#737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas

Tim Ferriss
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Naval Ravikant
Hello, boys. And girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade.

Tim Ferriss
I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life, and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode.

Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together, and for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim blog Combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, naval Ravakant at Naval on airchat and Twitter, co founder of Air Chat and angellist and host of the Naval podcast. I have a couple of core foundational values, and they're not things that I explicitly developed, they're just sort of, you can look back after the fact and say, oh, yeah, I won't compromise on those things.

Nick Kokonas
But now I realize how important honesty is. And I learned that from a couple of different places. One is, when I grew up, I wanted to be a physicist, and I idolized Richard Feynman. I read everything by him, technical and non technical, that I get my hands on. And he said, you must never, ever fool yourself.

And you are the easiest person to fool. The physics grounding is very important because physics, you have to speak truth. You don't compromise, you don't negotiate with people, you don't try and make them feel better, because if your equation is wrong, it just won't work, whatever you're doing. So I think the science background is important in that a second is growing up in New York, I grew up around some really rough and tumble kids, some of who were actually in the russian mob. And I once had an encounter where I watched one of them threaten to kill the other, and the would be victim went and hid.

And then finally he let the aggressor into his house after the aggressor promised him, no, I'm not going to kill you. Honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other, they would take each other's word for things. It sort of went above everything. And even though it was honesty in a mob context, I realized, like, how important that is in relationships. And then as I get older in life, I realized that a lot of happiness is just being present and whether you get this out of buddhism, or cognitive therapy or drugs or wherever, you realize that to live in the present moment is the highest calling.

It's the source of all happiness. And when you're not honest with somebody else, or when you even withhold something in your mind, what you've done is you've created a second thought process. You've created a second thread in your head that then has to stay active, keeping track of what you've said versus what you're really thinking. And that takes you out of the moment, and it brings you unhappiness over time. You will not realize it at that moment itself, but it will create stress and distraction.

So if you really want to be happy, you have to be present. And one of the core tenets of being present is to be completely honest at all times. There is a great short book that had a huge impact on me on this topic called lying by Sam Harris, which was just phenomenal because it explored the impact not just of lying in the way that most people think of it, but generalized deceit, or even white lies that are intended to protect people. What are the things that you look for in founders or the red flags that disqualify an investment or a founder? So, number one, intelligence, you got to be smart, which means you have to know what you're doing to some level, and that's a fuzzy thing.

But you talk to people and you kind of get a sense of, do they know what they're doing or not? Do they have insight? Do they have specific knowledge? Have they thought about this problem deeply? It's not about the age, it's not how many years they've spent, but just how deep is their understanding of what they're about to do.

So intelligence is key, energy, because being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time, and in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere. So if someone runs out of energy, or if they're doing this in some hesitating, preliminary way where they're looking for constant positive feedback, or if they're easily thrown off course, then they're not going to make it to the end, especially in the highly competitive startup context. And then, finally, is integrity. Because if you have someone who's high intelligence and high energy, but they're low integrity, what you've got is a hard working, smart crook.

And especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic, they're very fast moving, people are very independent. So if somebody wants to screw you over, they will find a way to do it. And fundamentally, ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. If being ethical was profitable, everybody would do it. So what you're looking for is a core sense of values that rises above and beyond the pure financial incentives.

So, for example, if Im talking to a founder and they offer to do something that is slightly unfair to another shareholder or employee or founder in exchange for making me happy, thats a red flag, because if they can do it to them, they can do it to me. And integrity is the hardest one to figure out because it requires longitudinal relationships, meaning long term. Exactly. So ive just become more hyper aware of that piece as time goes on. But those are kind of the three things that ill look for a thing that isnt really about success, but is more just about personal time, is when you invest in somebody or you work with somebody, you start a company with somebody, youre signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them in your life.

And so you just have to make sure you actually genuinely like these people. You dont consider work to have to answer a phone call or take a meeting or spend time with them. If its exhausting, if theyre downers, if theyre negative, if theyre difficult, no amount of money is worth it. You and I will both die with money in the bank. It's not about money at this point.

It's about do I want to spend my scarce time, resources, mental energy, spirit interacting with these people? My favorite founders are actually the ones who I learned from. So every time they call me up because they need help with something, I jump on it, because I know that walking around the block with them for an hour, I'm going to walk out much smarter. What books or people outside of the startup world have most improved your ability to invest? Maybe broadly speaking, just resource allocate.

Trey, that's a really good question. This is a very deep question that's going to have lots of answers. But at the end of the day, I think you have to work in your internal state until you are free of as many biases and conditioned responses as you can be. And it will improve every aspect of your life, including investing. And I am a bookworm, so I read an enormous amount.

I was raised essentially in a library of the daycare center, and so ive just read so much that I dont even know where to start. But if you work on your internal state, one of the things you start realizing is as an investor, emotions dominate. Investors are very emotional. Even though we act, we pretend to be very rational. For example, youll decide in the first five minutes of a meeting, usually whether you want to invest in the company or not.

And if a company doesnt take your money in the first round, you get annoyed with them or you feel like they crossed you. Then you have to undo that emotional state. So when the second round comes along, you can still be a positive force and continue helping the company and maybe have a bite at the apple a second time. And these kinds of skills are extremely hard to build. They're not things you're going to build by reading one book.

And then you're like, aha. So I don't believe in the epiphany theory of self development, where you read some book, you have an incredible epiphany. You read one phrase, you're like, okay, that's great. This changes my life. And then you scroll it down a piece of paper and you keep looking at it, or you put as a backdrop to your computer screen.

Life doesn't work that way. What you kind of have to do is you have to build skills. And I think happiness is a skill. Nutrition is a skill, diet is a skill, investing is a skill. Self awareness is a skill.

And skills get built up over decades with feedback loops, and you just have to constantly keep working at it, on it. So the books that have helped me a lot, I think there's a class of books that I would kind of put in the stoicism category. And I know you've been a big advocate of these in the past, and I sort of discovered them independently, but they were very influential. So Seneca and Marcus Aurelius both stand out. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius was absolutely life changing for me because it's the personal diary of the emperor of Rome.

And here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on earth the time that he lived, and he was writing his own diary to himself, not expecting it to be published. And when you open this book, you realize he had all the same issues and all the same mental struggles, and he was trying to be a better person. And so right there, you figure out, okay, success and power don't improve your internal state. You still have to work on that. And so that class of books is very influential.

I'd like to pay attention to what I consider the rational Buddhists, because a lot of Buddhism is drowned in mysticism and Hinduism and sort of worship this guru or do this ritual. I don't pay any attention to that, but I pay a lot of attention to what I consider rational Buddhists, where they can make the case very intelligently with reasoning along the way as to how you should train your mind to work or how you should observe your mind. Sam Harris, who you mentioned earlier, is great Jiru Krishnamurti, who's a lesser well known guy, but an indian philosopher who lived turn to the last century, is extremely influential to me. He's an uncompromising, very direct person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all times. And so I have been hugely influenced by him.

Probably the best book of his that I like is the one called the Book of Life, which is sort of excerpts from his various speeches and books that are stitched together. Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy, and striking thoughts is a book that is a good summary of some of his philosophy. But I could go on and on and on. I mean, there are, you have to read hundreds of these things, literally. Blogs.

The blogs are, I feel, an underappreciated resource. We're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook. We're getting sort of bite sized, pithy wisdom that's really hard to absorb. And books are very difficult to read as a modern person because we've been trained. We've got two contradictory pieces of training.

One is our attention span has gone through the floor because we're hit with so much information all the time that we want to. Skip, summarize, skip. We want to get to the TLDr. Cut to the chase. Too long.

Didn't read. What's the 140 character version? What's the Instagram version? On the other hand, we're also taught from a young age that books are something you finish. Books are something that are sacred, that you treat books as.

You know, when you go to school and you're assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book. So we forget how to read books, or we get in this contradiction where everyone I know, it's stuck on some book. Everyone is stuck on some books. I'm sure you're stuck on some book right now. It's like page 332.

You can't go on any further, but you know, you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while, your kindle or your iPad or whatever you use, or even your paper book is in a stuck state. That for me, was a tragedy because I grew up on books, and then I switched to blogs, and then I switched to Twitter and Facebook, and then I realized I wasn't actually learning anything. I was just taking a little dopamine snacks all day long.

I was getting my little 140 character burst of dopamine. And then I'd retweet, and then I'd see who retweeted my tweet. Then I get into an argument on Twitter and, you know, it's a fun, wonderful thing, but it's a game that I was playing. I wasn't actually learning anything. Usually with startup L.

Tim Ferriss
Jackson is. Yeah, I start up great character on Twitter. So I realized, like, I have to go back to reading books, because when you're talking about solving old problems, the older the problem, the older the solution. So if you're trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, absolutely. You should read something written in the modern age.

Nick Kokonas
Because this problem was created in the modern age. The solution is created in the modern age. But if you're talking about an old problem, like how to generally keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful of mind, what kinds of value systems are good, how should you raise a family? These kinds of things. The older solutions are probably better, and they withstood the test of time.

Any book that survived for 2000 years has been filtered to a lot of people. Now, it may have some stuff in it that we now know to be true, but the general principles are more likely to be correct. So if I want to learn the theory of evolution, which I kind of use as my binding principle whenever I'm trying to explain any human action, people read all kinds of blog posts and tweets on evolution. Everyone has a loose understanding of how evolution works, but how many have actually read the origin of the species? I mean, you can get it for $5 on Kindle.

And it's a very easy read. It's not a difficult read. And you can read the actual source and you can see the source of the brilliance, and you can see how Darwin came up with stuff back then that we're still trying to figure out or statements he made that we're still trying to prove out. But there's very little that's incorrect in that book, and it is a source book. So I wanted to get back into reading these source books.

And I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook and Twitter and these other bite sized pieces. So what I did was I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or as bite sized tweets or Facebook posts, and I felt no obligation to finish any book. So now anytime someone mentions a book to me, I buy it at any given time. I'm reading somewhere between ten and 20 books. I'm flipping through them.

If the book is getting a little boring, I'll skip ahead. Sometimes I'll start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye, and I'll just continue from there, and I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book if at some point I decide the book is boring or if it's got pieces of it that are incorrect. So now I can't trust the rest of the information in there. I just delete it, and I don't remember them at all. So I treat books now as other people might treat throwaway light pieces of information on the web, and all of a sudden, books are back into my reading library.

And that's great, because there's a lot of ancient wisdom in there. When you think of the word, say, successful, who's the first person or people who come to mind for you? Yeah, it's an odd answer because most people think of someone as successful when they win the game, and it's whatever game they're playing, right. So if you're an athlete, you're going to think of successful, someone who is a top athlete and wins that game. Or if you're in business, then you got to think Elon Musk or someone of that sort.

Or in my mind, I would have answered that question a little differently. A few years ago. I would have said Steve Jobs, because he created something, or he was a driving force, part of the driving force and the spearhead for creating something that has changed the lives for all of humanity, and that's the iPhone. I think of Marc Andreessen as super successful, not because of his recent incarnation as a venture capitalist, which is an interesting one, but because of the incredible work that he did with Netscape. He commercialized the web browser.

Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in the sense that he created bitcoin, which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come. So in the classic sense, I consider those creators and commercializers successfully, and, of course, Elon Musk, just because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology, entrepreneurship. But that said, to me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don't even play the game, who rise above it, and those are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness that they need nothing from anybody else. So there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life, some older gentlemen that I like to kind of learn from. And we mentioned our polish friend earlier, I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody.

He is at peace, he is at health, and whether he makes more money or less money, or where the next person over from him does better or worse than him, has no effect on his mental state and bearing. And historically, I would say that the legendary Buddha or Krishnamurti, who stuff that I like reading, they are successful, quote unquote, in the sense that they step out of the game entirely. Winning or losing does not matter to them. There's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour. Right?

And if you could literally just sit. If you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy, you were successful. And I think that that is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there. Do you have a current meditative practice? I have a couple.

Like most people, I talk about doing it, but don't really do it all that well. I think meditation is like dieting or where everyone is supposed to be following a regimen. Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does it. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I found, are pretty rare. And I've identified and tried at least four different forms of meditation.

The one that I found that works the best for me is something called choiceless awareness or non judgmental awareness, where you essentially don't sit in the corner and don't stay quiet. You walk around, you're going about your daily business, but hopefully there's some nature around. You're not talking to somebody else. And what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you're in without making judgments. You don't say, oh, there's a homeless guy over there.

I better cross the street. You don't look at two people running by and say, oh, he's out of shape, or, I'm in better shape than him, or that person's better than me, or this one's better, or, I should go get a coffee or whatever. You just don't make any decisions. You don't judge anything. You just accept everything if you do that.

I find if I can do that, even for ten or 15 minutes walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. And so that one works well for. Me when those thoughts come up, right when you see the guy with the bad hairdo and you're like, that guy has no business having that unmanageable hairdo or whatever ridiculous thought comes to mind. What is the internal response to that? What I do is, for those of you who programmed, I'm basically trying to run my brain debugger mode.

I'm trying to be very, very alert and watch my thoughts. You're not trying to judge anything, including your own thoughts. There's a great definition that I read that says, enlightenment is a space between your thoughts, which means that enlightenment isn't this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting at a corner on a mountaintop. It's something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be certain percentage enlightened every single day. You want to create as much space between your thoughts as possible.

And the way you do that is by being aware of what your thoughts are and why you're having them. So if I saw the guy with the bad hairdo toupee, I would look at that and I would. At first I'd be like, haha, he has a bad hairdo. And then I'd say, well, why am I laughing at him? Oh, to make me feel better about myself.

And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hairdo? Oh, because I'm losing my hair, and I'm afraid it's going to go away. And what I find is that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear, 90% are fear based. The other 10% are probably desire based. And as any, it's a very tactful.

Tim Ferriss
Way to put it. Yeah. And as any buddhist will tell you, that desire is just fear by another name. It's the other coin. Oh, I thought you were talking about something else entirely.

There's this. Yeah, there's this cartoon. I don't know if you know who Harry Crumb is. He has all of these very sort of profane comic strips and was very famous. And there's a great documentary about him as well.

