I’m Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. We’re on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is William Ury. William co-founded the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. He served over 20 years as its director. Then he established the Harvard Negotiation Project, which trained over 30,000 people in conflict resolution strategies. He also worked extensively as a negotiation advisor and mediator around the world. He’s helped in disputes ranging from corporate conflicts to civil wars in the Mideast, Venezuela, and Ukraine. He received the Distinguished Service Medal from the Russian Parliament for his work resolving ethnic conflicts. William is also the co-author of Getting to Yes, which popularized principled negotiation with over 15 million copies sold. His latest book, Possible, draws on his experiences to offer time-tested practices to engage and transform conflicts. I’m Guy Kawasaki, this is Remarkable People, and now here is the remarkable William Ury. So many instances in your book, including the foreword from Jim Collins, they’re talking about this one sentence that defines your life’s work. So let’s just get that out in the open. Now that you’re 70 years old, William Ury, what’s the one sentence that defines your life’s work? That was a hike I was taking with Jim, and he asked me to sum everything up that I’d learned in one sentence. It could be relevant to today’s times, you know, to help us. And I went back and thought about it in terms of three metaphors, and I’ll give you the three metaphors, but you really need to unpack them, because he then said, when I came it up with it, he said, great, now go write the book. The three metaphors are the balcony, the path to possible. The question basically is that I’ve sat with my whole life is like, how do we get along with each other? How do we deal with our deepest differences? How can we make agreements? How can we get to yes and not blow the whole world to smithereens, either the small world or the large world? And so I’ve sat with that question ever since I was a school boy, and for me, the path to possible in these times when conflicts seem impossible is to go to the balcony, which is just a metaphor for a place inside of us of calm and perspective, where we can keep our eyes on the prize and see the bigger picture. The path to possible is go to the balcony, which is dealing with ourselves first, then build a golden bridge, which is a metaphor for trying to reach agreement across the chasm of disagreement. And then, because that’s really hard to do, it’s to engage what I call the third side, which is our birthright, which is the community that surrounds us that can help us transform these difficult conflicts, because we’re not gonna end them, but we just might be able to transform them. And so the sentence I gave Jim was the path to possible is go to the balcony, build a golden bridge, and engage the third side. I love it, I love it. Now, you basically have described the three components of possibility, right? And possibleness, or. Right. Okay, so the 6,000 pound gorilla in the room is, I read that and I love the theoretical concept, but the first question that came to me is, I cannot imagine Netanyahu going to the balcony or building bridges. What do you do when it’s something that profoundly broken between Netanyahu and the rest of the Mideast? That’s true. People ask me after 45 years, maybe almost 50 actually, of wandering around the world as an anthropologist and negotiator in some of the world’s toughest conflicts, starting with the Middle East, am I an optimist, am I a pessimist? And I like to say, actually, I’m a possibleist. I believe in human potential, why? Because I’ve seen with my own eyes, human beings, whether it was in South Africa with apartheid, where it seemed like it was gonna go on forever. And you saw a remarkable transformation there of a racial war against the racist system of apartheid. Then Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants, people said, oh, they’re gonna fight each other forever. They’ve been fighting for generations. I watched as that conflict was transformed. More recently, I was in the country of Colombia where 50 years of civil war, hundreds of thousands of dead, millions of victims, and that conflict also got transformed. That’s why I come back to the Middle East today and it looks impossible, just as it looked impossible in South Africa, just as it looked as impossible in Northern Ireland, just as it looked impossible in Colombia. And yeah, I can even see possibility. Now, do I expect Netanyahu to go to the balcony? No, I wouldn’t count on it, but we need to go to the balcony and dealing with people and dealing with a leader like Netanyahu. And do I think it’s possible to build a golden bridge between Israelis and Palestinians? In other words, if we shifted the question from who’s winning and who’s losing, which we all know that win-lose game, what does it lead to? Everybody ends up losing. I mean, people may win a battle. You might win militarily a little bit, but you all lose, everybody loses, including the community. And can we change the question to how can two peoples live side-by-side in the same land in security, in dignity, in peace? People have been able to do it in other parts of the world with impossible situations, so why not here? But it’s gonna take, because that’s really hard, it’s gonna take the activation of the third side, which is all of us together. The Israelis and Palestinians, just like any two sides who are really deeply traumatized, and they’re two traumatized peoples, they’re gonna need a lot of help from within their society, of natural third-siders inside their society, and then with outsiders outside the society. And is it gonna be easy? This is the hardest work you can do, but is it possible? I believe so. What’s the first step? The first step is to start by stopping. That’s the going to the balcony, which is to realize that what I found in negotiation is the single biggest obstacle to me getting what I want in a negotiation is not what I think it is. I might think it’s that difficult person on the other side of the table. It’s actually the person on this side of the table, it’s the person I look at in the mirror every morning, it’s me. It’s our own very natural, very understandable tendency to react. In other words, act without thinking, act out of fear, act out of anger, act out of