Jocko Podcast 354: Everything in Life Is A Negotiation. With Chris Voss.

2022-10-06T14:45:02Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @thefbinegotiator @echocharles Businessman, author of "Never Split The Difference". Former FBI hostage negotiator. CEO of The Black Swan Group.

AI summary of episode

and they they want to get you into a very short term mindset and get you to say things that you know to be against your interests the problem is if you're getting somebody into a short term mindset they're going to come a point in time when they regret saying it to you and you're going to lose their cooperation everything's going to fall apart so it has a shelf life now the rapport based people those are the magic magic magicians that make cases nobody else can make or make deals no one else can make and the other side still wants to talk to them like when I left surveillance in New York and went inside to investigate what we were talking earlier became an inside you know open investigator I was surrounded by guys that had gotten cooperation from witnesses voluntarily that people would just say like I got no idea how that guy got that cooperation one agent particularly his name is Larry Wack and even on the task force people admired how he got people to cooperate because he was he was he developed a rapport relationships with people even if he had a hammer the rapport and the relationship you know the belief that we will always be able to talk to one another as opposed to me tricking you into a short term mindset which at some point in time you're going to feel betrayed like the rapport based approach to deal making interrogation wins every time same thing with leadership we might as well throw leadership in there as well agree the time I say well you know if you don't do this I'm going to fire you or whatever it'll work for that task but I talked about asking earnest questions as a leader you're asking earnest questions and you've got this little bit similar approach but different verbiage here calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment they have a direction once you figure out where you want a conversation to go you have to design the question that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think it's his choice to take you there that's why I refer to these questions as calibrated questions you have to calibrate them carefully just like you would calibrate a gun sight or a measuring scale to target a specific problem the good news is that there are rules for that first off calibrated questions avoid verbs like can is are do or does these are close ended questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no instead they start with a list of words people know as reporters questions who, what, when, where, why and how those words inspire your counterpart to think and then speak expansively but let me cut that list even further it's best to start with what, how and sometimes why nothing else who, when and where will often just get your counterpart to share a fact without thinking and why can backfire regardless of what the language, what language the word why is translated into it's accusatory there are very rare moments when this is to your advantage the only time you can use why successfully is when defending, when defensiveness that is created supports the change you are trying to get them to see why would you ever change from the way you've always done things to try my approach as an example so I found this very useful because you know I often talk about something from a military perspective called the indirect approach which means I don't want to attack you head on I want to, you know, I want to attack you from a flank where you're not defensive and this applies to everything it applies to leadership it applies to approaching people it applies to, you know, if you've got an ego which everyone does and I attack your plan that means I'm attacking your ego you're going to get defensive but you got to recognize what the best possible outcome is so it's a great metaphor for making tiny little subtle changes in your negotiation approach the other side is never going to see where you're going to make all the difference it's completely invisible and then while you're in the middle of it there's always stuff the great stuff will fall out of the sky if you let it the other side is going to say something that works for you they're going to talk to you they're going to be softer in a position and you realize there's going to be pressures on them that you don't understand something is always always there and in many cases the other side doesn't imagine it and to draw a real fine point on this that a lot of people miss it's a reason why reading body language to detect deception is almost a waste of time because for you to deceive me you've got to know it's important to have a tell you have to be consciously covering it up but a significant amount of the time you don't even know it's important so if I'm just looking for towels and not getting you talking the stuff that you didn't know is important is never going to come out those those similarities building relationships across the board so you just mentioned the analyst that's one type of person you got a whole section here about not only you what kind of negotiator are you because you got to know yourself but then also how are you going to interact with these people you got the analyst that you talked about which is methodical diligent they're not in a big rush you talked about them tell me about the accommodator just the so being an assertive the accommodators is weird animal that neither the analysts nor the assertive can really figure out but the accommodators really is a very hope based person and very focused on that the moment is pleasant and then if the moment is pleasant and we hope hard enough then everything will be fine now when we wrote when we wrote the book we said the accommodator was focused principally on the relationship having a positive relationship and that's pretty close to true like they want the relationship to be positive but you know we worked with people that would see a train coming at us rhetorically federal figuratively not literally his problem coming at us this person was on a team and we had a training and all the books that were supposed to be there were gone this guy knew about it for days the last minute tells us none of the manuals were here because he'd