This is the Art of Charm podcast, a show where we bring you actual tips and strategies on how to better connect socially, boost your intelligence, and navigate social behavior. I'm AJ. And I'm Johnny. Last month was all about decision making. We had a few of you write in about becoming more decisive, listening to those episodes. If you haven't had a chance, check out last month's episodes, especially our Tool Box episode, where we go into our decision making process here at the Art of Charm. Of course, this month means a new theme. Well, I just want to say I really enjoyed last month and it's, of course, it does tell them what we're going to be doing this month, but, you know, now we have a few hundred thousand people who are going to know our thought processes on how we go about making decisions. Yeah. Doesn't that freak you out at all? I try not to think about that. Personally, I think about talking to you across from me. And as long as it's not falling on deaf ears, I'm pretty happy. Well, I had recently got an email saying that some, the, the person who listens to the show really loves our stories and really feels like they get to know us. And I'm like, yeah, that's, that's a problem in itself. It's a one way storytelling. Well, how much stuff, you know, like we're so open about things that that people are able to put together, I think, a pretty good picture of who we are as people, though without knowing us. And it kind of freaks me out a little bit every once in a while. When I actually think about it, which I try not to think about at all. Well, thank you. What a great way to kick off this month's theme on negotiation, which is essentially two parties coming to a decision together. So last month, we focused on your internal decision making process. This month, we hopefully are going to change your perspective on how you view negotiation. We're going to talk about creating high value outcomes for both parties. And instead of going into negotiations with a win, lose attitude, looking at things from a win, win attitude. Now, this is the grand scheme that we've been working on here at the art of charm with our monthly themes. We want you at the end of this episode to understand how we at the art of charm have made some mistakes along the way in negotiating and shifted our own mindsets. So hopefully that we could be more effective negotiators. I know a lot of us, when we think about negotiation, we think about this first idea of a zero sum game where someone is going to win, someone is going to lose. And when we forge a compromise, well, we're both going to have to back away from what would be our traditional idea of winning. And a lot of these negotiations that we get questions about are written in about tend to be one off and really short-sighted, not thinking about the long game of negotiating. And with everything that we talk about here in the art of charm, these are skills that are developed through experience. So what we're going to try to do is reset some of your mindsets and attitude around negotiation and then hopefully inspire you to practice utilizing some of the tools we're going to lay out for you. Well, obviously it's the things that make us nervous. The things that make all these a zero sum game, a win-lose situation has to stem from how we view it. Where do you think a lot of these ideas about negotiation come from that have us looking at them in the wrong way? You know, possibly I was trying to think about this, but a television plays a large role. You know, when you see shows like Shark Tank, for instance, you know, sometimes it seems as if they could be true. But yes, it's for the tension of the television show. If they were all looking for happy win-wins for everyone, it wouldn't really be much of a tension filled show. And if you don't have a very tension filled show, well, do you have a show? Well, I think a lot of us view negotiation as conflict. Yeah. And I know myself growing up being conflict diverse, trying not to get into shouting matches. I really avoided negotiating. And many times negotiating can start with by asking for something. So for me, I've never really developed that skill of negotiating until we started the business The Art of Charm. And I know what we're talking about here, this idea of zero sum game is how a lot of us approach negotiations. And this is what's called positional bargaining. You've probably done this a few times in your life. Well, I just and I just wanted to say on that is that when you watch shows like Shark Tank or whatnot, like, for instance, Mark Cuban has been known to be an incredible businessman. He's not going to have people who are going to want to continue to work with them. If he if it's always about how much can I get off of everybody? It's he's looking for a win-win situations. Well, I think and will also illuminate this in the later half of the show here. Understanding how the sharks negotiate, they're not looking at just the trade of dollars for equity. They're talking about value adds more than just money to paint a win-win scenario for the founder that they're talking to. So we're going to dive into that. But a lot of us when we think about negotiation, we think about those one off conversations. I got to talk to my credit card company. I got to negotiate this used car. I got this guy on Craigslist who's trying to buy an office chair. How do I get myself the best deal? And this positional bargaining is that both parties are somewhat content with the deal being made. But as I said, no one really walks out feeling like it's a win. There's a reason for this. And I know we are huge fans of Daniel Kahneman. We talk a lot about cognitive biases. He won a Nobel Prize for this exact thing and the starting of behavioral economics, looking at how we go into negotiations and the mental tricks that we will play on ourselves that hinder us from being effective negotiators. And this first cognitive bias that we want to talk about is the idea of anchoring. When we think about positional bargaining situations, we typically go into that negotiation thinking about the outcome that we want or the win that we have in mind. And inevitably that win that we have in mind becomes anchored in our mind. So if that win is $50 for the office chair and Sam on Craigslist comes over to the house and he's only got 20 and we start dickering back and forth. And now we've whittled our way down to about $35 on that office chair. Well, because of the cognitive bias of anchoring and the idea that $50 is what I've established in my mind is the value of the chair. Well, of course, I'm not going to feel like it's a win if I sold the chair for $35 and Sam's not really going to feel it gets a win if he went in hoping to get the chair for $20. So you can see right out of the gate with positional bargaining. Mentally, we're going to start working against ourselves. And it's going to be very difficult to feel like we're winning, which is why a lot of us avoid negotiations in the first place. Well, yeah.  Well, remember last month, Dan Ariely talked about his friends trying to sell a house and not understanding the value outside of just selling the house and making the money back, not understanding that having to carry a mortgage for X number of months and the probabilities that go along with the math. So a lot of us, again, fall victim to this cognitive bias of anchoring. We have value in our mind that we want out of the negotiation and we know that we're going to have to give a little bit and we hope that we don't give too much and the other person doesn't take advantage of us. But ultimately what ends up happening is it doesn't feel like a win-win. It feels like a little bit of a loss for both parties. And that conflict can lead to you not working again.    So this positional bargaining framework and understanding of negotiating doesn't really develop relationships with the people you're negotiating with. And I think that's one of the big things, especially if you see working together or this person being in your life long term, then that needs to be part of a part of this negotiation. And I think it's better to start from a place of assuming that there's going to be future deals with this person than writing it off completely and going in an adversarial way. If you remember last month, the example that we gave, and this was a big learning lesson for us here at The Art of Charm, we were excited. We hired a web design team to rebuild our website. And it was a pretty big project. We were excited with the web team that we had, the development team that we had found, they had done a bunch of big websites on the internet. And we were excited to work with them. Well, and of course, this also, this is like one of the first times that we had put together this amount of money to do something like this. So this was, this was a big deal for us at the time. And I, not being a very savvy negotiator myself or feeling like one, I deferred to another member of our team on this negotiation. And this team member tended to have this exact mindset of positional bargaining, right? Yes. Get maximize the deal for us, even at the cost of the other party. And with this adversarial mindset, what ended up happening was we negotiated fiercely down from their asking price. We had come in our mind hoping to spend a lot less than their initial quote was. And of course, after some wrangling, they agreed to take on the project. But we had to go up in budget. They went down in budget, right? So now neither party in this negotiation feels like they're really getting a win. We had to spend a more money than we had hoped. And they're getting less money that they had hoped and quoted us. So right out of the gate in this situation, we've been anchored to that price point. They were anchored to their proposal. We're anchored to what we thought was the best value. In losing in that negotiation, feeling like it's not quite a win in either side. Well, what ends up happening over time, both parties in realizing that it's not a win, start second guessing and doubting the other side. So of course, as the project started to get going, more and more hours are being consumed, trying to build out the website. And I'll be honest, we're not the easiest clients to deal with. We're not designed minded. And we had some thoughts and ideas around conversion, optimization and things that we've seen on other websites that we wanted to incorporate in their design. Well, of course, them being the expert, they feel like they're wrestling with us a little bit, the project's going a little bit off track. And they're getting less money than they had originally quoted. How do you think that made them feel? Oh, they weren't thrilled at all. Incredibly frustrated. And now, because we felt that we spent more than we had actually valued the work at, well, we were really invested to get more out of this project. So you can see how immediately this adversarial dynamic is starting to develop because of positional bargaining. And I did. So another thing I want to point out. And this is we've heard this time and time again, and this happened to be true in this case, which is if you're fiercely negotiating with somebody and it's and they are just they are standing firm and they're on this positional bargaining and and everything is a fight with this person, then you can imagine that working with this person is going to be just as tough. Well, and certainly they're negotiating strategy and tactics didn't line up with the outcomes that we were looking for. But it really took us understanding this weak framework of negotiating, creating a dynamic where we both have to go in and ferociously negotiate for our side and there's going to be concessions. Well, guess what? The way our mind works is concessions are taken as a loss. Our mind views any concession made as a loss. And here's the thing. And this is what Daniel Kahneman and his researchers found. It's called the prospect theory. In short, we will work much, much harder to not lose a hundred dollars than we would to earn an additional hundred dollars. So let's restate that. Yes, that loss of a hundred dollars is so great to us that we will expend more effort and energy to save and prevent the loss than we would spend to just go out and make the extra hundred dollars elsewhere.  