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Feb. 26, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:35
HOW TO NEGOTIATE!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid.
Hope you're doing well. So I am just going to spend a few minutes here talking to you about the most powerful skill that you can learn to make your life as great as humanly possible.
I'm talking about the skill and power to persuade people, to negotiate with people, because negotiation is so elemental.
To just about everything that we do in life from trying to get someone to go out with you, to trying to get a job, to negotiating with parents and professors and teachers and boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands and wives.
If you're a parent, you know.
If you're interested in peaceful parenting, which I hope you are, then...
You have to negotiate with your kids all the time and find common ground.
So, so much of what we do in life is around negotiating and selling and it has such a bad reputation.
When I was growing up, selling was like kind of sleazy, you know, like you think of some used car salesman Dressed in some suit that looked like it was cut out of the back of a Volkswagen station wagon, and just kind of sleazy and oily and slick, and you walk away, minus your money and sense of self-respect, holding some good or service you didn't really want.
And that's a very dishonorable way to go about getting what you want in life.
It doesn't give you lasting happiness, although it may give you material success for a short amount of time.
Now, with regards to...
Why should you listen to me? Some guy sitting here with a camera about negotiating.
Well... I've done a lot of it in my life.
So in the theater world, I was a director and had to work with actors, which can be a little challenging and volatile, a lot of negotiation involved in that.
I have, of course, had a long-term entrepreneurial career before I do this philosophy before I started this philosophy show had a long-term entrepreneurial career where I traveled the world selling my software solution to Fortune 500 companies in just about every corner of the planet to help them reduce their pollutants and emissions and so on and I was doing that for many many years sometimes flying around one week two weeks a month and just negotiating like crazy and I,
of course, was running a software team, had to negotiate with employees, had to hire people, had to negotiate with vendors and banks and financial institutions and investors and, oh man, you name it, just a lot of negotiation.
And I was the guy who was called in to Bungie in emergencies when things went wrong with projects and customers were angry and there were threats.
I would be the one going in there to calm the waters and negotiate.
So I've been doing this for many, many years.
And of course, I've been engaged in this amazing conversation for 15 years.
I started this show in 2005.
So for 15 years, I've been negotiating with the world about philosophy, about reason, about evidence, about negotiation rather than coercion or bullying as a way of resolving human conflict.
So I'm pretty experienced.
I'm pretty good.
And I really want to get across how I do what I do.
And I'm going to use this show as an example.
If you listen to this and put this into practice, I can guarantee you your life is going to change in positive ways that you really can't picture or imagine right now because very few people have these skills but those who do tend to win significantly and not at the expense of others which is generally what we think of as winning.
So here's how to negotiate.
So the first thing that you have to do when you negotiate is figure out how accepting your perspective is going to benefit the other person.
This is absolutely essential.
If you're only interested in stamping your perspective on someone else, then you are going to lose.
Because when people feel imposed upon, in other words, when you do not appeal to people's self-interest...
They will push back very hard against what it is that you have to say.
Now, I've done some public debates which are pretty contentious, but that's different because I'm actually negotiating with the audience.
I'm not necessarily negotiating with the person that I'm debating against.
So I just sort of want to point that out.
That's a little bit of a different situation.
You have to figure out how, if someone accepts what it is that you say, it benefits them in some manner.
If you can't figure out how it benefits them, please don't engage in the negotiation, because that's a kind of exploitation.
That's you saying, give me something that I want.
I'm not going to give you anything that you want.
That is never going to create a long-term, sustainable, productive win-win situation.
So this is the creativity that goes into negotiating.
How can it benefit the other person?
Listen, I would sit down, try and sell my software solution.
My software solution, I mean, it would sell for a hundred thousand dollars, quarter of a million dollars.
Some of the bigger implementations went over a million dollars.
So getting a big company to invest in a small startup A million dollars and have regulations hang on the balance of the software and their reputation as a non-polluting company hang on the balance of that software That's a big thing.
It's a big risk. And I was competing with IBM. I was competing with other large established companies who wanted to sell more polished, professional, long-lasting solutions.
So the only way to do it is to tell them how it's going to benefit them to go with me and my software rather than someone else.
And, of course, it's implicit when I sit down to negotiate that I want to sell them the software.
How is it I'm going to make it beneficial to them?
Well... You've got to think about that ahead of time.
If you can't figure out how to make your decision regarding your children beneficial to them, then you are just going to lose.
You're going to fail because then it just turns into a battle of wills.
Here's a great secret in life I learned very young.
