Welcome to this masterclass edition of Negotiate Anything.
With over 1700 episodes featuring some of the world's brightest minds, we've carefully curated a couple of powerful conversations for you.
What makes this so special is that you'll hear how different experts from different industries approach the same challenge in their own unique ways.
Our goal is to give you multiple perspectives so you can build your own unique style.
Success doesn't look the same for everyone.
And in this masterclass, you'll see exactly why.
Let's dive in.
This episode is brought to you by.
Now available in Canada too.
By HomeServe.
Help protect your home systems and your wallet against covered repairs.
Plans start at just $4.99 a month.
Sign up today at HomeServe.com.
Not available everywhere.
Most plans range between $4.99 and $11.99 per month for your first year.
Terms apply on covered repairs and by Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash Kwame.
That's Shopify.com slash Kwame.
Richard, thanks for joining us today.
Very nice to see you.
Yes, likewise, my friend.
So how would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
So my background is in taking findings from behavioral science and what people used to call social psychology.
So the study of how people actually behave rather than how they claim to behave, and then applying those findings to marketing and persuasion.
I like this.
And little birdie told me that you might have written a book recently.
I have a second book.
So the recent one is called The Illusion of Choice.
And the subtitle is 16 and a half principles from behavioural science that influence what people buy.
Love the title.
Love the subtitle, too.
This is great.
And I would like to, before we get into the topic, because both of us we connect and vibe over psychology.
So I like this.
I think the semantics that you put out first are very important.
Talking about the transition from social psychology to behavioral science.
I think that's really important.
Can you like outline that a bit?
I think behavioural science is a broader term.
It's a term people might be familiar with because it's come into vogue in the last 10 or 15 years is behavioural economics.
And the reason I say behavioural science rather than behavioural economics is behavioural economics is, I think, a small subfield.
It's very much associated with people like Kahneman and Tversky, where they took finding some psychology and apply them to economics.
And they talk about principles like loss aversion and anchoring.
But if you just focus on those principles as a negotiator, as a marketer, as anyone trying to persuade other people, I think you're missing out on a really rich heritage of a lot broader findings from social psychology.
Those findings go all the way back to the 1890s.
I think many of them for practical commercial use.
I agree 100%.
And that gives us a great segue into the topic of today's episode.
So I think it would be great if we start off by just talking about the benefit of understanding psychology as a negotiator to really bring life to the negotiation tactics and strategies that we utilize.
But then I want to go into some of your favorite claims to discuss.
First we're going to talk about the stolen thunder phenomenon and then also the precision of claims and making benefits concrete.
So let's just start off by setting the stage, letting folks know of why it's so important to understand psychology as a negotiator.
There's probably three big reasons.
The first, I think, is relevance.
You're trying to influence the behaviour of another person.
And all behavioural sciences is the study of what effectively changes people's behaviour.
So I think that is a very, very relevant field for anyone trying to persuade other people.
The second strength is robustness.
In all fields of business and I think this is true whether it's marketing or negotiation there's an awful lot of hearsay.
People claim there is an effective way to change behaviour to others.
What I like about behavioural science is it's never just based on behaviour, claim or logic or authority.
Now, all these ideas are based on peer-reviewed observed experiments.
So you can give these findings genuine credibility.
So there's this robustness to the field as well as the relevance.
And then the third R is there's a wonderful range.
It's not that there are five or six of these experiments.
There are tens of thousands.
So whatever country or category or area you work in, there will be an experiment out there that can help you.
Not saying it's going to solve the problem, but it will give you a head start to solving the problem.
Agreed.
And I love that terminology of head start too, because a lot of times when we are in the midst of a difficult conversation, we might not be able to access a precise strategy or tactic for the situation in front of us.
But if we can understand the psychology and come up with workable hypotheses in the moment for what psychological challenges might be in front of us.
Then it gives us a starting point where we can start to create our own bespoke strategies in the moment and solve for those potential challenges.
Yeah, not nice way of putting it.
The other strength, talking about head starts rather than complete solutions, is it opens up people to trying small things.
Now, if you just look for a silver bullet to solve all your problems well, I think you'll still be looking in 10 years time.
But if you accept there are lots of small things you can do that cumulatively add up to a big effect, that's much, much easier to put into practice.
Absolutely.
And tell me if this resonates with you too, because when you start to avail yourself to the knowledge of this literature here, it can initially be overwhelming because, like you said, there are thousands of studies and it's like finding the starting point on a circle.
Where do I start?
What do I do?
How do I approach this?
But then when you think about the cumulative effect, then you can start to recognize oh, we can put these in order and make our eventual point more persuasive.
The way that I think about it is in terms of psychological stacking.
So we don't know what that final thing that will push the other person across the edge and lead us to that magical endpoint of persuasion is.
But if we can get a better understanding of the psychological nuances at play, we can start to stack some of these principles on top of each other in the interaction in an organic way.
That makes it more likely holistically, that the person will be persuaded and change their mind.
Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it.
And I certainly agree with your point that The topic can sometimes feel confusing.
And part of that is the volume of experiments.
The other part is academics don't try and make it easy.
I mean, unfortunately, academics write in an unnecessarily jargon filled way often.
So the original papers can often be quite dense.
That's a little bit ironic, because there is a brilliant behavioural scientist, or maybe defined as a psychologist, but called Oppenheimer.
And he has a wonderful paper and it's called Erudite Vernacular Utilised Irrespective of Necessity.
And then there's a colon and it's minutes long.
The danger of using long words needlessly.
And in his study he gets a group of participants and half of them are given a abstract of an academic paper.
So this is the pricey at the beginning of the paper that it tends to be written in an unnecessarily complex way.
That group.
Read the paper, sorry.
Read the abstract and then they rate the intelligence of the author.
Oppenheimer then gets another group of people, gives them the same basic abstract, but this time he's replaced the jargon with simpler alternatives.
Now, when that second group rate the intelligence of the author, the scores are 13% higher.
So Oppenheimer's argument is we often believe the way to impress other people is to speak in an unnecessarily convoluted, complex way.
But actually, it tends to backfire.
You want to speak in the simplest way you can. that still reflects the nature of the subject.
So unfortunately, many psychologists have not learned from that paper.
Most academic papers are unnecessarily dense and turgid.
This is so validating.
And listeners.
