to

2:10:42 You know, at times in good months twenty to twenty five percent. in an industry that Over the last five years, if you read, I give a talk called Tuesday is not Saturday and seven things you already know but are doing nothing about. It's a talk that I give to the restaurant industry. And you know, one of the things

2:11:02 that that I point out in there. Is that There's so many obvious things. that you could be doing to improve your hospitality. to improve your booking process to

2:11:13 Get rid of food waste. But people tend to just kind of move along because it's a really chaotic environment. It's hard to make change in it because every day is game day. Like you wake up every day and hundred people are gonna come through the door and if your fish monger doesn't show up, well you you need to figure out what to do with that, you know? And so it's It's

2:11:31 Not really about the return on that one investment at that one moment. It's more like you know, a thousand small improvements over time. And you know, the what if I look back at that system that I built then

2:11:45 Compared to what we have now. Yeah, it's a minuscule part of what it turned into. But It was the seed of an idea which is more important, which is Hallo.

2:11:56 Let's shake things up. And then I I got a great CFO who was at Bain Consulting and he He came on to like help manage the building of the project of Next. And when he started wanting to build out a business team, I was like, Great. Run with it.

2:12:09 And so we've built out Food cost analysis that uses Marimeco charts. It's totally different because it's visual and you give that to the chef. It uses what charts? Ah, Marimecho. Oh, if you had if you don't know Merameco, if you get nothing out of this. One of the greatest visualizations in charts that you could like, you know. Do an Excel or whatever.

2:12:28 Hard to do Vocally. But imagine a square. Where each of your X axis is the percentage of let's say Food costs.

2:12:38 And then each square within there is Like I don't know. meat or produce, but the whole of the square is a hundred percent. The Y axis is a hundred percent of one metric and the X axis is a hundred percent of another.

2:12:51 So you could kinda look at any given square and see how much that impacts the whole. It becomes like a big Lego. building with different colors. Um If you give

2:13:01 A busy chef. Four hundred receipts. And say, Hey, every Friday look through all these. And Yeah, figure out what we're spending too much on. Or worse.

2:13:12 Hey, your food costs last month were thirty six percent, I need them at thirty two percent. You can't take percentages to the bank. Let's talk about dollars. Let's see where we can say dollars. Or the revenue could have just gone down that month for whatever reason. It's August in New York.

2:13:25 The end. So it's not really a good way to look at it, but you give this person this this Yeah. Chart this mayor Mecco. No Marimeco, I'm the guy's name. Yeah, it's M A R I M E K K O chart. Is that right?

2:13:38 Again, not not good at spelling, but I think so. There is a Google result, which is how to make a Marimeco chart in Excel. So I'm guessing that's probably it. There's some YouTube videos as well. So I'll I'll put those in the show notes for people. Man, I gotta tell you, like From a utility perspective. You show that to a person? You explain it.

2:13:57 visually, like when you see it, it makes much more sense. And they instantly get it. And they look at it and they're like, Oh, there's no way I spent that much on Fish last month. Yeah, and this can be this can be used for things outside. Okay. Everything. Yeah. Not just food, not just restaurants.

2:14:12 Oh no no. It's it's just a great visualization of Utility. And Like consultants love it. And I gotta tell you, I don't love consultants. In general. But but but but if I've learned anything from from the best consultant that I've ever hired, like who who is now my partner and CFO.

2:14:29 He came hip up with this and as soon as I saw it, I was like, How Did this not enter my life until my fortieth year. This makes no sense, you know. It's just incredibly useful. But I my point is is that we We kinda went through everything in the restaurant and went like, Well, what are the biggest spending areas that we can like analyze?

2:14:46 And It's true in any endeavor. that you're doing. You know, there's no point looking at at the dimes if if you've got something that costs a thousand dollars. Start there. And that's

2:14:55 getting into like Our thoughts on Our publicity, our PR. Like we don't Have a professional

2:15:03 PR person and haven't in fourteen and a half years. We don't spend money on any promotions other than social media. And then with the social media, we track all of that. We can see what our ROI is on a boosted post. We can see what our ROI is if we advertise on your podcast. You know, those are That's that's why these mediums are are working is because they're measurable.

2:15:26 Mm-hmm. You know, I I was looking up Just as you were Shadowing in as I was also looking for Marimeco. A quote that I think applies and you may certainly feel free to disagree, but applies very well to a lot of

2:15:43 The breakthroughs. They That you have experienced and also helped to catalyze in uh a lot of what you've done and it's a quote from Charlie Munger, who for those who don't know

2:15:55 You should definitely take a look at poor Charlie's almanac. He's the right hand or I shouldn't even say that he is the investing partner of Warren Buffett. And Fascinating, fascinating human being. But one of one of the quotes of his that I really return to a lot when I think I might be outsmarting myself in some way.

2:16:13 Or in general as a reminder is quote It is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by Trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent. Yeah. I mean b because you you as you noted earlier, you have these Practices that

2:16:35 Otherwise. In many cases, smart people who've just not taken the time to ask, why are we doing this? Why does this exist as a thing? Why what why does Like you pointed out, it's so obvious once you reframe it, like you walk into a clothing store and they're like, Okay, what are you looking for? Nope, sorry, guess again. It's like that's fucking ridiculous. Right. And and yet that's exactly the way it works in many other places. Yeah, once you start

2:17:01 down that road of thinking that way, it will drive you a little nutty. Because you you stuck like you can't do every business, you know? And um You know, there's a couple things that I've got in my back pocket that I'm kinda like, you know, one day I'm gonna arbitrage truffles. Because it's like there's an opaque market that's absurd.

2:17:21 Here's an example. I'm gonna give somebody out there Call me up because this is a real business idea. And I've been wanting to do it for years, but you know, black and white truffles, not the kind not the chocolate ones, but the kind that the dogs dig up in France and Italy. Are as expensive as the most expensive drugs in the world. You order them as if it were an illegal drug. Of course they're perfectly illegal, but you call up a truffle dealer.

2:17:43 And you go like, Yeah, what do they cost while they're you know Six hundred and fifty a pound right now for black truffles, sixteen hundred for white. You try to talk them down a little bit. You make sure that you get the best quality'cause hey, we're a Linea and we've we'll ship you back the stuff we don't like and all that. And then in an unmarked box.

2:18:02 stacked with newspaper will come twenty thousand dollars of truffles. Good for like a week, by the way. Like not like this is not like a big supply. And Is Completely opaque.