been and we're like you know this is the train is getting ready to hit us we've been here for three days you haven't said a word for three days that's not relationship focus because I'm standing on a railroad track and you see a train coming my way right go do it your way no never do that and the other one again this isn't just for negotiation this is for life bite your tongue when you're attacked in a negotiation pause and avoid angry emotional reactions instead ask your counterpart a calibrated question just such a solid move that will keep you out of trouble you want to say something back you know I actually go I tell people you know someone starts attacking you or someone someone starts getting aggressive with you you know take a step back kind of nod your head show them that you're listening don't say anything back to them instead ask them a question you know that's going to be a good way to go forward the 738 55% rule and two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody UCLA psychology professor Albert Mayhabrian totally murdered that one you're not Persian I'm not you know how to say that if you're a Persian I don't know how to say it so what I need what I really want besides just throwing a number first I want to know what number do you think a good number is that you're gonna work really hard for and feel like you earned your money and not change that you just undervalued yourself in the past and now now all of a sudden I'm worth this much more money which means you're not gonna put in extra effort you're also talking here about if people are stuck on the money you can start talking about other things the non-monetary terms so like if you're negotiating for a job you start talking about things that don't have anything to do with money and that can be a good way to start to move the conversation forward the this is just interesting psychology the biggest thing to remember when you start when you do get to numbers you say the biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in zero inevitably feel like temporary placeholders guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of but anything you throw out that sounds less rounded say $37,263 feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart so use them to fortify your offers and she's labeling and marrying the next thing you know this this this thing comes out that the other person has no idea makes any difference changes the structuring of the whole deal now instead of talking about one film they're talking about multiple films completely changes the complexion of the the finances that are needed on the first if she go back out she's already got partial packaging on a second film like it changes everything and there's no way that she would have known to ask it and the person on the other side was well instead of 300 grand what about my castle because that's not going to do any good for a film in LA just little things like that one thing that emphasize the importance of listening is you know at one point you're talking about a case you got a guy that's you know drives to drives to Washington DC and a tractor he's gonna blow himself up he's gonna blow up some of the white ones but I just want to hit some of these highlights here let what you know your known knowns guide you but not blind you every case is new so remain flexible and adaptable black swans are leverage multipliers remember the three types of leverage and you go over these in the book positive which is the ability to give someone what they want negative the ability to hurt someone and normative using your counterparts norms to bring them around again there's more detail on the book inside the book work to understand the other sides religion what you just mentioned everybody's got a religion digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond negotiation table and into life emotional and otherwise of your counterpart that's where black black swans live you know you hear everything you hear from your counterpart you will not hear everything the first time so double check compare notes with team members use backup listeners exploit the similarity principle people are more apt to concede to someone when they share a culture someone they share a cultural similarity with you know dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground when someone seems irrational or crazy they most likely aren't faced with the situation search for constraints hidden desires and bad information and last get face time with your counterpart 10 minutes of face time often reveals than days of research pay special attention to your counterparts verbal and non verbal communication at unguarded moments at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line so really good really just awesome points that apply to me they apply to business they apply to interacting with any human obviously they apply to negotiations but you've got the black swan group this is your consulting firm and quick description of the black swan black swan theory tells us that things happen that were previously thought to be impossible or never thought of it all this is not the same as saying that sometimes things happen against a one in a million odds but rather that things never imagined do come to pass the idea of the back black swan was popularized by the same to lab in his best selling books fooled by randomness and the black swan but the term goes back much further until the 17th century people could only imagine white swans because all swans ever seen had possessed white feathers in the 17th century London it was common to refer to impossible things as black swans but when the but then the Dutch explorer William Devlamin sorry people of Holland went to Western Australia I did indeed apologies down went to Western Australia in 1697 and saw a black swan suddenly the unthinkable and unthought was real this is a crucial concept in negotiation and every negotiation session there are different kinds of information there are those things we know like our counterparts name and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations those are known knowns there are those things we are certain that exist but we don't know like possibility that the other side might get sick and leave us without another counterpart those are known unknowns and they are like poker wildcards so it could be for different reasons the short answer is yes and the longer answer is how do you