Two of the three remaining hostages were killed and they were shot by friendly fire. That was the first time that I'd worked anything where people had gotten killed. Former FBI kidnapping negotiator.
Best-selling co-author and the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group. I'm Chris Voss. How important is it generally in negotiations to listen? Whether it's business or law enforcement. If I take the time to really hear somebody out in our first deal, then every deal after that will come to me faster.
it's critical. I'm so compelled to ask you, what is the cost that we don't get to see of your job? You know, you get really wrapped up in your work and I think you tend to become distant in your personal life.
The closer you are to someone, sometimes it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective. The truth sometimes is a knife to the heart, right? Like you go through a traumatic event, are you traumatized by it and never recover? Or is there post-traumatic stress growth where you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before because you never want to let that happen again? So without further ado, I'm She Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition.
I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Chris, you've lived a extraordinary life for many, many reasons, which I'm sure we're going to go into. But I guess my first question is, what do I need to know about your upbringing, your early years if I am to understand the man you are today?
I think really that my father just required that we work hard and that we figure stuff out. My father was an entrepreneur. And then no matter how old you are, even I started working for him probably when I was about 11. But the downside of working for a guy that would never ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself. If there isn't anything that he wouldn't do himself just because it needed to be done, then you get asked to figure out some crazy stuff. Like, you know, middle class entrepreneur, you know, blue collar, you know, guy.
I remember, I think it was about 11, he decided he wanted a new garage in the backyard and we had to get rid of the old garage. And he handed me and my 13 year old sister crowbars and said, go out and tear down the old garage. So you just gotta figure stuff out.
And so I really grew up in an environment of working really hard. He never preached us ethics, but we were, you know, very ethical, you know, honest, hardworking and figure stuff out, which is, if that's your attitude, there isn't that much you can't do. And that was kind of drilled into me at an early age. Figure it out, work hard, be honest.
So if I hit fast forward on your life from that point and I go into your days in the SWAT team for the FBI. Right. How long were you working in the SWAT team with the FBI? I was technically a member of the SWAT team for about a year.
And then, you know, I was on a Pittsburgh FBI, was on that SWAT team. And then I got transferred to... new york and i decided to try out for the fbi's equivalent of the navy seals the fbi's hostage rescue team and so i tried out for that team and i re-injured my knee so i wasn't i never technically made that team nor when i was in new york was i on the new york swat team but i had been on the swat team and pittsburgh for about a year you injured your knee during training yeah you know it was originally uh tore it up originally in college and my view is you know the worst things that have happened to me i've always led to better stuff i would never become a hostage negotiator if i hadn't torn up my knee and so you know then when i was trying out for the hostage rescue team then i re-injured it and uh i went went to a doctor to have it rebuilt for a second time and And at that point in time, I thought, well, I don't know how many times they could put Humpty Dumpty back together. So I love crisis response because you got to make a decision.
I've been very much a decision oriented guy. You know, President Kennedy talks about the dangers of comfortable inaction. I've always hated that. So, you know, I wanted to stay involved in crisis response.
We had hostage negotiators. My son and I like to joke that one of the Voss family mottos is, how hard can it be? And I remember thinking, how hard can it be?
They talk. Talk to terrorists? I talk every day. I can talk to a terrorist. When you injured your knee and you're thinking about what to do with your life, I read that you had a chat with a lady about options and she basically rejected you and said that.
Yeah, I said, go away. Who was she? The was the head of the hostage negotiation team for FBI New York. The was on one of the terrorism squads close to mine. And I knew she was in charge of the program.
And, you know, I thought, you know, the willingness to learn was adequate. And so. you know i sought her out to express my interest and kind of presented myself like to die here i am i'm wonderful look at me i'm willing to learn and she was just like go away everybody wants to do this it sounds cool everybody wants a t-shirt she asked me about you know any previous experience or credentials i had i didn't have any one after another i was like nope nope no education no background no experience None of this, none of this, none of this.
And finally she just said like, no, you can't do it. Stop bothering me. It was like, got to be something I could do. You know, I've always kind of been proactive. I didn't know I was, there's a theory that I, a principle that we operate on now, which is never ask advice from somebody you wouldn't trade places with or never take direction from somebody who hasn't been where you're going.
I just thought it made sense to go to the right person and ask. Which is kind of how I got into the FBI in the first place. And I said, there's got to be something I could do.
What is it? The said, you know what there is. Go volunteer on a suicide hotline.
But until you've done that, don't bother me. And it just seemed really obvious to me. Okay, you know, this is somebody who knows. I'll do it. And that's how I got in the FBI, really.
And so I went and did it. And I went back to her and I said, you know. I've been volunteering on a suicide hotline for the last five months.
And she's like, what? The was shocked. The said, I tell everybody to do that.
Nobody ever does it. When I went back to her and said, I'm including the story in the book. The said, you know, I told over a thousand people over the course of my career to volunteer on a hotline and only two people did it and you were one of them. And I thought, that's just...
It's so obvious. What was that like, that CSO hotline? Five months you did that.
I actually volunteered there for a total of three years. And then I got involved in the board and the funding and the operation. And I taught there too because I was so into it.
