Communication, Negotiation, and Capitulation

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I just finished Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators. The book teaches a set of techniques for understanding people — listening so they feel heard, matching their conversational mode, building enough trust that real exchange becomes possible. The techniques are real and they work.

What’s missing from the book — and from most communication writing — is a clear picture of what happens when the same techniques get used for different purposes. Because they do, all the time, and the techniques themselves give you no way to tell the difference.

That’s the thing I want to talk about.

Three Modes

There’s a continuum running through almost every important conversation we have:

Communication is when both parties are trying to understand each other. The goal is shared ground. Even when interests differ, the orientation is mutual.

Negotiation is when there’s an outcome being sought, and both parties know it. A salesperson and a customer. Two business partners. A couple deciding where to vacation. The outcome matters, the interests may diverge, but the rules of the game are visible to everyone in the room.

Capitulation is when one party knows the stakes more clearly than the other and uses the asymmetry to move them somewhere they wouldn’t have chosen with full information. The other party doesn’t realize they’re being moved. By the time they figure it out, the conversation is over and they’ve already agreed to something.

The techniques that produce each of these are largely the same. Listening. Reflecting back. Naming emotions. Looking for common values. The variable isn’t the technique. The variable is what you’re trying to do with it.

Intent Is the Variable

Reading someone well is a neutral skill. It can be used to honor them or to operate on them. Two people can run identical techniques and produce opposite ethical outcomes depending on what they’re actually trying to accomplish.

I don’t have a problem with salespeople. If someone has a product they genuinely believe will make my life better, I want them to sell to me. The techniques they use to understand my situation, find what I actually need, and propose a solution are exactly the same techniques a friend might use to recommend a restaurant. The difference isn’t the moves. It’s whether the person across from me is here to enrich my experience or here to take from it.

The hard part is that intent is invisible. You can’t reach across a table and verify what someone is actually trying to do. So how does anyone know?

The most reliable answer is pattern over time. People who’ve been around me long enough have watched me handle situations where I had something to gain and chose not to take it. They’ve seen me update my position when I realized I was wrong. They know what I’ve stood by when it cost me. That track record speaks louder than any single conversation. Intent reveals itself through pattern, and over a long enough timeframe, it can’t really hide.

The Honest Middle

Most real conversations don’t have pure intent. They have mixed intent. You want to help someone and you want them to do what you think is right and you’d prefer the outcome that benefits you. All at once. That’s not a flaw. That’s how human cognition actually works.

Marriage is where I see this most clearly in my own life. After twenty-seven years, I know my intentions toward my wife are fundamentally good. But on a given Tuesday, when I’m pushing for us to go out to dinner, am I doing it because she’s tired and needs a break, or because I’m lazy and don’t feel like cooking? Most of the time it’s both. The discipline isn’t to pretend the selfish part isn’t there. The discipline is to recognize both parts are present and ask which one is driving the conversation.

The same thing happens at work. The same thing happens in friendships. Pure intent is rare. Mixed intent is the human condition. The question isn’t whether you’re free of self-interest. The question is whether you can see it when it’s there and not let it run the show.

Knowing You’re Wrong

There’s a moment in some conversations where I realize, mid-sentence, that I’ve been arguing for the wrong thing. I think out loud, which means sometimes the act of articulating a position is what reveals to me that I no longer hold it. The honest move is to stop and say so. Wait. Hold on. I just realized I’m not thinking about this right. Forgive me — let me back up.

The reader will ask: how do you know whether someone is genuinely updating or just capitulating to pressure? From outside, both look like changing your mind.

There’s a tell. The genuine update has energy. It looks like discovery — oh, I just saw something I hadn’t seen. It’s an aha moment. The capitulation has the opposite shape. It looks like resignation. The person isn’t surprised by what they’re now saying. They’re tired of defending what they were saying before.

It’s not an aha moment. It’s an oh-crap moment.

The two are visibly different if you’re paying attention. Genuine updates make a person more present in the conversation. Capitulation withdraws them.

The Test

Communication is for connection. Negotiation is for honest exchange. Capitulation is what happens when one of us has decided where the conversation ends before it began, and we don’t tell the other person.

The first two are good. The third one corrupts everything it touches — relationships, businesses, marriages, the public square. Most of what passes for “influence” or “persuasion technique” online right now is teaching people to operate on each other while calling it communication.

The techniques aren’t the problem. The intent behind them is.

The test I run on myself is one question: Am I here to enrich the experience of the person across from me, or am I here to take?

