The Tim Ferriss Show - #727: In Case You Missed It: February 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers, and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers,

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Starting point is 00:01:35 So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Optimal minimum. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a question? and thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Tim Ferriss Show. which serves as a recap of the episodes from the last month. It features a short clip from each conversation in one place, so you can jump around, get a feel for both the episode and the guest, and then you can always dig deeper by going to one of those episodes. View this episode as a

Starting point is 00:02:35 buffet to whet your appetite. It's a lot of fun. We had fun putting it together. And for the full list of the guests featured today, see the episode's description probably right below wherever you press play in your podcast app. Or as usual, you can head to tim.blog.com and find all the details there. Please enjoy. First up, Cal Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the New York Times bestselling author of Deep Work. His new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Could you give some examples, old and new, of people who in in your mind, exemplify slow productivity? I was motivated by slow food as an example, where they look back to traditional cuisines where cultures had evolved over generation and generation.

Starting point is 00:03:34 Like, what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy? And the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So people who did things with their brain, but not the normal 1950s and onward, I'm in an office or working at a computer screen. So like artists and philosophers, scientists, the original knowledge workers, they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said, great, we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work because they had freedom and flexibility so we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the sort of modern life. So a lot of my examples are these traditional

Starting point is 00:04:13 knowledge workers. So one of the early examples is Isaac Newton. And I said, okay, we all know he wrote this great masterwork, the Principia. Calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity, to give celestial order to the way that the cosmos works. He wrote that thing over decades, decades. He would go and do other things and come back. It wasn't this frantic push until it's done, but no one remembers how long he spent working on that. They're just like, yeah, that thing changed the way we understand the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play, In the Heights, the same way. I do his whole story.

Starting point is 00:04:51 It's a seven-year odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play, which wasn't very good, to when it first goes on to a professional stage, his pre-Broadway debut. That's a seven-year period, and he's working on it, then he's not. Then he's working on it again, and he's not. We don't know about that now. We're just like, oh yeah, his first play won a lot of Grammys, and he did Hamilton. He's a really good playwright. If you read Wikipedia, you're like, oh, that was fast.

Starting point is 00:05:17 Yeah, you don't realize- The synopsis in one sentence. His dad told him, when he left, when he graduated from college, his dad was like, you really should go to law school. He took a job as a substitute teacher. He was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap troupe called Love Supreme that would travel around doing freestyle rap shows. in the almost decade that Lin-Manuel Miranda was working on in the Heights. You'd be like, man, you're so lazy. You're not even working on your thing. What's going on? Why aren't you getting after it? Why aren't you crushing it?

Starting point is 00:05:50 Because things take longer. I use Georgia O'Keeffe as an example of seasonality, that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began. So you know what? In the summers, I'm going with Alfred Stieglitz. We're going to Lake George. And I'm going to sit there in a shanty that she called it the shanty. It was an outbuilding near the lake.

Starting point is 00:06:10 I'm just going to paint and be inspired. And then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff. Most productive years of her life. By actually slowing down for a season every year, her productivity exploded. She became one of the most famous early modernists of that whole era of painting. So we see those examples. Well, Marie Curie at the pinnacle of about to discover in pitchblende, the substance she's studying, about to isolate radioactivity and win her first of two Nobel prizes, goes to France with her family on vacation for two months. In the moment, you're like, what are you doing? You got

Starting point is 00:06:43 to be getting after, you got to be crushing it. But we don't see that now. We're like, yeah, she was great. She won two Nobel prizes. Way to go. She wasn't part of the hustle culture. There was no hustle culture. That's the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people producing things of real value using their brain, they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard, but they didn't hustle. And they didn't work 10-hour days, day after day. They didn't work all out year round. They didn't push, push, push until this thing was done.

Starting point is 00:07:14 It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the same time, and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality. That's the slow productivity approach. It still produces stuff that you're really proud of, but it doesn't burn you out. And it doesn't leave you in this weird out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time. Next up, Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building, and former Chief Operating Officer of Stripe, where she scaled the company from roughly 160 to 6,000 plus employees.

