YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Kokonas

lines on the record: 218
first: 2024-05-15
most recent: 2024-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The word oblivious is not too strong of a word. This is not a criticism of him either, right? It's just like he came to my house and he was just like, Yeah, I want Martin to design everything. Martin Kastner, who is a genius designer, has crucial detail, which we've been involved with for 15 years now. He's a designer. He's like an artisan. Like he built plateware and he won the Bousta ore for the platter he designed for Thomas Keller, Daniel Ballud's team for the Team USA and all that. But back then, like, I mean, this guy's not going to design plumbing or electrical. So I would just look at him going like, well, no, he can't. We need an architect. And you need to get city stamps on all that and all that. So I think Grant was just like, yeah, you find a place, you put tables in it. Build a kitchen and you go in terms of like, obviously, he knew there were health inspectors and all that. But the process of all this just about either were going to not build it ever eight weeks in because we would have hated each other or we were the kind of people that figured everything.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone else wanted to offer him a restaurant that they had already built or wanted to build. And I actually answered that question correctly. The I don't know is an awesome thing to say, like 90% of the time of your life, right? And so when he said, what can a restaurant do you want to build? I could have waxed on about some dream I had or just made some bullshit up at the time. But I just said like, I have no idea. Like that's a big question. We need to sort that out. And I think that was the right answer for him. I think that's all he needed to know was like, okay, the guy's got an open mind. He seems to have done well in business. He knows apparently how to build something. What was really funny is that the stuff that I was concerned about, which was like architecture, design, plumbing, you know, building, lease, all of that, he was like.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scope of each other's backs. Yeah, I mean, I actually studied that. Like that, I actually knew, I knew the facts, you know, and I knew what he was putting in front of me, but I didn't know him the way you know someone that you're going to become a business partner with. And I think he just thought I was rich. I'd be serious. I think everyone else wanted this is this is really true because he has said this to me.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was it and then like a week later I got an email with his business plan and I invited him by my house and a year to the day later of that was May 4th we went back and forth on email on May 4th we held a dinner at my house for potential investors and on May 4th 2005 we opened a linear that is”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, no, no. That's totally fine. And so at the end, I said, you know, I doubt anybody, anywhere in the world had a better meal tonight. And he was like, well, thank you. And I said, what are you planning on doing with yourself? I was like, kind of, I had a lot of wine and I I kind of looked at him. You know, he sat down with us. And I said, What are you going to do? And he goes, Well, what do you mean? I said, Well, you're not going to be here forever. And he said, well, I want to build my own restaurant. I said, I'd be happy to help you do that. And he said, well, what kind of restaurant do you want to build? I said, I don't know. I've never built a restaurant before.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he would research Latvian food, he would have to redo, like he would redo a whole menu, 20 courses, right? And I didn't know they were going to put us in the kitchen. And they put us in the kitchen. I mean, it sounds like a jerky thing to do now, but we did have a relationship a little bit at the time. And served us like the most amazing meal of my life, you know. And it started out with Latvian sorrel soup with braised hambox. And, you know, it had flavors of the sea, which was a Japanese dish. It had Thai dishes, but it was all in his style. And so it was his own. And yet it had elements of all these things. And at the end of that meal, he said to me, well, what do you think? And I'd watched the kitchen and it was like a watchmaker shop. It was not screaming and yelling.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife's birthday. And she said, Yeah, I want to go back there. And we'd never been in the kitchen before. And they have a table there, but we never eaten in there. And I remember I emailed him and said she's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese, loves Thai food. Good fucking luck. And I knew exactly what that would do to them that would put him into 10 days of pure hell.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I went on there, and his spelling and grammar notwithstanding, I mean, it was like reading someone who's just really thinking hard about what they were doing. Everything we just talked about, here was this young 28-year-old chef from Michigan who looked like Captain America, who would come out, not, you know, he was like Hollywood in the sense of like he was good looking and very driven and very clean cut, but he didn't look like the stereotype central casting of a chef, right? You know, chubby, gregarious guy, he was really quiet, introspective, shy. But then you read these, which are still up, you can still Google it, and you'd go, he'd go on for like four pages about bread service. What's the point of bread? And this is a guy that I could wrap my, you know, wrap my head around. And so I remember on January 20th, 2004.