align your thinking in the moment a little bit of what you mentioned earlier like if you're really interested in what the other person is saying and then you worry about evaluating after the fact you don't have to worry about the look on your face as a matter of fact if you're really interested the more interested you look the more they're going to talk so if you can separate the two things out from evaluating judging what somebody said to just being making sure you fully understand then facial expressions are not a problem the people that have a problem with them and you know your guys faces turn red making all that's a characteristic principally of the assertive negotiator who can't wait to disagree and is holding it in the highly analytical type you know the people that seem completely emotionally detached when they think you're not looking they reveal everything and like their facial expressions their body language I mean they almost sometimes they look like they're twitching and I bet you have to admit that it immediately triggered feelings of defensiveness and discomfort these feelings are often subconscious and lead to irrational concession the second use of the f bomb is more nefarious in this one your counterpart will basically accuse you of being dense or dishonest by saying we've given you a fair offer the terrible little jab meant to distract your attention away from distract your attention manipulating to giving in if you find yourself in this situation the best reaction is to simply mirror the f that has just been a lot that you fair you respond positive let the words power do to them what it was intended to do to you following that with a label seems like you're ready to provide evidence that supports that which eludes to the opening of their books or otherwise handing over information that will either contradict their claim to fairness or give you more data to work with then you had previously right away you declaw the attack the last use of the f word is my favorite because it's positive and constructive it sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation here's how I use it early on in a negotiation I say I want you to feel like you're being treated fairly at all times so please stop me at any time if I'm being unfair and will address it it's simple and clear and sets me up as an honest dealer with that statement I let people know it's okay to use the word with me if they use it honestly as a negotiator you should strive for reputation of being fair you represent reputation precede you let it precede you in a way that paves success when I read all that I was like and I'd never gotten a hostage on a phone so between how does somebody get a hostage on a phone and who the heck is getting proof of life on our hostages like there was more than one buyer like I didn't know what to do with this so the case is an ongoing 13 month long train wreck a lot of people died including two out of three of the total Americans that were taken listen to a drug dealer kidnapping in Pittsburgh a few months afterwards drug dealer on drug dealer one drug dealer's got the other drug dealer's girlfriend hostage who do you go when somebody important to you has been kidnapped even if you're a drug dealer you go to the FBI so our hostage negotiator is right around listen to the drug dealer talk to the other drug dealer and just on his own he goes hey dog how do I know she's okay and so if you know who's highly analytical if you're faced with a team of people do not talk to the analytical guy or gal but keep an eye on them you gotta kind of watch them out of the corner you're right because they're going to be rolling their eyes and they're going to be sneaking peaks at people and moments I mean like they are the most honest most unguarded body language you ever saw in your life if they don't think they're being stared at let me ask you this so I've been talking about leadership you're talking about you write about negotiation how much interaction because there's also a ton of similarities with interrogators how much interaction did you have with interrogators I mean I obviously worked with a ton of interrogators and a bunch of different organizations how much work did you do with interrogators fair amount and there's that statement is when when you were totally bought in on what was just said and as is and our co-author tall was one that pulled out the description of it being a subtle epiphany tall contributed brilliantly to the book I mean he brought a lot to the table besides just being a writer and so then as I was getting more into neuroscience I look up neuroscience the neuroscience of epiphany what neurochemicals do you get hit with you get hit with serotonin and oxytocin and oxytocin is the bonding drug so they hence people bonded to Donald Trump or any other leader you're you're bonded to Obama you're bonded to whoever has ordered the things that you believe to be completely true there's this it's a one way bond and there's a feeling of a bond and then again back to you were men's podcast you know for me just being bonded is enough and another one of his podcast he points out oxytocin and clients people to tell the truth so now not only you bonded to me you're more likely to tell me the truth and then he points out on yet another podcast serotonin the feeling of satisfaction which means you're not as demanding so if I can get it that's right out of you you're going to bond to me you're going to tell me the truth and you're going to make fewer demands what else do I want and then we don't bargain so if I got a thrown number I like to refer to as I never throw the number I'd naked if I and if otherwise I want to know where you're coming from I also want to give you a price that you want because price is a term and I need to hit the sweet spot on your price if I go too high you're not gonna over deliver you're gonna feel like you undervalued yourself and you're gonna do the same amount of work if I pay you too much I found that out the hard way if I go too low you're gonna do a lousy job and I remember thinking like how could that be I'm the nicest guy I know you know it's like what I said what I talked about earlier like me punching you in the face with the truth is not a good way to get you listen exactly echo always brings up the example of the person that says you know I'm just a direct person that's what the goal is each type has something really critical they