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Chris Voss - Mastering The Art Of Negotiation

18,449 views •

July 23, 2018

Never Split the Difference

“Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better.”

In short: Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage negotiator, founder of The Black Swan Group and co-author of Never Split the Difference, and in this 2018 London Real conversation he took Brian Rose through the negotiation techniques he carried from kidnappings and bank sieges into business. His core idea: tactical empathy, showing the other side you understand how they see things, gets results faster than any argument.

Recorded in London while Chris was in the city for consulting work, the conversation covered the three negotiator types, unknown unknowns and loss aversion, the use of silence, mirroring, labelling, the power of getting a no, and why he aims for the words “that’s right” instead of yes. He also told the stories behind his methods: a 1993 bank robbery in Brooklyn, the 1972 Munich Olympics that gave rise to modern hostage negotiation, and a kidnapping in the Philippines where a $10 million ransom demand fell to nothing.

Brian and Chris finished with his views on women as negotiators, how empathy changed him as a person, the case where hostages were killed, and the advice he would give his 20-year-old self.

Key takeaways

Tactical empathy is not sympathy. Chris told Brian that you don’t have to agree with or feel what the other side feels. You only have to recognise how they see things and show them that you do.
Aim for “that’s right”, not yes. When you summarise someone’s position so well that they say “that’s right”, they feel understood. In the Philippines case, that moment ended a $10 million ransom demand.
A no can be worth more than a yes. Asking “Is this a bad idea?” or “Are you against this?” makes people feel safe and in control, and they often go on to explain exactly how to make the deal happen.
Call out the negative before they do. People feel losses about twice as strongly as gains, so Chris prefers to name the other side’s fears up front rather than pitch the benefits or deny the worry.
Mirror instead of asking what they meant. Repeating the last few words someone said, as a gentle question, gets them to expand far more than “What did you mean by that?”
Yes is nothing without how. A deal only counts if it gets implemented, so Chris gets the other side to describe how it will work, because people stick to plans that were their idea.
Practise in low-stakes moments. He suggested answering “How are you today?” with “Sounds like there’s something on your mind”, so the skill is ready when the stakes are high.

Chris Voss on London Real: emotions, Trump and Kim Jong-un

Brian Rose opened by asking whether negotiating in London felt different. Chris said everybody has the same emotional wiring, which he compared to the respiratory system: you can control your emotions for about as long as you can hold your breath. He added that in his experience business people get more emotional than terrorists, and that people shout because they don’t feel heard, so his first job is to make them feel listened to.

Brian then asked about the 2018 talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. Chris described three negotiator types, which he linked to the caveman responses of fight, flight and make friends, and said the world splits roughly into thirds. He saw both leaders as assertive types and said the American side’s focus on implementation, and its readiness to walk away, was a sound tactic. He also noted that people are far more likely to make a deal with someone they like.

From there they moved to unknown unknowns, the cards each side keeps hidden. Chris explained that people fear losses more than they value gains, which is why he starts by naming the other side’s worries. His example was a Texas energy company trying to buy land rights: saying “we probably look like everybody else pitching you” builds trust far faster than a sales pitch.

Silence, tells, Munich and a Brooklyn bank robbery

Chris said silence only works if you read how the other person reacts to it, and that small talk is really a way of learning someone’s baseline, much as a polygraph does. Rather than asking a question when he spots discomfort, he makes an observation such as “It seems like something’s bothering you”, which gets past people’s guard.

He traced modern hostage negotiation to the 1972 Munich Olympics, where Palestinian militants took Israeli athletes hostage. Chris talked about what he took from the documentary One Day in September: the surviving hostage-taker described becoming a terrorist as a way of gaining an identity, and identity, Chris said, is at stake in every negotiation.

He then told Brian about a 1993 bank robbery in Brooklyn, one of his first real hostage negotiations, which he approached with experience gained on a suicide hotline. The ringleader played the powerless spokesman, a tactic Chris now recognises in business leaders. Surprised by the man’s answers, Chris fell back on mirroring, repeating his last few words, and the robber began to give away more than he meant to. Later a colleague passed him a note suggesting the second robber simply wanted to come out, which led to one of his rules: never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better.

Tactical empathy and the kidnapping in the Philippines

Chris explained that tactical empathy is what psychologist Daniel Goleman calls cognitive empathy: understanding someone’s perspective without sympathising or agreeing. He pointed out that the amygdala gives more weight to negative emotions than positive ones, so defusing fears works faster than building excitement.

The idea that sold the book to its publisher, he said, was that the aim is not to get a yes but a “that’s right”. He told the story of a kidnapping in the Philippines in 2000, where an American hostage was held by a militant group demanding $10 million as “war damages”. Chris coached a senior Philippine National Police officer who handled the phone calls, and praised Admiral Bill McRaven, then a captain on the National Security Council, for bringing the agencies together.

After weeks of arguments got nowhere, the team decided to do one thing: summarise the kidnapper’s grievances so completely that he would say “that’s right”. He did, and he never asked for a ransom again. The hostage later walked away from his captors, and the kidnapper even called back to say the negotiator should be promoted, which Chris saw as proof that people deal again with those who made them feel respected.

Counterfeit yeses, the power of no and implementation

Chris told Brian that people want to be listened to, then respected, and only then to get what they want. He is wary of anyone who says “win-win” in the first five minutes, and of the “yes ladder” sales technique, which he said makes people suspicious. Instead he asks questions designed to get a no, such as “Is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak to my class?”, the question that led Jack Welch to offer to speak to his USC negotiation class if he was in Los Angeles that autumn.

Because a yes means nothing without a how, he wants the other side to lay out the implementation themselves. He also shared a rule from the book: never be mean to someone who could hurt you by doing nothing, since even an order taker can move you to the front or the back of the line.

For practice, he gave Brian a line to use in everyday conversations, “Sounds like there’s something on your mind”, describing it as low-stakes practice for high-stakes performance, much like sparring before a fight.

Learning, empathy and advice to his younger self

Chris said he was still learning, now more as a leader than a doer, and was reading about flow, neuroscience and company culture. He said women tend to pick up this emotionally intelligent style of negotiation faster than men, perhaps because men have more bad role models to copy, and he warned against the deal tactics shown in films.

Asked how empathy had changed him, he described terrorism trials in New York where Muslim witnesses testified voluntarily because the team respected their point of view. He also spoke about the Burnham case in the Philippines, where two hostages died in a rescue attempt, calling it the worst moment of his career and the reason he went to study at Harvard.

Asked what advice he would give his 20-year-old self, Chris said to seek advice from people you would trade places with, and then follow it. That is how he became an FBI agent and, after a mentor told him to volunteer on a suicide hotline, a hostage negotiator. His advice to young listeners was to be in less of a hurry to make your case and more of a hurry to hear the other side out, because being right is not the same as getting your way.

Who is Chris Voss?

Chris Voss is a former FBI special agent who spent 24 years with the Bureau and served as its lead international kidnapping negotiator. He was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorism Task Force, investigated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative on the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. He was trained in negotiation by the FBI, Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School.

After leaving the FBI he founded The Black Swan Group, which trains companies to use these techniques, and co-wrote Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It with journalist Tahl Raz. He has taught business negotiation at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. All of his London Real appearances are on the Chris Voss guest page.

Frequently asked questions

When did Chris Voss appear on London Real?

Chris Voss appeared on London Real in July 2018, in a two-hour conversation with Brian Rose recorded in London about negotiation, tactical empathy and his years as an FBI hostage negotiator.

What is tactical empathy according to Chris Voss?

Chris Voss describes tactical empathy as recognising how the other side sees things without agreeing with them or feeling what they feel. He told Brian Rose it is not sympathy, and that it works because it makes people feel heard.

Why does Chris Voss want people to say “that’s right” instead of yes?

A yes can be counterfeit, said only to end the conversation. When someone says “that’s right” after you summarise their position, they feel genuinely understood, and in one Philippines kidnapping that moment ended a $10 million ransom demand.

How does mirroring work in negotiation?

Mirroring means repeating the last few words someone said, in the tone of a question. Chris Voss said it gets people to explain and expand much more than asking what they meant, and he first used it by accident with a bank robber in Brooklyn in 1993.

Why does Chris Voss try to get people to say no?

Saying no makes people feel safe and in control. Chris Voss asks questions such as “Is this a bad idea?” because people who answer no often go on to explain exactly what is needed to make the deal work.

What does “Never Split the Difference” mean?

Chris Voss argues that meeting in the middle is lazy and rarely produces the best deal. By combining it with his rule never to be so sure of what you want that you would not take something better, both sides can find a better solution together.

How can you practise negotiation skills every day?

Chris Voss suggested answering everyday questions such as “How are you today?” with “Sounds like there’s something on your mind”. He called it low-stakes practice for high-stakes performance, like sparring before a real fight.

Chris Voss' website

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Chapters

2:27 | Brian introduces Chris Voss
6:44 | Trump, Kim Jong-un and the three negotiator types
16:13 | Why being likeable matters
18:12 | Unknown unknowns and fear of loss
25:24 | Silence, tells and reading people
32:28 | Munich 1972 and the birth of hostage negotiation
37:33 | The Brooklyn bank robbery and mirroring
47:46 | Tactical empathy versus sympathy
51:35 | Aiming for “that’s right” instead of yes
55:22 | The Philippines kidnapping and Admiral McRaven
1:04:47 | How “that’s right” ended a ransom demand
1:11:42 | Win-win offers and counterfeit yeses
1:14:12 | The power of getting a no
1:20:52 | Yes is nothing without how
1:25:50 | Low-stakes practice for high-stakes deals
1:33:38 | Still learning: neuroscience, flow and women negotiators
1:42:37 | How empathy changed him
1:45:42 | When hostages are killed: the Burnham case
1:50:12 | Intensity, fear and handling critics
1:58:10 | Advice to his 20-year-old self

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Full transcript: Chris Voss on London Real

2:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today is Chris Voss, the former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator who handled more than 150 international hostage cases and spent three years investigating the first bombing of the World Trade Center. You are the co-author of the Best-selling book Never Split The Difference. And the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group, a consulting firm that advises Fortune 500 companies to perform complex negotiations. Chris, Welcome to London Real. Thank you, Brian. I’m happy to be here. Yeah, I like how your socks almost match.

2:59 My book, too, was that was that on purpose? It’s not on purpose, but I’m glad you noticed, you know, I want to know, What’s it like to be in London? And, you know, are there any negotiators from British Times that you might admire that are from this country, and what’s it like being here? Is it a different vibe socially, and would that affect negotiations differently? Because I know you’re doing some consulting while you’re here?

3:20 Now, you know, we drive at human nature stuff, so everybody’s got the same basic wiring in their what our neuroscience brothers and psychologists would call the limbic system. And it’s an awful. The analogy I like to use all the time is it’s like the respiratory system, everybody’s got a respiratory system that operates on the same rules, everybody’s got a limbic system. The emotional system operates on the same rules. The other thing is kind of interesting about it is if I ask you if you could control your breath, you’d say, All right, you know, I’ll hold my breath and you can.

3:51 You can control your emotions for about the same amount of time. You can tell yourself to calm. If you’re upset, you can tell yourself calm down, calm down, and that’ll last for as long as you can hold your breath. And then the emotions kick right back in. And hostage negotiator?

4:04 I just know how to get in there and massage that occasionally, so we’re all humans. Basically, we all behave kind of the same way in the same patterns, regardless of the age, gender or ethnicity. Okay, and you’re teaching businessman here, but is a businessman any different from a kidnapper or a bank robber or a gang member? When it comes to negotiations, businessmen get upset more, they’re more emotional than the terrorists are. Why is that?

4:35 You know? It’s kind of crazy, but it’s actually really true. Business people have more stories of getting screamed at and people get upset because both sides are sort of on raw emotion. You put somebody in the middle of that can dial somebody’s emotions up or down right away. You’re not going to get upset with me.

4:56 And so hostage negotiators know how to get in and cause an actual, productive dialogue. Or at least you’re going to think it’s a productive dialogue. Immediately, you’re going to feel listened to you. People yell because they don’t feel like they’re being hurt. Like, my first job is to make you feel like you’re being hurt so you can stop yelling when people yell and swear, Is that because they don’t have power, is that kind of a sign of weakness?

5:22 Sometimes, like when I see parents yelling at their kids, it’s almost a sign that they’re not in control sometimes. Yeah, well, it’s all fear it’s all for your base. They’re afraid of something one way or another, you know? a parent yells at their child. It’s more they’re afraid that their child is going to be on the wrong track. And they got a vision in their head of disaster of the If this child keeps this behavior up, you know you’re not going to learn.

5:43 You’re not going to be educated. You’re not going to get a college degree, you’re not going to do this, you’re not going to do that. The human brain is wired to be overly negative. Okay, and so one way or another, that’s what causes this. Or if I yell at you, it’s not because I feel powers, but because I feel urgency.

6:01 And it’s something as silly as if you start yelling at me. The first thing I might say is it sounds like this is really important. Well, that was the first message you were trying to get across, that I needed to understand it was important, so you’ll immediately calm down. Okay, Gotcha, nice, all right then. I know we’re going to go through some techniques and some things that people can use in their everyday lives.

6:24 Because you said, the most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in right. And we’re in negotiations all the time that we’re not aware of, right? Yeah, I know I’m definitely in negotiations with a lot of people at times that they’re not aware of, and so I want to talk about that. I want to hear about your history with bank robbers and kidnappers, but I wanted to kick off and talk about it. We got to talk about my in-laws.

6:44 Oh yeah, we’ll talk about that too, right? And kids as well, right? Probably tougher. I wanted to kick off and talk about Trump with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. I know you wrote an article about that, right?

6:54 But I wondered if you could just break down what you see as the negotiation tactics between those two gentlemen, even over the past year. And I know you wrote an article about it, and maybe you can even say what you see. As with Trump as a negotiator again, we’ve never really had an American president, was kind of a businessman first, so it’s a different angle. Different priorities, different unknown unknowns. As you talk about, what did you see him doing successfully or unsuccessfully?

7:19 Well, yeah, I was a little surprised initially, you know, all the name calling early on and the fact that it ended up in such a good place, okay? So he called him Rocket man, and Kim called him kind of irrational stuff that surprised you. That didn’t seem like a tactic that it ended up in such a great place. Okay, but then, you know, now that we’re looking at it, I mean, both of these guys are sort of the classic aggressive negotiator. Okay, the world kind of splits into three types one of them is a natural,-born, aggressive, slash, assertive that happens to be my default type.

7:49 Okay, aggressive, assertive is one type, right? This and the other two are, well, it’s fight flight, make friends. The caveman response to threat was if they saw if the caveman saw something, he didn’t know what it was. He’s either gonna fight it, he’s gonna run from it, he’s gonna try to make friends with it. Those are the three cavemen that survived.