And when they are framed as concessions, we actually do a disservice to the other side. As we saw in our web development project, what ended up happening is they felt a little taken advantage of. They made concessions to work with us. Those concessions were losses in terms of revenue that they're proposed project and typically their budgeted projects go for. So as the project started to consume more time and energy, well, they wanted to expend less resources on the project. Of course. Those resources became scarce based on our tough negotiation. Now, guess what happened with the outcome? They felt burned. We felt burned. How do you think the website turned out? Do we even have that website? The website turned out half baked and we had to spend a bunch of hours outside of the original specced out hours internally as a team, getting the website up and running to the standards that we had hoped for at the start of the project. Well, that's what I remember most because I was like, why are we spending all this time outside of this to develop a website that we commissioned to have done? As the project went on longer and longer, they were less and less willing to spend time. So we would come up with nitpicks and they would be brushed aside. So this did not create a dynamic. And I think it doesn't need to be said, but I'll restate it. We're no longer working with them. They don't want to work with us. So when we come at negotiations with this positional bargaining situation where we hope that through some concessions, we can meet in the middle and create a win-win mentally. Cognitive biases get in the way and don't allow for that to happen. Well, the minute you go to positional bargaining, you are arguing from scarcity. Yeah. And and if you're arguing from scarcity, then you have no power. So how can we negotiate differently? And this, for me, is really exciting because this new way to negotiate that we're going to unlock for you changed everything for me. I stopped looking at negotiations as adversarial and I started to get excited about negotiations because when you come at it from a different lens, you see more opportunity and ultimately a better outcome for both parties. And some of the things we're going to be discussing here is that you can get creative with negotiations. There's tons of things that come into play here. Now, of course, we love science. We've talked about the Harvard Happiness Research. Well, today we're going to talk about the Harvard Negotiation Project. In 1979, William Urie and Roger Fisher and their teams at Harvard Law School start researching negotiations all around the world. And they want to see how negotiation could be improved and ultimately translated into a better framework that, of course, they could teach their lawyers who are going through law school, but ultimately to create better dynamics when we have to go into these situations to negotiate. And of course, this is a massive project that's still ongoing. Now, what did they discover? There's a bunch of books all around bargain negotiation, positional bargaining that we talked about earlier. We're not going to delve into those. Today, we're going to focus on how to create a bigger pie. So it's not a win-lose. We're not fighting over a zero sum game. But instead, we are unlocking other opportunities that the other person going into the negotiation may not have even thought of to create a win-win dynamic. So there's no anchoring. There's no cognitive biases that allow us to feel that we've made concessions or there was losses, because as we talked about earlier, those losses can impede our ability to get to a finished result. And this is where the Harvard Negotiation Project takes a different course. Their ideas surrounding negotiation were exactly that. How can we increase the pie? So when we talk about splitting, both sides leave the negotiation feeling that they got more than they even went into the negotiation looking for. You could imagine how that changes the dynamic. If I go into the negotiation hoping that I'm going to get $50 for the office chair and Sam from Craigslist is hoping to get $20 for the office chair. But at the end of the negotiation, I get $30 from Sam, but I get another $25 gift card to Target that allows me to buy some new paper for the office. And Sam gets rid of that gift card that really didn't have any value to him. He's not shopping at Target. We've now created a dynamic where there's a greater pie to be split. And both of us can feel like we're winning. So how do we do this? And negotiation tactics, as we said at the start, are skills that we want to build up through practice. So as we unpack this negotiation strategy, we highly encourage you to go out and look for more opportunities to negotiate. I think that's one of the great things about the show is we can figure out unique opportunities to practice and stuff where you're not going to have to wait to the first time you're in negotiation to then listen to this podcast and brush up on it so you can go in and nail it tomorrow. That's not what this is about.  Lots of things come down to negotiations. And let's be honest, when resources are scarce, your ability to negotiate becomes even more valuable. And this is something that we learned very early on, bootstrapping at the art of charm. When you only have X number of dollars in your bank account and it's not overflowing, well, you start to figure out creative ways to get what you want out of negotiations. And that's exactly what we're talking about here. So instead of fighting over who gets the biggest piece, we want to increase the pie so that everyone feels like they're winning. And of course, this is going to involve some emotional intelligence. This is going to involve some empathy because we need to make strategic use of the simple fact that people have different needs, interests, resources, values and so on. And the more that we could take into account these variables when we are in a negotiation, the greater likelihood there will be that we could create the win-win that everyone is looking for. Now, Yuri and Fisher actually provided a detailed list of elements to look at, and we're going to get to those in a moment. But first, let's go back to this negotiation with our web development team. Because as we said, when we created a win-lose or concession-based negotiation strategy, it didn't lead to the results that we were looking for. So how could we, thinking about the Harvard negotiation project, potentially go at this from a different direction? Well, first off, we have to realize that there are more resources that the art of charm is bringing to the table than just dollars and cents. We have exposure. We have the ability to refer them to new business. We have plenty of opportunity to help support the web development team outside of just compensating them with money. But if all you're doing is going into that negotiation, looking for the lowest amount of money that you can spend and only thinking on those terms, well, you're not making use of all these other resources that we outlined. You're not making use of our network. You're not making use of our traffic. You're not making use of our footer to link to the design team. There are a lot of things that we could bring to the table that aren't just money. You know, this is where good lawyers come into play, right? They're able to see all the different ways that they can help make the pie bigger so that you and said company can successively negotiate a win-win for both sides. So how could we have potentially helped the web development team feel like they got more out of the deal than the actual price that was quoted to us? Well, you can imagine we have friends that also need websites that also need their stuff redesigned. So coming to the table and pulling those resources and saying, hey, my buddy also needs a website. What do you say you knock out both of these websites? So we're bringing new business to the table that the web development team would have to pay resources for to try to chase and find. That's one option. Another option that we could have done to give them some more value and some more clips and some more exposure could have been offering to put a link to their design team in the footer of our website, knowing that we get millions of visits every month. Some of those visits are probably people who are excited about our web design and might be interested in also utilizing our design team. So these are all options that you need to think about before you actually sit down to negotiate. All right. That's what I meant by having high emotional intelligence. We have to start paying attention to other items and other resources that are available to us that have value to the other person. And when we start thinking about it from a value perspective, as we've talked about on this show, value is not just the money you have in your bank account. There are a lot of things that humans value and they don't all have monetary values associated. Well, once again, it comes back to attention, approval and acceptance. If you think about value in those terms, then there's multiple ways of growing the pie. As you mentioned, we were talking about getting them more attention, more eyes. We live in the attention economy. This is a big piece of it. The more people that you can get their attention and get them to understand your services, the better you're going to do. Yeah. So let's unpack that, right? The AOC value scale, attention, as I said, giving them more eyeballs and more people, more exposure is a great way to get them that attention. Well, how could we give them some appreciation or approval? Well, we could write them a glowing Yelp testimonial. We could record a video testimonial that they put on their website that has the AOC stamp of approval. Look, we can allow them to showcase our website in their portfolio. That's also valuable in terms of them gaining new clients. And what about acceptance? Well, that's referrals. That's actually having them work on future work for us, redesigning the podcast logo in the cover art. So all of these are ways that we can increase the pie for both of us by giving someone else more value outside of just, hey, the negotiated price is 30 K, we can only pay 20 K. How can we make this work? And when we start to think about other people's needs, wants, values and interests, we're now negotiating at a higher level. Most people, as we said, focus on positional bargaining. They only focus on the here and now and what can I get out of the other side? They're often not thinking about ways that they can give the other side more value that may not be more skin off their back or more money out of their bank account. It may mean something that you really don't value that much and you have in spades, but you can definitely benefit the other party with. Well, and of course, if you have a relationship that you're going to be working together, then both of you are going to want to see that mutually, you're escalating quality of life for each partner. Well, as I said, in a win, lose scenario or a lose, lose scenario where we're both conceding, we both feel shortchanged, we both feel taken advantage of, what is the likelihood that they're going to redesign our next website, that they're going to want to work on another project with us? I think you should think about it in this manner. When it comes to negotiations, especially when it comes to negotiations where your work is involved, both parties should be thinking about the investment in each other's products. So for the web design company, we want to be invested in their growth and we want them invested in our growth. So now as we continue to work together, both of us are escalating business opportunities for each other and that payback is now working on both sides. So it's never about that cash up front. It's about the investment together, growing together. It's a relationship. That's exactly it. We want you to shift your mindset around negotiations from one-off to investment in your future. You are also either building or breaking relationships with everyone you negotiate with. So imagine this. Imagine that in my negotiation with Sam over the office chair that we're trying to get rid of at the art of charm, I ask him a few questions to understand. What is he using the office chair for? What are some of his other needs? I may find out that he's looking for a bunch of office furniture, not just one chair. And I happen to have a buddy who also is getting rid of some of his office furniture. Would that give Sam some value? Absolutely. So when we're thinking about negotiating, we also want to zoom out from just us and the interaction that we're having with the other person. We want to start to think about the interactions that that person is having with others and how we can provide the value that exceeds what that person went into the negotiation looking for. So how do we do that? According to Yuri and Fisher, we need to look at four elements of negotiation. And these are called boundary conditions. It's people, interests, options, and criteria. And we're going to unpack each of those for you. The first one is people. Now, it is important to mentally draw a line between the people who are involved in the negotiation and the problem that we are trying to solve. We talk about this a lot. The problem isn't the other person. And we talk about this in a way also when it comes to body language, when you're meeting somebody for the first time, if you're facing them with full positive body language, you're putting tension and pressure in between that party and you. And until you break that space, it's going to continue to rise. That tension and pressure has nothing to do with you in an adversarial role with the other person. It is just what happens naturally upon meeting somebody for the first time between both people. And if you move to neutral position side by side, now you can both allow, well, you can now both look at the tension and pressure that between the both of you, but you can do that as if you're on the same team. And in that way, you can discuss the feelings of meeting this person for the first time. You can understand it. You can allow it to wash over you, but it's not connected to the other person. It's just nature working and taking effect. It's also, it has the same situation here where if you see the other person as adversarial, then they're going to be painted in a negative light for the negotiations. They're now the enemy. And if they're the enemy, well, then you cannot have a conversation with them. And certainly they're not going to want to have a conversation with you after the negotiation. No, right. You treat them like the enemy. Right. You don't build relationships with your enemies usually. How do we diffuse the person from the negotiation itself and the problem that we're trying to solve? And oftentimes we will blend them together. The problem that we have and the person we have it with becomes synonymous. Your stingy landlord and the broken water heater. The messy flatmate in the dishes that never get done.  In all of these scenarios, you can see how very quickly we're linking the person to the problem, but Yuri and Fisher found that in order to negotiate a win-win deal, you actually need to maximize both how you deal with the person and how you deal with the problem. And that obviously affects your relationship with the party. This is what they call the substance of the negotiation. If you hate your landlord because he's so stingy, then yes, you could use that new heater to make him pay through the nose. To get back at him for being so stingy. But how's that going to help you in the long run? How's that going to help you if you getting the hot water heater makes your landlord feel like he got taken advantage of and he's already stingy? He's probably going to be slow to respond to your next problem, the leaking toilet. Oh, the roof is leaking. Well, let me get on that. You can see that when we can't separate the problem from the person we're negotiating with and we fuse those two together, we're creating this vicious cycle that's adversarial, that's going to lead to conflict. Or let's separate your dislike of your landlord's financial decisions being stingy and the problem that you need solved. Well, there's an easy way of going about that, which is you have to put yourself in his shoes and realize that maybe he has a few apartments or properties that he has to maintain. He's trying to do that to the best of his abilities. He's not in your head. He can't understand what you're going through. And so he's going, he has to deal with all the properties and the best way that the best supports what was going on and what he's doing. And so that's going to be difficult. However, if you put yourself in his shoes and realize that, then all of a sudden you can start to think about how you can speak to him in a way that the problem is both of your problems. It's not he's the problem. You're working to solve the problem with him. Yeah, and helping him with his problem. And he's going to appreciate that. So now that that he sees that it's going to allow for him to sit down and discuss best ways of going about this with you. And let's think about that, right? This is where emotional intelligence comes in. We have to think about the other party. So why do you think he's being stingy? Well, maybe money is a bit tight. And because money is tight, that's causing him to be stingy. So instead of looking at it as like being stingy is a negative behavior. This is a negative person. We think about the underlying reasons that he might be stingy. Well, he's financially strapped. We can start to unpack the two. And here is where this is key. Why does this matter in a negotiation? Well, if you know that this water heater is going to be a large expense up front, you could imagine how the stingy landlord is going to view that, right? He's not going to be happy for that cash outlay. But knowing that this newer hot water heater is going to create some efficiency and energy, it's going to lower his bills. It comes with a warranty that ensures that it's not going to have to be repaired or replaced at his expense for the next three, five, seven years, whatever the warranty is. Well, these are going to be important details and information that are going to be incredibly valuable to your stingy landlord. So when it comes to negotiating, what we have to do is try to learn more about the other party. If your goal is for the outcome in the negotiation for both sides to feel like winners, well, we need to figure out how that person views winning. What are some ways that he or she is going to feel like they won in the negotiation? So instead of googling hot water heaters and installation costs, right, we also want to be curious about why the landlord is so afraid of money. What's causing all these financial woes? Maybe there's a big repair coming up next year that he's saving for and nervous about. Just think about googling how to handle this situation and you could see somebody having this situation. And rather than looking at it from any other way, the Google entry is, how do I deal with my slumber? How do I deal with a stingy landlord? Right off the bat, you're going into this researching all wrong. I'm actually now picturing myself in front of Google. You're going to do it. Stingy landlord hot water heater problems. Yeah, there you go. All right. So the financial concerns are pressing and they are on your landlord's mind. How else can we use this to find some value here? Well, what if your lease is about to be up and he's nervous that fixing this hot water tank is also going to happen in a time where he's going to have to struggle to find a new tenant to live in this apartment? Well, maybe you could add that into the negotiations as a win saying, hey, you know, I'm happy to renew my lease, but this hot water heater is starting to concern me. Well, what do you know that your lease renewal is going to be of incredible value to that landlord? It might actually calm his nerves around investing in the apartment to know that you'll renew for another year. Has that created you to spend any more money out of pocket? No. Has that created a situation where your landlord feels taken advantage of? No. So this understanding the people is the number one factor in negotiation that we have to concern ourselves with. And of course, we've been over the last year and a half plus helping you understand the science of people breaking down empathy. Toolbox episodes 767 and 768, we talk about mastering connection. So that we're not just trying to guess what the other person's intentions are. We're using the skills available to us to understand their intentions really well. And for the people who are listening to this who who are ready to ask, well, what if he's a dick? It's all that always comes up. First of all, let's give everyone at least benefit of the doubt first and try some other ways of going about things rather than just getting angry and thinking that you're just dealing with a dick property owner. Because if that is your first thought, that is going to be your first thought going into any. And what is the outcome?   Absolutely.  