Wait, Harry Crumb? I think that's actually a comedy, but R. Crumb, maybe I'm mixing it up. In any case, somebody can correct me in the comments. But there's this one cartoon of his.

I think it's a single cell, kind of like the far side in its format. It's basically a drawing of people on the street in Manhattan. And every man has a thought bubble above his head with a vagina in it. And every woman has a thought bubble above her head with a penis in it and everybody walking. That's why the Adam and Eve story is there, right?

Nick Kokonas
Original sin is lust. It's a thing that makes you fall out of heaven the same way. Maybe some of your readers have read this book called Siddharsa, but it's a beautiful parallel story to the making of the Buddha by Herman Hesch. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.

But even in that book, our protagonist is out there seeking enlightenment and gets really close. And the thing that drops him out of it is lust. He meets a woman that he feels lustful towards, and that sort of slowly becomes his undoing into everything. But anyway, so to answer your original question, when I'm doing the choiceless awareness form of meditation, which, by the way, isn't, as far as I can tell, it's not taught in any school, it's something that I discovered mostly by reading enough of Krishnamurti's book and piecing together what he meant, because he's a very, hes not a very clear speaker at times, or he is clear, but in a very different kind of way. And then I realized that, okay, so the point of meditation is to clear your mind.

And the way to clear your mind is, yes, you can sit in the corner and struggle with it, which doesnt really get you the outcome. Or you can do transcendental meditation, which is where youre using this chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts. Or you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. And as you watch them, you realize how many of them are just fear based. And the moment you recognize it as fear, without even trying, it sort of goes away.

And then after a while, your mind quietens. And when your mind quietens, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start noticing the details of, oh, my God, I live in such a beautiful place. It's so great that it clothes on me. Yeah, I can go into a Starbucks and get a coffee anytime I want.

How rich am I? Look at these people. Each one has a perfectly valid and complete life of their own in their own heads that's going on. It pops us out of the story, the dream that we're always in, the story that we're constantly telling ourselves. And if you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes or if you stop obsessing over your own story for even ten minutes, you'll realize that we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that life is pretty good.

Tim Ferriss
What is a bad habit that you're working to overcome right now? So this is something that I learned through our polish trainer friend, Victor.

Naval Ravikant
Hi, guys. Just a quick note from present day Tim the polish friend and trainer in question is Jersey Gregorick. And you can hear my conversation with Jersey titled the lion of Olympic Weightlifting, 62 year old Jersey Gregory, which also features Naval. Naval. And I were working with him at the time.

Tim Ferriss
We both co interview him. I still work with Jersey, and I just saw him just a few weeks ago. So to learn more about this amazing man, go to Tim dot blog Jersey Jerzy to listen to that conversation one more time. Tim Blog Jersey Jerzy at the age of whatever, he is now 67, he can still do things that most 20 somethings cannot do. Now back to the episode with Duvall.

Nick Kokonas
Habits are everything. Everything. I think that we are trained in habits from when we are children, including potty training and when to cry and when not to, and how to smile and when not to. And all of these things become habits. These are all behaviors that we learn and that we then integrate into ourselves.

And then what ends up happening when we're older is that we're a collection of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of habits are constantly running subconsciously, and they're internalized, and then we have a little bit of extra brain power in our neocortex for solving new problems. And so you become your habits. And what really brought this to light for me is our friend, our trainer, gave me a routine to do every single day. And before that, I had never worked out every single day. And it's a light workout.

It's not tough on your body. But I did this workout every single day, and I realized just the incredible, astonishing transformation that it had upon me, both physically and mentally, because I think to have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first. So that taught me the power of habits. And after that, I started realizing that it's all about habits. So at any given time now, within a six month period, I'm either trying to pick up a good habit or I'm discarding a previously bad habit, and it takes time.

So, for example, if someone says, I want to be fit, I want to be healthy, but right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat, well, nothing is going to work for you in three months. It's going to be sustainable. It's going to be a ten year journey, at least. And in the ten year journey, what you're going to do is every six months or every three months, depending on how, how fast you can do it, you're going to break bad habits and you're going to replace them, or you're going to pick up good habits. So I think it is all about habits.

There is nothing else. Examples of habits I've picked up in the last twelve months or I'm still working on. I'm one of these people who wants everything, right? So I don't want to give up anything. So, for example, if I want to stop eating bad foods, if I want to lose weight by fixing my diet, I don't say these foods are bad.

I'm not going to eat them and then suffer and then feel like I'm not eating tasty food. Instead, what I do is I do some combination of changing my taste buds to actually like the foods that are healthier for me and substituting unhealthy tasty foods with healthy tasty foods so that I can sustain it forever. I'm not interested in anything that is unsustainable or even hard to sustain. I want my life to be effortless. So once I've created a good habit, it has to be the kind of habit that I can sustain with no effort.

Tim Ferriss
You're about to graduate. If you had to go back and give vatnaval advice, you're already hooked on reading, so that seems to be covered. What advice would you give yourself? Yeah, it's funny, I actually did this exercise recently where I sat down and I didn't write it because it was in my head, but I did spend some time thinking about what is the advice I would give my 30 year old self? And the advice was along the lines of, chill out, don't stress so much, not so much anxiety, everything will be fine, and be more yourself.

Nick Kokonas
Don't try and do what you think society wants or needs. Don't try and live up to other people's expectations. Self actualize. Say no to more things. Protect your time, because it's very precious.

You know, on your dying day, you will give everything, everything you have for another day. So the discount rate, the marginal value of that extra day just goes up as you get older. So the advice was all along those lines. It was basically, be yourself. Don't listen to other people.

Don't worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you. And then I said, well, what would my 30 year old self have said to my 20 year old self? And it turned out to be pretty much the exact same thing. And what would my 20 year old self have said to my ten year old self? Pretty much the exact same thing.

So I think my 50 year old self is going to say, chill out, relax. Don't stress so much. Live in the moment. It'll all be all right. Less fear, more love.

You know, I love people more. You know, love is one of those weird things, like, everyone wants to be loved. Everyone deeply needs to be loved. It's not something you can buy. No amount of money or power will bring you true, unconditional love.

But it turns out you can give love. It's free to give, so you can't necessarily get it. But if you can get in the mindset of, well, I'm just going to give it eventually, on a long enough time scale, you get what you deserve. The universe kind of sends it back your way. Yeah, well, not only that, it's like, if you don't know how to make yourself happy, try to make someone else happy.

Tim Ferriss
And that is sort of a, as you said, kind of a recursive function. And now I'm getting. I'm using vocab. I shouldn't, but it's a virtuous cycle. Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway and just a brilliant older gentleman.

Nick Kokonas
His speeches are collected in poor Charlie's almanac and they're worth reading. But he was asked at one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings. Someone basically asked him on the lines of, like, you know, how do I find a worthy mate? And he said, be worthy of a worthy mate. And I think that's absolutely right.

You just work on yourself until you no longer need them, and then they appear. I think that's what the Zen saying that says, when the student is ready, the master appears. What that basically means is you have to work on yourself and be ready, and then good things will happen to you. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Where would you put it?

I don't know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages that I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I figured this out was that what is desire? And desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don't think most of us realize that's what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wondering why we're unhappy.

So I like to stay aware of that, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time. And I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that's where I've chosen to be unhappy. So I think that that is an important one, or even a simpler one is a lot of meditative.

Like you said, you did a transcendental meditation course. They give you a mantra. The mantra is supposed to have actually no meaning. Maybe the universal mantra that's been derived through the ages is om, which where you kind of just sit there and say om in your mind to yourself. It's strange.

You can say it to yourself all day long in your mind, and it'll make you happier, more peaceful. You start chanting it out loud, they'll lock you up. But om has no meaning, I think. But to me it has a meaning. And the meaning is just accept.

Just accept. In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. Those are your three options.

What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it, but not changing it. Wishing you would leave it, but not leaving it and not accepting it. So it's that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. So probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is to just tell myself one word, accept. So anytime I look at myself and I'm judging something, I just say accept.

And it's only very, very, very few things that I will choose not to accept. And if I don't accept something, it's for one of two reasons. Either I'm aware that this is something that it's just so important to me right now that I can't accept it, and now I'm going to put up with a mental battle for it. Or more likely, I've just lost control of my thoughts. I'm no longer present.

I'm dreaming. I'm in a highly emotional state.

Tim Ferriss
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn jobs. When you're hiring for your small business, you want to find quality professionals that are right for the role as well, soon as possible. That's why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs has the tools to help find the right professionals for your team faster and for free.

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Nick Kokonas
And now, Nick Kokonis Instagram, nkokonis, twitterickkacones. Nick is the co owner and co. Founder of the Alinea group of Restaurants, which includes Alinea, one of only 13 restaurants in the US to earn the. Coveted Michelin three star rating. Nick, welcome to the show.

Naval Ravikant
Thanks, Tim. Awesome to be here finally. Yeah, yeah. We have the benefit of having spent some time together, and I have been fed a lot of caffeine by you, and you're also of great help with the four hour chef. So I wanted to, right off the bat, thank you for that.

It was kind of a fun thing because I remember when you. You sent me, like, a preview of the book, and then you called me to say, like, hey, you know, do you want to say anything about it? And I was like, on a chairlift? And I was like, by the time I get off this chairlift, I will have a blurb for you with such pressure, which meant a lot. And pressure, I think, is the word to describe so much about you and your life.

Tim Ferriss
I want to say trajectory, but I'm not even sure that is the right word. And I thought a fun way to kick off the conversation would be to share with people listening some of the back and forth that we had when we were brainstorming what a podcast might look like. Because certainly I don't think of you first and foremost as a food guy, per se. And we were having this exchange via text and then via email, and I thought I'd just read one of your responses as we were swapping different ideas. I'll probably edit for space a little bit here, but not by much.

And here we go. I'm a huge believer in radical transparency in business. I give numbers and burn bridges with big companies because I think that a lot of times, people don't ask the basic questions. In publishing. For instance, how much did that book cost to print?

How many did it sell? Oddly, those numbers are very hard to come by. I dug from months, years ago to do the Alinea book the right way for bars. Why does a bartender wash dishes and talk to customers? We've redesigned the bar experience and won best bar in the world 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 Thaler.

Or is it Taylor? Yeah, Thaler. Thaler. Thaler is 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 or 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 curiositys sake, ill go back. To the word you used, options. Because I started out back in 1992 or three studying options trading, derivatives trading. And I think theres a huge misconception about what that is because of movies, because of the big short, because of Wall street, all of that.

Naval Ravikant
Its a bit like playing a game of chess for a living or being the house at a casino, that sort of thing. Its about taking hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day and pretending its like a big decision tree. And any given decision is if youre really good, 48% chance of being wrong. So you have to be really, really good at constantly being comfortable being wrong, but knowing that your overall number of decisions that youre going to be right more than youre wrong. I know theres a big theme.

A lot of the folks at Yvonne, they talk about success or failure or how to measure those things. And I kind of dont look at it as success or failure with anything. I look at it as just is my pattern of decisions. Correct. And then getting back to your actual question with Professor Thaler and behavioral economics, 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, picking a mate, 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, ive 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 its going to be an iterative process.

And so I think thats 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? You know, and to me it was all the same thing.

Tim Ferriss
That particular transition, or rather progression, I suppose, from philosophy to 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.

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, a wonderful professor who just passed away last year at 94 years old, really great mentor to me, Professor Jerome Belmuth, was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost 60 years.

Naval Ravikant
Pulled me aside, introduction to logic 101, and basically said, what are you studying here? I told him, and he said, nope, you're going to be a philosophy major. I'm going to teach you how to think. There's this great scene in Riverruns 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 graded, he gives it back to him and says, half as long.

Again, long before that movie ever came out, Professor Belmuth would essentially assign 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, how long is a piece of string? 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 understand what logic was, to process information and really to look for parallels in different fields and different fields of thought. And so, man, 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 told my 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 phds from MIT, and then there was people who were like, 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 is game day and be really disciplined and very clear headed with chaos around you? How did you get introduced to that world?

You know, if you grew 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 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 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, well, I'm just rehabbing these homes. And I thought literally like, oh, he's a construction worker. And I was like, what are you doing with him? He's like, well, I just bought this block and I'm turning this all over. This is the true story.

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 out as a runner on the floor of the merck. Now 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. 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.

True story, 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. Five 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 Zarino, who was at Chicago research and trading, which also was founded by a philosophy major.

It's actually very common. Why is that common? I wish I knew the answer. I don't know the answer. I do know that there's three or four of the largest trading firms in the world are 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.

Like, I can't think of anything worse than studying business it just seems like a terrible thing to study to me. Is that because it's like the surface of the waves in the ocean? Topically, it's just so non transferable in a sense. And then as you go lower and lower to the slower moving layers, that's just more multidisciplinary in terms of studying the basics of how things work or how people think. 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, with the Internet, would have gotten blown up. And so for me, it's like I always ask the why question you were mentioning, like the book publishing or a bar. I just looked at some things and it's like, why is that? Why does it work that way? And oftentimes the people most entrenched in a system 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.

Tim Ferriss
Undervalued skill, by the way, in some cases, right? You gotta be careful, but very, very, very interesting. I wanna pause here, partially because I'm over caffeinated. I was inspired by my nostalgia related to your double espressos. But why did the professor pull you aside?

What did that early undergrad professor in logic 101 see in you? Whether he explained it or not later, I don't know. That led him to take a special interest in you. I think I was prepared in earnest because I was mostly terrified. He had a reputation of being kind of like he was a socratic method teacher.

Naval Ravikant
He was pretty harsh. Colgate was very small classes, and there was a class of 80 people, and he wanted to whittle it down to a more manageable number. And his method to do that was just to kick your ass. I remember. Probably as great as he was, 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, like, examples of how to put out a fire. And this one guy was just stuttering cause he was so in fear. And so he just lit his notebook on fire, and he stinks and he stamped it, and the kid threw it on the ground stamped on it. He's like, you could smother it. Sure.

And he called everyone. He memorized every person's last name, and it was Mister and miss. And I remember the specific day. He was literally back to the. It was like right out of a movie.

He is back to the class, writing on a chalkboard, some logic problems, 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, mister Kokonis, 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. And he said, mister Kokonis, 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, and there was, like, a line forming to create office hours or to, like, ask to be transferred out or whatever.

