The, the change and very few. Guests will ever ask whether MIA is an ai. And of course if if they do that, she answers truthfully and she says, actually, I am an AI assistant, but probably one in a thousand guests will ask, what is the thing that makes it feel more human? I mean, that's just thousands and thousands and thousands of [00:04:00] conversations.
And what we do is like at the beginning of an engagement with a restaurant, we'll take all the emails that they've ever sent back and forth with guests for private events and we'll, and Mia will take all that information so that she can model herself in terms of the natural language. And so for, for example, we work with one of the largest wedding destinations in Hawaii and MIA is not called Mia.
In that case, she's called Lei, LEI, and she starts everything off with Aloha and ends her messages often with Mahalo. And she, um, one of the first things she does is she scrapes the website and any information Google has about the restaurant, Yelp and Open Table and, and Resi and so forth. She'll take on the little nuances of how you guys speak.
And so that's really it. And then of course there's probably a lot of pixie dust that I think. [00:05:00] Open ai. And then my, my software engineers, we have a seven person software engineering team, so there's probably a lot of pixie dust that they sprinkle on there to make her
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Sound. Yeah. I guess maybe another way to ask is what are the things that make it feel not human?
Mm-hmm. Because it, it, something happened where you, where there was this, whatever the UX was, you notice that, okay, now this, now this feels human. What was happening before that? Yeah. That was like the, you know, whatever, it's the clunkiness or the awkwardness or, or, yeah.
Jesse Stein: She would respond too quickly. By text message with responses that were too long.
She would, um, be overly polite, you know, over and over thanking them. She would, yeah, toward the beginning. She would make all manner of little nuanced, you know, errors that, you know, humans kind of have antennae behind antenna that pick up on why is this person human? I think it's called the Turing test.
Right? And so with Mia, she's gotten better and better and better to the extent that. All those little nuances precisely [00:06:00] how long she takes to respond to, to text messages. For example, someone will say something how long she responds from time to time. She'll make little on purpose, little grammatical, um, or spelling, uh, mistakes and so forth, and all that kind of adds up to feeling human.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, I think it's so smart too that it's text because you also have like a lot more window of error. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. What's the, uh, you know, have you thought about sort of the long term vision for what you're building here?
Jesse Stein: Yeah, we wanna be, I mean, there's 120,000 event capable venues just in the United States alone.
That's everything from wineries to breweries to. You know, um, restaurants, obviously of, of all, I mean, fine dining restaurants, there's about 15% of fine dining restaurants that we consider in our total addressable market. It's 750,000 restaurants in the us. About 15% of 'em are even capable. [00:07:00] And then entertainment venues, um, like Topgolf and so forth.
And then hotels, uh, of course as well. But we're really, our bullseye is. Restaurants, the pain there is just so obvious. And so that's what we eat, sleep, and breathe is, is restaurateurs. And like yesterday, I sat face to face for an hour with an event coordinator for uh, a restaurant that we work with in West Hollywood, but the event coordinators here in Miami because the restaurant group is headquartered in Miami.
And I learned a ton. From, from her about little nuances of what she, what's helpful for Mia to do for her, and then what actually creates extra work and is a pain. Uh, so yeah. So we're just obsessed with making this perfect for, for private events.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Actually, I, I think I, I noticed, um, you, you, you mentioned a number of times, uh, I spoke to.
You know, this [00:08:00] restaurant ceo, and I've spoken to so many, uh, restaurant folks. It sounds like you've been doing a lot of, of research, obviously probably prior to building this, and now that this is live and, and, and, and launching, how, how do you go about that? Are you just reaching out to restaurants and asking them to chat?
Like, you know, it seems like a pretty small team as well. Like what are you, like, how are you interfacing with all these, all these restaurant operators? Yeah, well
Jesse Stein: LinkedIn has been a great opportunity, so I have a very specific strategy with LinkedIn that I think a lot of your viewers can and listeners can perhaps map or transplant to their own businesses or their own lives.