8:05 Okay, that’s how our emotions are wired, and those are the three kind of types of negotiations, three types of negotiators. Okay, fight flight, although some would say Fight flight, make mate, right, but we fight flight, make friends okay, and Trump’s a fight guy. You know, I’m a fight guy that’s my natural born type. The other thing, too, is the world splits pretty evenly into thirds. No matter whether you’re from, whether you’re Asian, whether you’re African, whether you’re a Latino, whether wherever you’re from.

8:34 The world splits pretty much evenly into thirds. We’ve seen it enough, we’ve tested it enough that we’re pretty satisfied with that. Okay, is it most likely that two people involved in a high level negotiation won’t be the flight type, or it could be the flight type? You know, if the world breaks evenly into thirds, then one out of only one out of three times. Is your counterpart going to be the same as you?

8:56 In government? Most are not fighters heads of government, most of them are make friends or flight analysts very analytical. They see conflict as something to be avoided. Even our leaders, most government leaders, are avoiders. They got there by compromise, they’re thinking about their career, their image long,-term, things right.

9:17 Okay, so it’s already rare that we got a president. That’s the aggressive one. That’s an aggressive. Yeah, okay, we’ve had a few in the past, do you? But not with the same exterior.

9:26 I mean, Ronald Reagan was a fight guy, right, Roosevelt fight guy, you know, speak softly, carry a big stick. You’re talking about carrying a big stick, you’re a fight guy, Okay, all right. So watching these two behave started off the name calling. Then we had kind of a negotiate, a meeting that was on, then it was off, then it was on. You saw the way they behaved with each other and then you saw the way they both concluded it afterwards. What are some of the elements you see there in negotiation?

9:53 Well, not just the elements in this negotiation, but it’s also a preview of the future in a number of different ways. They got, they got into details right away. I mean, I think both sides realized that if I let this get too far out of control. If I let the other side start to backtrack and renege on promises or not, follow through. This is going to go bad and I’m going to look stupid, right?

10:17 And I saw President Trump and his crew, you know, the T, his team of court advisers around Mike Pompeo, the other people that I think he’s listening to on this, I think Mike Pompeo is one of the main ones. They realize that this could go bad in a hurry, so they’re not going to let it get an inch out of line. And that’s why I initially said, You know, this could go bad, you know, if they don’t follow through, we’re not even going to go to Singapore. He’s signaling the other side. Look, you know, don’t backtrack, I’m not even going to show.

10:45 And he also said, Look, I’ll know in the first few seconds that I’m there, whether or not it’s going to do any good. Okay, but he’s really easy singling to the other side. Like, the minute we think this is going sideways, we’re not going to let you make us look stupid. We’re telling the world that we’re ready to back out of this in a heartbeat. If you, if you don’t, follow through, if you, if you mess around with this at all, which I think it’s, it’s a.

11:08 In this instance. It’s a great focus on implementation. And it’ll be the one time that we have the best chance at causing North Korea to stick to their promises. Okay, so that’s a good tactic on Trump’s part. I think I think it’s phenomenal because it worked.

11:23 If there was no meeting, he might have said differently, but an impressive tactic, but probably only one that he could have pulled off as an aggressive guy. Yeah, and also with this focus, I mean, previously American, I don’t know what’s wrong with American presidents. They don’t want to dignify the dictator by showing up and sitting down. You know, they’re worried about losing face, or then they’re what they’re worried about. Is a previous history of North Korea making promises and not following through with them.

11:48 Yeah, they look stupid, and then the whole meeting goes in. Kim Jong-un’s favor Yeah, it’s all nonsense now. Trump has always been kind of this profile of, I’m an erratic guy, you know? He’s also got a big track record with his business and with buildings with his name on there. So he brings a lot of baggage to the table, maybe that is good for him.

12:04 Is that something you think he calculates? Because if you’re dealing with someone that’s erratic, you know it can be an upper hand in negotiations, right? Well, he’s, he’s erratic, but he’s, you might refer to him as a radic, but he’s not without patterns. Somebody can be erratic and be eminently predictable. Okay, nobody’s surprised by any but that he tweets nobody, you know, he keeps doing the same thing over and over again.

12:25 People are surprised by it. That’s ridiculous. He’s, he’s, he’s, he sticks, he’s true to his form, he’s true to his type, he does. He continues to do the same thing, which at this point in time, he’s like this. This is a pattern that’s got me this far.

12:39 It’s silly for me to change at this point in time. People wanted him to be a different guy. As president of the United States, he’s like, Why do I? why do I change from my pattern to success up to now? That’s just in his thinking, That’s silly, yeah? And two years later, people are starting to think he’s crazy like a Fox.

12:55 I mean, people are starting to admire what he can get done, even though no one agreed with or understood the politically incorrect tactics that he did it. But it’s starting to look like there’s a method to the madness. And, yeah, exactly, and what he can get done, which the assertive negotiator has, you know, and I did this myself, you know, we don’t burn bridges, we bomb them. So explain that, well, you, you, a aggressive, assertive negotiator, will have a tendency to hit a few home runs in a given area. And then no one will talk to them anymore, and they then at that point of time, they can’t make nobody.

13:32 Since nobody will talk to you anymore, you can’t make deals anymore. Okay, now, what the advantage he’s got in a foreign policy. ROME And we’re. My prediction is North Korea isn’t going to be the only success he’s going to have in foreign policy. Because, you know, he goes to North Korea, he takes this approach and he starts beating people around.

13:49 But there’s two things that’s different than any other American president. First is, you know, he’s willing to get in there himself. So the other side wants to talk to the American president and they’re going to cut a deal on North Korea. Now the Iranians are seeing this and they’re thinking if North Korea can cut a deal with Trump, I bet we can, too. Now.

14:12 The other added element that people tend to ignore is no American president tries to do anything in foreign policy wise until the second half of their second term. And every other country in a volatile area on the planet knows this. I was in Ramallah, where the head the government for the Palestinian Organization is in 2008, right after Obama got elected. And the leadership there said, Oh God, we hate this because it’s going to be six years before anybody tries to do anything in the Middle East. Because no American president will touch a foreign policy issue until the second half of their second term.

14:48 What did President Obama do? Didn’t try to do anything foreign diplomatically until the second half of his second term. But then the relationship with Israel have been poisoned. To the point where they’re like, Where can we go? We got to go to Iran and then an American president looks desperate.

15:02 And the other side knows that all they got to do is wait to the last minute. Americans will capitulate because the clock is running out on them. President Trump is not. It’s not Wade sticking around, and he’s not putting himself under any deadlines because he’s got plenty of time, right? So these guys know the clock is not working against them, but they’re very encouraged because he’s got.

15:23 He’s got the backbone to go into foreign policy in a big way early in his administration. And no other American president has done that. And I think Iran, even the Palestinians, everybody’s going to be encouraged by that. Interesting What do you rate him as a negotiator from one to ten? Well, isn’t it?

15:41 He’s a he’s a, he’s a prototype classic, assertive, right, but is he good? He’s good at that, okay, he’s good at the deals that it requires a baseball bat to get the deal done. But eventually people get tired of hitting the getting hit with the baseball bat, which is interestingly enough. Which publicly, he’s a baseball bad guy, but privately sits down, and suddenly he’s buddies with people. That’s what suddenly he’s charms with.

16:05 Kim Jong-un Yeah, he’s a nice guy, I like him. You know, we had a good time with him. Man, I really genuinely means that, right? I think he does. I think he does too.

16:13 You said in the book that someone six times more likely to make a deal with someone if they like that person likeable is a huge. You don’t have to change your position that crazy a lot more by being likable. I mean, that’s great. I mean, it’s a crazy thing to know. It’s that much.

16:27 Because technically, you’d think that him would be thinking about a deal for the country for the next 100 years, maybe even for economics. But the last thing he’d be thinking is a personal relationship with Trump. Because, you know, the Max that’ll be is six years. And yet it says such a bearing, because we’re emotional creatures, right, right? That’s why you’re still in business because you’re teaching people how to tap into that right.

16:48 Yeah, we’re an analytic society, you know, we like to, we know the numbers work, but when it comes to negotiations that goes out the window well. Emotions come in the window, okay? And how our brain reacts and see the other thing about being likable, that’s a strategic advantage. You’re also up to 31 smarter in a positive frame of mind. So if you’re if I’m likable, you’re going to be in a better mood.

17:12 And not only will you think of better ideas in our negotiation, you’ll also be more inclined to put them on the table. For me, because you were smarter and you like me, so I’ll be smarter because I’m in a better mood, what’s that? I’ll be smarter because I’m in a better mood. Will if I smile at you, Okay, I actually I hit your mirror neurons. It’s an involuntary response.

17:31 There’s a chemical change in your brain and your brain capacity actually increases, huh? It just worked when you smiled, all right, so you’re seeing some things now. The fascinating thing is when they finished and you talk about this in the book as well. This concept of unknown. So when people go into a deal together and say, it’s something that’s ultra simple, like I’m going to buy something at a store.

17:51 And the price is this, and the product is this, and you think there’s nothing else to negotiate about when? In fact, there’s all of this unknown territory that people can cut deals here and there. And people can walk out. Extremely satisfied, even if they paid double or extremely unsatisfied, even if they sold the product. Kim wants to go back and say, I did this and Trump wants to go back, and I said, And I did this.

18:12 But talk to me about this concept of these unknown unknowns because they’re motivated by different things. Right, right? Well, you know, and it comes, it’s like it’s really. The unknown unknowns are the overlap of the unknowns. Now, what the hell am I talking about when I say that you’re hiding cards, every negotiation I walk to the table, I get stuff.

18:30 I’m not telling you every negotiation every night, even with me and my kid trying to get him to go to bed. Right there, there’s stuff that you’re thinking about that’s valuable to you, right? And same with him, the kid, everybody. Yeah, so I’m thinking that the last thing I wanted to do is bang his head on the ground until it bleeds. So he’s got a card on me, and then maybe he’s thinking, If Dad could just let me watch the movie and go to bed, then I’d be happy to go to bed.

18:53 And so we both have these maybe unknown areas. I don’t know if I’m explaining that right. Where. If we knew that, we might be able to have power over one another or come to a better deal. Well, you’re always thinking about what’s coming in the future, too.

19:04 Okay, like you want your kid to go to bed because you want your kid to study. You want your kid to be healthy, you want a kid to, maybe you want your kid to play sports, maybe you want. Maybe you have a vision for where your kid’s life is going. Your kid’s got another vision, but there’s stuff in there that you. There’s an overlap of what you a kid like sports kids want.

19:20 Kid wants to be happy, kid wants things, maybe the kid wants things in his life that he’s already thinking about his little kitties. Imagine being an astronaut, you know who knows what’s in their head, but you want to know what’s in their head. Because everybody’s got something that they where they feel their life is going. You know, what’s the future look like, what I hope for, What do I want to have fun doing? Okay, so you play about future expectations for both parties and we work our way back.

19:46 Okay, not necessarily the present kind of short-term wins. You’re talking about kind of the future, Yeah, why do you want your kid to get a good night’s sleep? Yeah, I guess it is because how it affects the rest of the how effects this week. How it affects their school work, how it affects their life, how it affects, how they interact with the other kids, how they socialize. I mean, you’re always thinking about, where is this going, what’s this, what, where, what’s going to happen, how does how’s this? How is my future being built?

20:12 Whether it’s you or your kid? Okay, so knowing that when I go into a negotiation with anybody, how can I maximize that knowledge? Whether it’s about me or the other person involved? I’m going to try to tease out what’s in your head about your future. Okay, you know, and then I’m I see.

20:28 I need to know what you see in your head and where you see. Things are going okay. And I and I can’t change that until I know what it is. And we’ve and we’ve always got this. We’ve always got an overly negative view because that’s the way we’re wired, we can’t, we can’t help ourselves.

20:45 And Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Peace Prize in Behavioral Economics for pointing this out to the world that we’re overly negative. And how does that manifest itself? Lost things twice as much as gain? If I take five dollars from you, it’s gonna hurt twice as much as if I give you five dollars, right, okay? And 70 in business, 70 of buy decisions are made to avoid loss.

21:09 But most businesses. I’m pitching your gain. Here’s how this is Going to Benefit you. Here’s how you’re going to be better off. And your first thought is going to be like, Here’s what I stand to lose. And so I go in through that side door.

21:22 And it’s a much faster route because you’ll do the deal with me as soon as I can. As soon as you, as soon as I get rid of the obstacles, what are you afraid of, What are you, What are you worried about losing? We were talking to an energy company in Texas just a couple weeks ago. They’re talking about and it is crazy as it is. They’re still discovering new oil fields in Texas, one of the last big oil fields they discovered that was in 2008.

21:45 I would have thought they stopped discovering oil in Texas 50 years ago, but 2008 they one of the biggest oil fields they ever found in Texas. What does that mean? That means they’re still buying land from Texas landowners, and this Texas landowner is not selling this oil company. The rights to his land, and they’re following this guy around there waiting for him in the gym. I mean, they’re trying to show him that they can be trusted.

22:14 What does that mean? They’re trying to overcome mistrust, but they’re pitching him with how much money he’s going to make every step of the way. Which is what every other oil company pitches. A guy and he, they were just hung around long enough. That finally, he got the message that they want to fly by night operation and that he could trust him and they cut the deal.

22:32 But if now that they know, taking my approach, instead of taking six months to get past his mistrust, we can get him past that. Mistrust in a week. How by un? By saying, Right off the bat, you know what, we probably seem like, everybody else that’s pitching you. These get rich schemes and from your position.

22:55 We got to be hard to trust because we look like everybody else. Because that’s exactly what he’s saying in his head, right? And the minute you articulate what’s in the other guy’s head, then all of a sudden they go like something about you. I like, I don’t know what it is, and that’s how we get in the side door, right? I think you say, if you, if you try to call out a negative, that’s not there, you won’t plant it.

23:19 Which is, I think you’re saying there, but if you try to deny a negative that’s not there, then you plant that the two millimeter shift. And that’s crazy, because everybody’s used to denying negatives because that oil guy. If we hadn’t taught him, he might have said, You know what, I don’t want us to look like everybody else I don’t, I don’t. I don’t want you to think that we’re like every other salesperson, right? And that’s when the guy goes, you’re denying it, you must be like them, otherwise you wouldn’t deny it.

23:43 The gut reaction is you deny what you’re afraid of, but when you say, you know, we probably look like everybody else, then you then now suddenly I look accountable to you, I look honest, I look fearless to you. What’s the next statement after you say that? We probably look like this big oil company that wants to come in and muscle you over and squeeze you out of a good deal. What’s the next line after that? Well, then it’s a It’s a little bit of a dance at that point, right?