Starting point is 00:07:56 I want to come back for a second to Fred Kaufman and Victim vs. player. Can you explain what this is? I love this one because I think it's so simplifying and clarifying really about, are you managing someone or interacting with someone who has agency, takes responsibility? Fred, when he introduces this framework, tells the story of how young children, and he's the, I think he has six or seven children, by the way, but how young children, and he's the, I think he has six or seven children, by the way, but how young children, when something has happened that they know is bad, will not take responsibility. So, they will say things like, the coat is at school. So, not I left my coat at school, right? A thing has happened. Things have happened. The toy is broken. You're like, well, did you break it? So, he has this really disarming way of introducing this concept, which is we're all laughing, just like you and I. We're like, well, did you break it? So he has this really disarming way of introducing

Starting point is 00:08:45 this concept, which is we're all laughing, just like you and I were like, haha, the toy is broken. But then he's like, okay, now let's talk about if one of your direct reports came to you and said, the report was not written. And you're like, the report that you were meant to write? But how it actually manifests is you're supposed to write some report up or some summary of a meeting. And you say, oh, tell me where that is. And the player says, completely my fault. I had planned to get it to you by five o'clock yesterday. I prioritized this emergency that came up. Didn't tell you. My bad. Can we renegotiate? Can I get it to you at five o'clock today? And you're like, fine. I wish you'd told me that you weren't going to get it. But the victim says, let me tell you about that report. Lucy owes me her notes and I can't finish

Starting point is 00:09:31 it without Lucy. And Lucy, you know, is super slow at getting her notes. And I'm sorry, I don't know when I'm going to get it. But that actually is pretty common. People are like, well, it's this other person that I'm depending on, and therefore I have no responsibility. And they're a victim, and they're going to play the victim. And I think that's a very hard person to coach. How much do you have to select that in your hiring process versus coach people from one side to the other? Have you had much success or seen much success in moving people from the victim side to the player side? And that's a bit of a leading

Starting point is 00:10:06 question by my tone, I guess. I suspect there are a lot of instances where that's hard. But in the success cases, what does that coaching process look like? I've seen both. I feel like with people who are earlier in their career, they're more, I'm all growth mindset, but they're a little more moldable and you can actually coach people out of this as like a way of operating. If they're later in their career, it's a little more ingrained and it's quite hard, especially because they tend to not be aware of it because they've somehow been successful operating in that mode. And so they're kind of like, what are you saying? You see leaders who, and you know how they behave, Tim, is they say, well, if it's not under my direct control, then I am not responsible. And so they become empire builders.

Starting point is 00:10:51 And some organizations let them get away with it. They're like, sure, you can have all the infrastructure teams then. It becomes this weird failing upward problem where people say, well, if I can control it, I'll take responsibility. If it's within my house, then I'll take responsibility. So people satisfy that checkbox by giving them more and more resources. What a nightmare. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:11:11 And it becomes this weird expanded scope of this person who actually doesn't take responsibility. It's a pattern I've seen. For people earlier in their career, the easiest coaching move you do, which I'm sure you've heard or someone's done it to you. I've certainly had it done to me. They're saying, Lucy didn't send me her notes. And you're saying, what could you have done differently? And you have to let uncomfortable silence then. And some people will then say, what do you mean? You're like, you're like, oh my gosh. But some people will say, well, I guess I could have helped Lucy write the notes. So what I try to do is stay in the discomfort, which is hard,

Starting point is 00:11:45 and just sort of like, let's list out a few things you could have done differently and not be judgmental, like not judge the things, just say what it was. So you could have helped Lucy write the notes. You could have set a deadline with her

Starting point is 00:11:56 that was ahead of your deadline. Right, put a deadline in a sauna where people can actually see it. You could use a productivity tool where you could see. I love those tools because that's sunshine. Sunshine is a great disinfectant, Tim. If everybody can see that Lucy has not done her action item, that is going to help Lucy be more accountable. But the point

Starting point is 00:12:15 is you come up with this list and the person often is like, wow, you're right. Really what they're going to have to admit to you is they're being a little lazy. They're not helping others do the work. They're not helping others do the work. They're not a good collaborator. And that's what I sometimes do with someone who's like, you know, if this is a pattern, I say, you know, I see this pattern. Do you see this pattern where you're waiting for other people all the time? Tell me more about why you think that's happening.