If I can’t answer that honestly, I shouldn’t be in the conversation yet.

AI: Abdication or Augmentation

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday a 22-year-old developer named Austin Kennedy posted something on X that has been viewed over a million times.

“I’m 22 years old and Claude Code is deteriorating my brain. Every single day for the last 6 months I’ve had 6 to 8 Claude Code terminals open, waiting for a response just so I can hit ‘enter’ 75% of the time. And it’s doing something to me… None of us feel as sharp as we used to.”

The replies are predictable. Some people are smug. Some are sympathetic. The standard framing showed up almost immediately: the tools are amazing, but how you use them entails a trade-off with how you use your brain. Never forget there’s a trade-off there.

The trade-off framing isn’t wrong. It’s incomplete.

The framing assumes that AI use necessarily costs cognitive function and the only question is how much. That’s not the whole picture. Two people can have eight terminals open and have completely different cognitive outcomes. The question isn’t how much you use AI. The question is what role you’re letting it play.

There are two modes, and they produce opposite results.

Abdication

Abdication mode is the mode Austin is describing. AI does the thinking. You do the executing. You ask, it answers, you accept, you ship. Hit enter. Hit enter. Hit enter.

Brain softens because you’ve outsourced the part of cognition that builds neural pathways — the wrestling, the articulating, the testing-against-reality. Six to eight terminals running in abdication mode for six months will absolutely deteriorate your sharpness. Austin isn’t wrong about what’s happening to him. He’s just misdiagnosing what caused it.

I’ve been there. Earlier this year I was running editorial passes on one of my novels. I’d run a chapter through Claude, hit enter, glance at the output, hit enter on the next chapter. I told myself I was doing light edits. After two or three chapters I went back and read what had actually shipped, and the AI hadn’t just edited my prose — it had quietly changed what my protagonist was doing. Connection points I’d built in earlier chapters were gone. The story was drifting and I hadn’t noticed because I hadn’t been reading. I’d been hitting enter.

That was my wake-up call. Everything I generate, I have to review. Not just the words. The reasoning. The intention I gave it versus what came back. The places where it made decisions I didn’t authorize.

Abdication doesn’t announce itself. You slide into it.

Augmentation

Augmentation mode is the opposite shape. You are the thinker. AI is the amplifier. You bring a thought. AI sharpens it. You push back. You refine your own articulation against a partner that won’t let vague thinking pass.

The brain doesn’t soften here — it strengthens. You’re now articulating more precisely, more often, against a more demanding interlocutor than most humans you encounter daily. The reps build the muscle, not atrophy it.

The catch is that augmentation requires something to amplify. You can’t sharpen what isn’t there. Cal Newport has written extensively about the cognitive infrastructure people built before AI existed — the deep reading, the long-form thinking, the deliberate practice that produced minds capable of holding complex problems at length. Augmentation works because that infrastructure is there to amplify.

Most people running AI tools today are skipping the step where the infrastructure gets built. They’re trying to amplify thinking they never trained. The tool can’t strengthen what isn’t there.

C.S. Lewis wrote something in the preface to The Great Divorce that I keep coming back to:

“I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”

You don’t undo a wrong math problem by working the problem harder. You go back to the step where the error entered and start again from there.

The same is true here. You don’t recover from six months of abdication by doing more AI work better. You go back to the step where you stopped engaging — wherever that is for you — and you rebuild the engagement. Then the AI can resume amplifying instead of replacing.

What I’d Say to Austin

He’s not in the trouble he thinks he’s in.

He felt something was wrong. He named it. He went on record in front of more than a million people and said his brain was getting softer and he thought the tool was doing it. That admission is the entire game. Most people sliding into abdication don’t notice. Or they notice and they make excuses. He didn’t.

I don’t know the specifics of his work. Six to eight parallel terminals could be a workflow where most prompts are routine approvals and a smaller share require real engagement — that’s a different scenario than rote abdication. Only he knows which it is.

But that 75% number is worth sitting with. Hitting enter most of the time without engaging is where abdication lives, regardless of how anyone arrived there. If most of what’s coming back from the tool isn’t getting read for reasoning — only for output — the cognitive workout has stopped happening. That’s the muscle that softens.

If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t tell myself to use AI less. I would make sure my understanding was rock solid and that the enter button never got hit unless I knew exactly what was being executed.

That’s the whole discipline, compressed. Know what you’re trying to build before you start. Know what each prompt is asking the tool to do. Read the reasoning before you accept the output. Don’t approve what you didn’t understand.

