#341: Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life

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Why hello, you sexy little minks. This is Tim Ferris and welcome to another episode of the Tim Varris show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers, whether they come from the worlds of chess, sports, business, it really doesn't matter. We're trying to spot patterns of excellence. What are the habits, the routines, the favorite books, the morning exercises, whatever it might be, that you can test and apply in your own lives. And my guest today is a friend We've been trying to make the podcast happen for quite a few years now

And he is a polymath. you need to listen to this episode. Nick Caconis is his name. Last name is spelled K O K O N A S Nick Kaconis on Instagram at N Coconus.

Nick is the co owner and co founder of the Alinea group of restaurants, which includes Alinea next, the Aviary Royster, I think I'm getting that right, and the Aviary. New York City. NYC that is. He's also the founder and CEO of Talk Inc., a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than two and a half million diners and clients in more than twenty countries. Now, you might be thinking, wait a second, restaurants, food, that's not my thing. Doesn't matter. We're gonna get into philosophy. We're gonna get into derivatives trading. We're gonna get into Books like Fooled by Randomness, The Problems of Philosophy

Uh let's see, peregrinations of an Epicurean and how Nick seems to break every industry or type of business he goes into in the most productive way possible. It's a really fun conversation. But back to the bio. A linea. A L I N E A, which by the way I based basically an entire section of the Four Hour Chef on, which was one of my books, because I was so impressed. Alinea has been named the best restaurant in America and best restaurant in the world by organizations and lists as diverse as the James Beard Foundation. they give James Beard awards out, which are kinda like the Oscars in the food world. World's fifty best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler. His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them.

Despite the fact that uh he does not, or didn't at least have any experience whatsoever in restaurants. And he had some amazing, amazing partners we get into. But that set of beginners' eyes is really, really crucial. And we dig into how he cultivates that a lot. Nick has been uh he uses this word, a subversive entrepreneur, which I agree with, and angel investor since nineteen ninety six. He spent a decade as a very successful derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is the Aviary Cocktail Book.

which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I've ever seen. I got an early copy. It is Stunning. It is just unbelievable what they've done. It is self published. has already sold That is pre-sold nearly a million dollars in copies and is being released right now. shipped right now in October of two thousand eighteen. It it is truly, I think, the most beautiful book I've ever seen and held in my hands. So

You can find out all about it. You can see all sorts of photos and samples at The Aviarybook.com. That's w dot The Aviary Book.com. A V I A R Y. Check it out. So I'll leave it at that. Please listen to this episode, even if you have no interest in food, it doesn't matter.

We span so many different businesses, industries. life lessons. Uh I had a blast with this and I hope you do as well. Here too, Nick. Cocoas.

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've been fed a lot of caffeine by you.

And uh You're also of great help with the four hour chef, so I wanted to right off the bat thank you for that. It was a really lovely experience. It was kind of a fun um thing'cause I remember when you you sent me like a preview of the book and then you called me to say, like, hey, you know

You wanna say anything about it? And I was like on a chairlift and I was like by the time I get off this chairlift I will have a blurb for you such pressure. Uh we well which which meant a lot. And pressure I think is The word To describe Uh so much about you and your

Life. I I wanna say trajectory, but I'm not even sure that is the right word. And I thought a fun way to kick off the conversation would be to share with people listening Some of the back and forth that we had when we were brainstorming what a podcast might look like because Certainly. I I don't think of you first and foremost as a food guy per se.

And s we were we were Having this exchange via text. And then via email. And I thought I'd just read one of your responses as we were swapping different ideas. And uh I I'll I'll probably edit for space a little bit here, but not by much. And here we go. I'm a huge believer in radical transparency in business. I give numbers and burn bridges with big companies because I think that a lot of times people don't ask the basic questions in publishing. For instance, how much did that book cost to print? How many did it sell? Oddly, those numbers are very hard to come by. I dug from uh month years ago to do the Alinea book the right way. For bars, why does a bartender wash dishes and talk to customers? We've redesigned the bar experience in one best bar in the world. For restaurants, why is it the only form of entertainment that

has only a mutual promise to show up. And then it goes into behavioral economics and in parentheses. I don't even know how to pronounce this last name correctly. Richard Thaler or is it Thaler? Yeah, Thaler, Thaler. Thaler, as a friend and investor, just won the Nobel Prize. Investing, been beating the market for nearly thirty years. Everything in all caps is about asymmetric risk taking and information, and yet people people's perception of risk. Or of what I do is that it's risky. It is not. And uh in a separate exchange. when we were talking about uh 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 to even begin with the twenty op the twenty options that we have here. But Maybe you could maybe you could maybe you could explain to me. How behavioral economics And Richard Thylor.

fit into this. For for Curiosity's sake. Uh yeah, I mean well I'll I'll go back to the word you used options because I started out um back in nineteen ninety two or three studying options, uh, 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 you know Wall Street, all that. Um it's a bit like playing a game of chess for a living or being the house at a casino, that sort of thing. It's about taking you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day.

And pretending it's like a big decision tree. And any given decision is is probably got a you know, if you're really good, forty eight percent chance of being wrong. So you have to be you have to be really, really good at constantly being comfortable being wrong. But knowing that your overall number of

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

Um and then getting back to your actual question with Professor Thaler and behavioral economics and I mean essentially what they're looking at is 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 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.

you know, um picking a mate, like all those things. Um, it comes down to a whole bunch of decisions that you make without often really thinking about Yeah. Um Not that you can go around walking around going, Wow, I've just made another decision. But when you are doing

you know, business or or starting a company or publishing a book or whatever it may be. You can be intentional about that and realize that it's gonna be an iterative process. And so I think that's That's been not only the case for me in in learning um how to filter things through that mindset. But

Like when you said there isn't really a trajectory, like I kinda look at everything I've done as as 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. And I 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. How is that that particular Transition or

Rather. uh progression, I suppose, from philosophy to finance is one that you and I haven't really talked about. And that that one is interesting to I I'd love to explore for a second and th we're gonna go into a million different nooks and cranes here. But d was f do you feel like philosophy was studying philosophy undergrad was an asset that then later helped you or was it just an interest you explored on route to other things? No, I I I can't remotely imagine having not

not done that. And the way that actually I did it was really interesting. I I had no intention of but when I got to college, I thought I'd study political science, economics, pre-law kind of thing, something like that. And um my very like second week at Colgate University, uh wonderful professor who just passed away last year at ninety four years old, really great mentor to me, um Professor Jerome Balmouth. I was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost sixty years, pulled me aside, um, introduction to logic, you know, one oh one. And basically said what do you

What are you studying here? And uh I 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. Um and and he would he was the kind of guy like there's like There's this great scene in a river runs through it where the where the dad You know, every time the kid writes An essay like the young uh, you know.

Fisherman kid. writes an essay and he brings it to his father to be graded. He he gives it back to him and says half as long again. And that's like long before that movie ever came out, um, Professor Balmouth would would essentially assign a paper to the class and say it should be about fifteen pages, and people would be like, Well how long? and he'd always say, like

You know, how long's a piece of string, like it's however long it needs to be. And then he would tell me, Yours can't be longer than three pages. And 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 in thinking, succinct. To to you know, understand what logic was to process information and really to look for parallels. in different fields and different fields of thought.

Um and so Man, like when I got out of school, I I went to law school for like a a day and a half. I got into Penn like a a joint J D PhD program at Penn. And as soon as I kind of knew who the other folks were and what their their desires and trajectories were.

I was like, Well, this isn't actually a good fit for me and um I remember my future father in law Told my now wife, um, then girlfriend that I was in danger of becoming an intellectual bum because I I I dropped out of I dropped out of law school before I really entered law school. And um You know, I floundered around for a little while.

Um, but you know, if you grew up in Chicago you end up meeting people who who had this unusual lifestyle and that was back in the days pre pre Internet, pre pre electronic trading.

I'm on pre high frequency trading where there was literally people on a giant trading floor th shouting at each other. And you either were attracted to the I don't know, almost animalistic nature of that. Um And for me it was like a huge challenge because there are people down there that

We had, you know, PhDs from MIT and then there was people who were like, you know, butcherers that went down there with a hundred thousand dollars and just kicked ass. And and and so it was it wasn't about your your level of education or any of the stuff I already talked about. It was about can you show up every day and every day's game day. And be really disciplined. and very clear headed in in with chaos around you. How did you get introduced to that world? You know, I 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 gonna name a name here. as you'll find out f uh why in a second. But I I I was walking down the street, I had uh I was like you know, six months out of college, kinda didn't know what I was gonna do. And I was walking down the street and I bumped into a guy I knew in high school. And

You know, he wasn't um the best student. He didn't try the hardest. And I was like, Hey, what are you doing now? And and he was like, Well I'm I'm just rehabbing these homes and I I thought literally, like, Oh, he's a construction worker and I was like You know, w what are you doing with them? He's like, Well I just bought this block I'm turning this all over. This is the true story. This is so not like, you know, a good reason to do something. But but I looked at him and I was like, What are you talking about? He's like, Yeah, I skipped college and I I started out as a runner on the floor of the Merc and now I I you know, I own like

twenty five condos and three townhomes and and I I trade. And I kinda went like wow. You know. 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 truly fascinating thing. And You know, I I went down, visited the floor. I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction to get a job.

True story. Um like people lie on their resume all the time. I'm probably the only person that got rid of like, you know, my degree and my my like uh academic awards and all that. Because you know, to get a clerk job on the floor, the last thing they wanted was someone with a good degree, five beta kappa, you know, magnicum laude, all that stuff. Um so I faked my resume, got a five dollar an hour job and looked for a mentor. And I I found a guy named Frank Zorino, who um was at Chicago Research and Trading, who was which also was founded by a philosophy major. It's actually very common. And um why is that common?

I don't know. I wish I knew the answer. I I don't know the answer. I I do know that there's three or four of the largest trading firms in the world. are run by philosophy majors. Um and If you look back at

My my class just of 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, like It was it's a really Interesting path. It's not just like studying physics.

You know, like I know some great physicists Who who are great in whatever they do. And I think it's

I think it's a similar discipline of abstract thought. Mm-hmm. Like I can't think of anything worse than studying business. Ha ha Okay.

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

If you're taught in nineteen ninety two, if I went and got an MBA. I would have been taught a certain kind of management that six years later what the internet would have gotten blown up. Mm-hmm.

And so for me it's like I always ask The why question. You know, um, when we're Yeah, when you were mentioning like the book publishing or or a bar. Like

You know, I just look at some things and it's like why is that? Mikey, why does it work that way? Um 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.

Um and often I don't know the real answer. Um, but I come up with alternative ones, at least that suit my narrative, I guess. Undervalued skill, by the way, in some cases, right? You gotta be careful, but uh Very uh I a very, very, very, very, very interesting I I I wanna pause here partially because I'm over caffeinated. I wasn't inspired by my nostalgia related to your double espresso up But why did the professor Pull you aside.

What did that early undergrad professor in Logic One O One That Led him to take a special interest in you. Well I you know, I think

I think I was Prepared in earnest because I was mostly terrified. Um You know, he had a reputation of being kind of like a Um

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

college campus now. I mean I've literally s 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 fear and so he just lit his notebook on fire and he stamped and he stamped it. And the kid the kid threw it on the ground, stamped on it. 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 um I remember the specific day um He was literally at you know, back to the This is like right out of a movie. He his back to the class, writing on a chalkboard, you know, some some logic problem, symbolic logic. And um the guy next to me, um

Uh had no shot. At getting it. None. Right. And so he he said his name and um And I wrote on the paper on my desk so he could see it, like what what the answer was. And then without missing a beat or turning around, he was like Mr. Caconis, please do not help him. There is no way in hell he could possibly have done that without your help. And 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 Kaconas, where is your book? And I say it's at my it's in my dorm room. Yeah, Professor, and he said, Well a lot of good it's doing you there. I said, on the contrary, it must apparently be doing me a lot of good there. And he said, I'll see you after class. So I thought I was getting kicked out. And there was like a line forming to create office hours or to like ask to be transferred out or whatever. And when I got to the front, he said, Follow me and I filed him to his office.

And I I swear I mean he's you know, running through the fall. uh New England fall and and I thought I was gonna get kicked out of the class. And when I close the door I turned around, he has feed up on the desk and he said, Where are you from? What do you want to do here?

And that was it. Like he he he took me under his wing. I was very fortunate. I um And you know, it's like I never knew here's the amazing part. I never knew the guy liked me until ten years after I graduated. And then I was treated like a member of his family at his funeral thirty years later. Huh. Right. So really fascinating uh person, really fascinating uh, you know, uh moment in my life where

Um I don't know, someone saw something in me and kinda went like I'm gonna make an investment in this person then never asked for anything back. How did you not know that he liked you? Did he withhold in some way so that you wouldn't get a big head or something along those lines? Did he not want to get atta overly attached to you so you wouldn't have to be. No, no, no, no. I I I think I was nineteen years old and I didn't know that the people you like you hold to a higher standard, probably. Right. Um and so consequently, uh

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

He would be talking to my English professor without me even knowing and being like, you know, that paper sucks. He can do a lot better than that. Give him a C on that one. And I was just like I was like what's going on? Like all of a sudden that class got hard. I didn't know. I like I had no idea. Um and uh it was just it was an interesting uh lucky Fortunate. Mm-hmm.