2:18:14 As a market. There is no mycologist touching these. There are knock offs from but not knock offs, there's different species and quality from Australia, from Tennessee, from From

2:18:26 China, et cetera, et cetera. that they cut into it. Sound familiar. And It was my like we spend a lot of money on truffles every year. and try to figure out what the US market

2:18:39 in the fall truffle season is worse. You can't. It's exactly like publishing. You can't find numbers. You know?

2:18:47 And so whenever I sp Whenever I see something like that. I'm like someone's guarding They're they're golden goose. You know.

2:18:56 Whenever it's a black box, you're like, I feel like I am not on the best side of this trade. That's right. That's right. And and that's that's what I did, you know, I did a closed in seller network between the Merc and the Amex to arbitrage ETFs. to get rid of the phone brokers in the middle. That took me like a year and a half to get through The Merc and Amex powers that be. read like most of the CFTC. So when they would tell me it's that

2:19:21 Like in the rules or not legal or whatever. C of T C Chicago trade uh something federal um commodities Trading commission. I see. Okay. It's like the SE C, but for commodities. I gotcha. And yo, again, sit down and actually read that someday. Which what's amazing is that the experts never it's like it's like the members of Congress who don't read the bill.

2:19:43 And then if you ask them detailed instructions on it, they're like, Oh yeah, I don't really know. But The general tenor is this or that. the people who were governing the exchanges had never read the rules. So they would just quote to me they would just quote to me like, Well, it's against the rules. I'd be like, Well, here are the seven volumes. Please show me where If not, I'm gonna do it, you know. And so similarly, like

2:20:03 Like truffles, same thing. The booking for the restaurants, same thing. Open table had a monopoly. They wouldn't tell you who your customers were. They would sell your customers they still do to other restaurants. Yeah, if you're full one night, they'll just send you down the street to a Japanese restaurant down the street. They don't care. So I wanted to get rid of all that. So I built the software for that.

2:20:21 Truffles, I will some day build a truffle exchange. So you question for you. Th this is this is uh this is something also for this is maybe just turning this into a therapy session slash coaching session for for myself, but I get attracted like a moth to the flame to puzzles. And Oh I've got a puzzle for you. No, well no no, I don't need any more puzzles. I need no more puzzles. But

2:20:45 You there are many, many black boxes out there. Right, you ha you have truffles and like you said, it's like all right, what's the market size of Yeah. Truffle Exchange at X point in time.

2:20:58 Don't know. Yeah. Although you guys is one establishment or multiple establishments buy a lot. There might be a hundred different

2:21:08 Black boxes like that that you run into. How do you choose The Black boxes worth trying to shine light on like a detective because that it's gonna consume energy, it's gonna consume time.

2:21:20 How do you pick and choose which to go after? That's like the manic test, right? Like it's like the one that bothers me the most. Like I kinda start doing, you know. And then I you know, and then it's iterative from there. Like sometimes you find yourself

2:21:34 in a construction of your own doing that was accidental. Mm-hmm. Like all of a sudden, you know, you kinda opened your mouth and and said something like the truffle thing and All of a sudden like, well, okay, I guess we're building the truffle exchange. I feel like I feel like um the boring company is like that for Musk. Like he he opened his mouth and were like Yeah, just big

2:21:53 B. You know, dig big tunnels and he's got enough credibility now where Some engineers went like Yeah, we could build Yeah. We can dig.

2:22:01 tunnels that are seismically fine and like hey, you work for SpaceX, okay. Like let's see if you can build it Dig a tunnel. I don't think that was like a business plan, you know. Right. Um, and and he just has a lot of credibility, um you know, at this point. I think that To a certain extent, like A lot of people have a lot of ideas. They just don't dig

2:22:20 Down That rabbit hole. So You know, I I do some as like a hobby.

2:22:26 I do some where I kind of Have someone that I like within our company and say, Well If you really wanted to be independent and do something cool. Like Here's a project.

2:22:36 learn about this and start researching it, you know. We have Three hundred and some employees on the restaurant side and about fifty on toc. Many of them are incredibly hardworking and intelligent. And when someone says, Hey, I want to learn how to be more entrepreneurial, I take one of my black boxes out and say, Well, let's see if that's true.

2:22:52 Because this is gonna take you six months of independent work. Without any guidance. And you're gonna get tired of it really fast. Or you're gonna come back to me and say Hey, you know what? Like I can't figure out.

2:23:05 the total value of the truffle market. In the United States. And I'm like, Yeah, no shit. That's why I asked you to do it. Now when you give them an assignment like this, they're like, You know what?

2:23:14 Boss, I really want to be an entrepreneur like Congratulations. I'm Now giving you a project and A It's on your time and you're not getting paid for it. Or do you not no I w I I never, never, never take

2:23:28 Every single intern that works at our restaurants for a minute is paid. Gotcha. So even if so I don't get paid for the black box time. Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I would never Like I think one of the things that I really dislike actually are industries like where they say Hey, like you're You know, you're in college, whatever

2:23:46 You know. Be an intern. And then you know, your parents say, Yeah, that's a great opportunity for you to learn something and all that. And it's like, Well, you're probably not if you're not getting paid, you're not being valued, frankly. And for me, we pay everybody.

2:23:59 nobody who's working here, if they're you know I'm I do expect That You know, salaried people. are gonna work more than just the time here.

2:24:07 And I think that people who are passionately curious We'll be given a problem like that and will come up with interesting solutions to finding out what the answer may be. And that's that's enough. You know? Mm-hmm.

2:24:21 So I I want to add some sort of commentary on the question that I asked, which is Uh, I think it's incredible that you do pay them for that. Independent. Research.

2:24:31 Which is also acting as entrepreneurial. training slash filtering for them. But I wouldn't have judged you harshly at all if you said no, that's on their own time. And the reason I say that is that If you are going to be investigating black boxes as an entrepreneur, there are going to be periods of time where you are doing it in the evenings. You are doing it on the weekends. You are doing it without a clear road. Two

2:24:54 immediate cash flow. Right. So I wouldn't have judged you if you said, you know what, I am paying them full time for their normal job, but if they want to tackle one of these black boxes, That's considered. extracurricular. Uh so I wouldn't have judged you harshly uh if you had responded. In the negative on that. Yeah, I mean I I guess I guess, you know, to to back up a little bit, like when there are people who I don't know.

2:25:16 Who do not work. for our company and they call me up and say, Hey, I've got this Idea for XYZ or whatever. And it's intriguing enough. I will

2:25:25 I will pose some more difficult questions. But They're not working for me. You know what I mean? Like there's there's a guy who brought me a food product that I I you know, uh about A year ago. And

2:25:36 It was Interesting but not Super compelling. And I said, Hey, if you did these five things. It would be a lot more compelling for me to be involved and to help with it and all that. And yesterday I got a box in the mail.

