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

Brought to you by HEY http://hey.com/tim premium email service, Theragun http://therabody.com/tim percussive muscle therapy devices, and LinkedIn Jobs http://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 800M+ users. Aryeh B. Bourkoff (@aryehbourkoff https://www.instagram.com/aryehbourkoff/) is the Chairman and CEO of LionTree http://www.liontree.com/, an independent investment and merchant bank advising and investing in transformational CEOs and the companies they lead. Aryeh founded LionTree in 2012 during a time of unprecedented disruption, and since then, LionTree has supported an expanding number of industries as they capture opportunity in an evolving digital economy. Aryeh is also the founder of Kindred Media https://www.youtube.com/c/KindredCast, a digital media and podcasting company powered by LionTree, and serves on the boards of Yahoo and Carnegie Hall. Before founding LionTree, Aryeh spent 13 years at UBS, closing his tenure as Vice Chairman and Head of Americas Investment Banking. Before UBS, Aryeh was a high yield research analyst and ranked as the #1 cable and satellite analyst by Institutional Investor for seven consecutive years. Aryeh is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and resides in New York City with his family. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by HEY http://hey.com/tim! I was introduced to HEY http://hey.com/tim by my friend Kevin Rose, who calls it “a beautiful rethinking of everything wrong with email.” HEY http://hey.com/tim is a premium email service for people who are tired of having an inbox overflowing with things they don’t care about, and who value their privacy and online security. They offer a 14-day free trial http://hey.com/tim if you want to get a taste of HEY. A full-year’s subscription to HEY http://hey.com/tim is just $99. Plus, The Tim Ferriss Show listeners get an exclusive discount that has never been offered anywhere before: get $20 off your first year’s subscription when you sign up at Hey.com/Tim http://hey.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 800 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Theragun http://therabody.com/tim! Theragun http://therabody.com/tim is my go-to solution for recovery and restoration. It’s a famous, handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. I own two Theraguns, and my girlfriend and I use them every day after workouts and before bed. The all-new Gen 4 Theragun http://therabody.com/tim is easy to use and has a proprietary brushless motor that’s surprisingly quiet—about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Go to Therabody.com/Tim http://therabody.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today, starting at only $179. * [05:35] What makes a good research analyst? [12:39] Lessons learned from Alan Ginsberg. [16:02] Why did Aryeh choose to move across the country for a career in finance? [19:49] Professional job-seeking, doorknob negotiation, and toe-stepping. [24:30] Tying together the disparate and thinking outside convention. [35:38] Coping with overflow when time is short. [51:56] “What is your edge?” [58:27] A deck of cards and Joe Ianniello. [1:05:08] Resources for sharpening negotiation skills. [1:13:56] Recommended reading. [1:22:04] Thoughts on the future of audio/streaming/podcasting. [1:29:41] Building and maintaining community trust. [1:32:39] Goalkeeping. [1:35:59] Mach2. [1:39:12] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  full of intrusive trackers, and all framed by a multitude of ads that watch your every move. If you think about it, you have an email account, but you really have no control over it. That is where HEY comes in. So, try the HEY way. What does that mean? Your inbox should be for important stuff. That's why HEY made the inbox, I-M-B-O-X, where important things go. Normally, anyone can email you and land right at the top of your inbox, whether it's a message from a trusted friend or from a total stranger, a rando. It makes no difference. Your inbox is fair game to anyone. Not anymore. With HEY, emails never land in your inbox by default. You get to screen senders the first time they email you and decide if you want to hear from them or not. They offer a 14-day free trial if you want to get a taste of HEY.

• 1:25Tim Ferriss?

  A full-year subscription to HEY is just $99. Plus, the Tim Ferriss Show listeners, that's you guys, get an exclusive discount that has never been offered anywhere before. Get $20 off of your first-year subscription when you sign up at hey.com/tim. That's hey.com, H-E-Y dot com slash T-I-M, to take back control of your email.

• 1:53Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night, I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension. So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level.

• 2:37Tim Ferriss?

  Helps with performance, helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed, after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing. And the all-new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet. It's easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing and you really have to feel the Theragun's signature power, amplitude, and effectiveness to believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So, I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun, that's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun with an OLED screen. That's OLED, for those wondering. That's organic light emitting diode screen, personalized Theragun app, and incredible

• 3:22Tim Ferriss?

  combination of quiet and power. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So try Theragun for 30 days, starting at only $199. Go to therabody.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more time, that's therabody.com/tim. T-H-E-R-A-B-O-D-Y.com/tim.

• 3:56Tim Ferriss?

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

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question? No, it would seem inappropriate, Tim.

• 4:07Speaker 02

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

• 4:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short so we can get to the meat of this conversation with my guest today, Aryeh Bourkoff. He is the chairman and CEO of Lion Tree, an independent investment and merchant bank advising and investing in transformational CEOs and the companies they lead. Aryeh founded Lion Tree in 2012 during a time of unprecedented disruption, and since then, Lion Tree has supported an expanding number of industries as they capture opportunity in evolving digital economy. We're going to touch on a lot of those points. Aryeh is also the founder of Kindred Media, a digital media and podcasting company powered by Lion Tree, and serves on the boards of Yahoo and Carnegie Hall. Before founding Lion Tree, Aryeh spent 13

• 5:01Tim Ferriss?

  years at UBS, closing his tenure as Vice Chairman and Head of America's Investment Banking. Before UBS, Aryeh was a high-yield research analyst and ranked as the number one cable and satellite analyst by Institutional Investor for seven consecutive years. Aryeh is a graduate of the University of California at San Diego and resides in New York City with his family. You can find Lion Tree at liontree.com, and on Instagram, you can find a number of accounts, @AryehBurkoff, that's spelled A-R-Y-E-H-B-O-U-R-K-O-F-F, @liontree_LLC, and @KindredPodcast. Aryeh, welcome to the show. Nice to see you.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Thanks, Tim. Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, of course. I've been looking forward to this. And I wanted to start with actually a mention in your bio. So ranked as the number one cable and satellite analyst by Institutional Investor for seven consecutive years. What makes a good analyst, or what made you a good analyst, and what are common mistakes that analysts make?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Well, that takes me back. You know, a career has different chapters to it, right? I actually think those... Chapters should be related to one another and foundational in nature, but I don't like to hover in one place for too often. And I also don't like to think about the zero sum game. So things I'm doing today have no relationship to things I did before. But I'm glad you brought up this analyst job because I think a lot of people forget about that part of my life, but it was so core in training and also in the relationships and the understanding of how to be not only

• 6:43Speaker 03

  a good purveyor of companies, but also of my own emotional stability, I would say. And so the way I would say that as analyst is often thrown around, but you know, it could be like a therapist, an analyst. But in this case, a research analyst, which I was as someone that, you know, really looked at securities or stocks or bonds in a particular industry. So for me, the industries were always media, cable, telecoms, technology, consumer-driven companies. And at first I looked at those companies from a bond perspective, junk bonds, high-yield bonds, and then equity, stocks. And covering those stocks in those same industries allowed me to ultimately get to a goal of helping investors

• 7:28Speaker 03

  make money with those recommendations. Now, how you do that is understanding the company, its fundamental picture, and ultimately where it's going in the future. Because everything today should be understood and everything tomorrow should have a lot of uncertainty around it. So pattern recognition, how to predict the future is the first thing that you really are supposed to be learning as an analyst in order to help inform the masses of which investments to make. But then the emotional stability part of it comes into play when you get out in front of everybody and say with some boldness

• 8:10Speaker 03

  and some prose and some analysis, here's my view. I think I'm right.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  More often than not, you're wrong.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And it's like watching two kids in a schoolyard when you were growing up, getting into an argument. And you watched one of them clearly lose that argument. And then count down until you saw that they recognized that they would have the confidence to admit that they lost the argument. And there's always a lag. It could be 10 seconds. It could be weeks, could be years. And that's all about like capitulation. And so the first thing I learned was when I was wrong and I thought that I would be right, to quickly recognize that I didn't have anything that was that interesting or different to say in front of everybody.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  And by doing that, it was hu- very embarrassing. These could even be minor things. But it built so much credibility later that when you are right, it counted so much more and for so much more. And then it built your own self-confidence that you really did have something. And then if you're really lucky, and that's where the rankings come into play, when you say something that's different than the masses.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  And you have the confidence to say going against the grain to predict the future, then the markets will go with you. The investors will go with you. People will be profitable based on your recommendation. People will make money based on what you say. And you build a reputation. And that was a process.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  This raises a number of secondary questions. Well, the first, just for clarification, when you're talking about taking a public stance and promoting or publishing an opinion, what form does that take? Is it a ranking system? Is it a general sort of binary buy or sell recommendation? Just for for folks who are listening to have a more discreet understanding of what that opinion looks like. What form does that take?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  It has to be a published report that has to have an initiation report. It could be a report on the industry. So it has to have some perspective, some thematic and within it, some specific company recommendations. So let's just say I want to write a report on the movie studios. And then within that report, I would say, here's my view of the movie studios and specifically my recommendations on Disney and Warner Brothers and Viacom at the time and Fox at the time. And then within these, these are my recommendations. Buy, hold, sell and supportive documents. And then because you knew that no one would actually go and read a hundred pages,

• 11:02Speaker 03

  you'd have to summarize it in a perfectly synthesized four bullet point cover page. And before any of that stuff happened, you have to go through internal processes to defend your arguments. Where people internally have the right to say, we don't really think that works. But more often than not, they would let you go and let the public be your ultimate judge and juror. Because that public embarrassment would be much, far more damaging to you. And that far more self correcting than anything they would say internally. But they have obviously institutions to protect. But those documents were full of analysis and semantics and context. Both context of the here and now and the past versus the future.