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there was a chapter in there on La Pyramide, which was a very classical restaurant, kind of the best in the world at the time. And he described a meal there in emotional terms that resonated with what Grant was doing, even though his technique, his cuisine, everything was completely different. And so I literally just highlight like a couple lines in there and give him this book, which was out of print at the time. We kind of developed this email relationship back and forth where he would sort of try out some new food on us and I would give direct, honest feedback, but not like, oh, it was delicious. It was Marlowe. It was more like, you know, you're going for a provocation there, but if you, you know, and we would go back and forth. And he wrote at the time on a forum called E. Gullet.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no. A peregrination is like a wondering about. So it was written just after World War II by an ex-serviceman. He kind of goes around Paris, I want to say maybe late 40s, early 50s. I can't recall exactly.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got to know Grant a little bit. I think sometimes people bring the chef some wine or beer or whatever. And it's like, that's kind of sand to the beach, you know. I would bring him books and I didn't figure he had a lot of time to read. So, I would put a post it note on a page of an old book. So I remember I brought him this book called The Peregrinations of an Epicure.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I kind of looked at them and I'm like, oh, they don't really seem all that happy, even though they've got this lifestyle. And so I met Grant Ackett's, the chef at Dwell Dining at Trio, went to a lunch there one afternoon that some friends set up and it was a transformative experience. It was artistic. It was intellectual. It was thought-provoking. Most of all, it was emotional. Those are all things that I would never have associated with eating a dinner, right? And so from a perspective of like great art experiences, like seeing a great movie or a great play or going to an amazing museum opening, we kept drawing back there. Like we kept going back and we would go back so frequently that it was absurd because, you know, it's a big meal and it wasn't cheap. And every time we'd go somewhere else, we'd go like, wow, why is no one else thinking this way?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Left trading in about 2002, 2001 was a tough year between 9-11, which was my father died in February of that year. I was burnt out after, you know, going really hard for so long. And we'd built up a pretty good size company too. And I merged with a firm in New York. And I just, I kind of needed a break, but didn't know how to really take one at the time. And so I left trading and I immediately kind of panicked because here's something that I really genuinely enjoyed, but didn't kind of know what I wanted to do next and started doing consulting for a small hedge fund. And then I just didn't know what to do. And I had an awesome wife and a young son and things were good. But I was kind of panicked. I was playing golf with like, you know, ex-athletes because who else is 34 years old and can play golf on a Wednesday afternoon? And so it was just a weird.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the company, but they don't actually have a piece of software yet. I'm just going to hire someone to build that for me or an app. You get so many apps pitched to me. And they don't know how to build an app, but they've got a logo and an idea. And I was like, that's a good way to blow a half million dollars in a consultant. You must get that 50 times worse than I”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct I've been on a couple of graduate school entrepreneurship contests and whatnot. And one of the things that always happens there is what I call like the time machine. Someone comes up with a business plan that is like, you know, I'm going to build a time machine. Now, of course, it's not really a time machine, but I have seen ones that defy the laws of physics, for example, or new pipeline technology, but they have no idea like it's just a pipe dream. They've done none of the engineering. So you kind of look. You haven't really done the homework yet at all. And then there's a lot of people that come to me and they've spent like six months doing their logo and then the name.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never written a book before, but yet someone's gonna write me a $400,000 check. There must be a lot of money on the other side of that bet. And so consequently, like I always try to look for the high small hoops. And then I spend my time learning as much as I can. And then I jump through that hoop. It's both more interesting, I think. And I also think getting back to the asymmetry of risk, those are the ones that, yeah, you might have a, well, first of all, do you really have a 95% failure rate if you put in all that effort? I don't think so. So I think they priced it wrong, so to speak. And then, second of all, man, that's where the fun is. That gets you up in the morning and going to work.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know no one does. That's kind of like what we'll get to it, I'm sure, but that's like the way I was with the publishing thing. It's like, hey man, people keep printing books, and yet I can't figure out any of the information. And yet they're going to give me like three or four hundred thousand dollars to write a book. Some things remiss here. Like, you know what I mean?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The higher, the smaller the hoop, the more interesting it is to figure it out. And once you're up there and you know how to jump up through that little hoop, there's fewer people playing that game. And the other thing is, I remember right when I was going to start building Olenia with Grant, I was talking to a restaurant owner. And by all accounts, he was pretty successful. He had four or five restaurants. And one of them I really liked a lot and we'd go there a lot and I kind of got to know him a little bit. And he said, so you know, what are you up to? And I said, well, actually, I'm building a restaurant now. And he looked at me, he said, ah, it's a terrible business. You don't want to do it. Like incredible failure rate. Terrible. And I was like, why did you build the next four?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you go to the restaurant business and people, oh, yeah, 95% of all restaurants go out of business in their first two years. And I'm like going, great. You know, that's perfect.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's pretty difficult question. If you look at everything that I've done business-wise, everybody would say that the failure rate is super high in what we do. So trading, they used to say one out of 100 people that goes down there, breaks even their first year, and fewer out of that one take another hundred of those ones and less than one in a hundred of those becomes a millionaire. And I went, great. It was like the old Jim Carrey. So you're saying there's chance. Right. And then.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally, yeah, literally. And I don't take any pleasure. Like people are like, oh, you must love gambling or whatever. And it's like, I would never sit down to a blackjack table because I know that there's a 49 and a half percent chance that I'm going to win. And that's the wrong way.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to do walk through a casino. Yeah, you walk through a casino and you see everybody pricing their outcomes incorrectly. The entire city is built on that. If you could get in your head.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For mental models, anything that you would recommend. Really, really hard. I think the mental model is asymmetric risk. Always look for something that the upside is, you know, three to four X, the downside. Obviously, quantifying those is very difficult, but that's the key. Everything I try to do is asymmetric. And then even though Nesam Taleb is a bit of a pandantic goofball on Twitter, his book Fooled by Randomness is Awesome. That was the one that preceded Black Swan. And I think Black Swan's great, it's fine, but fooled by randomness is, I think, the better of all of his books because it just encapsulates everything that people price things incorrectly”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An awful, it is an awful thing in a way, right? Like it's just about pure commerce, it serves a purpose of price discovery and all of that, but any individual person isn't really the one doing that, you know. So I think that there are negatives to the whole system as well in hindsight. But man, at the time, it just felt like great mental training.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who can pull that rabbit out of the hat at exactly the right moment? It's pretty wonderful to see. And the thing I loved about my time down there, even though I burned out of it after 10 years, is that there were moments where I did absolutely, I mean, I have friends, they'll listen to this and they'll be like, oh, yeah, I remember that time in the S&P pit. You really got this right. But I made some completely stupid decisions, but mostly on the measure when things got crazy, I was able to perform more than that. I remember like Greenspan's irrational exuberance speech was like a formative moment where I kind of went, wow, I can actually, I can not only hang in this environment, I can thrive in it. And, you know, you get home soaking wet with sweat. It was a physical job. I guess people, it was really blue collar in a lot of ways. And, you know, it's like I got home that day and I was like, that was what I prepped my last six years for. It was very satisfying. It sounds.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why we love watching big time sports when it matters. There are certain people that you know you can almost look at them and go, oh, that poor person's going to fade. And then you hope they don't, right? You hope all that training pays off. When you see someone, I love golf for all the same reasons. It's like, you know, just a series of constant failures. And then so when you look at someone who”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to be willing to not be perfect and you need to make that decision instantaneously and realizing that it could cost you $50 to $100,000 if you get it right or wrong. And you have to be really, really comfortable with that. And so what did we do? Well, we stood around and we turned people's brains into mush until like I had people punch me, cry, run out. No, I mean, it sounds awful, but it was, it's amazing training because the rest of the world moves much slower.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You had to be quick, you had to be quick on basic mental agility. I see. So if you bought 450 contracts and it was a 20 Delta, you needed to be able to do what's 20% at 450. It's 90, but you need to do that precisely with numbers that are not so round.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just kind of went, you know, it's been great. And I've learned a ton and we've made each other a bunch of money and it's a win-win. But I really wanted to do my own thing. Like I wanted to be the captain of my own ship, I guess. And thankfully this guy Jim Hanson, who's still one of my dearest friends, sort of had an option to stay with that company or come at a completely underfunded company. I mean, thinking back, it was so stupid, you know, from a risk perspective. It was asymmetric, you know, far more upside than downside. It worked out really well. And we spent most of our time as we hired people and taught them how to do this. It was mostly psychology training. It was mostly standing around after hours and saying what seven times 28 and screaming it at each other like a drill sergeant until the person couldn't remember what nine times three wasn't.