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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He said, Mr. Kakonis, where is your book? And I said, it's in my dorm room, professor. And he said, well, a lot of good it's doing you there. I said, on the contrary, it must apparently be doing me a lot of good there. And he said, I'll see you after class. So I thought I was getting kicked out.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And he called everyone he memorized every person's last name, and it was Mr. and Ms. And I remember the specific day. He was literally back to the, this is like right out of a movie. He is back to the class writing on a chalkboard some logic problem, symbolic logic. And the guy next to me had no shot at getting it, none, right? He said his name and I wrote on the paper on my desk so he could see it like what the answer was. And then without missing a beat or turning around, he was like, Mr. Conas, please do not help him. There is no way in hell he could possibly have done that without your help. And this is like two or three weeks in, right? And he spun around and he saw that I didn't have my book.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was prepared in earnest because I was mostly terrified. He had a reputation of being kind of like a, he is a Socratic method teacher. He was pretty harsh. Colgate was very small classes. And there was a class of, you know, 80 people, and he kind of wanted to whittle it down to a more manageable number. And his method to do that was just to kick your ass. And I remember, I mean, he probably, as great as he was, he, I doubt he would survive starting out at a college campus now. I literally saw him light fire to someone's notebook once when he was asking people examples of how to put out a fire. And this one guy was just stuttering because he was so in sheer. And so he just lit his notebook on fire and he stamped it. And the kid threw it on the ground, stamped on it. He's like, you could smother it.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have no idea why. They're like the third or fourth generation of person within that system. And they have no idea why a school bell rings in the morning, for example, or why a bartender is washing the dishes. And often I don't know the real answer, but I come up with alternative ones, at least that suit my narrative, I guess.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's almost like it's how to do something or how to manage something, but not why to do it. And so if you're taught in 1992, if I went and got an MBA, I would have been taught a certain kind of management that six years later what the internet would have gotten blown up. And so for me, it's like I always ask the why question. You know, you were mentioning like the book publishing or a bar, you know, I just look at some things and just go like, why is that? Why does it work that way? And oftentimes the people most entrenched in a system”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wish I knew the answer. I don't know the answer. I do know that there's three or four largest trading firms in the world run by philosophy majors. And if you look back at my class just of, you know, there's a few professors in there, but there are people who make movies. There's a guy who runs an ad agency, a large ad agency. It's a really interesting path. It's not dislike studying physics. Like I know some great physicists who are great in whatever they do. And I think it's a similar discipline of abstract thought.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True story like people lie on their resume all the time. I'm probably the only person that got rid of my degree and my academic awards and all that because to get a clerk job on the floor, the last thing they wanted was someone with a good degree, phi beta kappa, you know, magna cum laude, all that stuff. So I faked my resume, got a $5 an hour job, and looked for a mentor. And I found a guy named Frank Serrino, who was at Chicago Research and Trading, who was, which also was founded by a philosophy major. It's actually very common.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm turning this all over. This is the true story. I mean, this is so not like a good reason to do something. But I looked at him and I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, I skipped college and I started as a runner on the floor of the Merck. And now I, you know, I own like 25 condos and three townhomes and I trade. And I kind of went like, wow, I don't know what. I knew a little bit about it. I'd been down on the floor before just visiting. But I was kind of like, that's fascinating. Like that is a truly fascinating thing. And I went down, visited the floor. I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction to get a job.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disciplined and very clear headed with chaos around you. How did you get introduced to that world? You know, if you grow up in Chicago, you know some of these guys and some of them are flashy. And I can remember the exact moment. I'm not going to name a name here, as you'll find out why in a second, but I was walking down the street. I was like, you know, six months out of college, kind of didn't know what I was going to do. And I was walking down the street and I bumped into a guy I knew in high school. And, you know, he wasn't the best student. He didn't try the hardest. And I was like, hey, what are you doing now? And he was like, Know what are you doing with him? He's like, Well, I just bought this block.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now wife, then girlfriend, that I was in danger of becoming an intellectual bum because I dropped out of law school before I really entered law school. And I floundered around for a little while. But if you grew up in Chicago, you end up meeting people who had this unusual lifestyle. And that was back in the days pre-internet, pre-electronic trading, pre-high frequency trading where there was literally people on a giant trading floor shouting at each other. And you either were attracted to the, I don't know, almost animalistic nature of that. And for me, it was like a huge challenge because there are people down there that had, you know, PhDs from MIT. And then there was people who were like, you know, butchers that went down there with $100,000 and just kicked ass. And so it wasn't about your level of education or any of the stuff I already talked about. It was about can you show up every day and every day's game day and be really”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fields and different fields of thought. And so, man, like when I got out of school, I went to law school for like a day and a half. I'd gotten into Penn, like a joint JD PhD program at Penn. And as soon as I kind of knew who the other folks were and what their desires and trajectories were, I was like, oh, this isn't actually a good fit for me. And I remember my future father-in-law.