Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

SPOTTING LIARS, DEALING WITH JERKS, AND
CHARMING EVERYONE ELSE
As a negotiator, you’re going to run into guys who lie to
your face and try to scare you into agreement. Aggressive
jerks and serial fabricators come with the territory, and
dealing with them is something you have to do.
But learning how to handle aggression and identify
falsehood is just part of a larger issue: that is, learning how

---

to spot and interpret the subtleties of communication—both
verbal and nonverbal—that reveal the mental states of your
counterparts.
Truly effective negotiators are conscious of the verbal,
paraverbal (how it’s said), and nonverbal communications
that pervade negotiations and group dynamics. And they
know how to employ those subtleties to their benefit. Even
changing a single word when you present options—like
using “not lose” instead of “keep”—can unconsciously
influence the conscious choices your counterpart makes.
Here I want to talk about the tools you need to ID liars,
disarm jerks, and charm everybody else. Of course, the
open-ended “How” question is one of them—maybe the
most important one—but there are many more.
Alastair Onglingswan was living in the Philippines when,
one evening in 2004, he hailed a taxi and settled in for a
long ride home from Manila’s Greenhills shopping center.
He dozed off.
And he woke up in chains.
Unfortunately for Alastair, the cabbie had a second
business as a kidnapper. He kept a bottle of ether in his front
seat, and when a target fell asleep he would drug him,
imprison him, and ask for ransom.
Within hours, the kidnapper used Alastair’s phone to
contact his girlfriend in New York. He demanded a daily
payment to “take care” of Alastair while he researched the
family’s wealth.
“It’s okay if you don’t pay,” he said. “I can always sell

---

his organs in Saudi Arabia.”
Within twenty-four hours, I’d been charged with heading
the negotiation from Quantico. Alastair’s girlfriend was too
nervous to handle the family side of the negotiation, and his
mother, who lived in the Philippines, just wanted to accept
any demand the kidnapper made.
But Alastair’s brother Aaron, in Manila, was different: he
just got the idea of negotiation and he accepted that Alastair
might die, which would make him a better and more
effective negotiator. Aaron and I set up an always-on phone
line and I became Aaron’s guru on the other side of the
world.
Through the kidnapper’s comments and demands, I saw
that he was experienced and patient. As a token of his
intentions, he offered to cut off one of Alastair’s ears and
send it to the family along with a video of him severing the
ear.
The demand for the daily payment was clearly a trick to
quickly drain the family of as much money as possible
while at the same time gauging their wealth. We had to
figure out who this guy was—Was he a lone operator or part
of a group? Did he plan on killing Alastair or not?—and we
had to do that before the family went broke. To get there,
we were going to have to engage the kidnapper in a
protracted negotiation. We were going to have to slow
everything down.
From Quantico, I loaded Aaron up with calibrated
questions. I instructed him to keep peppering the violent

---

jerk with “How?” How am I supposed to . . . ? How do we
know . . . ? How can we . . . ? There is great power in
treating jerks with deference. It gives you the ability to be
extremely assertive—to say “No”—in a hidden fashion.
“How do we know if we pay you that you won’t hurt
Alastair?” Aaron asked.
In the Chinese martial art of tai chi, the goal is to use
your opponent’s aggressiveness against him—to turn his
offense into your way to defeat him. That’s the approach we
took with Alastair’s kidnapper: we wanted to absorb his
threats and wear him down. We made sure that even
scheduling a call with us was complex. We delayed making
email responses.
Through all these tactics, we gained the upper hand
while giving the kidnapper the illusion of control. He
thought he was solving Aaron’s problems while we were
just reading him and wasting his time. You see, it’s best not
to go chin to chin with aggressiveness like that of Alastair’s
kidnapper; rather, default to using “what” and “how”
questions to avoid making bids or adjusting your own
negotiating position. Dodge and weave.
Finally, following days of back-and-forth bargaining on
the daily rate, Aaron got the kidnapper down to a token
amount and agreed to deposit a portion of the funds in his
bank account. After that partial payment was made, Aaron
came up with the perfect way to nonconfrontationally
confront the cabbie with a calibrated “When/What”
question.

---

“When we run out of money, what will happen?” Aaron
asked.
The kidnapper paused.
“It will be all right,” he finally responded.
Yes!
Without realizing what he had just agreed to, our killer
had just promised us he wouldn’t hurt Alastair. A repetitive
series of “What” and “How” questions can help you
overcome the aggressive tactics of a manipulative
adversary.
As you can see in that last exchange, the kidnapper’s
protracted chats with Aaron had turned Aaron almost into a
friend. Over time the kidnapper had become unguarded
about spending time on the phone with his “friend.” Finally,
the Philippine National Police investigators tracked the
phone to a house and raided it. The kidnapper and Alastair
were not there, but the kidnapper’s wife was. She told the
police about another house they owned. The police quickly
raided the other house, freed Alastair, and arrested the
kidnapper.
There are plenty of other tactics, tools, and methods for
using subtle verbal and nonverbal forms of communication
to understand and modify the mental states of your
counterpart. As I run through some of them here, I want you
to take a moment to internalize each one. These are the kind
of tools that can help observant negotiators hit home runs.

---