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. And, you know, it's like I never knew. Here's the amazing part.

I never knew the guy liked me until ten years after I graduated, and then I was treated like a member of his family at his funeral 30 years later. Huh? 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 gonna make an investment in this person that never asked for anything back, you know, ever.

Tim Ferriss
How did you not know that he liked you? Did he withhold in some way so that you wouldn't get a big head or something along those lines? Did he not want to get it overly attached to you so you wouldn't express it? 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, right?

Naval Ravikant
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, they work you harder than the folks around you. So the people that I thought he liked, he was just being nice to because he didn't think they had a chance, right? Yeah.

Tim Ferriss
He didn't care. He wasn't invested. Yeah. 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.

Naval Ravikant
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, it was an interesting, lucky, fortunate place to be at that time. So we're going to get back to the merc, but before we do philosophy. I'm endlessly fascinated by philosophy, but I'm also a nerd and kind of academic and pedantic. And I've spent a lot of time in school for people who are listening to this, who are, say, already in their careers, or maybe they're in their early twenties thinking of starting a company, but are entrepreneurially either involved or inclined. Would you suggest if they don't have any exposure to philosophy, that they read any particular books or resources or explore it in any way?

Tim Ferriss
Or would you say, actually, you know what? That was an intermediate step to something else? You would probably be better off studying x, Y, and Z. Is there like a starter kit or something you would recommend to folks who don't have the philosophy exposure? I think part of it is if you read a book in isolation, its not as rich of an experience as discussing those ideas within that context.

Naval Ravikant
That said, if youre the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas, I mean, theres hardly a better place. Its a matter of finding what you enjoy. I happen to love the problems of philosophy, which Bertrand Russell wrote sort of about Wittgenstein's ideas. But before Wittgenstein published, and its written in plain language, its not hard to understand. Certainly Nietzsche is more like philosophy with some weird sugar coating of something on top of it.

And man, as a young male reading Nietzsche for the first time, I was like, fuck yeah. It's not passive. I think people think of philosophers as 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, that we all have if you pause to think about it. And so it's so big. It's not just, you know, Descartes, you know, I think, therefore I am. It's kind of every little bit of that. Back to like, you know, read Lucretius.

He had the atomic. Could you spell that? I'm going to be the first one to admit that. Lucretius. Oh, I can't.

Oh, Lucretius. Lucretius. Yeah, Lucretius. Yeah. I mean, l u c r I t I U S.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. I'm a terrible speller, so never ask me to spell it. We'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, right, right. But like, you know, it's like you read.

Naval Ravikant
Read that or read this great book called the Swerve, which is, you know, about this, 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. Lucretius. L U C R E T I U S. Titus Lucretius Carus is a Roman poet and philosopher. We'll put that in the show notes.

Tim Ferriss
The. I want to second Bertrand Russell. Also, I haven't read Bertrand Russell in so many ages, but it is very digestible. It is not dressed up in $10 words when ten cent words would suffice. A lot of his writing is really powerful.

I also just wanted to mention for folks that. And I just thought about this ages and ages ago. I felt like I had certain gaps in my education after college, and I ended up. I don't know why this didn't occur to me earlier, but somebody mentioned that Stanford, UC Berkeley, these top tier universities, all had extended or adult education classes taught by professors and junior professors. I mean, this is the same team who's teaching, and those are very readily accessible.

Naval Ravikant
Well, and even MIT, opencourseware, like 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 an all nighter of taking some college class that I know nothing about. And it's so far over my head, but it kind of refuels you again. To go like, oh, 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. I would actually. Not to pull a nickel, actually, sir. Disagree. On the contrary, sir.

Tim Ferriss
My book is doing me a lot of good in my dorm room. That's right. I think one of your superpowers is that you ask the fundamental why. Questions about longstanding assumptions or conventional wisdom in different fields. And the more you have done that, the more obvious it is to you to do it as a starting point, in a way.

Let's go back to the merc. We can go in any direction, of course, but you step into this lord of the flies gladiatorial arena with butchers and phds and so on. Then what? At what point? Is there a point when you're like, okay, I actually do think I could be good at this.

Naval Ravikant
No, no. For real. No. I was down there and I. I had made a fatal error of leaving school.

And everyone told me it was a fatal error. And this is leaving out the middle 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 you would rip the paper out of your hand, and then you go get another one.

It was literally that brain dead. 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 Merc on mock trading and just learning the hand signals and things like that, which were fine, but didnt 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 on their math and psychology tests. I would get offered a job as a trader, and then I would look at the contract. And this is a key thing.

People get out of college, they get offered a job. I think I'm the only one who ever read the employment contract. And what it said 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 what 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 God knows what. And so when I would question that, they'd be like, man, you should be really happy. We had 300 applicants for this, and we offered eight positions. Just take it.

And I was kind of like, totally your style. I'd be remiss not to say that my dad modeled. My dad was an entrepreneur by necessity because his dad died when he was really young. He fought both. At the end of world war two, he was drafted into the navy.

At the end of World War two, was dismissed honorably after 1618 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, he had no usable skills, so he went to work at the grocery store that he started working at when he was twelve years old, saved up all of his money from the army and the navy and bought the store. So as I was growing up, my hero was my dad, who was not an academic, who was not what people would think of as an executive in a suit or whatever, but did really well. He had bought property and real estate.

He owned a temporary labor office that supplied unskilled laborers to factories and conventions and whatnot. That was a really good business. And he had a lot of common sense, smarts. He was horrified that I didnt go to law school, but meanwhile I was modeling what he did. And so when I got down there, I was like, you have to own your own situation.

And so when I was offered those jobs, I was like, well, I dont 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 didnt want to make him trader because he was too much of a quant. Like, he was really well educated, he was really mathematical. 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. How did you meet him? Do you remember how you guys met?

Yeah, I was just introduced to him through, he was back then, 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 key, punch in all the cards into like, a computer that was 17 floors away. Wow, 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 needed.

And then when he told me that he didn't want to hire me because he just hired some clerk, I was like, no, no, no, I will pay you to work for you. He was like, this is really strange. 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 leasing a seat and actually trading within a year. And I was like, I need to get going on this. I need someone that's going to teach me options. It's fascinating because he then hired me for, I want to say it was dollar 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 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 certainly the money had an appeal, but it was also, hey, here's this giant competition. It's like playing 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 ten in a row that come up tails, you know that the next one's 50 50, you know.

And, uh, 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 Street I have seen. I haven't lived, but I've seen it all.

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. Why did you leave?

Tim Ferriss
After a year, 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, he was a really, really smart guy, and he made me a deal that, when you analyzed it very carefully, got worse over time. 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.

Naval Ravikant
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 Hansen, 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, but it was asymmetric, far more upside than outside. 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's seven times 28? And screaming it at each other like a drill sergeant until the person couldn't remember what nine times three was anymore. And wait, why did you do that?

Well, 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% of 450? It's 90.

But you need to do that precisely with numbers that are not so round. Right. You 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.

So any other decisions that I've made in business since then have felt glacial in pace. Yeah. There's also something to be said for making the trainer, the training in some or all respects harder than the competition. Right. I mean, the adage of, the more you sweat during peacetime, the less you bleed during wartime.

Tim Ferriss
The best competitors I've met in many, many fields often strive to make their training and the toil of their preparation harder than what they expect to face. 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.

Naval Ravikant
I love golf for all the same reasons, it's like just a series of constant failures. And then. So when you look at someone who, 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 ten 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, the s p p. You really got this right, you know, but I made some completely stupid decisions, but mostly on, on the measure. When things got crazy, I was able to perform more than not. I remember, like Greenspan's irrational exuberance speech was. Or 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 get home soaking wet with sweat. It was a physical job, I guess, with people. It was really blue collar in a lot of ways. And 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 like an awful. It is an awful thing in a way, right? It's just about pure commerce. It serves a purpose of price discovery and all that.

But any individual person isnt really the one doing that. 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. Preston, what would you recommend to people who are listening and are having this flashback to the introductory text exchange about beating the market over a long period of time, who are hoping to become better investors? And you can take that anywhere you want. But are there any particular tools, mental models, anything that you would recommend?

It's really, really hard. I think the mental model is asymmetric risk. I always look for something that the upside is three to four x. The downside, obviously, quantifying those is very difficult, but that's the key. Everything I try to do is asymmetrically.

And then even though Nehem Taleb is a bit of a pedantic goofball on Twitter, his book fooled by randomness is awesome. That was the one that preceded black swan. And I think Black Swan is 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.

You have to do a casino. Yeah. You walk through a casino and you see everybody pricing their outcomes incorrectly. The entire city is built on that. You know, if you could get in your head literally.

Tim Ferriss
Literally? Literally? Yeah, literally. And I don't take any pleasure. Like, people are like, oh, you must, you must love gambling or whatever.

Naval Ravikant
And it's like, I would never sit down to a blackjack table because I know that, you know, there's a 49.5% chance that I'm going to win, and that's the wrong way.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, the fool. Randomness has come up a number of times. I haven't read it in ages because it is one of his earlier books. But Howard marks also brought this up recently when I was chatting with him. And it is an exceptional book, I think, for developing a new lens on life, not just investing.

When you are investing for yourself now, how do you think about risk? Because this is a word that has popped up a few times. How do you personally think about risk in your life? Do you, for instance, some startup founders look at the risk as the various early stage startups, restaurants, bars and so on that youre involved with, and then you play it safe in your other kind of asset allocation. How do you think about risk in your life or in investing?

Naval Ravikant
Thats a pretty difficult question. Yeah, I think that if you look at everything that ive 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 100 of those ones, and less than one in a hundred of those becomes a millionaire. And I went, great.

It's like the old Jim Carrey. So you're saying there's chance, you know? Right. You know, and, and, and then, and then you go to the restaurant business and people, oh, yeah, 95% of all restaurants go to business in their first two years. And I'm like going, great, you know, that's, that's perfect.

Tim Ferriss
Why do you, why do you have that response? Is it because, yeah, so, and then I'm going to start, I'm doing software startup now. Go for it. So the higher, the smaller the hoop, the more interesting it is to figure it out. And once youre up there and you know how to jump up through that little hoop, theres fewer people playing that game.

Naval Ravikant
And the other thing is, I remember right when I was going to start building Alinea 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 wed go there a lot and I kind of got to know him a little bit and he said, so what are you up to? And I said, well, actually im building a restaurant now. And he looked at me, said, ah, its a terrible business. You dont want to do it like incredible failure rate, terrible.

And I was like, why did you build the next four?

Tim Ferriss
How did he respond to that? You know, no one does. Thats kind of like, what? Well get to it, im sure, but thats 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 $400,000 to write a book.

Naval Ravikant
Something's remiss here, you know what I mean? I've never written a book before, but yet someone's going to write me a $400,000 check. There must be a lot of money on the other side of that bet. And so consequently, 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?

Yeah, I don't think 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. Yeah, yeah, this is where, among many, many other places, averages can be very, very misleading.

Tim Ferriss
Right. And I always end up in public Q and A's and things of this type, hearing various numbers and stats thrown around, many of which I think have no basis on any data whatsoever. But there's the, we only use 10% of our brands. Not true. There is the nine out of ten startups fail within the first year or whatever the stat, yeah, stat is.

And the first question that occurs to me with a number like the ladder or I guess a ratio is, well, is it because the model is difficult? Is it because startups are inherently that high risk? Or are there other plausible explanations? Is it that nine out of ten people who attempt to start a startup, don't do any of the necessary due diligence. Correct?

Naval Ravikant
Yes. Yeah. You know, I've been on a couple of, like, graduate school, you know, entrepreneurship, you know, 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, 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, you know, 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 at that and you go, 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 the name of the company, but they don't actually have a piece of software yet.

Tim Ferriss
Right. 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 on a consultant.

Naval Ravikant
Oh, man, you must get that 50 times worse than, I mean, what I. Tend to get, and this is part of the reason why I stopped all the startup stuff a couple of years ago, is it got to the point where 90% of the pitches I received which were unsolicited would be along the lines of hi, comma, like, not even a first name, or be like, hi, Tim. Or, hey, Tim. Even better. I am the CEO or co founder of X.

Tim Ferriss
We are raising this at this valuation. We are oversubscribed, but we could squeeze you in for 25k if you're really interested, because we admire ABC. Hear the docs attached. Yeah. Right.

Let us know if you're interested in the next 60 minutes, which might end up. My default response to anything like that, where people are pressuring me for a fast decision, is no. Like, it's just ive lost very little money saying no to those things. But coming back to the examples that you were giving and what we were talking about, bridging over to restaurants and food, youre being told how restaurants are an awful business. Food is an awful business.

And I remember someone told me a long, long time ago, theyre like, yeah, if you want to lose money, go into magazines or restaurants and at what point. I have a little bit of the backstory, but not all the details. At what point do you decide to go into or get involved with restaurants and why? I left trading in about 2002, 2001. Knew it was a tough year between 911, which was, my father died in February of that year.

Naval Ravikant
I was burnt out after going really hard for so long. And we built up pretty good sized 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.

How to really take one at the time. And so I left. 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, you know, a small hedge fund. And then I just didn't know what to do. And I had, you know, an awesome wife and a young son.

And things were good, you know, but I was kind of panicked. I was playing golf with ex athletes because who else is 34 years old and can play golf on a Wednesday afternoon? It was just a weird thing. 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 Achatz, 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. And 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 it was 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? And as 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.

I would bring him books, and I didn't figure he had a lot of time to read, so I would put, like, 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. Hold on a second. The peregrinations, like a peregrine falcon. I don't even know what that is.

No, no, no. A peregrination is like a wandering about. So it was written just after World War Two by an ex serviceman. He kind of goes around Paris, I want to say, maybe late forties, early fifties, I can't recall exactly. There is a chapter in there on La Permide, 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 more like. It was more like, you know, you're going for a provocation there.

But if, you know. And we would go back and forth. And he wrote at the time on a forum called E Gullet. 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.

He was like Hollywood in the sense of, like, he was good looking and very driven, 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 and introspective, shy. But then you read these, which are still up, you can still google it, and you'd go, like, he'd go on for, like, four pages about bread service.