• 11:46Speaker 03

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

• 12:29Speaker 03

  Then obviously over time, if you're right, more often than not, you just start investing for yourself. You may not give it to everybody else as a service. That's the notion of a career, right?

• 12:40Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that is your evolution. It's not always evolution, right? Playing with your own ships and taking that responsibility to make direct bets in that way is not a leap that everyone makes. And I want to take a step back for a second just to read a fantastic headline. This is a piece from the Hollywood Reporter. So how Arya Borakov became media's hottest dealmaker. So some of the groundwork that we're laying right now is going to lead into that. But I wanted to mention that because it is an exceptional piece. I thought it was a very entertaining piece also that people should check out. Let's rewind to Allen Ginsberg, not the poet, different Allen Ginsberg. But who's Allen Ginsberg? And what are some of the lessons that you learned from him?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Allen Ginsberg gave me a shot and he was a mentor and the person that first hired me into this thing called Wall Street in New York. And remember, I came from California, had no reason to be anywhere near this industry or Wall Street. Didn't know anything really of substance coming out of university, except what everyone else knows, which is like how to communicate, look for a job, maybe how to write a little bit. Other people maybe have much more vocational expertise in engineering and medicine than I did, but I was a generalist coming out. So coming to New York, didn't know a soul and basically put resumes under windshield wipers.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  You know, said like, you know, here's my flyer. I have an interest in being here. I'll hustle and I'll earn it. And then you have to convince people to give you a shot. And Allen Ginsberg gave me that first shot. And when I interviewed with Allen, who himself was and is, we're still in touch, a creative person in finance. Because Allen's background, even though he was a lawyer and financier and so on, he also wrote for Rolling Stone magazine. He liked writing. He liked the way the world worked. And he wasn't a traditional person you think of as a, you know, Gordon Gekko, Wall Street type. And so maybe that's why we took an interest in each other because we talked about how the world worked and he gave me a chance. And so Alan hired me and he said, I

• 14:53Speaker 03

  remember, you're going to be the first person that works for us in the high yield bond group at Smith Barney. And Alan ran the Smith Barney research group, having come from Bear Stearns before that. And I think before that, he was immediately at Drexel Burnham in Los Angeles, the Michael Milken High Yield Bond Shop. And I said, okay, great. I'm going to work for you. What do I do? And he said, you're gonna help me cover the industries that I focus on. I said, which are those industries? And he said, it's media, it's telecom, it's technology, it's food and it's restaurants. And I said, I have no idea what you just said, but I like to eat and like to go out to eat in restaurants. So that sounds good. Eventually, those fell away. And I kept

• 15:35Speaker 03

  going with those media and communications and technology industries from day one. And then I just decided to get that competitive streak to be better than the rest and to work at it. And I eventually got the bug. But I remember thinking to myself, watching Human Action, I will never be able to be as good at communicating as he is, or as good at analyzing companies as he is. And he just kept going at it until you eventually get the groove.

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  So two questions related to what you just shared. The first is, why go from California to backpack in hand to Wall Street and even make the attempt? What was the draw or the reasoning there? And then secondly, why do you think Alan gave you a shot? Why would he say yes? Why would he take that ostensible risk?

• 16:28Speaker 03

  I was in California, at the University of California in San Diego, as you mentioned. I knew as I was graduating that I wanted to get into the center of finance. Like, I didn't want to stay in the periphery. So if you're going to go into an industry, go to the heart of it. Don't play around the edges.

• 16:53Tim Ferriss?

  Why the interest in finance also? Why finance at all?

• 16:56Speaker 03

  This is the way I described it to my parents, who are academics and looked at finance, I could tell in a disdainful way, like, that's not a way to live your life. Maybe a lot of your listeners think the same way. And I thought to myself, okay, I have to present this to them. I remember going to travel to see my mother. And I said, I'm going to go into finance. This is the way that I think it's a worthwhile way to live your life. And I, because they were academics and professors and so on. And I said, entrepreneurs, people have hopes and dreams that sometimes take the shape and form of businesses.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  And those businesses need money, capital, to see the light of day, to realize the dreams. And that's finance. And if I can play a role in helping those individuals get capital and have their dreams realized, that is a worthwhile life to live. Sounds like a good pitch, right?

• 17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it sounds like a good pitch.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Good pitch, right? I mean, that landed well. I got the blessing, plus I was rehearsing, you know, probably practicing my interviews. And, but that's really what I believe and believe to this day. And that's kind of what makes it interesting. You know, you, you see the energy in someone else that you're able to recast a problem as a solution that is based on someone's real idea. And it's not just about moving pieces around. It's about creating something new. And I think that that wasn't enough. That was enough for my parents, but it wasn't enough in New York. Because a lot of people have that pitch. I think, you know, I remember like when I was in college, I went to some of these parties and you'd walk in with your friends

• 18:45Speaker 03

  and like the vibe would happen. And I remember walking with one of my college friends and he couldn't get any women to pay attention to him. And he said, I remember he said to me one day, he goes, I don't know, like, you know, my mother always says I'm attractive. I remember thinking to myself, I also like, so I passed a test with my mother about my pitch. But when I got to New York, it didn't really land as well. It may have landed, but it was in competition with a lot of other people. And so it took me about four months in New York to get to Allen because the day I moved to New York was because of a job interview. And I thought I hit the jackpot like one of one.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  The day I graduated was a Sunday and I think Monday or Tuesday I had interviewed, had an interview set up with a guy named Paul Ting, I don't mind saying it now, he's probably out there somewhere, at Oppenheimer. And he covered the oil and gas industry. I told myself I wasn't going to choose the industry. Whoever hired me first, I would just be loyal to that industry for the rest of my life. And I can build a specialty. And so I went and I incredibly, I got this interview. And I had a meeting like this, day two in New York downtown, the big city, it was 1995. And I thought the interview was great.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  And I was going to be a research analyst, working for Paul Ting, oil and gas, Oppenheimer. And at the end, I was like, you know, starting to like strut out of the office and say, okay, like next step, when do I start? You know? This is like the same interview I have with my mother, like it's landing well, you know? And, um, and he goes, by the way, one more question. He goes, do you know the programming language Visual Basic? Like C plus Visual Basic? And I said, no. And he said, um, well, I kind of need you to know that if you're going to be on the team. These days they call it a doorknob negotiation. On the way out, as you're holding the doorknob, it turned back and say, by the way, one more thing. That's the whole negotiation.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  So I said, by the way, one more thing, do you know the Visual Basic? I said, no. And he said, well, you need, you're going to need to know that for me to hire you. I said, well, what if I learn it and master it? Well, then you hire me? He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, then we're good.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  That's New York City. I was like, great. I left, bought like Visual Basic for Dummies, bought a laptop, drained my account and got sublet an apartment, started learning this thing. Two weeks later, felt comfortable. This is the world as it should be, you know, called up. And I never got a return phone call. And I was like, well, what do I do now? Like, what I, what do I do now? By the way, while I was at UBS in a senior position in research, I did see across the tape, probably, I don't know, fifteen years later, that we hired a guy named Paul Tang at Oppenheimer to do oil and gas for UBS when I was there doing media. And I waited till he started and I went down the hallway.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  I knocked on the door. I said, by the way, Paul, you may or may not remember me. I want to welcome you to UBS. At this point, I was an established senior person doing, you know, media stocks, really well established at UBS. And I said, I just want to welcome you and I want to tell you that I mastered that fucking Visual Basic programming language.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  And I wish you luck here, buddy.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  And like, so like, you've already put like on the side, one of your philosophies in life, like the toe you step on today could be connected to the ass you're gonna kiss tomorrow.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  By the way.

• 22:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Good mantra.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  So yeah, Alan, Alan, four months later, left in New York. I became a professional job seeker. And I would basically walk to different buildings that looked like, you know, hitter buildings. And I looked at the directory at the basement at the lobby level, what sort of looked like Wall Street firms, the ones I recognized, obviously. And then others I didn't recognize. And I would go up, this is before where they, pre nine eleven, they didn't check IDs. I would go up to the HR floor and I would hand in my resume and I would choose a different location in Manhattan every week to tackle. The downtown, the midtown. And then one day I stumbled upon, you know, Smith Barney, it was still on Greenwich Street downtown,

• 23:16Speaker 03

  right across, you know, from the Greenwich Old Town, like this is now like an amazing hot area. Back then it was like away from Wall Street, away from the action. And Corinne Krennic, to her credit, since I'm naming names, was the HR person that let me through the door and gave me a shot, wherever she is, and introduced me to Alan Ginsberg. And at that point, I was pretty good on the pitch. And also self-corrected, like knowing what didn't land and what landed. And Alan gave me a shot, and I think, you know, he liked the hustle. He liked hustle, liked the background probably, and also a little bit of luck. But he also called me out on the bullshit, because I do remember he asked me, the proverbial question in interviews, what's your weakness?

• 23:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  And I do remember I said, remember, that's when I was practicing. So I said, my penmanship.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  And I thought that was pretty clever. He said, that's a bullshit answer.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Try it again. And so then I had to figure it out, and then I stumbled through it. We both chuckled and, and I forgot what I said exactly, but I'm sure I said something that was more subtle, but he called me out on it, you know?

• 24:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Amazing.

• 24:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it seems like perhaps a blessing in disguise, life saving you from what you wanted with Paul and the oil and gas, but who's to say, I suppose, in retrospect. I want to take a closer look at Alan teaching you how the world worked. And I'm looking at a Kindred Media piece on Medium, and there's a mention of Alan. And I'll just read part of it, which is, one day Ginsberg asked him, that's asking you, if he read the paper, thinking, uh-oh, what deal did I miss? What happened? Did I miss a number? RA reminisced. Ginsberg goes, no, no, no, forget the numbers. The opera house burned down in Florence. You didn't read that?

