Transcript for:
Hostage Negotiation Techniques with Chris Voss

we used to talk about this all the time like what's your opening line and we would go back and forth on a lot of stuff um for the longest time my favorite was i'm here to talk to you about coming out knowing that they're going to respond i ain't coming out now my next line which and and that's all i'm scripted is i know you're not coming out now i just want you to know that when you do we're gonna make sure that you feel treated with dignity and respect and i gotta make sure you don't get hurt chris voss welcome to the show tom thank you pleasure to be here dude i'm really excited to have you on i i'm actually a little shocked at myself that we haven't had you on sooner i find your book never split the difference absolutely incredible and where i want to start so i think i'm a terrible negotiator so let's start with that we will definitely today cover some of the principles of that but what i really want to talk about is in the book when you're talking about some of the scenarios that you were in where people it's a life-and-death situation right and you're the line of defense how do you deal with that emotionally like that's my job feels high stress but that's no one's life is on the line how do you deal with that yeah well there's a couple things i mean first of all you just don't know any better [Laughter] maybe when you first started but not long term uh you know training in the fbi they started out really good um i mean they hit you you know with the tyson uh line everybody is playing till they get punched like the second day of the negotiation training the fbi they hit you square between your eyes with something really hard like a real story or yeah yeah yeah you know they spit they spend the first day laying out a philosophy which if you understand the nuances of the words i still completely agree with a hostage has never been killed on deadline in the united states ever and so like you get kind of comfortable and you got a sense that negotiation's pretty successful overall i mean in reality it's about a 93 success rate whoa and then and then the very next day they present a scenario where it looks like a hostage got murdered right on deadline right in front of everybody and you just like i mean you were hit in the head can i use the words you use in the book because this was when i realized i don't want your job or the one that you had back then you said she was shot twice in the back with a shotgun but almost cut her in half as she flew through the glass window yeah and i thought god damn like i i don't know i'd find a way but chris i don't know how i'd come back from that like that would that would damage me in ways that i can't imagine well that that ends up kind of getting into a secondary characteristic because then when i was running a program i went out of my way to look for negotiators that had been involved in a siege where somebody got killed and they bounce back you know typically with a success rate that that's that high if any time you're under less than double digits of a job sieges whatever you want to call them probably everything you touch is going to turn out good and you're going to get a little overconfident you know once you start climbing past double digits i mean odds are starting to run against you and what happens with pretty much every time is the negotiator would be like you know i didn't get into this to watch people die i'm gonna find another thing to do or they're gonna say i'm never gonna let this happen again and those people will double down and they'll be more courageous and speaking truth to command whether it be an ambassador or an onsen commander and basically saying like no we can't do it like this we're involved in an operation where somebody got killed yeah so how did you how did you did you need to put yourself back together or do you not react like that let's start with that question um i've been uh repeating one phrase in my head for a long time leading up to that that i didn't really realize what it meant my old boss gary nessner used to always teach us best chance of success what we're doing is the best chance of success and so then when uh the burnham subaru case in the philippines a lot of people got killed and finally a quick breakdown what happened um uh gracia and martin burnham and another american citizen named guillermo cebaro got scooped up in a dive resort in the philippines and a region of the philippines every thought was completely safe now the bad guys the abu sayyaf were looking for westerners they'd been a siege earlier in the same year in another part of the philippines where they looking for americans and westerners they got nothing but western europeans and he ultimately that case was a train wreck which i was not involved in because there were no americans there and the bad guys ended up scoring about 20 million dollars as a result oh which made a rival gang jealous of the score so they go out and they do an even more daring raid they cross like 400 miles of open ocean on these lousy little boats scooped everybody up in a dive resort and ended up getting three americans and a bunch of filipinos sebero ends up getting murdered by the the terrorists about uh three-ish weeks in 21-ish days how does the siege go on for that long oh this thing lasted 13 months so yeah that was just that was just a beginning that wasn't even the opening act so did they kill them to make a point to just prove like we're serious well you know they were western american arrogance if you will when several finally got killed or got killed early on you know there had been filipinos the bad guys were killing filipinos regularly like it was no big deal and i can remember at that point in time when we tried to stir up a little outrage over it i thought you know we have sat here and not really said much at all well these filipinos are getting beheaded now the sudden we want everybody to be bent out of shape and i remember thinking like if i if i was a host country my reaction would be like oh now it's important to you so um but that the group that was doing it at the time i mean there were they did all the bad things that that terrorist murderers do i mean all of them how do you so one was that the first time that you were on a call where somebody got killed as a first kidnapping that i was directly involved in where somebody or people were getting killed yes all right so when the first body shows up what are you the one talking to them now we coached okay uh one of the reasons why you know what i'm doing now is applicable the black swan method is based on hostage negotiation which is universal human nature everybody's human so i could show up in any country i mean literally any country any culture philippines nigeria cape town baghdad all i need to do is find somebody that's coachable and that person probably knows the market if you will and i understand the human wiring so we put together their their their knowledge of the market in very general terms and my knowledge of how to get people to engage and then we can negotiate anywhere hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at betterhelp go to slash betterhelp.com to get 10 off your first month enjoy the episode okay so when the first body comes out what happens to you it's the first time that this has gone awry we're in the seven percent now yeah that don't go well it for me when i think about the way that that would like impact my mind and force me to like regroup did it knock you off or are you just laser focused well you got to keep rolling because case was still ongoing and so no time for emotions right now is that what you're telling yourself uh yeah kind of probably you know it's just i mean you got no choice a case is still going on you gotta you got a team you want to go fast go alone you want to go far go as a team you can always run screaming from the building but really and this this is where life gets interesting for me is that by nature i would say i'm a run screaming from the building person but i had to flip it all because i don't respect that and right in discovering that you don't respect your initial impulse becomes a fascinating journey if you're willing to walk it so i'm always curious if if other people are having to do what i have to do to keep myself centered in there or if it's just like nah it didn't occur to me to run screaming from the building well when you're when you're in the midst of when you're in the battle i mean you can't you can't you can't bail i mean people are looking at you to lead there are other people's lives that are still online so that's your identity you wouldn't allow yourself to do that probably yeah okay good did you because i know you at least have one son did you teach him that like hey in this family we don't tuck tail we don't run because what fight flea make friends yeah yeah yeah so i mean do you have those kind of conversations then because this like i don't know how much of this is your character from birth and how much of this is you've built this incredible um value system that allows you to be in the most insanely difficult situations on planet earth you go into great detail about this in the book and it's so true most people are so uncomfortable with conflict that even when it's asking for a raise or negotiating for a car they can't do it they can't sit in that discomfort right right right that's nothing compared to they just dumped a beheaded body at our feet to say you're not convincing basically right like you're not getting anywhere that's a real life man like i can i can understand why most people would not want to do that so i'm curious and it i find that asking people how to raise their kids often gets to what they do internally so what did you teach your son or sons uh about who we are as a family yeah i think it was me and my father simultaneously and you know and everybody else is what my mother as well because um uh you know my son brandon who runs my company is the best negotiator or something he's he's a star he's really good um he's basically a jersey guy you know he's mixed race but he's this bizarre combination of jersey and iowa because we started sending them back to iowa my father's very blue blue collar hard worker expects you to figure stuff out get stuff done we start sending my son back to iowa in the summertime when he's about six so he's so comfortable in both worlds that actually back in iowa i like to call him metro jethro because he loves it there he fits in completely and you know he's growing up he's eight years old uh grandpa's got him working in the business first half of the day because the town pool doesn't open till noon so he he'd have to get out of bed in the morning and have breakfast was with his grandpa's grandparents and then he'd have to get on his bike and ride to the same location his grandfather was driving to his grandfather wouldn't give him a riot he's like look you get on your bike you get out there you're supposed to be there at 8 30. get yourself out of bed get yourself fed i'll see you at the office and they would leave it approximately the same time and you know he'd be like why am i not getting a ride but that was just sort of the way that he grew up with you know my my parents help and then then at home it was always yeah he got knocked down pick stuff up he's got a memory from when he was playing football in uh he went to fifth year of high school because he was really young so there was a special program to get him ready for college ball and he was i mean he made a great play he's playing middle linebacker he hustled all the way across the field missed the tackle just barely missed a guy i mean phenomenal hustle ended up diving through the air landing on the ground out of bounds and put just such effort into it and he was laying on the ground and he remembers hearing my voice in the distance go great hustle now get up and it was like all right well this is the environment i grew up in but i think it's yeah it's sort of a family thing that we inherited from my dad and you know my dad picked out a woman that believed in those values and his