1310: Negotiation & Urban Planning by Lawrence Susskind, Havard Law School & MIT

In this off-topic 10th episode, Jason Hartman spends some time analyzing the power of the brain and what our brain does to protect ourselves and allow us to function in our day to day life. He also lays down a challenge for all listeners in order to figure out what's important to us all.

Then Jason talks with Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor of Environmental & Urban Planning at MIT and Vice-Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and author of Entrepreneurial Negotiation: Understanding and Managing The Relationships That Determine Your Entrepreneurial Success, about what urban development means in today's age and ideas coming up that can help alleviate many of our city's difficulties.

Jason and Lawrence also discuss the importance of negotiation and the mindset you must have whenever you enter into them. Many people's attitudes these days are skewed toward doing what's best for themselves, and Lawrence explains why that's wrong and why the methods we're trying to use for negotiations are all wrong.

Key Takeaways:

[4:25] Always be trying to strengthen your attention muscle

[7:15] Our brains are phenomenal at denying we're going to die, which allows us to function

[13:59] Jason actually did an assignment that a professor gave in the 1988 movie Cocktail

[19:20] What if we embraced life and brought our A game every day rather than thinking death was some thing way off we don't need to worry about?

Lawrence Susskind Interview:

[24:05] The art of urban planning and its changing nature

[27:06] Cities are going through a process of change and we're likely to see big cities continuing to spread rather than becoming denser

[32:09] Some ideas for the future on how to reduce or eliminate traffic

[36:47] The single most important thing to becoming a better negotiator

[41:49] You need to know the other party's options so that you can know where you stand in negotiations

[45:42] How negotiation can make you a better leader

[50:10] We need to stop thinking that text based communication can be a way to run a business

Website:

www.EntrepreneurialNegotiation.com

www.LawrenceSusskind.mit.edu

www.JasonHartman.com/Properties