Starting point is 00:12:37 Why are people not delivering for you? And the question is like, either it's because they haven't figured out how to do action items or accountability or be clear about deadlines, or there's someone people don't like to work with. I always call it like going meta. Like you're looking from the balcony at the situation, which is a term from adaptive leadership. Are you on the balcony? Are you on the dance floor?

Starting point is 00:12:57 And if you're on the balcony, you try to get the person up there with you and say, why do you have this pattern of people not helping you get your work done? And then I think of it as going to the basement. I know this is, I'm a very visual person. So we look down and they sort of, if they acknowledge it, they say, yeah, I guess I see that. And I say, well, let's talk about a few examples. And we come up with some examples. Then we go down and we're in the scenario and I say, let's do the five whys. I mean, everyone loves the five whys. I'm like, why do you think Lucy didn't send you the notes? Well, she's not good at deadlines. Okay. And then this is a wonderful expression that I learned from some coach I had a million years ago. Be that as it may, which is not normal

Starting point is 00:13:35 English language, but I don't know, it worked. Sort of like, be that as it may. Okay, maybe Lucy's terrible at deadlines, but why else? Well, I didn't ask her to get it to me at a specific time. Okay. So maybe there's a thing. Why else? And you're sort of pushing them. And sometimes, not every time, they'll sort of say, well, I don't know, Lucy and I don't work that well together. Aha. And you're like, oh, say more about that. What do you think's going on? And of course, by the way, your left-hand column, Tim, is it's because Lucy doesn't like you because you blame her for all of your missed deadlines, right? But I can't say that because that person is going to go from learning to

Starting point is 00:14:16 barely in learning mode. I'm trying to bring them along with me and they're going to just shut down. And by the way, they may never admit that Lucy doesn't like them because they blame her for missed deadlines. But they're going to realize that their manager, who's me, is not letting them off the hook. If they can't get into an agency, a player mindset, I'm a responsible party for my work and others, then they are going to be off my team. If I can't coach them out of it, to your point, there's two gaps that I think are really hard. One is people who can't stop being victims. And the other gap, I call it self-awareness gap, where they think they are the best in the world. I once worked with this BD

Starting point is 00:14:54 person who was like, I can negotiate a deal better than anyone. And talk about not being in a learning mindset. I'm like, do you not think we should get any outside advice? I'm exaggerating a little bit, but really unaware that they had any potential blind spot or had never done a deal like this deal. And I'm like, how are we going to close this awareness gap? Because the people around you are saying you are not the best person to negotiate this deal. And I'm trying to hand it to someone else. And you're like, what? You have no one better than me. You know, and that's a very hard gap to close. Next up, William Ury, co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation, co-author of Getting to Yes and author of Getting Past No. His new book is Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict.

Starting point is 00:15:51 And then Camp David happened. The Egyptians and Israelis arrived at Camp David for this retreat. And after three days, they were just going at it hammer and tongs. They were just dug into their positions. Egypt demanded the entire Sinai back. Israel wanted to keep a third. Menachem Begin said, I'll pluck out my right eye and cut off my right hand rather than surrender a single settlement. They were just about to give up. And then Cy Vance remembered the memo in his briefcase.

Starting point is 00:16:21 And he said to Carter, he said, well, why don't we try out this idea for a one-text process? And they tried it out. And this is the way it went, was the Americans, instead of asking the Egyptians and the Israelis in the traditional way, you know, the mediator goes in and asks you to make a concession. No one wants to make a concession. No one wants to make the first concession because that'll signal weakness for sure. And, you know, Begad and Sadat said, well, I have to go back and consult. And it wasn't going to go anywhere. So the Americans said instead, with the one-tax process, they said, don't make any concessions. We understand what your positions are. Just tell us what your interests are. And they said, what do you mean?

Starting point is 00:16:57 It was, tell us what you really want. What are you really concerned about? I mean, you're trying to draw a line in the sand, but what's the underlying driver? What is it you're really afraid of? What are you concerned of? What do you really want? And the Egyptians talked about sovereignty. Sadat said, you know, this land has been ours since the time of the pharaohs, and we want it back. And the Israelis talked about security. You know, they said Egyptians had attacked them four times in the previous 30 years across the Sinai. They didn't want that happening again.