mom believed brandon's mom believed in hard work so that's just kind of how he came up yeah i love that value system i'm a fan for sure uh okay so at what point do you start articulating those values out loud and are you talking about toughness resilience um like what what is it like i read your book before i saw interviews with you and so i wasn't expecting the sort of east coast uh attitude and it was um then suddenly it asked an interesting question for me because what i'm trying to tease out is okay how much of like the your ability to negotiate is just this like aggressive tough nut you know it's all about being hardcore and how much of it is learned resilience and strategy i'm a little bit of a believer in uh that pretty much everything is learned um the talent code daniel coyle i think that's that point that he tries to make that you know the human beings that we think are prodigies they just got interested before anybody noticed and then bang suddenly they were good at it but they'd been interested in practicing for a while i think that's pretty close to being true um i wish i could think of his name documentary i saw recently on a phenomenally successful uh music producer picked out uh the correct key when he was three years old when somebody was cleaning a piano and hit one hit one of the the keys so he probably was born with some extra but um i pretty much think everything is learned now how did my son learn it what um right after i left the fbi i attended a training session and it was the first time it occurred to me i remember saying to myself leading by example is not enough i don't think i ever told them anything explicitly i think i both hate myself you know his grandfather we saw it lead by example you know you want somebody to learn how to do something or to learn how to live i mean then set a great example and expect them to pick it up so but if it's not enough what is the magic formula yeah great question um depending upon the age of the human being you know probably they gotta you gotta you gotta find somebody else hopefully to mentor them or you gotta let them find their own way and it's going to be messy and ideally you've led by example enough until you know some that stuff is you were talking about the age of imprinting right so by the time they're starting to get into trouble in their mid teens or later i mean they're kind of imprinted you you got to go with whatever you you put in them and then ideally they're mistakes um that they're gonna have to make uh ideally they're not costly enough for their cripples for life over it but give them some space make them ride their bike to the pool pick yourself back up yeah be tough be resilient face it yeah i think all that stuff's amazing okay so and now you know and even to take a little bit further because you know and um taleb's book anti-fragile great book post-traumatic stress growth right and then i'm reading an art piece about cooper cup today who uh uh receiver for the rams cobra cup cooper cup cooper cup the guy who settled he wanted a triple crown this year everybody forgotten that the guy recovered from an acl tarik several years ago normally the end of a football player's effectiveness if not their career like normally they're never the same after this traumatic injury torn acion almost none of these guys are ever the same cup says to himself this is my opportunity to rebuild myself get rid of my bad habits you know i'm all right fix what i was ever doing wrong and rams are in the super bowl and he won the triple crown for receivers i mean he's got he's number one in all these categories and you and i'm like wait a minute i he tore his acl nobody comes back from an acl tear and i'm reading that and i'm thinking post-traumatic stress growth he made the decision not just to recover but to be better as a result of this massively traumatic injury that's you know that's that's beyond resilience that's what tyler would talk about being anti-fragile yeah no i love that such a powerful idea that getting hurt can actually make you stronger but in the human anyway it comes down to your mindset how you respond to it so now let's we're back in the philippines the first body just gets dropped off you obviously decide that you're going to get stronger you don't want it to happen again how do you like are you just really good at re-centering yourself emotionally or have you are is it a meditative practice like when the body hits i i know what that would be like for me that rush of blood to my head where my ears almost feel like they're closing in you can hear your heartbeat beating in your ears um how did you did that happen and you had to calm yourself down or does that just not happen and you're just so laser focused well it was principally because we were still in the midst of the siege there were still two still two americans whose lives were at stake and up to that point in time the intergovernment the intergovernmental organization was probably at its worst like we had previously gotten through a case and everybody had gotten away with kind of half cooperating and the bodies hadn't been the case we just finished uh just a couple of months earlier like nobody got killed and it's a little bit like like success you went you know a football analogy again it's tough for a football team to repeat after they won the super bowl because people a little more focused on our own success versus team success once they reach the pinnacle so the cooperation in the early part of the second case was horrible i mean horrible because they'd gotten away with it previously and there was no body count but now there was there was people were dying so we really had to we got arms more around the case we pushed a little harder on cooperation people got a little more serious about not cooperating which in the long run 12 months later was when the final round uh two out of three remaining americans got killed in a botched rescue attempt and the case had gotten really ugly again at that point now that one hit me harder than the first one because in the first one nobody had been cooperating with us so i felt less responsible for the outcome because government of the philippines was playing games with us you know they they they felt out of control on the last case so they gave us a guy who was supposed to handle the negotiations that was just completely going missing in action on a regular basis when he was supposed to be with us i mean he went and they pulled him right after the first series of deaths they were like all right this ain't working out so good so i felt you know we still had the case going and i hadn't gotten my arms wrapped around it that well now 12 months later i had had my arms wrapped around it and then when martin burnham when the ward came in then he got killed that that hit me that was that was a real i'll never forget that moment i was i was at home in the u.s when i when i got the call that he'd been killed back for me at the time was difficult uh worst moment of my professional career one of my worst personal moments until i'm listening to a case a couple years later listening to a negotiator talk about how hard it was on him when a baby got killed in siege oh god and i remember thinking at the time and it was a guy i had a tremendous amount of respect for i thought hard on you that wasn't your relative and then when i thought about that i thought and how am i you know feeling sorry for myself over martin burnham's death because he wasn't my father he wasn't you know my spouse he was my brother you know i i got no right feeling bad about this or at least to the extent that his family members do so that you know that was a bit of you know the overall journey there putting things in perspective like you asked to be in the middle of this stuff it's a volunteer job you're going to feel sorry for yourself when you volunteered that's probably out of perspective why did you volunteer you know i i found myself i was in crisis response i was a member of the fbi swat team and i had reinjured my knee and i wanted to stay in christ's response i liked crisis response people got to make up their mind you know you can't go well let's sleep on this you know let's give this 24 hours to think about it you know you can't do that you get you know you got to make a decision and i've always been in favor of decision making so i'd been a swat guy and we had hostage negotiators and it was a little bit like what we were talking about earlier you know some stuff is a lot harder than it looks from the outside oh yeah and i literally remember thinking to myself i talk to people every day i can talk to terrorists how hard could it be you know my son and i joke that the voss family motto is how hard could it be which is a little bit like you know it's a little bit like the rednecks famous last words hey watch this yeah hold my beer on my beer so uh but then i got into it and i've been volunteered when i finally got trained i got volunteered on a suicide hotline and then when i'm in it i'm like i'm around these extraordinary people that are doing phenomenal things with words i mean with words not actual actions just words making a huge difference and being in the middle of these sieges and making a difference simply by what they said and i thought now you know i could get into this this this this could be good it was and so how does that journey begin of learning what to say like what are they what are the sort of magic words like take us back to the philippines the bodies start coming out how do you talk somebody down like that like it it just seems like all hope is lost once they kill the first person there's no backing out yeah man they still get more people that are at stake and so you you can't not communicate and you know it's kind of like any other negotiation where the other side is doing stuff that is just not in their interest but they're absolutely convinced that they're right i mean these guys want to get paid and negotiation is not what it is to you it's what it is to the other side you get all bent out of shape that it's a horrific horrible thing that was something i heard you say i think in in an interview yeah so there is no such thing as logical there's only what matters to you yeah i was like oh my god that is so true you literally just cut through decades worth of economics textbooks that try to make people seem rational with that one that that the second i heard you said i was like oh my god that is absolutely true there is no such thing as logical there's only what matters to you yeah okay so is that like when you come into a situation like that are you just asking yourself what matters to this person yeah is that is that the most fundamental question what matters well then what matters and and then ultimately people make up their mind principally on what they perceive the loss to be um and that's that's human nature doesn't matter the scenario when you say the loss the loss that led them to do this or what losing in that scenario would look like gotta look at both lost the drove them to the table in the first place to take the action and then what loss are they avoiding by the action and you want to get in their head and find out what it is and since what loss are they avoiding is all perception you know vision of the future then depending upon how you got in their head if you're in there by invitation which is the whole point of empathy or the tactical application of empathy to get in by invitation since you're in there by the invitation then the idea is to get them to look at another loss so if it's a kidnapping it's a question that's as is seems as um merciless as how are you gonna get paid if you kill people how how are we gonna how are we gonna collaborate you know how much are you losing by getting rid of hostages when you could have gotten paid for them because somebody's going to scare up the money for the hostage right somebody's going to a hostage negotiators real job internationally is to make sure that if somebody scares up that money that there's enough of a trail left that you can hunt them down afterwards it's exactly why you give a bank teller bait money you don't want the bank teller to get shot over money now you also don't want the bank robber to leave the bank with the entire contents of the vault you give them enough money so bank tell it doesn't get shot the bad guy leaves and you chase them down afterwards that's the way to save lives and put the bad guys out of business you want to get them focused back on the money again and then if they kill more hostages it's their loss and that's when they start to think like all right well maybe we made our point you know let them let them feel that way who cares how they feel as long as you get what you want and that's the idea to try to re-engineer the outcome that's really interesting that um is that an easy position to take because it definitely makes them feel like we're a game this is a game or they're a chip versus like you almost have to divorce yourself from their humanity and meaning the hostages right i can't even think about them as people right now because that may stop me from actually getting them back is that do you approach it that way or are you trying to hold front and center this is somebody's mom daughter or whatever and keep that front of mind like how do you what's the best tactic well yeah you know you actually you learn the success tactic again and i learned it from gary the process is you you lower the value as a bargaining chip you increase your value as a human being to the bad guys so that decreases the chances not only the bad guys will kill them but also you impact how they're treated in the meantime that's incredibly shrewd so how do we lower their value as a bargaining chip and then how do we increase our value as a human without the person feeling like they're being manipulated that's always the fine line right right well it's one of the reasons for potentially for a proof-of-life question not necessarily that you're getting proof of life but you're making them thinking about it as a human being like all right at this point in time we got no hostage still alive what's uh you know martin burnham's favorite thing to do with his kids first thing in the morning and by asking that question you force a thought pattern into the bad guys because they were kids at one point in time you know um terrorists really bad guys it's not that they're completely lacking in emotion they're completely lacking in certain emotions which means they've had some emotional experiences you want to see which ones are there that they resonate positively with you know one of the crazy things that i learned a long time after the fact is tara's got moms i mean you'd be shocked at the emotional vulnerability across the board to the power of a well-crafted message from a mom really i mean and if like the first we found this out and again my boss gary nestor he had a great feel for this one admits to the first case um the um uh jeff schilling case which in baghdad nobody died hostage walks away because the bad guys get so um uh disorganized and disheartened and two months after the case the the serial killer terrorist on the other side calls the negotiator that i coached to congratulate him on how effective he was not in a rage but to literally say you know you're really good at what you do wow they should promote you so in the midst of that one bad guys are threatening that they're torturing the american not they're going to kill them but they're torturing them and the state department is like you know we got to get this torture threat off the table and i remember thinking like you're not really bent out of shape unless you're being made to look bad here because having american tortured overseas makes you look bad and that's what you're concerned about i'm like all right so we'll see what we can do and i talked i talked to my boss gary and i'm like all right so how do we go from release him release him to be nice to him [Laughter] this is absurd and uh you know gay says to me says um tell him that his mom is worried about him i can remember literally in that moment like i held the phone away from my head and i remember looking at the phone and i thought to myself that is the dumbest effing thing i have ever heard in my life and i kind of roll my eyes and and i used to ignore so much what gary told me anyway you know he was good he gave me a lot of rope and so i go okay we'll see if we can work that into the conversation because i want to make him feel like i was paying attention to him so we coach up the negotiator the next day and you know we got the negotiation operations center set up and we got sheets of paper with dialogue and we're going to be there with him the whole time you can hear tone of voice when you get the cadence you get a pretty good idea what's being said just based on tone and we tell him he says you know you got to work this mom thing into the conversation and he looks at us like you're kidding right you know it's just find a way to work it in so he's on the phone with a bad guy and we're we're all but getting them to come right out that they're not torturing them because they're not i mean there's no need to but it makes them look good to claim they are and and benji says to the bad guy says you know his mom's worried about him and the sociopathic terrorist on the other end of the phone literally says his mom knows about this you tell her he's okay whoa and we're like this is the dumbest thing i've ever heard and you know we're on the other side of the clock in manila you know we're 12 hours on the other side of the clock so it's the middle of the afternoon for me it's a middle it's 1 30 in the morning for gary and i'm like i got to get this out of the way i mean i i i have to get this out of the way so i immediately call gary and i wake him up in the middle of the night you know he always took the calls 1 30 in the morning phone rings and i hear you oh and i go you always f and have to be right and he's like what do you mean [Laughter] let go i don't know how you knew that this guy was going to resonate with the mob stuff but it worked perfectly how did he know did he say you know a great gut instinct but once we started looking for it then it would show up in case after case and which is really hard you know once i was looking for that dynamic every terrorist got a mom and if you had to bet it's a good bet that they're bonded to their mom like physically they were born they had to have a mom mom was probably nurturing all the different stuff to bend them out of shape and turn them into the twisted human being that they became i didn't have any anything to do with mom so they still got deep inside in a first year of their life they were nurtured by mom mom did everything she could she possibly could even terrorists got moms and i saw this show up a couple times later on and i started realizing it was probably if i you took me to vegas which i lived there now and you said place a bet is this guy gonna resonate emotionally with the mom and i'd say based on our data we got an 85 to 90 chance that the mom is a button we can punch and so then in subsequent cases knowing this i'd bring it up with ambassadors or you know fbi headquarters or the white house and they'd all react the exact same way that i did that's the dumbest thing i ever heard that ain't you know they're inhuman that ain't ever gonna work and we saw i saw evidence of it in 2012 when um son of al qaeda uh the group in in iraq that was chopping people's heads in 2012 2014 2014 time frame um their name will come to me after the fact but there was uh there was one case there where the mom car got played really strongly and the head of head of the group responded and i remember thinking like i've been telling you know i know this sounds crazy but we see it over and over and over again so there's a common humanity thread to every human being regardless of circumstances that's really interesting so we've got the mom thread we've got what are some of the other threads a desire to be heard want to be in control like what are what are some known knowns when you roll up on average the sort of 80 85 percent range when you roll up you know okay mom probably going to be a button they want to be in control they want to be heard um are there any others sense of loss and you know an idea of some sort of a loss loss is the strongest be true uh behavior trigger of human nature period how do you track that down um well first of all it's it's like you know what you're looking for to begin with but it's not really active listening it's proactive listening and there's certain things or the tactical application of empathy what do we know to be true what do we got to bet on loss is the primary the biggest impact on decision making of human beings across the board danny kahneman 2002 nobel prize winner behavioral economics lost things twice as much as an equivalent gain for people period if you're human you're wired that way which makes it the biggest trigger in thinking so if they're engaged in a behavior that we don't understand they perceive the loss and we got to start you know sniffing around for it looking for the hints knowing it's there and then consequently you're going to get them change their mind about something you reformulate the loss if i say to you if you do this there's a 90 chance you fail like i'm not doing that but if i say do this says you know you got a 10 chance of success ooh that sounds and lands completely different 10 percent i could succeed 10 i'm a winner i'm in the 10 percent you know it it lands differently but if you want to make sure they don't do it 90 chance you'll fail here i'm not doing that i'm not taking that risk that's too far against me i mean that will shut somebody down for sure 10 success might move them forward but i guarantee you i shut you down with a 90 failure rate there is no difference in those numbers exact same numbers and so you start to see it across the board and like all right so we're going to get them to change their mind we just change the frame of the loss you're going to merge in an acquisition negotiation entrepreneur sole proprietors trying to sell this company wants to get you know whatever um 10x ebitda because a buddy of his get 10x now the person buying his company wants to take him wants him to take a lower multiple so that in two years he retains a piece and he makes 30 40 50 100 million dollars more by taking less now guys thinking is lost i you know i can't i can't take a million dollars less for this i can't take nine when i should take ten i lose a million dollars take nine take a piece you're willing to risk a hundred million dollars seven years from now you wanna lose a hundred million dollars over a million dollars now and be like no that's crazy that's the dumbest thing i ever heard you just re-framed what the law says and that's where you get people to change their mind because whether it's a terrorist thinking we have law you know we've been harmed in the past we've lost our homeland you know we've lost our identity terrorism is about choosing violence as a way to make up for laws interesting i have never heard that before uh is that universal um it's the universal driver of human decision making now how they're looking at the loss you know you know there's kind of three groups that are out there that you see over and over again in a lethal triad they called it the charismatic leader the sociopathic um middlemen you know the number twos captains lieutenants and then the inadequate followers it was a terrorism book from way back when called crusaders criminals and crazies a friend of mine tom strench wrote a book called the bad the man the sad so it kind of breaks down into you know the complete charismatic leader maybe he believes in a cause maybe just believes in himself the criminals are involved they're just doing it because it's a way to combat the status quo and continue to commit crime the people that are looking for identity you know it's hard to describe as being inadequate followers but the sad you know they're looking for an identity and the leadership has convinced them that they've been harmed by this perceived loss and they have to make up for it so it's kind of packaged along