Like, what's the point of bread? And this is a guy that I could wrap my head around. And so I remember on January 20, 2004, it was 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'd 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 him. That would put him into ten days of pure hell, because he would research latvian food. He would have to redo. 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 he served us, like, the most amazing meal of my life. And it started out with latvian sorrel soup with braised ham hocks, and 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 had watched the kitchen, and it was like a watchmaker shop. It was not screaming and yelling.

Tim Ferriss
It is just as sorry to interrupt. It is so unlike anything that the vast majority of people listening to this would possibly expect. Right? Yeah. Gordon Ramsay.

Naval Ravikant
It's not Gordon Ramsay. Right. Yeah. It is just complete silence. It is like a watchmaking factory.

Tim Ferriss
It is. It is really something else. Anyway, sorry to jump in. 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.

Naval Ravikant
And he was like, well, thank you. And I said, what are you planning on doing with yourself? You know, I mean, I was like, kind of, I had a lot of wine, and I looked, I kind of looked at him, you know, he sat down with us, and I said, what are you, what are you going to do? And he goes, well, what do you mean? I said, well, youre not going to be here forever.

And he said, well, I want to build my own restaurant. I said, id be happy to help you do that. And he said, what kind of restaurant do you want to build? I said, I dont know. Ive never built a restaurant before.

That was it. And then, like, a week later, I got an email with his business plan. I invited him by my house, and a year to the day later of that, that was May 4, we went back and forth on email. May 4, we held a dinner at my house for potential investors. And on May 4, 2005, we opened Alinea.

Tim Ferriss
That is nuts. In terms of nuts, we didn't even know each other. Can you put that in perspective for people? I actually did not realize that was the timeframe. Yeah.

I mean, can you just, in the context of, like, normal restaurant world, we argued. So we didn't really know each other very well. You've said we didn't know each other very well. What did you know about each other? Nonetheless, that gave you guys the push, like, the impulse and the sufficient level of trust, excitement to actually pursue it, right?

There had to be something there. It couldn't just be nothing. So what was it? You didn't know each other well, meaning maybe you didn't know the full scope of each other's background? Yeah.

Naval Ravikant
I mean, I actually studied that. Like that, actually. 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. Be serious.

Like, yeah, yeah. Like. Like, you know, I think everyone else wanted this is. This is really true, because he has said this to me. 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 kind of 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, we. 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, building lease, all of that, he was like, 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. And 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. He built plateware, and he won the bocousta or for the platter he designed for Thomas Keller, Daniel Balloud's team, for the Team USA and all that now. But back then, this guy's not going to design plumbing or electrical. So I would just look at him going like, well, no, we need an architect, and you need to get city stamps and all that and all that.

So I think Grant was just like, yeah, you find a place, you put tables in it and 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, you 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 out and we just talked it out, like right down to what kind of tables, what kind of glassware, what kind of this. Like, we wanted to rethink the why again of everything. Like why do you put a candle on a table? Why is a candle romantic?

That's a question we asked, do we need candles? That's kind of like, why is that romantic? Why do people put a little bud vase on a table? Why shouldn't that be an edible thing? That'd be cool.

So we did all that and we designed the experience to create emotional responses from the moment that you walked in the front door. So we didn't have the podium, we went, what does a good greeting feel like? Not just if you're at someone's house, what does that feel like? If youre at restaurant, what shouldnt it feel like? Well, it shouldnt feel like a computer in front of your face saying, whats your name?

And all that. So we went through every aspect of that and I lost almost 20 pounds that year. Not in a healthy way, just gc ing the construction. I laid tile in the basement like three days before we opened. Let me pause for 1 second.

Tim Ferriss
So the why question that comes to mind for me is, after the finance, after battling it out on the front lines and going through 2001, why this as your next thing? Why was this the thing that captured your imagination? You had to know on some level, once you started getting into the details, like, fuck, I mean, this is going to be. Yeah, it's all in. This is going to be a big.

This is going to be all my chips, energetically. So why? Why this? You know, there are occasional times when you wake up in the morning and that thought comes back to you that, hey, I'm really sucked into this, right? You know, and for about three or four months without telling anybody, even Dagmara, like even not telling her, like telling no one, I kept going, like, I should build a restaurant with this guy.

Naval Ravikant
It would be the best restaurant in the world if it was done all the way. And I recognized my inner voice saying, that's a really dumb idea and you don't know what you're doing. I'd never worked a day in my life in a restaurant. And I also recognized, and this is also critical, I recognized that so many people built their living room after they made some money. So they went like, oh, well, I know how to host a good dinner party and I know good wine.

So I'm going to build me a restaurant and then they sit there like it's their living room, and that's not good. I didn't want to be that juicy guy that built a restaurant because my ego was needed to host a party. And so whenever I would kind of later on broach that subject and people would say, like, well, I could almost hear their brain whispering, well, of course that's what he's going to do. And so that was, again, not the best of motivations in the world, perhaps, but the honest one that was hugely motivating eventually. But when we first started, it was this nagging thing like, id wake up in the morning and I would go, you know, Im not really into what Im doing right now, and ive just met somebody whos the best in the world at what they do and no one knows it yet.

Thats probably happened to me. Im really fortunate that thats probably happened to me seven or eight times in my life. And when it happens and I meet that person, whoever it may be, no matter what theyre doing, I pause. I kind of acknowledge that directly, and then I just go like, can we grab a glass of wine or coffee or something? And that's something worth marking and going like, wow, this person's really invested in something.

And Grant had every aspect of being that at 28 years old. And in hindsight, like, it looks smart, but I gotta tell you, it was years before it felt smart. You mentioned just now that you've met these people seven or eight times who are the best in the world, or potentially the best, or among them. Yeah, among them. But the key point that jumps out for me is, and the world didn't know it yet.

Tim Ferriss
So my question for you is that sort of brings to the forefront, in my mind at least, the question of what is nick seeing or feeling that other people are not? Could you talk to that? Is there a feeling or a particular type of observation, a particular type of detail that you notice in these people that allows you to scout the talent where other people might miss it or not pay enough attention to it? Yeah, I mean, I think you've written a couple of books about that. It's definitely intangible.

Naval Ravikant
I think it's different in every case. But it's interesting because you can tell when someone is fully committed, I guess, to their craft or their art or their business or whatever it is, that they're doing, their sport. And it's not because they talk about it all the time. Though, of course, if you push a little, they're happy to do so. But it's more that if you look around, the vast majority of people are not fully committed to whatever.

And I think part of what you do is you try to steer people to find those things that they can commit to, or you can try to lower a barrier to show them, like, hey, the commitments. Not as hard as you think in this particular area. Right, right. But these folks are, like, they're all in. They're 99%, and that's what they do, often to the detriment, frankly, of other aspects of their lives.

And I guess you get better at noticing them. And I mean, now, like, that's like, boy, I live for that. Like, I love meeting people that, even if it's not something I'm interested in, that are all in. That's an interesting. Weirdly, I've never really thought about it that way, but it was just very clear to me that Grant was all in.

If he wasn't going to do it with me, he was still going to do it. I was a helper. Over time, I certainly contributed a great deal to it. Not just he contributed a great deal to business, and then I also contributed to the artist. But that took time, you know?

But I could tell that he was all in, and that was fun. I mean, it's fun to work with somebody who is basically like, okay, man, if you're not in, like, get out of the way. Cause I'm still going. Mm hmm. And for.

Tim Ferriss
For anyone who has the opportunity, I don't even know if they would have the opportunity, but to watch, observe grant, even for 60 seconds. Well, chef's table on Netflix is great. Chef's table great. Perfect. So everybody should have the experience of observing grant working and focusing.

I've met a lot of people who are good at focusing, who have abnormal focusing abilities, and spending the time that we did together in Chicago and the time that I had to observe grant is. It is a next level of focus. It's really hard to encapsulate in words. So chef's table, fantastic. People should check it out and just watch the level of focus that permeates the appearance, the air, the atmosphere.

It's really something else to that point. Focus. One of my favorite aspects of speaking with you and having conversations is the questions that you raised. Candle. Not just should we have candles, that's maybe a good question, but it's probably not the right first question.

Why do restaurants use candles in the first place? Furthermore, why are candles considered romantic? Right. Like, kind of stepping basic stuff. Yeah.

What are other questions that you asked related to Alinea? Or you could certainly bridge to other. I think it makes sense to chat about aviary as well. But what are some other questions that you guys asked that people might not think to ask? Yeah, I mean, Grant set the tone for that in our first meeting, not really knowing me, and we started talking, we didnt even know where to start, right?

Naval Ravikant
And he said, well, I know one thing. I want to have wooden tables. I want to have bare wood tables. And I said, why? He said, well, why do tables, why do fancy restaurants have white tablecloths?

They literally call it a white tablecloth restaurant. If it's fancy, why? And I couldn't really. I came up with dumb answers like, oh, it feels good, or it absorbs, like, a spill or whatever it may be. And he said, no, it's because the table underneath is a piece of shit.

He goes, and you know that, like, as soon as you say it, everyone goes, oh, yeah, I knew that. And you've been at weddings and stuff where you feel under the table, and you're like, oh, it's plywood, right? But if you go to, like, a really fancy restaurant, you feel under the table. Guess what? Also plywood.

Just a little thicker. And he's like, when you rest your arms on the table, even if it doesn't come forefront in your mind, you kind of subconsciously know that they're kind of fooling you. And he's like, why can't we just have, like, black, beautiful tables? It'll show the food great. It'll show the plateware great.

And then I kind of went like, well, yeah, but the health department doesn't let you put in. Chicago doesn't let you put silverware right on the table. And if you put a glass there, the condensation will form a little ring, and then you have a wear issue, but you'll save $70,000 a year in laundering linens. And so we started going like, well, how do we solve the water problem? Well, you create a fridge that's just above the dew point, 44 degrees, you know, in the winter, maybe a little warmer in the summer because it's higher humidity in Chicago, and you just get rid of ice.

So you have these cascading decisions that become part of the art of the place, that some of them start from a really practical thing. Like, hey, we want to have a quality table. And then all of a sudden, you need a little pillow that the silverware goes on that Martin designed because you can't put. We didn't want to have placemats that's too cheap. So all of a sudden we had to design a silverware holder.

So it just became this cascade of, like, interesting little art projects that were there for good reasons and really created a unique atmosphere. And it was like one of those things. Like, we never tested it until the day we opened. Like, you couldn't test those things. And the very first guy through the door was, is now a famous chef, chef Sean Brock of Husk.

Tim Ferriss
Oh, fantastic. Yeah, so he was not, he was not yet a chef then. 2005, and he was the first guy through the door. And he wrote this giant blog post on e gullet with pictures and everything. You can go see it and every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional trigger, an emotional reaction, it's almost all there.

Naval Ravikant
Like, I remember going home and seeing that the next day and going, wow, that shit actually worked. And, you know, and it's like, right down to the front hallway. That was a reverse perspective stolen from Chartres Cathedral and. And inverted. So all of my interests of architecture and art and science and all of grants, food and all that all came together in a year long conversation on how to do something.

And we really fought with the architect and designers and all that, because people would tell us the practical reasons why you needed to do this or that, and we would just go, nope, no hosting. We want to greet people in an open way. And so just little things like that. And then we've taken that on through everything that we've done, where we took seven years, six years to build our next place, because we didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again. And so when we did, then we did it.

And I think editing yourself and each other in an open way is really, really painful, but really, really important. And coming back to something you mentioned related to the living room, the well off, who then create, say, an art project that may be beautiful, but is most often not a viable business. How did you apply those questions and rethink the business model to make any of this work financially? Yeah, well, I mean, you dont want to be a dilettante, right? My biggest fear is that it would work in an artistic way, but wouldnt work as a business.

And so the answer is, at the beginning, I didnt do much. I handled all of our marketing and pr. I wrote everything myself. Really thought about open sourcing the building of the restaurant. You can still go online and see the original business plans and what logos we were considering using, and the test kitchen, which was in my house.

We didn't tell anyone at the time, but that was my house. At the time and see the development of this restaurant. And I felt like the open source movement in that way was a good model for what we were trying to accomplish. And part of that was people would say, a restaurant like this cant make money. And I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the universal restaurant calculator.

Tim Ferriss
Can people find that online? No, no. But it would be very unimpressive if they could. But it was basically like, how many covers per night? I mean, this is back of the envelope stuff.

Naval Ravikant
How many covers per night can you do? Whats the check average for food, check average for beverage? What are your food costs, beverage costs, labor costs, was insurance cost, your lease, your rent, all those things. I had enough experience with most of those things to at least give good estimates to it. And so what I started doing is I started modeling other restaurants using the universal restaurant calculator.

And I had, again, this goes to the transparency of data. I had real data for only two restaurants. And from those two, I would then make assumptions about restaurants like the french laundry where grant used to work, one of the greatest restaurants in the history of America, certainly. And I came up with a number that Grant went, theres no way their revenues that high or they make that much money. Thats impossible.

And it was really funny because years later, I now work with Jeff Keller and hes a friend all these years later. And I literally pulled that out one day with Grant being there and went like, how close am I on this back in 2005? And hes like, oh, youre within two or 3%. And we're talking about back of the envelope stuff. And so you asked, like, where can people start to start a business?

Start on the back of an envelope. Like, one of my favorite exercises is to sit in a restaurant or a small business of some sort and just literally do the back of the envelope. That is the kind of calculation my dad called it. The two shoebox method put me through college, right? Like money coming in in one shoebox, money going out in the other.

Whatever's left is profit. You know, start that basic. And we did that. And I didnt really think about the we did well, but we didnt make a ton of money. Alinea cost $2.2 million to build.

I put up a little over a quarter of that myself and found investors for the rest, all of whom I knew. And in the first year, we made about four hundred fifty thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars on four or $5 million in sales. Not a great return. Not a terrible return. We then won best restaurant in America from Gormier magazine.

And I was horrified that we won that. Frankly. I remember Grant called me and said, yep, I just got a call from Ruth Reichel. And, like, we had some stated goals of, like, how would we know if this is a success? And one of the things we wrote down was Ruth Reichel declares it the best restaurant in America.

