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Nick Kokonas

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2024-05-15

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2024-05-15

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1. “Yep, Instagram, which is ncoconis, k-oko-n-e-s, and Twitter is nickonis, n-i-k. And hey, it's all Googleable, right? So beyond that, if you could figure out my email address, I'll probably answer. Although given the reach of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated. It might take a while.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Know why this came to mind, but the word would be pause. I have no idea why that came to mind, but I think in talking through this whole thing, you kept asking me, why are you digging this black box or whatever? Or it'd be like curiosity. And I think those are two, I'm thinking of those in the same way. I'm not saying pause like stop. I'm saying think, right? And so I think, you know, the hallmark of the people that I like as friends the best, what we try to. Instilling our kids, and the reason I like my wife so much is that. Intellectual curiosity is everything. And so I don't know how do you get that on a billboard? I think pause or be curious or something like that. I know it's cliche, but I think that's the thread that ties everything together.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I bought, like, when I give someone something, I try to make it something that, and I really want to make it a great gift. I try to get it something that you can't buy. And so I bought an old typewriter. And when I write a thank you note, I type it up on the old typewriter. And it is the most confounding thing to people. Because they look at it and they go, How did you do that? I'm like on a 1922 typewriter. It's like a personal artisanal thing. But I know that that's not what you're getting at.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Yeah, I named one of them already. Fooled by randomness. Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that. And I've definitely given that away. That's a tricky one because just like I said, I can't remember books very well, but that's certainly probably number one on a business side of things. And then on the other side, I tend to give away what I would call vintage art books. So it's not a book people can buy. I'm sorry to say, but occasionally I'll be like use bookstore and I'll find some of these great old art books. And I buy a few of them. And then when I want to thank someone for something, I send them that.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Can easily make some ice with Payroads bitters in it or something like that, and then as the ice melts in the cocktail, it's going to change the flavor. And it's going to look really cool too. Doing some of these things at home is not hard. I did a dinner party once where it was like, you know, a cocktail party probably had 40 people at my house. And each room in my house had all of the ingredients for the cocktail and then little instructions on how to make it themselves. So that took away the need for a bartender because they're terrible anyway. Anyone that you'd bring in, you know, that you caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like, oh, like, and now I know how to make it old-fashioned. Now I know how to make a Manhattan. The one that I discovered that party was a Frisco sour, had like Benedictine whiskey and lemon, you know. It was really delicious. So it can be more than just like a strong cocktail. It can be really delicate and interesting.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “Or something like that. Man, it's like an endlessly fascinating thing. I don't consider myself a cocktail person 10 years ago. I really loved wine. I felt like from a health perspective it was better as well. But just like anything else, if you have a well-constructed cocktail and something of high quality, it's an additive thing. Like you can have it in a meal and it can make the meal better. You know, whereas like, you know, a vodkatonic's just boozing and it's just getting drunk. That's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make things that are It's really a culinary approach to cocktails. It's endlessly fascinating just like anything else in this world”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Know it's just lime sugar and rum. That's all it is. And yet, like most bars you go into will make a terrible daiquiri or they'll blend it or blah, blah, blah, right. But a great daiquiri is really, really transformative. So did a video on that. And then I always make a half Mezcil margarita. That's my favorite drink. All I'm doing is I'm taking some rapisado and a little bit of Mezcal and equal weights along with some, you know, Grand Marnier or Quatrot equivalent and lime and simple syrup. That's it. That's all there is to it. Man, I love simple stuff like that. And then we have a whole section in the book on old whiskeys, dusty bottles, old gins. Like there's a growing movement to kind of rediscover some of the distilleries in America that were really, really, really great that don't exist anymore, that were more artisanal at the time. You can still find those bottles around. It's a little bit easier than like, you know, someone like Wine Club.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Basically, Grant just said, Hey, everything upstairs, people are going to think it's lenia, smoke, and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail. So one of the foundational cocktails for me is a dakiri. I say three ingredients in a million ways to fuck it up.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “Well, I'm going to do a little video promo for the book that we just filmed last week where essentially I work with Eric Jeffers, who's one of our bartenders in the office, which is our little speakeasy below the Aviary, which is amazing.”