2:25:50 And He had done not only the five things I said, but said, Hey, when I started doing those, these seven other things popped up. Here's where the product is. Here's the people we signed. Here's the airline we just signed to to carry the product. And I would love to have you still involved, even though

2:26:06 We're so much further down the road than I thought it'd be a year later. That's super cool. Like I didn't pay that guy, obviously, but there's a person who's truly entrepreneurial, right? And did this on his own time. But if they're working here, if they work for the Lini Group, if they work for Talk, like For sure they're you know.

2:26:20 You could take time during your day. Like doing your normal business that's a project that we're working on. And um yeah, we we also try not to have such harshly defined roles. Not within the restaurant. Like look if you're a server, if you're a captain, if you're a a line cook. You're probably not working on my truffle project.

2:26:38 Yeah. Uh it's I mean, realistically, yeah, you know, that's not Yes. But on the business side We certainly have people who who work in roles as like a lawyer or an analyst or something like that.

2:26:53 who wanna get involved with our publishing project or who wanna get involved with the Truffle project or whatever it may be. And You know I'm happy to to pull them in and try to include them. And, you know, like you said, you you use the a word As an entrepreneurial filter.

2:27:08 I would say ninety five percent of the time people filter themselves out. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean they're gonna self self select or self select out. Yeah. Are there any particular books or resources

2:27:21 that you found useful on hiring or managing? God, if you found one, let me know. No, I hiring is so hard. I think it's the hardest of all things. To do And

2:27:34 I think my style of interviewing people is totally different than it was twenty years ago. We used the word self selecting just a moment ago and It's exactly what I do. I kind of bring people in, I let them know

2:27:48 What I'm about, what the company's about. They've probably already been interviewed. By other people. Before they They get to me.

2:27:56 And so at that point I I let them know like what are the upsides and downsides of working here. You know. And I kinda let them know what the expectations are. And I

2:28:06 I tell them like people self selecting to do a job. And you don't want to come here if you're gonna fail. Because that would be terrible. And I don't want you to come here and fail. 'Cause that'd be a waste of my time and resources and would also feel awful. It's never good to let go of someone. She fear.

2:28:21 So Let's see if you are self selecting in. What do you want to know? Like I'll be completely transparent about What's good, what's bad, what's good about working for me personally. The fact that you maybe you'll never see me again. I mean, it's it's like a big enough organization where, you know, there are definitely people working here who who I don't know at all.

2:28:42 But People tend to join organizations where they want to work. And so I I try to make that process I try to make them Be able to say no.

2:28:55 Easier than they can say yes. What would be some examples of how you do that? You know I kind of judge the person By what their pain points are.

2:29:04 And so if someone says like Uh you know, one of the things I I I like to ask, you know, which it kinda resonates probably W with you. As I say, here were the last five books he read. And

2:29:16 I gotta tell you, that's a really hard question to answer. Because even if you're a voracious reader. You remember like a book from two years ago, but you can't remember the one you read two months ago sometimes. Totally. At least I can't. You know? And so that is a great filter on people because

2:29:30 A couple of things will happen. One The person who's a voracious reader will go, like, Oh my God, I swear to God I I read like twenty books this year. Um, let's see. And they will really start going, Oh, well, I read one like three months ago that was this and it was about that. You could tell that they're intellectually curious. And and read a lot.

2:29:46 You'll also get a person who goes, Look, I haven't read a book in twenty years, but every night I go home and I do woodworking. And that's my outlet. Like that's where I focus. That's my Zen moment. And that's a valid answer to that question too, you know, like you don't have to be a reader.

2:30:03 Some people will just lie through their teeth. And they'll they'll answer what they think. is the smart answer to that question. And I don't want that person there. I read War and Peace and then I went to the problems of philosophy and uh Yes, yes, yes. So so definitely not the right answer. So there's that. And I asked that kind of question. But then like things like do you enjoy writing?

2:30:27 One of my things is like if someone doesn't like to write When people ask what I do for a living, I say I'm a writer. And they go like, Oh, you've written a couple of books I go, No, no, no, I read about four hundred emails a day And that skill is hugely important right now. If someone doesn't like to write, they're not gonna want to work for me.

2:30:43 Because Wind When they send out an email And I I'm C C D on it and it Isn't

2:30:50 A well Thought out. Little thing. The answer coming back is like, Hey, here's four ways to improve this. And

2:30:59 At some point it'll be like, Really? You did that same mistake again? it comes off kinda harsh in email, you know? And so if you're the kind of person that doesn't take feedback well or doesn't wanna learn, like Man, I don't I I'm lacking patience for that at this point in my life. And I let them know that.

2:31:15 And some people like look at you and just go, like, Yeah, dude, I don't want to work there. More than I would think. Which is great. Yeah, simplifies matters. Yeah. And it it's not it's not it's done with a smile. You know, I'm not like trying to like

2:31:28 Terrorise people when they come in and interview. And then there's some people that go like Awesome, that's exactly what I want. Yeah, we've everything from like You know, t double PhD engineers. to people who've never

2:31:40 you know, attended a university for a minute. But they've they've self selected into an organization that People ask a lot of questions. I love that like I can be in room. I come up with an idea and everyone there will just be like

2:31:52 Well, that's a great idea. There's no way we're gonna be able to do that in the next six months. Because that's not that's not in our That's that. in our capacity at our size right now. I think a question on a lot of people's minds and a pain point for most people listening will be email. So you seem to be

2:32:12 At least confident in your treatment of email. Four hundred is a lot of email. Do you have any Particular. Commandments, do's do nots, times you check, things you check first. Any types of Systems or approaches that

2:32:27 allow you to maintain A degree of sanity. With with the amount of email that you must receive. Yeah. You're gonna hate this answer, too.

2:32:38 I am terrible at it. It used to be Not so long ago. That I personally replied

2:32:46 absolutely every single email that came in. Myself. And I used to have an auto sign that basically was like if I don't reply to you Within five minutes, I'm dead or asleep. Yes.

2:32:59 And it's the opposite of everything that that you stand for. I know that. Um it's it's like I was listening to Jason Freed. So Jason Freed's a friend. I was listening to his His podcast with you. And I don't get it at all. Like I I I am not like I I would I would love nothing more than you know to rework.

2:33:20 Or to not work. Yeah, work four day weeks. Or to have six week projects and all the stuff that he espouses. He's a friend, he's an investor in uh one of my businesses. But man, I don't that's not how I function at all.

2:33:32 And I weirdly think that he misses cause and effect a little bit. Like he has a very successful company. And that's the cause that allows the effect, which is the ability to manage your time really well. I live really paranoid. I'm more comfortable that way. And also I kind of feel like a weird moral responsibility.