• 25:18Tim Ferriss?

  And I said, I didn't even think to read that. And then he said, you're going to have to be a little more open-minded about this. And the reason I bring this up is that observing you in person and also doing research. In preparation for this conversation, you, more than almost anyone I've ever met, tie together many, many, many, many disparate worlds. And you seem to have pattern recognition, not just in one sector, but across sectors. Was there any other world educating that comes to mind? And that could be through direct teaching or osmosis observation that came to you from Alan or other mentors?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  I appreciate that you said that because it's much easier in life to stay in a box and a blanket, a compartment of the whole ecosystem. And by the way, there are places for people to be in those boxes and to thrive in those boxes. When you start to move outside of that box, or in the corners of that box, or the edge of that box, or outside of that box, to draw outside the line, so to speak, it is a beautiful place to live and it is also a dangerous place to live because it's full of unknowns and uncomfortable, maybe groundbreaking things.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  It reminds me of another philosophical line of conventional thinking is typically right, but seldom profitable.

• 26:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's great.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  It feels good to think like everybody else and to be moving with the herd, but you're not going to make a difference. You could be wrong, but you may never really be right in an outsized way if you don't really stretch into the unknown. And some people are not comfortable with that, but where do I get that from? I mean, I get that from everybody. I mean, but it really goes back to self-work. Ultimately, you have to have a strong core to be able to do that because if you just move with the wind outside the box, then you don't really know who you are.

• 27:27Tim Ferriss?

  So just to interrupt for a second, so by having clarity on that core or a solid core, is that, if you wouldn't mind, I'm sorry to interrupt, but just expanding that for a second, is that a core set of values, a clear idea of what you will or will not do so that you don't end up conforming to whatever winds happen to be blowing at that moment?

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Yes. It reminds me of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That last scene where the evil spirit comes in to the warehouse and Indiana Jones and his compatriot or his partner or his girlfriend, wherever at that point they're all intermingled, are hanging on to a foundational pole with their eyes closed. But yet this spirit comes in and completely destroys everything else and kills everyone's faces. And it's a horror scene, right? But they survive and they survive because of hanging on to this pole, hanging on to each other and keeping their eyes closed and just hoping their way through it.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  And obviously the metaphor is they're good and everyone else is evil and that spirit recognizes it, right? But I think about that, like you have to hold on to a few poles. You can't just be floating around. You have to have a few poles of foundational strength that you believe in that are making up your core. And those are tried and true, but at the same time, that allows you to be curious, self-adjusting, self-corrective, migrational around other areas and being comfortable with many different types of people that are not like you at all because you have that core.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  And that creates a very balanced and textured life and existence and a way to build pattern recognition and perspective that most people would be locked in pursuing. And by the way, I'm locked in my own way too. Like everyone has certain blocks, right? But the more of that exercise that you can do, the more of a perspective you can get of where the world's going and where it looks like to be different cultures while you're living in your own foundational strengths and values. And I think to me that that all goes back to the basic foundation of self-awareness, self-work, self-correction, self-growth.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  And once you have that, like you're a member of society that's valuable. And then you look for that in others and run away from people that are ignorant or biased or, you know, morose or also maybe a nicer way to nicer version of that is just want to go with the flow everywhere.

• 30:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Speaker 03

  And don't feel comfortable with some out of the box thinking because it's threatening to those foundational values. A way to say that from a finance perspective is when I was a research analyst, I wouldn't feel comfortable putting a buy recommendation on a stock before hit the send button until I both felt the conviction of the buy and the rejection of the sell. So I had to live with the sell recommendation inside of me first for a while, see if it felt comfortable or uncomfortable. And let it in, left like the poison inside for a while. If that felt too comfortable for me, I couldn't in good conscience go to the buy. So I had to have a buy and the rejection of itself because the buy to me could have

• 31:03Speaker 03

  been a passive recommendation, not an active recommendation.

• 31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  You have to ask yourself, are you comfortable going into a controversial scenario? Or do you want to just live in the non controversial?

• 31:14Tim Ferriss?

  One more question on this core. Is this a, let's just call it a general imper turbibility? Or a solidity that was more a felt sense for you? Or was it something that you at that time codified in some way where you're like, I prioritize these five things or I will, I resolve to follow these following values? Was it codified or was it more of a felt sense of stability and solidity for you at that time?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Both, they're interrelated. So the first time I remember feeling that sensibility was probably like in grade school, being popular kid with the friends, everything, not an outcast, like with the group, but a little bit different. And feeling inside a little different. And then the question is like, do you feel bad about being different? Or does it start to empower you or both? And I kind of felt like, let's test it out. And I remember thinking. I am very happily situated where I was in eighth grade.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  But let me leave that to go to a new ninth grade school that was an unknown away from all my friends. And let's see if friends were the thing that made me feel great. Or the inside was the thing that I could apply to new friends and keep that train going. I chose to apply to the unknown and chose a brand new place. And left behind what I had before. Now, I wouldn't do that with family or like a very close relationship. But I felt very comfortable doing it with the environment I was in. To get myself in a new environment and knowing that it's me.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  That can adjust and apply my skills to different areas. And not the environment around me that defined who I was. I could be more proactive defining environments versus having them define for me. I remember that back then and it's happened a few different times in my life. Whether it's moving different places or feeling comfortable. I always say, I feel comfortable everywhere, but belong nowhere. That's like a geographic comment and that's true by and large. But I also have done that in my careers where I feel after a certain amount of time in one area. Move, take these strong parts of what is applicable, maybe the industry knowledge.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Into new areas, learn areas that I didn't know before and see if you can reconcile those two things. And then that builds that core with the unknown together. That's a life of curiosity and creativity. But also life of foundation and strength and contribution on the other hand. I call that like the gray area. You know, like you are comfortable in the gray area. I feel like that's a competitive advantage for me. I can live, I can hang out in that gray area longer than most, most people in the world. Very comfortably until I see the optimal scenario to pass on, you know?

• 34:33Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, every new potential hire can feel like a high stakes gamble for your small business. So you want to be 100% certain that you have access to the most qualified candidates. That's why you should check out LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right people for your team faster and for free. Add your job and the purple hashtag hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Simple tools like screening questions make it easy to focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience so you can quickly prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's been a tough year for everyone, so finish it strong by hiring the right new team members to set yourself up for strong and successful 2023. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the qualified candidates you want to talk to faster. So post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 35:39Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about perhaps that gray area. I may be misapplying that term to what I'm going to ask, but this relates to a story you told me last winter. And if you don't want to discuss this, I can't imagine. It's sensitive, but we can also cut it afterwards. But I think it came about because of the title of my first book, Four Hour Work Week, and someone said, oh, you should talk to Ariah because that is probably not going to be a driving philosophy or something along those lines. Although I do think we have some similarities as well in terms of per hour output and thinking about various things. And you told me a story, I'm going to get some of the details wrong, so I'd like you

• 36:19Tim Ferriss?

  to correct it, but about at one point realizing that many meetings were being declined because your calendar was full and then deciding to take an entire year to block out every Wednesday, I can't remember from like 6 to 10 PM or something, to take all of those overflow meetings that were being canceled. Could you retell that story if you wouldn't mind?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  So it all starts with the concept of rejecting constraints. On one hand, on the other hand, problem solving, which is like probably one of these terms that are thrown around so many times, problem solving, I'm a problem solver, I run a company, I'm solving problems. And it's probably like, but like, who actually does that? You know, like, I mean, put yourself in a situation where you actually solve a problem that seems insurmountable. So one of those problems were time. I don't have enough time, time being the constraint. Let's just tackle solving that problem. Because everyone just talks about that all the time. And the other part of the story is the passive or active conscious

• 37:28Speaker 03

  or subconscious deprioritization of people that are, let's say, not as important to you as your kindness gene wants them to be, but you're really not going to put them on your calendar, the prime spots. But so you deprioritize them. And even if you are prioritizing them in your mind, in your heart, in your body, in your soul, your office will deprioritize them for you. And people have become an expert at these things, right? Now, over time, you build a luxury in life of being able to do that and be more selective because as you mature, you want to spend time with only things that are essential, maybe you're running

• 38:08Speaker 03

  out of time. And we first started a company with relationships as its core. And with reputation, that's really important to define the company. The concept of rejecting people or those relationships in any form is out of the question. So what would happen at the beginning of the firm some 10 years ago was I recognized I was a funnel. People would want to figure out what was going on at one point in time. There are very few things in your life that light up all your contacts at one time. Like, let's say, your wedding, your funeral, God forbid, maybe a big job movement, a big news item. Imagine then like

• 38:53Speaker 03

  all of a sudden your phone like lights up. But most of the time, it just kind of smooths out. Certain people want to care about different things. When you start a company, it will light up everything on your contact, hopefully, or if it doesn't, you have a bigger problem, right? And so this was a company starting based on all of the relationships in my contact base.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  And a place to put them and to cultivate them to build a skyscraper. But the beginning was just me and the relationship and an assistant. And so I started to get wind of the fact that certain people couldn't get on my calendar, which is obviously natural because you can't put every single one of your contacts on your calendar at the moment you announce a new company, even if it's like a few weeks out. People are gonna say, sorry, you can't make it. But imagine how that feels for somebody else. I wanna support this new Lion Tree Venture and what Aria is doing. Oh, but you can't see me? What a horrible way to start a company. I don't care who you are. After a while of reading and hearing people sending me notes or emails,

• 39:57Speaker 03

  I recognize that there are certain category of people that they were. Because obviously, the office knew enough to give them credit to prioritize, you know, the Tim Ferriss's of the world right away, right? Or they maybe prioritize things that would be like immediately like dollars oriented or transactional, which is also not the philosophy of the company. But they wouldn't prioritize things that would be career advice or people that wanted to work with the company as a vendor or business partner or things like that, that they wouldn't even know, but I would know. So I brought my assistant into the office and I said, um, so what is this thing we're rejecting people? He said, well, you don't have time. I said, yeah, but you get paid to say yes. I can say no.

• 40:41Speaker 03

  That's the job of the assistant. If you're gonna wait, say yes. And they said, but yes, but Aria, you don't have the time on your calendar. And I said, well, that's a question. Let's figure out the problem solving of time now. What if I created a whole extra day in the week? Would that unlock the potential for filling in all these kind of second tier requests, so to speak? There's a, yeah, I mean hypothetically, if you had an extra day, we probably have a lot more to work with. I said, okay, let me think about it. I got it. Wednesday nights, you're right, Wednesday nights. But the hours are different from 10 P M. till 2 A M.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  From year one of the company, I will do, you know, office hours, but no internal like bitch sessions, there's no like suggestion box. This is an external session. If people really want it that bad, I'll be here. No one else internally has to be here. Just leave me a little food and a little drink. Unless he wants to be here, I'll be here and then I'll start the next day at the same time. You know, seven in the morning, eight in the morning, whatever. I'll, I'll eat it on my end for a year and I think I'll apply unplug the, the situation. And we've created what you viewed as a constraint of time. I created time by eating into my, my sleep hours. So your four hour work week is really a four hour sleep week for me.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  But anyway, but it worked, it worked. People showed up for a year until two in the morning. And it was the most interesting, grateful conversations. It's just like New York City and it's fine. It's like, you know, in the office, you do, you know, you're talking about life and career. That paid dividends, not business dividends, but like, you know, reputational benefits and humanity benefits. Like the people, like what, who are you, what do you want to be at the end of the day? And I'm happy we did it. I don't regret for a second. Now I don't do that now. I would love for someone else in the company to do that now. I'm in motion still and I, I want to be more selective and deep with relationships versus volume oriented right now. And I always like when people will compete for the depth of those relationships with me versus the masses.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  But that's what the firm was supposed to be to understand what is selective. But the firm needed that at the beginning to really understand what we're about.

• 42:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Amazing story. Wow. 10 to 2 a.m. So two questions. How did you choose 10 to 2 a.m.? Was that just to separate the casual inquiries from the true believers? Uh, that's question one. How did you choose 10 to 2? And then the second, you mentioned something that I think probably caused a number of people to perk up because it was, would be the opposite of what many would perhaps say. And that is the assistant's job is to say yes. You can always say no. I think assistants are viewed by many folks as a.

• 43:28Tim Ferriss?

  Protective layer, maybe a flak jacket to deflect as much incoming as possible. So I'd love to hear you just explain why 10 to 2 and elaborate on the assistant's job being to find a way to say yes.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  10 to 2 is easy because I want to leave room for dinner.

• 43:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Not dinner, you know, God forbid, like a personal dinner, like a client dinner, like a dinner outside. Business and life for me are very well integrated. So it'll be use the city, go to dinner and then after dinner, come back. Some people still bring this up. People see me on the street, they say, are you, are you still doing three dinners a night? And I'm like, that'd be different one time, maybe like 10 times, but then two times I would do dinner, I would go to two dinners. I was just trying to get it all in and, you know, not eat as much at each dinner and move around and probably in retrospect wasn't the best thing to convey to people. But except for the fact that I was working hard and trying to make sure everyone was happy and that I would get it all in.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  But this 10 to 2 was about making sure that that night I would have room for my dinner, meeting out of the office. Using New York, great city to do that. And then going back to the office enough time and then starting 10pm. And then I want to have enough time. There's this great song, I think it's a U2 song. That has a line that says, like, the magic hours are when it's not yet the morning, but it's still night. But it's not really nighttime, you know, and so you haven't yet figured out that it's morning time. You haven't started thinking about your next day yet. But it's past normal nighttime for everybody else.

• 45:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  So you really can't be bothered. And none of us really live that way, I think, day to day. But that must be where a lot of magic happens, you know? And then you get to a point where you start thinking, oh, my gosh, tomorrow morning, my calendar is this and that. That to me starts around two in the morning.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  And so if I went past two, I'd I'd start eating into like what I have to start doing the next day. I'll remember the song and just listen to it the first time again.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  No problem. You could put it in the show notes, too.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great song. Oh, yeah. When the night has no end and the day yet to begin. When the moon stills around. I need your love. It's hot moon rising and rattle and hum YouTube.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  On the rattle and hum album. It's the only place you can find it, I think. Rattle and hum YouTube. Hot moon.

• 46:06Tim Ferriss?

  Good memory.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 46:08Tim Ferriss?

  And the the assistant.

• 46:10Speaker 03

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

• 46:54Speaker 03

  How the calendar flows and behaves is like a living, breathing animal with a soul and a brain and everything else. And the people that have to construct that every single day, today and into the future, the assistant, I respect that brain power and that knowledge more than anything. In some cases, including my role. So if you start with no. Instead of yes, you've kind of stopped playing the puzzle. You've said, I can't fit the puzzle piece, so it's not going to fit somewhere. But if you say yes, then the puzzle keeps expanding. And the calendar has to mimic the strategy of the firm.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Where I want to be going, the changes in the development of the firm, the changes in the people I want to play with, work with, experience life with. And the understanding of that has to mimic one another. And so it's not they say yes, I say no. It's much more of like, we understand where we're going and it has to reflect the vision of what's going on in my head and therefore has to be communicated that way. And it has to have a yes around it somewhere.

• 48:04Tim Ferriss?

  I dig it. Yeah, thematically makes sense. I want to hop to UBS here.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  I'll tell you one more thing about the calendar, by the way, because I talk about this a lot. Like, if you boil it down, internal meetings, everyone has a ratio. So like, if you did nothing because of your reputation, your brand and your substance, your calendar is going to be full. People are going to want to get on your calendar all the time without you even choosing who you want to see. That's I call like defense. And then put that aside for a second. And then you had a blank shitty paper and said, forget that calendar. I, Tim, want to choose exactly who I want to see. And that may not fill the whole calendar every single day, but it'll be proactive. It'll be offense. So one's defense, one's offense. Everyone has to create a balance of those two things in their calendar.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Who wants to see them and who do you want to see? And that mix. And then there's the internal versus the external. And there's no way around the fact that internal meetings are cost or investment. It doesn't have to be negative, it could be, you know, but they're necessary investments in the company or cost. And external meetings should be revenue or potentially for your future revenue. So one's revenue, one's cost. If your calendar is fifty fifty, offense, defense, or external, internal, or revenue cost, you haven't done anything.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, you're running in place. And so I'm very cognizant of that. What's the ratio? What's the ratio? And so I figured out a long time ago, I really would love the ratio to be like seventy thirty, external versus internal. Or maybe eighty twenty. And then you can start thinking to yourself, okay, that's still a good margin. And then different times of year have different moments. Obviously, if you're paying bonuses, you're doing reviews, maybe there's a little more internal. But by and large, the internal should be more predictable if you're managing a good organization.

• 50:01Speaker 03

  You could probably put the internal on your calendar for the entire year. Otherwise, there's surprises going on. And as there's more surprises going on, the less well managed the company is. So you should be able to pretty much put the internal on your calendar right now for the whole year. And then the external, you'd be surprised at how much external you can put in your calendar in advance also. I'll meet you at Formula One in Austin, Tim. Do you want to go again this year? Like, this is a date. Or this conference? Or this event, or this holiday? You know, and you could probably put the tent poles of your external on the calendar. You'd be surprised how little room that leaves for the spontaneity and the serendipity of life, which it must. Something has to then give absent sleeping hours, right?

• 50:45Speaker 03

  And so like, that's kind of what you're playing with. You're playing with these like marginal slivers of space that is growth, that is a choice, that is what's different today versus last year. And that will represent who you are today versus last year. And what you want to be in the future. And whether the best companies in the world are going to stay exactly where they were or evolve. There's no accident that most people don't, most companies don't evolve. You, you really have to work at it. A constant build. You're dealing with slivers of space and time to make that happen.

• 51:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm glad you added that. I'm taking a number of notes for myself. That's why I'm scribbling furiously over here.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  I would cancel all internal meetings for you, by the way. To see you, I would take my internal meetings off this. I would just on a moment's notice, I would go fly and see you. You know, that would be like, that's a sign of true respect.

• 51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, thank you for saying that. And I look forward to the next time we're able to to spend some time in person. And I'm very much enjoying this entire conversation. I've been looking forward to this and bonuses. You mentioned bonuses, and I think this will tie a number of threads together, some of which are yet to come. We're skipping ahead a bit, but you ran investment banking in the Americas for UBS and had something like 1,500 people reporting to you. When people came to you or bankers came to you to talk to you about annual bonuses,

• 52:16Tim Ferriss?

  as I understand it from the Hollywood Reporter piece, you would ask, what is your edge? And I would love to hear you just elaborate on the function of that question and what you mean by that.

• 52:27Speaker 03

  It goes back to how you're judged. Ideally, you're judged, you're judging yourself every single day. Everyone's making their own adjustments every single day. And then you have external factors which remind you how you're doing every single day. And there's a lot of haphazard activity and not everything is logic based on logic and reason. But if you're running a business, you have a daily profit and loss statement, which tells you how you're doing. If you own a restaurant, tells you what you're doing. If you run an investment fund, tells what you're doing. That all those things contribute to your own humility and self-correctiveness, right?