Most people will do just about anything you ask them to.
Almost nobody will do what you tell them to.
They may comply if you have a lot of power, but they'll push back pretty hard over time.
So figure out How your perspective benefits someone else.
So here's an example from my show.
So my show, I've been running for 15 years.
I've got 4,500 shows.
I've got three major documentaries.
I've got a dozen books which are available for free.
I've put out a lot of content.
I know that it benefits the world enormously.
You can go to my website at freedomain.com and you can click on the blog and see all the testimonials of people who've just had their lives massively improved through philosophy, not through me or my persuasion, so to speak, but through bringing reason and evidence to their own lives.
I made the decision very early because I knew I was going to be tackling some controversial topics.
I made the decision very early to not accept advertisements, but instead to rely upon donations.
So on a regular basis, I would go out and ask people for donations to support what it is that I do.
And I have to make a value proposition as to how I get people to support what it is that I do.
You have to show the benefit. So one benefit is I get to take on really controversial topics without having the weak point of people who hate what I say targeting advertisers and shutting me down.
So having a direct relationship with the audience has me much more free to talk about things that are difficult for some people in the world, things that are challenging for some people in the world.
You know, philosophy, it's kind of like an edgelord game, so to speak, always has been, probably always will be.
Well, maybe not always if we get reason and evidence into more people's minds.
So, telling the audience, look, if you support what it is that I do voluntarily, I don't have to go to ads, and therefore have the vulnerability that has me self-censoring.
You get a better show out of supporting me directly, which you can do at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
So there's, you know, one benefit.
And of course I get to produce more shows if I'm not dealing with advertisers all the time, their questions, their comments, their concerns, them being trolled by people who dislike reason and evidence or philosophy for whatever reason.
So I get to produce more and better shows.
Also, the sales pitch, so to speak, for this model, a donation model, is I get into some really intense conversations with people about how philosophy can really help their lives if they're facing challenges at work, if they're facing challenges in their relationships, if they're unhappy, if they're depressed.
There's a lot that philosophy can do to drag people out of the tar pit and Of a squelched and squashed history and have them sort of spread their wings, flex their muscles and take off to a better place.
Now, can you imagine? I'm talking with someone about a really deep, deep and detailed and powerful examination of how philosophy can change their lives for the better.
And then in the middle, it's like, hi, have you ever thought about buying such and such?
You know, that goes on for a minute or two.
And then we get back into the deep conversation about their history, their deepest thoughts and fears, and how these can be altered for the better.
With philosophy, it just would be jarring.
It would be unpleasant. It would be difficult.
You know, another little thing, too.
Ads tend to be louder. And so if people are drifting off or dozing off to my show...
And some ad comes in that's loud.
It's just, you know, it's a little jarring.
It's a little unpleasant. So the interruptions, the weakness, the self-censorship, the weakness of the show through the weakest link of advertisers able to be targeted, all of that is...
A way of helping people understand how donations are better than ads.
Now here's another example. Look, you pay for shows no matter what.
You pay for shows in terms of you can donate to shows, you can pay for shows in terms of your time gets consumed by advertisements, but you pay because your time is being consumed by listening to the shows no matter what.
You're listening to this show, hopefully you're not listening to something else at the same time.
Unless it's a video game, in which case that's okay because, you know, I'm background.
Here's an example. I did some basic math.
Let's say you've watched 100 hours of my show.
If I had 5 minutes of ads per hour, which is not a lot, and it's actually less than half what you'll get on the radio.
So let's say you've listened to 100 hours of content of mine.
And if I have 5 minutes per hour of ads, that's 500 minutes, which is 8.33 hours of ads.
So if you've listened to my show for 100 hours, I've saved you 8.3 hours of not having to listen to ads.
Now that's more than one entire workday.
That's more than one entire workday.
Now let's say that you make about $25 an hour, right?
So because I don't have ads, if you've listened to 100 hours of my show, I've saved you over $200 of time.
What's that worth to you?
Well, that's an important question, right?
What is your time worth to you?
Now, if you were to go, if I was on the radio, so for every hour of radio, you get about 12 minutes of ads.
And so if you've listened to 100 hours of my show, if I was on the radio, you would have had to listen to 1200 minutes of...
Commercials, right? Now that is 20 hours, or that's over two and a half work days.
And so again, if you're getting paid 25 bucks an hour, you've listened to 100 hours of my shows, I've just saved you $500.
$500! What's that worth to you?
Plus, you get all the other benefits, right?
Which is, I don't have to focus on advertisers and managing that relationship.
You're not constantly getting powerful, deep conversations interrupted by endless ads and so on.
And so, 500 bucks.
So if I say to you, listen, it would be really great if you could support the show, that's a reasonable case to make, right?
I've saved you 500 bucks. Now, there are some people who've been listening for a long time and they have listened to a thousand hours.
Now, if a thousand hours of listening to my show, my interviews, my listener calls, my presentations or whatever, if you've listened for a thousand hours, if that was on the radio, then I have saved you 200 hours of ad time.
200 hours of ad time.
Isn't that an amazing thing?
200 hours. So if you were...
That's 26 days.
That's 26 work days.
That's more than an entire month of working that I've saved you by not running ads.
That's $5,000 worth of time if you're just making $25 an hour.
If you make $50 an hour, that's of course $10,000 of time that I've saved you.
So that's a value proposition, right?
It's a better show. You save a lot of time, save a lot of money, and get to focus on deep conversations without interruption.
So that's an example of me making the case as to why, and I hope you listen to this and will actually come and support the show at freedomain.com forward slash donate, but that's an example.
Of how it's a mutually beneficial situation.
I would rather be doing shows and talking to you wonderful people out there in the world about philosophy than wrangling with and dealing with particular ads or, you know, I put an ad in and then later they pull the ad and, oh, I don't want to have the ad in my show.
I mean, it's just a mess, right?
So I'd much rather be doing shows.
But the way that I achieve that It's through you donating to the show at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
So that's the kind of mutual benefit that you want to get into with people, showing how it benefits them to do what you want them to do, which I think is the right thing to do.
Now, the second thing, of course, is that you do have to be able To provide a fairly unique value.
It's very tough to negotiate.
If you're just like a vendor selling water and there are 10 vendors on the beach selling water, you can't really differentiate yourself by saying, my water is better.
I mean, assuming it's the same water as everyone else.
So you've got to have a kind of unique product.
And that means taking risks and mixing more of your personality into what it is that you're doing.
So have something a little bit more unique.
I know for sure. There's nothing anywhere out there in the world, now, throughout history, or at any time in the future, that's going to be as varied, as deep, as powerful, and as philosophical as what I do here in this show.
It's never going to happen. And some of that is me, some of that is this donation model, some of that is this unique technology, some of that is just the circumstances of history, and some of that is if somebody copies my show tomorrow, I don't think they could because I'm pretty unique, but if it did happen, no problem.
Well, they're still second out of the gate.
They'd still be copying something rather than creating something directly.
You've got to have something unique.
You can't just be a cookie cutter.
You've got to take risks. You've got to invest in whatever is uniquely powerful and important and perfectionable about you.
Whatever you can bring to the table, that is going to be hard to replicate.
That is important because then, if you're selling yourself, and we are all fundamentally selling ourselves, Then you can't just be replaced by someone else.
So find something unique that can create a demand for something that you or only a few other people can bring to the table.
That's really, really important.
Now the next thing when it comes to negotiating and selling, you must, must, must believe in the product.
Whether it's you or something else, you must believe in the product.
that you are trying to sell or the perspective or the ideas or the ideology or the argument whatever it is you must deeply and passionately believe in it.
Now if you can't do that you're going to lose in general to people who can more passionately believe in what they're selling.
So there's an old story about two guys building and this was a better story before the cathedral half burnt to the ground but In the Middle Ages, two men building Notre Dame Cathedral.
And one guy comes up to the first guy and says, Hey, what are you doing?
He says, I'm just putting one brick on top of the other.
And he goes up to the next guy and says, Well, what are you doing?
He says, I'm building a holy house dedicated to the glory of God that will inspire people to live more holy and better and more virtuous lives.
Now, come on.
Who's going to be more persuasive?
Who's going to have a deeper commitment to what it is that they're doing?
If you're just out there trying to make a buck and hustle your way to some kind of temporary success, you've got to find something that invests what you do in a deeper and more powerful meaning than the mere action themselves.
So yes, I'm just talking into a camera right now.
But what I'm really trying to do is improve millions of people's lives through my bitter and hard-won and hard-earned experience and, you know, hopefully get a couple of donations along the way as well.
So it's a win-win, right?
I am engaged in battling some serious demons in the world and in the human heart and the human mind.
I am, you know, Gandalf on a bridge with a bulrog of anti-rationality coming down upon the next generation.
And I am, you know, none shall pass.
I'm stamping my stuff.
What I'm doing is not trying to become famous, or to get known, or to get donations.
I actually don't like being famous at all, and donations are necessary for what it is that I do, but my purpose here Is to bring the joy and the glory and the power of philosophy to everyone out there in the world.
It's another reason why I don't charge for what it is that I do.
I could put all this stuff behind a paywall, but I believe that everybody really has a birthright to access philosophy, and that's why I put almost all of my books out for free, and my documentaries are all free.
You can find those, by the way, at freedomain.com forward slash documentary.
But... You've got to have a belief in what it is that you're doing.
So when I wasn't selling software, I was cleaning up the environment.
You understand, like, my software was about reducing water emissions, ground emissions, air emissions, and keeping the planet cleaner.
So my purpose wasn't, oh, I really want you to buy this software so that I can make my payroll.
My purpose was...
I will save human lives by keeping the air cleaner.
You know, when I went to China, I went to China in the year 2000 and sold software that really, I mean, don't get me wrong, China's far from clean, but it's a little bit cleaner, for sure.
And there's no question that saved some lives over time.
You may not be able to measure it, you may not be able to track it directly, but you know.
For sure. So if you can get involved in something, and it can be anything.
If you're going to open a store, you say, well, I just want to sell some stuff.
That's not going to be enough. Well, you want to create a magical experience for people.
You want them to elevate their day in some manner through their contact with you.
You've got to have a passion over and above the mere tennis ball whack back and forth of bucks changing hands.
You've got to have something that means something to you, that you're doing something in the world where The transaction, if it's an economic transaction, okay, that's a fine and necessary part of it and so on, but it's something that facilitates a larger goal.
If you don't have that larger goal, you will almost never be able to succeed.
So, if you are...
A parent, right, and your kid in general, but they want sugar and they don't want to eat their vegetables.
It's a typical example.
They want sugar, they don't want to eat their vegetables.
So how do you persuade children about that?
Well, if it's like, well, you know, sugar's bad for you and you've got to eat your vegetables, that's just kind of a dominance thing.
I'm bigger than you and I'm just snapping at you and I'm creating a barrier.
And then your kids will just sneak candy.
They'll get candy at a friend's house.
You know, because they haven't internalized it, right?
And so, you know, the way that I've talked about this with my daughter is to say, first of all, you explain that your tongue and your body are not the same thing.
There are things your tongue like that your body doesn't like.
And there are things that your body likes that your tongue doesn't like.
And then you explain, like, why is it that we like...
Sweet stuff so much.
Why is it that we like brightly colored sweet things so much?
Well, because it was essential in the past that we put out extra effort to find fruit.
Fruit was essential for our survival as a species, and certainly in the Northern European, don't want to die of scurvy like half the sailors in the Royal Navy situation, we need, we really need that fruit.
So you explain, sit down and say, okay, so it's brightly colored like fruit, it's sweet like fruit, so we've got that, but our bodies weren't designed for like infinite chocolate cannonballs to the face that characterize modern Supermarkets and so on.
So, you know, they're making it look like fruit and they're trying to sell you the sweet stuff.
Your tongue loves it and your body doesn't in general, right?
Nothing wrong with a little bit, right? So you explain all of that kind of stuff and have them understand it because if they don't internalize the values of good eating, they're just going to find ways around it and you've just taught them to be more creative in how to disobey you and so on, right?
And the other thing, too, of course, is if your kid's sitting around, they don't want to exercise or whatever, then you have to sort of say, look, you know, if you have a puppy, you've got to feed the puppy, right?
Like, if you bring a puppy home from the store, right, to the pet store, you've got to feed that puppy because you're the only one who can.
Like, the puppy's already got food in the pet store.
If you're in the pet store, the puppy can eat.
But if you bring it home, put it in the basement, don't feed it, you're starving that puppy to death, that's pretty bad, right?
And they will understand that.
And you say, well... So when it comes to exercise, you know, my job is to deliver to you at the age of 18, like because you're going to be 18 and an adult sort of outside my legal authority, so to speak, right?
So my job as a parent is to deliver you to adulthood healthy in mind and body.
And listen, what I don't want is for you at the age of 18, let's say that you've got bad teeth and you're overweight and you're unhealthy, right?
Would you say, I really, really appreciate the parenting job that you did to deliver me to adulthood with bad teeth and I'm overweight and I'm unhealthy and I'm pre-diabetic and all?
I mean, you would be mad at me, right?
Because you'd sit there and say, well, gosh, you know, you didn't do a great job because I'm not healthy and your job was to deliver me to adulthood in a healthy way, right?
And that's, you know...
So you have to think about them bouncing to the adulthood end of time and that works...
For me, around seven or eight, it started to work where you could sort of say, okay, I think 10 years from now, right?
I mean, 10 years from now, you have to think about your future self and what your future self would want, and your future self would not want to be Unhealthy when reached adulthood and just get them to sort of understand that and it takes a bunch of these conversations but they can be really powerful and really effective and what they get the child to do is to internalize the standards and so you're not sitting there because if it's a willpower thing it's an authority thing they will simply find a way to resist it and avoid it that's inevitable you can't avoid that sorry I just repeated myself inevitably it seems So,
if the children understand that you're not saying no to candy and suggesting vegetables because you're irritable, because you like to control them, because they've annoyed you, but if you can get them to internalize that, so it's not you finger-wagging at them, but it's their future self saying, okay...
Don't do it because when you get to be 18, you'll be unhappy if you're unhealthy, right?
That is a way that they can then have a healthy relationship with food and treats and so on for the rest of their life.
So that's a negotiation that's really, really important.
And if you can find those kind of win-win situations where, look...
And don't shoot the messenger is also really important.
You know, like, empathize.
You know, we all remember what it was like to be a kid, and you got candy from Halloween, you just want to stuff your face, and like...
I mean, I would love to eat it all.
I mean, I would love to eat it all.
I mean, I'd turn into something that was, you know, a pear-shaped muffin in comfortable shoes, but I would love to eat all that candy and say, you know, your kid's looking at the candy, oh, I want that.
It's like, oh man, so do I, but I have to say no.
I have to say, and of course, you have to model that kind of saying no-ness so that, you know, if your kid offers you a piece of candy, you say no, then it just shows you saying no to a piece of candy, which is more helpful and so on, right?
When it comes to negotiation, if it's only about your needs, if it's only about your preferences, you're going to fail.
You might succeed for a short amount of time, but you're going to fail.
If you can... Be committed to that which will help the other person.
And I'm not saying sacrifice your needs, your preferences and so on, of course.
Negotiate for what you want.
But, you know, if you're trying to get a job, then saying, I want the job, is kind of implicit in you being there.
What you have to do is say to the person across the desk, the hiring manager, here's how hiring me is going to benefit you.
You know, here's how hiring me is going to benefit you.
And the way to do that is, let's say that you're going for a job in software, and let's say you were coming to work for me.
If you said, oh, you know, I love coding software.
It's really, really important to me.
I love puzzle solving and problem solving.
It's like, okay, well, that's, you know, a particular curiosity and mechanical skill that's important.
But if you say, I'm incredibly dedicated to The power of cleaning up the environment, of keeping crap and dirt and volatile organic chemicals and PCBs and all of that out of the air and out of the water.
I mean, I want my kids to grow up in a clean environment.
I want fewer people to be dying from air pollution.
And listen, what your software does is that.
So I'm not just going to come in here and type.
I want to come in here and save lives.
You need to get that like vaguely, you know, like Elizabeth Holmes, but not scammy.
You need to get that kind of messianic glow to your eyes, this passionate excitement about what it is that you do.
And yeah, you'll be called all kinds of names because when people encounter passion, it reminds them of how passionless a lot of their own lives are.
But you've got to find a way to hook into that passion.
What is the meaning of your life?
Is the meaning of your life to collect a paycheck, watch some Netflix and go to bed?
Well, you will be uninspired and uninspiring and you will be in no condition and you'll have no juice for negotiation.
If you have a life of higher meaning and higher purpose and deeper aspiration, then you will find that this kind of negotiation is really important.
People love to feel taken care of.
And if in your negotiation you're on the other side of the table and saying, how does this benefit this person?
And you've got to be honest.
I mean... If you're in a negotiation and you suddenly realize you can't figure out how what you want is going to benefit the other person, you've got to say that and you've got to back away from that negotiation until you or the other person or both of you together perhaps can figure out how it's going to benefit the other person to be in negotiation with you and to accept your request.
So I really, really wanted to get these principles across and If you follow these principles and these ideas, you will find that which was almost impossible to achieve in the past, not only will it become easier, Then instead of facing resistance, trying to impose your will on others, you will be a team working together to solve a very important and deeply passionate goal in the world.
It's a wonderful place to be.
It's an amazing place to be.
And please, if you have found what it is that I say helpful, if you accept the argument of how much time and money I've saved you by not running ads, please, please help me out at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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