In assessing how serious somebody is, you said, it's fair, you called it the F word. I like that. I'll never forget that. Just ask a fair question, like, how much money do you think you deserve? Or would that be a good example of a very direct question? Or is it, how likely are you to walk away if we don't give you the money?

Because I could imagine there's all sorts of reasons why people would be dishonest about answering those questions. Well, and then how much money do you think you deserve is a really good question. Not necessarily what the answer is, but how they answer it. You're going to get how quickly they fire back and whether or not they stop and think about it.

How and what questions typically are best to judge the other side's reaction, and the answer is secondary, because the how or what question causes what we would refer to as deep thinking, slow thinking, Danny Kahneman, behavioral economics, thinking fast and slow. Slow thinking is in-depth thinking. You ask a how or what question to make the other side think first and judge their reaction to how they think about it.

And do they actually think about it, or do they fire right back at you? It gives you a clearer picture of who you're dealing with, where the outcome is going to go. How much money do you think that you deserve if they immediately, you know, $10 million? So this is, I got a shakedown artist on the other side.

Or they say, all right, if they stop and think about it and they give you a thoughtful answer, that's a completely different person on the other side. You're asking a question to get a, to diagnose how they respond first, the answer is second. And sometimes I, if it's a cutthroat on the other side, I'm going to start peppering them with how and what questions just to wear them out.

That's passive aggression. If I, if I got a cutthroat aggressor on the other side, I'm going to drop into passive aggressive behavior to slow them down and wear them out. One of my hostage negotiation heroes, a guy named Johnny Pico, was John Domenico Pico, not Johnny like Johnny Rockets, Italian Johnny, John Domenico, got all the Western hostages out of Beirut in the mid 80s, wrote a book called Man Without a Gun, negotiated in person face to face with Hezbollah, the only guy that ever did that, got everybody out.

And in his book, he wrote one of the great secrets to negotiation is learning how to exhaust the other side. And when you've got a really dangerous adversary on the other side of the table, you don't go nose to nose. You don't argue. You don't, you're not combative. You wear them out, exhaust them.

And if you get somebody really combative or cutthroat on the other side, start peppering them with how and what questions because to even think about the answer tires them out. And it's passive aggressive and it's deferential and it really works. So if the person on the opposite side of a high friction negotiation is aggressive, the goal is to slow things down, fatigue them, and get them to just either relent or to reveal something that's a loophole.

If I have to make the deal, then I'm going to wear them out. I'm interested in drilling a little bit further into this process of wearing them down and the passive aggressive way of reducing the aggressor's stance. And I want to highlight for people that what we're talking about here isn't manipulation to extract something.

We're actually talking about the reverse. We're talking about a bad actor who's aggressive and trying to defang that bad actor. What does that process of wearing them down look like or sound like? Could you give us a couple of examples of, let's say I'm the bad actor, we could play this game.

I won't be very good at this. And I am saying, look, I want x number of dollars by this date or you're not going to get what you want. They're going to die or disappear. Is that simple? And I'm a stonewall kind of approach. What is the approach that you take to wear that person down?

Well, they're going to be questions that are mostly how and what. And they're going to be legitimate questions, which is how do I know you're going to follow through? What does that look like? Like if I do what you want, how do I know you're going to follow through?

So get them to talk about the alternative. Okay. So if you were to, well, if you deliver by that date, I'm going to pass them to you without fail. So they're just getting kind of brief answers where the person is just, again, this kind of like rigid stonewall approach.

Yeah. Well, and so there's a phrase that we use all the time, vision drives decision. So if you're really going to comply, if I give in, and when I said, how do I know you're going to follow through, I'm not talking about the threat. I'm not trying to get you to clarify the threat.

I'm trying to get you to clarify what implementation looks like. So I need to know I'm based on your reaction to that. If you plan on following through, if I comply, you will already have that in your head or be open to it. Vision drives decision. You've thought it through in advance.

What does letting the hostages go look like? If you have no intention of ever releasing the hostage, if I follow through, then you're not going to be able to answer the question and you're probably going to throw it back on me really quickly. And so then now I know like, all right, so you got no plans on complying.

If I give in, you're not going to comply. So I, but you still want the money. Then I'm going to ask, well, how am I supposed to pay you if you don't have any plans for complying? And if you're willing to entertain a conversation about what compliance looks like, there was a kidnapping that my unit worked just before I was in it in Venezuela, where they weren't entirely sure that the bad guys were going to, the FARC I think had the hostage.

They agreed on an exchange point to let the hostage go that was some distance from where they had a pretty good idea the hostage was being held. So they figured they're not going to drag the hostage all the way to this river crossing if they're not going to let them go.

It's just too much effort. And then it was one of the few times there was going to be a simultaneously, theoretically a simultaneous exchange, but they're going to have to send the money across the river before the hostage was let go. So if we agree to this, all right, so they're not going to drag this guy all the way to this river crossing.

If they don't plan on letting them go, and if it's a long way to drag them and they got their money, do they want to drag them back? Like even if they're ambivalent, once they get there, if they've gone through all the effort to get to the meeting location and the hostage is there, we've now just increased the chances significantly they're going to go ahead and comply because it's a pain in the neck to take them back.

This is all human nature stuff, human nature investment. How do you get them to engage in actions and behaviors and then verbal commitments that actually mean something to them? When I was working kidnappings, the very last thing we'd always have the family get the bad guys to say it, last, not first, but last, was we'd actually get a verbal promise to let them go.

Again, at the end, because we've been talking to them long enough at this point in time, we got a pretty good idea of what they sound like when they're lying and what they sound like when they're telling the truth. If somebody tells the truth, they pretty much tend to tell the truth the same way every time, if they tell the truth.

You talk to somebody long enough, you got a line on, do they ever tell the truth? If they do, what does it sound like? People lie 20 ways, they tell the truth one way. We've been coaching in negotiations with the kidnappers long enough that we know what they sound like when they tell the truth.

When they ask at the very end, if we paid your promise to let them go, it's not that they answered, but how they answered it. That'll be the last thing to seal the deal. How do you continually stack the odds in your favor for implementation?