trauma. And when you react, you often act in ways that go exactly contrary to your own interests. As the old saying goes, when you are angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. Okay. You will send the best email you’ll ever regret, the best text you’ll ever regret. So that’s why it’s so important to start by stopping and to take a step back. The balcony is a metaphor for it. Imagine you’re negotiating on a stage, you and the others and everyone else and whatever, like the middle. Part of you goes to a mental and emotional balcony where it’s a place of perspective, it’s a place of calm, it’s a place of a slight detachment where you can ask yourself, what’s really important? For example, going back to the Middle East, what’s really important for the Israelis right now? Just because you mentioned Netanyahu, it’s security, right? What’s gonna advance their security? Is the current behavior that their leaders engage in, is that really gonna advance their security? I doubt it, long-term. It seems actually can probably make them less secure. So that’s a good example to me of all of us, we all fall off the balcony. When we get hit, when we get attacked, when our traumas get activated, and that’s why we need help from our friends. Now, when you say we need help from our friends, are you saying that Joe Biden should call up Netanyahu and say, listen, BB, you need to back off. I’m not gonna send you any more weapons until a ceasefire starts. Is that help from the community and friends? That could be, that’s one option. And some people would think that should have been done long ago. There are precedents for that. And I’m not saying one way or the other, but yeah, from your friends, sometimes, all of us, we get so blinded in a conflict, we can’t see the way out. Gandhi once said, an eye for an eye, and we all go blind. That is a great quote, yeah. So we need the ability to step back. And so we could go back to that example again. You’re talking about maybe the hardest conflict in the world. And let me just give you an example. When I started off in my career, I was working on the Middle East. There had been a surprise attack on Israel, Israel’s holiest day, Yom Kippur, the Yom Kippur War, 1973. Egypt, surprise attack, thousands dead, just Israel in existential crisis. And at that point, there had been four wars in the previous 25 years between Israel and Egypt, which were the largest military powers at the time. And everyone expected it to be another war. But Jimmy Carter, bless him, was trying, and everyone said it’s impossible, and he was about to give up himself. And he and his wife, Rosalyn, went off to Camp David for a weekend to enjoy things. And she said, why don’t you bring him here? It’s a balcony. It’s a place of nature, little cabins. Maybe that will help. One last try. So he brought the leader of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, and the leader of Israel, Menachem Begin, together. And the first three days, there was no chemistry. They were attacking each other, and neither one was gonna give in one little bit. But lo and behold, to everyone’s surprise, after 13 days, there was a surprise Camp David accord that actually brought about an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that exists to this day, 45 years later, through wars, assassinations, everything, all the rough stuff, and it’s holding strong. So early on, I learned that what everyone thought was impossible, actually, with a little bit of growth, with a little bit of grit, with a little bit of grace, it had become possible. Oh, my God. Are you saying that, let’s go back to 9-11. Should the first step have been to go to the balcony as opposed to go to the missile strikes and trying to take out Osama bin Laden, yeah. Yeah, what I’m saying is, yes. The thing about terrorism, as terrible as it is, is that it’s intended to provoke a reaction in which we hurt ourselves much more than the terrorist hurts us. We play right into the terrorist’s hands. And the war on terror, last I checked with some scholars, led to an estimated 1 million deaths worldwide. 1 million deaths, 3,000 people for every one of those, I don’t see how to do my calculation here, but anyway, so many people. And the question is, did it make us more secure as a nation? We spent trillions of dollars. And what actually did it bring us? If we’d gone to the balcony at that moment and said, let’s really think about what’s our interest here, what’s our deepest interest here? How are we gonna safeguard America? How are we gonna safeguard the world? How are we gonna move things forward? Would we have gone into a 20-year war in Afghanistan? Would we have gone into Iraq? I think everyone can see that those turned out to be colossal failures. If we don’t learn that it’s actually our own reaction that hurts us more than our original action, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have done something. Of course, from the balcony, then you think, okay, what would be the smart thing to do? Maybe it’s to treat it as, okay, we’ll see if we can disable Al-Qaeda. But that doesn’t necessarily mean taking over an entire country. It can be a police action, an action that’s highly targeted, which ultimately succeeded in some sense. Did we need to go in and think we’re gonna rebuild and revamp a country that we knew from history? Pretty soon, the longer you stay, even though you might be seen as friends by some when you first show up in the country, pretty soon they see you as occupiers. And we saw that happen in Vietnam. We could learn these lessons. And those are lessons you learn from the balcony, the place of wisdom here. Because, yeah, go ahead. I was just saying, this is obviously wishful thinking, but if after the October terrorist attack, Netanyahu had called you up and say, listen, I just read your book. I understand the concept of going to the balcony. What should I do? Should I send in the IDF and wipe out that country? Or what’s your advice about the long-term viability of Israel? The first thing is humility because we don’t know. And in this sense, humility in front of it. But I would say, from the balcony, I would say, think hard. What’s Israel’s main interest here? It’s to make sure that this never happens again, never again. And what are the lessons we need to learn from this? There was a catastrophic failure in Israel’s defenses, one thing, right? Because that should never have been allowed