#341: Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Life

Nick Kokonas (IG: @nkokonas https://www.instagram.com/nkokonas/, TW: @NickKokonas https://twitter.com/nickkokonas) is the co-owner and co-founder of The Alinea Group https://www.thealineagroup.com/ of restaurants, which includes Alinea, Next, The Aviary, Roister, and The Aviary NYC. He is also the founder and CEO of Tock, Inc https://www.exploretock.com/, a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than 2.5M diners and clients in more than 20 countries. Alinea https://www.alinearestaurant.com/ has been named the Best Restaurant in America and Best Restaurant in The World by organizations and lists as diverse as The James Beard Foundation, World's 50 Best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler. His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them. Nick has been a subversive entrepreneur and angel investor since 1996. He spent a decade as a derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is The Aviary Cocktail Book http://www.theaviarybook.com/, which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I've ever seen. It is self-published, has already pre-sold nearly $1M in copies, and is being released and shipped in October of 2018. We've been trying to get this interview going ever since Nick was of immense help to me for The 4-Hour Chef, so I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. We talk about much more than the restaurant business, including philosophy, derivatives trading, favorite books, and how Nick tends to break every industry he enters in the most productive way possible! Enjoy! This episode is brought to you by 99designs https://99designs.com/Tim50, the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together. From logos to apps and packaging to books, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget. Right now, my listeners can get 50 dollars off a logo and brand identity package from 99designs https://99designs.com/Tim50, plus a free upgrade that lets you promote your project on the platform (an additional 99 dollar value), by visiting 99designs/Tim50 https://99designs.com/Tim50. This episode is also brought to you by Charlotte's Web https://www.cwhemp.com/tim, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract, that has become one of my go-to tools. Charlotte's Web won't get you high, but it does have some pretty powerful benefits, and it works with your body's existing endocannabinoid system. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting restful sleep, and to bring about a sense of calm and focus. Visit cwhemp.com/tim https://www.cwhemp.com/tim to take a quick quiz, which will determine the best product for your lifestyle. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're just seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together. From logos to apps, business cards, packaging to books, you name it, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget. Right now, my listeners, that's you guys, can get $50 off a logo and brand identity package from 99designs, plus a free upgrade that lets you promote your project on the platform, which is an additional $99 value, by checking out 99designs.com/tim50. That's T-I-M-5-0. So 99designs.com/tim50. As many of you know, I've used 99designs for many, many years now.

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

  I've used them for book covers, including mockups for The Four Hour Body, which went on to become a number one New York Times bestseller, illustrations for the multi-volume The Tao of Seneca, it's an ebook series, basically, and other graphic design projects. And I've been very impressed by the quality of their designers and illustrators. And you can check out all sorts of stuff like Tao of Seneca to get an idea. They're really mind-boggling. Most recently, I used 99designs to update the illustrations and layout of my Five Morning Rituals ebook. This is a PDF that I offer as an incentive to get people to sign up for my newsletter. The illustrations inside are gorgeous, and I loved working with the designer who we ended up selecting for the project. You can take a look at that.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33Tim Ferriss?

  That's 99designs.com/tim50 and click on the link on the landing page. Check it out 99designs.com/tim50.

• 2:45Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Charlotte's Web, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract that has become one of my go-to tools. Now, I have never really talked about CBD oil and cannabis has never really been the plant for me. I know we're talking about hemp, but nonetheless, after several nights of inexplicable insomnia, this was about a year ago, I just could not get to sleep to save my life. And after other fixes failed, so melatonin, California poppy extract, da, da, da, da, an elite athlete introduced me to this non-psychoactive extract and bam, problem solved. I had some of the best sleep that I'd had in months. Now, I don't use sleep aids on a daily basis, but this has become part of my toolkit and

• 3:28Tim Ferriss?

  I hope to be exploring other applications soon. CBD oil products have exploded in popularity in the health and wellness and fitness worlds and Charlotte's Web is one of the top players that offers broad spectrum hemp extract with CBD in the form of oils, capsules and topical products. Charlotte's Web products will not get you high, so that maybe that is good news, maybe bad news to you, but it does have some powerful benefits and applications and it works with your body's existing endocannabinoid system. Endo meaning from within, like endo versus exoskeleton, for instance. So endocannabinoid system works with your body. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  restful sleep, which is what I most often use it for, to bring about a sense of calm and focus. A lot of my friends use it for that. CBD is also Known or becoming known for helping athletes to recover from exercise-induced inflammation. Charlotte's Web hemp extract has naturally occurring terpenes, flavonoids, and other valuable hemp compounds that work synergistically to heighten positive effects, sometimes referred to as the entourage effect, which you guys can look up, making it more complete than single compound CBD alternatives, or at least that is what I've been told. I do not know much about CBD alternatives nor a single compound. In any case, check it out. This stuff has

• 4:48Tim Ferriss?

  really worked for me. To jump over to CWHemp.com/Tim, CW is in Charlotte's Web, CWHemp.com/Tim, to take a quick quiz, which will determine the best product for your particular aims, lifestyle, etc. And they ship to all 50 states. Charlotte's Web are offering listeners of this podcast 10% off of their purchase. While there are some exclusions, I personally use the extra strength CBD oils or the extra strength capsules, and you can see what might be a fit for you on that page. And there is a 30-day risk-free guarantee, so why not

• 5:25Tim Ferriss?

  try it out? So get 10% off of your purchase at CWHemp.com/Tim. And disclaimer, these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Enjoy.

• 5:46Tim Ferriss?

  Why, hello, you sexy little minks. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers, whether they come from the worlds of chess, sports, business, it really doesn't matter. We're trying to spot patterns of excellence. What are the habits, the routines, the favorite books, the morning exercises, whatever it might be, that you can test and apply in your own lives? And my guest today is a friend. We've been trying to make the podcast happen for quite a few years now, and he is a polymath.

• 6:23Tim Ferriss?

  You need to listen to this episode. Nick Kokonas is his name. Last name is spelled K-O-K-O-N-A-S. Nick Kokonas on Instagram @Nkoakonas, on Twitter @NickKoakonas. Nick is the co-owner and co-founder of the Alinea Group of Restaurants, which includes Alinea, Next, The Aviary Roister, I think I'm getting that right, and The Aviary New York City, NYC that is. He's also the founder and CEO of Tock Inc., a reservations and CRM system for restaurants with more than 2.5 million diners and clients in more than 20 countries. Now, you might be thinking, "Wait a second, restaurants, food, that's not my thing." Doesn't matter. We're going to get into philosophy, we're going to get into derivatives trading,

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  we're going to get into books like Fooled by Randomness, The Problems of Philosophy, let's see, Peregrinations of an Epicurean, and how Nick seems to break every industry or type of business he goes into in the most productive way possible. It's a really fun conversation. But back to the bio. Alinea, A-L-I-N-E-A, which by the way, I based basically an entire section of The 4-Hour Chef on, which was one of my books, because I was so impressed. Alinea has been named the Best Restaurant in America and Best Restaurant in the World by organizations and lists as diverse as the James Beard Foundation. They give James Beard awards out, which are kind of like the Oscars in the food world. World's 50 Best, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Gourmet Magazine, and Elite Traveler.

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  His restaurants have won nearly every accolade afforded to them, despite the fact that he does not, or didn't at least, have any experience whatsoever in restaurants. And he had some amazing, amazing partners we get into. But that set of beginner's eyes is really, really crucial, and we dig into how he cultivates that a lot. Nick has been, he uses this word, a subversive entrepreneur, which I agree with, and angel investor since 1996. He spent a decade as a very successful derivatives trader, has co-written three books, and believes in radical transparency in markets and business. His latest effort is The Aviary Roister.

• 8:32Tim Ferriss?

  Aviary Cocktail Book, which is perhaps the most gorgeous book I've ever seen. I got an early copy. It is stunning. It is just unbelievable what they've done. It is self-published, has already sold, that is pre-sold, nearly a million dollars in copies and is being released right now, shipped right now in October of 2018. It is truly, I think, the most beautiful book I have ever seen and held in my hands. So, you can find out all about it. You can see all sorts of photos and samples at theaviarybook.com. That's www.theaviarybook.com, A-V-I-A-R-Y. Check it out. So, I'll leave it at that. Please

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  listen to this episode, even if you have no interest in food. It doesn't matter. We span so many different businesses, industries, life lessons. I had a blast with this, and I hope you do as well. Here to Nick Kokonas. Nick, welcome to the show.

• 9:36Nick Kokonas?

  Thanks, Tim. Awesome to be here, finally.

• 9:39Tim Ferriss?

  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 4-Hour Chef. So, I wanted to, right off the bat, thank you for that. It was a really lovely experience.

• 9:57Nick Kokonas?

  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."

• 10:11Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 10:12Nick Kokonas?

  It was such pressure.

• 10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Well, which, which meant a lot, and pressure, I think, is the word to describe so much about you and your life. 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

• 10:57Tim Ferriss?

  I'd just read one of your responses as we were swapping different ideas. And 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 for months, years ago, to do the Alenia 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

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  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? Yeah, 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 in 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,

• 12:21Tim Ferriss?

  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...

• 12:46Tim Ferriss?

  How behavioral economics and Richard Thaler fit into this, just for curiosity's sake.

• 12:55Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, well, I'll go back to the word you used, options, because I started out back in 1992 or '93 studying options, trading, derivatives trading. And I think there's a huge misconception about what that is because of movies, because of The Big Short, because of, you know, Wall Street and all of that. It's a bit like playing a game of chess for a living, or being the house at a casino, that sort of thing. It's about taking, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of decisions per day and pretending it's like a big decision tree. And any given decision is probably, you know, if you're really good, 48% chance of being wrong.

• 13:37Nick Kokonas?

  So you have to be, you have to be really, really good at constantly being comfortable being wrong, but knowing that your overall number of, of decisions, that you're going to be right more than you're wrong. And so like, I know there's like a big theme, a lot of the folks that you have on, like, they talk about success or failure, how to measure those things. And I kind of don't look at it as success or failure with anything. I look at it as, just like, is my pattern of decisions correct? And then getting back to your actual question with Professor Thaler and behavioral economics, and, I mean, essentially what they're looking at is, is decision making. What drives people to make certain decisions?

• 14:21Nick Kokonas?

  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, they're making a decision, which is often the case as well? And then if you think about it, every single form of what we do, art, commerce, science, you know, picking a 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, I've just made another decision." But when you are doing, you know, business, or, or starting a company, or publishing a book, or whatever it may be, you can be intentional about that and realize that it's going to

• 15:06Nick Kokonas?

  be an iterative process. And so I think that's, that's been not only the case for me in, in learning how to filter things through that mindset, but... Like when you said there isn't really a trajectory, like I kind of look at everything I've done is is 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.

• 15:35Tim Ferriss?

  How is that that particular transition, or rather, progression, I suppose, from philosophy to finance is one that you and I haven't really talked about. And that that one is interesting to, I'd love to explore for a second, and we're gonna go into a million different nooks and crannies.

• 15:55Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  But was, did 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?

• 16:06Nick Kokonas?

  No, I can't remotely imagine having not 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, like, second week at Colgate University, wonderful professor, who just passed away last year at 94 years old, really great mentor to me, Professor Jerome Belmath, was a tenured professor at Colgate for almost 60 years, pulled me aside, introduction to logic, you know, 101. And basically said, what are you, what are you studying here? And I told him, and he said, no, you're gonna be a philosophy major. I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna teach

• 16:47Nick Kokonas?

  you how to think. And he was the kind of guy, like, there's like, there's this great scene in A River Runs Through It, where the, where the dad, you know, every time the kid writes an essay, like, the young, you know, fisherman kid writes an essay, and he brings it to his father to be graded, he gives it back to him, says, half is long again. And that's, like, long before that movie ever came out, Professor Belmath would 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, like, you know, how long is a piece of string? Like, it's however long it needs to be. And then he would tell me, yours can't be longer than three pages. And and people would be like jealous, like wow, you only have to write three pages.

• 17:31Nick Kokonas?

  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 to, you know, understand what logic was, to process information, and really to look for parallels in different fields and different fields of thought. And so, man, like, when I got out of school, I went to law school for like a day and a half. I'd gotten into, 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 their desires and trajectories were, I was like, oh, this isn't actually a good fit for me.

• 18:11Nick Kokonas?

  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, I dropped out of law school before I really entered law school. And, you know, I floundered around for a little while. But, you know, if you grew up in Chicago, you end up meeting people who 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.

• 18:55Nick Kokonas?

  And for me, it was like a huge challenge, because there are people down there that had, you know, PhDs from MIT, and then there was people who were like, you know, butchers that went down there with a hundred thousand dollars and just kicked ass. And and and so it was, it wasn't about your your level of education or any of the stuff I already talked about. It was about, can you show up every day, and every day's game day, and be really disciplined and very clear-headed in 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, and I'm not going to name a name here. As you'll find out why in a second. But I, I was walking down the street.

• 19:39Nick Kokonas?

  I, I was like, you know, six months out of college, kind of didn't know what I was gonna do. And I was walking down the street and I bumped into a guy I knew in high school. And, you know, he wasn't the best student. He didn't try the hardest. And I was like, hey, what are you doing now? And, and he was like, well, I'm just rehabbing these homes. And I, I thought literally like, oh, he's a construction worker. And I was like, you know, what are you doing with them? He's like, well, I just bought this block. And I'm turning this all over. This is a true story. This is so not like, you know, a good reason to do something. But, but I looked at him and I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, I skipped college and I, I started out as a runner on the floor of the Merc.

• 20:18Nick Kokonas?

  And now I, I, you know, I own like 25 condos and three townhomes and, and I, I trade. And I kind of went like, wow, you know, I don't know what. I knew a little bit about it. I'd been down on the floor before just visiting. But I was kind of like, that's fascinating. Like, that is truly fascinating thing. And, you know, I, I went down, visited the floor. I had to fake my resume in the wrong direction to get a job.

• 20:45Nick Kokonas?

