Hey, I'm Kwame Christian and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything,

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Todd, welcome to the show, my friend. It's so great to see you. Thanks for having me, man.

Hey, man, it is my pleasure. So how could you get it started by telling us a little bit about

yourself and what you do? Well, the short story is I'm probably the luckiest person you're going to talk to in a while. I really feel that way. I have a lot of gratitude for the career so far. Had a few different careers started with Anderson and Ernst & Young and figured out that business and relationships especially were fascinating, but did not fit me as well as I kind of maybe thought they would. But I wouldn't let go of those objects I wanted to study. And I realized my inner dork really wanted to come out. So I said, I'm going to take a risk and get out of here and be a professional outsider in the business world. And when got PhD and became a professor, PhD at Texas A&M in organizational behavior. I was a professor for 10 years at a school in Ohio

that I loved, a place called Wright State University, teaching mostly MBA students, things about

leadership. And on the side, this is where the current career began to slowly bubble up, as you

know, smart people like you can't even just do one career. We just always have to be dabbling over here,

side hustling over there. And people

started calling, hey, man, I was in your class. We got a meeting coming up. Last year, this guy we had was boring. Would you come out and tell some stories? You were great in class. That's how it started. And I showed up for free for a year like people do. And then they started offering to pay me. and then it built into a career.

And about the time I was thinking, true story,

I'm not sure if I had time to be a professor anymore

because I'm not sure

if I had time to be a professor anymore because I'm running around trying to be this new speaker

...