to happen. And as we now know, there was intelligence that wasn’t listened to. But the thing is, be careful about how you act right now, because right now, the country is traumatized. It feels to people, and this is where deep empathy is needed, it feels to people like, wow, this is horrendous. People were saying this is the biggest loss of life since the Holocaust and whatever. That trauma’s coming up. One thing is you have time. It’s not like Hamas is going away, but you could make sure this doesn’t happen again, but you’ve got time to reflect and think about what’s the smartest thing that will advance and protect the security of the situation and understand that what’s the game that the people who inflicted this were up to, and make sure you don’t play right into their hands and do exactly what they want you to do. Because what they want you to do is to go in and attack right now. And go ahead. I mean, so you could say that 30,000 people were killed in retaliation, right? So let’s say they have, I don’t know, on average five members of their family each. Did Israel not just create like 150,000 people for the next thousand years are gonna hate Israel for doing this? I would say that’s a very plausible possibility, yeah. It’s a little bit like the old myth of the Hydra, where you cut off one head and then 10 heads grow. And so the thing to think about is you have time to think about what’s your best action in this case. Right now, you have the strong sympathy and support of the entire world after October 7th, but you’re going back to that moment. How do you deploy that to be able to build a Middle East in which this will not happen again? And if you remember, at that moment, Israel was on the verge of a breakthrough normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, which in fact, that attack might have been intended to spoil, right? And what would be the best way to prove that the terrorists wrong and to defeat them, but to go ahead with that deal and create a Middle East in which Israel integrated in the Middle East, safer in the Middle East, and in which terrorism has much less of a toll. My last question about this particular. I didn’t know we were gonna go off on this tangent. Listen, I understand the difference between causation and correlation, okay? But there seems to be at least very high correlation. And I’m gonna ask you if there’s causation. Seems to me like a lot of these things that blow up like this. The leaders are always men. Do you think if we had women in charge, we would be in such a bad place in these kinds of conflicts and just acts of terrorism and reactions like this? Probably not, at least for my understanding of these things. I often say that in my work in dealing with wars around the world, I’m always dealing with the me problem, which is male ego, you know? And that’s not to say that you can’t have wars with women in charge and so on, and people give examples. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and so on. But the truth is, yeah, women by and large, they’re not quite gonna be drawn into these kind of ego slugfests, not as likely. And they’re more relational. They tend to be a little more empathetic. And yes, I do think as more and more women become leaders and more and more women go into even the field of negotiation and mediation, I think you’re gonna see a beneficent effect. And there is actually some data on this, actually, to back it up too. We were just talking about Jane Goodall. You were saying one of the most remarkable people you and I both know. It’s that kind of leadership from a woman is the kind of leadership the world sorely needs these days. Okay. I wanna go backwards a little bit. Let’s just go on the balcony for a second. Now, one author to another, I want you to explain how Getting to Yes became such a best-selling book. How did you pull that off? I don’t know. I don’t know if I pulled it off, actually. So it was a surprise to both my co-author, Roger Fisher, and myself at the time. I think what helped was we made it very simple. We made the language very clear. You know, academics sometimes we’re prone to write in ways that make it hard for people to understand what you’re saying. We tried to make it very simple, short, pithy. And the other thing was we tried to write down what I think of as common sense, but it’s actually uncommon sense. It’s common sense that’s uncommonly practiced. And what we said in that book too was, there’s probably some sense in which you already know these things, but we’re articulating them. We’re putting them into words, into concepts, into tools that you can then use more easily. And I also think it was the zeitgeist. You know, at that time, the bestsellers on the New York bestsellers list to do with negotiation had titles like, Looking Out for Number One and Winning by Intimidation. Yeah. And so we were coming at it with a, hey, let’s think differently here. Let’s take a different approach. Oh my God. Both sides could win or at least come to a deal that’s better for them, for both sides, you know, and look at it differently. And it just hit a chord and kept on going. But the rest of it is a mystery to me. So you didn’t have some magic, mystical marketing plan that got it on the New York Times bestseller list, or you got it to the most famous, you got it to, I don’t know, Tom Peters endorsed it or whatever. I’m looking for a path here. I’m looking for tactics here as opposed to the zeitgeist happened. Yeah, okay. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Don’t obfuscate. Speak from your own experience, what you truly have seen and whatever, which is what we did. And what did we do? We didn’t have a brilliant marketing plan. We did get some good quotes. Do you remember Ann Landers? Yeah. Ann Landers, she gave a quote together with Cyrus Vance, so we had Secretary of State, and then we had Dear Ann from the newspaper column. And one thing we did do was we had a center, a program at Harvard that offered courses and academics picked up those courses. And then they, of course, and they assigned Getty DS and it spread that way through so that a lot of people who’ve gone through law school or business school or school of government or psychology departments, whatever, picked it up and it filled a niche. Or the other thing I would say is address some basic human need where there’s a need. We’re like, okay, how do we deal with our differences? And we frame negotiation not just as, okay, you got a sale here, you’re selling your house or whatever it is, but negotiation is in the sense that everybody is a negotiator and everybody negotiates every day, just back and forth communication, trying to reach agreement. So it got framed in a larger sense. I’ll give an example here. Before that book, Roger and I wrote a little book called International Mediation, A Working Guide. And we joked at the time there were about six readers of that book. To be honest, we didn’t really publish it, we published it privately and so on, but nevertheless, international mediation, how many international mediators are there? And I said, I had lunch with them, I said, what if we took out international and we made it not just mediation, but everybody’s a negotiator, made it negotiation. So we framed it so that actually a lot of people could see themselves in that book. And basically the same ideas that are in International Mediation, A Working Guide are in Getty DS with a different framing. And who came up with the title? I wish I could say it was Roger and me, but actually we came up with a lot of titles, getting, I don’t know, but we had some getting titles, we had getting to negotiate, whatever. But it was actually, it was our editor at Houghton Mifflin at the time who was shaving and he came up with, what about getting to yes? And when I first heard that, I thought, that’s not quite grammatical, is it? Getting to yes. Definitely, but it actually stuck. And I think the title actually, that is a tip. Get the right pithy title that has a chance to become an everyday phrase in the language. Because now getting to yes is used independent of the book all the time by people. I hear people, oh, let’s get to yes, whatever. It didn’t exist in the language before it got coined. Okay, my last question. And obviously it’s because I’m an author that I am just so curious how this went down, but did it like immediately go bestseller and just take off or was it months and months and then finally one day it hits critical mass? How did it roll out? It wasn’t a sprint, it was a marathon. It wasn’t like, oh, hit the bestseller list the next week. No, it grew, it spread by word of mouth. And that’s the thing is it’s like the little engine that could, it just kept on going. There was a lot of grit there, it just kept on going. And of course we helped by teaching and giving courses and things like that. But it kept on going and going and going because to this day, that book came out, believe it or not, in 1981. So that’s 43 years ago. And it’s still selling almost as well as it sold in the first year. In fact, maybe even, so it just keeps on. So I think it’s a timeless subject. I’ve lost count, but the last time I tried to count it, it’s probably about 15 million copies. And all you have to do is endorse the royalty check. That’s it. Is it a wire transfer at this point? Probably. And now throw some humility at us. So did you get anything wrong in that book that now you say, oh, I should have said this instead of that? Well, there are probably things that probably I would rewrite, I don’t know, I’m trying to remember. One thing, the first chapter, we called separate the people from the problem. And what we meant by that was distinguish between the people and the problem so that you can be soft on the people while you’re hard on the problem. But some people took that, let’s separate the people from the problem means like, don’t deal with the people. No, we were saying deal with the people first. The people are, human beings are negotiators. So maybe I would change, we would change that so it didn’t lead to that misunderstanding of, oh, you can take the people out of the equation. You don’t take the people out of the equation. You start with the people. You deal with the people first, but you’re soft, you’re respectful with the people, that respect is the cheapest concession you can make. In a negotiation, in my opinion, it costs you nothing, but someone else’s dignity means everything else to them. So yeah, I might change that. What I tried to do in Possible, this latest book, is I realized that getting yes is necessary. It’s the kind of the central part, but it’s a little bit like the Golden Gate Bridge, not too far from you. There’s the bridge. Getting yes was about how to build that bridge. But there are these two giant pylons on each side which support that bridge, which make it work. And for me, the first pylon is the balcony. And we didn’t have that in getting to yes. We didn’t have this notion of that you have to get to yes with yourself, that your biggest opponent is yourself. And so for me, the balcony is the foundation of that. And then on the other side of the bridge, the other pylon is the third side, which is, in a lot of these negotiations, it’s hard to build that bridge. You gave examples. Without the engagement of a power that’s untapped around us, which is our birthright, which is the way in which indigenous cultures have always dealt with conflict, which is you engage and mobilize the community to help the parties transform the country. Okay. So you may think I’m being facetious, but I’m dead serious, because I think that about 99.99% of the people listening to this are not negotiating the peace in the Middle East or some South American country, okay? So I just want to know that since the book, can you just say that I regularly get mundane things like I can always get an aisle seat, I get first class upgrades, I get free refills. When I get pulled over, I never get a ticket because I’m freaking William Ury and I know how to get to yes. Yeah. Listen, I’m an eternal learner, a lifelong learner. Your growth mind. The kind of things we’re talking about in the book, lessons like maybe the most important thing you can do in your negotiators to listen. We think of negotiation as talking, but more about listening. That’s something we have to practice every single day. So yes, the methods in the book, which are what we see successful negotiators do, can help you in those instances. But more importantly, what they help you is in the vast majority of our negotiations. When I ask people, who do you negotiate with in the course of your day? What’s the first thing they say? Well, they say, my spouse, my kids, my boss, my colleagues, my coworkers, my staff, whatever it is. It’s the vast majority of negotiations that we have are with people with whom we have ongoing relationships. It’s not a one shot deal. One shot deal, you’re buying a used car. There are the usual bargaining tactics and things like that. No, that’s a tiny percentage of our negotiations. Our negotiations are with people with whom we have ongoing relationships. If we treat them badly, they’re gonna remember it. And they’re gonna say, I’m gonna get you back next time. What you find is the strategies in getting a yes, or the strategies in possible are, go to the balcony. Okay, watch your reactions because you may act, particularly in difficult situations in ways that you will later come to regret. Build that bridge by listening to the other side, by trying to understand what they really want, going behind the positions, the underlying interests. Yeah, those things will help you a lot in life. And when I teach negotiation, it’s not about dealing with the Middle East. It’s about, okay, day to day, how do you deal with all those negotiations? And those are the negotiations that count because oftentimes when we think of negotiation, the question is who’s winning. In the negotiations I’m talking about, which are with the people with whom we care most about, the people around us. If you ask yourself, who’s winning this marriage? Your marriage is in serious difficulty. If you ask yourself the question, who’s winning this business partnership? Who’s winning me or my long-term customer? If you ask that question, that’s not the right question to ask. It’s like, how are we doing? I wish I could ask Melania that question, but okay, I see your point. Up next on Remarkable People. And the joke about being disposable was, if the conversations went too far, you could always ship them back to Washington or Moscow and say, this conversation never took place. It was deniable. And they said more good ideas for breaking impasses came out of those wizard conversations. So my question for us today is in any conflict, be it a small conflict in business or whatever it is, or conflict in politics, is where are the wizards? And might you possibly be a wizard yourself? Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It’s our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate, and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. You’re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. More tactics. So how should people prepare for a negotiation besides figuring out you gotta go to a balcony and shut up and listen? Yeah. So first of all, preparation is essential. No matter how skilled you are, you might be the best negotiator in the world. You don’t prepare, you put yourself at a grave disadvantage. So prepare, prepare, prepare. Take at least as much time, and ideally a lot more than you would spend talking with the other person. So preparation is time on the balcony. And the first thing you wanna prepare to ask yourself is, what do I really want? What are my interests? I’ll give you an example. I was working with a fellow who became a friend of mine who was a business leader, big business leader, was in a big fight with his business partner over control of the company. And I asked him, what do you really want? And he said, like a good business intelligent leader, so I want this amount of stock and I want the end of the three-year non-compete clause and I want the company headquarters and I want the company sports team, and he had his whole list. I said to him, Abelio, I understand that. Those are our positions. Those are the things we say we want. I said, but what do you really want? What do you really want? And he looked at me stunned for a moment because he wasn’t used to be asking that question because we think we know what we want. I said, but what do you really want? You know, you’ve been in this fight for a long time, two and a half years at this point. It’s driving you crazy. What do you really want? He looks at me for a long time. And finally, with a sigh, he says, you know what I really want? I want my freedom. That’s what I want. And as soon as he heard that, again, listening with a heart, not just with a head, it’s like the tone, it’s like a little bell. And I thought, okay, that’s what he really wants. And I knew a little bit about him and freedom actually had some resonance for him because 30 years earlier, he’d be coming out of his apartment, he’d been kidnapped by a group of urban political gorillas and held in a coffin for a week and thought he was gonna die. So freedom, you know, that’s how we often feel in a conflict. We often feel like we’re hostages, right? But I asked him, so what does freedom mean to you? And he said, freedom means freedom to spend time with my family, which is the most important thing in my life. And freedom means the chance to make the business deals that I love to make. So then I thought, I’m not sure I’m gonna be able to get you all those things you said, that laundry list, but maybe I get you your freedom. And the other thing that I could sense was dignity. Everyone wants their dignity. And he felt like this thing had gone public. It was in the newspaper, it was all over. He didn’t want to be seen as a loser. Couldn’t be seen to lose in this situation. So once I had those two clues, freedom and dignity, then when I sat down with the other side, in this case, the representative of the other side, who was a mentor of the other side, it wasn’t about, okay, we’re gonna negotiate those dollars and cents thing. No, it was about how do we give our clients who are our friends, how do we give them the freedom they want? How do we get them out of this? How do we make sure that neither one loses in this situation? And that approach in face of this impossible business dispute, within less than a week, we had both men sitting at a law office, signing an agreement, wishing each other well, joint press release, going to explain to the executives and the employees of the company what they had decided. And it was over. And I asked my friend, I said, how do you feel? He said, I got everything I wanted. He did actually get most of the things on his list there. I said, but the most important thing is I got my life back. Wow, okay. Can you mention, just so we have some examples in our head, who’s in the William Urey Hall of Fame for negotiation as people or as companies? As an expert in negotiation, who do you say, oh my God, they really did this right? The person I’m gonna come up with is Nelson Mandela. And I’ll tell you why. When I was in South Africa