  It's a true story. Um, like people lie on their resume all the time. I'm probably the only person that got rid of like, you know, my degree and my, my like academic awards and all that. Because, you know, to get a clerk job on the floor, the last thing they wanted was someone with a good degree, Phi Beta Kappa. You know, magna cum laude, all that stuff. Um, so I faked my resume, got a $5 an hour job and looked for a mentor. And I, I found a guy named Frank Sorino, who, um, was at Chicago Research and Trading. Who is, which also was founded by a philosophy major. It's actually very common. And, um, Why is that common? I, I, I don't, I wish I knew the answer. I, I don't know the answer. I, I do know that there's three or four of the largest trading firms in the world. Are run by philosophy majors.

• 21:28Nick Kokonas?

  Um, and if you look back at my, my class, just of, 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. Like, it was, it's a really, Interesting path. It's not just like studying physics, you know? Like, I know some great physicists who who are great in whatever they do. And I think it's I think it's a similar discipline of abstract thought.

• 21:59Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:00Nick Kokonas?

  Like, I can't think of anything worse than studying business.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 22:04Nick Kokonas?

  It just seems like a terrible thing to study to me.

• 22:08Tim Ferriss?

  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 like the basics of how things work or how people think?

• 22:29Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I think it's it's almost like it's how to do something or how to manage something, but not why to do it.

• 22:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 22:35Nick Kokonas?

  And so if 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.

• 22:47Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:48Nick Kokonas?

  And so for me, it's like I always ask the why question, you know? Um, when we're, you know, you were mentioning like the book publishing or a bar. Like, you know, I just look at some things and it's like, why is that? Like, why does it work that way? Um, 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. Um, and often I don't know the real answer. Um, but I come up with alternative ones, at least that suit my narrative, I guess.

• 23:27Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing) Undervalued skill, by the way, in some cases, right? You got to be careful, but, uh, very, uh, a very, very, very, very, very interesting. I I want to pause here partially because I'm over-caffeinated. I was inspired by my nostalgia related to your double espressos up. 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?

• 24:04Nick Kokonas?

  Well, I, you know, I think, I think I was prepared in earnest because I was mostly terrified.

• 24:11Nick Kokonas?

  You know, he had a reputation of being kind of like a, um, you know, uh, he is a Socratic method teacher. He was pretty harsh. Um, Colgate was very small classes and there was a class of, you know, 80 people and he kind of wanted to whittle it down to a more manageable number. And his method to do that was just to kick your ass. And I, and I remember, I mean, he, he probably, as great as he was, he, I doubt he would survive starting out at a college campus now. I mean, I've literally, 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 because he was so in fear. And so he just lit his notebook on fire.

• 24:54Nick Kokonas?

  And he stamped it and the kid, kid threw it on the ground, stamped on, he's like, you could smother it. Sure. And he called everyone, he memorized every person's last name and it was Mr. And Miz. And, um, I remember the specific day, um, he was literally at, you know, back to the, this is like right out of a movie. He is back to the class, writing on a chalkboard, you know, some, some logic problems, symbolic logic. And, um, the guy next to me, um, uh, had no shot at getting it, right? None, right? And so he, he said his name and, um, and I wrote on the paper on my desk so he could see it, like what, what the answer was. And then without missing a beat or turning around, he was like, Mr. Kokonas, please do not help him. There is no way in hell he could possibly have done

• 25:39Nick Kokonas?

  that without your help. And, 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, Mr. Kokonas, where's your book? And I said, it's at my, it's in my dorm room, you know, 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, you know, 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,

• 26:23Nick Kokonas?

  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. Like, he took me under his wing. I was very fortunate. I, and you know, it's like, I never knew, here's the amazing part. I never knew the guy liked me until 10 years after I graduated. And then I was treated like a member of his family at his funeral 30 years later.

• 26:44Tim Ferriss?

  Huh.

• 26:45Nick Kokonas?

  Right? So really fascinating person, really fascinating, you know, 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. And never asked for anything back, you know, ever.

• 27:01Tim 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 overly attached to you so he wouldn't express it?

• 27:14Nick Kokonas?

  No, no, no, no. I think I was 19 years old, and I didn't know that the people you like, you hold to a higher standard, probably.

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:21Nick Kokonas?

  And so consequently, you know, I like, it was really like, he beat the shit out of me in a good way. You know what I mean? Like, he, 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 you because they didn't, he didn't think they had a chance.

• 27:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah, he didn't care. He wasn't invested.

• 27:47Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. And so with, with me, I think it would be like, he would be talking to my English professor without me even knowing and being like, you know, that paper sucks. He can do a lot better than that. Give him a C on that one. And I was just like, 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.

• 28:13Nick Kokonas?

  Place to be at that time.

• 28:14Tim Ferriss?

  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? Or would you say, actually, you know what, that was an intermediate step to something else, you should, you would probably be better off studying X, Y, and Z? Is there like a starter kit or a plate,

• 28:57Tim Ferriss?

  something you would recommend to folks who don't have the philosophy exposure?

• 29:01Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, you know, I think part of it is, if you read a book in isolation, it's not as rich of an experience as discussing those ideas within that context. That said, if it's, if you're the kind of person that loves to read and explore ideas, I mean, there's hardly a better place. It's a matter of finding what you enjoy. You know, I, I happen to love The Problems of Philosophy, which Bertrand Russell wrote, sort of about Wittgenstein's ideas, but before Wittgenstein published. And it's, it's written in plain language. It's not hard to understand. Certainly Nietzsche is more like philosophy with some weird sugar

• 29:45Nick Kokonas?

  coating of something on top of it. And man, like as a young male, you know, reading Nietzsche for the first time, I was like, fuck yeah. Like, you know, like, it's not like, it's not passive. Like, I think people think of philosophers as like Zen monks, sitting there quietly contemplating the universe. I think what it is, is it's people grappling with all the same questions and curiosity that, that we all have, if you pause to think about it. And so, it's, it's so big, you know, that it's, it's not just, you know, Descartes, you know, I think, therefore I am. It's, it's, it's kind of every little bit of that. Back to like, you know, read Lucretius. Like, he had the atomic

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  Could you spell that? I'm gonna be the first one to admit that.

• 30:31Nick Kokonas?

  Lucretius?

• 30:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Lucretius, Lucretius.

• 30:33Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, Lucretius, yeah. I mean, You know, he.

• 30:36Tim Ferriss?

  L U C R I T I U S.

• 30:39Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I'm a terrible speller, so never ask me to spell anything.

• 30:43Tim Ferriss?

  We'll put it in the show notes.

• 30:43Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, right, right. But like, you know, it's like, you, you read, read that, or read this great book called The Swerve, which, you know, is, is, you know, about this, this monk ages ago, um, that, 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. Um, but I, you know, it's like, I continue to find sort of the world of ideas endlessly inspirational. And, and then, by the way, you know, steal them and use them in whatever you're doing. Like, they're there for you.

• 31:22Tim Ferriss?

  Lucretius, L U C R E T I U S. Titus Lucretius Caris was a Roman poet and philosopher. We'll put that in the show notes. The, I want to second Bertrand Russell also. I haven't read Bertrand Russell in so many ages, but it is

• 31:40Tim Ferriss?

  very digestible. It is not dressed up in $10 words when $10 words would suffice. Uh, a lot of his writing is, is really powerful. And I, 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, uh, 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

• 32:21Tim Ferriss?

  taught by professors and junior professors. I mean, these, this is the same team who's teaching.

• 32:26Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:28Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, those are very readily accessible.

• 32:31Nick Kokonas?

  Well, and even MIT OpenCourseWare, like, so many colleges now have. Taking that model and put great, great, great classes online. And, you know, I know that every now and then I'm surprised what I, what I find on there. And get sucked into like an all nighter of, of taking some college class, you know, that I know nothing about and it's so far over my head, but it kind of refuels you again to go like, oh, like there are huge gaps where I know nothing. And the older you get, the harder it is to, to start into something new, I find at least. Um, because it feels like the mountain's too big, you know?

• 33:12Tim Ferriss?

  I, I would, I would actually, not, not to pull a Nick, actually, sir.

• 33:17Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, you disagree.

• 33:18Tim Ferriss?

  On the co- on the contrary, on the contrary, sir. My book is doing me a lot of good in my dorm room.

• 33:23Nick Kokonas?

  That's right.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  I think one of your superpowers is that you ask the fundamental why questions about longstanding assumptions or, uh, 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. Uh, in, in a way, so it, let, let's go back to the Merc. Uh, we, we can go in any direction, of course, but.

• 33:52Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 33:53Tim Ferriss?

  You, you get, you step into this Lord of the Flies slash gladiatorial arena with butchers and PhDs and so on. Then what? Like, at what point, is there a point when you're like, okay, I actually do think I could be good at this?

• 34:12Nick Kokonas?

  No. No, uh, I, I, for real, no. Um, I, I was down there and I, I, I had made, um, a fatal error of leaving school. And, and everyone told me it was a fatal error and, um.

• 34:28Tim Ferriss?

  This is leading out, uh, the law school.

• 34:30Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, and, and I, I, I remember being down there and.

• 34:36Nick Kokonas?

  You know, 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'd 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, that, 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 didn't really teach you how to trade. And I spent, you know, time interviewing with big companies like

• 35:21Nick Kokonas?

  Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale 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. 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. Like, that's what I was interested in doing, but they could, they could ship me to France and have me do something totally different. I could be an analyst, or, you know, god knows what. And so when I would question that, they'd be like, man, you should be really happy, like, we had, you know, 300

• 36:03Nick Kokonas?

  applicants for this, and we offered eight positions. Like, just take it. And I was kind of like- Totally your style. I know, and I was, I was just kind of like, you know, I grew up, you know, like, I'd be remiss not to say that, like, my dad modeled, um, 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 II, he was drafted into the Navy at the end of World War II, was dismissed honorably after 16, 18 months because they were downsizing the Navy. And then he was barely young enough to be drafted into the Army for the Korean War. And when he got out, like, you know, he had no usable skills. So he went to work at the grocery store that he started working at when he was 12 years

• 36:45Nick Kokonas?

  old, saved up all of his money from the army and the navy and bought the store. And so as I was growing up, you know, my hero was my dad, who was not an academic, who was not what people would think of as like an executive in a suit or whatever, but did really well. You know, he had bought a property in real estate. He owned a temporary labor office that supplied unskilled labors to factories and conventions and whatnot. That was a really good business, you know? And he had a lot of common sense smarts. He was horrified that I didn't go to law school, you know? But meanwhile, I was modeling what he did.

• 37:28Nick Kokonas?

  And so when I got down there, I was like, you gotta own, you have to own your own situation, you know? And so when I was offered those jobs, I was like, well, I don't really see myself working for someone else, you know? And I found a guy who also felt that way, and he was working for a big company and they didn't want to make him a trader because he was too much of a quant, like he was really well educated, he was really mathematical. 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 had 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.

• 38:13Nick Kokonas?

  How did you meet him? Do you remember how you guys met? Yeah, I was just introduced to him through, he was, back then, there were, you know, if you're a trader or even a trading company, you have 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, you know, up on 17 floors away, you know? Wow. Ancient times. And 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 like that he didn't want to hire me because he just hired some clerk, I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, I will pay you to work for you.

• 38:58Nick Kokonas?

  And he was, he was like...

• 39:02Nick Kokonas?

  This is really strange, you know. 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, you know, becoming, like, getting on a badge, it was called, like leasing a seat and actually trading within a year. And I was like, I need to get going on this. Like, I need someone that's gonna teach me options. And it's fascinating because, you know, he then hired me for, I mean, I wanna say it was $400 a week or something like that. And, you know, 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, you know, three derivatives in, you know, the, it's not just volatility curve, but the curve of the curve.

• 39:47Nick Kokonas?

  And, you know, as soon as I started grasping this and going deeper, deeper down that rabbit hole, the more, the more I liked it as, as a puzzle. It wasn't, certainly the money had an appeal, but it was also, hey, here's this, this giant competition, it's like playing a huge multifaceted chess game that no one's gonna get exactly right, but like I said earlier, it's about making hundreds of decisions a day, and even when you get 10 in a row that come up tails, you know that the next one's 50/50, you know? And that discipline was interesting. That was more about teaching yourself the psychology of standing there while everyone

• 40:31Nick Kokonas?

  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. I, everything in Wolf of Wall Street, I have seen.

• 40:49Nick Kokonas?

  I haven't lived, but I've seen it all. Yeah. And, you know, I, I started hiring very shortly after. I started trading, and 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, what I learned, and I, I hired people that I considered corporate refugees, people who worked for companies and decided that independence was better. Why did you leave after a year?

• 41:25Nick Kokonas?

  You know, 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 like some of the operations at the Mercantile Exchange when he went over to trade the bonds at the Board of Trade. And, you know, I mean, he was a really, really smart guy and he made me a deal that when you analyzed it very carefully, it got worse over time. And I just kind of went, you know, it's been great and I've learned a ton and we've made each other a bunch of money and it's a win-win, but I really wanted to do my own thing. Like I wanted to be the captain of my own ship, I guess.

• 42:09Nick Kokonas?

  And thankfully, this guy Jim Hansen, who's still one of my dearest friends, sort of had an option to stay, you know, 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, you know, far more upside than downside. And 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 like psychology training. It was mostly standing around after hours and saying, what's seven times 28?

• 42:51Nick Kokonas?

  And screaming it at each other like a drill sergeant until the person couldn't remember what nine times three was anymore. Wait, why did you do that? Well, you had to be quick, you had to be quick on basic mental agility. So if you bought, 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 $50,000 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?

• 43:34Nick Kokonas?

  Well, we stood around and we turned people's brains into mush until like I had people punch me, cry, run out. It was, it was, 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.

• 43:57Tim Ferriss?

  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. The, 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 when they actually...

• 44:27Nick Kokonas?