If he can hold that line, the eight terminals aren’t the problem. They’re a workflow. If he can’t hold that line, the terminals aren’t the problem either — the engagement is, and that’s the thing to rebuild.

Either way, the diagnostic isn’t am I using AI too much. It’s am I still doing the thinking.

The tool isn’t the problem. The relationship to the tool is the problem.

He realized something was off in six months. He’s going to be fine.

He just has to walk back to where he went wrong, and start again from there.

The Song That Outgrew the Woman I Wrote It For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It must have been 2013. We were at our Toastmasters club, and our mentor — a woman who had been in the organization a long time, the kind of presence who leads by example without announcing she’s leading — stood up to give a speech.

She titled it Watch Me.

I don’t remember every word. I remember the vulnerability. She had come through a relationship where the man she’d been with told her she wouldn’t make it without him. Then he left anyway. The contradiction was the part she wanted us to hear — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell someone they’re nothing without you and then walk out the door. But she had walked through it. She was standing at the lectern as proof. The title wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Watch me.

I sat in that audience and felt two things at the same time.

The first was admiration. Her pain was real and she wasn’t hiding it, but the speech wasn’t a confession. It was a war cry dressed in survival clothes.

The second was anger.

I am married to a woman I have loved for twenty-seven years. I have spent every one of those years trying to be the kind of husband who does the opposite of what had been done to the woman at the lectern. The thought of telling my wife she couldn’t make it without me — and then leaving — is unimaginable to me. Not because I’m a perfect husband. Because love doesn’t do that. Love doesn’t do that.

I wrote a song after her speech. I called it Watch Me, after her title. It was her voice — a survivor speaking back to the man who had left her. Watch me, as I get over you. Watch me, as I do something new. I played it for her. She appreciated it.

I was proud of it then. I’m still proud of it now — because the thirty-five-year-old who wrote it was doing the work he could do at thirty-five. He heard a story that mattered. He gave her a song.

Thirteen years is a long time. And songs that get written for one person sometimes outgrow the moment they were written for.

What I Wrote This Week

I was going through old material looking for things I could rebuild with Suno, the AI music tool I’ve been using to arrange songs I’ve written over the years. Watch Me came up in the queue. I listened to the AI’s first pass at the original lyrics, and the words felt thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like the song was reaching for something it didn’t yet have the vocabulary to say.

I cracked it open. And what came out wasn’t a polish of the original. It was a different song.

The protagonist changed. The 2013 version was her. The 2026 version is a man — working class, pre-dawn shifts, a chain around his neck made of lies he used to believe. A bridge that prays through the worst of it and finds Someone bigger walking the rest of the road with him.

The song was no longer hers. But it was hers underneath.

What Her Courage Seeded

There’s a kind of empathy that almost nobody talks about. Most writing about empathy makes it sound gentle — sitting with someone’s pain, holding space, listening well. All of that matters. But there’s another kind of empathy, and it’s the one that made me write Watch Me in the first place.

It’s not gentle. It’s a cry for justice. It’s a sound that leads the charge.

When that mentor stood at the lectern and told us what had been done to her, the empathy I felt wasn’t quiet. It was furious on her behalf. I can’t believe a man did this to her. Love doesn’t do that. The anger didn’t belong to me — I hadn’t earned the right to it the way she had — but it could be channeled. Into a song. Into something I could give her.

That was 2013. The 2026 version is what happened when that anger sat in me for thirteen years and grew up. It stopped being a gift to her — she didn’t need it anymore — and became something that could reach somebody else. Some recovering man, somewhere, who needed a sound to use. The same fury, looking for somewhere new to go.

That’s what her courage seeded in me. Not just her song. The capacity to write somebody else’s.

What Songwriters Owe

Songwriters and novelists do this all the time. We inhabit experiences we haven’t had. Phase Defiant is a man writing a woman’s story. Watch Me started as a husband writing a survivor’s voice and ended as a husband writing a recovering man’s voice. Neither of which is mine.

The danger is obvious. You can get the experience wrong. You can flatten it. You can use someone else’s pain as a costume for your own performance. Every writer who picks up a story that isn’t theirs has to wrestle with whether they have any business carrying it.

I think the answer comes down to this: if you can’t be furious on the person’s behalf, you don’t have any business writing their story. If you can’t channel the anger that the situation actually deserves, you’ll write a polite version that doesn’t honor what they lived through.

The empathy without the fury produces something that sounds like a Hallmark card. The fury without the empathy produces something exploitative. You need both. And you don’t always know which one you’re holding until afterward.

I wrote the original Watch Me because I was angry for her. I wrote the new one because that anger had matured into something that could reach further than her one voice ever could.

The 2013 version ended with you are never going to put me down again. The 2026 version ends differently. The man in the rewrite isn’t talking to anybody anymore. He’s walking. Someone bigger than the lies you told, walkin’ with me down the rest of my road.

The defiance is still there. Underneath it now is something the younger me didn’t yet know how to write.

Survival doesn’t end with proving the other person wrong. It ends with not having to prove anything to them anymore. It ends with the road becoming yours again — even when you started somebody else’s story to find your way back to it.

That’s what her speech taught me. It just took me thirteen years to write it down properly.

Watch me.

What the Scale Wasn’t Telling Me

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

For about six weeks, the scale stopped moving.

I’d been showing up every day. At least thirty minutes of exercise on regular days, an hour or more on 7-40 Challenge days. I’ve gone through two pairs of running shoes this year — the kind that are supposed to last four to five hundred miles each. Both pairs are blown out. I’ve been doing the work.

The scale didn’t care.

I started the year at 289 pounds. I’d dropped to 273 a few weeks ago. Then I added back muscle and the number on the scale crept up to 276. Anyone watching the scale alone would have said I’d plateaued — or worse, regressed. So I stepped onto the Hume Pod scanner this week to find out what was actually happening underneath.

The scan goes back to June 2025. That’s when I got the device. That’s the real baseline.

In June 2025, I weighed 299.6 pounds.

This week, I weighed 276.2.

Twenty-four pounds in ten months. Roughly two and a half pounds a month. Not biggest-loser numbers. But I’m not doing biggest-loser things, which I happen to think are harmful for the body. The math works. The program is working. The scale just couldn’t see all of it.

What the Scale Couldn’t See

In June, my body fat was 31.6 percent. For a guy four ounces short of three hundred pounds, that’s essentially a hundred pounds of fat I was carrying around. This week the scan put me at 21.7 percent.

Here’s the part the scale was hiding. While I was losing fat, I was also gaining muscle. Fat mass dropped from 94.6 pounds to 59.9 — almost thirty-five pounds gone. Skeletal muscle went up nearly ten pounds.

That’s why the scale stopped moving. Fat was leaving. Muscle was arriving. The two were trading places, pound for pound, and the scale couldn’t tell the difference.

The visceral fat index — the dangerous fat around your organs — went from 20 to 13. My heart rate during the weigh-in dropped from 104 to 85.

And the metabolic age. The Hume Pod’s algorithm puts your body’s functional age against your actual age. In June it told me I had the metabolic age of a fifty-five-year-old. I’m forty-seven. That number frustrated me when I saw it.

This week the same scanner put me at thirty-five.

I’m walking around in a body that’s functioning twelve years younger than my driver’s license says.

The Honest Part

I have to tell the truth about something.

In Round 1 of this challenge, I was rigorous about calorie tracking. Every gram. Every meal. No drift. Round 3, I’ve loosened up a little. I’m still eating responsibly. I’m still inside the range I know works. But I’ve been less precise than I was four months ago.

If I’d held the same standard I held in January, that scan number might be a little lower. Some of the recomposition would have been more weight loss instead.

I’m not going to pretend I executed perfectly and the data is the result. The data is the result of a system that absorbed some slack and still produced a result. That’s a different thing to learn from.

The lesson isn’t be perfect or it doesn’t work. The lesson is the foundation is more forgiving than perfectionism wants you to believe — but it has to be a real foundation. Daily exercise. Honest food, even when it’s not measured down to the gram. Hydration. Sleep. Showing up. The system can metabolize a few weeks of looser tracking. It cannot metabolize quitting.

What If You Don’t Have a Hume Pod

Most people don’t.

You don’t need one. The Hume Pod is useful because it shows you the layer underneath the scale, but the layer underneath the scale was always there. You just have to learn to read other signals.

The mirror is honest if you let it be. I took a photo of myself the first week of January that I didn’t like — bloated, soft, uncomfortable in my own skin. I looked in the mirror this morning and I could see my abdominal muscles. That’s not a Hume Pod measurement. That’s a bathroom in my house.

My belt notch moved. My pants size dropped. My son got me into a six-week ab challenge in March, and my core feels different now than it did then. None of that required a scanner.

Use what you have. Trust what you can verify with your eyes and a tape measure.