24:10 My next line is this I gotta shut up, I gotta read you, I gotta let you react, you’re gonna tell me one of two things. Either I’m on the right track and you need to hear more of me defusing the negative. Or you’re gonna relax a little bit. You’re gonna like, I, you know, I don’t know, and then you’re probably gonna say, Look, here’s what’s important to me. Everybody else wants a 99-year lease.

24:39 You know, I g, I get kids, I gotta worry about work, worry about it, right? You know, I. I’ve just opened a trust that I’m moving my assets into. You’re gonna tell me what you need to make the deal okay, and at that point in time, now you’re gonna now. The next thing you’re gonna do is you’re gonna watch me to see if I actually listen to you, right?

25:00 There’s an article that I saw a few years ago. The chief Mark, the guy in charge of marketing for Facebook, said he hated dealing with people from Hollywood. Because they all sit down, they say, What’s keeping you up at night? and then don’t listen to the answer, right? So they teed it up perfectly. The guy’s about to share the unknown, and they’re busy not even listening they don’t even listen to, they’re thinking about their next move.

25:24 Maybe, yeah, or they’re gonna, they’re gonna, they’re gonna pitch what they came to pitch, no matter what he says. Right, Okay, interesting talk to me about silence and the use of silence. You just use it there on me, right? But sometimes it’s not the right thing to do because people, they react differently to silence. Right?

25:39 Well, yeah, we got to watch how we react. To silence some relationship oriented people, they signal anger by giving somebody the silent treatment, so they will misinterpret silence, and they would say silence besides, man, they’re upset. I got to talk when, in fact, the other side might be trying to think so. Silence is a dynamic in order for it to be effective, hence the term effect. The pause You got to read the other side in the moment, and so I’ll shut up and you’re gonna.

26:10 You’re gonna give me massive amounts of information as to how you’re reacting. I’m either gonna see a contemplative look on your face. You know, I’m gonna see a go on, look on your face. Or there’s some people that are really good at holding their face but can’t hold their hands. And we see that highly analytical people will keep a complete stone face and their hands or their futures start to move.

26:34 Okay, what’s the biggest tell for men? Well, tell his context, okay, and that’s why I need to talk to you long enough to know the context and what am I talking about there? The CR? What I’m really looking for is the way a polygraph works is. It’s not trying to pick up your tells, it’s trying to establish your baseline.

26:53 What do you look like when you’re telling the truth, you’re going to lie 15 ways you’re going to tell the truth one way? So my small talk is really designed to get your baseline on what you look like. When you’re telling the truth. What you had for breakfast today, you know, what was your commute like in today? You know, how many kids have you got?

27:11 The stuff that you’re talking this stuff to? The polygrapher asks you a bunch of baseline questions. And then anytime you deviate from that, if I, you know, if I say, Look what’s really important to you and you’re like, that means breaking eye contact, breaking eye contact, looking in a different direction. Chances are you’ve probably got at least four different ways that you signal discomfort. Lying is just a means of discomfort.

27:34 Now if I get a tell out of you, the other thing I’ve got to do is not go. Aha, but what I really got is that appreciation. Or let me know, you know, it makes everybody uncomfortable, it makes everybody uncomfortable. Okay, but I’ll say, Seems like something’s bothering you, and then you’ll tell me. But it’s probably going to be hands related, moving feet or legs looking away.

27:58 I mean, there will be some basics right, right, right? And we were with a construction company yesterday. And one of their highly analytical guys his, his signal is just that his eyebrows come up now. When his eyebrows came up, one of the other people in the training misinterpreted that he was insulted because we were talking about his particular type and their reaction and his eyebrows came up. And the other type said, What about that bothered you?

28:29 Because he thought he was insulted and he just kind of went, Ah, you know, I don’t know. And then I came back and it said, and I said, Seems like you’re uncomfortable. And he said, You know, really, I was just really thinking about this is somebody told me before this was one of my big issues now. There was two completely different responses there, and I knew somebody asked him a question. He gave a very guarded answer.

28:53 Now we need to gather information. I didn’t ask him a question. I said, You know, it seems like that made you think about something, it seems like that bothered you. And then boom, floodgates of truth,-telling are opened up by my observation. Because the question put him on guard, where my observation of his reaction sort of bypassed.

29:12 The prefrontal cortex went in the side door again. Suddenly he’s like, Well, what he wasn’t insulted by was he found it intriguing because he’d gotten some coaching feedback. That was one of his issues. And he was trying to fix it and it had been called out in the conversation, and instead of being offended by it, he was actually reacting very positively. So you also have to be concerned about what your interpretation of their tells are.

29:37 They might be lying, they might be reacting really positively. You got to pull out of them what’s going on behind their head without automatically. Assuming that it meant he was uncomfortable and that was a negative thing, he actually really appreciated the observation. Okay, so you get it, you gotta. You gotta stay with people in a way that you don’t go, Ah, right, because then it drives them back.

29:59 Are all negotiations really therapy? Yeah, if you’re if you’re a great negotiator because the other side is going to want to talk to you even more. They’re going to want to be honest with you, they’re going to want to tell you what their unknowns are. They’re going to want to tell you if I, if you’re going to want to tell me what you’re hiding, it’s, Yeah, it’s kind of got to be a therapeutic experience, right? And you’re not going to.

30:23 And just to be clear, I mean, it’s in everyone’s interest to kind of open up and show each other the cards. Or it’s not like I’m going to get you, and then I’m going to win. But it really, I mean, is it really in both parties interest if they can discover their each of their unknowns? Yeah, because it is because it depends upon whether or not you take yourself hostage. But first of all, the best deal possible.

30:45 We both got to show our cards because we never know how those cards overlap. And we’ll never get to the best deal we could possibly make. Unless we open up now. Maybe we’ll make some acceptable deals, maybe we’ll make survivable deals, but without opening up, we cannot maximize the opportunity. And then that requires trust.

31:10 Let’s talk about trust and like some of the probably the big moment of your career, where you? You put it on the line. And everyone was watching. And that was the first bank robbery, so tell me about that situation, tell me about bank robberies in general. Actually, you know, in the book you kind of talk about the history of negotiations, but I think it’s more negotiations.

31:31 In a real-time audio medium, right when we’re talking about what happened in the 70s. And I think that’s really interesting. Because, you know, negotiations have been going on since the time of Genghis Khan. I’m guessing they would send someone in. I even think in the Iliad like they’re sending people into the gates and they negotiate.

31:46 But this whole concept of a real time on the phone negotiation is new. And that’s kind of what you specialized in originally. So I don’t know if you’re going to tell me a little bit about that. And then the situation you were in and what you learned on that bank Robbery Day, because that’s pretty unique. Yeah, well, bank robber in Brooklyn, you know, six thousand years ago, back in 19 early 1990s, was the 80s 70s No.

32:09 This is that bankrupt was in what was bankrupt, it was it was in 93, it was in 93, it was. It was crazy. there was crazy stuff that happened that year. It was nuts in 93. Okay, yeah, yeah, that was crazy, was that World Trade Center bombing? Yeah, okay, yeah. They read the first one in the parking lot in the parking structure, so there’s banks in Brooklyn.

32:28 I didn’t know that, for example, okay, there’s trees in Brooklyn, there’s banks in Brooklyn, right, right? So first of all, real quick on, like hostage negotiation and those kinds of things, that’s a fairly new phenomenon, right? Relatively speaking, yeah. Hostage negotiation, per se, was invented at about in about 1972 as a result that were triggered across the law enforcement. World War the Munich Olympics, Okay, with these is the Palestinians in Israel, right?

32:57 So 72 in Munich. As I remember, there’s a great movie called One Day, One Day in September. Yeah, and so as I remember, the Germans were kind of they didn’t want to project a lot of force at that event. And they didn’t want to look like a police state for the Hangover from World War II, right? So they’re probably a rule a bit lacks.

33:15 And then it was the Israeli wrestling team or something that got really athletes. A number of them were wrestlers, right, okay, and taken hostage. And then on top of all that, the Olympics was going on. There’s news crews everywhere, real-time video feeds. It’s insane, it’s insane.

33:30 And so that’s like one of the first times where there’s this real-time, multimedia kind of negotiation process. Right, right, right? And that’s a phenomenal if you’re into terrorism and great insight into the Palestinians, also because they interview the surviving Black September terrorist. And he talked about, you know, growing up in a refugee camp and feeling like a wretched refugee. Which meant it was an identity issue, which is what in what it is for everybody in every negotiation.

33:58 How does this affect who I am as a human being? And that’s how these guys get into this. Because, he says, I, I grew up feeling like I was a wretched refugee and becoming a terrorist gave me an identity. And then you begin to understand how these guys get into that. But then they get into the hostage taking and there hadn’t been any negotiations at the time.

34:18 And there the Germans are trying not to use force. And it was just one train wreck after another. And resulting in just a horrific, horrific incident that the German authorities almost pulled it off. With a little bit of command and control, they would, they would have pulled off the rescue at the airport, but their command and control fell apart and their discipline of their assaulters they had. They had some police officers that were waiting on one of the Jets that the Palestinians were supposed to board to leave Munich.

34:47 And at the last minute, the assault team on the jet took a vote to abandon their posts. I mean, it’s insane they might have pulled it off if those guys had an abandoned post. Knowing what you know now about both sides, how would you have negotiated that? I mean, again, if you already know that information about these Palestinian guys, I mean, that can be a very powerful unknown. Absolutely, and they’re also, I think people forget maybe you can talk about this, too, is that they’re in a situation they didn’t necessarily design.

35:14 They sure as hell didn’t emotionally prepare for what’s happening and let alone in the first minute, let alone 30 minutes or days into it. I mean, this is all adrenaline madness. They’re probably scared. Yep, they their result, they’re reverting to being humans in the midst of this. That’s the interesting thing in the study of terrorism over the years terrorist leaders. Big problem is the cannon fodder they send into.

35:38 These are still human beings, and it’s still wired the same way everybody is. And they still have the emotional system that everybody has, and they know that as a human being, you’re going to get scared, there’s you can’t override that system, it’s going to continue to function. And that’s exactly what happened to those guys. They thought they were going to get out of there, and in fact, some of them did. You know one of them?

35:59 Hats off to the people that did that documentary because they tracked down a remaining member of Black September and put him on camera and interviewed him. Oh wow, how do you pull that off? Because he’s still a human being right? And he still wants to talk about it, he still wants that. Everybody wants to talk.

36:12 If you’re alive, you want to talk if you’re in a business deal, you want to talk. You just got to understand how to unlock somebody from talking okay, and so knowing what you know now, how would you have approached that negotiation if they would have, if they would have just had a little bit of command and control? And there are some situations where you got to call in a SWAT team, right? And at that point in time, if somebody wants to leave and the Palestinians wanted to leave, they wanted to escape. They’re telling you loud and clear they want to live, and that gives you the edge.

36:44 And at that point in time, you start talking to them about how their actions are going to help them live or if they want to live. The other thing they want to do is they want to be heroes. Everybody wants to be a hero, everybody wants to be immortal, an athlete wants to be in a Hall of Fame. What athletes want more than winning championships is to be in Hall of Fame and you begin to understand what people want. That makes him immortal, then you.

37:09 You can talk about whatever it is that makes him immortal, okay? And also, from a law enforcement perspective, you can open up holes in their game, open up gaps in the plan, where they might agree to something they wouldn’t normally agree to. That will give you a tactical advantage, right? Okay, interesting, so people should definitely watch that movie. They basically indicated they wanted to live, wanted to get the airport, and then it kind of all went wrong there, so it’s a great feeling to watch.

37:33 Tell me about the bank robbery, and by the way, you’re former SWAT guys. You kind of know that side of it, which is probably makes you a different kind of negotiator than other people. No one is like on the ground, but what happened that day, what did you learn, what were you nervous and how did you get in that situation? Well, I wasn’t nervous, I mean, but by that point in time I’ve been doing the process enough that I was comfortable with the process like. And but, you know, I’ve been practicing well, I practicing, but my real life practicing had been.

38:03 I’d spent a lot of time on a suicide hotline, which is real life emotions, okay, and so I knew how powerful this stuff was. Walking in a suicide hotline. You got to talk somebody down off a ledge, figuratively, literally in 20 minutes or less. Wow, and I remember when I first got there in, like, 20 minutes, how’s that gonna work, you know, on TV, their own phone for hours? I said, No, if you do this right, you, you’ll get, you’ll get you’ll be done in 20 minutes or less.

38:28 And it was true. And that’s why, in our analogy in business, the application of this stuff saves time. I mean, I had one of my students say this, you know, tactical empathy saves time, so we get to the bank. By time. They hand me the phone, I’m like, I’m just going to put my process on these guys.

38:44 I’m using late night FM DJ voice and the guy’s going to calm down and he did. You got a phone line to him, is that what happened on the phone? Yeah, okay, and then they went to rob it. They didn’t plan on the situation. Three guys we didn’t know at the time, there were three, two went inside.

39:01 The getaway driver stayed on the outside. The ringleader planned on robbing the bank. He told the other guys they were going to rob the cash machine so they thought they were only going to get as far as inside. To rob the cash machine, the insane idea was this guy actually ran a cash courier route, so he knew where the cash machine was. He knew how to get into it.

39:23 He convinced these guys that since he had all this information they could get, they could avoid the camera, they took pictures. He could disable everything they could get in and out clean, they could take all this money. Nobody’d ever find him. What he really wanted was a money in the vault and he didn’t tell anybody that. Until they got inside the bank and he pulled out, a 357 started waving around, took hostages.

39:44 Everybody was surprised, even the guy that followed him inside and then so the they tripped the bank alarm. A passer by sees what’s going on side. The getaway driver on the outside was kind of like Feet Don’t fail me now, he got out of there, okay? Immediately we show up at the bank, we get the banks surrounded. The guy on the inside is actually the classic CEO negotiator, classic CEO, CEO negotiator pretends like he’s powerless, use nothing but plural pronouns.

40:16 Example of that would be, You know, all there are all these other guys in here. I got all these other decision makers, you know, I don’t have any power, the I’m This bank, robber said. You know, I’m scared of the other guys. I’m gonna have to get off the phone because they’re gonna catch me on the phone with you, and then you get off the phone. He was completely in charge business, the most influential negotiator in the negotiation team.

40:36 On the other side, if he comes to the table, he’s gonna say, You know, we got all these people in my company that I’m accountable to, you know, I don’t, I. I’m only the spokesperson, but, you know, I’ve got a board I gotta talk to. I’ve got all I’ve got, all these people who just completely constrained me. Okay, that’s not Trump’s style, but that is not Trump’s stuff, right? That’s the guy who’s hiding his power, okay, because he is powerful because he’s got he’s the last word.