  It's why we love watching big time sports. Like when it, when it matters, there are certain people that you know are, you can almost look at them and go, oh, that poor, that poor person's gonna fade. And then you, you hope they don't, right? You hope all that training, you know, pays off. When you see someone, I, I love golf for all the same reasons. It's like, you know, just a, a series of constant failures. And then so when you look at someone who, who can pull that, that rabbit out of the hat, you know, at the exactly the right moment, it's, it's pretty, pretty wonderful to see. And, and I, the thing I loved about my time down there, even though I burned out of it

• 45:07Nick Kokonas?

  after 10 years, is that I, there were moments where I, I did absolutely, I mean, I have friends that they'll listen to this and they'll be like, oh yeah, I remember that time in the S and P, but you really got this right, you know? But I, I made some completely stupid decisions, but, 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 like a formative moment where I kind of went like, wow, I can actually, I, I can not only hang in this environment, I can thrive in it. And, you know, you get home soaking wet with sweat. It was a physical job, like I said, people, it was really blue collar in a lot of ways.

• 45:49Nick Kokonas?

  And, you know, it's like, I got home that day and I was like, that was, that was what I prepped my last six years for.

• 45:58Nick Kokonas?

  It was very satisfying. It sounds like an awful, it is an awful thing in a way, right? Like, it's just about pure commerce. It serves, you know, a purpose of price discovery and all of that, but any individual person isn't really the one doing that, you know? So, I think that there are negatives to the whole system as well, in hindsight, but man, at the time, it just felt like great mental training.

• 46:20Tim Ferriss?

  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, books, mental models, anything that you would recommend?

• 46:45Nick Kokonas?

  It's really, really hard. I think the mental model is asymmetric risk. I always look for something that the upside is, you know, three to four X the downside. Obviously, quantifying those is very difficult, but that's the key. Everything I try to do is asymmetric. And then, even though Nassim Taleb is a bit of a pandemic goofball on Twitter, his book Fooled by Randomness is awesome. That was the one that preceded Black Swan, and I think Black Swan's great, it's fine, but Fooled by Randomness is, I think, the better of all his books, because it just, man, it just encapsulates everything that

• 47:27Nick Kokonas?

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

• 47:41Tim Ferriss?

  Literally, literally.

• 47:42Nick Kokonas?

  Literally, yeah, literally. And I don't take any pleasure, like, people are like, "Oh, you must love gambling," or whatever. And it's like, I would never sit down to a blackjack table, because I know that, you know, there's a forty-nine and a half percent chance that I'm gonna win, and that's the wrong way.

• 47:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the full randomness is, 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, how do you think about risk? Because this is a word that has popped up a few times, but a lot of, how do you personally think about risk in your life?

• 48:40Tim Ferriss?

  Do you, for instance, like some startup founders, look at the risk as the various early-stage startups, restaurants, bars, and so on that you're 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?

• 48:59Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, that's, that's a pretty difficult question. I think that, yeah, I think that if you look at everything that I've, I've done business-wise, everybody would say that the failure rate is super high in what we do. So, trading, they used to say, one out of 100 people that goes down there, breaks even their first year. And fewer, out of that one, take another 100 of those ones, and less than 1 in 100 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, to the restaurant business.

• 49:44Nick Kokonas?

  And people, oh yeah, 95% of all restaurants go out of business in their first two years. And I'm like going, great, you know, that's, that's perfect.

• 49:52Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you, why do you have that response?

• 49:54Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, so and then I'm going to start, I'm doing a software startup now.

• 49:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 49:59Nick Kokonas?

  So, so the higher, the smaller the hoop.

• 50:04Nick Kokonas?

  The more interesting it is to figure it out. And once you're up there and you know how to jump up through that little hoop, there's fewer people playing that game, you know? And the other thing is, I remember right when I was gonna start building Alenia with Grant, I was talking to a restaurant owner. And by all accounts, he was pretty successful. He had four or five restaurants. And one of them, I really liked a lot. And we'd go there a lot, and I kinda got to know him a little bit. And he said, "So, you know, what are you up to?" And I said, "Well, actually, I'm building a restaurant now." And he looked at me and said, "Ah, it's a terrible business. You don't wanna do it. Like, incredible failure rate, terrible." And I was like, "Why did you build the next four?"

• 50:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. How did you respond to that?

• 50:55Nick Kokonas?

  You know, no one does. That's kinda like, you know, we'll get to it, I'm sure, but that's like the way I was with the publishing thing. It's like, it's like, "Hey, man, people keep printing books, and yet I can't figure out any of the information, and yet they're gonna give me like three or four hundred thousand dollars to write a book." Like, something's remiss here. Like, you know what I mean? I've never written a book before, but yet someone's gonna write me a four hundred thousand dollar check. There must be a lot of money on the other side of that bet. And so consequently, like, I always try to look for the high, small hoops. And then I spend my time learning as much as I can, and then I jump through that hoop. It's both more interesting, I think. And I also think, getting back to the asymmetry of risk, those are the ones that, you know,

• 51:39Nick Kokonas?

  yeah, you might have a, you know, well, first of all, do you really have a ninety-five percent failure rate if you put in all that effort?

• 51:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Nick Kokonas?

  I don't think so, you know? And second of all, you know, so I think they priced it wrong, so to speak. And then, second of all, like, man, that's where the fun is. Like, that gets you up in the morning and going to work.

• 52:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. This is where, among many, many other places...

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Averages can be very, very misleading, right? And I always end up in public Q and As 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 10 startups fail within the first year, or whatever the stat is. And the first question that occurs to me with a number like the latter, or I guess a ratio, is, well, is it because the model is difficult? Is it because startups are inherently that high risk?

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Or is it, are there other plausible explanations? Is it that nine out of 10 people who attempt to start a startup don't do any of the necessary due diligence?

• 53:01Nick Kokonas?

  Correct. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the number of, you know, I've been on a couple of like graduate school, you know, entrepreneurship, like, 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 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, you know? So you kind of look at that and you go, you know, you haven't really done the homework yet at all.

• 53:44Nick Kokonas?

  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.

• 53:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 53:55Nick Kokonas?

  I'm just going to hire someone to build that for me, or an app. You know, I get so many apps pitched to me and, you know, 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.

• 54:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man, I

• 54:14Nick Kokonas?

  You must get all the, you must get that 50 times worse than I did.

• 54:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, 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. 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.

• 54:56Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, right.

• 54:57Tim Ferriss?

  Let us know if you're interested in the next 60 minutes, which my default response to anything like that, where people are pressuring me for a fast decision, is no. Like, it's just, it's like, I've lost very little money saying no to those things. But the, coming back to the examples that you were giving, and what we were talking about, bridging over to restaurants and food. So you're being told how restaurants are an awful business. Food is an awful business. And I remember someone told me a long, long time ago, they're like, yeah, if you want to lose money, go into magazines or restaurants,

• 55:37Tim Ferriss?

  right? And at what point, and I have a little bit of the backstory, but not all the details, like, at what point do you decide to go into or get involved with restaurants, and why?

• 55:51Nick Kokonas?

  Well, so I left trading in about 2002, 2001, it was a, you know, tough year between 9/11, which was, my father died in February of that year. I was burnt out after, you know, going really hard for so long. And, you know, we'd built up a 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 was something that I really genuinely enjoyed, but didn't, didn't kind of know what I wanted to do next. And started doing consulting for, you know, a small hedge fund, and then

• 56:37Nick Kokonas?

  You know, 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 like, you know, ex-athletes because who else is 34 years old and can play golf on a Wednesday afternoon? And so it was just a weird 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 Aketz, 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,

• 57:19Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know, 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 like sometimes people bring, you know, the chef some wine or beer or whatever. And it's like,

• 58:02Nick Kokonas?

  that's kind of sand to the beach, you know? I would bring him books and I didn't figure he had a lot of time to read. So I would put 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.

• 58:17Tim Ferriss?

  Hold on a second. The Peregrinations, like a peregrine falcon? I don't even know what that word is.

• 58:22Nick Kokonas?

  No, no, no. A Peregrination is like a wandering about.

• 58:25Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, okay.

• 58:26Nick Kokonas?

  So it was written just after World War II by an ex-serviceman and he kind of goes around, you know, Paris, I want to say maybe late 40s, early 50s, I can't recall exactly. And there is a chapter in there on La Permeade, 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 would literally just highlight like a couple of lines in there and give him this book, which was out of print at the time. And

• 59:06Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know, direct, honest feedback, but not like, "Oh, it was delicious." It was more like, you know, like 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, on a forum called EGullet 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,

• 59:48Nick Kokonas?

  who would come out, not, you know, 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, you know, the stereotype central casting of a chef, right? You know, chubby, gregarious guy, he was really quiet and introspective, shy. But then you read, and you know, these, which are still up, you know, you can still Google it, and you'd go like, you know, he'd go on for like four pages about bread service. Like, "What's the point of bread?" You know? And this is a guy that I could wrap my, you know, wrap my head around. And so I remember on January 20th, 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.

• 1:00:32Nick Kokonas?

  And I remember I emailed him and said, "She's ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese, and loves Thai food. Good fucking luck." And I knew exactly what that would do to him, that would put him into 10 days of pure hell. Because he would research Latvian food, he would have to redo, like he would redo a whole menu, 20 courses, right? And I didn't know they were going to put us in the kitchen. And they put us in the kitchen, I mean, it sounds like a jerky thing to do now, but we did have a relationship a little bit at the time. And he served us like the most amazing meal of my life, you know? And it started out with Latvian sorrel soup with braised ham hocks.

• 1:01:18Nick Kokonas?

  And, you know, it had flavors of the sea, which was a Japanese dish. It had Thai dishes, but it was all in his style. And so it was his own, and yet it had elements of all these things. And at the end of that meal, um, he said to me, you know, well, what do you think? And I had watched the kitchen and it was like a watchmaker shop. It was not screaming and yelling.

• 1:01:40Tim Ferriss?

  It is, it is just as, I'm sorry to interrupt. It is so unlike anything that the vast majority of people listening to this would possibly expect, right?

• 1:01:51Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, it's not Gordon Ramsay. It's not Gordon Ramsay.

• 1:01:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it is just complete silence. It is like a watchmaking factory. It is, uh, it is really something else. Anyway, sorry to jump in.

• 1:02:02Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, no, no, no. It's, it's, that's, that's totally fine. And so at the end, I said, you know, I doubt anybody anywhere in the world had a better meal tonight. And he was like, well, 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 kind of looked, I kind of looked at him, you know, he sat down with us. And I said, what are you, what are you gonna do? And he goes, well, what do you mean? I said, well, you're not gonna be here forever. And he said, well, I, I want to build my own restaurant. I said, I'd be, I'd be happy to help you do that. And he said, what kind of restaurant do you want to build? I said, I don't know. I've 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 4th, um, you know, I, we went back and forth on

• 1:02:47Nick Kokonas?

  email. On May 4th, um, we held a, a dinner at my house for potential investors. And on May 4th, 2005, we opened Delinia.

• 1:02:55Tim Ferriss?

  That is nuts in terms of-

• 1:02:57Nick Kokonas?

  Completely nuts. We didn't even know each other.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  That, I mean, can you put that in perspective for people? I actually did not realize that was the timeframe.

• 1:03:06Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, can you, just in the context of like, normal restaurant world?

• 1:03:11Nick Kokonas?

  We, we, we argued, like, so we didn't really know each other very well. But he would come by my house and he, and he didn't-

• 1:03:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let me, let me, let me interject for a second, because you've, you've said we didn't know each other very well. What did you know about each other, nonetheless, that gave you guys the, like, the, the push, like, the impulse and the, the sufficient level of trust slash 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 backgrounds.

• 1:03:47Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, I actually studied that, like that I actually knew, I knew the facts, you know? And I knew what he was putting in front of me, but I didn't know him, you know? Like the way you know someone that you're going to become a business partner with. And I think he just thought I was rich.

• 1:04:07Nick Kokonas?

  You know, I, I, I'm being serious. 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,

• 1:04:49Nick Kokonas?

  okay, the guy's got an open mind. He seems to have done well in business. He knows like, you know, apparently how to build something. What was really funny is that the stuff that I was concerned about, which was like architecture, design, plumbing, you know, building, lease, all of that. He was like, the word oblivious is not too strong of a word. Like, you know, I mean, this is not a criticism of him either, right? It's just like he came to my house and he was just like, yeah, you know, 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, like a designer, he's like a, an artisan, like he built plateware and, and he won the Buckus de Or

• 1:05:32Nick Kokonas?

  for the platter he designed for Thomas Keller and Daniel Balloud's team for the Team USA and all that now. But back then, like, I mean, this guy's not going to design plumbing or electrical. So I would just look at him going like, well, no, he can't, we need an architect and you need to get like 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 you, you know, build a kitchen and you go. You know, in terms of like, obviously he knew there were health inspectors and all that. But the process of all this, just about, you know, you either were going to not build it ever. Eight weeks in because we were hated each other or we were the kind of people that figured everything out and we just talked it out like right down to like what kind of tables,

• 1:06:16Nick Kokonas?

  what kind of glassware, what kind of this like, you know, we wanted to rethink the why again of everything. Like, why do you put a candle on a table? Why is a candle romantic? Like, that's a question we asked. Why? Do we need candles? That's kind of like, why is that romantic? Why is, um, why do people put a little bud vase on a table? Why shouldn't that be an edible thing? That'd be cool. So, 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. Um, you know, we went, what is a good greeting feel like? Not just, you know, if you're at someone's house, what does that feel like? If you're at a restaurant, what shouldn't it feel like? Well, it shouldn't feel like a computer in

• 1:07:00Nick Kokonas?

  front of your face saying, what's your name, you know, and all that. So, we, we went through every aspect of that and, you know, I lost almost 20 pounds that year, not in a healthy way. Um, just like GCing, the construction, I laid tile in the basement like three days before we opened.

• 1:07:16Tim Ferriss?

  Let me, let me pause for one second. 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? Like, why, why was this the thing that captured your imagination? Because you had to know on some level, once you started getting into the details, like, fuck, I mean, this is gonna be

• 1:07:43Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, it's all in.

• 1:07:44Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna be a big, this is gonna be all my chips energetically. So, why, why this?