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was moving over to the Chicago Board of Trade, and I had found a couple of awesome programmers to help build this options analysis software. And he sort of offered me up to run some of the operations at the Mercantile Exchange when he went over to trade the bonds at the Board of Trade. And, you know, I mean, he was a really, really smart guy and he made me a deal that when you analyzed it very carefully, it got worse over time.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I started hiring very shortly after, I started trading about a year later, I left and started my own company with almost nothing. And I hired my first employee who became my business partner for the last 25 years. And I taught him what I learned. And I hired people that I considered corporate refugees, people who worked for companies and decided that independence was better.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, the money had an appeal, but it was also, hey, here's this giant competition. It's like paying a huge multifaceted chess game that no one's going to get exactly right. But like I said earlier, it's about making hundreds of decisions a day. And even when you get 10 in a row that come up tails, you know that the next one's 50-50, you know. That discipline was interesting. That was more about teaching yourself the psychology of standing there while everyone told you you were wrong or you were like physically small or you were too educated or too serious. I mean, you can't imagine how much of a fraternity house that place was. Everything in Wolf of Wall Stre I have seen.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I explained to him what I just said. It's like I've been here six months. I set a goal for myself of getting on a badge, it was called, like leasing a seat and actually trading within a year. And I was like, I need to get going on this. Like I need someone that's going to teach me options. And it's fascinating because he then hired me for, I mean, I want to say it was $400 a week or something like that. I stood right next to him all day every day, and he taught me options theory from scratch, better than any college ever could, to the point where you're looking three derivatives in, such as volatility curve, but the curve of the curve. And, you know, as soon as I started grasping this and going deeper down that rabbit hole, the more I liked it as a puzzle. It wasn't.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was just introduced to him through he was back then there were you know if you're a trader or even a trading company of a clearing firm like Goldman Sachs at the time there was a company called First Options and he cleared first options and back then you would literally have to take the elevator up to keep punch in all the cards into like a computer that was 17 floors away ancient times I met him through being introduced to him there after talking to him I knew he was the sort of geeky intellectual that I that I needed. And then when he told me like that he didn't want to hire me because he just hired some clerk. I was like, no, no, no, no. Like I will pay you to work for you. And he was like.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wanted to prove them wrong, so he took a small amount of money and started trading currency options. And when I found him, I instantly knew that this was the right person because I talked to dozens of people and no one was like him. And then he said he didn't want to hire me. Like he didn't want to hire anyone.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as I was growing up, you know, my hero was my dad, who was not an academic, who was not what people would think of as like an executive in a suit or whatever, but did really well. He had bought property in real estate. He owned a temporary labor office that supplied unskilled laborers to factories and conventions and whatnot. That was a really good business, you know. And he had a lot of common sense smarts. He was horrified that I didn't go to law school, you know. But meanwhile, I was modeling what he did. And so when I got down there, I was like, you got to own, you have to own your own situation. And so when I was offered those jobs, I was like, well, I don't really see myself working for someone else. And I found a guy who also felt that way. And he was working for a big company and they didn't want to make him a trader because he was too much of a quant. Like he was really well educated. He was really mathematical.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd be remiss not to say that my dad modeled an entrepreneur by necessity because his dad died when he was really young. He fought both at the end of World War II. He was drafted into the Navy at the end of World War II, was dismissed honorably after 16, 18 months because they were downsizing the Navy. And then he was barely young enough to be drafted into the Army for the Korean War. And when he got out, like, you know, he had no use.