So with, with LinkedIn, you wanna kind of like, if you have a business, right? You wanna think about who is your ideal customer persona. So if you have a restaurant. You definitely want to be connected on LinkedIn with any prospective employee down the line. [00:09:00] Uh, you know, and so you could start with like, you know, who would be the prospective general managers, uh, investors, and then like any influencer within your town or city from the mayor on down, any.
Restaurant journalist, any restaurant, you know, podcaster like you, Josh, any you know, board member of the National Restaurant Association, like anyone who's spoken at conferences, anybody who has ever amplified in any way, shape or form one of your competitors. And a great thing to do is. So we talked about built with earlier.
A great thing to do is to go to a website called SEMrush, S-E-M-R-U-S-H. Josh is nodding his head 'cause it sounds like he's used it before. And you can go type in your competitors. There's a lot you can do with SEMrush. The one thing you can do is see who are all the people linking. [00:10:00] To your competitors.
So through that you can figure out who are all the journalists, who are the thought leaders, who are the podcasters, you know, and other influencers and micro influencers who you just have to be connected with. And LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn? It's like, gee, isn't that a recruiting? You know, isn't that a place to go find a job?
No. Like, it's that too, but it's very, very quickly becoming a social network. There's nearly a billion people up on LinkedIn and there's a ton of people who go, who are not looking for a, a Jo employment in any way, shape or form. And so, and LinkedIn is where Instagram was. 10 or 12 years ago in terms of opportunity for a business owner to cut through and take cold audiences that are super valuable for you and warm them up and turn them into either customers or employees or investors [00:11:00] or acquirers or amplifiers.
And the way to do it is like you want to identify, the way I did it is I identified all the. Multi-unit, fine dining restaurant owners and investors. And then I ranked them in sending order of the ones that had the most connections on LinkedIn and were most active on LinkedIn. And then I connect with about 200 people every week.
So you can connect with roughly 10,000 people a year on LinkedIn. If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can click with a with, you can connect with a little bit more. But that's kinda like, so you connect with them and then what you do, and I know all this because I went out and one of the first things I did is I interviewed a bunch of people who've crushed it on LinkedIn.
I've watched them over time and I'm like, tell me how you did it. You know, here I, I'll, I have this value to give you in return, gimme the blueprint. [00:12:00] And so success leaves clues, right? So I would interview these people and then, and then they tell me exactly how they cracked the LinkedIn algorithm. And then I kind of took the common threads between all of 'em, and then that became my playbook, and I'm giving it to you right now.
So, or parts of it. I can't give you all, we don't have enough time, but I think this is super. Would you agree, Josh, this is really valuable for your listeners. Yeah. I, you know,
Josh Sharkey: because it depends on the context of the, you know, the, of the restaurant operator versus the, I mean, there's, I'm sure there's a lot of things they're trying to do to do online.
Yeah. You mentioned something else, and I think it might, it might lead to this, but I don't know if you were harnessing Robert Kini when you did this, but you, uh, you posted about, uh, the Mozart of sales, this right hummus shop. And the rule of reciprocity. And obviously immediately I thought of, uh, Kini. But, um, I don't know if that was on purpose, but
Jesse Stein: 60 Minutes, actually 60 Minutes had a something and they called somebody the Mozart of, and I forgot what it was, but [00:13:00] I, I actually took that saying from 60 Minutes.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. But there, there's a, there's a guy, and I don't know if you, if you knew him, uh, if you were just sort of like, um, reiterating the story that you had heard about this hummus, uh, the guy that was selling hummus, and I thought it was a really, yeah. Really great
Jesse Stein: anecdote. Yeah. He's, uh, he's at the farmer's market two blocks from me every Saturday and he blows my mind.
So I had to, had to write a piece about him.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, it could Do you mind sharing that story? So that was a really interesting, uh, you just approach the
Jesse Stein: Absolutely. So he's one of the best salespeople I've ever seen in my life. So there's a farmer's market couple blocks from where I'm sitting here in Ki Biscayne, Florida, which is a little island, about 12 minutes from downtown Miami.