• 1:07:50Nick Kokonas?

  You know, there, there are occasional times when you wake up in the morning and like that thought comes back to you that, that like, hey, um, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm really sucked into this, right? You know, and for about three or four months, without telling anybody, even, you know, Dagmar, like, even not telling her, like, telling no one, I kept going like, I should build a restaurant with this guy. Like, like, it would be the best restaurant in the world if it was done all the way, right? And I recognized my inner voice saying, "That's a really dumb idea." You know, "And you don't know what you're doing." I'd never worked a day in my life in a restaurant, right?

• 1:08:34Nick Kokonas?

  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 gonna build me a restaurant." And then they sit there like it's their living room. And that's not good. Like, I didn't want to be that, that ducy guy that built the restaurant because my ego was, was needed to host a party. And so whenever I would kind of later on broach that subject and people would say like, "Well," you know, I could almost hear their brain whispering, "Well, of course, that's what he's gonna do."

• 1:09:14Nick Kokonas?

  And, and, 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, I'd wake up in the morning and I would go, "You know, I'm not really into what I'm doing right now. And I've just met somebody who's the best in the world at what they do. And no one knows it yet." Like, and, and you know, there was probably met, that's probably happened to me, I'm really fortunate, that that's 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 they're doing, I, I, I pause, I kind of acknowledge that directly,

• 1:09:56Nick Kokonas?

  and then I just go like, you know, "Can we, can we, you know, grab a glass of wine or, or coffee or something?" And like, that's something worth marking and going like, "Wow, this person's really invested in something." And Grant had every aspect of being, being that at 28 years old. And, and it, you know, I mean, in hindsight, like, it looks, it looks smart, but I gotta tell you, it was years before it felt smart.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 1:10:32Nick Kokonas?

  Or among them, yeah.

• 1:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, among them, but the key point that jumps out for me is, and the world didn't know it yet. So my question for you is, that 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? I mean, 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?

• 1:11:11Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you've written a couple of books about that. It's definitely intangible. You know, 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, you know, if you if you push a little, they're happy to do so. But it's more that, like, if you look around, like, the vast majority of people are not fully committed to whatever, you know? And I think

• 1:11:56Nick Kokonas?

  part of what you do is you try to steer people to find those things that that they can commit to. Or you can try to lower a barrier to show them, like, hey, the commitment's not as hard as you think in this particular area, right?

• 1:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:12:08Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know? And, I mean, now, like, that's, like, boy, I live for that. Like, I love meeting people that...

• 1:12:35Nick Kokonas?

  Even if it's not something I'm interested in that are all in, you know? And, and there, that's, that's an interesting, you know, I, I weirdly, I've never really thought about it that way. But like, it was just very clear to me that Grant was all in. Like, if, if, here's the thing, if, if he wasn't gonna do it with me, he was still gonna do it.

• 1:12:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Nick Kokonas?

  I was, I was, uh, uh, uh, I, I was a helper, I, you know, over time, I certainly contributed, uh, you know, a great deal to it. Not just, he contributed a great deal to business and then I also contributed to the art, but that took time, you know? But I could tell that he was all in and, 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.

• 1:13:20Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. And for, 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.

• 1:13:35Nick Kokonas?

  Well, Chef's Table on Netflix is a great.

• 1:13:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Chef's Table, great, great, perfect. So, everybody should have the experience of observing Grant working and focusing. It is, I've, 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, 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 is, permeates the appearance, the air, the atmosphere, it's really something else.

• 1:14:22Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, so to that, to, to, to that point, focus.

• 1:14:27Tim Ferriss?

  One of the, my favorite aspects of, of speaking with you and having conversations is the quest, the questions that you raised, right? Like what candle, not just should we have candles? Like, that's maybe a good question, but it's probably not the right first question. Like, why do restaurants use candles in the first place? Furthermore, why are candles considered romantic, right? Like, kind of stepping back.

• 1:14:49Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, basic, basic stuff, yeah.

• 1:14:51Tim Ferriss?

  What are other questions that you asked related to a Linea? Or you could certainly bridge to, to other, uh...

• 1:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  You know, 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?

• 1:15:11Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, Grant set the tone for that in our first meeting, not really knowing me. And we started talking, but we didn't even know where to start, right? And he said, "Well, I know one thing. I want to have wooden tables. Like, 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."

• 1:15:50Nick Kokonas?

  And he's like, 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."

• 1:16:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:16:01Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know, "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 grade, it'll show the plateware grade." And then I kind of went like, "Well, yeah, but like, you know, 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?

• 1:16:45Nick Kokonas?

  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." It's, you know, it's that's so you have these cascading decisions that like become part of the art of the place that some of them start from like 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 because that Martin designed because you can't put, we didn't want to have place mats. That's too cheap. So all of a sudden, we had to design like, you know, a silverware holder. So it just became this cascade of like interesting

• 1:17:28Nick Kokonas?

  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. 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 Egolet with pictures and everything. You can go see it. And every single thing that we hoped would create an emotional, you know, trigger, an emotional reaction, it's almost all there. Like, I remember going home and

• 1:18:11Nick Kokonas?

  seeing that the next day and going, wow, like, that shit actually worked. And, you know, and it's like right down to the front hallway that was, you know, a reverse perspective and stolen from Shark Cathedral and, and, and inverted, you know. So all of my interest of architecture and art and science and all of Grant's, you know, food and all that, like, all came together in like a year long conversation on how to do something. And we really fought with the architect and designers and, 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 host stand. Like, you know, we want to greet people in an open way. And so just little things

• 1:18:56Nick Kokonas?

  like that. And then we've taken that on, you know, through everything that we've, we've done where we took, you know, seven years, six years to, to build our next place because we didn't have that idea that kept us up at night again. And so, you know, when we did, then we did it. And I think, I think editing.

• 1:19:19Nick Kokonas?

  Editing yourself and each other is in an open way is really, really painful, but really, really important.

• 1:19:28Tim Ferriss?

  And coming back to something you mentioned related to the living room, the well-off

• 1:19:37Nick Kokonas?

  Yes.

• 1:19:38Tim Ferriss?

  Who then creates, say, an art project that is not, may be beautiful, but is most often not a viable business. What, how did you apply those questions and rethink the business model to make any of this work financially?

• 1:19:59Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, well, I mean, you don't want to be a dilettante, right? And, and so, you know, my biggest fear is that it would work in an artistic way, but wouldn't work as a business.

• 1:20:13Nick Kokonas?

  And so, you know, the, the answer is at the beginning, we didn't, I didn't do much. I handled all of our marketing and PR, like I wrote everything, you know, myself. Really thought about open sourcing the, the building of the restaurant. You can still go online and see the, the original business plans and what logos we were considering using. And the, the test kitchen, which was in my house, you know, we didn't tell anyone at the time, but that was my house at the time. And, 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, to accomplish.

• 1:20:57Nick Kokonas?

  And part of that was people would say like, a restaurant like this can't make money. And, you know, I, I wrote this little spreadsheet that I called the universal restaurant calculator. And

• 1:21:08Tim Ferriss?

  Can people find that online?

• 1:21:09Nick Kokonas?

  No, no, no, but it's, but it would be very unimpressive if they could. But it was, it was basically like, how many covers per night? I mean, this is back of the envelope stuff. How many covers per night can you do? What's the check average for food, check average for beverage? What are your food costs, beverage costs, labor costs? What's insurance cost, you know, your lease, your rent, like all those things, right? And 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.

• 1:21:53Nick Kokonas?

  One of the greatest restaurants in the history of America, certainly. And, you know, I came up with a number that Grant went, there's no way their revenue's that high or they make that much money, that's impossible. And it was really funny because years later, you know, I now work with Chef Keller and he's 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 he's like, oh, you're within like two or three percent, you know? And Grant was just like, and we're talking about back of the envelope stuff. And so, you know, you ask 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.

• 1:22:38Nick Kokonas?

  It's 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? You know, start that basic. And we did that. And I didn't really think about the... We did well, but we didn't make a ton of money. A linear cost of $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, you know, in the first year, we did, you know, we made about $450,000 to $500,000 on four or five million dollars in sales.

• 1:23:20Nick Kokonas?

  Um, not a great return, not a terrible return. Um, we then won, you know, best restaurant in America from Gourmet Magazine. And I was horrified that we won that, frankly. Um, 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 Laundry. 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.

• 1:24:04Nick Kokonas?

  And having her write that in New York Times propelled that restaurant to its permanent status. Um, I think that can't happen nowadays, honestly, for other reasons. But this is kind of pre, pre, you know, 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?

• 1:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:32Nick Kokonas?

  And so, um, he was like, dear God, can you let me enjoy it for like a minute?

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  To you.

• 1:24:38Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, he was getting really mad at me. I was like, that's terrible. Like, you know, I mean, I was happy, but I was also like, oh no, now what do we do? We need to, we need to find another artificial construct here that like, go after.

• 1:24:52Tim Ferriss?

  Enough of this, I need to find happiness and get this other happiness out of my, out of my face.

• 1:24:56Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, it's about, I really do believe that, actually. Um, that it's often, the process is, is so rewarding that when you get something done, it can be a letdown, you know? 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. Um, and so...

• 1:25:19Nick Kokonas?

  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 would start going in at night and asking really dumb questions again. And, you know, weirdly, our goal was to keep Alinia open for when he came back. And mind you, he only missed like, you know, 12 days, 14 days of service during really intense chemo and radiation. And, but he was given six months to live. And, you know, when people are in that situation and their livelihood is tied to this restaurant,

• 1:26:04Nick Kokonas?

  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. So, it was, and in the midst of that, we decided to do our first book, really to chronicle, you know, his, his, you know, 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 of that,

• 1:26:49Nick Kokonas?

  I started going, this place is run in strange ways, man. This industry is, is, is not run right, you know? And I started asking like, 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. You know, the service industry as a whole can't run at a hundred percent every single day of the week unless they're incentivized to do so. And you could go like, well, yeah, but every server there will make an extra hundred bucks a night or whatever. But they're kind of going like, look, if every night was Saturday, I'd be dead. It's really hard work, you know?

• 1:27:30Nick Kokonas?

  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. You know, and which, which cut some of the normal social filter off and I'm sure it wasn't a pleasant time to be around anybody.

• 1:28:12Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know, years, years later, when we finally like, we're kind of like, hey, we've got some ideas to build next and the aviary, that's when I kind of went like, well, we're going to do things totally differently here. And anyone who's not on board, even though they work for us, like if you're not on board all the way in, like on getting rid of normal reservations and not using telephones and doing all these things, I'm like, you know, you just, we don't have a place for you here. And man, it really worked, you know? That was the basis of, you know, I talked to every software company in the industry

• 1:28:53Nick Kokonas?

  asking for their APIs, asking to build essentially what's options pricing software on top of reservation systems. And OpenTable told me no, and the POS systems told me no. I called theaters and went like, what ticketing system do you use? And all of those told me no. And So I heard 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.

• 1:29:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so pause here for a sec.

• 1:29:26Nick Kokonas?

  I know, we're way ahead.

• 1:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, this is great, this is great. So a few, 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.

• 1:29:40Nick Kokonas?

  Ah, but it is a piece of shit.

• 1:29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it may also be a piece of shit. What was, what were the design specs that you were looking for? In other words, before you get to the 500,000 plus.

• 1:29:54Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:55Tim Ferriss?

  The snap of fingers, like, what were you trying to fix or what were you trying to create?

• 1:30:00Nick Kokonas?

  So, I, 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, 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 7:30. And then they tell you, yeah, yeah, we'll have a seat ready for you at 7:30.

• 1:30:43Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know? 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 9, and you wanted an 8:15, you'll just go to the restaurant down the street from them that will lie to them. Right?

• 1:31:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:31:09Nick Kokonas?

  So, so they, so they do that, and...

• 1:31:14Nick Kokonas?

  Ultimately, it's just bad all around. It's bad for the restaurant. It's wasteful for food, and it's bad hospitality. Like, and that's like, there are so many pop culture references and entire sitcom, you know, episodes built around someone trying to get into a restaurant, right? It's absurd. It's completely absurd. And, you know, I looked at our no-show rate at Alenia, 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, like, people would go, like, "Well, what do you have available?" "Oh, well, I have an 8:30 for four." "Okay, we'll take that." And they never intended

• 1:31:55Nick Kokonas?

  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 manager, or 74 seats. So it's a yield management problem. And so, we, 5% to 8% of our revenue every night was, was being lost to that transaction. That was a non-transaction, right? And so I wanted to figure out ways to do two things. One, I 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 people have a small vested interest in something, in 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.

• 1:32:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:32:41Nick Kokonas?

  Right? Because you're like, "What was that?"

• 1:32:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Nick Kokonas?

  Dude gave me a gift, now he's pulling it back, you know?

• 1:32:46Tim 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.

• 1:32:55Nick Kokonas?

  Correct. Yes, huge. So, you know, that came to me one day because I, my, 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 bucks to not go to this movie, right?

• 1:33:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Nick Kokonas?

  And then... My wife basically says, hey, well, let's go to that movie. So I go on Fandango, I buy four tickets, sixty bucks, whatever it was. And at like five thirty 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 sixty dollars to not go to the movie. But once I had the sunk cost of of paying for the movie, my psychology totally flipped. And and I was like, we're going to this movie that I don't want to go to like. And I literally irrationally made everyone go to the movie. Like which weirdly cost, you know, I mean, from an emotional family standpoint, all bad, all the way around, right?

• 1:33:56Nick Kokonas?

  And so I I thought about it and I was like, wow, what if people? What if people put down a small deposit on times when demand exceeds supply? Like, right? So Saturday night, eight o'clock? Great, that's a that's the best seats at the opera house. Let's see if people will prepay for that or put down twenty bucks 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 gonna do that. Like, this is 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.

• 1:34:40Nick Kokonas?

  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, that 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 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. Mm hmm.

• 1:35:25Nick Kokonas?

