Speaker 1- If you wake up every day feeling great, you're not taking enough risk. If you wake up every day throwing up, you're taking too much risk. You need to feel a tingle of uncomfortableness. -
Speaker 2I started with 60 grand. I can't express to you how undercapitalized that is on the trading floor. - Essentially, you were looking for arbitrages. You were looking for some sort of mispricing. - I am now convinced that every arb is just about time scale. - How much money were you making doing this? - Well, I drove to my dad's house and I showed it to him, and he was kind of like, "Oh, shit." He's like, "Is what you're doing legal?" - Yeah. - I genuinely believe that geofence, meaning localized dynamic and variable pricing for time-slotted businesses, is something that someone's gonna make hundreds of billions of dollars with. -
Speaker 1How does a guy who goes from trading and no restaurant experience create the best restaurant in America? -
Speaker 2Knowing what great is is making mostly shit 99% of the time. -
Speaker 1Is it that you're actually seeking the anxiety and fear? - It's exciting to be uncomfortable in the sense of. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it ♪ ♪ Like my days off on the road ♪ ♪ Let's travel, never look back ♪ - All right, today we're hanging out with my friend, Nick Kekonis. He is one of the most interesting founders you have never heard of. He's the guy who started off trading options and then went and started one of the best restaurants in the world, then started a software company and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. So an entrepreneur who's played many different games that really he had no business playing and somehow found a way to win. So I came here to hang out and find out how he does it. I'm gonna read you a quote. "I'm motivated by fear. "Fear of not living up to the possibilities. "If you wake up every day feeling great, "you're not taking enough risk. "If you wake up every day throwing up, "you're taking too much risk. "You need to feel a tingle of uncomfortableness." -
Speaker 2Yeah, or nausea was the actual quote, yeah. I have to give credit where credit's due. Keith Goggin, good friend of mine, former business partner. We were traders back in the '90s, early aughts, and we had this ridiculous short position on plug power. Still a company. - A company, weirdly. But he told me that, like he said that to me, 'cause I was like really on the verge of throwing up every morning. And he was like, "Perfect. "That's right where we need to be. "That's right where we need to be." - He's like, "But you haven't thrown up yet, correct?" - Correct. - All right, then we got it. - We're good, yeah. And so I do think that I internalized that at the time because then when I got comfortable, I was like, "Oh, we're not taking enough risk now. "We're not learning, we're not pushing the edge "of what the possibilities are." And the phrase in my own household from my wife, also someone who pushes me, is AT&A. You know what AT&A is? -
Speaker 1So I was at your house. - Oh, you know, I said that. I told you. - You said it, but you said it in a hilarious way. You're like, you said it like a cop. It's like, we issued an AT&A this morning. - Yeah, yeah, right. - We have an AT&A. -
Speaker 2Yeah, so I mean-- - So explain, what does it mean? - AT&A means I'll talk, no action. So you-- - But you'll do it to your kids. - Well, we'll do it to each other. - Anyway. - Yeah, right. - To each other, yeah, right. And with this place where we're sitting right now, for 30 years, this was like a North Star kind of thing. We came here every year since probably like 95 or 96 when we were very young. And we kept finding our way back here like a couple times a year. Why not? Like, it's beautiful. It's like a blue zone. It feels amazing. The weather's great. You know, all that. - And you had the dream you were like, one day-- - We had the dream. We had just the dream. - And the dream is useful. -
Speaker 1We had the dream without the credit score. -
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. But that's really useful. You know, you do have to have goals. And in many ways, this was an unrealistic goal, I think. And then we were here three years ago and rented a house and we had friends and this place was for sale and I kept looking at it. And when I say I kept looking at it, I mean, I like looked at the video of this. They had like people in the pond, you know, the real estate like guy, like pretending like he lived here with a canoe. And I watched that video a thousand times, right? And-- And at some point my wife just looked at me and go like, you know, are you gonna pull the trigger or are you just gonna be AT&A on this one? -
Speaker 1Like that it's like a slur. - It is a slur. - It's like derogatory. -
Speaker 2It is a very much a slur. And I put in a super low ball bid and they called me 15 minutes later, didn't even count her and they hit the bid, which also gives you concern. So, because that, you know, it's kind of like the, you know, Persian rug sale, like where they price the rug super high and then you go low and then they go like, okay, here you go. You know, here's to have more tea and we're good. And you've bid like three times too high, even though you got 70% off kind of thing. - So you had buyer's remorse. - Well, I don't know that I had buyer's remorse. I had fear because I didn't know how any of this worked. I know nothing of agriculture. I know very little of viticulture. I certainly didn't know how irrigation works. You know, I don't know pond management. Like these are all things that we've learned in the last couple of years, but between the acceptance of that offer, and the closing on this, I lost sleep. Because this is a real commitment. I was 55 at the time. And it was like, okay, is that, that's your next three decades. - Right. - You can't half-ass this. And I mean, there's a lot of people who do, actually. I shouldn't say that you can half-ass it. It just feels wrong. Like it just feels like some people just buy a place like this and. -
Speaker 1So I want to say two ideas and you tell me if these apply to you or what you think about these. - One of my brothers actually, he told me this. So the first brother is the guy who started Native Deodorant, Moiz Ali. And when he decided he was going to go start a deodorant company, his friend was like. - Weird. - Yeah. - No offense, but like. - Yeah, yeah, right. - When I think deodorant, you're not the guy that comes to mind. Like, do you know anything about the deodorant industry? - Yeah, yeah. - And he goes, I know nothing about the deodorant industry, but I'll tell you what, in six months, I'll know everything there is to know about the deodorant industry. - Yes. - And he just had this sort of like, you know, a self-belief, but also a bit of a practical approach to, if I just obsess over anything for six to 18 months, I can get to the top of any, of almost every field. - Yeah. - Of knowledge just through sheer brute force. That was one brother. And the other brother has this phrase where, you know, he's been very successful. I said, well, why are you doing this new thing? And he said, you know, I think a lot of life is fine. It's like a Jerry Seinfeld quote, like finding the torture that you're comfortable with. - Yeah, yeah. - So, you know. - It's like being in a prison of my own making. - Yeah. - And he's just, he's like every decade or so, I set up a new prison of my own choosing, and it's painful and weird and uncomfortable in lots of ways, but that's the only way I know how to live. Is that? - I relate to that.
Speaker 2I mean, we're done, we're shut off the cameras, right? Like that is absolutely the case. Every 10 years, I've done an entirely new career. -
Speaker 1And we should say with someone more. So you had a finance career, you were a trader. -
Speaker 2I was a trader. -
Speaker 1On a trading floor. - Do the trading floor yell. Last time I was here, you were like, have you- - 28, 32, 50 up.
Speaker 2You learn how to do that. You know, like we had like a vocal coach come in. - Really? - And teach people how to do that. - From the opera or what? - Yeah. Literally, like we're right next door to the Lyric Opera in Chicago. 'Cause now it's not like that. Now you just come- -
Speaker 1I know, I was like, no. - But you actually needed to communicate to a guy- -
Speaker 2Oh yeah, like, you know, from here, 20 yards away, and you know, like the old, this is big, this is bid, that's sell, this is price, this is quantity, this is tens, this is singles. I can still do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, to me, that was, like, I knew nothing about that. I was a philosophy major in college. I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want to sit behind a desk and I didn't want to limit my upside earnings potential. I thought that like having a salary was the wrong kind of prison. Like that was a prison of like predictability. - Right. - My dad's dad died when he was like 14 or 15. And my dad was what he called an entrepreneur by necessity. He got out of the army and the Navy, drafted twice, and worked at the grocery store that he grew up working at from the time he was 12. And he bought that store when he was 28 or 29. - Wow. - And you know, he was like, yeah, no one would hire me. But he didn't want me to go through that struggle. So he wanted me to go to law school or something like that. But I was looking at someone modeling behavior, where he could come to my baseball games. He could come to my basketball games. Like he was one of the only dads there. If it was at a two o'clock game, he could leave work. - Right. - And-- - His prison let him out there. - Yeah, I mean, well, you know, look, if you own your situation, you have no one to blame. There's no boss man that's gonna, you know, say, no, you don't get a bonus this year. We've had a bad year or whatever. And so I just wanted to own my own situation is the best way to phrase it. I didn't know how to articulate that at the time. I just knew that when I went in for interviews at Goldman Sachs or Sock Gen or any of these firms, you could get a contract and you kind of knew not what your work would be, because you kind of didn't even know what that really entailed. - Right. - But you kind of knew what you were gonna make for the next five years. It was good. Like it was a lot of money in one sense. And in another sense, it was like really boring because you knew exactly what you were gonna do. And to me, that felt limiting and scary in the other way. But at the time I was just, I floundered about for years because I was, I knew what I didn't wanna do, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. -
Speaker 1Right. Which seems common. I mean, I think that's the most common state. - Of course. - But when you're in that state, you don't think, well, this is common and normal. You feel like you're an idiot who doesn't know what to do and you feel uncertain and everybody else around you seems like they know a little bit more about what they wanna do than you. - I just kind of had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder,
Speaker 2but hadn't earned it. I don't think I've earned any reason to have that. - Right. - Which is the worst. Like that's, you know, the hubris of being like 23 years old and, you know, testosterone-fueled male with nowhere to put it, right? - And so, you know, if you grew up in Chicago, you, you know, people who were traders, that was a thing, you know, New York was investment bankers. Chicago was traders. Those are not the same. Like you said, finance career. I do not consider it a finance career. It's, it's a trading career, which is very different, especially back then. What's the difference?
Speaker 3Um, I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're going to copy them or just use it as inspiration, because then now, you know, what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful. And I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful. Finally, the year that they broke through and I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through. And I put it together in a database and HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about. It did change my life and they resurfaced it. They made it even better. And they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out. In finance, like you were
Speaker 2working for investment banks and obviously like they, they had trading desks, but they also, you know, do, you know, deals on companies and, and, and IPOs and all this sorts of stuff. And as a trader, you're basically, especially as an independent trader, you basically have like a core nest egg, you know, of whatever, a couple hundred thousand dollars in those days. I started with 60, which is 60 grand, like, you know, 40 from 20 from me, 40 from a backer. And, you know, like, you would make trades all day long, just like, you know, now there's day traders, but then you would lease a seat and you'd be on a trading floor. We'd get one of those colorful coats and it was all written down and you'd make a trade and you'd trade futures options on commodities, currencies, you know, yield curve, whatever it may be, cattle.
Speaker 1And just to set the table. So you have this trading career. You then start what became the best restaurant in America. At one point, some people call it the best restaurant in the world. You created a software company that you sold. You've done on and on and on, right? And each one of those, all these interesting little sub stories that we're going to go to. So if we're looking at the trading side, my understanding is you basically applied to a job that you were overqualified for.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's right. I mean, I wanted to get on the trading floor. And if you had my academic career and you went to the, like a clearing house to get a job as a runner for $5 and 25 cents an hour, they would go like, go work for Socrates, go work for Goldman, go work for Merrill. Like they'll hire you. And so I did that. And then I looked at like the contracts and they, you know, I wanted to be a floor trader and they'd be like, no, no, no, you're going to be on a bond desk somewhere selling bonds. I was like, no, no, no, it's not what I want to do. So in order to get that first job as a runner, which is exactly as described, you would take a piece of paper. Someone would call, you'd call, you know, your broker, the broker would call the floor, the floor, hand the order to the runner. The runner would physically run it, walk it fast. You weren't technically allowed to run, but you'd have to walk fast and you would hold it up in the air for a broker who would grab it, read it, call it out to the pit, trade it, write it, hand it back to you. You'd go back. I mean, there's room for arbitrage. It was like a 30 second process, 40 second process. So I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction in order to get the runner job. What'd you do? I eliminated all college. Like, you know, and, and, you know, they hired me for $5 and 25
Speaker 1cents an hour. And did you have the mentality at that point? Like, okay, I'm going to take this job. That's like, you know, sort of like I'm over educated for overqualified. I must take this runner job, but I have my eye on the prize. Like I'm going to be here in a certain amount of time.