And he. Comes every Saturday and he has a small booth and he has, it's all Middle Eastern food and he's got the various dipping sauces like hummus and tabouleh and leadin and baba, gnu and [00:14:00] everything stacked up like that. So you see like this wall of. Goodies basically. And then he's got his pita bread, he's got his baklava, and what he does is just incredible.
And first of all, he makes, I think in that post, I don't have the post in front of me. He makes something like $5,000 in net cash flow each day. Was that what I calculated? 60, 60, 100. $6,100. Yeah. And I confirmed that with him the other day. Actually. He was a little coy, but he implied that it was even more, and he does it in like five or six hours.
So he is making like a thousand dollars an hour. And of course there aren't farmer's markets every day. I think he is able to do two or three farmer's markets, uh, a week. He's been doing this for several years, and what he does is he just evokes reciprocity all day [00:15:00] long. And what I mean by that is he is giving out samples almost continuously.
And so you'll, you're standing there and not. Seven seconds go by before he's dipping a piece of pita and not one, but typically two or three of the dipping sauces, which I'll explain why he does this. And then he holds, holds it out to you. So even if you weren't hungry in the moment or whatever, it's just right there in front of you, you're gonna take it and then he doubles down.
So the moment after you eat it, and there's typically in order to make the $6,000 in a day, there's usually. Seven or 10 people around his booth because people also just want free food. And he's got this incredible energy and he is smiling and he is positive and he is joking. And then the moment after you've eaten it, what does he do?
He gives you another one. And he, and he has a great move [00:16:00] too. There are people, I have photos of this actually. There are people who are like, no, I don't want anymore. And he has this move where he will take the PETA right underneath like that and he'll smile, right? So you just can't. You can't deny this guy and he, and so you, you keep going, keep going.
And then what happens? You feel, even if you had no plans to buy anything, you feel the sense of reciprocity, you feel the sense that you want to give back. Right. And that's probably the most powerful psychological phenomenon in sales because humans will typically over index on giving back. Mm-hmm. If they've been given something.
So this guy, this who's selling this Middle Eastern food will, I don't know, in my, in my post, 'cause I spent a while, like watching him and calculating what was the average ticket? It's something like 30,
Josh Sharkey: uh, lemme pull it up. I
Jesse Stein: think I
Josh Sharkey: have it here. So 80, 80 orders per hour every 45 seconds. Three dipping sauces.
He [00:17:00] upsells 50% of all customers with PETA or baklava, $21 average. Yeah. Are you, are you familiar with the, with Kalani's book? No, I know the name, but I'm not, uh, there's a, there's a really great book by Rabbi Alini called Influence. It's the Psychology of Persuasion.
Jesse Stein: Oh, yeah. Influence. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do, I know that
Josh Sharkey: reciprocity is one of the, I think there's like, seven is reciprocity.
Real commitment rule of social proof. Yeah. Basically like if you get somebody to publicly commit to something, they're much more likely to to, to, to do it, right? Yeah, he did.
Jesse Stein: He did the study. Or he, I think in that book influence, he also cites a study where you have two, you have, um, people in a shopping mall, and then there's the participant in the study.
And the per um, hands, that person in the shopping mall, a cold coffee, an iced coffee. Then, um, later, somehow that person is asked to buy something. It, and then that's, then another other set of the group is, is [00:18:00] handed warm coffee, like hot, normal coffee. And the people that were handed the warm coffee are much more likely to buy.
Uh, which I thought was totally fascinating. It's like a framing, uh, in, in sales framing can also be like subconscious, so mm-hmm. Warmth. Actually makes people more, more likely to buy. But anyway, this guy, um, in the farmer's market, I think there's a couple of things operating here. One is just like, he's just so energetic and, and positive, I guess other people in the farmer's market are too, but like he exudes that energy and you want to be around it.
And then he's really, he's, he's picked, this is a great lesson for entrepreneurs. I think everywhere is like, he's picked. A type of cuisine that is pretty much universally loved and very versatile, and it lends itself to, you know, being bought in a farmer's market, but also upsell. So he'll mix all the dipping sauces in the sample to you so that when [00:19:00] you, you say, oh, wow, that's delicious.
He goes, great. Um, that was this, this and this. Would you, would you like me to combine those? You know? And so he'll take three dipping sauces and then as he's having his colleague check you out. Uh, via Stripe or whatever it is. They've got the console, the wireless con credit card console. He offers APO and the, and the pita, and it's just game over.
And I call it a tower of power when he is got like more than two dipping sauces. It's, it's unbelievable to watch. It's
Josh Sharkey: really a lot of fun. It's smart. Yeah, it really is. Uh, you know, when I, when I read it, I was just thinking all, all the ways in which restaurants, uh, can do this. I bet you could also, with with with events as well, you talked about the importance of.
Having a plan B? Yeah. What, why, why is that? I mean, obviously it sounds somewhat obvious, but is there, is there a backstory to that or,
Jesse Stein: uh, well, it's good I think to have a plan B within your own business, and so to have multiple contingency [00:20:00] plans. For example, for us, you know, we're not just integrated with Triple C, right?
It's seven rooms. There's, we spend quite a bit of time with. Think about off, well, you know, off-premise catering. And it's just important within your business to be thinking, to be paranoid. I think paranoia and a little bit of fear is really, really healthy. Uh, and then in terms of like plan B. Financially for one's own finances, at least for, for mine and the people I know who I really admire in terms of their financial planning.
It's like if you make your money in hospitality, don't invest in hospitality. You know, don't take that same money and double down and triple down and quadruple down in the same exact industry. Because if that industry experiences headwinds, you know, then you're just gonna be hit really hard, like try to.
Invest in multifamily real estate, let's say, or index [00:21:00] funds, you know, or you know, a little bit in gold, let's say, and just classic diversified portfolio theory. And so that's. Kind of what I mean by,
Josh Sharkey: was there something that happened to you that sparked this, like very, this really important need to make sure you have a plan B?
Because I've heard by the way, you know that there's varying theories here, right? Of of, of, if you're gonna have, you know, um, focus in the business that you, you can just go all in. It's like, this is, I'm, I'm gonna be maniacally like driven on this thing, and if this doesn't work, this is my hypothesis. I'm just doing this.
And then of course there's the, okay, let's make sure we're hedging. Mm-hmm. Um, did, did something happen that that has now sort of like driven your brain? Make sure you always have. You know, a plan being in business.
Jesse Stein: Yeah. Yeah. So that first post that you read about the $1.8 million mistake, that's when I bought the remaining share.
This is in oh 2015 or 16, I think, and I, uh, maybe a a little bit later. No, it's right around there. I paid $1.8 million to buy the [00:22:00] remaining 40% share. My business partner for a website called diet spotlight.com. And diet spotlight.com was rocking. It would've taken two years maximum to, to pay back that $1.8 million in cash.
Uh, but it was totally dependent on Google. And a few months after I bottom out for $1.8 million like you read in the, in the post, Google demoted us and wiped out 80% of my traffic and basically left the site. As a shadow of its former self. And I saw that, I mean, it was a really painful lesson, but I didn't really have a plan B, you know, to hedge against SEO in that case.
How did that happen? So yeah, Google made, I mean, Google's a monopoly, right? And it's been, it's been proven in court that Google's a monopoly and I love. Google, I've been, you know, we're [00:23:00] all happy. Probably Google users, but they act exactly like a monopoly. 'cause they are right. 95% of all web searches in the US and in many other countries are originated on a Google property.
And that is a monopoly, pure and simple. And so Google has had a long history of just making. Changes to its search algorithm that really hurt smaller businesses and there's often no rhyme or reason to it. So with Diet Spotlight, I'll keep it short and sweet, but Diet Spotlight, we wrote reviews of really in depth, uh, objective reviews of diet supplements, types of diets like Atkin diet, Mediterranean diet, and we had like.
2,500 of these reviews up and we would buy the products. We would do video reviews. We had doctors [00:24:00] that would read the reviews and put their stamp of approval on them. It was, and the site I launched in 2009 and we. We, uh, had up until 2009, about 135 million visitors to the site. So it was a very highly trafficked, very trusted, authoritative site.