Lead vs. Lag

In data work, we talk about lead indicators and lag indicators. Lead indicators predict outcomes — calories in, exercise minutes, hours slept, reps completed. Lag indicators report results — body weight, body fat percentage, what the scale says on Tuesday morning. Lead indicators are what you can do something about today. Lag indicators are what shows up later, after the leading work has accumulated.

The trap is that the lag indicator feels like the real thing. It has a number. It’s on a screen. It seems precise. So we obsess over it and ignore the leading metrics that actually drive it. And when the lag indicator stops moving, we conclude the work isn’t working.

The scale is a lag indicator. The work is the lead indicator.

I still weigh 276 pounds. My knees still hurt. My back still hurts. I’m not in the shape I want to be in. I’m still experimenting on myself. But this isn’t look at how good I’m doing. It’s look at this guy who almost weighed three hundred pounds — if he can do this stuff, why can’t you?

The data didn’t surprise me because I worked harder than anyone else.

It surprised me because the scale by itself was lying about what kind of work I’d done.

Drive-Through Talking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It had to have been the early 2000s. My bride and I were sitting in a church auditorium listening to Kevin Leman speak, and the phrase he kept using made me chuckle every time I heard it: drive-through talking. I kept mistakenly calling it drive-by talking in my head — which, as I’d later realize, is an entirely different communication style and not one anybody recommends.

But the drive-through? That one I knew well.

In my younger years, my wife and I ate out constantly. There was a Taco Bell just down the street, and we learned a small but important truth at that pickup window: when the kid on the headset repeated our order back to us, we got what we ordered. When they didn’t repeat it back, the odds of getting something we hadn’t asked for went way up.

Marriage works the same way. The window is just invisible, and the cost of getting the order wrong is much higher.

The Technique

When your spouse is talking and you’re listening, act like you’re at the drive-through window. Repeat the order back. Make sure they know you actually heard the words they said — not the version your brain rewrote on the way in.

We’ve been doing this for over twenty years. It usually sounds something like, “Hold on — I think this is what you’re saying. Do I have it right?”

Over time, four phrases have done most of the heavy lifting:

  • Can you repeat that, please?
  • Do I have this right?
  • Is this what you said?
  • Help me understand.

That last one is the one I have to be careful with.

“Help Me Understand”

When I say it, I mean it the way it’s supposed to be meant: I’m being dense, I’m missing context, I need more from you so I can actually track what you’re telling me. It’s me admitting I’m the bottleneck.

That phrase has a problem. It can land as “you’re being too vague — explain it better,” which puts the work back on the person already doing the talking. Same words. Different posture. Completely different effect.

I’ve had to work at making sure my tone matches my intent on that one.

What the Research Says

Charles Duhigg points to research on couples who argued differently — specifically, on what separated couples who stayed together from couples who fell apart, based on how they fought.

The pattern is uncomfortable in its simplicity. Couples who focused on controlling the other person tended to end up divorced. Couples who focused on self-control — managing their own reactions, taking responsibility for their own part — tended to end up still married, and happier in the marriage they were still in.

That’s not abstract to me. It’s been my goal for twenty-seven years — to be the husband who’s regulating himself, not the one trying to manage her. Drive-through talking is what that goal looks like in practice. You’re not trying to win the conversation. You’re not trying to control where it goes. You’re regulating yourself long enough to clarify, repeat, and confirm — so that the other person actually feels heard.

I also use this with my son, too. Testosterone gets in the way more often than I’d like to admit, on both sides of those conversations. But the same courtesy I extend to a stranger at a checkout counter is the courtesy I want to extend to him — and even more to him and to my wife than to anyone else.

He and his mother shouldn’t get the worst version of how I communicate just because they’re the most familiar.

The Pushback

Someone might tell me their marriage is fine without all this work. That they don’t need techniques. That things are good.

I’d push back. “Fine” is an invitation. Just because something is good doesn’t mean we stop trying to make it better. Just because things work okay right now doesn’t mean they can’t fail later. The roof you don’t maintain is the roof that fails in the storm — not on the sunny day you decided it was fine.

I’ve never wanted to be over-prescriptive about this. I’m not a counselor. I’m a husband who’s been married a long time and has paid attention. My belief is this: because we’re friends, because we have the mutual aim of respecting each other, taking care of each other, honoring the vows we made — we can work through things. Not because the technique is magic. Because we love each other, and we choose to be married to each other, every day.

The drive-through window just helps us hear each other while we’re choosing.