The Tim Ferriss Show - #629: Aryeh Bourkoff — Media's Hottest Dealmaker on How to Negotiate, Rejecting Constraints, Mastering the Calendar to Create More Time, and How to Play the Long Game

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Hey. I was introduced to Hey, that's H-E-Y, by my friend Kevin Rose, who calls it, quote, a beautiful rethinking of everything wrong with email, end quote. Hey is a premium email service for people who are tired of having an inbox overflowing with things they don't care about and who value their privacy and online security. You're probably familiar with the names behind Hey, Jason Fried and David DHH, Hannah Meyer Hansen, creators of Basecamp. Both Jason and David have been on this podcast, and they're two of the most innovative and contrarian entrepreneurs I've met. So back to the story of Hay. For almost two decades, email, as you know,

Starting point is 00:00:34 has remained unchanged, soulless, chaotic, and borderline abusive. Your inbox is packed with all sorts of emails from people that you don't care about, full of intrusive trackers, and all framed by a multitude of ads that watch your every move. If you think about it, you have an email account, but you really have no control over it. That is where Hay comes in. So try the Hay way. What does that mean? Your inbox should be for important stuff. That's why Hay made the inbox, I-M-B-O-X, where important things go. Normally, anyone can email you and land right at the top of your inbox. Whether it's a message from a trusted friend or from a total stranger, a rando, it makes no difference. Your inbox is fair game to anyone. Not anymore. With Hay, emails never land in your inbox by default. You get to screen senders the first time they email you and decide

Starting point is 00:01:20 if you want to hear from them or not. They offer a 14-day free trial if you want to get a taste of Hay. A full year subscription to Hay is just $99. Plus, the Tim Ferriss Show listeners, that's you guys, get an exclusive discount that has never been offered anywhere before. Get $20 off of your first year subscription when you sign up at hay.com slash Tim. That's hay.com, H-E-Y.com slash T-I-M to take back control of your email. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day,

Starting point is 00:02:05 muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night. I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back, It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend

Starting point is 00:02:25 use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level. Helps with performance, helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing. And the all-new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet. It's easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing.

Starting point is 00:02:57 And you really have to feel the Theragun's signature power, amplitude, and effectiveness to believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun. That's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun with an OLED screen. That's O-L-E-D for those wondering. That's Organic Light Emitting Diode Screen. Personalized Theragun app, an incredible combination of quiet and power. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So try Theragun for 30 days starting at only $199. Go to therabody.com slash Tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more

Starting point is 00:03:47 time. That's therabody.com slash Tim.netic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short so we can get to the meat of this conversation with my guest today, Aryeh B. Borkoff. He is the chairman and CEO of Liontree, an independent investment and merchant bank disruption. And since then, Liontree has supported an expanding number of industries as they capture opportunity in evolving digital economy. We're going to touch on a lot of those points. Aryeh is also the founder of Kindred Media, a digital media and podcasting company powered by Liontree and serves on the boards of Yahoo and Carnegie Hall.

Starting point is 00:04:59 Before founding Liontree, Aryeh spent 13 years at UBS, closing his tenure as vice chairman and head of America's investment banking. Before UBS, Aryeh was a high-yield research analyst and ranked as the number one cable and satellite analyst by institutional investor for seven consecutive years. Aryeh is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and resides in New York City with his family. You can find Liontree at liontree.com. And on Instagram, you can find a number of accounts at Aryeh Burkoff, that's spelled A-R-Y-E-H-B-O-U-R-K-O-F-F, at Liontree underscore LLC, and at Kindred Podcast. Aryeh, welcome to the show. Nice to see you. Thanks, Tim. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Of course. Of course. I've been looking forward to this. And I wanted to start with actually a mention in your bio. So ranked as the number one cable and satellite analyst by Institutional Investor for seven consecutive years. What makes a good analyst or what made you a good analyst and what are common mistakes that analysts make? Well, it takes me back, you know,

Starting point is 00:06:05 a career has different chapters to it, right? I actually think those chapters should be related to one another and foundational in nature, but I don't like to hover in one place for too often. And I also don't like to think about the zero sum game, so things I'm doing today have no relationship to things I did before. But I'm glad you brought up this analyst job because I think a lot of people forget about

Starting point is 00:06:31 that part of my life. But it was so core in training and also in the relationships and the understanding of of how to be not only a good purveyor of companies, but also of my own emotional stability, I would say. And so the way I would say that is analysts is often thrown around, but it could be like a therapist, an analyst. But in this case, a research analyst, which I was as someone that really looked at securities

Starting point is 00:07:03 or stocks or bonds in a particular industry. So for me, the industries were always media, cable, telecoms, technology, consumer-driven companies. And at first, I looked at those companies from a bond perspective, junk bonds, high-yield bonds, and then equities, stocks. And covering those stocks in those same industries allowed me to ultimately get to a goal of helping investors make money with those recommendations. Now, how you do that is understanding the company, its fundamental picture, and ultimately where it's going in the

Starting point is 00:07:39 future. Because everything today should be understood, and everything today should be understood and everything tomorrow should have a lot of uncertainty around it. So pattern recognition, how to predict the future is the first thing that you really are supposed to be learning as an analyst in order to help inform the masses of which investments to make. But then the emotional stability part of it comes into play when you get out in front of everybody and say with some boldness and some prose and some analysis, here's my view. I think I'm right. More often than not, you're wrong. And it's like watching two kids in a schoolyard when you were growing up getting into an argument. And you watched one of them clearly lose that argument.

Starting point is 00:08:30 And then count down until you saw that they recognized that they would have the confidence to admit that they lost the argument. And there's always a lag. It could be 10 seconds. It could be weeks. It could be years. And that's all about like capitulation. And so the first thing I learned was when I was wrong and I thought that I would be right to quickly recognize that I didn't have anything that was that interesting or

Starting point is 00:08:57 different to say in front of everybody. And by doing that, it was very embarrassing. These could even be minor things, but it built so much credibility later that when you are right, it counted so much more and for so much more, and then it built your own self-confidence that you really did have something, and then if you're really lucky, and that's where the rankings come into play,

Starting point is 00:09:25 when you say something that's different than the masses, and you have the confidence to say, going against the grain to predict the future, then the markets will go with you. The investors will go with you. People will be profitable based on your recommendation. People will make money based on what you say, and you build a reputation. And that was a process. This raises a number of secondary questions. Well, the first, just for clarification, when you're talking about taking a public stance and promoting or publishing an opinion, what form does that take? Is it a ranking system? Is it a general sort of

Starting point is 00:10:07 binary buy or sell recommendation just for folks who are listening to have a more discreet understanding of what that opinion looks like? What form does that take? It has to be a published report that has to have an initiation report. It could be a report on the industry, so it has to have some perspective, some thematic, and within it, some specific company recommendation. So let's just say I want to write a report on the movie studios. And then within that report, I would say, here's my view of the movie studios, and specifically my recommendation on Disney and Warner Brothers and Viacom at the time and Fox at the time. And then within these, these are my recommendations, buy, hold, sell, and supportive documents. And then because you knew that no one would actually go and read

Starting point is 00:11:00 a hundred pages, you'd have to summarize it in a perfectly synthesized four-bullet point cover page. And before any of that stuff happened, you have to go through internal processes to defend your arguments, where people internally have the right to say, we don't really think that works. But more often than not, they would let you go and let the public be your ultimate judge and juror because that public embarrassment would be much far more damaging to you and far more self-correcting than anything they would say internally. But they have, obviously, institutions to protect. But those documents were full of analysis and semantics and context, both context of

Starting point is 00:11:43 the here and now and the past versus the future. But the ultimate goal is breaking the future. If I said to you, Tim, today is, let's say, Monday, and by Friday, I was going to tell you based on certain pattern recognition what was going to happen to these stocks based on my analysis, or maybe better, a year from now, and you believe in me because of my credibility and our relationship, and we had a track record together, and that conviction level was high, then you may invest just based on my word. But at the beginning, you'd say, I need to do my own research. I'm going to read your report. Then I'm going to check it with other people's reports, my own conviction level. And then I may even go counter what you say. Maybe I'm a counter indicator sometimes,

Starting point is 00:12:27 but hopefully you are the indicator. Then obviously over time, if you're right, more often than not, you just start investing for yourself. You may not give it to everybody else as a service. That's the motion of a career, right? Well, that is your evolution. It's not always evolution, right? Playing with your own chips and taking that responsibility to make direct bets in that way is not a leap that everyone makes. And I want to take a step back for a second just to read a fantastic headline. This is a piece from The Hollywood Reporter. So how Aria Borkhoff became media's hottest dealmaker. So some of the groundwork that we're laying right now is going to lead into that. But I wanted to mention that because it is an exceptional piece. I thought it was a very entertaining piece also that people should check out. Let's rewind to Allen Ginsberg, not the poet, different Allen Ginsberg, but who's Allen Ginsberg and what are some of the lessons that you learned from him? Allen Ginsberg gave me a shot and he was a mentor and the person that first hired me into this thing called Wall Street in New York. And remember, I came from California,

Starting point is 00:13:40 had no reason to be anywhere near this industry or Wall Street, didn't know anything really of substance coming out of university, except what everyone else knows, which is like how to communicate, look for a job, maybe how to write a little bit. Other people maybe have much more vocational expertise in engineering and medicine than I did, but I was a generalist coming out. So coming to New York, didn't know a soul, and basically put resumes under windshield wipers, you know, said like, you know, here's my flyer. I have an interest in being here. I'll hustle and I'll earn it. And then you have to convince people to give you a shot. And Allen Ginsberg gave me that first shot.