And then one day Google decided that it wanted to elevate WebMD, Healthline, Mayo Clinic, and a handful of others who had totally inferior reviews. They're, they're really not. Review websites and they, that one day they elevated those sites just because of the brand name of the sites. And by definition, they crowded out little businesses like ours.
And it was really painful. I had to let go of a bunch of people who I'd been working with for many, many years and yeah, destroyed our revenue model. And unfortunately it really hurt the consumer because the consumers. Didn't have access to really awesome, [00:25:00] authoritative objective reviews. Diets and diet supplements and nutrition products.
So that was the, the long and short of it.
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That's crazy. So, I mean, you, you've had so many businesses, a lot of successes and you know, obviously some failures is along the way as well, which, which is just how this, how this works. Do you think about how hermetic AI could fail? Yeah,
Jesse Stein: definitely. I mean, I've learned a lot from businesses that haven't done well, and so hermetic checks all the boxes, which is.
Massive market, 120,000 event capable venues in the United States alone. And we've conducted hundreds of demos now and we haven't encountered a single competitor, AI or non-AI for some reason, like lead management, which is very [00:27:00] complicated to like, how do you manage and nurture leads that have come in is not nearly as popular as lead generation.
So people are super focused on like. Buying media and going out and generating the lead, and not ironically, nearly as focused on like taking care of the lead that you already paid for. And so it's got, hermetic is a huge tam, total addressable market. Uh, we've high gross margins. We have a very efficient sales marketing process and really low.
Overhead and the clients that we're working with love it. So we have high lifetime value or high stickiness, low churn, high retention. And so those are like the, the, and those things that I just listed are often like the main reasons why businesses fail, right? They don't have enough gross margin, right?
Their operating expenses are too high. Their total addressable market is too small. Like it's way too [00:28:00] niche of a, of a product or a service. You know, uh, the, the sales and marketing expenses are too high, right? In the case of a restaurant, it's just too darn expensive to drive people into, um, you know, drive foot, foot traffic.
Um, and those are like, typically, and so the, it checks all the boxes. So for hermetic. It would need to be some black swan event, some like major macro economic. Event that would need to happen and that, and so restaurant tours, even though they would know that Mia would be in their, in their best interest to get, they would like totally close the purse strings and not move forward.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Jesse Stein: So it'd be some unforeseen, huge event like that. But, you know, otherwise I feel really, really good about this one. And all I think about all day long are our customers like, and the event coordinators and the restaurant owners. [00:29:00]
Josh Sharkey: You've grown a lot of businesses to, to pretty like large scale. Um, I mean these, you know, the, this, this, uh, skin cream, it's like 50 million before you sell, like there's a bunch of these, uh, examples of this.
If you were gonna give like a little a playbook to restaurants of just growing sales, it's, let's assume that it's a restaurant group and they, they, they have already have great food, great service. Yeah. They wanna increase sales. What would you recommend?
Jesse Stein: Yeah, so I'm a huge believer in. Like just putting as many tools in the toolbox as possible for sales and marketing, for growing, for growing sales, for growing top line.
Because if you've, you're already paying. You know, last night I had Indian food couple blocks away and I love, I've been going there for 18 years, but it was us and one other table. Granted it was a Tuesday night, but like he does not do. A great job of staying in touch and nurturing his current database.
So the first thing I [00:30:00] recommend is like, you paid all this money to, to bring in customers, you know, export anybody from your OpenTable and your triple C or seven rooms or resi, whatever platforms you're using, uh, who have spent X amount of dollars with you. Um, or have been and or have been y number of times.
So they've pinned more than 10 times. Like for example, I hadn't been back to that Indian restaurant in two years yet. I didn't hear a peep from him. It just so happens my colleagues are in town and really craved Indian food. And that's the reason I went. But had Mo, who's the owner and chef of this wonderful Indian restaurant, reached out to me earlier and stayed top of mind with me.