41:00 If a decision maker comes to the table, they’re very cautious about how they come to the table. The analogy with Trump was, although he looks like the decision maker, look how cautiously he approached Singapore once the deal was set. He cautiously said, I’m going to know once inside the first minute whether or not this is a legitimate negotiation. I’m going to know if this is going sideways. He had, and then he had people signaling this form, he had all his people in what we call hardwired control.

41:31 He knew the conversations that were going on in advance. He had all those people in advance saying, If this goes sideways, we are out of here the minute we smell it. And that’s how he maintained control to keep himself from getting backed into a corner. And of course, what’s he end up doing? He goes, and he makes all these pitches.

41:47 He shows them a video, you know, which evidently appealed to the counterpart. Interesting, huh? And then also that researcher could get out of there as quickly as he could okay to leave the details to his guys. How long did he stay? I mean, headlines Trump’s out early, Yeah, you know, he’s letting people know that he’s extremely worried about implementation.

42:08 And he got away from the table as quickly as he could so that he couldn’t get back into the into a corner at the table. So having tactical control of your team is just as important as you being on message as well. Yeah, exactly very, very good. Or and as much as tactical control is, you don’t want your people saying stupid things right? Loose lips, sink ships, or you don’t want you don’t want somebody on your side going like, You know what, he’s really worried about this.

42:35 So if you come in on this angle, we can make this deal, and that actually happens in business all the time. Leaders are like, Why did you tell them that, you know, I, you revealed stuff that I wasn’t read, not that I would never reveal it, but I wasn’t ready for you to reveal it now. And that’s actually defections on your side when your people become impatient are one of the biggest problems. Okay, cool back to this bank. You’re talking to this guy.

43:00 He’s implying that there’s other people involved, he’s not in power, not in control. Do you buy it right away or no, No, well, I didn’t, I didn’t know that was the read at the time. I now know that’s this common tactic of a smart leader to act powerless at the table. But I didn’t know it at the time, initially get him into a conversation, and he said something that surprised me so much. By accident, I reverted to a negotiation skill we refer to as a mirror.

43:27 When she said, You know, I asked him about a van, we figured we had the getaway van, he said. We got a van out here and he said, You chased my driver away and I was so startled by that. I. I went back to my training and I just said, We chase your driver away and he said, Yeah. When he saw the police he cut and run, I said he cut and run. He said. Yeah, the guys, you know, he left.

43:46 He and I said, Well, what about the van? he said. We only have one van. I said, You only have one van, he said. We have more than one van and he just started inadvertently, a highly controlled guy. The mirror triggered some inadvertent responses. So you’re basically, people don’t figure out what’s going on there.

44:03 Chris is repeating back to him the last four or five words. He said, Right, but you’re doing it in a way where it actually sounds like a genuine question, but it’s making him open up more. For whatever reason. It hits the brain where people go on, okay, and it’s actually much. It works better than saying, What did you mean by that?

44:19 Like at this point in time, I never ask anybody, What did you mean by that? I’ll just repeat the words I’m not clear on and they’ll go, Yeah, well, this is what I mean. And then they explain it every time. And if I say, what did you mean by that? you’d be like, Ah, you know, well, that’s, you know? It’s pretty clear what I said, I meant I meant what I said.

44:39 You know, you don’t get people to expand by saying, What did you mean by this? You’re trying to always buy to bypass that prefrontal cortex. Yeah, and all the time, because that way you get the genuine realness out of that person, right? Exactly, I need unguarded, unvarnished responses. Okay, how did that end up that day and why, you know, everybody came out?

44:59 I mean, the this first guy that was highly controlling. He something about me made him uncomfortable and he knew he couldn’t get under get me under control. So what he actually did initially, instead of becoming more angry, he hands the phone off to another guy and the other guy got on the phone and an hour and a half later I got him to come out. And one of our sayings Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. We’re hammering this guy hammering in a nice way to get him to let a hostage go, and suddenly he’s suddenly.

45:36 One of my colleagues senses This guy probably wants to come out, and so in an instant, I get a note, say, ask, tell him, tell him to come out. So I switch from trying to get what I want to getting what he wants, which is to get out alive. And your listener will always hear stuff that you don’t hear. Okay, so you have a backup team, backup listeners, that’s how that’s what we do in business today. Interesting any important conversation?

46:01 We have listeners listening with us because you’re involved too, you’re bypassing your own prefrontal and you’re emotionally involved in that, maybe to where you can’t see something. Well. When I’m thinking about talking, it takes away my ability to listen. If I’m only listening, I will hear more if I’m listening and talking. Every time I construct a sentence, my brain actually stops listening, constructs a sentence, gets it ready and sends it out.

46:27 In those moments, you might have said something that was important. While I’m thinking about what I want to say, Okay, so in this particular instance, I said, Seems like you want to meet me outside. This guy says, Yeah, I want to end this, and now it’s just the details. And it took us a little, it took us probably about another 20 minutes to work out the details. But the important thing was I wanted a hostage.

46:58 He wanted to come out, I got a I gotta what he you want might be better than what I want, and I actually have to be flexible enough for that. Never be so sure what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. Your answer to the problem, your route to the problem might be better than my route. I got to be, I got to get my ego out of the way. If that, if you throw something out, I’m like, Hey, that’s a good idea.

47:27 Interesting. So that’s why it is in your interest to potentially show your cards. Yeah, and him show his cards, and then you find even the better deal between the two of you time after time, time after time. Interesting because most people think that you’re the guy driving the hardest deal. You’re the guy running mind games on everyone else, right?

47:46 You’re the guy who’s like Spock and playing everywhere, playing him like a fiddle. But you know, you say in your book that it’s actually empathy, that’s your best emotion, and you even said in your book that’s changed you. As a person trying to get inside the brain of these other humans, can you speak on that? Yeah, because you know, suddenly, if I could see it from your from your perspective, by definition, you’re going to see things that I can’t see. So it’s actually going to make me smarter, you know, I got to willing to be smarter, I get.

48:17 I got to be willing to add your brain to my brain instead of overcome your brain, because together we’re actually smarter by definition, right? So I need to tap into that. I ain’t that smart. I need your brain, I need your insight, I need your intelligence, I need your acumen. If for enemies, you’re not gonna.

48:37 If you share it with me accidentally, once you realize you shared it with me accidentally, you’re gonna get very defensive, you’re gonna back up if we’re enemies. But if some, if there’s something about me that makes you want to collaborate, you don’t know exactly what it is. You know this, what is this thing called empathy, what is this thing? We call it tactical empathy because it’s not sympathy that very clearly the hostage negotiators empathy, the business, negotiators, empathy is not sympathy. I don’t have to feel what you feel.

49:04 Yeah, what’s the difference? I don’t feel it. I don’t agree with it. Okay, I don’t disagree with it. I only recognize that it’s how you see things okay, so you put yourself into the Palestinian shoes. I was growing up, a refugee that looked down upon involved this. I hate these guys here, I was willing to kill these wrestlers.

49:23 That’s empathy. Sympathy is feeling bad for them, trying to have emotions for them. You want to cut that out, right, right, because it begins to interfere with your ability to process right? You know, it’s what Daniel Goleman would call cognitive empathy, he says. There’s three kinds of empathy, the third being cognitive empathy.

49:43 And he says, Interestingly enough, it’s what sociopaths are best at, because the sociopath doesn’t care why you, how you see, why you see what you see. He just wants to always see sociopaths apply empathy because they like you, or because it works because it works. Also, why do sociopaths apply empathy because they’re lazy, which means it works faster than anything else does? Social past wouldn’t love empathy if they weren’t if it didn’t work and if they weren’t lazy. It’s the hack, it’s the influence hack and the empathy.

50:22 As a term has come in, usage around the world has become to be so synonymous with sympathy. Right? That we put the word tactical in front of it. Also, because we know so much more about how the brain works now that we can neuroscience, we can see in your head. I know what chemical changes are going on.

50:39 I know that you’re Amygdala, where you’re the center, the command post for your emotions. I know that I know, but for a fact, if there’s three times as much real estate in your Amygdala devoted to negative emotions, then there is positive emotions. And in the science happens to back up the negativity bangs in your brain three times louder than positivity does. So if I were to use that information on my benefit, I would know if I defuse your negative emotions. I’ll get a deal faster than if I try to increase your positive emotions because they’re louder and if I turn that down, it’s much faster.

51:18 This is how people sell insurance. I guess that be, that’s one of the ways you start. Look, you know, you want to lose your house, right? You know what, what’s the loss, what are you afraid of? And now, how do you accelerate that empathy, or how do you let the other party know you’re feeling empathy or get that?

51:35 Are there some kind of quick ways? Or, well, I’ll just start feeding it back to you. Okay, actually, the thing that sold the book to the publisher because they’d never seen anything like it. We said the goal of the negotiation is not to get the other side to say yes. The goal of the negotiation is the if you get the other side to go, that’s right.

51:55 Not your right, but the two magic words that if you get the other side to say you get what you want, okay, instead of, yes, give me an example of that quick example in terrorism trying to get a hostage out of the Philippines 10 million dollar ransom demand. Okay, a bad guy, the bad guy on the other side said. Straight out of the movies, sociopathic terrorists, murder and rape and sociopath. Okay, I mean, straight out of the movies. Okay, bad, bad, bad dude, bad as they come, okay, and you kidnap somebody.

52:29 He and his group have gotten American Americans they’re asking for 10 million dollars of war damages, not ransom, but for 500 years of oppression. Wow, from Spanish to the Japanese to America. It’s actually a pretty good bargaining tactic because it makes 10 million dollars seem like nothing right? And it gets everybody behind your higher power. And it’s not about the kid, it’s about ourselves, about leadership, it’s about the future, our history, about where we’re going, it’s about where we came from.

52:53 Smart management style. Yeah, yeah, sociopaths are great leaders are most of these guys sociopaths, either they are, or to actually see people’s emotions. You got to get your own emotions out of the way. So, you know, there’s an interesting question now whether more and more leaders in business are sociopathic to begin with. Or they just understood they had to get their own emotions out of the way to actually see the dynamics that are going on.

53:20 Okay, definition quickly of a sociopath is what? because it has bad connotations. No, no shortage of bad, but let’s just say somebody doesn’t feel any sympathy for you, okay, brand new sympathy for anybody. They also don’t feel guilty about stuff okay. And so and actually, in some ways this is because if I feel guilty, my brain slows down. It’s a negative emotion.

53:39 It makes me dumber regret makes me dumber, and that’s why you know so and social past. Look at the rest of us as weak. Right? They go, you feel bad, you get dumber, you make more dumb decisions when you feel bad. I don’t feel bad, I don’t do as many stupid things as you do.

53:59 And that’s why, from their perspective, those of us that feel guilt and regret, and all these other things that actually slow us down, which make us human. But they also slow down our cognitive processes. Okay, so anyway, we got a social path on the other side, which are usually bad people, but they can be good people right? Well, they’re smart enough if they’re smart enough to realize, like, if I commit crimes, I’m gonna go to jail, they’re gonna catch me right. If I don’t commit crimes, I can be highly successful and really wealthy.

54:26 Let’s weigh this out, right? But if I looked at the top CEOs of our generation Gates, Jobs, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, you might argue that they all have some sociopathic tendencies. You know, I wouldn’t to be an effective leader. You’ve got to get your own emotions out of the way you’ve got. You’ve got to be able to make the hard decisions and they’re going to be people that will.

54:53 There will be negative consequences for people, so I would not put that tag line on any single human being. But the difficulty of leadership is making decisions that you know, that some of the people that those decisions are going to affect they will. It will hurt them, it will affect them negatively, they’ll lose a job, they’ll lose it, they’ll lose. Yeah, I mean, these are hard decisions to make. Sounds like the military, you know, perfect exactly, you love your men, but you got to send them in.

55:22 Yeah, you know, yeah, so these are tough decisions. I mean, I, you know, I, I wouldn’t hang that label on anybody. I know how tough the decisions are. Okay, cool back to this kidnapper. So you’re talking to him, he’s got, he’s got the vision, the mission. They’re on 10 million dollars American hostages getting the vision spending division.

55:38 He may not necessarily happen. Okay, great, correct, that’s what we got, that’s what we have done. If he spends it enough, he might believe it himself. We’re going to find out, okay, because what we ended up doing was, How do you get involved in the situation? And how does I just always curious how the details happen?

55:52 Is it a phone call? Is it this? You know, I’m going to have to go to some movies later, but that’s that movie proof of life, which I think is a hostage situation down in South America. But right now, I always wonder, Is this a matter of days, weeks and months, and is it a phone call? Is it a mobile number like, How does this happen? Well, you know, I’m water skiing and the phone rings while I’m water skiing and I pick it up and there’s, I don’t know.

56:15 Well, it’s by. It happens by phone. At the time, the system, the system we had at the time was based out of Washington, D.C. Okay, I had a very close relationship with the State Department’s counterterrorism section. State Department counterterrorism at that point in time was very proactive.

56:31 They kept wired into all the embassies that anytime an American got into trouble, State Department counterterrorism would find out quickly. My relationship with them, they would call me and tell me, Okay, I would actually find out. The FBI always had the Psych Strategic Information Operations Command Post at headquarters. Always made them mad because I found out before they did, they were supposed to know first. Okay, and I would call them and tell them, and they’d be annoyed because I found that again before they did.

56:59 But I had a great working relationship with the State Department, counterterrorism guys, very proactive guys. Okay, so I get the call. And Amer, the MSC finds out it hits the media phones, start ringing, mine is high on the list of phones that ring, Okay, Well, yeah, this happened to be in 2000, 2000. Okay, are they as vigilant now as they were back then? I haven’t worked with them in a number of years.

57:20 My guess is they probably are okay. I don’t know who’s there now. Okay, I know we, we got there the hard way. And interestingly enough, one person that helped all the agencies coordinate phenomenally then was a man who’s much more famous now. He’s now retired. Admiral Bill McRaven He was Captain McRaven, assigned to the National Security Council.

57:42 At that time, CAP Admiral McRaven caught both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Yeah, he’s got a book called Making Your Bed. Yeah, we almost had him on here, We missed him by a phenomenal guy. Yeah, yeah, he made some calls to go in and he made some controversial calls as well. But it sounds good, you know, a definition of a leader, okay, the absolute definition of a leader.

58:02 And he and he was Captain McRaven then, and he coordinated us phenomenally. He would, he brought us all together, he brought the FBI and he brought the rest from the FBI and State Department counterterrorism. He brought the DOJ people, and he even brought the CIA people in. You’re in a room with Captain McRaven and you know you’re getting behind the right guy. Good leadership, phenomenal.

58:23 Okay, he’s listening, he’s getting people in the same room, he’s not scared of controversy. I can remember we were PR in Washington, we were pushing some issues at the time and I heard him say something. I never heard anybody else in government say, he said. I’m going to keep pushing this and tell me until somebody tells me to sit down and shut up. And then they’re going to have to tell me twice, You don’t hear government guys talk like that, that often, what kind of things you talking about pushing?