Starting point is 00:14:21 And when I interviewed with Allen, who himself was and is a, we're still in touch, a creative person in finance, because Alan's background, even though he was a lawyer and financier and so on, he also wrote for Rolling Stone magazine. He liked writing, he liked the way the world worked. And he wasn't a traditional person you think of as a, you know, Gordon Gekko, Wall Street type. And so maybe that's why we took an interest in each other, because we talked about how the world worked and he gave me a chance. And so Alan hired me and he said, I remember you're going to be the first person that works for us in the high yield bond group at Smith Barney.

Starting point is 00:15:00 And Alan ran the Smith Barney Research Group, having come from Bear Stearns before that. And I think before that, he was immediately at Drexel Burnham in Los Angeles, the Michael Milk Ohio Bond Shop. And I said, okay, great. I'm going to work for you. What do I do? And he said, you're going to help me cover the industries that I focus on. I said, which are those industries? And he said, it's media, it's telecom, it's technology, it's food, and it's restaurants. And I said, I have no idea what you just said, but I like to eat and like to go out to eat in restaurants. So that sounds good. Eventually those fell away.

Starting point is 00:15:34 And I kept going with those media and communications and technology industries from day one. And then I just decided to get that competitive streak to be better than the rest and to work at it and I eventually got the bug. But I remember thinking to myself, watching him in action, I will never be able to be as good at communicating as he is or as good at analyzing companies as he is

Starting point is 00:15:57 and he just kept going at it until you eventually get the groove. So two questions related to what you just shared. The first is why go from California to backpack and hand to wall street and even make the attempt? What was the draw or the reasoning there? And then secondly, why do you think Alan gave you a shot? Why would he say yes? Why would he take that ostensible risk? I was in California at the University of California in San Diego, as you mentioned. I knew as I was graduating that I wanted to get into the center of finance. I didn't want to stay in the periphery. So if you're going to go into an

Starting point is 00:16:49 industry, go to the heart of it. Don't play around the edges. Why the interest in finance also? Why finance at all? This is the way I describe it to my parents who are academics and looked at finance, I could tell in a disdainful way, like, that's not a way to live your life. Maybe a lot of your listeners think the same way. And I thought to myself, okay, I have to present this to them. I remember going to travel to see my mother. And I said, I'm going to go into finance. This is the way that I think it's a worthwhile way to live your life. And I just, because they were like academics and professors and so on. And I said, entrepreneurs, people have hopes and dreams that sometimes take the shape and form of businesses. And those businesses need

Starting point is 00:17:41 money, capital to see the light of day, to realize the dream. And that's finance. And if I can play a role in helping those individuals get capital and have their dreams realized, that is a worthwhile life to live. Sounds like a good pitch, right? Yeah, it sounds like a good pitch. Good pitch, right? I mean, that landed well.

Starting point is 00:18:04 I got the blessing. Plus, I was rehearsing, probably practicing my interviews. But that's really what I believe and believe to this day. And that's kind of what makes it interesting. You see the energy in someone else that you're able to recast the problem

Starting point is 00:18:20 as a solution that is based on someone's real idea. And it's not just about moving pieces around. It's about creating something new. And I think that that wasn't enough. That was enough for my parents, but it wasn't enough in New York because a lot of people have that pitch. I think, you know, I remember like when I was in college, I went to some of these parties and you would walk in with your friends and like the vibe would happen. And I remember walking I was in college, I went to some of these parties and you would walk in with your friends and the vibe would happen. I remember walking with one of my college friends and he couldn't get any women to pay attention to him. And I remember he said to me one day, he goes, I don't know, my mother always says I'm attractive. I remember thinking to myself, I passed a test with my mother about my pitch.

Starting point is 00:19:05 But when I got to New York, it didn't really land as well. It may have landed, but it was in competition with a lot of other people. And so it took me about four months in New York to get to Allen because the day I moved to New York was because of a job interview. And I thought I hit the jackpot like one of one. The day I graduated was a Sunday. And I think Monday or Tuesday, I had an interview set up with a guy named Paul Ting. I don't mind saying it now. He's probably out there somewhere at Oppenheimer. And he covered the oil and gas industry. I told myself I wasn't going to choose

Starting point is 00:19:41 the industry. Whoever hired me first, I would just be loyal to that industry for the rest of my life. And I can build a specialty. And so I went and I incredibly, I got this interview and I had a meeting like this day two in New York, downtown, big city, it was 1995. And I thought the interview was great and i was going to be a research analyst working for paul ting boiling gas oppenheimer at the end i was like you know starting to like strut out of the office and say okay like next step when do i start you know this is like the same interview that happened my mother like it's landing well you know and um and he goes by the way one more question he goes do you know the uh programming language visual basic like c plus visual basic

Starting point is 00:20:30 and i said no and he said um well i kind of need you to know that if you're going to be on the team these days they call it a doorknob negotiation on the way out as you're holding the doorknob they turn back and say say, by the way, one more thing. That's the whole negotiation. So he said, by the way, one more thing. Do you know the visual basic? I said, no. And he said, well, you're going to need to know that for me to hire you. I said, well, what if I learn it and master it? Well, then you hire me? He goes, yeah me he goes yeah yeah then we're good that's new york city i was like great i left bought like visual basic for dummies bought a laptop drained my account and got subletted apartment started learning this thing two weeks later felt comfortable

Starting point is 00:21:18 this is the world as it should be you know called. And I never got a return phone call. And I was like, well, what do I do now? Like, what do I do now? By the way, while I was at UBS in a senior position in research, I did see across the tape probably, I don't know, 15 years later that we hired a guy named Paul Tang at Oppenheimer to do oil and gas for UBS when I was there doing media. And I waited till he started and I went down the hallway. I knocked on the door. I said, by the way, Paul, you may or may not remember me. I want to welcome you to UBS.

Starting point is 00:21:57 At this point, I was an established senior person doing media stocks, really well established at UBS. And I said, I just want to welcome you. And I want to tell you that I mastered that fucking visual basic programming language. And I wish you luck here, buddy. And so like, you've already put it on the side, one of your philosophies in life, like the toe you step on today could be connected to the ass you're going to kiss tomorrow by the way yeah you know you still do a good mantra uh so yeah alan alan four months later left in new york i became a professional job seeker and i would basically walk to different buildings that looked like, you know, hitter buildings. And I looked at the directory at the basement

Starting point is 00:22:50 at the lobby level. So it looked like Wall Street firms, the ones I recognized, obviously. And then others I didn't recognize. And I would go up, this is before where they, pre 9-11, they didn't check IDs. I would go up to the HR floor and I would hand in my resume

Starting point is 00:23:04 and I would choose a different location I had every up to the HR floor and I would hand in my resume and I would choose a different location. I had every week to tackle the downtown, the midtown. And then one day I stumbled upon, you know, Smith Barney. It was still on Greenwich Street downtown, right across, you know, from the Greenwich Hotel. Like this is now like an amazing hot area. Back then it was like away from Wall Street, away from the action. And Corrine Krennic, to her credit, since I'm naming names,

Starting point is 00:23:29 was the HR person that let me through the door and gave me a shot, wherever she is, and introduced me to Alan Gisberg. And at that point, I was pretty good on the pitch and also self-corrected, like knowing what didn't land and what landed.

Starting point is 00:23:44 And Alan gave me a shot. I think, you know, he liked the hustle. He liked the hustle, liked the background probably, and also a little bit of luck. But he also called me out as a bullshit guy. I do remember he asked me what my, the proverbial question in an interview is, what's your weakness?

Starting point is 00:23:59 Yeah. And I do remember I said, I remember that's when I was practiced. So I said, my penmanship. And I thought that was pretty clever. He said, that's a bullshit answer. Try it again. So then I had to figure it out.

Starting point is 00:24:22 Then I stumbled through it. We both chuckled and and i forgot what i said exactly but i'm sure i said something that was more something but he called me out on it you know yeah amazing well it seems like perhaps a blessing in disguise life saving you from what you wanted with paul and the oil and gas but who's to say, I suppose, in retrospect. I want to take a closer look at Alan teaching you how the world worked. And I'm looking at a Kindred Media piece on Medium, and there's a mention of Alan. And I'll just read part of it, which is, one day Ginsburg asked him, that's asking you, if you read the paper, thinking, uh-oh, what deal did I miss? What happened? Did I miss a number? R.A. reminisced. Ginsburg goes, no, no, no, forget the numbers. The opera house burned down in Florence. You didn't read that? And I said, I didn going to have to be a little more open-minded about this. And the reason I bring this up is that observing you in person and also doing research in preparation for this conversation, you, more than almost anyone I've ever met, tie just in one sector, but across sectors.

Starting point is 00:25:45 Was there any other world educating that comes to mind? And that could be through direct teaching or osmosis observation that came to you from Alan or other mentors. I appreciate that you said that because it's much easier in life to stay in a box and a blanket a compartment of the whole ecosystem and by the other places for people to be in those boxes and to thrive in those boxes when you start to move outside of that box or in the corners of that box or the edge of that box or outside that box or draw outside the line, so to speak. It is a beautiful place to live, and it is also a dangerous place to live because it's full of unknowns and uncomfortable, maybe groundbreaking things.

Starting point is 00:26:41 It reminds me of another philosophical line of conventional thinking is typically right, but seldom profitable. That's great. It feels good to think like everybody else and to be moving with the herd, but you're not going to make a difference. You can be wrong, but you may never really be right in an outsized way if you don't really stretch into the unknown. And some people are not comfortable with that. But where do I get that from? I mean, I get that from everybody. But it really goes back to self-work.