those lines and is that who's going to be there actually doing the hostage part so you're not dealing with the charismatic leader you're dealing with the sad underlings principally the sad underlings of their implementers because they're the cannon fodder for the leader you know the leadership whether it's a charismatic leader of a sociopathic enabler who are they going to put at risk who are you going to send out to conduct the kidnapping who's going to who's going to hold the hostage who's going to be the hostages jailer that's the worst job on their side you know to have to sit around with a hostage day after day it's a it's a it's you know you're not you're not giving that to your talented people how did these guys 13 months yeah how did they not just get bored and want it to end um they're prepared for a little longer siege they've got a vision of a big payoff in the end that 20 million dollar payout the year previous painted visions of wealth which means if they don't get their 20 million they're losing so you'll stay in the game longer because of this perceived loss and these guys letting food get in or have they stocked up enough food to get through all this well we're trying we're trying to get stuff in um uh you know didn't know this was going on at the time but um dan bowden the author of black hawk down [Music] wrote an article in vanity fair probably about a year after this case went down [Music] revealing a whole bunch of information that i was not privy to in the case so according to dan bowden who evidently has great resources in the us government not in the fbi there were unnamed government agencies they were setting in sending in food deliveries with informants that had tracking devices in them oh that again according to dan bowden in his article in vanity fair you know i am quoting a publicly source i am not quoting pri you know secret government information that uh there were food deliveries that were being made with tractors on them okay so that starts getting complicated with all kinds of different agencies pulling in different directions right um what is all this like seeing people beheaded uh recognizing the sad the man yeah that's rhyme there huh thank you tom strand i'll try to remember it better but um what is all of this revealing to you like about humanity do you do you have a look at humanity like this is crazy that this is ugly are you optimistic like i mean that you've seen some gnarly [ __ ] like what does this give you a takeaway because you said i could drop you anywhere and you know enough about human wiring right to to go into this yeah and it does not paint a pretty picture with the ways in which we are manipulatable between this is all about loss and just reframing the loss completely reframed like the fact that we would do this kind of crazy [ __ ] over loss that my mother is gonna like trigger some very strange reaction given the circumstances like how do you conceptualize of human nature at this point well yeah first of all i'm very optimistic um you know it to me it's relief that we're kind of relieved that we're all kind of rewired the same interesting you know even though it means that we are all then in oh god who was it soldier nitsan i think that said either soulja nitsan or frankel that evil runs through the center of every human heart i wouldn't go that far i think um the the capability of doing something that appears to be very evil and heartless when people get really scared and afraid for their own survival i am i am somewhat like when people start getting really afraid for their own survival people's ability to uh discard the humanity of people around them as a defense mechanism you know that saddens me to some degree but it it is so you know don't curse the darkness get a flashlight figure it out get night vision goggles you know just there are certain things that simply are um but they're they're consistent so if i understand what is and it's consistent and you don't it doesn't do you any good to get angry at people for having a propensity to to do really bad things inadvertently or just out of self self protection and but maybe it makes it more forgivable to know that when backed into a corner people are more scared rabbits than they are predatory wolves so most people are not predatory wolves they're they're they're out there but the vast majority of people are not have you come across predatory wolves well you know i think you know the guy in the uh um uh the the schilling case who was only on the other end of the phone yeah he was he was a predatory wolf i mean he was a bad guy he was the one that was batting people yeah and then then the crazy thing was i mean it's really interesting the way that plays out because in the second case instead of being in charge of the negotiations second case he's in a chart in charge of the hostages same guy same guy he gets a terrible he got demoted from negotiator to jailer okay but the hostages loved him because he he understood that a hostage who was so spiritually broken that they couldn't get up off the ground [Music] was a logistical problem because they were on the run for most of the 13 months they were moving from place to place they were staying ahead of drones they're staying ahead of patrol like sitting in in one house and you guys are surrounding it no no kidnapping is a mobile operation wow i've had the wrong impression this whole time well there's two kinds of cases i could be working i could work on a contained case like what you're talking about where they're not getting away or i could i could be working the uncontained you know to use real simple terminology so you know talking with gracia burnham uh the the american lived she got shot by friendly fire in the leg and she survived phenomenal human being and her kids whom i'm acquainted with um are wonderful people every every member of their family wonderful human being and that's the father that got killed yeah now she's telling us about this after the fact because we're always debriefing hostages who survive because we want to understand the dynamics behind the scenes number one number two our survival debriefings happen to be great stress debriefings for them two kinds of interviews information gathering and stress debriefing why is it a step stress debriefing what do they get out of it uh you know the opportunity to talk somebody through a horrific situation from beginning to end and for the listener to be genuinely curious as opposed to trying to extract information like an interview of a released hostage by an investigator is exhausting i mean exhausting and they don't like it and it sucks the life out of them if they said we sit around we asked them questions about what was the experience like what were the bad guys what were they like how did you survive you know what emotional triggers did you go through it's very cathartic for the hostage so we're talking to gracia burnham and like you know of your captors what was your reaction to this guy this guy this guy and we bring up the sociopathic murderer and she said yeah we kind of liked him i mean he could tell when we were really down and if he sensed that i was really down he would say you know take her down the river you know give her some time alone let her clean herself up you know just just give her a break take it a little bit easier on her this is the guy that was beheading people yeah because so weird to me he's responsible for moving these people if they need to move in a hurry see this this is something that from uh what what are humans like chris voss let us answer the question what are humans like so it is really strange to me that a human can in one scenario be beheading people and then get a slightly different job description and be like all right take them down to the water and let them wash um that does say to me that the line of evil runs through every human heart how does that not say it to you do you think that is that not the predictable part like you just of course like that makes sense he's going to have bonded with them because that's his job with him he's tr he's he's to him their commodity that he has to be able to move in a hurry and so he's just letting him go down to the river so they they will move quickly when he needs them to exactly yeah he knows he's got to he you know he doesn't want him like happy to be there but if they're completely disabled emotionally they're going to be disabled physically and if a military patrol comes too close they're not going to be able to bug out of there in a hurry and this is a valuable commodity he's got to take care of and so he's agnostic now some of the other captors are messing with them because they're bored and they're inadequate followers and they're inadequate human beings and that's a completely different approach which is what most hostages go through on a regular basis you know the people out there they just start [ __ ] with them yeah and what does that take the look of throwing rocks at them you know i've heard plenty of stories in uh you know in in some of the rougher kidnappings in south america where just for entertainment they'll put a rifle to somebody's head and pull the trigger on an empty chamber just to watch them fly just and you know because they got nothing better to do mental health is a huge priority in my life and i encourage everyone to prioritize it and one of the best ways to follow through on healthy mental health habits is by working with a licensed therapist better help is available for clients worldwide you can log in to your account anytime and send a message to your therapist betterhelp is committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change therapists if needed it's more affordable than traditional offline therapy and financial aid is available betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact that's better h-e-l-p and join the over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional and with a special offer for our impact theory audience you can get 10 off your first month at betterhelp.com impact again that's betterhelp.com impact take care and be legendary what do you take away from that like that's so sadistic yeah so have you read um soulja nitsan's book uh the gulag archipelago i have not oh my god read it chris i'm so curious to know what you think about this so it's interesting i i am not yet sure i understand what you have taken away from all of these people i have thankfully not encountered anything like this there was one guy in high school that people said he beat kittens to death and i remember thinking oh my god that's so dark i almost couldn't allow myself to believe that it was true so i was like ah maybe it's exaggerating whatever so anyway that always stuck in the back of my head did that guy really beat kittens to death so that just freaks me out but when i read the gulag archipelago and it's basically soulja nitsan screaming for like a thousand pages it's unreal cataloging the cruelty that befell him the way that people turn on each other the way that you could get a prisoner to turn into a guard and that they would then be cruel to other prisoners just as a way to like get themselves out of it and that so easily we could turn on each other and pluck you know fingernails and just torture people cruelly kill them uh send them away to you know these prison camps that were almost certainly death sentences and it was like jordan peterson introduced this idea to me which has been useful he said don't think of yourself as the one that hides jews in the attic think of yourself as a nazi guard and i was like whoa because you want to talk about something i just always no way like i could never ever ever and then when you allow yourself to go do i have weakness inside of me i do and is there a threshold at which just to save my own family that i would do something horrendous i worry that i would and so hearing soulja nitsan basically say you're all capable of it we're all capable of it and it's like oh man so when you talk about somebody going from because i don't know i don't read that guy like you obviously were in the mix and so i could just be totally