So we're we're gonna get back to the Mirk, but before we do I'm endlessly fascinated by philosophy, but I'm also a nerd and kind of academic and pedantic and have spent a lot of time in school. For people who are listening to this who are, say, already in their careers, or maybe they're in their early twenties thinking of starting a company. But are entrepreneurially either involved or inclined. Would you suggest if they don't have any exposure to philosophy that they

read any particular books or resources or explore it in any way, or would you say actually you know what that was an intermediate step to something else you sh You would probably be better off studying X, Y, and Z. Is there like a starter kit or a pl something you would recommend to folks who don't have the philosophy exposure? Yeah, uh you know I think part of it is if you read a book in isolation

Um it's not as rich of an experience as discussing those ideas. Within that context. Um, that said, if it's if if you're the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas, I mean there's hardly a better Yeah.

Um, you know, I I I happen to love um The Problems of Philosophy, which Bertrand Russell wrote, um, sort of about Wittgenstein's ideas, but before Wittgenstein published. Um and It's it's written in plain language. It's not

Um certainly Nietzsche um is more like philosophy with some weird sugar coating of something on top of it. Um, and man, like as a young male, you know, reading Nietzsche for the first time I was like Fuck yeah. Like you know, like like 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. Um I think what it is, is it's people grappling with all the same questions and curiosity that that we all have if you pause to think about it. And so there it's it's so big.

You know, um that it's it's not just, you know, Descartes, you know, I think therefore I am. It's it's it's kind of every little bit of that. Um Back to like you know, read La Crucius. Like He had the atomic that's Lucretius. Oh Lucretius Lucretius. Yeah, Lucretius. Yeah. I mean Yeah, he

L U C R I T I U S. Yeah, I'm a terrible speller. So never ask me to spell it. We'll put it in the show notes for sure. Yeah, right, right. But like you know, it's like You you read read that or read this great book called The Swerve. Which you know is is uh you know, about this This monk ages ago um that that sort of found that book and then

rewrote it and saved it for history. Like that reads like a murder mystery. Like you don't necessarily need to start with the philosophy, you can start with the things around it. Um, but I you know, it's like I continue to Find sort of the world I of ideas endlessly inspirational. And and then by the way, you know Steal them and use them in whatever you're doing.

Like that they're there for you. Lucretius L U C R E T I U S Titus Lucretius Caris was a Roman poet and philosopher. We'll put that in the show notes. I haven't read Bertrand Russell in so many ages, uh, but it is Very digestible. It is not dressed up and

in ten dollar words when ten cent words would suffice. Uh a lot of his writing is is really powerful. And I I also just want 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 uh 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 uh those are very readily accessible. Well, and even MIT open courseware. Like so many colleges now have taken that model and put great, great great classes online.

Um And you know, I know that every now and then I'm surprised what I what I find on there And get sucked into like an all nighter of of taking some college class, you know? that I know nothing about and it's so far over my head, but it it kind of refuels you again to go like, Oh, like

They're huge. Gaps where I know nothing. And the older you get the harder it is to to start into something new, I find, at least.

Um because it feels like the mountain's too big, you know? I I would I would actually uh not not to pull a Nick Actually, sir, on the c on the contrary, on the contrary, sir, my book is doing me a lot of good in my dorm room. I think one of your superpowers is That

You ask the fundamental why questions about longstanding assumptions or uh 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. uh in in a way.

L let's go back to the Merc. Uh we we can go in any direction, of course, but You you get you step into this Lord of the Flies slash Gladatorial 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. Yeah. No. Uh I I for real, no. Um I I was down there and I I I had made um a fatal error of leaving school and and everyone told me it was a fatal error. And um This is leading uh the law school.

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

Um and of course I I bought books on finance and commodities and options and all that. And there are completely ridiculous and opaque and academic that and they looked like they had no relationship to what was going on there at all. Um, I started taking classes that were run at the Merc on mock trading and just learning the hand signals and things like that. Which

were fine, but didn't really teach you how to trade. And I spent Yeah, time. interviewing with big companies like Goldman Sachs and Societe General and whatnot because I did have the academic background where I

I would get the interview, I would be able to take the test, I would do well on their math and psychology tests, I would get offered a job as as a trader. Uh and then I would look at the contract. Um, this is a key thing. People get out of college to get offered a job. I I think I'm the only one who ever read the employment contract. And what it said in there was basically like they could do anything they want with me for three years.

Like I don't even necessarily need to be a trader. Like I w that's what I was interested in doing. But they could they could ship me to France and have me do something totally different. I could be an analyst or, you know, God knows what. And so when I would question that, they'd be like, Man, you should be really happy. Like we had, you know, three hundred applicants for this and we offered eight positions. Like just take it. And I was kind of like totally your style. I no and I've I was just kind of like You know, I I grew up you know, like I I'd be remiss not to say that like my dad modeled

Um 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 Two, he was drafted into the Navy at the end of World War Two, was dismissed honorably after sixteen, eighteen months because they were downsizing the Navy. And then he was barely young enough um 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 at when he was twelve years old, saved up all of his money, um, from the army and the navy and and bought the store.

And So as I was growing up Uh You know, my hero was my dad, who was not an academic, who was not um what people would think of as like an executive in a suit or whatever.

But did really well. Um, you know, he had uh uh bought a l um property in real estate. He he owned a temporary labor office that supplied unskilled laborers to factories and and and conventions and whatnot. Um that was a really good business, you know? And he had a lot of common sense smarts. Um, 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 gotta own you have to own your own situation, you know? Um, and so when I was offered those jobs, I was like, Well, I don't really see myself working for someone else, you know? And I found a guy um who also felt that way and he was working for a big company and they didn't want to make him 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 um currency options. And when I found him

I instantly knew that this was the right person. Because I Talk to dozens of people. And no one was like him. Um

And Then he said he doesn't Didn't want to hire me. Like you don't want to hire anyone. How did you meet him? Do you remember how you guys did that? Yeah, I was I was just introduced to him um through he was back then there were there you know, it's if you're a trader um or even a trading company of a clearing firm like Goldman Sachs, um at the time there was a company called First Options um and he cleared First options and back then you literally have to take the elevator up to key punch in all the cards into like a computer that was

You know, up on seventeen floors away. Uh yeah. Wow. Ancient times. And uh I I met him through uh being introduced to him there. Uh after talking to him

I knew he was the sort of geeky intellectual that I that I needed. Um And then when he told me like that he didn't want to hire me'cause he just hired some clerk. I was like, No, no, no, no like I will pay you to work for you. And and he was he was like This is really strange, you know? And I I explained to him what I just said. It's like look I've been here six months

I set a goal for myself of of getting, you know, becoming like getting on a badge, it was called, like leasing a seat and actually trading within a year. And I was like I need to get going on this. Like I need someone that's gonna teach me options. And um It's fascinating because You know, he he then hired me for I mean, I want to say it was four hundred dollars a week or something like that. And uh

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. Um to the point where you're looking, you know, three derivatives in um you know, the it's not just volatility curve, but the curve of the curve.

And um You know, as soon as I started grasping this and going deeper d deeper down that rabbit hole, the more 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 this giant competition. It's like playing a huge multifaceted chess game.

that no one's gonna get exactly right. But like I said earlier, it's about making hundreds of decisions a day. And even when you get ten in a row that come up tails. You know that the next one's fifty fifty.

You know. And uh That discipline was interesting. Um 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. I everything in Wolf of Wall Street I have seen.

I haven't lived, but I've seen it all. Yeah. And um you know, I I started Hiring very shortly after I started trading and about a year later I left and started my own company with almost nothing. And I hired my first employee, um, who became my business partner for the last twenty five years.

And I taught him what I what I learned and I I I hired people that I considered corporate refugees. Um people who Work for companies.

and decided that Independence. was better. Why did you leave after a year?

Um you know, he He was moving over to the Chicago Board of Trade and I had uh found a couple of awesome programmers. Um to help build this options analysis software. And he sort of offered me up um

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

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

um sort of had an option to To stay you know, um with that company or come a completely underfunded company. I mean thinking back is so stupid, you know, um from a risk perspective. But um It was asymmetric.

You know, um far more upside than downside. And uh it worked out really well and and we spent most of our time as we hired people and and taught them. um how to do this it was mostly Like psychology training.

It was mostly standing around after hours. And saying what's seven times twenty eight? And screaming it at each other like a drill sergeant. until the person couldn't remember what nine times three was anymore.

Yeah. Wait, why did you do that? Well, you had to be quick you had to be quick on basic mental agility. I s so if you bought if you bought four hundred and fifty contracts and it was a twenty delta you needed to be able to do well it's twenty percent of four fifty, it's ninety, but you need to do that Precisely with Numbers that are not so round. Right. Uh you need to be willing to not be perfect.

And you need to make that decision instantaneously. Um and realizing that it could cost you fifty to a hundred thousand dollars if you get it right or wrong. And you and you have to be really, really comfortable with that. Um and so What did we do? Well, we stood around and we beat we turned people's brains into mush.

Until like liter I've had people punch me, cry, run out. It was um it it was No, I mean it sounds awful, but it was it's amazing training because the rest of the world moves much slower. So any other decisions that that I've made in business since then. Um have felt Glacial.

In pace. Yeah. Um 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 peace time, the less you bleed during wartime. The best competitors I've met in many, many fields often strive to make their training and the toil of their preparation harder than what they expect to face.

when they're we it's why we love watching big time sports. Like when it when it matters. there are certain people that you know are are you can almost look at'em and go, Oh, that poor that poor person's gonna fade. And then you you hope they don't. Right. You hope all that training.

You know. pays off. Um when you see someone, I I love golf for all the same reasons. It's like, you know, just a a series of constant failures. And then so Um When you look at someone who Who can pull that that rabbit out of the hat, you know, at the exactly the right moment.

Um It's it's pretty pretty wonderful to see. And and I the thing I loved about my time down there, even though I burned out of it after ten years. Is that I uh There were moments where I I did absolut I mean, I have friends that they'll listen to this and they'll be like, Oh yeah, I remember that time in the SP Pit, you really got this right, you know. Um but

I I made some completely stupid decisions. Um but but mostly on on the measure Um when things got crazy I was able to perform Um, more than that, I remember like Greenspan's irrational exuberance speech was like a formative moment where I kinda went like, Wow, I can actually

I I I can not only hang in this environment I can thrive in it. And you know, you'd get home soaking wet with sweat. It was a physical job. I guess with people it was really blue collar in a lot of ways. And um

You know, it's like I got home that day and I was like That was that was what I prepped my last six years for. It was very satisfying. It it sounds like an awful It is an awful thing in a way, right? Like it's it's just about pure commerce. Um it it it serves uh you know a a purpose of price discovery and and all that, but any individual person isn't really the one doing that, you know. So

I I 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. Yeah. 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, tricks, mental models, anything anything that you would recommend. Um 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. Um obviously Quantifying those is very difficult. Um but

That's That's the key. Everything I try to do is asymmetric. Um and then even though um Nessum Talub is a bit of a pedantic Goofball on Twitter.

Um his book Fooled by Randomness is awesome. Yeah. And um I think Black Swan's great, it's fine. But um Fooled by Randomness is is I think the better of of all his books because it It just man, it just encapsulates everything that people price things incorrectly. It's a all you have to do is walk through a casino. Yeah, you walk a casino and you see everybody pricing

their outcomes incorrectly. The entire city is built on that. And um You know, if you could get in your head literally. Literally. Literally. Yeah. Literally. And and I I don't take any pleasure like people like oh you must have you must love gambling or whatever. And it's like I would never sit down to a blackjack table because I know that, you know, there's a forty nine and a half percent chance that I'm gonna win and that's the wrong way. Yeah, yeah, the the Foolboy Randomness is is uh has come up a number of times. I haven't read it in ages, uh because it is one of his earlier books, but uh you know Howard Marks also brought this up recently when I was chatting with him and

Uh It it is an exceptional book, I think, for developing a new lens on life, not just investing. When you are investing for yourself now H how do you think about How do you think about risk? Because this is a word that has popped up a few times.

Uh But a lot of uh How do you person 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. Yeah, that's Yes.

Pretty difficult question. I think I think that I yeah, I I think that um If you look at everything that I've 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 o out of that one. Take another hundred of those ones and less than one in a hundred of those becomes a millionaire.