• 53:09Speaker 03

  If you're paying somebody a bonus or a compensation at the end of the year, you are the one that's creating that self-awareness in that person. I've never seen anybody come into a conversation around compensation and feel as an employee that their boss.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Has synced up exactly with what they think that they're worth. Never seen it. So within that is a chasm of a misunderstanding or emotion of what you think you're worth versus what they think you're worth on a given year. And so that's normal life, right? Ideally, you'd like to have some daily metric that just defines that, like that daily P and L. So at the end of the year, there's no one big event. So what I was trying to do is to try to build in as much of that narrowing of that chasm as possible before the conversation.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  You could say it's a negotiating strategy, or you could call it like a real effort to just build awareness, saying like, the best way to do that is to ask someone to define who they are. And you'd be surprised when you ask someone to talk about themselves, how passive they will be and how, how little they will value themselves on the right way and how much they will overbuy themselves in the wrong way. And so I feel like, you know, people always say, what is your superpower? Maybe those things are thrown around too often these days. What's your competitive advantage? What's your edge? And in a certain defined role, like the role of finance or the role of banking,

• 55:00Speaker 03

  I said, the edge really comes into play of, you know, do you have a unique idea? Do you bring unique capital? Or do you have a unique relationship? But I wouldn't give them the answer. I was trying to figure out if they could get to it. If someone says, I work harder than everybody else. I mean, okay. Imagine telling like an NFL player or NBA player, I work harder. Is that really an edge these days? I mean, one of the things you hear like, I'm doing the best I can. I'm like, okay, well, then you get out of bed. And then what happens?

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Like, I'm assuming everyone's doing the best they can. Whenever I says like, you know, life is, life is too short. I'm like, well, life is the longest thing you know. You don't, you don't know anything longer than life, you know, so like.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  Living to the fullest as much as you can, you know, but then do better than that. And when you ask someone to define their edge or their advantage, you'll learn a lot about themselves.

• 56:00Tim Ferriss?

  So was this conversation then, it was preceding the official performance review slash decision on the bonus. This would be a precursor sort of setting the table. Yeah. Months or weeks or whatever timeframe prior to the actual conversation.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yes. And I would rarely even initiate it. You would see people. Oh, I had one this morning. You know, people want to get a sense of where they stand or how they're valued. Or what their opportunity is. In the future, all those are code words for how I'm going to get paid.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  It's fine. It is what it is. Again, it'd be better for those things to happen on a day to day basis. That define that instead of why am I telling you how you're going to get paid? You tell me. How are you going to get paid based on what your edge is, what your opportunity is? And my job is to provide the platform for you to optimize that better than anywhere else. And your job is to optimize it here and have the free market to choose somewhere else. If you can't do that, or I can't do that. And embedded within all those solutions or scenarios is maybe some biases or some lack of self-awareness. Or my mistakes in not building the right platform or not managing correctly.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Right? And so maybe as a manager, my job is really to throw the penalty flags around versus manage and tell you exactly what you're worth before I have to. One's entrepreneurial and one's needing to be secure. Where does that security come from? Self inside or outside? You know, like when you're a parent to a child, you have to provide that security, but at some point after then. Get unlocked. So I, I just think it's about, not everyone has to be entrepreneurial all the way. But there are certain responsibilities that I have to build the business for people to thrive. And make sure it's that kind of environment, mission driven and opportunistic and a meritocracy around that.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  And certain responsibilities that people have within it. To then take it competitively better than the best they can. And the risk I take is that they could do it somewhere else better than here. But I own that risk every single day. What risk do they own?

• 58:26Tim Ferriss?

  Uh, well said. So for people listening, I want to add a bit of color and then ask about a specific instance. So you have been part of and a driving force behind some of the, the largest deals. I mean, the world has ever seen, certainly in media. And people are, might be listening and thinking, my God, this guy doesn't sleep. He has endless energy. It's just a home run every time he steps up to the plate, which may in part be true, but. Could you please, and I'm going to get the name wrong. I don't know how to pronounce this properly, but. Could you please tell the deck of cards story with Joe Ianniello? Is that how you say that name correctly?

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Ianniello.

• 59:11Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I knew I wasn't going to get that right. All right.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  In fact, you got my name right and not Joe's is a real sign of growth in the industry. I appreciate it. Obviously what appears to be a home run every time is not, I mean, um. Every day is full of happiness and successes. And frustrations and consternations and irritations about what we could be doing better, what I could be doing better, frankly, all the time. And I do try to, I'm as much an introvert as I am an extrovert, by the way. I think the biggest misnomer is like mall is out and about. I get a lot of energy from being out and about, partially because of other people's energy, not just my own. But I also really enjoy some thinking time with music and some reading time and.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Kind of a chance to re-energize and go deeper than just bouncing around. You just don't Instagram out the periods where you're sitting alone. Yeah. People only see the things that you're like where you're bouncing around. They don't see the moments where you're just happily sitting alone, uh, reading a book or listening unless you're really not focusing on it. The appearances are a bit misleading, but it's the texture of all of the above. And some of that thoughtfulness is where you really come into strategizing around what the future can be for you, for your loved ones, and also for the deal making in the future. But in that particular story, uh, it all goes back to this element of what you know, what you don't know.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  We were doing a deal, I think in 2007 for a company called The Sundance Channel and, um, which was owned by NBC, CBS and Robert Redford. We were selling the company on behalf of the owners. I was at UBS. We really did a good job, I have to say. Like we did a good job selling the company. It was not an easy sale. Eventually the Dolans bought it, actually. The company that owned IFC Cablevision, the next bought The Sundance Channel for $500 million. And I thought we did a good job. And I remember in those days, in some cases also today, when the job is done, then you start to think about, well, how much money can you get paid for the services?

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Not, sometimes you get that figured out at the beginning. In this case, figure out the end. We were thinking that would work to our benefit because it was such a home run deal. And I thought we did such a good job that they would want to pay us more. Whereas if we agreed at the beginning, we probably would have under, undersold ourselves. And Robert Redford did really well in that deal. I remember, I think, I think probably made more money in that deal than all of his acting years combined. But it was a pleasure to work with. But CBS's CFO, or even I think it was the treasurer at the time was Joe Ianniello. He rose to the ranks of even being the CEO for a while after that. And Joe was a, you know, tough negotiator, but we were on the same side of the table.

• 1:02:07Speaker 03

  So afterwards, I was told by my, my bosses at UBS, like, okay, are you a great job deal? Now go get us a good fee. I said, okay, I have to do that too. Like, all right. I said, yeah, that's, that's what it takes. And I said, okay. So I went over to, Joe was appointed as a person that um had to negotiate our fee. And I thought it'd be like one of these great kumbaya conversations. We all did a great job together and let's, let's, let's have drinks and get this settled quickly. But no, so I went over to uh like a Black Rock, you know, the CBS building. And it was a long conference room and it was just Joe and myself sitting in the middle. And Joe said, hey, um, you're here to negotiate your fee, right? I said, yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  But, you know, you project some confidence, but you're really nervous inside. And he said, you know, just to break the ice a little bit before we get into that negotiation. Do you wanna play some cards? Do you wanna do a card trick? I'm getting into cards recently.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Sounds great, like friends now too. This is great. Yeah, amazing. So, so he, he said, that's, in fact, you know what? More than just a card trick. Why don't we just shortcut the whole thing since you're busy, I'm busy? And why don't you just pick out of the deck? Any card? And whatever card you pick will be your fee. And we'll just do it by chance. I said, really? Like, we'll do that, like, just to clarify, like a face card, like a jack, queen, a king? That's like, that's, that'd be like $10 million? He said, yeah, that's right. It's only coming from $500 million. Whatever you pick, that'll be your fee. I said, okay. So I reached in, pull a card out, it's a three. And he saw my face, I was very disappointed.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  And he said, you seem dejected. Um, would you like to do it again? I said, well, yeah, can I do it again? And he said, yeah, let's do like best answer. So I said, great, like so nice, gracious. Do it again, I uh, and I pick out a three again. And I'm thinking that's terrible. Now, I don't remember exactly what I was expecting to get, but definitely more than a three and definitely relative to the face cards or anything else. I was thinking this was towards the bottom of the deck, right? So you go, you seem like you're in a bit of a stuck place. Maybe you want to call the home office back at UBS and find out what they have to say. I go, yeah, I have to, I have to do that. I can't just walk back with that. You could use the phone in the conference room here, it's just in the corner. So I went to the phone, picked up the handset

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  and there was a card on the handset. And it was face down. I picked it up and I turned it over and it was a three. At that point, I didn't realize what was happening. I put the phone down.

• 1:04:47Tim Ferriss?

  Negotiating with David Blaine.

• 1:04:50Speaker 03

  I said, are you telling me, Joe, that by our fee of $3 million? He goes, that's what I'm telling you.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  He had the whole thing wired.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  So I respected it. That's what we, that's what we got. That's what we took.

• 1:05:08Tim Ferriss?

  So negotiating is one of your sports in the sort of decathlon of, of deal making. That is the craft, one of the crafts you've mastered. This is going to seem like a lazy question, but I'm going to ask because it'll be on the mind of a lot of people listening. For someone who wanted to become a skilled negotiator,

• 1:05:32Tim Ferriss?

  would you have any recommendations in terms of resources, approaches, common beliefs that are actually very unhelpful, anything at all for somebody who wants to develop their ability to negotiate well?

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's probably the opposite of what people believe or instinctively would do, which is usually the answer, by the way. So I would say like 90% of the time, everyone focuses on what is important to them and what we or what you say.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  It's irrelevant. All that matters is how it lands to the other person. It's a life. In order to understand how something will land to the other person, you have to put yourself, you have to meet them where they are.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  You have to put yourself in their shoes.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Once you put yourself in someone else's shoes, then you don't have to do what they say in a negotiation. You have to at least start with that understanding. And then go back to what's most important to you from there. And then you have a fair

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  understanding of what that negotiation is going to look like. But if you just start like throwing your words against the wall, it's never going to end well. And you're going to be very frustrated and there'll be temper tantrums and so on. I kind of make it, the best analogy I can think of is when you're in a huddle about to throw a pass in a football game. And you have figured out you're going to throw a post pattern in the huddle and you've thought about it in that huddle. If you, you know, say how play goes and you throw the post pattern play, but you haven't looked at actually what happened in the field and the receiver had to go in a different direction. You need to meet that receiver where they are. Your post pattern play is irrelevant.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  It's only relevant to your formation at the beginning. But it's not relevant to actually where the ball is going to go in the end. Because what happened on the field is much more important. You have to do the preparation work and have to have a sense of what you think is proper and right from your perspective. But you also have to understand what will be the scenarios that will be important to them.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  And then the middle ground approach is too often used. It's not that. It's just starting from understanding both vantage points. It's the same kind of skill set as saying, before I put a buy on something, I have to also reject the sell. You know, you have to be comfortable in an unknown position before you can adequately argue for your, for what's important to you. And then in a trusted relationship, which is the only way to negotiate, with a trusted relationship, you're going to get down to things that are really important and things that are not really that important. And to be able to be comfortable saying that, like, okay, if I listed these three things, please rank in order for me. What's most important to you and what?

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  You really don't need, that would give me a little bit more room to come back to something that I think we could work with. That shows that you'll be able to give up something to get something, which is obviously hallmark in any transaction. Now, that's a good negotiation. There are tactics above that. So sometimes in order to get to somewhere that you need, you may ask for things that you don't really want, just to settle back in to something that is a discount to that. That you only would do that if you feel like the other person's doing the same thing. So it all goes back to trust. And that trust is not about one person trusting another. It's at different phases of the negotiation that

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  trust picks up. So at the beginning of a negotiation, it may be less trustworthy than at the end, when things are really coming to the finish line, when you can see the light of day, that thing starts to pick up towards the trust. So you have to see kind of when you can play those different tactics. But then, it's kind of seeing people where they are, I think is really important without giving up what you really need.

• 1:09:29Tim Ferriss?

  Let's explore that a bit. So seeing people where they are, you give the football metaphor. Could you describe an actual deal situation or process? It could be real, it could be anonymized, it could be hypothetical, but just to walk us through a concrete case study of what that looks like, knowing the other side, since you led with that in your answer. Could you perhaps just walk us through an example?

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will, actually. I think all the deals that we work on that are public, company deals, end up being filed publicly with the play by play of the deal. No one likes to read legal documents, but the fun part of the legal document is the play by play of the deal, if people are interested in the step by step of how a deal works. Because while we're doing the deal, we're very aware of the fact that it will be filed publicly. So it's not like you're pulling fast ones, because it's going to be disclosed how you're doing what you're doing. So you have to be truthful. There's no concept of like lying

• 1:10:43Speaker 03

  in a deal, because it will all be uncovered later, if you want to be in the business the next day. So that that's called a proxy statement and you know that that one section is written up by lawyers that actually recount the deal.

• 1:10:58Tim Ferriss?

  Did not know that.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what I'm gonna say is is public information. You know, when we did the transaction of selling MGM Studios to Amazon,

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  which is the only example of a content company being sold to a technology company today. There was an impasse between the buyer and the seller that went on for a while. The deal ended up being worth around eight point five billion dollars. But for months, Amazon would not go above eight billion.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  And MGM and the owners of MGM said, we are not selling below nine billion dollars, hell of a high water.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  And so we were at an eight to nine billion dollar bid ask for months.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  To the point where the deal could have gone away. You know, one hand, you're close. On the other hand, nothing's happening. So finally, the chairman of MGM, who is really dear friend, you know, calls me and says like, I'm ready to like, what do you think? I'm ready to unlock this gap. And I knew Amazon very well enough to know that they were thinking because this gap was going on for so long, that the owner of MGM and the chairman, in their mind, they were thinking, didn't really want to sell. So they're thinking that nine billion was just basically saying, I don't really want to sell.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  But I knew that was not to be the case. So the owner and chairman of MGM said to me, I give you my proxy to go in there and break the logic. And so I did. And I, when I went to call the Amazon executives, I said, okay, we're ready to negotiate now. They said, well, there's nothing to negotiate. You know, they're at nine billion and, you know, we're at eight billion and we're not moving. I said. Okay, so and they're not even really selling the company. I said, well, what if I told you that they were selling the company? He said, well, how would I know? I said, well, I'll in good faith, speak on behalf of the chairman and give you a new offer

• 1:13:01Speaker 03

  that will yield a bit, under the condition that you give back to me with a counter offer, like right away, within twenty four or forty eight hours. So I get also the feedback back to the chairman that you're serious about dealing, meaning that if I can speak for a principle, you have to speak also that you want to get something done. But I'm not going to move unless you're going to move. I need to know that you're going to move. And that that was trust because they took a risk that I was telling them that I could represent the owners of MGM. They said, um, okay, what do you got? I said, I think we should split the difference and go right to it, but it has to go fast and you have to get back to me right away. And they did.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  And if they didn't, and in those forty eight hours, there was a lot of emotion, but they did get back and it moved very, very fast from there. That's exactly what we're talking about.

• 1:13:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, someday I look forward to reading your compendium of deal stories. I would, I would be the first in line to buy a copy of that. But before we, before we get to the compendium of deal stories, probably a better title to be had. You mentioned a while back, reading time, and there are quite a few books recommended in your year end letter. Are there any particular books that come to mind that have impacted your thinking recently in the last few years? Or any, let's just say timeless books, perennial books that have impacted your thinking?

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. There are quite a few. I mean, I I probably buy more books than I read. I wonder if that's the case for a lot of people, actually. I listen to more books than I read. I don't read complete books, but I do try to read as much as I can. I'd say the timeless books are one book called Leadership and Self Deception. It's really a book about self-awareness that we really handed out to the firm. And it's a book about really just kind of owning your own decisions. That's a timeless book.

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  And the title was Leadership and Self Deception?

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, Leadership and Self Deception. There are two timeless books are a book called Scale by Jeffrey West. That is all about why some things last minutes. You know, humans could go on for seventy, eighty years. You know, the Queen lasted ninety six years. The average public company goes for ten, ten and a half years and dies. But cities seemingly last forever. You can throw nuclear bombs in cities, unfortunately, and they, but they still keep moving. Why do some things last some finite periods of time and some things last much longer? It's all about what you feed it and the ability to grow it. But ultimately goes back to adaptability.

• 1:15:50Speaker 03

  If something has a rigid purpose and you break the purpose, it will die. Profits for a company will die. A city, the people always reinvent itself. You know, this summer, I think five governments fell this summer. You know, the UK, you had Italy, you had Israel, you had Sweden recently, right? And you had like even like France became dysfunctional. And I was like, oh, my goodness, all these governments are falling. But that's okay, because if the people are unhappy and the governments don't fall, that's rigid. That's a problem. Governments fall, it's a chance for reinvention. And just like New York City where I'm sitting now, like had a chance to reinvent itself post pandemic.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  Or in Detroit, company town, when the industry falters in the auto industry, they had a chance to reinvent themselves with creativity, or Medine and Columbia used to be like known as like a rough drug trade.

• 1:16:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, murder capital of the world during Escobar's rule. Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  That's cool. Technology hub, artsy, right? Cities reinvent themselves based on the adaptable forcing function of those people, right? I love that concept. That's very helpful for a company build dynamic. The third one is a book called scarcity. I think we're moving from a period of abundance to scarcity. And so how you are not fearful of scarcity, how you can do more with less. And we're getting into a period now where, you know, there's unfortunately a scarcity of food and water and energy resources shortages because of macroeconomic dynamics, warfare in the Ukraine and Russia. And I think it equality post pandemic and how you deal with scarce resources,

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  people paying their bills plus inflation. What you do out of those dynamics, it creates a lot of tension and fear and conflict, even military conflict. So different kind of read than abundance and we have everything we want. But then a books I read now more recently are about people. I'm reading a book now called The Banker's Journey about Edmund Soffra's journey, a banker from Brazil just came out. I'm reading a book by Chris Blackwell about the music industry and his forming in the music industry and founding Bob Marley and U2 and his journey. You know, things are interesting, personal stories. I read books all the time.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Jan Leonard just came out with a book today I'm looking forward to buying. Rolling Stone editor and founder. He and his son Gus are friends, so his son more than than Jan. But interesting life stories, texture to read. So I like to read a lot. I probably read more than I consume other forms of media.

• 1:18:38Tim Ferriss?

  So related to the books, any biographies that really stick out for you? And then second, if you read any fiction, which is not a judgment question, but if you read any fiction, if there are any fiction books that have had a outsized impact on you in any way?