misreading this but when i hear the guy in one kidnapping time is beheading people hey no problem and the next is like letting them go down to the river that to me is more of a mother moment than it is a this guy's a logistical genius and he knows i have to like keep them to a certain level of prime maybe he is maybe he is you heard first-hand experience but to me i just hear when you're in a different role and i don't know how real the stanford prison experiment is and if it's ever been replicated but i'm sure you've heard that classic thing where they had some students they said you guys are the guards you guys are the prisoners but they were classmates and within three days they had to shut the experiment down because the prison guards started acting so abusively towards the prisoners even though they were randomly assigned that they ethically they just couldn't continue and so that's what i hear in this story and i'm not sure if that means that you have a way more optimistic view because you're just a better person than i am or i don't know that's really a deeply flawed person yeah it's very intriguing what do you believe to be true about the individual are we capable are all of us capable of great kindness and great evil or it's a spectrum and some of us are tighter on the scale what what is true of humans yeah you know um i think it's a spectrum um you know just because you get some people to do horrific things doesn't mean you get everybody to do horrific things it you know it's kind of in the in the environment and then things go a little at a time you know the the the boiling frog analogy can't drop a frog in a boiling water but you can start them out in warm water and raise the temperature and they'll stay you know the the degree of changes and then as we as we grow um and go through life then then what what have we experienced that we failed everybody fails it goes down to twos everybody's got something there's got a moment where they were fragile or they did something that they that they uh probably deeply regret now again are you do you become a better person as a result and forgive yourself uh for failing to step up you know what do you do as a result you know everybody's gonna do stuff where they failed themselves well they were fragile they made a bad decision they were heartless either intentionally or accidentally like how do you how do you how do you pick it up after that is what the real issue is and how do you pick yourself up like for me it would be i would assess what i believe to be [Music] right true aren't quite there but i would figure out what what do i want my values to be what do i aspire to be and i would have to reorient myself towards aspiration so i failed and i would be very careful not to allow the failure to become what i perceive of myself your thank you for letting me talk through something i've never had to articulate but here is a really interesting idea that i've had on my mind lately that you can who you believe yourself to be is a frame of reference unto itself yeah and you see things and experience things through that frame of reference what you believe to be true about yourself if you believe yourself to be capable if you believe yourself to be a good person you will act accordingly and view your actions accordingly and view as you imagine the future you will imagine i'm going to be successful you'll have optimism i'm going to handle this well because that's your frame of reference but if something happens that knocks your frame of reference a failure or whatever then suddenly your frame of reference shifts in an instant i'm a failure i'm a loser i'm not good at this and as you imagine the future the future is bleak and all of it is suddenly neurochemically real and you are there and what i have found interesting is if i ever find myself going to a dark place and it feels heavy and it feels like i'm pessimistic about the future i say there is a single phrase that i will say to myself and it changes my neurochemistry in like four seconds and that's remember who you are now what's interesting is i know that's a game i know it's a gimmick because i'm i'm not anybody right i am i am the person who can be confident and i am the person who can be scared i am both of those things but somehow along the way that phrase triggers a neurochemical state for me and i can shift myself out of a negative viewpoint and get there and so as i think about like okay you fail and this big traumatic thing happens to you how do you grab the right and maybe we need to debate this idea of frame of reference but how do you grab a hold of the right frame of reference which is going to completely distort good or bad what you see think and feel yeah i think it very definitely gets back to because when you're saying remember who you are it's like remember what your core values are you know get back on track sometimes i refer to that as two lines of code you know computer code everybody got two lines of code somewhere very deep in their brain which kind of drives who they are god knows what it is in some cases or how i got that like how do those two lines occur how do the two lines of code that i believe probably drive me how'd they get in my head i i don't know do we all literally have two lines of code i said i think there's a duality i think there's something you know i just say two lines of code because i think it's probably pretty simple okay for whatever it is it might either be like life you know it doesn't matter for some people and you know then then when you do something wrong it doesn't matter let it go or look um you're good guy like that doesn't mean you're perfect or be a good person or you can succeed you know i don't know my mom whispered that in my ear at some point in time when i was three i don't know i don't know how i got in there i know exactly what it is but i you know i think it would it what gives me the ability at some point in time pick yourself up and get and learn from this you know you you're not here to be uh to take a bite to use oxygen you got a purpose whatever it is you know your spiritual outlook on life um the bigger picture you know we talked about uh it never split the difference you know finding out somebody's religion what is it that they believe in that's bigger than them that they would you know they would work forever and be happy and when another person would consider it to be um disparaging uh and ruining their life like how how do people take the exact same circumstances seem completely differently maybe it's a two line of code or if they get defeated and then and they never got up so yeah i guess you know mine's got to be largely optimistic whatever it is um and that's so then when you know i find myself curled up in a feudal position uh unable to get off the floor eventually i'm gonna say look it's time to get up and get smarter time to get up and get smarter smarter okay so let's talk about what makes somebody a good negotiator what does the smarter look like so if all of this is about two lines of code like so much of your book revolves around once you understand how people are wired once you understand what their religion is once you understand their two lines of code we become controllable isn't the right word but we become movable influenceable if that's a word so how do we begin to suss that out so when you're sitting across the table and i like i know that a lot of this deploys against business negotiations but i want to keep it when lives are on the line so ultra high stakes literal life and death what are you asking what are you looking for how much of like the fact that you guys have these teams and everybody's broken up okay you're looking for positive statements you're looking for negative walk us through that what what's the setup and then how are we going to tease out this information well yeah the setup is yeah you know we're going to pull together a team because there's so much in what's said and the way it's said even more in the way it's said that there's just there's more information coming off a person if even if you can't see them there's more information that you can keep up with if you're not trying to respond and then you know you formulate a statement in your mind in the amount of time that you're formulating a statement you're not listening there's just more data there than one person can handle so we built a team concept and we had different people listen for different things and the more we thought about it like how long did the conversation go how much profanity which is you know emotional adjectives how many emotional adjectives were in there negative emotional adjectives as as few as the conversations get longer and there's fewer negative emotional adjectives you're making progress it's never a straight line so it's going to go and come so you know what's our pulse what's our frequency and then would people really start listening for the nuances and you get five people together i mean if you want to listen for everything you probably need at least five people keeping track of everything and it then then then the patterns start to emerge really fast or like in a in a tractor man siege in dc and tractor man yeah dwight watson drove a tractor to the middle of washington dc in 2003 just before the beginning of the first iraq war and his family had been crushed by the tobacco industry settlement they were no longer able to [Music] farm and sell enough tobacco you know i don't know but this the tobacco industry settlement ended up crushing his family business he tried to protest in dc a couple times got legal permits to protest nobody cared you know save the tobacco farmer that ain't exactly a hashtag that's real popular yeah and it's not their fault that that's how they grew up making a living which was completely legal acceptable and nothing wrong and then the world suddenly decides it's a bad thing so we protest couple years in a row nobody cares so he rolls back into dc now with his tractor and his and his trailer and his his uh 4x4 and claims he's got bombs which gets everybody's attention has a way of doing it yeah yeah you'll get somebody's attention for working a case park police negotiators we're backing them up we're coaching them we're doing all the analysis for them you know we're the team that we put up around them because we work a good team and we get to the point where he's found a face-saving way to surrender you know he said i was in the 82nd airborne the 82nd airborne parachutes behind enemy lines and you're there for for 72 hours with no backup you can withdraw so basically he's agreed to come out after 72 hours now the problem is he's a volatile dude and since we don't know for sure whether or not he's got explosives in a fit of rage if he goes the wrong direction the sniper's got a green light on him and we're thinking like all right we got to keep this guy from getting himself killed because when you're in a rage you're going to do something stupid and there's a very specific protocol where we suspect the explosives might be and if he makes a move for the explosives we cannot wait and find out if they're there and so we're thinking like we got to get this guy out of here in less than 72 hours because that's just too much for for stable behavior we cannot expect them to stay cool for 72 hours so there's a disagreement within in the negotiation cell as to when he said he's going to come out and i look at the negotiators and i go when's dwight coming out and they go like he's coming out tomorrow and i said um i don't think he is i think we're still 36 hours away you know we're not we're not eight hours away well we'll call him and ask him and i'm like hold hold hold before we call in the event he's not coming out tomorrow morning what are you going to say to get him to change his mind now we've heard all this military stuff all this hyper masculine stuff and buried in the military jargon and the hyper masculine stuff their hints of his religion was christianity just hints of it just hints and winnie miller a female negotiator on my team [Music] sitting in the back of the room and what do we say what do we say what do we say