Starting point is 00:17:30 So then the question became not where do we draw a line in the sand, but how do we get Egyptian sovereignty and Israeli security? And the Americans went back and drafted up what's called, we call it a one-text. It's a non-paper paper. It's very low status. You've got coffee stains on it or whatever it is. But it was an idea to do both, to try and reconcile both interests, to meet the interests of both. And it was based on an idea, actually, the Egyptians had surfaced, which was a demilitarized Sinai, a Sinai where Egypt gets the entire Sinai back. The flag can fly everywhere, but it's demilitarized, so Israel gets security. And in this context, demilitarized means there cannot be presence of military forces? That's it. Egyptian tanks can go nowhere. And basically, Americans,

Starting point is 00:18:10 the idea was to propose that the Americans would put technical means, you put a little multinational force in there, but you could tell if a goat crossed, but no armed forces there exactly. Got it. Wow. What a story. Yeah. I mean, the idea is, I mean, the one text, the way it works is very simple. It's kind of like what in Silicon Valley called rapid exactly. Got it. Wow. What a story. Yeah. I mean, the idea is, I mean, the one text, the way it works is very simple. It's kind of like what in Silicon Valley they call rapid prototyping nowadays. But essentially, the Americans took the idea and they said, we're not asking you to accept it. We don't want you to make any decisions. All we want you to do is criticize it. Well, no one likes to make a hard decision, but everybody loves to criticize.

Starting point is 00:18:45 So the Egyptians criticized it. The Israelis criticized it. The Americans went back and redrafted the proposal to try to address the concerns. And then they brought it back and did it again. And again, more criticism. The Americans went through that process 23 times. There were 23 drafts over the course of 13 days, even less because there was fewer days. And by the end of it, only at the very end of that process did Carter go to Sadat and

Starting point is 00:19:13 Begin, the two leaders, and say, this is the best we can do. We can't improve it anymore. We can't make it better for one without making it worse for the other. This is the best we can do, do you want it or not? And then Sadat and Begin were faced with a very different decision. Instead of having to make multiple painful concessions, they had to make only one decision, and only at the end of the process, when they could see exactly what they were going to get in return. And so Sadat could see he was going to get the entire Sinai back. Begin could see he was going to get a non-precedented peace with Egypt. And they both said yes. And that's what led to the Camp David Peace Treaty,

Starting point is 00:19:47 to a treaty that has lasted 40 years, has lasted actually more than that at this point, to 45 years, to this point, has lasted to this day, even in the midst of wars, assassination, coup d'etats. And it was the inventive idea of like applying our creativity, not just to the hardware of software of computers, but to the way in which we negotiate. There are better ways to negotiate, more effective. And that was a really powerful example for me. I mean, it's the software of humans, in a way. The software of humans. That's what we need. That's really what we need. Yeah. And to sort of debug. So you mentioned a few things I want to underscore. The first was the powerful looking behind positions for the underlying

Starting point is 00:20:29 interests. I suspect we'll come back to this for sure. But identifying the wants, desires, concerns, fears that are behind a request or sort of unrelenting position. And you also mentioned something, and you didn't say it in these words, but it seemed to imply what I'm about to mention, and that is writing the other side's victory speech in quotation marks. What are they going to use to explain to others why they agreed to X, whatever that is? Would you mind expanding on that? It doesn't need to be in the Camp David context. It could be in another context. But it strikes me that in both cases, these leaders need to go back and explain to their cabinets, to their populace, why they did X. And that type of consideration of external judgment,

Starting point is 00:21:25 I would imagine accounts for a lot of failures at the negotiating table. The victory speech is one of my favorite exercises because you're looking at an impossible situation. It could be with your boss, it could be with your roommate, or it could be an international conflict, but you're looking at something seemingly impossible. It's kind of like, you know, I like to climb mountains. You know, you're at the bottom of the mountain, you look at the top of the mountain, and it

Starting point is 00:21:52 seems impossible to get there. You can't get from here to there in your mind. But you might be able, if you use your imagination, put yourself on top of the mountain, get from there to here, and then you can figure out your way back. In other words, you can work backwards. And that's what is behind the victory speech, which is when you're facing a difficult conflict, start by writing out the other side's victory speech. Imagine you're asking your boss for something. It might be a situation. And you write out, what is it you imagine, just as a thought experiment, imagine your boss says yes to you.