And we wrote that because in 1997, she wrote, the most exciting place to eat in America is the french lingerie. And Grant was there and cooked that meal and said that the energy of having someone that he respected so much, because Ruth is just a great writer. She's one of the unimpeachable food critics in the history of America. And having her write that in New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status. I think that can't happen nowadays, honestly, for other reasons.

But this is kind of pretty Internet, pre yelp, all that. And then all of a sudden, we got that. And I was, like, horrified because, you know, one of the goals was completed so early, we would have. We wouldn't have our, like, our lodestar, you know? And so he was like, dear God, can you let me enjoy it for, like, a minute, you know, to you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was getting really mad at me. I was like, that's terrible. You know? I mean, I was happy, but I was also like, oh, no, now what do we do?

We need to find another artificial construct here to, like, go after. And enough of this. I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of my face. Only way, for sure. Yeah, I know.

It's about. I really do believe that, actually, that it's often the process is so rewarding that when you get something done, it can be a letdown. And I wanted that process to go. And then, unfortunately, six months later, Grant was diagnosed with stage four cancer and given six months to live. And so, weirdly, that was the moment where, after he was going through treatment, where I started going into the restaurant at night, because, remember, I'm not a service professional.

I was running the business of the restaurant. I was going in at night and asking really dumb questions again. And weirdly, our goal was to keep Alinea open for when he came back. And mind you, he only missed, like, you know, twelve days, 14 days of service during really intense chemo and radiation. But he was given six months to live.

And when people are in that situation and their livelihood is tied to this restaurant, even despite their loyalties, oftentimes they just need to find another job, because they're like, hey, in four months this place is going to be closed. And in the midst of that, we decided to do our first book really to chronicle what he had accomplished, because for him, he felt like that would be his legacy. He thought he was going to die. He was told he was going to die. So in the midst of managing a self created, self published book and trying to do that differently and then keeping a dwindling staff motivated, trying to let him know that it would still be there when he got well, all that, I started going, this place is run in strange ways, man.

This industry is, is not run right. And I started asking basic questions like if we have a waitlist for 100 people on a Wednesday, why do we do 74 people on a Wednesday but 86 on a Saturday? And the answer was because our incentives were misaligned. The service industry as a whole can't run at 100% every single day of the week unless they're incentivized to do so. And you could go like well yeah, but every server, they'll make an extra $100 a night or whatever, but they're going like look, if every night was Saturday, I'd be dead.

It's really hard work so you need to figure out ways of load balancing that and making every day the same and you end up way ahead. So from a business perspective, that's when my sort of self education in this industry came forward. And it came forward in a way that I think I was less patient with everything because we were also going through this really difficult emotional time. And so consequently, when I didn't get answers that made any sense, instead of being diplomatic about it, I would just be like well that's stupid.

Which cut some of the normal social filter off and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to be around anybody, but I also think it was accepted within that environment at that time because everyone knew what we were going through. And so when we years years later, when we finally were kind of like, hey, weve got some ideas to build next in the aviary, thats when I kind of went like, well were going to do things totally differently here and anyone whos not on board, even though they work for us, if youre not on board all the way in on getting rid of normal reservations, on not using telephones, on doing all these things, im not, we dont have a place for you here and man it really works. That was the basis of I talked to every software company in the industry asking for their API is asking to build essentially whats options, pricing software on top of reservation systems. Opentable told me no. And the POS systems told me no.

I called theaters and went like what ticketing system do you use? All those told me no. I hired a single programmer and he and I in six weeks built a really rudimentary booking system. But the first day we turned it on, we sold $562,000 of tickets to a restaurant for the first time. For the first time ever.

Tim Ferriss
Okay, so pause here for some reason. No no no, this is great. This is great. So a few things for folks who are not familiar. API application programming interface.

It's how you can effectively link into someone else's software. POS point of sale. Not piece of shit. But it is a piece of shit. Oh, it may also be a piece of shit.

What were the design specs that you were looking for? In other words, before you get to the 500,000 plus. Yeah, yeah. The snap of the fingers. Like what were you trying to fix?

Or what were you trying to create? So I get a lot of grief for this, for saying this in the industry and in the press, but basically whenever you make a restaurant reservation one of the two of you talking is lying to each other if you think about it. No other industry form of entertainment which. Dining out is a form of entertainment. I know it's sustenance.

Naval Ravikant
I know there's so much culture embedded in it and all that. But you could eat at home right? No other form of entertainment. You just call them up and say hey hold a seat to the Bears game or the Cubs game or the opera and I'll show up around 730 and then they tell you yeah yeah we'll have a seat ready for you at 730 and then when you get there they go oh you know what? Go wait over there for 30 or 40 minutes because we're running a little behind tonight.

The reason that they're running behind is because they overbooked because about 15% to 18% of the people just don't show up. So they overbook. They also know that if they tell you that they'll really seat you at nine and you wanted an 815, you'll just go to the restaurant down the street from them that will lie to them. Right? Right.

So they do that and ultimately its just bad all around. Its bad for the restaurant, its wasteful for food and its bad hospitality. There are so many pop culture references and entire sitcom episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant. Its absurd. Its completely absurd.

I looked at our no show rate at Alinea. Data driven tracked it. I looked at our what we call short seated tables. Like the number of tables that were four people, but only two showed up. And the dirty secret there is people would go like, well, what do you have available?

Well, I have an 830 for four. Okay, we'll take that. And they never intended to bring the other two people. Well, that's just as bad as a two top, no showing. We only have 74 people in there.

And so it's a yield manage, or 74 seats. So it's a yield management problem. And so we. Five to 8% of our revenue every night was. Was being lost to that transaction.

That was a non transaction. And so I wanted to figure out ways to do two things. One, want to figure out ways to make it transactional, because, again, you asked about Professor Thaler. One of the key tenets is there's a little bit of skin in the game, right? When.

When people have small vested interest in something and the outcome of something, or even if I gave you a pencil as a gift and then 30 minutes later I want to take it back, you will get so mad, even though you didn't care about that pencil. Right, right. You're like, what was that? Dude gave me a gift. Now he's pulling it back.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, it's like the expected. It's like the expected value of a mug. If you ask them how much they would spend to buy the mug versus giving them the mug and saying, how much will you accept to sell it? You know the differential? Yes.

Naval Ravikant
Huge. So, you know, that came to me one day because my kids wanted to go see a movie at night that I did not want to go see. And I was really, really, like, I would have easily paid $50 to not go to this movie. Yeah. And then my wife basically says, hey, well, let's go to that movie.

So I go on Fandango, I buy four tickets, $60, whatever it was. And at, like, 530 night, it's pouring rain and everyone's napping, and they're like, yeah, I don't want to go. And I'm like, get your asses in the car. We're going to the movie, man. Now, I would have easily paid that $60 to not go to the movie.

But once I had the sunk cost of paying for the movie, my psychology totally flipped. And I was like, we're going to this movie that I don't want to go to. And I literally, irrationally made everyone go to the movie, which weirdly cost, I mean, from an emotional family standpoint, all bad all the way around, right? So I thought about it and I was like, wow, what if people put down a small deposit on times when demand exceeds supply? Like, right.

So Saturday night, 08:00 great. That's the best seats at the opera house. Let's see if people prepay for that or put down $20 for it. That's fully credited at the end of their meal. It's not a cover charge.

I'm not trying to squeeze people on the actual cost of the meal. I'm just trying to go like, yeah, let's see if people make a commitment. And everybody told me, no, no one's going to do that. That's just not the way it works. But if you look back historically, and this is the interesting part, again, it's about, like, digging in deep on something.

If you look back historically, restaurant reservations started with the telephone. And at the time that we were starting to do this, the telephone was dying. And I didn't know that at the time. You know, I was eight years ago, but I have a computer in my pocket, and if you ring me and I don't know your number, I don't want to talk to you, I don't answer it. I'd much rather receive, like, a little piece of text letting me know what's going on than a phone call.

Similarly, like, calling a restaurant is an antiquated thing to do at this point. But long before the telephone, people got room and board. And what room and board was literally. It was like, you go to an inn and you get a room for the night, and then do you need food? Okay, well, you get a board of food.

That was literally it, and you'd prepay for it. And so there was hundreds of years of that, long before there was a telephone. And people called and said, yep, id like to eat at your restaurant. Sure. Well let you in.

And so as the technology for the telephone is morphed into what we all have in our pockets now, I just wanted to update that whole transaction. And so I also wanted to acknowledge that Tuesday nights should be cheaper than a Saturday night. So it has to work in both ways. I always thought Uber could have fixed their surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Just move pricing in two directions, and if you move pricing in two directions, then that whole argument goes away.

Tim Ferriss
Right? So we did that. We priced out different prices by day of the week and times of day. So 05:00 p.m. On Wednesday at Alinea is still cheaper than 08:00 p.m.

Naval Ravikant
On a Saturday by a lot. By $80 to $100 a person. Wow. And you know what happens? And this is now we have hundreds of restaurants doing this on our software called talk.

What happens is people buy the most expensive seats first and the cheapest seats first, which is exactly what you'd expect, actually. Right? Because there's some people who are price conscious and go like, wow, this is a really expensive meal. But holy cow, I don't really care if I eat at 05:00 on a Tuesday. Great.

Like, I can save $400. And then there's some people that go like, I only eat at 08:00 p.m. On Saturday. Well, okay, thats fine. Pay a little more or theyre attracted.

Tim Ferriss
To the fact that it is the most expensive. Sure, that happens too. And then theres a whole bunch of tools that over time we built on top of that to sell wine pairings or sell books. We sell 20 Alinea books a day on checkout with the booking process. Thats a ton.

Naval Ravikant
Because were not going to exit through the gift shop at Alinea. Its a Michelin three star restaurant. We would subtly have one book like near the restrooms that people could peruse. But it didnt say like buy the book or anything like that. So typically wed sell like one or two per night.

Now on checkout, when you book Alinea, it says, hey, would you like to buy an Alinea book personalized and 20 people a night get it? That is $400,000 in revenue a year. Yeah, thats incredible. Its crazy, right? And its amazing to me that no one did that beforehand because ultimately people cant buy what they dont see.

And people don't want to be upsold inside of a restaurant. There's nothing worse in my mind than some places that today's special is today's special and it's real and you kind of know that. But sometimes it's just the old fish.

Tim Ferriss
Right?

Sunday night.

Naval Ravikant
And we all know these things. And I think no restaurant wants to raise their hand and go, yep, that's all true. Like, we rely to our customers and we are not going to really see you at 815. And so I think when I said that, like, you can look back through some articles, I remember that there was an article, I think it was in GQ, that they interviewed like a grizzled veteran, you know, and he didn't use his name and said overbook and a bar to wait in has always worked for me. And I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that, you know?

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. There's so many systems that have similar overbooking, load balancing issues. Right? You look at airlines, you look at hospitality.

Naval Ravikant
My dentist. Yeah, I have a great dentist. They only do it via phone call or email. And so I have to play a guessing game. It's like going into a clothing store and going like, yeah, I'm looking for a blue v neck cashmere sweater.

Like, nah, don't have one. Guess again.

It's like, put this shit on display, man. Like, just tell me what day you could clean my teeth. Show me, and I'll just go online and hit the button. You know, when you then debuted the ticketing option, if I'm labeling it properly, how did you prime the pump for that? Was there anything.

Tim Ferriss
Did you need to prime the pump to have this, what seems like certainly a windfall? Well, we did. Yeah, we did a video where next restaurant was about a restaurant that's always new, essentially. Like, what's one of the big problems of the restaurant industry? Well, when you open a new restaurant, doesn't matter what it is.

Naval Ravikant
People are going to show up for, like, five or six months. And then after that, you guys struggle to get regulars and find new audiences and all that. But people like the new quote, unquote. The other problem is that our own staff and chefs were the kind of people who I said to grant one time, he cooked this amazing french dish for me at Alinea right in the middle of his sickness, because I had driven down from Michigan. I've never eaten before or after in the Alinea kitchen, but he whipped up this little french dish for me of duck.

And I was like, man, let's open a french restaurant someday. And he went like, eh, we'll get bored after six months. Then I was at one of our chefs homes on a day off Tuesday, and he loves thai food, and he made this amazing thai meal. Amazing. And I was like, wow, I had no idea these guys were so versatile.

And then it made sense. Hey, these are passionate, amazingly talented people. And it kind of dawned on me, like, let's change the restaurant every four months. Let's do. And then we dwelled on that for, like, a year, thinking, like, it was kind of impossible to do.

And then I said, well, let's start with the french menu. He's like, well, what does that mean? There's southern France, there's Loire Valley, there's France. That's the nouvelle cuisine. And then there's France from, like, 100 years ago.

Totally different. And I was like, yep, Paris, 1906. I don't need to explain to you what that is, you'd want to eat that. If I just said, like, if someone said, hey, new restaurant opening. What's the menu?

It's Paris 1906. I go, like, cool. Like, I want to do a little time travel and see what that was like. And so as soon as we had, like, a city and a time, we instantly knew that was the idea that kept us up at night, you know, where we went, like, wow, look at all these different places we can travel. And what does that restaurant look like?

And how do you create a kitchen versatile enough to make all these different cuisines? And how do you make it not feel like Disneyland, where one time you have a theme of Paris, and the next time you have a theme of Japan? So you have to go with, like, an austere minimalism, you know? Is there a particular reason why you chose the year 1906? You know, doing some research, and I may get the exact date wrong, because this is eight years ago.

I did the research, but I believe the seine flooded in 1908, somewhere around there. And so escoffier, like, the father of french cuisine, was at the Ritz then, and that was kind of like the height of that era of cuisine. And then after the Seine flooded, that's where you got sort of your brasseries and bistros, because they had to kind of go to a more casual. It opened up for more people. It took the price point down, it made it more approachable, and it wiped out dozens of these fancy restaurants.

And so rank got cheap, and all of a sudden, like, hey, we're going to get this new style of restaurant. That's roughly as I recall it. Somebody's going to listen to this and tell me I'm all wrong. That's where we landed. Because we could do this escoffier menu.

And, boy, we argued about that, too. Like, they didn't have blenders then, so. Like, electric blenders. So, I mean, we did like, a. So you wanted to mimic the production.