  And so, you know, there was hundreds of years of that, long before there was a telephone and people called and said, yep, like, you know, I'd like to eat at your restaurant. Sure, we'll let you in. Um, and so as the technology for the telephone has morphed into, you know, what we all have in our pockets now. Um, 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, their surge pricing issues by having discounted pricing when there was no demand. Like just move pricing in two directions. And if you move pricing in two directions, then like that whole argument goes away. Right.

• 1:36:09Nick Kokonas?

  Um, and so, so we did that. We, we, we priced out different prices by day of the week and times a day. So 5:00 PM on Wednesday at Alenia is still cheaper than 8:00 PM on a Saturday. By a lot, by eighty to a hundred dollars a person. Wow. Um, and, and you know what happens? Um, and this is now we have, you know, hundreds of restaurants doing this on our software called TALK.

• 1:36:33Nick Kokonas?

  What happens is people buy the most expensive seats first and the cheapest seats first.

• 1:36:39Nick Kokonas?

  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 five o'clock on a Tuesday. Great. Like I can save 400 bucks. Um, and then there's some people that go like, I only eat at 8:00 PM on Saturday. Well, okay, that's fine. Pay a little more. Or they're, or they're attracted to the fact that it is the most expensive. Sure, that happens too. And then there's, there's a whole bunch of tools that over time we built on top of that to sell wine pairings or sell books. You know, we sell 20 Alenia books a day on checkout with the booking process.

• 1:37:15Nick Kokonas?

  That's a ton because we're not going to exit through the gift shop at Alenia. It's a Michelin three-star restaurant. So, so like, we would subtly have like one book, like near the restrooms that people could peruse, but it didn't say like, buy the book or anything like that. So typically we'd sell like one or two per night. Um, now on checkout, um, when you book Alenia, it says, hey, would you like to buy an Alenia book personalized? And 20 people a night get it. That is $400,000 in revenue a year. Yeah, that's incredible. Crazy, right? And it's amazing to me that no one did that beforehand, um, because ultimately. People can't buy what they don't see. And people don't want to be upsold inside of a restaurant. There's nothing worse in my mind than, you know, some places that today's special is today's

• 1:38:00Nick Kokonas?

  special and it's real and you you kind of know that. But sometimes it's just the old fish.

• 1:38:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:38:10Tim Ferriss?

  Sunday night.

• 1:38:12Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. And we all know these things and like, I think no restaurant wants to like raise their hand and go, yep, that's all true. Like, we were lying to our customers and and we're not going to release it you at eight fifteen. And so I think when I said that, like, you can look back through some articles. Um, I remember that there's an article, I think it was in GQ, that, um, they interviewed, like, a grizzled veteran, you know, and he didn't use his name, and said, you know, um, overbook in a bar to wait in has always worked for me.

• 1:38:40Nick Kokonas?

  And I was just like, how does that not sound like terrible hospitality to everyone reading that? You know?

• 1:38:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:38:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, there's so, there's so many systems that have, uh, similar overbooking, load balancing issues, right? You look at airlines, you look at hospitality.

• 1:39:00Nick Kokonas?

  Yep. My dentist.

• 1:39:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Nick Kokonas?

  I 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. They're like, nah, don't have one. Guess again.

• 1:39:19Nick Kokonas?

  Like, 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?

• 1:39:30Tim Ferriss?

  So the, when you then debuted the, uh, the, the ticketing option, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm labeling it properly. How did you prime the pump for that? Was there anything? Did you need to prime the pump to have this, what seems like certainly a windfall?

• 1:39:50Nick Kokonas?

  Well, we did. Yeah, we did a, a, a video where, you know, next restaurant was about a restaurant that's always new, essentially. Like, what's, what's one of the big problems of the restaurant industry? Well, when you open a new restaurant, it doesn't matter what it is, people are going to show up for like five or six months. And then after that, um, you know, you gotta struggle to like get regulars and, and, you know, like find new audiences and all that. But people like the new, quote unquote, right? Um, the other problem is, 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 Alenia, right in the middle of his sickness, because I had driven down from Michigan.

• 1:40:32Nick Kokonas?

  I've never eaten before or after in, in the Alenia 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, ah, we'll get bored after six months. And then I was at, um, one of our chef's homes on a day off Tuesday. And he made, he loves Thai food and he made this amazing Thai meal, amazing. And I was like, wow, like I had no idea these guys were so versatile, you know? And then it made sense. Hey, these are passionate, amazingly talented people. And it kind of dawned on me like, let's just change the restaurant every four months. Like, you know, let's, let's do, and then we dwelled on that for like a year, thinking like it was kind of impossible, um, to do. And then, you know, Grant said, I said, well, like, let's start with a French menu.

• 1:41:16Nick Kokonas?

  He's like, well, what does that mean? Like there's Southern France, there's Loire Valley, there's France that's the new Val cuisine. And then there's France from like, you know, a hundred 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 in 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?

• 1:41:58Nick Kokonas?

  And how do you make it not feel like Disneyland where one time you have a theme of Paris and next time you have a theme of Japan? So you have to go with like an austere minimalism, you know? And um.

• 1:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  Is there a particular reason why you chose the year 1906?

• 1:42:12Nick Kokonas?

  You know, um, doing some research, um, uh, 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, um, it somewhere around there. Um, and so, um, Escoffier, um, like the father of French cuisine, um, 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 broisseries 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.

• 1:42:54Nick Kokonas?

  And so like rent got cheap and all of a sudden like, hey, like, 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. But, um, that's where we landed because we could do this Escoffier menu. And, um, boy, we argued about that too. Like they didn't have blenders then. So, so like electric blenders. So, I mean, we did like.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  So you wanted to mimic the production.

• 1:43:19Nick Kokonas?

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

• 1:43:27Tim Ferriss?

  That's like, hey pal, you don't have to make the food.

• 1:43:30Nick Kokonas?

  Well, partly that, but partly he was like, should we make it intentionally worse than we can?

• 1:43:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:37Nick Kokonas?

  Because the recipes were really vague. They didn't even call for salt.

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Nick Kokonas?

  So, so in the middle of this press dinner where we had like the New York Times that we had all sorts of these people there, which we, I'll never do again, right? That was just a genuine error. Like, and like, like, we were still arguing out conceptually what this thing would be. And then we served dinner and, and we were like openly, like he'd come out of the kitchen and we would openly argue about it, you know? And, and he's

• 1:44:05Tim Ferriss?

  This is, this is, this is at the press dinner?

• 1:44:08Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and I remember he brought the soup out and it was like, you know, he was like, I was like, oh, they, they must've used like the actual blenders, right? Like modern blenders. Cause it was like, the mouth feel was like perfect, right? And so I was like, oh, you, you use the blenders, you know? And he was 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? You know? And, 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.

• 1:44:48Nick Kokonas?

  But, but that was, that was, that's our method. Like that's what we did, you know? And, um, I mean, to the day we opened, we, we had those, those arguments. Um, and then, you know, in terms of the software, like, man, like I didn't sleep for a week. Um, we set it up on Rackspace. It didn't work right. I'd never done anything like that before. Um, you know, it was like, no one would help. I think like, like, you know, nobody would help.

• 1:45:14Tim Ferriss?

  No, when you say nobody would help, you mean competitors, potential, uh, I don't know.

• 1:45:19Nick Kokonas?

  Potential allies, potential like

• 1:45:21Tim Ferriss?

  These are people. I got it. Why wouldn't they help?

• 1:45:26Nick Kokonas?

  I don't, I, you know, like in the case of OpenTable, they had a monopoly.

• 1:45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:45:31Nick Kokonas?

  So why?

• 1:45:32Tim Ferriss?

  That, that makes sense to me. That makes sense.

• 1:45:33Nick Kokonas?

  Um, in terms of everyone else, I think they just didn't get it. Um, but even people within my own company thought this was a fool's errand.

• 1:45:41Nick Kokonas?

  You know, like Grant, for sure, like he will fully admit this now, thought it was a terrible idea.

• 1:45:45Tim Ferriss?

  Why did he think it was a terrible idea?

• 1:45:47Nick Kokonas?

  Cause it's not hospitable. It's not hospitality.

• 1:45:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's not, it's not, it's not, it's low touch, not high touch.

• 1:45:53Nick Kokonas?

  Correct. And, and, and hugely the case where, you know, all of a sudden the price is different every day. Like, are people gonna 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 on the, you know, above the dugout. And then like the guy who's in the third deck back row looks down and go, oh, that guy, like, he totally stole that ticket from me. You're like two different price points, you know? And I just feel like people inherently get that without having to explain it to them.

• 1:46:22Tim Ferriss?

  How, how, if I may, how far in advance of the opening were you, were you hoping to launch the software? And when did you end up launching the software?

• 1:46:34Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I launched it about seven hours before the first dinner.

• 1:46:37Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit.

• 1:46:39Nick Kokonas?

  I hoped to have done it four to five weeks ahead of that. It was literally a one man operation plus me, like one programmer and me. When we launched it, Rackspace, this is 2010, I'm not saying anything bad about Rackspace. It was, I didn't, I probably set it up wrong. 2010, it did not, like, it's supposed to auto-load correct and self-propagate. And it neither happened. I was expecting, we had 17,000 people on our email list that had signed up on the website to like be notified when, when the bookings went on sale. And I was expecting maybe, you know, 700 show up, like, should be fine. And something like eight or 9,000 showed up and everyone just kept hitting the refresh key.

• 1:47:24Nick Kokonas?

  And here's another fatal error of stupidity. And, 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.

• 1:47:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 1:47:40Nick Kokonas?

  So I couldn't even go into configure. So I, and 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.

• 1:48:04Nick Kokonas?

  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'd literally not showered in five days. I had pizza boxes longer. I looked like a bad movie startup thing. I had a beard, like, I was, you know, 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, like, because if not, we'll turn on the phones. What I didn't tell him was I didn't order the phones because I didn't want to have a failsafe.

• 1:48:50Nick Kokonas?

  You'd burn the ships, yeah. I, yeah, I would, I just wanted to make sure it, I, I forced myself to work. So we had no phone line. And I, when it started working, I would double click. You know, 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, it would turn green. And then when it was sold, it would turn red. But the first time I did that, to act, to let more inventory out, and clearly things were working. It turned red so fast, I thought it was broken. And so then I went into the credit card processing and saw, oh, my gosh, someone bought that that fast. And I called Grant and I said, dude, you gotta come to my house.

• 1:49:35Nick Kokonas?

  And he was like, we're opening a restaurant in like six hours. What's going on? I said, as the guy who helped save your life, get in 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, 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 nine thirty and it instantly turned red. And in another window, I had the credit card thing up and I go, look, Mr. Jones bought that. And he went, really? And I'm like, yep, there are, you know, four thousand people waiting for you to do that right now.

• 1:50:19Nick Kokonas?

  And that was the moment at which I, I was basically like, this is the best thing I've ever built.

• 1:50:27Nick Kokonas?

  Because, because it was, it was, it was, 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, you know, what was interesting is that, of course, the software itself sucked. But as a proof of concept, it was awesome.

• 1:50:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, quick question on that, if you're comfortable answering, how much, how much money had you put into developing the software? At that point?

• 1:50:57Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Tim Ferriss?

  Roughly?

• 1:50:59Nick Kokonas?

  I'm gonna say a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars.

• 1:51:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Nick Kokonas?

  Roughly.

• 1:51:03Tim Ferriss?

  So in your mind, were you completely confident it would work? Or, and there's, it doesn't have to be A or B, there could be C, D, E, F. Or were you like, you know what, for a hundred and fifteen K, or whatever it might be, even if you budgeted for less and it overran,

• 1:51:18Tim Ferriss?

  the, even if there is a twenty percent chance that this works, is, it is worth risking the

• 1:51:26Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Tim Ferriss?

  hours and time because it will so completely transform what we're doing. And if it fucking fails, who cares?

• 1:51:31Nick Kokonas?

  Correct.

• 1:51:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:32Nick Kokonas?

  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 I would, it was like being a therapist. People would go like, I would like to, you know, make a reservation on my anniversary, you know, seven weeks from now on a Thursday. And you're like, I'm really sorry, sir, it's totally full. And a hundred percent of the time, they thought you were lying to them. And so consequently, like, I realized that we were saying no to people more than we

• 1:52:12Nick Kokonas?

  were saying yes, and that even when we said no in a nice way and took 10 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. And I had this, like, same thing with, like, you know, the trading markets, they've 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

• 1:52:56Nick Kokonas?

  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 didn't go beyond my own restaurants, I was totally fine with that. In fact, I didn't do anything with it for four years. And I didn't really intend on making it, you know, a software product. I intended on fixing my own problems. And I think often that's where, that's where good ideas come from.

• 1:53:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, super often, yeah, the scratching of your own itch. At least, you know, you have a market of one, guaranteed market of one. And I also want to point out, when we were talking about asymmetric risk earlier, and you're like, well, I want to stand to make three to four X what I stand to lose. And if you run the math, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot of subtleties here, but when you said we booked 500 and X, $1,000, and it cost 115, like, we're getting very much within the ballpark of that.

• 1:53:50Nick Kokonas?

  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 10 to 12% to, you know, at times, in good months, 20 to 25% in an industry that, over the last

• 1:54:04Nick Kokonas?

  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. It's a talk that I give to the restaurant industry. And, you know, one of the things that I point out in there is that, you know, there's 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 kind of move along because it's a really chaotic environment. It's hard to make change in it because every day is game day. Like, you wake up every day and a hundred people are gonna come through the door, and if your fishmonger doesn't show up, all you need to figure out what to do with that, you know?

• 1:54:46Nick Kokonas?

  And so, it's not really about the return on that one investment at that one moment. It's more like, you know, a thousand small improvements over time. And, you know, if I look back at that system that I built then compared to what we have now, you know, it's a miniscule 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 like, help manage the building of the project of Next. And when he started wanting to build out a business team, I was like, great, like, run with it.

• 1:55:30Nick Kokonas?

  And so, we've built out food cost analysis that uses Merameco charts. It's totally different because it's visual and you give that to the chef. It uses what charts? Ah, Merameco. Ah, if you don't know Merameco, if you get nothing out of this, one of the greatest visualizations in charts that you could like, you know, 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 a hundred percent of one metric and the X axis is a hundred percent of another.

• 1:56:14Nick Kokonas?

  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. 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 need them at 32%. You can't take percentages to the bank. Let's talk about dollars. Let's see where we can save some dollars. Or the revenue could have just gone down that month for whatever reason. It's August in New York. And so it's not really a good way to look at it, but you give this person this chart, this Marimeko.

• 1:56:55Tim Ferriss?

  No, Marimeko.

• 1:56:56Nick Kokonas?

  This guy's name.

• 1:56:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's M A R I M E K K O chart. Is that right?

• 1:57:02Nick Kokonas?

  Again, not good on spelling, but sure.

• 1:57:04Tim Ferriss?

  I think so. There is a Google result, which is how to make a Marimeko chart in Excel. So I'm guessing that's probably it.

• 1:57:09Nick Kokonas?

  That is it.

• 1:57:10Tim Ferriss?

  There's some YouTube videos as well. So I'll put those in the show notes for people.

• 1:57:13Nick Kokonas?

  Man, I gotta tell you, like, from a utility perspective, you show that to a person, you explain it visually, like 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. You know?

• 1:57:30Tim Ferriss?

  And this can be, this can be used for things outside.

• 1:57:33Nick Kokonas?

  Everything. Everything, yeah.

• 1:57:35Tim Ferriss?

  Not just food, not just restaurants.

• 1:57:36Nick Kokonas?

  Oh, no, no, no. It's, 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, from the best consultant that I've ever hired, like who, who is now my partner and CFO, you know, 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, you know? It's just incredibly useful. But my point is, is that we, we kind of went through everything in the restaurant and went like, well, what are the biggest spending areas that we can like analyze? And it's true in any endeavor that you're doing. You, you know, there's no point in looking at, at the dimes if, if you've got something that costs a thousand dollars.

• 1:58:20Nick Kokonas?

  Start there. So.

• 1:58:24Nick Kokonas?

  You know, and that's, you know, getting into like 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, we don't spend money on any promotions other than social media.

• 1:58:45Nick Kokonas?

  And then with the social media, we, we track all of that, you know? We can see what our ROI is on a boosted post. We can see what our ROI is if we advertise on your podcast. You know, those are, that's, that's why these mediums are, are working is because they're measurable.

• 1:59:04Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I, I was looking up, just as you were chatting and as I was also looking for a Marimeco quote that I think applies, and you may certainly feel free to disagree, but applies very well to a lot of the breakthroughs that, 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 Almanack. He's the, the, the right hand, or I shouldn't even say that. He is the investing partner of Warren Buffett and fascinating, fascinating human being.

• 1:59:44Tim Ferriss?

  But one of, one of the quotes of his that I really return to a lot when I think I might be outsmarting myself in some way,

• 1:59:53Tim Ferriss?

  or in general as a reminder, is, quote, "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."

• 2:00:05Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Because you, you, 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, what, why does, like you pointed out, it's so

• 2:00:28Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:00:40Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah, and that's...

• 2:00:43Nick Kokonas?

  You know, once you start down that road of thinking that way, it will drive you a little nutty.

• 2:00:50Nick Kokonas?

  Because you can't do every business, you know? And, you know, there's a couple of things that I've got in my back pocket that I'm kind of like, you know, one day I'm gonna arbitrage truffles. Because it's like, there's an opaque market that's absurd. Like, you know, it's like, here's an example. I'm gonna 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, you know, 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. And of course, they're perfectly illegal. But you call up a truffle dealer, and you go like, you know, what do they cost?

• 2:01:33Nick Kokonas?

  Well, they're, you know, six hundred and fifty a pound right now for black truffles, sixteen hundred for white. You try to talk them down a little bit. You make sure that you get the best quality, because hey, we're Alenia, and we will ship you back the stuff we don't like and all that. And then in an unmarked box stacked with newspaper will come twenty thousand dollars of truffles. Good for like, a week, by the way. Like, not, like, this is not like, a big supply. And is completely opaque as a market. There is no mycologist touching these. There are knockoffs from, not knockoffs, there's different species and quality from Australia, from Tennessee, from, from China, et cetera, et cetera,

• 2:02:18Nick Kokonas?

  that they cut into it. Sounds familiar. And, and, like, it was my, like, we spend a lot of money on truffles every year.

• 2:02:29Nick Kokonas?

  And try to figure out what the US market, in the fall truffle season, is worth. You can't. It's exactly like publishing. You can't find numbers, you know? And so, whenever I Whenever I see something like that, I'm like, someone's guarding their, their golden goose, you know?

• 2:02:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right, whenever, whenever it's a black box, you're like, I feel like I am not on the best side of this trade.

• 2:02:53Nick Kokonas?

  That's right, that's right. And, and that's, that's what I did, um, you know, I did, um, a closed insider network between the Merck and the Amex to arbitrage ETFs to get rid of the phone brokers in the middle. Um, that took me like a year and a half to get through the Merck and Amex, um, powers that be. Um, read like most of the CFTC. So when they would tell me it's not like in the rules or not legal or whatever.

• 2:03:19Tim Ferriss?

  What is the CFTC Chicago Trade, uh?

• 2:03:21Nick Kokonas?

  No, no, no, this is the, uh, the federal, um, commodities trading commission.

• 2:03:26Tim Ferriss?

  I see, okay.

• 2:03:27Nick Kokonas?

  It's like the SEC, but for commodities.

• 2:03:29Tim Ferriss?

  I gotcha.

• 2:03:29Nick Kokonas?

  Um, and yo, again, sit down and actually read that someday. Like, what's amazing is that the experts never, it's like, 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. Um, 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, oh, it's against the rules. I'd be like, well, here are the seven volumes, please show me where, if not, I'm going to do it, you know? Um, and so similarly, like, like truffles, same thing. Um, the, the, you know, the booking, um, for the restaurants, same thing. Open table 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, you know, if you're full one night, they'll just send you down the street to a

• 2:04:14Nick Kokonas?

  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.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  So you, question for you. This is, this is, uh, this is something also for, this is maybe just turning this into a therapy session slash coaching session for, for myself, but I get attracted like a moth to the flame to puzzles and...

• 2:04:39Nick Kokonas?

  Oh, I've got a puzzle for you.

• 2:04:40Tim 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, 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, right? Uh, although you guys, uh, 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, it's going to consume time. How do you pick and choose which to go after?

• 2:05:23Nick Kokonas?

  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 iterative from there. 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 a truffle exchange. You know, I feel like, I feel like the boring company is like that for Musk. Like, like, like, he, 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.

• 2:06:08Nick Kokonas?

  Like, let's see if you can build, dig a tunnel. I don't think that was like a business plan, you know?

• 2:06:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:06:14Nick Kokonas?

  And, 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, that rabbit hole. And so, you know, I, I do some as like a hobby. I do some where 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, like, here's a project. Like, learn more about this and start researching it. You know, we have, you know, 300 and some employees on the restaurant side and about 50 on top. 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.

• 2:07:01Nick Kokonas?

  Because this is gonna take you six months of independent work without any guidance and you're gonna get tired of it really fast. Or you're gonna come back to me and say, "Hey, you know what? Like, 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."

• 2:07:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you give them an assignment like this, they're like, "You know what? Boss, I really wanna 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."

• 2:07:31Nick Kokonas?

  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.

• 2:07:38Tim Ferriss?

  Gotcha. So even...

• 2:07:40Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, so I don't...

• 2:07:41Tim Ferriss?

  So they do get paid for the black box time?

• 2:07:42Nick Kokonas?

  Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I would never... 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, I... We pay everybody. Like, I don't... Nobody who's working here, if they're, you know... I do expect that, you know, salaried people are gonna work more than just the time here. And I think that people who are passionately curious will be given a problem like that

• 2:08:23Nick Kokonas?

  and will come up with interesting solutions to finding out what the answer may be. And that's enough, you know?

• 2:08:31Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. 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 slash filtering for them. But I wouldn't have judged you harshly at all if you said, "No, that's on their own time." 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're 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.

• 2:09:16Tim Ferriss?

  So I wouldn't have judged you harshly if you had responded in the negative on that.

• 2:09:22Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess, I guess, you know, to back up a little bit, like when there are people who I don't know, who do not work for our 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, I will pose some more difficult questions, but they're not working for me, you know what I mean?

• 2:09:42Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:09:42Nick Kokonas?

  Like, there's, there's a guy who brought me a food product that I, you know, 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. 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, 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.

• 2:10:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:21Nick Kokonas?

  Like, I didn't pay that guy, obviously, but there's a person who's truly entrepreneurial, right? And did this on his own time. But if they're working here, if they work for the Illini Group, if they work for Toc, like, for sure, they're, you know, 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. Just because, like, it's, I mean, realistically, you know, that's not, that's, but on the business side... We certainly have people who who work in roles as like a lawyer or an analyst

• 2:11:05Nick Kokonas?

  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, you know, I'm happy to pull them in and try to include them. And, you know, like you said, you used a word as an entrepreneurial filter. I would say 95% of the time, people filter themselves out.

• 2:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, they're going to self-select or self-select out.

• 2:11:32Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:33Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular books or resources that you've found useful on hiring or managing?

• 2:11:42Nick Kokonas?

  God, if you found one, let me know. 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 they get to me. And so at that point, I let them know, like, what are the upsides and downsides of working here? You know? And I kind of let them know what the expectations are. And I I tell them, like, people self-select into a job.

• 2:12:27Nick Kokonas?

  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. It feels terrible. So let's see if you are self-selecting in. What do you want to know? Like, 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. You know, I mean, it's like a big enough organization where, you know, there are definitely people working here who who I don't know at all. But

• 2:13:03Nick Kokonas?

  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? You know, I kind of judge the person by what their pain points are. And so if someone says like, you know, one of the things I like to ask, you know, which it kind of resonates probably with you, is I say, "Hey, what are the last five books you read?" And I gotta tell you, that's a really hard question to answer. Because even if you're a voracious reader, it's really, like, you remember like a book

• 2:13:47Nick Kokonas?

  from two years ago, but you can't remember the one you read two months ago, sometimes. Totally. At least I can't, you know? And so that is a great filter on people because a couple of things will happen. One, the person who's a voracious reader will go like, "Oh, my God, I swear to God, I read like 20 books this year. Let's 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 they're intellectually curious and read a lot. You'll also get a person who goes, "Look, I haven't read a book in 20 years, but every night I go home and I do woodworking. And that's my outlet. Like, that's where I focus, that's my zen moment." And that's a valid answer to that question, too, you know? Like, you don't have to be a reader. Some people will just lie through their teeth.

• 2:14:30Nick Kokonas?

  And 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. And the Four Hour Work Week. Definitely not the right answer. So there's that, and I ask that kind of question. But then, like, things like, "Do you enjoy writing?" Like, 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 of books." And 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 gonna want to work for me.

• 2:15:13Nick Kokonas?

  Because when they send out an email, and I MCC'd on it, and it isn't a well-thought-out little thing...

• 2:15:24Nick Kokonas?

  The answer coming back is like, hey, here's four ways to improve this. Um, and at some point it'll be like, really? You, you did that same mistake again? Like, it, it comes off kind of harsh in email, you know? Um, 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, I'm lacking patience for that at this point in my life. Um, 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. Like, more than I would think, which is great.

• 2:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, simplifies matters.

• 2:15:57Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. And it's not, it's not, it's done with a smile. You know, I'm not like, trying to like, terrorize people when they come in an interview. And then there's some people that go like, awesome, that's exactly what I want. And, um, you know, we have everything from like, you know, double PhD engineers to, um, people who've never, you know, attended a university for a minute. And, um, but they've, they've self-selected into an organization that, um, 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, that's a great idea. There's no way we're going to be able to do that in the next six months. Because that's not, that's not in our, that's not in our capacity at our size right now.

• 2:16:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think a question on a lot of people's 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. Uh, 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, a degree of sanity with, with the amount of email that you must receive?

• 2:17:14Nick Kokonas?

  You're gonna hate this answer.

• 2:17:17Nick Kokonas?

  I am terrible at it. Um, it used to be, um, not so long ago, uh, 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, um, 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, his podcast with you. And I, I don't get it at all. Like, I, I am not,

• 2:17:58Nick Kokonas?

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

• 2:18:42Nick Kokonas?

  who've taken their time out of their day to write us a note, you know? Even if it's not like critical business for me. And one of the things I did for about 10 years that I, I loved doing when we first started Linea is that I would have Google Alerts set up and I would find some blog, you know, that only like, some woman and her mother read, you know? And I would reply personally, like, say, wow, thank you for the great write-up of Linea. And they'd be kind of mind blown that I found it and, and, you know, all that. I treated email that way for a long period of time.

• 2:19:15Nick Kokonas?

  Unfortunately, now, I, I can't quite do that. So I do have a bunch of filters and whatnot, but I didn't even set them up. My business partner, Brian Fitzpatrick, who used to be the head of Google Chicago, and he's my, he runs the engineering team, he's the CTO of Toc. He kind of said, like, dude, you're, you're slipping, man. Like, you know, you need to grade some filters and, and, and get some stuff that's directly to you. So he went into my Gmail accounts and kind of, kind of forced the issue for me.

• 2:19:42Nick Kokonas?

  But, so now I can't quite do that. I do wake up in the morning and look at sort of our bazillion social media messages and whatnot, kind of pick a random one and just answer it. Like, I want to be involved. And 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 6,000 people a week, you're gonna get, you know, something going wrong. But man, I'm terrible at it, honestly. And I've tried, I will tell

• 2:20:20Nick Kokonas?

  you a funny thing is that when I go away on vacation, I do try to concoct a, a pretty funny, I basically say like, look, I'm gonna be in a mountain or on a boat or whatever, and you're, 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 a panda that I adopted, and I'm bringing it back to Chicago. And it ended the year around Christmas time when I went on break with a, with a, with a picture of a baby panda, and, and a really

• 2:21:03Nick Kokonas?

  kind of mediocre Photoshop job of me standing there with the panda. And, and, and the Chicago Tribune called me up like three days later going, you know, is it going to the Lincoln Park Zoo? Like, and I was like, no, dear God, it's not. And the following, there is no panda. That's why I went back. That was my type of reply to that. And then the following year, I said, like, I like to talk, as you might be able to tell. And so everyone who knows me knows that, like, I can just go on and on, right? And so I said I was going to a combination of a tantric sex retreat and silence retreat for, for eight days to explore my both inner and outer self. And, and, you know,

• 2:21:42Tim Ferriss?