Starting point is 00:22:28 They accept what you want them to do. They say, yeah. Now imagine your boss then has to go and justify that to someone else whom he cares about, maybe his board of directors, maybe his peers or her peers, and write out the victory speech. Just write out maybe three talking points. Like how could they present to the people

Starting point is 00:22:44 that they care about why they said yes to your proposal? It's got to be a victory for them. It can be a victory for you, obviously, because they're doing what you want them to do. But think about it and think about the hardest questions that they're going to get, the criticisms that they're going to receive, and then think about what are the best answers they can give. Go through that exercise and then see your job as a negotiator as helping them deliver that victory speech. And I can tell you about how I've used it, but that's the essence of it is to work backwards, think about what victory would look like, and then work forwards.

Starting point is 00:23:21 Last but not least, Soman Chanani, New York Times bestselling author of The School for Good and Evil book series and Beasts and Beauty, his collection of reimagined fairy tales. So I never did drugs growing up. I maybe did pot once or twice and found it slowed me down to the point of I never wanted to do it again. And just sort of walled that whole thing off as stuff that other people do. And then during COVID, I read The Body Keeps the Score. And I had struggled with some things for my entire life in terms of anxiety and just getting stuck in kind of ruts of feeling. And it was 2021, January, where I just remember talking about follow the flow. I stood up, went to my computer. I remember being in Miami at my parents' house, Googling ketamine treatment, New York City. I knew nothing about ketamine, like nothing.

Starting point is 00:24:23 How was it even in your field? I don't know. Just popped into the head. I don't know. I just remember going, ketamine there in New York City, calling up, scheduling the consultation, and a week later, I'm back in New York going to meet the doctor.

Starting point is 00:24:35 And I was like, I don't know if I'm right for this. I don't want anything that will mess with my creativity. I said, the only reason I'm entertaining this idea is because it's in a doctor's office. I said, I would never do drugs on my own because the fear surrounding that of what could happen and where it's procured from and all that stuff would end up infecting the whole experience. And with a doctor's office, you know, I'm entertaining it. I said, but I don't want it to affect my creativity.

Starting point is 00:25:03 I don't want it to. He's like, it's only going to make you more yourself and more creative but he goes these are the three things that i think make for a good candidate he's like number one have you felt emotionally numb for most of your life and at that point in my life absolutely i think i was in a just cycles of numbness number two was did you have a volatile childhood where emotions were not particularly welcome? And I was like, check. Check. Number three, because this one's the most important.

Starting point is 00:25:38 He's like, do you know how to have fun? And I said, no. And I cried. I remember crying in the office. He's like, do you know how to have fun? And I said, no. And I cried. I remember crying in the office. He's like, do you know how to have fun? And that was the first time anyone had asked the question in the right way. Because I knew the idea of fun. I knew that I should be having fun. I knew how to act like I was having fun, but I never felt like I was having fun. And he goes, you don't drink? I said, no. And he goes, and I meditate. I was in that point four or five years into meditation. He's like, you're going to have a very good response to this.

Starting point is 00:26:08 He just like, it's like, and so I started ketamine treatments at that time. I think you do six and 12 days and then you go back for a booster. In my case, it's every 10 weeks and I still go and it changed my life. I mean, it was like, I feel like a totally different person because what it did is it woke up parts of my brain that I didn't know existed because they'd shut off so early that I didn't know they were there. And then all of a sudden, I started to get glimpses of what I could be like. And then it became a question of, could I hold on to that?