   2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Yeah, well, we did it, you know, we did it all ourselves too. It's really like a five person project. It's deep enough that if a professional gets it, they're going to learn a lot. But I'd say about 35, 40% of it can be done at home because unlike the Olinia book where, hey, you got to go out and buy a duck, like, you know, in your local grocery, you might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you need some Fleur to kind of rum or a certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store. It's exactly the same thing that we use. That product is universal.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “And so he breaks So, we are going completely without a distributor or publisher at this time. And I think we're going to, man, I don't know. I'm either completely delusional. It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half million of these.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “Alan kept the blog on there called Our Progress. And in it, he details every single aspect of what it takes to make a book like this, right down to line screens and compositing photos of one of the things that every single book publisher told me is that you can't sell a cocktail book for more than $30. There's no market for it. And you don't need pictures because it's just liquid in a glass. And I think we blew that out of the water with what the book looks like. I think that because Certain things like fire are really hard to photograph. There's a great picture in there of this one cocktail where we spray some anise and we light it on fire and it creates an aroma into the bowl that it served in called loaded to the gun walls. It's a Bataabia rock cock cock cock cock cock cocktail and that took a composite of 18 different photographs.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Oh, sorry, the aviarybook.com. All right. Very lead, Nick. Genius Marketing, you're right there. So, yeah, the AviaryBook.com. But if the coolest part of that is other than, of course, your ability to buy said book is.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “So they called me up one day and said, Oh my God. And I was like, oh, they got cold feet. Oh no. And they said, you know, we're pregnant. We're going to have a baby. And I said, okay, well, we're going to wait a year because there's no way in the world I'm letting you move out of your comfort zone and have a child and have that change of life. And they thought I was like punting on them just because like in a discriminatory way, I said, nope, we're not going to do this with anyone else. We'll wait as long as it takes. And about a year and a half later, they moved to Chicago. And we spent the last year and a half set up a studio of our own, spent last year or a half doing this book, did a Kickstarter to just essentially raise awareness for it. We raised almost a half million dollars in the Kickstarter. We sold about another $300,000 a book since then. It comes out in October. You can go to the OleniaBook.com. And the coolest part of that website is that if you look at the Olinia book.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “And I have ideas. And after waiting for like four or five years to do a book on the aviary, I immediately was like, this is the guy to do the book. Now I need to lure him out of Pixar, which is about the best place to work in the world. And then I found out his wife worked at Industrial Light and Magic and she did all the graphic design. And I was like, this is perfect. You guys need to quit your jobs and move to Chicago. And they flew out. We had some conversations about what they might look like. It was very much a partnership. They would have equity in the book. We would have creative freedom to do it exactly the way we wanted. We knew more about the printing and the bidding and all of that. So I wasn't worried about the economics of it anymore. I was worried about trying to make something really awesome. And right as they were about to say yes, they found out they were going to have a baby.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “And he was kind of like, what do you mean I could be wrong? He goes, Well, you know, we did have some Marata in there. Like, I mean, we documented hundreds of recipes that could be wrong And at that point, Alan, his mentality changed. It's in the video. And we got to know him and I got to know him. And when he sent me the book, it wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting like a homegrown book. And what I got was, you know, a 400-page, beautifully, beautifully illustrated, beautifully written book about a person's journey of learning. It was called the Olinia Project. And I had no idea that he had done anything like this. And so suddenly I thought to myself, immediately, and it's in the intro to the aviary book, I texted him and said, holy shit, you're crazy.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Yeah, and he's an autodidact. Like this guy learns and learns and learns and is the kind of person that goes to the black box and goes, I'm going to learn how to forge knives and I'm going to learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, I'm going to cook everything in there and I'm going to take pictures of it and I'm going to make a book documenting that. And when he asked if he could use, like we had kind of a little email relationship and he came out to a linear ones to ask grant some questions about how to make something because it wasn't working. And when Grant kind of threw up his arms and go, well, the book might be wrong. Like Alan's world view was shattered. It was like the Bible.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “Fascinated with it, was not a cook, didn't know how to cook, and did the Julia thing. He spent five years not only cooking his way through the entire book, but also would do things like, well, I don't know where to get this plate. And I've always wanted to learn how to fire porcelain.