Does the talk provide any evidence for the efficacy of the tactics?
The speaker has a whole career of experience dealing with people who are irrational because they're drunk, angry, frightened, or some combination of the above. He says this stuff is what he does, and that it works great. That's anecdotal, but it's about the strongest kind of anecdotal evidence it's possible to get.
It would be nice if someone did a properly controlled study on this.
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