It was so valuable. I went there to learn a skill. And I ended up learning a skill and serving the community, which then was very no better secondary bonus than to do something that benefits you and have it benefit everyone.
everybody else too difficult no uh well if you take the training you're willing to learn the training was phenomenal and i went there to learn so i soaked it up like a sponge emotionally difficult It can be, depending upon how vulnerable you make yourself. Now since, and what I used to tell the volunteers there, because crisis hotline, suicide hotline, the biggest problem is volunteer burnout. It is difficult emotionally. if you go there to help and you want so much to help, and there's a lot of people that make it extremely difficult to help them, and that can be emotionally draining. Now, I went there to learn versus help, and the help was the same.
secondary benefit so the really difficult types we used to call them frequent callers they didn't suck the life out of me they fascinated me like this is crazy i gotta learn how to communicate with these people these are no different than the people that are very difficult in business negotiation because how you do something is how you do everything Way back when I learned this thing called the drama triangle, which was kind of three archetypes of difficult people. And we're seeing that show up exactly in business negotiations. So human behavior is human behavior, period.
What is that triad? Well, the way I learned it way back then was, you know, there's... The victim, the protector, and the persecutor.
And someone who comes on a hotline really portraying themselves as a victim, they're trying to draw you into being the protector or to give advice. You know, I need your advice might be what they would literally say. And then if you're dumb enough to give advice...
then they switch from being the victim to the persecutor and they attack you for your advice. And then as soon as you get there, you back off, then they go back to being a victim again, to try to lure you into giving them advice so that they can attack your advice. And so what they told us, you know, the earmarks of watch out for somebody trying to lure you into giving advice versus being a great sounding board, helping them discover the answer on their own.
And then in 2002, much later, I run across Jim Kemp's book, Start With No. And he talked about effectiveness in business negotiation, helping your counterpart discover the best answer. Because if they discover something mutually beneficial versus if you offer it, if they discover it, it's their idea and they're going to do it. If you offer it, you're giving them advice and they got no emotional ownership and they're less likely to do it. So he called it helping them discover the best deal.
And back in the... On the hotline days, it was just guided discovery, helping them discover the best outcome. From those three years volunteering at the suicide prevention line, was there anything else that you really learned about the nature of human beings that has stayed with you still to this day in business and your days as an FBI negotiator? Yeah, well, you know, still actually going back and pulling the lessons out of it. And it's, you know, people are...
Their thoughts are most dominated by loss. What are they worried about losing? What's their vision of loss over the future?
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002. Behavioral prospect theory. Yeah, economic Nobel Prize on human behavior, which is loss looms larger than gain. Some people are putting it at a two to one ratio.
Nobody ever puts it a less than two to one. Lost things twice. twice as much as an equivalent game. I've heard people talk about it being as much as 9-1, which is why researchers are having trouble putting an exact number on it. So somewhere between two and nine times loss.
Your vision of the loss is going to... to determine your behavior. And that was really, we taught on a hotline and taught in hostage negotiation, look for the loss. Nobody's taken hostages, they've suffered a personal identity loss somewhere along the line, and there's probably a triggering event in the last 24 to 48 hours, but look for the loss.
And then Kahneman comes across in 2002, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Tversky had died by the time they awarded the Nobel Prize which is why he didn't get it along with Kahneman because they're not giving it after somebody's died saying that now this is just human behavior period period not just hostages not just people in crisis but it's the single dominating influence of all human decision making not the only influence just the biggest and so learning how to cope with that on the hotline is exactly what we're doing these days in all our interactions is there a way to like leverage that to your favor when you're negotiating with someone you can you have to be really careful with it which is really the whole reason to be in use empathy as an approach because if you don't use empathy um then you're the hostage taker are you trying to use leverage against them i mean it's It's such a blunt force trauma concept that if you don't do it gently with empathy versus sympathy, you know, empathy is not the same as sympathy. But you're going to seem like a hostage taker yourself. If you start out by saying like, look, man, I know you got a lot to lose if you don't make this deal. Well, that's trying to trigger loss, but I seem like a hostage taker myself.
if I do that. So I got to work my way into a position where I got to get you to realize that that's the case. Quick one.
We bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio when we're here in the UK and when we're in LA. If you want to be one of those people, all you've got to do is hit subscribe. When you became a hostage negotiator, when was your first real job? Yeah, it was a Chase Manhattan bank robbery.
Bank robbery? Yeah, with hostages, which, although it happens all, you know, in the movies all the time, you know, Bruce Willis, Samuel Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Eddie Murphy, they're negotiating the hostages out of banks in every movie about it. In real life, it's a really rare event. Like, it was a bank robbery with hostages in New York City, and there hadn't been a bank robbery with hostages.
in New York City for over 20 years. Now, people get taken hostage in bank robberies, but generally the bad guys are gone before the police show up because they know if the police get the place surrounded, their chances of getting away are low. So they're going to be gone.
But to trap bank robbers in a bank with hostages is really, really rare. And that happened about... A year and a half after I got out of the negotiation training and I was still volunteering on a suicide hotline, so my skills, you know, you fall to your highest level of preparation.