Speaker 2Like, did you have, I had a goal. My goal was I want to be trading in a year. So I need access to the arena. And this, this is like, you know, something Bill Gurley says, like, you know, like move to the place where the shit's happening. Right. Right. So in this case, the arena was literally like an arena. Like, you know, it was like, it was an octagon, like 30 octagons in the trading floor, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but they all work the same. You know, I needed access to the arena and you get down there and it's very opaque. Like you can't figure out how it doesn't matter if you're smart, you know, or dumb or what, you just don't know how it works. And then after like running for a little bit, they were like, oh, you seem sharp. Like we'll put you on the phones. And you became a phone clerk. Right. So now I'm the guy writing on the ticket. It is absolutely soulless, banal work, right? Like there's no, nothing to it. And so what I started doing is taking open outcry classes from a guy at, at, after the close, just learning the hand signals and this and that, which might get you to a pit clerk position next. Right. You know, you might get $8 an hour at that point. But I was starting to meet people that were independent traders, and I was very much like, I want to find someone who can teach me how to do this. And for like six months, I didn't find anybody, you know, or I found some people, but I was like, ah, that's not the guy. I need someone that can exploit the things I'm good at. Like I was a philosophy major in college. I studied philosophy of language and logic. I grew up programming, you know, and I was watching this system that I felt was going to become digital really in an analog world at the time. And I was looking for a guy that would take me to what I call now the smallest, highest hoops. Like smallest, highest. Yeah. Yeah. Like, so, you know, like if you've got a big hoop on the ground, it's easy to jump in. Okay. If there's something 30 feet in the air and it's tiny, you know, and you got to figure out how to get up there, not a lot of people are going to follow you up there. So that you want what high, a good prize and less competition basically. Yeah. And also difficult to understand. Like, I felt like I was capable of understanding options and swaps and exotic options. Right. And as I was reading book, like there is not a good option. There are like one or two, but they're all the options books that you get are academic books on like, this is the right, but not the obligation to buy by a certain time. And like, yes, you have to understand all that, but that doesn't get you anywhere in terms of actually, why do I buy this one or sell that one? How did you making money or yeah. Or how do they all interrelate and all that? So I read all the books and I felt no closer to understanding any of it. And I finally met a guy who was super geeky and he had like a little HP calculators that had macros in it, like super cool, you know, 48 K in it kind of thing. And he had just hired a clerk and I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're the guy. And he like, you are the guy, like he went to the university of Chicago. He studied, you know, quantitative finance and he had worked for Chicago research and trading and they didn't want to put him on the floor. They thought he was a quant. They thought he was too geeky. So he quit and he, you know, put himself up on the floor trading very small and very, you know, and as soon as I met him, I'm like, you're my guy. And he's like, oh, I just hired someone. And I was like, no, no, no. Like, you're the only, like, you're the only guy here that understands what I'm trying to get at and can teach it to me. And I literally said, I'll pay you to work for you. And that got his attention. Like, because he was like, that's weird. Why? And I explained it and he was like, okay, I'll pay you like 250 bucks a week. Like totally illegal. I'm sure, you know, by today's standards. Right. And that was awesome. Like six months later, like I had a rudimentary understanding on how to make markets and options. And I put up $20,000, he put up 40,000 and I started trading Swiss franc options. It was almost a year to the day, which is a theme that we'll come back to. You asked at the beginning of the question, did you set a goal? And the answer was within a year, I need to be on a badge and trading. And it was, I was a week late, but I was in process. So I knew I counted it, you know, but like, it was terrifying. There's nothing harder. I mean, I taught 30, 40 people how to do that after the fact. And the rule was on your first day in the pits, you had to make one trade. I cannot express to you how useful that is because you have to go into a very zero sum, hostile, competitive environment, which was physical, loud, chaotic. And you have to open your mouth in front of all those people looking like an idiot.
Speaker 1Yeah. What is it about that day one? So I think Facebook had this too, day one, any engineer, you will ship code to production. They did this for a long time. I didn't know that, but that's wonderful. And it was like blasphemy back then. My very first job was at a very first business idea I had. It was a sushi restaurant. And I went out to LA to train with the chef. And sushi is famous for this thing where you like spend years just mopping. Rice. That would be incredible if you got rice. You would do all this menial work before you were allowed. Yes. The chef that I was going to work under, he's like, we're going to open this restaurant up. Can't do that. So the very first day, Daryl from the office walked in, came in as a customer, sat down at the bar and he goes, you're up. I just watched him do like, you know, for an hour, I'd been watching him like try to pay attention. You know, I don't know if you know how to make sushi. You dip your hands in water. Oh yeah. Yeah. Flap. It's hard. Then you do the seaweed, the rice, et cetera. Yeah. So I didn't understand at that time, the clap. So I thought it's just like a celebratory thing. Why are they clapping? They're just, I don't know. It's just a ritual. but it's to get all the water off to leave only the perfect amount of moisture too little water rice is stuck to you yeah too much water soggy soggy sushi yeah i didn't clap i gave daryl from the office some soggy sushi but it was actually very beneficial to just absolutely f**k up yeah you have to right away you have to
Speaker 2just you know break the seal break the seal and you know there was a guy who ended up becoming a very good trader very good friend and he went like three weeks performance anxiety yeah i mean frank if you're out there like you know i remember and every day like he'd come back and i would just be like dude you know you're a capable human just right do it and he would freeze he'd lock up you know and everything else every 10 years i kind of did something different because it didn't produce that same anxiety is it that you're actually
Speaker 1seeking the anxiety and fear or are you seeking something else anxiety fear is like the signal to you i found it yeah the latter well what is what is it what are you
Speaker 2looking for um we're here for whatever decades if we're lucky and in order to keep learning and keep young and wake up like you guys were coming today they showed up at what 6 30 6 15 something like that i get excited by that it's exciting to be uncomfortable in the sense of hey we're doing something today we're making this little thing here and who knows what that'll lead to and and all that and if you just put yourself out to pasture once you get good at something it's very very easy to fall into well i'm making good money and i know what i'm doing i'm kind of an expert in it now and expertise is such a trap right it's such a trap and you know that a non-expert is going to come after you like once you get to expert level you're screwed because somebody who's younger hungrier fresher eyes more willing to break convention to find the new way through is going to kick your ass so before your ass gets kicked you should quit yeah it's really hard to do and then go find something new and it's really hard you know the older you get the slower you get at doing that the less incentive you have to do it right right like there's very little incentive financially and otherwise if you've had some success to break it to quit to go do something new and lose money
Speaker 1for a while you know what's the quote you know most men die at 20 25 they're buried at 75 or yeah you know i think nivol says as well like the great the great ones the truly great ones they're great because not because they've reached the top of a mountain is because they are willing to go back to the bottom of the mountain and starting in and find
Speaker 2a new path nobody does that one of the things my dad had on his desk was a little sisyphus i've got that like you know always on my desk i've had it on my desk forever and and for me like the sisyphus thing is like shit we gotta wake up and you know i'm building a wine bar here like i got out of the restaurant but we'll get back to it and i'm like i'm gonna go to the restaurant and i'm gonna go to that i'm sure but i got out of the restaurant business i was here for you know half the time for two years and also i'm walking by i'm like oh shit i gotta rent that place build a new restaurant you know
Speaker 1bring out the boulder yeah
Speaker 2right right yeah found a new hill yeah yeah and and i was very much like you know do i want to do this and everything in me said no i i don't want to do it
Speaker 1so that's why i should probably do it well you're a philosophy guy you might know this the story of it's the ultimate punishment right he's gonna push the boulder up the hill yeah and then somebody i forgot who but they were like we must imagine sisyphus happy yes meaning that the the work is the win that and so he had this sort of alternate take on the the idea that this is like the cruelest punishment and instead it's like no he's in his element he's doing exactly what he wants to do and must be doing and where man is kind of at its best yeah is work is the win the work is the win yeah hey let's take a quick break you know that feeling when stress is so strong when you're you know when stress is so strong when you're feeling down and you're feeling down and you're feeling down and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow well the breeze assistant from hubspot can help it works right inside hubspot you can draft campaign copy blog posts emails all in your brand voice all using your actual customer data so you don't create just content you create content that converts check out hubspot.com the agentic customer platform for growing businesses so you talked about trading how you started as a trader and you were my understanding is that you're essentially you were looking for arbitrages you were looking for some sort of glitch in the system you're looking for some sort of mispricing where you can come in and take advantage and i think trading is a very pure way to do that but even in your other businesses i feel like in some ways you found an arb can we talk about arb so like yeah what excites you about an arb and then explain to me some arb
Speaker 2stories okay so so here's so i've said no to every podcast for like three years until i got to this one idea right and i said yes to this because i because of you and also because i am now convinced that every arb is just about time scale like this is not something that i've come up with or whatever but like it's it's evident especially with ai coming in now and and everything everything is time scale so at the time we started talking that like that piece of paper took like 30 seconds to go back and forth right and i was a good trader not a genius trader i was certainly capable and i was quasi decent at bringing what i called corporate refugees so i'd meet someone like at a dinner party who was certainly bright capable outgoing could probably do mental math quickly and then i'd see that they're miserable being an attorney right and i'd be like i got a thing for you come with me i'll i'll pay you seven dollars an hour and in eight months you can you can trade and i did that dozens of times that scaled kind of linearly and made i went from making you know five dollars an hour to thousands of dollars an hour in five or six years but i was looking around and there were companies making 10 million dollars a day down there more you know the crazy money and i was like what we really need to do is figure out a way to bypass that piece of paper going so if you're in new york trading what was then nascent etfs triple q spiders all that those are just a basket of the nasdaq 100 stocks we know what those are and we know their ratios so if you have a thousand triple qs you can figure out exactly how many shares all that is the natural hedge for that is the futures in chicago nasdaq futures and then it all comes down to in the triangle a cash position you don't really need to understand it okay in detail beyond that but what i wanted to do is you know the guys trading the triple qs in new york would have to pick up a phone or be on the phone and they would have to pick up a phone and they would have to be on the phone constantly with someone who would give someone a piece of paper and if i could just talk directly to new york from inside the pit i've got a 20 second time window on goldman sachs they can't beat me well what does 20 seconds actually mean and what is that worth what does it allow you to do how does well so a trade would take place in the triple qs and then the way you know if you just bought a million dollars notional in triple qs you would sell eight futures roughly in chicago against it okay and you'd lock in a little profit there and you'd be left with a long position in new york and a short position there but it's all one company and now that 30 seconds if i make that trade there and i can talk to the guy who's actually in the pit bypassing that i know the pricing information instantly and with like the first day it took me like a year to get this all done so here's here's another thing okay read the rules okay it sounds like most people don't read the rules it sounds like a dumb thing but read the rules there are laws and the cftc had regulations that were like this thick and all the people on the board at the merc and the amex and all these institutions probably never read them they had lawyers right and lawyers probably never read them they went on case law they went on practice they went on what they're used to and i went well if we're on the same tax id in new york and chicago same firm why can't i talk to somebody there like i don't see the rule like i've read the whole damn thing i mean i really did it's really long and this is not when you can just throw it in a computer and be like find the thing you know and i'm like man i can't find this and so i was like great i need to put up a partial t1 line for a dedicated phone line between new york and chicago and the merc wouldn't run you know underneath this these pits was like cabling back then it wasn't wi-fi and i needed at&t to run fiber and i put in permitting and they wouldn't let me do it because they kind of got that this would be bad for the broker groups and who owned who owned the merc the broker groups so i bribed the union guys who did the work with cases of jameson for real i can say that now i'm not gonna get in trouble anymore do you remember the day you kind of had that idea well or i remember the day when we turned it on the first time and it was basically like saying like let's say you know there's apples here and there's apples on the other side of that pond and that guy there's someone who rolls up over there and is willing to pay five dollars an apple and this guy over here is willing to sell me apples for three dollars and there's a guy about to run to the pond going like do that trade over there but meanwhile we can we can talk we got you know the string in the tin can so we made a trade i went oh my And we made, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1like instantly. And you're taking no risk at this.
Speaker 2Zero risk. Yeah.
Speaker 1And I immediately. Is that feeling just orgasmic when you find? No, it was terrifying. It was terrifying.