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

Um why do you have that response? Is it because I'm yeah, so I and that and then I'm gonna start I'm doing uh software startup now. Yeah, go for it. So so The higher the smaller the hoop. Um The more

Interesting it is to figure it out. Um And once you're up there and you know how to Jump up through that little hoop. Um

There's there's fewer people playing that game. You know? And and the other thing is I remember right when I was gonna start building Linea. with with Grant. I I was talking to a restaurant owner. And by all accounts he was pretty successful. He had four or five restaurants.

And one of them I really liked a lot and we'd go there a lot and I kinda got to know him a little bit. And he said, So, you know, what are you up to? And I said, Well actually I'm building a restaurant now. And he looked at me, he said, Ah. 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? How do you respond to that? You know, no one does. That's kinda like with you know, we'll get to it, I'm sure, but that's like the way I was with the publishing thing. It's like It's like Hey man, people keep printing books.

And yet I can't figure out any of the information and yet they're gonna give me like three or four hundred thousand dollars to write a book. Like Something's remiss here. Like you know what I mean. I've never written a book before, but yet someone's gonna write me a four hundred thousand dollar check. There must be a lot of money on the other side of that bet. And um

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. Uh it's both more interesting. I think. And I also think Getting back to the asymmetry of risk.

Um Those are the ones that You know Yeah, you might have a you know Well, first of all, do you really have a ninety five percent

failure rate if you put in all that effort. Yeah. I I don't think so. You know. Um and second of all Yeah, so I think they priced it wrong, so to speak. Um and then second of all, like

Man, that's that's where the fun is. Like that that gets you up in the morning and and going to work. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is where uh in among many, many other places Averages can be very, very misleading. Right. And uh I I always End up in

Public Q and A's and uh things of this type hearing various numbers and stats thrown around, uh, 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 the first question that occurs to me with uh a number like the uh the latter or I guess a ratio is

Well, is it because the model is difficult? Is it because startups are inherently that high risk. Or Is it Is 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?

Like graduate school. you know, entrepreneurship. Um Like You know, contests and whatnot.

And one of the things that always happens there is what I call like the time machine. Someone comes up with a business plan that is like, you know Yeah, I'm gonna build a time machine. Now, of course it's not really a time machine, but I have seen ones that defy the laws of physics, for example. Um, or you know new pipeline technology, but they have no idea, like it's just a pipe dream. They've done none of the engineering, you know? Um so you you kinda look at that And you go

You know. You haven't really done the homework yet, at all. Um, and then there's a lot of people I come to meet and they've spent like six months doing their logo. And the n and the name of the company. But they don't actually have a piece of software yet. Right. I'm just gonna hire someone to to build that for me. Or m an app. Uh yeah, 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 on a consultant. Oh man. Yeah. I mean what what I tend to get, and this is part of the reason why I stopped all the startup stuff, uh

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

uh hear the docs attached. Yeah right. Like let us know if you're interested in the next sixty minutes. Which my end uh my default response to anything like that where people are pressuring me for a fast decision is no. Like it's just correct. Uh it's like I've I've lost very little money uh saying no to those things. But the The go coming back to the the examples that you were giving and what we were talking about. Uh bridging over to restaurants and food. Uh so you're 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 they're like, Yep, if you want to lose money, go into magazines or restaurants. Right. And At what point And I I have a little bit of the backstory, but not

all the details. Like at what point do you decide to go into or get involved with restaurants and why? Well so I I I left trading in about two thousand two. Um, two thousand one uh it was a you know tough year between nine eleven, um Which was my father died in February of that year. Um, I was burnt out after, you know, going really hard for so long.

And um, yeah, we built up a pretty good size company too, and I merged with a firm in New York and I just I kinda needed a break, but didn't know how to how to really take one at the time. Um and so I left I left trading. And I immediately kinda panicked because here's something that I I really genuinely enjoyed.

Um but didn't Didn't kinda know what I wanted to do next. and started doing um consulting for you know a small hedge fund and and then You know.

And just didn't know what to do and I I had, you know, an awesome wife and a young son and and things were good, you know, but I I I was kinda panicked. I was I was playing golf with like you know, ex athletes'cause who else is thirty four years old and can play golf on a Wednesday afternoon. Um and so

It was just a weird thing and I kinda looked at them and I'm like, oh, they don't really seem all that happy, even though they're they've got this lifestyle. And so Um I met Grant Akitts, um, the chef. Uh at dwell dining at Trio. Um went to uh a lunch there one afternoon had 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 at dinner?

Right. Um 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 uh opening. Um We Kept g 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 are why is no one else thinking this way? And as I got to know Grant a little bit, I think like sometimes people bring Um You know, the chef some wine or beer or whatever, and it's like that's kind of sand to the beach, you know. I would I would bring him books. And I didn't figure he had a lot of time to read. So I would put

Like a post-it note on a page of an old book. So I remember I I brought him this book called The Peregrinations of an Epicure. The Peregrinations like a Peregrine Falcon. I don't even know what that's like. No, no, no. A peregrination is like a wondering about. So it was written just after World War Two um by an ex serviceman, um, and he He kind of goes around. um you know, Paris, I wanna say maybe late forties, early fifties, I can't recall exactly. And uh there is um a chapter in there on La Parmide, um which was a very classical restaurant, kinda the best in the world at the time. And he described a me 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 would literally just highlight like a couple of lines in there and and give'em this book, which was out of print at the time. And um We kind of developed this email relationship back and forth where he would sort of try out some new food on us and

Um, I would give you know, direct, honest feedback, but not like, Oh, it was delicious. It was more like it was more like the you know Like You're going for a provocation there, but if y you know and we would go back and forth and he wrote uh at the time on a on a forum called E Gull It. Uh, and I went on there and his spelling and grammar not with withstanding, I mean, it was like reading someone who's

Just really thinking hard about what they were doing. Everything we just talked about, here was this young 28-year-old chef from Michigan who looked like Captain America. who would come out not you know, he was like Hollywood in the sense of like he was good looking and very driven, very clean cut, but he didn't look like You know, the stereotype central casting of a chef. Right, you know chubby, gregarious guy. He was really quiet, introspective, shy. But then you read

And you know, these which are still up, uh you know, I you can still Google it. And you'd go like you know, he'd go on for like four pages about bread service. Like 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 um I remember on on January twentieth, um two thousand four

Uh my wife's birthday. And uh she said, Yeah, I I wanna go back there and we'd never been in the kitchen before. And they have a table there, but we we'd never eaten in there. And Um

I remember I emailed him and said She's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese. Loves Thai food. Good fucking luck. And I knew exactly what that would do to him. That would put him into ten days of pure health. 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 gonna put us in the kitchen. And Um they put us in the kitchen. I mean it sounds like a a jerky thing to do now, but we we did have a relationship. A little bit at the time.

And He served us like the most amazing meal of my life, you know. Um, and it started out with Latvian sorrel soup with braised hambox. And you know, it had flavors of the sea, which was a Japanese dish. It had it had Thai dishes, but it was all in his style. And so it was his own and yet it had elements of all these things. And at the end of that meal, um

He said to me, you know, Well, what do you think? And I had watched the kitchen and it was like a watchmaker shop. It was not screaming and yelling. It is it is just as uh sorry to interrupt it is so unlike anything that the vast majority of people listening to this would possibly expect. Right. It's not Gordon Ramsey. It is just Complete silence. It is like a watchmaking factory. It is uh

It is really something else. Anyway, sorry to to jump in. And so at the end I said, you know, I doubt anybody anywhere in the world had a better meal tonight. And he was like well well thank you And I said, What are you planning on doing with yourself? You know? I mean I I was like kind of I had a lot of wine. And I kinda look I kinda looked at him, you know, he sat down with us. And I said, What are you what are you gonna do?

And he goes, Well, what do you mean? I said, Well you're not gonna be here forever And he said, Well, I I I wanna build my own restaurant. I said, Uh I'd be I'd be happy to help you do that. He said, Well what kind of restaurant do you want to build? I said, I don't know. I've never built a restaurant before. That was it. And then like a week later I got an email with his business plan and I invited him by my house. And a year to the day later of that, that was May fourth.

Um You know, I we went back and forth on email on May fourth, um, we held a a a dinner at my house for potential investors. And on May fourth, two thousand five, we opened Delinea. Um That is nuts in terms of Tha I mean t can you put that in perspective for people? I actually did not realize that was the the time frame.

Yeah. I mean, can you just in the context of like normal restaurant world. So we didn't really know each other very well. But he would come by my house and he and he didn't like it. None the less that gave you guys the like the 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, meaning maybe you didn't know the full scope of each other's back. Yeah, I I mean I actually studied that. Like that I actually knew I knew the facts, you know. Um, and I knew what he was putting in front of me. Um but I didn't know

him, you know, like the way you know someone that you're gonna become a business partner with. Um and I think he just thought I was rich. You know, I I'm being serious.

Um Everyone else wanted to offer him A 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 ninety percent of the time of your life, right? And so When he said what kinda 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 got that's a big question. We need to sort that out. Um, and I think that was the right answer for him. I think that's all he needed to know was like Okay, the guy's got an open mind. He seems to have done well in business. He knows like you know

I 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, leaf, all of that. He was like the word oblivious is not too strong of a word. Um like you know I mean I'm this is not a criticism of him either, right? It's just like he came to my house and he was just like, Yeah, I you know, I want Martin to design everything. And Martin Kastner, who is a genius designer, has crucial detail which we've we've been involved with for fifteen years now. Um he's a

like a designer. He's like a uh an artisan. Like he built plateware and and he won the Bocusta ore for the platter he designed for Thomas Keller and Daniel Ballud's team for the team USA and all that now. But back then, like I mean this guy's not gonna design plumbing or electrical. So I would just look at him going like well no, he can't we need an architect and you need to get Like city stamps on all that and all that. So um I think Grant was just like, Yeah, you find a place, you put tables in it, and you you know, build a kitchen and you go. Um, you know, in terms of like obviously he knew there were health inspectors and all that, but the process of all this Just about You know.

You either were gonna not build it ever. eight weeks in because we would have hated each other, or we were the kind of people that figured everything out. And We just talked it out, like right down to like What kind of tables? What kind of glassware? What kind of this like

You know, we wanted to rethink the why again of everything. Like why do you put a uh candle on a table? Why is a candle romantic? Like That's a question we asked. Why do we need candles? That's kind of like why is that romantic? Why is um why do people put a little Bud vase on a table. Why shouldn't that be an edible thing? That'd be cool.

So we did all that and we designed the experience. To create emotional responses from the moment that you walked in the front door. So we didn't have the podium. Um, you know, we went what is a good greeting feel like? Not just

You know, if you're at someone's house, what does that feel like? If you're at a restaurant, what shouldn't it feel like? Well, it shouldn't feel like a computer in front of your face. saying what's your name, you know, and all that. So we We went through every aspect of that and I lost almost twenty pounds that year, not in a healthy way. Um just like G Cing the construction. I laid tile in the basement like three days before we opened. Let me pause for one second. So the why question that comes to mind for me is

After the finance after Uh battling it out on the front lines and going through two thousand one. Why this as your next thing? Like why why was this the thing that captured your imagination? 'Cause you had to know on some level once you started getting into the details. Like Fuck. I mean this is gonna be. This is gonna be a big this is gonna be all my chips energetically. So why why this?

You know There are there are occasional times when you wake up in the morning And like that thought comes back to you that that like Hey um

You know. I'm I'm really sucked into this. Right, you know. And for about three or four months without telling anybody, even

you know, Degmara, like even not telling her like Telling no one. I kept going like I should build a restaurant with this guy. Like like it would be the best restaurant in the world if it was done all the way. Right.

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 never worked a day in my life in a restaurant, right? And and 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 gonna 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 deucey guy that built the restaurant. um because my ego was was needed to host a party. Um and so

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

Again, not the best of motivations in the world, perhaps, but the honest one. That was hugely motivating. Um 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. Like and and you know, th uh that was probably met that's probably happened to me I'm really fortunate that that's probably happened to me seven or eight times in my life.

And when it happens and I meet that person, whoever it may be, no matter what they're doing. I I I pause, I kind of acknowledge that directly. And then I just go like You know.

Can we can we You know, grab a glass of wine or or coffee or something. And Like that's something worth marking and going like wow, this person's really invested in something. And Grant had every aspect of being

being that at twenty eight years old. And And it I you know, I mean in hindsight, like it looks It looks smart, but I gotta tell you it was years before it felt smart. You mentioned just now that you've met these people seven or eight times who are Best in the world.

Or potentially the best. Yeah, among them. But the the uh the the the key And the world didn't know it yet. So my question for you is that that sort of brings to the forefront, my mind at least, the

the question of What is Nick seeing or feeling That other people are not. Could to that mean wick w is there a feeling or particular type of observation, a particular type of detail that you notice in these people

That allows you to scout the talent. Where other people might miss it. Or not pay enough attention to it. Yeah, I mean I think you've written a couple of books about about that. Um it's it's it's definitely intangible. Um you know, it's I think it's different in every case.

Um But It's it's interesting because You can tell when someone is fulmitted. I guess.

to their craft or their art or their business or whatever it is that they're doing. There's sport. Um And it's not because they s they talk it about it all the time, though of course, you know, if you 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. You know.

And I think part of what you do is you try to steer people to find those things that that they can commit to. Or you can try to lower a barrier to show them like, hey, the commitment's Not as hard as you think in this particular area, right? Right. But these folks are like They're all in. They're ninety nine percent in. That's what they do. Often to the detriment, frankly, of of other aspects of their lives.

Um And I guess you get better at noticing them. You know? Um

And I mean now like that's Like Boy, I live for that. Like I love meeting people.

that Um Even if it's not something I'm interested in. That are all in. Yeah.

And And there that's that's an interesting You know, I I really I've never really thought about it that way. But like it was just very clear to me that Grant was all in. Like if if here's the thing, if if he wasn't gonna do it with me He was still gonna do it. Yeah.

I I was a a helper. I you know, over time I certainly contributed um Yeah, a great deal to it. Not just He contributed a 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'cause I'm still going. Mm-hmm.

And for for anyone who has the opportunity, I don't even know if they would have the opportunity, but to watch observe grant even for Sixty seconds. Well Chef Table on Netflix is great. Chef's table. Yeah. Right. Perfect. So everybody should uh

have the experience of observing Grant. Working. And focusing. It is I've s I've met a lot of people who are good at focusing. Who have you got to be able to do it.

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 it's really hard to encapsulate in words. So Chef's table, fantastic. People should check it out and just watch the level of

Focus that is Permeates the appearance, the air, the atmosphere. It's really something else. Uh So to that to to to that point, focus.

My favorite aspects of And having conversations is the quest the questions that you raised, right? Like why 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. Wha what are other questions that you asked related to a line or You you could certainly bridge to to other

Um Yeah, I think it makes sense to to chat about aviary as well. But what what are some other questions that that you guys asked? that uh People might might not think to ask.

Yeah, I mean it you know, Grant set the tone for that. Um in our first meeting, not really knowing me and We started talking, but we didn't know even know where to start. Right. And he said, Well I I know one thing, I I wanna have wooden tables. Like I wanna have bare wood tables.

And I said, Why? He said, Well why do tables Why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths? They literally call it a white tablecloth restaurant, if it's fancy. Why? And I couldn't really I came up with dumb answers like oh it it feels good or it absorbs like a spill or whatever it may be. Um and he said no it's because the table underneath is a piece of shit.

And he's like 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 and you feel under the table, guess what? Also apply wood, just a little thicker. Um, 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'll show the food great. It'll show the plateware great. And then I kinda went like well, yeah, but like

you know, um 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 condensation will form a little ring and then you have a a wear issue. Um but you'll save seventy thousand dollars a year in laundering Women's. 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. Forty four degrees, you know, in the winter, maybe a little warmer in the summer because it's higher humidity in Chicago. And you just get rid of ice. It's yeah.

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

That Martin designed. Because you can't put We didn't want to have placemats. That's too cheap. So

All of a sudden we had to design like You know, a silverware holder. So It it just became this cascade of like interesting little art projects.

Um 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 um the door was um is now a famous chef, chef Sean Brock. Of Husk. Oh fantastic. Yeah. So he was not he was not yet a chef then, two thousand five. And he was the first guy through the door. And he wrote this giant blog post on e Gull it with pictures and everything, you can go see it.

And every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional you know, trigger an emotional reaction. It it's almost all there. Like I remember going home and seeing that the next day and going, Wow like That shit actually worked. And you know, and it's like right down to the front hallway that was, you know, a reverse perspective and I was stolen from Shark Cathedral and and and inverted, you know. Um so all of my interest of architecture and art and Science and Olive Grant's

you know, food and all that. Like all came together in like a year long conversation on how to do something. And we really fought with the architect and designers and and all that because people would Tell us the practical reasons why you needed to do this or that. And we would just go, Nope, no host stand.

Like, you know, we want to greet people in a an open way. Um and so just Little things like that. And then we've taken that on, you know, um Through that we've

We've done it Where we took You know seven years, six years to to build our next place because We didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again.

Um And so You know, when we did, then we did it. And I think I think editing Editing yourself.

and each other is i in an open way is really, really Painful. But really, really important. And Coming back to something you mentioned.

Related to the living room. Uh the uh the well off uh Who then create, say, an art project that is not uh maybe beautiful. But is most often not a viable business.

What 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 Dilto, right? Um

And and so Yeah, my biggest fear is that Um It would work. in an artistic way, but wouldn't work

As a business. Uh and so You know, the the The answer is at the beginning. We didn't I didn't do much.

Um I handled All of our marketing and PR, like I wrote everything, you know, myself. Um

Really thought about open sourcing the the building of the restaurant. Um you can still go on line and and see the the original business plans and what logos we were considering using and the the test kitchen which was in my house. You know, we didn't tell anyone at the time, but that was my house at the time. And and see the development of this restaurant. Um, 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 I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the Universal Restaurant Calculator. And um Can people find that online? No, no, no. But it's but it would be very unimpressive um 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 are your food costs, beverage costs, labor costs. What's insurance cost, you know, your your lease, your rent, like all those things, right? Um 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 um I had Again, this goes to the transparency of data. I had Real data for only two restaurants. And from those two, I would then make assumptions about restaurants like the French laundry where Grant used to work.

Well one of the greatest restaurants in the history of America, certainly. And You know, I came up with a number that Grant went, there's no way their revenue's that high or they make that much money. That's impossible. And it was really funny because years later, um, you know, I now work with with Jeff Keller, um, and he's he's a friend all these years later. And I I literally pulled that out one day with Grant. being there and went like How close am I on this back in two thousand five? And he's like, Oh you're within like two or three percent, you know? And and Grant was just like and it's I'm we're talking about back of the envelope stuff. And so you know, you ask like where can people start to start a business.

Start 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. It was the kind of calculation my dad called it, the two shoebox method put me through college, right? Like money coming in in one shoe box, money going out in the other. Whatever's left is profit, you know. Um Yeah. Start that basic.

And and we did that. And I didn't really think about The We did well.

But we didn't make a ton of money. Um Alinea cost of two point two million dollars to build. Um I put up a little over a quarter of that myself. and found investors for the rest, all of whom I knew. And um

You know, in the first year we did Yeah, we made about four hundred fifty to five hundred thousand dollars. on four or five million dollars in sales. Um not a great return. Not a terrible return.

Um we then won, you know Best restaurant in America from Gourmet Magazine. And I was horrified that we won that, frankly. Um I remember Grant called me. And said, Yep, I just got a call from Ruth Reichel. And like we had some stated goals.

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

of having someone that he respected so much'cause Ruth is just a great writer. She's one of the unimpeachable food critics in the history of America. And having her write that in New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status. Um, I think that can't happen nowadays, honestly. For other reasons.

But this is kinda pre Pre you know Internet pre Yelp, all that. And Then all of a sudden we got that and I was like horrified.

Because you know, one of the g goals was completed so early. We would have we wouldn't have our like our lodestar, you know. Mm-hmm. And so um He was like, Dear God, can you let me enjoy it for like a minute? Yeah.

To you. Yeah, yeah, he's getting really mad at me. I was like that's terrible. I mean I was happy, but I was also like oh no, now what do we do? We need to find another artificial construct here to like go after Enough of this ha I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of that out of my out of my face. No, it's about I really do believe that, actually. Um that it's often the process is is so rewarding that when you get something done it it can be a letdown, you know. And um I wanted that process to go. And then unfortunately, six months later, Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And given six months to live.

Um and so Weirdly, that was the moment where after he was going through treatment where I started going into the restaurant at night'cause remember I'm not a service professional I was running the business of the restaurant.

Um I would start going in at night and asking really dumb questions again. And You know, weirdly, um Our goal was to keep Linia open.

for when he came back. And mind you, he only missed like you know, twelve days, fourteen days of service during really intense chemo and radiation. And But he was given six months to live.

And you know When people are in that situation and their livelihood is tied to this restaurant. Um Even despite their loyalties, oftentimes they just need to find another job because they're like, Hey, in four months, this place is gonna be closed.

So Okay. It was And and in the midst of that, we decided to do our first book. Really to chronicle

Um you know, his His you know, what he had accomplished. Because for him, he felt like that'd be his legacy. Um he thought he was going to die.

He was told he was gonna die. So In the midst of managing a self created self published book. Um

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

Is is not run right, you know. And I started asking like basic questions like if we have a wait list for a hundred people on a on a Wednesday Why do we do seventy four people on a Wednesday but eighty six on a Saturday? And the answer was because

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

It's really hard work, you know? So you need to figure out ways of load balancing that. um and making every day the same and you end up way ahead. So from a business perspective, Um, that's when my sort of self education.

uh in this industry. came came forward. And it came forward in a way that I think I was less patient with everything because we were also going through this really difficult emotional Time. Um

And so consequently When I didn't get answers that made any sense, instead of being diplomatic about it, I would just be like, Well that's stupid You know, and which which cut some of the normal social filter off, and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to to be around Anybody? 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, yours years later when we finally like we're kinda like, hey we've got some ideas to build next and the aviary That's when I kinda went like well, we're gonna do things totally differently here. 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 not you know, you s we don't have a place for you here. Um And man, it really worked. You know? That was the basis of Yeah, 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. Um I called theaters and went like what ticketing system do you use? And and all those told me no.

And um So I hired a single programmer. Um, and he and I in six weeks built a really rudimentary booking system, but the first day we turned it on we sold five hundred sixty two thousand dollars of tickets to a restaurant for the first time. Okay so pause here for now way ahead of the No this is great. This is great. So a few a few things for folks who are not familiar API app uh application programming interface. It's how you can effectively link into someone else's software POS point of sale, not piece of shit.

But it is a piece of shit. Oh, it may also be a piece of shit. What was the what were the design specs that you were looking for. In other words Uh before you get to the five hundred thousand plus Yeah, yeah. The snap of the fingers. Like w what were you trying to fix or what were you trying to create?

So I I get a lot of grief for this for saying this, um in the industry and in the press. But basically Whenever you make a restaurant reservation, one of the two of you talking is lying to each other. If you think about it, Northern industry form of entertainment.

Uh, which dining out is a form of entertainment. I know it's sustenance. I know there's so much culture embedded in it and all that. But you could eat at home. Right. Um 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'cause we're running a little behind tonight. You know? Um, 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 seat you at nine

and you wanted an eight fifteen, you'll just go to the restaurant down the street. from them that will lie to them. Right. So so they

So they do that. And Ultimately it's just bad all around. It's bad for the restaurant. It's wasteful for food. Um and It's bad hospitality.

Like and that's like There are so many pop culture references and and entire sitcom you know, episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant, right? It's absurd. It's completely absurd. And

Yeah, I looked at our no show rate at Alinea. Data driven, tracked it. I looked at our um what we call short seated tables, like the number of tables that were four people but only two showed up.

And the dirty secret there is like people would go like Well what do you have available? Oh 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 seventy four people in there. And so it's a yield management or seventy four seeds. 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, right? And so I wanted to figure out ways Um to do two things. One I want to figure out ways to make it transactional. Because again, you asked about Professor Thaler, one of the key tenants is there's a little bit of skin in the game, right? Uh when when people have a small vested interest in something, in the outcome of something. Or even if I gave you a pencil as a gift.

And then thirty minutes later I wanna take it back. You will get so mad even though you didn't care about that pencil. Right. Like, what was that? Yeah. Dude gave me a gift, now he's pulling it back. Yeah, it's like the expected it's like the expected value of a mug if you uh ask them how much they would spend to buy the mug versus giving them the mug and saying how much will you accept to sell it? You know the differential. Yes, huge. So you know it That came to me one day because I I my 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. Right. Yeah. And then My wife basically says, Hey, well let's go to that movie. So I go on Fandago, I buy four tickets, sixty bucks, whatever it was. And at like five thirty at night it's pouring rain and everyone's napping.

And they're like, Yeah, I don't want to go. And I'm like, Get your asses in the car, we're going to the movie, man. Now, I would have easily paid that sixty dollars to not go to the movie. But once I had the sunk cost. Of of paying for the movie. My psychology totally flipped. And and I was like, We're going to this movie that I don't want to go to. Like 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? And um So I I thought about it and I was like wow, what if people What if people put down a small deposit on Times when demand exceeds supply.

Like right. So Saturday night, eight o'clock. Great. The best seats at the opera house. Let's see if people prepay 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 gonna do that. Like this is not the way it works. But if you look back historically This is the interesting part. Again, it's about like digging in deep on something. If you look back historically, Um Restaurant reservation started with the telephone.

And at the time that we were Starting to do this, the telephone was dying. And I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, that was eight years ago. But 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. than a phone call.

Um similarly, like calling a restaurant is an antiquated thing to do at this point. But long before the telephone, people got room and board. And what room and board was literally, it was like you go to an inn And you you get a room for the night. And then do you need food? Okay, well you get a board of food. That was literally it. And you'd prepay for it.

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

Um, and so as The technology for the telephone is morphed into You know, what we all have in our pockets now. Um, 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 it has to work in both ways. I always thought could have fixed their their surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Like just move pricing in two directions. And if you move pricing in two directions, then like

That whole argument goes away. Right. Um and so So we did that. We we we priced out different prices by day of the week and times of day. So five PM on Wednesday at Alinea is still cheaper than eight PM on a Saturday. By a lot. by eighty to a hundred dollars a person.

Wow. Um and And you know what happens? Um and this is now we have you know, hundreds of restaurants doing this on our software called Talk

Um What happens is people buy the most expensive seats first. And the cheapest seeds first. Yeah. 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 it at five o'clock on a Tuesday, great. Like I can save 400 bucks. Um, and then there's some people that go like I only eat at eight PM on Saturday. Well, okay. That's fine. Pay a little more.

Or they're or they're attracted to the fact that it is the most expensive. Sure. That happens too. And then there's there's a whole bunch of tools that over time we built on top of that to sell line pairings or sell books. You know, we sell twenty line of books a day. on check out with the booking process. Mm-hmm.

That's all ton'cause we're not gonna exit through the gift shop at Allinia. It's a Michelin three star restaurant. So 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. Um Now on checkout Uh when you book a Linia, it says Hey, would you like to buy an a Linia book personalized? And twenty

people at night get it. That is four hundred thousand dollars in revenue a year. Yeah. That's incredible. And it's amazing to me that no one did that beforehand. Um 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. then you know, some places that today's special is today's special and it's real and you you kinda know that. But sometimes it's just the old fish.

Ha. Right. Uh huh. Sunday.

Yeah. 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 and we're not gonna really see you at eight fifteen. And so I think when I said that, like you can look back through some articles, um, I remember that there's an article, I think it was in GQ, that um they interviewed like a grizzled veteran, you know, and he didn't use his name and said, you know Um overbook and a bar to wait in has always worked for me. And I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Ah yeah, yeah. There's so there's so many systems that have uh similar overbooking

Yeah. I I have a great dentist. They only do it via phone call or email. And so I have to play a guessing game. It's like going into A clothing store and going like, Yeah, I'm looking for a blue V neck

Cashmere sweater, they're like, Nah, don't have one. Guess again. It's like Put the shit on display, man. Like just tell me what day you can clean my teeth. Show me.

And I'll just go online and hit the button. You know? Sh so the when you then debuted The uh the the ticketing option if I'm if I'm if I'm labeling it properly. H 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 a uh A video. Where You know, next

Restaurant was about a restaurant that's always new. Essentially. Like what's what's one of the big problems uh of the restaurant industry. Well, when you open a new restaurant, doesn't matter what it is, people are gonna show up for like Five or six months. And then after that

Um, you know, you gotta struggle to like get regulars and and you know, like find new audiences and all that. But people like the new quote unquote, right? Um, 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 Alinia right in the middle of his sickness because I had driven down from Michigan. I've never eaten before or after in in the Alinia kitchen, but he whipped up this little French dish for me of duck. And I was like, Man, let's open a French restaurant some day and he went, Like, uh, we'll get bored after six months

And uh then I was at um one of our chef's homes on a day off Tuesday, and he made he loves Thai food and he made this amazing Thai meal, amazing. And I was like, wow, like I had no idea these guys were so versatile, you know? And then it made sense. Hey, these are passionate, amazingly talented people. And it kinda dawned on me like let's just change the restaurant every four months. Like you know, let's let's do and then we dwelled on that for like a year. thinking like it was kind of impossible. Um to do.

And then You know Grant said, I said, Well, like let's start with the French menu. He's like, Well, what does that mean? Like there's southern France, there's Loire Valley, there's France that that's the Nouvelle cuisine, and then there's France from like You know, a hundred years ago. Totally different. And I was like, Yep, Paris nineteen oh six.

I don't need to explain to you what that is. You'd want to eat that. If I just said like if someone said, Hey, new restaurant opening, what's the menu? It's Paris nineteen oh six. I go like cool. Like I wanna do a little time travel and see what that was like. And so as soon as we had like a city and a time.

We instantly knew That was the idea that kept us up at night, you know, where we went like wow, look at all these different places we can travel. And what does that restaurant look like? And how do you create a kitchen versatile enough to make all these different cuisines and and how do you make it not feel like Disneyland where one time you have a theme of Paris and the next time you have a theme of Japan. So you have to go with like an austere minimalism, you know? And um Is there a particular reason why you chose the year nineteen oh six?

You know, um doing some research, um Uh and I may get the exact date wrong'cause this is eight years ago I did the research, but I believe the Seine flooded in nineteen oh eight. Um it somewhere around there. Um And so um Escoffier, um, like the father of French cuisine, um

was at the writs then. And that was kind of like the height of that. era of cuisine. And then after the sun flooded, that's where you got sort of your brossays and bistros. Because they had to kinda go to a more casual It opened up for more people.

It took the price point down, it made it more approachable. And it wiped out dozens of these fancy restaurants and so like rank got cheap and all of a sudden like, hey, like we're gonna get this new style of restaurant. That's roughly as I recall it. Somebody's gonna listen to this and tell me I'm all wrong. But um that's where we landed because we could do this a Scoffier menu. And um boy, we argued about that too. Like they didn't have blenders then. So so like electric blenders. So I mean

We did like a print. So y so you wanted to mimic the production. Well, I did. Grant did not. So So we we We were I remember we were at a we invited the press to a practice dinner at the F like Hey pal, you don't have to make the food. Well partly that, but partly he was like Should we make it intentionally worse than we can? Ha.

Yeah, because the recipes were really vague. They didn't even call for salt. Yeah. So 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 we I'll never do again, right? That was just a a genuine error. Like and Like Like We are still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be.

And then we served dinner and and we were like openly argu like he'd come out of the kitchen. And we would openly argue about it. Yeah. And he's this is at the press dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and and it I remember he brought the soup out and it was like

You know, he was like I was like oh they they must have used Like the actual blenders, right? Like modern blenders,'cause it was like the mouthfeel was like perfect, right? And so I was like, Oh, you you use the blenders, you know? And he was 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?

Yeah. And and then I was like well maybe you don't know that they didn't have refrigeration then either and they packed The vegetables in salt as a desiccant. And so they were almost all pre salted by the time they get to Paris. And that was it. Like people were just like, These guys don't like each other at all But but that was that was that's our method. Like that's what we did, you know? And um I mean to the day we opened

We we had those those arguments. Um, and then you know, in terms of the software, like Man, like I didn't sleep for a week. Um, we set it up on rack space, it didn't work right, I had never done anything like that before. Um, you know, it was like No one would help.

I think like Like you know, nobody would help. No when you say nobody would help, you mean competitors, potential uh I don't know. Allies, potential like these are people. I got it. Spe why wouldn't they help? Don't

I You know, like In the case of Open Table, they had a monopoly. Right. So why that makes sense to me. That makes sense. Um in terms of everyone else, I think they didn't just didn't get it. Um, but even people within my own company thought this was a fool's errand.

You know, like 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. Mm. It's not hospitality. It's not it's not it's not h it's low touch, not high touch. Correct.

Mm-hmm. the case where, you know, all all of sudden the price is different every day? Like are people gonna 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 baseball game. They're not sitting on the Uh you know, above the dugout. And then like the guy who's in the third deck back row looks down and goes, Oh, that guy like he totally stole that ticket from me. Two different price points, you know. And I just feel like people inherently get that without having to explain it to them. How and

I'm if I if I may, how far in advance of the opening were you pl were you hoping to launch the software and when did you end up launching the software? Yeah, um I launched it about seven hours before the first dinner. Holy shit. Um, I hope to have done it four to five weeks ahead of that. It was literally a one man operation plus me, like one programmer and me. Um when we launch it, um

Rackspace. This is two thousand ten. I'm not saying anything bad about Rockspace. It was I didn't I probably set it up wrong. Uh two thousand ten. Um It did not like it's supposed to auto load correct and self propagate. And it neither happened. I was expecting we had seventeen thousand people on our email list that signed up on the website to like be notified when when their bookings went on sale.

And I was expecting maybe, you know, seven hundred. 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. um of stupidity and and this is not the way our software is built now because we have professionals here. But uh Basically my admin login was on the very same server as

Everybody's Public access. So I couldn't even go into configure So I I and the 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. um for the business, which in two thousand ten not very many people did. And so if you go back and scroll all the way down to the beginning of that, you'll see me going like hey, if everyone could please stop refreshing. I can sort this out. And what was really cool is that people felt

Part of something. Um, they felt like, wow, holy shit, this guy is actually doing this himself. Um, we're part of this experiment. Um and we're on the inside of it. Um, 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 lying. It looked like a bad movie startup thing. I I had a beard. Like I was Yeah. Just strung out manic.

And I remember I called Grant. And it was opening day and he said, How many should I prep for? And I said, Prep for full. Like as If not, we'll turn on the phones. But I didn't tell him was that I didn't order the phones because I didn't want to have A failsafe.

You'd burn the ships. Yeah. I I forced myself to work. So we had no phone line. And um I It when it started working

I would double click, you know, one of the functions was I could double click on a table. And if it was um Yellow. it was held, the public couldn't see it. I could make it available d 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. Um to act to let more

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

and saw, Oh my gosh, someone bought that that fast. And I called Grant and I said, Dude, you gotta come to my house. And He was like, Uh, we're opening a restaurant in like six hours. What's going on? I said as the guy who helped save your life get in a fucking taxi and come over here'cause I need to show you something. And

He looked at me and kinda went like what is wrong with you, right? And And I took him upstairs to my office and I said I explained what I just to him what I just explained to you. And I said, Click on one of those and make it available. And he said, Which one? I go, Any one in the next month. And he clicked like three weeks out at nine thirty and it instantly turned red. And in another window I had the credit card thing up and I go, Look, Mr. Jones bought that.

And he went Really? And I'm like, yep, there are, you know, four thousand people waiting for you to do that right now. And that was the moment at which I

I was basically like, This is the best thing I've ever built. Because it was it was tr it was. It was functionally different. Then 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. How much How much money had you put into developing the software? At that point. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna say a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. 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 C D E F Or were you like, you know what, for 115K or whatever it might be, even if you budgeted for less and it overran The the even if there is a twenty percent chance that this works is it is worth risking

the hours and time because it will so completely transform what we're doing and if it fucking fails, who cares? Correct. Yeah. Again, it's about the asymmetric risk, right? And it was also about this thing that f as I dug into how a linea 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 a Linea And I would

It was like being a therapist. People would go like I would like to, you know, make a reservation on my anniversary You know, seven weeks from now on a Thursday and you're like, I'm really sorry, sir, it's totally full. And f hundred percent of the time they thought it you were lying to them. Right. And and and so consequently, like I realized that we were saying no to people more than we were saying yes.

And uh Even when we said No in a nice way and took ten minutes to do so. Um 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.

um and the actual yield management. I felt like Like Allowing people to see the entirety of the inventory was the most important thing. Yeah. And

I I had this re like Same thing with like you know, the trading markets, um, they've moved to more and more and more transparency. Um, more and more speed. Um, this is true across every industry.

And I just felt like wow, this industry I I found myself in was 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. Um and

I I didn't really intend on making it you know, like a software product, I intended on fixing my own problems. And I think I'm not going to be able to Often that's where That's where good ideas come from.

Oh super often. Yeah, the scratching of your own itch. At least you know you have a market of one. Guaranteed market of one. And I I also want to point out when we were talking about asymmetric risk earlier and you're like, well, I want to stand to make three to four X what I stand to lose. And if you run the math, and I'm I'm sure I'm missing a lot of subtleties here, but when you said we booked five hundred and X, thousand dollars and it cost one hundred and fifteen. Like we're 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 ten to twelve percent to, you know, at times in good months twenty to twenty five percent um in an industry that Over the last five years if you read, I give a talk called Tuesday is not Saturday and Seven Things You Already Know But Are Doing Nothing About. Um 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 Mm-hmm. You know 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.

Um, but people tend to just kinda 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 a hundred people are gonna come through the door and if your fishmonger doesn't show up, well, you you need to figure out what to do with that, you know? And so it's 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 what if I look back at that system that I built then compared to what we have now. Um you know, it's a minuscule part of what it turned into. Um but it was the seed of an idea which is more important, which is Hey, let's.