I was ready to go when they put me on the phone because I'd been... Negotiation is a perishable skill and I'd been working at it at my skill level was really high at the time. Are you nervous when you get that phone call about that bank robbery?
I was ready to go. I mean, I was doing it because I wanted to get involved. I wasn't doing it to get the t-shirt.
You know, I was doing it because I wanted to get involved. And as a matter of fact, like... I was never asked to go.
A friend of mine had taught me, and having made a mistake previously, I'd learned the lesson of just show up. If something's going down, show up. I heard this advice from a government official not that long ago, and he said, run to trouble.
Always run to trouble. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, whether it's business or law enforcement. One of the nice things about running to trouble is running into, you know, figuratively, theoretically, running into the burning house, you don't get criticized as much.
You know, you run the trouble. If you're running into a static situation or something that a bunch of people have been dealing with for a while, and it's just been sitting there in deadlock, and whatever you do, People are going to criticize you, you know, because they failed and you're doing something different and they don't want to see you succeed. But if you're running that, you're running into chaos, you run into trouble, you know, the criticism is much lower.
You know, nobody's dealing with it. Nobody's got to do something. Decisions have to be made. It's a great strategy.
Run the trouble. And I had come to like that a lot. So I'm sitting at my desk in New York.
my buddy Charlie walks up and says there's a bank robbery with hostages in Brooklyn let's go I looked at a police detective colleague because I had an interview scheduled that morning I said can you cover the interview he says yeah I got it and we go head to the bank and we show up and a team forms FBI and NYPD both show up because it's a bank we know the PD negotiators really well our commander Hugh McGowan super sharp guy knew what he was doing he integrated the team first negotiator on the phone was a pd detective he points at me says you're the coach we stood up the rest of the team around joe the original negotiator joe talks the situation into stalemate which is not a bad thing because the threat level is not coming up and uh lieutenant mcgowan looks at me and he says okay you're up and they handed me the phone you And what was your job at that point? What was the bank robber asking for? And what was your job, your objective? Well, we didn't know it at the time. Like the bank robber was actually the classic great CEO negotiator.
Like the great CEO negotiator is going to act helpless at the table because he doesn't want you to force him into a commitment. You know, I found this out some years later when I was learning negotiation at Harvard. You know, they called a business.
and strategy, blame somebody who ain't in the room. So a great CEO negotiator is going to be like, look, man, I got a board of directors. Like, I got to be careful what I commit to here because this board of directors, I do the wrong thing.
These guys are going to fire me. They're going to throw me right out of this company. And if the guy does that, he's got all the power in the world. He don't care about his board of directors.
He just doesn't want to get backed into a corner. So the bank robbery, we get on the phone with this guy, the guy who orchestrated the whole thing, and he's like, man, I'm... I'm scared of these guys in here, these other guys that I'm with.
Man, they are dangerous. Like, I'm scared of them. They might hurt me.
So I got to be careful what I say to you. Oh, here they come now. And I got to hang up the phone. And he was making it all up. You know, initially, our initial assessment is this guy's an inadequate personality.
He's scared to make a decision. Complete smokescreen on his part. So, you know, we're in the negotiation for several hours, and we got the bank surrounded, and then the investigators on the outside, and this is a residential commercial area of Brooklyn, so there are cars everywhere. everywhere and they identify the owner of every vehicle on the outside and talk to them except there's one van out there and it belongs to this guy and as it turns out this guy is running a cash courier business that services this bank and they can't find this guy he is nowhere to be found so they go to his address and they say hey do you know you This guy. And when you come to the scene of the bank and listen to the voice, because we're running the negotiations on speaker outside to the commanders, and the witness comes in and says, yeah, this guy's name happened to be Chris also.
So they voice ID this guy, and he has never given us his name. This is another great technique. If we meet and I don't give you my name. It unsettles you. You don't feel you've connected with me.
And this guy would not give us his name. So, you know, we got a voice ID on him when the lieutenant says, you're up next. He says, I want you to confront this guy.
about his name as quick as you can. And we're not going to do a normal smooth handoff. You're just going to start talking. Normally, the protocol is if you hand off from one negotiator to another, the second guy comes on, he says, look, I've been here the whole time, and I've heard everything that's going on, and here's everything that I've heard.
Because you don't need the other guy on the other side saying, like, where do I start with this guy? Have you been here listening? Do you have any idea what's going on? It's a smooth transition. But a lieutenant, his gut instinct is like, yeah, we're not going to do this.
This guy's a manipulative guy, and in a really subtle way, we're going to start taking back control. And we're going to start by not doing a smooth transition. So I get on the phone, I'm talking to this guy. Now, this is a cagey dude.
We shift with no intro. So what does he do in order to remind us that he's got hostages, but also not... not raise the threat level, because he's got to genuinely be concerned that the snipers are going to put a red dot on his forehead, and the next thing that's going to happen is he's going to be at the pearly gates explaining his actions over the last 24 hours. He goes and gets a hostage and puts her on the phone.
We've been there five hours. We had no confirmation of the condition of the hostages other than him saying, I'm taking care of the girls. Everything's fine.
As a matter of fact, I've got to hang up the phone because they're hungry and they want to get something to eat. All kinds of smoke screens. so I'm on the phone and I hear this female voice come on go like I'm okay I'm okay and I'm like who uh who's this what's your name I'm okay and then that's the last I heard of her he comes back on the phone pretends like this didn't even happen so i'm like all right this is a kg dude we're gonna go forward i'm gonna find a way to hit him with his name but do it gently gently so i start talking about his van outside which he knows is out there he just doesn't know that we've identified it and i said you know we got a van out here and we found the owners of every van and spoken to him except one and he goes We have more than one van. Now, I got no idea what this guy is talking about.
So I did what we refer to as a mirror. I just repeat the words. Because my brain is like, what is this guy talking about? I go, you have more than one van? He goes, no, we only have one van.
I go, you only have one van? And he goes, yeah, yeah, and you chased my driver away. I go, we chased your driver away? He says, yeah, when he saw the police, he cut and run. Now this super control freak guy is now blurting stuff out as a result of my mirror, my technique, that he did not mean to say.
This ends up convicting his getaway driver who had gotten away, and we didn't even know there was a third guy. How did that case end? Everybody came out.
Why did the bank- Robert conceded in the end. Did he get anything he wanted? Well, the, uh, no, I didn't, you know, and, you know, how do you negotiate when you're not going to give him anything? You know, you help them see a different vision of the future. That's what it really boils down to.
And what you really want them to see is a vision of the future where they live. And then you're hoping the survival instinct kicks in. And when the second guy got on the phone with me, his principal concern was getting killed.
Right. And his secondary concern was... being handled roughly when he came out.
Of course, he knew that they had beaten the women on the inside. And that may contribute to his being handled roughly when he came out. But he, number one, didn't want to get killed. And number two, my opening line was, look, when you come out, you'll be treated with dignity and respect. And I said that to him enough times that he decided it was going to be true and he asked to meet me face-to-face out in front of the bank.
Was he treated with dignity and respect when he came out? A thousand percent. You got to keep your promises because...
And, you know, this was one of the things when I was teaching negotiation at Harvard. You know, my academic brothers and sisters up there were like, would you lie to get the guy out? And my answer was no.
And they'd say like, yeah, but let's say, let's pretend, let's imagine that a terrorist has got a nuclear bomb in Boston and you know that if you lie to him, he won't set the bomb off. So how do you answer that one? And my answer is, well, number one, the guy's probably testing me to see if I'll lie. So I got to watch out that it's not a trap. Number two, if he's not testing me, he's going to be a better liar than I am, and he's going to sniff it out.
You can't lie to a liar. You just can't. They're too good at it.
And then number three... even if I lied to him and get him out somebody's going to find out that I lied and I will always have the reputation of being a liar and I can't risk my reputation so if I'm a if I'm a if I've got hostages and I call you and I say listen I want a car. I think I saw this one on your YouTube channel. I want a car in 60 seconds outside. Right.
What's the first thing you say to me? You want to try? Yeah, let's do it.
All right. So I'm the... You're the bad guy.
I'm the bad guy. Okay. Yeah. Chris, I'm going to blow this woman's head off if you don't give me a car in the next 60 seconds.
How am I supposed to do that? Not my problem. You've got 55 seconds.
Alright, so if I wanted to do it, it's madness out here. It's chaos. I mean, this is Ringling Brothers, Barnum Bailey Circus is organized compared to the nonsense that's going on out there. So even if I wanted to do it, I can't do it in that time frame. I'm sure you're the FBI, you're the police.
You can make anything happen. 50 seconds. Sounds to me like you're not going to give me a chance. I'm giving you a chance right now.
50 seconds, Chris. There's plenty of cars out there. Go get one of the cars and pull it up outside or I'm going to blow her head off. Sounds like you have a reason to live.
I do have a reason to live. That's none of your business. No, I'm not trying to find out why. I mean, my first number one thing is to make sure that you live.
So get me a car and I will drive off. Honestly, you've got 45 seconds. I don't want to talk anymore.
If you're not going to give me a chance, how am I supposed to do it? I'm giving you a chance. 45 seconds.
That's plenty of a chance. Like to me, even find, get all the commanders together and get them to think about this, which they're probably not going to do anyway. I will go and talk to them.
But how am I supposed to find them all, talk to them, get them to think about it in 45 seconds? Okay, how long do you need? All right, now, first of all, I want you to understand.
I don't think they're going to do it. Well then I'm going to blow their head off. That would be your choice. Poof! See now, so the other thing too is, hostage negotiators are successful 93% of the time.
which is one of the things that i learned in the business which means seven percent of the time they just ain't coming out now i we have to do everything we could possibly do in the meantime but our number one goal is not putting any additional people at risk like i get this question all the time like if you think it's going to save a hostage why don't you just give them a car and save those hostages Well, I can't put additional people at risk. And by the way, while we were doing that, I don't know anybody put a clock on us, but we went more than 45 seconds. It's true.
And what were you thinking as we were going through it? There was all the questions were... provoking me into all the questions you asked me felt like they were dragging me away from my objective in a quite a tactical way so i was thinking oh this is annoying he's making me talk and i don't want to talk that's kind of what i was thinking and then yeah i mean the questions you asked were making me ponder and they were making me abandon my focus which was to just get this car and kill this woman right see which was i wasn't asking you that you Stuff to get you to answer. What I was really doing was doing exactly what you talked about.
Get you to ponder. Get you to think. You know what Kahneman has talked about in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow? Pondering, he would call slow thinking, in-depth thinking, where you really think about stuff. And then you really make the decision.
And you really make up your mind. Instead of me trying to hustle you. Like I could hustle you into something really quick.
but it wouldn't be your decision and the whole point of getting somebody to ponder something is so that when they do come to a decision they own it when you said the thing about even if i wanted to do that like i couldn't do that in 45 seconds or whatever there i like that sentence because it obviously there was a degree of empathy there so even if i wanted to it wasn't you know shitting on my parade it wasn't attacking me too much and you made me ponder the reality of the fact that it's not even possible my demand is not even possible even if you you know were on on my side so that was a very good question to to make me ponder myself to realize that what i'm asking for is not going to happen seeing there's another reason why i said it like that too um because you know a lot of people if you ask for something in a business deal that they're not going to give you they'll give you the classic american lie i'll try you know and and and maybe maybe it's not an american line maybe it's a lie in the english language like but you know in any kind of deal somebody looks at you and says i'll try you don't get a good feeling no and you get i'll try enough times you know right away it ain't never happening yeah yeah so i didn't do i'll try you know i basically said i don't think it's gonna happen but i'll check because i'm trying to shift us out of an adversarial into a collaborative conversation And so then what I'm basically saying is like, I don't want to mislead you. I don't think this is going to happen. I will be your advocate. How important is that collaboration?
No relationship survives long-term without collaboration. Just ain't going to happen. So you're giving me the impression that you're actually on my side to some degree and that we're collaborating to find an outcome together. Yeah, and in point of fact, See, the crazy thing is hostage negotiators have repeat customers. If I get you out alive, the chances of you straightening out your life are not great.
And the chances of you ending up in another hostage siege are high, if you don't get killed otherwise. And you got to have a memory of the last hostage negotiator trying to work with you versus the guy hustled you in line. to you guy or gal so if you always look at all interactions as if you're going to have to pay for everything you said eventually which means if you lie you're going to pay for it if you did everything you could to be collaborative then your counterpart's gonna remember that in the future. Like, well, I didn't go my way, but at least you get in line with me.
It's like karma, isn't it? It's karma. A thousand percent it's karma.
I'm a big believer in karma, very much. I had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast. As the seasons have begun to change, so has my diet. And right now, I'm just gonna be completely honest with you. I'm starting to think a lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of, probably the last four or five months, my diet has been pretty bad.
and it started to show a little bit. Really over the last two months, I go to the gym about 80% of the time. So I track it with 10 of my friends in a WhatsApp group and this tracker online that we all use together. We call it fitness blockchain. And I'm currently at 81%.
So 81% of the days I've done a workout in the last 150 days, right? So I'm going to the gym about six times a week. That's been a little bit impacted by the Dairy Overseer Live Tour, but I'm trying to stick to it.
And so one of the things I'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete in all I eat is I'm having the He protein shake. Thank you, He, for making a product that I actually like. The salted caramel is my favorite.
I've got the banana one here, which is the one my girlfriend likes. But for me, salted caramel is the one. How important is it generally in negotiations to listen?
Because a lot of people, you know, kind of think they can overpower someone with just talking at them. Right. Yeah. And what they're called is, they can't hold a job.
You know, and there are a lot of people that are very visible that are doing that. And in the moment, they might look very good. But what ends up happening is they're frequently initially extremely successful and then their success rates drop off a cliff. And then they don't hold a job because they were awesome in their first quarter and had a continuing steady decline in their productivity until it went to zero and they can't be tolerated anymore.
But everybody sees a really loud guy or gal getting deals and they're the ones that make the most noise about it. So your original question is how as important as listening. There is no negotiation methodology that doesn't list listening as an advanced skill. No matter what school of thought somebody's in, in negotiation, they all list listening as advanced.
Far more difficult than simply keeping quiet. It's critical. And you will actually end up...
Increasing the velocity of your deal cycles by listening, which a lot of people think it's really counterintuitive. But I did an interview with Mark Cuban six or seven months ago, and I talked about listening. And he's like, yeah, if I take the time to really hear somebody out in our first deal and pay attention to what's important with them, then every deal after that will come to me faster.
having done it right up front. And it'll increase the velocity of my ability to make deals with them because they'll trust me. They'll know that I hear them out.
They know that I'm looking out for them. And consequently, you know, it doesn't take me a long time to establish trust. And we come back, we come to the table, we get right down to it.
And it really increases the velocity of my ability to make deals. And a lot of people can't see that because I got to hear them out. I got to, you know, blah, blah, blah.
I got to find out what their point of view is. It seems highly efficient. But what it is, is incredibly efficient long term. And then as it relates to speaking, when you're talking, when you were talking to me then in our little dummy negotiation, I noticed the tone of voice you took was very...
Very calm. You list in the book three different voices available to negotiators. Right.
Give me a flavor of those three voices that are available to negotiators. Well, there's three natural types. and humans, fight, flight, or make friends. And these are our caveman ancestors that lived, either fought the saber-toothed tiger, ran from the saber-toothed tiger, or figured out a way to make friends with it.
And the indecisive caveman got eaten by the saber-toothed tiger, doesn't have any descendants. And we've got substantive reason to believe that that exists globally, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion. the three types the globe splitting pretty evenly into thirds got a lot of that on it backs it up our brothers and sisters at harvard pretty much agree based on their experience wharton has pulled a lot of the same data comes very very close to the same And each type has a voice, you know, and the voice of the assertive, natural born assertive, which I'm actually a natural born assertive, is more the Donald Trump style negotiator, you know, attacking, blunt, direct, you know, Ivanka Trump once described her dad, Donald, and said, you know, he's not blunt, he's just direct.
Well, he's just an example. But what I think is direct, you feel like you got hit in the face with a brick, which is always counterproductive long-term. Always, always, always long-term counterproductive. Inhibits your ability to make deals.
People get tired of getting hit in the face with a brick. So it wears them out. Then there's the very analytical type, which was the soothing, calming voice that I was using. triggers a neurochemical response in you it actually calms you down neurochemically it's a involuntary automatic response now you can fight it you fight your way back out of it You can't stop me from getting the calming neurochemicals started in your head. And, you know, if you're careful not to seem either cold or condescending, that tone of voice is what the great TV interviewers use, the great news anchors, because there's a lot of confidence and calm simultaneously, and people really like it.
And then there's, you know, there's a smiling voice, a friendly voice, and somebody just smiles when they speak. That triggers a different neurochemical reaction. The people that you automatically like right away, as soon as you lay eyes on them, as soon as they start speaking, you know, and there's an advantage to that. So I was using, you know, in an emotional situation, and if you're in an emotional negotiation, you know, you want to go with the soothing voice and smile, sprinkle that in.
And now you kind of, you get the combination of both of them and it's collaboration. You're going to want to collaborate with me if I use that voice. I guess it's an attempt, as you say, to like pacify them. The other thing that in chapter three of your book you talk about is...
By the way, you got a pretty good voice. You got, you got, you got, you, you're basically downward inflecting. Your voice portrays, first of all, it's very genuine.
But it portrays a guy who's actually really thinking about what he says, and he actually listens. Oh, that's a very kind compliment. Thank you.
But she's still going to die. In chapter three, you talk about labeling their pain. I find that a really interesting concept. Don't feel their pain, label it. I think that's probably a mistake I've been making.
I actually was thinking about that in the context of my romantic relationships. When my girlfriend is talking at me, as a way to kind of create that bridge, how do I... create that bridge by acknowledging or labeling her pain.
Can you explain to me what you mean by labeling their pain? You know, think of whatever their negative emotion that they're feeling is, the elephant in the room. So if I'm, you know, I'm holding someone hostage and I'm crying. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm going to say, it sounds like you feel like you're out of control. It sounds like you feel that you're going to have to do something you really don't want to do. and what does that do to me when you when you do that all right so and this is one of the few and the black swan method that's also backed up by neuroscience like we know anecdotally that this stuff works because we're proving it over and over again we're walking the talk we make our own deals very effectively and the people that we coach make their deals and accelerate their deals very effectively you know so we got no shortage of our own anecdotal information we don't really don't need the neuroscience but there's been several neuroscience experiments. They put people in fMRIs, functional magnetic resonance imaging devices where they can watch the brain light up, and they induce negative feelings in people, and they watch.
the brain light up you typically by showing them some sort of photograph that causes them to feel a negative emotion whether it's sadness anger whatever it is and then they simply ask the people to identify or label what they're feeling as a result of what they saw. And each and every time the person labeled it, the electrical activity in that part of the brain diminished. Every time.
Not deny. but just called it out. You know, you don't deny the elephant's in a room.
You say, there's an elephant in a room. And that makes people feel heard or seen or felt. All of the above.
So, you know, whatever the emotional reaction to that is, people feel seen, heard, felt, understood. And it's probably a combination of, you know, the emotional reaction. And the neuroscience reaction is it diminishes the negative emotions.
Every time. Now, the degree that it diminishes the emotions changes. Like, you know, we call that a label, and I may label the negative that I hear, and it might have a minimal impact, a tiny little impact, or it might have a huge impact.
But the impact is, the type of impact is the same every single time. The degree of impact changes, but the nature of the impact is always to diminish the negative emotion. One of the things that I read as well that you're looking for in these negotiations is for them to give you a confirmation that like, if they say that's right yeah so you're you're trying to get me to not blow this lady's head off and if you can get me to say that's right what is that a signal of that's right is what people say when they feel understood you pull that right out of somebody you're on your way in a in a direction of a great resolution no matter what the negotiation landlord tenant employee employer you know, business deal. Pulling that's rights sends you in a great direction.
So you've labeled something that I'm feeling. You said, She, it feels like you're about to do something you don't want to do. And then I go, that's right.
Right. Now, so Tal, Raz, great researcher besides great author, he speculates, he says, you know, I think somebody says that's right when they've been experienced an epiphany to some degree. That's what you say when you when you what you think you've heard is completely true.
You're not agreeing with a person. You're observing that what they said was true. And when he said epiphany, I'm like, ah, this is interesting. Let me look up the neuroscience of epiphanies.
And among the neurochemicals that you get a hit of in an epiphany is oxytocin, which is the bonding drug. So you get a hit of oxytocin based on what I've said, and you have an involuntarily feeling of bonding towards me. And then, you know, the neuroscientist that I think the world of, Andrew Huberman, I heard him talking about oxytocin and he says that oxytocin tends to make people tell the truth.
So if you say that's right, you're going to feel bonded to me and you're going to be more likely to tell me the truth. That ain't a bad position for me to be in in a negotiation. Negotiations are, you know, all over our lives.
So, I mean, when I was reading- Everywhere, right? It's everything. It's teams, it's business, it's podcasting, it's my girlfriend, whatever. When I was reading through the principles in your book, Never Split the Difference, so much of it I can relate to from the context of like romantic relationships with my partner.
Yep. You must find yourself in your own romantic relationships deploying some of these skills. And which ones of them, which one in terms of whether it's just, you know, acknowledging them, making them feel heard, What are the key skills that translate really effectively to romantic relationships?
Well, they all do because every human being wants to be understood. And in a romantic relationship, they want to know that you understand. And in many cases, like any relationship, they just need that in and of itself. Now, the additional demands of a romantic relationship is...
They're going to want you to understand and adjust, which in point of fact, what other relationship do they not want that from you as well? Not only show me you understand, but then walk the talk. It's the closer you are to someone. Sometimes it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective.
Like you think you didn't do anything wrong, and typically a male, female would not confide to this. You thought you were fine when in fact what they perceived was that you were clumsy and insensitive. Are you good at negotiating in a romantic relationship? Because I can, I'll ask her when.
Well, the problem with dating a really smart girl is she starts out negotiating you pretty quickly. But the real, you know, the real issue is. What's your intent behind it? Like if you're hearing your romantic partner out just to get him to shut up, like the second or third time you pulled that on him, they have figured it out and you're disingenuous. But if you're hearing somebody out because you want things to be better, you really want the relationship to be long-term and you want it to continue to get better, then they're happy to let you hear them out.
or to let you make them feel heard, because you're going to make the adjustments in your behavior to take that into account. And you're going to show that you care enough about how they feel, not just what happened, but how they feel about what happened, which is a recipe for great relationship, romantic or not. But as should be, it's even a higher standard for a romantic relationship, because how can you be... Involve long term if you don't care how the other person feels.
In your negotiating days, was there an instance where it really didn't go the way you wanted it to go? Yeah. And with 93% success rate means 7% of the time it's going bad. And that's just the nature of the game.
Is there one that stands out for you as being? Well, every one of them does. But then the issue is, do you learn? Like Nassim Nicholas Tal would call it post-traumatic stress growth.
Like you go through a traumatic event, are you traumatized by it, and then damaged and never recover? Post-traumatic stress injury, harm, disorder? Or is there post-traumatic stress growth? Well, you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before because you never want to let that happen again.
When I say this, what is the incident that comes to mind? Well, the first one that people died in was the second case that I worked on in the Philippines, the Burnham Sabero case. And early on, before we could even get our arms around, like a situation that was moving really fast, and the Philippine military was engaged in chasing the bad guys, and a chase had been on for weeks.
Guillermo Cerbero was murdered by the Abu Sayyaf. About 21 days into that case, they had already killed a number of Filipinos prior to that. And as they moved across the landscape and the oceanscape and island to island south of Philippines, they would kill hostages and pick up new hostages because there were people in their way all the time. So that was an ugly case from the beginning to the end. In the end of it...
The two of the three remaining hostages were killed in a botched rescue attempt, and they were shot by friendly fire. Philippine Scout Rangers inadvertently stumbled over the Abu Sayyaf encampment, didn't realize it was one that had hostages in it, just opened fire. they recognized it as a terrorist encampment formed the skirmish line on the trees on the uphill side and just started pouring um rifle fire down into the camp uh and so that was that was the first time that i'd worked anything where people had gotten killed does that stay with you yeah it does it does and and i felt sorry for myself for a long time and it's not like i'm um i'm happy about it but for i'll never remember the moment that i got the call 5 30 in the morning i was in washington dc where i lived and a voice on the other end of the phone said i've got bad news martin is dead and it was just a few hours after martin burnham had been killed and deborah yap the filipino hostage been killed martin's wife gracia was wounded and lived And I'll never forget that was the worst, to that point and since, was the worst professional moment, personal moment of my professional career.
And I used to say it was the worst moment of my personal career until I was hearing another hostage negotiator talking about a siege he was in when an infant had died, had been killed. And I remember sitting there watching him talk about it, and he still very definitely... dealing with the scars and the wounds from having been the negotiator on scene. And I remember him saying, like, you know, I don't know why I keep telling, you know, giving these presentations. Maybe I just want people to know something bad that happened to me on a winter's day.
And I was sitting there thinking, bad for you. That wasn't your blood. It wasn't your child. And I thought, you know, we're taking on too much.
Because it wasn't a member of our family. It wasn't my brother. It wasn't my significant other.
It wasn't my son that got killed. And that's when I realized I had to put that stuff in perspective. It wasn't doing anybody any good for me feeling sorry for myself. I couldn't. And the changes we made as a result of the Burnham-Sarborough case saved lives.
You know, that was our mandate. All right, so Man Burnham is dead. What do we do with that? Do we quit or do we get better?
If we get better, somebody else is going to live. And a whole bunch of people ended up living based on strategy adjustments we made as a result of that case. Seems like a big, very significant sort of burden to carry, right?
It goes back to what I said at the start, you know, it takes a certain type of person to want to be, want to play with those stakes. Yeah, somebody who's naive. Yeah. You just don't know any better.
Makes us difficult sometimes just thinking about, you know, the traumatic things we go through. It makes us much difficult, especially in forming relationships. I struggled with that a lot.
Struggled in having a girlfriend, probably because my home life was so traumatic that I would always run from commitment. But when you've lived in such, and you hear the same with like soldiers and stuff, you know, when you've lived through such sort of traumatic events and high stakes, coming home to... Hey babe, you're right. It can be difficult, right? Yeah, it can be.
It can be difficult. You can have difficulty unwinding. The other person, depending upon how you process information, like the other person might genuinely doing their best to be there with you to get you to talk about it. You know, if that isn't the best way that you process it, and yeah, one of the very difficult things about me is I don't process stuff by talking about it. I'll talk about it afterwards, you know, but I kind of need to unplug, you know, I'll need a good night's sleep.
You know, I'll need to let it run through the data banks and kind of bake on its own. probably pretty good the next day. Which is interesting because in your work, you have no time for that. Yeah, well, you know, and maybe that's why I need it more at home because in the work, I mean, we're going to, you know, we're going on it right now.
We're dealing with it right now. Mirroring, something you talk about as well in the book, which I find really interesting because again, something with my girlfriend, I started to explore, which was, you know, when she says something to me, when she does something, I... to make her again feel heard, I guess. I just kind of repeat it back to her.
Right. Is it also a body language thing or is it just, how does mirroring work? Well, the hostage negotiators mirror, the black swans mirror, you know, the way that we teach in business now is just all verbal. Verbal, okay. You know, if you start lining up physically, which is what the body language mirroring thing is, like if you...
if that happens naturally then so be it enough people try to do it as a manipulative tool that we're really leery of even coaching people on that at all like if we're talking and suddenly we both find us and i'm actually listening and you're listening and we both find ourselves leaning the same direction that's cool because we're dialed in but the body language thing is is a tool of manipulation so many times of people that are just trying to exploit you that aspect of it we stay away from now the hostage negotiator mayor the black swan mirror repeating just the last one or three words of what somebody said or then taken surgically picking a gist one or three words here and there it's ridiculously effective ridiculously effective yeah you did very nice and and the thing that i find fascinating about it too is Like if we find somebody that's really into mirroring, they'll typically be somebody whose IQ and EQ both are real high. And there are a lot of people whose IQ is real high. You know, their book smarts are good, but their people smarts aren't good.
And they tend to love mirroring because... It's the least amount of effort with the maximum amount of response. And they want to guide a negotiation in a very gentle but purposeful way. and the other side doesn't feel guided they feel like they're expanding and it's been real consistent when you think about your your next phase and your next your your projects that you're working on now and what you're trying to do you've got your the black swan group right i saw that online um the objective of that is to to coach people into negotiation skills and stuff like that yeah worldwide globally yeah and what does that look like is it a course that people can buy is a uh webinar what is it yeah it's all of it the website is blackswanltd.com i mean if you just start now we got free stuff like how do you start to get better now if you're further on down the line we coach people through all kinds of deals on a regular basis and it's a really big part of what the company does we coach a lot of people through negotiations And you've got your book as well, which we've talked about a bit, which is Never Split the Difference, which has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, which is just staggering. Crazy, crazy numbers.
We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest leaves a question for the next guest. And I only get to see it when I open the book. Okay.
Good handwriting. So this is useful. Okay. Is there someone in your life that really needs your help but you are still unsure on how to help them?
There's someone in my immediate family that I can I continue to buy the wrong gifts for And we've got actually a conversation scheduled for me to at least say, all right, I realize I'm getting it wrong. Help me get it right. I think we can all relate to that in some respects. Well, I can anyway. Thank you, Chris.
Thank you for your time. Thank you for writing such a great book on a topic that is relevant to more than just FBI negotiations. As you know, it's relevant to my relationship with my partner, to my business, to everything in between. It's really relevant to all the interactions I have with all humans.
And that's clearly... a testament to why it sold more than it's almost 2.5 million copies or something crazy like that but i know that i know the stats around books i know that more i think my publisher told me that most books don't sell a thousand copies so like 90 plus percent of books don't sell a thousand copies to so to sell 2.5 million copies worldwide is staggering but it speaks to your experience and and the way you've articulated it in the book it's been an honor to speak to you thanks for your wisdom and um I'm going to keep brushing up my negotiation skills. Pleasure's been mine. Thanks for having me on.
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