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  Biography is, I mean, I like all the Neil Ferguson books. I read the House of Rothschilds, JP Morgan books. I actually read a Bill Cohen's book on the Lizard, the last tycoons. Really good book, not only because of being in this business, but you do want to go back to the underpinnings of what is like relationship banking. I really think that's a really interesting profession beyond just finance. It's like, you know, how to build with people over a long period of time with outsized impact. That's, I think that's really, really interesting to me and I hope other people in the firm and even your listenership. And fiction, I mean, like, I've always loved some of the mystery novels, illegal thrillers. I've always liked

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  the John Grisham books. I would say, you know, meaningful to me, like Anne Rand, obviously it's not, you know, fiction per se, John Steinbeck, The Pearl, out of recommendation of a friend of mine who's in the business, I reread the other day, great book. And I love The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway. There's a particular line in there that I love that he's like, we're talking about bankruptcy, saying that it happens gradually and then suddenly. So like, it's like, things on the, sometimes things on the way up happen very slow and methodical, but on, on the way down, things happen gradually and then suddenly, like, there's not a symmetric relationship between things that happen on the way up

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  and things that happen on the way down. And then another book I would say is David Brooks' The Second Mountain. It's a really interesting book. It is a, a book about, I view it as a book about personal development, careers, people in our age of life. You know, you kind of start your career, coming out of school and thinking about what you want to do, one step in front of the other. And you get to a certain point, like at our stage of life, and then you say, well, that's where I started from to where I am, has nothing really to do with where I want to end up, top of the second mountain. And once you start thinking about that, you end up in the valley of thought. Until you figure out where that second mountain is. And when you start climbing the second mountain, you don't even have to get to the destination.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  It's just a joyful climb and it's a happy climb. You're doing every single thing you want to do with every breath you have. I love that whole concept, finding that second mountain. There's no such thing as a linear move from, you know, the day you come out of school all the way until you die. It's not linear. You're going to hit a chasm and it's cool. Until you find that second mountain to climb, personally, professionally, et cetera. It's all good.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to buy that today. I also love John Steinbeck and I've read pitifully little of his work, but Travels with Charlie, if anyone has not read that, a nonfiction account of him traveling across the United States with his dog is, is absolutely laugh out loud hilarious and also very profound in its hilarious observations. But David Brooks, I'm going to get that book today. So, thank you for the recommendation. I must ask a question to scratch my own itch in terms of curiosity. And this is related to one of your more recent investments. You've invested Malcolm Gladwell's audio production company,

• 1:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  Pushkin Industries, per your 2021 year end letter. And I'm a huge fan of Malcolm. He's been on the podcast. Huge fan of Michael Lewis also, who's been involved with Pushkin and who's also been on the podcast. And the caliber and quality of what they produce is, is I think, absolutely astonishing. What do you think is next for the podcast market? Or what would you, if you have any thoughts on where you think things are going, what trends are emerging or converging? What do you see coming over the next handful of years for the podcast market or industry?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  The audio market and the podcast market is. Strong and growing, clearly like everything in content, the quality has to rise to the top because a lot of people have jumped into it and has to also get curated in terms of guides. Remember at the beginning of YouTube, you were in the jungle. You had no idea how to navigate YouTube. Now, finally, you could, if you want to go to sports, you know where to go. And if you want to go to history, if you want to go to brands, commerce, you kind of know where to go. So I think there needs to be more curation around audio and podcasting in general, where you find different content and when and how you digest highlights and versus, you know, the whole episodes, et cetera.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  But it is going to be more branded and more curated, I think, from here. And heavily monetized, but hopefully not over monetized in ways that are uncomfortable. Like, I'm not anticipating things are full advertisements, but sponsorship is going to be more interesting platform that will really get behind it. Or like, you know, obviously iHeart, Spotify, Amazon. But every platform that reaches a global audience needs differentiated content today. And video content alone has kind of had diminishing returns. Audio content and podcasting content, I think, that's really well branded and curated and quality like this one. I think the best is yet to come still and hasn't even scratched the surface globally.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  And so I think those are going to be really interesting. But I think more curated, more guides, more branded content and monetized in different ways, I think will be pretty, pretty important. And then there's social features as well, like some more interactivity of being able to do events and tours, going around to talk to your audiences and having more of an interaction between the fans and the creators, I think is a big white space.

• 1:24:47Tim Ferriss?

  And do you have any thoughts on how the market will move or consolidate? Because I've watched all this with great interest, of course. And I've looked at certain transactions, say, relatively speaking, heavy spending. And I will just underscore something you said, which is I think it's still very early. If you look at the terrestrial radio.

• 1:25:12Tim Ferriss?

  Total ad dollars compared to what has currently migrated, say, podcasts. It is still just the tip of the iceberg. And even when I launched this podcast in, I can't even recall when it was, 2014, 2016, I was told by folks, "The ship has sailed, it's too late, there are too many podcasts." I just don't think that's the case at all.

• 1:25:30Speaker 03

  I was told the same thing when we launched the bank in 2012, that it was late to start a new independent bank, the ship has sailed. And I was like, "Well, maybe the door shut behind us, you know, the last one."

• 1:25:43Tim Ferriss?

  Seems to be working out in both cases. And if I pick one player, for instance, let's just say Spotify, spending very heavily with respect to just their, say, market cap and moving into podcasts, the Joe Rogan deal valued at at least 100 million, probably quite a bit more with earnouts and everything else. My assumption has always been that once Spotify accounts for more than single-digit listenership or downloads or streams for the top, say, 100 podcasts, which will be reflective of broader trends, that that type of talent acquisition would drop quite significantly,

• 1:26:26Tim Ferriss?

  just as one sort of hypothesis. But what do you think the movements will be among some of the larger players? Because you have Amazon, you have Spotify, you have iHeart, and podcasts are an existential imperative, perhaps, or viewed that way for some and not others. What do you think the landscape of the larger players will look like a few years from now?

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  It took some of the streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon and Apple a long time to get into sports, for example. And now they're all bidding for sports rights. Because they have to have sports as a differentiator and once one gets in, they're all in. So Amazon has been in for sports rights, Apple just did the MLS deal. They're all looking at sports deals, Netflix has Formula One and Drive to Survive, right? In some ways, so I think podcasting is the same thing. Now that it's getting the sweet spot of the curve from a revenue and profitability contribution for iHeart. And that was all over Spotify's Investor Day of like the podcasting growth driver.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Then you're going to see Amazon and all of them jump into it. And then you may see competition for talent between platforms. And then you may start to see some of the podcasting personalities and brands intersect with other genres. So imagine you're with Amazon and Amazon is doing the NFL. And they want your post-game show intersected with your podcast of the NFL. So they're going to start using you as a key brand for the platform overall beyond just the show. So I think it becomes assets of the platform that become very interesting and different packaging of the deals. I think will be fascinating. It all depends on the loyalty and engagement of your user base and your community.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  And what the community is going to be driving that they want to see. And obviously your ability to engage with them.

• 1:28:24Tim Ferriss?

  I hadn't thought about the cross asset utilization of podcast personalities, but that makes all the sense in the world. And I have to imagine that's playing into negotiations right now for talent deals. Because they might say, well, what's the size of your advertising base? Will your sponsors transfer over to us if we acquire exclusive license? Or if we acquire you outright or whatever it might be. But in fact, the value of that property in terms of the personality may be much greater. When it's viewed as being possibly applied to all these various things. I think this is pure speculation, not, not investment advice, obviously.

• 1:29:08Tim Ferriss?

  But I think Twitch is going to prove to be increasingly valuable to Amazon. And I recall when the. Pandemic hit, I had an ongoing bet of sorts with a friend of mine that we would see some type of platform utilization for streaming sports if sports could not be attended in person. And I just think these off-label uses of these technology platforms and cross-asset utilization of personalities, I hadn't thought about that. Makes a whole lot of sense.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, you and I met at Formula One, so imagine maybe that's your future, where you're doing a, taking on a British accent, doing the Formula One. It's coming, I know you're friends with Lewis, and I think that there could be that in your future. But what do you want, if you were going to migrate and take and evolve your audience into a different genre with you, what do you think that they would be into?

• 1:30:06Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great question. I think I haven't really thought of it in this way. I would imagine, and this will seem very simplistic, but whatever I am interested in, I think my audience will trust me to take a very close look at, or a meaningful percentage of my audience will trust me to look at, which is by design largely. I mean, that's why I did a book on physical and sports performance after the four-hour work week, rather than doing the three-hour work week, is I wanted to see, early on, since I had this open option to always extend the business book side of things, if my audience, much like, say, with a Michael Lewis, even though he's a far superior writer, or John McPhee, or Malcolm

• 1:30:48Tim Ferriss?

  Gladwell, would they follow me because of my approach and thinking, not because of the subject matter? And I think by and large, that has held since then. So it would be a matter of me determining what I am legitimately interested in. Because without that legitimate interest, I won't have the endurance, I won't have the necessary emotional investment and endurance to make it count in any meaningful way, if that makes sense.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I think your whole community is built on trust.

• 1:31:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  And you also have

• 1:31:23Speaker 03

  A curiosity to you as well, but based on certain foundations that people sort of view you as dependable, right? They're not, they don't think you're going to veer them off to an extreme position.

• 1:31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:36Speaker 03

  But you're inquisitive about where the world's going. And my view is that you're ultimately interested in impact around that.

• 1:31:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I am.

• 1:31:43Speaker 03

  But not in an establishment sort of way. There's a sort of insurgency around it, right?

• 1:31:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Speaker 03

  I think we're very similar.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do too. So I was just thinking about this trust and how it's the asymmetrical rise, decline, the precipitous drop, you know, how it takes 20 years to build a reputation and 20 minutes to destroy it if you make the wrong choices. And so I say no, the vetting process for say sponsors and guests and so on is very, very, I don't want to say strict, it's not quite the right word, but I always try to ensure that I'm following my own rules and not getting swept away by the winds of trend or more specifically fads. And this may seem like a non sequitur. This will be probably one of the last questions. So hopefully

• 1:32:34Tim Ferriss?

  we can do a round two sometimes because I have a lot of questions that I would still love to explore. But this may seem like an odd segue, but maybe it makes sense in some way. So you were known as a goalkeeper at UBS, protecting the balance sheet. You saved them hundreds of millions of dollars. And, you know, I'm reading here a snippet from the piece in the Hollywood Reporter. So your job was to analyze potential deals and advise the bankers on whether they made sense. In that role, he rejected 40 out of 45 potential deals, which is my words now, didn't make everybody super thrilled. However, when all 40 companies later went bankrupt, they realized that the higher ups, that you'd saved hundreds of millions of dollars. What were you doing there? You seem to have a certain, I don't

• 1:33:18Tim Ferriss?

  want to say prescience, but a

• 1:33:22Tim Ferriss?

  inability to see where the puck was going with respect to the 40 that were rejected. How did you do that? Why did you do that?