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “So, what happened with the aviary is that we basically couldn't figure out how to do another book because the Olinia book was such a project and Martin was on to other things. And we didn't want to do it traditionally. And I didn't know anyone who could do what we wanted to do. And then there was this guy, Ellen Hemburger. And boy, if you get nothing else from this whole talk and you've made it this far, go see, go Google Alan and Alinia. Alan is a procedural effects artist. He worked at Weta Studios and all the Hobbit movies doing like hair and water and things like that. So he writes the physics that then makes the magic, right? And then he worked at Pixar. And while he was at Pixar and his wife, Sarah worked at Industrial Light Magic as the graphics designer. He was given by Sarah a copy of the Elenia book to go full circle and became just”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “But yeah, like on the day it was due, they went, What's this? I'm like, that's the manuscript. Yeah. They went, oh, that's cute.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “It was a bit like doing the no phones with the software. Like, I was like, well, if I get a really big contract off to figure out how to write a book, and then it'll be a lot of pressure. So I did that and I wrote it and I turned it in on time, which apparently no one does.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “Yeah, you can't ambush people to a Mexican standup. Yeah, you can't do that. I mean, you could. It might be fun, but I didn't do that. I wouldn't talk. I created enticement. I sold on my ability to actually do it.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Yes, they did. Oh, they did. They did. Yeah, yeah. So I went and met with them all personally, kind of said. Or if you're like, John, I'd love to get.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “That's a great way of price discovery. If you think about it, most auctions, even like you go to a charity event or whatever, they start low and they try to get interest going high. It's often the case that if they start really, really high and start going down, people start going like, oh my God, someone's going to say something. Like I would pay that someone else must as well. They could be off by a factor of 30% and they'll never even know it because there's only one bid that ever happens. So no one knows how off they are.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “So I went to the publishers that I'll bid on it and I just got them all on a conference call and just started at a really high price. And every couple seconds, I went down $10,000. And then one of them blinked and bought it”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Because now they're actually working for you, right? Well, similarly, I went into that publishing negotiation and I was kind of like. The way the agent is probably lookupable, she's great, like great person. I don't think she even knows that that's what was happening. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't even think she just knows that. Like, hey, she was brought up in this industry for this company. And that's the way it works. And she would for sure dispute everything I just said. She would say, I always try to get the highest price. But I went in and I just went like, look, I'm not going to spend my time doing this for X. So I need four times that. And she was like, there's no way you'll ever get that. You've never written a book before. I said, well, we did the Linea book. That's a cookbook. Doesn't count. These are words.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “That last dollar is actually like $9,600. It's a lot more money. So, what I do whenever I've sold real estate is that I figure out what the intrinsic value is of the house. Like what's the bare minimum that I'd be willing to sell it for? And I price it just slightly higher than that. And I tell all the agents in the whole town, I will pay you 50% of everything over 10% higher than that. And they all say, Oh, that's against the real estate ethics code, or I would never do that deal because it would subvert all my other deals or whatever. And then what happens is two days later, you get like a dozen phone calls and they've priced it like 40% higher. It sells in two days.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Yeah. Yeah. So basically, like, here, I'll do this. Like, let's say, so I think one of the great problems to solve, one of the black boxes is the agency problem. Let's say you want to sell your house, you put it on the market and the agent's going to get, I don't know, four to five percent of the sale price. That's a lot for something. It's like your most biggest investment in your life. But they kind of say like they control the information, they control the MLS, all that. Will they, if they're the seller's agent, get the highest price for you? And the answer is almost certainly not because they, let's say a house is going to sell for $500,000. They're going to get 4% of that. That's $20,000. If they get $490,000, it's almost no difference to them. $400 difference. But if they lose the deal over that last 10,000, it's a lot. So they want to price a home so that it sells quickly so they can keep their deal flow going. And they don't really care about maximizing their last dollar. Whereas for you.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “So we felt like really vindicated on that. The book still sells. This is eight years later. We still sell seven, eight thousand copies a year. And when we did the aviary, which is our bar that's a non-bar that we talked about earlier, we started getting all of the same offers again. And this time it was really easy to go like just kind of like go like, oh, that's cute. Like, you know. And so I should add that we did. I wrote a book of Grant and I wrote his memoir together that we didn't use a ghostwriter. We wrote it ourselves called Life on the Line. And for that one, we did a traditional book deal. But after our agent kind of got it halfway, I got on our plane and flew out there and then brokered the deal myself. And I got a giant multiple of the highest bid by doing essentially a reverse Dutch auction, starting at a really high price and working my way down.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “And we got to control the quality of it. And we won both the Dream Spirit Award for Best Cooking from a professional point of view, best cookbook of the year. And we won, I say we, Martin and Laura Kastner won the Communication Arts Award, where if you're a designer that's like their annual isting the Oscar, right?”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “Yeah, and he basically said I'm going to make you an unusual offer, no advance at all, and we can negotiate. Essentially, we'll just be the distributor. And we'll negotiate out like what that looks like. And we'll help you with the printing. It will help you with the editing, which we're both really good at. And within 10 minutes, we had struck a deal whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves, for our restaurant, we paid actual printing costs, not wholesale, actual printing costs. Anything that they sold and distributed through their channels, they would get about 27% of the sale price, which means that we got 73% of that. These are like state secrets, right? Like nobody tells this stuff. And so for years, I was walking around with this knowledge where if we sold 100,000 books, say, that would be the equivalent of selling like 500,000 books on any other deal.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “They would go, oh, yeah, but look, we did 40 different prints, 40 different books last year. Only five of them did well. And I'm like, that's your problem, man. Like, I know what we're going to sell well. I don't really give a shit if you lost 35% of the time and need to spread your portfolio risk. I'm the one you're spreading it on. Right, so we decided with the linear book, we put together like 20 pages and Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system. And we shipped it out to eight different publishers we like, two of which were art houses that had never done a cookbook. And they all came back and same all the usual criticism, except for Aaron Wayner at 10 speed press.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “A print broker who had actually printed brokered the print job of one of the famous books. And I was expecting that the book retailed for $60. It would cost like $15 to print $20. I didn't know anything about it. And when he told me it was like $2.23 per book to print per 30,000 30,000 copyrun. Went, no way like that. And he went, Well, it's probably less now Like he thought he meant it was like too much. And instantaneously, I went, oh shit, everything makes sense. And when I would call publishers and tell them this.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “So the more that we dug, the more that we got more and more curious, a little bit angry, actually. But Grant was weirdly angry at me because he's going like, well, dude, like. Why do you care? Like, you know, it's like I've been wanting this since I was 15. And I was like, well, look, if this is our budget, it's not going to be the book you want. It's not going to be as good as you want it to be because we're not going to be able to spend six months doing the photography. We're not going to be able to get great pages. We're not going to be able to get a picture of every dish. Like if what do people cook in a cookbook? Well, they tend to cook those pages where they see a picture of the final dish because you know what? It looks delicious. You know what it's supposed to look like. You got something to emulate at least, right? And so when we did the specs for the book, I had one of the best publishers in America say, if you do that book, there's no way you sell more than 5,000 of them. No way. And no one's going to publish it. And you can't use metric and you can't use a gram scale and you can't have that font and you can't have those pictures in full bleed. And it'll cost way too much to print. And so it took about a month and a half before I got lucky.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “But if you wanted to actually do a meaningful comparison across the industry, it's almost impossible to do it, even though that there's a company that does that. Then you start trying to reverse engineer it and you go to the New York Times, which you can go the New York Times website and just look at how is the New York Times bestseller list created. And on their own site, they say it's a compendium of known publishers like publishing houses, as well as these top 50 retailers, you know, back in the day. It's a gamable system. right like the way that publishers want to do it is that they want to ship out all the books at the same time because that's how they're counted for the new york times bestseller list and stuff i should”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “Or plausible ignorance. Yes. Willful plausible ignorance And so I do what I start doing. I'm like, well, let's just Google that up and see what it costs to print a book. Or how many copies of the French lingerie book sold? How many copies of 50 other books that we wanted to emulate or that we thought were well done sold? And man, it's like asking for like, you know, keys to the Vatican or something when you call a publisher and ask them that. I'm sure you know this, right? You probably know now because you've been so entrenched in the industry. Like you know your numbers and you might know that of some of your colleagues and friends, right?”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “And I mean, I just called. I asked them, like, well, how much is this book going to cost to print? Well, I don't really know. And so what they would do is that they would always have layers of people so that they said, well, that's not what I do. Like I am the person that does this. The lawyers give the contract. The printer does the printing.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “I knew people in bands. That would get signed to a record label back in the day, and they would get a quarter million dollar advance, you know, shit, that seems like a lot of money, right? And then all of a sudden, all your studio time comes out of that and you don't recoup another dime until you sold X number of records or CDs, or in this case, books. And then in the contract, it actually said, and the restaurant guarantees that they will buy $2,500 at half of retail price. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're looking at something like $80,000 right there that goes right back to them. In essence, like, and then I kind of went like, well, I wonder what a book cost to print.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “Neck, like the spidey sense. The spidey sense starts telling me that something back there is pricing this in a usual way.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “Started getting a lot of publishing offers. And the natural inclination was to go to what he knew, which was Artisan Press, which published the French laundry book, which is one of the best-selling high-end cookbooks ever. And it's certainly beautiful. It was very revolutionary at its time. I think it was published in about 98, 99, something like that. And the typical publishing deal kind of came into us, which was great that they were coming in. And it was 250 to $300,000. And they would basically say, well, out of that, you're going to pay for the designer and the photographer and you need like a 30-day photo shoot. And, you know, here are the guidelines for how many photos you want in the book and, you know, to keep costs down and this and that. And I kind of looked at all of that and all the offers came in within about 10% of each other, which immediately, you know, the hair on the back of my.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