Well, I did. Grant did not. We were. I remember we were at a. We invited the press to a practice.

Tim Ferriss
Grant's like, hey, pal, you don't have to make the food. Well, finally that, he was like, should we make it intentionally worse than we can? Yeah, the recipes were really vague. They didn't even call for salt. So in the middle of this press dinner, where we had, like, the New York Times there, we had all sorts of these people there, which I'll never do again.

Naval Ravikant
Right. That was just a genuine error. Like, and we were still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be. And then we served dinner, and we were like, openly, like, he'd come out of the kitchen and we would openly argue about it, you know? And he.

Tim Ferriss
This is at the press dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember he brought the soup out, and it was like. I was like, oh, they. They must have used the actual blenders, right?

Naval Ravikant
Like modern blenders, because it was like, the mouthfeel was, like, perfect. And so I was like, oh, you used the blenders, you know? And he's like, the recipe didn't call for salt either, did it? But I should. I have not used that and had it taste like shit.

And then I was like, well, maybe you don't know that they didn't have refrigeration then, either. And they packed the vegetables in salt as a desiccant. And so they were almost all pre salted by the time they get to Paris. And that was it. Like, people were just like, these guys don't like each other at all.

But that's our method. Like, that's what we did, you know? And, I mean, to the day we opened, we had those arguments. And then in terms of the software, like, man, I didn't sleep for a week. We set it up on rackspace.

It didn't work, right. I had never done anything like that before. It was like, no one would help, I think. Like, nobody would help. No one.

Tim Ferriss
When you say nobody would help, you mean competitors potential? I don't even know. Allies potential. Like, these are the people. I got it.

Why wouldn't they help? In the case of opentable, they had a monopoly, right? So why? That makes sense to me. That makes sense in terms of everyone else.

Naval Ravikant
I think they just didn't get it. But even people within my own company thought this was a fool's errand. Grant, for sure. Like, he will fully admit this now. Thought it was a terrible idea.

Tim Ferriss
Why did he think it was a terrible idea? Because it's not hospitable. It's not hospitality. It's low touch, not high touch. Correct.

Naval Ravikant
And hugely the case where all of a sudden the price is different every day. Are people going to get that? And I just kept looking to other industries, and I'm like, no one has a problem with it. When they go to a baseball game, they're not sitting above the dugout. And then, like, the guy who's in the third deck, back row looks down and goes, oh, that guy.

Like, he totally stole that ticket from me. Like, two different price points, you know? And I just feel like people inherently get that without having to explain it to them. If I may, how far in advance of the opening were you? Were you hoping to launch the software?

Tim Ferriss
And when did you end up launching the software? I launched it about 7 hours before the first dinner. Holy shit. I hope to have done it four to five weeks ahead of that. It was literally a one man operation.

Naval Ravikant
Plus me like one programmer and me when we launched it. Rackspace, this is 2010. I'm not saying anything bad about rockspace. I probably set it up wrong. 2010, it did not like it's supposed to auto load correct and self propagate.

And neither happened. I was expecting. We had 17,000 people on our email list that had signed up on the website to be notified when their bookings went on sale. And I was expecting maybe 700 show up, should be fine. And something like eight or 9000 showed up.

And everyone just kept hitting the refresh key. And here's another fatal error of stupidity. And this is not the way our software is built now because we have professionals here. But basically my admin login was on the very same server as everybody's public access. Oh God.

So I couldn't even go into configure.

The good news on this is that I couldn't answer like hundreds of angry emails all at once. So I created a Facebook group for the business, which in 2010, not very many people did. And so if you go back and scroll all the way down to the beginning of that, you'll see me going like, hey, if everyone could please stop refreshing, I can sort this out. And what was really cool is that people felt part of something. They felt like, wow, holy shit, this guy is actually doing this himself.

We're part of this experiment and we're on the inside of it. I got a lot of empathy from the customers, even though they were the ones that were unable to get what they wanted. And then when it finally started working, I mean, I literally not showered in five days. I had pizza boxes. I looked like a bad movie startup thing.

I had a beard. I was just strung out, manic. And I remember I called Grant and it was opening day, and he said, how many should I prep for? And I said, prep for full, because if not, we'll turn on the phones. But I didn't tell him was I didn't order the phones because I didn't want to have a fail safe.

Tim Ferriss
You'd burn the ships. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure I forced myself to work so we had no phone line. And when it started working, I would double click one of the functions was I could double click on a table and if it was yellow, it was held, the public couldn't see it. I could make it available by double clicking it.

Naval Ravikant
It would turn green. And then when it was sold, it would turn red. But the first time I did that to let more inventory out and clearly things were working. It turned red so fast I thought it was broken. Then I went into the credit card processing and saw, oh my gosh, someone bought that that fast.

I called Grant and I said, dude, you got to come to my house. And he was like, we're opening a restaurant in like 6 hours. What's going on? I said, as the guy who helped save your life getting a fucking taxi and come over here because I need to show you something. And he looked at me and kind of went like, what is wrong with you?

Right? And I took him upstairs to my office and I said, I explained what I just to him, what I just explained to you. And I said, click on one of those and make it available. And he said, which one? I go, any one in the next month.

And he clicked like three weeks out at 930 and it instantly turned red. And in another window I had the credit card thing up and I go, look, Mister Jones bought that. And he went, really? And I'm like, yep, there are 4000 people waiting for you to do that right now. And that was the moment at which I was basically like, this is the best thing I've ever built.

Because it was functionally different than any way that anybody was doing this. It wasn't novel. It was just applied in a novel way. And so what was interesting is that of course the software itself sucked. But as a proof of concept, it was awesome.

Tim Ferriss
Quick question on that if you're comfortable answering. How much money had you put into developing the software at that point? Yeah, roughly. Im going to say $115,000. Yeah, roughly.

So in your mind, were you completely confident it would work or. And theres, it doesnt have to be a or b. There could be CDEF or were you like, you know what, for 115K or whatever it might be even if you budgeted for less and it over ran, even if there is a 20% chance that this works, is it is worth risking the hours in time because it will so completely transform what we're doing and if it fucking fails, who cares? Correct. Yeah.

Naval Ravikant
The latter one. Yeah. Again, it's about the asymmetric risk. Right. It was also about this thing that as I dug into how Alinea ran, there's like things that you can fix and control and there's things you can't.

Right. And this was the one that, you know, I would answer phones at Alinea and it was like being a therapist, people would go like, I would like to make a reservation on my anniversary seven weeks from now on a Thursday. And you're like, I'm really sorry, sir. It's totally full. And 100% of the time they thought you were lying to them.

Tim Ferriss
Right. And so consequently, I realized that we were saying no to people more than we were saying yes. And that even when we said no in a nice way and took ten minutes to do so, people thought that we were lying or that they weren't important to us or any of those things. And so I felt that transparency was actually more important than the actual money and the actual yield management. I felt like allowing people to see the entirety of the inventory was the most important thing.

Naval Ravikant
Same thing with the trading markets. Theyve moved to more and more and more transparency, more and more speed. This is true across every industry. And I just felt like, wow, this industry I found myself in was so backwards. And so I just wanted to make the whole thing more transparent.

And so even if it didnt go beyond my own restaurants, I was totally fine with that. In fact, I didnt do anything with it for four years. I didnt really intend on making it like a software product. I intended on fixing my own problems. And I think often thats where good ideas come from.

Tim Ferriss
Oh, super often. Yeah. The scratching of your own itch, at least you have a market of one, gets guaranteed market of one. And I also want to point out when were talking about asymmetric risk earlier and youre like, well, I want to stand to make three to four x what I stand to lose. And if you run the math, and Im sure Im missing a lot of subtleties here, but when you said we booked 500 next thousand dollars and it cost 115, like, we're getting very much within the ballpark of that.

Naval Ravikant
Yeah, but I didn't even like, I mean, well, I mean, since then it's like we've taken our margins at our restaurants from ten to 12% to, you know, at times in good months, 20% to 25%. In an industry that over the last five years, if you read, I give a talk called Tuesday is not Saturday and seven things you already know but are doing nothing about. Its a talk that I give to the restaurant industry. And one of the things that I point out in there is that theres so many obvious things that you could be doing to improve your hospitality to improve your booking process to get rid of food waste. But people tend to just move along because its a really chaotic environment.

Its hard to make change in it because every day is game day. You wake up every day, 100 people are going to come through the door. And if your fishmonger doesn't show up, well, you need to figure out what to do with that.

It's not really about the return on that one investment at that one moment. It's more like 1000 small improvements over time. And if I look back at that system that I built then, compared to what we have now, it's a minuscule part of what it turned into. But it was the seed of an idea, which is more important, which is, hey, let's shake things up. And then I got a great CFO who was at Bain Consulting and he came on to help manage the building of the project of next.

And when he started wanting to build out a business team, I was like, great, run with it. And so we've built out food cost analysis that uses Mermeko charts. It's totally different because it's visual and you give that to the chefs. It uses what charts? Ah, Mermeko, if you don't know Merrimeco, if you get nothing out of this, one of the greatest visualizations in charts that you could like do in excel or whatever, hard to do vocally, but imagine a square where each of your x axis is the percentage of, let's say, food costs.

And then each square within there is like, I don't know, meat or produce, but the whole of the square is 100%, the y axis is 100% of one metric and the x axis is 100% of another. So you could kind of look at any given square and see how much that impacts the whole. It becomes like a big Lego building with different colors. Um, if you give a busy chef 400 receipts and say, hey, every Friday, look through all these and, you know, figure out what we're spending too much on, or worse, hey, your food costs last month were 36%. I needed them at 32%.

You cant take percentages to the bank. Lets talk about dollars. Lets see where we can say some dollars. Or the revenue couldve just gone down that month for whatever reason. Its August in New York.

And so its not really a good way to look at it. But you give this person this chart, this Marimeco. Marimeco, its guys name. Yeah, its m a r I m e k k o chart. Is that right?

Again, not good. I think. I think so. There is a Google result which is how to make a Merrimeco chart in Excel. So I'm guessing that's probably it.

Tim Ferriss
There's some YouTube videos as well, so I'll put this in the show notes for people. Man, I got to tell you, from a utility perspective, you show that to a person, you explain it visually. When you see it, it makes much more sense. And they instantly get it. And they look at it and they're like, oh, there's no way I spent that much on facial last month.

And this can be used for things outside. Okay. Everything. Yeah. Not just food, not just restaurants.

Naval Ravikant
Oh, no, no, no. It's just a great visualization of utility. And, like, consultants love it. And I gotta tell you, I don't love consultants in general, but if I've learned anything from the best consultant that I've ever hired, like who is now my partner and CFO, he came up with this. And as soon as I saw it, I was like, how did this not enter my life until my 40th year?

This makes no sense. Its just incredibly useful. But my point is that we kind of went through everything in the restaurant and went like, well, what are the biggest spending areas that we can analyze? And its true in any endeavor that youre doing, theres no point looking at the dimes. If youve got something that costs $1,000, start there.

And thats getting into our thoughts on our publicity, our pr. Like, we don't have a professional pr person and haven't in 14 and a half years. We don't spend money on any promotions other than social media. And then with the social media, we track all of that. We can see what our ROI is on a boosted post.

We can see what our ROI is if we advertise on your podcast. That's why these mediums are working, is because they're measurable. I was looking up just as you were chatting and as I was also looking for Marameko, a quote that I think applies, and you may certainly feel free to disagree, but applies very well to a lot of the breakthroughs that you have experienced and also helped to catalyze in a lot of what you've done. And it's a quote from Charlie Munger, who, for those who don't know, you should definitely take a look at poor Charlie's almanac. He's the right hand, or I shouldn't even say that he is the investing partner of Warren Buffett and fascinating, fascinating human being.

Tim Ferriss
But one of the quotes of his that I really return to a lot when I think I might be outsmarting myself in some way or in general, as a reminder is it is remarkable how much long term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid instead of trying to be very intelligent.

Because as you noted earlier, you have these practices that are being implemented by otherwise, in many cases, smart people who have just not taken the time to ask, why are we doing this? Why does this exist as a thing? Why does, like you pointed out, it's so obvious once you reframe it. Like, you walk into a clothing store and they're like, okay, what are you looking for? Nope, sorry, guess again.

It's like, that's fucking ridiculous, right? And yet that's exactly the way it works in many other places. You know, once you start down that road of thinking that way, it will drive you a little nutty because you start like, you can't do every business, you know? And there's a couple things that I've got in my back pocket that I'm like, one day I'm going to arbitrage truffles because it's like, there's an opaque market. That's absurd.

Naval Ravikant
Here's an example I'm going to give somebody out there, call me up, because this is a real business idea and I've been wanting to do it for years. But black and white truffles, not the kind, not the chocolate ones, but the kind that the dogs dig up in France and Italy, are as expensive as the most expensive drugs in the world. You order them as if it were an illegal drug. Of course, theyre perfectly illegal. But you call up a truffle dealer and you go like, what do they cost?

Well, theyre 650 a pound right now. For black truffles, 1600 for white. You try to talk them down a little bit. You make sure that you get the best quality because hey, were Alinea and well ship you back the stuff we dont like and all that. And then in an unmarked box stacked with newspaper will come $20,000 of truffles.

Good for like a week, by the way. Like, not like, this is not like a big supply. And it is completely opaque as a market. Theres no mycologist touching these. There are knockoffs from, but not knockoffs.

Theres different species and quality from Australia, from Tennessee, from China, et cetera, et cetera, that they cut into. It sounds familiar. It was my, like, we spend a lot of money on truffles every year and try to figure out what the US market in the fall truffle season is worth. You cant its exactly like publishing, you cant find numbers, you know? And so whenever I, whenever I see something like that, im like someones guarding their, their golden goose, you know?

Tim Ferriss
Right. Whatever. Whenever its a black box, youre like, I feel like I am not on the best side of this trade. Thats right. And thats what I do.

Naval Ravikant
I did a closed ancillary network between the merck and the Amex to arbitrage ETF's to get rid of the phone brokers in the middle. That took me like a year and a half to get through the Merck and Amex powers that be read like most of the CFTC. So when they would tell me it's not like in the rules or not. Legal or whatever, what is this CFTC Chicago trademark? This is the federal commodities Trading Commission.