58:48 We were pushing the issues on hostage recovery. We were pushing what we believe to be the proper way to get hostages out of harm’s way. More proactive, very proactive, Okay, not sit back and wait to see what happens. What are the government assets, how do we get government assets and pet in place and prepared for situations instead of wait? Instead of waiting for the situation to call to us, okay, what can we anticipate?

59:13 How can we get out in front of this? Okay? And Captain McCraven Admiral McRaven was by that. And that’s why, when you know, President Obama figured that they found Osama bin Laden, who do they call the FIG to lead to lead the operation? But captain or Admiral McRaven, right, because he, you know, and he always made the right call okay.

59:31 And I’m guessing all the guys under him had known him as a leader and known he would back him up. And it was the real deal and it probably feels good going in working for a guy like that. Yeah, and if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna hang your, if you’re gonna put your career on the line, you’re gonna put your criminal line for a guy like that, okay, because you know he’s making decisions for the proper moral decision. Which government is not always guided by because government has bureaucratic rules, right and elections and cycles? And yeah, okay, so he gets you in on this on this call with this hos with this.

1:00:03 Well, they get me into the Philippines. Okay, so you go, there is that important to be on the same time zone and on the ground. That’s a lot easier because you’re gonna have to coach somebody there and chances are you need to find somebody’s coachable. And I found ultimately it took us a week or two to get to this guy. But he was in a colonel with the Philippine National Police retired a few years ago, he from the Philippine National Police.

1:00:28 He was the number three general, he was a definition of a patriot. Okay, this is the guy that the kidnapper or the guy that talked to the guy that I coached the guy. Why don’t you talk to him? Because we need to hide that we’re there, okay? So he wanted to talk to the government about the U.S. government.

1:00:45 He wants to talk to somebody he could do business with, but we got to keep somebody. You know, you keep your decision makers from the table. Okay, is that a good thing? You put it, You put it, Yeah, you put a You put a U.S. government rep at the table like, Oh, you’re a government rep, you could. You guys can come up with five million dollars you guys are offering at that point in time, the U.S. government was offering five million dollars reward for the World Trade Center bombers that were still on the run.

1:01:10 At the time, it was Ramps Yusef in I think, Yeah, I’m, yeah, I got a mental block on the other guy, Okay, who I think is still out there. But the U.S. government says, You know, we’ll pay 5 million for the return of these guys in the Third World. They said, Well, if you’ll pay 5 million for a bad guy, you’ll pay more than that for one of your own citizens. Don’t tell us you don’t have money to spread around the world because you’re offering it for somebody you don’t like. What will you pay for somebody you do like?

1:01:38 If you pay 5 million for someone you don’t like, you’ll pay 10 for somebody you do like you got to understand the other side’s logic, Okay, so you’re trying to hold your cards back, yeah, but that’s how they see it. Yeah, so okay, that’s how you see it, okay? And that’s another reason why they came up with the 10 million dollars. But they made up all this nonsense about it, so we weren’t getting any well with logic or reasoning or argument. What does an American in 2000 have to do with what the Spanish did 500 years ago?

1:02:07 Right, and you’re coaching this general to talk to this other guy, how often do you guys? Are they talking to each other once a day? You know, we at that point of time, there’s probably a conversation every three, four days. And do you need this proof of life concept? You needed the hostages alive?

1:02:21 Proof of life is the issue. It’s a sticky wicket, if you will. What do you do if you know hostage is alive? What happens if you ask for proof of life if you ask for something? The most dangerous negotiation is the one you don’t know you’re in. You have now started bargaining because I’ve asked if I start bargaining by coming up with an ask, then, by definition, I if I fail to reciprocate.

1:02:51 I’m now in bad faith bargaining because I’m asking, but I’m not giving. I can’t be trusted to give bad implications down the line. So we have to be very careful about how we trigger proof of life versus whether or not we ask it. Do we suggest it get that right to it, get them to come up with the idea. Plus, we know the hostage is alive.

1:03:11 How? because they’re putting pictures of them everywhere. Okay, right, right? They’re showing them all over the place, okay? They’re also. They’re also running their own counterintelligence operation when they’re marching through the jungle.

1:03:24 They’re handing him a rifle that’s got no weapons and no ammunition in it, but he’s walking through the jungle with them carrying a rifle. The locals are saying, You know what, he’s not a hostage, he’s walking around carrying a rifle, He’s got to be a bad guy himself. These guys are not idiots, they understand how to run a disinformation campaign themselves, right? Keep the other side confused. Now, when this guy’s on the phone with the kidnapper, are you in the same room, or is that going to probably trigger an ungenuine conversation?

1:03:51 You can’t be like, Don’t say that, say this. Well, we put some, we I’m in the same room with them. Okay, and but we’ve got. We’ve got a room like this and we’ve got stuff all over the walls and we’ve written down ideas. So here’s decision, trees.

1:04:06 And then, although the conversation’s taking place in Tagalog, the guy that we’re working with his name is Benji. Phenomenal. I would to this day, I would trust him with the life of my son. Aft. After a while, we started pointing to stuff that we’ve written in English.

1:04:21 And he get off the phone and goes, You guys don’t speak to garlic because you’ve been pointing to the right notes at the right times because tone of voice like, How can how can you read a conversation? As soon as you start reading tone of voice, you got a pretty good idea What’s going on, huh? Actually, you could hear the other guy’s tone of voice and you could see his right at the same time. Yeah, so or we’re getting. And so what happened, this negotiation, what was the breakthrough and what and how did it end up being resolved?

1:04:47 And more breakthrough was when we got the terrorists to say, That’s right, we’d spend a lot of time trying to say It’s an American. You have to do with what the Spanish did. Or if you let him go, you’ll be a hero. Or, you know, whatever ridiculous argument or what we thought. I mean, you don’t win a negotiation by making an argument.

1:05:09 And we spun our wheels trying to make arguments. And finally I said, You know what, we’re gonna stop making arguments. I don’t know how we got an impasse. It’s like when you’re arguing with your wife and you’re trying to argue the logic of why you shouldn’t take the trash out of this. I mean, it never goes anywhere or anybody else, but as.

1:05:25 But we have a repetitive pattern of arguing with our spouse, we just don’t realize that it’s the same pattern we have with everybody else. When we get into an argument, we just happen to get into arguments with our spouse more. Okay, so I said, Well, you know, today we’re only going to do one thing. We’re going to get the other guy to say, That’s right. And then we’re going to shut up and wait to see what happens.

1:05:43 Which is a really hard thing to do. And so my guy gets on the phone with the terrorist sociopath, and he says, You know what, you’re not asking for ransom, you’re asking for. War damages 500 years of oppression, from Spanish to the Japanese to the Americans. The violation of your fishing rights. The injustice for over 500 years from three colonial powers that have been raping and pillaging the south of the Philippines.

1:06:06 And you’re not even Filipinos anywhere, but your morals and your separate, independent Muslim nation. Who’s been suppressed by an American infidel government that’s holding up a puppet infidel government in the Philip in Manila, anyway? And he lays everything out that the terrorists have been saying for weeks. And then my guy on cue shuts up and they sit there in silence for a moment. And the sociopath on the other end of the phone is a sociopath vulnerable to empty empathy.

1:06:36 This sociopath, when having empathy applied to him, said, That’s right. And I sat there for a couple more moments of silence. And my guy says his talk again in a couple of days, he says, Okay, they never asked for a ransom again. After that moment, we went from 10 million to zero in the instant that he said, That’s right. The kidnapping lasted for a couple more months, took a couple of other twists and turns, but they never asked for ransom ever again.

1:07:06 They started asking for intermediaries to be involved non-substantive stuff to try to work it out. They become sufficiently disorganized on the other side that on the Thursday before Easter on Monday, Thursday, our hostage walked away. He walks away, he gets spotted by a local farmer. They alert the military, the military says, that American is walking around by himself in a jungle. They fly down, they pick them up, they take them back to Manila, they hold a big press conference that we’ve rescued.

1:07:40 The American Daring Rescue operation. Yeah, they gave him a ride, it was a that’s a daring rescue operation. They gave him a ride, but he didn’t say anything. He’s sitting with the president of the Philippines. On one side, the second defense on the other keeps his mouth shut.

1:07:54 We fly him out back in the Philippines three weeks later on another kidnapping by another faction of the same terrorist group. I cannot back up with the guy had been coaching, he says. You’re not gonna believe who called me on the phone like, you know, I don’t know who called you, who calls you on the phone. The terrorist still had my guys. Undercover names still at his undercover phone number didn’t know knew he had to be with the government, police.

1:08:19 The military didn’t know, but he figured he was with the government. Calls them back on the phone and says, Did they promote you? I don’t know what you said to me on the phone, Who’s going to kill the American? You’re really good, they should promote you. He hangs up what he’s saying when he makes that call is I deal with you again.

1:08:44 I felt respected by you for some reason I would deal with you if we talk again, I’ll talk, and that’s what we teach people. We teach everybody that, no matter what the interaction, no matter what the outcome is for the other side, no matter how bad it is for them. If they felt respected throughout the duration of it, they will always deal with you again. That’s what, and that’s what that’s the epitome of what you do. Everything you’ve learned is for them to say, That’s right, yeah, it is over and over and over.

1:09:18 It doesn’t matter what the context is. And I think you said that in your book, like when people go into these negotiations, there’s like three things they want, almost in this order. They want to be listened to, they want to be respected and then they want to get what they want right? Which most people would never think. It was that order, maybe the other way, right, exactly.

1:09:34 And so if I can make a deal by just listening to and respecting to you, then I’m going to make as many of those deals as possible. Now at that point in time, if we have to adjust on terms. But I’m not adjusting any of my terms if I don’t have to. And the only way for me to be sure that I don’t have to change a single term. Or put you in a frame of mind where you might say, Hey, you know what?

1:09:56 Here’s what we can do Instead of paying you your full fee, what if we put you on the cover of our magazine? I’m like, Put me on a cover of your magazine that’s worth way more than my fee was worth. Yeah, I didn’t even know you had a magazine. We cut a deal with one conference, a local conference. Their national organization has twenty thousand members they don’t have a local magazine, but the National has a membership of twenty thousand.

1:10:30 National finds out that if they put an article about me in the National magazine, I’ll come in and talk to the local group for nothing. Nationals Yeah, awesome. We gotta put stuff in a magazine anyway, we gotta support the local group the local group brings me in. I do a no fee talk for them, they’re so happy they go ahead on their own. And they videotape my talk without telling me it’s a phenomenal videotape of the speech.

1:10:54 They give it to me for nothing. So I got an article in a national magazine that was worth more than what the fee was. At the time. I got a video of me giving a talk, which I didn’t have at the time I turn around. They let me put it on my YouTube channel.

1:11:08 They don’t retain ownership of it, they give me ownership. Now I got a video that’s got all kinds of views on it on the YouTube channel. Plus, at some point in time, I can monetize that. I didn’t know they could do any of those things until we got into the conversation, right? So that’s the unknown unknowns.

1:11:23 The other guy might have a better solution than you have never be willing to. What? Except never, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. Okay? And again, that’s the epitome of what you do, opening up these other possibilities right to where it’s a win-win situation, but you hate that term win-win Because if someone says Win-win to you, what does that normally mean?

1:11:42 Because that’s what that situation was. But when someone says that, you don’t like that, if someone, if, if I sit down with somebody and someone says, you know what, let’s cooperate, I want to do a win. -win deal with you, I just do a win. -WIN You know what they’re telling me is, I want to win. We’ll see what happens you afterwards, okay, every time.

1:11:59 Somebody that uses that terminology in a first five minutes is trying to get me to work for nothing right and give me nothing. Okay. So beware of that. Be aware of somebody who says it, that’s the difference between somebody who embodies it. Okay, a couple other things that Chris talks about be very wary of someone that says, Yes, right away, counterfeit.

1:12:21 Yes, man, well, you said you said something about yeses it can be, it can be three things right. Confirmation, confirmation, commitment, counterfeit what does that mean? Well, so there’s this nonsensical yes, momentum idea out there, or, yes, ladder, right? Get them to say yes four times saying Yes, you know, yes, momentum tie them down with, yes, tie them down. That nonsense has been played on so many people worldwide that if you say to me, does this look like something that would be interesting to you?

1:12:51 You’re trying to get me to say, Yes, you can walk me down that path and I know it right, so I’m like, I feel that hook there, you know what? Right now you’re telling me that I can’t really trust you, so I’m gonna go sure, because I want to know what you got. I want you to. I want you to give me ideas I could use without using you, so I want you. What’s your value proposition? What do you guys bring to the table in your marketing company?

1:13:15 I’m going to say, you might say as a marketing company to me, you know, is better marketing something you might be interested in and will go like, Okay, maybe I can do what you do without paying you. So I say, Yeah, what are you guys going to do for me? And you might begin to lay out what you’re going to do for me. If you’ve already told me that I can’t trust you, I’ll be happy to take let you make me smarter and not hire you. Okay, and if you start this, yes, nonsense on me right off the bat, the first one.

1:13:49 I’m gonna wonder whether or not you’re doing it accidentally or on purpose. If you turn right around and ask me another yes question, I’m like, Okay, basically meeting’s over. You’re going to try to pump me for information before you walk. Right, okay, so what do you want to hear? No, well, no, tell people, no, yeah, well, you know, nobody in my company tries to get anybody to say, Yes, we.

1:14:12 I’m going to get you to say no, because I know you’re going to react instantly differently. First of all, if you, when you say no, you feel safe, yeah, tell me about the power of the No. It’s crazy, you know. Calculated no is calibrated, no is worth at least five yeses. Because if I say to you, Are you against this, do you disagree with?

1:14:33 This? is, is this a bad idea? You’re gonna say, No, it’s not a bad idea, but as a matter of fact, if we’re gonna make it work, we gotta do this, this, this and this, or we’re gonna have to follow up with this. This, this and this. Which is the next five yeses that I would have had to ask you for every time you say no. You instantly begin to think about how to make something work, and since you feel protected, you’re gonna lay that stuff out to me.

1:14:57 We’re trying to get a deal done on a possible C TV show in Los Angeles recently. I love the people in L.A. because they say, you’re a hostage negotiator, that’s cute. It won’t work here, but it was cute that you did it out there, and so I’ll trigger a No. We’re in a meeting with an executive, we’re trying to bring another party in right. My colleagues are trying to get him to say yes to bringing the party in right.

1:15:18 And finally I say, Look, are you against this? Is this a bad idea? he says. No, it’s not a bad idea, but we have to set up a meeting, so you’re gonna have to. Here’s my Secretary’s name, and here’s how you get ahold of her. Now.

1:15:28 I want you to get a hold of them and I want you to set up a meeting. And I don’t want it to be over the phone for me to trust someone’s, I’m gonna need them to come into my office. We’re gonna sit down on purpose in person. What was that? Well, how do you want it, When do you want it? How do we get in touch with people, who do we set up? Where do you want the meeting, do you want to be?

1:15:45 I would have had to ask all those questions, but when I said, You know, are you against this? is, is this a bad idea? Not only was he in favor of it, he answered my next seven questions and told us how to do them. His secretary was already on notice to be looking for a call to set up a meeting in his office. Because you triggered a no out of him. He felt safe, or he felt good enough to just open up a bit right and begin to lay the rest of it out.

1:16:10 Okay, I, I tried to get Jack Welch, I was working on getting Jack Welch to come and speak to the class I was teaching at USC. He’s had a book signing everybody at the book signing asked him to do stuff. I walk up to Jack Welch. And I say, Is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and teach, to negotiate, come and speak to the negotiation course I teach at USC? He took this, he got this glare on his face and he looked up into the sky.

1:16:31 I mean, I thought, and he froze for so long. Actually, I thought he had a stroke, I thought I thought he, he looked furious and I got scared. I mean, I like, you’re like, I just can’t check well, it’s a stroke and he’s gonna die. But after he stopped staring up in the sky, he looked back at me and he said, This is my personal assistant’s name. This is a Twitter account.

1:16:49 We have set up to communicate with her, I will call her and tell her who you are and what you want. I think we’re going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we’re in Los Angeles in the fall, we’ll come and speak to your class. How many yeses was that okay, instantly? Because people want to say no to that, right?

1:17:03 They want to sell. You know, right away, like, if you say, you know how, how impossible would it be for you to come and say that? Like, they want to say no, because like, they always want to deny an impossibility, right? Well, it hits a saying it like that actually triggers a couple of different emotional things. It makes people feel in control, which always causes people to be able to think quicker and clearer and more in terms of implementation.

1:17:27 If you feel in control, okay, instead of feeling threatened, when you say yes to something, you always think, you know, What’s the hook here? What have I let myself in for? what, what, what am I not seeing, right? That’s a distraction, okay? So I feel comfortable when I said no, because I feel like I’m not laying something on the line revealing information. And once I do that, probably with a little bit of silence, too.

1:17:48 I want to fill in some gaps. Well now, now that I feel protected and safe and I’m not committed, I can get in my head if we’re going to do this. This is what I have to have. Okay, that and what, what? And someone feels all right if I’m gonna do this, and I haven’t said I am, but if I’m gonna do this, this is what we have to have happen.

1:18:07 When you are not making a commitment of any sort in any way, shape or form. You can then think things through what you have to have to make it work, and that shortcuts everything else. All right, you use this a lot all the time and people should use it a lot. And the upon time, the only time they use it is by accident. Exactly because they’re going in, they’re trying to, they’re scared, Okay, they’re being deferential, right?

1:18:32 I guess you’d never go out with me, but maybe that’s maybe that’s why, you know. Here’s what I told a friend of mine to say to women he wanted to meet. Have you given up on finding the man of your dreams the No ladder? Yeah, there you go, all right? But another example negotiation I had recently with Robert Hersevich from Shark Tank.

1:18:51 By the way, he’s a prince of a guy, I mean, on a mere introduction. I get 90 minutes with him over lunch and getting 90 minutes with a billionaire is not an easy thing. And only on an introduction. Wonderfully generous guy. He’s building a relationship now you’re six times more likely to do business with him, six times more likely.

1:19:07 So we’re trying to get him to buy some tickets, to come to negotiation, training, where Hammond and harm back and forth. And our training is selling out, I mean, when we open up, the training doors close fast and I want his people in. So I finally sent him an email. And I say, Are you against making a commitment for the tickets now? And I said in the email, Are you against paying for them tonight before business starts tomorrow?

1:19:33 Because I knew that as soon as business started the next day, the rest of our tickets were going to sell out. He’s going to be blocked out, but instead of saying, Would you commit to these now, would you pay? Tonight? I said, Are you against doing it now? are you against paying? Tonight?

1:19:47 I get an instantaneous email back saying, No, we got no problem payment for the tickets. I want. This is exactly how many I want. I am making that commitment. My Secretary will get in touch with you and we will pay tonight and it went down in a matter of minutes.

1:20:00 There’s two parts to that question. You get the commitment, and then they feel like they have to follow through on their word, right? Because then are you against paying for them tonight? Like, No, I’m not, and I’m now going to make it happen, right, right? That’s and they will tell you how to do it because I’m not trying to trap them with.

1:20:16 Yes, and this was a conversation that was that was in the office, and it was going to happen anyway. I mean, when we close, when we go for the close, we don’t try to get people to say yes. We either try to get them to say, That’s right, or we close with. On a No. Are you against doing this? do you disagree? Is this a bad idea?

1:20:31 Interesting? And just go on that a little bit more. When you agree to a deal, you never say yes, you would rather say okay, or you win. Well, I would rather say, Hey, that was a great idea, you know, effectively you win in some fashion or another. Okay, and why is that all right?

1:20:52 So yes, is nothing without how what does that mean? If I can’t implement my yes and we don’t see implementation the same way, then my yes is meaningless. So and the how is going to be more likely to happen if it’s your idea because your ego’s at stake? If you came up with the how and I already know, I want the deal, so I, you know, implementation on my end. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t agree to stuff we’re not going to do, it’s that simple.

1:21:22 We don’t sign contracts, we take deposits. Because every time somebody says, Will you be here on this date and will you give us a training? We are always there, so first of all, we always implement and that’s our reputation and actually our reputation is that we over implement. We will always give somebody more than what they paid for, so they will never. Their money is always well spent.

1:21:44 But yes, there’s nothing without how I got to get the how out of you. Because two things. If it was your idea, you’ll stick to it and you’ll remember it. If I lay out to you how it’s going to happen, if you don’t write it down, you’re not going to remember any of it. But if it all came through your cranium and through your thought process, it’s going to be really easy for you to recall what you agreed to.

1:22:06 Because it was your idea, right? So towards the end of that negotiation, to say, How do you think we should do this or how right? How does this work, what works for you, what works for you? Okay, well, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna this. You’re listening, you’re trying to get all those details in their head.

1:22:20 And then you’re like, Okay, let’s do it, or you win well and get all the details out of your mouth, right? And I will. I will have said, You know, great idea, and then I’ll summarize, because the other thing about the summary of driving for that’s right. Then I get it right, right? And it gets reinforced in your head and you’ve given me a complete confirmation and it gets drilled in that much farther.

1:22:44 And then you feel really good about the interaction you feel connected to me in a way that you can’t explain, but no different than a terrorist. You’re like, I like dealing with you, right? Because you respected me, you listened to me, and now I feel like I got what I wanted. Yeah, exactly. And the implementation right, yeah, right, and the implementation is everything because you said something like, you know, never under.

1:23:07 Never underestimate the harm someone can do to you by doing nothing. Never be mean to someone who could hurt you by doing nothing right. Which, if you give that any thought that includes everybody you talk to in, if you want something from them, that’s policy, I can’t do it. You know, whatever kind of by doing nothing, yeah, you gotta wait in line here. You know where there’s 10 people in front of you, take a number by doing nothing, whatever it is.

1:23:38 If you’re talking to somebody and you want something or you’re trying to get them to say yes. Their inaction by itself could hurt you. So if that’s true for everybody, the flip side of that coin, which is harder to see. Everybody you talk to, could help you. If they felt like it right, even if they’re only an order taker, do they put you at the back of the line, do they put you at the front of the line?

1:24:02 Even if they’re an order taker only, and they have no decision? -making authority. Do they put you at the front of the line, do they take your request? And they walk it down the hall for you? It’s stunning how much how much power people have or the hacks that they’re aware of.

1:24:19 If somebody says, I can’t help you, it’s policy they gotta work around, they just don’t feel like using it right, okay? And the implementation of a deal is probably 99 of the deal anyway, so don’t just walk out of the meeting. High-fiving and feeling like you won when if the guy doesn’t feel good about it, you’re going to pay for this dearly in the long run. Or if his company saws them off, saws a limb off behind him. We, we’re in the running for negotiation contract for a major tele international telecommunications company.

1:24:52 About three years ago, we had a representative, didn’t get us in the deal. But in the process, we found out that this major carrier that every, you know, most people in America have. 50 of the deals they signed, 50 are never implemented, half their deals that they say yes to, because nobody’s paying attention to implement implementation. It gets back to the people on the other side into what people refer to as the terms and conditions phase and it gets slaughtered. We take terms and conditions into account up front and shorten the terms and condition phase on the other end.

1:25:31 So instead of going from six months to implementation, you’re going to one month or you’re never getting implemented. Implemented. Half of their deals, half that they signed. Think about how much money that cost people. You just you get into the house sooner and you begin to knock those numbers way down.

1:25:50 Tell me about some exercises we can do now. What do you normally do with study? You said, you have to, you can’t role play with people because they’re acting, and if they feel someone else is acting, then you can’t bypass that prefrontal cortex. So how would you train me, or just see how I’m doing with some of these? All right, I’m gonna give you, I’m gonna give you some, I’m gonna tell you what to say.

1:26:11 Okay, and then I’m gonna need you to practice saying this in certain instances, okay. And all I want you to say is, sounds like there’s something on your mind. Let me hear one okay, just say, sounds like that’s something I’m just practicing my voice here. Sounds like there’s something on your mind now whenever anybody calls you on the phone or anybody sees you face to face. And they say, Either, Have you got a few minutes to talk? or they say, How are you today?

1:26:40 What do you say? Sounds like something’s on your mind. Bang. Now you probably get asked that, How are you today? or have you got a few minutes to talk? How many times in a given day?

1:26:51 A good amount 10 at 10 is a great, great guess easily 10 times. What we’re doing here is low stakes practice for high stakes performance. Now. Sounds like there’s something on your mind is a great opening line to nearly anything somebody says in a negotiation. Somebody might call our company up on a phone and talk to my son, who’s the chief negotiator for our company.

1:27:17 And he’ll say, Give us your value proposition, what do you guys bring to the table? And my son will say, Sounds like there’s something on your mind and they go, Yeah, we’re struggling with these issues, you know, we’ve researched all these negotiation companies and we haven’t been able to get any training. You know, we think your book is great and it’s different than any other book that’s out there, and we want to bring you in for training. Bang, bang, bang, bang, okay. We don’t give a value proposition when somebody asks us for us, because if somebody asks you for a value proposition, you failed.

1:27:46 No, they’ve been thinking about you already, okay, right? And when you say sounds like there’s something on your mind, you just jump past the prefrontal cortex and you trigger all that stream. But the conversation when somebody says to you, give me your value proposition, most business people are like, All right, yeah, I’ve been working on this for weeks. This is an important I’m in a Super Bowl. This I got something at stake here, right?

1:28:08 So you’re not going to say, Sounds like there’s something on your mind unless you’ve been practicing, working that magic in your day. -to-day Conversations you’re going to want to perform the your number on Broadway like you’ve been practicing in front of everybody in the meeting. Right in front of your boss. And you’re going to be like, You’re going to land, you’re going to land it perfectly. And then the other party is going to be sitting there.

1:28:27 And you’ll have gotten no further in the negotiation because you don’t know what’s on their mind, right? So if you’ve been practicing in those 10 conversations, you have a day, you’re going to be astonished. Nine of those 10 conversations. Because when somebody says, How are you today, do they really want to know how you are or they want to? They want to test you a little bit to see if they can talk to you about something they’ve been thinking about.

1:28:52 They want to test the waters. Are you in a good mood? Are you in a bad mood? Are you tired? Because I got something I really want to talk about with you, and I’m just trying to figure out what you’re like before. I put it out there, okay, isn’t that weird, though, if I say, like, sounds like something’s on your mind to everybody who says, Hi to me, not hi. Oh, have you got a few minutes to talk? Okay? or how are you? or how are you? Okay?

1:29:16 All right now, your gut reaction first is, Ah, this is weird. what are they? You know, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna they, They’re going to run away from me. That’s why you don’t have any stake in the game yet. Lows takes practice for high stakes results. Okay, if you’re worried about saying that in, just when somebody said, How are you today? How are you going to perform in the big game where you’re in the big meeting?

1:29:40 And somebody says, Give me your value proposition. You’re not going to go to that because you were scared to say it in the No. No stakes conversation, right? It’s like sparring and martial arts. You do that you do the low stakes piece, so you can do it in the cage, exactly.

1:29:52 And then you test, drive this enough times and you go, like, you know, now I can read exactly when I need that because I practiced right. Okay, that’s an interesting tactic, and so it sounds like something in your mind. You’ve said before that people, sometimes they go into meetings, they try to get all the information they try to research the company. I mean, I, I’ve dealt with people that have had me private investigators, they spent thousands of dollars. I got some weird people that have been on the show like trying to dig up all my stuff, to try to find out what’s going on.

1:30:20 But you said, that’s not the very good use of time or resources. Is this one of those tactics to elicit information that someone that has? Because you said, Why go through all this rigmarole? When they’ll actually tell you, Yeah, you’re going to tell me a lot fat, you’re going to tell the stuff. First of all, you know more about yourself than I’m ever going to find out online, right?

1:30:39 You can follow me 24 7 for 365 and you can make an opinion of what’s going on in my head. But you’ll never know what’s really bothering me or what’s going on in my life. Yeah, the facts and how what they mean to you right? Like, what does it mean to be to me to be a small town boy from Iowa? When I feel like I belong in New York City, you know, so people have to re people have to talk to me to know what that difference is.

1:31:02 Okay, or how does a guy who thinks that New York City is his hometown when he grew up in Iowa? How’s that guy comfortable in Los Angeles? Because those are two vastly different places, right? Or how do I feel about being in Washington, D.C. Yeah, I was in Washington, D.C. for a long time, must have liked it.

1:31:18 Well, no, I liked the job, but I was never that happy in D.C. but you were there for so long. Yeah, watch your conclusions, you got to find out for me what that is, okay, so your research, if you look at your research as a way to give you an inkling instead of a full story, then you do your cursory research in advance. A couple of trigger points, but only to get dialed in really fast, like when you and I spoke earlier. You know you’ve been, you’ve been all over the U.S. man, you’ve been a lot of places, you’ve done some cool stuff, you know? And I, I’m into a conversation with you because I’m into the conversation, but you take great care of yourself.

1:32:01 You’re, and I said to you, I think you’re much happier than you were in that other job. You know, are you reading my patterns? Are you doing cold? reads on me. You know, I would never do a cold read on you in advance. When we got a studio, I would not do that. You probably do without even thinking about it now, right? Yeah, because it’s all.