  This is your out of office reply.

• 2:21:45Nick Kokonas?

  That's my out of office reply. And, and, I mean, and, you know, 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 with the only group and it was like kind of a consulting project, very lucrative. And he was looking at me really funny, you know, and I said, like, what's up? And he said, well, you know, I really wish we had worked together, but you know, then you went to that sex retreat. I just couldn't get it past everybody. And I was just like, I was looking at him going like, what are you talking about? And then I remembered like four years earlier, my out of my out of office reply. And I told him like that it

• 2:22:30Nick Kokonas?

  was kind of a joke like the panda. And, 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.

• 2:22:48Tim 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've 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, etc. 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, I do want to demonstrate that I am listening. And I

• 2:23:33Tim Ferriss?

  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 when you do it, what you were describing.

• 2:24:06Nick Kokonas?

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

• 2:24:50Nick Kokonas?

  shows me that, like, hey, there's an actual human on the other line. It's not just a marketing thing. And B, like, they really, really do have something that they want to talk about. And so, you know, it's like little things like that are kind of puzzle filters, I guess, that I call them. Like, where I just create, like, a little bit of a barrier. And if you're really into it, and you really want to talk to me, you can pretty much find me pretty easily. I'm not that hidden.

• 2:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And the detail is really important here. The mini hurdle. I have a friend, I'm not going to mention his name, because I'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 address is given earlier. "Call this number and leave a voicemail answering the following things." And automatically, he takes the pool of 1,000 people who are going to do the wrong thing, and finds the 10 people who are actually paying attention.

• 2:25:59Nick Kokonas?

  Yep, 100%.

• 2:26:01Tim Ferriss?

  So, publishing. What is, we didn't really, 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 is not an inappropriate word, if you could give people a little bit of context?

• 2:26:30Nick Kokonas?

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

• 2:27:10Nick Kokonas?

  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, like, kinda came into us, which was great that they were coming in. And it was, you know, $250,000 to $300,000. And they would basically say, well, out of that, like, you're gonna pay for the designer and the photographer, and you need like a 30-day photo shoot, and, you know, here are the

• 2:27:53Nick Kokonas?

  guidelines for how many photos you want in the book, and, you know, to keep costs down and this and that. And I kind of looked at all of that, and all of the offers came in within about 10% of each other, which immediately, you know, 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 an unusual way. And then, and then, I started going like, oh, this is actually like the music industry. Very much so. I knew people in bands that would get signed to a record label back in the day, and they would get a quarter-million-dollar advance. You know, shit, that's, seems like a lot of money, right?

• 2:28:35Nick Kokonas?

  And then, all of a sudden, all your studio time comes out of that, and you don't recoup another dime until you've sold...

• 2:28:42Nick Kokonas?

  You know, X number of records or CDs, or in this case, books. And then in the, in the contract, it actually said, and the restaurant guarantees that they will buy 2,500 books at half of retail price. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's, you know, you're looking at something like $80,000 right there that goes right back to them, in essence. Like, and then I kind of went like, well, I wonder what a book costs to print. And, I mean, I, I just called, I asked them, like, well, how much does this book going to cost to print? Well, I don't really know. And so what they would do is that they would always have layers of people. So that, they said, well, that's not what I do. Like, I am the person that does this, the lawyers give the contract, the printer does

• 2:29:26Nick Kokonas?

  the printing, like, I- There's always plausible deniability, or plausible ignorance. Yes, willful plausible ignorance. Yeah. Um, and, and so I, 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, hey, how many, how many copies of the French Laundry books sold? Um, how many copies of 50 other books that we wanted to emulate, or that we, that we thought were well-done, sold? And, um, man, it's, it's like asking for like, you know, keys to the Vatican or something, when you call a publisher and ask them that. They, I, I'm sure you know this, right? You probably know now, because you've, you've been so entrenched in the industry, like,

• 2:30:11Nick Kokonas?

  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, it's almost impossible to do it, even though that there's a company that does that. Then you start trying to reverse engineer it, and you go to the New York Times, which you can go to the New York Times website and just look at, how is the New York Times, you know, bestseller list, um- Created and on their own site, they say it's a compendium of known publishers, like publishing houses, as well as these like top 50 retailers, you know, back in the day. And it's a gamable system, right? Like, the way that that the publisher publishers want to do it is that they want to ship out

• 2:30:54Nick Kokonas?

  all the books at the same time, because that's how they're counted for the New York Times bestseller list and stuff.

• 2:30:58Tim Ferriss?

  I should also note, it's not only gamable, but it's also conversely highly subjective within the New York Times. So there, 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, was, was, was tabulated.

• 2:31:20Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. So the more that we dug, the more that we got like curi, like more and more curious, a little bit angry, actually. And, but Grant was weirdly angry at me, because he's going like, well, dude, like, why do you care? Like, you know, it's like, I've been wanting this since I was 15. And I was like, well, look, if, if this is our budget, it's not going to be the book you want. It's not going to be as good as you want it to be, because we're not going to be able to spend six months doing the photography. We're not going to be able to get great pages. We're not going to be able to get a picture of every dish. Like, if, what do people cook in a cookbook? Well, they tend to cook those pages where they see a picture of the final dish. Because you know what? It looks delicious. You know it's supposed to look like. You got something to emulate at least, right?

• 2:32:04Nick Kokonas?

  And so when we did the specs for the book, I had one of the best publishers in America say, if you do that book, there's no way you sell more than 5,000 of them. No way. And no one's going to publish it. And you can't use metric. And you can't use a gram scale. And you can't have that font. And you can't have those pictures in full bleed. And it'll cost way too much to print. And so it took about a month and a half before I got lucky. And I called a print broker, who had actually printed, you know, brokered the print job of one of the famous books. And I was expecting that the book retailed for $60, it would cost like 15 to print? 20? I didn't know anything about it.

• 2:32:45Nick Kokonas?

  And when he told me, it was like $2.23 per book to print per 30,000, you know, 30,000 copy run. I went, no way, like that. And he went, well, it's probably less now.

• 2:32:58Nick Kokonas?

  Like he thought I meant it was like too much.

• 2:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:33:00Nick Kokonas?

  And and instantaneously, I went, oh shit. Like, everything makes sense. And when I would call publishers and tell them this, they would go, oh, yeah, but look, like, we did forty different prints la- you know, forty different books last year, only five of them did well. And I'm like, that's your problem, man. Like, I know what we're gonna sell well. I don't really give a shit if if you lost thirty-five percent of the time and needed to spread your portfolio risk. I'm the one you're spreading it on. Right? And so, um, so we decided, um, with the linear book, um, we put together like twenty pages. And Martin made this beautiful stainless steel bracketing system.

• 2:33:44Nick Kokonas?

  And we shipped it out to eight different publishers we liked, two of which were art houses that had never done, um, a cookbook. And they all came back and and same, all the usual criticism, except for Aaron Weiner at Ten Speed Press.

• 2:33:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, smart, smart, smart guy, by the way.

• 2:33:59Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, and he basically said, I'm gonna make you an unusual offer, no advance at all. And we can negotiate, essentially we'll just be the distributor. And we'll negotiate out like what that looks like. And we'll help you with the printing, and we'll help you with the editing, which we're both really good at. And within ten minutes, we had struck a deal. Um, whereby any of the books that we bought or sold for ourselves, for our restaurants, we paid actual printing cost. Not wholesale, uh, actual printing cost. Um, anything that they sold and distributed through their channels, they would get about twenty-seven percent of the sale price, which means that we got seventy-three percent of that. Um, these are like state secrets, right?

• 2:34:42Nick Kokonas?

  Like, like, nobody tells this stuff. And so for years, I was walking around with this knowledge. Where if we sold a hundred thousand books, say, that would be the equivalent of selling like five hundred thousand books on any other deal. And we got to control the quality of it. And we won both the James Beard 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?

• 2:35:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, similarly for people who don't know, I mean, the James Beard Awards are also very much like the Oscars.

• 2:35:24Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. So, so we felt like really vindicated on that. The book still sells, this is eight years later, we still sell seven, eight thousand copies a year. And when we did the Aviary, which is our bar, that's a non-bar that we talked about earlier, you know, we started getting all of the same offers again. And this time it was really easy to go like, just kind of like, oh, like, oh, that's cute. Like, you know. And so, I should add that we did, I wrote a book of, Grant and I wrote his memoir together, that we didn't use a ghostwriter, we wrote it ourselves, called Life on the Line.

• 2:36:05Nick Kokonas?

  And for that one, we did a traditional book deal, but after our agent kind of got it halfway, I got on a plane, flew out there, and then brokered the deal myself. And I got a giant multiple of the highest bid by doing essentially a reverse Dutch auction, starting at a really high price and working my way downward.

• 2:36:27Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain to people just briefly what that means?

• 2:36:29Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. Yeah, so basically, like, 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 five percent 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 they, let's say a house is going to sell for five hundred thousand dollars, they're going to get four percent of that, that's twenty thousand dollars. If they get four hundred and ninety thousand dollars, it's almost no difference to them.

• 2:37:15Nick Kokonas?

  Right, four hundred bucks difference. But if they lose the deal over that last ten thousand, 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 don't really care about maximizing their last dollar. Whereas for you, that last dollar is actually like ninety-six hundred dollars. It's a lot more money. So what I do whenever I've sold real estate is that I figure out what the intrinsic value is of the house. Like, what's the bare minimum that I'd be willing to sell it for? And I price it just slightly higher than that, and I tell all the agents in the whole town, "I will pay you fifty percent of everything over ten percent higher than that."

• 2:37:53Nick Kokonas?

  And they all say, "Oh, that's against the real estate ethics code, or I would never do that deal because it would subvert all of my other deals," or whatever. And then what happens is, two days later, you get like a dozen phone calls, and they've priced it like forty percent higher.

• 2:38:10Nick Kokonas?

  And they're, and like, it sells in two days. Yeah. Because now they're actually working for you, right? Well, similarly, I went into that publishing negotiation, and I was kind of like,

• 2:38:23Nick Kokonas?

  by the way, the agent, it's probably look-up-able, she's great, like, great person. I don't think she even knows that that's what was happening. Do you know what I mean? Like, I don't even think she, she just knows that, like, hey, she was brought up in this, in this industry for this company, and that's the way it works. And she would for sure dispute everything I just said. She would say, "I always try to get the highest price." But I went in, and I just went like, "Look, I'm not going to spend my time doing this for X, so I need four times that." And she was like, "There's no way you'll ever get that. You've never written a book before." And I said, "Well, we did the Illini book. That's a cookbook. It doesn't count. These are words." So, so I, I, I went to the publishers that all bid on it, and I just got them all on a, on a conference call and just started at a really high price.

• 2:39:08Nick Kokonas?

  And every couple of seconds, I went down ten thousand dollars. And then one of them blinked and bought it.

• 2:39:16Tim Ferriss?

  What was the?

• 2:39:18Nick Kokonas?

  That's a great way, that's a great method of price discovery. Like, if you think about it, most auctions, even like you go to a charity event or whatever, they start low and they try to get interest going high. It's often the case that if they start really, really high and start going down, people start going like, "Oh, my God, someone's gonna 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.

• 2:39:44Tim Ferriss?

  No, on that phone call, where you're like, "Hey, guys, would love to get you on the phone," and then?

• 2:39:51Nick Kokonas?

  Well, someone said, "Go right away."

• 2:39:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, so I guess my question is, did they know that they were signing up for a, like, Mexican standoff slash?

• 2:40:01Nick Kokonas?

  Yes, they did.

• 2:40:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they did, they did?

• 2:40:03Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, yeah. So, I went and met with them all personally.

• 2:40:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're like, "John, I'd love to get you on the phone," and it's like, "All right, congratulations, guys."

• 2:40:09Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, you can't ambush people to a Mexican standoff. Yes, you can't do that.

• 2:40:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:40:14Nick Kokonas?

  I, I, 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. Like, I was like, "Well, if I get a really big contract off to figure out how to write a book, and that'll be a lot of pressure." And so, so I did that, and I wrote it, and I turned it in on time, which apparently no one does.

• 2:40:41Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very rare.

• 2:40:42Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, because when I sent it to them, like, on the day it was due, they went, "What's this?" I'm like, "That's the manuscript." And they went, "Oh, that's cute."

• 2:40:50Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it's kind of like showing up at the restaurant on time as a diner and then being seated at the point of time.

• 2:40:56Nick Kokonas?

  Apparently, very rare.

• 2:40:57Tim Ferriss?

  It's just this, like, open, open lie.

• 2:41:01Nick Kokonas?

  Do you turn your books in on time?

• 2:41:02Tim Ferriss?

  I do, actually, yeah.

• 2:41:04Nick Kokonas?

  I believe that.

• 2:41:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do turn my books in on time, and we could get into that separate time.

• 2:41:09Nick Kokonas?

  I just wanted to ask you a question.

• 2:41:11Tim Ferriss?

  No, I do, I do. I do not turn them in at the expected length.

• 2:41:18Nick Kokonas?

  A little longer perhaps.

• 2:41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do tend to turn them in on time.

• 2:41:23Nick Kokonas?