and when he goes tell them to mars or dawn on the third day because you know the christian religion jesus crucified on friday he gets up on sunday that's 48 hours that ain't three days that's not 72. it's one day to saturday it's two days to sunday so we're thinking about this and we're like yeah okay going to the third day so we call them back on the phone they go dwight when are you coming out you're coming out tomorrow right he goes no i'm not coming out tomorrow and then a negotiator brilliantly because delivery is as important as awards she brilliantly says the white tomorrow's the dawn of the third day this is long silence on the other end of the line yes i'll come out tomorrow now she saved his life because i promise you that 24 more hours he'd have cracked and he'd have made some move where the sniper would have taken him out and we did not want that to happen by this point in time we're talking to this and this this poor schmuck has just been crushed he's tried to get the world's attention we don't think he's got bombs but we don't know he doesn't have bombs and we can't take that chance we got to get him out of there before he gets himself killed and so that was kind of you know here's a guy doing something that looked really bad but they were still possibly to your point what's inside somebody you know one of those kernels those grains that are still in there that maybe we can uncover that maybe we can reach in and reach and and and we got him out he came out and nobody nobody got hurt okay so that was a case of literally knowing their religion and also there's something in there about knowing that he needs to save face and the military thing about 72 hours and having an honorable exit and all of that um how do you tease out this stuff so somebody that wants to use this in their real life yeah the most interesting thing that you cover in the book in great detail is how you begin to like pull this information out you mentioned earlier but it's worth noting that the name of your company is black swan right and the whole idea of it's the unknown unknowns the tiny little things that make all the difference yeah and so how do you get to that well yeah um again what are you listening for you're not not i know what to tell you to look for you know look for the hints of loss you know what impacted their identity look for the narratives that they're telling themselves that they're telling themselves you know how does this make sense that them you know what's the trigger here what's the opening question do you have a standard opening question that you asked them to get them to start talking yeah you know you know one one of a couple things um which is like how every negotiation should go script out your first two or three lines and then you're into an ad-lib from that point on you gotta prepared it's a dance let the other person lead and they'll take you where you wanna go give them a chance and the opening is going to be some catch em off guard an expression of concern for them and we used to talk about this all the time like what's your opening line and we would go back and forth on a lot of stuff um for the longest time my favorite was i'm here to talk to you about coming out knowing that they're going to respond i ain't coming out now my next line which and and that's all i'm scripted is i know you're not coming out now i just want you to know that when you do we're gonna make sure that you feel treated with dignity and respect and i gotta make sure you don't get hurt and now we're off to racist wherever he wants to go but i put a vision in his head with that statement it doesn't matter what he says it's that i got a chance to draw that picture and then a buddy of mine super talented guy vince delfonzo he says i want to call in and say are you okay because they're expecting us to call in and ask about the hostages but are you okay now i'm in a confrontation in a parking lot here in l.a about two months ago really yeah just on a personal level yeah okay and um [Music] this guy honks at me you know he's clearly bent out of shape and you know i'm not being aggressive and i'm in a parking lot and and i happen to be standing i think i'm out of his way but he wants to park where i am he honks at me and he drives by me happens to be a black dude doesn't really matter and he's running his mouth as he goes by and it clearly something has got him wound up before he ever saw me and for whatever reason i'm there at the wrong time now i ain't letting this pass and i'm also not getting into a fight with this guy you're not letting opacity honk to you and was aggressive yeah and he's running his mouth as he goes by you know he's about five six feet of way as it turns out we're both headed to the same restaurant anyway but i'm like i'm just in the mood like i you know i'm i'm not the type to let this pass for a whole variety of reasons so of course i walk right over to his car and as he's getting out and he's glaring at me i'm like are you okay he goes yeah of course i'm okay you're in my way i said yeah no no no seriously seriously are you okay are you okay and he was so caught off guard by that that it initially deactivated him he said yeah well you know i'm trying to i'm trying to park you know you're in the way i'm like yeah yeah man oh man i'm you know i'm so sorry i that was stupid of me i i didn't i was trying to look at the at the front of the um the store to make sure i was at the right place and now he he's come down about halfway you know he's clearly he's coming down and like again this dude has been triggered by something that he's carrying inside him before i'm even on the scene and i'm not going to aggravate this so we both of course we both head to the same restaurant door at the same time so i go to hold the door for him and he's he picks up his phone and acts like he's not going in he is not going to accept a gesture of kindness for me and then i go inside and you know my girlfriend is there and she's like is is everything okay you know what we do wrong and he's like oh you got you guys didn't do anything wrong and so he lurks outside the restaurant until i'm getting ready to leave but decides to come in at the same time that i'm leaving because it's a takeout and i go to hold the door from the second time and he walks through so he goes from being combative and calling me names and refusing to walk through the door when i'm being polite and not accepting a gesture of kindness for me to now i you know i haven't been confronted combative but i kind of have been confronted but confronted him about is he okay are you okay are you okay and saying in a way where i gently genuinely meant it when i get ready to leave the second time he's good with accepting a gesture of goodwill for me i hold the door and he comes through all right so from a technique standpoint you knock him off guard by asking him if he's okay and be genuinely concerned and let it come across in my voice because i didn't plant that anger in him i made you know i inadvertently added to it but he rolled into this you know i there's a phrase that i've seen which is like if you understood half the stuff that people are struggling with you take it a lot easier on them like this dude is struggling with something before he shows up it's a nice car you know i'm i'm judging from his demeanor even though he's a black guy he's a white call of duty he's got he's in a nice car as i recall it was a nice jeep you know everything about him is just like another regular guy making probably a pretty good living and something is eating him up before he even shows up there and i happen to be there at the moment when inadvertently you know i add to it by standing his way so for you the idea of not letting it go you weren't you confronted him like you said but it wasn't i don't know is there emotional gratification to you just to engage like or you said i i'm not going to let it go for a whole host of reasons so now i need to understand what reasons are those is it did that feel like an affront to you in some way and now you just need to engage you need to like lower his anger and that gives you the the sense of justice like i'm not sure because i if you've gone up to him and been like listen [ __ ] that i would understand dumb but i wouldn't understand but what's your problem yeah but if is it emotionally are you looking for emotional catharsis in the confrontation and is it catharsis that you get by helping him come down well i can promise you that this is mostly selfish okay you know there's almost a joke out there the myth of altruism you're not helping people because you care about people you help them because it makes you feel good therefore it's very selfish to be altruistic so you get into a whole circular argument over all this and knock yourself out unnecessarily so it does make me feel good to to help somebody out um so yeah i get it i get i feel genuinely better about it part of my philosophy is life you know i i didn't invent this phrase leave people better than you found them you ain't making the world a better place i'm also a very strong believer in karma the more positive stuff i do the more positive stuff comes back to me i think there's actually there's more and more reason to believe that there's something to this energy feeling karma there's probably science behind karma and it probably in fact impacts how people react to us and what comes our direction and what we repel we you know we tracked you put out positivity you're gonna track positivity i'm also naturally born assertive type somebody runs their mouth at me i'm not good at letting that go i'm also not interested in making it worse you know um what's that you make a speech when you're angry it's the greatest speech you'll ever regret i'm not looking i'm not looking to make it worse and i know that you know if i got my negotiator hat on you know i can leave this guy better off and probably in that particular moment i've talked my way out of confrontations that i did not start other times i've talked my talk people out of confrontations that i've seen in public that i had nothing to do with because i just didn't want to see him go down when somebody's hyped up they feel an injustice has been done what's the path to helping them out of that i'm a train i'm on a train in jersey on a saturday morning a couple years ago and a bunch of regular folks on a path train headed into manhattan and i see this again and skin colors got nothing to do with it could be irish could be jewish you know they're just they're just human beings see what looks to be like a basically hard-working blue-collar black guy sitting on a on a train another hard-working uh decent human being black female sits down next to him i mean just slams in onto the there's like about six inches she plants herself shoves them forcefully to the side and says i said excuse me move over and i s and you know i see this poor guy he's just sitting there minding his own business probably struggling with whatever he's doing and i can see her pushing him and she's got something she's struggling with on a completely separate and i can see this getting ready to go bad because at some point i'm on the other side of the car at some point in time he's going to get pushed to his limit because he was setting her mind in his own business and no matter how he reacts unless he gets up and walks away he's going down over it there ain't no excuse for pushing back physically with a female under any circumstances legally morally however you look at it and i'm looking at this poor bastard and i'm thinking like i don't want to see this guy go down so i walk across the train and i lead with i'm sorry and when i'm sorry is the first thing out of your mouth it startles people in a really good way like what are you sorry for and i and and i'm gonna personalize myself i go i'm sorry i'm chris and i hold out my hand which he refuses to take and he snaps back chris i'm not looking to meet you chris now in point the fact he has met me he's using my first name i went from being this bozo on the other side of the train to chris and i said look man i just don't want to see anything bad happen to you that's all and i go back to the other side of the train and i can see the wheels in his head turning a completely different way and i can see from the look on his face he's thinking like this is stupid this is just dumb and he sits there for a few more seconds and he gets up he doesn't stay in the ward and he gets crosses her car to get away from this girl and that was it you know two people living their lives being triggered by something got nothing to do with one another a potential conversation between just two regular people getting ready to go bad he just needed an intervention to rethink what was going on so did that work because of the idea of trying to so you talk about daniel kahneman and thinking fast and thinking slow and you're trying to shock him out of right the sort of emotional moment and get him to think more deeply about the situation i'm look well i'm looking i'm definitely looking for a thought pattern interrupt that's not where i'm not threatening and and i'm trying to trigger an emotional moment which very much as you talked about earlier triggering the brain chemistry the neural chemicals we got to get some different neurochemicals course into the brain get somebody thinking again because like if if you were to think about that dispassionately if somebody's a jerk to me in public which i didn't do anything to cause it like this person walked into this situation by being eaten up by their own amygdala before i even got got here something else been triggering they're struggling with something if i were to completely understand i'd walk away and you need to get somebody in that mindset like like i didn't do anything wrong this person's been out of shape you know they're struggling with something if they had time to tell me i'd i'd i might give money but instead it's turned into a confrontational thing in a moment people are the negative neurochemicals are triggering them and again if you make a speech when you're angry it's the greatest speech you'll ever regret you don't do smart stuff when you're mad very true but you have said that you if you can control the anger that it can actually be useful in a negotiation and if you can trigger it to a higher level what does that mean well anger and this is what a lot of people miss about anger um like if you're if you're if you're if you've been shattered if you're frat fragile if you're laying on the floor and you can't get up if you're in the depths of sadness anger will get you out of it in a heartbeat and i've actually used it some in the past um if i if if something has made me incredibly deeply sad loss of a loved one i pulled myself out of it and i can feel the neurochemical change by thinking of somebody i'm really mad at or someone or something that has made me intensely angry and i'm instantly lifted out of sadness grief despair the problem that most people don't see is that doesn't lift you to your highest level of performance like in in on a grading scale of a to f like if you're in the in the f emotionally anger will en will instantly bring you up to c level performance maybe even b minus now you won't know how much more room there is at the top all you know is in comparison danger pulled you out of your depths so you're capable of much more but if you've got no way of knowing that you don't know that that the really the next level up is the state of flow is human being's highest performance level stephen collier's got a lot of research on it people are doing stuff that they should not be able to do just because they've gotten into flow that's highly positive that ain't there ain't no anger and flow flow is highly positive it's borderline euphoria you know evil knievel crashed his motorcycle trying to jump the pa the fountain at caesar's palace in 1970 something mike can't think of mike's last name before they tore the fountain down an x games athlete does a backflip on his motorcycle over caesar's palace fountain flow what are you capable of in flow the first kid and i again it's in kotler's book the rise of superman who jumped the great wall of china on a skateboard anyway did it with a broken ankle crazy because he was in flow not only did he do it with broke he did it several times that day he was in flow nobody had ever done that before and he did it with injuries that should have put anybody else you know in in a hospital bed but he's in flow it's highly positive so we don't know that if the anger has lifted us out of our depths you can lift yourself out of the depths with anger you probably can't lift yourself out of the depths as quickly with a positive emotion so that you know there's a sequencing there's a staging there but you cannot get to your peak performance in a negative state of mind and anger's a negative state of mind so as somebody who knows the power of emotional control how do you get to your ideal state of mind i've read waiting um not waiting for superman because the rise of super the rise thank you stephen cutler's book i've read that very familiar with the ideas that he puts out around flow but let's say that we're in a negotiating situation our anxiety spikes massively or we're in a big confrontation in a parking lot anxiety is up how do you bring that down re-center and get to your best self you know some of some of the the mantras that you were talking about you know who am i remember who you are that's a great mantra you ha you have to have there has to be some preparation in advance you know and then you have to have found some success with it you're not going to try anything if you haven't applied it successfully you're not going to try it when it's really important if you haven't applied it when the stakes are low it's like so what are you doing first thing in the morning you know am i lucky to be up or oh god is it another day is a day gift what's the difference between adventure and ordeal only your the way that you perceive it i threw that out on my instagram a couple of months back you know what's the difference between an uh veteran or a dealer stress and stimulation you know and i got a bunch of neuro can oh stress is cortisol you know people want to give me i know the neuroscience the answer is how you filter it completely you know how do you look at it is it happening for you or to you are you lucky to be here or uh or you're unlucky i'm in a negotiation a couple years ago with somebody whose values i detested and thinking about this person made me angry every time that's hostage or business business negotiation but personally a person was a liar person person lied had no problem lying and uh that you know i got an ex-girlfriend once said to me you'd sooner get your arm torn off than tell me a lie and i remember thinking at the time well the words i find highly complimentary but the way that you said it makes it sound like an insult like that's you know yeah but wait a minute you said that like it's a bad thing so integrity is really important to me so when i deal with somebody who lacks it they're going to trigger me and if they're triggering me negatively i'm having trouble prepping for the conversation because i'm dumber when i'm angry and then i remember the only pers reason this person is persistent in these negotiations is because my company is a success and in point of fact i'm lucky to be in this conversation and as soon as i did that i reframed it i was like i instantly i found myself in a different frame of mind so you know you got to find the phrase tony robbins says i think he's the guy that said you know does life happen for you or to you life is happening for you for you like wow i don't have to do this i get to do this you know however do you reframe that which takes some practice pick out your phrase practice it up a little bit because your your negative circuitry is going to kick in the the default circuitry for human beings is negative interesting we inherited from the caveman and the optimistic caveman got eaten by the saber tooth and the negative pessimistic caveman made a run for it or killed it but the optimistic guy was like you know yeah you know i i got i know i know i you know this this thing it it look it's not you know it's just how hard could it be how hard could it be just needs a hug yeah so uh uh the negative cavemen that we we were gifted with the wiring of our ancestors and the negative guys survived it's interesting how much you've leveraged an understanding of human nature to get people where you want to go i want to talk about some of your open-ended questions i think these are really powerful so the the way that why questions are accusatory but how questions invite people to do the thinking for you and explain that like the explain the power of how yeah it will it uh to use common condiments phraseology triggers slow thinking or in-depth thinking you know because it's logistical uh yeah you know how how largely is implementation or logistical is another how's this going to get done um it feels deferential so i'm going to kill these [ __ ] if you don't give me 20 million dollars right now and you say how am i supposed to do that go to the bank call the president do whatever you need to do this is somebody's life give me the 20 million right now how am i supposed to do that right now you want me to call the president you want me to go to the bank do they not just keep screaming yes that's exactly what i want you to do all they got to do is come down a little at a time now i'm not resisting i'm an implementation and it triggers in-depth thinking any point of fact those are legitimate questions you know the the ask a question that the whether the other side likes it or not is actually a legitimate question it's not resisting i'm asking in a way where i'm deferential i'm not saying i ain't doing it i'm asking for your help now how you respond to that is going to tell me where this is really going you know there's a 93 success rate means seven percent of the time it ain't gonna go anywhere this is nothing but bad i gotta know which one i'm dealing with and so you know my how and what questions early on [Music] and occasional the the strategical use of why surgical use of why i gotta diagnose what i'm really dealing with and i got to do it in a way where you're not feeling like you're being diagnosed but you know because i got to do everything i can do to avoid triggering you but i got i got i got to get a diagnostic on what i'm actually dealing with to begin with and how do you handle telling people no in a way that doesn't shut them down yeah you know uh a friend of mine here in town ned coletti used to be the gm for the dodgers brilliant negotiator good guy like him a lot ned is still around i'm still affiliated with the dodgers first year he was gm they went from worst to first that's a sign of a capable gm okay you know and and we were talking about this one time and ed said that someone had taught him to let out know a little at a time i'm like that's exactly what we're doing like you have to be able to say no to people what your job is to not let them get blindsided by it where they feel like they were clotheslined and caught off guard so you let it out a little at a time and how am i supposed to do that is really a way to get the other side thinking about the difficulty of the situation about the difficulty of the ask and it's the first way to start letting you just say that's really going to be hard further down the line we're going to get there but first i really kind of need the how question is designed to get stop you in your chat your tracks and get you thinking it's calibrated which is why we call them calibrated questions to start to trigger a state change in the other side now we gotta let out a little more know in a little firmer way as we go along then we got we got a whole succession of ways to eventually ultimately if forced into it to say no which then also is not now it's no but we don't need to go like if if you here know from me or my side we've been hitting at it for a while so you're not going to be cl feel blindsided by it you're going to and we're going to continue to demonstrate collaboration because i you know i don't want to