Starting point is 00:27:15 Ultimately, you have to have a strong core to be able to do that. Because if you just move with the wind outside the box, then you don't really know who you are. So just to interrupt for a second, so by having clarity on that core or solid core, is that, if you wouldn't mind, I'm sorry to interrupt, but just expanding that for a second, is that a core set of values, a clear idea of what you will or will not do so that you don't end up conforming to whatever winds happen to be blowing at that moment yes it reminds me of the scene of the in raiders of the lost ark that last scene where the evil spirit comes in to the warehouse and indiana jones and his compatriot or his partner or his girlfriend, wherever, at that point, they're all intermingled, are hanging on to a foundational pole with their eyes closed.

Starting point is 00:28:11 But yet this spirit comes in and completely destroys everything else and kills everyone's faces. And it's a horror scene, right? But they survive. And they survive because of hanging on to this pole, hanging on to each other, and keeping their eyes closed,

Starting point is 00:28:29 and just hoping their way through it. And obviously the metaphor is they're good, and everyone else is evil, and that spirit recognizes it, right? But I think about that like, you have to hold on to a few poles. You can't just be floating around. You have to have a few poles of foundational strength

Starting point is 00:28:47 that you believe in that are making up your core. And those are tried and true. But at the same time, that allows you to be curious, self-adjusting, self-corrective, migrational around other areas and being comfortable with many different types of people that are not like you at all because you have that core. And that creates a very balanced and textured life and existence and a way to build pattern recognition and perspective that most people would be locked in pursuing. And by the way, I'm locked in my own way too. Like everyone has certain blocks, right? But the more of that exercise that you can do, the more of a perspective

Starting point is 00:29:40 you can get of where the world's going and where it looks like to be in different cultures while you're living in your own foundational strengths and values. And I think to me that all goes back to the basic foundation of self-awareness, self-work, self-correction, self-growth. And once you have that, you're a member of society that's valuable. And then you look for that in others and run away from people that are ignorant or biased or morose or also maybe a nicer way, a nicer version of that is just want to go with the flow everywhere and don't feel comfortable with some out-of-the-box thinking because it's threatening to those foundational values. A way to say that from a finance perspective is when I was a research analyst,

Starting point is 00:30:28 I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a buy recommendation on a stock before I hit the send button until I both felt the conviction of the buy and the rejection of the sell. So I had to live with the sell recommendation inside of me first for a while, see if it felt comfortable or uncomfortable, and let it in, let the poison inside for a while.

Starting point is 00:30:55 If that felt too comfortable for me, I couldn't in good conscience go to the buy. So I had to have the buy and the rejection of the sell because the buy, to me, could have been a passive recommendation, not an active recommendation. You have to ask the buy and the rejection of the sell because the buy, to me, could have been a passive recommendation, not an active recommendation. You have to ask yourself, are you comfortable going into a controversial scenario, or do you want to just live in the non-controversial? One more question on this core. Is this a, let's just call it a general

Starting point is 00:31:20 imperturbability or a solidity that was more a felt sense for you, or was it something that you at that time codified in some way where you're like i prioritize these five things or i will i resolve to follow these following values was it codified or was it more of a felt sense of stability and solidity for you at that time? Both. They're interrelated. So the first time I remember feeling that sensibility was probably like in grade school, being a popular kid with the friends, everything, not an outcast, like with the group, but a little bit different

Starting point is 00:32:07 and feeling inside a little different. And then the question is like, do you feel bad about being different or does it start to empower you or both? And I kind of felt like, let's test it out. And I remember thinking, I am very happily situated where I was in eighth grade, but let me leave that to go to a new ninth grade school that was an unknown away from all my friends. And let's see if the friends were the thing that made me feel great or the inside was the thing that I could apply to new friends and keep that train going. I chose to apply it to the unknown and chose a brand new place and left behind what I had before. Now, I wouldn't do that with family or like a very close

Starting point is 00:33:03 relationship, but I felt very comfortable doing it with the environment I was in to get myself in a new environment and knowing that it's me that can adjust and apply my skills to different areas and not the environment around me that defined who I was. I could be more proactive defining environments versus having to define for me. I remember that back then, and it's happened a few different times in my life, whether it's moving different places or feeling comfortable. I always say, I feel comfortable everywhere, but belong nowhere. That's like a geographic comment. And that's true by and large. But I also have done that in my careers where I feel

Starting point is 00:33:45 after a certain amount of time in one area, move, take these strong parts of what is applicable, maybe the industry knowledge, into new areas, learn areas that I didn't know before, and see if you can reconcile those two things. And then that builds that core with the unknown together. That's a life of curiosity and creativity, but also a life of foundation and strength and contribution on the other hand. I call that like the gray area. You know, like you are comfortable in the gray area. I feel like that's a competitive advantage for me.

Starting point is 00:34:20 I can hang out in that gray area longer than most people in the world very comfortably until I see the optimal scenario to pass on. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high-stakes gamble for your small business. So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates. That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free. Add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to

Starting point is 00:35:00 spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. It's been a tough year for everyone, so finish it strong by hiring the right new team members

Starting point is 00:35:19 to set yourself up for strong and successful 2023. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash tim. That's linkedin.com slash tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Let's talk about perhaps that gray area. I may be misapplying that term to what I'm going to ask, but this relates to a story you told me last winter. And if you don't want to discuss this, I can't imagine, it's sensitive, but we can also cut it afterwards. But I think it came about because of the title of my first book, Four-Hour Workweek, and someone said, oh, you should talk to Aryeh because that is probably not going to be a driving philosophy or something along those lines. Although I do think we have some similarities as well in terms of per hour output and thinking

Starting point is 00:36:15 about various things. And you told me a story. I'm going to get some of the details wrong, so I'd like you to correct it. But about at one point realizing that many meetings were being declined because your calendar was full and then deciding to take an entire year to block out every Wednesday, I can't remember, from like 6 to 10 p.m. or something to take all of those overflow meetings that were being canceled. Could you retell that story, if you wouldn't mind? So it all starts with the concept of rejecting constraints, on one hand. On the other hand, problem solving, which is like probably one of these terms that are thrown around so many times, problem solving. I'm a problem solver. I run a company. I'm solving problems. And it's probably that? You know, like, I mean, put yourself in a situation where you actually solve a problem

Starting point is 00:37:07 that seems insurmountable. So one of those problems were time. I don't have enough time, time being the constraint. Let's just tackle solving that problem. Everyone just talks about that all the time. And the other part of the story is the passive or active, conscious or subconscious deprioritization of people that are, let's say, not as important to you as your kindness gene wants them to be, but you're really not going to put them on your calendar of the prime spots.

Starting point is 00:37:42 Let's say you deprioritize them. And even if you are prioritizing them in your mind, in your heart, in your body, in your soul, your office will deprioritize them for you. And people have become an expert at these things, right? Now, over time, you build a luxury in life of being able to do that and be more selective because as you mature, you want to spend time with only things that are essential maybe running out of time and we first start a company with relationships at its core and with reputation that's really important to define the company the concept of

Starting point is 00:38:20 rejecting people or those relationships in any form is out of the question. So what would happen at the beginning of the firm, some 10 years ago, was I recognized that I was a funnel. People would want to figure out what's going on at one point in time. There are very few things in your life that light up all your contacts at one time. Like, let's say your wedding, your funeral, God forbid, maybe a big job movement, a big news item. Imagine then like all of a sudden your phone like lights up. But most of the time, it just kind of smooths out. Certain people want to care about different things.

Starting point is 00:38:59 When you start a company, it will light up everything on your contacts, hopefully, or if it doesn't, you got a bigger problem, right? And so this was a company starting based on all of the relationships in my contact base and a place to put them and to cultivate them, to build a skyscraper. But at the beginning, it was just me and the relationship and an assistant. And so I started to get wind of the fact that certain people couldn't get on my calendar, which is obviously natural because you can't put every single one of your contacts on your calendar at the moment you announce a new company, even if it's like a few weeks out, people are going to say, sorry, you can't make it. But imagine how that feels for somebody else. I want to support this new lion tree venture and

Starting point is 00:39:44 what Ari is doing. Oh, but you can't see me? What a horrible way to start a company. I don't care who you are. After a while of reading and hearing people sending me notes or emails, I recognize that there are a certain category of people that they were, because obviously the office knew enough to give them credit to prioritize, you know, the Tim Ferriss's of the world right away, right? Or they maybe prioritize things that would be like immediately like dollars oriented or transactional,

Starting point is 00:40:13 which is also not the philosophy of the company. But they wouldn't prioritize things that would be career advice or people that wanted to work with the company as a vendor or business partner or things like that, that they wouldn't even know, but I would know. So I brought my assistant into the office and I said, so what is this thing we're rejecting people? They said, well, you don't have time. I said, yeah, but you get paid to say yes. I can say no. That's the job of the assistant

Starting point is 00:40:43 to figure out a way to say yes. And they said, yes, but Arya, you don't have the time on your calendar. And I said, well, that's the question. Let's figure out the problem solving of time now. What if I created a whole extra day in the week? Would that unlock the potential for filling in all these kind of second tier requests, so to speak? Yeah, I mean, hypothetically, if you had a whole extra day, we probably have a lot more to work with. I said, okay, let me think about it.

Starting point is 00:41:12 I got it. Wednesday nights, you're right, Wednesday nights, but the hours are different from 10 p.m. till 2 a.m. Oh, gosh. From year one of the company, I will you know office hours but no internal like bitch session there's no like suggestion box this is an external session if people really want it that bad i'll be here no one else internally has to be here just leave me a little food a little drink and let's see who wants to be here i'll be here and then i'll start the next day at the same time

Starting point is 00:41:42 you know seven in the morning eight eight in the morning, whatever. I'll eat it on my end for a year. And I think that will unclog the situation. And we've created what you viewed as a constraint of time. I created time by eating into my sleep hours. So your four-hour work week is really a four-hour sleep week for me. But anyway, but it worked. It worked.