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to be a philosophy major. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to teach you how to think. There's this great scene in a river runs through it where the dad, every time the kid writes an essay like the young fisherman kid writes an essay and he brings it to his father to be great at he gives it back to him and says half as long again long before that movie ever came out professor Belmouth would would essentially sign a paper to the class and say it should be about 15 pages and people would be like well how long and he'd always say like you know how long is a piece of string like it's however long it needs to be and then he would tell me yours can't be longer than three pages and people would be like jealous like wow you only have to write three pages if you take it seriously that is a much much harder thing to do so he really trained me as well as a number of other professors there to be clear in thinking succinct to you know understand what logic was to process information and really to look for parallels in different”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Finance is one that you and I haven't really talked about. That one is interesting. I'd love to explore for a second and we're going to go into a million different nooks and crannies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But do you feel like philosophy was studying philosophy undergrad was an asset that then later helped you or was it just an interest you explored en route to other things? I can't remotely imagine having not done that. And the way that actually I did it was really interesting. I had no intention of when I got to college, I thought I'd study political science economics pre-law kind of thing, something like that. And my very second week at Colgate University, wonderful professor who just passed away last year at 94 years old, really great mentor to me, Professor Jerome Belmouth, was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost 60 years, pulled me aside, introduction to logic, you know, 101, and basically said, what are you studying here? I told him. And he said, nope.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like all those things comes down to a whole bunch of decisions that you make without often really thinking about the decision itself. Not that you can go around walking around going, wow, I've just made another decision. But when you are doing business or starting a company or publishing a book or whatever it may be, you can be intentional about that and realize that it's going to be an iterative process. And so I think that's been not only the case for me in learning how to filter things through that mindset. But like when you said there isn't really a trajectory, I kind of look at everything I've done as the same in a way, even though other people look at it and go like, wow, you went from being a derivatives trader to owning restaurants. Like, that's weird. And I studied philosophy in college. So like people are like, how do you go from philosophy to finance? And to me, it was all the same thing. That particular transition or rather progression, I suppose, from philosophy.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Constantly being comfortable being wrong, but knowing that your overall number of decisions that you're going to be right more than you're wrong, I know there's like a big theme, a lot of the folks that you have on, like they talk about success or failure or how to measure those things. And I kind of don't look at it as success or failure with anything. I look at it as just like, is my pattern of decisions correct? And then getting back to your actual question with Professor Thaylor and Behavioral Economics. And I mean, essentially what they're looking at is decision making, what drives people to make certain decisions, what's rational about those decisions, what is mostly irrational or emotional, or what decisions do we make that people don't even realize they're making a decision, which is often the case as well. And then if you think about it, every single form of what we do, art, commerce, science, you know, picking a makeup.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Studying options trading, derivatives trading. And I think there's a huge misconception about what that is because of movies, because of the big short, because of Wall Street, all of that. It's a bit like playing a game of chess for a living or being the house at a casino, that sort of thing. It's about taking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day and pretending it's like a big decision tree. And any given decision is, you know, if you're really good, 48% chance of being wrong. So you have to be really, really good at.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of what I do is that it's risky. It is not. And in a separate exchange when we were talking about many of the topics that you could talk about outside of, say, restaurants, bars, and so on, even though that's been a big part of your life in recent history, many of these different experiments, explorations, portions of your career, topics that you could talk about, and then going into what you said, they come down to a single thought, really. Wherever there is opaque information that should be obvious, run to that gap. So I struggle with where to even begin with the 20 options that we have here, but maybe you could explain to me how behavioral economics and Richard Thaler fit into this just for curiosity's sake. I'll go back to the word you used options because I started out back in 1992 or three.”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For restaurants, why is it the only form of entertainment that has only a mutual promise to show up? And then it goes into behavioral economics and in parentheses. I don't even know how to pronounce this last name correctly. Richard Thaylor, or is it Taylor? Yeah, Thaler, Thaler. Thaler was a friend and investor, just won the Nobel Prize. Investing, been beating the market for nearly 30 years. Everything in all caps is about asymmetric risk-taking and information. And yet people's perception of risk is Yeah, Thaler. Thal”
2024-05-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT