FBI’s Top Hostage Negotiator: The Art Of Negotiating To Get Whatever You Want: Chris Voss
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · 30 May 2022
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Transcript: https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/diary-of-a-ceo/fbis-top-hostage-negotiator-the-art-of-negotiating-to-get-whatever-you-want-chri-3351df/ (via OpenNash Podcasts, machine-generated)

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Two of the three remaining hostages were killed, and they were shot by friendly fire. That was the first time that I'd worked anything where people had gotten killed.

Former FBI kidnapping negotiator.

Best selling co-author and the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group.

Whether it's business or law enforcement, if I take the time to to really hear somebody out in our first deal, then every deal after that will come to me faster. It's critical.

I'm so compelled to ask you, like, what is the cost that we don't get to see of your job?

You know, you get you get really wrapped up in your work, and I think you tend to become distant in your personal life. The closer you are to someone, sometimes you just it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective. The truth sometimes is a knife to the heart, right? Like you go through a traumatic event, are you traumatized by it and never recover, or is there post-traumatic stress growth? Where you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before because you never want to let that happen again.

So, without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Chris, you've lived a extraordinary life for many, many reasons, which I'm sure we're gonna go into. But um, I guess my first question is, what do I need to know about your upbringing, your early years, if I am to understand the man you are today?

Well, yeah, I think really that my father just required that that we work hard and that we figure stuff out. Like my father was an entrepreneur, and then no matter how old you are, even and I started working for him probably when I was about eleven. But the downside of working for a guy that would never ask you to do anything, he wouldn't do himself. If there isn't anything that he wouldn't do himself, just because it needed to be done, then, like, you get asked to figure out some crazy stuff.

Like, you know, a mid middle-class entrepreneur, you know, a little blue blue-collar, you know, guy. And I remember, I think it was about eleven. He decided he wanted a new garage in the backyard, and we had to get rid of the old garage. And, you know, he handed me and my thirteen-year-old sister crowbars and said, Go out and tear down the old garage. So you just gotta, you know, you just gotta figure stuff out. And so I really grew up in an environment of working really hard.

It he never preached us ethics, but we were, you know, very ethical, you know, honest, hardworking, and figure stuff out, which is if that's your attitude, there isn't that much you can't do. And that was kind of drilled into me at an early age. Figure it out, work hard, be honest,

So if I hit fast forward on your on your life from that point, and I go into your days in the the SWAT team for the FBI, how lo how long were you working in the the SWAT team with the FBI?

Uh, I was, I was technically a member of the SWAT team for about a year. And then, you know, I was in on a Pittsburgh FBI was on that SWAT team, and then I got transferred to New York. And I decided to try out for the FBI's equivalent of the Navy SEALs, the FBI's hostage rescue team. And so I tried out for that team and I re-injured my knee, so I wasn't I. I never technically made that team.

Nor when I was in New York, was I on the New York SWAT team, but I had been on the SWAT team in Pittsburgh for about a year.

You injured your knee during training?

Yeah, you know, it was originally, uh, tore it up originally in college. And my view was, you know, the worst things that have happened to me have always led to better stuff. I would never become a hostage negotiator if I hadn't torn up my knee. And so, you know, then when I was trying out for the hostage rescue team, then I re-injured it. And, uh, I went went to a a doctor to have it rebuilt for a second time.

And at that point in time, I thought, Well, I don't know how many times they can put Humpty Dumpty back together. So I love crisis response, cause you gotta make a decision. I'm I've been very much a decision-oriented guy, you know, President Kennedy talks about the dangers of comfortable inaction. I've always hated that. So, you know, I wanted to stay involved in crisis response. We had hostage negotiators. Uh, my son and I like to joke that one of the Voss family mottos is how hard can it be?

And I remember thinking, How hard can it be? You know, they they talk, talk to terrorists, I talk every day, I could talk to a terrorist,

When you, um, when you injured your knee and you you're thinking about what to do with your life. I I read that you had a chat with a lady, um, about options, and she basically rejected you and said,

Yeah, yeah, I said, Go away,

Who is she?

uh, uh. She was the head of the hostage negotiation team for FBI New York. She was on, uh, one of the terrorism squads close to mine, and I knew she was in charge of the program. And, you know, I thought, you know, the willingness to learn was adequate, and so, you know, I sought her out to express my interest and kind of presented myself like, Ta-da, here I am, I'm wonderful, look at me, I'm willing to learn.

And she was just like, Go away, everybody wants to do this, it sounds cool, everybody wants a T-shirt. She asked me about, you know, any previous experience or credentials I had, I didn't have any. One after another, I was like, Nope, nope, no education, no background, no experience, none of this, none of this, none of this. And finally, she just said, like, No, you can't do it, stop bothering me. And I was like, it's gotta be something I could do, you know?

I've always kind of been proactive. I didn't know I was. There's a theory that I, uh, principle that we operate on now, which is never ask advice from somebody you wouldn't trade places with, or never take direction from somebody who hasn't been where you're going. And I just thought it made sense to go to the right person and ask, which is kind of how I got into the FBI in the first place. And I said, There's gotta be something I could do.

What is it? And she said, You know what there is? Go volunteer on a suicide hotline, but until you've done that, don't bother me. And it just seemed really obvious to me. Okay, you know, this is somebody who knows I'll do it, and that's how I got into FBI, really. And so I went and did it, and I went back to her and I said, You know, I've I've been volunteering on a suicide hotline for the last five months.

And she's like, What? She was shocked. She said, I tell everybody to to do that, nobody ever does it. When I went back to her, said, I'm including the story in the book. She said, You know, I told over a thousand people over the course of my career to volunteer on a hotline, and only two people did it, and you were one of them. And I thought, that's just it's so obvious.

What was that like, that suicide hotline? You five months, you did that

I actually volunteered there for a total of three years, and then I got involved in the board and the funding and the operation, and I taught there too, uh, because I was so into it, it was so valuable. Um, I went there to learn a skill, and I ended up learning a skill and serving the community, which then was there ain't no better secondary bonus than to do something that benefits you and have it benefit everybody else too.

difficult, man, Uh, it well, if you take the training, you're willing to learn. The training was phenomenal, and I went there to learn, so I soaked it up like a sponge.

emotionally difficult.

It can be, depending upon how vulnerable you make yourself now, since a. And what I used to tell the volunteers there, cause, uh, crisis hotline, suicide hotline, the biggest problem is volunteer burnout. It is difficult emotionally if you go there to help and you want so much to help. And there's a lot of people that make it extremely difficult to help them, and that can be emotionally draining. Now I went there to learn versus help, and the help was a secondary benefit.

So the really difficult types we used to call them frequent callers, they didn't suck the life out of me, they fascinated me. Like, this is crazy, I gotta learn how to communicate with these people. These are no different than the people that are very difficult in business negotiation, because how you do something is how you do everything. Way back when I learned this thing called the drama triangle, which was kind of three archetypes archetypes of difficult people, and we're seeing that show up exactly in business negotiations.

So human behavior is human behavior, period.

What is that triad?

Well, um, the way I learned it way back then was, you know, there's there's, um, uh, the victim, uh, the protector, and the persecutor, and someone who comes on a hotline really portraying themselves as a victim. They're trying to draw you into being the protector or to give advice. You know, I'm, I'm I. I need your advice might be what they would literally say. And then if you're dumb enough to give advice, then they switch from being the victim to the persecutor, and they attack you for your advice.

And then as soon as you back off, then they go back to being a victim again to try to lure you into giving them advice so that they can attack your advice. And so what they told us, you know, the earmarks of watch out for somebody trying to lure you into giving advice versus being a great sounding board, helping them discover the answer on their own. And then in 2002, much later, I run across Jim Camp's book Start with No, and he talked about effectiveness in business negotiation, helping your counterpart discover the best answer.

Because if they discover something is mutually beneficial versus if you offer it, if they discover it, it's their idea and they're gonna do it. If you offer it, you're giving them advice, and they got no emotional ownership, and they're less likely to do it. So he called it helping them discover the best deal. And back in the on the hotline days, it was just guided discovery, helping them discover the best outcome.

From those three years volunteering at the the suicide prevention line, was there anything else that you really learned about the nature of human beings? Um, that has stayed with you still to this day in business and and your days as an FBI negotiator.

Yeah, well, you know, still still pull, still actually going back and and pulling the lessons out of it. Um, and it, it's, you know, people are, uh, their thoughts are most dominated by loss. Um, what are they worried about losing? What's their vision of loss over the future? Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 behavioral, um, uh, prospect theory, uh, economic Nobel Prize on human behavior, which is loss looms larger than gain. Some people are putting it at a two to one ratio.

Nobody ever puts it a less than two to one. Lost things twice as much as a as an equivalent gain. I've heard people talk about be as much as nine to one, which is why researchers are having trouble putting an exact number on it. So sometime somewhere between two and nine times loss, your vision of loss gonna determine your behavior. And that was really, and we taught on a hotline and taught in, uh, hostage negotiation, look for the loss.

Somebody's taken hostages, they've suffered a personal identity identity loss somewhere along the line, and there's probably a triggering event in the last twenty four to forty eight hours. But look for the loss. And then Kahneman comes across in 2002, Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky Taversky had died by the time they awarded the Nobel, uh, prize, which is why he didn't get it along with Kahneman, because th they're not giving it after somebody's died. Saying that, no, this is just human behavior, period, period.

Not just hostages, not just people in crisis, but it's the single dominating influence of all human decision making, not the only influence, just the biggest. And so learning how to cope with that on a hotline is exactly what we're doing these days in all our interactions.

Is there a way to, like, leverage that to to your favor when you're negotiating with someone to

You can, you have to be really careful with it, which is really the whole reason to be in use empathy as an approach. Cause if you don't use empathy, um, then you're the hostage taker, or you're trying to use leverage against them. I mean, it's it's such a blunt force trauma concept that if if you don't do it gently, uh, with empathy versus sympathy, you know, empathy is is not the same as sympathy. But you're gonna seem like a hostage taker yourself if you start out by saying, like, Look, man, I know you got a lot to lose if you don't make this deal.

Well, that's trying to trigger loss, but you, yeah, I seem like a hostage taker myself if I do that. So I gotta work my way into a position where I gotta get you to realize that that's the case.

when you became a hostage negotiator? When was your first real job?

Yeah, it was a Chase Manhattan bank robbery.

Bank robbery?

And yeah, with hostages, which, although it happens all you know in the movies all the time, you know, Bruce Willis, Samuel Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Eddie Murphy. They're negotiating the hostages out of banks in every movie about it. In real life, it's a really rare event. Like it was a bank robbery with hostages in New York City, and there hadn't been a bank robbery with hostages in New York City for over twenty years. Now, people get taken hostage in bank robberies, but generally the bad guys are gone before the police show up because they know if the police get the place surrounded, their chances of getting away are low, so they're gonna be gone.

But to trap bank robbers in a bank with hostages is really, really rare. And that happened about a year and a half after I got out of the negotiation training, and I was still volunteering on suicide hotlines. So my skills, you know, you fall to your highest level of preparation. I was ready, I was ready to go when they put me on the phone, cause I'd been negotiation's a perishable skill, and I'd been working at it.

And my skill level was really high at the time.

Are you nervous when you get that phone call about that bank robbery?

Uh, no, I was ready to go. I mean, I was doing it because I wanted to. I was wanted to get involved. I wasn't doing it to get the T-shirt, you know, I was doing it because I wanted to get involved. And as a matter of fact, like, I was never asked to go. A friend of mine had taught me, and having made a mistake previously, I had learned a lesson of just show up. If something's going down, show up.

Um, I heard this advice from a government official not that long ago, and he said, Run to trouble, always run to trouble. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that, whether it's business or law enforcement. One of the nice things about running into trouble, running into a, you know, figuratively, theoretically, running into the burning house, you don't get criticized as much. You know, you run the trouble. If you're running into a static situation or something that a bunch of people have been dealing with for a while and it's just been sitting there in deadlock.

And whatever you do, people are gonna criticize you, you know, cause they failed and you're doing something different, and they don't wanna see you succeed. But if if you're running at, you're running into chaos, you're running into trouble, you know, the criticism is much lower. You know, nobody's dealing with it, somebody's gotta do something, decisions have to be made. It's a great strategy. Run the trouble. And and I had, and I had come to, uh, to like that a lot.

So I'm sitting at my desk in New York, my buddy Charlie walks up and says, There's a bank robbery with hostages in Brooklyn. Let's go. I looked at a police detective colleague cause I had an interview scheduled that morning. I said, Can you cover the interview? He says, Yeah, I got it. And we go head to the bank and we show up and a team forms FBI and NYPD both show up because it's a bank. We know the PD negotiators really well.

Their commander, Hugh McGowan, super sharp guy, knew what he was doing. He integrated the team. First negotiator on the phone was a a PD detective. He points at me, he says, You're the coach. We stood up the rest of the team around Joe, the original negotiator. Joe talks the situation into stalemate, which is not a bad thing because the threat level's not coming up. And Lieutenant McGowan looks at me and he says, Okay, you're up, and they handed me the phone.

And what was your job at that point? What was the the the bank robber asking for, and what was your job, your objective?

Well, we didn't know it at the time, like the bank robbery was actually the classic great CEO negotiator, like the great CEO negotiator is gonna act helpless at the table because he doesn't want you to force him into a commitment. Yeah, I found I found this out some years later when I was learning negotiation at Harvard. You know, they call it a business strategy. You blame somebody who ain't in the room. So a great CEO negotiator is gonna be like, Look, man, I got a board of directors, like, I gotta be careful what I commit to here, cause this this board of directors, I, I, you know, I do the wrong thing.

These guys are gonna fire me, you know, they're gonna throw me right out of this company. And and if the guy does that, he's got all the power in the world. He don't care about his board of directors, he just doesn't want to get backed into a corner. So the bank robbery, we get on the phone with this guy, the the guy who orchestrated the whole thing. And he's like, Man, I'm scared of these guys in here, these other these other guys that I'm with, man, they are dangerous, like, I'm scared of them, they might hurt me.

So I gotta be careful what I say to you. Oh, here they come now, and I gotta hang up the phone. And he was, he was making it all up, you know? Initially, our initial assessment is this guy's an inadequate personality, he's scared to make a decision, complete smokescreen on his part. So, you know, we're in the we're in the in the negotiation for several hours, and we got the bank surrounded, and then the investigators on the outside.

And this is a, uh, residential commercial area of Brooklyn, so there are cars everywhere. And they identify the owner of every vehicle on the outside and talk to them, except there's one van out there and it belongs to this guy. And as it turns out, this guy is running a cash courier business that services this bank, and they can't find this guy, he is nowhere to be found. So they go to his address and they say, Hey, do you know this guy?

And will you come to the scene of the bank and listen to the voice? Cause we're running the negotiations on speaker outside to the commanders, and the witness comes in and says, Yeah, that's that's. This guy's name happened to be Chris, also, so they voice ID this guy and he has never given us his name. This is another great technique. If we meet and I don't give you my name, it unsettles you, you don't feel you've connected with me, and this guy would not give us his name.

So, you know, we're, uh, we got a voice ID on him. When the lieutenant says, You're up next, he says, I want you to confront this guy about his name as quick as you can. And we're not gonna do a normal, smooth handoff, you're just gonna start talking. Normally, the protocol is if you hand off from one negotiator to another, the the second guy comes on, he says, Look, I've been here the whole time and I've heard everything that's going on, and here's everything that I've heard.

Cause you don't need the other guy on the other side saying, like, where do I start with this guy? You know, uh, have you been here? Listening? Do you have any idea what's going on? It's a smooth transition, but a lieutenant, his gut instinct is like, Yeah, we're not gonna do this. This guy's a manipulative guy, and in a really subtle way, we're gonna start taking back control, and we're gonna start by not doing a smooth transition.

So I get on the phone, I'm talking to this guy now. This is a KG dude. We shift with no intro. So what does he do in order to remind us that he's got hostages, but also not raise the threat level? Because he's got to genuinely be be concerned that the snipers are gonna put a red dot on his forehead. And the next thing that's gonna happen is he's gonna be at the Pearly Gates explaining his actions over the last twenty four hours.

He goes and gets a hostage and puts her on the phone. We haven't we've been there five hours. We had no confirmation of the condition of the hostages, other than him saying, I'm taking care of the girls, everything's fine. As a matter of fact, I gotta hang up the phone cause they're hungry and they wanna get something to eat. All all kinds of smokescreens. So I'm on the phone and I hear this female voice come on, go like, I'm okay, I'm okay, and I'm like, Oh, uh, who's this?

What's your name? I'm okay. And then that's the last I heard of her. He comes back on the phone, pretends like this didn't even happen. So I'm like, All right, this is a KG dude. We're gonna go forward. I'm gonna find a way to hit him with his name, but do it gent gently. So I start talking about his van outside, which he knows is out there. He just doesn't know that we've identified it. And I said, You know, we got a van out here, and, uh, we found the owners of every van and spoken to them, except one.

And he goes, We have more than one van. Now, I got no idea what this guy is talking about. So I did what we refer to as a mirror. I just repeat the words, cause I'm my brain is like, What is this guy talking about? So I go, you have more than one van? He goes, No, we only have one van. I go, you, you, you only have one van. And he goes, Yeah, yeah. And and you chased my driver away.

I go, We chased your driver away. He says, Yeah, when when he saw the police, he cut and run. Now, this super control freak guy is now blurting stuff out as a result of my mirror, my technique that he did not mean to say. This ends up convicting his getaway driver, who had gotten away, and we didn't even know there was a third guy.

How did that case end?

Everybody came out.

Why? Why did the bank robber concede in the end? Did he get anything he wanted?

Well, the uh, no, didn't you know? He? And and you know, how do you negotiate when you're not gonna give them anything? You know, you help them see a different vision of the future is what it really boils down to. And what you really want them to see is a vision of the future where they live. And then you're hoping the survival instinct kicks in. And then when the second guy got on the phone with me, his principal concern was getting killed, and his secondary concern was, uh, being handled roughly when he came out.

Of course, he knew that they had beaten the women on the inside, and that may contribute to his being handled roughly when he came out. But he number one didn't want to get killed, and number two, my opening line was, Look, when you, when you come out, you'll be treated with dignity and respect. And I said that to him enough times that he decided it was gonna be true. And and, uh, he asked to meet me face to face out in front of the bank.

Was he treated with dignity and respect when he came out?

1,000%. You gotta keep your, you gotta keep your promises, cause, and you know, this was. This was one of the things when I was teaching negotiation at Harvard, you know, my academic brothers and sisters up there were like, were like, would you lie to get the guy out? And my answer was no. And they'd say, like, Yeah, but let's say, let's pretend, let's imagine that a terrorist has got a nuclear bomb in Boston, and you know that if you lie to him, he won't set the bomb off.

So how do you answer that one? And my answer is, well, number one, the guy's probably testing me to see if I'll lie, so I gotta watch out that it's not a trap. Number two, if he's not testing me, he's gonna be a better liar than I am, and he's gonna sniff it out. You can't lie to a liar, you just can't. They're too good at it. And then number three, even if I lie to him and get him out, somebody's gonna find out that I lied.

And I will always have the reputation of being a liar, and I can't risk my reputation,

So if I'm a, if I'm a, if I've got hostages and I call you and I say, Listen, I want a car. I think I saw this one on your YouTube channel. I want a car in sixty seconds outside. What do you? What's the first thing you say to me?

You wanna try?

Yeah, let's do it. All right, So I'm the

you're the bad guy.

I'm the bad guy, okay, Chris. I'm gonna blow this woman's head off if you don't give me a car in the next sixty seconds.

how am I supposed to do that?

Not my problem. You got fifty five seconds.

All right, so if I wanted to do it, it's just it's madness out here, it's chaos. I mean, this is Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. Is organized compared to the nonsense that's going on out there. So even if I wanted to do it, I can't do it in that time frame.

I'm sure you're you're the FBI, you're the police, you can make anything happen. Fifty seconds.

Sounds to me like you're not gonna give me a chance.

I'm giving you a chance right now. Fifty seconds, Chris. There's plenty of cars out there. Go get one of the cars and pull it up outside, or I'm gonna blow her head off.

Sounds like you have a reason to live.

I do have a reason to live. That's none of your business.

No, I'm, I'm. I'm not trying to find out why. I mean, my first number one thing is to make sure that you live.

So get me a car and I will drive off. Honestly, you've got forty five seconds. I don't want to talk anymore.

If you're not gonna give me a chance, how am I supposed to do it?

I'm giving you a chance. Forty five seconds, that's plenty of a chance.

Like to me, even find, get all the commanders together and get them to think about this, which they're probably not gonna do anyway. I will go and talk to them, but how am I supposed to find them all, talk to them, get them to think about it in forty five seconds?

Okay, how long do you need?

All right now, first of all, I want you to understand, I don't think they're gonna do it.

Well, then I'm gonna blow her head off.

That would be your choice. See now. So the other thing, too, is hostage negotiators are successful 93% of the time, which is one of the things that I learned in the business, which means 7% of the time, they just ain't coming out. Now, I. We have to do everything we can possibly do in the meantime, but our number one goal is not putting any additional people at risk. Like, I get this question all the time, like, if you think it's gonna save a hostage, why don't you just give them a car and and save those hostages?

Well, I can't put additional people at risk. And by the way, while we were doing that, I don't know anybody put a clock on us, but we went more than forty five seconds.

It's true.

And what were you thinking when as we were going through it,

There was all the questions were provoking me into all the questions you asked me felt like they were dragging me away from my objective in a quite a tactical way. So I was thinking, Oh, this is not this is annoying, he's making me talk when I don't want to talk. That's kind of what I was thinking. And then, yeah, I mean, the questions you asked were making me ponder, and they were making me abandon my focus, which was to just get this car and kill this woman.

right? See, which was I wasn't asking you that stuff to get you to answer. What I was really doing was doing exactly what you talked about, get you to ponder, get you to think, you know, what, what Kahneman would has talked about in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, pondering, he would call slow thinking, in-depth thinking, where you really think about stuff, and then you really make the decision and you really make up your mind. Instead of me trying to hassle you, like I could hassle you into something really quick, but it wouldn't be your decision.

And the whole point of getting somebody to ponder something is so that when they do come to a decision, they own it.

When you said the thing about, even if I wanted to do that, like I couldn't do that in forty five seconds or whatever. There, I like that sentence because it obviously there was a degree of empathy there. So even if I wanted to, it wasn't, you know, shitting on my parade. It wasn't attacking me too much. And you made me ponder the reality of the fact that it's not even possible. My demand is not even possible, even if you, you know, were on my side.

So that was a very good question to to make me ponder myself, to realize that what I'm asking for is not gonna happen.

See, and there's there's another reason why I said it like that, too. Um, because, you know, a lot of people, if you ask for something in a in a business deal that they're not gonna give you, they give you the classic American lie, I'll try, you know, and and uh, and may maybe it's not an American lie, maybe it's a lie in the English language. Like, but you know, in any kind of deal, if somebody looks at you and says, I'll try, you don't get a good feeling, and you get I'll try enough times, you know right away it ain't never happening.

So I didn't do, I'll try, you know, I. I basically said, I don't think it's gonna happen, but I'll check, cause I'm trying to shift us out of an adversarial into a collaborative conversation. And so then what I'm basically saying is like, I don't wanna mislead you. I don't think this is gonna happen. I will be your advocate.

How important is that collaboration?

No relationship survives long term without collaboration. Just just ain't gonna happen.

So you're giving me the impression that you're actually on my side to some degree and that we're collaborating to find an outcome together.

Yeah, and in point of fact, see, the crazy thing is hostage negotiators have repeat customers. If I get you out alive, the chances of, um, you straightening out your life are not great, and the chances of you ending up in another hostage siege are high if you don't get killed otherwise. And you gotta have a memory of the last hostage negotiator trying to work with you versus the guy who hustled you and lied to you, guy or gal.

So if you always look at all interactions as if you're gonna have to pay for everything you said eventually, which means if you lie, you're gonna pay for it. If you did everything you could thing you could to be collaborative, then your counterpart's gonna remember that in the future. Like, well, it didn't go my way, but at least the guy didn't lie to me.

It's like karma, isn't it?

It's karma. 1,000%, it's karma. I'm a I'm a big believer in karma, very much

How important is it generally in negotiations to listen? Cause a lot of people, you know, kind of think they can overpower someone with just talking at them.

right, yeah, and and what they what they're called is, um, they can't hold a job, you know, you, you, p. And there are a lot of people that are very visible that are doing that, and in the moment they might look very good. But what ends up happening is they're frequently initially extremely successful, and then their success rates drop off a cliff. And then they don't hold the job because they were awesome in their first quarter and had a continuing steady decline in their productivity till it went to zero and they they can't be tolerated anymore.

But everybody sees a really loud guy or gal getting deals, or and and they're the ones that make the most noise about it. So your original question is how is important is listening? There is n no negotiation methodology that doesn't list listening as an advanced skill, no matter what school of thought somebody's in in negotiation, they all list listening as advanced, far more difficult than simply keeping quiet. It's critical, and you will actually end up, uh, increasing the velocity of your deal cycles by listening, which a lot of people think it's really counterintuitive.

But, you know, I did, I did an interview with Mark Cuban six or seven months ago, and I talked about listening. And he's like, Yeah, you know, if I take the time to to really hear somebody out in our first deal and pay attention to what's important with them, then every deal after that will come to me faster. Having done it right up front, and it'll increase the velocity of my ability to make deals with them.

Cause they'll trust me, they'll know that I hear them out, they know that I'm looking out for them. And consequently, you know, it doesn't take me a long time to establish trust. And we come back, we come to the table, we get right down to it, and it really increa increases the velocity of my ability to make deals. And a lot of people can't see that because I gotta hear them out, I gotta, you know, blah, blah, blah.

I gotta find out what their point of view is. It seems highly efficient, but what it is is incredibly efficient long term,

And then, as it relates to speaking, when you're talking, when you were talking to me then in our little dummy negotiation, um, I noticed the tone of voice you took was very, very calm. You list in the book three different voices available to negotiators. Give me a flavor of those three voices that are available to negotiators.

Well, there's, there's, there's three natural types, um, in humans, fight, flight, or make friends. And these are the, uh, our caveman ancestors that lived either fought the saber-toothed tiger, ran from the saber-toothed tiger, or figured out a way to make friends with it. And the indecisive caveman got eaten by the saber-toothed tiger, doesn't have any descendants. And, uh, we've got substantive reason to believe that that exists globally, regardless of gender, ethnicity, um, religion. Uh, the three types, the globe splitting pretty evenly into thirds, got a lot of data on it, backs it up.

Our brothers and sisters at Harvard pretty much agree based on their experience. Wharton has pulled a lot of the same data, comes very, very close to the same, and each type has a voice, you know, and the voice of the assertive, natural born assertive, which I'm actually a natural born assertive, is more the Donald Trump style negotiator, you know, attacking, blunt, direct, you know, uh, Ivanka Trump once described her her dad, Donald, and said, You know, he's not blunt, he's just direct.

Well, he's just an example, but you know what I think is direct? You f feel like you got hit in the face with a brick, which is always counterproductive long term, always, always, always long term counterproductive. Inhibits your ability to make deals. People get tired of getting hit in the face with a brick, so they they it wears them out. Then there's the an very analytical type, um, which was, you know, that soothing, calming voice that I was using.

Triggers a neuro neurochemical response in you. It actually calms you down neurochemically. It's a involuntary automatic response. Now you can fight it, you can fight your way back out of it, but you can't stop me from getting the calming neurochemicals started in your head. And you know what if if you're careful not to seem either cold or condescending, that tone of voice is what the great TV interviewers use, the great news anchors. Because there's a lot of there's confidence and calm simultaneously, and people really like it.

And then there's, you know, there's a smiling voice, a friendly voice, and somebody just smiles when they speak. That triggers a different neurochemical reaction. The people that you automatically like right away, as soon as soon as you lay eyes on them, as soon as they start speaking, you know, and there's an advantage to that. So I was using in a in an emotional situation, and if you're in an emotional negotiation, you know, you want to go with the the soothing voice and smile, sprinkle that in, and now you kind of you get the combination of both of them, and it's it's collaboration.

You're gonna wanna collaborate with me if I use that voice.

I guess it's an attempt, and and as you say, to like, pacify, pacify them. The other thing that I in chapter three of your book you talk about is, um,

By the way, you got a pretty good voice. I mean, you you got, you got an, you got you. You're basically downward inflecting. Your voice portrays, first of all, it's very genuine, but it portrays a guy who's actually really thinking about what he says and he actually listens.

oh, that's very kind compliment, thank you. But she's still gonna die. Uh, in chapter three, you talk about, um, labeling their pain. I find find that a really interesting concept. Don't feel their pain, label it. I think that's probably a a mistake I've been making. I actually was thinking about that in the context of, like, my romantic relationships when my girlfriend is talking at me as a way to kinda create that bridge. How do I create that bridge by acknowledging or labeling her pain?

Can you explain to me what you mean by labeling their pain?

you know, um, think of what whatever the negative emotion that they're feeling is the elephant in the room.

So if I'm, if I'm, you know, I'm holding someone hostage and I'm crying, yeah,

I'm gonna say, sounds like you feel like you're out of control, sounds like you. You feel that you're gonna have to do something you really don't wanna do,

and what does that do to me when you, when you do that?

all right. So, and this is one of the few, and the Black Swan method that's also backed up by neuroscience. Like we know a anecdotally that this stuff works, cause we're proving it over and over again. We're walking the talk. We make our own deals very effectively, and the people that we coach make their deals and accelerate their deals very effectively. So, you know, so we got no shortage of our own anecdotal information. We don't really don't need the neuroscience, but there's been several neuroscience experiments.

They put people in fMRIs, functional magnetic resonance imaging devices, where they can watch the brain light up. And they induce negative feelings in people, and they watch the brain light up. Typically, by showing them some sort of photograph that causes them to feel a negative emotion, whether it's sadness, anger, whatever it is. And then they simply ask the people to identify or label what they're feeling as a result of the what they saw. And each and every time the person labeled it, the the uh, electrical activity in that part of the brain diminished every time.

Not deny, but just call it out. You know, you don't deny the elephant's in the room, you say there's an elephant in the room,

And that makes people feel heard or seen or felt, or

all of the, all of the above. So, you know, whatever the emotional reaction to that is, people feel seen, heard, felt, understood. And it's probably a combination of, you know, the emotional reaction and and the neuroscience reaction is it diminishes the negative emotions every time. Now, the degre- the degree that it diminishes the emotions changes. Like, I, you know, we call that a label, and I might label the negative that I that I hear. And it might have a minimal impact, a tiny little impact, or it might have a huge impact.

But the impact is the type of impact is the same every single time. The degree of impact changes, but the nature of the impact is always to diminish the negative emotion.

One of the things that I read as well that you're looking for in these negotiations is for them to conf give you a confirmation that, like, if they say, that's right, so you're, you're. You're trying to get me to not blow this lady's head off, and if you can get me to say, that's right, what is that a signal of?

that's right, is what people say when they feel understood. You pull a that's right out of somebody, you're on your way in a in a res in the direction of a great resolution. No matter what the negotiation, landlord tenant, employee, employer, you know, business deal pulling, that's rights sends you in a great direction

So you've labeled something that I'm feeling? You said, Stephen, it feels like you're about to do something you don't wanna do, and then I go, that's right.

right now. So so tall, Roz, great researcher, besides great author, he speculates. He says, You know, I think somebody says that's right when they've been experienced an epiphany to some degree. That's what you say when you, when you, what you think you've heard is completely true. You're not agreeing with a person, you're observing that what they said was true. And when he said epiphany, I'm like, Ah, this is interesting, let me look up the neuroscience of epiphanies.

And among the neurochemicals that you get a hit of in an epiphany is oxytocin, which is the bonding drug. So you get a hit of oxytocin based on what I've said, and you have an involuntarily feeling of bonding towards me. And then, you know, the uh, neuroscientist that I think the world of, Andrew Huberman. I heard him talking about uh, oxytocin, and he says that oxytocin tends to make people tell the truth. So if you say that's right, you're gonna feel bonded to me, and you're gonna be more likely to tell me the truth.

That ain't a bad position for me to be in in a negotiation.

Negotiations are, you know, all all over our lives. So I mean,

Yeah, everywhere.

when I was reading everywhere, right? It's everything, it's teams, it's business, it's podcasting, it's my girlfriend, whatever. When I was reading through the the principles in your book, Never Split the Difference, um, so much of it I could relate to from the context of, like, romantic relationships with my partner. You must find yourself in your own romantic relationships deploying some of these skills, and which ones of them? Which one? In terms of whether it's just, you know, acknowledging them, making them feel heard.

What are the key skills that translate really effectively to romantic relationships?

well, they all do, because every human being wants to be understood, and in a romantic relationship, they wanna know that you understand, you know, and and in many cases, like any relationship, they just need need that in and of itself. Now, the additional demands of a romantic relationship is they're gonna want you to understand and adjust, which, in point of fact, what other relationship do they not want that from you as well? Not only show me you understand, but then walk the talk.

It's, um, the closer you are to someone, sometimes you just it's really harder for you to see things from their perspective. Like you think you didn't do anything wrong, and and you know, and and yeah, typically male, female, but not confined to this. You thought you were fine when, in fact, what they perceived was that you were clumsy and insensitive.

Are you good at R negotiating in Y a romantic relationship? Cause I can, I'll ask her when

Right? Well, the problem with dating a really smart girl is she starts out negotiating you pretty quickly. But the real, the, you know, the real issue is what's your intent behind it? Like, if you're hearing your romantic partner out just to get them to shut up, like the second or third time you pulled that on them, they have figured it out, and you're you're disingenuous. But if you're hearing somebody out because you want things to be better, you really want the relationship to be long term, and you want it to continue to get better.

Then they're happy to let you hear them out, or to be f let you make them feel heard, cause you're gonna make the adjustments in your behavior to take that into account, and you're gonna show that you care enough about how they feel. Not just what happened, but how they feel about what happened, which is a recipe for a great relationship, romantic or not. But as as should be, it's even a higher standard for ro romantic relationship, cause how can you be involved long term if you don't care how the other person feels?

in your negoti- negotiating days, was there an instance where it really didn't go the way you wanted it to go?

Yeah, and with 93% success rate means 7% of the time it's going bad, and that's just that's just the nature of the game.

Is there one that stands out for you as being

Well, every one of them does, but then then the the issue is, do you learn? Like, uh, Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call it post-traumatic stress growth, like you go through a traumatic event, um, are you traumatized by by it, which and then damaged and never recover post-traumatic stress, uh, injury, harm, disorder, or is there post-traumatic stress growth? Where you took that and decided to be better than you ever were before, because you never want to let that happen again.

when I say, when I say this, what is the incident that comes to mind?

Well, the first one, uh, that people died in was a second case that I worked in a Philippines, a burn and Sabero case. And early on, before we could even get our arms around, uh, like a situation that was moving really fast. And the Philippine military was engaged in chasing the bad guys, and a chase had been on for weeks. Um, Guillermo Sabero was murdered, uh, by by the Abu Sayyaf, about twenty one days into that case.

They had already killed a number of Filipinos prior to that. And as they moved across the landscape and the oceanscape and island to island south of Philippines, they would, they would kill hostages and pick up new hostages, cause there were people in their way all the time. So that was an ugly case from the beginning to the end. In the end of it, uh, uh, the two of the three remaining hostages were killed in a botched rescue attempt, and they were shot by friendly fire.

Philippine Scout Rangers inadvertently stumbled over the Abu Sayyaf encampment, um, didn't realize it was one and had hostages, and it just opened fire. They recognized it as a terrorist encampment, formed a skirmish line on the trees on the uphill side and just started pouring um, rifle fire down into the camp. Uh, and so that was, that was the first time that I'd worked anything where people had had gotten killed.

Does that stay with you?

Yeah, it does, it does, and and I felt sorry for myself for a long time. And it's not like I'm, um, I'm happy about it, but for I'll never remember the moment that I got the call. Five thirty in the morning, I was in Washington, DC, where I lived, and a voice on the other end of the phone said, I've got bad news, Martin is dead. And it was just a few hours after Martin Burnham had been killed and Deborah Yap, the Filipino hostage, had been killed.

Martin's wife, Gracia, Um, was wounded and lived, and I re I'll never forget. That was the worst that to to that point, and since was the worst professional moment, personal moment of my professional career. And I used to say it's the worst moment of my personal career until I was hearing another hostage negotiator talking about a siege he was in when a a an infant had had had died, had been killed. And I remember sitting there watching him talk about it, and he's still very definitely dealing with the scars and the wounds from having been the negotiator on scene.

And I remember him saying, like, you know, I don't know why I keep telling, you know, giving these presentations, maybe I just want people to know something bad that happened to me on a winter's day. And I was sitting there thinking, bad for you. That wasn't your blood. It wasn't your child. And I thought, you know, we're taking on too much. Cause it wasn't a member of our family. It wasn't my brother, wasn't my significant other, it wasn't my son that got killed.

And that's when I tried to that's when I realized I had to put that stuff in perspective. It wasn't doing anybody any good for me feeling sorry for myself. I couldn't and and what we the changes we made as a result of the Burnham Sabare case saved lives. You know, that was that was our mandate, all right? So Martin Burnham is dead. What do we do with that? Do we quit or do we get better? If we get better, somebody else is gonna live.

And a whole bunch of people ended up living based on strategy adjustments we made as a result of of that case.

Seems like a big, a very significant sort of burden to to carry, right? It goes back to what I said at the start, you know, it takes a certain type of person to wanna be wanna play with those stakes.

Yeah, some somebody who's naive. You just don't know any better.

Makes us difficult sometimes. It's just thinking about, you know, the traumatic things we go through, it makes us much difficult, especially in forming relationships. I was I struggled with that a lot. Struggled in f- f- having a girlfriend, probably because my my home life was so traumatic that I would always run from commitment. But when you've lived in such through and you hear the same with, like, soldiers and stuff, you know, when you've lived through such sort of traumatic events and high stakes, coming home to, Hey babe, you alright?

Can be difficult, right?

Yeah, yeah, it can be. It can be it can be difficult. It you can you can have difficulty unwinding. The other person, depending upon how you process information. Like, the other person might genuinely doing their best to be there with you to get you to talk about it. And, you know, if you if if that isn't the best way that you process it, and, yeah, one of the very difficult things about me is I don't process stuff by talking about it.

I'll talk about it afterwards, you know, but I I kind of need I need to unplug, you know, I'll need a good night's sleep, you know, I'll I'll need I'll need to let it run through the data banks and kind of bake on its own. I'm probably pretty good the next day.

Which is interesting cause in your work, you have no time for that.

Yeah, well, you know, and maybe that's why I need it more at home, cause in the work, I I mean, we're gonna, you know, we're going on it right now, we're dealing with it right now.

Mirroring something you talk about as well in the book, which I find really interesting cause again, something with my girlfriend I I started to explore, which was, you know, when she says something to me, or when she does something, I to make her, again, feel heard, I guess. I just kind of repeat it back to her while also trying to is it also a body language thing, or is it just how how does mirroring mirroring work?

Well, hostage negotiators mirror the Black Swans mirror, you know, the way that we teach in business now, it's just all verbal.

Verbal, okay.

You know, yeah, if if if you start lining up physically, uh, which is what the body language mirroring thing is like, if you if you if that happens naturally, then so be it. Enough people try to do it as a manipulative tool that we're really leery of even coaching people on that at all. Like, if we're talking and suddenly we both find us and I'm actually listening and you're listening, we both find ourselves leaning the same direction, that's cool, cause we're dialed in.

But the body language thing is is a tool of manipulation so many times of people that are just trying to exploit you, that aspect of it, we stay away from. Now, the hostage negotiator mirror, the Black Swan mirror, repeating just the last one to three words of what somebody said, or then taking surgically, picking a gist, one to three words here and there, it's ridiculously effective.

Ridiculously effective. Yeah. It's I did that.

You did. Very nice. It's re and and the thing that I find fascinating about it too is like, if we find somebody that's really into mirroring, they'll typically be somebody whose IQ and EQ both are real high. And there are a lot of people whose IQ is real high. You know, their book smarts are good, but their people smarts aren't good. And they tend to love mirroring because it's the least amount of effort with the maximum amount of response.

And they wanna guide a negotiation in a very gentle, but purposeful way. While the oth- and the other side doesn't feel guided, they feel like they're expanding. And it's been real consistent.

When you think about your your next phase and your next your your projects that you're working on now and what you're trying to do, you've got your the Black Swan group. I saw that online. Um, the objective of that is to to coach people into negotiation skills and stuff like that.

Yeah, worldwide, globally. Yeah.

And what does that look like? Is it a course that people can buy? Is it a a a webinar? What is it?

Yeah, it's all of it. The website is blackswanltd.com. I mean, if you just start now, we got free stuff. Like, how how do you start to get better now? If you're further on down the line, we coach people through all kinds of deals on a regular basis, and it's a really big part of what the company does. We coach a lot of people through negotiations.

And you've got your book as well, which we've talked about a bit, which is Never Split the Difference, which has sold more than 2,000, 000 copies worldwide, Which is just staggering. Crazy, crazy numbers. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the previous guest leaves a question for the next guest. And I get to I only get to see it when I open the book. Okay, they've Got good handwriting, so this is useful. Okay, is there someone in your life that really needs your help, but you are still unsure on how to help them?

Uh, there's uh, there there's someone in in in my immediate family that, um, I can, uh, I continue to buy the wrong gifts for. And, uh, we've got actually a conversation scheduled for me to at least say, Alright, I realize I'm getting it wrong. Help me get it right.

I think we can all relate to that in some respects. Well, I can anyway. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for your time. Thank you for writing such a great book. I on a topic that is relevant to more than just FBI negotiations, as you know, it's relevant to my relationship with my partner, to my business, to everything in between. It's really relevant to all the interactions I have with all humans. And that's clearly a testament to why it sold more than it's almost 2, 500,000 copies or something crazy like that.

And I know that I know the stats around books. I know that more than I think my publisher told me that most books don't sell 1,000 copies, so, like, 90 plus percent of books don't sell 1,000 copies. So to sell 2, 500,000 copies worldwide is staggering, but it speaks to your experience and and the way you've articulated it in the book. It's been an honor to speak to you. Thanks Thank For your wisdom,

You. Yeah.

And, um, I'm gonna keep brushing up my negotiation skills.

Pleasure's been mine. Thanks for having me on.

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