To make this even simpler the more you try to sound smart, the dumber you may end up sounding.
That would be off an arm's length.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I think really it speaks to the tribal nature of communication too, because a lot of times you write these papers and they are written in this esoteric language because you're essentially trying to look cool to your friends.
So I want to show off to the people who are in academia. who can understand this.
But then for the people who are in the business world, they're trying to take this knowledge and apply it practically.
It makes it inaccessible and now people can't utilize it in the way that it was meant for.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think a lot of professions are similar, both in using unnecessarily complex terminology, but also often doing things that aren't for the benefit of the end client but are signaling their sophistication to their peers.
My field is advertising.
And often brands don't use very simple techniques like rhyme, for example.
Rhyme in the 1960s 1970s is a very common tactic in advertising.
There's lots of studies that show it's very memorable and it tends to be believable.
But if you look around at the last five or ten years of advertising, rhyme is used much, much less and i think the reason is if you're a creative director, You feel slightly simplistic to suggest a rhyme.
You want to be admired by all your creative peers.
And rhymes certainly won't generate that image of sophistication.
Agreed, agreed.
And it's again.
It requires a bit of internal negotiation to figure out what it is that's most important to you.
And efficacy and persuasive value is what you're going for.
Then sometimes it requires a little bit of humility in order to put that into practice.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, let's move on to the stolen thunder phenomenon.
I was really excited to see that.
Can you let the listeners know about it?
It's a lesser known study.
The original work was done by Kipling Williams at the University of Toledo and he sets up a a scene for the participants and they're all imagining they're in a jury.
And there's three different groups of participants.
And the first group of participants hear a strong case from the defence and then a case from the prosecution.
And then they say whether the defendant is guilty or not.
Second group of people get a weak case from the defendant and then the prosecution tears it apart.
And that's that's called the thunder version.
So there's a weakness in the defense's case and the prosecution tears it apart.
Final group, and this is called the stolen thunder group, exactly the same as the previous group.
Defence has a weak case.
The only change is at the very end the defence case admits the flaw in their argument, and then the prosecution tears it apart.
Now in that group There is a significant increase in the proportion of participants who believe the defendant is not guilty.
So between the Thunder case and the stolen Thunder case, you see an increase in the volume of people who are found innocent.
Now, it never gets up to the stage of innocence again. in the strong defence case.
So the argument from Kipling-Williams is if you have a problem, better to admit it before the other side draws attention to it.
Because if you admit a flaw in your argument, you have proved your honesty, and then everything else you say becomes that much more believable.
Because remember, in the setup for this case, the defence never gives reasons about why in the stolen thunder part, never gives reasons about why that weakness isn't a problem.
All they do is state its existence.
If person you're dealing with knows that you have a flaw, far better that you say it, and then at least you get the benefit of trustworthiness and believability.
That's something I think can be applied far more often in negotiations or persuasion.
Richard, let me summarize this, making sure I get it.
So we have three different scenarios.
In the first one, One, we have the strong defense, and then we hear from the prosecution.
And the second one, we have a weak defense, and then we hear from the prosecution.
And in the third one we have a weak defense, but at the end you admit the weakness and then you hear from the prosecution.
And then in terms of persuasive value, it is the...
It's the strong defence that gets the most innocent verdicts.
Next best is the stolen thunder where the defence admitted the flaw.
The worst one for the defence perspective is when the defence never admitted the flaw.
Yes.
So point being, if you've got an amazing courtroom case, absolutely brilliant.
But if, like in most circumstances, there's going to be a problem, there's going to be conflicting evidence.
If you admit that problem, then you stand to benefit.
I love this.
And especially as a lawyer.
I love this too, because a lot of times, through no fault of your own, your client comes to you with flaws.
Every client is going to have flaws.
And I think a lot of times the ego of the lawyer can lead them to say well, it almost reflects poorly upon me if there are flaws.
But it's not that you, as a persuader, we all are flawed, but you understand.
The point is that the circumstance is not 100 perfect.
And for us as negotiators, whatever realm we happen to find ourselves in.
We have to recognize that sometimes we find ourselves, through no fault of our own, in situations that are not very advantageous and we have to play our position.
And a lot of times we overplay our hands because we think that's the best way to approach it.
But what this study is showing us is that that might undermine our credibility and therefore make us less persuasive.
Yeah, absolutely.
In most situations you're not going to be, especially in a commercial situation there's going to be scepticism from the other side.
Because if you just say your product's amazing, the other party's going to think well, you would say that, wouldn't you?
But if you admit there's a problem...
Then you have tangible honesty.
Everything else becomes more believable.
So I think it's dealing with the world as it is, rather than dealing with the world as you want it to be.
And the problem with most negotiations is that skepticism.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And we have to recognize too that a good negotiator to a certain extent has to have that level of skepticism, or else somebody will take advantage of them.
So we have to assume that they're going to come with that skepticism.
And if we give them essentially what they're looking for and say, hey, here it is.
Yeah. eases a little bit of that tension and it helps them to trust you more.
And now let's say somebody listens to this and they say, okay, I know what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna steal their thunder.
I'm gonna talk about my weaknesses.
What are some of the mistakes that people could make when doing this?
That's a brilliant question.
So, of course, admitting a flaw is a broad recommendation.
There are all sorts of types of flaws.
What's interesting in my field of advertising is The best communicators don't admit a flaw randomly.
So you admit a flaw that has a mirror weakness.
One of the great alcohol campaigns from around the world is Guinness.
And for a long time, they used to say in their strap line, good things come to those who wait.
Brilliance of that line is you admit flaws. that it takes time for a pint of Guinness to be poured.
So you admit the problem of delay and waiting, but most people in their mind have a trade-off with slowness.
We believe if things are slow... they're going to be high quality.
Or Listerine, the taste you hate twice a day.
You admit that you taste foul, but people assume well, if you taste foul, you're going to be really potent.
So the best communicators, I think, find a weakness that has that mirror strength.
Oh, that's brilliant.
So it's one of those situations where you admit yes, this is a weakness, but at the same time, it is a good thing.
For this reason,
Yeah, yes.
Now, you've got to be careful here.
You can't humble brag.
You can't say, you know, the classic interview response of what's your weakness?
Oh, I'm a perfectionist.
That will just irritate people.
It's got to be a genuine flaw.
Imagine your customer.
It's late.
They're scrolling and then they find exactly what they've been looking for.
Your product.
They add it to the cart.
They hit checkout.
And then they realize that their wallet is nowhere near them.
Passwords?
Forgotten.
Card number?
Not a chance.
That's the moment most businesses lose the sale.
But not yours.
Because your store has that purple button.
One tap, done.
That's Shop Pay, powered by Shopify.
And it's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet.
Fewer abandoned carts, more completed sales.
But Shopify isn't just great for buyers, it's a powerhouse for business owners too.
With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, you can build a beautiful online shop that matches your brand.
Shopify is also packed with AI tools that write product descriptions, Polish page headlines and even enhance your product photography.
And with world class expertise in inventory, shipping and returns, Shopify is truly your commerce expert.
See less carts go abandoned and more sales go. with Shopify and their shop pay button.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash Kwame.
Go to Shopify.com slash Kwame.
That's Shopify.com slash Kwame.
You know what's ironic?
As a negotiation expert, one of the most important skills I teach is presence.
Truly listening, reading the room, catching what is not being said.
But for the longest time I'd walk out of my own meetings realizing that I spent half of the time buried in my notes instead of actually being present.
Things would fall through the cracks, action items would get fuzzy and I'd have to piece everything together after the fact.
But that changes with Granola.
Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way that real people actually meet.
Here's how it works.
You take notes, like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting.
And when it's over, it turns everything into clean, structured, and actually useful notes.
And the best part?
Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the tools that you already use.
No setup, no awkward interruptions.
It is just your normal meeting with superpowers.
You get to actually listen, stay fully engaged and still walk away knowing exactly what was decided, who's doing what and what comes next.
Before granola, our team would spend extra time cleaning up notes and double checking details.
Now we leave meetings aligned and clear.
It saved us time and helped us to operate at a much higher level.
Now we know maybe a one-to-one or a business-to-business commercial setting.
Your flaw might be that you're expensive.
Now that's quite interesting because, although high price might put some people off, most people assume if you're high priced you're high quality.
So if the case is that you are trading at a premium versus your competitors, there is an advantage sometimes to leaning into that.
The other party is going to find out anyway.
And you want to make sure they connect and are reminded of high price equaling high quality.
So yeah, it's really about picking the best floor to admit.
This is great.
And what this is telling me too, it shows the power of preparation before these conversations.
Because if you do your research, you understand what your flaws are going to be.
Then you can think about how you can strategically introduce that in a way that is non-threatening during the negotiation.
Preparation, I think you're right, is very important.
Because if you go back to that original Kipling-Williams study, in his argument he's saying well, admit the flaw if the other party is going to be aware of it eventually.
So trying to work out what the other party already think of you.
I think you're right that's an area that would reward preparation.
Love it.
Love it.
All right.
And now let's move on to that next point to the precision of claims and making benefits concrete.
Yeah.
So two separate points.
First one around precision.
And again, this is trying to overcome the challenge of a trust gap.
So the study in question comes from Schindler at Rutgers University and gets a group of people, randomizes them into two separate groups.
The first group see an ad for a deodorant, picture of the deodorant description.
And within the description, the ad says reduces perspiration by 50 percent.
Next group.
Same picture, same description, but the percentage changes.
Now, it either says it reduces perspiration by 47% or 53%.
So essentially, some people see a round claim, 50%.
Some see a precise claim, 47% or 53%.
Schindler then questions everyone as to one how accurate do they think that claim about perspiration reduction is?
And two, how believable or credible is it?
Now the group who heard the precise number rate accuracy 10 higher.
Credibility believability 5 higher.
Schindler's argument is this.
That over time people have got so used to hearing those who are speculating using round numbers and those who know their stuff using precise numbers that the two things become fused together.
We're very attuned to this.
If someone said to you, how old's your brother?
You'd probably say, well, he's 37 or 38, depending on his age.
If someone said to you, how old's that old guy who lives six doors down from you in your road?
You'd say, oh, he's in his 60s, he's in his 70s.
We learn over time that if you know what you're talking about, you tend to come up with precise numbers.
If you are guessing, you tend to speak generally.
Let's say your children actually reduces perspiration by 51%.
Don't make the mistake of most brands and rounding down to a nice, clean, round number.
That will reduce its believability.
Use the specific number that's actually the truth.
I love this.
And the timing of this, Richard, is perfect.
Just an hour ago, I was delivering a training for a real estate company.
And we're talking about how to, first of all, how to list your prices.
I said, every price on your website is a round number.
That makes it more ripe for negotiation.
That's the first thing.
And then when you're conceding, when you're making your concessions, you want to think about it beforehand, and if you concede on a round number, then it makes it more likely for the person to invalidate that number and not take it as seriously.
So you want to think about it beforehand and come up with precise numbers, and so Just incorporating this psychology into your negotiations makes the offers and counter offers that you make so much more persuasive.
Yes.
So interestingly, you mentioned a development of this idea from Schindler around precise prices.
Now, precise prices are fascinating.
Some work from the mid-90s from the University of Florida, where they showed that If you showed someone a precise price, they were more likely to think it was worth that price than if you gave them a round price.
But, and this was Januszewski and you, I think, the experiment was a little bit abstract.
It was asking people to speculate on what they do.
I think it was students as an audience.
So it always had a little bit of uncertainty around it from the academic backup.
But recently uber have released data.
Now they have a big behavioral science team.
So if you get into an uber you've probably been in one of the experiments and they released data saying that they had been testing surge pricing.
Right, so you and me might be on the same road, different ends of the same road.
You look for an Uber and you're given a 2x surge price.
I'm given an Uber and I'm given a 2.1x surge price.
What Uber found was that on average, I would be more likely to accept the ride.
So, even though I'm seeing a higher price, I'm more likely to accept it because, being slightly sceptical, if we see round prices We assume they've been marked up a lot, whereas if we see a really precise price, we probably still think it's been rounded up, but just edged up in small degrees.
So there's this lovely opportunity, as you say with your real estate client, that if you ever got round prices, just put them up a little bit.
You've got more margin.
They'll be perceived to be better value.
Oh, I love this.
And I love the validation.
Thank you very much.
And I think this is a good opportunity.
Listeners.
If you plan on using that technique or any of the ones that Richard said, give Richard a five star review on the podcast.
Don't give it to me.
Just give it to Richard.
That's, you know, that's what we're doing here.
This is great, man.
I love that.
And I know we're coming up on time too.
And then let's hit that last point, making benefits concrete.
So yeah, lovely study.
The original one was done in 1972 by Ian Begg at the University of Western Ontario.
Simple study, reads out a list of 22 word phrases.
The phrases that he reads out.
They're all jumbled up, so the participants can't guess what he's doing, but they fall into two types.
Half of the phrases are what he calls abstract phrases.
So things like better excuse or impossible amount.
These are things that you cannot visualize.
They're intangibles.
The other half of the phrases are physical things.
So white horse or square door.
He reads out the list.
After he's read it out, he asks people to recall as much as they possibly can.
And he finds that on average, people remember 9% of the abstract words, 36% of the concrete words.
So there is a massive fourfold difference in memorability.
Begg's argument is vision is the most powerful of our senses.
So if you use language that people can visualize, what you say will be very memorable and sticky.
If you use abstract language, very forgettable.
Now that idea can definitely be applied in a business setting, because lots of times, professionals talk about their premiumness, their trustworthiness, their quality.
The problem is they're all abstractions.
What you have to do as a communicator is translate those abstractions into concrete, visualizable words.
And if you think about maybe one of the best and most effective brands ever Apple, that's exactly what they used to do.
With the iPod, all the competitors talked about 126 or 256 megabytes of memory.
They talked about memory in an abstract way.
What Apple did was still talk about the abstract concept of memory, but they turned it into something visualisable.
Thousand songs in your pocket, a picture, a pocket.
You can imagine, a song that's memorable in a way that those abstractions will never be Incredible.
And this is not.
I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, but I think for just for me as a business owner here and somebody who negotiates every day, just these little tweaks, I can see immediately how it could lead to better understanding, more collaboration, less distrust and more persuasive value, while still being really honest and transparent with the way that you negotiate.
Yeah, I love your point about honesty.
What I'm not suggesting is people make up a flaw or make up precision or make up concrete word.
Most of the time we have flaws.
The data probably was precise until we rounded it.
And changing a word isn't immoral.
So you're absolutely right.
All of these principles you've got to apply honestly.
But if you do, absolutely, they'll have a positive effect.
Absolutely.
Oh, Richard, this was so good.
I really appreciate this.
And before you go, can you remind the listeners again how they can get in touch with you and the books that you've written too?
So two books on this topic, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice.
And then if they want to get in contact, LinkedIn's great.
So it's Richard Shotton.
I often tweet or just tweet about psychology and marketing.
And that's at R. Shotton on what I guess I should call X now rather than Twitter.
But people know what I mean.
Fantastic.
Richard, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
You've just heard one powerful perspective and now we're moving on to the next, a fresh voice with a new angle on the same challenge, so you can keep expanding your skills.
Let's dive in.
Jordi, thanks for joining us today.
Thanks, Kwame.
I'm excited to be here.
Yeah, man, we're excited to have you.
So how would you get started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
So I'm a business school professor at ESADE Business School in Barcelona.
But as you can tell from my accent, I'm not Spanish.
I'm actually Belgian.
So that's a French accent you're hearing.
And I've been teaching negotiation for over a decade.
And I have been doing research on negotiation emotion, happiness and right now I'm really excited about sort of using hard data to investigate some of the claims and practitioner wisdom about negotiation and using large language models to actually look at transcript of conversation thousands of conversation and unpack sort of the tactics that we can use to be better negotiators.
Oh my gosh, Jordi, you see this smile.
This is a nerdy smile.
I'm excited to get into this data and the research.
This is fascinating.
I think we should just start off and just marvel at the technological advances that have gotten us to a point where you could even do something like this
So I think it'll be cool to just start off by talking about what research in negotiation looked like in the past, compared to what you can do now with artificial intelligence and large language models.
Yeah, so a lot of the negotiation research was done in, you know, with students, asking them to engage in different kind of role plays and maybe manipulating one variable.
So you know you've, I think you have a background in psychology.
You know that psychologists would like to experiment.
So we would give secret instruction to half of the half of the negotiators.
You know, act tough or uh, ask more questions, or these sort of things.
And observe results in scorable negotiations, negotiations on which you can quantify how well a person is doing or not.
But it's always been sort of at the negotiation level, right?
So we give instructions about certain behavior and then we observe if, on average, people are getting more or less points or value out of the deal.
What the new technology sort of unlocked is now the ability maybe to record very easily negotiation conversations and start looking in not at the broad behavior level but at the word level.
What are the key predictors of success?
What are the words that influence the other person?
What are the killer questions?
What are the things that we should not say?
And not only the verbal behavior, but also the nonverbal behavior.
We can analyze the tone.
We can analyze the pauses that people make and so forth.
Oh my gosh.
All right.
Well, let's get into it, Jordy.
So when you look at the research, what were some of the most surprising findings?
Well, we've done a lot of research.
One thing that I like to do is to start from the claims that every single business school professor makes in their class.
And no one really asked himself if they were true or not.
So one of the claims that you might have heard in a negotiation class is that we negotiate every day, for example, or that you know we should ask more questions.
And then you know, because we've collected hundreds of negotiation conversation, you know thousands and thousands of hours.
We can actually look at whether this is true and when it is and when it is not.
So I give you an example in a recent project, we looked at the claim that negotiators don't ask enough questions and that they should, and we actually quantify it.
So we have Uh, I think, 600 negotiations where we're talking thousands of hours and we look at each speech turn
And use AI to first spot, is there a question or not?
Because humanly it would not be possible for us to listen to all these conversations and code it manually.
But with AI, you can do it very easily.
And then if so, what kind of question do people ask?
And how does the counterpart respond?
And so, for example, I ask you Kwame, what is the percentage of speech turns?
Do you think that contain an open-ended question?
For good negotiators?
Well, on average.
Oh, on average.
I would say if we're saying on average, I would probably say 25%.
Okay, so it's much lower.
It's 8%.
Oh, dear Lord.
Over 90 of what negotiators say in a negotiation is a statement, or sometimes also 8 a closed-ended question, but very few open-ended questions.
Interestingly, when we ask negotiators after the negotiation to estimate how many questions they asked they, they estimate that they've been asking.
You know somewhere around like 30 to 33 of of questions that that their speech turns.
You know a third of their speech turns included in open ended questions.
This is mind blowing.
This is really fascinating for a couple of reasons.
Because first of all, we recognize that curiosity is the foundation of effective negotiation.
And it's a little bit disheartening to see that the percentage is so low.
And then also we see the self-serving bias in our own interpretation of our own performances.
So we assume that we're asking more questions than we actually are.
And it makes me wonder too Jordi, if it comes down to not just the questions that we ask, but other elements of negotiation that we know that we should be sprinkling in.
Are we always overestimating the amount of negotiation skills we're utilizing with intentionality, versus how many times we are just reacting without much intentional thought behind the strategic approach?
Here's something that i've learned over the years how you show up matters every single day and, i'll be honest, i used to overthink getting dressed, trying to look put together without spending a fortune on it.
And then i found quince and it genuinely simplified everything.
So i bought their stretch knit pin tuck trousers and they have been in constant rotation.
I'm talking about meetings with the team, running around the town with the kids hanging out with friends.
I just throw these on and I know I look good.
The fabric feels elevated, lightweight and breathable, but they're so comfortable.
I honestly feel like I'm wearing loungewear.
And that's the thing.
They look polished and they feel that relaxed at the same time.
One pair and every kind of day.
And the price?
It is not at all what I expected for that kind of quality.
And here's why that is.
Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen.
So you're getting premium materials at 50 to 80% less than what you'd pay for similar brands.
For spring, think 100% European linen shorts and shirts starting at just $34.
And 100% Pima cotton tees with a softness that honestly just has to be felt.
And their pants hit the same sweet spot too.
Relaxed and comfortable but polished enough to wear pretty much everywhere.
Refresh your everyday with luxury you can actually use.
Head to quince.com slash kwame for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash kwame for free shipping and 365-day returns.
Quincecom slash kwame now available in Canada too.
And a big thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode.
You know we talk a lot on the show about being prepared, having the right strategy before you walk into a difficult conversation.
But I'll tell you, nothing humbles you faster than being completely unprepared for a home repair.
I remember when my water heater just gave out.
No warning, no negotiation, just gone.
And suddenly you're scrambling, searching for a reliable contractor at the worst possible time, watching costs stack up in real time.
That is a stressful place to be.
But here's what I wish I'd known.
Your regular homeowner's insurance likely doesn't cover that.
Plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, electrical issues.
You're often completely on your own for those.
And that's exactly where HomeServe comes in.
HomeServe offers plans that cover specific home systems starting at just $4.99 per month.
When something goes wrong on your plan, you simply call their 24-7 hotline and they connect you with a local experienced professional that can handle the repair.
No panic, no frantic searching.
They've been helping homeowners for over 20 years, with a network of over 2600 local contractors, 45 million customers and a 48 out of 5 post-repair rating.
Help protect your home and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs.
Plans start at just $4.99 per month.
Sign up today at HomeServe.com to find the plan that is right for you.
That is HomeServe.com.
Not available everywhere.
Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month.
For your first year, terms apply on covered repairs.
That's interesting.
I think for many things, there's a self-serving bias, right?
So we like to imagine ourselves... better versions of ourselves than we really are.
But when it comes to negotiation, I also think about some of the work, and I cannot name the author right now, but I remember reading some articles showing that people also overestimate how aggressive they've been.
So it's not always like on the positive side.
Like people say, I've been maybe too pushy, too demanding and things like that.
But their counterpart actually feel that they were just perfectly normal.
So I think the misperceptions can go in many directions, but they can lead us astray, of course.
That's fascinating.
So we're not even consistent in our misunderstanding of ourselves.
Exactly.
But you're putting the finger on something important.
Of course, on average, people don't ask that many questions in negotiation.
But if you look at the correlation between the number of questions that negotiators ask and their performance really measured objectively by the terms of the deal, we observe a very strong correlation between the two.
So the more open-ended questions you ask, the better you do.
And it doesn't seem in the data, at least that we have, that there's like an upper limit.
So it's really the more, the better.
Oh, interesting.
So there's no point of diminishing returns.
It doesn't seem like it now, maybe because of our sample.
You know these are executives and and business uh, business folks and um, business students.
Uh, we don't have anyone who's asking like 70 80 percent uh of questions, right?
So uh, the highest sort of the most the most inquisitive negotiators in our samples ask roughly one fourth of their speech term.
Oh, that's very interesting.
Okay.
So what's really fun about this and just validating is that we've known this in negotiation, but now we know this with specificity.
It's really cool when we can utilize new levels of technology and advancement to validate things.
The work that's been done in the past, but also bring another level of precision as well and self-awareness, because now for me, when I'm going through these conversations, I'm going to say OK, great.
Well, Kwame, now you can be even more confident in your strategies, which is great.
I don't need to try to do something completely different.
Now I just have more faith in the fundamentals.
And I think that's one of the things that separates novice negotiators from expert negotiators.
The expert negotiators know the fundamentals and they stick to it until it works.
The novice negotiators know the fundamentals.
They try it and then they feel some resistance and then they give up.
So this is really cool from that perspective.
And so now we know we should ask more questions.
What are some of the things that you've found that we should not be doing in our negotiations?
Okay, so still on the question, and then I'll give you other examples, but still on the question.
For example, we found that there are instances where asking open-ended questions actually hurts the negotiator.
Uh well, i'll let you guess what would you say?
Asking, not ask a question.
I would say oh, this is a tough one when, when you're asking a question that could inadvertently get the person more anchored in their position, So you're asking something that is phrased in a way that gets somebody to commit to something that's not in your favor.
And when somebody commits to something, it makes it more difficult for them to adjust down the road.
That's a super interesting research research idea.
There you go.
One thing that we look, though, is that when you're making an offer.
You should not ask a question.
So we can look at the transcript and we can look at all the offers that are being made.
And a big chunk of these offers come with, what do you say?
What do you think?
How does it sound?
These sort of questions.
And actually what we observe is that if People ask questions when they're making an offer, that tend to get a worse deal.
And that is a statistically significant result.
And we can even sort of back it up causally by doing experiments where we add a question to an offer or not.
And we can see that the counter is tougher if there is a question.
It just opens more room for negotiation, I guess.
This is so cool.
Okay, can you give us an example of where somebody might do this and it hurts them in a negotiation?
So if I'm selling my service or if I'm selling my phone, I just said look, the price is 450 an hour.
Period.
Silence.
Don't say, what do you think?
That will lead the counterpart to negotiate a lot more.
So that's one instance, for example, that sort of counterintuitively we found that questions were not helping.
Another cool thing we found on questions were, That not all the questions were created equal.
So one thing you can do when you have so much data is to start looking at different types of questions, for example, using why versus what versus how.
And then we can see if someone asks a why question, what does the answer of the counterpart look like?
And does it look different than when someone asks you what question or how question, for example?
And what we found there is that, you know, there's typically two motives in negotiation.
You want to build a report, but you also want to get information, strategic information.
Why will get you more information?
So when you ask a why question, why do you think so?
People give you longer answers as a response, but the sentiment, the word that they use tend to be more negative.
And we can quantify that.
If you ask a how question, answers are shorter.
But sentiment is a lot more positive and what falls somewhat in between.
So I think one of the insights is that we want to maybe balance the way we phrase questions in a way that sort of also balance information gathering and report building.
This is one of those times where I want this interview to never end.
Jordi, because I have so many questions.
Because what's coming to mind for me when I'm thinking about the utilization of these questions strategically is that, for example,
If my goal is to get somebody to sour on something, an idea or a position, maybe at that time I ask them to describe their position using a why question.
And then maybe, if I just want pure information, but I want it to be more positive, I would ask a how question, because it would give me the quality of information but it would not have the risk of tipping negative.
Is that an example of how we could kind of use these questions strategically?
Absolutely.
A how question will give you on average a little bit less information, but people will feel better.
And so I would just try to strategically maybe sample different kinds of questions.
Not always why why why why why, and not always what what what,
What falls in between?
So probably the safest option is to say, what do you think?
Then why do you think so?
Man.
Oh, that's great.
That is great.
And when you're doing this investigation, I know we're – thus far we've talked about questions that are formulated in the traditional sense, that have a question mark at the end.
What about these more –?
I call them open-ended statements, where it's meant to gather information, but not formulated as a question.
Did we do any research on that?
It's ongoing, so I don't have any like exciting findings to share, but that's where we're going right now.
So we're looking at things like, hey, tell me about this and this and this.
Or just simply, you know, saying like it sounds like you have something on your mind.
You know, these sort of non-question sort of inquiry is that's all we call them.
But uh yeah yes, so these are some of the things we look at.
We've also been looking at um pronoun use um and it's kind of um, it's kind of interesting.
So i mean, and in a way maybe a little bit obvious, but the more people use i, the less They tend to gain in negotiation.
You, the use of you tends to be a winner there.
The use of we as well, but I, probably not.
Interesting.
Oh, okay.
So this is interesting because I think now we have to consider the timing of these words too.
Because for sure I think if it's just I speech all the time, it can feel very selfish and self-centered.
That type of stuff very off-putting.
We using collaborative speech, it's really cool to see that validated.
Because that's been the trend more in negotiation with collaborative negotiation.
Now, when it comes to you and tell me if I'm off on this too, because there are some times where in a heated negotiation, if the person's more emotional, you can sound accusatory.
So how do we balance that?
Yeah, that's, that's right.
So we're observing like really big trends on average, right.
Across all kinds of, of negotiation interactions.
And then it looks like being centered on the other side is probably better than being centered on ourselves.
That's I think the idea, but for example, in conflict, you're right.
Right.
Then if I want to express my emotions.
I'm much better off saying like I feel frustrated right now and saying like this is frustrating or you're, you're frustrating.
So, so absolutely.
Right.
So take it with a grain of salt.
These are big trends and the way I interpret them is like you know.
We should be focusing on on the other person.
So these are some of the findings.
Talking speed is something we looked at.
So we find that people that speak with maybe a little bit faster than average and with more energy tend also to win more in in our you know samples of negotiation.
That was quite interesting.
And there was one behavior.
I'll let you guess which one.
So we look at two kinds of outcome in your negotiation.
We look at what we call objective outcomes, right?
It's the number of points that you get in these scoreable negotiation.
Oh, it's the terms of the deal, you know, the price you get and so forth.
And we also look at relational outcome.
That is, we survey the counterpart afterwards and we say like, how much do you want to negotiate with that person?
Again,
Right.
How do you feel about that person?
So there's one factor in the many, many dimensions of communication that we analyzed that the biggest killer of willingness to negotiate with the person again,
The conversation behavior.
Interrupting.
Absolutely.
That is the only negative predictor of liking is the number of times you're being interrupted.
Absolutely.
And again, it's, it's practitioners wisdom.
But it's kind of cool to see it.
You know, with big data, because sometimes some of the wisdom doesn't fully replicate.
Yeah.
And I think for me Jordi, what's fascinating about this is the fact that we are dealing with sample sizes that we've never been able to work with in the past.
And this is an assumption I need you to clarify, too.
I'm assuming that we're dealing we're analyzing conversations that are like cross-cultural.
So we're not just talking about folks in one country, are we?
Or do we sprinkle in some other like diversity into the dataset?
So the sample is extremely diverse.
I think there's, you know, 40 over 40 different nationalities from all the continents, but it's in English.
And I'm saying that because it could very well be that negotiations in French, in Italian, in Japanese, you know, There are different determinants.
There are different sort of key behaviors and key words and key questions in different languages.
So this is diverse sample, but English language.
Yeah.
No, that's helpful.
That's helpful, because what's really fascinating too, is we can see that even within the English language, there's a lot of diversity.
We have North America Canada Africa Australia, all of these different cultures speaking the same language.
So there's still a lot of diversity.
And this is something I mentioned to you before, and I'll tell you.
I need to cite my source.
This is Jack Schaefer, the former FBI agent who wrote The Like Switch.
Great guy.
He was on the podcast yesterday.
The way he described it is he said –
The psychology is like the cake that you bake.
Everybody has the same cake.
But then the icing is the cultural nuance.
So everybody has the same psychological foundation.
So what's really cool about this is that as we go deeper into the research, we'll be able to see what elements of persuasion are just purely psychological, from a human perspective, versus what elements are more cultural.
So we can see what can cut through all of these types of cultural nuances and just stay as the foundational, fundamental principles of negotiation, and then where we might need to flex absolutely.
It's a tangential point, but i i remember reading a study that i find fascinating what do you?
I think some managers were surveyed about like what's a good meeting for you?
And you know the Americans would say the number one answer for the Americans would be well, a decision was made.
The number one answer for the Chinese managers were like well, we put an official stamp on a decision that was already made before the meeting.
And the French, which is the culture I identify more with, said like oh yeah, there was a heated discussion, some conflict, you know, and we throw some stuff at each other.
It was a good debate.
So, yeah.
Wow.
That's really interesting because that shows the different cultural values too, right?
Not in an ethical or moral sense, but just the things that we drive toward.
Absolutely.
And actually we should talk about this too, because at the end of a lot of these negotiations the goal is some kind of decision.
And I know that your research has a lot to do with.
Some of the research that you've done talks about emotions as it relates to their impact on decision-making.
So when you did this research with the LLMs, What did you find about emotions in negotiations?
Not that much.
And that was kind of a surprise for us.
So what we did is that we looked at nonverbal display of emotion.
Which might not be exactly the emotion that you feel, right.
But we're looking at like when people frown, when they smile and things like that.
And um one of the few and one of the only things that we found sort of predicted success in negotiation was uh, adaptability.
So if like, if, if your counterparts smile. and you smile back, that seems to be adaptive.
But if you're the one smiling first and consistently smiling too much, that is actually detrimental, right?
So there's probably no like nice guy discount in negotiation.
That's, But, you know, being nice back is okay.
This is one of the things that we find.
Now, in other lines of research, one thing that I find sort of consistently is that allowing yourself to experience a broader range of emotion is adaptive for well-being.
It's adaptive for decision-making.
Uh, we call it emo diversity.
It's like biodiversity, but for emotions, and what we observe and these again are like tens of thousands of people is that people who have experienced a broader range of emotion uh, you know um, let's say, a weekly basis or yearly basis uh, they tend to be healthier physically and mentally.
They tend to be wiser in interpersonal conflict and discussion and they tend to make better decision.
And, in particular, we just ran a study that I think it was kind of cool, where we instructed people to think about emotions that they were feeling while making a decision.
So we asked them you know, Think about a decision you need to make in the next few days or the next few weeks.
What is it about?
Tell us about that decision.
And then we said to half of our participants okay, what is the main emotion you're feeling when you're contemplating that decision?
They wrote about it.
And then the other half, we said, please write down at least three emotions. that you're feeling.
And they need to be different when you're considering that decision.
And then we let them be for a few weeks and we checked in a few weeks later and say hey, what did you decide?
And how satisfied are you with your decision?
And people who consider three emotions were statistically more satisfied than the people who consider one.
And we have many, many studies like that that seems to suggest that if we pause and we ask ourselves OK, what else am I feeling right now?
This is actually a powerful way to make better decisions.
That's brilliant.
And I think that speaks to the power of internal negotiations for decision making too, because a lot of times we make the same mistake.
That we make negotiating with other people, which is we don't ask enough questions.
We just stop at the shallow answer.
What am I feeling?
I'm feeling this.
And then we move on.
Usually it's an emotional cocktail that includes more things.
And the deeper we can understand ourselves, the more we can recognize there are other elements than maybe the thing that is most glaring at the surface that we need to consider.
So I think that is valuable. brilliant.
And it's so simple.
And what's fascinating to me too, is that There's value in stoicism, being able to stay even and focused and manage your emotions in a way where it might not be perceptible to the other side.
But when it comes to our own understanding of ourselves, it seems like it's incredibly important for us to give ourselves license to feel.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I think you put it beautifully and you tied it to negotiation.
Yes.
And emotions are messengers, right?
And so the more messengers I listen to, the better informed my decision really.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay, how about this?
Now with the research, did you find that there were any kind of magic words that seemed to consistently have a positive or negative impact in negotiation?
The questions were the biggest determinant.
So if I have to give one advice, it's like, ask more questions.
Talking speed was one, not interrupting was one.
Magic words, not so much, but we're only scratching the surface.
There's so many things that we can look at with this dataset.
Every back on the show in a year, I'll have a lot more insights to Yes, absolutely.
Seriously, man.
This is fascinating to me because like you said, you know, my background's in psychology.
I love this stuff.
And there were times where I would, I loved, I respected research, but I personally didn't want to do it.
But I've got tons of questions.
I want to be explored.
So listen, if there's anything we can do to help.
I mean, we have what?
Thousands of episodes you know.
So I, because I think this, this helps us to move forward.
That's the beautiful thing about this.
And it validates what we've known, but now we know with more specificity and more just.
It gives us an opportunity to go so much deeper.
But then the more we can explore this and then the more we can understand how humans respond in these really tough conversations, the better the world will be.
Because there are going to be some patterns that are just imperceptible.
But once you give an LLM enough data, it can find things that we can't find.
And that's just so exciting.
Absolutely.
And I think it makes the world better.
It makes us also happier.
That's another research finding I wanted to tell you about.
So recently we tracked hundreds of people with an app that pinged them many times a day and asked them like how do you currently feel?
And then like, are you currently in a conversation with whom?
And what is this conversation about?
And one thing that we found was that when people were negotiating reporting, you know a conversation that some negotiation flavor, maybe they were bargaining over something, trying to convince someone, trying to find a joint solution.
Many different kinds of negotiation.
People were feeling actually less happy than if they were not in a negotiation.
However, What was interesting is that if you don't look at the moment, but now you look at the entire set of moment for the person, the frequency at which a person negotiate, if you said like Hey uh, you know, 30 of my my conversations are negotiation, or 40 of my conversation until negotiation,
Well, that directly predicted their happiness level overall.
So people negotiate more are happier people.
Wow.
It's such a fascinating finding.
And it's almost just like a human principle sometimes.
Doing what is required feels bad, but the outcome feels good.
It's about prioritizing the long term benefit over the short term discomfort that we can feel.
Absolutely.
And again, right.
If you ask any negotiator, they will tell you you have to go over your fear of negotiating and things like that.
But I find it really cool that we're able to take hundreds of people and show statistically that really, if you start negotiating more in your everyday life, you'll probably – sure, you'll have a better job and things, but you'll also be happier.
By the way, do you know the percentage of a conversation that entails some form of negotiation?
I need to get better on my percentages, guest Geordie.
I'm going to nail this one. the percentage that has some element of negotiation.
How are we defining negotiation?
You've probably heard the phrase, we negotiate every day.
I heard you say something similar.
That's true, but I wanted to know, okay, every day, but how much every day?
70%?
As you know, trying to find a conversation where people have sort of differing views, differing interests that they need to reconcile right.
Or even more broadly, any conversation where you need something from the other side.
Oh, yeah.
So we're at about 80% for that.
So at least in our sample, there was a bit lower.
That was 25%.
25!
But that means like one out of four conversation is a negotiation.
To me, that was still a pretty... That's still a lot.
That's still, hey, Jordy, that might just be a me thing.
That just might be me.
Yeah, exactly.
You're an outlier.
You're like regular everyday people.
And, by the way, that's interesting because we looked at things like gender and age and we don't find much differences.
Again, this goes against some of the stereotypes that you know, we might have.
And some of the things that might've been true like 20 years ago, but at least in our data we find very, very little tender differences.
Ooh, that is a fascinating one.
That's a really.
And man, now this you know every once in a while you have these moments, and by every once in a while, i mean frequently, every day.
You have these moments where you're like, oh wow, time is moving past, because i was thinking about um women, don't ask by linda babcock and sarah lashiver, and remember they were really the the, the trailblazers in gender dynamics and negotiation.
And that was one of their big findings.
But you're right, that is about 20 years ago.
And they and a lot of other people have done a really great job of championing just encouraging women to negotiate more.
And it's really fascinating to see that in the data it seems like it's worked.
It seems like it worked yeah, and i think the most recent piece of research i read was actually showing a slight opposite trend.
Uh, was women negotiating even more now?
Again, it depends on, you know, it depends on the ses and depends on the kind of job and most of the research is done on, you know, MBAs and executive MBAs and things like that.
So you might not be representative of the entire population, but but clearly it seems like the trend is is is reversing.
And some of these.
That's why it's so important to check.
You know, with data every once in a while, that some of the wisdom that we have is still true.
Incredible.
And Jordi, I want to revisit something you mentioned, that talking speed is positively correlated.
I thought that was really interesting.
I honestly thought it was going to be the opposite.
Do you have any hypotheses or ideas for why that could be?
Sure.
My scientist hat.
There could be first a confound.
And talking speed might be associated with being more fluent in English or native.
And because this is a very international and diverse sample, it could just be that it's a byproduct of culture and things like that.
It could be that.
Another possibility and I think it's in line with some of the things we observe is that just being sort of dynamic in the way you talk and outgoing is positively associated with outcome.
And so that could be a signal that we're picking up, right?
I don't want to recommend to people to start being like radio host or, you know, sports commentator.
But clearly you want to be engaged and engaging, I think, the way you talk.
That's how I read the data.
Man okay, this is really interesting, because now I want to bring this back to authenticity as well, because we want people to be themselves.
We also want them to utilize really consistent, grounded people foundational negotiation strategies that we know would work.
But I think that still gives you a wide berth and a lot of latitude when it comes to sprinkling your own personality into that process.
And so for somebody who's listening to this and they're saying okay cool, I need to fundamentally change who I am.
What advice do you have for that person?
Well, I think I'll follow your great – I remember last year or a couple of years ago, going through your online LinkedIn course on personality types.
I was trained as a personality psychologist originally.
I was like, oh, these are some really neat ideas.
And I started digging into the literature.
And you're right.
I think well, there's room to express authentically our personality, but also we should consider the personality of the person on the other side.
And if they're neurotic, highlighting your risk will probably make them act, more then highlighting the benefit.
If they're open to new experiences, just a very creative type of personality.
Telling them that 95 of the customers go with the package B is a bad idea, right?
They want to be special.
So I think your personality can shine, but also like consider the personality of the other side and the type of arguments they'll be sensitive to.
Amazing.
Okay.
See, I need to land this plane because I was about to go onto a whole laundry list of questions.
We'll just have to have you back, Jordy.
This is great.
But before we go, I want to make sure you get an opportunity to talk about the app that will be coming out too.
Absolutely.
That research that I mentioned is based on, you know, hundreds of negotiation, thousands of negotiation.
And we wanted sort of to give the opportunity for people to check how many questions they ask, the kind of questions they ask, how many times they interrupt, how fast they talk and all these things that we talked about.
And so we've built an app that analyze conversations.
So basically if people want to try it, it's free.
The only thing is that we might use your data for some scientific publications, but the idea is that with a friend, you can download a role play case that we have on the app.
And then we'll ask you to negotiate it on Zoom. to upload the recording of your negotiation.
We don't keep the audio.
We just uh, you know crunch the numbers and we generate a 10 page report with all the nonverbal behaviors and some, you know, sort of customized advice for people based on what they say and how they say it.
So this is a win-win, uh, science wins and, and.
As negotiators, we also win by having this really unique way to look at our own nonverbal behavior and words that we use.
This is incredible.
And I'll be, I teach in the spring. at the law school.
So I'm going to make sure that my students do this.
This will be good.
Man, I appreciate it.
Listeners, we will have links to the app in the description of the episode.
And Jordi, before you go, I want to give you an opportunity to remind the listeners again about who you are, what you do and how they can learn more about what it is that you're doing, as it relates to research and negotiation.
All right.
So my name is Jordi Quedback.
I'm a negotiation professor at the Society of Business School Barcelona, originally Belgian.
I'm a psychologist.
And I like to use big data to sort of look at the behaviors that can give us a head in negotiation.
So if people want to learn more, they can check out my website.
My last name is complicated.
It's called quadback.org and check out my research paper.
And if they want to contribute to some of the research we're doing.
We're always looking for volunteers.
That's the power of a masterclass.
One topic, multiple lenses, and real world application.
And now the question is, what will you do with it?
Negotiation isn't theory.
It's practice.
It's self-awareness.
It's choosing courage over comfort.
So pick one insight today and apply it in your next conversation, because skill doesn't come from listening.
It comes from doing.
I'll catch you in the next one.
If you're still here, that means you really like this episode.
So why don't you leave us a review?
Five stars, please.
That really means the world to us and it helps other people find the show.
And now, I will catch you later.