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In there was basically like they could do anything they want with me for three years. Like, I don't even necessarily need to be a trader. That's why I was interested in doing. But they could ship me to France and have me do something totally different. I could be an analyst or, you know, God knows what. And so when I would question that, they'd be like, man, you should be really happy. Like we had, you know, 300 applicants for this and we offered eight positions. Like, just take it. And I was kind of like”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was desperately looking to learn what was going on around me. And of course I bought books on finance and commodities and options and all that. And they were completely ridiculous and opaque and academic. And they looked like they had no relationship to what was going on there at all. I started taking classes that were run at the Merck on mock trading and just learning the hand signals and things like that, which were fine, but didn't really teach you how to trade. And I spent time interviewing with big companies like Goldman Sachs and Societe General and whatnot because I did have the academic background where I would get the interview. I would be able to take the test. I would do well in their math and psychology tests. I would get offered a job as a trader. And then I would look at the contract. This is a key thing. People get out of college to get offered a job. I think I'm the only one who ever read the employment contract. And what it says.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The law school. Yeah. And I remember being down there and What I was doing was so brainless. It was literally you take this piece of paper over to that guy, and then that guy would yell at you and he would rip the paper out of your hand and then you'd go get another one. It was literally that brain dead.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, for real, no. I was down there and I had made a fatal error of leaving school. And everyone told me it was a fatal error.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even MIT opened courseware so many colleges now have Taken that model and put great, great, great classes online. And I know that every now and then I'm surprised what I find on there and get sucked into like an all-nighter of taking some college class, you know, that I know nothing about. And it's so far over my head, but it kind of refuels you again to go like, oh, like there are huge gaps where I know nothing. And the older you get, the harder it is to start into something new, I find at least because it feels like the mountain's too big, you know?”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right, right. But you read that or read this great book called The Swerve, which is about this monk ages ago that sort of found that book and then rewrote it and saved it for history. Like that reads like a murder mystery. Like you don't necessarily need to start with the philosophy. You can start with the things around it. I continue to find sort of the world of ideas endlessly inspirational. And then by the way, steal them and use them in whatever you're doing. They're there for you.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Male, you know, reading Nietzsche for the first time. I was like, yeah. He'll think, you know, like it's not like, it's not passive. Like, I think people think of philosophers as like Zen monks sitting there quietly contemplating the universe. I think what it is, is it's people grappling with all the same questions and curiosity that We all have, if you pause to think about it. And so it's so big. It's not just Descartes. I think therefore I am. Kind of every little bit of that back to like you know, read Lucretius. He had the atomic.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think part of it is if you read a book in isolation, it's not as rich of an experience as discussing those ideas within that context. That said, if you're the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas, I mean, there's hardly a better place. It's a matter of finding what you enjoy. I happen to love the problems of philosophy, which Bertrand Russell wrote sort of about Viktor Stein's ideas, but before Wikenstein published. And it's written in plain language. It's not hard to understand. Certainly Nietzsche is more like philosophy with some weird sugar coating of something on top of it. And man, like as a young.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he didn't care. And so with me, I think it would be like he would be talking to my English professor without me even knowing and being like, that paper sucks. He can do a lot better than that. Give him a C on that one. I was like, what's going on? Like all of a sudden that class got hard. I didn't know I had no idea. And it was just an interesting, lucky.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Work you harder than the folks around you so the people that I thought he liked, he was just being nice to because they didn't, he didn't think they had a chance.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not want No, no, I think I was 19 years old and I didn't know that people you like you hold to a higher standard probably. And so consequently, he beat the shit out of me in a good way. You know what I mean? It's like if you have someone who's teaching you something and they invest their time in you and they think you have a chance of being good.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know, it's like I never knew here's the amazing part. I never knew the guy liked me until 10 years after I graduated. And then I was treated like a member of his family at his funeral 30 years later. Right. So, really fascinating person, really fascinating moment in my life where I don't know, someone saw something in me and kind of went like, I'm going to make an investment in this person that never asked for anything back. Ever.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I got to the front, he said, follow me, and I followed him to his office. And I swear, I mean, he's running through the fall, New England fall. And I thought I was going to get kicked out of the class. And when I closed the door, I turned around. He has feet up on the desk. And he said, where are you from? What do you want to do here? And that was it. He took me under his wing. I was very fortunate.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT