December 22, 2020 • 40 mins
Chris Voss was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI and during his 24-year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Harvard Law School. Before then, he had served as the lead crisis negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI and was a member of the NYC Joint Terrorist Task Force.
Chris has taught business negotiation as an adjunct professor at the USC's Marshall School of Business, Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, and Harvard University.
He's the CEO & Founder of The Black Swan Group, which provides negotiation training for individuals, companies, and live events, and a recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.
Chris joins us to talk about the qualities that make a successful negotiator, how using empathy, rather than direct questions, can elicit more effective responses, and the groundbreaking tactics discussed in his book Never Split the Difference.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Art of the Hustle is a production of I Heart Radio.
You're listening to the Art of the Hustle, the show
that breaks down how some of the world's most fascinating
people have hustled and learned their way into achieving great things.
(00:21):
I'm your host Jeff Rosenthal, co founder of Summit, and
today on the show, I had the pleasure of chatting
with Chris Voss. Chris was the lead international kidnapping Negotiator
for the FBI, and during his twenty four year tenure
in the bureau, he was trained in the art of
negotiation by the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Harvard Law School.
Before then, he had served as the lead crisis negotiator
(00:43):
for the New York City Division of the FBI and
was a member of the NYC Joint Terrorist Task Force.
Chris is taught business negotiation as an adjunct professor at
the USC's Marshall School of Business, Georgetown University, and Harvard,
and he's the recipient of the Attorney General's Award for
Excellence and Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award
for Distinguished an Exemplary Service. Chris joins us to talk
(01:06):
about the qualities that make a successful negotiator, how using
empathy rather than direct questions can elicit more effective responses,
and the groundbreaking tactics discussed in his book Never Split
the Difference. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Boss. Chris, Jeff.
(01:26):
We're on a podcast. We did it. The next thing,
you know, there's going to be a pandemic. Come on,
and uh, a former reality TV show star will be
elected president. Yeah, how so how do we negotiate with
a former reality TV show star effectively? Yeah? Man, Like,
you know, really, the way you negotiate with anybody, you
(01:48):
got to dial into them. The golden rule, treat people
the way you want to be treated. That goes south
on you about a third of the time, because two
out of three people are enough different from you that
what empathy is really about is ailing into the other person.
And if you do that, most people really are relatively
easy to get along with. I couldn't agree with you more.
(02:09):
I think that the pushback people would say is like, oh,
but you know, they're you know, inhumane, or you know
they're impervious to that kind of charm because they're so
you know, self obsessed. Yeah, get really focused on yourself
then you disconnect with other people you know, and and
there's something else in and now if we if we
do a little free association here, you know, as an article,
(02:32):
I wish I could remember what the topic was. But
we so much equate understanding to agreement. We say I
don't understand you, I don't get where you're coming from.
And people on different sides of political issues or emotional issues,
they understand where the other side is coming from, they're
scared to understand because they think it means agreement. I mean,
(02:52):
that was that was maybe the simplest, most difficult hurdle,
hurdle to get over when I was a hostage negotiator.
I know where a terror is coming from. You know,
it doesn't matter whether what it's me. Understanding where they're
coming from doesn't equate to agreement. If you can make
that distinction, you talk to anybody. I I love that,
and I want to unpack it further. I think about
(03:13):
it from a separate angle where it's like I'll use
that two continue a conversation or negotiation without committing to anything.
If you hear me say I understand, that's me acknowledging
what you're saying, but not committing to seeing your viewpoint,
and you're right, most people gloss right by that. Yeah,
you know, and that's the issue. Understanding is not commitment understanding.
(03:36):
He's just hearing the other side out. And if you
could do that, that makes a huge difference. Plus then
you know you're you you're less argumentative, people are more
likely to talk with you. Man, Well, I want to
get back into the meat of your you know, global
expertise on this in particular. But you know, I just
how does one get into hostage negotiation? Usually kind of
(04:00):
I got into it by default, all right? So I
was already an FBI agent. You know, this is what
was a long time ago comedian Steve Martin said how
to be a millionaire and never paid taxes? First get
a million dollars, right, So first you gotta be an
FNBI agent, or you gotta be in law enforcement already
and where you recruited or is this an ambition of
yours from childhood? Now? Man? Not only my ambition from
(04:24):
my mid teams was to be in law enforcement. I
never thought about the FBI until it kind of fell
in my lap in front of me. What what does
that mean? I was a cop in Kansas City, and
I went there right after graduating college. My father paid
for college degree. I went out and got a job
that did not require a college degree. You know, if
(04:44):
i'd have been my dad, i'd asked for my money back.
So I go out and and that's not the den
a great policing, but even to this day, but back
in the eighties, you know, it was rare to be
have a college degree and become a police officer. So
he reconciled himself to the fact that I wasn't gonna
leave law enforcement. So he wanted to get me interested
(05:05):
in federal law enforcement, perceiving from the outside that it
was a step up. Again, not necessarily the case, he
encouraged me to the first look at the Secret Service.
I met the Secret Service guy and he said, I
traveled all over the world with the Secret Service. And
I grew up in Iowa. I've never been anywhere, and
I just kind of like, but wait a minute, somebody
will pay you to travel the world. I got to
(05:28):
hear some more about this. As it turns out, at
the time, the Secret Service wasn't hiring. The FBI was
putting on a big push. I didn't know one agency
from the other I put in for the FBI and
they hired me, and then um, I was on SWAT.
No way. I was on a SWAT team in Pittsburgh,
which is my first office with the FBI. You get
(05:50):
transferred to New York. Wanted to get more heavily into
SWAT and then started to screw up my knee, and
so I don't want to do crisis response, but didn't
want to totally destroy my knee. Figured you know, hostage negotiators,
not very many knee injuries come from talking on the phone.
(06:11):
Great things in life come at us out of left field,
or come as a result of something really bad. Like
if I hadn't torn up my knee, I never would
have become a hostage negotiator. And it was far and
away more challenging and more interesting then SWAT ever was.
And I loved SWAT. Believe me, that is an adrenaline rush.
(06:35):
But the reality is a SWAT guy doesn't get to
do his thing as much as a hostage negotiator does.
We'll tell us first about some of those first hostage
negotiations situations that you got called into. Do any stick
out in your memory? Yeah, the universe was watching out
for me, like I negotiated a bank robbery with hostages
really early in my career in Brooklyn, New York. The
(06:57):
bank robbery went down in Brooklyn. Were you in Brooklyn?
Did they call you and from somewhere else in the country. Well,
you know, we showed up. I mean you know that.
They say, what nent of life is just showing up.
I'm in New York, in Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, in our office.
We do not get called. A partner of mine, Charlie
walks up to my desk and says, there's a bank
(07:17):
alarm in Brooklyn. Let's go. Now, we're not called. We're
just responding again, you know, show up, you know, be
the guy that shows up early. I've gotten the edge
so many times we just went. We didn't get called.
As it turned out. You know, most bank robberies with hostages,
a bad guys are going along before the police get there,
they get trapped inside. Throw together a negotiation team, which
(07:39):
is a combination of the FBI and NYPD. We trained
together a lot knew the guys. Well. Hugh McGowen was
the commander of the PDS negotiation team. Generous guy he put.
He throws a team together on a spot. He puts
a police detective on as a primary negotiator, puts me
on his in the second seat coaching position. Five hours later,
(08:00):
you know, the first guy manages to negotiate us to
a complete stale might which is an accomplishment in and
of itself. Hugh looks at me and he tells the
first guy says, all right, we're gonna rotate. Chris gonna
go on the phone. He gives me some basic guidelines.
I get on the phone. You're saying, that's pretty rare
that you you switch. And if somebody gets to a
stalemate like that, yeah, well, um, most of the time,
(08:23):
if you just wear the other side out, you're you know,
you're gonna see if you're not gonna get todaylight, you're
gonna see it. And this one was completely stalemated and
just stuck, just just stuck going nowhere. And the NYPD's
main move at the time was to swap negotiators. So
(08:45):
Hugh determined that it was time to do a swap.
He pointed me and he put me in the game.
Were you a natural like from the start? Did you
just have a different way of doing it where you
know you were getting better results. So I'm gonna believe
that there's no such things the natural. I mean, one
of my favorite books is A Talent Code by Daniel Coyle,
(09:05):
and that's kind of Coil's contention, is that anybody can
be good if you decide to be good. You know,
the man on Fire moving a long time with Denzel Washington.
He he said, you know, there's only trained and untrained.
There is no good and bad or better or worse.
There's trained and untrained. So I've been doing my training.
I volunteered. I had volunteered on a crisis hotline in
(09:27):
order to get on the team. That's phenomenal training for
hostage negotiation. I mean, volunteering on a crisis hotline is
a masterclass and emotional intelligence. And I had done that.
I was ready. I you know, I've done my training,
I've done my preparation, and I got on the phone.
I got a guy out about ninety minutes. Amazing, I
saw you had a masterclass, come out. Congratulations, thank you,
(09:48):
thank you. Yeah, the masterclass is cool and it was
fun to doing them. Very proud of the product, and
I'm sure it was super helpful to like refine the lessons, right,
I mean, you had written the book of course, never
Split the Difference, and you know that has been a
huge bestseller, and you must be getting closer and closer
to like the essence of the thing that you've been
working on and thinking about for the last thirty years. Yeah,
(10:09):
you know, we are, I mean and definitely we work
as a team. You know, I know you guys have
got a great team over there. You want to go fast,
go alone, you want to go far ago as a team,
and you know I have slowly pulled together and we're
still pulling people in. You know, my son who's been
exposed to this since you could talk. You know, we are.
We are very proud of the book that we put out.
(10:31):
But we keep refining and I got some smart people
around me, and we love this stuff. We just keep
making it better. What what is the stuff that you
were initially being taught when you were you know, just
getting into the space when you're doing the you know,
the hostage negotiation work, like what we're what was it
like getting to yes or what was sort of like
the top of the stack. Yeah, you know, uh, it
(10:52):
was really just getting really good at sounding people out emotionally. Okay,
Now the neural side. It's backs it up. I mean,
in crisis negotiation and even crisis hotlines. They don't care
why stuff works. They just need stuff that works. And
as it turns out, you know, by helping people navigate
(11:14):
their negative emotions in all walks of life moves people
quickly forward. Now they they've fell into that on hotlines
and in hostage negotiation and made it work for years.
And I used to think it was just crisis. It
turns out it's all human functioning. It's just effective emotional
(11:36):
intelligence and how to apply it. That's why we call
it tactical lympathy. It's just a tactical knowing application of
stuff that works. I'm familiar with, like some of the
work around neurobiology and psychology for behavioral change. It's just
so fascinating familiar. I'm sure you're at the term Pascal's wager. Oh,
I've heard of it. It's not coming in it's from
(11:58):
the seventeen hundred. It's and it's this idea that like
why people believed in heaven. It's a low risk belief
in the short term during life, and it's you know,
a low cost on the other side. But if you're
wrong and if you and you are an atheist and
you are wrong, it's it's an eternal cost. So the
idea is is that like whenever you're negotiating with, say,
(12:20):
you know, a terrorist group, or trying to figure out
how to shift the narrative or you know, break conflict deadlock,
you're essentially trying to figure out how you can create
the scenarios for somebody to you know, say yes where
there was once and no. But it's just you know,
I'm I want to get more to the core of
like the things that you're learning yourself right now, about
the space that you've now you know, just focused on
(12:42):
for so long, well, tiny little things that make massive differences.
Like if I need information from you, I'm not going
to ask you a single question, really, like you mean
that You're really not gonna ask me a single question. No, no,
not in in a structure of a question. What I'm
going to try to do is I'm gonna get you talking,
(13:02):
and I'm gonna get you just to basically trigger a
stream of consciousness and then you'll just start data dumping
on me and I'll get a lot more information a
lot faster. Like, for example, if I could say to
you what are you thinking about? And you'll stop and
hesitate and formulate an answer and basically curate your answer
(13:24):
and then give it to me. If I say, seems
like you're thinking about something, you'll start to give me
a download of what you're thinking about much more quickly
as opposed to curating the answer, and it will be
a much richer source of information for me. And it's
(13:45):
just a tiny little thing like that, like we started,
we teach it everywhere, and but some real estate people
were teaching recently. One of their agents describes that as
unlocking the floodgates of truth telling. I mean, people just
start to talk if they don't feel like they have
to curate their answer. So this is this is how
(14:07):
you're really creating strategic and tactical empathy. You're saying start
with empathy, And just the simple edition of the words
seems like implies that you personally are being thoughtful about
that person's perspective. Yeah, yeah, well said that. You're you're
dialing into them and you're paying attention to them, and
(14:30):
you're genuinely interested what about what? So you know, there's
there's sociopaths, right, and I think in every in every industry.
I think the number of sociopaths is not really thought
about enough. If it's three or four percent of the population,
that means that they're likely, And like every industry and discipline,
how do you negotiate with that? Yeah, well, sociopath isn't
(14:51):
a lot of people think they're You know, there's people
that don't feel emotions. They feel emotions, they just don't
feel guilt. So if you start, if you just take
that out of your equation of them, Now, how's this
how's this person gonna act? Every human being engages in patterns,
and they're relatively predictable. So the social path is gonna
(15:15):
make what you want the path to what he or
she wants. It's a little bit of just alignment of stuff.
And you know, they, like everybody else, they're driven by
how they see the future playing out. And the future
is still completely open. So you get them to adjust
(15:35):
a different view of the future, you're going to get
them to adjust their behavior. We like to say emotion
draws vision, vision drives action, So start looking at what
emotions greed, They experience loss of version just the same
way that everybody else does. They're driven principally by loss
of version, It's just that you've got to get in
(15:57):
their head and find out what they're afraid of losing.
They fear loss like everybody else. They just don't feel guilt,
not being feeling guilty about hurting you, not caring about
whether or not you live or die, which is where
sociopath comes from. It doesn't mean that they don't experience
loss of version. They still do. And loss of version
(16:18):
is a driving, the overwhelming driving decision making factor in
all human existence. So if you start wrapping your mind around,
all right, so what's their loss of version where they're
worried about losing and it's all imaginary because it's in
the future anyway, now you can. Now you can begin
to interact with them in many ways. There's overriding self
interest is going to make them predictable, aligned things so
(16:40):
that their interests serve your interests, and you're gonna be good.
We'll be back with more out of the hustle after
the break. The Shaw called the suicide bomber the poor
man's nuclear weapon. And so you've been in those situations.
(17:01):
You've negotiated with terrorists who intended, I'm sure to kill themselves.
Other people how do you find empathy and you know,
how do you get past that hurdle of loss a
version for somebody who's ready to lose it all. Yeah,
so all right, So to take empathy out and you know,
make it the mercenaries definition cognitive empathy, which is just
(17:24):
completely understanding where the other side is coming from, being
able to articulate it back to him. Not agreement, not sympathy,
not compassion. You know. One of the reasons why when
I was with the FBI, we started working with Harvard
Law School and a program on negotiation because Bob Manuken
wrote a book on negotiation and then it he said,
empathy is that agreement. It's not even liking or the
(17:45):
other side or being nice to him. And that was
exactly the FBI's definition. So I'm like, all right, we can,
we can, we can resonate on this. So terrorists, he
wants to kill somebody, I can say to him, you
believe that we're infidels and that we deserve to die.
That empathy. I didn't say that we were or that
I agreed. I said you believe X. This is what
you believe. Now the guy is interested. Now the guy
(18:08):
wants to talk to me. Now I know that every
vision drives decision. Terrorists has got a vision for how
he's gonna die. My Israeli brothers used to call it
a killing journey, and a killing journey has a destination.
If I can keep him from that destination and he's
got to get there to go to heaven, I will say,
(18:29):
how are you going to get to heaven if you
don't get to the destination you're going to? So how
a question? It's designed to make him stop and think.
M It's not designed to get an answer, because I
don't ask questions to get answers. I ask questions to
get people to think about stuff. So if I want
to I wanted to stop and think, I would say, like, look,
(18:50):
you know, we got you trapped in this house. You're
surrounded by the police, but you wanted to go to
the u N and blow it up to get to heaven.
How are you going to get to heaven if you
don't get to the u N because you're not going there.
Now that's it. Now I've just reset his whole vision
of the future. And you don't ask these things. You
(19:13):
tell them these things when you say this is what
you believe in it seems like an important distinction here
in your tone, Yeah, you know, tell him or essentially
some you know, the tone is a downward inflection or
can be an upward inflection, which sounds like a question,
but it doesn't impact the brain the same way. I
gave you another example of what used to do this
(19:33):
on a regular basis. We had a trial in New
York and Lower Manhattan in the early nineties. It was
the largest terrorist trial in the history of the United States.
As a side note, terrorist trials do not need to
be held in Guantanamo. We can effectively hold them and
open American courts. The American judicial system, as flawed as
it may be, is still the best judicial system on earth.
(19:55):
We hold the terrorists trial, we convict the terrorists Islamic terrorists,
and we have Muslim witnesses who testify voluntarily. How did
we get them to testify voluntarily against other Muslims? Every
conversation I would open up when I would meet one
of these guys on the street or wherever we met him,
I'd say, you believe that there's been a succession of
(20:17):
the United States governments for the last two hundred years
that we're anti Islamic and you just watch them like
twitch and and and then go yeah, I never said
it was true. I never said I believe that. I
said you believe. I don't believe that. But it doesn't
frighten me to be able to articulate your beliefs. And
(20:40):
it would be instant rapport, an instant influence as soon
as I articulated to them their beliefs. Plus they know
that I never said I believed it, because that would
be a lie and a con. I'm not trying to
con anybody. I'm just not scared to say what you
(21:01):
believe and then being able to say it without arguing.
I would never follow up with but here's why you're wrong.
I lay your belief out there, and I'm so fearless
and strong in my own that I don't got to
argue yours. You're not worried about your understanding, signaling agreement,
not in the least, and only from you do it
(21:24):
a thousand times and then you finally get it like
nobody ever came no, no Muslim ever came back to
me ever and said, so you agree, But had they,
I would have said, now, I never said I did.
I said that your belief. I respect your belief. I
respect your belief completely. I don't agree if you want
(21:47):
to get into that, but I'm happy to respect yours
and just let it stand. Do you feel like there's
a different set of stakes with money, like how people
behave in negotiations around asset, around capital? You know, I
would have until like the early two thousand's because I
(22:07):
definitely used to think crisis negotiation only worked in crises.
And then Daniel Knoman won one of behavioral Nobel Prize
for behavior Economics in two thousand two on prospect theory,
which said that lost things twice as much as an
equivalent game. That's for all human beings and hostage negotiation.
(22:28):
We were taught to look for the loss, and then
Conomon comes along and says, no, it's not crisis, it's
all interaction. Loss is the overriding decision making driver by
a two to one margin. And then in about two
thousand ten ish they start doing neuroscience experiments and we
moved from psychology to as you said, neurobiology, neuroscience and
(22:52):
we actually start to watch how the brain works, and
they mapped the brain out and they watch electricity and
we see the chemicals and all that, and human reaction
backs up what we were doing in a hostage negotiation.
And that's when I really learned over the years that
it's not just these tools are just not for crisis interaction,
there for all human interaction. You know, I don't want
(23:13):
to give away any too many of my secrets, but uh,
I do this with my friends and with people that
I want to you know, do business with and negotiate with.
I'll often think about like where someone relaxes, because you know,
if we're in a we're in a parasympathetic nervous system
goes down and our stress is low and our oxytocin
(23:34):
is high. Those are all great places to present, you know,
a narrative or an alternative narrative to get someone on
board with. So if I'm inviting you to go, you know,
hit the sauna with me, it could be just because
her homies, or it could because I'm trying to get
deal done, you know, And there's there's nothing wrong with that.
I've always taught and we teach business people like if
(23:55):
your skill satisfies to people, it's a right skill. You're
mercenary who's just trying to get the deal done, cares
about nothing else other than the deal the missionary because
it's good for the person. It actually fosters great long
term relationships. If you're doing stuff to make them makes
the missionary and the mercenary happy, you're on the right track.
(24:18):
And what you were just talking about and bonding with
someone so you can make a good deal. You didn't
describe trying to exploit anybody. If you're trying to bond
with somebody, you want to have an effective, productive relationship
with that person for fifty years, which means you're not
trying to explore them short terms so that you can
(24:38):
cheat them, or so that you could scrowm over in
some fashion. That's actually bad for business. M hm. You're
talking about having great relationships where everybody makes money for
a long time to come well. And you know, you
could be predatory and you could use this in a
you know, a weaponized manner and be a shrewd entrepreneur, investor,
(24:59):
whatever and go and take from others. If it's not
your nature, you're not going to be good at it's
certainly not my nature. And you know, like I've built
my own enterprises for twelve years now, so myself and
my co founders and partners were pretty aware of like
our capacity and our skill set. So what we actually
need is to always like reach up. We're trying to
get people that do not need to work with us,
(25:22):
who like already are made and they've you know, they've,
they've they just don't need us. So like that, there's
it's really interesting to have that, you know, perspective when
you're bringing anybody any deal or you know, any opportunity
with our organization or frankly asking for you know, the
help to set the course for you know, the next
ten years. Yeah. Yeah, And then and then especially for
(25:45):
the people you're talking about, when you're trying to reach up,
when the people that that don't need to do the
deal but they would like to deal with people that
they respect and mind they see a future with, then
that kind of begins to accelerate and more of those
people start coming into your world because people, where is
this taking me? Is really vision drive, decision, vision of
(26:09):
the future. Where is this going? That's how people make
up their minds. I know that you're spending a ton
of time still scaling you know, the company, and and
and and you know, doing this work explicitly and teaching people.
But for you, what's motivating you right now? Where are
you going with all of us? So we're really overdue
to start going global a little bit more because there
(26:30):
are hostage negotiators around the world. Yeah, so I started
reaching back for Spanish speaking negotiators I knew from a
bureau to see where they are, and very much like
what you're talking about, I'm looking for people that don't
need this to pay the mortgage, but they wanted As
one guy I spoke to on the phone the other day,
he said he wanted to do something that was sexy
(26:52):
and fun. And doing this on a business basis and
helping people make better deals really is a lot of
fun and it's very sexy because people are doing good
things for other people. It's just kind of cool. So
we're gonna We're gonna go global and the simultaneously I
decided to double down a little bit more on some
(27:14):
of the Black Lives Matters issues. That's fantastic to hear,
like what implicitly going after finding ways to make black
entrepreneurs more successful, bring the skill set to them. I
think you know Stephen Cotler, Yeah, of course, good buddy,
And Steven's a cool dude, and he wants to take
(27:36):
a deep dive into this. Also, he's got two books
that he's just he's putting the finishing touches on. And
empathy is a component of flow. And Steven said to
me on a flow on on the phone the other
day and we were talking about this, he thinks that
flow is a sneak attack on racism. So if we
can go out and we teach enough people better flow
and better decision making, change the conversation out of accusatory
(28:00):
conversation into a solution focused conversation. Let's stop accusing the
cops of being racist. Let's say you guys have been
making bad decisions. They're probably more open to that conversation.
How do we help them make better decisions? And and
you know, there isn't a single racist event that the
media has spotlighted where black Americans were victimized by brute
(28:26):
force that even the law enforcement people to want to
defend those in some way would say, well, that was
good decision making. Let's look at this whole thing and say, well,
show me any good decision making and not. So, let's
change the conversation from decision into decision making. We're probably
gonna end up solving a lot of problems as a result. Yeah,
I think that there's two conversations. You know, there's like
(28:49):
something like defund the police pushes the boundaries of possibility further.
And so all I might not agree with defunding the police,
I understand why that is the rallying cry, because you know,
things that seemed impossible twelve months ago with police reform
are happening, right, and like they're going to continue to happen.
(29:10):
When you're a cop or you're in public service, that
sense of service is typically what motivated you write, Like
most cops or soldiers or anyone that's in you know,
the military or has done this for they do it
for other people truly, Like that's a that's that's part
of their identity. So it is, you know, doubly painful.
I think for a lot of good you know, cops
(29:32):
to deal with what's happening, I'm agreeing with all of that.
And so you know, let's let's let's see what we
can move into to actually make a difference. Take the
accusation out of it. You know, you're a racist, you're
an asshole, whatever it is, and start working on solutions.
You know, I'm a solution oriented guy that there's been
(29:52):
a lot of effort put into awareness of the problem,
and then it's another skill set to start working on
answers and solutions. And I'm looking to work on answers
and solutions. Art of the Hustle will be right back
after this short break. Do you have any thoughts on
(30:16):
the sort of polarization of you know, red and blue,
of right and left right now in the United States
and how we can bridge that gap a little bit further.
You know, if anybody would just be willing to hear
somebody out without calling names. I actually think Biden is
on that track, and any of the leaders have got
(30:40):
aspects of their base that don't want to hear anybody out,
and so that makes it hard for them to pull
a coalition together. You know, Joe Biden is an interesting
cat who's been circling the White House for the longest time,
and I really would be interested to see what a
(31:02):
presidency looks like under him, because I think he's a
moderate dude who actually wants what works, and it's not
interested to plan to a base that he's afraid of.
I don't know if we'll get there with him. We're
gonna get there with somebody. We're in the middle of
a really rough time right now, and rough times are
always learning times. Sure, is Donald Trump a good negotiator?
(31:29):
I'll answer it this way. And but and this is
this is the typical thing that people miss with assertives.
Where are we on North Korea? Nowhere? Or nobody really knows? Interesting?
Now what? And this is what typically happens with a
really aggressive negotiator. He didn't inherit the North Korean problem.
(31:50):
It was a horse manure sandwich that was handed to
everybody that's been in a White house now with his
really aggressive roach, he opened up the conversation and suddenly
there was a dialogue and they were unprecedented meetings. And
he didn't let you know, who President United States should
(32:12):
ever go see the North Korean you know, he should
come to you. He didn't let any of that crap
get in his way. Yeah, so he opened up the
conversation in a way that every president before him has
completely failed at. But that aggressive approach, which has a
tendency to have great openings, then suddenly it just kind
(32:33):
of goes away and nothing happens, and nobody knows where
anything is. And that's exactly what's happened with North Korea.
He opened it in a spectacular fashion. You start out
with a lot of fireworks. Things look great, but then
the other side gets tired of getting beat up all
(32:53):
the time, and then they just withdraw and it just
goes away and no progress is made. And the other
side now doesn't want to re engage because they get
beat up really badly and they got called names, and
they were willing to play, and then there were there
were moments when there was hugging and kissing, but the
(33:16):
hugging and kissing they went in back the name calling,
and the other side is like they're confused and they
don't want to engage because they don't know what's going
to happen. Sure, I have a a dear, dear friend
and a decade plus long collaborator that has gone in
and out of being a business partner. And one of
(33:36):
the things that you know that is just a part
of their personality is they just win ten zero every time.
They can't win nine one. They can't win eight too.
They need to just it's just it's, you know, in
in a debate or in a negotiation, and I think
I shared that same feedback was just like, dude, who's
gonna want to like play games if you always win
(33:59):
ten zero? Like if if they're because like I think,
in everything when it comes to like business or impact
or all these things, there's always these moments where just
it's undefined, like you didn't contemplate this potential scenario. And
so now here you are on the other side of
an understanding with someone that needs to come to consensus, right,
and you know, like, um, yeah, I mean, I I'm
(34:21):
it's it's just funny to hear you talk about it
in these terms of this strong opening gambit and then
just dominating like you dominate for too long. You don't
want to You just don't want to blow people out right, right,
because why do they ever gonna want to deal with you? Again?
The not like I think the best negotiating in the
world is open interesting? Why is that? Well, considering the
(34:43):
distance she's traveled, Okay, you know she's she I guarantee
you she's worth more than Donald Trump is. And she
started from way back behind. Sure, Now who's mad at
her and who's unwilling to deal with her? And who
has she successfully dealt with over the years, like the
most vulnerable personalities ever. I'm sitting on a plane about
(35:04):
a year and a half ago, by grace of the universe,
I'm sitting next to Lance Armstrong. We struck up a conversation.
Oprah got Lance Armstrong to admit to everything on TV
mm hmm, if he ever had if there was ever
anybody that had reason to resent his negotiation, Lance Armstrong
(35:24):
gave it all up. Like everybody else. Oprah understands how
to treat people really well and get what she wants,
and Lance Armstrong isn't bad mouthing or any more than
anybody else's, and so consequently she rolls up success after
success after success. When you look back, what's the greatest hit?
What was like the one that you know really sparkles
(35:47):
as an achievement in your career as a hostage negotiator.
Is there a moment that were experience where you felt
like it wasn't going to go the way that you
hoped and through applying you made it happen. Well, right
after the Burnham case went down the Philippines and hostages
get killed by friendly fire, you know, I did a
(36:09):
reassessment of what we're doing internally and negotiations strategies, and
I did it with my team, but we made a significant,
subtle We had really substantial change in a way that
we were doing kidnapping negotiations and you know, we don't
get a chance to try and simulations. You make a change,
(36:30):
you're gonna drop that strategy. And when lives are on
the line. In the very next two cases that we worked,
we achieved spectacularly good results that popped out if you,
if you a good strategy will make unexpected great things happen.
And if first we were back in the Philippines on
(36:52):
another case with a sociopathic serial killing kidnapper, we rescued
the hostage. The rescue was created by the negotiations strategy,
and we turned around and worked the case in Ecuador,
and the negotiations strategy created an opportunity for the hostage
to escape. And I was ecstatic over both. And we
(37:14):
got internally, we got significant pushback over the new approach
because people were telling us it wasn't gonna work, and
it created these great outcomes that we could not have predicted.
So it was really happy about those changes. I love
that I I got introduced to the story of one
Miguel Santos, the former president of Columbia. Are you familiar
(37:35):
with him? I'm not so. He was the one that
negotiated the peace treaty with the FARC, and which has
you know come it was hard to do socially, and
he was a hawk. He was the minister of defense
or the head of the military, whatever the appropriate term was.
He basically figured out that they would allow the hostages
to go and see doctors once every year essentially, and
(37:58):
they would send in helicopters and they would get on
the helicopters and get checked. And they basically figured out
how to land these helicopters, get all the hostages on,
and fly away without firing a single shot. He also
chose not to like bomb this encampment after the fact,
because he could have you know, it was it was war,
so like could have killed all of these people that
were in that camp and chose not to. And then
(38:20):
later on when he was in these you know, exploratory
talks with FARC, I think that, you know, they really
respected him, one for the move and too for how
he you know, spared them in the sense or there
or they're you know, brothers and arms in that moment
to sort of show, not tell a possible future. Yeah, wow,
(38:41):
yeah exactly. I mean that's kind of it. I mean,
don't be afraid to show respect, don't be afraid to
not put the hammer down if you don't have to,
if you can avoid it. When we used to counsel
people all the time in the FBI that restrained is
not weakness. Well, if you can wrap your mind around that,
you can really make some spectacular things happen. H Well,
(39:01):
I really appreciate you taking the time. I want to
be respectful of it as well. Thank you so much
for being on the podcast. It's such an incredible story,
an incredible body of work that you've built and we've
all benefited from it. I mean, I really have to
thank you truly, Like you know, these are the moments
that you know, when you look back on the decisions
that you made and the negotiations that you had that
(39:21):
impact you the most, and uh, you know your work
is masterful of that. So thanks again, Chris, really appreciate
you being on. That's kind of you have. The website
is black Swan Ltd dot com b l A c
K s w A N Ltd dot com and we've
got a free, concise, actionable newsletter that you can sign
up for that comes out on Tuesday mornings. We've got
(39:43):
a ton of free material on the site. A lot
of people get a long long way with the book
and the amount of free stuff that we put out.
The website is a gateway to all the stuff that
we can do to help make people better negotiators. Well,
thank you, Chris, thanks for having me on Man all
Right Better. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(40:23):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Art of the Hustle is a production of I Heart Radio.
You're listening to the Art of the Hustle, the show
that breaks down how some of the world's most fascinating
people have hustled and learned their way into achieving great things.
(00:21):
I'm your host Jeff Rosenthal, co founder of Summit, and
today on the show, I had the pleasure of chatting
with Chris Voss. Chris was the lead international kidnapping Negotiator
for the FBI, and during his twenty four year tenure
in the bureau, he was trained in the art of
negotiation by the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Harvard Law School.
Before then, he had served as the lead crisis negotiator
(00:43):
for the New York City Division of the FBI and
was a member of the NYC Joint Terrorist Task Force.
Chris is taught business negotiation as an adjunct professor at
the USC's Marshall School of Business, Georgetown University, and Harvard,
and he's the recipient of the Attorney General's Award for
Excellence and Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award
for Distinguished an Exemplary Service. Chris joins us to talk
(01:06):
about the qualities that make a successful negotiator, how using
empathy rather than direct questions can elicit more effective responses,
and the groundbreaking tactics discussed in his book Never Split
the Difference. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Boss. Chris, Jeff.
(01:26):
We're on a podcast. We did it. The next thing,
you know, there's going to be a pandemic. Come on,
and uh, a former reality TV show star will be
elected president. Yeah, how so how do we negotiate with
a former reality TV show star effectively? Yeah? Man, Like,
you know, really, the way you negotiate with anybody, you
(01:48):
got to dial into them. The golden rule, treat people
the way you want to be treated. That goes south
on you about a third of the time, because two
out of three people are enough different from you that
what empathy is really about is ailing into the other person.
And if you do that, most people really are relatively
easy to get along with. I couldn't agree with you more.
(02:09):
I think that the pushback people would say is like, oh,
but you know, they're you know, inhumane, or you know
they're impervious to that kind of charm because they're so
you know, self obsessed. Yeah, get really focused on yourself
then you disconnect with other people you know, and and
there's something else in and now if we if we
do a little free association here, you know, as an article,
(02:32):
I wish I could remember what the topic was. But
we so much equate understanding to agreement. We say I
don't understand you, I don't get where you're coming from.
And people on different sides of political issues or emotional issues,
they understand where the other side is coming from, they're
scared to understand because they think it means agreement. I mean,
(02:52):
that was that was maybe the simplest, most difficult hurdle,
hurdle to get over when I was a hostage negotiator.
I know where a terror is coming from. You know,
it doesn't matter whether what it's me. Understanding where they're
coming from doesn't equate to agreement. If you can make
that distinction, you talk to anybody. I I love that,
and I want to unpack it further. I think about
(03:13):
it from a separate angle where it's like I'll use
that two continue a conversation or negotiation without committing to anything.
If you hear me say I understand, that's me acknowledging
what you're saying, but not committing to seeing your viewpoint,
and you're right, most people gloss right by that. Yeah,
you know, and that's the issue. Understanding is not commitment understanding.
(03:36):
He's just hearing the other side out. And if you
could do that, that makes a huge difference. Plus then
you know you're you you're less argumentative, people are more
likely to talk with you. Man, Well, I want to
get back into the meat of your you know, global
expertise on this in particular. But you know, I just
how does one get into hostage negotiation? Usually kind of
(04:00):
I got into it by default, all right? So I
was already an FBI agent. You know, this is what
was a long time ago comedian Steve Martin said how
to be a millionaire and never paid taxes? First get
a million dollars, right, So first you gotta be an
FNBI agent, or you gotta be in law enforcement already
and where you recruited or is this an ambition of
yours from childhood? Now? Man? Not only my ambition from
(04:24):
my mid teams was to be in law enforcement. I
never thought about the FBI until it kind of fell
in my lap in front of me. What what does
that mean? I was a cop in Kansas City, and
I went there right after graduating college. My father paid
for college degree. I went out and got a job
that did not require a college degree. You know, if
(04:44):
i'd have been my dad, i'd asked for my money back.
So I go out and and that's not the den
a great policing, but even to this day, but back
in the eighties, you know, it was rare to be
have a college degree and become a police officer. So
he reconciled himself to the fact that I wasn't gonna
leave law enforcement. So he wanted to get me interested
(05:05):
in federal law enforcement, perceiving from the outside that it
was a step up. Again, not necessarily the case, he
encouraged me to the first look at the Secret Service.
I met the Secret Service guy and he said, I
traveled all over the world with the Secret Service. And
I grew up in Iowa. I've never been anywhere, and
I just kind of like, but wait a minute, somebody
will pay you to travel the world. I got to
(05:28):
hear some more about this. As it turns out, at
the time, the Secret Service wasn't hiring. The FBI was
putting on a big push. I didn't know one agency
from the other I put in for the FBI and
they hired me, and then um, I was on SWAT.
No way. I was on a SWAT team in Pittsburgh,
which is my first office with the FBI. You get
(05:50):
transferred to New York. Wanted to get more heavily into
SWAT and then started to screw up my knee, and
so I don't want to do crisis response, but didn't
want to totally destroy my knee. Figured you know, hostage negotiators,
not very many knee injuries come from talking on the phone.
(06:11):
Great things in life come at us out of left field,
or come as a result of something really bad. Like
if I hadn't torn up my knee, I never would
have become a hostage negotiator. And it was far and
away more challenging and more interesting then SWAT ever was.
And I loved SWAT. Believe me, that is an adrenaline rush.
(06:35):
But the reality is a SWAT guy doesn't get to
do his thing as much as a hostage negotiator does.
We'll tell us first about some of those first hostage
negotiations situations that you got called into. Do any stick
out in your memory? Yeah, the universe was watching out
for me, like I negotiated a bank robbery with hostages
really early in my career in Brooklyn, New York. The
(06:57):
bank robbery went down in Brooklyn. Were you in Brooklyn?
Did they call you and from somewhere else in the country. Well,
you know, we showed up. I mean you know that.
They say, what nent of life is just showing up.
I'm in New York, in Manhattan, Lower Manhattan, in our office.
We do not get called. A partner of mine, Charlie
walks up to my desk and says, there's a bank
(07:17):
alarm in Brooklyn. Let's go. Now, we're not called. We're
just responding again, you know, show up, you know, be
the guy that shows up early. I've gotten the edge
so many times we just went. We didn't get called.
As it turned out. You know, most bank robberies with hostages,
a bad guys are going along before the police get there,
they get trapped inside. Throw together a negotiation team, which
(07:39):
is a combination of the FBI and NYPD. We trained
together a lot knew the guys. Well. Hugh McGowen was
the commander of the PDS negotiation team. Generous guy he put.
He throws a team together on a spot. He puts
a police detective on as a primary negotiator, puts me
on his in the second seat coaching position. Five hours later,
(08:00):
you know, the first guy manages to negotiate us to
a complete stale might which is an accomplishment in and
of itself. Hugh looks at me and he tells the
first guy says, all right, we're gonna rotate. Chris gonna
go on the phone. He gives me some basic guidelines.
I get on the phone. You're saying, that's pretty rare
that you you switch. And if somebody gets to a
stalemate like that, yeah, well, um, most of the time,
(08:23):
if you just wear the other side out, you're you know,
you're gonna see if you're not gonna get todaylight, you're
gonna see it. And this one was completely stalemated and
just stuck, just just stuck going nowhere. And the NYPD's
main move at the time was to swap negotiators. So
(08:45):
Hugh determined that it was time to do a swap.
He pointed me and he put me in the game.
Were you a natural like from the start? Did you
just have a different way of doing it where you
know you were getting better results. So I'm gonna believe
that there's no such things the natural. I mean, one
of my favorite books is A Talent Code by Daniel Coyle,
(09:05):
and that's kind of Coil's contention, is that anybody can
be good if you decide to be good. You know,
the man on Fire moving a long time with Denzel Washington.
He he said, you know, there's only trained and untrained.
There is no good and bad or better or worse.
There's trained and untrained. So I've been doing my training.
I volunteered. I had volunteered on a crisis hotline in
(09:27):
order to get on the team. That's phenomenal training for
hostage negotiation. I mean, volunteering on a crisis hotline is
a masterclass and emotional intelligence. And I had done that.
I was ready. I you know, I've done my training,
I've done my preparation, and I got on the phone.
I got a guy out about ninety minutes. Amazing, I
saw you had a masterclass, come out. Congratulations, thank you,
(09:48):
thank you. Yeah, the masterclass is cool and it was
fun to doing them. Very proud of the product, and
I'm sure it was super helpful to like refine the lessons, right,
I mean, you had written the book of course, never
Split the Difference, and you know that has been a
huge bestseller, and you must be getting closer and closer
to like the essence of the thing that you've been
working on and thinking about for the last thirty years. Yeah,
(10:09):
you know, we are, I mean and definitely we work
as a team. You know, I know you guys have
got a great team over there. You want to go fast,
go alone, you want to go far ago as a team,
and you know I have slowly pulled together and we're
still pulling people in. You know, my son who's been
exposed to this since you could talk. You know, we are.
We are very proud of the book that we put out.
(10:31):
But we keep refining and I got some smart people
around me, and we love this stuff. We just keep
making it better. What what is the stuff that you
were initially being taught when you were you know, just
getting into the space when you're doing the you know,
the hostage negotiation work, like what we're what was it
like getting to yes or what was sort of like
the top of the stack. Yeah, you know, uh, it
(10:52):
was really just getting really good at sounding people out emotionally. Okay,
Now the neural side. It's backs it up. I mean,
in crisis negotiation and even crisis hotlines. They don't care
why stuff works. They just need stuff that works. And
as it turns out, you know, by helping people navigate
(11:14):
their negative emotions in all walks of life moves people
quickly forward. Now they they've fell into that on hotlines
and in hostage negotiation and made it work for years.
And I used to think it was just crisis. It
turns out it's all human functioning. It's just effective emotional
(11:36):
intelligence and how to apply it. That's why we call
it tactical lympathy. It's just a tactical knowing application of
stuff that works. I'm familiar with, like some of the
work around neurobiology and psychology for behavioral change. It's just
so fascinating familiar. I'm sure you're at the term Pascal's wager. Oh,
I've heard of it. It's not coming in it's from
(11:58):
the seventeen hundred. It's and it's this idea that like
why people believed in heaven. It's a low risk belief
in the short term during life, and it's you know,
a low cost on the other side. But if you're
wrong and if you and you are an atheist and
you are wrong, it's it's an eternal cost. So the
idea is is that like whenever you're negotiating with, say,
(12:20):
you know, a terrorist group, or trying to figure out
how to shift the narrative or you know, break conflict deadlock,
you're essentially trying to figure out how you can create
the scenarios for somebody to you know, say yes where
there was once and no. But it's just you know,
I'm I want to get more to the core of
like the things that you're learning yourself right now, about
the space that you've now you know, just focused on
(12:42):
for so long, well, tiny little things that make massive differences.
Like if I need information from you, I'm not going
to ask you a single question, really, like you mean
that You're really not gonna ask me a single question. No, no,
not in in a structure of a question. What I'm
going to try to do is I'm gonna get you talking,
(13:02):
and I'm gonna get you just to basically trigger a
stream of consciousness and then you'll just start data dumping
on me and I'll get a lot more information a
lot faster. Like, for example, if I could say to
you what are you thinking about? And you'll stop and
hesitate and formulate an answer and basically curate your answer
(13:24):
and then give it to me. If I say, seems
like you're thinking about something, you'll start to give me
a download of what you're thinking about much more quickly
as opposed to curating the answer, and it will be
a much richer source of information for me. And it's
(13:45):
just a tiny little thing like that, like we started,
we teach it everywhere, and but some real estate people
were teaching recently. One of their agents describes that as
unlocking the floodgates of truth telling. I mean, people just
start to talk if they don't feel like they have
to curate their answer. So this is this is how
(14:07):
you're really creating strategic and tactical empathy. You're saying start
with empathy, And just the simple edition of the words
seems like implies that you personally are being thoughtful about
that person's perspective. Yeah, yeah, well said that. You're you're
dialing into them and you're paying attention to them, and
(14:30):
you're genuinely interested what about what? So you know, there's
there's sociopaths, right, and I think in every in every industry.
I think the number of sociopaths is not really thought
about enough. If it's three or four percent of the population,
that means that they're likely, And like every industry and discipline,
how do you negotiate with that? Yeah, well, sociopath isn't
(14:51):
a lot of people think they're You know, there's people
that don't feel emotions. They feel emotions, they just don't
feel guilt. So if you start, if you just take
that out of your equation of them, Now, how's this
how's this person gonna act? Every human being engages in patterns,
and they're relatively predictable. So the social path is gonna
(15:15):
make what you want the path to what he or
she wants. It's a little bit of just alignment of stuff.
And you know, they, like everybody else, they're driven by
how they see the future playing out. And the future
is still completely open. So you get them to adjust
(15:35):
a different view of the future, you're going to get
them to adjust their behavior. We like to say emotion
draws vision, vision drives action, So start looking at what
emotions greed, They experience loss of version just the same
way that everybody else does. They're driven principally by loss
of version, It's just that you've got to get in
(15:57):
their head and find out what they're afraid of losing.
They fear loss like everybody else. They just don't feel guilt,
not being feeling guilty about hurting you, not caring about
whether or not you live or die, which is where
sociopath comes from. It doesn't mean that they don't experience
loss of version. They still do. And loss of version
(16:18):
is a driving, the overwhelming driving decision making factor in
all human existence. So if you start wrapping your mind around,
all right, so what's their loss of version where they're
worried about losing and it's all imaginary because it's in
the future anyway, now you can. Now you can begin
to interact with them in many ways. There's overriding self
interest is going to make them predictable, aligned things so
(16:40):
that their interests serve your interests, and you're gonna be good.
We'll be back with more out of the hustle after
the break. The Shaw called the suicide bomber the poor
man's nuclear weapon. And so you've been in those situations.
(17:01):
You've negotiated with terrorists who intended, I'm sure to kill themselves.
Other people how do you find empathy and you know,
how do you get past that hurdle of loss a
version for somebody who's ready to lose it all. Yeah,
so all right, So to take empathy out and you know,
make it the mercenaries definition cognitive empathy, which is just
(17:24):
completely understanding where the other side is coming from, being
able to articulate it back to him. Not agreement, not sympathy,
not compassion. You know. One of the reasons why when
I was with the FBI, we started working with Harvard
Law School and a program on negotiation because Bob Manuken
wrote a book on negotiation and then it he said,
empathy is that agreement. It's not even liking or the
(17:45):
other side or being nice to him. And that was
exactly the FBI's definition. So I'm like, all right, we can,
we can, we can resonate on this. So terrorists, he
wants to kill somebody, I can say to him, you
believe that we're infidels and that we deserve to die.
That empathy. I didn't say that we were or that
I agreed. I said you believe X. This is what
you believe. Now the guy is interested. Now the guy
(18:08):
wants to talk to me. Now I know that every
vision drives decision. Terrorists has got a vision for how
he's gonna die. My Israeli brothers used to call it
a killing journey, and a killing journey has a destination.
If I can keep him from that destination and he's
got to get there to go to heaven, I will say,
(18:29):
how are you going to get to heaven if you
don't get to the destination you're going to? So how
a question? It's designed to make him stop and think.
M It's not designed to get an answer, because I
don't ask questions to get answers. I ask questions to
get people to think about stuff. So if I want
to I wanted to stop and think, I would say, like, look,
(18:50):
you know, we got you trapped in this house. You're
surrounded by the police, but you wanted to go to
the u N and blow it up to get to heaven.
How are you going to get to heaven if you
don't get to the u N because you're not going there.
Now that's it. Now I've just reset his whole vision
of the future. And you don't ask these things. You
(19:13):
tell them these things when you say this is what
you believe in it seems like an important distinction here
in your tone, Yeah, you know, tell him or essentially
some you know, the tone is a downward inflection or
can be an upward inflection, which sounds like a question,
but it doesn't impact the brain the same way. I
gave you another example of what used to do this
(19:33):
on a regular basis. We had a trial in New
York and Lower Manhattan in the early nineties. It was
the largest terrorist trial in the history of the United States.
As a side note, terrorist trials do not need to
be held in Guantanamo. We can effectively hold them and
open American courts. The American judicial system, as flawed as
it may be, is still the best judicial system on earth.
(19:55):
We hold the terrorists trial, we convict the terrorists Islamic terrorists,
and we have Muslim witnesses who testify voluntarily. How did
we get them to testify voluntarily against other Muslims? Every
conversation I would open up when I would meet one
of these guys on the street or wherever we met him,
I'd say, you believe that there's been a succession of
(20:17):
the United States governments for the last two hundred years
that we're anti Islamic and you just watch them like
twitch and and and then go yeah, I never said
it was true. I never said I believe that. I
said you believe. I don't believe that. But it doesn't
frighten me to be able to articulate your beliefs. And
(20:40):
it would be instant rapport, an instant influence as soon
as I articulated to them their beliefs. Plus they know
that I never said I believed it, because that would
be a lie and a con. I'm not trying to
con anybody. I'm just not scared to say what you
(21:01):
believe and then being able to say it without arguing.
I would never follow up with but here's why you're wrong.
I lay your belief out there, and I'm so fearless
and strong in my own that I don't got to
argue yours. You're not worried about your understanding, signaling agreement,
not in the least, and only from you do it
(21:24):
a thousand times and then you finally get it like
nobody ever came no, no Muslim ever came back to
me ever and said, so you agree, But had they,
I would have said, now, I never said I did.
I said that your belief. I respect your belief. I
respect your belief completely. I don't agree if you want
(21:47):
to get into that, but I'm happy to respect yours
and just let it stand. Do you feel like there's
a different set of stakes with money, like how people
behave in negotiations around asset, around capital? You know, I
would have until like the early two thousand's because I
(22:07):
definitely used to think crisis negotiation only worked in crises.
And then Daniel Knoman won one of behavioral Nobel Prize
for behavior Economics in two thousand two on prospect theory,
which said that lost things twice as much as an
equivalent game. That's for all human beings and hostage negotiation.
(22:28):
We were taught to look for the loss, and then
Conomon comes along and says, no, it's not crisis, it's
all interaction. Loss is the overriding decision making driver by
a two to one margin. And then in about two
thousand ten ish they start doing neuroscience experiments and we
moved from psychology to as you said, neurobiology, neuroscience and
(22:52):
we actually start to watch how the brain works, and
they mapped the brain out and they watch electricity and
we see the chemicals and all that, and human reaction
backs up what we were doing in a hostage negotiation.
And that's when I really learned over the years that
it's not just these tools are just not for crisis interaction,
there for all human interaction. You know, I don't want
(23:13):
to give away any too many of my secrets, but uh,
I do this with my friends and with people that
I want to you know, do business with and negotiate with.
I'll often think about like where someone relaxes, because you know,
if we're in a we're in a parasympathetic nervous system
goes down and our stress is low and our oxytocin
(23:34):
is high. Those are all great places to present, you know,
a narrative or an alternative narrative to get someone on
board with. So if I'm inviting you to go, you know,
hit the sauna with me, it could be just because
her homies, or it could because I'm trying to get
deal done, you know, And there's there's nothing wrong with that.
I've always taught and we teach business people like if
(23:55):
your skill satisfies to people, it's a right skill. You're
mercenary who's just trying to get the deal done, cares
about nothing else other than the deal the missionary because
it's good for the person. It actually fosters great long
term relationships. If you're doing stuff to make them makes
the missionary and the mercenary happy, you're on the right track.
(24:18):
And what you were just talking about and bonding with
someone so you can make a good deal. You didn't
describe trying to exploit anybody. If you're trying to bond
with somebody, you want to have an effective, productive relationship
with that person for fifty years, which means you're not
trying to explore them short terms so that you can
(24:38):
cheat them, or so that you could scrowm over in
some fashion. That's actually bad for business. M hm. You're
talking about having great relationships where everybody makes money for
a long time to come well. And you know, you
could be predatory and you could use this in a
you know, a weaponized manner and be a shrewd entrepreneur, investor,
(24:59):
whatever and go and take from others. If it's not
your nature, you're not going to be good at it's
certainly not my nature. And you know, like I've built
my own enterprises for twelve years now, so myself and
my co founders and partners were pretty aware of like
our capacity and our skill set. So what we actually
need is to always like reach up. We're trying to
get people that do not need to work with us,
(25:22):
who like already are made and they've you know, they've,
they've they just don't need us. So like that, there's
it's really interesting to have that, you know, perspective when
you're bringing anybody any deal or you know, any opportunity
with our organization or frankly asking for you know, the
help to set the course for you know, the next
ten years. Yeah. Yeah, And then and then especially for
(25:45):
the people you're talking about, when you're trying to reach up,
when the people that that don't need to do the
deal but they would like to deal with people that
they respect and mind they see a future with, then
that kind of begins to accelerate and more of those
people start coming into your world because people, where is
this taking me? Is really vision drive, decision, vision of
(26:09):
the future. Where is this going? That's how people make
up their minds. I know that you're spending a ton
of time still scaling you know, the company, and and
and and you know, doing this work explicitly and teaching people.
But for you, what's motivating you right now? Where are
you going with all of us? So we're really overdue
to start going global a little bit more because there
(26:30):
are hostage negotiators around the world. Yeah, so I started
reaching back for Spanish speaking negotiators I knew from a
bureau to see where they are, and very much like
what you're talking about, I'm looking for people that don't
need this to pay the mortgage, but they wanted As
one guy I spoke to on the phone the other day,
he said he wanted to do something that was sexy
(26:52):
and fun. And doing this on a business basis and
helping people make better deals really is a lot of
fun and it's very sexy because people are doing good
things for other people. It's just kind of cool. So
we're gonna We're gonna go global and the simultaneously I
decided to double down a little bit more on some
(27:14):
of the Black Lives Matters issues. That's fantastic to hear,
like what implicitly going after finding ways to make black
entrepreneurs more successful, bring the skill set to them. I
think you know Stephen Cotler, Yeah, of course, good buddy,
And Steven's a cool dude, and he wants to take
(27:36):
a deep dive into this. Also, he's got two books
that he's just he's putting the finishing touches on. And
empathy is a component of flow. And Steven said to
me on a flow on on the phone the other
day and we were talking about this, he thinks that
flow is a sneak attack on racism. So if we
can go out and we teach enough people better flow
and better decision making, change the conversation out of accusatory
(28:00):
conversation into a solution focused conversation. Let's stop accusing the
cops of being racist. Let's say you guys have been
making bad decisions. They're probably more open to that conversation.
How do we help them make better decisions? And and
you know, there isn't a single racist event that the
media has spotlighted where black Americans were victimized by brute
(28:26):
force that even the law enforcement people to want to
defend those in some way would say, well, that was
good decision making. Let's look at this whole thing and say, well,
show me any good decision making and not. So, let's
change the conversation from decision into decision making. We're probably
gonna end up solving a lot of problems as a result. Yeah,
I think that there's two conversations. You know, there's like
(28:49):
something like defund the police pushes the boundaries of possibility further.
And so all I might not agree with defunding the police,
I understand why that is the rallying cry, because you know,
things that seemed impossible twelve months ago with police reform
are happening, right, and like they're going to continue to happen.
(29:10):
When you're a cop or you're in public service, that
sense of service is typically what motivated you write, Like
most cops or soldiers or anyone that's in you know,
the military or has done this for they do it
for other people truly, Like that's a that's that's part
of their identity. So it is, you know, doubly painful.
I think for a lot of good you know, cops
(29:32):
to deal with what's happening, I'm agreeing with all of that.
And so you know, let's let's let's see what we
can move into to actually make a difference. Take the
accusation out of it. You know, you're a racist, you're
an asshole, whatever it is, and start working on solutions.
You know, I'm a solution oriented guy that there's been
(29:52):
a lot of effort put into awareness of the problem,
and then it's another skill set to start working on
answers and solutions. And I'm looking to work on answers
and solutions. Art of the Hustle will be right back
after this short break. Do you have any thoughts on
(30:16):
the sort of polarization of you know, red and blue,
of right and left right now in the United States
and how we can bridge that gap a little bit further.
You know, if anybody would just be willing to hear
somebody out without calling names. I actually think Biden is
on that track, and any of the leaders have got
(30:40):
aspects of their base that don't want to hear anybody out,
and so that makes it hard for them to pull
a coalition together. You know, Joe Biden is an interesting
cat who's been circling the White House for the longest time,
and I really would be interested to see what a
(31:02):
presidency looks like under him, because I think he's a
moderate dude who actually wants what works, and it's not
interested to plan to a base that he's afraid of.
I don't know if we'll get there with him. We're
gonna get there with somebody. We're in the middle of
a really rough time right now, and rough times are
always learning times. Sure, is Donald Trump a good negotiator?
(31:29):
I'll answer it this way. And but and this is
this is the typical thing that people miss with assertives.
Where are we on North Korea? Nowhere? Or nobody really knows? Interesting?
Now what? And this is what typically happens with a
really aggressive negotiator. He didn't inherit the North Korean problem.
(31:50):
It was a horse manure sandwich that was handed to
everybody that's been in a White house now with his
really aggressive roach, he opened up the conversation and suddenly
there was a dialogue and they were unprecedented meetings. And
he didn't let you know, who President United States should
(32:12):
ever go see the North Korean you know, he should
come to you. He didn't let any of that crap
get in his way. Yeah, so he opened up the
conversation in a way that every president before him has
completely failed at. But that aggressive approach, which has a
tendency to have great openings, then suddenly it just kind
(32:33):
of goes away and nothing happens, and nobody knows where
anything is. And that's exactly what's happened with North Korea.
He opened it in a spectacular fashion. You start out
with a lot of fireworks. Things look great, but then
the other side gets tired of getting beat up all
(32:53):
the time, and then they just withdraw and it just
goes away and no progress is made. And the other
side now doesn't want to re engage because they get
beat up really badly and they got called names, and
they were willing to play, and then there were there
were moments when there was hugging and kissing, but the
(33:16):
hugging and kissing they went in back the name calling,
and the other side is like they're confused and they
don't want to engage because they don't know what's going
to happen. Sure, I have a a dear, dear friend
and a decade plus long collaborator that has gone in
and out of being a business partner. And one of
(33:36):
the things that you know that is just a part
of their personality is they just win ten zero every time.
They can't win nine one. They can't win eight too.
They need to just it's just it's, you know, in
in a debate or in a negotiation, and I think
I shared that same feedback was just like, dude, who's
gonna want to like play games if you always win
(33:59):
ten zero? Like if if they're because like I think,
in everything when it comes to like business or impact
or all these things, there's always these moments where just
it's undefined, like you didn't contemplate this potential scenario. And
so now here you are on the other side of
an understanding with someone that needs to come to consensus, right,
and you know, like, um, yeah, I mean, I I'm
(34:21):
it's it's just funny to hear you talk about it
in these terms of this strong opening gambit and then
just dominating like you dominate for too long. You don't
want to You just don't want to blow people out right, right,
because why do they ever gonna want to deal with you? Again?
The not like I think the best negotiating in the
world is open interesting? Why is that? Well, considering the
(34:43):
distance she's traveled, Okay, you know she's she I guarantee
you she's worth more than Donald Trump is. And she
started from way back behind. Sure, Now who's mad at
her and who's unwilling to deal with her? And who
has she successfully dealt with over the years, like the
most vulnerable personalities ever. I'm sitting on a plane about
(35:04):
a year and a half ago, by grace of the universe,
I'm sitting next to Lance Armstrong. We struck up a conversation.
Oprah got Lance Armstrong to admit to everything on TV
mm hmm, if he ever had if there was ever
anybody that had reason to resent his negotiation, Lance Armstrong
(35:24):
gave it all up. Like everybody else. Oprah understands how
to treat people really well and get what she wants,
and Lance Armstrong isn't bad mouthing or any more than
anybody else's, and so consequently she rolls up success after
success after success. When you look back, what's the greatest hit?
What was like the one that you know really sparkles
(35:47):
as an achievement in your career as a hostage negotiator.
Is there a moment that were experience where you felt
like it wasn't going to go the way that you
hoped and through applying you made it happen. Well, right
after the Burnham case went down the Philippines and hostages
get killed by friendly fire, you know, I did a
(36:09):
reassessment of what we're doing internally and negotiations strategies, and
I did it with my team, but we made a significant,
subtle We had really substantial change in a way that
we were doing kidnapping negotiations and you know, we don't
get a chance to try and simulations. You make a change,
(36:30):
you're gonna drop that strategy. And when lives are on
the line. In the very next two cases that we worked,
we achieved spectacularly good results that popped out if you,
if you a good strategy will make unexpected great things happen.
And if first we were back in the Philippines on
(36:52):
another case with a sociopathic serial killing kidnapper, we rescued
the hostage. The rescue was created by the negotiations strategy,
and we turned around and worked the case in Ecuador,
and the negotiations strategy created an opportunity for the hostage
to escape. And I was ecstatic over both. And we
(37:14):
got internally, we got significant pushback over the new approach
because people were telling us it wasn't gonna work, and
it created these great outcomes that we could not have predicted.
So it was really happy about those changes. I love
that I I got introduced to the story of one
Miguel Santos, the former president of Columbia. Are you familiar
(37:35):
with him? I'm not so. He was the one that
negotiated the peace treaty with the FARC, and which has
you know come it was hard to do socially, and
he was a hawk. He was the minister of defense
or the head of the military, whatever the appropriate term was.
He basically figured out that they would allow the hostages
to go and see doctors once every year essentially, and
(37:58):
they would send in helicopters and they would get on
the helicopters and get checked. And they basically figured out
how to land these helicopters, get all the hostages on,
and fly away without firing a single shot. He also
chose not to like bomb this encampment after the fact,
because he could have you know, it was it was war,
so like could have killed all of these people that
were in that camp and chose not to. And then
(38:20):
later on when he was in these you know, exploratory
talks with FARC, I think that, you know, they really
respected him, one for the move and too for how
he you know, spared them in the sense or there
or they're you know, brothers and arms in that moment
to sort of show, not tell a possible future. Yeah, wow,
(38:41):
yeah exactly. I mean that's kind of it. I mean,
don't be afraid to show respect, don't be afraid to
not put the hammer down if you don't have to,
if you can avoid it. When we used to counsel
people all the time in the FBI that restrained is
not weakness. Well, if you can wrap your mind around that,
you can really make some spectacular things happen. H Well,
(39:01):
I really appreciate you taking the time. I want to
be respectful of it as well. Thank you so much
for being on the podcast. It's such an incredible story,
an incredible body of work that you've built and we've
all benefited from it. I mean, I really have to
thank you truly, Like you know, these are the moments
that you know, when you look back on the decisions
that you made and the negotiations that you had that
(39:21):
impact you the most, and uh, you know your work
is masterful of that. So thanks again, Chris, really appreciate
you being on. That's kind of you have. The website
is black Swan Ltd dot com b l A c
K s w A N Ltd dot com and we've
got a free, concise, actionable newsletter that you can sign
up for that comes out on Tuesday mornings. We've got
(39:43):
a ton of free material on the site. A lot
of people get a long long way with the book
and the amount of free stuff that we put out.
The website is a gateway to all the stuff that
we can do to help make people better negotiators. Well,
thank you, Chris, thanks for having me on Man all
Right Better. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
(40:23):
the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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