ders from whoever sent them: don't give up anything. Of course Putin told his team, all right if you have to give this up? No he didn't. He said don't give anything up. And what did Trump tell his team? Okay if you have to you can back off on this? No he didn't say that. He said you can't give them anything. You tell them what you want and that's it. And then you see if he can get it.

Now how in the world is that going to work? Underlings cannot negotiate because the underlings can't make the tough decisions. That's why they're the underlings. So what you're trying to do is exhaust each other. You want to reach the point of, oh this is actually impossible. It looks like it's forever war. Oh God, you know we really really wanted this to end but it doesn't look like there's any path. There's just no way we can get there. And then Trump calls Putin and Trump and Putin say all right, here's the deal. We're not going to get anywhere unless we both give up a little something. Here's what I need you to give up. Maybe he says what he needs you to give up and then they make a deal.

But you have to exhaust everybody and make it look impossible before the real people come in and make a deal. Now what the negotiators could do, and maybe this is useful, they could find out maybe what's completely off the table. And maybe they can't even find that out but they might at least raise some new ideas. Maybe something comes up that nobody said before. So Trump and Putin will both be a little bit better informed about what looks practical and possible by the time they talk. But nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going to happen until the two of them talk. That's the only negotiating. Everything else is theater and exhaustion and what I call softening the room.

So softening the room is a negotiating tactic. This is, I used to write about this when I was in the corporate world. Go into a meeting and everybody's got an idea about what it is we should do and the ideas are not that good and they argue and they argue and they argue. If I had a better idea in my own opinion I'd wait until the last 10 minutes that we have the room scheduled for. And then after everybody's so frustrated that they can't get anything done, that's when I dropped my idea. Go, you know you could do this. And everybody's so exhausted and they don't want to talk about it anymore. They just want to be done in 10 minutes. They've got some other meeting to go to. And everybody will look at me and say, well that might work. The number of times I did that, the last 10 minute st