  So what happened with the aviary is that we like, we basically couldn't figure out how to do another book because the Illini book was such a project and Martin was on to other things. And we didn't want to do it traditionally and I didn't know anyone who could do what we wanted to do. And then there was this guy, Alan Hamburger. And boy, if you get nothing else from this whole talk and you've made it this far, go see, go Google Alan and Illini. Alan is a procedural effects artist. He worked at Weta Studios on all the Hobbit movies doing like hair and water and things like that. So he writes the physics that then makes

• 2:42:05Nick Kokonas?

  the, makes the magic, right? And then he worked at Pixar. And while he was at Pixar, and his wife Sarah worked at Industrial Light Magic as a graphics designer. He was given by Sarah a copy of the Illini 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.

• 2:42:44Tim Ferriss?

  Alan, for people wondering, is A-L-L-E-N. There are also videos of Alan and Illini.

• 2:42:50Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah. And he's an autodidact. Like this guy learns and learns and learns and is the kind of person that goes to the black box and goes, I'm gonna learn how to forge knives, and I'm gonna learn how to fire porcelain. And by the way, I'm gonna cook everything in there and I'm gonna take pictures of it and I'm gonna 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 up to Illini once to ask Grant some questions about how to make something because it wasn't working. And when Grant kind of threw up his arms and go, well, the book might be wrong.

• 2:43:21Nick Kokonas?

  Like Alan's worldview was shattered. It was like And he was kinda 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 that could be wrong. And at that point, Alan, like, his mentality changed. It's in the video. And, and we got to know him and I got to know him. And when he sent me the book, it wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting like a homegrown book. And what I got was, you know, a 400-page, beautifully, beautifully illustrated, beautifully written, um, book about a person's journey of learning. And it was called The Illiniya Project. And I had no, no idea that he had done anything like this.

• 2:44:05Nick Kokonas?

  And so suddenly, um, I thought to myself immediately, and it's in the intro to the aviary book.

• 2:44:14Nick Kokonas?

  I texted him and said, holy shit, you're crazy.

• 2:44:18Nick Kokonas?

  And I have ideas.

• 2:44:21Nick Kokonas?

  And after waiting for like four or five years to do a book on the aviary, I immediately was like, this is the guy to do the book. Now I need to lure him out of Pixar, which is about the best place to work in the world.

• 2:44:34Nick Kokonas?

  And then I found out his wife worked at Industrial Light and Magic, and she did all the graphic design. And I was like, this is perfect. You guys need to quit your jobs and move to Chicago. And they flew out. We had some conversations about what they might look like. It was very much a partnership. They would have equity in the book. We would have creative freedom to do it exactly the way we wanted. We knew more about the printing and the bidding and all of that. So I wasn't worried about the economics of it anymore. I was worried about trying to make something really awesome. And right as they were about to say yes, they were, they found out that they were gonna have a baby.

• 2:45:11Nick Kokonas?

  So they called me up one day and said, oh my God. Like, and I was like, oh, they got cold feet. Oh, no. And they said, you know, we're pregnant, we're gonna have a baby. And I said, okay, well, we're gonna 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 like punting on them just because, like, in a discriminatory way. And I said, nope, we're not gonna 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 on the Kickstarter. We've sold about another $300,000 a book since then.

• 2:45:55Nick Kokonas?

  It comes out in October. You can go to the linear book.com. And the coolest part of that website is that if you look at- It's the linear book? Oh, sorry, the Avery book.com. All right. Oh, great, Nick. Very the lead, Nick, very the lead. Genius marketing right there. So, yeah, the Avery book.com. But if you, 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, you know, like, one of the things that every single book publisher told me is that you can't sell a cocktail book for more than $30.

• 2:46:39Nick Kokonas?

  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 sprayed 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 like, that took a composite of 18 different photographs. And so he breaks down the photography techniques and also the New York Times Bestseller List.

• 2:47:18Nick Kokonas?

  And I showed him like how, you know, 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 gonna set a, man, I don't know. Like, I'm either completely delusional. It wouldn't surprise me if we sold a half a million of these.

• 2:47:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:44Nick Kokonas?

  In the next two or three years.

• 2:47:45Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, yeah, it's not a, not a nine ninety-five book either, which it shouldn't be, right? I mean, this is-

• 2:47:50Nick Kokonas?

  No, it's, it's eighty-five dollars. Um, we've invested close to a million dollars all the way in around it. And it looks like it, I think, I hope.

• 2:47:59Tim Ferriss?

  Um, yeah, from what, from what I've seen, it looks like it would cost more than that.

• 2:48:04Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, well, we did it, you know, we did it all ourselves, too. Um, you know, it's really like a five-person project. Um, it's, it's deep enough that if, if a professional gets it, they're gonna learn a lot. Um, but I'd say about thirty-five, forty percent of it can be done at home because unlike the Alenia book where, hey, you gotta go out and buy a duck, like, you know, in your local grocery, you might not have this kind of duck or whatever. If you, um, need some flor de cana rum, or, you know, um, you know, a certain kind of tequila or whatever, you just go to your local liquor store and it's exactly the same thing that we use. Um, you know, that product is universal.

• 2:48:37Tim Ferriss?

  I read somewhere, that's, I don't think it's taking us too far afield. 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?

• 2:48:51Nick Kokonas?

  Well, there's, so I, I just, I'm gonna do a little video promo for, um, for the book that we just filmed last week, where essentially I, I work with Eric Jeffis, who's one of our bartenders in the office, which is our little speakeasy below the aviary.

• 2:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  Which is amazing. If, if people have the, the opportunity, they should check it out.

• 2:49:09Nick Kokonas?

  It's basically, Grant just said, hey, everything upstairs, people are gonna think it's Alenia, smoke and mirrors. We need to prove we can make a real cocktail. So, one of the foundational cocktails for me is, is a daiquiri. It's, uh, I say three ingredients and a million ways to fuck it up. You know, it's, it's just, um, lime, sugar, and rum, that's all it is. And, uh, and yet, like, most bars you go into will make a terrible daiquiri, or they'll blend it, or blah, blah, blah, right? But a great daiquiri is really, really transformative. So, did a video on that, um, 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, um, some, uh, you know, a gram of-

• 2:49:53Nick Kokonas?

  Or or Quanto equivalent and lime and simple syrup. That's it. That's all there is to it. Man, I love the simple stuff like that. And then we have a whole section in the book on old whiskeys, dusty bottles, old gins, like there's a growing movement to kind of rediscover some of the distilleries in America that were really, really, really great, that don't exist anymore, that were more artisanal at the time. You can still find those bottles around. It's a little bit easier than like, you know, someone like wine collecting or something like that. And, man, it's it's like an endlessly fascinating thing. I don't consider myself a cocktail person 10 years ago. I really loved wine. I felt like from a health perspective, it was better as well.

• 2:50:39Nick Kokonas?

  But just like anything else, if you have a well constructed cocktail and something of high quality, it's an additive thing. Like you can have it in a meal and it can make the meal better. You know, whereas like, you know, a vodka tonic's just boozing. And it's just getting drunk. That's not what we're trying to do here. We're trying to make things that are, it's really a culinary approach to cocktails. And, man, it's endlessly fascinating, just like anything else in this world.

• 2:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  And the the I would also say, just contrasting, say, someone who wants to recreate something from a line, 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. That, 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, but it's also.

• 2:51:43Nick Kokonas?

  You can easily make some ice with Pedro'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 is not hard. I did a dinner party once where it was like, you know, a cocktail party, probably had 40 people at my house, and each room in my house had all of the. Ingredients for the cocktail and then little instructions on how to make it themselves. So that took away the need for a bartender because they're terrible anyway, anyone that you'd bring in and you know that you know caterer or something like that. And the other cool thing is that people got really into it. They went like, oh, like now I know how to make it old fashioned. Now I know how to make a Manhattan.

• 2:52:21Nick Kokonas?

  You know, 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, it can be more than just like a strong cocktail. It can be really delicate and interesting.

• 2:52:38Tim Ferriss?

  And people can learn all about this at theaviarybook.com.

• 2:52:45Nick Kokonas?

  That's right. Yep.

• 2:52:47Tim Ferriss?

  Well, Nick, I have 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, to, to a close, but

• 2:53:02Tim Ferriss?

  we've talked about books and 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

• 2:53:17Tim Ferriss?

  bites and food, at least last time I was there.

• 2:53:20Nick Kokonas?

  Still can.

• 2:53:21Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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?

• 2:53:57Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I named one of them already. Fooled by Randomness. Almost everyone in my office is forced to read that. And I've definitely given that away. Boy, that's a tricky one because I, just like I said, I can't remember, I can't remember books very well, but that's certainly probably number one on a business side of things. And then on the other side, I tend to give away what I would call vintage art books. So it's not a book people can buy, I'm sorry to say, but occasionally I'll be at 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.

• 2:54:41Tim Ferriss?

  Peregrinations of an Epicurean, something like that.

• 2:54:43Nick Kokonas?

  Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, like, I bought, like, when I want to give someone something, I try to make it something that you, and I really want to make it a great gift. I try to get it something that you can't buy, right? And so I bought an old typewriter. And I write, when I write a thank you note, I type it up on the old typewriter. And it's 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.

• 2:55:23Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no.

• 2:55:24Nick Kokonas?

  I can't really think of, I can't really think of like, the number one. I'm sure once 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.

• 2:55:33Tim Ferriss?

  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. This is, 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?

• 2:56:07Nick Kokonas?

  I don't know why this came to mind, but the, but the word would be pause.

• 2:56:13Nick Kokonas?

  I have no idea why that came to mind, but I think in, in talking through this whole thing.

• 2:56:20Nick Kokonas?

  You know, it's, you kept asking me, like, why are you digging this black box, or whatever? Or it'd be like, curiosity. Like, and I think those are two, I'm thinking of those in the same way. I'm not saying pause, like, stop. I'm saying, think, right? And so I think, you know, the hallmark of the people that I like as friends the best, is what we try to instill in our kids, you know, and the reason I like my wife so much, is that intellectual curiosity is everything. And so, I don't know, how do you get that on a billboard? I think pause, or, you know, be curious, or something like that. I know it's cliche, but I think that's the thread that ties everything together.

• 2:57:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you do pause a lot. Even though, on a macro level, you seem to be moving

• 2:57:13Tim Ferriss?

  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-

• 2:57:28Nick Kokonas?

  Oh, good, that's a great compliment. Thank you. I'll take it. I'll take it.

• 2:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  And where can people find you? I know you have, of course, the linear group dot com, you have explore talk dot com, the aviary book dot com, which is the sort of 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?

• 2:57:54Nick Kokonas?

  Yep, Instagram, which is N. Kokonas, K-O-K-O-N-A-S. And Twitter is Nick Kokonas, N-I-C-K. And, hey, it's all Google-able, right? Like, so, beyond that, if you could figure out my email address, I'll probably answer. Although, given the reach of your podcast, perhaps I will be inundated. It might take a while.

• 2:58:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that might be a hug of death situation, but we will-

• 2:58:19Nick Kokonas?

  That's okay.

• 2:58:20Tim Ferriss?

  TBD.

• 2:58:21Nick Kokonas?

  Good problem to have, I suppose.

• 2:58:22Tim Ferriss?

  Good problem to have. Nick, this was a blast. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really, really appreciate it.

• 2:58:28Nick Kokonas?

  Thank you, Tim.

• 2:58:29Tim Ferriss?

  And many more conversations to be had. This, I think, another trip to Chicago may be in order soon.

• 2:58:33Nick Kokonas?

  I was gonna say, I hope we see you here soon.

• 2:58:35Tim Ferriss?

  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.blog/podcast, as with this episode and certainly every other episode. And until next time, thank you so much for listening.

• 2:58:58Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 2:59:38Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Charlotte's Web, which makes a CBD oil, a hemp extract, that has become one of my go-to tools. Now, I have never really talked about CBD oil, and cannabis has never really been the plant for me. I know we're talking about hemp. But nonetheless, after several nights of inexplicable insomnia, this was about a year ago, I just

• 3:00:20Tim Ferriss?

  could not get to sleep to save my life. And after other fixes failed, so melatonin, California poppy extract, da-da-da-da-da, an elite athlete introduced me to this non-psychoactive extract, and bam, problem solved. I had some of the best sleep that I'd had in months. Now, I don't use sleep aids on a daily basis, but this is Become part of my toolkit and I hope to be exploring other applications soon. CBD oil products have exploded in popularity in the health and wellness and fitness worlds. And Charlotte's Web is one of the top players that offers a broad spectrum hemp extract with CBD in the form of oils, capsules, and topical products. Charlotte's Web products will not get you high, so that maybe that is good news, maybe

• 3:01:04Tim Ferriss?

  bad news to you, but it does have some powerful benefits and applications. And it works with your body's existing endocannabinoid system. Endo meaning from within, like endo versus exoskeleton, for instance. So endocannabinoid system works with your body. Some of the most common uses are for relief from everyday stressors, help in supporting restful sleep, which is what I most often use it for, to bring about a sense of calm and focus. A lot of my friends use it for that. CBD is also known, or becoming known, for helping athletes to recover from exercise-induced inflammation. Charlotte's Web hemp extract has naturally occurring terpenes, flavonoids, and other valuable hemp compounds that work synergistically to heighten positive effects, sometimes referred

• 3:01:47Tim Ferriss?

  to as the entourage effect, which you guys can look up, making it more complete than single compound CBD alternatives, or at least that is what I've been told. I do not know much about CBD alternatives nor single compound. In any case, check it out. This stuff has really worked for me. So jump over to CWHemp.com/Tim. CW is in Charlotte's Web. CWHemp.com/Tim to take a quick quiz, which will determine the best product for your particular aims, lifestyle, etc. And they ship to all 50 states. Charlotte's Web are offering listeners of this podcast 10% off of their purchase. While there are some exclusions, I personally use the extra strength CBD oils or the extra

• 3:02:30Tim Ferriss?

  strength capsules, and you can see what might be a fit for you on that page. And there is a 30-day risk-free guarantee, so why not try it out? So get 10% off of your purchase at CWHemp.com/Tim. And disclaimer, these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Enjoy. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for designers and clients to work together. From logos to apps, business cards, packaging to books, you name it, 99designs is the go-to design resource for any budget.

• 3:03:14Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:03:57Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:04:39Tim Ferriss?

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