Speaker 2And the reason it was terrifying was because it was so good that the powers that be would kill you. And I don't mean that as. It's not figurative. I don't mean that as figurative. Muffling shit. Yeah, it really was. It really was at that time. I also knew that if we picked the pockets of the big investment banks and we made two million dollars that day, that'd be the last two million dollars we ever made. So in one sense, I was going like, oh, my God, it is as I thought it was. You know, there's this gap here. Right. But then I went, shut it down. And everyone was like, shut it down. We we've been working on this for seven months. What do you mean? Shut it down. I go, we can't be so blatant. We're much better off picking their pocket a little bit for years. Right. Then we are just destroying them on day one. Right. So I went back and reapplied for, hey, here's all the evidence that we're the natural hedge in Chicago. And these are growing really fast. This product class, this ETF, new innovation. You're going to want to do this kind of thing. So they gave me a pilot program thinking that it would take me six to eight months to get everything wired up. You know, and then once they give me the pilot program, then I could do it in the open. And I could do it in a couple of different pits. And I had partner, the guy, the nausea guy that he was in the New York side. And we went to college together. And he was a spreadsheet guru, you know, just great math mind. And we cranked that thing up. So you started where and at its peak, what were you doing? We were doing a couple percent of the daily volume of the American Stock Exchange within six months. What does that mean in dollars? How much money were you making doing this? Well, I think that year we made over a hundred million. In a year? In a year. Back when a hundred million was a lot of money. And I, and I, and I had like, not, I had a small. A hundred million is not a lot of money. Well, apparently not. I mean, like it is for me, but it's not for the world. Yeah. It's nothing,
Speaker 1right? You know, it's like, oh, a hundred million. But like. That's profit. That's revenue. What does that mean? Well, there it's trading. It's not like a GMV. That's like your tape. That's what you made.
Speaker 2Yeah. It was arbitrage, arbitrage profits. I mean, the overhead on that was relatively small. And obviously we, we hired a lot of people and, you know, paid out a lot. Of salaries. And so did you call home? Like, hey, mom, dad had a good year. Money this year. So I had. You didn't grow up rich. No, no, no. I had a minority, a tiny little percentage of that company because I needed the capital. The one thing I didn't have then was I probably had, you know, my first million probably happened when I was 28 or so. And all that money was at risk. And sorry, what age are we talking about right now when you figured. 31. Okay. Right. But all that money was at risk. Right. So I had it, but it very much felt fragile. Right. It was your bankroll. It was the bankroll to trade. Yeah. And as we grew the company, you know, my first employee became my business partner, still my best friend, Jim Hansen. And we grew the company and we hired the corporate refugees and we built to like 35 guys. But in order to do this, our at scale, we needed capital. So we merged our firm with a firm in New York that had some more capital. No one knew how to run a company. Like, let's just be clear. Like I had no idea how to manage people. What were you like back then? An asshole. I don't know. I was trying to come up with a good way. You woke up every day at 5:30 in the morning and I, I, you know, got on the floor at 6:30 and it was game day and I was fueled by espresso and, and agitas. And, you know, like I was just like, yuck, you found this thing, let's go. Right. And one of the things that, you know, my dad was still around then. And, you know, you asked like, you know, did you call the parents? I remember like, whoever says rich people don't pay taxes, trust me. If people are rich, they don't pay taxes. People have figured it out. I have not. That year I remember that I had like a giant tax bill, multimillion dollar tax bill, and had to then figure out like, well, I need to remove money from the trading firm and pay the taxes and all that. And I remember writing a check, you know, the biggest check I'd written before that was probably like $3,000 for like a down payment on a car or something. So I write this multimillion dollar IRS check and I, I drove to my dad's house and I showed it to him and he was kind of like, oh shit. He's like, is what you're doing legal? First question. Like, you know, Greek guy who grew up like, you know, at a grocery store. Fair question. Fair question. I said, of course it's, of course. Yes. And he went, okay, it won't last. Like, you know, he is a product of, of the great depression. And he was like, it won't last, put it away. No boats, no women, no drugs. Like, you know, gave me that like little talk. And then he said, just like, remember that this is like the great country that your grandparents came to. Pay that. It's your patriotic duty to pay that. That's why I sacrifice. That's why they sacrifice. And I went, shit, I was hoping for a little, a little sympathy on the tax bill here, but I remember it vividly.
Speaker 1Yeah. We need a name for that speech. It's like, we have the birds and the bees speech. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's the money? Son? No, no, no. You pay your taxes. Yeah. No boats, no liquor, no ladies.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. I mean, really that's, that's what he said. And then he's like, I will allow you to take me out to dinner this time. And, and that was it. Like there was no like hurrah congrats. It was more just a cautious tale of, of optimism in a way of like, save it. Don't do stupid shit. Go home and wake up the next day and do it again. Like one of the other thing that my dad really taught me was like, at the beginning, you were kind of like, oh, you have this great mind and all that stuff. And that might, or might not be true, but what's really the case is that you show up. Like my dad was just like, show up every day on time early, early, you know, the old, the old adage, like early is on time on time is late. And the late means get the out of here. And I literally feel that way. Most people don't show up. Most people don't follow through. Yeah. Yeah. And showing up means not just showing up, like, look, there's two kinds of showing up. There's showing up prepared and then there's showing up unprepared, but admitting that you're unprepared. Both of those count by the way, like, but then like show up late, don't show up, cancel, move it. Like when you, when you text me, how long does it take to get a text back? Almost instantaneous. Because if you consistently do that, it's not very hard, right? Like I don't need to plan something three weeks out. Like you text me, let's get on the phone right now. Let's hash it out. And if you do that consistently, it accrues so many benefits over
Speaker 1time. Right. So you learned that from your dad. Yeah. A thousand percent. And you have this amazing year. I assume these things don't last forever.
Speaker 2Well, so the following year, you know, of course, any arbitrage is going to be a window that closes and they close quickly or slowly, but always going to close. So the time scale that kept getting shorter. Other people figured it out. We started adding computation onto it. What had happened is that some of the older partners in New York made so much money that year that they went, this is what I've been waiting for for 30 years. I'm out. Yeah. And at that time we were taking, like, we'd see like a small trading company that was distressed in Boston at the Boston stock exchange. We'd be like, how much do they need to like keep them in business? Okay. Next thing you know, I'm on a plane to Boston and some 30 year old dude with a computer is telling these guys who've been there for 40 years, like, here's how we're going to run your business now. Right. That did not go well. Like, you know what I mean? Like, so there was over expansion, not because of anything other than like, oh yeah, well, we'll take what we've learned and we'll apply it to new things. But we didn't know how to build a business. We didn't know how to build a layer of management and accounting. And we were terrible at that. And some of the guys the following year made half of what they made in call it 2000, 2001. So 2002 comes along, trading volumes go down. We're not doing anything wrong. We're just making a lot less money. So a guy that made $2 million, you know, he was making 50 grand when I met him and he makes $2 million. It's like athletes or something. And you get poverty. Yeah. And then all of a sudden it's like they make $800,000 two years later and they're like, this is bullshit. Right. And then you get the rock band syndrome, you know, where everyone's starting to, you know, get a little salty and all that, but we're all super fortunate. And I just got, like I've said eight times in the beginning, I was a terrible manager of people. I probably still am. And I just didn't enjoy it. Like I got to the point where I had run really hard for 10 years. My dad died in '01. I was very close with him. 9/11 happens. We had people that worked on wall street. Everyone was okay, but I definitely knew people who were not. Yeah. And I left that year going, what am I doing? Like I need to dial, dial this back. And I wasn't a good parent. I wasn't good husband. I wasn't, I just wasn't being a good person. I go to dinner parties and I'm like, can we just move shit along people? Like, you know, cause it's like, it just felt like there's not the trading floor. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the world felt slow. And I grew up caddying. I'm a lifelong golfer. So all of a sudden I would find myself playing golf, golf with ex professional athletes who were in their thirties, who were famous big time guys. And they were like miserable and like they took golf way too seriously and they played for big money. And I was like, there's no edge. Like why are they gambling on golf? Like, you know, I don't understand what's going on. I didn't consider myself a gambler. I consider myself an arbitrageur and I just looked at them. And I got the nudge from the wife like, "Hey, you're not pleasant to be around." and all that it wasn't really a nudge it was a you know slap you know slap in the face to her credit like you know right and deserve it yeah and i just remember one day going waking up going i think i'm out like i think i need to like take a sabbatical it sounds like i remember i called keith and i was like i think i need to take six months off he's like that you don't get six months off like you want to take six months off and get paid and meanwhile the options group that you're building is not doing as well as the you know xyz you know i was like man what am i doing here you know like i i kind of figured something out i'm not enjoying it anymore i should quit and i and i did i walked into like a group and i and they were all infighting one morning and i was like guys just so you know like this is my last week here and you're all getting paid out and some of you will get some equity and i'm gone and people are like what are you talking about you like this is bizarre you know and in hindsight i probably didn't do a good job of of that in terms of like i was with my partners i was super communicative but like also like you can't go hey i might be leaving in a month right you know that's just not something you can do and so i did and you know we had a young son and and now there's no game to play right and all of a sudden i was thinking about those athletes don't want to be them and i'm going like you know what do they all i'm going to ask you what do they all say when they retire they say i'm retiring to i don't know spend more time with my family more time with the family yeah classic michael jordan retires he's
Speaker 1going to spend more time with the family it's the best ceo resignation i've decided to spend more time with the family yes and the board has decided you're not the ceo anymore also that's right yes
Speaker 2yeah i mean you know when i when i left talk like you know it's or when i sold the alinea group what do you the statement you put out is i'm allowing more opportunity for the people like in the organization or whatever but the reality of course is that either like you sold for good reasons because something was not you know you were no longer a good fit or you got your ass kicked out
Speaker 1did you ever read the groupon ceo's letter when he did that i don't think so he's a chicago guy lefkoski yeah no no mason andrew mason oh yeah yeah when he's like he's decided to spend more time with my family just kidding i got fired i got fired yeah the second line of
Speaker 2the thing was that sounds like i i've met him a couple times yeah by the
Speaker 1way when you're you told the story to me once about how you crossed paths with the early jane street folks yeah yeah you were doing the arbitraging and they were the
Speaker 2smartest guy can you tell that story i thought that was awesome yeah i mean in 99 we started doing adr arbitrage american depository receipts and i was not hugely involved with it it was out of new york but the guys who had built the best robo box of doing that were the early jane street guys and my partners were like these guys are better smarter faster you know have these dell boxes on a desk that are doing things and of course now like you know you could see the dorkish podcast and they've got you know the data center this is the public you know i i i can't really say much about about the great thing about jane street is that you know it's like fight club um and and i've honored that and i've honored that for 30 years you don't say much about jane street but i will say that they are incredibly smart incredibly dedicated fiercely independent of thought and high integrity and i know some of people are going to watch this and they're going to go but the india thing that's public or this or you know it's like yeah okay well you know
Speaker 1again read the rules yeah you had an idea at the kind of like thought or idea around everything would you say everything's an arbitrage but it's just a question of the time scale yeah
Speaker 2would you say yeah roughly what do you mean by that once i was in the restaurant business the slow thing became how do people make reservations that was the equivalent of the the 32nd piece of paper right and people still call restaurants it's so weird there's nothing worse experience at a restaurant than going up to host stand hearing a phone ring and getting this i'll be right with you and you're the customer and the first thing you see is right might as well be the middle finger i'm on the phone right and then they hang up and they go essentially who are you and do you belong here that's terrible hospitality but that's every restaurant so we got into starting to build the linea and i was like we gotta get rid of that and then okay well how do you get rid of that how do you know who's walking in the front door without them telling you who they are not it's not that hard right you know how do you get rid of the host stand so it doesn't feel off-putting how do you then get like i the analogy i used at the time was like it's like going to a sweater store and you see all these different color sweaters and styles of sweater you're like hey i want that blue cardigan cashmere sweater can't have it what can i have i don't know guess at one of the other 300 sweaters and that's what open table was like in 2005 that's what the software was dismal they wanted to intermediate the relationship between the customer and the restaurant that's how they that was their art arbitrage and so you know talk was born out of my frustration with not knowing the customer it was a it was a kyc thing you know know your customer then it was overlaying the value of that customer which is different on a tuesday night at 9 p.m in chicago when no one goes out to dinner than it is on a saturday night 7 p.m when everyone goes out to dinner right those two things should be priced differently and they're not that was obvious to you but was not obvious to the world it's still not obvious to the world right you know i don't want to get political here but elizabeth warren a couple months ago tweeted we need to make a law against dynamic pricing everything's dynamically priced this table is dynamically priced it's just really slow this is dynamically priced this water everything is dynamically priced like it's not nothing nothing's priced forever yeah and what she's really saying is is that we don't want to squeeze people when bad things happen agreed but the best way to do that is to dynamically price things as fast as you possibly can right and so like uber when uber did surge pricing that is the dumbest way you could possibly name something right and they got in a lot of trouble for it chose the
Speaker 1wrong word for the right idea correct and travis tried to explain it he was they were like how you know on new year's eve you guys are going to be gouging yes people with this surge pricing and he's like we need to get more drivers onto the road to meet the demand we need the supply to rise and we need to get more drivers onto the road to meet the demand how do you get the supply to rise you give it an incentive that you're going to make more money
Speaker 2i will say that i i was a little too autist on like travis was on that yeah like i remember that and i was like dude just call it dynamic like get rid of the surge word like you know just and you know my original pitches to restaurant was like look you're paying people to sell to your rivals like if you're full and you're really busy on a wednesday all they're going to do is say well you should go to this restaurant down the street and they're like you know which is terrible like you should just change your pricing right but people are like well we print our menus once every quarter so that time scales off you should print your menu in some respect every day or every hour or every minute so used to
Speaker 1even after talk and selling talk for hundreds of millions you still see that this problem is like you know just fundamentally not solved across the economy
Speaker 2i i genuinely believe that geofence meaning localized dynamic and something that someone's going to make hundreds of billions of dollars with and i simply got tired of convincing people of it right you know it's like trying to convince a restaurant owner who every day is game and i understand why every day is game day that's not their core business that is what they self-selected out of when they got into the restaurant business they want to do accounting you need a big dumb button that you hit once that says make more money right and then the whole back end needs now with ai maybe we have that big dumb button do you have that big dumb
Speaker 1button so so let me ask you a question how does a guy who goes from trading and no restaurant experience create the best restaurant in america that that's a mind-blowing sentence that that happened yes what is the explanation for that
Speaker 2part of it is grant akins great great young chef who i met part of it is the willingness to go man like it's really weird that like no one's seeing that like you know chicago should have the next charlie trotter trotters was i don't know open 15 years at that point and i'm like oh my god i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't point or whatever he put chicago on the map and i was just like that thing i said earlier you know every 15 years someone's going to come along and kick someone's ass and i met grant and i was like aha we have the ass kicker we have
Speaker 1the guy who can do it and this is kind of the same thing you said about trading where you met that guy and you were like you're the guy you're the guy and you had this moment with grant where the guy you're the guy right and i asked you i go how did you know you go you said something like every bite of food the guy put in my mouth was the best thing i'd ever tasted yeah yeah but there might be more to it where like there was something either entrepreneurial or creative or something about the person the
Speaker 2showing up part it's it is the showing up part because look i mean for good and bad he was me when i was a trader he would show up and he would stay there till four in the morning and he would come up with the next thing and he would do the stuff the hard work and grind it out everything's grind like if you are a great songwriter you write songs every day you throw out 98 of them i met you know i love wilco i love those guys i met jeff once in the the loft in Chicago and he doesn't like people being there much. And I, he was writing a song and it was honestly not good. And it was a wonderful thing for me to see because one of my favorite songwriters. And so finally I mustered up the courage to ask him like, why do you come in here every day? And he was like, I have to write like two or three songs every week because otherwise I won't have 12 good ones at the end of the year. Right. And I was like, oh man, like you want that artistic thing to be, you wake up in the middle of the night and yesterday is just done, you know? And the answer is like, that might happen once in a while, but most people are Picasso. And what you do is you, you grind out a lot of shit to get to something that's great. And when you find
Speaker 1people that do that, those are your folks. Chris Rock has a great quote on this. He's, he was talking to some young comedian and the comedian was like, Hey, any advice for me to make it? And this is Chris Rock. You know, so he says, uh, what are you doing today? And he goes, I got two shows tonight, big day. I got two, two, two shows, uh, one at seven, one at nine. So I'm just getting ready for that. He goes, no, I said, that's tonight. I said, what are you doing today? He goes, well, I'm just getting, you know, food, you know, whatever he goes, you want the advice. The advice is you write jokes every morning. The money is made in the day. We just happened to collect it at night. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, the stuff you're doing on the stage is the by-product of the daily writing of bad. Jokes. If you're not doing the daily writing of bad jokes, like that's the whole racket. That's the whole, there's nothing else to it besides doing that. And that sounds simple, but guess what? Even amongst the professionals, most are not doing that.
Speaker 2I gave the commencement address at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park years ago. And I was like, what do I tell? Like, you know, these people are all, they all are chefs and it's in the era of TV chefs. And you know, I always liked the, the commencement address where they, you kind of tell three stories. Right. Like you don't really, they don't even need to seem to connect. People will try to connect jobs. Steve Jobs. Yeah. Perfect. So I watched, you know, a couple of great commencement speeches and I was like, okay. And I finally thought of it like the morning of, and the day we were going to open next, which is a restaurant that the idea was every four months, we're going to have an entirely new cuisine, entirely new menu, entirely new everything. We were opening with this Paris 1906 menu, time and place. You don't, the great thing about that concept was as soon as we had that idea. Paris 1906. I don't need to tell you anything more, right. It's, it's like already has aura to it. It's got, you want to go like, what was it like? I like, I like French food. What was it like in the Scoffier 1906? So there was a sauce on the lamb dish that was off in the practice thing. And I had to go back early in the morning at like 6.00 AM to like, I don't know, do vinyl tile in the basement to pass the inspection or something like that. And on the, on the, on the pass were like 20 small saucier pans, this big with blue tape in front of them labeled like, you know, A through P or whatever. And I was like, what are you doing here? And Grant was there. And he was like, I'm fixing that sauce that you emailed me about. Like, I knew it was off. Like, you know, I didn't make it. And so I, in my head, I'm like, well, of course he just knows how to make this classic sauce. And the reality was he made the base of it in the middle, and then he made these a little sweeter and these a little more like salty and, and acidic. And somewhere along that spectrum was the right one, but no one knows what it's supposed to taste like. It was from 1906. Right. And also like, no one really knows how to make it. Those recipes were kind of miserably, you know, they went down to the gram. That's for sure. And that was what I told the commencement. I was like, if you want to be a great chef, you show up at 6.00 AM and you make 25 sauces. Yeah.
Speaker 1I better see 20 sauces.
Speaker 2On the counter with blue tape. You don't simply go like, well, here's the recipe and it should taste like this. You have to know what great is. And knowing what great is, is making mostly shit 99% of the time. And then you go like, oh, well, this one's kind of, I don't hate this one. That's probably actually really good, you know? And I get a lot of people that blind email me, my email's out there in the public and I'm fine with it. And I get a lot of like young entrepreneurs going like, hey, I've got this idea and I want to do this or that. And I was like, cool, go do it. Come back to me in five weeks. I don't care about your logo. Right. Like everyone wants to make the logo, right? You know, logo first name for, I got a great name for a restaurant. Awesome. That's terrific. Make the 50 sauces, you know?
Speaker 1Have you ever read that book art and fear? I think they use this, uh, the pottery class example. Do you know this story? It's a perfect example for this. So the story is there's a professor in Florida at university. I think he was actually teaching a photography class and it changed. It's pottery, but story is the same either way splits his class in two. And he basically tells the first, first group when they come in, Hey, for this pottery class, uh, I'm going to grade you on your pottery, but it's really simple. At the end of the semester, you turn in your best pot and I will grade you only on your best work. And you pick, you get to pick which one is your best. You get, you submit that one. I'll give you a grade. They leave group two. He says, you'll be graded based on the volume of pots that you make. So at the end of the year, at the end of the semester, you're going to give me a hall based on volume. I will give you your grade. Yeah. Easy enough. I feel like I know where this is going. At the end of the semester, obviously the volume people made more volume. They also made the better pots. Of course. And like, you know, basically this is like, this principle is just everywhere. And it's so obvious.
Speaker 2And
Speaker 1yet even I, who espouse this
Speaker 2stuff, wake up, try to make a great pot when I, well, no. And also when I met, you know, Jeff that time, I left going, God, am I an idiot? Of course, that's what he does every day. Right. Like, of course, that's what he's doing. The weird part is he's doing it after 30 years because for him, that's, that's the process. You know, I like to do that and I like to change it. And I get miserable when I don't have pots to make, I guess. Like I'm, I'm fearful of not finding more quests, side quests.
Speaker 1So I've gotten to know you a little bit. One thing I think you're very good at is you're good at having an inspiring, vision, which sounds obvious, but that's a skill to like be able to do that. A vision that's compelling, that gets people excited, a story that you want to be a part of that will get you to jump out of bed every day and like go do hard things, go do minutiae bullshit, go make 20 sauces. Yeah. You're really good at the vision part and you're really good at working backwards. And I think the story of Alinea, you told me that I knew it was this great three Michelin star restaurant. What I didn't know was that before you made it, you declared this will be a three, this will be a Michelin star restaurant. Michelin wasn't in America. Michelin wasn't even in America. And you said something even better. You go, we need to make it so that it will look bad for Michelin. If they're not even coming to America, like us not being there will be bad on them. That's right. Which is a stated goal. Which is a stated goal that is, I would say unusual. And you said you posted this on some forum on the internet year before you even launched. Can you tell us? I don't think this is a well-told story. Yeah. So like, so there was E.
Speaker 2Gullet at the time. Like there was the, you know, the, what do you call it? Boards, you know, like BBS forum. Yeah. Yeah. Forum boards. There's a foodie one called E. Gullet at the time. You can still look at, I mean, like the archives are up and I was kind of fascinated with open source software at the time. And I do what I always do. And I start like reading how to run a restaurant, like restaurant for dummies. I'm reading all these books. I'm like, just like with the options. I'm like, I feel like none of these actually is, they're not teaching me anything on how to run a restaurant. Okay. So I'm now building a restaurant. But I don't know how to run a restaurant. I wrote this one spreadsheet that was, I call it the universal restaurant calculator. It was literally one tab with like 80 cells. So any input that I could think of, like cost of insurance, like that's a cell, right? And I couldn't think of any more cells. Like at the end of the day, like anybody listening to this could probably, if they sat in a restaurant long enough and really thought about it, you could come up with the cells. It's not that, it's not that big. And that's why restaurants fail because the actual bar to interest really kind of pretty low, you know, anyone who has a good dinner party or thinks they can cook something can start a restaurant. So I just started like going, okay, what, how can we learn from our customers? And maybe there's someone else out there that I can learn from. And so I was like, let's just open source the whole business plan. So I created this thing called the Alinea project on eGullet. And it was like, hey, here's, here's how we're thinking about naming the place. And here are all the names we didn't take. And here are the ones we didn't take. Here's the menu development. These are foodies? These are chefs? Who's in this forum? So it turns out it was a lot of people. I mean, we got hundreds of thousands of views. So suddenly the press was interested. So, you know, Food & Wine and Gourmet Magazine and, and, you know, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, we're all like, oh, this is interesting. Like these people are building a restaurant. And did you say openly, like we're trying to build a Michelin star restaurant in Chicago? I didn't say, I don't think I said Michelin star. I think we're trying to build the best restaurant in America. Trying to build the best restaurant in America.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. And you start. And it needs to be profitable. You start building in public or open sourcing your ideas. Yeah. And you're saying you're doing it because you kind of want smart, smart people to be pushing back on.