Starting point is 00:42:03 People shut up for a year until two in the morning and it was the most interesting grateful conversations and it's just like new york city and it's fine it's like you know in the office you know you're talking about life and career that paid dividends not business dividends but like you know reputational benefits and humanity benefits like the people like who are you what do you want to be the other day and i'm happy we did it i don't regret for a second now i don't do that now benefits and humanity benefits. Like, who are you? What do you want to be at the end of the day? And I'm happy we did it. I don't regret it for a second.

Starting point is 00:42:27 Now, I don't do that now. I would love for someone else in the company to do that now. I'm in motion still, and I want to be more selective and deep with relationships versus volume-oriented right now. And I almost like want people to compete for the depth of those relationships with me versus the masses. But that's what the firm is supposed to be, to understand what is selective. But the firm needed that at the beginning to really understand what we're about.

Starting point is 00:42:52 Yeah. Amazing story. Wow. 10 to 2 a.m. So two questions. How did you choose 10 to 2 a.m.? Was that just to separate the casual inquiries from the true believers? That's question one. How did you choose 10 to 2 a.m.? Was that just to separate the casual inquiries from the true believers? That's question one. How did you choose 10 to 2? And then the second, you mentioned something that I think

Starting point is 00:43:12 probably caused a number of people to perk up because it would be the opposite of what many would perhaps say, and that is the assistant's job is to say yes. You can always say no. I think assistants are viewed by many folks as a protective layer, maybe a flak jacket to deflect as much incoming as possible. So I'd love to hear you just explain why 10 to 2 and elaborate on the assistant's job being to find a way to say yes. 10 to 2 is easy because I want to leave room for dinner.

Starting point is 00:43:49 Yeah. Not dinner, you know, God forbid, like a personal dinner, like a client dinner, like a dinner outside. Business and life for me are very well integrated. So it would be use the city, go to dinner, and then after dinner, come back. Some people still bring this up. People see me on the street, they say, are you still doing three dinners a night and i'm like one time maybe like 10 times but then two times i would do dinner i would go to two dinners i was trying to

Starting point is 00:44:15 get it all in and you know not eat as much at each dinner and move around and probably in retrospect wasn't the best thing to convey to people, except for the fact that I was working hard and trying to make sure everyone was happy and that I would get it all in. But this 10 to 2 was about making sure that that night I would have room for my dinner meeting out of the office,

Starting point is 00:44:38 using New York, great city to do that. And then getting back to the office enough time and starting 10 p.m. And then I wanted to have enough time. There's this great song uh i think it's a u2 song that has a line that says like the magic hours are when it's not yet the morning but it's still night but it's not really nighttime you know and so you haven't yet figured out that it's morning time you haven't started thinking about your next day yet but it's past normal night time for everybody else right so you really can't be bothered and none of us really live that way i think day to day but that must be where a lot of

Starting point is 00:45:21 magic happens you know and then you get to a point where you start thinking, oh my gosh, tomorrow morning, my calendar is this. And that to me starts around two in the morning. And so if I went past two, I'd start eating until like, well, I have to start doing the next day. I'll remember the song. I just listened to it the first time again.

Starting point is 00:45:38 No problem. You could put it in the show notes too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great song. Oh yeah. When the night has no end and the day yet to begin when the moon stills around i need your love it's hawk moon rising and rattle and hum you too and the rattle and hum album is the only place you could find it i think rattle and hum youtube hawk moon good memory there you go and the the assistant the complexity of the job of an assistant

Starting point is 00:46:13 particularly for me or for anyone in a relationship business where it's meaningful and there's a long build to it and a long tail to it as genuine is probably the most complex, respected job in the company. It is a puzzle piece that is, I always think of it as like those images of broadcast television when you're like, okay, I have Thursday night, must see TV. And what's going to be the six o'clock hour? What's going to be the seven o'clock hour?'s going to be at an eight o'clock hour, and how's one going to lead into the other, and how's it going to fit, and are people going to be still watching at 10 o'clock when it's over, and what's going to be the show after the Super Bowl that you promote. How the calendar flows and behaves is like a living, breathing animal with a soul

Starting point is 00:47:02 and a brain and everything else. And the people that have to construct that every single day today and into the future, the assistant, I respect that brain power and that knowledge more than anything, in some cases, including my role. So if you start with no, instead of yes, you've kind of stopped playing the puzzle. You've said, I can't fit the puzzle piece, so it's not going to fit somewhere. But if you say yes, then the puzzle keeps expanding. And the calendar has to mimic the strategy of the firm, where I want to be going, the changes in the development of the firm, the changes in the people I want to play with, work with, experience life with. And the understanding of that has to mimic one another.

Starting point is 00:47:49 And so it's not they say yes, I say no. It's much more of like, we understand where we're going and it has to reflect the vision of what's going on in my head and therefore it has to be communicated that way. And it has to have a yes around it somewhere. I dig it. Yeah, thematically makes sense.

Starting point is 00:48:06 I want to hop to UBS here. I'll tell you one more thing about the calendar, by the way, because I talk about this a lot. If you boil it down, internal meetings, everyone has a ratio. So if you did nothing because of your reputation, your brand, and your substance, your calendar is going to be full.

Starting point is 00:48:24 People are going to want to get on your calendar all the time without you even choosing who you want to see. That's what I call defense. Put that aside for a second. Then you had a blank sheet of paper and said, forget that calendar. I, Tim, want to choose exactly who I want to see. That may not fill the whole calendar every single day, but it'll be proactive. It'll be offense. So one's defense, one's offense. Everyone has to create a balance of those two things in their calendar. Who wants to see them? And who do you want to see? And that mix. And then there's the internal versus the external. And there's no way around the fact that internal

Starting point is 00:49:02 meetings are cost or investment. It doesn't have to be negative. It could be, you know, but they're necessary investments in the company or cost. And external meetings should be revenue or potentially for future revenue. So one's revenue, one's cost. If your calendar is 50-50, offense, defense, or external, internal, or revenue costs. You haven't done anything. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:31 Again, you're running in place. And so I'm very cognizant of the fact that what's the ratio? What's the ratio? And so I figured out a long time ago, I really would love the ratio to be like 70-30, external versus internal, or maybe 80-20. And then you can start thinking to yourself, okay, that builds a good margin. And then different times of year have different moments.

Starting point is 00:49:51 Obviously, if you're paying bonuses, you're doing reviews, maybe there's a little more internal. But by and large, the internal should be more predictable if you're managing a good organization. You could probably put the internal on your calendar for the entire year. Otherwise, there's surprises going on. And as there's more surprises going on, the less well-managed the company is. So you should be able to pretty much put the internal on your calendar right now for the whole year. And then the external, you'd be surprised at how much external you can put on your calendar in advance also. I'll meet you at Formula One in Austin, Tim.

Starting point is 00:50:23 Do you want to go again this year? Like, this is a date. Or this conference, or this event, or this holiday. And you could probably put the tent poles of your external on the counter. You'd be surprised how little room that leaves for the spontaneity and the serendipity of life, which it must. Something has to then give, absent sleeping hours, right? And so that's kind of what you which it must. So something has to then give absent sleeping hours, right? And so that's kind of what you're playing with. You're playing with these marginal

Starting point is 00:50:49 slivers of space that is growth, that is a choice, that is what's different today versus last year. And that will represent who you are today versus last year. And that will represent who you are today versus last year and what you want to be in the future. And whether the best companies in the world are just going to stay exactly where they were or evolve. There's no accident.

Starting point is 00:51:18 And most people don't, most companies don't evolve. You really have to work at it. It's a constant build. You're dealing with slivers of space and time to make that happen. I'm glad you added that. I'm taking a number of notes for myself.

Starting point is 00:51:32 So that's why I'm scribbling furiously over here. I would cancel all internal meetings for you, by the way. To see you, I would take my internal meetings off. I would just, on a moment's notice, I would go fly and see you. You know, that would be like, that's a sign of true respect. Oh, thank you for saying that. And I look forward to the next time we're able to spend some time in person. And I'm very much enjoying this entire conversation. I've been looking forward to this.

Starting point is 00:51:57 And bonuses, you mentioned bonuses. And I think this will tie a number of threads together, some of which are yet to come. We're skipping ahead a bit, but you ran investment banking in the Americas for UBS and had something like 1,500 people reporting to you. When people came to you or bankers came to you to talk to you about annual bonuses, as I understand it from the Hollywood Reporter piece, you would ask, what is your edge? And I would love to hear you just elaborate on the function of that question and what you mean by that. It goes back to how you're judged. Ideally, you're judging yourself every single day. Everyone's making their own adjustments every single day.

Starting point is 00:52:37 And then you have external factors which remind you how you're doing every single day. And there's a lot of haphazard activity and not everything's logic based on logic and reason. But if you're running a business, you have a daily profit and loss statement, which tells you how you're doing. If you own a restaurant, tells you what you're doing. If you run an investment fund, tells what you're doing.

Starting point is 00:53:02 All those things contribute to your own humility and self-correctedness right if you're paying somebody a bonus or a compensation at the end of the year you are the one that's creating that self-awareness in that person. I've never seen anybody come into a conversation around compensation and feel as an employee that their boss has synced up exactly with what they think that they're worth. I've never seen it. So within that is a chasm of a misunderstanding or emotion of what you think you're worth versus what they think you're worth on a given year. And so that's normal life, right? Ideally, you'd like to have some daily metric that just defines that, like that daily P&L. So at the end of the year, there's no one big event. So what I was trying to do is to try to build in as much of that

Starting point is 00:54:11 narrowing of that chasm as possible before the conversation. You could say it's a negotiating strategy, or you could call it like a real effort to just build awareness, saying like, the best way to do that is to ask someone to define who they are. And you'd be surprised when you ask them to talk about themselves, how passive they will be and how little they will value themselves on the right way and how much they will over by themselves in the wrong way. And so I feel like, you know, people always say, what is your superpower? Maybe those things are thrown around too often these days.

Starting point is 00:54:51 What's your competitive advantage? What's your edge? And in a certain defined role, like the role of finance or the role of banking, I said the edge really comes into play of, you of, do you have a unique idea? Do you bring unique capital? Or do you have a unique relationship? But I wouldn't give them the answer. I was trying to figure out if they could get to it.

Starting point is 00:55:14 If someone says, I work harder than everybody else, I mean, okay. Imagine telling an NFL player or NBA player, I work harder. Is that really an edge these days? I mean, one of these things you hear, like, I'm doing the best I can. I'm like, okay, well, then you get out of bed. And then what happens?

Starting point is 00:55:33 Like, I'm assuming everyone's doing the best they can. But everyone, like, says, like, you know, life is too short. I'm like, well, life is the longest thing you know. You don't know anything longer than life. You know, so like, let's just live it to the fullest as much as you can, you know? But then do better than that. And when you ask someone to define their edge or their advantage, you'll learn a lot about themselves. So was this conversation then, it was preceding the official performance review slash decision on the bonus? This would be a precursor, sort had one this morning. You know, people want to get a sense of where they stand or how they're valued or what their opportunity is in the future. All those are code words for how am I going to get paid?

Starting point is 00:56:41 It's fine. It is what it is. Again, it'd be better for those things to happen on a day-to-day basis that define that instead of, why am I telling you how you're going to get paid? You tell me how you're going to get paid based on what your edge is, what your opportunity is.

Starting point is 00:56:57 And my job is to provide the platform for you to optimize that better than anywhere else. And your job is to optimize it here and have the free market to choose somewhere else. If you can't do that, or I can't do that. And embedded within all those solutions or scenarios is maybe some biases or some lack of self-awareness, or my mistakes is not building the right platform. We're not managing correctly, right? And so maybe as a manager, my job is really to throw the penalty flags around versus manage and tell you exactly what you're worth

Starting point is 00:57:30 before I have to. One's entrepreneurial and one's needing to be secure. Where does that security come from? Self inside or outside? You know, like when you're a parent to a child, you have to provide that security, but at some point they have to then get unlocked. So I just think it's about,

Starting point is 00:57:52 not everyone has to be entrepreneurial all the way, but there are certain responsibilities that I have to build a business for people to thrive and make sure it's that kind of environment, mission-driven and opportunistic and a meritocracy around that. of environment, mission-driven and opportunistic and a meritocracy around that, and certain responsibilities that people have within it to then take it competitively better than the best they can. And the risk I take is that they

Starting point is 00:58:17 could do it somewhere else better than here. But I own that risk every single day. What risk do they own? the largest deals the world has ever seen, certainly in media. And people might be listening and thinking, my God, this guy doesn't sleep. He has endless energy. It's just a home run every time he steps up to the plate, which may in part be true. But could you please, and I'm going to get the name wrong. I don't know how to pronounce this properly, but could you please tell the deck of cards story with Joe Ianiello? Is that how you say that name correctly? Ianiello. Ah, I knew I wasn't going to get that right.

Starting point is 00:59:13 All right. In fact, you got my name right and not Joe's. It's a real sign of growth in the industry. I appreciate it. Obviously, what appears to be a home run every time is not. I mean, every day is full of happiness and successes and frustrations and consternations and irritations about what we can be doing better, what I can be doing better, frankly, all the time. And I do try to, I'm as much an introvert as I am an extrovert, by the way. I think the biggest misnomer is like, I'm always out and about.

Starting point is 00:59:46 I get a lot of energy from being out and about, partially because of other people's energy, not just my own. But I also really enjoy some thinking time with music and some reading time and kind of a chance to re-energize and go deeper than just bouncing around. You just don't Instagram out the periods where you're sitting alone. The people only see the things that you're like,

Starting point is 01:00:11 where you're bouncing around. They don't see the moments where you're just happily sitting alone, reading a book or listening, unless you're really not focusing on it. The appearances are a bit misleading, but it's the texture of all of the above. And some of that thoughtfulness

Starting point is 01:00:24 is where you really come into strategizing around what the future can be for you, for your loved ones, and also for the deal making in the future. But in that particular story, it all goes back to this element of what you know, what you don't know. We were doing a deal, I think in 2007, for a company called the Sundance Channel, which was owned by NBC, CBS, and Robert Redford. We were selling the company on behalf of the owners. I was at UBS. We really did a good job, I have to say. We did a good job selling the company.

Starting point is 01:01:00 It was not an easy sale. Eventually, the Dolans bought it actually. The company that owned IFC, Cablevision, the next bought the Sundance channel for $500 million. And I thought we did a good job. And I remember in those days, in some cases also today, when the job is done, then you start to think about,

Starting point is 01:01:22 well, how much am I gonna get paid for the services? Not sometimes you get that figured out at the beginning. In this case, figured out at the end. We were thinking that would work to our benefit because it was such a home run deal. I thought we did such a good job that they would want to pay us more. Whereas if we agreed at the beginning, we probably would have undersold ourselves. And Robert Redford did really well in that deal. I think he probably made more money in that deal than all of his acting years combined. But it was a pleasure to work with.

Starting point is 01:01:52 But CBS's CFO, or even I think it was the treasurer at the time, was Joe Ionello. He rose to the ranks of even being the CEO for a while after that. And Joe was a tough negotiator. But we were on the same side of the table. So afterwards I was told by my, my bosses at UBS, like, okay, Ari, great job with the deal. Now go get us a good fee. I said, okay, I have to do that too. Like, all right. Yeah, that's, that's what it takes. And I said, okay. So I went over to Joe was appointed as a person that um had to uh negotiate our fee

Starting point is 01:02:26 and i i thought it'd be like one of these great kumbaya conversations we all did a great job together and let's let's have drinks and get this settled quickly but no so i went over to uh like a black rock you know the cbs building and it was a long conference room and it was just joe and myself sitting in the middle and joe said hey um you're here to uh negotiate your fee right i said yeah but you know you project some confidence but you're really nervous inside and he said you know just to break the ice a little bit before we get into that negotiation. Do you want to play some cards? Do you want to do a card trick? I'm getting into cards recently. Sounds great.

Starting point is 01:03:09 Like friends now too. This is great. So he said, let's, in fact, you know what? More than just a card trick. Why don't we just shortcut the whole thing since you're busy, I'm busy. And why don't you just pick out of the deck any card and whatever card you pick will be your fee. And we'll just do it by chance. I said, really? Like,

Starting point is 01:03:31 we'll do that. Like, just to clarify, like a face card, like a Jack, Queen and King, that's like, that'd be like $10 million. He said, yeah, that's right. It's only coming from five and a million. Whatever you pick, that'll be your fee. I said, okay. So I reached in, pull the card out. It's a three. And he saw my face. I was very disappointed.

Starting point is 01:03:54 He said, you seem dejected. Would you like to do it again? I said, well, yeah. Can I do it again? And he said, yeah, let's do like best out of three. So I said, great. Like so nice, gracious. Do it again. And I pick out a three again.

Starting point is 01:04:08 And I'm thinking, that's terrible. Now, I don't remember exactly what I was expecting to get, but definitely more than a three and definitely relative to the face cards or anything else, I was thinking this was towards the bottom of the deck, right? So you go, you seem like you're in a bit of a stuck place. Maybe you want to call the home office back at UBS and find out what they have to say. I go, yeah, I have to do that. I can't just walk back with that. He goes, yeah, you could use the phone in the conference room here. It's just right in the corner.

Starting point is 01:04:34 So I went to the phone, picked up the handset, and there was a card on the handset. And it was face down. I picked it up, and I turned it over, and it was a three. At that point, I didn't realize what was happening. I put the phone down. You're negotiating with David Blaine. I said, are you telling me, Joe, that our fee is $3 million? He goes, that's what I'm telling you.

Starting point is 01:04:56 He had the whole thing wired. I so respected it. That's what we got. That's what we got. That's what we took. So negotiating is one of your sports in the sort of decathlon of deal-making. It is the craft, one of the crafts you've mastered. This is going to seem like a lazy question, but I'm going to ask because it'll be on the mind

Starting point is 01:05:24 of a lot of people listening. For someone who wanted to become a skilled negotiator, would you have any recommendations in terms of resources, approaches, common beliefs that are actually very unhelpful, anything at all for somebody who wants to develop their ability to negotiate well? Yeah. And it's probably the opposite of what people believe or instinctively would do, which is usually the answer, by the way. So I would say like 90% of the time, everyone focuses on what is important to them and what we or what you say. It's irrelevant. All that matters is how it lands to the other person. It's in life.

Starting point is 01:06:12 In order to understand how something will land to the other person, you have to put yourself, you have to meet them where they are. You have to put yourself in their shoes. Once you put yourself in someone else's shoes, then you don't have to do what they say in the negotiation, but you have to at least start with that understanding and then go back to what's most important to you from there. And then you have a fair understanding of what that negotiation is going to look like. But if you just start throwing your words against the wall, it's never going to end

Starting point is 01:06:46 well. And you're going to be very frustrated and it'll be temper tantrums and so on. I kind of make it the best analogy I can think of is when you're in a huddle about to throw a pass in a football game and you have figured out you're going to throw a post pattern in the huddle and you've thought about it in that huddle. If you say hi, play goes, and you throw the post-pattern play, but you haven't looked at actually what happened in the field and the receiver had to go in a different direction, you need to meet that receiver where they are. Your post-pattern play is irrelevant.

Starting point is 01:07:22 It's only relevant to your formation at the beginning, but it's not relevant to actually where the ball is going to go in the end. Because what happened on the field is much more important. You have to do the preparation work and have to have a sense of what you think is proper and right from your perspective. But you also have to understand what will be the scenarios that will be important to them. And then the middle ground approach is too often used. It's not that. It's just starting from understanding both vantage points. It's the

Starting point is 01:07:51 same kind of skill set of saying, before I put a buy on something, I have to also reject the sell. You know, you have to be comfortable in an unknown position before you can adequately argue for what's important to you. And then in a trusted relationship, which is the only way to negotiate, with a trusted relationship, you're going to get down to things that are really important and things that are not really that important. And to be able to be comfortable saying that,

Starting point is 01:08:17 like, okay, if I listed these three things, please rank in order for me what's most important to you and what you really don't need. That would give me a little bit more room to come back to something that I think we could work with. That shows that you'll be able to give up something to get something, which is obviously hallmarked in a transaction. Now, that's a good negotiation. There are tactics above that. So sometimes in order to get to somewhere that you need, you may ask for things that you don't really want just to settle back in to something that is a discount to that.

Starting point is 01:08:55 You only would do that if you feel like the other person is doing the same thing. So it all goes back to trust. And that trust is not about one person trusting another. It's at different phases of the negotiation that trust picks up. So at the beginning of a negotiation, it may be less trustworthy than at the end when things are really coming to the finish line, when you can see the light of day, that thing starts to pick up towards the trust. You have to see kind of when you can play those different tactics.

Starting point is 01:09:24 But at the end of the day, it's kind of seeing people where they are. I think it's really important without giving up what you really need. Let's explore that a bit. So seeing people where they are, you gave the football metaphor. Could you describe an actual deal situation or process? it could be real, it could be anonymized, it could be hypothetical, but just to walk us through a concrete case study of what that looks like, knowing the other side, since you led with that in your answer, could you perhaps just walk us through an example? Yeah, I will actually. I think all the deals that we work on that are public company deals end up being filed publicly with the play-by-play of the deal. No one likes to read legal documents, but the fun part of the legal document is the play-by-play

Starting point is 01:10:21 of the deal if people are interested in the step-by-step of how a deal works. Because while we're doing the deal, we're very aware of the fact that it will be filed publicly. So it's not like you're pulling fast ones because it's going to be disclosed how you're doing what you're doing. So you have to be truthful.

Starting point is 01:10:42 There's no concept of like lying in a deal because it will all be uncovered later if you want to be in the business the next day. So that's called a proxy statement. And that one section is written up by lawyers that actually recount the deal. Did not know that. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:01 So what I'm going to say is public information. When we did the transaction of selling MGM Studios to Amazon, which is the only example of a content company being sold to a technology company to date, there was an impasse between the buyer and the seller that went on for a while. The deal ended up being worth about $8.5 billion. But for months, Amazon would not go above $8 billion. And MGM and the owners of MGM said we were not selling below $9 billion hell of a high water.

Starting point is 01:11:40 And so we were at an $8 to $9 billion bid ask for months. To the point where the deal could have gone away. You know, one hand you're close, on the other hand, nothing's happening. So finally, the chairman of MGM, who was a really dear friend, you know, calls me and says, I'm ready to like, what do you think? I'm ready to unlock this gap. And I knew Amazon very well enough to know that they were thinking, because this gap was going on for so long, that the owner of MGM and the chairman, in their mind, they were thinking, didn't really want to sell. So they were thinking that $9 billion was just basically saying, I don't really want to sell. But I knew that was not to be the case. So the owner and chairman of MGM said to me, I give you my proxy to go in there and break the logic.

Starting point is 01:12:34 And so I did. And when I went to call the Amazon executives, I said, okay, we're ready to negotiate now. They said, well, there's nothing to negotiate. They're at $9 billion and we're at $8 billion and we're not moving. I said, okay. And they're not even really selling the company. I said, well, what if I told you that they were selling the company?

Starting point is 01:12:52 He said, well, how would I know? I said, well, I'll, in good faith, speak on behalf of the chairman and give you a new offer that will yield a bit under the condition that you get back to me with a counter offer like right away within 24 or 48 hours. So I get also the feedback back to the chairman that you're serious about dealing. Meaning that if I can speak for a principal, you have to speak also that you want to get something done, but I'm not going to move unless you're going to move and i need to know that you're going to move and that was trust because

Starting point is 01:13:29 they took a risk that i was telling them that i could represent the owners of ngm they said um okay what do you got i said i think we should split the difference and go right to it but it has to go fast and you have to get back to me right away. And they did. And if they didn't, and then in those 48 hours, there's a lot of emotion, but they did get back and it moved very, very fast from there. That's exactly what we're talking about. Yeah. Well, someday I look forward to reading your compendium of deal stories. I would, I would be the first in line to buy a copy of that. But before we get to the compendium of deal stories, probably a better title to be had,

Starting point is 01:14:13 you mentioned a while back reading time. And there are quite a few books recommended in your year-end letter. Are there any particular books that come to mind that have impacted your thinking recently in the last few years? Or any, let's just say, timeless books, perennial books that have impacted your thinking? Yeah, there are quite a few. I mean, I probably buy more books than I read. I wonder if that's the case for a lot of people, actually. I listen to more books than I read. I don't read complete books, but I do try to read as much as I can. I'd say the timeless books are

Starting point is 01:14:53 one book called Leadership and Self-Deception. It's really a book about self-awareness that we really hand out to the firm. And it's a book about really just kind of owning your own decisions. That's a timeless book. And the title was Leadership and Self-Deception? Yeah, Leadership and Self-Deception.

Starting point is 01:15:11 There are two timeless books. There's a book called Scale by Jeffrey West that is all about why some things last minutes. You know, humans could go on for 70, 80 years. You know, the queen lasts 96 years. The average public company goes for 10, 10 and a half years and dies. But cities seemingly

Starting point is 01:15:33 last forever. You can throw nuclear bombs in cities, unfortunately, but they still keep moving. Why do some things last some finite periods of time and some things last much longer? It's all about what you feed it and the ability to grow it, but ultimately it goes back to adaptability. If something has a rigid purpose and you break the purpose, it will die. Profits for a company will die.

Starting point is 01:15:58 A city, the people always reinvent itself. This summer, I think five governments fell this summer. You know, the UK, you had Italy, you had Israel, you had, you know, Sweden recently, right? And you had like, even like France that came dysfunctional. And I was like, oh my goodness, all these governments are falling. But that's okay. Because if the people are unhappy and the governments don't fall, that's rigid. That's a problem. Governments fall, it's a chance for reinvention. And just like New York City, where I'm sitting now, like had a chance to reinvent itself post-pandemic.

Starting point is 01:16:38 Or in Detroit, company town, when the industry falters in the auto industry, it had a chance to reinvent itself with creativity. Or Medellin, you know, Colombia used to be known as a rough drug trade town, right? Yeah, murder capital of the world during Escobar's rule, yeah. That was cool. Technology hub, artsy, right?

Starting point is 01:16:58 Cities reinvent themselves based on the adaptable forcing function of those people, right? I love that concept and it's very helpful for a company build dynamic. The third one is a book called Scarcity. I think we're moving from a period of abundance to scarcity. And so how you are not fearful of scarcity, how you can do more

Starting point is 01:17:18 with less. And we're getting into a period now where there's unfortunately a scarcity of food and water and energy resources, shortages because of macroeconomic dynamics, warfare in Ukraine and Russia. And I think inequality post-pandemic and how you deal with scarce resources, people paying their bills plus inflation, what you do out of those dynamics, it creates a lot of tension and fear and conflict, even military conflict. It's a different kind of read than abundance and we have everything we want.

Starting point is 01:17:54 But then the books I read now more recently are about people. I'm reading a book now called The Banker's Journey about Edmond Safra's journey, a banker from Brazil. Just came out. I'm reading a book by Chris Blackwell about the music industry and his forming in the music industry and founding Bob Marley and U2 and his journey. Things that are interesting personal stories. I read books all the time. Jan Wenner just came out with a book today I'm looking forward to buying.

Starting point is 01:18:27 The Rolling Stone editor and founder. He and his son Gus are friends. So his son more than his, and then Jan. But interesting life, stories, texture to read. So I like to read a lot. I probably read more than I consume other forms of media. So related to the books, any biographies that really stick out for you? And then second, if you read any fiction, which is not a judgment question, but if you read any fiction, if there are any fiction

Starting point is 01:18:53 books that have had a outsized impact on you in any way? Biographies, I mean, I like all the Neil Ferguson books. I read the House of Rothschilds, J.P. Morgan books. I read the House of Rothschilds, JP Morgan books. I actually read a Bill Cohen's book on the Lazard, The Last Tycoons. Really good book. Not only because of being in this business, but you do want to go back to the underpinnings of what is like relationship banking. I really think that's a really interesting profession beyond just finance. It's like, you know, how to build with people over a long period of time without size impact. That's, I think that's really, really interesting to me. And I hope other people in the firm and even your listenership. In fiction, I mean, like, I've always loved some of the mystery novels,

Starting point is 01:19:39 illegal thrillers. I've always liked the John Grisham books. I would say meaningful to me, like Anne Rand. Obviously, it's not fiction per se. John Steinbeck, The Pearl, at the recommendation of a friend of mine who's in the business, I reread the other day. Great book. And I love The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway. There's a particular line in there that I love

Starting point is 01:20:02 that he's talking about bankruptcy, saying that it happens gradually and then suddenly. So like, it's like things on the, sometimes things on the way up happen very slow and methodical, but on the way down, things happen gradually and then suddenly, like there's not a symmetric relationship between things that happen on the way up and things that happen on the way down. And then another book I would say is David Brooks' Second Mountain. It's a really interesting book.

Starting point is 01:20:31 It is a book about, I view it as a book about personal development, careers, people in our age of life. You know, you kind of start your career coming out of school and thinking about what you want to do one step in front of the other. And then you get to a certain point, like at our stage of life, and then you say, well, that's where I started from to where I am, has nothing really to do with where I want

Starting point is 01:20:56 to end up, top of the second mountain. And once you start thinking about that, you end up in the valley of thought until you figure out where that second mountain is. And when you start climbing the second mountain, you don't even have to get to the destination. It's just a joyful climb. And it's a happy climb. You're doing every single thing you want to do with every breath you have. I love that whole concept, finding that second mountain. There's no such thing as a linear move from the day you come out of school all the way until you die. It's not linear.

Starting point is 01:21:27 You're going to hit a chasm, and it's cool until you find that second mountain to climb, personally, professionally, et cetera. It's all good. I'm going to buy that today. I also love John Steinbeck, and I've read pitifully little of his work, but Travels with Charlie, if anyone has not read that nonfiction account of him traveling across the United States with his dog, is absolutely laugh-out-loud hilarious and also very profound in its hilarious observations.

Starting point is 01:22:01 But David Brooks, I'm going to get that book today. So thank you for the recommendation. I must ask a question to scratch my own itch in terms of curiosity. And this is related to one of your more recent investments. You've invested in Malcolm Gladwell's audio production company, Pushkin Industries, per your 2021 year-end letter. And I'm a huge fan of Malcolm. He's been on the podcast. I'm a huge fan of Michael Lewis also, who's been involved with Pushkin and has also been on the podcast. The caliber and quality of what they produce is, I think, absolutely astonishing.

Starting point is 01:22:39 What do you think is next for the podcast market? If what would you, if you have any thoughts on where you think things are going, what trends are emerging or converging, what do you see coming over the next handful of years for the podcast market or industry? The audio market and the podcast market is strong and growing. Clearly, like everything in content, the quality has to rise to the top because a lot of people have jumped into it and has to also get curated in terms of guides. Remember at the beginning of YouTube, you were in the jungle. You had no idea how to navigate YouTube. Now, finally, if you want to go to sports, you know where to go. And if you want to go to history, if you want to go to brands, commerce, you kind of know where to go.

Starting point is 01:23:25 So I think there needs to be more curation around audio and podcasting in general, where you find different content and when and how you digest highlights versus the whole episodes, et cetera. But it is going to be more branded and more curated, I think, from here. Heavily monetized, but hopefully not over-monetized in ways that are uncomfortable. Like I'm not anticipating things that are full advertisements,

Starting point is 01:23:50 but sponsorship is going to be more interesting. Platform that will really get behind it are like, you know, obviously iHeart, Spotify, Amazon. But every platform that reaches a global audience needs differentiated content today. And video content alone has kind of had diminishing returns. Audio content and podcasting content, I think that's really well branded and curated

Starting point is 01:24:17 and quality like this one, I think the best is yet to come still. And it hasn't even scratched the surface globally. And so I think those are gonna be really interesting, but I think more curated, more guides, more branded content and monetized in different ways, I think will be pretty, pretty important. And then there's social features as well, like some more interactivity of being able to do events and tours, going around to talk to your audiences and having more of an interaction between the fans and the creators, I think is a big white space. And do you have any thoughts on how the

Starting point is 01:24:49 market will move or consolidate? Because I've watched all this with great interest, of course. And I've looked at certain transactions, say, relatively speaking, heavy spending, and I will just underscore something you said, which is I think it's still very early. If you look at the terrestrial radio total ad dollars compared to what has currently migrated, say, podcasts, it is still just the tip of the iceberg. And even when I launched this podcast in, I can't even recall when it was, 2014, 2016, I was told by folks, the ship has sailed. It's too late.

Starting point is 01:25:26 There are too many podcasts. I just don't think that's the case at all. I was told the same thing when we launched the bank in 2012, that it was too late to start a new independent bank and the ship has sailed. And I was like, well, maybe the door's shut behind us. You know, leave me the last one. Seems to be working out in both cases and if i pick one player for instance let's just say spotify spending very heavily with respect to just their

Starting point is 01:25:53 say market cap and moving into podcasts the joe rogan deal valued at at least 100 million probably quite a bit more with earnouts and everything else. My assumption has always been that once Spotify accounts for more than single-digit listenership or downloads or streams for the top, say, 100 podcasts, which will be reflective of broader trends, that that type of talent acquisition would drop quite significantly, just as one sort of hypothesis. But what do you think the movements will be among some of the larger players? Because you have Amazon, you have Spotify, you have iHeart, and podcasts are an existential imperative, perhaps, or viewed that way for some and not others. What do you think the landscape of the larger players will look like a few years from now?

Starting point is 01:26:52 It took some of the streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon and Apple a long time to get into sports, for example. And now they're all bidding for sports rights because they have to have sports as a differentiator. And once one gets in, they're all bidding for sports rights because they have to have sports as a differentiator and once one gets in they're all in so amazon's bidding for sports rights apple just did the mls deal they're all looking at sports deals netflix has formula one and drive for survive right in some ways so i think podcasting is the same thing now that it's

Starting point is 01:27:22 hitting the sweet spot of the curve from a revenue and profitability contribution for iHeart, and that was all over Spotify's investor day of like the podcasting growth driver, then you're going to see Amazon and all of them jump into it. And then you may see competition for talent between platforms. And then you may start to see some of the podcasting personalities and brands intersect with other genres. So imagine you're with Amazon and Amazon is doing the NFL

Starting point is 01:27:53 and they want your post-game show intersected with your podcast of the NFL. So they're going to start using you as a key brand for the platform overall beyond just the show. So I think it becomes assets of the NFL. So they're going to start using you as a key brand for the platform overall, beyond just the show. So I think it becomes assets of the platform that become very interesting and different packaging of the deals, I think will be fascinating. It all depends on the loyalty and engagement of your user base and your community and what the community is going to be driving that you may want to see. and obviously your ability to engage with them. I hadn't thought about the cross-asset utilization of podcast personalities,

Starting point is 01:28:29 but that makes all the sense in the world. And I have to imagine that's playing into negotiations right now for talent deals because they might say, well, what's the size of your advertising base? Will your sponsors transfer over to us if we acquire exclusive license or if we acquire you outright or whatever it might be? But in fact, the value of that property in terms of the personality may be much greater when it's viewed as being possibly applied to all these various things. I think this is pure speculation, not investment advice, obviously. But I think Twitch is going to prove to be increasingly valuable to Amazon. And I recall when the pandemic hit, I had an ongoing bet of sorts with a friend of mine that we would see some type of platform utilization for streaming sports if sports could not be attended in person. And I just think these off-label uses of these technology platforms and cross-asset utilization of personalities, I hadn't thought about that.

Starting point is 01:29:40 It makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, well, I mean, you and I met at Formula One. So imagine maybe that's your future where you're taking on a British accent doing the Formula One. I know you're friends with Lewis. And I think that there could be that in your future. But what do you want if you were going to migrate and take and evolve your audience into a different genre with you? What do you think that they would be into? That's a great question. I think I haven't really thought of it in this way. I would imagine, and this will seem very simplistic, but whatever I am interested in, I think my audience will

Starting point is 01:30:18 trust me to take a very close look at, or a meaningful percentage of my audience will trust me to look at, which is by design largely. I mean, that's why I did a book on physical and sports performance after the four-hour workweek rather than doing the three-hour workweek is I wanted to see early on since I had this open option to always extend the business book side of things. If my audience, much like say with a Michael Lewis, even though he's a far superior writer, or John McPhee or Malcolm Gladwell, would they follow me because of my approach and thinking not because of the subject matter? And I think by and large, that has held since then. So it'd be a matter of me determining what I am legitimately interested in. Because without that legitimate interest,

Starting point is 01:31:05 I won't have the endurance. I won't have the necessary emotional investment and endurance to make it count in any meaningful way, if that makes sense. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that your whole community is built on trust. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:31:20 And you also have a curiosity to you as well, but based on certain foundations that people sort of view you as dependable, right? They're not, they don't think you're going to veer them off to an extreme position, but you're inquisitive about where the world's going. And my view is that you're ultimately interested in an impact around that, but not in an establishment sort of way. There's a sort of insurgency around it, right? I think we're very similar. Yeah, I do too.

Starting point is 01:31:52 So I was just thinking about this trust and how it's the asymmetrical rise, decline, the precipitous drop, how it takes 20 years to build a reputation and 20 minutes to destroy it if you make the wrong choices. And so I say no. The vetting process for, say, sponsors and guests and so on is very, very, I don't want to say strict. It's not quite the right word. But I always try to ensure that I'm following my own rules and not getting swept away by the winds of trend or more specifically fads. And this may seem like a non sequitur.

Starting point is 01:32:31 This will be probably one of the last questions. So hopefully we can do a round two sometimes because I have a lot of questions that I would still love to explore. But this may seem like an odd segue, but maybe it makes sense in some way. So you were known as a goalkeeper at UBS, protecting the balance sheet. You saved them hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm reading here a snippet from the piece in The Hollywood Reporter. So your job was to analyze potential deals and advise the bankers on whether they made sense. In that role, he rejected

Starting point is 01:32:59 40 out of 45 potential deals, which is my words now, didn't make everybody super thrilled. However, when all 40 companies later went bankrupt, they realized that the higher ups, that you'd saved hundreds of millions of dollars. What were you doing there? You seem to have a certain, I don't want to say prescience, but an ability to see where the puck was going with respect to the 40 that were rejected. How did you do that? Why did you do that? Well, first of all, I was a goalkeeper in high school. Even as well as a short person,

Starting point is 01:33:37 I was able to play goalie in soccer. I think that it all comes down to understanding there'll be many more shots on goal than exist today. So don't be afraid to say no to something today with a fear that nothing's going to come tomorrow. So like the sample set that you're dealing with today is not the whole thing and play the long game. And so I felt that a lot of the companies that we were

Starting point is 01:34:08 looking at at that time were coming to us because of sort of negative selection, that we were getting pitched by companies that weren't necessarily the highest quality. But just because we had capital doesn't mean that we should do it. And so I wanted to play quality. I wanted to only do business with the best companies. And if we didn't have the structure in place to attract those best companies today, that's our issue to deal with. But the worst thing you can do to compound that is make bad decisions on top of, you know, fixing your own structural issues.

Starting point is 01:34:44 And that governs everything. Even today, like when you're building the company of, you know, fixing your own structural issues. And that governs everything even today. Like when you're building the company, when you're working with the outside world, the internal world, you're making sure that you're making the right decisions with a quality standard for excellence at all times, and that you're not accepting mediocrity, especially if those things have a lot to do with your own fixes that you have to make. You know, so like we spend a lot of time doing infrastructure work internally and then playing for excellence.

Starting point is 01:35:15 But if you're going to do one thing, I prefer inactivity than mediocrity. I want to make sure that we play for excellence and quality all the time, all the way through the company and all the way through the ripple effects we have externally, and do fewer things with quality than scale things. Obviously, ultimately, you prefer to do a lot of quality things, but that takes a lot of structure. That's what I call scaled intimacy. If you can scale the concept of intimate relationships and intimate deal-making,

Starting point is 01:35:46 that's the panacea. But otherwise, I prefer to do just a few high-quality things and then take it easy for a while. But I think that's the standard. Don't settle ever. But I do have to tell you one story, though, because you did give me some really interesting prep work. Yes, please. Your prep work had questions on it about certain things that like what's one of the things that you purchased for less than a hundred dollars that made a big impact and i would have said a book you know so we've talked about some of these books but you also said anything particularly interesting you've ever had to eat or drink in your life i thought about for a few minutes and

Starting point is 01:36:20 yeah i travel the world in interesting places And you try to integrate business and life and enjoy what you're doing and appreciate the finer things where you can. And there is a drink that is served at the Hemingway Bar, the Ritz Hotel in Paris, that is called the Mach 2, M-A-C-H 2. And it's a really, I've never had it anywhere else. It's a whiskey-based drink with a chartreuse sense of the essence of ginger and some ice. It's really, really good. But the funny thing about it is, as I was thinking about it yesterday, and thinking I was going to be talking to you on the podcast, I last night went to an event in New York for the Ritz in Paris and frame,

Starting point is 01:37:08 you know, as part of the fashion week, I was invited to because some friends were putting it on. And unexpectedly, that bartender from the Hemingway bar in Paris at the Ritz was at the event. And I said, it's unbelievable. I'm going on the Tim Ferriss podcast and he's going to ask me about a drink and only you serve this drink in the whole world. And here you are in New York, leaving your perch at the anyway bar. Could you indulge me with this Mach II drink? And he did yesterday. And so like it all came together this is how like there's certain karma to my calendar and uh and this podcast everything else so and your questions i want to make sure that we talked about it wow that is incredible what synchronicity and now i

Starting point is 01:37:58 have to try that now i have to try the mock too i look forward to that i've only been to paris once really in any meaningful way so i need get back. Side note, because this took place in Paris for me, I did a lot of writing. I've done almost all of my writing for my first three books during those witching hours. So the before the morning and after the usual night, almost all my writing was done in that, I would say, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. period, almost all of my writing. Why is that? Is that when there are fewer distractions or you're clear-headed? Yeah, no distractions. No distractions, more energy. I tend to be like a hamster. I just have a second wind that, for whatever reason, for my entire life, has started very very late and freedom from distractions silence less compulsivity to

Starting point is 01:38:49 interact or text or check anything because i know the rest of the world is asleep or i shouldn't say the rest of the world but the rest of my network is largely asleep and it's just always been that twilight that creative twilight through which you can perhaps pull on threads that are normally harder to access. I think for me, that's been my experience. Well, Aria, I could keep going for hours. I've got plenty, so maybe another time. But is there anything you would like to add, any recommendations or requests of the audience, things you'd like to point their attention to, of course, people can find liontree at liontree.com. We'll link to all of the Instagram handles and social handles in the show notes so people will be able to access those. But are there

Starting point is 01:39:39 any closing comments or requests you would like to make before we wind to a close? It's been a great pleasure. Tim, I could also talk to you for hours. And I was looking forward to this for a long time. You know, as we go through different periods of time in our lives and the world at large, and we've all been through different unexpected movements and motions and things. And that's one concept that is going to be more unexpected things to come. It's all about these trusted friends and communities that we can build, which is the distinguishing feature of humans,

Starting point is 01:40:14 right? That we can bond together for good things and then tackle the world. And if we eliminate all the extremism, then everyone can redefine their view of what their centers look like. And then that's where the richness lies. And whether you find it in the magic hours and the wee hours of the night or the middle of the day, I think we can form these circles and then really bond together. And I think the best is yet to come. And I really appreciate this relationship and what we can do together. And I really appreciate the attention of all of your audience. And the one thing about media that is defined is it's the distribution of content over a technology. And when you think of it that way, the technology

Starting point is 01:40:51 used to be books, newspapers. Now it's podcasting. It's going to be different things in the future, but the best content distributed is something that applies to everything in life that people consume and digest, whether it's music or words of wisdom or politics and the responsibilities on all of us to make the best impact out of it all. And I really appreciate what this and media can do for our lives. So best is yet to come. Perfect place to close. So Ari, thank you so much for all your time and for your wisdom and for your

Starting point is 01:41:25 stories. I have copious notes of my own, so I'll be following up on a lot after this conversation personally. And really love what you're doing. And the more I read and learn of you directly or indirectly, the more questions I have. So I look forward to future conversations. And for everybody listening, we will have links to all resources, names, books, everything related to REA and Liontree in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, please be safe, be just a little bit kinder than necessary, and find your center. for 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

Starting point is 01:42:35 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, 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 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.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 Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's

Starting point is 01:43:20 why I use the Theragun. I use it at night. I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level. Helps with performance, helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing. And the all new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary

Starting point is 01:44:02 brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet. It's easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing. You really have to feel the Theragun's signature power, amplitude, and effectiveness to believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun. That's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun with an OLED screen. That's O-L-E-D for those wondering. That's organic light emitting diode screen, personalized Theragun app, an incredible combination of quiet and power. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime,

Starting point is 01:44:43 and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So try Theragun for 30 days starting at only $199. Go to therabody.com slash Tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more time. That's therabody.com slash Tim th T-H-E-R-A-B-O-D-Y.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Hey. I was introduced to Hey, that's H-E-Y, by my friend Kevin Rose, who calls it, quote, a beautiful rethinking of everything wrong with email, end quote. Hey is a premium email service for people who are tired of having an inbox overflowing

Starting point is 01:45:22 with things they don't care about and who value their privacy and online security. You're probably familiar with the names behind Hey, Jason Fried and David DHH, Hannah Meyer Hansen, creators of Basecamp. Both Jason and David have been on this podcast, and they're two of the most innovative and contrarian entrepreneurs I've met. So back to the story of Hey. For almost two decades, email, as you know, has remained unchanged, soulless, chaotic, and borderline abusive. Your inbox is packed with all sorts of emails from people that you don't care about, full of intrusive trackers, and all framed by a multitude of ads that watch your every move. If you think about it, you have an email account, but you really have no control over it. That is where Hay comes in.

Starting point is 01:46:01 So try the Hay way. What does that mean? Your inbox should be for important stuff. That's why Hay made the inbox, I-M-B-O-X, where Hay comes in. So try the Hay way. What does that mean? Your inbox should be for important stuff. That's why Hay made the inbox, I-M-B-O-X, where important things go. Normally, anyone can email you and land right at the top of your inbox, whether it's a message from a trusted friend or from a total stranger, a rando. It makes no difference. Your inbox is fair game to anyone.

Starting point is 01:46:21 Not anymore. With Hay, emails never land in your inbox by default. You get to screen senders the first time they email you and decide if you want to hear from them or not. They offer a 14-day free trial if you want to get a taste of Hay. A full year subscription to Hay is just $99. Plus, the Tim Ferriss Show listeners, that's you guys, get an exclusive discount that has never been offered anywhere before. Get $20 off of your first year subscription when you sign up at hey.com slash Tim. That's hey.com, H-E-Y.com slash T-I-M to take back control of your email.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #629: Aryeh Bourkoff — Media's Hottest Dealmaker on How to Negotiate, Rejecting Constraints, Mastering the Calendar to Create More Time, and How to Play the Long Game

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.