#199 | June 2024 Recap: Big Month—a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Lessons From Da Vinci, and a Negotiation Expert Shares His Best Tips

episode SUMMARY:

Douglas Vigliotti recaps the month of June 2024, discussing the novel "Trust" by Hernan Diaz, which explores themes of wealth, power, and the distortion of truth, the biography "Leonardo da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson, highlighting 20 life lessons that can be learned from the iconic Renaissance artist, and lastly, an interview “From the Vault” of his previous podcast, with negotiation expert Herb Cohen, who shares secrets to negotiate anything and become a better person in the process. This recap episode is a great starter for new listeners and book lovers who are short on time!

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Welcome back to “Books for Men”, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this is indeed a recap of the month of June 2024, it was a really big month, so there was a lot to take away from it. But before I jump into the actual recap, the first thing I always like to do is send a big thank you to everyone out there, all the listeners who continue to support the podcast in the two primary ways that you could do so, which is subscribing on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on and sharing it with a friend or a family member, just one other person. Either one of those goes a long way in helping new listeners find the show and ultimately supporting the initiative, which is to inspire more men to read. And of course, for more information on the podcast, you could always visit BooksforMen.org where you could also sign up for the newsletter, which is a monthly newsletter.

(01:09)

So one email every month that rounds up all of the episodes from that month. It features all the book information, episode summaries, all the best quotes from the books, as well as newsletter-only book recommendations. So again, if you're interested in that, you could sign up at BooksforMen.org where you can also get full transcripts for all of these episodes. Okay, so now that we've got that out of the way, let's jump into the recap for the month of June 2024. It was a big month, as I've already alluded to in the opening. The first episode was number 196, “What Lies Behind the Golden Gates of the Super-Rich?—an Exploration of the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel ‘Trust’”. So this book, as I said in the episode, was one of my favorite reads so far this year, and I had to do a double-take into my list of reads from the air.

(02:09)

I do track all the books that I read in an Excel file just so I can go back and remember them. And this indeed was one of the best books that I read so far this year. It came out in 2022, and it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In the episode, I talk about the intricate structure of the novel, the unique style, some of the thought-provoking questions and themes that the novel raises and the questions that it asks, and what you can expect from the experience of reading a novel like “Trust” by Hernan Diaz. In short, it's a novel that spans over 120 years and looks at some very big ideas like the distortion of truth and how wealth, power, and influence can distort reality in many ways, and warp relationships, and shape history in a lot of respects. So if you're interested in this novel, and I know I didn't share too much about the plot, but again, you could go back and listen to the episode, it's not terribly long, and it will definitely give you a better feel for the actual plot.

(03:25)

It's sort of a hard novel to explain the story in plot briefly because it shifts from one thing to the next, meaning you think it's about something, and then as you keep reading, you realize it's about something else. So I don't want to be too misleading, but again, the episode I think does a decent job at summarizing that. So true to form the next episode of the month moved from fiction to nonfiction, and it was number 197, “Unlock Your Inner Leonardo da Vinci: 20 Life Lessons from the Iconic Renaissance Artist, Genius and Polymath”. It features the biography “Leonardo da Vinci” by Walter Isaacson, and it really delves into Leonardo's art theories, and techniques. And as the title of the episode promises 20 life lessons that we can learn from the creative genius himself, from embracing curiosity and retaining a childlike sense of wonder, which is perhaps one of my favorites, to relying on experience and avoiding silos in our life.

(04:34)

All things that Leonardo's artistic brilliance relied on, and the things that backboned perhaps his most famous works, but even more than just his art or the things that he's most known for. This book sheds light on his entire life utilizing 7,200 pages of notes from his personal journals as the basis for the book. So it really looks at his life in a very wide-spanning fashion. And perhaps there's nobody who led a more interesting life than Leonardo, which to me is why not only this book is incredibly interesting, but why Leonardo is such an important figure, not just in the Renaissance, but in human history. Of course, you could go back and listen to the episode where I talk at pretty good length about the book, but as I already mentioned, 20 life lessons that you can learn from Leonardo. My favorite quote from the book is not actually from Leonardo himself, although he has quite a few that I did enjoy, it comes from Walter Isaacson, the author, and he says, “If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.”

(05:57)

I see this as a superpower for people who can access it and utilize it as a strength because it's not intuitive and it's hard to do because once we think we know something, we get anchored into that belief and update our model of how we see it becomes a supreme challenge for a lot of us. This is something that Leonardo never allowed himself to do really. So that idea is one that if you weren't going to take away anything else from the book or anything from that episode, that's one that I think we all could do a little bit better job with because most things we don't know, and I'm using air quotes here as well as we think we know them, we know what we're told, we know what we know at the moment. We know what we can see, what we can feel, what we can hear, or what's in our ecosystem.

(06:58)

But most things go much deeper. And, when presented with new information, instead of getting defensive about it, we should take it into consideration and perhaps update our model of how we see the world, or how we're trying to achieve something, or the next action we're going to take or decision we're going to make, or what we're willing to speak out about. Now, this requires great strength, and backbone, and courage, but I think it's a North Star in an objective worth shooting for. Alright, so that brings us to the last episode of the month number 198, and it was a “From the Vault” episode titled “‘The World's Best Negotiator’ Herb Cohen Reveals the Secrets to Negotiating Anything”. I hadn't featured a “From the Vault” episode in a while. And just as a reminder, those are episodes, mostly interviews that were on my previous podcast, “It's Not What It Seems.”

(07:58)

And this one was originally published in September of 2018, but the conversation is just as applicable today as it was then and probably will ever be. It's an evergreen conversation around negotiating. And since we're all negotiating everything all the time, sure, we're not all Herb Cohen advising us presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, or Bill Clinton. But we are all negotiating things in our life from relationships to business situations and relationships with our bosses and coworkers and family. And I don't know, everything is a negotiation. Someone wants one thing, someone else wants something different. Hopefully, you want the same thing, but that doesn't happen as often as we'd like. So I think this episode is informative not just to people who negotiate for a living, which if you do, if you are in sales or in business, then it will surely help you, but also helpful to every human.

(09:07)

I like to think that this conversation does help you be a better human in a way. So just so you have a little bit better understanding of Herb, I had mentioned he was an advisor to a lot of different presidents and their administrations, but he also wrote the classic book, “You Can Negotiate Anything” and was instrumental in resolving the Iranian hostage crisis of the 1970s, which was a pretty big deal at the time. I know that history has a way of washing away, but if you go and check that out, you might be slightly impressed with it. And as the episode sort of alludes to, he was once coined “The World's Best Negotiator” by Playboy Magazine, and he spent a lifetime as a negotiation expert. But as I mentioned, I think our conversation is entirely more wide-ranging than that, and it will help you be a better human.

(10:02)

Or as Herb says at the end of the episode, “You make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.” And I think that that's a good place to end this recap episode. If you are compelled by it in any fashion, please remember to share it with a friend or a family member. And as I mentioned at the top of the episode, please subscribe. This is the best way for new listeners to find the show and inspire more men to read. And before you go, I did want to remind you that you can now listen to my 2021 poem collection on the podcast, “Slightly Crooked: Good Stories, Told Well”, it is season two where I read in its entirety, 74 little poems from start to finish. And it's a mini-memoir and unorthodox poem collection, really, on life, writing, artistry, women, alcohol missed opportunities, and moving forward. It's titled “mini heartbreaks (or, little poems about life)”. So if you're interested in checking that out, the link is in the show notes of this episode. Alright, that's all I've got. This episode is a wrap. Thank you so much for listening. And if you want more information, you could always visit BooksforMen.org.