Katie McManus explains the negotiation tactic of anchoring in a short YouTube monologue. She defines anchoring with a boat-price example, argues that the Trump administration uses it by nominating extreme candidates (e.g., initially considering Matt Gaetz) to make lower-quality nominees seem acceptable, and urges listeners to maintain higher standards; she also recommends Chris Voss’s negotiation book.
Chapters
Now that Matt Gaetz has dropped out of the running for Attorney General, we know the Trump strategy, okay? And it's classic negotiations, actually a really shady negotiation tactic. It's called anchoring. So basically when you want something, say you want something that you know, like the other party is not going to agree to, you ask for something that is far worse. So say you see someone who has a boat and you go and you want to make an offer on the boat, and you know the boat's probably around like $10,000 value. You can go in and make a $10,000 person has more leeway to negotiate them because they, they know that that's like the base when you anchor, nautical term, when you anchor them, say going in and offering, offering them six thousand, there's now a four thousand dollar gap from the value of the boat to what you're willing to pay, right? And so that is kind of the space that they have to go. Now it's kind of weird for them to come at their anchoring point, which might be like 14,000. And generally, once you anchor low, people will generally come to meet you because any leeway that you give between 6,000, 7,000 feels like a win to the other party. So what Trump is actually doing here is he's saying, okay, I have this massive turd of a dumpster fire human being that I want as Attorney General and as this cabinet position and this cabinet position and this cabinet position. And he's not, he's not counting on any of them being confirmed. He's not counting on most of them being successful in gaining that position. What he's doing is he's anchoring. He's saying, this is my first pick. This is the dumpster fire that I would like to have in this office. And so any improvement, even like, like a less on fire dumpster, will seem like an improvement to the opponents, to other people who have to, he has to convince, right? And this is incredibly dangerous. This is an incredibly dangerous way to run our government. It's, it's irresponsible. It's like anchoring in a lower quality of human and it's unacceptable. But it's a great example of anchoring out there in the world. If you want to learn more about negotiation. This is one of my favorite books on negotiation by Chris Voss. I like this book because it's really engaging. It's very storytelling. It goes through because he's the next FBI hostage negotiator, and so he goes through hostage negotiation stories and then makes the business point for it. I really like it. I've actually only ever listened to this book. I have the hard copy, but I haven't actually read the hard copy. But anyway, that's. That's what's happening right now. And we gotta. We gotta just continue to hold a high standard. We can't let the standard. B. Dumpster fire or not on fire. Dumpster. Okay. We have to hold the standard higher. And do not let turds like this anchor you into lower quality than you deserve or lower money or any of that jazz. So anyway, that's what's going on. Yeah, we're. What is this hellscape? I don't understand.