2:33:51 to reply to the people. who've taken their time out of their day to Write us a note. You know. Even if it's not

2:33:59 Like critical business for me. And one of the things I did for about ten years that I I loved doing when we first started Linia is that I would Have Google Alert set up. And I would find some blog. Yeah, that only like

2:34:10 Some woman and her mother read You know. And I would reply personally, like say, Wow, thank you for the great write up Belinea. And they would be kind of mind blown that I found it and and you know, all that. Um I treated email that way for a long period of time.

2:34:24 Unfortunately now I I can't quite do that. So I do have a bunch of filters and whatnot, but I didn't even set them up. My business partner, Brian Fitzpatrick. who used to be the head of Google Chicago and he's my He runs the engineering team and he's the CTO of Talk. He kinda said, Like, dude, you're you're slipping, man. Like, you know.

2:34:41 You need to create some filters and and and get some stuff that's directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and kinda Kind of forced the issue. For me. So now I can't quite do that. I do wake up in the morning and look at sort of our our Bazillion social media.

2:34:56 messages and whatnot, kinda pick a random one and just answer it. Like I I wanna be involved. in knowing what our customers are asking, what they're doing, what they're saying, what they're replying. Anything that's a complaint actually gets brought directly via email to a complaint tracker that me and Grant see. And so luckily there aren't that many of those, but any time you serve five or six thousand people a week.

2:35:18 You're gonna get You know, some something going wrong. But man, I'm terrible at it, honestly. And I think I've tried I I I will tell you a funny thing is that when I go away on vacation, I do try to Concoct a uh

2:35:29 I basically say like look I I'm gonna be In a mountain or on a boat or whatever. And you're I'm not gonna be able to reply. And so I I would make these elaborate stories up. But almost it's like a fun piece of art.

2:35:41 Project. As to why I couldn't do it. And so one year Every year, every time I went away, I I basically said, Like I'm going to visit Panda that I adopted. And then bring back to Chicago. And it ended the year around Christmas time when I went on break. With

2:35:55 A with a with a A picture of a a baby panda. Yeah. And a really kind of mediocre photo shop job of me standing there at the teeth. And and and the Chicago Tribune call me up like three days later going, Yeah, is it going to the Lincoln Park Zoo? Like and I was like, No, dear God, it's not.

2:36:13 And the following the follow I hope there is no panda. That's why I wrote back the uh that's my entire reply to that. And then the following year I said, like, I like to talk. As you might be able to tell. And so everyone who knows me knows that like I can just go on and on, right? And so I I said I was going to a combination of a tantric Sex retreat and silence retreat.

2:36:33 Sure. Sure, eight days to explore my both inner and outer self. And elaborate. This is your out of office reply. That's my out of office reply. Anybody would get that, right? And so

2:36:45 I thought that was really funny. And then about two years later, I bumped into some guy who works for a very big corporation. And they wanted to do some work with the L Group and it was like kind of a consulting project, very lucrative. And he was looking at me really funny. You know? And I said, Like, what's up? And he said, Well, you know, I I really wish we had worked together, but you know, then you went to that sex retreat and I just came

2:37:09 I just couldn't get it past everybody. And I was just like I was looking at him going like what are you talking about? And then and then I remembered like four years earlier my out of my out of office reply. And I told him like that it was kind of a joke like the panda. And he did not find any humor in it. And I did. I thought it was hilarious. Even though we lost the business. I thought it was really funny. Um so if you ever get a really unusual out of office reply from me.

2:37:35 Um, it's fiction. Probably. I love that. Yeah, I mean if you're serious all the time, you're never gonna get the actual serious work done. You're gonna burn out before that ever happens. I also want to underscore one thing and then I wanna ask you about a black box that you and I have talked about quite a bit, which is publishing.

2:37:52 The fact that you pick A message to reply to. even if it's one is really important. And I've noticed this certainly with the audience that I have, listeners, readers, et cetera. It is not physically possible for me to reply to everyone. It would also be anathema to everything that I'm espousing. in many of the books, but

2:38:14 I do want to Demonstrate that I am listening. And I think that it it goes a really long way, even if you do not personally reply to people. if you are able to prove that you're pay attention and that Seems to resolve

2:38:31 a lot or at least act as a salve for people. out there who very seldom feel heard, which does not always necessitate a response. So I just wanted to point out that It might seem like a drop in the ocean, but it it actually has much more uh further reaching implications when you when you do it what what you were describing. Yeah, I I feel like it's genuine. First of all, I'm always curious.

2:38:54 What are people writing about? to the restaurants, what are they writing about to me? My LinkedIn profile basically like I don't really read LinkedIn at all. I keep it. I think it's important to have it. But I don't ever read the messages on there, but in my bio it basically says, If you can find my email address, I will then cite this, I will reply to you.

2:39:12 And so that gets rid of all of the marketing crap. But That comes in. But every now and then I get like You know, a a subject line.

2:39:21 to the email address that's on there. It says basically like Hey, via your LinkedIn bio. And I'll I'll read that and reply. And it just shows me that like Hey, there's an actual human on the other. Line, is that just some marketing thing?

2:39:33 And B, like they they really, really do have something that they want to talk about. And so You know, it's like little things like that are kind of Puzzle filters, I guess, that I call them. Like where I I just create like a little bit of a

2:39:46 A little bit of a barrier and if you if you're really into it and you really want to talk to me. You can pretty much find me pretty easily. I'm not that hidden. Yeah, and the detail is really important here. The mini hurdle. I have a friend, I'm not gonna mention by name, because I'll get deluged, but he is a very, very successful author and journalist. And when he is hiring for different positions part time or full time,

2:40:09 at the bottom of the job description on a job site or w wherever it might be. In Small print at the very bottom. It will say do not send a message on this platform. Do not send an email, even though email addresses give it given earlier. call this number and leave a voicemail answering the following things and automatically he takes

2:40:31 the pool of a thousand people who are gonna do the wrong wrong thing and finds the ten people who are actually paying attention. Yep, hundred percent. So publishing. What is I we didn't really we didn't really talk much about it, but can you give a little bit Just a a a tiny bit of background on the aviary and then uh

2:40:49 Some of your Related. Publishing investigations. Which I think is is not. Not an unappropriate word, if you could give people a little bit of of context.

2:41:02 Yeah, I mean I'm gonna back up before the aviary just a little bit and just go like You know. For a chef. Do me a quick book. It's something that they dream about if they're a serious chef from the time they're fifteen.