go all the way to now if we're talking there's a reason for us to talk the adversary is the situation so if there's a reason for us to collaborate and talk we can both be better off i also don't want to let out no too quickly because there might be a better way and i want to discover that so let's let me let me let me start telegraphing that there are problems here inviting collaboration see if we can tease out a solution before this thing goes down in tubes have you ever had a negotiator or a hostage taker give you an answer to something that you were like i actually don't have a rebuttal to that we should try that not yet yeah i was i i'm running these scenarios through my head and i'm like what would i do if they like offered a suggestion like yeah like actually sounds maybe we should try that like how do you because there are scenarios where you end up paying apparently 20 million dollars well we first of all it was in the u.s to pay that or anybody on the u.s side the u.s would never do that uh correct the u.s does not pay ransom now that doesn't mean that there can't be bait money go downrange because give them money that you know you're going to take back or you're going to trace like like money is ridiculously easy to trace like ridiculously easy and it could be a very smart move it's like eject injecting dye into their financial circulatory system where are they buying weapons who are they paying safe houses for they got a larger criminal network terrorists are not supported by the red cross they're supported by a larger criminal network of illegal arms dealers and illegal this and illegal that and you want to know who they're buying their guns from and the best way to find out who they're buying their guns from is to give them some money that you could trace and find out where it goes follow the money as they said a long time ago in the watergate scandal that's a tremendous investigative tool and if you there was a uh in 2000 that was exactly what happened because there was a criminal gang out of ecuador that had been taken hostages on oil platforms every year about october and they were a combination of former terrorists and criminals and so the third time it went down a payment was made because they if they'd assaulted the the oil platform they'd only got the kidnappers who were the lower end of the food chain but they made a payment and they ended up dismantling the gang in its entirety and they never hit again over 50 people were rounded up because they were tracking the money back in the money the whole organization was dismantled as a result of the ransom payment so it became a great way to take out a criminal organization that had been operating completely freely prior to that and a rescue would have only taken out the bad guys on a platform it would not have taken out the whole organization they took the whole thing down and these guys never reserved resurfaced as an organization again so going back to the magic words that you use as a negotiator why is getting them to say no more important or better much better if i remember your words correctly yeah then yes yeah it's it's shocking um and a friend of mine that i'm flattered that we're acquainted andrew huberman hubermann labs podcast amazing guy brilliant neuroscience stuff uh met him for the first time recently was sitting down at lunch and i'm like all right so i don't know what the neuroscience behind this is but people feel safe and protected when they say no they feel better they're more likely to collaborate and then plus we know so weird the other thing that's crazy that we know for sure is like when you're exhausted mentally you could still say no but yes it's hard yes it's hard or even as answering how like if if you uh if you're tired and one of my colleagues did this to me recently and i could instantly tell the difference they wanted to follow up with me when i was exhausted and i knew that if they'd asked me what are you thinking what great question triggered deep thinking i didn't have the mental gas in the tank to answer that question but they answered me a question that was built around no and i went boom boom boom boom boom i laid it all out i was like wow i don't know how that happens i just know it does and we've seen time after time if i need to close a deal at all especially if i know that you're tired instead of saying do you agree do you want to do this or you favor this i say do you disagree is this a bad idea are you against this is this ridiculous and you'll either go no let's do it or you go no but here are the problems and you'll lay them all out for me and feel no obligation which means you're going to lay them out to me honestly like if i say do you agree with this you're going to afraid to say yes but here are the problems because you feel that yes is an obligation and you're going to be worried about digging yourself deeper in by saying anything after that but having said no you feel you have no obligation i think it might be that simple so you will you will lay the rest of the stuff out not being worried about digging yourself into a hole it's really interesting that some part of our brain is tracking the even though it's not like obviously a contract but that some part of our brain is like yeah we've just agreed to that and now i have a sense of obligation and they have the right to like take me to task on it very interesting yeah yeah and we stumbled over that one by by accident and it is just the the good and the bad about getting people to say no is it makes such a huge difference in all interactions that sometimes that's the only thing somebody learns and we're like look there is so much more here like i know you're making a lot more money now and you're doing better than anybody that you see around you but you're not doing as good as you could be doing and you cannot stop there a lot of people i see it all the time they just learn how to trigger no instead of yes and they're instantly significantly more successful and they quit there they don't keep going all right what then if you were going to bring this all together if no is that first bit that shows people like whoa you can frame this in a new way what are the the few key tenets of like all right if you had to bestow quickly upon somebody what the core tenants of the black swan way are yeah you know let the other side go first um and then you're the cliche the other side's gotta talk five times as much as you not twice as much five times as much it doesn't mean that you go uh that you go mute you drop in occasionally you let the other person know that whatever they're thinking is it's okay to share it like one of our favorite things you got to have some go-to labels go to labels yeah label is one of our negotiation techniques seems like sounds like looks like feels like no matter what anybody says you can say seems like he had a reason for saying that like no matter what they say i hate you and everything you stand for seems like you got a reason for saying that it's disarming they'll talk with you about it i want to do business with you and i want to deal with you right now seems like i had a reason for saying that well yeah here's why i want to do business with you um one one of my son came up with again like brilliant guy we you know we would not be our team without him clients call on the phone say how are you today how are you today is a diagnostic they want to know if they could talk if you're in a mood to talk about what they want to talk about brandon's responses seems like you got something on your mind yeah as a matter of fact you know because they've been they've been planning this call how are you today is not like genuinely how some people really want to know but most people want to know are you prepared to listen to what i have on my mind how are you the temperature check are you in a bad mood because i'm wasting my time you're in a good mood we could talk and you the only pushback he ever got on that was he had a guy say yeah you know there's stuff i want to talk about really i want to know how we are today and some brands say yeah i'm good you know we talked about it and then they got down to business so you know the more you encourage the other side to talk the more likely it is that you're going to get to this moment of collaboration quicker never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better how do you get something better you get the other side to talk you spend a lot less time talking and appreciate that they're bringing something to the table that you could use the black swan the tiny little thing is going to change everything you trigger that you're going to make great deals that's it we've got our our basic principles chris i found your book just so interesting and it makes me want to really go back through this stuff over and over and over picking up the different using hows watching out for your whys getting people to know getting them to talk more um it's really incredible that this stuff works in the most tense situations possible that you can use it in the boardroom i am definitely going to be using it with my team with my wife uh it's it's about human wiring yeah that's that's what i find so interesting yeah thank you pleasure man and i'd like to offer a way for people want more from the black swan group how do they get it you tell me you know we get everybody's got a newsletter um everybody's got a free newsletter that's not what makes ours valuable ours is concise like most newsletters you got 10 choices ours is complementary but the value is the fact that it's concise you're going to get one scenario specific application and plus we've got a whole library we've got job negotiations in the past we got leadership application whatever you need so the black swan website is blackswanltd.com upper right hand corner of the home screen is a tab for the blog the blog is the edge sign up for the edge you get it emailed to you on a tuesday morning after you've got monday behind you but it's concise and it's free and a lot of people get a long way it's a great compliment to the book we got a bunch of other stuff that's free too you you take the free stuff you know buy the book take the free stuff see where that gets you if it's for you then you can dig in and learn more would it be crazy to get people to sign up for something free now now we've got wow we've got them somehow i'm compelled to say no right and i feel so much better i feel safe i feel secure i feel safe i have this feeling of safety now like drinking a starbucks laptop there's a funny comedic video along those lines recently i saw you you know you're safe if you're drinking a lot the police aren't gonna beat you up if you're if you're drinking a starbucks that's the key that's hilarious all right anything else you want to leave people with they're going to the newsletter they're going to sign up for the edge they're ready to rock and roll anything else go through your catalog or podcast and go back and listen to the stuff you haven't listened to very kind i will say read your book never split the difference it is phenomenal speaking of which guys the book really is amazing the tactics i haven't started deploying them yet so i can't swear they work but when you hear the stories it is very compelling and as i ran through them in my own mind it actually did make me feel differently so i invite you guys to try this stuff out and like you said don't just stop at getting people to say no dive into this stuff because the ability to um help people get to and he he's very careful to talk about this in the book that you're not trying to get people into where they're losing but you are and you're not trying to get win-win either he's careful to talk about that as well uh but you're getting them to a place where they feel good at the end of the exchange um it's really some pretty powerful insights into human nature for that chris foss i thank you very much for coming on the show thanks brother and uh for being a part of this and to all of you at home i hope that you enjoyed this and you got as much out of it as i have and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace