The Power of Empathy in Negotiations with Ex-Hostage Negotiator J. Paul Nadeau

Hey everyone. Just wanted to let you know that we are adding a trigger warning to this episode because Paul is a former hostage negotiator, police interrogator, and he tells some stories, but we talk about some really, really serious issues. So if you listen with small children or if you have a history of trauma or violence in your life, I just wanted to make sure that you were aware before we got into this episode. Also, on a much lighter note, this episode was oddly hilarious in other ways because we had so many Internet connectivity problems and other weird things that kept on coming up and making it incredibly hard to get through this episode. And so if you want to hear some funny bloopers, just listen to the end about so you could hear how many weird things happened in the recording of this episode. And also of course, big shout out to Simone and our podcast team for putting it together and editing it to make it sound smooth, because this one was a tough one, but the episode quality is incredible. Hello my friend, and welcome to another exciting episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for joining us today. With over 10 million downloads and listeners from more than 180 different countries, it's dedicated listeners just like you who have made Negotiate Anything the number one negotiation podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, author, and the proud CEO of the American Negotiation Institute. Now, before we get into today's insightful conversation, I have a golden opportunity for those of you who who recognize the power of negotiation in your professional lives. Have you ever found yourself wishing that you could navigate those high stakes conversations with more confidence? Or perhaps you're looking to empower your team with the art of persuasion and conflict resolution? At the American Negotiation Institute, we've crafted specialized keynotes and workshops tailored for those very needs. We've transformed the negotiation skills of professionals worldwide and we're eager to do the same for you. You. We believe the best things in life are on the other side of difficult conversations. And our goal is to help you improve your lives and the lives of those around you, one difficult conversation at a time. Don't let another challenging conversation leave you second guessing. Click the link in the description to discover how we can help you find confidence in conflict, negotiate better deals, and have stronger relationships. Because in the world of business, every conversation counts. And now, without further ado, let's jump into the interview. Paul, thanks for joining us today.

Hey Kwame, it's always nice to see you and I'm so happy to be here.

Yes, likewise my friend. So how Would you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Oh, absolutely. I'm a former hostage negotiator. I was an international peacekeeper, Special Victims Unit detective. I was a professional interrogator. Lot of stuff. Stuff dealing with people and dealing with conflict and dealing with getting along. My past that was an abused kid. Severely abused as a kid. But I discovered a big secret years ago when I was just developing. That changed everything for me. And since that time, I'm on a mission to just better myself. Every day. I'm competing with someone. I got to say this, Kwame, I'm competing with someone. And that guy, he just keeps pushing me forward and forward and forward and nobody else out there. I'm competing with more than this one guy, and that is me. Who am I today compared to who I was yesterday or six months ago? So I'm on a mission. I've got so many good things happening. A lot of projects I can't talk about, but I am just excited about life, man.

Yes. And, man, I'm so excited to have you. This is a long time coming. And, yes, I want to make it clear, once those projects come out and you're ready to talk about it, come back and we will help you to promote because I really appreciate the work that you're doing.

Thank you. I certainly will.

Yeah. Well, listen, I usually don't start this way, but let's start this with a bang. So a little bit ago, you just told me a story about the power of relationships. Can you tell the story?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You know what? I. I'm a real believer. Two of the greatest. I'll start off with this, Kwame. Two of the greatest lessons I learned when I was a cop. Number one, we are more similar than we are different. Meaning that, you know, the person that sitting across from you, standing across from you, the person you're about to deal with, is just more similar in most ways than they are different than you. Doesn't matter what religious beliefs they have, what color skin. They laugh, love, and bleed, just like you. When I discovered that, it really made a difference in the way that I approached people, because I thought to myself, what would it be like for them to. When I was a detective in the Special Victims Unit, for example, here's a man walking in to speak to. 90% of them were female victims of an aggravated sexual assault, a sexual type of crime. And here I am asking for the details. Can you believe it? Who's going to talk to me? I had to put Myself in that person's shoes, imagining what it was like. So we are more similar than we are different. The moment we start imagining what other people are experiencing is the moment we start to relate and connect. The second most important lesson I discovered was you get what you give. And so if I give you the finger, you're likely to give me the finger and perhaps even more because I don't always get the same level. I might get even more if I treat you with disrespect, likely to get that disrespect in return. However, you flip that. If I treat you with dignity and respect, I'm likely to get dignity and respect in return. That is the way that we are. That's the way that we are designed as human beings. We're designed to work together, not to work against each other. Somehow we forgot about that. Now let's go back. To answer your question, this was 2005. I was deployed as a Canadian peacekeeper during the Iraq war. And my job was not to fight on the front lines of the war. I was a peacekeeper and I was assigned to teach at the Jordanian International Police Training center, which was just outside of Iraq. It was about 100 km outside of Iraq on the main road. And we had 3,000 police cadets who joined us on an eight week rotation. So they would, we'd have 3,000 for eight weeks. They'd grow, go through a series of different classes. I was teaching criminal investigations and human rights. They would leave me after being with me for two weeks. They would move on to self defense, firearms, explosives. They would go on to all different kinds of training for that eight week period. When I first started teaching there, I started to imagine what would it be like for these cadets. Imagine this, Kwame. You get all these men who are leaving their country, they're trying to defend their country from terrorism. Many of them have never been away from home for even one day. Many of them are people who live in small communities who have never gone away from home. So when they're coming to defend their land and they're training in Jordan, they're suffering from homesickness, Some of them were suffering from mental illness, some of them were, were just suicidal. Iraq had no way of vetting these men. They just grabbed as many men as they possibly could, shipped them off for eight weeks training, and hoped that they would come back in one piece so that they could defend their land. Only 10% of them ended up going back and fighting and most of them died. So I imagined, what would it be like for these Students to be in front of an instructor, a foreign instructor, a white man talking to them, their country, they're at war. How am I going to treat them? So I would start off by saying, I am honored to be here to share my experiences with you. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to share some information and I hope it resonates with you. As much as I would like you to learn from me, I would like to learn from you. I would like it if you could share your experiences with me. We'll get to know each other in these two weeks, and I am going to treat you all with dignity and respect. And I would expect the same in return. Let's make this fun. That would be my speech to these cadets. I had Sunnis, Shiites, who were not getting along very well, as we know, and I had terrorists in my classroom. Terrorists had managed to infiltrate the academy simply by wearing a police uniform and walking in again. There was no way of vetting them. So one terrorist cell is thinking, you know, I could send a number of my men to that academy to learn how to fight, to learn how to set explosives, to learn how to defend themselves, to learn police procedures, to. They're going to get paid and they're going to come back and they're going to work for me. So let's do that. And so they would send these police cadets and terrorists into the academy. We had no way of vetting them. And although we could identify a couple, we couldn't identify them all. So let's fast forward a little bit to one of my classes. I had this one particular gentleman who had a bodyguard, and that wasn't unusual because in certain tribes, depending on your rank within the tribe, you can get a bodyguard. And oftentimes you are assigned a bodyguard. So this gentleman who spoke very good English, he sat with me after class and said, Mr. Paul, I would love to have tea with you. Coffee and can we talk? And so we started having these conversations. And he was brilliant. He was smart. He just asked me what I thought about the war and where I was from. And we just developed this friendship. Little did I know Kwame, he was a terrorist, and in fact he was a leader. And it was his job to kill internationals. And so let's fast forward a few weeks. He was only with me for two weeks, then he moved on to different classes. About six weeks later, I was transferred into the advocacy and counseling division. And my job was to advocate for the well being of the cadets, sending those who were suffering from medical or mental conditions back home, getting them the help that they needed, advocating for better food, for better, just entertainment, because they had nothing to do with their spare time. 3000 men with nothing to do in their spare time. Some of them are university graduates. Some of them have never been to school. One day and you are giving them two days of free time. Fists are blaring, come on. I know this. And you're a Sunni, I'm a Shiite, so let's do it. Let's, let's. No. I had to find different ways to occupy their time. When I was in the advocacy and counseling division, another cadet who used to come to me for some help, a lot of them would come and just want to talk. Please, Mr. Paul, please send me home. I miss my family. They only got 10 minute talks, Kwame, with their family a week. And so many of them are family oriented. That was all they knew. And they only got 10 minutes with their family. Come on. So they would come to me and just if I had time in my schedule, I'd sit and I'd talk, and we'd just try to make it a little bit more pleasant for them. And this one cadet, he says, Mr. Paul, there's going to be an attack on the academy, and internationals are going to be killed. The attack is happening from within. There are militants who are gathering weapons, and there's rocks and stones and pipes and everything, and you guys are going to be attacked. I just don't know when. And so I said, thank you. And I went to our security division who had heard that there was something happening, just didn't know what. And so now that they had this confirmation, we were put on high alert. But you can imagine, Kwame, it's not like if you're at war and you hear that there's going to be an enemy attack, that you go, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm going to go home now because it's going to get pretty rough here. Yeah, I'm going to go home. No, you can't do that. So we were put on high alert, and I was expecting the unexpected. And that happened about three days after that warning. It was early in the morning. And my partner, who was this wonderful Finnish man, he and I worked in the advocacy and counseling division together. And we had to arrive at the academy before the other Internationals. We didn't live on the academy grounds. We lived about an hour and a half away. We had to drive into the desert to get to this secret academy, and we arrived. So our job was to Take these different reports, go to the director of the academy and say, these 10 cadets must be redeployed home because this one's suffering from mental illness. This one was physically raped last night. This one was this. This one was that. This one can't. They can't stay. They are suffering dearly. And so that was our job. As we left the director's office that morning, we were walking probably a couple hundred meters back to our building in the desert. And from behind one of the buildings, 40 or so armed cadets rushed from behind the building. And they just stormed us. They surrounded us. And they had, as expected, they had these pipes, they had these chains, they had these rocks that they had managed to collect. And they were hooping and hollering and ready to grab us. And I just remember my Finnish partner, Jarmo. He's about a foot taller than me, and he looks down at me and he pats me on the head. And he said, this is going to hurt, little buddy. And I looked up at him and I said, yeah. And I started to think about my daughters and how I'd never get to see them again. But my. My intent, of course, was to fight for my life until the very last breath. And I think that most of us feel that way when we are surrounded by the unknown and. And we. We just want to fight. And so they grabbed us and they threw us on the ground and they started to beat us. And just as they were doing that, they. They were honest, like a pack of wolves. And I think when I say that statement, a lot of people can imagine what it's like when a wolf package attacks like their prey, and we were that prey. And I remember hearing one voice from behind the crowd going, Mr. Paul, Mr. Paul. Mr. Paul. And he showed us something in Arabic. Of course, I didn't have my language assistants with me. I had no idea. I was just fighting. I was just doing what I could to survive. But what happened was the. The assault stopped. The wolves backed off. And I was trying to collect my thoughts, but my head was spinning. I had been hit. And I was just trying to focus on what had just happened here. And I could hear the voice speaking. And I focused my vision on this one face walking through the crowd. And that face was one that I recognized, that big smile on it. And it was that cadet that I had met on those previous occasions, the one who used to sit with me and have coffee. And he just said, Mr. Paul, Mr. Paul. He had to smile, and he reached out and he helped me up, and he looks at me. And he looks at my partner, he says, it's time for you guys to go. It's not going to be a good day. And so he allowed us, Kwame, to leave. And when we left, we ran back to our building and alerted the security to stop all the other Internationals from coming into the academy that day. And our lives were spared, and the lives of other Internationals were spared because they weren't allowed into the academy. Those 40 cadets were joined by other militants and they destroyed the academy pretty much and did about million dollars worth of damage. But nobody was fortunately killed that day. When I look back at that incident, Kwame, I recognized that it was the way in which I had treated him. The philosophy that I have about you get what you give. I had given him dignity and respect. I did not judge him. I did not know that he was a terrorist. But still I treated him like a human being that was paid back to me in such a big way. He stepped in front of 40 of his men and put a stop to an assassination at the cost of likely his own life. We take a look at the power of what we can do when we start to treat people the way that we want to be treated ourselves. You know, like, or using the platinum rule, treat people the way that they want to be treated. And I think most of us just want to be seen, heard, appreciated and understood and treated with disrespect. Can you imagine the differences that we would make in this world if we started to do that? Is that I don't judge you. I may not agree with you, but who am I? I'm not in your shoes. Like, that's been a big philosophy of mine for many, many years.

Does your company invest in professional development training? If you believe that your team would benefit from a negotiation workshop, all you need to do is go to our website, fill out the workshop request form, and then we'll set up a time to chat. These workshops are completely customizable, and we've done them all around the country. Negotiation and conflict resolution skills are beneficial across all professions, but they're especially useful in procurement, purchasing, sales, sourcing, and contract management. Our calendar is filling up quickly, and we even have some workshops scheduled for next year. If you think you might want one. I'd suggest reaching out soon so you don't miss out. Check out the link in the description to learn more and we will be right back after this. First of all, that was a beautiful story. That has to be one. I can't even think of another one. But one of the the most captivating stories that I've heard on this show. So I appreciate that. Second of all, listeners, I hope you appreciate the story, and I also hope you can appreciate the incredible editing skills of Simone Perez in the background, because Paul and I got disconnected like, three times and the phone kept ringing. So if you ever hear, like, the. The emotionality of the story kind of fluctuating, just know there was probably some chaos happening. So. But, Paul, this is incredible. There's so much in this. Because the thing that I love the most about this is that we can all recognize that this is the highest of stakes when it comes to these conversations. And then we have to really marvel and appreciate the simplicity of the approach. Because you weren't telling people about a technical strategy that is hard to understand. No, this is human to human interaction. And I think on a deep, fundamental psychological level, we can all appreciate this and understand it, but what is it that makes people. Makes it so hard for people to actually put this into practice when it matters?

I think a lot of it comes down to our ego, is that it's me. Look at me. And this may be as a result of our upbringing. I don't know. I'm not a psychologist, but when you go back, maybe we didn't get cradled enough as kids. Maybe we got told we were going to be so special that everything's going to come our way. And we grow these human beings that realize that, no, life is hard and I gotta fight. I've got to be a fighter. I've got to make it from one day to another, and I've got to be assertive in myself. It could be a number of different things that we find ourselves in these adult bodies going, hey, it ain't. It ain't supposed to be this hard. You know, life is hard. And, you know, it's like Rocky says, life ain't all rainbows and sunshine. It can be a mean and nasty place, and it'll beat you down to your knees and keep you there if you let it. But like he also says, not about how many times you get hit. It's about how many times you can get hit and keep moving forward. And I think we let our ego come in the way of moving forward, of saying, I appreciate you and I want to set our differences aside so I can see through your eyes. I don't know what it's like to be in your shoes. And when I look back at the first lesson that I mentioned, we're more similar than we are different. When I started to look through the eyes of a victim who had gone through a horrific experience. Not their fault, I imagined. Okay, if I were in those shoes, how would I want to be treated? I would want to be treated by an officer who takes his or her time, who doesn't make me feel ashamed, who is there to support me, who is there to understand and doesn't do all the talking. They just give me space and give me encouragement. This is the way that I want to be, want to be treated. We don't do enough of that. We just go and we think about where we want to be without thinking that other people are using the same space. They're all in their vessels, moving towards their destinations and we put roadblocks up every once in a while and it's just not good. Just like we talked before our podcast here today about the energy that we bring in, the frequency that we bring into a room, and if it's all about you and what you want, how many people are going to be drawn to that kind of energy? Not very many. We have to have high velocity energy. We have to have this energy that speaks that we are confident people. But in being confident, we understand that we are equal and that other people are in this world and we have to get along, that kind of thing. So those were some of my ideas on it.

Absolutely. It makes so much sense and there's so much to explore with this response. Because I like what you talked about in that last part where you talked about confidence, but then you're able to still blend that confidence with the humility that comes from the fact that we don't know everything in general. I don't know about your situation. I need your help in order to understand how to solve this problem. You have value. We're equals. And so for you, how do you blend that confidence with humility to make sure it doesn't tip into arrogance?

I approach it with, I'm here to listen, I'm here to understand. And again, I don't put my needs above that of the other person. I have no idea. I'm going to go back to my hostage negotiation days. When I look at approaching a conflict such as a hostage negotiation, I can imagine that the hostage taker, in most cases, 90% of the cases, if it's not done for business, what I mean by that, we have pirates, we have hostage takers who in some countries will take hostages simply for the money transaction. But if we go back to the understanding of what we think hostage negotiations are all about, it's a spur of the moment Thing where a crime has gone wrong or it's a domestic situation and someone loses control, they grab a hostage out of desperation, they find themselves confined. What do I do now? Hey, there's a person here. I might be able to deal my way out of this, and I don't know what I'm doing. So that person is going through a great deal of anxiety and stress and uncertainty, and the beating of their own heart will drown out anything that I say. Have you ever found yourself. Imagine you walking down the street late at night and it's very quiet. Then all of a sudden, a tin can, like a trash can, goes down and smashes on the ground. And you're startled and you jump up. Ever been there? Ever had something, a door slam or something? It just startled the heck out of you. You go, what the heck was that? And your heart starts to beat and you're thinking, what's going on? The fight or flight, Right? Fight, flight or freeze. Well, when a hostage taker is in a situation where they on a spur of the moment, show something desperate to do, then I, as the negotiator, have to realize that I'm not going to get through right off the bat, I'm going to say, hi, my name is Paul. I'm the negotiator. I'm here to help. Those are my opening lines. And it's like any kind of negotiation, even in business. Hi, my name is so and so. I'm here to do this. I'm here to help. It's like, in most cases, the hostage taker's head is underwater. If you've ever been in a pool and people were talking above you, you couldn't make out what they were saying. So this is what happens when someone is in a state of anxiety where their heart is beating so much, they might just hear. It's like the sound of the Charlie Brown cartoon. Wa wa wa wa wa wa. They might hear hot new o. It's like the little. The little bits that we had and it happen in our. In our. Where I was talking and all of a sudden it was cut off and you were, what's next? Well, that could be how the hostage taker is hearing it until I can bring their heart down to a level of some homeostasis in which I can then say, hi, my name is Paul. I'm the negotiator. I'm here to help. Are you okay? Are you injured? Is anyone with you injured? Does anyone need medical assistance? That kind of stuff. So when you start to approach a situation with a Genuine intent to focus on the other person and not so much on yourself. To begin when you are there to understand and to collect information and to. We're judging each other, we're just kind of judging the situation. If I do most of the talking, like we were joking, I walk into a date and I go, hey, how you doing? I know that you've been on these dating apps, but you don't have to look anywhere else. I'm the guy that you're looking for. So you can get off those dating apps all about me. What do you want to know about me if I do that? How successful do you think I'm going to be in getting a second date or even getting through 10 minutes of that? A normal person would get up and say, oh man, I got one finger for you. And then they would leave. But when you make it about the other person, tell me about you, tell me about what you're going through, tell me about this, tell me about that. You leave your ego behind. You just leave it at the door. And you just want to understand that's where it makes the biggest difference. We connect people. Now, if I may just talk about frequency and energy. I do believe that we are energy, that we radiate energy and what we give is what we get. And I said that from the very beginning. So if I'm a confident person, if I believe in myself and I have this assurance about myself, who I am, and I walk into the world, walk into a room, shoulders back, head up, go in and say, I got this. And if I walk in with that high energy, a high value man, high value woman, we walk into this room, we know that we are high value. We know that we are confident. We're not arrogant, we're confident, we want to meet people, we want to make people feel good, to be around us, we're going to draw the energy that we omit. If I omit this high energy, people are going to go around, go, who is this person? They're a magnet. I want to be like this person or I want to get to know this person. Wow, they've got this great energy. I'm going to attract that great energy. And it's going to be, if I'm looking for someone to be in a relationship with, I'm going to draw a person who's on the same energy frequency as me. However, if I've got low energy, if I don't have any confidence and I always am doubting myself or I feel down or who's going to love me and I always attract the wrong person in my life or I can never get a deal. I can't sell anything. Okay, I'm going into this sales meeting and here I go. So what kind of energy are you dispensing? You're dispensing this really low energy. What are you going to attract? People who are on the same frequency. People are attracted to what they see in themselves. It's like, yeah, I know this person. They're not confident. I think I'm going to go sit with that person because that is who I relate to. Poor you, too. Yeah. You know, as opposed to this energy that we bring out and say, hey, man, you and I have this great energy. By the way, you and I are tuned into this energy and we are feeding off each other. That's what high energy, high value energy is about. It's about connecting with someone, saying, you're on my frequency, dude. It's great. And this is how life should be for each and every one of us. Change your frequency. Change your life. If you've got a high frequency and you change it down to a low one, you just change your life. If you don't believe in yourself or the future or whatever it is, you stop working, you stop fighting, then you're going to give in. That terrorist who's got you on the ground is going to get the best of you. However, if you turn that frequency around and you elevate your frequency, you elevate your life. Change your frequency. Change your life.

Paul, this is incredible. This is incredible. And you, like, speaking, like, talking about what you just mentioned, the energy. We feel that between each other, and we could talk for hours. And I would love to. I would love to, but I know you have a hard stop at 1:30, so I want to respect that. But we will definitely have you back on because there's so, so, so much more to explore. But before you go, I want to make sure that I give you the space to shout out your books, the keynote opportunities, and how people can get in touch with you.

Well, thank you. I first want to thank you very, very much for your patience for your listeners. Simone has stitched this together so that it makes sense. But, boy, my computer crashed about three times. There was a knock at the door, the phone rang. I think my computer lost energy, everything. You know that old saying, what can go wrong, will go wrong. Well, these are things that happen. But as you can see from the energy that Kwame and I have, we made it work. And so I just want to thank you so much for that. As far as my books and my speaking, I speak on business negotiations. Everything that I've learned from my years of police development, dealing with very difficult negotiations, either on the hostage front or dealing with criminals, killers and everything, or even speaking with victims and negotiating with them. I learned a lot, and this is what I bring into the business world. I wrote a couple of books. One's called Damn it, Just Ask, and it's both available in audio and written form. And it really is about how to negotiate and how to ask for what you want in life, what you deserve in life. And the other one is a book on taking control of your life. Just a mental wellness book, and it's called Take Control youl Life. So thank you for allowing me to do that.

It is my pleasure, Paul. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, my friend, for joining us. Can't wait to have you back.

You got it. And thank you so very much.

Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're not now officially on the Negotiate Anything team, so welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing, and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crazy, crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you. And I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.

Because the crowd was angry, and the crowd was. Was assaultive, and I started thinking about my daughters. And the moment I started going into this, I knew that I was going to fight for my life. They grabbed us. They started throwing us on the ground and started to beat us. We were fighting. And I remember just as it was. Hold on one second.

Hold on one second. You. You glitched. Go back to where you said. I remember. Just remember. Go. Go back to that part because I want to. I don't want that to be list. Yeah, the Internet kind of glitched for a bit. Okay.

All right. So you're back. Yeah.

Okay.

Yes. All right. So I remember as.

Oh, no. Hold on. Hold on a second. Can you hear me at all?

Oh, no. And I can see there. Can you hear me?

All right, now you stop. I lost you for, like, 40 seconds. Hold on. Let me check my Internet speed.

All right. Yes. I'm so sorry, man. Let's give this a shot. Let's do it.

Like, right at the climax of the story, I was like, what happened next?

All right.

Okay, cool.

We were right. You're recording now, right?

Still recording. And we're still using the same track. So, like, right when they surrounded you and they were just. And then that's where we went. So I'll clap back for Simone and our producer, and then we'll. We'll start from there. So we're good.

So we were surrounded by these 40 angry, militant cadets who were armed with these rocks and these stones. And I just remember I was trying to figure out what was going on. Number one.

Oh, man. Oh, man.

God.

Oh, my goodness. The life of a podcaster. My goodness.

That face was one that I recognized, that big smile on it. And it was that cadet that I had met just a few weeks earlier, the one who used to sit with me after class having coffee.

The world is conspiring against us. Say that last sentence. You're good.

Yep. Hold on. Yep. When I look back at that incident, Kwame, I think to myself, why am I here? And I can imagine what. I'm so sorry.

That's weird. Maybe check it, though. Check it, because it might be somebody. Multiple.

No worries.

Yeah, somebody. If somebody double calls for an emergency, that. Yeah. If you need to take it, it's. It's.

No, no, no, It's. It's good, but you're good.

Okay.

Just to confirm. Oh, you know, this is so. It. It. It. It's just amazing. I. I think. Right. Well, I. I think our ego comes into. I think our ego comes into place and. Kwame, give me one second. You know, of all the podcasts that I've done and I've done. I've done dozens and dozens of podcasts. This has been really entertaining, and it's been unexpected twists and turns. It's like watching a late night movie. You're going, what's going to happen next? Knock, knock, knock. There's a knock at the door. What's going on there? Oh, my goodness. Who could that be on the phone? Oh, my. Let me check this out, but I've got to tell you.