2:41:14 You know, just like if you're a basketball player you want to make the NBA or y you know, if you're a runner, you don't want to be in the Olympics or whatever. Like to grant to a bunch of chefs having their own ideas. In physical, beautiful cookbook. is kind of a holy grail for them.

2:41:31 It's very sacred. And What was interesting is that Just before Rant was sick. We started getting a lot of publishing offers.

2:41:40 And the natural inclination was to go to what he knew, which was artisan press. which published the French laundry book, which is one of the best selling high end cookbooks ever. And it's certainly beautiful. It was very revolutionary at its time. I think it was published in about ninety eight, ninety nine, something like that. And

2:41:59 the typical publishing deal, like kind of came into us, which was great that they were coming in. And it was two hundred fifty to three hundred thousand dollars. And they would basically say, Well, out of that, you're gonna pay for the designer and the photographer. And you need like a thirty day photo shoot.

2:42:18 And You know, here are the guidelines for how many photos you want in the book and you know to keep costs down and this and that. And I kind of looked at all of that. And all the offers came in within about ten percent of each other. Which

2:42:31 Immediately, you know, the hair on the back of my neck, like the spidey sense. The spidey sense starts telling me that something back there is pricing this in a usual way. And then I started going like oh This is actually you like the music industry. Very much so.

2:42:48 I knew people in in bands. that would get signed to a record label back in the day. And they would get a quarter million dollar advance. Yeah, shit. That's seems like a lot of money, right? And then all of a sudden all your studio time comes out of that and you don't recoup another dime until you sold

2:43:08 You know, X number of records or CDs, or in this case books. And then in the in the Contract actually said and the restaurant guarantees that they will buy twenty five hundred bucks at half of Retail price. I was like

2:43:21 Whoa. That's Yeah, you're looking at something like eighty thousand dollars right there. That goes right back to them. In an essence. Like and then I kinda went like, Well, I wonder what a book costs to print.

2:43:34 And I mean I I I just called I asked them like well how much is this book gonna cost to print? Well, I don't really know. And so what they would do is that they would always have layers of people.

2:43:46 So that They said, Well that's not what I do. Like I am the person that does this, the lawyers give the contract. The printer does the printing, like I there's always pl uh plausible deniability or plausible ignorance. Yes.

2:43:59 Willful plausible ignorance. Yeah. And And so I I do what I start doing. I'm like, Well let's just google that up and see what it print costs to print a book. Or How many copies of the French laundry book sold?

2:44:13 Um how many copies of fifty other books that we wanted to emulate or that we that we Thought were well done sold. And Man, it's like asking for like

2:44:25 you know, keys to the Vatican or something when you call a publisher and ask them that. They I I'm sure you know this, right? You probably know now because you've You've been so entrenched in the industry, like you know your numbers. And you might know that of some of your colleagues and friends, right?

2:44:39 But if you wanted to actually do a meaningful comparison across the industry. It's almost impossible to do it, even though that there's a company that does that. Then you start trying to reverse engineer it and you go to the New York Times, which you can go to the New York Times website and just look at how is the New York Times Best seller list.

2:44:57 created and on their own site they say it's a compendium of known publishers, like publishing houses. as well as these like top fifty retailers, you know, back in the day. And It's a gameable system.

2:45:09 Right. Like the way that publishers want to do it is that they want to ship out all the books at the same time because that's how they're counted for the New York Times bestseller list and stuff. I should also know it's not only gameable, but it's also conversely s highly subjective within the New York Times. So there there's a lot of wiggle room. In other words, it is it is not like the Olympics where you're like, okay, clear gold, silver bronze video replay. We know exactly how this was Tabulated.

2:45:38 The more that We Got I like curious more and more curious, a little bit angry, actually. And but Grant was weirdly angry at me. Well

2:45:48 Dude, like Why do you care? Like you know, it's like th I've been wanting this since I was fifteen. And I was like, Well, look, it if if this is our budget, it's not gonna be the book you want. It's not gonna be as good as you want it to be because We're not gonna be able to spend six months doing the photography.

2:46:04 We're not gonna be able to get great pages. We're not gonna be able to get a picture of every dish. Like if what do people cook in a cookbook? Well they tend to cook Those pages where they see a picture of the final dish. 'Cause you know what it looks delicious. You know what it's supposed to look like. You got something to emulate at least, right? And so when we did the specs for the book

2:46:21 I had one of the best publishers in America say If you do that book, there's no way you sell more than five thousand. No way. And no one's gonna publish it. And you can't use metric.

2:46:32 And you can't use a gram scale. And you can't have that font. And you can't have those pictures in full bleed. And it'll cost way too much to print. And so

2:46:42 It took about a month and a half before I got lucky. And I called a print broker who had actually printed Yeah, brokered the print job of one of the famous books. And I was expecting that the book retailed for sixty dollars, it would cost like Fifteen to print? Twenty?

2:46:58 I didn't know anything about it. And when he told me it was like Two dollars and twenty three cents per book to print per Thirty thousand. Yeah, thirty eight thousand copy run.

2:47:08 I went, No way like that. And he went, Well, it's probably less now. Like he thought it meant it was like too much. Right. And l and instantaneously I went, Oh shit. Everything makes sense.

2:47:20 And when I would call publishers and tell them this They would go, Oh yeah, but look, like we did Forty different. Prince, Latin. Yeah, forty different books. Last year.

2:47:31 Only five of'em did well. And I'm like, that's your problem, man. Like I know what we're gonna sell well. I don't really give a shit if if you lost thirty five percent of the time and it need to spread your portfolio risk. I'm the one you're spreading it on. Right.

2:47:46 So we decided With the LineBook. We put together like Twenty pages. And Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system. And we shipped it out to eight different publishers we liked, two of which were art houses that had never done

2:48:00 A cookbox. And They all came back and and same all the usual criticism except for Aaron Wayner at Ten Speed Press. Yeah, smart smart smart guy. By the way. Yeah. And he basically said

2:48:11 I'm gonna make you an unusual offer, no advance at all. And we can negotiate. Essentially we'll just be the distributor. And we'll negotiate out like what that looks like. And we'll help you with the printing. It will help you with the editing, which we're both really good at.

2:48:25 And Within ten minutes we had struck a deal. Whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves for a restaurant, we paid Actual printing cost. Not wholesale.

2:48:37 Actual printing cost. Anything that they sold and distributed. Through their channels. they would get about twenty seven percent of the sale price. Which means that we got seventy three percent of that.

2:48:47 These are like steet secrets, right? Like nobody Tells this stuff. And so for years I was walking around with this knowledge. Where if we sold

2:48:59 A hundred thousand bucks, say. That would be the equivalent of selling like five hundred thousand bucks on any other deal. And we got to control The quality of it. And we won both the James Beard Award for Best Cooking from a Professional Point of View Best Cookbook of the Year.

