#721: Master Negotiator William Ury — Proven Strategies and Amazing Stories from Warren Buffett, Nelson Mandela, Kim Jong Un, Hugo Chávez, and More

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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I'll see you through some question.
No it is.
cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal enter skeleton.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and gyms, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers from all different domains, whether that be sports,
Government.
Military chess.
Entertainment.
You name it. We really cover
The broadest spectrum possible today.
We have
William Ure as a guest. I am extremely excited about this guest.
I have been familiar with
Williams' 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 William Ury.
GTY, you can also find him on LinkedIn and other socials, 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 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 use 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. 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. But beyond the stories, there are strategies and tactics that you can use today. It is in
Incredibly, incredibly practical.
So I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. It was a thrill. Without further ado.
Please enjoy.
William.
Yuri.
William.
I'm so thrilled to be spending time with you today and having this conversation. So thank you for carving out the time.
Oh, it's a great pleasure, Tim. I've been looking forward to this.
I've read more than one of your books.
And in fact, use getting past no specifically to help build
my first company and have really used many of your frameworks and techniques.
So this is a real treat.
for me and I thought we might
Hit rewind though.
Going back in time before getting past no
Two
Getting to yes, but more specifically
Looking at
Roger Fisher.
And learning about Roger Fisher. How did the two of you
First connect.
We connected at Harvard. I was
Twenty two I was uh new
graduate student in social anthropology. I wanted to study anthropology because I wanted to understand human beings. I was curious. It was a license to be curious and to travel, learn about other cultures.
And figure out.
Why we're so strange in some ways.
But I wanted to apply anthropology to something practical. And I thought, what about the subject of war and peace? I mean, something you know you could really sink your teeth into.
Why is it that we're
Poised on the verge of
Self destruction as a species.
And so I had to write a research paper in anthropology about
what I might do field work on. And I thought why don't I do field work on a peace negotiation?
So I heard Roger Fisher was over at the law school and he was working on peace negotiations. So I went into see him and
And he was very generous with his time and then I
He said, Send me your paper and I sent him the paper. I didn't think of it.
twice and then January
Nineteen seventy seven.
Cold January night I was on the
Third floor of my
Attic room.
Creating my
students exams and studying for my own exams.
And the phone rings.
And it there's a voice that says.
This is Professor
Roger Fisher.
I just read your paper.
About taking an anthropological view of the Middle East peace negotiations, and I found it so interesting. I sent the central chart.
To the Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East because he's working on these things. I thought he might find it interesting.
Well,
I was floored. I was just like speechless. I didn't know what to say. And she said, and I'd like you to come work with me.
And so
That
Phone call, I can honestly say changed my life. That generous phone call, that generous invitation from Roger.
To come work with him on international peace negotiations and other negotiations.
Never did you get a call from a professor, let alone on a weekend night.
And never in my m wildest imagination would I've imagined that some idea that I'd cooked up in my little attic rental room on the third floor.
would be a possible use to a practitioner in
the world's most complicated negotiations. So I got hooked and that I've been on that journey ever since.
I can see that being quite the
Dopamine.
Reward rush.
Right. Of not only receiving the call, but having your work sent to the highest levels on the front lines is
really something out of the storybooks. At the time was Roger
Teaching the devising seminar.
Or was that a precursor to what he was doing at the time, or maybe it came afterwards?
The devising seminar was a he was just doing that, and that's what he asked me to work on to coordinate and facilitate this devising seminar, which was an amazing thing, which was
Every couple of weeks at the Harvard Faculty Club over dinner
bunch of faculty from different disciplines and
Visiting diplomats would be invited to what Roger called the devising center. Devise means to create, to be inventive, you know, to kind of craft something new.
And
He would pose a question that you would never ask in academia, which is
What can
I know the secretary of state or what can this president
due tomorrow morning.
What can they operationally do tomorrow morning?
That could
Help.
Take us forward on the Middle East or South Africa or the Cold War or Northern Ireland or whatever the issue was.
And
Instead of just
Sitting back and predicting.
Or analyzing.
This
Collective intelligence was being harnessed.
To try to focus in on
What practical step could someone do tomorrow morning?
What in Roger's
Background.
Dro be so motivated.
Two.

Conflicts or circumstances.
He just graduated from Harvard.
He'd gone into World War Two.
And
fought in the Pacific War and
When he came back, a lot of his friends were gone.
Didn't come back.
And
His father'd been a lawyer, he went in international law, he went to work at
Paris.
On the Marshall Plan.
But
His passion really was seeing if we could find
A better way.
To deal with our differences than dropping bombs and
Destroying everything.
And I have the same passion. Actually I'd spent some time growing up in Europe in my childhood and
I'd seen the ruins still.
In France and Germany and other places.
And you saw all the graveyards of World War One, World War Two and
And then there was every expectation that there might be a world war three, there was a nuclear bomb shelter in the school.
And it was like
We've got to have a a more creative way. And that's I think what led to the devising seminar and to Roger's work and
And that's how
He and I really

Come in passion.
Are there any particular
Maybe intervention is too strong a word, but
Conclusions or
Next actions.
that came of those devising seminars that stand out to you?
There were m several, but many. One was
About a year into my work.
Less than a year, probably.
Yeah, actually about a year into my work it was
The end of August nineteen seventy eight.
Roger
Called me into his office and said.
Guess what? I just came back from Martha's Vineyard and I happened to play a game of tennis with Cy Vance, who was the US Secretary of State.
And
He told me about there's this peace summit planned in September where
President Carter is bringing
the the leader of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, the president and the prime minister of Israel Manachem begging together for a peace summit.
And he asked me if I had any ideas.
And I brought him back to the cottage and I showed him this little booklet that Roger Fisher and I had worked on hard, which was called International Mediators, a Working Guide.
Which we joke there was about maybe six in the world, so I had a very small audience.
But there was an idea in it, which was a creative idea that came out of the Law of the Sea negotiations for a one text process, and he suggested it to Vance.
And Vance had asked him to write up a memo and so
We called the devising seminar. We got Louis Sewn, who'd worked on the law of the sea. We got all these professors, and then we wrote a memo and sent it to Sivance.
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 tongues. They were just dug into their positions. Egypt demanded the entire Sinai back.
Israel wanted to keep a third
Manachem Began 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
Sivance remembered the memo in his briefcase.
Yes.
And he said to Carter, he said, Well, why don't we try out this idea?
For a one text process.
And they 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, beg it and so that's it. Well, I have to go back and consult and it wasn't gonna go anywhere.
So the Americans said instead.
With the one text 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? Well, so tell us what you really want. What are you really concerned about? I mean it's 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. So that said, you know, that 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
Thirty years.
Cross the sign, they didn't want that happening again.
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.
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. It's 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 sign I wear
Egypt gets the entire Sana 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 the idea was to propose that you know 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. Mm-hmm.
Got it.
Wow.
What a story. 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 to accept it.
We don't want you to make any decisions.
All we want to do is criticize it.
Well, no one likes to make a hard decision, but everybody loves to criticize. 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.
Twenty-three times. There were twenty three drafts.
Over the course of thirteen 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 Bagan 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 Bagan 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 gonna get in return.
And so
Sadat could see he was gonna get the entire Sinai back. Bagan could see he was gonna get an unprecedented peace with Egypt.
And they both said
Yes, and that's what led to the Camp David Peace Treaty to
A treat that has lasted forty years has lasted
Actually more than that at this point to forty five years. To this point
Has lasted to this day, even in the midst of wars, assassination, coup d'etat.
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. Th there are better ways to negotiate, more effectively. Yeah. And that was a really
Just powerful example for me.
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 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 and quotation marks. Like what are they going to
Use
To explain to others.
why they agreed to X.
Uh, whatever that is. Would you mind expanding on that? Doesn't need to be in the Camp David context, it could be in another context, but
It strikes me that in both cases, I mean, these leaders need to go back.
and explain to their cabinets to their populace why they did X.
And the
That type of
Consideration of external judgment.
I would imagine accounts for a lot of failures at the negotiating table.
The victory speech
Is one of my favorite exercises'cause you're looking at
an impossible situation. It could be with your boss, could be with your roommate, or it could be a an international conflict, but you're looking at something
Seemingly impossible.
It's kind of like um
You know, I like to climb mountains, you know. Y you you're at the bottom of the mountain, you look at the top of the mountain, and it 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, амаджен.
You're asking your boss for something. You know, 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. 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 speed, just write out maybe three talking points. Like how could they present
To the people that they care about.
Why have they said yes to your proposal?
It's gotta 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 gonna get, the criticisms that they're gonna receive.
And then think about what are the best answers I 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 for it.
I would love to hear how you've used it.
In any context.
Well
One context in two thousand seventeen, Donald Trump had become president.
Kim Jong un of North Korea.
Was
Testing nuclear missiles, ballistic nuclear missiles aimed at the United States, uh testing nuclear weapons.
I mean it
Obama had warned Trump that this was the most dangerous situation he was leaving on his watch.
And
Trump was saying this won't happen and experts were worrying this could be
A nuclear war, a nuclear crisis, you know, that some people were saying was a fifty percent odds of war.
And so I sat down with my colleagues and I thought, Okay, let's sit down.
I don't know that much about North Korea, a little bit, but let's see if we can write out
Donald Trump's victory speech and
More importantly, Kim Jong un's victory speech in which they decide
Not to go to war.
But to actually meet instead.
And try and work out an agreement.
For Trump, you know.
He was more of an open book'cause you could you know knew a lot about him, you know, he would have to say, you know, like his three talking points might be
This was the best deal ever. Obama couldn't do this, Clinton couldn't do this, Bush couldn't do this, but I could do this. I made the biggest deal that really spared the world from nuclear war. It's the biggest deal ever.
That was point number one. Point number two would be I kept America safe. And point number three is and I didn't spend a penny. That was important for him.
Kim Jong un was the
There's nothing known about him, a black book. It was like nothing really known about him. He was new and so on.
And the only person I could find out who knew anything about Kim Jong un went on the web
was a retired American basketball player by the name of Dennis Robin.
So
In order to write Kim Jong un's victory speech, you know, I tr tried to figure it on the web, you know, what he would care about safety and respect and economics, but
To really understand him, I had to try and track down Dennis Rodman.
And that is the key is to really
Go to the ends of the world, whoever you need to talk to, figure out
What drives the person you're trying to influence?
So what happened? Did you get a hold of Dennis? Well Did you guys have a powder? What happened?
We did. It took a while. You tried the proverbial six degrees of separation, this person, that person. I know someone who knew the coach of the Lakers who'd been their coach, whatever.
But that didn't work out. And then I tried a different way and I finally
got hold of someone who was a friend of Dennis Rodman's and I talked to him
And explain, look, the world's in danger here and I I need to talk to Dennis. He's the only one who seems to know Kim Jong un.
I'm the only American and he said, Well, Dennis comes to visit me sometimes, arrange for us to have pizza sometime, I'll let you know. He's in LA.
He come stay with me.
So I
At the appointed moment I flew out there for pizza.
Dennis wasn't there. The guy said, Oh, he goes out partying. Sometimes he forgets, or whatever. He said, But you can spend the night. And so I canceled my plan, spent the night.
Next morning.
Dennis Rodman's there, you know.
Any sense?
What do you want? Bad day, man. Bad day. Why do you want to talk to me? And I said, Well because
You're the only one who knows Kim Jong un and I'd really like to hear what you learned from him, uh about what makes him tick. What are his interests? And he then proceeded to tell me the story of how
He'd gotten to know him. He'd gone over for an exhibition basketball game one day and he was just watching the game and suddenly Kim Jong un is sitting right next to him. And then Kim invites him out to go drinking and then he goes home and he holds Kim's baby.
And he told me a couple of things. He said
I actually believe that Kim doesn't want war.
I know he's perceived in the West as kind of a madman and so on, but he doesn't want war. He he actually wants to engage with the West.
And then as an example, he said, You know, one day I was talking to Kim and he told me
What his dream was. I said, What was his dream? He said, His dream, he told me.
was one day to walk down
Fifth Avenue with Dennis Rodman, go to Madison Square Garden.
And watch the New York Knicks play the Chicago Bulls.
Bingo. It was like you know, I listened for those little this is what you do in negotiation, you listen for those little nuggets.
They give you an insight.
Into the dreams.
You know, it's beyond the interest. It's deeper than the interest. The dreams and the fears, those two things are really big.
The dreams of the other side, and I got a sense, okay.
Maybe there is something possible here, my colleagues and I
And worked on it, but
The world was shocked.
You know, a year later when
Donald Trump.
Sat down.
With
Kim Jong un in Singapore, and they actually got along with each other, but I wasn't shocked because I talked to Dennis Rodman. So Dennis Rodman helped me figure out.
What Kim Jong un's victory speech was.
And what was interesting was
After Singapore
Those two guys didn't wait.
Donald Trump tweeted
The American people are safe now, no worries. He tweeted his victory speech already.
And Kim Jong un also
hail this as a great victory for North Korea, just their meeting.
And what was key.
was that even though they didn't reach an agreement
They change the atmosphere through meeting.
And the perceived risk of nuclear war went
Down from maybe fifty percent to one percent. So
It shows the power of the victory speech of each one being able to be a hero to the people that they care about. So William, I would love to ask you a question, which I hesitate to ask because
It's a hot button issue, but because you have so much time
In uh
conflict zones or at least operating as an advisor to those who are contending with conflict zones.
What do you wish you could do or orchestrate?
Or what type of conversation do you wish you could
coordinate with respect to
the situation in the Middle East as it stands right now.
Was there anything that would be on your wish list or at the top of your
priorities in terms of
strategy and how to
Defuse some of what's happening in the Middle East.
Well.
So this is what I would say. It is a hot button issue.
I would say
There is no solution.
In the Middle East. Let's be realistic.
There's no like two state solution. There's no solution.
Because there's no end to it.
But there might just be a beginning.
A new beginning. I'm a possibilist. People ask me, you know, after all these years
Are you an optimist? Are you a pessimist?
And actually, even though I am an optimist of sorts.
I like to say I'm a possibilist. I believe in possibility.
And even when it comes to a situation seemingly as impossible.
As heart breaking, as heart rending as the Middle East is right now.
I actually
think that even in these times of extreme crisis you can see possibilities.
If you can just stay still for a moment.
If you can what I call go to the balcony.
Just kinda detach yourself a little bit.
Watch it as a play.
See where the possibilities are.
And even though there might not be a solution, there could be a process.
Even though there's no end to the conflict, there could be a beginning.
Of a different way.
of living together.
Because if you look behind the positions.
The things that people fight about.
The things that people say they want, for what they're
deep underlying interests are. What are their deepest concerns? What are their deepest fears?
What are their deepest aspirations? If you dive down the
Like go down the iceberg.
To what's underneath the water.
Then
I think the question then becomes reframed as
How can the Israelis and Palestinians
Two people's
Live together.
How can they live together? It's the ancient stoic question, right? You know, how do we live together?
How can they live together?
In dignity.
Security
How can they live alongside each other?
And if that's the question
You know, then you ask yourself, has that ever been done in the world before with other impossible conflicts? And I can say in the last forty five years, whether it's in
South Africa, where blacks and whites there was a race war, or Northern Ireland, you know, sectarian war between Catholics and Protestants, or Columbia.
Guerrilla war in other places too.
Where it seemed absolutely impossible, I've watched people.
Do that.
There was no solution, there's no ending of the conflict, but there's a transformation of the conflict. The conflict is transformed.
And
Remarkable results occur.
And I think that that's still possible in the Middle East.
What were
any of the key elements in any of the
Conflicts that you mentioned.
That provided
The opening for that.
Transformation, that turning point.
Are there any common ingredients?
Or any historical examples that you can think of.
Well one is
I'll give you just an example from South Africa.
Someone I admire who's a
Like iconic possibilist, you know, Nelson Mandela.
Who
Was a kind of very reactive kind of guy, was a boxer, quick to take slights and so on. But when he went into prison
He was in prison for twenty seven years.
He really focused on self mastery.
He learned to meditate.
He learned to observe himself.
He writes about it in his autobiography.
He learned to control his natural reactivity. He learned what I call
To go to the balcony. Not to react, but to go to the balcony.
And
Then he also studied the
The language of his enemies.
I mean, that's the first thing he did in jail was he studied Afrikaans, the language of his enemies. Because he thought language is the way into someone's
That's the way you connect with people.
And
He
studied their history. He studied their traumas, the Boer War and how they'd suffered, concentration, I mean the whole thing.
He got into their suffering.
He also
Mobiliz Pi.
When he got out, he started meeting with the other side and building them what I call golden bridge, a way out.
He was trying to help his політика аніміз.
Find a way out of the situation.
He helped write their victory speech, in other words.
And he helped mobilize the community, which is uh what I call the third side. So he did these three things.
Which are
Go to the balcony.
Just detach from the situation, don't react.
Help build the other side a golden bridge, make it easier for them to make the decisions you want them to make.
And then
Mobilized this
resource around of the community which was
The community in South Africa
Blacks and whites and all others.
And then the worldwide community
To create
A container.
With even a seemingly impossible conflict could be transformed.
So to me it's a kind of
The leaders
And the community can work together.
It struck me so much that Mandela, he once said
People say it's impossible until it it's done.
And I was in South Africa when he was in jail.
People thought this was gonna be thirty years, forty years.
I came back five years later, he was the president.
It wasn't easy. There was a lot of political violence, but
The conflict
Was transformed.
If they could do it.
Then I believe it can be done
In the Middle East. And it's not just a magical leader.
It was the whole community engaging.
In a way that works. I've seen the same thing in Northern Ireland, I've seen the same thing in Colombia.
It's our birthright, really. I believe we can all do this. It's hard work, there's no question, but it's possible.
Let's
Take a closer look at going to the balcony.
watching something as a play, sort of taking this detached observer.
Role, perhaps, if that's not too much of a strain of a
Descriptor.
This leads me to wonder what you have found.
Or discovered or observed to be effective for de escalating.
emotions when things get heated in the midst of a negotiation.
Now that could be
you need to go to the balcony, but you need some space. So what do you say what do you do to create that space?
And
Equally important if the other side maybe does not have your books and does not have the capacity or the eagern to go to the balcony, how do you help them go to the balcony or at least de escalate things so they don't spin out?
First of all, I think these are all innate human potentials. Don't have to read my book. You could read my book, but
These are innate human potentials.
It goes back, you know, it's this is our birthright. It's about self mastery. It's the idea that negotiation, even though we think of it.
as trying to get the other side to do what we want them to do.
It starts with
Influencing ourselves. You can't possibly influence someone else.
Unless you can influence yourself first.
And human beings were reaction machines.
Yeah, the saying goes.
When angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

And
Yeah, that's good. Happens more often than not. The best email you will you will regret. That's it. You send the best email you will ever regret.
Exactly. That's it. The best text, the best WhatsApp, whatever it is that you will ever regret. And we do that all the time. And we live in a very reactive age where you just instantly, you know, the temptation to just to hit the send button to just like whoa, okay.
No, there's a save as draft on email for a reason. That's the balcony button.
And
What's the alternative? I mean, it's very natural for us to react. You know, we act, especially in conflict, you know, where there's a lot of anger, there's fear, whatever it is, you're quick to react.
But the ability to
Pause for a moment, that faint gap between the stimulus and the response.
The ability to I like to use the metaphor of imagining that you're negotiating you know, the negotiation's taking place on a play, all the characters there.
Part of you goes
Your mind goes to a mental and emotional balcony overlooking
The stage.
Where you can suddenly
Keep your eyes on the prize. What is most important to you?
And then see the big picture.
What can you do?
What can you do?
See the larger picture. Wh where's the way through this labyrinth in front of you?
That art of going to the balcony I've found
is key and
You know, I've learned it, had to learn it over and over, you know, like fall off the balcony, you get back on the balcony.
I
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I
Are there
rules or conditions you can set.
Two
mitigate some of the risk of
emotional spiraling. And what prompts this question
is a story, I believe it was a labor management group.
Where in the conversation
You adopted the role that only one person could get angry at a time, so it seemed like
Each party knew they would have their turn to get really pissed off. So
That's it. You wouldn't deal with the
sort of arms race of yelling and screaming and
Whatever tantrums might go along with it. Or aggression. Are there other techniques
That you have
Use successfully.
In
These types of
Potentially heated.
Conversations or negotiations.
Well, the one you mentioned is a good one because it's kind of a joint rule, right? Another is just to take frequent breaks. Just sometimes, you know, negotiations. I remember labor management negotiations, there was a
You know, they go on for hours and hours and hours, and it was kind of almost a like a no one wanted to call break. It was almost like an exercise in in bladder control or something. And
I find frequent breaks
Breaks are time to be on the balcony.
It's that time for that in the corridor conversation that you can have with someone or with your own side.
Frequent breaks.
And that's you know, just even when you're dealing online, just taking breaks.
Really helpful.
I like to go for walks, you know, before any
Difficult negotiation in the middle of it.
Just go for a walk.
Clear your head. Some people work out.
Anything you can do.
to change your state so you can kind of bring your best to the negotiation rather than as often
We bring our worst. You know, even a simple one. What I like to do is like I learned this
In a very high stakes negotiation once when the president of Venezuela was shouting at me.
Uh you know, for thirty minutes.
You know, Hugo Chavez. I don't know if you remember him, but Ugo Chavez was sh you know, it was like midnight in front of his whole cabinet.
And I'd been sent there to try and mediate between him and his political opposition.
He said, Yuri, so how are things going? And I said
Seems to me, mister President, I've been talking to some of your ministers, I've been talking to the opposition.
Making some progress.
Well progress wasn't the word he wanted to hear.

Are you a fool? You're not seeing the dirty trixos.
The other side is up to
And he leaned into my face, I could kind of almost feel his hot breath, almost his spittle.
And he proceeded to shout at me.
Yeah.
I was like
Oh God, a year of work down the drain. I'm you know humiliated or embarrassed in front of his whole cabinet. You go through all these things.
And then
I remembered.
A simple technique.
Which a friend of mine once told me which is
When you're in a tough situation, pinch the palm of your hand.
And I said, Ed Nun, why why would I pinch the palm of my hand? He said, Because it will give you some momentary pain. It'll keep you alert. So whatever reason I remembered at that moment.
Pinch the palm of my hand and sure enough
Then I was able to kind of like
Stop for a second and ask.
I was just about to think about what I was gonna say in reply to him and I thought.
What's my interest here? My interest is in calming the situation. Is it really gonna help the situation if I get into an argument with the president of Venezuela? In front of his guys. Right. So I bit my tongue.
And I proceeded to listen to him.
Like observe him. Like why why is he doing this? He's trying to impress his cabin and so on.
And you know, when you don't react
There was no
fuel for him for his anger. So
After
Fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, this guy could go on for seven hours. He was known for giving seven hour speeches.
And around thirty minutes I saw I was watching his body language and I saw his shoulders sink.
And he said to me in a weary tone of voice, he said
So
Yeah.
What should I do?
Well,
That, my friends, is the faint sound of the human mind opening.
And at that moment I thought
You know, Mr President, it's December
Last Christmas the festivities were cancelled.
Why not just
Take a break, give everyone a truce, you know, for three weeks. Let everyone enjoy the
the the holidays with their families and come back in January, maybe everybody will be in a better mood to listen.
Oh.
He looked at me for a moment. He was kind of startled.
And then he clapped me on the back and he said, That's a great idea. I'm gonna announce that in my next speech.
His mood had completely shifted.

And what I learned from that, Tim, was that maybe the greatest power you have in a negotiation
Is the power.
Not to react.
It's the power to go to the balcony instead.
This seems like a nice bridge to discuss we're gonna get to all sorts of specifics, Batmas and whatnot, but this is a specific, which is the different
species of silence. How can you use silence in different ways? Because I remember, for instance,
I listened to this audiobook. This was a hundred years ago when I was just thinking about starting my own.
Company, and I listened to this book. It's an audio book. It was mostly real estate focused. It was called Secrets of Pow Negotiating. I think it was Roger Dawson.
I might be getting the name wrong. In any case, he talked about
The flinch.
But the flinch followed by silence, right? And this is very mundane, maybe, but certainly having spent a lot of time in foreign countries.
Just looking as I look, my prices are automatically twenty X retail, right? That's the starting point. So sort of the flinch and then wait. But if you fill the void with
Words.
It doesn't have the desired effect. Where they tell you the price, you're like, oh God, so expensive. Then you just shut up and let the silence do the heavy lifting.
You just gave a much more sophisticated example in higher dick's environment.
What are some of the ways that people can use silence? This applies to interviewing also, by the way. I had Cal Fussman, who used to write the What I Learned column for Esquire Magazine, who interviewed Gorbachev and
Muhammad Ali and all these icons. He said, Let the silence do the work.
That was one of his tips to me.
What are some of the different ways that you can use silence or stories related to using silence?
Yeah, I'm a big believer in the power of silence.
In our culture.
We tend to fill up space'cause we
We feel like
If there's a moment of pause. I mean in East Asia, as you know, silence is appreciated.
And
You know, in an elevator, if everyone's quiet, everyone, you know, gets a little nervous. But in fact, if you can just relax into the silence.
And pause.
A negociation.
When you ask for something
It gives the other side a chance to
Think about it. And maybe if you say no and you know, or whatever it is, you just
You weaken your no if you
Follow it up.
Hang in the air.
Let them work through it because human minds take a little time to digest it.
Алета дискомфо
If there's any work in your favor. There's no reason why you have to say something.
And
The other thing is, you know, I have a colleague, Jared Curran who an MIT who's
Done studies of silence.
Just taking like negotiations, they record negotiations.
And then they measure
The amount of silence in the negotiation, the number of pauses.
And interestingly enough
They found a correlation between
The amount of silence
And the
outcomes that are mutually collaborative.
That actually silence actually
Helps you arrive.
And agreements that are good for both sides. Just because it gives
People chance to pause.
In the sense you were talking about can give a chance for the other side to actually digest it and maybe
It strengthens your
The persuasiveness of your argument.
So I uh absolutely agree. Silence is one of your very best tools in a negotiation.
The art of pausing.
The art of pausing.
Well let's talk about
The use of
Objective.
Measures.
Or
Data for
Maybe preventing escalation or just facilitating negotiation, for instance. If you are asking for a raise, you might talk about inflation rates and
X, Y, and Z, which ideally are not really debatable points, right? If they're reasonably agreed upon facts. How can you use facts?
In
negotiations effectively.
And do you have any examples that people might be able to
Try to wrap their heads around.
One of the big things in negotiation is negotiation about arrays, for example, is
You want one thing, they want something else.
Yeah.
often becomes a contest of wills. You know, who's stronger, who's gonna hold out longer, whatever.
And
If it's a contest of wills.
Oftentimes.
It gets emotional. It gets I'm not gonna give in, you know, my you know, manhood is on the line, or whatever it is, you get into this kind of contest of wills.
And
It doesn't go anywhere and it's high stakes and
There is an alternative to that, which is
Not to make it a contest of will, but to say look
You think you should get paid this much, I think you should get paid that much, but
Let's look objectively at the market rate. What is the market for your kinds of skills and this kind of job? Let's look at the average thing.
And suddenly
It's a lot easier for people to
Defer

A persuasive
objective standard than it is to give in. No one wants to give in.
No one wants to give in and people will fight.
Not to give in.
So
Preparing those objective criteria.
Persuasive and then okay, let's take a look. There's this criterion, there's that criterion.
And then suddenly.
You're in a collaborative exercise to figure out what's a fair resolution.
Rather than in a contest of wills.
Where one side's gonna win, one side's gonna lose, and the loser's gonna make the winner pay for it.
Yeah, this is a big deal.
in so many probably all cultures on some level, but the whole
Yeah.
concept of losing face, say in China, Jolian.
Loose face. This is a very big deal.
And uh people will not just fight not to lose space, but in some cultures, I mean they'll
Take it themselves to the grave to not lose face, right? It is very
It's a huge variable in terms of of consideration.
I'd like to ask you about respect. In my notes here I have it.
Listed as the cheapest concession you can make. And
At face value, this
Makes perfect sense to me.
My question is, how do you express that?
Respect.
that you have and let's take out maybe some of the
Complex.
cultural differences where it might be very different if you're in the penthouse.
in a chairman's suite at Mitsubishi than it would be in other places, let's just say. But in an English speaking environment, Western environment.
What are some of the ways you might express that?
respect. And if you want to expand first on what you mean by the cheapest concession, then uh we can do that too.
The other side's dignity.
May not mean much to you, but it means everything to them.
as you just mentioned in in China, you know, or in you know in East Asia where it might be their life.
And so
If you can
Give the other side.
Simple
Basic
human respect. I'm not talking about a lot of people confuse respect. Oh, they've got to earn my respect. No, I'm talking about the respect that is everyone's birthright.
By virtue of being a human being.
Respect actually the word comes from the Latin respect.
To see again, you know, like spectros and spectacles, Rhea's and again.
Spectator to see the human being that's there.
And so even if you're dealing with a hostage taker, I don't care who it is.
That's
What
police hostage negotiat do is they give
The person some respect. That's the way you connect with human beings. That's the currency.
That's the currency for actually making a connection.
It costs you nothing.
And it means everything to them. That's why it's the cheapest concession you can make.
And maybe
behaviorally to go back to the first part of your question.
The easiest way to give someone respect, the most basic way to give someone respect is
is to listen to them.
You know, we think of negotiation as talking.
But successful negotiation is far more about listening than it's about talking.
A persuasive negotiator, someone who's a persuasive listener.
Because
When you listen to someone
You are seeing them, you are hearing them, you're attuning to them, you're
You ask them questions, you know.
What is it that you really want here? You're you're showing interest in them. You're
That is
The basic
level of respect. And in addition to that, it gives you a lot of information.
About what they want so that you can more effectively
influence them to arrive at something that satisfies their needs and satisfies yours at the same time.
Is there any uh aside from listening, any particular
advice you would give to someone going into an important negotiation in terms of ways they might
Indicate respect.
Well
Like you, you learn as you you teach, you know, how to learn languages very quickly.
Learning a little bit of their language.
You know the basic
Formalities of their language.
That's a sign of respect.
Goes a long way. It goes a very long way.
And you know, I mean, just going back to Chavez for a moment, you know, the first time I met him
He has to be
What was my advice? I said, Why don't you sit down and talk with
The opposition.
And he said
They're traitors, you know, they you know, they tried to mount a coup d'etat, you know, they tried to kill me, you know, never talk to them.
And so I said to him, I understand you you don't trust them, right?
He said, Yeah, absolutely, I don't trust them. I said,
Let me ask you something. Is there anything
That they could do.
Tomorrow morning.
That would be a sign of respect.
That would be a sign that maybe
They change a little bit. And maybe they were.
Worth talking to.
Anything that they could do.
He said yeah.
He said they own the private T V stations. They could stop
Calling me
A mono.
On national television. And the mono is
Is a monkey.
Yeah.
You know, he took it as a kind of a like a racist insult and and even like it's not in most places a compliment. Right. And
You know, what I realized in that moment it's about respect is feeling that intense
Disrespect.
And so
That led to a whole process where we tried to negotiate a whole set of ways in which
To try to deescalate the crisis.
What were signals of respect that the other sides could give each other?
It would change the atmosphere and
Even just having a conversation about what the other side would see as respect and disrespect
Helped.
Calm the situation down a little bit so we could
Move forward.
Now in a situation like
That. Maybe it's not the best example, but I imagine you're being sent not as an emissary, but a mediator of sorts, facilitator in a lot of situations.
How does and this is an opportunity t to define what this is, but
Batna, the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. How does this fit into your strategizing or thinking about?
circumstances in Venezuela. Or circumstances in
Any situation.
It comes to mind.
Batna is an acronym that Roger Fisher and I coined back in getting the S for
Your best
Alternative.
to a negotiated agreement.
It's your best course of action if you cannot reach agreement. It's your plan B.
It's like
You're negotiating a job interview. If you can't get this job interview, you've got another job interview. If you can't sell to this
One client maybe of another client.
And it's your alternative and it
Turns out
to be extremely important in negotiation because in negotiation we often make the mistake of thinking, Okay, I want this agreement.
Our focus is on the agreement.
But it turns out that paradoxically one of the best ways to prepare for that negotiation
is to think through ostensible failure.
Ask yourself the question before you go into the negotiation.
What am I gonna do to satisfy my interests?
If I am not able to reach agreement with the other side.
And sometimes people don't like to go there because they well, that's negative thinking. It's actually alternative positive thinking. It's like
What's your alternative? What's your batna?
And if you do that, imagine go back to the job. Imagine you know next week you've got one job interview.
And it's the only one you got and you're gonna be negotiating about your salary.
Imagine how that negotiation's gonna go if you have no other alternative.
But imagine if you take
the intervening time to research
What are you gonna do if you don't get that job?
Will you continue looking? Are you prepared to move sectors? Are you prepared to make a lateral move? Are you prepared to go back and get some education?
Whatever your Badna is.
Maybe you get another job offer, maybe it's not even such a great job offer, but you've got something in your back pocket.
You're gonna negotiate with more confidence.
Because you know you have an alternative.
So actually having a Batner
In my
Experience.
makes it more likely that you can actually reach an agreement because it gives you that intangible confidence
That makes all the difference.
Totally.
Are there any real world examples that come to mind or other hypotheticals?
I was
Helping
A client who became a very good friend of mine was uh Brazilian.
Who was in a
Battle Royale.
with his business partner over control of the company. And this was rather a large company, 150,000 employees to be precise.
And they'd been fighting tooth and nail for like two and a half years every
Board meeting was just a
Battle.
And there were lawsuits and there was it got into the press the character assassinations, I mean
It was the worst.
And everyone thought it was absolutely impossible.
And so
This fellow asked me if I would come see him and I went to see him. I went to his home and
I began by asking him.
The first question before you get to the bat night, which is
What do you want? What are your interests, you know, because your batten is your best
Course of action for satisfying your interests.
So I said, Abelio, uh what do you want? And he said, Well, I want a
whole bunch of stock here and I want an elimination of the three year non compete clause.
And I want the company sports team and I want the company headquarters and he had this list. Just a really intelligent businessman.
And I said to him,
I understand that, but
Tell me.
What do you really want?
And he looked at me as surprised. He said, What do you mean? I said, No, I mean

What do you really want in life? What's really at stake here for you?
And I don't think you've been asked that question before.
Was a chance for him to go to the balcony and
He paused for a while. There's some silence. That's the
Power of silence.
And then finally he said to me.
You know what I want?
I want liberdade.
Which in Portuguese means
Freedom.
I want my freedom.
And the way he said freedom is
Just the tonality of it. And that's what you want to do is listen for the tone.
It's not just the words.
But what's the tone?
I knew I just kind of struck gold because it was like deep. It was like really deep inside of him.
And I had
read his little bit of his biography and
He had been kidnapped twenty years earlier and held in a coffin.
By a group of urban guerrillas for
Like a week he thought he was not gonna make it. You know, they had little air holes and they played this loud rock music, and it was only by a miracle that he was freed.
But freedom.
Really meant something to him.
Because that's often the case, we're hostages of these difficult conflicts.
And he was hostage of this conflict.
And he said, I want freedom. And then I said to him,
What does freedom mean to you?
Specifically then.
And that's the thing you want to do. Once you get that interest, you want to ask, okay, operationally specifically, what does it mean? And he said, Well
It's freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most meaningful thing in my life.
And it's freedom to make the deals I love to make. I love to make deals.
And then I asked him the Batna question.
I said, Okay, Obilia.
Imagine
That you can't reach agreement with your
business rival who's now your bitter enemy.
Imagine you can't.
We don't reach agreement.
Is there anything you can do?
Two
advance your interests, which in this case is spend more time with your family and make more deals.
And there was an aha for him.
Because he had assumed
that he couldn't advance his interests without settling this first. And he had to fight this. He was a fighter.
And he was gonna fight this.
But then no, then he realized that okay, yeah.
I'm not dependent.
On the other side.
For the interests that matter most to me.
When you realize that
Again, it goes back to the wisdom of Stoics when you realise
It's you.
You actually have control.
over the things that matter most to you.
Not the other side.
You know, he went on a vacation with his family, opened up an office, started to do deals.
That actually allowed him to relax.
So that in the end we're able to make a deal.
The follow up question that hops to mind for me, I'm so curious, is
What then happened? Like what we don't have to get into all the specifics of the deal, but I could see on one hand
possibility that
He would have
Ultimate walk away power in the sense that he would
be less likely to make certain concessions because
He
feels like he can address his interests elsewhere, so he could kinda hold out indefinitely, feeling like he can
Manage the endurance.
More than the other side. I could also see
it going the other direction, where he's less attached to it and is
more likely to make concessions. So what ended up happening. I could see that realization manifesting
Yeah in a number of different ways.
That's a really that's a really good point, Tim. So
In this case
I think it's both. It cut both strengthened his sense of confidence that, you know, he could do it. And and at one point he said to me, you know, maybe I'm gonna have to fight this for the rest of my life. And this conflict was gonna go on for at least another seven years'cause that's how long he was gonna be chairman of the board.
But I think in the end
It was the second thing, which is he relaxed on it, and I had to keep on reminding him because he was very reactive. And I'd say, Remember what you told me? You really wanted your freedom.
She was so attached to

In the end.
I met with the
Representative
of his business enemy. I went to Paris and over a r a restaurant.
I met him.
He said, You know, come and meet me, we went to lunch at his restaurant.
And
This fellow who was a French banker, a very distinguished French banker, asked me uh
So why are you here, you know,'cause this thing hasn't been settled in two and a half years, the lawyers have been it.

Using his language French, I said parce la vie
Et trop court.
Because life
Is too short.
Ha ha.
That wasn't what he was expecting. And I said yeah, because it's the kind of
Help.
Everyone go to the back. I said life's too short for these conflicts in which
Everybody loses. I mean, these guys are losing their time, their families are suffering, the employees are suffering from divided loyalties. Just think of all the losses here besides all the you know, all the money going to lawyers and everything.
And so he said so
What would you do?
And I said, Well if we could just agree for both of our
Friends
It wasn't like we were adversaries. It was most like
Let's help our friends settle this, you know. You just reframe the situation.
Both of our friends want their freedom.
to go on with their lives, you know, freedom from this dispute.
And they both want their dignity. They can't afford to be seen as, you know
Losing.
Yeah, William, just a quick question.
To the extent that you can describe it. Could you explain the dynamic just so I have uh some understanding. So you've got
Melia the chairman, and then there's somebody else who's also at odds.
I see.
The French entrepreneur.
was the principal shareholder and there'd been an agreement
That at some point control would shift to him.
And they were fighting over control over this.
Okay.
Mm-hmm. And this was a company that had been founded.
Via Beleo.
My friend and client with his father.
was Latin America's largest retailer was a supermarket chain.
And Emilio brought you in.
Two.
Try that.
Help the situation.
Actually his daughter and wife who were very concerned
Brought me in.
How often does that happen? That's the third side.
Yeah, yeah. I would imagine you get brought in by the third side. Not infrequently, I would imagine.
That's it. The third side turns out to be key. You know, it's like the people around the conflict who have a stake.
We're being affected by it.
Wanna find some way to
Transform it.
So you're saying you said
Life is too short.
Let's talk about our friends.
Let's talk about our friends and if we can give them both freedom and dignity, then maybe there's a chance.
And he looked at me and we had a very nice lunch French meal.
And then
About an hour later I got a call. I gave him my number. He said, When are you going back to America? I said I'm going back tomorrow morning. I got a call about an hour later. He said, Do you think you could stay
Tomorrow so that we could meet. And I said, Sure. And so I went to see him in his office and we spent forty five minutes in his office.
Trying to figure out.
This very complicated deal, what it would mean to give each man
Freedom and dignity.
So that no one could be seen to lose.
In forty five minutes we came up with a little formula on the you know, it was just very simple on the on the page there.
That was a Tuesday.
By Friday.
We had both men in a law office in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Signing an agreement.
Wow.
In which
That is fast. Ended it.
We had a joint statement where they wished each other well. I accompanied both men to
Talk to the leaders of the company to explain to them executives of why they'd done this.
There was a press conference and it was over.
And I asked Abel.
Later I said.
How do you feel? He said, Well, I got everything I wanted. You even got, you know, the things he wanted, he said
But the most important thing is
I got my life back.
Lawsuits.
Seldom winners all around.
And and even the other guy the other guy was very happy too. So that's the amazing thing is that it seems like
It's an impossible situation.
But by treating it as a win lose situation, there is no way out.
But then
Looking for those possibilities
There was a way in which both sides could
win could benefit that you know could get their freedom and their dignity.
And the community, the third side, actually the families and the and the company could also
benefit. So it was a win, win, win, a win for for for everybody.
What is a trust menu?
And how do you construct a trust venue? But what is a trust venue?
Well, trust is one of those things which is so important in negotiation. I mean
You know, you're always looking, I know, on the show for efficiency, you know, like
How do you can you do something more efficiently?
Well negotiation
What creates the greatest efficiency in negotiation?
Is trust.
Warren Buffett.
Whom I've had the pleasure of knowing a little bit.
He once had a negotiation with
A partner, a business partner.
Charlie Murphy over the buying
A B C the television network.
This is many years ago.
And Buffett was gonna put up five hundred million dollars. Looked like the deal was going through, so Murphy called up
Capsides USA called up Buffett and said.
Warren the deal's going through.
What are the terms?
This is on the phone.
And Buffett said, Well
Murph, you've probably thought about it more than I have. What do you think the terms should be and
Murphy just set out the terms, Buffett said fine.
End of negotiation. Thirty seconds, five hundred million dollar negotiation. Now
It turned out
that it was a very good deal for both sides. A B C was later sold to Disney.
But the trick was, or the secret was
Both men trusted each other such that they knew that it didn't matter who proposed the
Thing they knew that it would be fair for both sides. They knew they had that degree of trust and so they could operate.
At the speed of trust.
Now that high degree of efficiency otherwise it might take six months or it might never happen.
So
That's the coin of the realm in negotiation.
Question is
What do you do if you don't have trust? And that's where a trust menu comes in.
Okay. So let's say we're not starting with that level of trust. Yeah. Oftentimes you're dealing with high levels of distrust, right?
Yeah.
How do you get out of
Distrust at least
Establish some working trust. You might not be the closest of friends or whatever it is, but
Because it's best to work with people with whom you can have high trust.
But oftentimes that's not the case.
Going back to just the example with Chavez, when he told me, for example
That
You know, they could stop
Calling me a monkey on national television.
I said, Okay.
I know you don't want to meet with them, but maybe we can build a trust menu.
So the next night
He delegated his right hand person who was his Minister of Interior.
To meet with me.
couldn't afford to m be seen to meet with the opposition. So I was just staying in a villa uh in a kind of a bed and breakfast a Posada in the middle of Caracas and there was a garden.
At eleven o'clock at night, the minister shows up, I put him on my balcony.
And then in the garden I had
couple of the opposition figures.
And my colleague Francisco and I
Shuttle back and forth all night.
Trying to construct a trust menu, in other words, a pre arranged
Set of signals.
Steps.
That each side could take that were small enough.
And it's like each side
These are the kinds of things that would send us a signal of respect that you know we can be trusted.
And then
One person.
Like Chavez.
picks one thing off that item and says like he made a speech the next week, which is something the opposition asked him to do, saying
To the people.
Do not
physically assault or harassed
the media when they're covering rallies, you know, those kinds of things.
And
He did it. So then they did one thing that he had asked for on his list.
And then he did one thing.
It's like
Little signals you send one signal, the other person sends another signal.
Send one signal, another signal. These are prearranged, preorchestrated.
And their ways of
Beginning to rebuild.
trust or confidence that you can actually depend on the other such that you might then be willing to sit down together.
Makes perfect sense.
You mentioned
Warren Buffett. So I'm gonna segue.
Two.
More buffet here.
And this relates to
And interests that I have a keen interest in saying no. Different ways of saying no, the importance of saying no, how to say no.
And this is from an interview that you did some time ago, but it talks about
You're meeting Warren Buffett for breakfast. And at one point, this is quoting he confided in me the secret to creating his fortune lay in the ability to say no. This is now quoting Buffett.
Quote, I sit there all day and look at investment proposals. I say no, no, no, no, no, no, no until I see one that is exactly what I'm looking for. Then I say yes. All I have to do is say yes a few times in my life and I've made my fortune. So I'd love to
Here
Perhaps.
how you approach no and there are different ways to present no.
The positive no.
As one example.
And just how you've learned to think about no, because there's getting to yes.
And part of the reason that I found getting past no so seductive is that when I had my first job out of college, I was
Technical sales selling storage area networks to CTOs, CEOs, et cetera, or attempting to. These are seven figure.
plus systems and
Almost inevitably the first answer was always no. Right. So I found the title of the book very compelling.
How do you think about no? I know that this has been important in your life and and I suppose in most lives, but
I would you suggest people think about no?
And then maybe you can give an example of how to deliver a no.
In a skillful way.
Back to that.
breakfast meeting with Warren Buffett because it w Roger Fisher and I and Bruce Batten had just worked on
Getting the yes.
And
He said, Yo, yes is really a good word. He said, But in my line of business, you know, no is much more important. And it it really stayed with me. It stay with me. And then I wrote, you know, getting past no because people said asked about getting yes, yeah, but what if the other side says no? So but then I thought there's a trilogy here.
There's a third book here, which is really to do justice to no, because no is a really important word. Buffett is absolutely right. It's almost like
We have a right arm and a left arm.
The two most basic words in the language
Are yes and no, you know, Pythagoras said, you know, the two words
The simplest words in the language, yes and no

Complicated. They deserve the most study. And that's true. My whole life has been in some ways a study of the words yes and no.
And also I I noticed that I had some difficulty sometimes saying no. So I thought I always like to write about what I'm trying to learn, you know, because that's the best way to that's the best way to learn about it.
And so
I did some real deep
dive into it and in the end I came up with
What I felt was
An effective way to say no, which is
What I call positive no.
And it's like a sandwich.
A positive no
Starts
with a yes
It's a yes, no, yes. You know, no is the is the meat in the middle. And
It starts with a yes, and the yes is
To what is that deep
Your deep interest, your deep strategy, it you're you're saying no, not just to say no, but to say yes to something deeper.
And that's what Buffett was saying to me. He was saying that in order to
Land on the right deal.
That yes to the right deal, I have to say no to a thousand deals that are not quite right.
And that's how I make my fortune.
So it all starts with the yes, actually.
The effective no starts with a yes, it's like the roots of a tree.
If your boss is asking you
To work over the weekend. You know, you might say
Thank you.
I actually I'm going to a wedding this weekend, long promise, whatever it is.
I'm not able to work this weekend. So it starts with a yes.
To what's important to you.
Therefore I'm not able to work with the weekend. And then it doesn't end there. It immediately goes to a yes on the other side.
And there this is what I can do to try and solve the boss's problem.
I can work more during the week.
I can get Juan and Maria and Barry to to work with me.
Did try to uh get it done.
But
The yes on the other side is some kind of either referral solution relationship.
Some kind of

That is not a way of backing away from doesn't undermine the no.
It just offers them another thing, so it's a yes.
No yes. The no in between is calm.
It's not an angry no.
It's calm, matter of fact.
Strong.
No, no means no.
What makes it easier for people to hear it.
Is
The yes that precedes it, so they take it not as a personal challenge to the boss's authority.
They understand why you're saying
No.
And then it's followed by
A yes on the other side, which might be, you know, I look forward to doing business with you next time.
Whatever it is, but it's a positive note that you end on.
That was gonna be my follow-up question about the
The yes at the end, because I could see
This is something I've been thinking a lot about.
And practicing for trying to refine for decade plus now.
Which is how to say no.
And
Do so in a way that is sustainable.
In other words.
If you have a lot of incoming.
if you have a lot of inbound people asking you to
Who knows? Could be any number of things. Host a charity, fundraiser, come speak to XYZ.
Invest in this and that, help my
brothers GoFundMe campaign because he's trying to help people with ALS, whatever it might be, there could be a million of these coming in. And I could imagine if your closing yes is sort of a contingency commitment, that those things would really snowball. Absolutely. Right. So there are times you just have to say
Here's my positive reason why, therefore, I cannot say yes. What are some ways that you like to close
On a positive note.
Is there any language that you have found just to be
Ready from the quiver go to language for yourself or for others.
One is
You wanna make sure
That the no
is not taken personally.
Because oftentimes people don't like to hear the word no and that makes it hard to deliver for us.
So you know, you can say, look, my policy is don't do this, I'm taking this about you know, you put a very strong yes in the in the ground.
that they understand that the no is nothing personal, right? And then the yes on the other side
Might just be.
I love ya.
You know, to your brother.
So the the last note is not
No
It's yes, but it could just be a yes to the relationship. You know, how about I wish you much success with the fundraiser? It's just you don't have to come up with a a contingency plan for everyone. No, don't even think about that. But it's if a co-worker asks you
For help.
You could say.
Look.
I've got
An important work priority boss has asked me to do, so I can't help you.
But so and so might be able to help you or
You know, I can't help you now, but in three weeks I could help you and that but you gotta be careful. That's gotta be absolutely right if you're true. Right, right. Gotta be really careful about that.
You don't wanna like leave a door open that you're gonna regret later.
But
In some cases just like
A pleasant
relationship affirming
Wishing you success.
Godspeed.
Yeah, there's one that I received.
I don't want to misattribute it, but I I want to try to give attribution. I think it was Guy Kawasaki a million years ago, who is uh very well known. He was known as an evangelist from Apple Computer and
gone on to do angel investing and many other things. He's written some great books.
And I asked him.
For something. I can't remember what it was. This is back when I was just cutting my teeth. Early days had just moved to California.
And he replied and uh guy apologized if this wasn't you, but it's a good line either way.
Basically a very short, like really sorry, can't make this work. I'll raise a glass from the sidelines with an exclamation point.
And that was it.
But it was delivered in such a way that it was less bruising.
Then uh
It could have been otherwise, right? That strikes me as a good example. That's it.
The yes on the other side is an investment in relationship. It's a sign of respect.
Yeah, that's probably a helpful way for me to think about it too.
How can you really underscore respect?
In that closing part.
Possible.
The new book.
How we survive and thrive in an age of conflict. What was the impetus