1:32:18 It’s also about good relationships, right? It builds rapport. The cold read Right, Yeah, I believe in long,-term relationships. Okay, you know, I believe if we’re too productive people on a planet, we should be contributing to each other’s life positively for as long as we’re both here. So, because I’m not trying to take advantage of you, right?

1:32:33 So that’s a lesson everybody listening or watching should take that look at the end of the day. This is value,-added for both parties, for the for the planet for a long time. For everybody, right? If we understand each other better, have better empathy, no more information and build those relationships, which is kind of what we’re doing here. Yeah, yeah, exactly, we’re all gonna be better off.

1:32:56 It’s if you’re a sociopath, you want long-term relationships because it will make you wealthier, right? Okay, you know, it doesn’t matter, even what our rule is. I like negotiation techniques that missionaries and mercenaries like the mercenary is going to like it because it works. The missionary’s going to like it just because it’s a decent thing to do if it passes both of those tests I’m in. So just because a mercenary does it just because a sociopath does, it is not a disqualifier.

1:33:23 What am I doing it for? Sociopath does it? Because it works, sociopaths use these criminals, killers, terrorists, serial killers, use phones. Does that mean I’m not going to use a phone? Okay, it’s what I use it for.

1:33:38 Okay, are you still learning? I know you went and got to got to train at Harvard and your book starts off and you’re going ahead to have a couple professors in there who I guess were former negotiators. And they tried to see if they could get inside your head, they had a hard time. Are you still learning from other people learning new tactics about yourself and also you’re changing? You know, as a man you know you’re getting, you know, you’re getting older, wiser, calmer.

1:34:02 Ideally. Yeah, ideally, yeah, what’s that like? you know, are you still in the learning curve and how have you changed? Yeah, Yeah, yeah, well, you know. The new the pioneering and pioneering and neuroscience, the pioneering in interpersonal relationships. You know, there’s a book out recently that I read called The Culture Code.

1:34:20 It’s phenomenal about how to, how to run and lead organizations. Yeah, I’m learning that, because now, besides being a doer, I’m much more a leader. I mean, we’re bringing people into a company I’m helping other people pay, make better lives for themselves, by working for us and with us. You know, how do I do that? How do I go from being leading by example to bringing out the best in others and making them making them have a great time?

1:34:41 So there’s phenomenal stuff happening all the time that we’re trying to keep up with in our we’re continuing to event. Invent better ways of negotiating the research on the psychological state of the mindset of flow. Which is actually a chemical cocktail in your brain, which increases performance, endurance, happiness, pattern recognition, effectiveness so you want to get your other party into the flow? Potentially, yeah, for a better result, makes them smarter, right? Makes it more, maybe emotionally intelligent.

1:35:12 All that. Yeah, it does all those you can orchestrate the flow in him or her, and you exactly maybe better than we make better. It’s like a synergy or something, yeah, kind of coming up with a third solution. That’s where synergy comes from, exactly right. Yeah, okay, is it not a little weird that a former like cop from Kansas City is now talking to me about neuroscience?

1:35:34 I’m a neuroscientist. Damn it not, not, not a miracle worker, you know, I’m Dr. McCoy from Star Trek, I guess you are. I was like, I love McCoy. No, there is only one Star Trek, by the way, the original. Ah Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, William shot there and Leonard anymore anyway.

1:35:50 But I mean, you’ve had quite an evolution. Because, I mean, look, you kind of look like the undercover cop from Kansas City who’s in there about to get the bad guy. You know, you know, you got that kind of an image as this ex-cop, and yet, you know, you’ve taken it to a whole nother level. You know, one thing good people come on, no, they are obviously the other characteristics and the mannerisms is kind of that, that hard kind of ex. But then you go on to the negotiation which is called that emotional intelligence, and now you’ve gone into the neuroscience.

1:36:17 I mean, it’s unique. Yeah, it is, it is, I mean, and that’s why we’re staying, we are staying ahead of everybody. I mean, I don’t know anybody else in the negotiation business that’s simultaneously learning, pushing hard to get better. And most people that will coach you and teach you in. Negotiations are not constantly making deals themselves each and every day, using their stuff and then constantly training people to use their stuff and getting feedback from them.

1:36:40 So, you know, we’re pushing ahead and we’re learning from everybody that we can learn from. And people that are picking up in knowledge and in human performance, brain science, neuroscience, better relationships, better company cultures, better human beings and it. There’s exciting stuff going on all over the place and we can’t do that. Research ourselves, We read the culture code, we read the rise of Superman, we read Stealing Fire, you know, we’re learning, we read. I look to see what Elon Musk is reading because he’s trying to stay ahead of everybody.

1:37:11 Also, so if you know, Mark Cuban says, there’s a 12 year old out there looking at looking to beat you. Somebody, somebody younger than you is looking to outsmart you, I’ll think you outperformed you and the minute you said, still, they pass you by when I can, we’re gonna, we’re not gonna let anybody pass, yeah, and this information age, man, they’re they are so well equipped these days. You know, when we were 12, you know, I mean, you know, we have to be lucky to bump into someone like you or get the book in the library. Nowadays it’s at their fingertips and they will implement. You know, talking about women as negotiators as learning this stuff different than men, you know, women bring a lot of different things to the table.

1:37:47 What’s it like? You know, I can’t explain exactly why we know that women pick this up faster than men do. This emotional intelligence-based negotiation we have now. You could, you could get into a whole bunch of potential issues. Whether it’s nature, it’s nurture what is what causes women to be more open because you’ll pick it up fast.

1:38:05 If you possess the characteristic of openness, which is a coachability, you can actually test for this. You know, my one of my theories is the fact that women have fewer role models, so they’re looking more for models of how to, how to learn, how to get ahead. You know, men, we got all these examples around us of how to do stuff, most of which is bad. We don’t know what’s bad. But, you know, tH, this guy over here has been doing this for 50 years.

1:38:28 All I got to do is model him well, he’s doing it bad, but he’s a role model, and women have fewer. I think women are more open by the. They’re faced with more challenges of success in today’s business environment than men are, because they have fewer examples to model themselves after. And that could be their advantage to negotiate. I think it’s to their advantage, you know, there’s some other issues.

1:38:51 Whether or not they are socialized to be more emotionally aware. But to be good at negotiation, you have to be emotionally aware there’s, you know, Warren Buffett. He’s emotionally aware Oprah Winfrey. She’s emotionally aware she pulls off phenomenal deal after phenomenal deal. Getting people to be interviewed.

1:39:11 That’s, you know, getting Tom Brady to be sit down with an interview with Oprah. That was a negotiation getting Michael Jackson, getting Lance Armstrong to sit down for an interview with Oprah. Where he admits to what he did and doesn’t feel backed into a corner about, but knows walking in what he’s walking into. That’s a negotiation. She’s a phenomenal negotiator, emotional intelligence, emotional intelligence, awareness.

1:39:33 Now we’re seeing on a regular basis the percentages of women outperforming men using this style of negotiation is higher. I don’t a thousand percent know all the reasons why I just know that what we’re seeing on a regular basis. Do you think as men in these in these positions? Sometimes we bring a lot of ego to the table, we bring a lot of maybe some of the first things in there. I need to be liked, I need to be respected before the deal.

1:39:57 It’s a blending of that and I think the biggest thing is there’s so much bad negotiation. If you’re looking for models, men will see many more bad examples of male negotiators. They happen to be at the top of the profession, or they have the reputation for being the most effective negotiator in that company. But they’re actually not any good. They yell at people, right?

1:40:18 Must be a good idea to yell at people. I’m gonna do what that guy does because he’s in charge and he’s the example of the success. And so bad habits are reinforced. You don’t realize that they’re bad habits until you see somebody else that does it better. And you are not going to see a Black Swan negotiator coming at you, right?

1:40:35 You weren’t even never going to know that was who was on the other side of the table. Explain that because you’re going to like the deal, right, we, we’re not going to yell at you, right? And you, you’re going to feel like I won. You’re going to feel great about the deal. There’s going to stuff come out of that deal that are going to be better than you ever thought was going to be there.

1:40:56 And you’re going to want to do another deal and you’re going to want to do another deal after that. And you’re going to feel like you were listened to and you feel like you were respected. And those by themselves is what? What builds deal pipelines, and that’s what triggers long-term success. I didn’t put you out of business with the deal that I made with you.

1:41:13 You actually prospered. How much do movies play a part in, like me modeling, you know, a male behavior, because that’s probably worse than actually seeing a lot of movies are horrible. I mean, the movies put out bad behavior, yeah. Kevin Costner was in a film about sports negotiation a couple of years ago. Yeah, and they had a deal on the phone and they put went on hold and they got, you know, he laid out a deal and everybody went on hold, they picked the phone back up and the other.

1:41:42 The other guy said, You know, we’ll take that deal, and he said, You know what? The deal has changed since you were on hold and now it’s a different deal and everybody’s high-fiving each other because you got a better deal. He they’re never going to deal with in real life. If you do that, they’ll never deal with you, like that with you again. And they won’t fulfill the deal either.

1:41:58 Will they? No, no, they’ll find ways to screw it up. A friend of mine in Los Angeles is Ned Coletti, the former G.M. of the Los Angeles Dodgers. If you did that to Ned, he would never make another deal with you again. Or the next time that you tried to deal with him.

1:42:12 He would barbecue you, and Ned was a high-class guy whose word was his bond. And as great negotiators, their word is their bond. And you don’t put somebody on hold and then 10 minutes later, say, You know what it changed, you waited too long. What you, if your word is going to be your bond, that’s your calling card for the rest of your profession. and you either stay in business or you put yourself out of business by doing nonsense like that.

1:42:37 So don’t watch the movies when it comes to this stuff, that’s for sure. Tell me about you, I mean, you said, This change you as a person be, you know, doing this process and becoming more empathetic. I mean, can you talk about that a bit? Well, you know, I think I think it makes life a lot more enjoyable. I mean, a lot more interesting.

1:42:53 And when you see things from somebody else’s from some somebody else’s perspective when you, when you, you know I. We learned it early on in New York when we were working. Those terrorism cases that you talked about, we prosecuted Muslim terrorists in civilian court, nobody got killed, nothing blew up. And the vast majority of our witnesses were Muslims who were testifying voluntarily against other Muslims because they believed in right and wrong. And the people who were calling themselves Muslims but were murdering on behalf of a religion, the people that also studied that religion who didn’t believe the murder on behalf of the religion of innocent people was following the religion and were offended by it.

1:43:40 They voluntarily got on our on the witness stand for us, how do we do that? We did that by seeing things from their point of view. We talked with them about the religion, and they’d say You, you’re Muslim, and I’d say, no, but I respect the religion. I’d say I know how the Islamic religion transformed the Middle East. I know the atrocities that were being committed in the Middle East on a regular basis that the implementation of Islam put a complete halt to.

1:44:08 I’m not saying any of this is right or wrong, but I’m aware and I respect it. As soon as I start respecting the other side’s point of view, you’d be shocked that who will cooperate with you? Shocked and it was PA. And then and then you begin to connect with people on a human level. Then somebody’s backed into a corner that they never thought they could get out of.

1:44:25 This stuff is so powerful that hostage negotiators have talked people out of situations. I know of one instance where the perpetrator on the inside the suspect had committed a murder during the hostage situation. The body of that murdered person was still inside the house. The hostage taker was HIV-positive. Before we had drugs that could control AIDS so he was going to die of AIDS.

1:44:47 So not only did he have nothing to live for because he was going to die anyway. And he committed a murder and the murder was on the inside. But being so thoroughly understood in his position, that guy came out without killing the other hostages. This stuff is insane, what? How powerful it is when people, when someone feels recognized and hurt and it doesn’t matter, the situation doesn’t matter the negotiation.

1:45:07 It works in all contexts. Whoever human beings are because it might have never happened in their life or not happened for years, but someone actually listened to him. Yeah, how many people, how many times during the day that do people actually get listened to like, that’s one. That’s why you’re never going to see a Black Swan negotiator and why they’re going to make a deal with you. Because nobody else listened to you that day and nobody did.

1:45:29 We know that, and so we’re like, All right, this is this is the environment. There’s so much bad negotiation out there. There’s so many people making arguments to try to make deals. As soon as I stop making the argument. It’s transformed the entire interaction for you, right?

1:45:42 And you’re just listening, Yeah, tell me about when things go bad, you know, hostages, you lose them, they get killed, but how do you deal with that? You know, I used to say that in the Burnham case in the Philippines, the tail end of that case. There was a botched rescue attempt and two out of three of our remaining hostages were killed. Other hostages got killed on the way. But when A and the botched attempt at the end by the Philippine Scout Rangers.

1:46:08 Martin Burnham was killed by friendly fire and Deborah Yap, the Philippine, the one remaining Philippine female hostage. She was killed. Gracia Burnham was shot in the leg and she survived. The morning I got that call was the worst moment of my professional career and it was hard. But then I had to realize it wasn’t.

1:46:27 It wasn’t somebody in my family that got killed. As you know, there’s a little bit of self-centeredness to say that was a hard day, you know, I didn’t lose a member of my family, so coming to grips with those issues. If you’re in hostage negotiation, you’re working up cases. Somebody’s gonna get killed, and that’s the moment where you say, Either we get better or we get out. And I actually preferred bringing people onto my team.

1:46:52 Somebody who worked the case where somebody got killed and they doubled down and they said, You know what? Last time, when leadership was reluctant and I went with the flow, I’m not doing it again. You know, are you like, like Bill McRaven? Somebody’s gonna need to tell me to sit down and shut up more than once before I do. When you’ve gone through that kind of stuff, that’s when you raise the level of your game.

1:47:15 And do most people go back in, or does it end people’s careers when things like that happen? I would say that probably only about a third of the negotiators out there who’ve gone through a situation where somebody’s gotten killed are going to want to turn around and get better. Did you think about Clinton? No, okay, and it sounds like you kind of took ownership of some of the processes saying, I should have stood up, I should have done this, I should have done that. Well, we did actually the ownership that I took instead, when those hostages died.

1:47:45 In that case, you know, we did an internal review, so to speak. And I always worked on a team anyway, so at that point in time, I didn’t know what we’d done wrong, and I was. I was fairly certain that we hadn’t done anything wrong, and I went back to my whole team. I worked with a lot of smart people, a lot of smart people. My boss at the time, a guy named Gary Nesner, my partner at the time, Chuck Rajini.

1:48:07 Some really smart people. And we said we did everything we knew how to do, and my answer was then all right. So we don’t know enough if what we did was inadequate. We have to learn more. And that was actually when I ended up at Harvard as a result because I figured they knew stuff we didn’t know.

1:48:25 Okay, and maybe they didn’t, but you probably learned other things. Well, you know, they added To my knowledge, I mean, I think in reality, when I got up there with those guys, you know, because we called it, then active, listening, and so did they. And I walked up there. With these eight very specific techniques, hostage negotiation, active listening skills, clearly defined, clearly laid out, completely understandable, eight specific skills. And they had active listening.

1:48:53 But they said, You know, listen, actively paraphrase, say stuff to them, can you say more about that or tell me more? They thought that was active listening, and it’s not, it’s actually those are commands. Tell me more as a command, it’s not technically anything other than a commander. Can you tell me, Can you say more about that? That’s a closed in a question that I could say no to, right?

1:49:17 So we actually had a more refined set of active listening skills than they did at the time. But they had so much more experience in what you should be getting done in a business deal, which is having a long-term relationship, which was. They spent a lot of time teaching people to not lie, which I found both gratifying and horrifying. Simultaneously, I was happy that they placed such a premium on telling the truth. I was concerned that they felt they had to okay, but that, you know, they, they had all the same values that we had.

1:49:48 And they also believed that empathy they believed in the same mercenary definition of empathy that Daniel Goldman would call cognitive empathy. And that was really what drew them up there. Me up there to them was. I knew we were a thousand percent in agreement on what the definition of empathy was, which is not agreement. It’s not sympathy, it’s not disagreement, it’s just a very fine line, which becomes very powerful.

1:50:12 And since I knew we resonated completely on that issue, then I knew that we had a lot to collaborate on. Tell me a bit about you if I asked for, like, five of your friends and say, What’s Chris’s superpower? How is he able? You know, to be a great negotiator and to be a teacher, you teach a lot and then a big businessman? I mean, those are all different things.

1:50:31 What would they say about you? You know, they probably said, guys determined to learn. I mean, a guy works really, really hard and he’s just determined to learn. He’s kind of relentless at learning and getting better and he can be kind of intense. And you’ve always been that way.

1:50:47 Yeah, for learning and intensity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and you know, sometimes they’ll misread you like, If I’m really listening, Yeah, I’ll scare you. The way I glare at you, you’ll be like, Jeez, you’re scaring me, what do you imagine? and you imagine having me for dinner. You’re staring at me like, I’m just trying to listen, you’re just trying to get everything in. Yeah, real deep.

1:51:07 I have this intense look when I’m when I’m really, really listening. We had one of the negotiations at Harvard, where we’re negotiating in teams. One of the guys on the other side who became a friend, he said, You guys aren’t doing good cop bad cop on us, you’re doing bad cop and scary cop. I said I was just listening, I’m just sitting there listening, Yeah, well, you scare people. When you listen to him, I can see that.

1:51:29 What scares you being afraid scares me really, Yeah, unfortunately, when are you afraid, you know, if I haven’t shown up? If I’ve been reluctant? I’m horrified at the thought that I shouldn’t step up when I should, or if I’ve doubted my if, if for any reason. I’ve been reluctant to do something because I’ve been concerned of the consequences. Like one of my one of my to get myself over that.

1:51:54 One of my internal sayings is If you don’t know whether or not you should, you should. Which means if you’re feeling reluctance, you’re probably more worried about the consequences, then you’re worried about doing it. And you should say, You know, I don’t care who criticizes me, I don’t. I don’t care what it looks like, like if somebody says to me, we can’t do this because it’ll look bad. I don’t want those thoughts creeping into my head.

1:52:20 If it looks bad, we probably should do it and we should be willing to be criticized. We should be willing to attack, be attacked. Because you’re going to be anyway, I mean, you know, it’s knowing now, what are the credentials of my critics? You know, there’s a saying, Don’t take advice from anybody you wouldn’t trade places with. Well, criticism is the most cowardly form of advice.

1:52:41 So you know, and I love it. They say, You know, Twitter is outraged. I listen to somebody on Anderson Cooper and Anderson Cooper will say, You know, what do you say to your critics? I look forward to Anderson asking me that someday because I’m going to say, All right, what are my critics credentials because they’re going to be critics part of reconciling myself to that? Also, a friend of mine, Eric Barker, wrote this great book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, The Science of Success.

1:53:07 Eric’s a regular guy. And he said, You know what, you’re going to have haters, and you’re always going to have anywhere from 5 to 10 times the fans, as you will have haters. So every one of your critics, there are 10 people on your side, so you should actually collect critics because that means you’re doing better. I just had a guy in here named Grant Cardone, and I’m reading this book. Yeah, he is a smart guy and fascinating dude as well, not what you would think, and I told him that at the end of the interview, I mean, dark.

1:53:35 Past nine years of heavy drug addiction, dad died when he was 10 years old. Brother died when he was 20. You know, as usual, not what you would, not what you would think. Most people aren’t what you. They appear to be really deep guy, kind of spiritual guy and also, you know, crazy a guy. But he says, you got to collect critics, go out there and get as many as you can.

1:53:54 Because, like you said, you got probably eight to 10x of that of fans. And if you want to battle that Amygdala, that’s got three times the amount of surface area, you know, you gotta overcompensate. Yeah, and like, if anybody spend any time on social media, and I mean, I’m we have pretty big on YouTube, you know, I can read 10 comments, nine can be amazing nominating me for the Nobel Prize. It’s the tenth the kids and it gets the same. Yeah, so, so I try not to read them.

1:54:18 Sometimes I have someone else, read them for me, and then they give me the general flavor. And I’m like, All right. That gives me some flavor of the feedback, but it doesn’t get me to where I can interrupt my passion. But yeah, I agree, go out and collect those critics. And so you, you look at McRaven, and I think you probably are like, I gotta be McRaven, and you’re saying, You’re like, I’m just afraid of making sure I step up at every moment.

1:54:37 Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, at any point in time, if you know if I’m reluctant if I’m worried about something and that interferes with my thought patterns that I’m, I’m hurting myself and I don’t want that to happen, but as a human being, I know it happens anyway. Yeah, what are you gonna be doing in 10 years? What’s Chris doing? Let me see, you know, I, I need a year where I both climb Mount Everest and swim the English Channel. And that may be about the age that I try that I’m gonna have to get a new knee before I before I do those things okay, but I would. I would love to start some physical challenges at an age where people are like, What are you kidding me? and so what are you thinking about?

1:55:16 How are I’m 60, really, I’m pretty good for 60. Do you swim or no? is that I haven’t been in the water for a while. Okay, I got a guest that was just on. His name is Ross Edgley, and he is currently swimming in around the entire island of Great Britain. It’s going to take him a hundred days and so if you want some swimming motivation, he was doing 10k swims to warm up.

1:55:38 I mean, every day for the last, like, two months, holy mackerel. So, yeah, well, his name is Ross Edgley, he’s really fascinating, but how old is it? Oh, how old is he? I think he’s not your age. He’s probably 30. Oh, he’s a kid, Yeah, he’s a kid, but still, I mean, he’s doing. These six hour shifts six hours of swimming, six hours of sleeping, six hours when he’s ain’t on a boat the whole time in their GPS, tracking him excellent, so you might some swimming moments, some cool stuff, though I dig that, though that’s very cool. Yeah, he’s kind of a packer as well, so now that’s good.

1:56:03 What would we be surprised to learn about you, something weird you do on a regular basis or something kind of crazy? We would be surprised to learn about Chris. Yeah, I don’t know, you know, I mean, probably some, like I lived on a boat, you know, I had a Harley. A friend of mine used to say when I was living on a boat that was a cry for help. Richard Branson used to live on a boat here.

1:56:26 You know, I, I’ve read losing my virginity. I think Richard Branson is cool and he continues to be cool. Yeah, the hyperloop thing is going to be awesome, yeah, he used to do some crazy stuff back in the day, some, some. I mean, he really, which was what we you know, and we look back at that now. I mean, Richard Branson was getting in the flow, jumping in that balloon, trying to get up into the jet stream.

1:56:45 But you know that crazy stuff look at while doing that crazy stuff, how he kept his sanity at the same time he had fun. Yeah, you have fun, you accomplish more, yeah, and that was basically how you went viral back then. Pre-Internet. You know, he was no dummy good point that probably saved the Virgin Brand, you know, because it got him exposure. So one hand is right, he’s in the flow, he’s doing crazy things, it probably makes him a better businessman, parent et cetera.

1:57:09 He’s also blowing up his brand and doing these crazy things. I mean, it was just smart stuff. Yeah, like a fox, what keeps you awake at night trying to figure out how to get better? I mean, what you know, what did I miss today? My son and I are partners and it’s wonderful and horrifying simultaneously.

1:57:34 And when I’m not understanding enough with him or give him enough space or anybody else close to my life, if I’ve been too hard on them, I mean, you know, then when the assertive of me comes out and I and I and I and I’m my blunt and honest self, that hurts people’s feelings. And if I’ve done that, you know you feel self-righteous, and the next day you’re like, What was I thinking, Yeah, you know it? It bothers me if I’ve done something that hurt someone at all, let alone somebody that matters to me. Great leaders take their emotions out of the equation, right? That’s what you said, too, Chris, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end.

1:58:10 I’m going to ask you if you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Chris Foss. And I guess I don’t know where you’d be in Kansas City back then. Or maybe not even a cop yet 20 years old. I was still in college, okay? If you could give him some advice, what would you tell him?

1:58:25 The only thing I would say is somebody had to at some point in time said. Seek advice and follow it. You know, never take advice from somebody you wouldn’t trade places with. I did that a couple times, you know, I didn’t know it. I.

2:00:09 I had almost no shot at becoming an FBI agent, but I went to a seasoned onboard, FBI agent said. What should I do? That made all the difference in the world, it made every difference. I had no reason to become a hostage negotiator, I went to the hostage negotiator in charge of the hostage negotiation. Team in New York City said, What should I do? she told me, and I did it to this day, she said.

2:00:30 You know what, she told me to volunteer on a suicide hotline? She told me recently. She told a thousand people to do that and two of us did it. If I hadn’t sought advice from someone that I would have traded places with and followed it, I never would have become a hostage negotiator. So somewhere someday, at some point in time, somebody had to have told me said, You know, seek wise counsel and then actually pay attention to it, right, right?

2:00:57 Probably had to check your ego at the door a little bit to go do something like that, you know, to some degree, yeah, you have to be in a mentally in a mode where you, you, you have to admit, you don’t know, you know, I really don’t know I, I really want to know I’m really going to do it. If you tell me, and, yeah, you got to get out your own way to do that. Last part of that question to that 20 year old that’s out there watching us listening to us right now. Advice Do you give to them, you know, if they just want? I mean, like you said, we’re in negotiations all the time, every day with everyone around us, whether we know it or not.

2:01:29 You know, what advice do you give to them if they want to, I don’t know, be more successful, be more empathetic lead, you know, still with their values. But do it in a better way, you know, really don’t be such in such a hurry to lay out your case, be in a hurry to hear the other side out. That’s gonna save you a massive amount of time. Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you’re gonna get your way. As a matter of fact, it may get in your way because the other side will resent you being right.

2:02:03 And then it becomes who wins, who loses things, and people will choose to not lose despite you, so to speak. It’s a classic thing. Where the reason? We have hostage negotiators, because we thought if we threatened to kill people, they’d come out because we didn’t want to die. I don’t want to die, so if I threaten to kill you, you’ll give in.

2:02:22 And we’ve law enforcement found themselves killing people unnecessarily because we surround a guy’s house and say, Come on, it will kill you. And he’d say, You know what, kill me? I ain’t coming out when he would have come out otherwise, right? So find out where the other side is coming from first, and you’ll find that being right is not correlated strongly with getting your way. Whereas most people go into any negotiation, they want to fire first, they want to practice that pitch.

2:02:48 They’ve been thinking about all day and they’re mad. I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell you how it is when, in fact, the strongest thing would be to come in and listen attentively here, man, you’d be shocked at how far you’ll get right, and it’ll be you. You get a lot farther. It’ll actually be a lot more enjoyable, too. Chris I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, never split.

2:03:08 The difference is a great book. I was talking my wife last night and she said, What about what does he mean by that different by that title? And I said, Well, baby, you know, like when you go on eBay and they say 200, and then you know you say 600, and then you meet in the middle. I’m like, I think he’s trying to say that’s lazy, you know, and that’s what we all think. That’s a good deal, but that’s not a good deal.

2:03:26 No, it’s not a good deal. See, here’s the crazy thing about Never Split the difference. If you combine that with never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. You might have the best answer. My idea might be crap, We’re I’m never gonna.

2:03:43 If we split the difference, we’re never gonna get there. I also have to be willing to take your idea completely if I’m open-minded. Now chances are we’re going to take, we’re going to come find out what we don’t know about each other jointly. Come up with a better process, but never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better. I got to be prepared to go over to your side.

2:04:07 Yeah, yeah, stop splitting the difference. Check out this book, I guess you can get it on Amazon, most likely Amazon’s the best place Black Swan Group. If you want to get him for corporate help, Chris, thank you so much, really enjoyed this talk. I knew I would from the minute I actually saw a piece of video on you. There’s fascinating stuff here, there’s a lot of science, and I’ve been involved in neuroscience.

2:04:26 Yeah, there’s neuroscience. Even better, you know, I was in the city for 10 years in banking, and so I, I’ve been a part of a lot of negotiations. And now, reading your book, I can see why. People did certain things where at the time I kind of had a feel for why they wouldn’t, but now I know why they wouldn’t. You know, because usually egos were involved.

2:04:42 And, you know, I’ve seen guys, you know, not save a million dollars. Because they didn’t want to look stupid in front of three guys in a room that they’d never meet again. You know, and that’s crazy, but that’s what you’re talking about here, right? So this is big stuff. It’s going to change the way I negotiate and I love it.

2:04:57 So thank you so much as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours and all the best. Thank you, brother, all right, thank you, Sir so.

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Chris Voss - Mastering The Art Of Negotiation

Never Split the Difference

Key takeaways

Chris Voss on London Real: emotions, Trump and Kim Jong-un

Silence, tells, Munich and a Brooklyn bank robbery

Tactical empathy and the kidnapping in the Philippines

Counterfeit yeses, the power of no and implementation

Learning, empathy and advice to his younger self

Who is Chris Voss?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Chris Voss on London Real

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Chris Voss - Mastering The Art Of Negotiation

Never Split the Difference

Key takeaways

Chris Voss on London Real: emotions, Trump and Kim Jong-un

Silence, tells, Munich and a Brooklyn bank robbery

Tactical empathy and the kidnapping in the Philippines

Counterfeit yeses, the power of no and implementation

Learning, empathy and advice to his younger self

Who is Chris Voss?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Chris Voss on London Real

Latest Episode

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

More Like This

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

Dubai Real - Episode 3: Inside The Deal

Dubai Real - Episode 2: Billionaires’ Row

Dubai Real - Episode 1: Why Dubai Never Stops Building

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