Transcripts
How many negotiations are you active in right now?
Speaker:I bet it's more than you think.
Speaker:And it's not those necessarily across a table.
Speaker:Those that are in a text thread you haven't answered.
Speaker:In a raise you haven't asked for.
Speaker:In a conversation with your partner that keeps ending in the same place.
Speaker:Most people think negotiation is a skill for the boardroom.
Speaker:It's not.
Speaker:It's a skill for Tuesday.
Speaker:I just finished narrating Albert Rutherford's newest book on the game theory underneath negotiation, and the chapter I keep coming back to isn't the theory.
Speaker:It's five ordinary situations, and the one move each person is missing without knowing it.
Speaker:The first one.
Speaker:Julia is three years into a job and she's pretty good at it.
Speaker:Her reviews are strong, her workloads have grown.
Speaker:A competitor just offered her meaningfully more money.
Speaker:She hasn't told anyone.
Speaker:She updated her LinkedIn and figured that was signal enough.
Speaker:It wasn't.
Speaker:Her manager calls her in, says the company wants to keep her, slides over an offer, a modest bump, and the word non-negotiable attached to HR policy.
Speaker:Here's the part Rutherford's book gets right that most negotiation advice skips.
Speaker:Julia?
Speaker:She already has the leverage.
Speaker:She has a real competing offer.
Speaker:That's her batna, the walk away power we broke down in full a few episodes back.
Speaker:The problem isn't that she lacks leverage.
Speaker:It's that the leverage is invisible.
Speaker:Nobody can respond to a card you haven't shown.
Speaker:The book calls the diagnostic for this the signal audit.
Speaker:One question.
Speaker:What do I want the other side to know that I haven't actually said out loud?
Speaker:For Julia, the answer's obvious once she asks it.
Speaker:She has another offer and she's weighing it, not as a threat as information.
Speaker:I want to be transparent.
Speaker:I've received another offer and I'm genuinely considering it.
Speaker:Then she moves the conversation off the one number that's fixed.
Speaker:And if the base is set by policy, I'd like to understand the full picture.
Speaker:Bonus, equity, flexibility.
Speaker:Because HR policy governs the salary band, it almost never governs everything else.
Speaker:That undisclosed offer was her lever the entire time.
Speaker:Keeping it invisible didn't protect her, it neutralized her.
Speaker:Our second scenario runs in the same blind spot, but a different mechanism.
Speaker:Marco is a freelance designer, but the client he genuinely likes.
Speaker:Two years spilt, good pay, real trust.
Speaker:The contract covers three rounds of revisions.
Speaker:Over the current project, she's asked for one more logo version, a deck tweak, a copy change, each one small, together about 20 unpaid hours.
Speaker:And Marco hasn't said anything.
Speaker:He doesn't want to damage the relationship, but silence isn't neutral in a relationship you're going to keep having.
Speaker:Rutherford's book calls this The Echo.
Speaker:In any repeated interaction, your past behavior trains what the other side expects next.
Speaker:Marco's silence set a signal he never meant to send that small overages are fine here.
Speaker:His client calibrated that without necessarily knowing she'd done it.
Speaker:And Marco's stuck in what the book calls the fixed pie assumption.
Speaker:Treating this as a conflict where naming the problem means losing the relationship when there's almost certainly a structure that pays him fairly and keeps her happy.
Speaker:The fix is not a confrontation.
Speaker:It's a signal audit set out loud at a natural breakpoint, a project wrap not mid-deliverable.
Speaker:I want to name something.
Speaker:The revisions over the past few weeks went well beyond scope.
Speaker:I estimate about 20 hours.
Speaker:I haven't raised it because I value how we work, but I need us to address it going forward.
Speaker:Then, a structure, not a complaint.
Speaker:A monthly retainer or a tighter contract definition of what counts as a revision.
Speaker:That trains the other side's expectations, whether you intend it to or not.
Speaker:One direct, structure-first conversation can reset months of drift.
Speaker:Scenario 3 is the highest conflict one on the list, and it's not really about money.
Speaker:Diane and Ben co-founded the company two years ago.
Speaker:She put in $200,000.
Speaker:He put in two years of full-time unpaid work building the product.
Speaker:Now they're raising funds.
Speaker:Investors want the cap table clean and both of them are asking for 60%.
Speaker:The conversation's gone adversarial.
Speaker:Rutherford's book has a name for the trap they've both walked into, the pie test.
Speaker:They're treating equity as a fixed 100% that has to be divided.
Speaker:When the actual structure of equity is far more flexible than that and underneath it, both of them have drifted into mini-max thinking, protecting against the worst case of being undervalued, which produces what the book calls a safety trap.
Speaker:Neither one can move without it feeling like they're conceding that their contribution doesn't matter.
Speaker:The equilibrium they've landed on, call it the lock in Rutherford's terms, the point where nobody wants to move first, isn't actually the right lock.
Speaker:A better one exists.
Speaker:Neither of them can see it from inside the current frame.
Speaker:The move is to ask what each person needs that the other doesn't actually have to sacrifice.
Speaker:Diane needs recognition that the capital carried real risk.
Speaker:She could have lost that 200,000 outright.
Speaker:Ben needs recognition that two years of unpaid work built the value the capital is now funding.
Speaker:Now, those two needs aren't in competition.
Speaker:Once that's on the table, the actual negotiation is about structure.
Speaker:Cliff vesting with milestone adjustments, separate columns for financial and sweat equity, a profit sharing overlay.
Speaker:Not about who wins the percentage argument.
Speaker:The fourth scenario is lower stakes emotionally, but it's the cleanest lesson in the chapter.
Speaker:Tom.
Speaker:He's been hunting for a specific vintage guitar for two years.
Speaker:One finally shows up.
Speaker:The seller's listing is detailed and precise.
Speaker:This is someone who knows exactly what they have.
Speaker:Tom's first message.
Speaker:Happy to negotiate.
Speaker:What are you thinking?
Speaker:That question is a trap and it's an elegant trap.
Speaker:Brotherford's book calls this the information trap.
Speaker:Whoever names a number first, in a situation where one side knows far more than the other, that hands the other side information they didn't have to give up.
Speaker:Tom's Batna is weak in this instance.
Speaker:Two years of searching found exactly one of these.
Speaker:So answering fast before he knows what he's talking about is the worst version of this negotiation.
Speaker:This move is what the book calls a range check.
Speaker:30 minutes finding comparable sales, same model, same year, similar condition across a few platforms before responding to anything.
Speaker:If that produces a real number, Tom anchors just below it with the research attached.
Speaker:Now, based on recent comparable sales, I'm thinking around this, happy to discuss if you see it differently.
Speaker:If the models are rare enough that comparables don't exist, Tom does something that feels backwards but isn't.
Speaker:He lets the seller anchor first.
Speaker:I want to make sure I'm thinking about this accurately.
Speaker:What number did you have in mind?
Speaker:Their answer becomes research Tom couldn't get anywhere else.
Speaker:And this last one isn't really about negotiation tactics at all.
Speaker:Elena's been offered a role in another city.
Speaker:A real career step.
Speaker:A serious pay increase.
Speaker:The kind of opportunity she'd worked toward for years.
Speaker:Her partner Sam values what they've already built, family nearby, a community, a stability he has trouble putting into words without sounding like he's asking her to give something up.
Speaker:Every conversation ends the same way.
Speaker:One person states their case, the other restates theirs, nothing moves.
Speaker:They've framed this as binary, move or don't.
Speaker:And a binary frame turns a complicated set of interests into a fight one of them has to lose.
Speaker:It's the pie test again.
Speaker:But this is the highest stakes version either of them will ever run it on.
Speaker:Because the echo here, how this conversation goes, shapes how every major decision in their relationship gets made for decades.
Speaker:The fix is the same diagnostic as scenario one, run by both people separately in private, before the next conversation.
Speaker:What do I want the other person to know that I haven't actually said?
Speaker:Elena's answer?
Speaker:This specific opportunity might not come again.
Speaker:Sam's answer?
Speaker:His fear isn't about her career at all.
Speaker:It's about losing the infrastructure of a life he doesn't know how to rebuild.
Speaker:Once both of those sentences are actually said, the binary dissolves on its own.
Speaker:A trial period with a review point, a travel budget, a timeline tied to real conditions.
Speaker:None of it is available inside move or don't.
Speaker:Five completely different scenarios.
Speaker:Same buying spot, five times over.
Speaker:Leverage, information, or fear that never gets said out loud.
Speaker:Because saying it feels like weakness.
Speaker:Brotherford's argument, and it's a good one, is that it's the opposite.
Speaker:The undisclosed thing is never protecting you.
Speaker:It's just costing you the negotiation you didn't know you were already in.
Speaker:I've narrated close to 15 of his books at this point, and this is the one where the game theory really stopped feeling like theory.
Speaker:If you want to hear how deep the framework goes, batna, the echo, the pie test, all of it, the audiobooks are the place.
Speaker:I'm not a 15 minute video.
