Getting what you want: A guide to negotiating

March 6, 2026·50 min·4 clips

How a gold dog necklace ended a stalled discrimination lawsuit in 15 minutes.

The advice lands bluntly: shut up. Alex Carter treats silence as a negotiating tool, not a poker-face act. In her example, three and a half seconds matters. After a question or proposal, that little pause gives the other person room to offer a high-value move. Carter calls it landing the plane. The point is simple: stop filling the room before the proposal has had a chance to work. Manoush names the anxiety underneath it. People hear that the job market is tough, the economy is volatile, and asking for more could make them seem ungrateful. Carter has heard that before. She points back to 2020, when the pandemic was raging across the U.S. and people felt they could not negotiate. Hiring managers were saying something else. Carter says many had room in the budget, sometimes at least 10 percent and sometimes 20 percent or more. People often were not asking. Her larger point is that companies expect negotiation, and self-advocacy can show how someone might negotiate for them. That changes the stakes. A negotiation is about terms, but it can also show the culture on the other side. Carter gives a plain warning sign: if a company acts shocked or appalled when someone advocates from solid information, she reads that as a red flag. Manoush tests the movie version, and the conversation moves negotiation away from performance and toward calm, informed collaboration.

As heard by us

A Columbia Law professor argues that silence and preparation often beat the poker face.

Negotiation, in this episode, is less about being a natural closer than about learning a few repeatable moves. Alex Carter, a professor at Columbia Law School, talks Manoush Zomorodi through one of the simplest: make the proposal, then stop talking.

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Why you'd press play

Everything you think you know about negotiating -- poker face, no flinching, never showing your cards -- gets gently taken apart here.

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