You are going to start to take actions and behaviors that lead to screwing other people over and people feeling negatively about you. And it's also actions and behaviors that are going to lead you to to reap what you reap what you sow. And these these are this is how self-fulfilling prophecies start. You're already rolling in with a bad attitude. We cannot start there. Granted, yes, there are some property managers who just don't get it, who are incompetent, who are or who are stingy, who are awful. But but we cannot start there. We can't view that. That's what you're going to be rolling into. You have to try these other opportunities first. And you'd be very surprised because if you start with that mindset, it's going to it's it's going to affect everything. And you are always going to be continuing to negotiate from a place of scarcity. And that's not a good place to be. The second element of a principled negotiation is looking at interests instead of positions. Negotiation around a position, as you might remember from our example at the beginning, is when we're trying to strike a deal with the other person. Well, I just something I also wanted to state there as well. If you are arguing from a place of position, it's going to put the other person immediately in a place of position, a place of position. And let me tell you who is going to win that 100% of the time. It's the person with less to lose than you that who wants to go into negotiation. That's a hostage negotiation. That is. And let's just say that you are somebody who has a few things together. Well, then you will never be in the position with least to lose. You will always find yourself on the on the wrong end of that negotiation because of how you approached it. Position negotiation will is a losing fight all the time. So this idea of instead of focusing on positions, we want to focus on interest, right? When we negotiate around positions, it creates a terrible dynamic for us. Instead, Yuri and Fisher found that if we shift a negotiation over to interest, we're opening up a multitude of possible solutions, right? So you can imagine that a position is, I want to spend X amount of dollars, or I want to make X amount of dollars, right? And if that's where we stand, then our entire negotiation is going to focus around dollars. Instead, if we focus around interest, right? As we talked about the web development team, they want more customers, more customers equals more money for them. And how do they get more customers? Well, they have more eyeballs, so they have more leads coming in. Those leads see positive testimonials, which makes them more likely to buy. And oh, those leads see a beautifully designed website for the art of charm in their portfolio. I want that. Now all of a sudden, we're looking at more than just the dollars and cents of the negotiation. We're looking at all the amazing stuff the art of charm brings to the table that would be of interest to the other party. Let's use a different example. Say you want to buy a used car from a private seller. And when you're negotiating, you have a price in mind and the seller has the best price in mind. And of course, you can see that if we're just focused on price, we're going to get in a negotiation where both sides are conceding and losing. Let's shift this over to interest instead. Yes, you want the car for a great price, but you also want the car that's ready to go. It's got four brand new tires. It's had an oil change. It's fully gassed. You got a busy job. You don't have time to be running around town, getting all the documentation in order to actually make the purchase happen. Basically, you want rest assure that the car is running and ready to go. So you won't have issues for a long time. Now the other person, well, they want a good price as well, but they're moving out and they got to make this deal happen quickly. There's some pressure on them and they also don't want any hassle. Especially worrying about your check bouncing or you coming back two weeks later that something's broken. You can now see that you've added a lot more possible solutions. Thinking about the interest that that person has instead of just their position around the value they've associated with the car. How can we help them with their interests to make this happen? Well, maybe you'll both pay for an mechanic to look over the car to make sure that there are no issues whatsoever to solidify the deal. And in the end, you both get a lot more knowing rest assure that the car is working and functional. You know that the car has been serviced. It's ready to go. You don't have to worry about anything else because you brought in the mechanic into the equation. And for them, all of their worries around checks bouncing, you re-nigging on the deal, you feeling like you got taken advantage of by adding this third party of the mechanic, solve their worries and concerns. That's how we can start to shift from position to interest. The magic question here is why? Why do we do that, Johnny? Why do we focus on interest over position? Well, by focusing on interest, you're going to be able to find more opportunities to grow the pie. And when we're growing the pie, both sides feel good. And guess what? You'll probably get into another negotiation with that person in the future. You are working on building a relationship. Let's talk about the third thing we need to focus on when it comes to principle negotiating. And this third thing is options. When we start bringing options to the table, we start increasing that pie. If you and the other party spend time elaborating on interests, you'll find that there are a lot of other points you can negotiate around. When we start thinking about the interest that the other party has growing their web development business, getting this car deal done quickly with little skin out of their back, we start to see some new options that could benefit both sides. So we can start inventing options that both parties benefit from. Now we are experiencing gains, which allows us to feel like we're winning. This is where we need to let go of the idea that we have a single perfect answer going into the negotiation. We actually need to go into the negotiation more open and not so solely focused on one outcome. When we have interest on the table, both parties can now start generating ideas of how we can make this deal work. Oh, this is where things get creative. And compromise becomes a lot easier. Now we have a lot more that we can compromise on. And sometimes that compromise is a huge gain for the other party. And that huge gain washes away any feeling that they had of loss around the price point that you had negotiated on the car. Now there's a time savings for that car salesperson. They don't have to worry about taking it to a mechanic themselves to get it checked so that you sign the deal and they feel good. They've now saved some worry that they have around your check bouncing because you were willing to pay for cash to get the deal done. When we start thinking about the other person's interests, it creates opportunity for options. And it's important at this stage that we make clear our goal. Our goal is to brainstorm a few solutions here. So we allow the other person to start bringing options to the table too. Oftentimes you'll find a negotiation when we both come in with outcomes in mind. We have tunnel vision. We have very narrow focus. That's why it's important in all the good negotiations to think about the person. Ask questions to start to develop about what are their interests. And then let them know, hey, I want to brainstorm a few options that I think might work for both of us. And when you say that to the other person, you give them an opportunity to think about some options too. And now we're putting more cards onto the table. We're actually growing the pie. Well, it also shows that you are looking for a win-win. So they can relax. And if they're relaxed, they're going to be much more open to discussing all these finer points. And then they're going to put their attention on looking for other opportunities to grow the pie. Which means they're more likely to close the deal. And I also want to mention how you go into this and the mindset that you bring in is going to dictate how much communication and how the other person acts towards you. If you want the negotiation to be fun and looking for the win-win and an opportunity for everyone to lay the cards out and find what works best for both of you, so you both leave happy. And you have to go into it in that manner and show that.  You're going to put yourself in a position where he is going to have to be one. There are no options, right? He has to assume that role. And this is what's also key here. We want to keep this in mind. Say you are brainstorming options and no options are off the table. Allow the other person to brainstorm and throw options at you that you may not have thought of. Imagine how creative this deal-making process can now become. And in growing the pie, those options become a lot more favorable than taking the loss, than having to lose on what you initially came in on. Because as we talked about earlier, that cognitive bias, right? When we're actually losing, when we're compromising and losing something, well, that's going to stick in our craw. We're going to be pretty frustrated with that outcome. I want to go back. And for those of you who haven't listened to the episodes, the value episodes are going to define what value is and how defining yourself and acting in a high-value manner is going to open a lot of doors for you. And it's going to be a mindset. It's going to be how you go into it. And it's going to be reflected by the people that you're going into these negotiations with. The last element of principle negotiation are criteria. And all negotiations are going to have certain specific criteria. Those are laws that go into the way the contract is written. You can imagine when we're working with the web development team, they can't just willy-nilly write an independent contractor agreement in the state of California that says, we're going to pay them in jelly beans, and those jelly beans have X value. There are certain criteria that all negotiations will fall under. This involves doing your research. This involves being well-prepared to finalize that negotiation. Understanding contractual law, you don't need a law degree for, but we need to do a little bit of research. So we're not bringing to the negotiating table options that just will not work. Well, yeah. You're just not pulling numbers out of thin air and going in. There are market prices, labor costs, and community standards across the board. This is what you should be googling. This is the points that are going to help you move the negotiation forward. Exactly. So when you're negotiating with your stingy landlord around how to get the hot water tank repaired, well, you need to know the criteria as in, how much can be deducted from your rent while you don't have hot water. Knowing those numbers is important in the negotiation. That's the criteria. Here's a big point. So if you go into this, showing that you're looking to make the pie bigger, you're going in looking for options that allow the other person to fill just as much that they've won as you did. And you want everyone to leave. It is up to you then to then bring the criteria to the table. You've done all this work. So now when they see that you're interested in the win-win, most people in negotiations, a lot of times are going to see you then as the leader in this.  Because you've done everything else fairly for them to feel good about this. And now you're setting it up. So when you come with the criteria, well, the market says blah, blah, blah. And these costs are dictated by blah, blah, blah. And they're like, great. Let's roll with the community standards. Let's roll with the labor costs because it's already been researched. It's already been done. They're going to feel good about that. You've showed everything that you're looking for a win-win. Put yourself in a position to lead through this. Now these are complex decisions, meaning they can't be made with a gut decision. These are not split second decisions on how we negotiate here. The best negotiators are well researched. They go in ahead of the negotiation thinking about these things. And we're going to talk about this next week, what you need to do to prepare for the negotiation. But as we discussed, when we're talking about principled negotiation here, people, interests, options criteria, you can't assemble all of that on the spot. You don't go to the youth car dealership without having researched what the going rate for a used Toyota RAV4 is. You need to be prepared when we're talking about negotiation on who those people are that you're negotiating with, separating the problem from the person, what are their interests? What are some things outside of the deal itself that might be beneficial to you? And those options that you can bring to the table that have value. And lastly, the criteria that this negotiation is going to fall under so that when you're explaining the value, the landlord understands, well, geez, I'm going to get less in rent the longer I wait on getting this hot water tank repaired. Now you're at a place where the negotiation can be finalized. We want to remove indecision. We want to remove, well, I got to go back and Google that. Oh, well, sorry, I'll get back to you tomorrow about the used car. You, when you're negotiating, you want the end result. So we need to go in prepared ahead of time to get that end result. When people see the work that you've put in and how the care that you are putting in for this negotiation to get a win-win, they're going to see you as a leader. That's why when it comes to these options, you have to have them prepared because if they see you as a leader, they're going to want to see how you want to handle this and what your options are. You cannot do all this work only to give them the ball in their court and go, we've done, here's the problem. Here's the interest. Here is the options I've come up with. And so what do you want to do? They're like, you've done all the work. It is now time for you to capitalize on this work. And they can also feel better to make that decision because you have laid out clearly all the options, all the criteria, and all the value that's being provided to create the win-win dynamic. I think here's the situation that people find themselves in. And once again, this comes from a place of scarcity.  And then I put all this time and effort into it. Once again, you're looking at it from a place of scarcity, which puts you in a place of weakness. We don't want that. No. All right, we want to feel strong in our negotiation. And next week, we're going to look at ways to get the most out of a negotiation and to confidently stand your ground when the going gets a bit tough. We'll also talk about what a Batna is and why you need one. Before we let you go, here's our challenge for you this week. We want to push you outside of your comfort zone a bit with this one. It's called get something for free and it's pretty self-explanatory. We want you to go into a shop or a restaurant and see if you can get something no matter how small it is for free. Now here's the important part. Most probably you'll be met with a confused look and a no. And that's where the challenge really starts because we want you to stick with it a bit longer. Don't give up too quickly just because you get a no doesn't mean that that's a firm no. You could ask them if they've never ever given something away for free. Maybe they'll say, yeah, that one time I have. You could ask them if maybe there's a way to try some appetizers on the menu at the restaurant or you could ask if they have anything laying around that they no longer need. There are plenty of ways to go about getting something for free. We need you to stay through that initial confused look and no. I just want to preface this with it's not about getting the free thing. It is about you being able to negotiate in the face of a no. So as you can see that approach to principal negotiation that the Harvard negotiation project developed is far and away better than purely haggling overpriced with the used car salesman. You are able now to separate the people from the problem and to try to improve both the relationship and the outcome. This all means doing a little bit of legwork. You're going to make a list of all the interests that come into play so you both can brainstorm possible solutions that benefit both sides the most. And finally, you also look for objective criteria so that you can have something to fall back onto as a measure of fairness of the deal without being swept away by emotions. Let us know or always excited to hear from you all. You can send us your thoughts by going to the articharm.com slash questions. You can also email us at questions at thearticharm.com or find us on social media at the articharm. Also, could you do us and the entire articharm team a big favor? Could you go over to iTunes and rate this podcast? It would really mean the world to us. The articharm podcast is produced by Chris Olin and Michael Harold and engineered by Danny Luber and Bradley Denham at Cast Media Studios in sunny downtown Hollywood. Until next week, I'm Johnny. And I'm AJ. Have a good one.


Okay, we're here live for day two of Big Data Week here in New York City. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. This is Strata Plus Hadoop World. This is the groundbreaking event that we were here three years ago. This is now in our third cube, fourth year, and this is a show. Started as a small little group of Hadoop interested folks. Now it's a full-on industry. This is Silicon Angles TV's exclusive coverage of Strata Plus Hadoop World. I'm John Furrier, founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined this week with my co-host, as usual, Dave Vellante, the founder of Wikibon.org. SiliconAngle.com is the reference point for tech innovation. Go there, check out all the latest stories. Go to Wikibon.org and get free research, research analyst firm, and it's all great stuff known in the industry as being number one in Big Data. We love Big Data. Dave, welcome to day two. We are ready to rock and roll. Yeah, John, excited for day two. We got some terrific guests. Our good friend, Abhimet, is coming on. We've got the regular lineup of practitioners and innovators, and we're going to be running the table as we always do. And I wanted to mention to people, you talked about Wikibon.org. Go to Wikibon.org slash Big Data. It's a place where we keep a compendium of a lot of the research that we've done, the Big Data Manifesto that Jeff Kelly did, the market forecast and sizing effort that Jeff did, which he's in the process of updating, and lots of other great videos and other resources there. It's all free, go check it out. Really appreciate your contributions.  We would not be here if it wasn't for our generous support or for our underwriters and our sponsors that allow us to do our most excellent editorial, independent editorial from SiliconANGLE and Wikibon. We'd like to go out and extract the data, share that out to the Twitter sphere, it's the social networks, and talk to the brightest minds, people who have a voice, who are the signal from the noise, that's our goal to share with you. I want to thank Cloudera, who's our headline sponsor this week. Obviously, they started at Hadoop World. Now O'Reilly is taking it from the next level. And Cloudera has been a very generous support of theCUBE, and we want to thank Cloudera. Also MapR, MapR has been an amazing company to work with. Again, big supports of theCUBE, they recognize our work, and we like to do it. And it costs money, we want to thank those guys. So thank them by supporting their products. Datastacks, Hortonworks, Hadapt, Opera, Squirrel, Tableau, and Rainstore. Also contributing, want to thank them. These companies are leaders, they're supporting our mission to bring in-depth coverage to you. And I want to thank them and go visit them. Cloudera and MapR in particular for this event. And of course O'Reilly Media, Integrated Media Company that's working on stuff that matters, want to thank those guys as well. Amazing company. So Dave, day two. So day one we had a world win, we had great guests, we had the new president of Hortonworks on, we had Mike Olson, the CEO of Cloudera who is leading the charge in this marketplace. And we had a lot of other big data players out here, now emerging mainstream. And the theme here is simply business value and analytics seems to be the hot topic. And it ranges under the hood in a variety of different ways, infrastructure, folks who are building technology that allows to handle the massive scale of exponential data that's hitting the scene. We talked about this in our first Hadoop World here about data factories of Avimetta who's going to be our first guest. And it's just absolutely happened, the explosion of data is happening. And there are infrastructure players building tools and technologies to handle that explosion. The second area that's being focused on here is compute power, making things faster. We heard from MapR, they're building technology, making things go faster. All that's great stuff and new techniques, real time and getting the data to be crunched faster, sliced and diced with visualization, et cetera. This is kind of what's happening in phase two. And third, the final area that we're seeing is vertical markets. Vertical markets seem to be exploding. And this is why big data is so important because vertical markets are really where the action is. And big data affects every vertical market from oil and gas, financial services, to the government, to every vertical has an impact of big data. And there are new applications hitting the scene using big data technology, techniques and insights to drive new business value. And that is what the real story is here today. It's exploding to the next level. Big data is an industry, it's growing faster, I believe, and more transformative than the PC revolution and the client server revolution in the computer industry. Combined together is happening right now. So day two, I'm going to look for some of the same themes. The platform wars, the stack integration, tools and techniques and visualization. Again, to provide analytics and insight, making the most out of the data, understanding the data and obviously producing business value. You know, John, I think that CIOs out there have a big question on their mind and they're asking themselves, is my data warehouse and my traditional BI approach and infrastructure, is it a dinosaur? And the answer is, in some respects, yes. It's going to be around for a long, long time. It might not die for decades but all the innovation is going on elsewhere. And so we're at an inflection point and CIOs have a decision to make. They can sit back and watch and see what happens and do nothing, essentially, which is a strategy. It's just, in my opinion, not a very good one. Or they can hedge their bets. They can sort of sit on the fence and that's what many people are doing and you're seeing a lot of experimentation and activity or you can go all in and start really looking at your application portfolio as an investment portfolio and starting allocating some investment funds toward the new growth areas, which of course is Hadoop and this big data world and that really is where I think you're going to see a lot of the action. Our belief is that big data practitioners, the CIOs out there that are driving this are going to create more value than the suppliers. Now of course the supplier value is going to be concentrated but the value that's created by end users actually applying technology to create business capabilities and create business value is going to dwarf the revenue created by the supplier industry, in our view. The other thing that's happening here that we're also watching is really, really important is the community of developers because what's happening is that community of developers with open source has remained and continues to grow to be the most important element of making all these solutions happen. So you're seeing 100% open source be a very big theme here in the show. Obviously Hadoop grew out of the open source movement but big data isn't just about Hadoop, it's about applying it with other techniques, there's different kinds of databases and again databases are a big part of it. And what's exciting about the Strata Hadoop World Show with respect to developers and the innovation is the entrepreneurial startup community is on fire with new savvy entrepreneurs, not young kids coming out of college but experienced entrepreneurs who are coming in and building real value. That is completely validated by the big guys, the big companies, IBM, HP and others who have shown through their positioning that they are accepting big data. We were just at the IBM Information on Demand show, their big show in their company, their biggest show in their company just earlier in the week in Vegas and IBM absolutely put an exclamation point on the fact that they are moving into the big data space and they're agnostic, they don't really care where the innovation comes from, they're going to layer on top of it and provide the big data solutions to their customer base. So this produces an interesting dynamic Dave in the ecosystem because that means that startups actually have a chance not only to leverage the big guys' sales channels and relationships but also for M&A opportunities and that really is a big deal because that produces liquidity and that produces wealth and that creates value. So to me, the startup community right now is really hot for those following reasons, massive disruption, massive market growth, also the big guys have an appetite for business deals and also M&A. So John, I'm excited to be here and this is a big data week. As you said, we were at the IBM IOD event, quite different, IOD very button down and a lot of suits, very concentrated on the IBM portfolio and here it's just this diffuse set of innovation, a lot of smaller players coming together in an ecosystem to really try to change the world. And so again, the Cube is here, there's our third year here at Hadoop World which is now called Strata plus Hadoop World. Okay, so we are going to get right into the action, we've got a long busy day, we have a lot of guests lined up, we have Amar Awadallah from Cloudera, a slew of other great guests and obviously I'll be met as coming on next. And again, I want to shout out to Cloudera and MapR for being the top sponsors. Cloudera is our headline sponsor, they are the big data platform, they rolled out a new logo, new positioning, they want the big data platform to be Cloudera, again they're 100% open source as well and sell a premium product, premium product, free and premium to enterprises for support and extra services. So Cloudera continue to lead the charge, obviously MapR, a performance based product, I want to thank them as well and DataStacks, Hortonworks, Hedat and others. So thanks for supporting us, support our sponsors because they support us and we want to support them. So you can do your part by supporting them. So we'll be right back with our first guest right after this short break. We looked at all the programs out there and identified a gap in tech news coverage. Those shows are just the tip of the iceberg and we're here for the deep dive. The market begged for a program to fill that void. We're not just touting off headlines, we also want to analyze the big picture and ask the questions that no one else is asking. We work with analysts who know the industry from the inside out. So what do you think was the source of this missing? So you mentioned briefly, if that's the case, then why does the world need another software? We're creating a fundamental change in news coverage. Laying the foundation and setting the standard. And this is just the beginning. 10 years ago, the video news business


Loss of Ilyushin IL-22M impacts Russian air and land operations. On June 24th, air defence forces of the Wagner Private Military Company reportedly shot down Russian military helicopters and an Ilyushin IL-22M Airborne Command post aircraft. The IL-22M is part of a relatively small fleet of up to 12 aircraft heavily utilised for both airborne command and control and radio relay tasks. These special mission aircraft have played a key role in orchestrating Russian forces in their war against Ukraine. As high value assets, they have operated within the safety of Russian airspace far beyond the range of Ukrainian air defence systems. According to the UK Defence Intelligence, the loss of this aircraft is likely to have a negative impact on Russian air and land operations. In the short term, the psychological shock of losing a large number of aircrew in this manner will almost certainly damage morale within the Russian airspace force. In the longer term, there is a possibility that current tasking levels may have to be reduced to safely manage the remaining fleet. This will likely undermine Russia's ability to command and coordinate its forces, particularly during periods of high tempo operations.


In describing JavaScript in Pigeon, I've occasionally mentioned how some code will trigger errors. JavaScript calls these errors exceptions. For example, using an operator on the wrong kind of operands triggers an exception. Here, multiplying a string by a boolean triggers an exception because the multiplication operator doesn't accept those types as valid operands. Normally, when an exception occurs, the program will terminate. However, exceptions triggered in a try block will be caught, allowing the program to continue executing despite the error. Here, the same multiplication of a string and boolean is in a try block, so when the exception triggers, execution skips over the rest of the try, jumping immediately to the try accompanying catch clause. The catch clause includes a single variable name in parentheses, which acts something like a function parameter. We're free to name this variable whatever we want, but I always like to call it x, short for exception. This variable is local to the catch clause, so it disappears once execution leaves the catch block. The value passed to this variable is what's called the exception object, an object with information about the exception which is generated when the exception is triggered. In the code of the catch clause, we may choose to use this exception object, or we may simply ignore it. Again, what happens here is that the multiplication operation triggers an exception, an exception object describing the error is generated, and execution jumps to the catch block where the exception object passed to its parameter. Now, the idea behind all of this is that the programmer may be able to handle, as we say, some kinds of errors. Be clear, though, that for some kinds of errors, the program really can't do anything better in their eventuality other than simply terminate. In this artificial example, the real proper thing to do is not catch this erroneous use of the multiplication operator, but rather just fix the bad code. In other cases, however, the programmer might be able to cope with the eventuality of some kinds of errors. The classic example is what might happen when the program opens a file. If a program is reading a file from a USB thumb drive, one thing beyond the program's control is whether the user might yank out the thumb drive at any moment. What the program can do, however, is catch the exception triggered when this happens, and then do something like display an alert message telling the dummy user to plug the drive back in. So, there's a reason we call them exceptions. Exceptions are the uncommon eventualities, the exceptional circumstances, which our program should account for to the best of its abilities. As already explained, erroneous uses of language features, like the built-in operators, trigger exceptions. It's also possible, though, to deliberately trigger your own custom exceptions. At certain points in your own code, your logic may be able to detect some circumstances that prevent the code from proceeding as normal. For example, a function may determine that the argument values passed to it are no good, such that the function cannot complete its normal task. In such a case, it makes sense to deliberately trigger an exception. This is done in JavaScript with a throw statement, the reserved word throw followed by the object describing the exception, the so-called exception object. Most simply, the exception object can be just a string. Here, the throw statement triggers an exception with a string as its object, and execution jumps to the catch block, passing the string to the parameter x. Again, the code in the catch may simply ignore the exception object if we so choose.  What this means is that if we have some function in which an exception is triggered but not caught, execution will jump out of the function, and the exception will propagate to where the function was called, such that the exception must be caught there, lest it propagate again. This will happen ad infinitum until the exception propagates to the top level of code, and if not caught there, the exception will terminate the program. So here, for example, if an exception is triggered and not caught in the call to foo, execution of foo will end early, and the exception will propagate to where foo was called. Because the call to foo is in a try block, the exception is caught, and execution jumps to the catch block. Here, however, where ak calls bar, and bar calls foo, when an exception in the call to foo is not caught, the exception propagates to where foo was called, and because the exception isn't caught there, it propagates to where bar was called, and because the exception isn't caught there, it propagates to where ak was called, and finally because the exception isn't caught there either at the top level of code, the exception terminates the program. So that covers the mechanics of exceptions. However, understanding when exactly you should trigger and handle exceptions is a trickier subject, part of what we broadly call error handling. Honestly though, you can avoid doing much error handling until you start writing programs of significant length. It may actually be a good while before you deal much with exceptions in your code.


Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of our Pokemon VGC 2019 Battle Series. I hope you're all well, having a great day. It is Thursday in our last episode. We made some adjustments to the team you can see on your screen in front of you right now. We introduced the Megasalaments and unfortunately we didn't actually get to feature it in our last game. So hopefully, going into today's game we'll be able to feature that. We have made some further adjustments to the team going into today's episode and all of those changes will be detailed down in the description. There's always in a poker paste and a roll paste. You guys can check that out. Take the team away, as I always say, try it out. And if you do, let me know in the comment section how you get on with it. So the adjustments that we've made, we've tweaked the EV spread of the Ultranocrosman.  It's obviously going to be faster than you and be able to take that Cheddar Ball. So now we can do that and we can still guarantee the Keona in return with the Photon Geyser and more importantly, guarantee that knockout onto a standard Taboo Finney with the Photon Geyser in psychic drain. So we've still got that play that we're able to do to remove that support option from opposing teams. And the other option was a big shout out to Salty Electabuzz here for mentioning the After You on the Clefairy. So we are a little bit prone and weak to Trick Room at the minute with this team. Clefairy is a really good option for us then. If we've got the access to the After You on that, it means we can still utilise some of our Pokemon in Trick Room and take advantage of it that way. So as I say, there are the changes. We're going to jump into today. Hopefully it's a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to bringing the Ments, which we are going to do 100% guaranteed today. So it will be a lot of fun regardless. Just to let you know as well, guys, obviously we have done a bunch of guides in the Ultra Series. So if you are getting into the Ultra Series and you would like to learn a little bit more about the format, I will link the guides up here. You can go back and check all of those out. We've covered an introduction, Primal Kyogre, Primal Gyrodon, Mega Requisite, Ultra and a Crosmat as well. And we will have more guides coming next week covering some of those Mega Pokemon. So do keep an eye out for those. As always, if you do enjoy this content, make sure to drop a like on the video. Do subscribe to the channel for more Pokemon content. And as always, leave your comments down in the comments section below because I love hearing from you all and I will get back to you all as soon as possible. Hopefully it doesn't take too long to find an opponent. We will crack some music on before I forget to. And a reminder as well that hopefully pending my Wi-Fi, we will be doing a stream tonight. Now I did try to do one on Tuesday for all of you that did turn up on Tuesday. We had a bit of a disaster. I've got some serious issues in my area at the moment with my home Wi-Fi. So it does mean that I am experiencing quite a lot of issues. The stream got cut off and we couldn't continue and then I proceeded to be on hold for 40 minutes. And then they cut me off so I was in a great mood Tuesday night after that. But hopefully if my internet is back up and running on Thursday this evening, I will be kicking off around 7pm. So do come by if you are around. It would be great to see you guys and we'll be playing Viewer Battles this evening on the stream. So as I say, the link to the Twitch channel is down in the description. Do come by if you are around normal stream schedules on a Tuesday evening, a Thursday evening 7pm and then 9.30 on a Saturday morning. So it would be great to see you guys there. Can't find an opponent so I'm going to search again but I will cut to where we can bump straight into our next opponent. So we'll be right back. And we have our first opponent of the episode. So we got Wyatt on 15.32 rating. So we'll hop straight over into Team Preview. So Wyatt is playing a team of Groudon, Tabulele, Incineroar, Salamence, Amungus and Dawnwing's Nacrosma. So we've got that Dawnwing's Nacrosma, Primal Groudon call there. You've got a similar build to what we're playing really. The only difference really is the Amungus to what we would be running as Clefairy there. So what do we do to lead I think? Tabulele is not bad honestly although at the same time. Like the Tabulele is good for the Mence. It stops the Incineroar being so threatening. And we could go Ultra Nacrosma as well. I think if we do that we want Incineroar on the back and definitely Salamence here. I think just as an alleviation against that Groudon. I am kind of tempted to bring our Clefairy here because Clefairy with the friend guard, especially if we can get Tabulele onto the field and could be quite useful with the psychic terrain up and then having the field condition of Ultra Nacrosma and Clefairy out could be extremely good. I'm just mindful that we really need the Incineroar for the Intimidate primarily for the Groudon and then something to hit that Ultra Nacrosma with. But we'll go with Salamence here because I did say we are going to bring Salamence and I do think there is utility in it. So we'll go with that and see how we get on this first one. So good luck to Wyatt. It's going to be a good one to kick us off with today. It's tough. The Mirror is always going to be a tough matchup I think in any format, in any situation. A Mirror is always kind of one of those things that you don't really want to have to deal with. We're going to lead off with the Dawnwings and the Tabulele and we'll see my opponent lead off with the Tabulele and the Salamence. So I mean we're not in a bad position at all here because we don't necessarily need to Ultra Burst this turn which is probably one of the better things for us doing with the Dawnwings at least because we'll probably see that Lele there go for a Moonblast into our Nacrosma slot. So we can just Moon guys beam into that slot and that should be enough to take the Lele down you've got to imagine and we can just go. I mean we could go for Light Screen but I think it's better if we just take advantage of the board position that we've got we can nuke the Salamence with a Moonblast which should be enough to take it down here. You're going to see the Salamence mega revolve on my opponent's side of the field so let's see what we do. We've not seen any Protect so we are going to get this Moonblast like I said should be enough to take the Salamence down and it is so we get a quick early knock out there denying any speed control from my opponent as well as a Moonblast from the Tabulele to detect and maybe that we are going to go for that Ultra Blast but not going for it in the Moon guys beam. It would be nice if we could get a quick 2KO here that would be amazing because it does mean we might get three games today as well and we do pick up the knock out there so we're in a really nice position going into the rest of this game. It would be interesting to see what comes in I imagine the Primal Groudon will be in the back because the Salamence setting that up obviously alongside the Dawnwing's Nacrosma is going to be my opponent really probably wants to go for here. But we've always got the option to bring in either one of our Intimidators I think I prefer to probably bring in Salamence over Incineroar and keep Incineroar because I feel like...  It's just if we, if they pose an Ultra Nacrosma Ultra Blasts we're going to see. So he hasn't got one of the Restricted which one has he brought? I'm going to say it's a Groudon. Yeah okay.  I mean one of the things we could potentially do here is just mega-report Ultra Burst Protect with our Ultra Nacrosma and then bring in Salamence on our Tabulele slot and then at least we've got Scarf Tabulele to come in at the very end if things go really wrong but I don't feel like they're going to go that wrong from this point in time. So we will Ultra Burst, we'll just protect here and then we will switch into our Salamence get that Intimidate off and we'll be able to feature mega-salamence for the first time on the channel in the Ultra Series which is very exciting and we're finally able to do. I love mega-salamence as well. It is one of my favourite mega's and I'm surprised, well I'm not surprised. It's the core we're playing. It's just taking so long for us to feature it but finally we are here and I'm sure as we get a bit further into the Ultra Series and delve a little bit deeper into team archetypes and things we'll see a lot more from mega-salamence. It's utility in the format is amazing. Well there we go. We're just going to Ultra Burst there. We'll just get the protector. We are going to see the sword stance from the ground on and a snarl come out from this Incinero. Okay, that's fine. We do have access to Azimuth now that we could potentially go for. I just feel like the ground on protects here and that's why I don't really want Azimuth. I kind of would prefer to go. No, we're not going to Azimuth. We're going to just go Earth Power into the Incinero. Remove that and we'll mega-evolve with salamence and go double-edged and that should be enough to get the Incinero because we're not intimidated so a double-edged should be doing a lot of damage. Salamence will go after our Ultra Necrosma so we'll get the Earth Power first and as I suspect I reckon the ground on protects here. Yeah, trying to get a snarl off on us so we are able to detect that and we should be able to make hasty work of this Incinero. Yeah, it's definitely in range for a double-edged now. Here we go. Boom, boom. There we go. So that seals up the game for us because next to it we can just Z-Move, Ultra Burst, Z-Move, whatever we're calling it, Light that burns this guy and that will be more than enough. I mean, we don't even need to do it just to save editing, obviously. We'll just Earth Power and Hyper Voice and that'll be enough to get the ground on. Bye. A long way, so there's the Earth Power. Might even be enough to get it. No. Ooh, Hyper Voice Single Target. It's going to be close but I mean we're not in any trouble. Are we just getting the 4-0? We're going to miss out. Fire Punch, where's it going into salamence? Yeah, there we go. Salamence, take this though because it's just a beast. There we go. And the Crosma are going to get all the glory. We could have went for the Z-Move. It would have been over in a turn quicker but it's fine. It's fine. It's all right. We're going to maybe be able to get a few games into there because of that one being so quick. So very good game to wire. I think just showing how oppressive that lead of Tapulele, Skaft and then the Ultra and the Crosma is and having that option as well not to Ultra Burst straight away to kind of take advantage of situations like that but taking an early lead like that in any game is always going to be pretty one sided losing two Pokemon early on especially turn one. It's pretty hard to come back from. And it is early days in the format so you can't really be too judgmental on players at this point. They're still learning the format and learning what things do. So very good game to kick us off with either way and we got to see salamence which is always a lot of fun. So we'll hop into our next game. Hopefully it doesn't take too long. Again if it does I will I'll just cut to it and we'll come straight back when I bump into another opponent. So we have our second opponent of the episode. It's going to be Tommy from Italy. I don't know what music we've clicked in on. I've been cycling the search function now for the last 25 minutes no joke but we'll get into team preview. I can complain about that in a little bit. So for our second team today we're going up against Tommy. We're playing a core of a Rayquaza, Tapu Fene, Zernius, Incineroar, Landeras Theorian and Tapu Coco. So an interesting x-ray build here. We've got the combination of the Rayquaza and obviously the Zernius combination that you're going to see in this format and then you've got the Tapu Lele there. We've got the Incineroar there for the fake out support, the Intimidate support alongside that Landeras. It's going to offer that as well. There's very little speed control outside of maybe icy wind. My opponent's team from that Tapu Lele. So that's quite positive for us going forward. I think one of the things that we need to be a little bit careful of obviously is that Zernius here leading out for my opponent and one of the things that I probably want to do is lead across Matt. I think we will bring Incineroar just because the Intimidate is going to be useful against the opponent Incineroar, Landeras and that Rayquaza. I will bring Tapu Lele because it's a nice switch in and we can try and make that play in turn one with Azimov. Depending on whether or not the Incineroar comes out on the field as well for my opponent and I think it could bring Clefairy Salamence, but I think we're going to bring Zernius here and go straight into this next one. So good luck to Tommy all there and he's come all gear. Yeah, literally I've been sitting searching no opponent, no opponent, no opponent for 25 minutes, literally 25 minutes I can see. It's crazy. Where is everyone? You would think the Ultra Series is going mad hype at the minute but maybe it's my internet at home because I have been having issues as I said earlier so maybe that is one of the issues that we're looking at but who knows. Right, we are going to see the Zernius and the Tapu Fini come up for my opponent. I think what we'll do here is we'll just fake out do we fake out and maybe, like I'm going to make a play that doesn't really make so much sense so I'm going to Ultra Burst and just protect and go for the fake out into the Zernius here because one of the things I could see is happening if we don't protect here and we fake out it's obviously giving that tapu finny womb to get an icy wind off and then it would kind of scupper our little plan about nuking either the Zernius or the tapu finny the next turn so we will just protect and we'll see there's a protect on the Zernius so we know the next turn it cannot protect so it either is forced out into the Incinerole so they've got to know like my opponent has got to know the play that we could make this next turn is definitely bring that tapu lele and go for the Z move into the Zernius and I don't know whether they try and like this I'm conflicted here because I kind of want to go into the finny where I know it's a guaranteed knockout onto that slot but at the same time I know it's risky and we could definitely fall into the trap we could definitely fall into that trap but I do want to go for the Z move into the Zernius but I don't know if it's too obvious and bring in tapu lele let's see we're not going to see the Zernius switch out it would have switched out before the Incinerole so we are going to be able to remove the Zernius from the field now which is huge for us because we get the psychic terrain up we probably will take an icy wind in the process but that's fine it does mean we've got our Zernius Incinerole on the back now for if that requiser comes in we can cycle the Intimidate onto it we'll have to adjust a little bit our board position as well because we will be threatened by that requiser obviously it's the one thing that we need to do we're a little bit weak to that at the moment and it was identified in yesterday's episode we've made these changes but we've got to be very careful around Zernius we don't really have a solid answer to it within the team and I think going into tomorrow's episode one of the things we will do is have a look at that option and maybe change some things up to have a little bit more variation with the team and just have a look a little tweak on what we're actually playing at the minute one of the things I find difficult although we've got the Salamence in there and I do think it's got a lot of utility but it's one of those Pokemon I feel conflicted to bring all the time so the Mega Slot is something that I do feel like we could really look at and work on maybe Mega Lawpony or something else along the lines but I'll keep it a secret and we'll reveal it tomorrow so don't miss out tomorrow's episode so we do avoid the IC win from that type of thing there we've got the Incineroar now coming onto the field it is going to cause us a little bit of pressure but it can't fake out I think what we'll do is just be a bit safe I don't want Z move coming into my new crossbow slot so we'll switch that out there and do we attack with Tapilele? I don't feel like a light screen is really warranted right now and I think one of the things we could potentially do is bring in Zernius now and we could take the opportunity to go for a Geomancy have to be careful always in front of Incineroar and Tapifini when you do Geomancy and the Tapifini here is likely normally on these sort of builds they do carry Haze so that's something just to keep in mind for everyone at home when you're playing against these extra teams Tapifini normally does have the Haze there so keep that in mind if you have got your own Zernius and you're in a position to go for the Geomancy but I'm not going to see an IC win this turn just a natus madness into Incineroar and a snarl the memories of yesterday are coming back, flooding back we can't obviously um fake out here but we can you turn out onto the Incineroar um do we Geomancy anyway I don't really want to waste the Geomancy to be honest I'm just gonna protect Zernius so the Rayquaza is definitely in the back but I think my opponents here they're going for it trying to scout that out gets rid of the snarl reduction for us though which is really nice so we will be able to pivot out on the Incineroar keep Incineroar in the back because like I say with that Rayquaza probably looming in the back it's always going to be something that we want to try and keep safe for as long as possible until that Rayquaza does make an appearance we're bringing the Tapilele back in and we've got an easy switch out this next turn or you can just bring in Incineroar once again and we'll see if this type of thingy goes for another Haze I think we'll do this next turn because the Psychic Trun's got one more turn no two more turns left ok ok we could just start we could just start getting some damage on to the Incineroar go Moonblast and Dazzling Gleam get some damage on to the Finny I expect another Haze here from the Finny and as long as it's doing that I don't really mind yeah I'm just getting some damage on to the Incineroar it's going to be useful maybe this procs a berry but then at least the berry has been procked no berry procking so it must be a Z move Incineroar there's a nice wind coming out from the Tabu Finny what are we going to see from the Incineroar just another snarl ok that's fine that's fine fine because now what we'll do is switch in Incineroar we'll protect Zonius so we've got that Faker going into the next turn I mean we could quite easily just get rid of the Incineroar here it's maybe not a bad idea to be honest and just go for that Moonblast into that slot and we take away the I think one of the things that we took from yesterday's episode was giving the Incineroar too much room with that snarl just completely denied us any ability to utilize our GMMC and we don't want that happening again so we've got an opportunity here to take it down if it switches out into the Requizer then you're not really going to want to do that so it's likely that we get the Incineroar here and if they do switch it out for whatever reason then I'm totally happy with that because we can deal with that can't we but we are going to see just a nature's madness into the Zonius here take us down to about 50% health and we'll be able to remove that Incineroar quite comfortably from the field paving the way for the last Pokemon from my opponent's side of the field to come in the Psychic Train does disappear and that's the other thing that we've got the advantage of now of the Tapulele in the back we can fake out the Requizer this turn we can GMMC here we've got to be a bit careful around the Tapufini hazing us though which is one of those things but I do think we could go for it because the Tapufini is actually probably a lot faster than us right now after the icy wind drop and if it is then it means it hazes before GMMC which is ideal for us the Requizer is going to mega evolve we're going to see this kick into action and bring that horrible Delta Stream animation to the field, hopefully we can get rid of that ESA because I just hate it it looks awful does it protect, makes sense you want to preserve your sash fake out, finny, finny niche is madness it's fine get the GMMC now the problem is here it's not so much of a problem because I'm not going to call it a problem but the ray is definitely sashed and we're in extreme speed range so one of the things we want to do here is just make sure that we bring the Lele in so we don't get sniped by the extreme speed but my opponent's obviously going to be aware of that so the smarter choice here for me would be to Dragon Ascent with the Requizer you can get rid of the Zernius by doing that you're losing so much resource with what you've got left and we're opening the door again to keep Incineroar on the back to get that Intimidate so it's always very useful to kind of just keep these things in mind and be very mindful of the options that you've got left and what the options that your opponent's got left not too worried about the finny now it's got the icy wind, it's got the niche is madness they do go for the extreme speed so it gives us a little bit of room here we're probably going to see some more from the Tape of Finny but at this point it doesn't really matter too much because the Tape of Lele being scarfed coming in ooo he'll pulse nice nice nice but not going to be enough unfortunately to to allow that Rayquaza room to survive here so I think what we will do is go for a Sire Shock into the Tape of Finny and we'll just go for a Moon Blast I mean we could, yeah we'll go for a Moon Blast into the Rayquaza, Sire Shock will be enough to get the Finny, Moon Blast there's a Protector, we're going to probably see here's our icy wind here trying to get an advantage that way but fortunately the Sire Shock and the Psychic turn is going to be enough to get the Finny and then the Ray is just left by itself so we should be able to take another win in today's one which is excellent news for us my friends and although we've not really got to feature the Salamence very much like I say one of the things at least we got to feature which is really nice but we have a bunch of time left in the Ultra series so we're going to be playing a lot of cores that are going to be more centered around that Salamence where we'll be able to have a real good run with them and we see this disconnect from my opponent right at the death of things which is a little bit unfortunate and oh well you know it's one of those things but I tell you what guys because it has dried over it feels like it's went over a little bit longer we're going to cut things short there but I will guarantee to you we're going to have a really interesting build to finish up with this Ultranocross Miserneus team tomorrow so we're going to spice things up do not miss tomorrow's episode it's going to be a lot of fun and make sure you remember that we have a poll at the minute on the YouTube channel asking what core you'd like to see most of all going into next week's episode where we'll be revealing a brand new team to take into the Ultra series it's going to be a lot of fun thank you so much for tuning in though guys it's been a pleasure as always I hope you've enjoyed today's episode and I will see you all for another one very soon so until then take care and bye bye