Or the reasons behind wanting to write this book.
Our friend Jim Cullins.
Oh yeah. All right. Say more, please. So what happened was
Five years ago, I went for a hike
With Jim.
Uh mountain hike, lion's lair was the name of the city. I was gonna say that can mean a lot of things. He's a pretty aggressive rock climber. He is he is he's he's great.
And he likes to ask good questions, as you know. And
So we were hiking up there. It was the end of November.
Blue sky, Colorado.
And he turns to me and he says.
Yeah, but you said
Do you think you could sum up
Everything you've learned in your life
And
One sentence.
Everything you've learned about negotiation in one sentence that could be of use to us.
In these tumultuous times.
And I looked at him.
And then he's he said to me with a twinkle in his eye, he said, Well, you know, Darwin could, you know, and and I could give you the exact sentence
On page three hundred and so of the origin of species, where he sums up the entire theory of evolution.
And
I love challenges and I love simplicity. I'm always trying to like how do you synthesize something down?
So I took his challenge and I went back and thought about it.
And our next height I
talked it through. I said, you know, if I had to do it in one sentence, I went back
You know, I've always loved the Latin phrase
Omnitrium perfectum, which means
Everything that's in threes is perfect. You know, there's something about threes. So I was trying to think of what are the three things
that I would pass on for these difficult times of the things that I've learned. The three
Most basic things that hang together is one.
And so I tried it out on him.
And then he said, Okay.
Now you've got the sentence.
Write the book.
And that's the origin of possible.
Well I can't let that go as a cliffhanger. What was the sentence?
What did you start with? So the sentence was
Taking these impossible conflicts that we're facing now. I mean the the world's getting so disrupted, whether you mention the Middle East, Ukraine, you know, the US polarization, whatever it is in business, there's so many conflicts going on. It's like
Seems to be polarizing, paralyzing us.
Poisoning us.
So the first thing I said the path to possible the first thing is
Go to the balcony.
It all starts with us.
You gotta influence yourself first.
You gotta go to the balcony.
So you can
See the larger picture, you know, and we were hiking up. I said, you know, it's that balcony view that you can see as you're looking in.
Down the valley.
It's an inside job.
It's self mastery. That's where it begins. So go to the balcony was number one.
And then
Once you've influenced yourself, then you can influence the other and then
I thought about
Going back to getting past now.
Building a golden bridge, which is
Making it.
as easy possible for the other side to do what you want them to do, by listening, by being creative, by being attracting.
By writing their victory speech, you know? All of those things go into
Building a golden bridge. It actually is a phrase that comes from Sun Tzu, the Art of War, which is
Leave them a way out, I frame it positively as
Where's the way forward? You gotta be audacious. It's not just an ordinary bridge, it's a golden bridge. It's attractive, it's persuasive.
You've thought through what really
they want, what are their fears are, and so on. So you've really built them that golden bridge.
So influence yourself to influence the other. And then the third
Part of the whole
Is
Influence the whole which is
Take the third side, which is
Remember
In negotiation in conflict, we always tend to reduce everything to two sides.
It's labor against management. It's
Sales against manufacturing, it's
Husband against wife, it's uh Arabs against Israelis.
There's always a third side.
Which is a surrounding community, the people around.
We're affected by it.
And that's a great power.
If you can harness it.
So taking the third side of the side of the whole.
And
I think that's our most ancestral
Our oldest human heritage for dealing with conflict is using the third side. I've seen it in so many indigenous cultures, and we we have to reinvent it today.
So
My sentence was
The path to possible.
Is to go to the balcony.
Build a golden bridge.
And take
The third side.
Influence yourself, influence the other, influence the whole.
All right. I love every aspect of that and I want to hone in on one.
And this is a sort of a meta
question that I wanted to explore with you related to
Your comment on the inside job.
My experience
And I'm by no means a master negotiator, but I've done a fair amount just all the stuff that I've done. We all have negotiate every day. We all negotiate. Is my experience has been that the better you get
at negotiating.
And the core component of it is creativity.
The more you can harness
Seeing the same thing.
option C instead of just A versus B.
For yourself, not just
For mutual gain.
but actually in your own decisions as well. So I wanted to
Ask you about inventing creative options.
Finding creative options.
Could be for mutual gain, could be for personal direction. And I'd love to hear
If you're open to an example of
something in the negotiating world. And then if you have one, an example from your
Personal life or individual life.
We're
Similar techniques or lenses.
Helped you too.
See something that maybe wouldn't have been obvious.
In any situation, I always think about it, you know, you're negotiating imagine
You're negotiating something with someone
There's a pile of gold on the table.
And that gold represents the amount of gain
Potential gain.
That lies in whatever deal you can make or whatever relationship you can create.
Well so often what you find
is that people
Walk away from the table.
Either without a deal.
They leave all that gold on the table.
Yeah.
They walk away just taking away part of the gold.
So the question is how do you get all the gold? And the answer is by
Using our creativity.
Tapping into our innate potential for creativity.
There's a part of our brain that judges and evaluates. We've all been in meetings where you get these killer phrases like
you know, you raise an idea and they say, Oh, we've done that before, or we've never done that before, or that won't work, or that's the craziest idea, whatever it is.
After that, no more creative ideas come out of that meeting.
So
Our ability to invent means separating the cognitive process from evaluating, which is really important.
From the cognitive process of
Inventing of creating.
That's the
whole essence of brainstorming, which is you have one golden rule, which is
No criticism was allowed. So you try to come up with as many ideas as possible.
And then after you get all the ideas out
Then you can start to criticize and develop and improve them.
But if you try to do both at the same time you find you don't get very far.
So
You can do that. Like, for example, if I go back, you said uh, you know, an example from the negotiation world.
If I go back to
My friend Abelio. And
Yeah.
Particular.
Conflict.
It was
Freedom and dignity, you know.
For dignity, we had to figure out a way.
In which
No one could really tell who won. Because you know, like
For example, three year non compete.
You know, they were tangling around is it gonna be
Two years, half a year, whatever it is, how much it would be for each thing.
And we had to just have no numbers. So I said, No, look, freedom means
Zero non compete, you know, because that's what freedom means. But it's just like
There's no numbers and it's just it just disappeared.
Or, for example, the stock, what was the discount? No, it was gonna be one voting stock for one other stock. So that analysts could not tell.
Cool one. There was we we tried to remove numbers from it.
What about
Seeing creative options.
Outside of negotiation.
For yourself. Has it translated in that way for you?
Well.
For example, right now I'm thinking of taking a sabbatical. So
You know.
I'd like to
Like okay, so
What would I do on a sabbatical?
Be creative. Like should I learn something new? Should I learn a new language? Should I go off
On a hike a pilgrimage, walking somewhere, I take out a
piece of paper and I try to write down things, but even better.
What I love to do for creativity is I go for walks or hikes,'cause in nature somehow
When you see beauty and particularly you get these vistas
I find it enhances creativity.
And then I asked friends, what would you do? And just investigate it. So
Come up with
The essential thing of creativity is come up with a lot of possibilities.
And then
Start to winnow it down.
But don't just
Hone in on one.
Because
The best way to make decisions is to have a lot of options.
And then you can start to introduce criteria to try and figure out
Which one will
Satisfy you the best.
So I can't resist the temptation to
Ask about your exercise and self-care routines. And this is gonna seem like a very non-sequitur, but you mentioned the hiking.
And if you don't mind me asking, what is your current age?
Seventy.
Just turn seven. All right. So you do not look remotely close to seventy.
And I don't know how much of that is just out of the box powerball winner of genetics versus other things. I have no idea. Maybe it's an amazing skincare routine. I don't know. But you seem to be in very, very good shape.
What are some of your non-negotiable or ideal
Self care.
Routines. What do you do to stay?
Kind of active.
And fit.
The first thing.
Which I've already indicated is
Walking.
You know, I'm an anthropologist by training and
Walking is what made us human. Our ancestors walked all the time. I mean, we were nomadic, you know, hunters and gatherers for ninety nine percent of our time.
So I
Love to walk.
And I love to live
In a beautiful place, nature if I can, but if I'm in a city, you know, I walk in a park or whatever, but
There's something about or even just walk down the street. But I love
Walking.
And I love hiking, climbing mountains and
So
I do that every single day.
Religiously.
And it doesn't even have to be
It's like ingrained. It's not even doesn't even take a lot of discipline because
Walking, hiking
I think of
the satisfaction that it brings.
Obviously brings physical
fitness'cause it's really good for you. Just as as a thing. But
Emotionally, it helps me go to the balcony.
Uh
Calms me down, it lowers the stress level.
Intellectually, mentally
It leads to creativity. It's where I do my best ideas. It's I walk
All my books. Uh you know, that's where the ideas often come from.
And you mean that you ideate on when you're walking. Yeah, I ideate. That's what I mean. Are you recording anything? I do I do record. I do record. I used to have little post its I used to write on those things. Yeah, that's more labor intensive. But n now I just record. Yeah, I just record
'Cause things come.
It's quite amazing. Uh just creativity is like
You listen, you tune in.
You relaxed beauty inspires.
I find beauty
Factually, you know, I work in a lot of difficult
Heart wrenching conflicts.
Beauty's kind of like a balm. It's just kind of like
It regulates the nervous system.
And then you know, the last thing, of course, it does is it has a spiritual level, which is like beauty. It's like wonder, awe.
And so
But I find his walking actually covers the basis and so
That's my foundation. And then of course
I do some w little weights and I do some yoga or some stretching and
Those I I've added on and I and I realize and I experiment with those over the years
But the foundation of it
I hope to walk to the day that I die. That's my dream.
How much walking generally are you doing? Is it an hour a day? Is it two hours a day? Is it somewhere in between? What does it look like? When do you go for your walks? I know this is getting very uh nitpicky, but I'm curious.
I go for a walk whenever I can.
But
I usually walk first thing in the morning if I can.
I like to go for a hike.
I have my favorite hikes, you know?
Especi ones that kinda get me out alone.
And we're
People aren't around.
You know, I always find my favorite hike of like a canyon
The stream or just something that's like a little Zen rock garden.
effect just lends itself to more creativity.
I also walk with friends later on.
I try to do my meetings. Someone wants to meet with me.
Let's go for a walk.
I live a lake, we walk around the lake.
So
For me, you know, a three walk day would be great. So I walk
Between
I would say
An hour and a half and maybe
Could be sometimes as much as three hours a day or whatever it is. Or it could be even longer. You know, I
Speaking of the Middle East.
I had a crazy idea twenty years ago.
Of
Who walks why they fight. So I I had an idea of like creating a walking trail through the Middle East. And uh it's twenty years and it's been a lifelong hobby passion, but it's called the Abraham Path, and it's
long distance path where we've developed maybe about at this point about fifteen hundred miles of trails and to walk because
long I said this is you know hundred year project, but it's kind of
It's just to get people walking, because when you walk
You talk
You talk differently.
You know, you can work out conflicts while you walk because you know, what's interesting, you're walking you're
You're side by side facing a common direction, and that's the direction you want to go in negotiation. Side by side
Trying to solve a
Problem. You've got a horizon there.
Yeah, suppose this like pugilistic
Sitting across a table facing each other like two predators.
That's a different vibe. There's a reason why in negotiation, you know, especially international negotiations, they talk about
Walks in the woods, you know. Oftentimes that's where breakthroughs come is when
The negotiators go for a walk in the woods.
I have found similarly.
The more I walk, the better I do.
And I have thought often about
What makes us human on so many levels.

Yeah.
Walking.
It's a walking.
It's true, you know, w by walking by beetle.
That's what allowed our brains to expand. So walking made us human. You're absolutely right.
I'd like to if you're open to it.
Discuss a little more.
what seems to be a core competency in negotiation, but in life in general. I mean, life is kind of a whole string of different negotiations, whether it's with yourself or with other people
And that is uncovering underlying interests.
Because what people ask for versus what they
Actually.
What slash
need. The older I get, the more
Continually amazed I am.
At how
Different those two sets can be.
the cover story of what people say they want versus what will actually make them happy. And sometimes they don't know. It takes some
detective work to really uncover it.
Could you give it another example of
Uncovering interests.
Because I remember for instance and I'm a really
Pulling this from
A faulty memory, but this example, I don't know if it was in one of your books or maybe somebody told me about it, but there was a real estate developer who wanted to buy this.
plan to develop a shopping center or something like that. There was this farmer or someone who owned the property and
He didn't want to sell and it went on and on and on and seemed to be intractable. And it came down to ultimately he was afraid to be forgotten. And they were like, What if we put a statue up?
right in the center of the shopping center that basically would last forever and sort of assure your legacy. And he was like, great. And then they did the deal, right? But they were stuck in all the surface level stuff for
A long time prior to that.
Are there any stories that come to mind about
Uncovering interests, not just positions.
I can't tell you how many stories I've heard like that, you know, like
Where it just turns out to be something simple, you know, I go back to I give you
An example from
Years ago I was
Invited in as a mediator.
between a separatist group in Indonesia.
that have been fighting for twenty five years for their independence from Indonesia.
Thousands of people dead.
And I was meeting
The
Head of the guerrilla group and the leaders and so on.
In Geneva.
We were about to meet with the foreign minister of Indonesia the next day, but I I began by asking them, so
I understand your position, it's independents, but
If I may.
Why do you want independence?
What's your interest?
And there is this
Long.
Silence like you struggled with it. What do you mean? Independence. It's self evident. We want independence.
I said but
Why do you want independence?
And
They struggled with it for a long time.
And I finally said, Okay, so
Is it you want your own
Place of the U and
Is it because you want
Political autonomy, the ability to have your own parliament and run things, is it economic?
You want control over your natural resources? Is it cultural? Do you want your kids to go
to school in in your own language.
And we started to unpack it.
And the reason why it was so important
It's just struck me here they've been fighting for twenty five years, thousands of people dead.
And
They knew what their position was, but they hadn't really thought through what their strategic interests were and prioritize them. And the reason why that was so important was because of Batna.
Their best alternative in negotiate agreement was to continue the war.
And I said to them, Are you gonna win this war? They said, Oh the Indonesian army is much much stronger, you know, ten years we'll still be fighting this war.
And I said.
Is there any way that you can pursue your interests?
Without even giving up your aspiration for independence.
And you know, it's the only way you can meet your interests in autonomy and control over natural resources and so on.
And
That began a whole conversation with them. They went back into their movement for a couple of years.
And lo and behold, a few years later, after that tsunami, they came back and they negotiated
An agreement with the Indonesian government, which gave them autonomy, control of their natural resources. Kids can go to school in their own language, they can practice their own religion.
You know, everything.
And there was an election and the governor and the vice governor came from this independence movement.
They advance their interests.
Without surrendering their ultimate aspiration
They moved it forward.
And that to me just showed just the enormous value.
of always digging behind positions because we're like that.
We've got our position, it becomes self evident.
But oftentimes we know our position, but we don't know what our interests are. We missed the chance to advance our interests.
Yeah, I was just thinking as you're telling that story, that the longer something has persisted, whether it's a grudge against your parents or
Some strife with
Sure.
significant other or twenty five year
Conflict.
The interests may have been clear in the beginning, but somewhere along the line they got replaced with the
position and
Then it becomes this
faulty proxy where it's like, well it's self evident. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Is it self evident?
like the label of the thing, but not the thing. I can see how the longer something has lasted, the more likely
Perhaps it is that the interests have

Even if they were extremely clear at some point.
In getting yes, we told the story about these
Two sisters quarreling about an orange and they quarrel about the orange and finally they
Cut the orange in half and one sister takes her
Half and
Peels it and
uses the half a peel for baking a cake and the other sister takes her half peels it and eats the half of the fruit.
And they end up with
Half appeal for one.
And a half a fruit for the other, when
'Cause their position was the orange, but if they'd look behind what their interests were, which were cooking and eating, they could have ended up with a whole peel for one and a whole fruit for the other.
Yeah.
That is great. I need to go back and read Gang D S I mean, I bought that.
As soon as I could. As soon as I could buy it, I got it. And then Getting Past No followed up and then possible will be the next edition. What do you hope that possible?
does or what would success constitute for you with this book.
Comes out a year later.
How do you know if it's been a successful book or not?
Here's my dream.

My dream
Is
If I was a Martian anthropologist right now, looking at humanity, and I look at say, wow, we live in this time of paradox, because we have so much abundance, so much potential, so much opportunity to make the world better. You know, we you know, we've got the technology, we've got AI, we've got all this stuff. At the same time, what's in our way, there's no limit to what we could do.
There's no opportunity we can't realize. There's no problem we can't solve. If only we can learn to work together.
And what's in the way are these conflicts that seem impossible that
Seem polarizing and paralyzing.
And
The reason I wrote possible was to indicate from my own experience of spending forty five years wandering around the world as a negotiator and an anthropologist trying to understand these things.
Seeing where
People took
impossible situations and found possibilities.
And my hope
Is that
We're all possibilists. I mean, anyone listening to this podcast, you're a possibilist. You believe in human potential. My hope, my dream is that.
There's a
A worldwide league.
A possibilists who are
tackling the world's toughest problems and that could be your personal issues.
It could be issues with yourself, issues with your
partner, it could be professional work life issues, it could be in the community.
Or can be in the larger world, the political world.
But
using harnessing our full human potential.
for what you have here in this podcast, which is our full human potential for curiosity.
A full human potential for creativity.
And our full human potential for
Collaboration.
to transform these conflicts because if we can transform these conflicts
We can transform our lives.
We can transform our world.
That's my dream.
Amen.
It's very well said. Very well put and worthwhile dream to have, I think.
Yeah.
William, this has been an incredible
conversation. I've been looking forward to it for some time.
And
People can find the book.
Wherever they find their books. Possible, how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict. I have found your books so incredibly useful in the past.
So incredibly practical. So I really do hope people
Check it out and
Furthermore

As you said, a lot of this is an inside job.
working from the inside out. And it's highly compatible with a lot of the things, completely compatible with much of what
has been
I would say well received on this podcast in the past, stoic philosophy.
et cetera. And I think your craft and your genius is
a living example of
in some senses, you know, separating what you can influence from those things you can't and then being very creative.
And
I would say
As
Sort of a precursor.
believer in the possible.
In crafting potential solutions.
Not just ways out, but ways forward. And really appreciate all the time today. People can find you on Twitter.
Yes, all the cool kids call it X now these days at William Urey GTY as in getting TS. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any requests of my audience, anything else?
You would like to add before we
Wine to a close.
Well, first of all, it's been a huge pleasure to speak with you, Tim, and uh I'm a big fan of your podcast and of your
I believe this possibilist mindset, and my humble request to
Your listeners is
Take this possibleist mindset, this belief that I think infuses this podcast of
This belief in human potential and being curious and being creative and being collaborative.
And apply it.
To your own.
Difficult conflicts, and you'll see.
That
If you can go to the balcony.
Can do that inside job, that self mastery, that stoic
Philosophy.
And if you can then
Build the other side a golden bridge, you know, something that works for both sides.
And if you can take the third side.
engage the larger community for the benefit of the community. If we can do those three things, balcony, bridge, third side, those are our human
I believe innate superpowers. If we can awaken them.
Then I think.
We can kind of create the world that we want for ourselves and the people that we love.
William, thank you so much.
This has been uh
A fantastic conversation. I've taken all sorts of notes. It was a real pleasure to do research for this because it just triple reinvigorated my interest in everything that you have written about and all of the many adventures that you have had.
I really appreciate the time.
And uh for sharing your life and
techniques and perspectives on the show. So thank you for that.
And for everybody listening.
We will link to everything in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blog slash podcast to everything mentioned.
You can find possible how we survive and thrive in an age of conflict.
Anywhere you find your fine books. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary. Not only to other people, but also to yourself.
Thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
Between one and a half and 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 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,
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