the first time, he was in jail. I was there to give some negotiation training to both sides and so on, but he was in jail. He’d been in jail for 27 years. And it looked like there was no chance. The white nationalist government, they had all the power, they had all the guns and everything like that. And this looked like war was gonna go on for generations. What did he do in jail? He was a boxer. He was kind of reactive. What he learned in jail was to go to the balcony. He learned to study himself. He writes about it to his wife in his prison letters. He learned to meditate. He said, you’ve got to observe your thoughts and things. He learned to control his natural reactivity. And then the second thing he did was about bridge, which is he learned the language of his enemies. He learned Afrikaans. So he could speak to them in their own language. Now that he learned their language, he learned their history. He learned their history of their own history of humiliation and trauma at the hands of the English during the Boer War when they were in the first concentration camps and all that horror. So that when he was then able to come out of jail, he was able to negotiate with them in their own language and persuade them to build that golden bridge, to give them a way out, to give them a dignified way out. And he harnessed, he engaged the third side, which is the international community and engaged the community within South Africa, the business community, the labor community, the women’s groups, the faith leaders, and so on. And it was those three things all together, balcony, bridge, and third side. And he wasn’t just an advocate for his side. He made it very clear, I’m not just fighting for the freedom of the blacks, I’m fighting for the freedom of the whites too. He was a third side leader. So for me, that’s what makes him a great negotiator. That’s great. A few minutes ago, you were talking about sending out press releases and stuff, and you mentioned this in your book about crafting the theoretical victory speech of two people who are at loggerheads. Give me the victory speech that both Zelensky and Putin can make to resolve the war in Ukraine. You’re asking the easy questions there, Guy. Okay, well, I mean, you know what? NPR doesn’t ask you questions like this. Yes, when I am facing a difficult, impossible conflict, and I recommend this to anyone who’s listening to this, I like the thought experiment of imagining the other side’s victory speech. In other words, imagine that the other side accepts what you want them to do. The boss does what you want him to do, the spouse does what you want him to do. Now imagine that they have to go back in front of the people they care about, their board of directors, their voters, their workers, whatever it is, and explain why this is a victory for them. Why saying yes to you is a victory for them? What would be their three key talking points? So yes, in the beginning of the Ukraine war, what did I do? I sat down and wrote down what I thought would be Zelensky and Putin’s victory speeches. And there was a chance in the beginning of the war to bring the war to an end, just in the first month or two, before it gets solidified into this horrible thing. And there was a day, was Victory Day, the day in which both leaders in both countries commemorate the victory against the Nazis. And what did they need to say? Zelensky needed to be able to say, we stood tall, we still exist, they tried to wipe us out and wipe us out as a country, we still exist, we’re independent, we’re sovereign. He needed to be able to say something like that. And now we’re sitting down and we’re trying to figure out, okay, what do we do with this situation? But he needed to be able to say something like that. Putin needed to be able to say at that moment, we went in here to prevent Ukraine from joining, from being part of NATO and whatever, that’s not gonna happen. We went in to protect our Russian co-ethnic speakers, we’re not gonna do that. They need to be able to give something like that and then say, okay, and now we’re stopping, and we’re gonna negotiate this thing. There was a general, when I worked on the Cold War back in the old days, I met a Soviet general who once said to me, Bill, I’ve seen a lot of wars, a lot of wars. And what I’ve noticed is every one of those wars seems to end in a negotiation. So why not start with a negotiation? Is that easy? No, this is the hardest work you can do. But that exercise of writing the other side’s victory speech, of starting at the end and working backwards, of stimulating your imagination, I find can take even seemingly impossible situations and open up new possibilities. I’m not saying there’s any magic here. What I’m saying is the magic’s inside of you. That’s where the magic is. Maybe there are some very good negotiators, but every one of us has a negotiator inside of us that can be developed and honed to be a remarkable negotiator. And that’s what’s needed in today’s world. We need to start with the conflicts that are around us and then expand out to the larger conflicts like the ones around the world. You also explain the concept why more conflict is a good thing. So would you explain why more conflict can be constructive and positive? I say that sometimes a little bit tongue in cheek because people expect me to say, no, I’m all in favor of ending conflict. But the truth is, first of all, conflict’s natural. It’s, as anthropologists, it’s part of life and it can even be healthy. In fact, psychologists would tell you that a successful marriage isn’t about suppressing the conflict. It’s about engaging our differences, but engaging it constructively rather than destructively, surfacing them. You know, in business, the best decisions often result from divergent perspectives coming together. And out of that creative friction, you come up with a better idea. You probably discovered that an apple is a cheap job. And in that sense, conflict is the foundation of human growth. It’s how we grow. It’s how we learn. It’s how we deal with all the injustices in the world. And there are a lot of injustices in the world. There are a lot of changes that need to be made. That happens through conflict. That’s what Mandela taught us. That’s what Gandhi taught us. That’s what King taught us. Actually, ironically enough, in this world, we’re going to actually need more conflict, not less, but healthy conflict. Because the choice we