Speaker 2I wanted two things. I wanted, I wanted feedback from people that might come across it. And then I wanted to drum up future customers because when people have an engagement where they feel like, oh, I watched that. and now it's open right I feel like a little bit like the origin story is already known right it's like one of my favorite documentaries of all time that i literally watch once a year is hearts of darkness it's the making of apocalypse now you want to talk about fear every time i'm like oh i'm doing too much i watch francis ford coppola like you know with the with the philippine you know like navy and air force like actually going you know fernan marcos or whatever going to like you know you know get dennis hopper out of there they're actually going to start shooting you know he mortgaged his house twice all that stuff right so i'm not really taking much risk by doing a vineyard here compared to that so it's very comforting and i felt like by putting that out to the world people would have this engagement of like they see the process they see how we're thinking about it like we would write like i read i look back at some like there's you cringe always oh yeah it's cringy like you know the purpose of bread like is it you know and why do you think that most restaurants give you bread well it fills you up they can give you less of everything else like that could have been the whole post it's americans like fat and bread is a good vehicle for butter right or oil and we can cut down our portion size if we give them a big basket of bread right that is literally why they do it and it's delicious bread's delicious you know but like we wrote like 4 000 words on the purpose of bread but you know we had hundreds of thousands of people and one of the coolest things was that the sean brock who's a very famous chef now he was the first customer through the door on the first day wow and he wrote on there so did you have like a wait list by the time you launched or yeah we had we had like opening night we had new york times there head food critic michael rollman told us like that guy is the head critic of the new york times so you know what he would look like back then so you couldn't know this but if you hadn't been put publishing that stuff but you opened the same restaurant there's no
Speaker 1chance it would have been as good no chance that was like such a marketing like feat and how do you think about product marketing storytelling like what's your kind of theory or thesis or philosophy on this the more open you can be about
Speaker 2why you're doing it as long as it's authentic you win period like you can also lose on that like look like you win period you can also well i'm thinking of dario and sam right now like you know it's like there are real concerns around ai and you know if you run around saying everything you think everything you think might not be the best thing all the time fair enough you know at the end of the day like a restaurant is a pretty benign thing no one's gonna live or die based on me opening a restaurant um and but so why was i opening it we had really pure reasons like you know do we have ambition for sure at the time there was a real culture of people finding these things and there wasn't instagram and there weren't you know the social media outlets and so this was novel to have that now like one of the problems i think is that you know if you're going to paris you're gonna email hey where should i eat okay i i love la mijon you should go there you're gonna go on and look you see all of it before you get there it's really hard to be surprised in life right now and so you know a lot of what we were doing was creating desire and enough engagement to be able to do it right and so i think that's a really good point and i think that's a really good point that you felt like you knew people people always want to buy from people you always want to have an engagement you know one of the successes of of this podcast is you people see you and you're genuinely curious that's authentic that's that's the secret we could do so many bad things like making dumb questions or dumb answers or and as long as you're authentically like engaged and so that's the marketing yeah finding that and being willing to put it out there is a little bit scary a little bit invasive a little bit you know like not everything you do is good you know you might not like the way you look or sound on camera all that but you have to keep
Speaker 1doing it you told me another thing that i thought was really awesome because i've never been to india most people who listen to this will have never been there right so like for 99 of us we've never actually experienced what made it the best restaurant in america but you've told me a little bit about like kind of every detail so you know how are you greeted at the door uh you know what was the experience like you know the balloon uh for dessert you know where you're eating this this candy apple or this green apple balloon for dessert and you've talked about like all the different elements of the experience what are like three or four things where i where you are proud of like how you kind of rethought reinvented or just even a small touch like i think there are
Speaker 2dozens of those and what i would say is that we looked at it like a theater like you know if you write a great piece of theater or read a great novel or whatever the term of art would be a callback right so like you write a you're talking about chris rock like the great thing about great comedians and whatnot is that they they'll set something up at the beginning of their set and then they go through a whole bunch of unrelated stuff and then somehow there's a satisfying callback there's a satisfying callback which makes the beginning and the end funnier right right and when you leave you're going oh you know so we viewed the experience from the time you got out of your car so you walk down a hallway you you're at a table which was a complete cop of david byrne like you know like stop making sense i saw in 1984 i was at harvard summer school as a teenager and i haven't seen it what i've
Speaker 1yeah stop everything are you kidding oh my god when you said the name i had to decide oh dear god you're a generationally fake like oh
Speaker 2my dear god well i know what you're asking i know i know what i'm giving you for your birthday okay um so the great thing about stop making sense that concert was that david byrne walks out no one else is on stage he has a boom box which just plays you know before drum machines and all that and so you have cassette tapes and then he you know he starts playing the guitar and then the stage builds the stage builds and then pretty soon he gets smaller and smaller because he starts wearing the bigger and bigger suit you've seen them dancing in that big suit that big suit is as the world around him gets bigger he gets literally smaller by stagecraft right it's brilliant and i remember when we were building linea grant had said like why do why do fancy restaurants have tablecloths and the answer is because the table underneath is a piece of shit and so he was like we want great tables because you'll feel it you know and you'll see it and all that and then we were like well start with nothing you know you go to a fancy restaurant you got like 18 different right forks and knives and that's stressful because you're like i don't even know like how to use them i'm not i'm not like a 19th century french aristocrat and then you know and even then they have somebody with so you should probably use the fish right like fork or whatever yeah reprimand yeah yeah right right for bigger right yeah yeah yeah soup away like we didn't want any of that and i remember thinking of stop making sense and going like let's start with a empty stage and so when someone comes you get you know something that hits the table what's the point of that what's the callback for later so it could be you know a honeycomb or it could be you know what looks just like a flower arrangement but as it turns out there's edible things in there but you don't find that out until hour two right so these were all intentional things now none of this sounds particularly revolutionary now because there's tons of restaurants that do that i mean that was the influence of not just alinea but like a lot of other restaurants that push that envelope and so that's we we worked really really hard to hone all of the little things that would make you feel something right so if i said to you i'll ask you not your favorite meal in a restaurant necessarily but what's your like most memorable meal of your life you know uh i i know what came
Speaker 1to mind right away great i remember when i was 21 22 years old we were doing the sushi restaurant thing i wanted to start sushi restaurant we went to las vegas and my my buddy trevor's girlfriend uh her dad was wealthy and he said take the boys out to nobu and say the word omakase when you go in yeah yeah we didn't know of course why would you go to school in north carolina not a great sushi scene right not a lot of omakase going on there so we go to nobu and we and we say the word magic word omakase and they say we got you we got you yeah and they start bringing dish after dish we don't even know what's happening we're trying this like miso glazed cod it's like wow every bite tasted you know unique and and great and the whole bill was paid for by this other guy by you know the the her dad and the whole thing just felt like totally taken care of and new and novel i just remember also where we were at in life like it was just like a relief from like the stress of trying
Speaker 2to build something and being broke so now how do you make that happen every night for people like you know and that's so that that's a real thing so we would ask staff like best experiences best experiences what okay we're coming into fall what does that mean well it means something very different like we're in october here we filmed really early today because it's going to be 100 degrees in chicago the leaves are already down and it smells different and it's wet and so as you're trying to craft these experiences we just ask those very simple questions and when we built software there's a lot of different theories of software building i like to build dead ends in software that every software designer hates if you could hit every button at every page i can't take you on the journey where i want you to go right right so i kind of build like dead end that every software developer designer hates right like you know ux designer because they want like the microsoft version of i want every button every option at every time right my older son is very much like a windows guy because he can tinker with everything right but like in a great experience like that omakase that you had you had no choice right it's a defined it's a defined thing yeah and sometimes it's great to have a lot of choice and sometimes it's great to just be taken on a journey you know and so studying that was fun you know and that's
Speaker 1what we did you also study so as i'm kind of deconstructing what you do one of the things you do is you you learn but not from only within the industry you steal from the sort of adjacencies yeah yeah you don't look at a restaurant and say well how do the best restaurants do what restaurants do you say in fact you try very hard not to do that you say what do they do and then what's the how do we invert some expectations or what are they rules like i'm fine with stealing the best stuff what are they missing right and then what if this was theater how would a theater guy do this if dinner was was like a theater show what would it be right right so like taking these adjacent you also told me about magicians and how you were studying magicians and this kind of like some new stuff that we're doing but you told me the story of selling a bottle of wine to a table yeah and you were able to go in and you were able to sell a bottle of wine that maybe the waiter wasn't going to do and he's kind of asked you like how'd you know how to do that today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury uh they make the world's best banking product i think you know this already i use mercury for all my businesses i think i have like maybe seven or eight businesses we use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account so i have my personal account there i moved off of wells fargo and chase i'm just all in on mercury why uh i like products that are easy to use i like products that get me and the problems that i have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife very easy to spin up virtual cards uh one click and i get savings yield it just has all the benefits of having all the stuff that i need in one place so if you're looking for the best banking product on the market it's definitely mercury i will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and column and a members
Speaker 2fdic so when i was a kid like every kid you get a a box a magic box that has like the rope that with the little peanut in it that like holds yeah the hidden coins thing that the the roller that does the dollar bills on it and there's somewhere exists a video of me that my mom put me in a little tuxedo and i did the show for like the the relatives and everything went wrong that's why you know it's so great but of course i'm like doing the tricks and i'm like oh don't worry about that thing right you know and i'm like five or whatever right and so like almost everyone that sense of wonder and awe and all that is something that as you build out experiences for people magic is a wonderful thing to study but it's also a wonderful thing to study in everything else marketing sales and all that because you know for sure that i can't change a ten dollar bill into a hundred dollar bill right you know that everyone knows that and then when you do it if you do it really well it will appear as though you did it even though intellectually you have to suspend your disbelief and so how do magicians do that well you know that they control your attention and where they stand where they look at you where they look you know not at you all those things are cues that are incredibly practiced they know exactly when they're working and when they're not and as you're building out experiences for people in restaurants anywhere else if you read the books on restaurants i just hate them i don't like them at all but if you read a book on written by a to say the effect they always start with the effect the effect is that the bill will become a hundred dollar bill okay that's the effect and then they go through the method the method is well you've already got the hundred and you're gonna fold it like this then there's beyond the method the craft of like of what you're doing so the presentation the present yeah yeah if you read 150 year old books on magic from anywhere in the world they have all of these wonderful things like well if you want to gain people's trust you don't sit across from them or stand across from them you will stand next to them so if i present this to you and i'm standing here and i just go this is the best water in the world you know whatever like you're gonna be going like i got selling me water if i go around the other side and stand next to you so we're both looking at it first of all i could be doing a lot of different things there i could be signaling someone hey bring more water he's a little low i can be doing all sorts of stuff in a restaurant you know your attention can't be on the water and behind me at the same time right so i kind of own that space back there so in in reading these things and thinking about alinea it wasn't just the callbacks and it wasn't just hey we need to make a dish that transmogrifies into something else or whatever we're going to start doing service in a way where we are on the side of the diner we're going to present some weird stuff we're going to present a dish that look that's hanging at the end of a skewer that makes you uncomfortable because you know you're supposed to kind of right to do that and one of the things that we kind of realized was if you if you're going to have people eat something that looks like glass you should put it on a plate and if you're going to have something at the end of a skewer that's bobbing around it looks like you have to give it head you probably should make it taste like cherry pie you can't like challenge the two directions right but the way that you describe that should also not be adversarial it should be like you're on the same team hey and the waiter comes around to the side they look at it with you and they go look what he's putting out today now he might have been putting it out for three months right right right but you know it's like and that was a very staid thing you have to be on the team not team restaurant team customer team diner right and with that story with the wine you know this one table of six like we did wine pairings this one table of six wanted to buy all the wrong wine okay so big red wines don't really go with our food you're probably not going to sell mariesling if you're a psalm and you just go like oh you're they're gonna buy a thousand dollar bottle of the wrong wine well you want to sell the thousand dollar bottle but where we're at we're like well you probably shouldn't get that that's not really appropriate for the food you don't want to say that don't embarrass the person you and so you know i'm looking and i'm looking at their shoes and the wife's wearing brand new lebatons how do you know they're brand new well the red is absolutely perfect those things cost about 1200 bucks and that guy over there's got a watch that's a 55 000 watch that guy who's actually ordering the stuff is aspirational because he didn't have any of that so he's either the really rich guy because the really rich guys don't do any of that shit or he's trying to impress these people and it felt like that so rather than say to them you probably shouldn't get that i walk over i'm like hey i'm nick i love wine i'm the owner of the place what did you order and i go what would you drink on tuesday with a pizza now i know he's probably not gonna answer honestly right right i go all that goes really well with the pizza i said you know like we've got a couple like you know you could probably get two or three bottles for what you ordered but they'll pair wonderfully just like that that super tuscan with that pizza you'll get like a better value and i didn't make it about him i didn't cut down the spend at all right and then the waiter is like that's amazing like how'd you do that i'm like she's wearing lebatons that guy's got a 55 000 like you have to know what you're looking at right and that's what magicians do all the time they they they look at their environment they assess their environment and then they put themselves into that environment in a way that accomplishes the effect and so i got really into reading that stuff the theme here of going okay i see an effect that i really like i i'm going to reverse engineer how i would do that not because i want to perform it ever or i want to like know the trick right but because i want to know how he got to understand all the positioning you needed the sight angles the psychology of of the person seeing it and then how can we apply that to the to our sales team at talk selling software or how can we teach our waiters that standing in front of a table is not nearly as good as standing alongside a table and these little things like you know it's so like i would not do training very often because a lot of the training is literally like you don't backhand someone like you know if you're pouring wine and i'm pouring from here i'm not gonna do this i'm gonna use my right hand and open hand it's in the labels they're like small things and at that level i'm not the person to teach that but then i would show them a darren brown video you know and i'd be like today we're gonna watch a magic trick and it doesn't look like a magic trick the great thing about darren brown is he's on the street and it doesn't look like magic so i would then walk them through the anchoring and the wrist and the hold and if you watch this is what he's going to do every time and it seems like it flows like water it just flows perfectly out of him so it never feels like you know when he backs up and they're walking with him hey they're engaged it's easy to success engagement with people. So all of those things are studied in practice. And when you, when you kind of gamify that for your team, whether it's a marketing team, a sales team, whatever it may be, um, it becomes really fun, you know, and you can do that in a smarmy way, like the Jordan Belfort way, right. You know, sell me the pen, you know, and all that, like, yo, how long have you been in the market for a pen? Like, that's not what I'm talking about. And so the great thing about magicians is that there's a suspension of disbelief that you're being sold a bill of goods. You know, that it's literally called a trick and yet you're fine with it. That's where you want to get to, right. You know, and that's why we studied it. And that's why I studied it. And that's why I'm still fascinated with it. So how would you use your brain on a podcast?
Speaker 1So, uh, let's say, let's say you're me and you're going to try to do something, whether it's this podcast or a new podcast, what are some of the questions or, oh my God, think about this? I'm just curious. Huh? That's a really great question.
Speaker 2And I, I don't know the answer.
Speaker 1That's okay. You don't have a good answer. Yeah. Yeah. I don't, you know,
Speaker 2I feel nervous all of a sudden and stumped. That's a good nausea. That's a good question. Yeah. So I listened to podcasts. I listened to your podcast a lot. And I think one of the things I would do is I would never send any questions ahead. You did not with me. Right. I don't know if you ever do or if people request it, but I have on a lot of podcasts where someone sent me a list of the questions before an interview. I never look at them. Right. Like if you're running a podcast, do not send out any information ahead, you know, because it will not feel real and authentic. Like I didn't know you were going to ask that. Right. My response is, is much better because of that. Um, you've done a very good job of being yourself. And then the thing that I would say next is what's the next format? Like, I don't know what that answer is, but podcast, that's a thing you'd be thinking about. Oh, I need to know like, how are, how do you get this down into something that's going to be consumed in the next format? Right. So I would say, I would say, I would say, I would say, I would say, because it went, it went from listening to podcasts. I mean, all in like the last 10 years to now we're visually doing it to something here will be a soundbite that we'll get down to like the clip 15 second short video. That'll probably go. Like I do better. You know, I, a couple of the podcasts I've done have been long form and they've helped me immensely, uh, in business simply because people who I think wouldn't listen to it did. Right. And then they feel like they know me because it's authentic. Have you seen the hot ones? I don't think so. Oh yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1You mean the wings? Yeah. I love it. So it's a simple mechanic where the guy basically says, well, for celebrities coming in and every celebrity's P he uses like real Hollywood celebrity. Yeah. I've seen it. They're all PR trained and they do a thousand of these things. It's like actually not that novel to have access to them anymore. But what, what do you not have access to in that person? It's like, you get to see him sweat. Yes. It's like, but in a likable, understandable way, you're not like putting them under so much pressure.
Speaker 2Right. And it's, it's also like, and
Speaker 1it's relatable sweat. It's relatable. It's spice. Yes. Everybody can kind of even imagine what it looks like. And there's a progression. So you kind of, wherever they start, there's a built in, you know, it's coming and you also know it's coming, you know, it's coming and you want to see what the finale is, how bad does it get? And they can use clips of them like drinking milk and gas, you know, Oh man, they're going to, it gets bad. Yeah. So already it's like that guy took interviews. Yeah. And they're like, Oh man, they're going to, it gets bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One mechanic changed it. And if you look at our space, for example, like in the business space, nobody does that.
Speaker 2I will say that I wanted to, because I'm a golf fan, it would be really fun if we were walking up the hill behind here. Like one of the things I thought of and got rid of was like, and I didn't know that you'd have like a production, so it wouldn't have worked anyway, but like, like doing some activity like that is super cool. Right. I've been very fortunate to golf with amazing people, not just like professional golfers, but just. Amazing people. And four hours on a golf course is a great filter. Right. Because their golf is a game of utter failure. Like no matter how good you are, you're going to do bad, you're going to do poorly. How they react to that is fascinating. And human. And human and all of that. Yeah. And some people are really enjoyable to golf with and some people are not. And it's unpredictable. Like I can't predict. So one of the things I want to do is, you know, Bill Gates loves to golf. If I was going to interview Bill Gates, I'd be like, cool, let's go to the Muni golf course. Right. And we're just going to go and there's going to be like a little handheld camera around and we're just going to play golf. And we'll interview you about your history of software and AI or whatever, but we're going to, we're going to watch you look miserable in the middle. Cause he's not a very good golfer from what I hear. That's a really humanizing thing. Like, it's great to talk about all the things I do well, like, thank you. But like. There's a lot of things I'm miserable at. Like, like let's, let's put a little trouble in the way, which I guess is what your point is with the hot ones. Yeah. Put a little trouble in the way.
Speaker 1I think that's a good, like principle. How, how might we put a little trouble in the way and then you can come up with 10 ideas. Another one would be, you know, you, you talked about like, if you want to learn how to manipulate, let's say attention or make immediately disarm people or be suggestive, we can learn from magicians. Or if you want to create a three hour experience, we can learn from theater. So I wonder like, who should I have been studying? Like, should I have been studying, you know, how does a kind of interrogators for the, you know, the CIA, what do they do to really get somebody to be honest? Yeah. And I'm not going to interrogate somebody, but it'd be very useful to go to that level of stream thousand percent. Just listen to how podcasters like me do what we do.
Speaker 2Right. Well, and also you're trying to break down like for the audience, like, oh, you've had like four different careers. How and why? Right. How did that work? Why were you successful at it? What can people get out of it? It's a show. Don't tell thing like here we're forced to tell. Right. It'd be cool. If we just could show it somehow.
Speaker 1Right. Like Steve Bartlett from diary of a CEO early on the effect of every episode was the guest was going to cry. And so how do we achieve that effect? Method was, I'm going to surprise you at some point with a photo of your mother who has passed away recently, but it's a wonderful thing. And then I got your third grade teacher to write this letter. Yes. And I want you to read it here live. And then the fact was the guests would always get emotional. And you never used to see that. Yeah. That person, the high achiever get emotional. Yeah. And that became a calling card for his show. And then it was like this flywheel thing where the guests kind of know, oh, I better open up. I watch, I watch, I
Speaker 2watch that bear grill show. You know, uh, you know, he's like that outdoor survivor, man, survivor, man kind of thing. And he, he did a series where he takes celebrities and in the wild takes them somewhere and talks about their career. And, and I love the concept of it, but the execution of it, even though I love when he does it, obviously they can't put these people in actual danger. It feels dangerous, but like, you know, they, they can't, they can't really suffer, you know, like Uma Thurman is not going to go. I mean, she was one of the people I'm a big Uma fan. I was going to say that was a random reference. I know it wasn't that random. My wife's going to be like, yeah, okay. So, but like, you know, I watched that and I went like, oh, that wasn't like, that wasn't all that interesting because she never felt actually like emotional. I don't think.
Speaker 1I guess the thing I take from it is I consider myself a creative person. And it sounds like what I'm hearing about how you go to the restaurant industry or how you did, you found arbitrages or, you know, with talk, how you did talk, you know, I've, I've heard you tell some of these stories and I realized, oh, wow, there's levels to this game of how to truly live in that kind of creative mindset. And, you know, there's common patterns, like where can we go? What adjacencies or like totally unrelated spaces could we go learn from and pull? One or two things that might be really.
Speaker 2Well, I mean, and that's the philosophy training to me was like, figure out the first principles thinking when we were building Linea, it was great customer experience, great business, because then you've got a flywheel where if the restaurant's making money, you can reinvest in the customer experience, which makes you an even better restaurant, which means that you're making more money. Yeah. And I think that there's a lot of the garage band, reality among chefs, even some of the famous ones. I mean, I almost broke my TV in my basement when COVID started and they had famous chefs on CNN going, this is the kind of business where at best you make two or 3% and you pay, you know, this month's bills with next month's revenue and all that. And this very famous chef was on TV all the time saying that, and that we need to print $2 billion for the restaurant industry and all that. And I was like, this guy, I mean, I literally emailed him. I was like, stop. Saying that. That's not true. He's like, what part of it's not true? Like my restaurants make 2%. I'm like, well, that's because you don't actually, you haven't figured it out. Like you should be the last spokesperson on there. But he was a very successful TV chef, not a very successful restaurant owner. And those are two different things. And the press doesn't get that they're two different things, you know?
Speaker 1Well, for a lot of these industries that are like kind of art craft base, openly desiring running it as a good business is sort of low status. It's low status. You lose some cool points. It's like, that's what I mean by the garage band thing.
Speaker 2Like, oh, you sold out. Like, you know, it's like, for me, I'm really, really proud. I sold the Alinea Group three years ago. Our investors got quarterly distributions from the time I started it in 2005, all the way to when I sold it in 2023. And then they got 8X their initial investment walking out the door. Right. So I think overall it was like 27 or 28X. Right. So if you put in a hundred thousand dollars in 2005 into a restaurant that you thought was an art project, in 2019, you got about a quarter million back.
Speaker 1See, this is why I got mad at you last time. I was like, dude, I used to always just say restaurants were horrible. business. And I realized, no, no, no. The way I was horrible at the restaurant, it's a skill
Speaker 2issue. Well, and you know, look, I mean, we could have gotten lucky, but like at the, at the end of the day, like the end of whatever is relatively small. Like you could say like, well, you caught the right thing and this and that, but you know, the first year we did a linear, uh, it did about 5 million in sales and made like 8%, 7%. I was considered really good. And I'm going like, well, that's a giant downgrade from my previous career. Um, and a lot more work. And then at the peak, like it was doing 20 some million dollars a year and making, you know, 18, 20%. And like, that was, I needed to build a software company to do that. We need to get rid of all the phone lines to do that. You know, uh, Steve Bernanke, our CFO came up with Marimekko charts to do, to do all of the food costing. That wasn't me. That was, you know, a guy that I helped to mentor. And then I learned from him and, you know, it's like all of those things we disseminated freely to the industry. No one wanted to do them. Right. And so like you find yourself during COVID looking at the TV going, oh my God, like it's so broken, the information that comes out. And then the thing that happens to me is I go, what else is like that? And as it turns out, probably everything. Like, you know, if I do know awesome food reporters, I know awesome economic reporters and all that, but chances are that if you're going to write a book about trading, I don't pick on Michael Lewis here. Great writer, great writer, love his books, love reading them. When he finally wrote about something I actually knew about, I went, ah, this is all wrong, right? Flash boys is all bullshit because if you show up and start asking traders, Hey, how did you do that? And you engender their trust in order to betray it because they know you're going to write a book. What do you tell them? Well, you tell them the shit that worked five years ago. If my arbitrage between the Amex and the Merck was working right now, we would not be sitting here talking about it. Right. I'd be going like, oh, really hard. Doesn't work. Like, no, that's going to work. Right. And so like you read that and then you go, oh man, that's, you know, and I think that's a lot of where the current frustration with the press comes from is that when you have all of these people who can see information freely in each of their silos, where they're really learned, all of a sudden you go, oh, that's not what I said. Or that's not, you know, I love doing these long form things because if I put my foot in my mouth, everyone can see it, but it's really hard to take it out of context. Or if you did take it out of context, you'd go like, well, go look at there. Yeah. Look at that. And it was direct. It wasn't filtered. Yeah. Right. So, you know, I, I, I feel like that's part of the disconnect, politically these days. That's part of the disconnect with all of that is that you have, again, different timescales of information. And I have a really good friend that gets all of his media consumption for lack of a better term, filtered through three things. And I get it from the unfiltered messy versions of X and Reddit and boards. And like, I'm a geek, right? So I'm in all that. And by the time he reads it, I'm like, that's two weeks ago, man. Like it also it's wrong. That's actually not what happened or not what was said, or you're not getting the context of that thing. And so I'm like, oh my God, I'm consuming, you know, for sure. I'm also consuming it wrong. Right. Because I'm not close enough to it to really fully get it. So what I try to do is I'm fortunate enough being 58 years old that I just try to like, get to the person. Like if I see something and I'm like, that probably doesn't seem right. I just email the person that.
Speaker 1Well, one of my favorite stories you told me was when you were selling talk and I've gone through M and a, and I think every entrepreneur should try to listen to more M and a stories, because if you ever get to that point, it's going to be basically your life's work, you know, five, 15 years, however long you've been doing this company. And then in this like three to six months span, you're going to have this huge swing in the outcome that you're going to have price. Yeah. Maybe the deal falls apart, which happens all the time. And you're doing this thing with your other side of the table knows a lot more about this has done this 10 times more than you have. Yeah. And so you're going to going into the gunfight with a, you know, butter knife trying to do this. And you told this great story that resonated with me about when you were selling talk and how you treated the lawyers and the diligence process where you kind of like took control of it entrepreneurially rather than being a passenger to the process.
Speaker 2We, we had incredible growth during COVID and the trader in me was like, we are going to lap this growth and we're still going to do well, but we're not going to go 200% next year. Right. This is my moment. Like it looks really good right now. And with technology, you know, you could have something that that's, you know, growing 200% a year. And then all of a sudden you grow 50% one year. And even though that's amazing, the world of M and a and VC just goes, Oh, like you, you are, you are on your way down. And pretty soon you're going to be like a legacy. You're Comcast pretty soon, even though it's not true. So Steve Bernacki, myself the lawyers would go like well we just got the diligence list it's 896 questions and we would convert it from excel into google docs and then steve would go through and he would color code it all and and we would assign it to the people that could answer all the questions and of course like the investment bankers and lawyers kind of thing would go okay well this will take like four to six weeks right and i was like we built dashboards for all this i could have it like two days but then they realize they ain't getting paid if it's in two days right right you know it's like they're billing hourly and there's four of them so you're at you're at thirty two hundred dollars an hour or whatever every time you get on a zoom call with them and then you know the investment bankers want whatever three percent to four percent or whatever so we just went we don't need an investment bank like there's nothing here that we can't figure out on our own and of course the board hated that idea but we still had a controlling interest and so i just said like awesome we'll do it for two percent does that make you feel better for real and they so you your own your own investment yeah and i'm like i wasn't gonna do that but they were so adamant that it was hard and i said well you know like look they're getting paid four percent i'll save you two percent we'll take it and that way we'll be beholden if we don't get it done like we won't get paid which is weird they should just say no to that but they didn't say no they said yes and we did that whole list in three days we just stayed up hey just locked yourself in a room lock yourself in a room did the whole thing in three days there was like you know there's a lot of questions that were like unclear what this what you're asking here you know or irrelevant but and then they just went what is this we're like that's your diligence you gotta tell the spock the spock story oh god there was i'm not letting you up okay yeah there was a guy on the other side use his name or the firm but you know there'd be this is during covid too so they wouldn't be in person and there'd be like 30 people i mean i have screenshots zoom call zoom call of 30 people all lawyers all lawyers our side their side a couple people from squarespace and then the three of us basically and we knew the answers to all this stuff because we did it ourselves there's no one to parse it through whatever and so then i would just ask a question or steve would ask a question or jeff would ask you a question and a lawyer would literally go i will take that to my clients and i'd be like your client's on the like i can see her like we're here we've got two weeks left let's not leave it till like and it had to be done one of the critical things and and the reason it got done is because they were going to go public the following quarter and all of their s1 information whatnot need to be locked down end of q1 which happened to be on march 31st okay like it actually followed the calendar year so we had to be done otherwise it was not gonna happen for six months to a year and maybe never right and finally i just looked and i was like hey spock shut the out and everyone even some people on his own team were kind of like you know kind of tried not to giggle but you could see them you know and i was taking screenshots the whole time because this guy it takes guts to say that to the other side so angry because like did he wonder why you were calling him spot no no no no this was his entire strategy was simply to close at noon on the last day possible right because that's how they could get the most out of it right and that's one of the you know you were we were talking earlier like one of the superpowers is not a superpower it's just what what is this person's motivation if they're on your team even are they are your incentives aligned i learned very quickly at alinea that my manager's incentives on a wednesday night were not to be full and i learned it because this one guy said to me nick if every day was saturday we would be so tired and burned out because i'd be like we have 140 person wait list we're doing 80 people tonight 94 people saturday why is every day not saturday why are we not doing 94 people every night right and he said i'm holding back those because otherwise we'd be too tired and i'm like but you don't get that like we could hire 10 more people and you could work four days a week instead of five and get paid more right he did not last much longer like because i literally went into the primitive pre-talk talk and opened up 110 seats for every day for the next two weeks and we sold all 110 and i went in the kitchen and i told grant we're doing 110 every day for the next two weeks he's like okay and then i knew that they would make it happen and then the guy just kind of walked off like you know and so you just go like okay like i that was my fault in a lot of ways like in hindsight i did not align the incentives i did not explain explain that every day should be saturday and you know it's like there's a certain group of people that'd be like you know
Speaker 1yes every day is saturday like it's game day so i have this phrase that intensity is the strategy what i mean by that is i spent a lot of my life searching for the better way the better strategy the hack the shortcut the whatever as i hang out with enough winners you realize like the difference is not that they knew something i didn't know or they get some magic formula but like they applied a greater level of intensity to a pretty visible strategy that i could have seen and actually the intensity almost changes the strategy over time just like yeah and
Speaker 2also when you're wrong you go like oh i was i was really wrong i mean i just said in hindsight thinking about it i did that wrong he did not know why that was important to the business right or why it could make his life better that was my fault but do you think
Speaker 1that you had was the trading floor like the formative period where you so i will tell you
Speaker 2a great year i will tell you an exact thing that that is a tautological stupidity that is in a book called market wizards so this this book called market wizards it's one of the rare trading books that's great now everything in it's out of date in terms of the the process of like the floor traders and all that but what's not out of date with the market wizards book the mentality of the people that he profiles in there and interviews is great and one of them was called one lot wonders and so this guy would just trade one contract at a time really small and one of the questions i remember this and i think about it all the time is that he asked the trader what should a failing trader do to become a successful trader and he goes well that's a dumb question because a successful trader will figure that out and it sounds stupid right and all he's saying is like well no like if you're a success if you're going to be a successful trader you will stop doing all the stupid and i don't know what stupid you're doing you know i can't know right and i can't put it in this book and in this interview but it's a mark of a successful person that they will at the end of every day like kind of like you were saying about chris rock at the end of every trading day you do the post-mortem or whatever you know it's the google version of it post-mortem you know like something goes wrong you analyze what went wrong one of the things i tell people is like no one likes getting punched in the face but there's a certainly a lot of people that when they get punched in a face a lot instead of saying like maybe i should learn to bob and weave a little they blame the puncher or they blame the referee or they're like maybe i shouldn't be in the ring or whatever it is right and you know that's why you know that's the flip side is the mike tyson quote right you know everybody's got to play until they get punched in the face well it's true you got a plan thank you you know and i love that too you know i used to show that to people because i'd be like yeah like we have a plan our plan is changing right because we we are absolutely getting destroyed right now and i was wrong and one of the things i hate about managers and when i have worked in other organizations you know i'd be sitting in a meeting for two hours and like i'd be like can we just all admit that this is stupid like we should not like i don't care who's who owned it or whatever like it's just not working right kill it like this one company bought this other small company and i'm like you have 14 different competitors now and they'll never be monetized right can we admit that that's never going to make a dime now you could keep it for strategic reasons but you probably shouldn't spend 10 million dollars a year developing and everyone's like everyone who had ownership of it no one would just go like yeah it was right we screwed that up we shouldn't have bought that
Speaker 1i love that a successful trader will figure out how to be a successful trade successful trader which is a he will edit out the stupid he's doing yes he'll just over time every night edit out snip out some of the stupidity until there's not enough left yeah and he'll be successful yeah i mean look
Speaker 2like everything around us here i'm not a viticulturalist at all i am i don't know agriculture i'm learning but i got this place and got here and was very scared i didn't know how to shut off the sprinklers in this lawn today because it all changed in the last couple weeks and you learn you know you start going around you start learning and i i got asked to be the keynote speaker at the napa valley grape growers association this past spring and i said oh you you've got the wrong person you know i i don't know anything about grape growing really and i'm learning and but some of my heroes in this industry are the people who started that 30 40 years ago right and so i'm like i'm not i'm not going in there and telling randy dunn like anything about grape growing right and they said no you're the optimist left here like you're building you're planting grapes and you're building a wine bar in town and you're you bought property when everyone's selling property we just want to know your why so i was like okay i'll show up and the first thing i said is i know nothing about grape growing i hope to learn from all of you they all big smiles on their face because they thought i was going to get up there and be like new new rich guy comes to napa and tells people how to grow grapes right and then the software guy because they all use grape growing they're like ewes talk the software guy is going to tell us that the tasting rooms are doing great now even though we know they're not right okay and all that and what i said was you had 30 years up and to the right you thought you weren't going to get kicked in the face at some point prices weren't going to go down really who told you that was it the hippies that came here in the 50s right you know it's like they couldn't have imagined 38 000 a ton what makes you think that you're owed that walked out and people were like yeah yeah like let's go you know and this cycle is going to be like any other cycle this time scale is really long these grapes won't be good until i'm 70. and so like that's weird you can't yell at the grapes and have them grow faster but the way that they run their businesses can feel different right and i think i just gave a little hope in that like you have copium or hopium and i'm more of a hopium like figure out you know kind
Speaker 1of guy right it's like the the matrix red pill blue yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah choose one of these yeah we got to talk about strange house so you got to tell this story because this is one of the coolest projects that i hope it happens sean are we going to make this happen it's got to happen i mean you know how can you listen you should listen to this podcast and be like that guy would make that happen you know what i mean yeah if anyone's listening to this
Speaker 2i'm gonna look at the camera if anyone's listening down the barrel we are building the weirdest coolest thing i say we i we are now after like a couple conversations okay like where to begin and
Speaker 1it's it's just another one of these you have no business doing this but i'm gonna do it anyway and i'm gonna shoot to the very top when i try to do this and because of that i'm gonna like i'm gonna go figure this out all right i'm gonna i'm gonna figure this out one step at a time so so tell the
Speaker 2back story okay the back story is i was doing what i do on like a wednesday night at 10 o'clock and i i open up a bottle of wine too late and um everyone's like going to bed i start watching some random youtube magic thing you know and there's a guy who i'd never seen you know comes up on the feed nate staniforth does the lottery trick and the effect is that he's in an uh he's in a theater they throw around you know a beach ball or like a little crumpled piece of paper in this case and six people call out a number and at the end the last person comes up and in the wallet that's been sitting you know at the beginning he puts it on a stool on a stool there you know that comes up on stage and he opens up the wallet and he pulls out the lottery ticket from whatever state they're in and the guy reads off the numbers of of the uh what the random people and the crowd and they're they're genuinely random like you can tell that they're genuinely random they're not stooges they're not placed balls bouncing around and and the people are clearly you could see the audience going by the time they named the third number like you know that the lottery trick right and nate gives such it's kind of like that that's not making sense empty stage just one stool it's very elegant he's very qualified it about a big fog machine there's no craziness and boy i like this effect a lot but the thing that i didn't like was that he called out the numbers in the order that the audience called them out and every lottery ticket i thought and then i had to look it up if you buy and i played lottery for no edge so um they're an ordinal number right so if you go in and scratch off a lotto ticket or call it in or whatever it's always going to go for from 1 3 17 whatever but in his it would go 17 3 whatever the audience called it out so this upset me greatly right you know i was like watching it going like this is like one of the greatest illusions ever given my disorders it bothered me to no end this bothered me to no end because i thought he he did such a wonderful thing and then at the end he just messed it up just like a hair you know and so i reverse engineered how i would make that lottery ticket appear in that wallet and starting at the end working backwards which is kind of like like i look i think of everything like you know those mazes as a kid and there's like the mouse in the middle and the or the cheese in the middle the mouse in the end you have to like do the maze you know i would always like you're like you're not supposed to in the classroom but of course you start start with the cheese and work your way out right so that's that's it in a nutshell start with the cheese and work your way to the mouse right and so i did that with this and and you know had a reasonable solution i thought for how it would happen but i was really bothered by this thing so i'm like well you know i don't think i'm giving anything away that like everyone knows that the ticket couldn't have been in there the whole time so clearly it's getting printed at some point here i don't think nate's going to get angry with me on that so i was just like well i could write like a little arduino algorithm or however he's doing this for him and so i wrote him this long cold email you know as i want to do saying love your stuff i've watched all the stuff now and like man i love that effect so you gotta get the numbers right and much to my amazement like five minutes later my phone rings i expect to never hear from this guy because magicians also are kind of like yeah who are you that you're reverse engineering my eye on youtube yeah yeah some yeah right and nate was who are you and what what's going on and i was like well you know i own restaurants and i'm i kind of like look at magic he's like no no this is this is a great email this is a great like this is weird like only one other person's ever noticed that and i was like and he's like one of the best magicians in the world like you're not a magician i'll go no this is this is really weird and then he said something to me that i was really mad at myself for not noticing and that was hey i did it that way of course but the audience couldn't follow along and because two people out of five million noticed the numbers wrong doesn't matter matters to you kind of mattered to me too when i first did it not the best way to do the effect and i went of course it's not like i just went that's it i thought nothing more of it right but we exchanged books he sent me a book he wrote called finding real magic he went to india and i've read it after you read this unbelievable book wonderful guy like great thinker great everything and then he was working as a consultant on building magic for david blaine and i went and saw the vegas show because i i don't go to vegas i don't gamble but my wife and i happened to have to go there and then we got stuck there for a night and i was like oh i know that guy i know the guy who's working on that and we went to the show and that version of it i didn't love it but when i had breakfast with nate the next morning and he said how'd you like the show what am i gonna say two choices be nice i was nice okay it's not it's not typically me but i was like oh it's great and he just looked at me he goes nick i read people for a living what didn't you like like instantly and i said well i had done another email but i didn't send it and i pulled it out and he looked at it he said did blaine put you up to that and i go no because blaine had been to alinea a couple times i had never met him but you know and i go no no no no like i just i wrote that like when i got back from the show last night so it was fresh in my head but i felt like jerk sending it to you and he goes i gotta show you something and he had written almost the same email to all the production team like a week earlier and he was like that's extraordinary and then we started talking about the business of magic which i'd never really thought about before okay and he was kind of lamenting the fact that the next david blaine is not going to get minted that kind of tv doesn't happen and he's gotten tons of views on youtube and it doesn't monetize and you know he's been doing magic and looks at it as an art form and a love of his like many magicians and there's this guild of people that do it but they're kind of seen as outsiders right you know it's like you're either the the weirdo that does the kids you know birthday party with the balloons at the end or whatever and you're either the weirdo that does the kids you know and a lot of people don't see the art of it and i think he saw that i did see the art of it and the complexity of it and then i just said to him like yeah i had an idea years ago for a restaurant that would have a narrative arc through it and people would move through it like disney's haunted house because one of the problems of the restaurant is you have 50 seats they're gonna sit there for two hours you're gonna get a turn a turn and a half maybe you do 120 people at those 50 seats maybe you can only do 75 capped by the turnover right but i don't think you like caps very much but the wonder correct and one of the cool things though about disney is that the haunted house you get 30 people they have very intimate experience they go to the next room they're having another cool experience next 30 people come in and every 10 minutes whatever it is whatever it is yeah whatever it is and i was like you know i wanted to do a restaurant that way but the cogs were terrible like too many variable too many servers too many rooms too it's just is not gonna work and we talked about it for years i analyzed it to death and i'm like the economic you'd have to charge way more than it's worth to have it work and that's true of all the pop-ups like unless you get an underwriter like american express or whatever the pop-ups tend not to work either even though they're famous and they pop up all over the world um and people pay 500 to go to what xyz pop-up they don't really make money that's the weird secret of it because it's the production's too high and they're not okay but then i was sitting there going it would work for magic the theater scale needs to be different you know it's like when you go see sigfried and roy or whatever and a lion pops out it's not that surprising because there's a giant stage and they can hide a lion but if we're in a little room and a lion pops out holy shit that's something right because that's new and also the the kind of magic i like the best is close-up magic because i know exactly what they're doing i know i know how all of it's done at this point in my life a really great close-up magician is a thing of beauty it is an art form it's like watching a great musician or a great ballerina or something like that it's awesome i mean i'm getting choked up thinking about some of these people and what they do to make it happen it's amazing so i say that to nate and leave and then he starts calling me with questions how much does insurance cost what kind of room how many square feet do you think we would need you know all these things and we email back and forth and the day i closed on this and my wife was running she runs women's hiking groups all around the world she was on a hike somewhere i think portugal maybe i'm not somewhere in europe and i was terrified of this whole thing and i get a fedex package and it's from nate and it says hey nick thank you so much this is what i've been working on for the last eight months thanks for the inspiration thanks for the questions and here is my proposal for how to do that thing that you told me about and i think it's the solution and take your time reading it i'm on a 10-day trip to canada with my family that i take every year and i'll be completely off the grit so i'm sitting up there and i got a lot of shit to worry about here and i read the whole thing and every like 10th page there was a qr code and you'd look at it and it would be him in his studio with a scale model of a room and the first one when it first came on i just assumed like oh these are videos he's done and i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna be done and but it would be like hey nick okay room three is the car and i would be like oh my god he made all of the videos for me and then i got to the spreadsheets and the insurance all that and a lot of that was like verifiably like kind of wrong but here he was doing it all like it wasn't just like a business plan of like the thing he was great at it included all of the things to do a proof of concept that this would indeed be a great business and i had put a limit a bottom line i said look if you build something like that it can't gross under 20 million like it sounds like a big number but like when you do the throughput and the math it's actually not that big of a number at 120 ticket price or something and that's what it is you know and i started going through like whenever i go to like the sphere i'm like what are the economics of the sphere right you know you're not watching the show i can't help myself right so it was a great business plan and by the time he got out of the canadian wild i had read it like three times and my first thing i said to him i was like this is the last thing i need in my life right now but there's no way we can't do this right and that was three years ago and in the past three years we have scoured the world for real estate because the real estate is the thing you get married to it's like the ray kroc story like they're not in the business of selling hamburgers they're in the business of real estate i learned long ago that the deal that you make for a restaurant or for a show or whatever in this case you are not renting a theater on broadway a purpose-built theater that is a small high hoop right there are very few people that are going to do that and i knew the guys for years uh who did sleep no more and sleep no
Speaker 1more was a similar idea where traditionally the theater is you sit in a chair it's happening on the stage you watch the thing shows over sleep no more was like you go to this hotel motel yeah and the play is happening in and around you and it
Speaker 2makes no sense it's not linear it's not like
Speaker 1it because you go to a different room a different scene is going on yeah i don't know what the hell's happening they're dancing not talking and it's hamlet and like but the thing was like it was sold out made like hundreds of millions in revenue yeah
Speaker 2yeah yeah and it also like the first time i did it it was like nothing i'd ever seen and while this is different because it use it utilizes illusion to create that sense of childlike wonder and awe that we were talking about earlier right and that's what we were trying to do with olivia cheese that's the truth that's
Speaker 1the the customer's cheese that they would yeah a moment and i would i would say that
Speaker 2as much as i love ai and i love i am i i live mostly here i would like to connect my body more to my mind like you know like yeah like i'm not as disciplined about exercise as i should be and things like that but theater great theater great music is about human connection and utilizing illusion now in an immersive thing that you cannot get any other way feels like it's going to be more important two years from now than it is less important two years from now yeah because more and more and more things are going to go the ai route they're going to go in the non-person right you know they don't need to be person to person anymore. Agents are going to be doing things. I love all that. I am all in on all of it. I still believe that sitting down to a table is important. I still believe that growing the wine in 10 years is important. And I want to create human connection among complete strangers because you don't meet, people don't meet each other anymore. And all the discourse is that's an other, that person's an other. And I guarantee you, you could take any two people and put them in the environment that we're creating. They could hate each other politically. They could be from opposite ends of the earth. And at the end of that, we need to make them love each other.
Speaker 1Right. That's it.
Speaker 2And so how do you do that? Well, creating moments of awe and wonder where you feel like you're five years old again is what Strange House is about. And it's going to be really hard to build and really expensive to build. And we found a space, 90,000 square feet underneath Wall Street in Manhattan, six months of, of, I'm negotiating the LOI on the lease, because when you go to a REIT and you go, ah, I've got just the thing, it's kind of a magic show, but not really. Right. In fact, there's no magician and there's no stage. And it's kind of more like Disney's haunted house, but there's nothing haunted and it's about human connection. Nothing like this has ever existed. Yes. And so there's no comparables. And they just go, yeah, well, we, we've listened to your podcast and we've seen that you're successful, but like, what do you know about doing this? Right. And so, then you go like, well, Nate. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, you know, he's got some YouTube views. He's a magician. Like, we don't really want to lease out 90,000 square feet to a magician. So then you start talking to the powers that be in other things. So like Alon Lee, who's a friend of yours who connected us, did Exploding Kittens. I actually play tested that at a thing called Ord Camp that was run at Google. And you meet these creators, these builders, and the people who build are the people like that, that one lot wonder trader guy, who, you know, I sent this to Alon and Alon was like, this is what I've been waiting for my entire life. And he goes, he tells the same story about magic that I told. And when you watch his videos on how to build games and all that, they are about human connection and about getting a small group of people together and a family together. And my, my family, my wife and my younger son do the New York times crossword puzzle every day. They do British cryptic crosswords that I can't remotely get to. And my wife builds puzzles for family Thanksgiving to like do things like that. And so you meet Alon and he has passionately thought about these things and built amazing things. So we're trying to put together the dream team on this and we're running out of time because real estate only sits for so long. Yeah. So I don't know if it's going to happen. Is it going to happen, Sean?
Speaker 1It has everything it needs. It has everything it needs, except for a lot of the things that you talked about earlier in this episode, which is basically, if you look at when you were talking about building the arbitrage and you had to run fiber into the thing and they don't let you have the permit, you bribe the guy with the James, you figure out the way, you know, it's like, okay, you do it with Alinea and we've got no experience or whatever. Okay. We're going to start posting about this. We're going to open source everything that we're doing. We're going to build this wait list so that on day one, we have the right people who understand the story and are bought in. You found the way. So like, to me, the question of, is it going to happen or not? It's always like a self-referential question. It's like, well, you make it happen or not.
Speaker 2It's like the dumb trader will do like the dumb theater producer will, will not get it done. And the good one, obviously it's going to get done.
Speaker 1Right. Exactly. I think choice more than it is. Yeah. Like a question.
Speaker 2Yeah. I think what we're trying to do that's challenging for people to wrap their heads around is it works at scale and not at not scale. Can't do a small, you can't play test it. Right. Like a board game. And this is not Alon's problem. I'm just using it as a, as an analogy. You know, it's like some of the illusions that we've crafted and that Nate has done a technical guide that's hundreds of pages long that we don't want to really show to that many people. Really smart people will look at it and go, how do you know it will work? And it's like, well, we've spent the last three years working on it. Like we have the best people in the world who build these sorts of things, building it. Like the people who built Taylor Swift stage are going to build room three. For real. Like that's literally true. But until you spend a couple million dollars to build room three, you don't have room three. Yeah. So you could, you could make walkthrough videos and VR things and all that. And, you know, part of me is, is a little bit pissy in that, like, well, I didn't know anything about restaurants. They got 28 X, you know, and the tech people that I talked to go, oh yeah, well, you know, technology, but you don't know theater. And I'm like, nah, you said no to me eight years ago. I said, I didn't know how to build a software company. So, you know, and I get that, like, that's part of human nature. And then they're kind of like, what's the point? And the point is, it's going to be a great business. It has the throughput of Disney. It could be like Cirque du Soleil. You could build five of these things. Right. But the point is it's hitting the market at the right, with the right thing at the right moment. It's the Gretzky skate to where the puck's going to be. In-person experiences are going to be more important every single year from now until we hit deep. Like the holodeck. Right. Like, you know, and this is a different one. It's not a concert. It's not a theater. It's, it's, it is its own thing, which makes it really hard to reproduce.
Speaker 1Yeah. I think people will get it. I mean, I. You got it. In five minutes, I was like, oh, this is amazing. This is going to be a one in the world type of thing that exists. You read Nate's book. You're like, all right. Yeah. It's doable. Nate's wonderful. This guy's like, you know, he spent his whole life basically preparing for this. So you sort of figured that part out. Yeah. I think it's going to happen. I think we've got to figure out the way.
Speaker 2Yeah. I agree. I still feel that way. I'm like, that's the last thing I need. And then every time I pick up the phone, which is every day and we, Nate and I talk through something, I, you know, I'm often walking up the hill up there or whatever with the dog and I get off the phone and I'm like, man, I need to, like, we need to start, we need to get the next step because if we don't get the next step, we're not going to get it done. And it deserves to exist. Yeah. Like it's a great enough thing that it deserves to exist. Well, you found your next boulder. We found, we found the next, we found the next boulder. Nick, thanks for coming on. Thanks, Sean. Appreciate you, man. Always good to see you.
Speaker 1All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out. wherever you get your podcasts.
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