I would've gone. So the first thing is like. Nurture and stay top of mind with your, you know, frequent guests. And the way to do that is just to be organized about, and that doesn't really, email [00:31:00] blasts don't really get read anymore. And so what it is, is it's like a handful of text messages. If you have phone numbers daily and you just like.
You set a schedule for, and you don't bother people, Ryan, it's just, Hey, this is Mo. Haven't seen you around in a couple years. Would love to, would love to come in and, and buy you a drink or, or, or whatever, you know, and so, so staying in touch for sure. Here, here's a great hack that every restaurant should be doing.
So right after you put down the, the, the check. For the guests to, to pay, um, hand them a handwritten note. I'm a big fan of handwritten notes. This is a great one. And if they had a great experience, which I assume most everyone does in your establishment, the note should say, and it's handwritten, and it says, dear guest, thank you so much for dining with us today.[00:32:00]
We live and die by, uh, reviews from wonderful guests like you. Would you mind scanning this QR code and put a little QR code label on that and leaving a quick review? And if you do, we'll take 10% off your bill today and, and then that QR code can alternate. You can have like three or four different QR codes.
You know, one for, one for Google, one for Yelp, and so forth, whichever platforms you rely on most. Now, if someone had a negative experience for whatever reason, there's another note that's placed. And these notes, of course, are all pre-written and you set the note there, you know, and it's something like, I'm so sorry that you had a bad experience today.
Uh, please, uh, if you, if you would love, I would love to earn your business for another visit. And if you come again, we'll take 25% off your bill, and then as a general manager, leave your cell phone number. [00:33:00] If you, if you would like to chat with me directly, here's my, here's my phone number. That note is gold because it heads off at the pass, the dreaded one star reviews that are restaurant crushers.
They really hurt because. You get like, out of towners or whatever, who are looking for where to eat. Like my colleagues last night, right? A lot of people just go to go to Google, uh, you know, or they go to Apple Maps, right? They're, they're in the car and they're, they're asking Siri, right? People like interact with different platforms in different ways, but hey Siri, show me, you know, great Indian restaurants in the area.
Boom. The recency and frequency of high reviews. You know, four and five star will make it. So you just show up much more often. And then one star reviews are killer because you have to get like 45 star reviews to make up, to make up for them. Yeah. You know, if you already had a 4.3 or 4.5 rating or whatever, [00:34:00] it really makes a difference.
So this handwritten note thing, you know, I'm quite partial to handwritten notes, but that gets responded to and like if you just. If you just, I think Siri heard me.
Josh Sharkey: Oh, there we, yeah, that's right. I know where you are. Mm-hmm. There you go. That's a great, by the way, I, I love the handwritten note company that you had started.
Is that still around? Did you sell it like
Jesse Stein: No, it didn't. I sold it, but I didn't make any money at it. Um, you know, really leaned in hard into real estate agents. There were a lot of audiences that it would've make sense for uhhuh, like we, we really leaned into to real estate agents and then in March. 2022 interest rates skyrocketed.
Yeah. And real estate agents as if in unison, cut their marketing budgets and we were considered a, at $3 a note, we were considered a a real luxury offering. And so almost overnight our economics were turned upside down. Wow. And I had to sell the business two Decembers ago to close.com. It wasn't exit, but I don't consider it an exit.
Yeah. 'cause we didn't make any money. [00:35:00]
Josh Sharkey: Was, uh, is there a, I mean, is it still like around though, like the technology for people to use or, yeah, absolutely. They, they have the handwriting
Jesse Stein: robots and uh, yeah, absolutely. What is brain training? Oh, yeah. So I was at a Tony Robbins event. I took art. 14-year-old for his 14th birthday.
14th birthday to Tony Robbins for four Day Unleash the power within event in San Jose. How did he like it, your son? I, uh, he was a little young, to be honest for it. So like the part, you know, the four hours that he spends on relationships or whatever was a little dizzying for him. But I'm a huge believer, whether it's Tony or whoever it is in positive psychology.
I am just a huge believer in like finding the golden pony and the manure type of, you know, just glass is half full, right? And being around people who are really positive and in a space where when you're positive, you can think about your life [00:36:00] for some time. So anyways, Tony is doing his thing. This is like seven years ago or eight years ago.
He talks about the best thing he had done the last year was this brain training called Bio Cyber Not Sounds super out there. And it was, so it he, and there was an audience of 12,000 people at this Unleashed the Power Event. So I got all inspired by his recommendation for brain training. He spent about five minutes talking about like what it is and what it's meant for him.
And so like after the event, I reached out to Biocybernaut and I booked an entire week. I flew out to Victoria, which is, you know, adjacent to part of British Columbia. Mm-hmm. Flying to Vancouver and then you take another plane and then I drove an hour to this center that was like. Right out of, you know, severance or there were lost or lost or whatever.
And it was pretty trippy. It turns out [00:37:00] I was the only one out of 12,000 people that signed up. That's crazy. I know. I would have thought it would've been like, at least several of us. And so I didn't know what to think of that. Um, and I kind of asked why and they said, well, you gotta take a week off of work.
It's pretty expensive. And it's also kind of weird, right? You're just being hooked up and it's like 12 hours a day. They hook up little sensors to, um, eight different areas of your, of your brain, and then for 12 hours a day, seven days in a row, you sit in a padded room, no windows with a monitor in front of you, and you are to figure out how to control.
The different aspects of your brain to achieve, um, what's called an alpha state, which is like, you know, if you're exercising and you've got the endorphins and you're super [00:38:00] creative and you're not thinking about the future of the past, you're just in a flow state that's like alpha state and you can, it's a really great state.
Took me like a full day to figure out how to, how to do it. Inside that room. But once you figure it out, it feels really good. And so the, the irony of it is I don't actually recommend, I'm no smarter, that's for sure. And it's hard. It takes time to access that, that state. I can do it and it's pretty cool.
Worth, worth a whole week of work and all that money. No, but what was worth it was we did in that you do take breaks. And then talk with kind of like a therapist. And part of the work is you're in that state and then, and then doing a bunch of forgiveness work. Yeah. Which sounds very like, woo woo. What does forgiveness work You're like basically forgiving any, anyone [00:39:00] that's ever in any way, shape or form, you know, harmed you in any way and you're forgiving yourself.
For anything you've done and you kind of like go through, you have a lot of time to do this, and you're thinking, why am I doing this? There's part, part of me that was thinking that, but I'll tell you, it was really, really useful.
Josh Sharkey: It makes so much sense. There's so much weight we hold from just, you know, uh, resentment or anger rather from others or our or, or ourselves.
Mm-hmm. You know, what's most interesting about, about that is. That 12,000 people went to that and you're the only one that did that. And it's so, it's so telling of, you know, everybody has ideas and most people are like, ah, there's this, it's not worth it. There's probably too many people that are doing this, but there's actually very few people that really go and execute on, on an idea.
So. Most of the time when someone has that feeling of like, it's probably not worth it because somebody's already doing it, is a terrible like mental model to use because you're actually competing with far fewer people than you think, to your point, like you would think if someone's going [00:40:00] to Tony Robbins, they're already sort of ambitious and, and thinking outside the box, but you were, I don't know what the fraction of one in 12,000 is, but, but that, like you were the only person that decided to go and, and do that.
It's pretty incredible.
Jesse Stein: Yeah, it was cool. It was, um, yeah, the irony, I'm glad I got the forgiveness work out of it because I don't think the brain training, it's not really backed by science if you really ask GPT whatever. Um, it was cool that I got to do a lot of thinking about my life and, and stuff like that.
But yeah, with, with businesses, I think like anything, like my philosophy is just go for it, you know? Um, done is better than perfect. So, for example. Like 10, 11 years ago, I met this guy, um, Jeff Hicks, who's like this amazing, um, entrepreneur, and he and I met here in Miami and he started talking. We only spent like 20 minutes talking, but I said, so what's up with you?
What, what are you doing? He goes, I just got back. He, he tells me 11 years ago, [00:41:00] I just got back from taking my children, three children and wife on a. Whole year long trip around the world and we pulled 'em outta school and here's what we did. And like it took 20 minutes, we maybe talked about the, around the world trip for 15 minutes for me to be completely convinced that this is exactly what I wanted to do.
So I got, I got home and then asked my wife and she thought it was a great idea, and I'm like, let's freaking do it. And so I spent a year planning it. Like 15 hours a week, and then in 2014, in June, we took off. We traveled, we took our kids who were five, nine, and 11 at the time, and we followed the good weather around the world and we went to 36 countries and six continents.
That's crazy. In 13 months we ate like 1200 meals together. And if that's a case of, and by the way, you don't have [00:42:00] to go around the world to have an adventure with your family. You can do it right in your town. You can just be a little bit more creative. You know, a lot of the people I've been studying a lot about like how to make time more elastic.
How to like kind of hack linear time because especially I'm 55 now and you know, you like time definitely seems to accelerate as, as you get older. So it's kind of like how do you, how do you hack it and, and, and slow it down? And one of the main ways to do it is to put more hooks in your hull of memories by.
Metaphorically and literally taking a different route home every day, you know, so to speak. And so, like, if it's with your family and around the world, trip might be a little bit extreme version of that because that year felt like five years to me because it was so many hooks in the hall of memories and so many new experiences.
But you can do it in a, in a van or an RV or in your own town or with a scavenger hunt. And so that was a good, that was a good lesson for me. I
Josh Sharkey: love that. Have you, have [00:43:00] you read, um, di with zero, what is it called? Die With Zero No, by Bill Perkins. No. Uh, you, you'd love that, that book. I, it's funny, I I actually just got finished reading it maybe like a, a couple weeks ago, but
Jesse Stein: this is right, this is the Kleiner Perkins guy
Josh Sharkey: or another?
Yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, he's a poker player, incredible investor. You, I mean, you, you've heard of him before, but he's got this book called DA with Zero and the, and the, and basically the premise is that experiences are a currency and they sort of compound over time. And it, it really like, I'm 44, so I, you know, we're, we're about a decade apart, but, um, it really made me think a lot more about the investment in the time that we spend.
When we think about, you know, taking that trip or not taking that trip. And is it worth the time And the, and, you know, the spend and these experiences are what are, what make us, you know, happier over time. And I see it just from when I take our, when we take our kids on a vacation, we go to their Caribbean or wherever.
When they come back, they're noticeably different in a, in a better way. They're noticeably like a little bit [00:44:00] more evolved, a little bit more aware, a little bit more, uh, of themselves from these trips. And, and you, and you see it, you know, and you realize like, man, you know, you gotta make sure you take time to, to, to like have these experiences.
And again, to your point, you don't have to go for a year and a half. You don't have to go around the world. But it is important. And I, I think about this a lot because I spent 20 years in the restaurant industry before I started. You know, in, in, in this tech world, and for most of that time it was a hundred hour weeks, every week, doubles, holidays, weekends, and I mean, I loved it, but you realize that actually you become a better creator, a better, you know, a better everything, a better operator, a better business person, a better partner when you do have, uh, experiences outside of just the thing that you do every day.
I love that idea of taking a different route home if you, if you do actually commute.
Jesse Stein: No, I think that's more of a metaphor for me. I probably take the same route home every day, but like yeah, try to have different experiences and I fall victim to, to [00:45:00] habit, um, just like everybody else. So it's a good, it's a good reminder.
Yeah. For me, for
Josh Sharkey: sure. This is great, man. I really appreciate you taking some time and I'm stoked to see what you keep building with Hermetic ai. If it's anything like the things you've done in the past, then. Think it's gonna be really successful and uh, I love just seeing folks that have built other businesses built in the restaurant industry.
So thank you. Awesome. Thank you Josh. Thanks for tuning into the ME podcast. New music from the show is a remix of the Song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, fresh daily. For show notes and more, visit get mes.com/podcast. That's GETM eble z.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Keep innovating. Don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday. And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next [00:46:00] time.