Starting point is 00:26:38 And little by little, some people, I think, get their benefits much quicker. Or they don't get any benefits at all. I mean, it's so individual. In my case, it was almost like a practice. It was like every 10 weeks I'd go learn a million things, work on those things in between, go back. And it almost became like my version of like the deepest therapy. It's become a huge reason for everything. And I think it's also allowed me to follow the flow more than ever, because the whole thing of a ketamine treatment is it's a sedative, right? So it puts your brain in such a relaxed state that you have no choice but to follow the flow where it goes. And the

Starting point is 00:27:14 flow usually leads you closer to the truth. So I don't know. I think it's for someone who was so anti-drugs, it was the biggest thing I've changed my mind about. Yeah. And now here are the bios for all the guests. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages. He's also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His new book is

Starting point is 00:27:59 Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Cal is not active on social media. This is usually where I would say you can find him on these following social media profiles, but you can't find him. He is really not active outside of his YouTube channel, which is the at Cal Newport media channel and the podcast and everything else you can find at calnewport.com. In this conversation, we talk about slow productivity, human-paced productivity, the dangers of checklists and to-do lists and approaches that are similar. We talk about so many things that Cal puts into practice himself. He walks the walk. And part of what I find so impressive about him is how effectively he has put positive

Starting point is 00:28:45 constraints around his work and within his life so that he can do what he does best with the fewest distractions possible. My guest is Claire Hughes-Johnson. Claire currently serves as a corporate officer and advisor for Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. If you've bought just about anything online, chances are at some point or another, you have used Stripe or if you've sold something. Claire previously served as Stripe's chief operating officer, COO, from 2014 to 2021, helping grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to more than 6,000 employees.

Starting point is 00:29:27 At various times, she led business operations, sales, marketing, customer support, risk, real estate, and all of the people functions, including recruiting and HR. And if you think that sounds completely impossible and crazy, you are right. It does sound completely impossible. And she explains how she managed to spin so many plates at once at such a high level. Prior to Stripe, Claire spent 10 years at Google leading a number of business teams, including overseeing aspects of Gmail, Google Apps, and ultimately consumer operations. As well as serving as a vice president for AdWords online sales and operations, Google offers and Google's self-driving car project.

Starting point is 00:30:05 So she has a very diversified background and is highly, highly adaptable. Her book, which I recommend, is Scaling People, Tactics for Management and Company Building. We get into a lot of nitty-gritty details. You're not going to want to miss this one. So you can find Claire on Twitter at chughesjohnson, C-H-U-G-H-E-S Johnson. Today, we have William Ury as a guest. I am extremely excited about this guest. I have been familiar with William's work for decades. And when his name popped up as a possible guest, I had to hop right on it because I had many, many questions for him. So who is William? William Ury. You can find him on Twitter at WilliamUryGTY. You can also find him on LinkedIn and other socials.

Starting point is 00:30:58 He is co-founder of Harvard's Program on Negotiation. He is one of the world's best known and most influential experts on negotiation. He is co-author world's best known and most influential experts on negotiation. He is co-author of Getting to Yes, the all-time best-selling negotiation book in the world, the author of one of my favorite books on negotiation, Getting Past No, Negotiating in Difficult Situations, which, side note, I used to help build my first company. And he is author of the new book, Possible, How We Survive and Thrive in an Age of Conflict. He has served as a mediator in boardroom battles, labor conflicts, and civil wars around the world. An avid hiker, he lives in Colorado. There are some incredible stories in this podcast episode.

Starting point is 00:31:38 They will blow your mind. The role that Dennis Rodman has played in helping William to understand the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. There are stories about Hugo Chavez or Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, yelling in William's face and how that came about and what came of it. Lessons learned from Nelson Mandela in addition to Warren Buffett. And the stories just go on and on and on. So, Machinani, for those who don't know, who are you? I think of myself as a specialist in the teenage mind, and I access that by being an author of young adult fantasy, using everything I can about connecting to young people and lovers of fantasy through novels. So that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years.

Starting point is 00:32:30 And for people who might want to dig into that further, any works you might suggest they start with or check out, website, anything like that? I wrote a series called The School for Good and Evil for 10 years. So there's six books in the series and a Netflix made a movie out of it that came out last year. And then another book a little bit for older audiences called Be Some Beauty, which is going to be a TV show sometime soon. So those are kind of my two main things. off and that is five bullet friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that i send out every friday to share the coolest things i've

Starting point is 00:33:22 found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and

Starting point is 00:34:02 you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #727: In Case You Missed It: February 2024 Recap of "The Tim Ferriss Show"

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