face is not to get rid of conflict. The opportunity we have is to transform it, to change its form from destructive fighting, which everybody loses, into constructive, creative dialogue and negotiation. And in this theoretical world, what? Do people meet at the United Nations and they hash it out? You can have Crimea, but you cannot join NATO. Is that the kind of discussion we expect? That might happen at some point. Frankly, and it could take place at the UN. Oftentimes, I tell you where these conversations take place. It’s the informal conversations, the back channel conversations. In the front, on the stage, it’s theater, right? But behind the scenes, I’ll give you an example. Back to South Africa, we were talking about Mandela. Mandela, when he came out of prison, he was negotiating with de Klerk, who was the leader of the president of South Africa at the time. The two didn’t actually get along with each other. They didn’t have good chemistry. So where did the real negotiations took place? Behind the scenes. I call that wizards. And there was a person that Mandela trusted, who was a young trade union leader with a lot of negotiation experience. His name was Cyril Ramaphosa. He’s actually now the president of South Africa, 30 years later. And then there was a fellow, a junior minister in the government, Rolf Meyer. And these two would get together with their teams behind the scenes. And they would kind of, oftentimes the negotiation, the talks would break off, there’d be violence. Because oftentimes in conflict, things get worse for a while before they get better. But behind the scenes, these two were working things out. And that’s what you need all the time. We need wizards. I’ll give you one other example here. Roger Fisher and I once visited the arms control talks in Geneva between the Russians and the Americans. And over lunch, I was asking these guys, I said, so you haven’t made any deals in seven years and no agreements. But before that in the seventies, there were quite a number of arms control agreements. What was true then that’s not true today? And they said, well, there are many things. He said, but back then we had a really interesting little process we called the wizards. And I said, what were the wizards? The wizards were two Americans and two Russians who had four characteristics. They were bilingual in English and Russian so they could communicate easily. They were technically knowledgeable about the subject which happened to be arms control. They were lower level than the ambassador. And hence as they joked, they were disposable. And whenever there was an impasse in the talks, these four would get together out on a ferry boat in the lake there at a restaurant and they’d shoot the breeze. What if we were to count the warheads this way? What if we were to do it that way? Each side knowing full well that neither had the authority to bind their respective delegations. And the joke about being disposable was, if the conversations went too far, you could always ship them back to Washington or Moscow and say, this conversation never took place. It was deniable. And they said more good ideas for breaking impasses came out of those wizard conversations. So my question for us today is in any conflict, be it a small conflict in a business or whatever it is, or conflict in politics, is where are the wizards? And might you possibly be a wizard yourself? And how would you know if you’re a wizard? I think all of us could be wizards. The thing is, it’s that a wizard is someone who can easily communicate with the other side. You might’ve gone to school with that person, whatever. You’ve got some trusted relationship. In that case, I was giving that business case. I was a friend of one of the parties. I contacted a friend of the other party. He was a mentor. They knew him. So we were each trusted by our sides. And all of us can think of situations like that. We got together and we said, how do we help our friends get out of this? So we were the wizards behind it. They would not have been able to reach agreement anything, but we were able to go back and forth and we built enough trust between us that in a week we were able to settle something that seemed absolutely impossible. And so that’s what you’re looking for is wizards are trusted and they’re often creative and we all can build trust. We all have trust of certain people and create trust. And we all have that inner creativity. And if we bring that to our conflicts, then we become genuine possibleists and that’s what the world needs. I can’t remember who I interviewed. I think maybe it was Barack Obama’s speechwriter, but he told me that years ago in Washington, DC, all the members of Congress used to live in the same area, regardless of party. And so what happened was inevitably their kids were on little league teams together and all that. So there’s a lot of informal physical face-to-face meeting at little league games, sitting in stands and in restaurants. And that’s how a lot of things got done in politics. But now everybody lives completely separately. And Mike Johnson’s kid is not on the same little league team with Chuck Schumer’s and that just ain’t happening anymore. And I think that’s like a little bit of wizardry, right? Yeah, exactly. That’s what used to happen in Washington. You think of Congress as they’re taking votes, but most of what Congress is negotiation, right? That’s what they’re doing most of the time. Do you think of the president as mostly giving orders or signing executive orders? No, he or she is negotiating with different interest groups all the time. And negotiation is the central way in which we make decisions. And you’re right about Congress that it’s a pity that now there’s so much silos. People don’t even spend the weekends in Washington anymore. They just fly home. So you don’t have those relationships. You might disagree about this, but you’re on the same baseball team or you go to the opera together or whatever you do together. Actually, opera, I remember, I think it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved the opera and so did, who was a very conservative Supreme Court justice I’ve named just bringing, they used to go to the opera together. And that, you know, those kinds of things, those relationships help. It boils down to relationships. I once was a facilitator at a meeting of 200 members of Congress, 100 from each side. And this was a time of great stress. And they told me it was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the Hershey chocolates come from. And they were saying they spent more time with each other on the train going up from Washington to Hershey, Pennsylvania than they’d had in the previous three years. But we need those kinds of get togethers to build relationships. And this is the key thing I would say is there’s a funny thing where we say we’re gonna be in conflict with each other. So you have a problem with your neighbor, you cut the phone line. No, the more conflict, the more you need to spend time together. You need to spend more time together with your quote, political enemies than even with your friends, because that’s the way it works. And so the tendency to cut communication as a way of dealing with conflict is very unfortunate. I think we need to do the exact opposite. The more conflict, the more communication. So you would make the case that one of the normal reactions in conflict is to pull your diplomatic core out of the country, which would be probably the worst thing to do right now, right, or at that time. Absolutely, and you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face if you do that, because you’re losing your ability to understand even if it’s your enemy, know your enemy. You know, it’s funny, I remember once giving a talk at a military academy, the Naval Academy, and I was talking about how, this was back in the Cold War days, and I was saying we needed to put ourselves in the Russian, the Soviet shoes to understand how they see things. And one captain got up and said, you’re asking me to put myself in the shoes of the Soviets? That might distort my judgment. But the truth is, even in warfare, the first rule is know your enemy, right? You got to understand them. We have to understand each other. Like right now, the US and China are on a kind of collision course. We need to understand the Chinese, even all the more so if we’re gonna be in conflict with them. We need to understand them just like they need to understand us. What’s interesting, there are something like over 100,000, maybe 200,000 Chinese students here in this country. Do you know how many American students are in China? A few hundred. We need to learn more about that culture, that civilization, that history, those people, because the two biggest powers of the world, we will either go down together or we’ll find a way to coexist. When you bring that up, this concept that we should make it so hard to get a student visa and all that kind of stuff because we’re afraid they’re spying on us as their students and all that, it’s also counterproductive, right? I agree. I mean, yes, of course, you have to have some safeguards and so on and be prudent, but no, the more we know each other, the better able we’re gonna be. How are we gonna deal with any of the big problems facing the world? Take health, take climate, take economics. We’re so intertwined. We need to find a way to manage that relationship. Yeah, we’re gonna have our conflicts, of course. Conflict is natural, as I said, but we need to be able to manage it in a way that’s for our mutual benefit and for the benefit of everyone else in the world. Otherwise, what kind of future are we gonna leave our kids if we get into a war, God forbid, with China? Yeah, okay. My last question, talking to the father of negotiating here is, how do you discern people’s true strengths and weaknesses? Because everybody’s trying to bluff everybody in negotiation, right? So what’s a sign of strength and what’s a sign of weakness? I think as John F. Kennedy once said, let us never fear to negotiate. In other words, negotiation to me, reaching out to the other side is a sign of strength. It takes confidence. Sometimes people think negotiation is a sign of weakness. No, negotiation is a sign of strength. And empathy is a sign of strength. Sometimes people might think it as a weakness, but think of it as strategic empathy because in negotiation, you’re trying to change someone else’s mind. How can you possibly change someone else’s mind unless you know where that mind is and where their heart is? We might think of as vulnerabilities actually are our strengths in negotiation. The ability to build trust and inspire trust is essential to negotiation. The ability to empathize is essential to negotiation. The ability to listen is essential to effective negotiation. We need to reframe some of those things and see that those things are the ones that actually lead to successful negotiations and people who are successful negotiators are happier. They get more of what they need in life. Negotiation may be the core competence. One of the very few core competencies that any of us need to deal and navigate in the world of today. Okay, I asked all the questions I could think of. Well, let me just say this again. We live, the reason I wrote this book Possible is because we live in an age of conflict. Conflict’s not going away. It’s like increasing everywhere we’re around it. Everywhere I ask, is conflict going up or going down? Everyone says it’s going up. And so the question is, how do we navigate it? We are all potential possible lists. If we become possible lists and apply our innate human curiosity, our innate human creativity and our innate human collaboration to our conflicts, then we can learn to work together. And if we can work together, we can solve our problems. We can realize our opportunities. We can make life the way we want. We can transform our conflicts. Guy, I think we can transform our lives and we can transform the world. And that’s my dream. So you are the Carol Dweck of the possible list mindset, basically. She was kind enough to give me a quote for my book, actually. Yes, definitely. I really have a huge amount of respect for her. And exactly, it’s about applying the growth mindset. We need to take the very same things like the Carol has learned about, that you talk about in your own book about growth, grit and grace. We need to apply that to the conflicts around us. And if we can do that, then I’ve got a grandson now, Diego, and he’s my new boss. We can create the world that I want for him and all the future generation. We can do that through creative, constructive, curious negotiation. Well, there you go. I hope this episode with William Ury has turned you into a remarkable negotiator. Be a possibilist. See what’s possible, do what’s possible, try what’s possible.