Tim Ferriss
I see. Okay. It's like the SEC, but for commodities. I gotcha. And again, sit down and actually read that someday.

Naval Ravikant
What's amazing is that the experts never, it's like the members of Congress who don't read the bill, and then if you ask them detailed instructions on it, they're like, oh, yeah, I don't really know. But the general tenor is this or that. The people who were governing the exchanges had never read the rules. So they would just quote to me, they would just quote to me, like, that's against the rules. I'd be like, well, here are the seven volumes.

Police, show me where, if not, I'm going to do it. And so, similarly, like truffles, same thing, the booking for the restaurants, same thing. Opentable had a monopoly. They wouldn't tell you who your customers were. They would sell your customers.

They still do to other restaurants. If you're full one night, they'll just send you down the street to a japanese restaurant down the street. They don't care. So I wanted to get rid of all that. So I built the software for that.

Truffles. I will someday build a truffle exchange. So, question for you. This is something also for, this is maybe just turning this into a therapy sessions slash coaching session for myself, but I get attracted like a moth to the flame to puzzles and. Oh, I've got a puzzle for you.

Tim Ferriss
No, well, no, no, I don't need any more puzzles. I need no more puzzles. But you, there are many, many black boxes out there, right? You have truffles, and like you said, it's like, all right, what's the market size of the truffle exchange at x point in time? Don't know.

Naval Ravikant
Right? Although you guys, as one establishment or multiple establishments buy a lot. There might be a hundred different black boxes like that that you run into. How do you choose the black boxes worth trying to shine light on, like a detective? Because it's going to consume energy.

Tim Ferriss
It's going to consume time. How do you pick and choose which to go after? It's like the manic test, right? Like, it's like the one that bothers me the most. Like, I kind of start doing, you know, and then, you know, and then it's iteratives from there.

Naval Ravikant
Like, sometimes you find yourself in a construction of your own doing that was accidental. Like, all of a sudden, you know, you kind of opened your mouth and said something like the truffle thing, and all of a sudden, like, well, okay, I guess we're building the truffle exchange. You know, I feel like. I feel like the boring company is like that for Musk. Like, he opened his mouth and be like, yeah, just big, big, you know, dig big tunnels.

And he's got enough credibility now where some engineers went, like, yeah, we could build. You know, we could dig tunnels that are seismically fine, and like, hey, you work for SpaceX, okay? Like, let's see if you can build a. Dig a tunnel. I don't think that was, like, a business plan, you know?

Tim Ferriss
Right. And he just has a lot of credibility, you know, at this point. I think that to a certain extent, like, a lot of people have a lot of ideas. They just don't dig down that rabbit hole. So I do some as a hobby, I do some where.

Naval Ravikant
I kind of have someone that I like within our company and say, well, if you really wanted to be independent and do something cool, here's a project. Learn more about this and start researching it. We have 300 and some employees on the restaurant side and about 50 on talk. Many of them are incredibly hardworking and intelligent. And when someone says, hey, I want to learn how to be more entrepreneurial, I take one of my black boxes out and say, well, let's see if that's true.

This is going to take you six months of independent work without any guidance, and you're going to get tired of it really fast, or you're going to come back to me and say, hey, you know what? I can't figure out the total value of the truffle market in the United States. And I'm like, yeah, no shit. That's why I asked you to do it. Now, when you give them an assignment like this, they're like, you know what, boss?

Tim Ferriss
I really want to be an entrepreneur. You're like, congratulations. I'm now giving you a project and a. It's on your time, and you're not getting paid for it. Or do you.

Naval Ravikant
Oh, no, no, no. It's not. Oh, no, no, no. I never, never, never take. Every single intern that works at our restaurants for a minute is paid.

Tim Ferriss
Gotcha. So even if you get paid for the black box time. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I would never.

Naval Ravikant
Like. I think one of the things that I really dislike, actually, are industries like, where they say, hey, like, you're, you know, you're in college or whatever, you know, be an intern, and then, you know, your parents say, yeah, that's a great opportunity for you to learn something and all that. And it's like, well, you're probably not. If you're not getting paid, you're not being valued, frankly. And for me, we pay everybody, nobody who's working here, if they're, you know, I do expect that, you know, salaried people are going to work more than just the time here.

And I think that people who are passionately curious will be given a problem like that and will come up with interesting solutions to finding out what the answer may be. And that's enough. So I want to add some sort of commentary on the question that I asked, which is, I think it's incredible that you do pay them for that independent research, which is also acting as entrepreneurial training, filtering for them. But I wouldn't have judged you harshly at all if you said, no. That's on their own time.

Tim Ferriss
And the reason I say that is that if you are going to be investigating black boxes as an entrepreneur, there are going to be periods of time where you are doing it in the evenings, you're doing it on the weekends. You are doing it without a clear road to immediate cash flow. Right? So I wouldn't have judged you if you said, you know what? I am paying them full time for their normal job, but if they want to tackle one of these black boxes, that's considered extracurricular time.

So I wouldn't have judged you harshly if you had responded in the negative on that. Yeah, I mean, I guess to back up a little bit, when there are people who I don't know, who do not work for a company, and they call me up and say, hey, I've got this idea for XYZ, or whatever, and it's intriguing enough, I will pose some more difficult questions, but they're not working for me. You know what I mean? There's a guy who brought me a food product that about a year ago, and it was interesting, but not super compelling. And I said, hey, if you did these five things, it would be a lot more compelling for me to be involved and to help with it and all that.

Naval Ravikant
And yesterday, I got a box in the mail, and he had done not only the five things I said, but said, hey, when I started doing those, these seven other things popped up. Here's where the product is. Here's the people we signed. Here's the airline we just signed to carry the product. And I would love to have you still involved, even though we're so much farther down the road than I thought it'd be a year later.

That's super cool. I didn't pay that guy, obviously, but there's a person who's truly entrepreneurial and did this on his own time. But if they're working here, if they work for the Alinea group, if they work for talk, for sure, you could take time during your day, like doing your normal business. That's a project that we're working on. And, you know, we.

We also try not to have such harshly defined roles, not within the restaurant. Like, look, if you're a server, if you're a captain, if you're a line cook, you're probably not working on my truffle project. Yes. Just because, like, it's. I mean, realistically, you know, that's not.

But on the business side, we certainly have people who. Who work in roles as, like, a lawyer or an analyst or something like that who want to get involved with our publishing project or who want to get involved with the truffle project or whatever it may be, and I'm happy to pull them in and try to include them. And like you said, you used a word as an entrepreneurial filter. I would say 95% of the time, people filter themselves out. Right.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, they're going to self select or self select out. Yeah. Are there any particular books or resources that you found useful on hiring or managing? God, if you found one, let me know.

Naval Ravikant
No. Hiring is so hard. I think it's the hardest of all things to do. And I think my style of interviewing people is totally different than it was 20 years ago. We used the word self selecting just a moment ago, and it's exactly what I do.

I kind of bring people in. I let them know what I'm about, what the company is about. They've probably already been interviewed by other people before they get to me. And so at that point, I let them know, what are the upsides and downsides of working here. And I let them know what the expectations are.

And then I tell them, people self select into a job, and you don't want to come here if you're going to fail because that would be terrible. And I don't want you to come here and fail because that would be a waste of my time and resources and would also feel awful. It's never good to let go of someone feels terrible. So let's see if you are self selecting in what do you want to know? I'll be completely transparent about what's good, what's bad, what's good about working for me personally, the fact that maybe you'll never see me again.

I mean, it's like a big enough organization where there are definitely people working here who I don't know at all, but people tend to join organizations where they want to work. And so I try to make that process, I try to make them be able to say no easier than they can say yes. What would be some examples of how you do that? I kind of judge the person by what their pain points are. And so if someone says one of the things I like to ask, which kind of resonates probably with you, as I say, here were the last five books you read.

And I got to tell you, thats a really hard question to answer because even if youre a voracious reader, you remember a book from two years ago, but you cant remember the one you read two months ago sometimes. Totally. At least I cant. That is a great filter on people because a couple of things will happen. One, the person whos a voracious reader will go like, oh, my God, I swear to God, I read 20 books this year.

Lets see. And they will really start going, oh, I read one like three months ago. That was this and it was about that. And you could tell that theyre intellectually curious and read a lot. Youll also get a person who goes, look, I havent read a book in 20 years, but every night I go home and I do woodworking, and thats my outlet.

Thats where I focus. Thats my zen moment. And thats a valid answer to that question, too. You dont have to be a reader. Some people will just lie through their teeth and they'll, they'll answer what they think is the smart answer to that question.

And I don't want that person there. I read war and peace, and then I went to the problems of philosophy. And yes, yes, yes, we are so. Definitely not the right answer. So there's that?

And I asked that kind of question. But then like things like, do you enjoy writing? One of my things is like, if someone doesn't like to write, when people ask what I do for a living, I say I'm a writer and they go like, oh, you've written a couple books. I go, no, no, no. I read about 400 emails a day and that skill is hugely important right now.

If someone doesn't like to write, they're not going to want to work for me. Because when they send out an email and I MCC on it and it isn't a well thought out little thing, the answer coming back is like, hey, here's four ways to improve this. And at some point it'll be like, really? You did that same mistake again. It comes off kind of harsh in email, you know, and so if you're the kind of person that doesn't take feedback well or doesn't want to learn, like, man, I don't, I'm lacking patience for that at this point in my life.

And I let them know that. And some people like look at you and just go like, yeah, dude, I don't want to work there more than I would think, which is great. Yeah, simplifies matters. Yeah. And it's done with a smile, you know, I'm not like trying to like terrorize people when they come in and interview.

And then there's some people that go like, awesome, that's exactly what I want. Yeah, we have everything from like, you know, double PhD engineers to people who've never, you know, attended a university for a minute, but they've, they've self selected into an organization that people ask a lot of questions. I love that. Like I can be in a room and come up with an idea and everyone there will just be like, well thats a great idea. Theres no way were going to be able to do that in the next six months because thats not in our capacity at our size right now.

Tim Ferriss
I think a question on a lot of peoples minds and a pain point for most people listening will be email. So you seem to be at least confident in your treatment of email. 400 is a lot of email. Do you have any particular commandments, do's, do nots times you check things, you check first any types of systems or approaches that allow you to maintain a degree of sanity with the amount of email that you must receive.

Naval Ravikant
You're going to hate this answer. I am terrible at it. It used to be not so long ago that I personally replied to absolutely every single email that came in myself, and I used to have an auto sign that basically was like, if I don't reply to you within five minutes, I'm dead or asleep. And it's the opposite of everything that you stand for. I know that.

It's like I was listening to Jason Fried. So Jason Fried's a friend. I was listening to his podcast with you, and I dont get it at all.

I would love nothing more than to rework or to not work four day weeks or to have six week projects and all the stuff that he espouses. Hes a friend. Hes an investor in one of my businesses. But man, thats not how I function at all. I weirdly think that he misses cause and effect a little bit.

He has a very successful company, and that's the cause that allows the effect, which is the ability to manage your time really well. I live really paranoid. I'm more comfortable that way. 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 ten years that I loved doing when we first started linea is that I would have Google alerts set up and I would find some blog that only some woman and her mother read, and I would reply personally, say, wow, thank you for the great write up at Linea.

And they would be kind of mind blown that I found it and all that. I treated email that way for a long period of time. Unfortunately, now I cant quite do that. So I do have a bunch of filters and whatnot, but I didnt even set them up. My business partner, Brian Fitzpatrick, who used to be the head of Google Chicago, and he runs the engineering team and hes the CTO of talk, he said, dude, youre slipping, man.

You need to create some filters and get some stuff thats directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and kind of forced the issue for me. So now I cant quite do that. I do wake up in the morning and look at our bazillion social media messages and whatnot, kind of pick a random one and just answer it. 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 6000 people a week, you're going to get something going wrong. But man, I'm terrible at it, honestly. I will tell you a funny thing is that when I go away on vacation, I do try to concoct a, I basically say, like, look, I'm gonna be in a mountain or on a boat or whatever and I'm not gonna 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 basically said, like, I'm going to visit panda that I adopted and I'm going back to Chicago. And it ended the year around Christmas time when I went on breakfast with a, with a, with a picture of a baby panda and a really kind of mediocre Photoshop job of me standing there with the penis. And the Chicago Tribune called me up like three days later going, you know, is it going to the Linkin park zoo? And I was like, no, dear God, it's not.

And the following, there is no panda. That's why 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 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. Sure, sure. Eight days to explore my both inner and outer self and elaborate. This is your out of office reply. 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 the Le group. And it was like kind of a consulting project, very lucrative. And he was looking at me really funny and I said, like, what's up?

And he said, well, you know, I really wish we had worked together, but then you went to that sex retreat. So I just couldn't, 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 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.

Tim Ferriss
I love that. I mean, if you're serious all the time, you're never going to get the actual serious work done. You're going to burn out before that ever happens. I also want to underscore one thing, and then I want to ask you about a black box that you and I have talked about quite a bit, which is publishing. The fact that you pick a message to reply to, even if it's one, is really important.

And I've noticed this certainly with the audience that I have, listeners, readers, et cetera. It is not physically possible for me to reply to everyone. It would also be anathema to everything that I'm espousing in many of the books. But I do want to demonstrate that I am listening, and I think that it goes a really long way. Even if you do not personally reply to people, if you are able to prove that you're paying attention, and that seems to resolve a lot, or at least act as a salve for people out there who very seldom feel heard, which does not always necessitate a response.

So I just wanted to point out that it might seem like a drop in the ocean, but it actually has much more further reaching implications when you do it. What you were describing. 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?

Naval Ravikant
My LinkedIn profile, basically, 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. 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. It's not just a marketing thing. 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 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. Yeah. And the detail is really important here.

Tim Ferriss
The mini hurdle. I have a friend I'm not going to mention by name because we'll get deluged. But he is a very, very successful author and journalist. And when he is hiring for different positions, part time or full time, at the bottom of the job description on a job site or wherever it might be in small print, at the very bottom it will say, do not send a message on this platform, do not send an email, even though email addresses given earlier call this number and leave a voicemail answering the following things. And automatically he takes the pool of 1000 people who are going to do the wrong thing and finds the ten people who are actually paying attention.

Naval Ravikant
Yep, 100%. So publishing, what is. We didn't really talk much about it, but can you give a little bit, just a tiny bit of background on the aviary and then some of your related publishing investigations, which I think is not. I think it's not an unappropriate word. If you could give people a little bit of context.

Yeah, I mean, I'm going to back up before the aviary just a little bit and just go like, 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 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, we 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 here are the guidelines for how many photos you want in the book and 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. The hair on the back of my neck, like the spidey sense, the spidey sense starts telling me that something back there is pricing this in a usual way. And then I started going like, oh, this is actually like the music industry very much because 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. 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 2500 books at half of retail price. And I was like whoa, whoa, whoa. That's, youre looking at something like $80,000 right there. That goes right back to them in essence.

And then I kind of went like, well, I wonder what a book costs to print? And I mean, I just called, I asked them like, well, how much is this book going to cost to print? Well, I dont 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. There's always plausible deniability 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 soldiers, 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 keys to the Vatican or something. When you call a publisher and ask them that, I'm sure you know this, you probably know now because you've been so entrenched in the industry, you know your numbers and you might know that of some of your colleagues and friends, right?

But if you wanted to actually do a meaningful comparison across the industry, its almost impossible to do it, even though that theres 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 to 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 its a compendium of known publishers like publishing houses as well as these top 50 retailers back in the day. And it's a game able 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 also note it's not only gameable, but it's also, conversely, highly subjective within the New York Times. So there's a lot of wiggle room. In other words, it is not like the Olympics where you're like, okay, clear, gold, silver, bronze, video replay. We know exactly how this was tabulated.

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 hes going like, well, dude, why do you care? Ive been wanting this since I was 15. And I was like, well, look, if this is our budget, its not going to be the book you want.

Its not going to be as good as you want it to be because were 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. 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 5000 of them. No way. And no one's going to publish it.

You cant use metric and you cant use a gram scale, and you cant have that font and you cant have those pictures in full bleed and itll cost way too much to print. It took about a month and a half before I got lucky. And I called a print broker who had actually printed, brokered the print job of one of the famous books. 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 copy run, I went, no way, like that. And he went, well, it's probably less now. Like he thought it meant it was like too much, right? And instantaneously I went, oh, shit, everything makes sense.

And when I would call publishers and tell them this, 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, I know what we're going to sell. Well, I don't really give a shit if you lost 35% of the time and needed to spread your portfolio risk.

I'm the one you're spreading it on. So we decided with the lineabook, we put together 20 pages and Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system, and we shipped it out to eight different publishers we liked, two of which were art houses that had never done a cookbook. And they all came back and all the usual criticism, except for Aaron Wayner at Ten Speed Press. Smart guy, by the way. Yeah.

And he basically said, I'm going to make you an unusual offer, no advance at all. And we can negotiate, essentially, well just be the distributor and well negotiate out, like, what that looks like and well help you with the printing and well help you with the editing, which were both really good at. And within ten minutes we had struck a deal whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves, for our restaurants, 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 state secrets.

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 500,000 books on any other deal. 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 is like, that's like getting the Oscar, right?

Tim Ferriss
Yeah. Similarly for people who don't know, I mean, the James Beard awards are also very much like the Oscars. Yeah, so. So we felt like really vindicated on that. The book still sells.

Naval Ravikant
This is eight years later, we still sell seven to 8000 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 didnt 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 got it halfway, I got on a plane, flew out there and then brokered the deal myself. 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 downward. Can you explain to people just briefly what that is?

Yeah, yeah. So basically like here, here, I'll do this. Like let's say. So I think one of the great problems like 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 5% of the sale price.

That's a lot for something that'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 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 that they can keep their deal flow going and they dont really care about maximizing their last dollar. Whereas for you that last dollar is actually like $9,600.

Its a lot more money. So what I do whenever ive sold real estate is that I figure out what the intrinsic value is of the house, whats the bare minimum that id 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 ill pay you 50% of everything over 10% higher than that. And they all say oh thats 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 theyve priced it like 40% higher and it sells in two days. Yeah, because now theyre actually working for you. Right. Well similarly I went into that publishing negotiation and I was kind of like, by the way, the agent is probably look up, well 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? I don't even think she just knows that. 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. 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 Alinea book. That's a cookbook. Doesn't count. These are words.

So I went to the publishers that all 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.

Tim Ferriss
What was the. That's a great way. That's a great method 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.

Naval Ravikant
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 happened, so no one knows how. Off they are now on that phone call where you're like, hey, guys, would love to get you on the phone. And then publisher right away. Well, yeah.

Tim Ferriss
So I guess my question is, did they know that they were signing up for a mexican standoff? Yes, they did. Oh, they did. They did. So I wicked met with them all personally kind of said, or if you're.

Like, john, I'd love to get you on the phone. And it's like, all right, congratulations. Yeah, you can't. You can't ambush people to a Mexican stand up. Yeah, you can't do that.

Naval Ravikant
Okay. I mean, you could. It might be fun, but I didn't do that. I went and talked. I created enticement.

I sold on my ability to actually do it. It was a bit like doing the no phones with the software. I was like, well, if I get a really big contract, I'll have to figure out how to write a book and then I'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. Very, very rare.

Yeah. Because we sent it to them on the day it was due. They went, what's this? And I'm like, that's the manuscript. Yeah.

They went, oh, that's cute. Well, it's kind of like showing up at the restaurant on time as a diner and then being seated at the appointed time. Apparently very rare. It's just this like open, open lie. Do you turn your books in on time?

Tim Ferriss
I do, actually, yeah, I believe that, yeah, I do turn my books in on time. And we could get into that separate time. I just wanted to ask you a question. I do. I do.

I do not turn them in at the expected length, but longer, perhaps. Yeah, I do tend to turn them in. Right on. I believe that. So what happened with the aviary is that we basically couldnt figure out how to do another book because the Alinea book was such a project and Martin was onto other things and we didnt want to do it traditionally.

Naval Ravikant
And I didnt know anyone who could do what we wanted to do. And then there was this guy, Alan Hemberger, and boy, if you get nothing else from this whole talk, and youve made it this far, go Google. Alan and Alinea. 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 and magic as the graphics designer. He was given by Sarah a copy of the Alinea book to go full circle and became just fascinated with it was not a cook.

Didn't know how to cook and did the Julie and 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. Allen, for people wondering, is a L l e n. There are also videos of Allen and Alinea.

Yeah, and hes an autodidact. This guy learns and learns and learns and is the kind of person that goes to the black box and goes, Im going to learn how to forge knives and Im going to learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, Im going to cook everything in there and Im going to take pictures of it and Im 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 Alinea once to ask Grant some questions about how to make something because it wasnt working. And when Grant kind of threw up his arms and goes, well, the book might be wrong.

Like, Alan's worldview was shattered. It was like the Bible. And he was kind of like, what do you mean it could be wrong? He goes, well, you know, we did have some errata in there. Like, I mean, we documented hundreds of recipes.

It could be wrong. And at that point, Alan, like 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 a 400 page, beautifully, beautifully illustrated, beautifully written book about a persons journey of learning. And it was called the Alinea Project. And I had no idea that he had done anything like this. And so suddenly I thought to myself immediately, and its in the intro to the aviary book, I texted him and said, holy shit, youre crazy.

And I have ideas. And after waiting for 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. 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 that. So I wasnt worried about the economics of it anymore. I was worried about trying to make something really awesome. Right as they were about to say yes, they found out they were going to have a baby. 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, 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, out of your comfort zone and have a child and have that change of life.

And they thought I was punting on them just because 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 the last year and a half doing this book.

Did a kickstarter to just essentially raise awareness for it. We raised almost a half a million dollars in the kickstarter. We've sold about another $300,000 of books since then. It comes out in October. You can go to the alineabook.com.

And the coolest part of that website. Is that if you look at the alineabook. Oh, sorry. Theaviorybook.com. E the lead, nick, very genius marketing.

You're right there. So, yeah, theaviarybook.com. But if the coolest part of that is other than, of course, your ability to buy said book is. Alan kept a 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's served in. It's called loaded to the gun walls.

It's a Batavia rock cocktail. And that took a composite of 18 different photographs. And so he breaks down the photography techniques and also the New York Times bestseller list. And I showed him how Google target marketing works and Facebook ads work and all that, and all of a sudden he went, holy shit, I had no idea you could do this. So we are going completely without a distributor or publisher at this time, and I think we're going to set.

Man, I don't know. They're completely delusional. It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half million of these. Yeah. And the next two or three years.

Yeah. It's not a 995 book either, which it shouldn't be, right? I mean, this is. It's $85. We've invested close to a million dollars all the way in around it.

And it looks like it, I think. I hope. Yeah. From what I've seen, it looks like it would cost more than that. Yeah.

Well, we did it. 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 Alinea book, where, hey, you got to go out and buy a duck, like, you know, in your local grocery, might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you need some flirtatona rum or, you know, a certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store. It's exactly the same thing that we use. You know, that product is universal. I read somewhere that I don't think is taking us too far afield.

Tim Ferriss
I read somewhere that you consider yourself a tequila guy, or at least in part a tequila guy. Do you have any favorite tequilas or concoctions? Well, there's. So I just. I'm going to do a little video promo for.

Naval Ravikant
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. If. If people have the opportunity, they should check it out. It's basically Grant has said, hey, everything upstairs, people are going to think it's Alinea, smoke and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail.

So one of the foundational cocktails for me is daiquiri. I say three ingredients and a million ways to fuck it up. It's just lime, sugar and rum. That's all it is. And yet 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 mezcal margarita. That's my favorite drink. All I'm doing is I'm taking some reposado and a little bit of mezcal in equal weights, along with some grand Marnier or Cointreau 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 whiskies, dusty bottles, old gins. There's a growing movement to kind of rediscover some of the distilleries in America that were really, really, really great, that dont exist anymore, that were more artisanal at the time.

You can still find those bottles around. Its a little bit easier than someone like wine collecting or something like that. Man, its an endlessly fascinating thing. I dont consider myself a cocktail person. Ten 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. You could have it in a meal and it can make the meal better. Whereas avodka tonics just boozing, 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. I would also say just contrasting, say, someone who wants to recreate something from Alinea, which you certainly could do. I mean, Alan proved that with something from the aviary, there is also a tremendous amount of theater and presentation dynamism that you can create with cocktails that does not have to be super expensive or super complicated.

Tim Ferriss
I mean, certainly you guys are able to go as complex as you want to go, which is stunning. And I've spent time at the aviary. You can easily make some ice with peyote's 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.

Naval Ravikant
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 and you know that, you know, a caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like, oh, now I know how to make an 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.

Tim Ferriss
And people can learn all about this@theaviarybook.com. Is that right? Yep. Well, Nick, I've two rapid fire questions that are unrelated, and then I think we're gonna. We're gonna.

We're gonna bring this neat and tidy, round one podcast to a close. But we've talked about books. Everybody should not only check out the aviary book, but also, if they have a chance. Go to the aviary. It is.

It is tremendous. And you can also get some delicious bites and food. At least last time I was there. Still can at the aviary. So it is a bit of a, I hesitate to call it a workaround, but you guys have some very, very popular establishments if you want to sample the food.

This is also a great way to do it. And the drinks are just incredible. So it's a real sort of destination that makes a trip to Chicago worth it in and of itself. So I would recommend not only checking out the book, but also checking out a lot of what you guys are up to. Aside from that, books you have gifted the most to other people outside of those that you've made yourself.

What are the books that you've gifted the most to other people? Yeah, I named one of them already the fool by randomness. Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that, and I've definitely given that away. Boy, 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.

Naval Ravikant
So it's not a book people can buy, I'm sorry to say. But occasionally I'll be like a used 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. Per gradations of an epicurean. Something like that.

Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, like 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. No, no, no. I can't really think of like the number one. I'm sure once we, we end this, I'll immediately think of it.

And if I do, I'll send it to you so you can link to it. I think the answer, the answer is more interesting with the typewriter. So I think what I'm getting at was whatever you just offered. So that's perfect. And if you come up with anything else, we can put it in the show notes.

Tim Ferriss
This next one can be tough at times for folks. But the billboard questions. So, metaphorically speaking, non commercial, no advertising. But if you could get a word, a quote, a sentence, a question up on a billboard to transmit something to millions or billions of people, does anything come to mind that you might put on that billboard? I don't know why this came to mind, but the word would be pause.

Naval Ravikant
I have no idea why that came to mind, but I think in, 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. And so I think the hallmark of the people that I like as friends the best, what we try to instill in our kids, and the reason I like my wife so much and all that 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.

Tim Ferriss
Yeah, you do pause a lot, even though on a macro level you seem to be moving at hyperspeed a lot of the time. There are a lot of pauses built into that speed, if that makes sense from what I've noticed. I mean, you are simultaneously one of the craziest fuckers I know. And least craziest fuckers I know. If that makes sense.

Naval Ravikant
That's a great compliment. Thank you. I'll take it. I'll take it. And where can people find you?

Tim Ferriss
I know you have, of course, the alineogroup.com comma. You have exploretalk.com comma, theaviarybook.com comma, which is the most timely for people to check out right now. If people want to say hello or follow you on social, where are the best places, best handles for that? Yep, instagram, which is nkokonis kokones and twitter is nick kokonas. Nick.

Naval Ravikant
And hey, its all googleable, right? So beyond that, if you could figure out my email address, ill probably answer. Although given the reach of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated. It might take a while. Yeah, that might be a hug of death situation, but we will.

Thats okay. Tbd. Good problem to have, I suppose. Good problem now, nick, this was a blast. Thank you.

Tim Ferriss
So much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it and many more conversations to be had. This I think another trip to chicago may be in order. I was going to say I hope we see you here soon. I know I need to get back.

And to everybody listening, we've made mention of the show, notes, links to everything we've discussed, which you will be able to find at Tim Dot Blog podcast, as with this episode, and certainly every other episode. And until next time, thank you so much for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is five bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend, between one and a half and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter.

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#737: Naval Ravikant and Nick Kokonas

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1: Introduction

2: The Role of Honesty

3: Building Integrity

4: Philosophies on Success

5: Closing Thoughts

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