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, I was a goalkeeper in high school. Even as relatively short person, I was able to play goalie in soccer. I think that it all comes down to understanding the there'll be many more shots on goal than exist today. So don't be afraid to say no to something today with a fear that nothing's going to come tomorrow. So like the sample set that you're dealing with today is not the whole thing. And play the long game. And so I felt that a lot of the companies that we were looking at at that time

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  were coming to us because of sort of negative selection that we were getting pitched by companies that weren't necessarily the highest quality. But just because we had capital doesn't mean that we should do them. And so I wanted to play quality. I wanted to only do business with the best companies. And if we didn't have the structure in place to attract those best companies today, that's our issue to deal with. But the worst thing you can do to compound that is make bad decisions on top of, you know, fixing your own structural issues. And that governs everything even today, like when you're building the company, when you're working with the outside world, the internal world, you're making sure that you're making the right decisions

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  with a quality standard for excellence at all times. And that you're not accepting mediocrity. Especially if those things have a lot to do with your own fixes that you have to make, you know? So like we spend a lot of time doing infrastructure work internally and then planning for excellence. But if you're going to do one thing, I prefer inactivity. Then mediocrity. I want to make sure that we play for excellence and quality all the time. All the way through the company and all the way through the ripple effects we have externally. And do fewer things with quality than scale things. Obviously, ultimately prefer to do a lot of quality things. But that takes a lot of structure. That's what I call scaled intimacy.

• 1:35:41Speaker 03

  If you can scale the concept of intimate relationships and intimate deal making, that's the panacea. But otherwise, I prefer to do just a few high quality things. And then take it easy for a while. But I think that's the standard. Don't settle ever. But I do have to tell you one story though, because you did give me some really interesting prep work. Yes, please. Your prep work had questions on and about certain things that like, what's one of the things that you purchased for less than a hundred dollars? That made a big impact? And I would have said a book, you know, so we were talking about some of these books. But you also said anything particularly interesting that you've ever had to eat or drink in your life. I thought about it for a few minutes. And yeah, I travel the world in interesting places and you try to integrate business and life and

• 1:36:26Speaker 03

  enjoy what you're doing and appreciate the finer things where you can. And there's a drink that is served at the Hemingway Bar, the Ritz Hotel in Paris. That is called the Mach Two, M A C H two. And it's a really, I've never had it anywhere else. It's a whiskey based drink with a chatreuse and the essence of ginger and some ice. It's really, really good. But the funny thing about it is, as I was thinking about it yesterday, I'm thinking I was going to be talking to you on a podcast. I last night went to an event in New York for the Ritz in Paris and frame, you know, as part of the fashion week I was invited to because

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  some friends were putting it on. And unexpectedly, that bartender from the Hemingway Bar in Paris at the Ritz was at the event. Huh. And I said, it's unbelievable. I'm going on the Tim Ferriss podcast. And he's going to ask me about a drink. And only you serve this drink in the whole world. And here you are in New York, leaving your perch at Hemingway Bar. Could you indulge me with this Mach Two drink? And he did yesterday. And so I was like, it all came together. This is how like there's certain karma to my calendar and this podcast and everything else. And your questions. I wanted to make sure that we talked about it.

• 1:37:54Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that is incredible. But synchronicity. Now I have to try that. Now I have to try the mock too. I look forward to that. I've only been to Paris once, really, in any meaningful way. So I need to get back. Side note, because this took place in Paris for me, I did a lot of writing. I've done almost all of my writing for my first three books during those witching hours. So the before the morning and after the usual night, almost all my writing was done in that, I would say 10pm to 3am period. Almost all of my writing in those witching hours.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  Why is that? Because there are fewer distractions or you're clear headed?

• 1:38:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no distractions. No distractions, more energy. I tend to be like a hamster. I just have a second wind that for whatever reason for my entire life has started very, very late. And freedom from distractions, silence, less compulsivity to interact or text or check anything because I know the rest of the world is asleep. I shouldn't say the rest of the world, but the rest of my network is largely asleep. And it's just always been that twilight, that creative twilight, through which you can perhaps pull on threads that are normally harder to access. I think for me, that's been my experience. Well, Aria, I could keep going for hours. I've got plenty. So maybe another time. But

• 1:39:17Tim Ferriss?

  is, is there anything you would like to add? Any recommendations or requests of the audience, things you'd like to point their attention to? Of course, people can find Lion Tree at liontree.com. We'll link to all of the Instagram handles and social handles in the show notes. So people will be able to access those. But are there any, any closing comments or requests you would like to make before we wind to a close?

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  It's been a great pleasure, Tim. I could also talk to you for hours and I was looking forward to this for a long time. You know, as we go through different periods of time in our lives and the world at large, and we've all been through different unexpected movements and motions and things, and that's one concept, there's gonna be more unexpected things to come. It's all about these trusted friends and communities that we can build, which is the distinguishing feature of humans, right? That we can bond together for for good things and then tackle the world. And if we eliminate all the extremism, then you can, everyone can redefine their view of what their centers look like. And then that's where the richness lies. And whether you find it in the magic hours and the wee hours of the night, or the middle of the day, I think we can form these circles and

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  then really bond together. And I think the best is yet to come. And I really appreciate this relationship and what we can do together. And I really appreciate the attention of all of your audience. And the one thing about media that is defined is it's the distribution of content over a technology. And when you think of it that way, the technology used to be books, newspapers, now it's podcasting, it's gonna be different things in the future. But the best content distributed is something that applies to everything in life that people consume and digest, whether it's music, or words of wisdom, or politics. And the responsibility is all on all of us to make the best impact out of it all. And I really appreciate what this media can do for our lives. So best is yet to come.

• 1:41:19Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect place to close. So Ari, thank you so much for all your time and for your wisdom and for your stories. I have copious notes of my own, so I'll be following up on a lot after this conversation personally. And really love what you're doing. And the more I read and learn of you directly or indirectly, the more questions I have. So I look forward to future conversations. And for everybody listening, we will have links to all resources, names, books, everything related to Ari and Lion Tree in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, please be safe, be just a little bit kinder than necessary, and find your center.

• 1:42:04Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:42:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Theragun. I have two Theraguns and they're worth their weight in gold. I've been using them every single day. Whether you're an elite athlete or just a regular person trying to get through your day, muscle pain and muscle tension are real things. That's why I use the Theragun. I use it at night, I use it after workouts. It is a handheld percussive therapy device that releases your deepest muscle tension.

• 1:43:30Tim Ferriss?

  So for instance, at night, I might use it on the bottom of my feet. It's helped with my plantar fasciitis. I will have my girlfriend use it up and down the middle of my back and I'll use it on her. It's an easy way for us to actually trade massages in effect. And you can think of it, in fact, as massage reinvented on some level. Helps with performance, helps with recovery, helps with just getting your back to feel better before bed after you've been sitting for way too many hours. I love this thing. And the all-new Gen 4 Theragun has a proprietary brushless motor that is surprisingly quiet. It's easy to use and about as quiet as an electric toothbrush. It's pretty astonishing and you really have to feel the Theragun's signature power amplitude and effectiveness.

• 1:44:14Tim Ferriss?

  To believe it. It's one of my favorite gadgets in my house at this point. So I encourage you to check it out. Try Theragun. That's Thera, T-H-E-R-A-G-U-N. There's no substitute for the Gen 4 Theragun with an OLED screen. That's OLED, for those wondering. That's organic light emitting diode screen, personalized Theragun app, and incredible combination of quiet and power. And the Gen 4 Theraguns start at just $199. I said I have two. I have the Prime and I also have the Pro, which is like the super Cadillac version. My girlfriend loves the soft attachments on that. So try Theragun for 30 days, starting at only $199.

• 1:44:54Tim Ferriss?

  Go to therabody.com/tim right now and get your Gen 4 Theragun today. One more time, that's therabody.com/tim. T-H-E-R-A-B-O-D-Y.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by HEY. I was introduced to HEY, that's H-E-Y, by my friend Kevin Rose, who calls it, quote, "A beautiful rethinking of everything wrong with email," end quote. HEY is a premium email service for people who are tired of having an inbox overflowing with things they don't care about and who value their privacy and online security. You're probably familiar with the names behind HEY. Jason Fried and David DHH, Hannah Meyer Hansen, creators of Basecamp. Both Jason and David have been on this podcast, and they're two of the most innovative and contrarian entrepreneurs

• 1:45:38Tim Ferriss?

  I've met. So back to the story of HEY. For almost two decades, email, as you know, has remained unchanged, soulless, chaotic, and borderline abusive. Your inbox is packed with all sorts of emails from people that you don't care about, full of intrusive trackers, and all framed by a multitude of ads that watch your every move. If you think about it, you have an email account, but you really have no control over it. That is where HEY comes in. So try the HEY way. What does that mean? Your inbox should be for important stuff. That's why HEY made the inbox, I-M-B-O-X, where important things go. Normally, anyone can email you and land right at the top of your inbox, whether it's a message from a trusted friend, or from a total stranger, a rando. It makes no difference. Your inbox is fair game to anyone. Not anymore. With HEY, emails never land

• 1:46:24Tim Ferriss?

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