2:49:13 And we won I say we, Martin and and Laura Kastner won the um communication arts award. Where if you're a designer, that's like their annual is like That's like getting the The Oscar. Right. Yeah. Similarly for people who don't know what I mean the James Beard Awards. are are also very much like the Oscars.

2:49:31 Yeah. So So we felt Like really vindicated on that. The book still sells. This is eight years later. We still sell Seven, eight thousand copies a year. And when we did the aviary, which is our bar that's a non bar that we talked about earlier.

2:49:46 You know, we started getting all of the same offers again. And this time it was really easy to go like Ha ha. Just kinda like a like, Oh, that's cute. Like, you know. And so

2:49:57 I should add that we did I wrote a a book of Grant and I wrote his memoir together. That we didn't use a ghostwriter, we wrote it ourselves, called Life on the Line. And for that one, we did a traditional book deal.

2:50:09 But after our agent kind of got it halfway. I got on our plane, flew out there, and then brokered the deal myself. And I got A giant multiple of the highest bid. By doing essentially a reverse Dutch auction.

2:50:24 Starting at a really high price and working my way downward. Can you explain for to people just briefly what that means? Yeah. Yeah, so basically like Here here I'll I'll do this. Like Let's say I so I think one of the

2:50:34 Great. Problems. Like To solve. One of the black boxes is the agency problem. Let's say you want to sell your house. You put it on the market and the agent's gonna get, I don't know, four to five percent of the sale price. That's a lot for something. It's like your most biggest investment in your life.

2:50:49 But they kind of say like they control the information, they control the MLS, all that. Will they, if they're the seller's agent, get the highest price for you? And the answer is almost certainly not. Because They let's say a house is gonna sell for five hundred thousand dollars, they're gonna get four percent of that. That's twenty thousand dollars.

2:51:06 If they get four hundred ninety thousand dollars. It's almost no difference to them. Four hundred bucks difference. But if they lose the deal over that last ten thousand, it's a lot. So they want to price a home.

2:51:16 So that it sells quickly. So that they can keep their deal flow going. And they don't really care about maximizing their last dollar. Whereas for you, that last dollar is actually like ninety six hundred dollars. It's a lot more money. So what I do whenever I've sold real estate

2:51:30 is that I figure out what the intrinsic value is of the house. Like what's the bare minimum that I'd be willing to sell it for? And I price it just slightly higher than that. And I tell all the agents in the whole town. I will pay you fifty percent of everything over ten percent higher than that.

2:51:46 And they all say, Oh, that's against the real estate ethics code or I would never do that deal because it would subvert all my other deals or whatever. And then what happens is two days later You get like a dozen phone calls. And they've priced it like

2:52:00 Forty percent higher. And like it sells in two days. Yeah. Because now they're actually working for you. Right.

2:52:08 Well It similarly, I went into that publishing negotiation and I was kinda like By the way, the agent is probably look upable. She's great, like great person. I don't think she even knows. that that's what was happening. Do you know what I mean?

2:52:21 Like I don't even think she she just knows that like hey, she was brought up in this in this industry for this company. And that's the way it works. And she would for sure dispute everything I just said. She would say I always try to get the highest price. But I went in and I just went like look, I'm not gonna spend my time doing this for X. So

2:52:38 I need four times that. And she was like, There's no way you'll ever get that. You've never written a book before. I said, Well, we did the Alinea book. That's a cookbook, doesn't count. These are words. So I went to the publishers that I'll bid on it.

2:52:51 And I just Got them all on a on a conference call and just started at a really high price. And every couple of seconds I went down ten thousand dollars. And then one of them blinked. And bought it.

2:53:02 Yeah. What was the that's a great way that's a great method of price discovery. If you think about it, most auctions Even like you go to a charity event or whatever, they start low and they try to get interest going high. It's often the case that if they start really, really high and start going down.

2:53:20 Oh my God, someone's gonna say something. Like I would pay that. Someone else must as well. They could be off by a factor of thirty percent and they'll never even know it because there's only one bid that ever happened. Yeah. So no one knows how off they are. No, on that phone call. Where you're like, hey guys, would love to get you on the phone and then

2:53:38 Publisher. Well, yeah. So d I guess my my question is did they know that they were signing up for a Mexican standoff slash yes they did. Oh they did. They did. Yeah, yeah. So it's like I went and met with them all personally. Or be like John, I'd love to get you on the phone and that's like all right, congratulations guys. Yeah, you can't you can't ambush people to a Mexican stand up. Okay. I mean you could. It might be fun, but I I didn't do that. I wouldn't talk I created enticement. I I like Sold on my ability to actually do it. It was a bit like

2:54:09 doing the no phones with the software. Like I was like, Well, if I get a really big contract I'll have to figure out how to write a book and that'll be a lot of pressure. So I did that and I wrote it and I turned it in on time, which apparently no one does. Very, very rare. Yeah. Yeah. Cause we sent it to them like on the day it was due. They went, What's this? And like, that's the manuscript. Yeah. Oh that's cute. Well it's kinda like showing up at the restaurant on time as a diner and then being seated at the appointment time is just this like open

2:54:38 Open lie. Do you turn do you do you turn your books in on time? I do actually. Yeah. I believe that. Yeah, I do turn my books in on time and we we could get into that separate time. I just wanted to ask you a question. I do. I I do. I do not turn them in at the expected length. Yeah, I do tend to turn them in on it. So what happened with the with the aviary is that We basically couldn't figure out how to do another book.

2:55:05 Because The Linear Book was such a project. And Martin was on to other things. And We didn't want to do it traditionally and I didn't know anyone who could do what we wanted to do.

2:55:17 And then there was this guy, Ellen Hemberger. And Well, if if you get nothing else from from this whole talk and you've made it this far. Go see, go Google Ellen and Alinia. Allen

2:55:27 is a procedural effects. artist. He worked at Weta Studios and all the Hobbit movies, doing like hair and water and things like that. So he writes the physics that then makes the Makes the magic. Right.

2:55:41 And then uh He worked at Pixar. And while he was at Pixar And his wife, um, Sarah, worked at Industrial Light Magic as the graphics designer. He was given by Sarah a copy of the Alinea book.

2:55:53 To go full circle. And became just Fascinated with it. Wasn't how to cook, didn't know how to cook. And did the Julie and Julia thing. He spent five years not only

2:56:04 Cooking his way through the entire book. But Also would do things like, Well, I don't know where to get this plate and I've always wanted to learn how to fire porcelain. Mm.

2:56:14 Alan, for people wondering, is A L L E N. There are also videos of Alan and Alinia. Yeah. And he's An auto didact. Like this guy learns and learns and learns and Is the kind of person that goes. And goes.

2:56:30 I'm gonna learn how to forge knives and I'm gonna learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, I'm gonna cook everything in there and I'm gonna take pictures of it and I'm gonna make a book documenting that. And when he asked if he could use Like we had kind of a little email relationship and he came up to Alinea once to ask Grant some questions about how to make something'cause it wasn't working. And when Grant kinda threw up his arms and go, Well, the book might be wrong.

2:56:50 Like Alan's world view was shattered. It was like And he was kinda like What do you mean it could be wrong? He goes, Well, yeah, we did have some erata in there. Like I mean we documented hundreds of recipes. It could be wrong. And at that point, Alan like his mentality change. It's in the video. And and We got to know Him

2:57:08 And I got to know him. And when he sent me the book, it wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting like a home grown book. And what I got was, you know, a four hundred page beautifully Beautifully illustrated. Beautifully written.

2:57:22 book about a person's journey of learning. And it was called the Alinia Project. And I had no No idea that She

2:57:31 Had done anything like this. And so suddenly I thought to myself immediately and it's in the intro to the aviary book. I texted him and said Holy shit, you're crazy.

2:57:42 Yeah. And I have ideas. And after waiting for like four or five years to do a book on the aviary, I immediately was like, This is the guy to do the book. Now I need to lure him out of Pixar. Which is about the best place to work in the world.

2:57:58 And then I found out his wife worked at Industrial Light and Magic and she did all the graphic design and I was like this is perfect. You guys need to quit your jobs and move to Chicago. And They flew out. We had some conversations about what they might look like. It was very much a partnership.

2:58:12 They would have equity in the book. We would have creative freedom to do it exactly the way we wanted. We knew more about the printing and the bidding and all that. So I wasn't worried about the economics of it anymore. I was worried about trying to make something really

2:58:24 Awesome. And right as they were about to say yes. They found out they were gonna have a baby. So they called me up one day and said Oh my god.

2:58:34 Like and I was like, Oh, they got cold feet. Oh no. And they said, No, we're pregnant, we're gonna have a baby and I said, Okay, well we're gonna wait a year. Because there's no way in the world I'm letting you move out. out of your comfort zone and have a child and have that change of life. And they thought I was like

2:58:49 planting on them just because Like In a discriminatory way. I said, Nope, we're not gonna do this with anyone else. We'll wait as long as it takes. And about a year and a half later they moved to Chicago.

2:59:00 Yeah, we spent the last year and a half. Set up a studio. of our own spent the last year and a half doing this book. Did a Kickstarter to Just essentially raise awareness for it. We raised almost a half million dollars on the Kickstarter.

2:59:12 We sold about another three hundred thousand dollars a book since then. Uh it comes out. in October, you can go to the Alinea Book.com and the coolest part of that website. Is it a shit? Oh sorry, the Averybook dot com. Right neck.

2:59:24 Very the lead, Nick. Very the lead. What genius marketing right there. So um yeah, the Averybook.com. But if you the coolest part of that is other than of course your ability to buy said book. Is Alan kept a blog on there called Our Progress. And In it he details.

2:59:41 Every single aspect of what it takes to make a book like this. Um right down to line screens and compositing photos of You know, like One of the things that every single book publisher told me is that You can't sell a cocktail book for more than thirty dollars.

2:59:57 There's no market for it. And You don't need pictures because it's just liquid in a glass. And I think we blew that out of the water with what the book looks like. I think that because

3:00:09 Certain things like fire are really hard to photographed there's a great picture in there of this one cocktail where we we spray um some anise and we light it on fire and it it creates an aroma into the bowl that it's served in. Loaded to the gun walls. It's a Batabia rock cocktail. And

3:00:25 That took a composite of eighteen different photographs. And so he breaks down the photography techniques. And also the New York Times bestseller list. And I showed him like how You know?

3:00:37 Google target marketing works and Facebook ads work and all that. And all of a sudden he went, Holy shit, I had no idea you could do this. So we are going completely without a distributor or publisher at this time. And I think we're gonna set a r I man, I don't know, like And either completely delusional.

3:00:55 It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half a million of these. Yeah, and it's the next two or three years. And it's yeah, it's not a not a nine ninety five book either, which it shouldn't be. Right. I mean this is No, it's it's it's eighty five dollars. We've invested Close to a million dollars all the way in around it. And it looks like it, I think. I hope.

3:01:12 Yeah, from what from what I've seen, it looks like it would cost more than that. Yeah, well we did it you know, we did it all ourselves too. Yeah, it's really like a five person project. It's deep enough that if a professional gets it, they're gonna learn a lot. But I'd say about thirty five, forty percent of it can be done at home because unlike the Lineabook where Hey, you gotta go out and buy a duck.

3:01:31 Like, you know, in your local grocery, you might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you need some flour to kinda rum. Or you know, a certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store. It's exactly the same thing. That we use. Yeah, that product is universal.

3:01:44 I read somewhere the I don't think it's taking us too far afield. I read somewhere that you consider yourself a tequila guy, or at least in part a tequila guy. Do you have any Favourite. Tequila's Or concoctions.

3:01:58 Well there's So I I just I'm gonna do a little video promo for for the book that we just filmed last week where Essentially I I work with Eric Jeffes, who's one of our Bartenders in the office, which is our little speakeasy.

3:02:10 Which is amazing. If if people have the ch the opportunity, they sh they should check it out. It's basically Grant just said, Hey, everything upstairs, people are gonna think it's spelling a smoke and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail. So One of the the foundational cocktails for me is is a daiquiri. It's uh I say three ingredients in a million ways to fuck it up.

3:02:30 You know, it's it's just lime, sugar, and rum. That's all it is. And yet Like Most bars you go into will make a terrible decorate or they'll blend it.

3:02:40 Or Blah blah blah, right? But a great daiquiri is really, really transformative. So Did a video on that. And then I always make a half mascale margarita. That's my

3:02:49 Favorite drink. All I'm doing is I'm taking some reposado. And a little bit of Mezcal and equal weights along with some uh You know, uh Grand Marnier or or Quantro equivalent. And um lime and simple syrup. That's it. That's all there is to it.

3:03:03 Man, I love simple stuff like that. And then we have a whole section in the book on old whiskeys, dusty bottles. Old gins. Like there's a growing movement to kind of rediscover some of the distilleries in America that were really, really, really great. That don't exist anymore.

3:03:19 That were more artisanal at the time. You can still find those bottles. around. Uh it's a little bit easier than like, you know, someone like wine collecting or something like that. Man, it's it's like an endlessly fascinating thing. I don't consider myself a cocktail person. Ten years ago. I really loved wine. I felt like from a health perspective it was better as well. But just like anything else, if you have a well constructed

3:03:41 Cocktail. And something of high quality. It's an additive thing. Like you could have it in a meal and it can make the meal better. Yeah, whereas it's like, you know, a vodka tag's just boozing. And it's just getting drunk. That's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make things that are

3:03:55 It's really a culinary approach to cocktails. It's it's endlessly fascinating, just like anything else in in this world. I would also say just contrasting, say uh someone who wants to recreate something from a linea, which you certainly could do. I mean, Alan proved that. with something from the aviary, the there's also a tremendous amount of theater And presentation.

3:04:18 dynamism that you can create with cocktails that does not have to be super expensive or super complicated. I mean certainly you guys are able to go as complex as you want to go, which is Stunning and I've spent time with the JBR. You can easily make some ice with patriot bitters in it or something like that. And then as the ice melts in the cocktail, it's gonna change the flavor.

3:04:39 And it's gonna look really cool too. Doing some of these things at home is is not hard. I did a dinner party once where it was like, you know, a cocktail party probably had Forty people at my house. And each room in my house had

3:04:50 all of the ingredients for the cocktail and then a little instructions on how to make it themselves. So that took away the need for a bartender, because they're terrible anyway, anyone that you bring in and you know, that you you know, a caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like oh like now I know how to make an old fashioned, now I know how to make a Manhattan. The one that I discovered that party was a Frisco Sour. Had like Benedictine whiskey and lemon, you know. It was really delicious. So

3:05:16 It can be more than just like a strong cocktail. It can be really delicate and interesting. Mm-hmm. And people can uh Learn about this at the Aviary Book. dot com.

3:05:29 That's right. Yeah. Well Nick, I've I've two Rabidfire questions that are unrelated. And then I think we're gonna we're gonna

3:05:38 We're gonna bring this Neat and tidy round one podcast. We've talked about books. Everybody should not only check out the Aviary book.

3:05:48 But also if they have a chance, go to the Aviary. It is it is tremendous. And you can also get Some delicious Bites and food. At least last time I was there. Still can at the Aviary. So it is a bit of a

3:06:04 I I hesitate to call it a workaround, but you guys have some very, very popular establishments. If you want to sample the food, This is also a great way to do it. And the drinks are just incredible. So it's it's a real sort of destination. That makes a trip.

3:06:19 to Chicago uh worth it in and of itself. So I I would recommend not only checking out the book, but also checking out A lot of what you guys are up to. Aside from that, the books you have gifted the most to other people outside of those that you've made yourself, what are the books that you've gifted the most? To other people. Yeah, I I named one of them already.

3:06:39 A fool by randomness. Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that. You know? And I've I've definitely given that away. Boy, that's a tricky one because just like I said, I can't remember Books. Very well. But that's certainly probably number one on a business side of things.

3:06:56 And then the on the other side, I tend to give away But I would call vintage art books. So it's not a book people can buy, I'm I'm sorry to say, but occasionally I I'll be at like a use bookstore and I'll find some of these great old art books and I I buy a few of them and then when I when I want to thank someone for something I I send'em that. Paregradations of an Epicurean. Something like that.

3:07:18 Yeah, I mean. At the end of the day, like I I bought Like

3:07:23 Wanna give someone something, I try to make it something that Yeah, and I really want to make it a great gift. I try to get it something that you can't buy. And so I bought an old typewriter. And when I write a thank you note.

3:07:37 I type it up on the old typewriter. And it is the most confounding thing to people. Ha ha. Because they look at it and they go, How did you do that? And I'm like on a nineteen twenty two. Typewriter.

3:07:48 It's like a personal artisanal thing. But I I know that that's not what you're getting at. No, no, no. I can't really think of like the number one, I'm sure once we We end this, I'll immediately think of it and uh if I do I'll s I'll send it to you so you can link to it.

3:08:02 I think the answer the answer is more interesting with the typewriter. So I I I think what I'm getting at was whatever you just offered. So that's perfect. And if you come up with anything else, we can put it in the show notes. This next one can be tough at times for folks, but the billboard questions. So metaphorically speaking non commercial, no advertising, but if you could get A word, a quote, a sentence, a question. Up on a billboard.

3:08:26 To transmit. Something to millions or billions of people. Does anything come to mind that you might put on that billboard? I don't know why this came to mind. But the word would be pause.

3:08:37 Mm. I see. I have no idea why that came to mind. But I think in In talking through this whole thing. You know, it's

3:08:45 Y you kept asking me like why are you digging this black box or it'd be like curiosity. Like and I think those are two I'm thinking of those in the same way. I'm not saying pause like stop. I'm saying think.

3:08:58 Right. And so I I think um You know, the the hallmark of of the people that I like As friends the best. What we try to

3:09:06 And still in our kids and the reason I like my wife so much and all that is that Intellectual curiosity is everything. Mm-hmm. And so I don't know. How do you get that on a billboard? I I think pause or

3:09:18 you know, be curious or something like that. I know it's cliche, but I I I think that's the th the thread that ties everything together. Yeah, you do pause a lot. Even though On a macro level, you seem to be moving At hyper speed a lot of the time.

3:09:33 There are a lot of pauses built into that speed, if that makes sense. From what I've noticed. I mean you're similar you you are simultaneously one of the craziest fuckers I know and least craziest fuckers I know, if that makes sense. Thank you. I'll take I'll take it. I'll take it. And uh where can people find you. I know you have, of course, the the linear group dot com, you have explore talk.com, the aviarybook.com, which is the sort of the most timely for people to check out right now.

3:10:04 If people want to say hello or follow you on social, where are the best places, best handles for that. Yep, Instagram, which is N Kaconis, K O K O N E S and Twitter is Nick Coconus. And I C K.

3:10:18 And hey, it's all Googleable, right? Like so beyond that, if you could figure out my email address. I'll probably answer. Although given the given the reach of of of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated. It might take a while. Yeah, that might be a hug of death situation, but we will That's okay. TBD. Good problem to have, I suppose. Good problem to have. Nick.

3:10:39 This was a blast. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. And uh many more conversations to be had. This I think another trip to Chicago may be in order soon. I hope we see you here soon. I I know I need to get back. And to everybody listening, we've made mention of the show notes, links to everything we've discussed. Which you will be able to find at Tim dot blog forward slash podcast, as with this episode and certainly every other episode. And until next time.

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