Let's shake things up. And then I I got a great CFO um who was at Bain Consulting and he he came on to like help manage the building of the project of Next. Um, and when he started wanting to build out a business team, I was like, Great. Like run with it. And so we've built out

food cost analysis that uses Marimeco charts and it's totally different'cause it's visual and you give that to the chef. It uses what charts? Ah, Marimeco. Ah, if you ha if you don't know Marimeco, if you get nothing out of this. One of the greatest visualizations um in in charts that you could like, you know, do in Excel or whatever. Um hard to do Vocally, um, but imagine a square.

Where each Um of your X axis is the percentage of let's say Food costs. And then um each square within there is

Like I don't know. meat or produce. But the whole of the square is a hundred percent. The Y axis is a hundred percent of one metric and the X axis is a hundred percent of another. So you could kinda look at any given square and see how much that impacts the whole

It becomes like a big Lego. building with different colours. Um, if you give A busy chef. Four hundred 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 thirty six percent, I need them at thirty two percent. Um you can't take percentages to the bank. Let's talk about dollars. Let's see where we can save some dollars.

Um, or the revenue could have just gone down that month for whatever reason. It's August in New York. And so it's not really a good way to look at it. But you give this person this this Yeah. Chart. It's Marimeco. No Marimeco, I'm the guy's name. Yeah. Yeah. It's M A R I M E K K O Chart, is that right? Again, not not good for the chart. I think so. There is a Google result which is how to make a Marimeco chart in Excel. So I'm guessing that's probably it. There's some YouTube videos as well. So I'll I'll put those in the show notes for people.

Man, I gotta tell you, like From a utility perspective. You show that to a person. You explain it visually, like when you see it it makes much more sense. And they instantly get it.

And they look at it and they're like, Oh, there's no way I spent that much on Fish last month. Yeah. Okay. Everything. Yeah. Not just food, not just restaurants. Oh no no. It's it's just a great visualization of Utility.

And Like consultants love it. And I gotta tell you I don't love consultants in general. But but but but if I've learned anything from from the best consultant that I've ever hired, like who who is now my partner and CFO. Um He you know, he came in up with this and as soon as I saw it, I was like, How Did this not enter my life until my 40th year? This makes no sense, you know? Um it's just incredibly useful. But I I my point is is that we we kinda went through everything in the restaurant and went like, well, what are the biggest spending areas that we can like analyze? And um

It's true in any endeavor. uh that you're doing. You you know, there's no point looking at at the dimes if if you've got something that costs a thousand dollars. Start there. So um You know, and that's You know.

Getting into like our thoughts on our publicity, our PR. Like we don't have a professional PR person and haven't in fourteen and a half years.

Um We We don't spend money on any promotions other than social media. Um and then with the social media we we track all of that. You know, um, we can see what our ROI is on a boosted post.

Um we can see what our ROI is if we advertise on your podcast. Uh you know, those are that's that's why these mediums are are working Um Is because they're measurable.

Mm-hmm. You know, I I was looking up just as you were chatting and as I was also looking for Merameco uh 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 that you have experienced and also helped to catalyze in uh a lot of what you've done and it's a quote from Charlie Munger, who for those who don't know You should definitely take a look at poor Charlie's almanac. He's the the the right hand, or I shouldn't even say that he is the investing partner of Warren Buffett.

and uh 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. Uh 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.

Otherwise. in many cases, smart people who've just not taken the time to ask, why are we doing this? Why does this exist as a thing? Why what why does Like you pointed out. It's so Uh

obvious once you reframe it, like you walk into a clothing store and they're like, Okay, what are you looking for? Nope, sorry, guess again. It's like that's fucking ridiculous, right? And yet that's exactly the way it works in many other places. Yeah. Yeah, and and that's Yeah, once you start down that road of thinking that way, uh, it will drive you a little nutty. Because you you start like you can't do every business, you know?

And um You know, there's a couple of things that I've got in my back pocket that I'm kinda like, you know, one day I'm gonna arbitrage truffles. Because it's like there's an opaque market that's absurd. Like, you know, it's like here here's an example. I'm gonna give somebody out there call me up because this is a real business idea. Um 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, um are as expensive as the most expensive drugs in the world. Um you order them as if it were an illegal drug. Of course they're perfectly illegal.

But you call up a truffle dealer. Um and you go like you know, what do they cost while they're you know Six hundred and fifty a pound. Right now for black truffles, sixteen hundred for white. You try to talk'em down a little bit.

You make sure that you get the best quality'cause hey, we're Linea and we will ship you back the stuff we don't like and all that. And then in an unmarked box. Stacked with newspaper will come twenty thousand dollars of truffles. Good for like a week, by the way. Like not like this is not like a big supply. And

Is completely opaque as a market. Um There is no mycologist touching these. Um there are

knockoffs from but not knockoffs, there's different species and quality from Australia, from Tennessee, from from China, um et cetera, et cetera, that they cut into it. Sound familiar. Like It was my like we spend a lot of money on truffles every year. Um and try to figure out what the US market

in the fall truffle season is worth. You can't. It's exactly like publishing. You can't find numbers. You know?

And so whenever I Whenever I see something like that. I'm like someone's guarding their their golden goose. You know. Right. Whenever whenever it's a black box, you're like, I feel like I am not on the best side of this trade. That's right. And and that's that's what I did. Um, you know, I did um a closed in seller network between the Merc and the Amex to arbitrage ETFs. to get rid of the phone brokers in the middle.

Um that took me like a year and a half to get through the Merc and Amex um powers that be. Um, read like most of the CFTC. So when they would tell me it's not Like in the rules or not legal or whatever. C of T C Chicago trade uh No This is the uh the federal um commodities

Trading commission. It's like the SE C but for commodities. I gotcha. Um, and you know, 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. Um the people who were governing the exchanges had never read the rules. So they would just quote to me they would just quote to me like, Well, it's against the rules, and I'd be like, Well, here are the seven volumes. Please show me where. If not I'm gonna do it, you know. Um and so similarly, like

Like truffles, same thing. Um the the you know, the booking um for the restaurants, same thing. Open table had a monopoly. They wouldn't tell you who your customers were, they would sell your customers they still do to other restaurants. If you if 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. Truffles, I will someday build a truffle exchange. So y question for you. I get attracted like a moth to the flame to puzzles. And no, well no no, I don't need any more puzzles. I need no more puzzles.

You there are many, many black boxes out there. Right, you a 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. Right. uh although you guys uh is 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 gonna consume energy, it's gonna consume time. How do you pick and choose which to go after? Yeah, it's it's it's it's like the manic test, right? Like it's like the one that bothers me the most. Like I kinda start doing, you know?

Um And then I you know, and then it's iterative from there. Like sometimes you find yourself in a construction of your own doing that was accidental. Mm-hmm. Like all of a sudden, you know, you kinda opened your mouth and and said something like the truffle thing and all of a sudden like, Well, okay, I guess we're building a truffle exchange. You know, I feel like I feel like um the boring company is like that for Musk.

Like like like he he opened his mouth and were like Yeah, just big B. You know, dig 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. Um and and he just has a lot of credibility um w you know at this point.

Um I think that To a certain extent, like A lot of people have a lot of ideas. They just don't dig Down. Yeah.

that rabbit hole. And um so You know, I I do some as like a hobby. Um, I do some where I kind of have someone that I like within our company and say, Well If you really want

to be independent and do something cool like Here's a project. Like learn more about this and start researching it. You know, we have you know, three hundred and some employees on the restaurant side and about fifty on toc. Um, 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. Because this is gonna take you six months of independent work without any guidance and you're gonna get tired of it really fast. Or you're gonna come back to me and say

Hey, you know what? Like I can't figure out the total value of the truffle market. in the United States. And I'm like, Yeah, no shit. That's why I asked you to do it. Now when you give them an assignment like this, they're like, you know what? Boss, I really want to be an entrepreneur like

Congratulations. I am now giving you a project and A It's on your time and you're not getting paid for it. Or do you're not oh no no no. I w I I never, never, never take every single intern that works at our restaurants for a minute is paid. Gotcha. So even if 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, 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 um for me I we we pay everybody. Um like I I don't nobody who's working here, if they're you know, um I I do expect that

You know, salary people Are gonna work more than just the time here. And I think that people who are passionately curious We'll 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? Mm-hmm. So I I want to

add some sort of commentary on the question that I asked, which is a little bit more. Uh 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 m doing it in the evenings. You are doing it on the weekends. You are doing it without a clear road.

Two immediate cash flow. So I wouldn't have judged you if you said, you know what, I am paying them full time for their normal job, but if they want to tackle one of these black boxes. That's considered. extracurricular. Uh so I wouldn't have judged you harshly uh if you had responded in the uh in the negative on that.

Yeah, I mean I I guess I guess, you know, to to back up a little bit, like when there are people who I don't know Who do not work. for our company and they call me up and say, Hey, I've got this idea for X Y Z 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 there is a guy who brought me a food product that I I you know, uh 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 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 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. Um but if they're working here, if they work for the Alini 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 um yeah, we we also try not to have such harshly defined roles Not within the restaurant. Like look if you're a server, if you're a captain, if you're a a line cook Um, you're probably not working on my truffle project. I mean, realistically, yeah, you know, that's not That's but on the business side. Um, we certainly have um people who

who work in roles um 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 to pull them in and try to include them. And you know, like you said, you you use the a word as an entrepreneurial filter.

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

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

And I think my style of interviewing people is totally different than it was twenty years ago. Um We used the word self selecting just a moment ago and

It's exactly what I do. I kind of bring people in, I let them know what I'm about, what the company's about. They've probably already been interviewed. By other people before they They get to me.

And so at that point I I let them know like what are the upsides and downsides of working here. You know. And I kinda let them know what the expectations are. And then I I tell them like people self select into a job.

And you don't want to come here if you're gonna fail. Because that would be terrible. And I don't want you to come here and fail. 'Cause that'd be a waste of my time and resources and would also feel awful. It's never good to let go of someone. It 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. You know, I mean, it's it's like a big enough organization where, you know, there are definitely people working here who who I don't know at all. Um but People tend to

join organizations where they want to work. And so I I try to make that process I try to make them be able to say no. Easier than they can say yes. H what would be uh some examples of how you do that?

You know it I I kind of judge the person By by w what their pain points are. And so if someone says like Uh you know, one of the things I I I like to ask, you know, which it kinda resonates probably w with you, is I say, Here were the last five books you read?

And I gotta tell you, that's a really hard question to answer. Um, because even if you're a voracious reader. It's really har like 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 I read like twenty books this year. Um, let's see. And they will really start going, Oh well, I read one like three months ago that was this and it was about that And you could tell that they're intellectually curious and and read a lot.

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

Some people will just lie through their teeth. And they'll they'll answer what they think is the smart answer to that question. And I don't want that person there. I read War and Peace and then I went to the problems of philosophy and uh Yes, yes, yes. And then the four hour work week. So so definitely not the right answer. So so um so there's that and I asked that kind of question. But then like things like do you enjoy writing? Like I like one of my like one of my things is like if someone doesn't like to write What do we when people ask what I do for a living, I say, I'm a writer.

And they go like, Oh, you've written a couple of books I go, No, no, no, I read about four hundred emails a day. And that skill is hugely important right now. Um, if someone doesn't like to write, they're not gonna want to work for me. Because When When they send out an email and I I'm C C'd 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. Um

And At some point it'll be like, Really? You you did that same mistake again? Like It comes off kinda harsh in email, you know? Um and so if you're the kind of person that doesn't take feedback well or doesn't wanna learn like Man, I don't I I I am lacking patience for that at this point in my life. Um 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. Like more than I would think. Which is great. Yeah, simplifies matters. Yeah. And it it's not it's not it's done with a smile. You know, I'm not like trying to like terrorized people when they come in an interview. And then there's some people that go like, awesome, that's exactly what I want.

And um yeah, we've everything from like you know, t double PhD engineers. to um people who've never you know, attended a university for a minute. And um but they've they've self selected into an organization that

Um people ask a lot of questions. I love that like I can be in a 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 gonna be able to do that in the 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. Uh four hundred is a lot of email. Do you have any

Any types of Systems or approaches that Allow you to maintain A s a degree of sanity.

With with the amount of email that you must receive. Mm. You're gonna hate this answer too. I am terrible at it. Um, it used to be

Um, not so long ago. uh 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

Um within five minutes, um dead or asleep. Yeah. And it's the opposite of everything that that you stand for. I know that. Um it's it's like I was listening to Jason Freed so Jason Freed's a friend. I was listening to his His podcast with you. And um

I I don't get it at all. Like I I I am not I I I would I would love nothing more than um you know to rework or to not work. Um, you know you know, work four day weeks or to have six week projects and all the stuff that he espouses. Um he's a friend, he's an investor in in uh one of my businesses. Um, but man, I don't that's not how I function at all.

Um and I weirdly think that he misses cause and effect a little bit. Like he has a very successful company and that's the cause that allows the effect, which is the ability to manage your time really well. Um I live really paranoid. I'm more comfortable that way. And also I kind of feel like a a weird moral responsibility. to um reply to the people who've taken their time out of their day to write us a note. You know?

Um, even if it's not Like critical business for me. Um, and one of the things I did for about ten years that I I loved doing uh when we first started Linia is that I would have Google Alert set up and I would find some blog, you know, that only like Some woman in her mother red, you know. And I would reply personally, like say, Wow, thank you for the great Right of Belinia.

And they would be kinda mind blown that I found it and and you know, all that. Um, I treated email that way for a long period of time. Um Unfortunately now I I can't quite do that. So I do have a bunch of filters, but I didn't even set them up. Um my business partner, Brian Fitzpatrick, who used to be the head of Google Chicago, and he's my he runs the engineering team, he's the CTO of Talk. He kinda said, like, dude, you're you're slipping, man. Like, you know.

You need to create some filters and and and get some stuff that's directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and kinda kinda forced the issue um for me. Um but so now I can't quite do that. Um I do wake up in the morning and look at sort of our our Brazilian social media. Um Uh

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

Um But man, I'm terrible at it, honestly. And I've tried I I I will tell you a funny thing is that when I go away on vacation I do try to um concoct a uh Yeah. A uh pretty funny

Um I basically say, like, look, I I'm gonna be in a mountain or on a boat or whatever, and you're I'm not gonna be able to reply. Um what and so I I would make these elaborate stories up. Almost as like a fun piece of art. project as to why I couldn't do it. And so one year

Um I I uh every year every time I went away, I 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 A picture of a a baby panda and and a really kind of mediocre photoshop job of me standing there at the pants. And and and the Chicago Tribune called me up like three days later going, you know, is it going to the Lincoln Park Zoo?

Like and I was like, No, dear God, it's not. And the following there is no panda. So I went back the that was my entire reply to that. And then the following year I said, Like, um I like to talk, as you might be able to tell. And so everyone who knows me knows that like I can just go on and on, right? And so I I said I was going to a combination of a tantric Sex retreat and silence retreat. For for eight days to explore my both inner and outer self. And um

And last year. That's my out of office reply. I mean. And you know, anybody would get that, right? And so I thought that was

Really funny. And then about two years later, I bumped into um some guy who worked for a very big corporation and they wanted to do um some work with with the Lini Group and it was like kind of a consulting project, very lucrative. And he was looking at me really funny. You know? And I said, Like what's up? And he said, Well, you know, I I really wish we had worked together, but you know, then you went to that sex retreat. I just couldn't I just couldn't get it past everybody. And I was just like I was looking at him going like what are you talking about? And then and then I remembered like four years earlier my out of my out of office reply and uh I told him like that it was kind of a joke like the panda.

And uh And he did not find any humor in it. And I did. I thought it was hilarious. Even though we lost the business. I thought it was really funny. Um so if you ever get a really unusual out of office reply from me Um it's fiction. Probably. Yeah.

I love that. Uh I mean if you're serious all the time, you're never gonna get the actual serious work done. You're gonna burn out before that ever happens. I also wanna underscore one thing and then I wanna ask you about uh a black box that you and I have talked about quite a bit, which is publishing. Uh 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, uh listeners, readers, et cetera. it is not physic for me to reply to everyone. It would also be anathema to everything that I'm espousing. uh in many of the books, but

It I do want to I do want to demonstrate that I am listening. And I think that it it goes a really long way, even if you do not personally reply to people if you are able to prove that you're pay attention and that seems to resolve a lot or at least act as a salve for people.

out there who very seldom feel heard. Uh which does not always necessitate a response. Uh so I just wanted to point out that it might seem like a drop in the ocean, but it it it actually has much more uh further reaching implications when you when you do it what what you were describing. Yeah, I I feel like um it's genuine. First of all I'm always curious. Like what

What what are people writing about? um to the restaurants. What are they writing about to me? Um my LinkedIn profile basically like I don't really read LinkedIn at all. I keep it. Uh, I think it's important to have it. Um, 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 I will incite this, I will reply to you.

Um, and so that gets rid of all of the marketing crap that comes in. But every now and then I get like You know, a a subject line. um to the email address that's on there that says basically like You know.

Hey via your LinkedIn bio. And I'll I'll read that in reply. And it just shows me that like A, there's an actual human on the other line. It's not just some marketing thing. And B, like they they really, really do have something that they want to talk about. Um And so

You know, it's like little things like that are kind of Puzzle filters, I guess, that I call'em. Like where I I just create like a little bit of a Little bit of a barrier. And if you um 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 the detail is really important here. The mini hurdle. I have a friend, I'm not gonna mention by name,'cause he'll get deluged, but he

v 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 Small print at the very bottom. it will say, do not send a message on this platform, do not send an email, even though email addresses were giv 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 wrong thing and finds the ten people who are actually paying attention. Yep, hundred percent. Uh

So publishing What is I we didn't really we didn't really talk much about it, but can you give a little bit Just a a a tiny bit of background on the aviary and then uh Some of your uh Related.

Publishing investigations, uh not a mis uh uh an unappropriate word. Uh if if you could give people a little bit of of context. Yeah, I mean I'm gonna 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 fifteen.

You know, just like if you're a basketball player you want to make the NBA or y you know, if you're a runner, you're gonna wanna be in the Olympics or whatever, like to grant um to a bunch of chefs having their own ideas in A physical beautiful cookbook. Um is kind of a holy grail for them. It's very sacred.

Um and What was interesting is that Um, just before Grant was sick. We start getting a lot of publishing offers. And the natural inclination was to go to what he knew, which was Artisan Press.

um which published the French laundry book, which is one of the best selling Um high end cookbooks ever. And it's certainly beautiful. It was very revolutionary at its time. Uh, I think it was published in about ninety eight, ninety nine, something like that.

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

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

immediately, you know, the hair on the back of my neck, like the spidey sense. The spidey sense starts telling me that something back there is pricing this in a usual way. And then um And then I started going like oh This is actually like the music industry.

Very I knew people in in bands. that would get signed to a you know a record label back in the day. And they would get a quarter million dollar advance. Shit, that's seems like a lot of money, right?

And then all of a sudden all your studio time comes out of that and you don't recoup another dime until you've sold And then in the in the Contract it actually said. And the restaurant guarantees that they will buy twenty five hundred bucks at half of Retail price. And I was like

Whoa. That's You know, you're looking at something like eighty thousand dollars right there. That goes right back to them. In an essence. Like and then I kinda went like well, I wonder what a book costs to print. And

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

They said, Well that's not what I do. Like I am the person that does this, the lawyers give the contract, the printer does the printing, like I There's always pl uh plausible deniability or plausible ignorance. Yes. Willful plausible ignorance. Yeah. Um and

And so I d I do what I start doing. I'm like, Well let's just Google that up and see what it print costs to print a book. Or Hey, how many how many copies of the French laundry book sold? Um how many copies of fifty other books that we wanted to emulate or that we that we

thought were well done sold. And um Man, it's it's like asking for like, you know, keys to the Vatican or something when you call a publisher and ask them that. Um they I I'm sure you know this, right? You probably know now because you've you've been so entrenched in the industry, like you know your numbers and you might know that of some of your colleagues and friends, right? Um but if you wanted to actually do a meaningful comparison across the industry

It's almost impossible to do it, even though that there's a company that does that. Then you start trying to reverse engineer it and you go to the New York Times, which you can go to the New York Times website and just look at how is the New York Times uh you know, bestseller list um um created and on their own site they say it's a compendium of known publishers, like publishing houses, as well as these like top fifty retailers, you know, back in the day. Um and It's a gameable system. Right? Like the way that that the publisher

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

Um we Got like curio like more and more curious, a little bit angry, actually. And but Grant was weirdly angry at me. Dude, like

Why do you care? Like you know, it's like th I've been wanting this since I was fifteen. And I was like, Well look, if if if this is our budget, it's not gonna be the book you want. It's not gonna be as good as you want it to be because we're not gonna be able to spend six months doing the photography. We're not gonna be able to get great pages. We're not gonna be able to get a picture of every dish. Like if what do people cook in a cookbook? Well they tend to cook Those pages where they see a picture of the final dish. 'Cause you know what it looks delicious. You know what it's supposed to look like. You got something to emulate at least, right?

And so when we did the specs for the book, um, I had one of the best publishers in America say, If you do that book, there's no way you sell more than five thousand of them. No way. And no one's gonna 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 a print broker who had actually printed w what you know, brokered the print job of one of the famous books. And I was expecting that the book retailed for sixty dollars, it would cost like Fifteen to print? Twenty?

I didn't know anything about it. And when he told me it was like two dollars and twenty three cents per book to print per f thirty thousand. Yeah, thirty thousand copy run. I went, No way like that. And he went, Well, it's probably less now.

Like he thought I meant it was like too much. Right. And l and instantaneously I went, Oh shit. Like everything makes sense. And when I would call publishers and tell them this

They would go, Oh yeah, but look, like we did Forty different Prints, la yeah, forty different books. last year only five of them did well. And I'm like, That's your problem, man. Like I know what we're gonna sell well.

I don't really give a shit if if you lost thirty five percent of the time and it need to spread your portfolio risk. I'm the one you're spreading it on. Right? And so um So we decided um with the Linea book um

We put together like Twenty pages. And Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system and we shipped it out to eight different publishers we liked, two of which were art houses that had never done um a a cookbook. And They all came back and and same all the usual criticism except for Aaron Wayner at Ten Speed Press. Yeah. Smart smart guy, by the way. Yeah. And he basically said

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

Within ten minutes we had struck a deal. Um whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves for our restaurants, we paid actual printing costs. Not wholesale. Uh actual printing cost. Um, anything that they sold and distributed.

Through their channels. they would get about twenty seven percent of the sale price. Which means that we got seventy three percent of that. Um 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 A hundred thousand bucks, say.

Um That would be the equivalent of selling like five hundred thousand bucks on any other deal. And we got to control the quality of it. And we won both the Dreams Beard Award for Best Um Cooking from a Professional Point of Vest Cookbook of the Year. And we won um I say we, Martin and and Laura Kastner won the um communication arts award. Where if you're a designer, that's like their annual is like

That's like getting the The Oscar. Right. Yeah, yeah. Similarly for people who don't know, I mean the James Beard Awards are are also very much like the Oscars. Yeah. So

So we felt Like really vindicated on that. Um the book still sells. This is eight years later, um we still sell seven, eight thousand copies a year. Um and when we did the aviary, um, which is our bar that's a non bar. Um that we talked about earlier. Um

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

I should add that we did I wrote a a book of um Grant and I wrote his memoir together. that we didn't use a ghostwriter. We wrote it ourselves called Life on the Line. And for that one, we did a traditional book deal, but after our agent kind of got it halfway, I got on our plane, flew out there, and then brokered the deal myself.

Um, and I got Um 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 for to people just briefly what that means? Yeah. Yeah, so basically like Yeah. Here here I'll I'll do this. Like Let's say I so I think one of the

Great. problems like to solve. One of the black boxes is the agency problem. Um let's say you want to sell your house. Um you put it on the market and the agent's gonna get, I don't know, four to five percent of the sale price. That's a lot for something. It's like your most biggest investment in your life. Um but they kind of say like they control the information, they control the MLS, all that. Um will they, if they're the seller's agent, get the highest price for you? And the answer is almost certainly not. Um, because they let's say a house is gonna sell for five hundred thousand dollars, they're gonna get four percent of that. Um that's twenty thousand dollars.

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

Um 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 ninety six hundred dollars. It's a lot more money. Um 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 fifty percent of everything over ten percent 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 forty percent higher. And they're and like the it sells in two days. Yeah. Because now they're actually working for you.

Right. It similarly, I went into that that publishing negotiation and I was kinda like Th by the way, the agent, um 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 she just knows that like hey, she was brought up in this in this industry for this company and that's the way it works. And she would for sure dispute everything I just said. She would say, I always try to get the highest price.

But I went in and I just went like look I'm not gonna spend my time doing this for X. So 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. And I said, Well, we did the Alinea book. That's a cookbook. It doesn't count. These are words. So So

I I I I went to the publishers that I'll bid on it. And I just Got'em all on a on a conference call and just started at a really high price. And every couple seconds I went down ten thousand dollars. And then one of them blinked.

And bought it. Ha ha ha. What was the great way that's a great method of price discovery. Um like if you think about it, most auctions Even like you go to a charity event or whatever, and 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 gonna say something. Like I would pay that. Someone else must as well. They could be off by a factor of thirty percent and they'll never even know it because there's only one bid that ever happened.