41. “Yeah, I mean, I'm going to back up before the aviary just a little bit and just go like, you know, for a chef, doing a cookbook is something that they dream about if they're a serious chef from the time they're 15. Just like if you're a basketball player, you want to make the NBA, or if you're a runner, you want to be in the Olympics or whatever, to grant to a bunch of chefs having their own ideas in a physical, beautiful cookbook is kind of a holy grail for them. It's very sacred. And what was interesting is that just before Grant was sick.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “And B, they really, really do have something that they want to talk about. And so it's like little things like that are kind of puzzle filters, I guess, that I call them, like where I just create like a little bit of a barrier. And if you're really into it and you really want to talk to me, you can pretty much find me pretty easily. I'm not that hidden.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “Yeah, I feel like it's genuine. First of all, I'm always curious what are people writing about to the restaurants? What are they writing about to me? My LinkedIn profile basically like I don't really read LinkedIn at all. I keep it. I think it's important to have it. But I don't ever read the messages on there. But in my bio, it basically says, if you can find my email address, I will incite this. I will reply to you. And so that gets rid of all of the marketing crap that comes in. But every now and then, I get like a subject line to the email address that's on there that says basically like, hey, via your LinkedIn bio. And I'll read that and reply. And it just shows me that like, hey, there's an actual human on the other line. Is that just some marketing thing?”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “But out of office reply, and I told him like that it was kind of a joke, like the panda, and he did not find any humor in it. And I did. I thought it was hilarious, even though we lost the business. I thought it was really funny. So if you ever get a really unusual out-of-office reply from me, it's fiction, probably.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “That's my out of office reply. Anybody would get that right? And so I thought that was really funny. And then about two years later, I bumped into some guy who worked for a very big corporation. And they wanted to do some work with DL&E group. And it was like kind of a consulting project, very lucrative. And he was looking at me really funny, you know. And I said, like, what's up? And he said, well, you know, I really wish we had worked together. But, you know, then you went to that sex retreat. I just couldn't get it past everybody. And I was just like, I was looking at him going, like, what are you talking about? And then I remembered like four years earlier my out of.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “And the Chicago Tribune called me up like three days later going, is it going to the Lincoln Park Zoo? And I was like, no, dear God, it's not. And the following, there is no panda. That's what I wrote back. That was my entire reply to that. And then the following year, I said, like, I like to talk, as you might be able to tell. And so everyone who knows me knows that like I can just go on and on, right? And so I said I was going to a combination of a tantric sex retreat and silence retreat.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

47. “Basically, look, I'm going to be in a mountain or on a boat or whatever. And I'm not going to be able to reply. And so I would make these elaborate stories up almost as like a fun piece of art project as to why I couldn't do it. And so one year, every year, every time I went away, I would basically say like, I'm going to visit Panda that I adopted. And I'm going back to Chicago.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

48. “Messages and whatnot, kind of pick a random one and just answer it. Like, I want to be involved in knowing what our customers are asking, what they're doing, what they're saying, what they're replying, anything that's a complaint actually gets brought directly via email to a complaint tracker that me and Grant see. And so luckily there aren't that many of those. But anytime you serve five or six thousand people a week, you're going to get something going wrong. But man, I'm terrible at it, honestly. And like I've tried, I will tell you a funny thing is that when I go away on vacation, I do try to concoct a...”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “Need to create some filters and get some stuff that's directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and kind of forced the issue for me. So now I can't quite do that. I do wake up in the morning and look at sort of our bazillion social media.”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “And also, I kind of feel like a weird moral responsibility to reply to the people who've taken their time out of their day to write us a note, you know, even if it's not like critical business for me. And one of the things I did for about 10 years that I loved doing when we first started Lennia is that I would have Google alerts set up and I would find some blog that only like some woman and her mother read. And I would reply personally like say, wow, thank you for the great write-up of Linnea. And they would be kind of mind-blown that I found it and, you know, all that. I treated email that way for a long period of time. Unfortunately, now I can't quite do that. So I do have a bunch of filters and whatnot, but I didn't even set them up. My business partner, Brian Fitzpatrick, who used to be that of Google Chicago. And he's my, he runs the engineering team. He's the CTO of talk. He kind of said, like, dude, you're slipping, man. Like,”

    2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT