#737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas

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I'm a cybernetic organism living to show a metal impulse going. Late in the day, Paris show. 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 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.

So, this is a 2 for 1. That's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and past 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best. Some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these 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. 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.log slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, Naval Ravacant at Naval on Airchatt and Twitter, co-founder of Airchatt and Angel List and host of the Naval podcast. 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 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 idolized Richard Feynman. I read everything by him technical and non-technical that I get my hands on.

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. 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 going to 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 sort of went up up of everything. And even though it was honesty in a mob context, I realized like how important that is in relationships.

And then as a getting 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 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 destruction.

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 phenomenal because it explored the impact not just of lying in the way that most people think of it, but generalized to seat or even white lies that are intended to protect people.

What are the things that you look for in founders or the red flags that disqualify an investment or a founder? So number one intelligence, you got to 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 insight? Do they have specific knowledge? Have they thought about this problem deeply? It's not about the aid. 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, 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 or if they're easily thrown off course, then they're not going to 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 hardworking, smart crook.

And especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic. They're very fast moving. 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 course and so values 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. 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.

And so exactly. So 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 a thing that isn't really about success, but is more just about personal time is when you invest into 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. If it's exhausting, if they're downers, 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, interacting with these people?

My favorite founders are actually the ones who I learned from. So every time they call me up because they need help with something, I jump on it because I know that walking around the block with them for an hour, I'm going to walk out much smarter. What books or people outside of the startup world have most improved your ability to invest, maybe broadly speaking, just resource allocate.

This is a really good question. It's a very deep question. It's going to have lots of answers. But at the end of the day, I think you have to work in your internal state until you are free of as many biases and condition responses as you can be and it will prove every aspect of your life, including investing.

I am a bookworm, so I read an enormous amount. I was raised essentially in a library of the daycare center. I've just read so much that I don't even know where to start. But if you work in your internal state, one of the things you start realizing is as an investor, emotions dominate. Investors are very emotional, even though we act. We pretend to be very rational. For example, you decide in the first five minutes of a meeting, usually whether you want to invest in the company or not.

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. When the second round comes along, you can still be a positive force and continue to help with the company and maybe have a bite at the apple of the second time. These kinds of skills are extremely hard to build. They're not things you're going to build by reading one book and then you're like, aha.

So I don't believe in the epiphany theory of self-development where you read some book, you have an incredible epiphany, you read one phrase, you're like, okay, that's great. This changes my life and then you scroll it down to a piece of paper and you keep looking at it. You put it as a backdrop to your computer screen. Life doesn't work that way. What you kind of 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. 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 Sanika and Marcus Aurelius both stand out. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius was absolutely life-changing for me because it's the personal diary of the Emperor role. And here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on Earth at the time 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'd like to pay attention to what I consider the rational Buddhists because a lot of Buddhism is drowned in mysticism and Hinduism and sort of worship this guru or do this ritual.

So 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. Jidhu Krishna Morty who's a lesser well-known guy, but in an Indian philosopher who lived 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 all times. And so I've been hugely influenced by him. Probably the best book of his that I like is a one called the Book of Life, which is sort of excerpts from his various speeches and books that are stitched together. Oddly enough Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy and 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 actually under appreciated resource. We're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook were getting sort of bite size pithy wisdom that's really hard to absorb and books are very difficult to read 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 time they want to skip some rise skip when I get to the TLDR cut to the chase too long didn't read.

You know what's 140 character version was the Instagram version on the other hand we're also taught from a young age that books or something you finish books or something that are sacred that you treat books as a you know when you go to school and you're assigned to read the book you have to finish the book.

We forget how to read books are we getting this contradiction where everyone I know it's stuck on some book everyone is stuck on some books I'm sure you're stuck on some book right now it's like page 332 you can't go on me further but you know you should finish the book so what do you do you give

it reading books for a while your tindle or your iPad or whatever you use or even your paper book is a stock state that for me was a tragedy because I grew up on books and then I switched the blogs and then I switched to Twitter and Facebook and then I really was I wasn't actually learning anything.

I was just taking a little dopamine snacks all day long. I was getting my little 140 character burst of dopamine and then I'd retweet and then I'd see who retweeted my tweet and 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

so start up L Jackson is started for great character on Twitter so I realize 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 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 mine what kinds of value systems are good how should you raise a family of these kinds of things the older solutions are probably better and they would stood the test of time any book that survive for 2000 years has been silter 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 use as my binding principle whenever I'm trying to explain any human action people read all kinds of blog posts and tweets and evolution everyone has a loose understanding how of how evolution works but how many have actually read the origin of species

and you can get it for five bucks and 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 a 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 source book so I wanted to get back into reading the source books and I knew it was a very hard

problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook and Twitter and these other bite size 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 size tweets or

post and I felt no obligation to finish any book so now anytime someone mentions a book to me I buy it's at any given time I'm reading somewhere we intend in 20 books I'm flipping through them if the book is getting a little boring I'll skip ahead sometimes I start reading a book in the middle

because some paragraph caught my eye and I'll just continue from there 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 throw away light pieces of information in the web and all of a sudden books are back into my reading library 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. Yeah, it's an odd answer because you know most people think of someone successful when they win the game and it's whatever game they're playing right so if you're an athlete you're going to think of successful someone who is a top athlete and wins that game or if you're a

business that you got to think Elon Musk or you know someone of that sort or 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 and that's the iPhone you know I think of Mark and recent 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 successful in the sense that he created Bitcoin which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come.

So in the classic sense I consider those creators and commercialized successful and of course Elon Musk just because 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 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 he's at peace he's at health and whether he makes more money or less money or with the next person over from him does better worse than him has no effect on his mental state and bearing and historically I would say that the legendary Buddha or Christian Morty who stuff that I like reading they are successful.

Quote and quote in the sense that they step out of the game entirely winning or losing does not matter to them there's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour.

And if you could literally just sit if you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy you are successful and I think that that is a very powerful place to be with very few of us get there do you have a current meditative practice 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 said as they do it but nobody actually does it the real set of people who meditate in a regular basis I found are pretty rare 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 choice was awareness or non judge metal awareness where you essentially don't sit in the 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 and what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you're in without making judgments you don't say there's a homeless guy over there I bet across the street you don't look at two people running by and say oh he's he's out of shape or I'm better shape than him or that person's better than me or this one's better or I should 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 you were 10 or 15 minutes walk.

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 hairdo and 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 what I do is for those of you who programmed I'm basically trying to run my brain debugger mode I'm trying to be very very alert and watch my thoughts

I'm trying 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 30 years sitting in a quarter on a mountain top it's something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be certain percentage enlightened every single day

so you want to create as much space between your thoughts as possible and the way you do that is by being aware of what your thoughts are why you're having them. So if I saw the guy with the bad hairdo to pay I would look at that and I would at first I'd be like ha ha he has a bad hairdo and then I'd say well why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself and why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hairdo because I'm losing my hair and afraid it's going to go away

and what I find is that 90% of thoughts that I have or fear 90% or fear based the other 10% of play desire based in as any very tactful way to put it yeah and as any as any Buddhist will tell you that desire is just fear by another name it's the other coin it was the other coin fear. Oh I thought your dog met something else entirely. Oh yeah. There's this. There's this cartoon I don't know if you know who Harry Crumb 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 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 kind of like the far side in its format.

It's basically drawing a people on the street in Manhattan and every man has a thought ball above his head with a vagina and every woman has a thought ball above her head with a penis 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. The same way maybe some of your readers have this read this book called Siddhartha but it's a beautiful parallel story to the making of the Buddha by Herman Hash.

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 out he feels lustful towards and that sort of slowly becomes as undoing into everything. But anyway so to answer your original question when I'm doing the choice list awareness farm of meditation 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 in the end of Christian or 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 in a very different kind of way.

And then I realize that okay 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.

And as you watch them you realize how many of them are just fear based the moment you're a method of fear without even trying it sort of goes away. And then after a while your mind quite and when you're mind quite as 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 I've 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 there you know each one has a perfectly valid and complete life of their own in their own heads it's going on.

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 10 minutes or if you stop obsessing over your own story for even 10 minutes you realize that we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that life is pretty good. What is a bad habit that you're working to overcome right now so this is something that I learned to our Polish trainer friend Victor.

Hi guys just a quick note from present day Tim the Polish friend and trainer in question is Jersey Gregorak and you can hear my conversation with Jersey titled the Lion of Olympic Weightlifting 62 year old Jersey Gregorak which also features no vol. The ball and I were working with him at the time we both co-interview him I still work with Jersey and I just saw him just a few weeks ago so to learn more about this amazing man go to Tim.

blog slash Jersey J. E. R. Z. Y. to listen to that conversation one more time Tim. blog slash Jersey J. E. R. Z. Y. at the age of whatever is now 67 he can still do things that most 20 somethings cannot do now back to the episode with the ball.

Habits are everything everything I think that we are we are trained in habits were from when we were children including potty training and went to cry and went not to and how to smile and went not to and all 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 subconsciously and they're internalized and then we have a little bit of a

little bit of extra brain power in our new cortex for solving new problems and so you become your habits and what really brought this to light for me is our friend or 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 I did this workout every single day and I realized the incredible astonishing transformation that it had upon me both physically and mentally because I think to have peace of mind you have 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 or I'm discarding a previously bad habit it takes time so for example if someone says I want to be fit I want to be healthy but right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat

well nothing is going to work for you in three months it's going to be sustainable it's going to be a 10-year journey at least and in the 10-year journey what you're going to do is every six months or every three months depending on how fast you can do it you're going to break bad habits and you're going to replace them or you're going to pick up a good habits so I think it is all about habits there is nothing else the examples of habits I've picked up in the last 12 months or I'm still working on I want these people who wants everything so I don't want to give up anything so for example

if I want to stop eating bad foods if I want to lose weight by fixing my diet I don't say these foods are bad I'm not going to eat them and then suffer and then she 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 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 it

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 you're about to graduate if you had to go back and give that and of all advice you're already hooked on reading so that seems to be covered what advice would you give yourself?

Yeah it's funny I actually did this exercise recently where I sat down and I didn't write it because it was in my head but I did spend some time thinking about what is the advice I would give my 30 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 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 because 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 other people don't worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you

and then I said well what my 30 year old self I said to my 20 year old self and it turned out to be pretty much the exact same and well my 20 year old self I said to my 10 year old self pretty much the exact same thing so I think my 50 year old self is going to say chill out relax don't stress so much live in the moment it'll all be alright less fear more love you know I 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 matter what 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 miss they get it but if you can get in the mindset of well I'm just going to give it eventually and a long enough time scale you get what you deserve the universe

times that back your way yeah well not only that it's like if you don't have to make yourself happy try to make someone else happy and that is sort of a kind of a recursive function and now I'm getting I'm using vocab I shouldn't but it's a virtuous cycle Charlie Munger who is Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway and just a brilliant older gentleman his speeches of collected and poor Charlie's all men at can their

worth reading but he was asked at one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting someone basically asking one of the lines of like you know how do I find a worthy mate and he said be worthy of a worthy mate yeah 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 does then saying the says when the student is ready the master appears 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 I don't know if I have messages to send to the world but there are messages that I like to send to myself at all times

one message really stuck with me when I figured this out was that was desire and it desires a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want I don't think most with realize that's what it is I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wondering why we're unhappy so I like to stay aware of that 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 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 that give you a mantra the mantra is supposed to have actually no meaning maybe the universal mantra you know that's been derived through the ages is Ome where you kind of

just sit there and say Ome in your mind to yourself it's strange you can say it to yourself all day long in your mind it'll make you happier more peaceful you start chanting it out loud they'll lock you up but Ome Ome has no meaning I think but to me it has a meaning and the meaning is just accept just accept in any situation in life you only have three options you always have three options you can change it you can

accept it or you can leave it those are your 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 that is responsible for most of our misery so probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head it'll just tell myself one word except so anytime I look at

myself and I'm judging something I just say accept and it's only a very very very few things that I will choose not to accept and if I don't accept something is for one of two reasons either I'm aware that this is something that it's just so important to me right now that I can't accept it now I'm going to put up with a mental battles for it or more likely I've just lost control my thoughts I'm no longer present I'm dreaming I'm in a highly emotional state

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your job for free terms and conditions apply and now Nick Cacones Instagram at ncacones Twitter at Nick Cacones Nick is the co-owner and co-founder of the Illidia group of restaurants which includes Alinea one of only 13 restaurants in the US to earn the coveted Michelin 3 star rating

Nick welcome to the show thanks Tim awesome to be here finally yeah yeah we have the benefit of having spent some time together and I have been fed a lot of caffeine by you and you're also great help with the 4 hour chef so I wanted to write off the bat thank you for that it was

kind of a fun thing because 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 blur

before you with such pressure which made a lot and pressure I think is the word to describe so much about you and your life I want to 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 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 I thought I 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 and 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 cost print how many did it sell oddly those numbers are very hard to come by I dug from months years ago to do the Alignia 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 and then it goes into behavioral economics and in parentheses I don't even know

how to pronounce this last name correctly Richard Taylor or is it Taylor Taylor Taylor is a friend and investor just won the Nobel Prize investing been beating the market for nearly 30 years everything in all caps is about asymmetric risk taking

and information and yet people's perception of risk or of what I do is that it's risky it is not and in a separate exchange when we're talking about many of the topics that 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 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 I struggle with where it even begin with the 20 options that we have here but maybe you could explain to me how behavioral economics and Richard Taylor fit into this just for curiosity's sake I'll go back to the word you used options because I started out back in 1992 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 because of Wall Street 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 hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day and pretending it's like a big decision tree and any given decision is if you're really good 48% chance of being wrong

so you have to be really really good at constantly being comfortable being wrong but knowing that your overall number of decisions that you're going to be right more than you're wrong I know there's like a big theme a lot of the folks that you have on like they talk about success

or failure or how to measure those things and I kind of don't look at it as success or failure with anything I look at it as just like is my pattern of decisions correct and then getting back to your actual question with Professor Saylor and behavioral economics

and me 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 every single form of what we do art, commerce, science, picking a mate like all those things comes down to a whole bunch of decisions that you make without 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 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 going to be an iterative process and so I think that's been not only the case for me in learning how to filter things through that mindset but like when you said there isn't really a trajectory I kind of look at everything I've done is the same

in a way 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 nice studied philosophy in college so like people are like how do you go from philosophy to finance you know and to me it was all the same thing

that particular transition or rather progression I suppose from philosophy to finance is one that you and I haven't really talked about that one is interesting I'd love to explore for a second and we're going to go into a million different nooks and cranes

yeah yeah yeah but do you feel like philosophy was studying philosophy undergrad was an asset that then later helped you or was it just an interest to you explore it 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 had no intention of when I got to college I thought a study political science economics pre-law kind of thing something like that and my very like second week at Colgate University a wonderful professor who just passed away last year at 94 years old really great mentor to me professor Jerome Bellmouth was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost 60 years pulled me aside introduction to logic you know 101 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 riverance through it where the dad you know every time the kid writes an essay

like the young shishar men kid writes an essay and he brings it to his father to be graded he gives it back to him says half as long again long before that movie ever came out professor Bellmouth would would essentially assign a paper to the class and say it should be about 15 pages

and people would be like well how long and he'd always say like you know how long the piece of string like it's however long needs to be and then you tell me yours 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 trained me as well as a number of other professors there to be clear and thinking succinct to you understand what logic was to process information and really to look for parallels

in different fields and different fields of thought and so man like when I got out of school I went to law school for like a day and a half I got into I got into pen like a joint JDPHD program at pen and as soon as I kind of knew who the other folks were and what their desires and trajectories were

I was like oh 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 because I dropped out of law school before I really entered law school

and I floundered around for a little while but you know if you grew up in Chicago you end up meeting people 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 shouting at each other and you either were attracted to the I don't know almost animalistic nature of that and for me it was like a huge challenge because there are people down there that were head you know PhDs from MIT and then there was people who were like you know butchers that went down there with $100,000 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 is game day and be really disciplined and very clear-headed with KS around you how can you get introduced to that world? you know if you grow 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 going to name a name here as you'll find out why in a second but I was walking down the street I was like you know six months out of college

kind of didn't know what I was going to do and I was walking down the street and I bumped into a guy in New and High School and you know he wasn't the best student he didn't try the hardest and I was like hey what are you doing now and he was like well I'm just rehabbing these homes and I thought literally like oh he's a construction worker

and I was like you know what are you doing with him? He's like well I just bought this block and I'm tearing this all over this is the truth, this is so not like 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 started out as a runner on the floor of the Merck and now I you know I own like 25 condos and three townhomes and I trade and I kind of 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 that's fascinating like that is a truly fascinating thing and you know I went down and visited the floor I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction to get a job that's true story like people lie on the resume all the time I'm probably the only person that got rid of my degree and my academic awards and all that because to get a clerk job on the floor the last thing

they wanted to someone with a good degree if I beat a cap of you know Magnicom Laudé all that stuff so I fake my resume got a $5 an hour job and looked for a mentor and I found a guy named Frank Serino who was at Chicago Research and Trading who is which also was founded by a philosophy major it's actually very common

why is that common? I wish I knew the answer I don't know the answer I do know that there's three or four of the largest trading firms in the world are run by philosophy majors and if you look back at my class just of you know 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 it's not just like studying physics like I know some great physicists who are great in whatever they do and I think it's a similar discipline of abstract thought

I can't think of anything worse than studying business it just seems like a terrible thing to study to me is that because it's like the surface of the waves in the ocean topically it's just so non transferable in a sense and then as you go lower and lower to the slower moving layers

that's just more multi-disciplinary in terms of studying the basics of how things work or how people think yeah I think it's almost like it's how to do something or how to manage something but not why to do it so if you're taught in 1992 if I went and got an MBA I would have been taught a certain kind of management that six years later with the internet would have gotten blown up and so for me it's like I always ask the why question you know you were mentioning like the book publishing or a bar

you know I just looked at some things and it's like why is that? 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 the dishes and often I don't know the real answer but I come up with alternative ones at least that's huge by narrative I guess undervalued skill by the way in some cases right you got to be careful but very very very interesting

I want to pause here partially because I'm over caffeinated I wasn't inspired by my nostalgia related to your double expresses but why did the professor pull you aside?

what did that early undergrad professor in logic 101 see in you whether he explained it or not later I don't know that led him to take a special interest in you I think I was prepared and earnest because I was mostly terrified and you know he had a reputation of being kind of like a he is a secratic method teacher he was pretty harsh Colgate was very small classes and there was a class of you know 80 people and he kind of wanted to whittle it down to a more manageable number

and his method to do that was just to kick your ass I remember I mean he probably as great as he was he I doubt he would survive starting out at a college campus 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 in cheer and so he just lit his notebook on fire and he stamped and the kid threw it on the ground stamped on he's like you could smother it sure and he called everyone he memorized every person's last name and it was Mr. and Miz

and I remember this specific day he was literally back to the this is like right out of a movie he is back to the class writing on a chalkboard some logic problems symbolic logic and the guy next to me had no shot at getting it right 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 and then without missing a beat or turning around he was like Mr. Conus 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. Conus where is your book and I said it's at my it's in my dorm room you know professor and he said well a lot of good it's doing you there 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 a line forming to create office hours or like ask to be transferred out or whatever and when I got to the front he said follow me

and I found him to his office and I swear I mean he's running through the fall new English fall and I thought I was going to get kicked out of the class and when I closed the door I turned around he has to be 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 wing I was very fortunate and you know it's like I never knew just the amazing part I never knew the guy liked me until 10 years after I graduated

and then I was treated like a member of his family as funeral 30 years later huh right so really fascinating person really fascinating moment in my life where I don't know someone saw something in me and kind of like I'm going to make an investment in this person

and never asked for anything back you know ever how did you not know that he liked you did he withhold in some ways that you wouldn't get a big head or something along those lines I did not want to get it to overly attached to you so he wouldn't express no no

I think I was 19 years old and I didn't know that people you like you hold to a higher standard probably right and so consequently 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 I didn't care it wasn't invested

yeah 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 see on that one I was like what's going on like all of a sudden that class got hard

I didn't know I had no idea and it was just it was an interesting lucky fortunate place to be at that time so we're going to get back to the Merc but before we do philosophy I'm Indus Lee fast neighbor philosophy but I'm also a nerd

and kind of academic and pedantic and I've 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 20s thinking of starting a company but our entrepreneur really 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 that was an intermediate step to something else you would probably be better off studying x y and z is it 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 is discussing those ideas

within that context that said if it's if you're the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas I mean there's hardly a better 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 Victor Steins ideas but before

Victor Steins published and it's written in plain language it's not hard to understand 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 for the first time out it's like fuck yeah

it's not like it's not 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 we all have if you pause to think about it and so it's so big

it's not just you know daycart you know I think therefore I am it's kind of every little bit of that back to like you know read LeCris he had the atomic could you spell that I'm gonna be the first one to admit that I like oh LeCris yes yeah I mean LUC RIT I US yeah I'm a terrible

Speller so if it never asked me to spell it I'll put it in the show notes yeah right right but like you know it's like you read read that or read this great book called the Swerr which is you know about this this monk ages ago that sort of found that book and then re-wrote 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

find sort of the world of ideas endlessly inspirational and then by the way steal them and use them in whatever you're doing they're there for you LeCrisius LUC R E T I U S Titus LeCrisius Curus 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 tencent words would suffice a lot of his writing is really powerful 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 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 those are very readily accessible.

Even MIT open coursewear so many colleges now have taken that model and put great great great classes online 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 that I know nothing about

it so far over my head but it kind of refills 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 start into something new I find at least because it feels like the mountains too big you know I would actually not to pull a Nick

actually on the contrary on the contrary sir my book is doing me a lot of good in my dorm room 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 as a starting point in in a way let's go back to the murk we can go in any direction of course but you step into this Lord of the flies slash gladitorial arena with butchers and PhDs and so on 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 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 and this is the out the little school yeah and I remember being down there and you know what I was doing was so brainless it

was literally take this piece of paper over to that guy and then that guy would yell at you and you'd 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 and of course I bought books on

finance and commodities and options and all that and they're completely ridiculous and opaque and academic that they look like they had no relationship to what was going on there at all I started taking classes that were run at the murk 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 you know time interviewing with big companies like Goldman Sacks and Societation or all and whatnot because I did have the academic background where I would get the interview I would be able to take the test I

would do well in 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 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 that's why I was interested in doing but they could

they could ship me to France and have me do something totally different I can be an analyst or you know God knows what and so when I would question that they'd be like man you should be really happy like we had you know 300 applicants for this and we offered eight positions like just take it and I was kind of like totally your style 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 he fought both at the end of World War II he was drafted into the Navy at the end of World War II was dismissed honorably after 16 18 months because they were downsizing the Navy and then he was barely young enough to be drafted into the army for the Korean War 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 out when he was 12 years old saved up all his money from the Army and the Navy

and bought the store so as I was growing up you know my hero was my dad who was not an academic who was not what people would think of as like an executive and a suit or whatever but did really well he had bought property in real state he owned a temporary labor office that supplied on skilled laborers 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 go to

law school you know but meanwhile I was modeling what he did and so when I got down there I was like you got to own you have to own your own situation and so when I was offered those jobs I was like well I don't really see myself working for someone else and I found a guy who also felt that way and he was working for a big company and they didn't want to make him a trader because he was too much of a quant like he was really well educated he was really mathematical

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 talked to dozens of people and no one was like him and then he said he didn't want to hire me like you want to hire anyone how did you made him do you remember how you guys yeah I was just introduced to him through he was back then there were you know it's if you're a trader or even a trading

company of a clearing firm like Goldman Sachs at the time there was a company called First Options and he cleared first options and back then you literally have to take the elevator up to keep punch in all the cards into like a computer that was 17 floors away while ancient times I met him through being introduced to him there after talking to him I knew he was a serve geeky intellectual that I needed and then when he told me like that he didn't want to hire me because he

just heard some clerk I was like no no no no like I will pay you to work for you and he was like this is really strange you know and I explained to him what I just said it's like I look a bit here six months I said 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 going to teach me options and it's fascinating because he then hired me for I

mean I want to say it was $400 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 better than any college ever could to the point where you're looking you know three derivatives in such as volatility curve but the curve of the curve and 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 certainly the money had an

appeal but it was also hey here's this giant competition it's like paying a huge multifaceted chess game that no one's going to 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 you know that the next one's 50 50 you know and that discipline was interesting that was more about teaching yourself the psychology 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 everything in Wolf and Wall Street I have seen I haven't lived but I've seen it all yeah and I started hiring very shortly after I started trading 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 25 years and I taught him what I what I learned and I hired people that I considered corporate refugees people who worked for companies and decided that independence was better 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 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 made me a deal that when you analyzed it very carefully got worse over time and I just kind of went you know I it's

been great and I've learned a ton and we've made each other a bunch of money and 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 thankfully his guy Jim Hanson who's

still one of my dearest friends sort of had an option to stay with that company or come at a completely underfunded company I mean thinking back it was so stupid you know from a risk perspective but he was asymmetric you know I'm far more upside the downside it worked out really well and we

spent most of our time as we hired people and taught them how to do this it was mostly psychology training it was mostly standing around after hours and saying what seven times twenty eight and screaming it at each other like a drill

sergeant until the person couldn't remember what nine times three was anymore and I'll wait why did you do that well you had to be quick yet to be quick on basic mental agility I so if you brought if you bought 450 contracts and it was a 20 delta you needed to be able to do what's 20% of 450 it's 90

but you need to do that precisely with numbers that are not so around right you need to be willing to not be perfect and you need to make that decision instantaneously and realizing that it could cost you 50 to $100,000 if you get it right or on and you have to be really really comfortable with that

and so what did we do while we stood around we turned people's brains into mush until like I had people punch me cry run out no I mean sounds awful but it was it's amazing training because the rest of the world moves much slower yeah so any other decisions that I've made in business since then

have felt glacial in pace yeah there's also something to be said for making the trainer the training in some or all respects harder than the competition right I mean the adage of the more you sweat during peacetime the less you bleed during wartime the best competitors I've met in many many fields often strive to make their training in the toil of their preparation harder than what they expect to face.

That's why we love watching big time sports when it matters there are certain people that you know you can almost look at them go oh a person's going to fade and then you you hope they don't right you hope all that training pays off when

you see someone I love golf for all the same reasons it's like you know just a series of constant failures and then so when you look at someone who who can pull that rabbit out of the hat you know at the exactly the right moment it's pretty wonderful to see and I the thing I loved about my time

down there even though I burned out of it after 10 years is that there were moments where I did absolutely I have friends they'll listen to this and they'll be like oh yeah remember that time the acid people you really got this right you

know but I made some completely stupid decisions but mostly on the measure when things got crazy I was able to perform more than not I remember like green spans irrational experience speech was like a formative moment where I kind of 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 like it's a people it was really blue collar in a lot of ways and you know it's like I got home that day and I was like that was what I prep my last six years for it was very satisfying it sounds like an awful

it was an awful thing in a way right like it's it's just about pure commerce it serves a purpose of price discovery and all that but 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 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 for like mental models anything that you'd recommend really really hard I think the mental model is asymmetric risk always look for something that the the upside is you know three to four X the downside obviously quantifying

those is very difficult but that's the key everything I try to do is asymmetric and then even though nest and talib is a bit of a pendentic goofball on Twitter his book fooled by randomness is awesome yeah that was the one that preceded black swan and I think black swans great it's fine but

fooled by randomness is I think the better of all his books because it it just encapsulates everything that people price things incorrectly it's a great one yeah you walk through 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 yeah literally and I don't take any pleasure like people like oh you must you must love gambling or whatever and it's like I would never sit down to a black jack table because I know that you know there's a 49.5% chance that I'm

winning that's the wrong way yeah yeah the fuller and this has come up a number of times I haven't read it in ages because it is one of his earlier books but you know Howard Marx also brought this up recently when I was chatting with him and it is an exceptional book I think for 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 do you for instance like some startup founders look at the risk as the various

early-state 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 pretty difficult question I think that yeah I think that if you look at everything that I've

done business wise everybody would say that 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 and a hundred of those becomes a millier 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 and then and then you go to the

restaurant business and people oh yeah 95% of restaurants go to business in their first two years and I'm like going great you know that's that's perfect why do you why do you have that response is it because yeah so and then I'm going to start I'm doing a software startup now go for it so the higher the smaller the hoop the more interesting it is to figure it out 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 and the other thing is I remember right when I was going to start building Olenia 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 kind of 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 you have to me said oh 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 so whatever yeah what did you how do you respond to that you know no one does that's kind of 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 he man people keep printing books and yet I can't figure out any of the information and yet they're going to give me like three or four hundred thousand dollars to write a book something's remiss here

like you know what I mean I've never written a book before but yet someone's going to write me four hundred thousand or 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 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

shall you rate if you put in all that effort yeah 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 going to work yeah yeah this is this is where among many many other places

averages can be very very misleading right and I always end up in public Q&As and 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 ten percent of our brands not true 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 the ladder or I guess a ratio is well is it because the model is difficult is it because startups are inherently that high risk 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 yeah yeah yeah you know I've been on a couple of like graduate school you know 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 the business plan that is like you know I'm going to build a time machine now of course it's not really a time machine but I have seen ones that defy laws of physics for example on 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 and then there's a lot of people I come to me and they've spent like six months doing their logo and the name of the company but they don't actually have a piece of software yet right I'm just going to hire someone to build that for me or I'm then app I get so many apps pitched to me and you

know 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 and a consultant oh man I we're gonna you must get that 50 times worse than I yeah I mean to what what I tend to get this is part of the reason why I stopped

all the startup stuff a couple of years ago is it got to the point where 90 percent of the pitches I received which were unsolicited would be along the lines of high comma like not even a first name or be like high Tim or hey Tim even better I'm the CEO or co founder of X we are raising this at this

valuation we are oversubscribed but we could squeeze you in for 25K if you're really interested because we admire ABC here the docs attached yeah right let us know if you're interested in the next 60 minutes which my end up my default response to anything like that where people are

pressuring me for a fast decision is no like it's just yeah correct I think I've lost very little money saying no to those things but coming back to the examples that you were giving and what we were talking about bridging over to restaurants and food you're being told how restaurants are an

awful business food is an awful business and I remember someone told me long long time ago that yeah do you want to lose money go into magazines or restaurants and at what point I have a little bit of the back story 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 2002 2001 new was a you know tough year between 9 11 which was my father died in February of that year I was burnt out after you know going really hard for so long and you know we built up a pretty good size company to and I merged with the firm

in New York and I just I kind of needed a break but didn't know how to how to really take one at the time and so I left I left trading and I immediately kind of panicked because here's something that I I really genuinely droid but didn't kind of know what I wanted to do next and started doing

consulting for you know small hedge fund and and then it just didn't know what to do and I had you know an awesome wife and a young son and things were good you know but I was kind of panic does I was playing golf with like you know ex athletes because who else is 34 years old and complete golf on a Wednesday afternoon and so it was just a weird thing and I kind of looked at them and I'm like oh they don't really seem all that happy even though they've got this

lifestyle and so I met Grant Acquist the chef at Dwell dining at Trio went to a lunch there one afternoon that some friends set up and it was a transformative 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 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 and we would go back so frequently that it was absurd because you know it was a big meal and it wasn't cheap and every time we'd go somewhere else we'd go like wow why why is no one else thinking this way and as I got to know Grant a little bit I think like sometimes people bring

you know the chefs some wine or beer or whatever it's like that's kind of sand at 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 brought him this book called the Paragrenations of an Epicure hold on a second the Paragrenations like a Paragreen Falcon I don't even know what that was no no no a Paragrenation is like a wondering

about okay so it's written just after World War II by an ex-serviceman he kind of goes around Paris I want to say maybe late 40s early 50s I can't recall exactly and there is a chapter in there on La Périnmeade which was a very classical restaurant kind of the best in the world at time and he described a meal there in emotional terms 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 we kind of developed this email relationship back and forth where he would serve try out some new food on us and I would give direct honest feedback but not like oh it was delicious it was more like you know you're going for a provocation there but if you know we would go back and forth and he wrote at the time on a on a forum called eGullet

and I went on there and his spelling grammar not with with standing I mean it was like reading someone who's just really thinking hard about what they were doing everything we just talked about here is this young 28 year old chef from Michigan who looked like Captain America who would come out not staring 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 for Gary a guy who's really quiet and introspective shy but then you read and you know these which are still up you know 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 I remember on January 20th 2004 was what my wife's birthday and she said yeah I want to go back there

and we'd never been in the kitchen before and they have a table there but we never eaten in there and I remember I emailed him and said she's ethnically Latvian speaks Japanese loves Thai food good fucking lock and I knew exactly what that would do to him that would put him into ten days

of pure health because he 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 going to put us in the kitchen and they put us in the kitchen I mean it sounds like a jerky thing to do now but 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 and it started out with Latvian sural soup with braised ham box and you

know it had flavors of the sea which was a Japanese dish it had it Thai dishes it 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'd watch the kitchen and it was like a watchmaker shop it was not screaming and yelling it is it is just as I started to drop it is so unlike anything that the vast majority of people listening to this would possibly

expect right yeah that one Ramsey it's not Gordon Ramsey right it is just complete silence it is like a watchmaking factory it is it is really something else anyway started to jump yeah no no it's it's that's totally fine and so at the end I said you know I doubt anybody anywhere in the world had a

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 was like kind of I had a lot of wine and I kind of looked at I'm you know you set down with us and I said what are you what are you going to do and he goes well what do you mean I said well you're not going to be here forever and he said well I want to build my own restaurant I said I'd be happy to help you do that and he said

what kind of restaurant do you want to build I said I don't know I've never built a restaurant before 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 4th we went back and forth on email May 4th we

held a dinner at my house for potential investors and on May 4th 2005 we opened a linear 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 was the time frame yeah I mean can you just in the context of like normal restaurant

world we we argued 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 nonetheless that gave you guys the push like the impulse and the 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 me maybe you didn't know the full scope of each other's back yeah

I mean I 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 but I didn't know him the way you know someone that you're going to become a business partner with and I think he just thought I was rich I'm being serious like yeah I like like I think everyone else wanted this is this is really true because he has said this to everyone else wanted to offer him a restaurant that they had already

built or wanted to build and I actually answered that question correctly the I don't know is an awesome thing to say like 90% 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 but I just said like I have no idea like we should that's a big question we need to sort that out and I think that was the right answer for him I think that's all he

needed to know it was like okay guys 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 you know building lease all of that he was like the word oblivious is not too strong of a word you know I mean I'm not 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 Casner who is a genius designer has crucial detail which we've been involved with for 15 years now he's a designer he's like an artisan like he built plateware and he won the book used to or for the platter he designed for Tom's Keller Daniel

Balloude's team for the team you say and all that now but back then like I mean this guy's not going to design plumbing or electrical so I would just look at him and like well no he can't we need an architect and you need to get no city stamps and all that all that so I think Grant was just like yeah you find a place you put tables in it 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 just about you either we're going to not build it ever eight weeks in because we were to hated each other where we were the kind of people that figured everything out and we just talked it out like right down to you 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 bud base on a table why shouldn't that be an edible thing that 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 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 say what's your name you know and all that so we we went through

every aspect of that and you know I lost almost 20 pounds that year not in a healthy way just like GC in the construction I laid tile in the basement like three days before we open let me pause for a second so the why question that

comes to mind for me is after the finance after battling it out on the front lines and going through 2001 why this as your next thing why why was this the thing that captured your imagination you had to know on some level once you started getting into the details like fuck I mean this is going to be

yeah it's all in this is going to be all my chips and 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 hey I'm really sucked into this right

you know and for about three or four months without telling anybody even you know digmar like you're not telling her like 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 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 I also recognized and this is also critical I recognized that 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 and I know good wine so I'm going to build me a restaurant and then they sit there like it's their living room and that's not good like I didn't want to be that that duicy guy that built the restaurant because my ego was was needed to host a party and so

whenever I would kind of later on broach that subject and people would say like well you know I can almost hear their brain whispering well of course what he's going to do and so that was 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 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 and when it happens and I meet that person who ever 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 coffee or something 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 28 years old and in hindsight like it looks smart but I got to 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 the best in the world or potentially the best of them among them but the key 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

of my mind at least the question of what is Nick seeing or feeling that other people are not the so could you talk to that I mean when they go is there feeling or particular type of observation or particular type of detail that you notice in these people that allows you to scout the talent where other people might miss it or not pay enough attention to it. Yeah I mean I think you've written a couple books about about that.

It's definitely intangible I think it's different in every case but it's interesting because 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 talk it about it all the

time though of course 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 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 they're all in they're 99% and 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 I mean now like that's like I live for that like I love reading people that even if it's not something I'm interested hit that are all in that's an interesting really I've never really thought about it that way but like it was just very clear to me that grant

was all in if you wasn't going to do it with me you're still going to do it yeah I was a helper I you know over time I certainly contributed you know a great deal to it not just he contributed great deal to business and then I also contributed to the art 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 is basically like okay man if you're not in like get out of the way because 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 60 seconds well chef table on Netflix is great yeah chef stable yeah great perfect so yeah everybody should have the experience of observing grant working and focusing it is I've 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 to observe grant is it is a next level of focus it's really hard to encapsulate in words so chef stable fantastic people should check it out and just watch the level of focus that is

permeates the appearance the air the atmosphere it's really something else to that point focus one of the my favorite aspects of of speaking with you 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 stepping back basic stuff yeah what are other questions that you asked related to a linear or you we could

certainly bridge to other I think it makes sense to chat about a very as well but what are some other questions that you guys asked that people might might not think to ask yeah I mean you know grants at the tone for that in our first meeting not really knowing me and

we started talking we didn't even know where to start right and he said well I know one thing I want to have wooden tables like I want to bear wood tables and I said why he said well why do tables why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths they really 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 feels good or absorbs like a spill or whatever it may be and he said no it's because the table underneath his piece of shit he goes and you know that like as soon as you say

it everyone goes oh yeah I knew that and you've been at weddings and stuff where you feel under the table and you're like oh it's plywood right but if you go to like a really fancy restaurant 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 why can't we just have like black beautiful tables it will show the food grade it'll show the plate where a great and then I kind of

went like well yeah but the health department doesn't let you put in Chicago doesn't let you put silverware right on the table and if you put a glass there the kind of station will form a little ring and then you have a wear issue but you'll save $70,000 a year in laundering

linensed and so we started going like well how do we solve the water problem well you create a fridge that's just above the dew point 40-40 degrees you know in the winter maybe a little warmer in the summer because it's higher humidity in Chicago and you just get rid of ice so

you have these cascading decisions that become part of the art of the place that so 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 that Martin designed

because you can't put we don't want to have placemats that's too cheap so all of a sudden we had to design like a silverware holder so it just became this cascade of like interesting little art projects that were there for good reasons 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 of Husk. Oh fantastic. Yeah so it was not he was not yet a chef then 2005 and he was the first guy through the door and he wrote this giant blog post and he got it with pictures and everything you can go see it and every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional trigger

an emotional reaction it's almost all there like I remember going home and seeing that the next day and going wow that should actually be worked and you know it's like right down to the front hallway that was you know a reverse perspective I'm stone from

sharp cathedral and and inverted you know so all of my interest of architecture and art and science and all of grants 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 all that

because people would tell us the practical reasons why you needed to do this or that and we would just go nope no no host and like you know we want to greet people in an open way and so just little things like that 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 build our next place because we didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again and so you know when we did then we did it and I think editing yourself and each other is in an open way is really really painful but really really important

and coming back to something you mentioned related to the living room the well off yes who then create say an art project that is not maybe beautiful but is most often not a viable business 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 want to be a dill taught right you know my biggest fear is that it would work in an artistic way but wouldn't work as a business and so the answer is at the beginning I didn't do that much I handled all of our marketing PR I think I

wrote everything you know myself really thought about open sourcing the building of the restaurant you can still go online and see the the original business plans and what logos we were considering using and 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 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 and part of that was people would say like a restaurant like this can't make money

and you know I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the universal restaurant calculator and can people find that online no no 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 how many covers per night can you do what's the check average for food check average for beverage what your food cost beverage cost labor cost was insurance cost you know your lease you 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 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 were grant used to work well well that greatest restaurants in the history of America certainly and you know I came up with a number that grant with there's no way the revenues that hire they

make that much money that's impossible and it was really funny because years later you know I now work with chef Keller and he's he's a friend all these years later and I literally pulled that out one day with Grant be there and went like how close am I on this

back in 2005 and he's like all you're within like two or three percent yeah and it's I'm we're talking about back of the envelope stuff and so you know you asked like where can people start to start a business start on the back of an envelope like one of my favorite

exercises is to sit 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 call it the two shoe box method put me through college right like money coming in in one shoe box

money going out in the other whatever is left is profit you know start that basic and we did that and I didn't really think about the we did well but we didn't make a ton of money a linear cost of 2.2 million dollars to build I put up a little over a quarter

of that myself and John investors for the rest all of whom I knew and you know in the first year we did you know we made about four hundred fifty to five hundred thousand dollars on four five million dollars in sale not a great return not a terrible return we then

won you know 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's Rikle and like we had some steady goals of like how would we know if this is a

success and one of the things we wrote down was Ruth Rikle declares it best restaurant in America and we wrote that because in 1997 she wrote the most exciting place to eat America is the French laundry and Grant was there and cooked that meal and said that

the energy 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 New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status I think

that can't happen nowadays honestly for other reasons but this is kind of pre internet pre-yelp all that and then I was suddenly 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 load star you know and so he was like dear God can you let me enjoy it for like a minute yeah to you yeah yeah yeah he's getting really mad at me I was like that's terrible you know yeah I was happy but I was also like oh no now what do we do you need to find another artificial construct here

like go after and enough of this I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of my face only with the sure yeah no it's about I really believed that actually that it's often the process is so rewarding that when you get something done it can be a let down and 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 going into the restaurant at night because remember

I'm not a service professional I was running the business of the restaurant I was going in at night and asking really dumb questions again and you know weirdly our goal was to keep Alinea open for when he came back and might do he only missed like you know twelve days fourteen days of service

during really intense chemo and radiation 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 their loyalties oftentimes they just need to find another job because they're like hey in four months this

place is going to be closed and in the midst of that we decided to do our first book really to chronicle what he accomplished 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 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 had I started going this place is run in strange ways man this industry is 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 our incentives were misaligned you know the service industry as a whole can't run at 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 kind of going like look if every night was Saturday I'd be dead

it'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 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're also going through this really difficult emotional time 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 which which cut some of the normal social filter off and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to be around anybody 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 you

know years years later when we finally like we're kind of like hey we've got some ideas to build next and the avery that's when I kind of went like well we're going to do things totally differently here 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 and not using telephones and doing all these things I'm like you know we don't have a place for you here and man it really works you know 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 and the POS systems told me no I called theaters and went like what ticketing system do you use 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 ever. Okay so pause here for a second.

I don't know where you had no no this is great this is great so a few a few things for folks who are not familiar API application programming interface so you can effectively link into someone else's software POS point of sale not piece of shit and it is a piece of shit or they 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 yeah yeah the snap of fingers like what were you trying to fix or what were you

trying to create. So 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 nor their industry form of entertainment 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 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 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 because 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 they also know that if they tell you that they'll really see you at nine and

you wanted to need fifteen you'll just go the restaurant down the street from them that will lie to them right right so they do that 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 pop culture references and

entire sitcom you know episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant right now it's absurd it's completely absurd and you know I looked at our no show rate at a linear 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 go like well what do you have available well I have 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 showing we only have

four people in there and so to yield manage or something for seats so it's a yield management problem and so we five to eight percent of our revenue every night was was being lost to that transaction that was a non transaction and so I wanted to figure out ways to do two things one

what a figure out ways to make it transactional because again you asked about professor Taylor one of the key tenences is a little bit of skin in the game right when people have small vested interest in something in the outcome of something or even if I gave you a pencil as a gift and in thirty

minutes later I want to take it back you will get so mad even though you didn't care about that pencil right right like what was that yeah do give me a gift now he's pointed back yeah it's like the expected it's like the expected value of a mug if you 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 different yes huge so you know that came to me one day because 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 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 that movie so I go on and then go I buy four tickets sixty bucks whatever it was and like five thirty nights pouring rain and everyone is an app 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 that's it now I would easily pay that sixty dollars to knock over the movie but once I had the sunk cost of paying for the movie my psychology totally flipped and I was like we're going this movie that I don't want to go

do and I literally irrationally 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 thought about it and I was like wow the positive on times when demand exceeds supply like right so

Saturday night eight o'clock great that's off that's the best seats at the opera house let's see if people pre pay for that or put down twenty bucks for it 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 going to do that like this is out the way it works but if you look at the time that we were starting to do this the telephone was dying but I didn't know that at the time y'all's eight years ago but 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 letting me know what's going on that's not going to be a big deal but I'm not going to do it again and I'm going to do it

again and I'm going to do it again and I don't know if government is going to work but you know gonna work like you're talking about that is because we know what's going on then a phone call and similarly likely calling a restaurant isn't antiquated thing to do at this point But long before the telephone. People got room in board and what room in bored was literally it was like you go to an in.

And you get a room for the night and then do you need of that long before there was a telephone and people called and said, yep, I'd like to eat your restaurant. Sure. We'll let you in. And so as the technology for the telephone is morphed into, you know, what we all have in our pockets now, I just wanted to update that whole transaction. And so 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 surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Like just new pricing in two directions. 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 and times of day. So 5 p.m. on Wednesday at Alinea is still cheaper

than 8 p.m. on a Saturday. By a lot, by 80 to $100 a person. Wow. And you know what happens. And this is now we have hundreds of restaurants doing this on our soft rock. What happens is people buy the most expensive seats first and the cheapest seats first, 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 400 bucks. And then there's some people go like, I only eat at 8 p.m. on Saturday. Okay. That's fine. Pay a little more. They're attracted to the fact that it is the most expensive. Sure. That happens too. And then 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 20 Alinea books a day on checkout with the

booking process. That's all ton because we're not going to exit through the gift shop at Alinea. 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, when you book Alinea, it says, hey, would you like to buy an Alinea book personalized?

And 20 people a night get it. That has $400,000 in revenue. Yeah. That's incredible. Crazy. Right. And it's amazing to me that no one did that beforehand because ultimately 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 than, you know, some places that today's special is today's special and it's real and you kind of know that. But sometimes it's

just the old fish. Right. Sunday night. And we all know these things. And like 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 we're not going to really see you at 815. 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 the interviewed like a grizzled veteran, you know, and you know, he didn't use his name and said overbooking a bar to wait and has always worked for me. And I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that? You know, yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's so there's so many systems that

have similar overbooking low balancing issues, right? You look at airlines, you look at hospitality, you might dentist. Yeah. I have a great dentist. They only do it via phone call or email. And so I have to play a guessing game. 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. Put the shoot 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? Did you need to prime the pump to have this? What seems like certainly a windfall? Well, we did. Yeah, we did a video where, you know, next restaurant was about restaurant that's always new, essentially. Like, what's one of the big problems of the

restaurant industry? Well, when you open a new restaurant, it doesn't matter what it is, people are going to show up for like five or six months. And then after that, you know, you got to struggle to like get regulars 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 were the kind of people who I said to Grant one time he cooked this amazing French dish for me at Alinea right in the

middle of his sickness because I had driven down from Michigan. I've never eaten before after in the Alinea kitchen, but he whipped up this little French dish for me of duck. And I was like, man, let's open a French restaurant someday. And he went like, we'll get bored after six months. And then I was at one of our chefs homes on a day off Tuesday and he made he loves Thai food. And he made this amazing Thai meal amazing. 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 kind of dawned on me like, let's change the restaurant every four months. Like, you know, let's do. And then we dwell on that for like a year thinking like it was kind of impossible to do. And then I said, well, like, let's start with a French menu. He's like, well, what does that mean? Like there's Southern France, there's Laure Valley, there's France, that's the New

Val cuisine. And then there's France from like, you know, 100 years ago, totally different. And I was like, yep, Paris 1906. I don't need to explain to you what that is. You'd want to eat that. If I just said, like, if someone said, hey, new restaurant opening, what's the menu? It's Paris 1906. I go like, cool. Like, I want to do a little time travel and see what that was like.

And so as soon as we had like a city in a time, we instantly knew 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 version of enough to make all these different cuisines? 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

if I could steer minimalism, you know. So you do the reason why you chose the year 1906. You know, doing some research, and I may get the exact date wrong, because this is eight years ago, I did the research, but I believe the send flooded in 1908 somewhere around there. And so a scoffier, like the father of French cuisine was at the Ritz then. And that was kind of like the height of that era of cuisine. And then after the send flooded, that's where you got your groceries and

beastroes because they had to kind of 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 dozens of these fancy restaurants. And so like, rank got cheap. And all of a sudden, like, hey, like we're going to get this new style of restaurant. That's roughly as I recall it. Somebody's going to listen to this and tell me I'm all wrong, but that's where we landed because we could do this scoffier menu. And boy, we argued

about that too. Like in their blenders then. So like electric blenders. So I mean, we just like see, 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. Grant's like, hey, pal, you don't have to make the first. Finally that. Probably he was like, should we make it intentionally worse than we can? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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, which I'll never do again, right? That was just a genuine error. Like, and we were still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be. And then we served dinner and and we were like openly, our like he'd come out of the kitchen and we would openly argue about it, you know.

And and this is this is at the press dinner. Yeah. Yeah. I remember he brought the soup out and it was like, I was like, oh, they must have used the actual blenders, right? Like modern blenders, because it was like the mouth feel was like perfect. And so I was like, oh, you use the blenders. You know, and he's like, 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 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 uninstalled 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. But that was that was that's our method. Like that's what we did, you know. 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. I think like nobody would help. No one would be saying nobody would help. You mean competitors potential, I don't know how I was like these people. I got it. Why wouldn't they help? In the case of open table, they had a monopoly. Right. So why that makes sense to me. That makes

sense. In terms of everyone else, I think they 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? Because it's not hospitable. It's not hospitality. It's not it's not it's not it's low touch, not high touch. Correct. And usually the case where also in the prices different every day, like are people going to get that? And I just

kept looking to other industries. And I'm like, no one has a problem with it when they go to a Facebook and 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 go, oh, I got like, he totally stole that ticket from me. So like two different price points, you know? 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, where you 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. 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, Rackspace, this is 2010. I'm not saying anything about Rackspace. It was,

I didn't, I probably set it up wrong. 2010, it did not, like it's supposed to auto load correct and self propagate. And it neither happened. I was expecting we had 70,000 people on our email list that signed up on the website to like be notified when their bookings went on sale. And I was expecting maybe, you know, 700 show up, like should be fine. 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 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. Yes. Everybody's public access. Oh god. So I couldn't even go into a consumer. So I, and 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 for the business, which in 2010, 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 part of something. They felt like, wow, holy shit. This guy is actually doing

this himself. We're part of this experiment. And we're 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. And then when it finally started working, I mean, I literally not showered in five days. I had pizza boxes linger. I looked like a bad movie startup thing. I had a beard. I was, you know, just strung out manic. And I remember I called Grant. And it was opening day. He said, how many

should I prep for? I said, prep for full. Like, because if not, we'll turn on the phones. But I didn't tell him was I didn't order the phones because I didn't want to have a failsafe. You'd burn the ships. Yeah. I would, I just wanted to make sure it, I forced myself to work. So we had no phone line. And when it started working, I would double click, one of the functions was I could double click on a table. And if it was yellow, it was held. The public couldn't see it.

I could make it available 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, to let more inventory out. And clearly, things were working. It turned red so fast. I thought it was broken. And so then I went into the credit card processing and saw, oh my gosh, someone bought that that fast. And I called Grant. I said, did you come to my house? And he was like, we're opening a restaurant in like six hours. What's

going on? I said, as the guy who helps save your life, getting a fucking taxi and come over here, because I need to show you something. And he looked at me and kind of went like, what is wrong with you? Right? And, and I took him upstairs to my office. And I said, I explained to him, when I just explained to you. And I said, click on one of those and make it available. And he said, which one? I go, anyone in the next month. And he clicked like three weeks out at 930 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? And I'm like, yep, there are, you know, 4,000 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. Because it was, it was, it was, it was, it was functionally different than any way that anybody was doing this. It wasn't novel. 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, quick question on that, if you're comfortable answering how much money had you put into developing the software at that

point. Yeah. Roughly. I must say $115,000. Yeah. Okay. So in your mind, were you completely confident it would work or, and there's, it doesn't have to be A or B, there could be CDEF, or were you like, you know what, for 115K or whatever it might be, even if you budgeted for less in it over ran, even if there is a 20% chance that this works is, it is worth risking the hours in time because it will so completely transform what we're doing. And if it fucking fails, who cares?

Right. 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 Alinea ran, there's like things that you can fix and control, and there's things you can't, right? And this was the one that, you know, I would answer phones at Alinea, 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, you know, seven weeks from now on a Thursday,

and you're like, I'm really sorry, sir, it's totally full. And 100% of the time they thought you were aligned to them. And so consequently, like, I realized that we were saying no to people more than we were saying yes. And that even when we said no in a nice way and took 10 minutes to do so, people thought that 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 and the actual

yield management. I felt like, like allowing people to see the entirety of the inventory was the most important thing. And 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 while on this industry, I found myself in with so backwards. 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 didn't really intend on making it, you know, 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 edge. At least you know, you have a market of one. Guest guaranteed market of one. And I also want to point out when we're 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 sure I'm missing a lot of subtleties here, but when you said we booked 500 next thousand dollars and it

caused 115 like we're getting 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 10 to 12 percent to, you know, at times in good months 20 to 25 percent in an industry that over the last five years, if you read, I give a talk called Tuesday is not Saturday and some 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 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 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 100 people are going to come through the door and if your fishmonger doesn't show up, all you need to figure out what to do with that, you know. And so it's 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, if I look back at that system that I built then compared to what we have now, you know, it's a minuscule part of what it turned into. But it was the seed of an idea which is more important which is, hey, let's shake things up. And then I got a great CFO who was at Bane 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. And so we've built out food cost analysis that uses Marameco charts. It's totally different because it's visual and you give that to the chef. It uses what charts? Ah, Marameco. Ah, if you have, if you don't know Marameco, if you get nothing out of this, what are the greatest visualizations in charts that you could like, you know, do an excel or whatever. Hard to do vocally, but imagine a square where each of your

x-axis is the percentage of let's say food costs. And then each square within there is like, I don't know, meat or produce. But the whole of the square is 100%. The y-axis is 100% of one metric and the x-axis is 100% of another. So you could kind of look at any given square and see how much that impacts the whole. It becomes like a big Lego building with different colors. If you give a busy

chef 400 receipts and say, hey, every Friday, look through all these. And, you know, figure out what we're spending too much on or worse, hey, your food costs last month were 36% and you met 32%. You can't take percentages to the bank. Let's talk about dollars. Let's see where we can station dollars or the revenue could have just gone down that month for whatever reason. It's August and New York. And so it's not really a good way to look at it. But you give this person this

chart is Mirama. No, Mirama. I'm looking at M-A-R-I-M-E-K-K-O chart. Is that right? Again, I think so. I think so. There is a Google result, which is how to make a Mirama, go chart in Excel. So I'm guessing that's probably it. There's some YouTube videos as well. So I'll put this 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

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 facial as month. And this can be used for things outside. Everything. Yeah, it's not just food, not just restaurants. Oh, no, no, no. 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 if I've learned anything from the best

consultant that I've ever hired, like who's now my partner in CFO, he came in up with this. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, how did this not enter my life and sell my 40th year? This makes no sense. You know, it's just incredibly useful. But my point is that we kind of went through everything in the restaurant and went like, well, what are the biggest spending areas that we can like analyze? And it's true in any endeavor that you're doing. Yeah, there's no point looking at the dimes.

If you've got something to cost $1,000, start there. And that's getting into like our thoughts on our publicity, our PR, like we don't have a professional PR person and haven't sit in 14 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 why these mediums are working is because

they're measurable. You know, I was looking up just as you were chatting and as I was also looking for Merameco, a quote that I think applies and you may certainly feel free to disagree, but applies very well to a lot of the breakthroughs that you have experienced and also helped to catalyze in a lot of what you've done. It's quote from Charlie Munger, who for those who don't know, 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, 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, because you, as you noted earlier, you have these practices that are being implemented by otherwise, in many cases, smart people who have just not taken the time to ask, why are we doing this? Why does this exist as a thing? 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? No, sorry, guess again, it's like that's fucking ridiculous, right? And yet,

that's exactly the way it works in many other places. You know, once you start down that road, of thinking that way, it will drive you a little nutty. Because you can't do every business, you know, and you know, there's a couple of things that I've got in my back pocket that I'm kind of like, you know, one day I'm going to arbitrage truffles. Because it's like there's no peak market that's

absurd. Here's an example, I'm going to 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. Our as expensive as the most expensive drugs in the world, you order them is if it were an illegal drug, and of course they're perfectly legal, but you call up a truffle dealer and you go like,

we know, what do they cost? Well, they're, you know, 650 a pound right now for black truffles, 1600 for white. You try to talk them down a little bit. You make sure that you get the best quality because hey, we're a linear and we've we'll ship you back that stuff we don't like and all that. And then in the unmarked box stacked with newspaper will come 20,000 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 as a market. There is no micologist touching these. There are knockoffs from, but that knockoffs. There's different species and quality from Australia, from Tennessee, from from China, etc, etc. That they cut into it. Sounds familiar. And it was my like we spend a lot of money on truffles a year and try to figure out what the US market in the fall truffle season is

worse. You can't. It's exactly like publishing. You can't find numbers, you know. And so whenever I see something like that, I'm like someone's guarding their golden goose, you know. Right. Whatever. Whatever it's a black box, you're like I feel like I am not on the best side of this trace. That's right. That's right. And that's that's what I did. You know, I did a closing in seller network between the Merck and the MX 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 Merck and MX powers that be read like most of the CFTC. So when they would tell me it's that like in the rules or not legal or whatever. It's the she like CFTC Chicago trade. There's something. This is the federal commodities trading commission. I say okay. It's like the SEC but for commodities. I got you. And yo again, sit down and actually read that someday. Like what's amazing is that the

experts never it's like it's like the members of Congress who don't read the bill. 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 it's against the rules. I'd be like, well, here are the seven volumes. Police show me where? If not, I'm going to do it. You know.

And so similarly like like truffles. Same thing. The booking, sure, the restaurants, same thing. Open table item monopoly. They wouldn't tell you who your customers were. They would sell your customers. They still do to other restaurants. You know, 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. Trouffles, I will someday build the truffle

exchange. So you question for you. This is this is 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 month, the flame to puzzles. And I've got a puzzle. No, no, no, no, I don't need any more puzzles. I need to wear puzzles. But you there are many, many black boxes out there. Right. You have truffles. And like you said, it's like, all right, what's the market size of the truffle exchange at

x point in time? Don't know. All the you guys as one establishment or multiple establishments buy a lot. There might be a hundred different 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 going to consume energy. It's going to consume time. 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 kind of start doing, you know, and then you know, and then it's iteratives from there. Like sometimes you find yourself in a construction of your own doing that was accidental. Like all of a sudden, you know, you kind of opened your mouth and said something like the truffle thing and all of a sudden like, well, okay, I guess we're building the truffle exchange.

You know, I feel like I feel like the boring companies like that from us. Like he he opened his mouth and we're like, yeah, just big, big, you know, big, big tunnels and he's got enough credibility now where some engineers went like, yeah, we could build, you know, we could dig tunnels that are seismically fine and like, hey, you work for SpaceX. Okay, like let's see if you can build a

dig a tunnel. I don't think that was like a business plan, you know, right? And he just has a lot of credibility, 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 down that rabbit hole. So, you know, I do some is like a hobby. 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, learn more about this and

start researching it. You know, we have 300 and some employees on the restaurant side and about 50 on talk. 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. I'm trying to take you six months of independent work without any guidance and you're going to get tired of it really fast. Or you're going to come back to me and say, hey, you

know what? Like I can't figure out 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, you know what? 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? No, no, no, no, no, no, I never, I never, never take every single intern that works at our restaurants

for a minute is paid. Gotcha. So even so I don't say they do 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 or whatever, 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. Nobody who's working here, if they're, you know, I do expect that, you know, salary people are going to work more than just the time here. And I think that people who are passionately curious will be given a problem like that. And we'll come up with interesting solutions to finding out what the answer may be.

And that's, that's enough, you know? So I want to you add some sort of commentary on the question that I asked, which is, I think it's incredible that you do pay them for that independent research, 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're doing it on the weekends. You are doing it without a clear road to 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 extra curricular time. So I wouldn't have judged you harshly if you had responded in the negative on that. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, to back up a little bit.

Like when there are people who I don't know 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, I will pose some more difficult questions. But they're not working for me. You know what I mean? Like there's a guy who brought me a food product that I, you know, about a year ago. And 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. 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 carry the product. And I would love to have you still involved even though we're so much farther 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 Elinio Group, if they work for talk, like for sure, they're, you know, you could take time during your day, like doing your normal business. That's a project that we're working on. And, you know, 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 line cook, you're probably not working on my trouble project. Just because like it's really, I mean, realistically, you know, that's not, but on the business side, we certainly have people who work in roles as like a lawyer or an analyst or something like that, who want to get involved with our publishing project or who want

to get involved with the truffle project or whatever it may be. And, you know, I'm happy to pull them in and try to include them. And, you know, like you said, you used a word as an entrepreneurial filter. I would say 95% of the time people filter themselves out. Right. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, they're going to self select or self select out. Yeah. Are there any particular books or resources that you found useful on hiring or managing? God, if you found one, let me know.

No, hiring is so hard. I think it's the hardest of all things to do. And I think my style of interviewing people is totally different than it was 20 years ago. We use 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 what I'm about, what the company is about. They've probably already been interviewed by other people before they get to me. And so at that point, I let them know like what are the upsides and

downsides of working here, you know? And I kind of let them know what the expectations are. And I tell them like people self select into a job. And you don't want to come here if you're going to fail because that would be terrible. And I don't want you to come here and fail because that would be a waste of by time and resources. And would also feel awful. It's never good to let go of someone. She feels terrible. 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 maybe you'll never see me again. I mean, it's like a big enough organization where, you know, there are definitely people working here who I don't know at all. But people tend to join organizations where they want to work. And so I try to make that process. I try to make them be able to say no easier than they can say yes. I will be some examples of how

you do that. You know, I kind of judge the person by what their pain points are. And so if someone says like, you know, one of the things I like to ask, you know, which it kind of resonates probably with you. As I say, here were less five books he read. And I got to 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 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 read like 20 books this year. Let's see. And they will really start going, oh, I read one like three months ago. That was this and it was about that. And you could tell that they're intellectually curious. And read a lot. You'll also get a person who goes, look, I haven't read a book in 20 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. Some people will just lie through their teeth. And 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 yes, yes, yes. 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? 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 books. I go, no, no, I read about

400 emails a day. And that skill is hugely important right now. If someone doesn't like to write, they're not going to want to work for me because when they send out an email and I'm CCed on it and it isn't a well thought out little thing, the answer coming back is like, hey, here's four ways to improve this. And at some point it'll be like, really, you did that same mistake again.

It comes off kind of harsh an email, you know? And so if you're kind of person that doesn't take feedback well or doesn't want to learn like, man, I don't, I'm lacking patience for that at this point in my life. And I let them know that. 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's not, it's not, it's done with a smile. You know, I'm not like trying to like

terrorize 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, double PhD engineers to people who've never, 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 and come up with an idea and everyone there will just be like,

well, that's a great idea. There's no way we're going to be able to do that next six months. Because that's not, that's not in our, that's not 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 at least confident in your treatment of email, 400 is a lot of email. Do you have any particular commandments? Do's do not times you check things you check first.

Any types of systems or approaches that allow you to maintain a degree of sanity with, with the amount of email that you must receive. Is she? You're going to hate this answer. I am terrible at it. It used to be not so long ago that I personally replied to 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. And it's the opposite of everything that you stand for. I know that.

I was listening to Jason Friedz of Friend. I was listening to his podcast with you. And I don't get it at all. I would love nothing more than to rework or to not 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 one of my businesses. But man, that's not how I function at all. And I weirdly think that he misses cause and effect a little bit. 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 to reply to the people who've taken their time other day to write us note, even if it's not like critical business for me. And one of the things I did for about 10 years that I loved doing when we first started Lennia is that I would have Google alert set up.

And I would find some blog that only like some woman and her mother read, you know. And I would reply personally, like say, wow, thank you for the great read of Lennia. And there would be kind of mind blown that I found it. And you know, all that. I treated email that way for a long period of time. Unfortunately, now 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 that a Google

Chicago. And he's my, he runs the engineering team. He's the CTO of talk. He kind of said like, dude, you're, you're slip and man. And like, you know, you need to grate some filters and and get some stuff that's directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and 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 messages and whatnot. Kind of pick a random one and just answer it. Like, I want to 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 being grant C. And so luckily, there aren't that many of those. But anytime you serve five or six thousand people a week, you're going to get, you know, something going around.

But man, I'm terrible at it. Honestly. I will tell you a funny thing is that when I go away in vacation, I do try to concoct a, I basically say like, look, I'm going to be in a mountain or on a boat or whatever. And you're, I'm not going to be able to reply. And so I would make these elaborate stories up. I almost it's like a fun piece of art project as to why I couldn't do it. And so one year, every year, every time I went away, I basically said like, I'm going to visit

a panda that I adopted. And I'm going back to Chicago. And it ended the year around Christmas time when I went on break with a, with a, with a picture of a baby panda. And, and a really kind of mediocre Photoshop job of me standing there with the teams. And, and, and the Chicago Tribune called 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. And the following, the following, there was no panda. That's why I

went back to, there's my time to 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 said, I was going to a combination of a tantric sex retreat and silence retreat. Sure. Sure. E days to explore my both inner and outer self. And, you know, this is the last this is your out of office reply. That's my out of office replies. Anybody would get that, right?

And so 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 O'Leary 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 really wish we had worked together. But,

you know, then you went to that sex retreat. 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 I remembered like four years earlier by out of 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. So if you ever get a really unusual out of office reply for me, it's fiction, probably. I love that. I mean, if you're serious all the time, you're never going to get the actual series or done. You're going to burn out before that ever happens. I also want to underscore one thing. And then I want to ask you about a black box that you and I've talked about quite a bit, which is publishing 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 an athema to everything that I'm espousing in many of the books. But I do want to demonstrate that I am listening. And I think that it goes a really long way, even if you do not personally reply to

people, if you are able to prove that you're paying attention. And that seems to resolve a lot or at least act as a salve for people out there who very seldom feel heard, which is not always necessitate a response. So I just wanted to point out that it might seem like a drop in the ocean, but it actually has much more further reaching implications when you do it, what you were describing. Yeah, I feel like it's genuine. First of all, I'm always curious. What are people writing about

to the restaurants? What are they writing about? To me, my LinkedIn profile, basically, 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. And so that gets sort of all of the marketing crap that comes in. But every now and then I get a subject line to the email address that's on there that says,

basically, hey, via your LinkedIn bio. And I'll read that and reply. And it just shows me that, hey, there's an actual human on the other line. It's not just some marketing thing. And be like, they really, really do have something that they want to talk about. And so it's like little things like that are kind of puzzle filters, I guess, that I call them, where I just create a little bit of a barrier. And 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 going to mention by name, because they get delused. But he

is a very, very successful author and journalist. And when he is hiring for different positions, part time, or full time, at the bottom of the job description on a job site, or wherever it might be, in a 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 address is given earlier, call this number.

And leave a voicemail answering the following things. And automatically he takes the pool of a thousand people who are going to do the wrong thing and finds the 10 people who are actually paying attention. Yeah, 100%. So publishing, what is, we didn't really, we didn't really talk much about it. But can you give a little bit, just a tiny bit of background on the aviary. And then some of your related publishing investigations, which I think is not inappropriate word, if you

could give people a little bit of context. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to back up before the aviary, just a little bit, and just go like, you know, for a chef, doing a cookbook is something that they dream about if they're a serious chef from the time they're 15. You know, just like if you're a basketball player, you want to make the NBA or, you know, if you're a runner, you know, want to be in the Olympics or whatever, like to grant to a bunch of chefs having their own ideas

in a physical, beautiful cookbook is kind of a holy grail for them. It's very sacred. And what was interesting is that just before Grant was sick, we started getting a lot of publishing offers. 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 publishing in about

98, 99, something like that. And the typical publishing deal, like kind of came into us, which was great that they were coming in. And it was $250 to $300,000. And they would basically say, well, out of that, you're going to pay for the designer and the photographer. And you need like a 30-day photo shoot. 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 that and all the offers came in within about 10% of each other, which immediately, you know, the hair on the back of my neck, like the spidey sense, the spidey sense, that's telling me that something back there is pricing this in an unusual way. And then I started going like, oh, this is actually like the music industry. Very much so. I knew people in bands that would get signed to a record label

back in the day. And they would get a quarter-million dollar advance. You know, shit, that 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, you know, X number of records or CDs or in this case books. And then in the contract, it actually said, in the restaurant guarantees that they will buy 2,500 books at half of retail price. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's, you know, you're looking at

something like $80,000 right there that goes right back to them in essence. And then I kind of went like, well, I wonder what a book costs to print. And I mean, I just called, I asked them like, well, how much is this book going to cost to print? Well, I don't really know. And so what they would do is that they would always have layers of people so that they said, well, it'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 plen a plausible deniability or plausible ignorance. Yes. Willful plausible ignorance. Yeah. And and so I do what I start doing. I'm like, well, let's just Google that up and see what it costs to print a book or how many copies of the French laundry books sold? How many copies of 50 other books that we wanted to emulate or that we that we thought were well done sold? And man, it's like asking true like, you know, keys to the Vatican or something

when you call a publisher and ask them that. They 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 trends, right? 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 the New York Times, which you can go to the New York Times website and just look at how is the New York Times bestseller list created. And on their own site, they say it's like compendium of known publishers like publishing houses as well as these like top 50 retailers in a back in the day. And it's a gameable

system, 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 highly subjective within the New York Times. So there there's a lot of wiggle room. In other words, it is not like the Olympics. We're like, okay, clear gold silver bronze video replay. We know exactly how this

was tabulated. So the more that we dug, the more that we got like curi, like more and more curious, a little bit angry actually. But Grant was weirdly angry at me because he's going like, well, dude, like, why do you care? You know, it's like, I've been wanting this since I was 15. And I was like, well, look, if this is our budget, it's not going to be the book you want. This is going to be as good as you want it to be because we're not going to be able to spend six months doing the

photography. We're not going to be able to get great pages. We're not going to be able to get a picture of every dish. Like, what do people cook in a cookbook? Well, they tend to cook those pages where they see a picture of the final dish because you know what it looks delicious. You know, it's supposed to look like you got something to emulate at least, right? And so when we did the specs for the book, I had one of the best publishers in America say, if you do that book, there's no

way you saw more than 5,000. No way. And no one's going to publish it. And you can't use metric. 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 it took about a month and a half before I got lucky. And I called the print broker who had actually printed, you know, broker the print job of one of the famous books. And I was expecting that the book retailed for $60. It

would cost like 15 to print 20. I didn't know anything about it. And when he told me it was like $2.23 per book to print per 30,000, you know, 30,000 copy run. 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 instantaneously, I went, oh, shit, everything makes sense. And when I would call publishers and tell them this, they would go, oh, yeah. But look, like we did 40 different prints, you know, 40 different books

last year. Only five of them did well. And I'm like, that's your problem, man. Like I know we're going to sell well. I don't really give a shit if you lost 35% of the time and need to spread your portfolio risk. I'm the one you're spreading it on. Right. So we decided with the linear book, we put together like 20 pages and Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system. And we shipped it out to eight different publishers. We liked to which were art houses that had never

done a cookbook. And they all came back and and same all the usual criticism, except for Aaron Wainter, a 10 speed press. Yeah. Smart, smart guy, by the way. Yeah. And he basically said, I'm going to 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 were both really good at. And within 10 minutes, we had struck a deal whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves for our restaurant, we paid actual printing costs, not wholesale, actual printing cost, anything that they sold and distributed through their channels, they would get about 27% of the sale price, which means that we got 73% of that. These are like state secrets, right? Like nobody tells this

stuff. And so for years, I was walking around with this knowledge where if we sold 100,000 books, say that would be the equivalent of selling like 500,000 books 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. And we won, I say we Martin and Laura Casner won the Communication Arts Award, where if you're a designer that's like their annual is like, that's like

getting the Oscar, right? Yeah, similarly for people who don't know it, I mean the James Beard Awards are also very much like the Oscars. Yeah. So, so we felt like really vindicated on that. The book still sells, this is eight years later, we still sell seven to eight thousand copies a year. And when we did the Avery, which is our bar that's a non-bar that we talked about earlier, you know, we started getting all of the same offers again. And this time it was really easy to go like,

huh, just kind of like, oh, like, oh, that's cute. Like, you know, and so I should add that we did, I wrote a book of the grant I wrote his memoir together that we didn't use a ghostwriter. We wrote ourselves to life on the line. And for that one, we did a traditional book deal. But after our agent kind of got it halfway, I got on our plane and 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,

starting at a really high price and working my way downward. Can you explain to people just briefly with that? Yeah. Yeah. So basically like, here, here, I'll do this. Like, let's say, so I think one of the great problems 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 going to get, I don't know, four to five percent

of the sale price. That's a lot for something that's like your most biggest investment in your life. But they kind of say of 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 going to sell for $500,000, they're going to get 4 percent of that. That's $20,000. If they get $490,000, it's almost no difference to them.

400 bucks difference. But if they lose the deal over that last 10,000, it's a lot. So they want to price a home so that it sells quickly so 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 $9,600. It's a lot more money. So what I do whenever I've sold real estate 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 50% of everything over 10% higher than that. 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 40% higher. And like it sells in two days. Yeah. That's because now

they're actually working for you. Right. Well, it's similarly, I went into that publishing negotiation. And I was kind of like, by the way, the agent, it's 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? Like I don't even think she just knows it. 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 going to spend my time doing this for X. So 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 Elinio book. That's a cookbook. Nothing count. These are words. So I went to the publishers that I'll bid on it. And I just got them all on a conference call and just started a really high price.

And every couple seconds, I went down $10,000. And then one of them blink and bought it. 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, people start going like, oh my God, someone's going to say something. Like I would pay that.

Someone else must as well. They could be off by a factor of 30%. And they'll never even know it because there's only one bid that ever happened. 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 publisher. I said, so right away. Yeah. So I guess my question is, did they know that they were signing up for a Mexican standoff slash? Yes, they did. Oh, they did. They did. So I winked met with them all

personally. Kind of said, or like, John, I 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 standoff. Yeah, you can't do that. Okay. I mean, you could. It might be fun, but I didn't do that. I wouldn't talk. I created enticement. I sold on my ability to actually do it. It was a bit like doing the no phones with the software. Like I was like, well, if I get a really big contract off,

if you got how to write book, and then it'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. Because which is like on the day it was due, they went, what's this? I'm like, that's the manuscript. Yeah. It's nice. Oh, that's cute. Well, it's kind of like showing up at the restaurant on time as a diner and then being seated at the appointed time. Yeah. It's just this like open,

open lie. 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 could get into that separate time. I just want to ask you a question. No, I do. I do not turn them in at the expected length. But I see longer. Yeah. I do tend to turn them in on time. So what happened with the with the Avery is that we basically couldn't figure out how to do another book 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. And then there was this guy, Ellen Hemberger. And if you get nothing else from from this whole talk and you've made it this far, go see go Google Ellen and Aline. Alan 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. And then he worked at Pixar. And while he was at Pixar and his wife Sarah worked at industrial like magic as the graphics designer. He was given by Sarah a copy of the Alinea book to go full circle and became just fascinated with it was not a cook did not a cook and did the Julie and Julia thing. He spent five years not only 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. Alan for people wondering is A L L E and there are also videos of Alan and Alinea. Yeah. And he's an auto-died act like this guy learns and learns and learns and is the kind of person that goes the black box and goes I'm going to learn how to forge knives and I'm going to learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, I'm going to cook everything in there

and I'm going to take pictures of it. And I'm going to 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 because it wasn't working. And when grant kind of threw up his arms and go, well, the book might be wrong. Like Alan's worldview was shattered. It was like the piezo. And he was kind of like, well, he made it to be wrong. He was, well, you know,

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 changed. It's in the video. And we got to know him 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 homegrown book. And what I got was, you know, a 400 page beautifully, beautifully illustrated, beautifully written book about a person's journey of learning. And it was called the Alinea project.

And I had no, no idea that he had done anything like this. And so suddenly, I thought to myself immediately, and it's in the intro to the Avery book, I texted him and said, holy shit, you're crazy. And I have ideas. And after waiting for like four or five years to do a book on the Avery, 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. And then I found out his wife worked at

Industrial Light Magic and she did all the graphic design. And I was like, this is perfect. You need guys 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. 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 awesome. And right as they were about to say yes, they found out they were going to have a baby. So they called me up one day and said, oh my god, like I was like, oh, they got cold feet. Oh no. And they said, you know, we're pregnant. We're going to have a baby. And I said, okay, well, we're going to 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, punting on them just because like in a discriminatory way. I said, nope, we're not going to 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. And 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 in the Kickstarter.

We sold about another 300,000 dollars of books since then. It comes out in October. You can go to theeliniabook.com and the coolest part of that website is if you look at the Elinia book. I'll sorry, theevarybook.com. Great. Great lead. Great lead. Well, genius marketing right there. So yeah, theevarybook.com. But if the coolest part of that is other than of course, your ability to buy said book is Alan kept the blog on there

called our progress. And in it, he details every single aspect of what it takes to make a book like this. 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 from one of 30 dollars. There's no market for it. And you don't need pictures because it's just liquid in the glass. And I think we blew that out of the water with what the book looks like. I think that because

certain things like fire are really hard to photograph. There's a great picture in there of this one cocktail where we spray some anus and we light it on fire and it creates an aroma into the bowl that it's served in, it's loaded to the gun walls. It's a batavia rock cocktail. And that took a composite of 18 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,

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 publisher at this time. And I think we're going to set a man. I don't know. Like, I'm either completely delusional. It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half million of these. Yeah. And it's next two or three years. And it's, yeah, it's not a, not a 995 book either,

which it shouldn't be. Right. I mean, this is, it's $85. We've invested close to a million dollars all the way in around it. And it looks like it, I think, I hope. Yeah. 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. You know, it's really like a five person project. It's deep enough that if a professional gets it, they're going to learn a lot. But I'd say about 35, 40% of it can be done at home because

unlike the linear book where, hey, you got to go out and buy a duck. Like, you know, and your local grocery might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you need some fluid account of rum, or, you know, certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store. It's exactly the same thing that we use. You know, that product is universal. I read somewhere that, I don't think it's taking us too far field. I read somewhere that you consider yourself a tequila

guy, or at least in part a tequila guy. Do you have any favorite tequila's or concoctions? Well, there's, so I just, I'm going to do a little video promo for, for the book that we just filmed last week where essentially I work with Eric Jepis, who's one of our bartenders in the office, which is our little speak easy below the Avery, which is amazing. If, if people have the, the opportunity to check it out, it's basically granted to say, hey, everything upstairs,

people are going to think it's a linear smoke and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail. So one of the foundational cocktails for me is, is a daiquiri. It's, I say, three ingredients in a million ways to fuck it up. 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 daiquiri, or they'll blend it 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 mescal margarita. That's my favorite drink. All I'm doing is I'm taking some rapesado and a little bit of mescal and equal weights along with some, you know, a grandma, or a, or a Quantro equivalent and lime and simple syrup. That's it. That's all there is to it. 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 that were more attitudinal at the time. You can still find those bottles around. It's a little bit easier than like, you know, someone like wine collecting or something like that. Man, it's like an endlessly fascinating thing. I don't consider myself a cocktail person

10 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 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. You know, whereas it's like, you know, a vodka tonics just boozing, it has just getting drunk. That's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make things that are, it's really a

culinary approach to cocktails. It's endlessly fascinating, just like anything else in this world. I would also say just contrasting, say, someone who wants to recreate something from Alinea, which you certainly could do. I mean, Alan, prove that with something from the Avery, there is also a tremendous amount of theater and presentation, 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 at the Avery. You can easily make some ice with patroids, bitters, and it or something like that. And then as the ice melts in the cocktail, it's going to change the flavor, and it's going to look really cool too. Doing some of these things at home is not hard.

I did a dinner party once where it was like, you know, a cocktail party probably had 40 people at my house, and each room in my house had 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 bartender because they're terrible anyway, anyone that you'd bring in, and you know, you know, caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like, oh, like, and I know how

to make it old fashioned. 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 it can be more than just like a strong cocktail. It can be really delicate and interesting. And people can learn all about this at theaviarybook.com. That's right. Yep. Well, Nick, I have two rapid fire questions that are unrelated. And then I think we're going to,

we're going to, we're going to bring this neat and tidy round one podcast to close. But we've talked about books. Everybody should not only check out the aviary book, 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 stuck in at the aviary. So it is a bit of a, 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 to Chicago worth it in and of itself. So 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, 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 named one of them ready. The food by randomness almost everyone in my office is forced to read. You know, and 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. And then on the other side, I tend to give away what I would call vintage art books. So it's not a book people can buy. I'm sorry to say, but occasionally I'll be at like

a used bookstore and I'll find some of these great old art books. And I buy a few of them. And then when I want to think someone for something, I send them that. Paragradations have an epicurean, something like that. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like I bought, like, want to 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, I type it up on the old typewriter. And it is the most confounding thing to people because they look at it and they go, how did you do that? I'm like on a 1922 typewriter. It's like a personal artisanal thing. But I know that that's not what you're getting at. No, no, no, I can't really think of, I can't really think of like the number one. I'm sure once we in this, I'll immediately think of it. And if I do, I'll send it to you so you can link to it.

I think the answer, the answer is more interesting with the typewriter. So 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 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. I have no idea why that came to mind, but I think in talking through this whole thing, you know, it's, you kept asking me like, why are you digging this black box or it would be like curiosity. 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, right? And so I think, you know, the hallmark of the people that I like as friends the best, what we try to install in our kids and the reason I like my wife so much is that intellectual curiosity is everything. And so I don't know, how do you get that on a billboard? I think pause or, you know, be curious or something like that. I know it's cliche, but I think that's the thread that ties

everything together. Yeah, you do pause a lot. Even though on a macro level, you seem to be moving at high speed a lot of the time, there are a lot of pauses built into that speed, if that makes sense. From what I've noticed, I mean, you're simultaneously one of the craziest fuckers I know and least craziest fuckers I know if that makes sense. That's a great compliment. Thank you. I'll take it.

I'll take it. And where can people find you? I know you have, of course, the Alina Group.com, you have exploretalk.com, the aviarybook.com, which is the most timely for people to check out right now. 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 Coconis, K-OK-O-N-A-S, and Twitter is Nick Coconis, and I see K. And hey, it's all Googleable, right? Like, so beyond that, if you could figure out my email address,

I'll probably answer. I'll know given that given the reach of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated and might take a while. Yeah, that might be a hug of death situation, but we will. That's OK. TBD. It's a good problem to have. Good problem. Now, Nick, this is a blast. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. And many more conversations to be had. This, I think, another trip to Chicago, maybe in order to say.

I'm gonna say, I hope we see you here soon. 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.blog4tlashpodcast, as with this episode and certainly every other episode. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is five bullet

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