Mm-hmm. 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 uh Publisher as public. So di I guess my my question is did they know that they were signing up for a a like Mexican standoff slash? Yes they did. Oh they did. They did. Or if you're like John, I'd love to get you on the phone and it's like all right, congratulations. Yeah, you can't You can't ambush people to a Mexican stand up. Yeah, you can't do that. Um I I I mean you could. It might be fun, but I I didn't do that. I wouldn't talk uh I I created enticement. I I I sold on my ability to actually do it. Um, it was a bit like um doing the no phones.

um with the software. Like I was like, well if I get a really big contract I'll have to figure out how to write a book and then it'll be a lot of pressure. Um And so so I did that and um And I and I and I wrote it and I turned it in on time, which apparently no one does. Very, very rare. Yeah. Yeah. Like on the day it was due. They what's this? And I'm like, That's the manuscript. Yeah. And they went, Oh, that's cute. Well it's kinda like showing up at the restaurant on time as a diner and then being seated at the appointment in time. It's just this like open

Open lie. Do you turn do you do you turn your books in on time? I do, actually. Yeah. I believe that. Yeah, I do turn my books in on time, uh, and we we could get into that separate time. I just want to ask you a question. I do. I I do. I do not turn them in at the uh expected length. Yeah, I do tend to turn them in on the with the aviary is that We Like

We basically couldn't figure out how to do another book. Um because The Linear Book was such a 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 Well, if if you get nothing else from from this whole talk and you've made it this far. Um go see go Google uh Alan and Alinia.

Um Alan is a procedural effects. artist. Uh he worked at Weta Studios and all the Hobbit movies, doing like hair and water and things like that. Um so he writes the physics that then makes the Makes the magic.

Right. Um and then uh He worked at Pixar. And while he was at Pixar and his wife, um Sarah worked at Industrial Light Magic as a graphics designer. Um

He was given by Sarah a copy of the Alinea book. Um to go full circle. and became just fascinated with it. Wasn't how to cook. Didn't know how to cook. and did the Julie and Julia thing. He um spent five years not only um 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. Ha.

Alan, for people wondering, is A L L E N. There are also videos of Alan and Alinia. Yeah. And he's An autodidact. Like this guy learns and learns and learns and is the kind of person that goes to the black box and goes. I'm gonna learn how to forge knives and I'm gonna learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, I'm gonna cook everything in there and I'm gonna take pictures of it. I'm gonna make a book documenting that. And when he asked if he could use Like we had

kind of a little email relationship and he came out to Alinea once to ask Grant some questions about how to make something'cause it wasn't working. And when Grant kind of threw up his arms and goes, Well, the book might be wrong. Yeah. Like Alan's world view was shattered. It was like violent and he was kinda like what do you mean it could be wrong? He goes, Well, yeah, we did have some erata in there. Like I mean we documented hundreds of recipes. It could be wrong. And at that point, Alan like his mentality changed. It's in the video. And 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 home grown book. And what I got was, you know, a four hundred page, beautifully Beautifully illustrated.

Beautifully written. Um book about a person's journey of learning. Um and it was called the Alinea Project. And I had no

No idea that He Had done anything like this. And so suddenly, um I thought to myself immediately, and it's in the intro to the aviary book.

Um I texted him and said Holy shit, you're crazy. Yeah. And I have ideas.

And after waiting for like four or five years to do a book on the aviary, I immediately was like, This is the guy to do the book. Now I need to lure him out of Pixar. Which is about the best place to work in the world. And then I found out his wife worked at Industrial Light and Magic and she did all the graphic design and I was like, This is perfect. You guys need to quit your jobs and move to Chicago.

And They flew out. We had some conversations about what they might look like. Um it was very much a partnership. Um they would have equity in the book. We would have creative freedom to do it exactly the way we wanted. Um

We knew more about the printing and the bidding and all of 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 were dec they found out that they were gonna have a baby.

So they called me up one day and said Oh my god. Like and I was like, Oh, they got cold feet. Oh no. And they said, You know, we're pregnant, we're gonna have a baby and I said, Okay, well we're gonna wait a year.

because there's no way in the world I'm letting you move out. out of your comfort zone and have a child and have that change of life. And they thought I was like planting on them just because Like In a discriminatory way. I said, Nope, we're not gonna do this with anyone else. We'll wait as long as it takes.

And about a year and a half later they moved to Chicago. And we spent the last year and a half Um set up a studio of our own, spent the last year and a half doing this book. Um did a Kickstarter to just essentially raise awareness for it. We raised almost a half million dollars on the Kickstarter. We've sold about another three hundred thousand dollars of books since then.

Uh it comes out in October. Um you can go to the AlineaBook dot com. And the coolest part of that website Is it a few years? Oh sorry, the AviaryBook.com. Right, Nick. Very the lead, Nick. Very the lead. Genius marketer, you're right there. So um yeah, the aviarybook.com. But if you the coolest part of that is other than of course your ability to buy said book. Is um Alan kept a blog on there called Our Progress.

And In it he details. Every single aspect of what it takes to make a book like this. Um, right down to line screens and compositing photos of uh You know, like One of the things that every single book publisher told me is that

You can't sell a a a cocktail book for more than thirty dollars. There's no market for it. And You don't need pictures because it's just liquid in a glass. And I think we blew that out of the water with what the book looks like.

Um I think that because th certain things like fire are really hard to photograph. Um there's a great picture in there of this one cocktail where we where you spray um some anise and we light it on fire and it it creates an aroma into the bowl that it's served in. It's called Loaded to the Gun Walls. Um it's a Batavia rock cocktail. And Like that took a composite of eighteen different photographs.

And so he breaks down the photography techniques. And also the New York Times bestseller list. And I showed him like how You know, Google target marketing works and Facebook ads work and all that. And all of a sudden he went, Holy shit, I had no idea you could do this. So we are going completely without a distributor or publisher at this time. Um

And I think we're gonna set a r I man, I don't know. Like I I'm either completely delusional. It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half million of these. Yeah, and it's the next two or three years. Yeah, it's not a not a nine ninety five book either, which it shouldn't be. Right? I mean this is No, it's it's it's eighty five dollars. Um we've invested

Close to a million dollars all the way in around it. And it looks like it, I think. I hope. Um what uh 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. Um you know it's really like a five person project. Um it's it's deep enough that if if a professional gets it, they're gonna learn a lot.

Um, but I'd say about thirty five, forty percent of it can be done at home because unlike the Linea book where Hey you gotta go out and buy a duck. Like, you know, in your local grocery, you might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you um need some flur to kinda rum Or, you know, um you know, a certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store and it's exactly the same thing that we use. Um you know, that product is universal.

I read somewhere. That's the I don't think it's taking us too far afield. I read somewhere that you consider yourself a tequila guy, or at least in part a tequila guy. Do you have any Favorite. Tequila's

Or concoctions. Well there's So I I just I'm gonna do a little video promo for um for the book that we just filmed last week where essentially I I work with Eric Jeffes, who's one of our bartenders in the office, which is our little speakeasy below the aviary. Which is amazing. If if people have the ch the opportunity, they sh they should check it out. It's basically Grant just said, Hey, everything upstairs, people are gonna think it's a linear smoke and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail. So one of the the foundational cocktails for me is is a daiquiri.

It's uh I say three ingredients in a million ways to fuck it up. You know, it's it's just um lime, sugar, and rum. That's all it is. And uh 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. Um, and then I always make a half mascale margarita. That's my favorite drink. All I'm doing is I'm taking some reposado. and a little bit of Mezcal and equal weights along with um some uh You know like Grand Marnier or or Quantro equivalent.

And um lime and simple syrup. That's it. That's all there is to it. Um Man, I love simple stuff like that. And then we have a whole section in the book on old whiskeys, dusty bottles, um, old gins. Like there's a growing movement to kind of rediscover some of the distilleries in America that were really, really, really great. um that don't exist anymore, um that were more artisanal at the time. You can still find those bottles um around. Uh it's a little bit easier than like, you know, someone like wine collecting or something like that.

And um Man, it's it's like an endlessly fascinating thing. I don't consider myself a cocktail person. ten years ago. I I really loved wine. Um 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. Um it's an additive thing. Like you can have it in a meal and it can make the meal better. Um you know, whereas like you know, a vodka tonic's just boozing. Um just getting drunk. Um 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.

And uh Man, it's it's endlessly fascinating just like anything else in in this world. Yeah. Uh and the the the I would also say just contrasting say uh someone who wants to recreate something from a linea, which you certainly could do. I mean Alan proved that. with something from the aviary, the there 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. Uh that uh 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 Gabiary. But it's also. You can easily make um some ice with Petroad's bitters in it or something like that. And then as the ice melts in the cocktail, it's gonna change the flavor. And it's gonna look really cool too. Um, doing some of these things at home is is not hard.

Um, I did a dinner party once where it was like, you know, a cocktail party probably had forty people at my house and each room in my house had all of the ingredients for the cocktail and then little instructions on how to make it themselves. So that took away the need for a bartender,'cause they're terrible anyway, anyone that you'd bring in and you know, that you you know, a caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like oh like now I know how to make an old fashioned, now I know how to make a Manhattan Um, you know, uh I the one that I discovered that party was a Frisco Sour. Had like Benedictine whiskey and lemon, you know. It was really d delicious. So Okay.

it it can be it can it can be m more than just like a strong cocktail. It can be really delicate and interesting. Mm-hmm. And people can learn all about this at the Aviary Book.

dot com. That's right. Yep. Well Nick I've I've two

Rapid fire questions that are unrelated. And then I think we're gonna we're gonna We're gonna bring this up. Neat and tidy, round one podcast. uh to uh to a to a close. But We've talked about books.

And uh 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. uh at least last time I was there. At the aviary. So it is a bit of a uh I I hesitate to call it a workaround, but you guys have some very, very popular establishments. If you want to sample the food

This is also a great way to do it. Uh it and the drinks are just incredible. So it's it's a real sort of destination. That makes a trip. to Chicago uh worth it in and of itself. So I I would recommend not only checking out the book, but also checking out a lot of what you guys are up to.

Aside from that, books you have gifted the most to other people outside of those that you have made yourself, what are the books that you've gifted the most To other people. Yeah, I I named one of them already. Um A Fool by Randomness. Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that. Um you know, um And I've I've definitely given that away. Um

Boy, that's a tricky one because I just like I said, I can't remember can't remember books um very well, but that's certainly probably number one um on a business side of things. And then the on the other side, um, I tend to give away But I would call vintage art books. So it's not a book people can buy, I'm I'm sorry to say, but occasionally I I'll be at like a used bookstore and I'll find some of these great old

art books and I I buy a few of'em and then when I when I wanna thank someone for something, I I send them that. Yeah, I mean. At the end of the day, like I I bought

Like When I wanna give someone something, I try to make it something that You Yeah, and I really want to make it a great gift. Um, I try to get it something that you can't buy.

Right. And so um I bought an old typewriter. And I write 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 nineteen twenty two typewriter. Um It it it's like a personal artisanal thing. Um But I I know that that's not what you're getting at. No. Like I can't I can't really think of I can't really think of like the number one, I'm sure once we we

We end this, I'll immediately think of it and uh if I do I'll s I'll send it to you so you can link to it. I think the answer the answer is more interesting with the typewriter. So I I I think uh 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. Uh This is this next one it can be tough uh at times for folks, but the billboard questions. So metaphorically speaking non commercial, no advertising, but if you could get

a 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 but the word would be pause. Hm. That's it. I I have no idea why that came to mind, but I think in In talking through this whole thing.

You know, it's Y you kept asking me like why are you digging this black box or whatever? Or it'd be like um curiosity. Like and I think those are two I'm thinking of those in the same way.

I'm not saying pause like stop. I'm saying think. Right. And so I I think um you know, the the hallmark of of the people that I like as friends the best.

instilling our kids, uh, you know, and and the reason I like my wife so much and all that is that Intellectual curiosity is everything. Mm-hmm. And so um I don't know how do you get that on a billboard I I think pause or

you know, be curious or something like that. I know it's cliche, but I I I think that's the th the thread that ties everything together. Yeah, you do pause a lot. On a macro level you seem to be moving uh at hyper 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 were simil you you are simultaneously one of the craziest fuckers I know and

uh least craziest fuckers I know, if that makes sense. That's a great compliment. Thank you. I'll take I'll take it. I'll take it and uh where can people find you. I know you have, of course, the the linear group.com, you have explork.com, the aviarybook.com, which is the sort of 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 uh best best places, best handles for that? Yep. Uh Instagram, uh, which is N Kakonis, K O K O N E S, and uh Twitter is Uh Nick Kaconis. And I CK.

And uh hey, it's all Googleable, right? Like so beyond that, if you could figure out my email address. I'll probably answer. Although given the given the reach of of of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated. It might take a while. Yeah, that might be a hug of death situation, but we will TBD. Good problem to have. Good problem to have uh Nick This was a blast. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it. And uh many more conversations to be had. This, I think another trip to Chicago may be in order soon. I hope we see you here soon. I I know, I need to get back. And to everybody listening, we've made mention of the show notes links to everything we've discussed.

Which you will be able to find at Tim.blog forward slash podcast, as with this episode and uh certainly every other episode. And until next time. Thank you so much for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share The coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read.

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