bring to the table the the sort of I mean you gotta tell the aside where you come from otherwise you're making them gas you don't make good deals based on guesswork the analyst you gotta think things through you gotta come up with it run some number you don't have to run them all run any run some and the accommodator like so many people look at the accommodators and say that person's making tons of deals what are they doing it's in their demeanor it's in their approach the just FYI for people that are about to order this book you also kind of give how do you deal with the accommodator how do you deal with the assertive so you give both sides of the spectrum fast forward a little bit we mentioned this briefly this this Ackerman bargain bargaining But that idea, you know, for me, I'm like you, like, I don't want to be, I don't like to have like, I don't like to have to cover like lie about stuff and make stuff up. and so I saw that the idea like the impact of the highly improbable well that's what we did all the time in negotiation it's a combination of two things we're going to change ourselves and subtle little ways that the other side is never going to see and we're going to gain the upper hand we're going to steer it we're going to steer the negotiation and to the best possible outcome now that that doesn't mean that everything's going to a positive outcome and the change in the tone of voice the kidnapper drug dealer went from thinking he was in charge to being having lost all control of negotiation and not knowing it at the time and it was just a how question so then we changed all of our negotiation kidnapping strategy to how and what questions just hammering them with how and what questions because you want to test it out on the kidnapping and finally I'm coaching on another kidnapping in the Philippines coaching a brother his brother's been grabbed by a serial killer loan kidnapper only time in my entire experience with one kidnapper they're always operating gangs and the guy was a we found out after the fact because we caught him he was a multiple kidnappings and it killed at least well didn't have the evidence that he killed a hostage in another case just a ransom was paid and the hostage never appeared so there's only one conclusion we're coaching a brother again a good guy who would learn pick up fast how and what questions how and what questions how and what questions and at one point in time the kidnapper wants a daily prudence to keep the hostage alive which we had to fight over that because it's a way to test financial resources not to keep the hostage alive test the family's resources so on his own the brother says when we run out of money paying the daily amount what's going to happen and there's a silence and a serial killer on the other end of the phone says it'll be sorry there Albert we'll call him Albert Dr. Albert created the 738 55 rule only 7% of a message is based on the words while 38% comes from the tone of the voice and 55% from the speaker's body language and face while these figures mainly relate to situations where we are forming an attitude about someone the rule nonetheless offers a useful ratio for negotiators you see body language and tone of voice not words are our most powerful assessment tools important to remember that important to pay attention a lot of us a lot a lot of people your face it gives away so much and it doesn't even matter what you're saying the look that you have on your face is just giving away the way you feel and it doesn't even matter what your words are did you feel like you had to learn to you know control your facial expressions my business partner and my friend Leif Babin you know he when we first started working together when he was pissed you knew it but you don't know who has them but most important are those things we don't know that we don't know piece of information we've never imagined that would be game changing if uncovered maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail because he's leaving for a competitor these unknown unknowns are black swans so this is obviously something highly important to you since you named your company the black swan how did you stumble upon this idea the first Talib's book in 2007 a black swan got me thinking about it I like his stuff and they told me that I said this guy just promised never to kill a hostage like I had no idea that it was a lone guy I thought we were just talking to the boss didn't know he was a killer it was another case where he chopped a victim's ear off sent the ear and video of him chopping the ear off to the victims company they got paid I knew about that I've been told for a variety of reasons I'd heard about that I didn't know it was this guy take him completely out of his game with a version of what question saw another one took another guy completely out of his game with a version of the how question and a dynamic where you said we had no leverage if you thought in terms of leverage right I'm skipping ahead a little bit in the book the f word why it's so powerful when to use it and how the most powerful word in negotiations is fair as human beings were might least swayed by how much we feel we have been respected people comply with agreements if they feel they've been treated fairly and lash out if they don't once you understand what a messy emotional and destructive dynamic fairness can be you can see why fair is a tremendously powerful word and you need to use it with care in in fact of the three ways that people drop the f bomb only one is positive the most common is a judo like defensive move that destabilizes the other side this manipulation usually takes the form something like we just want was fair think back to the last time someone made this implicit accusation of unfairness to you and it is if they're giving you your right you got problems be careful with that one look for that's right next section bend their realities and and you get into this here don't compromise which is interesting thing we're going to talk through the win-win mindset pushed by so many negotiation experts is usually ineffective and often disastrous at best it satisfies neither side and if you employ it with the counterpart who has a win-lose approach you're setting yourself up to be swindled of course as we've noted previously you need to keep a cooperative rapport building a pathetic approach the kind that creates a dynamic in which deals can be made but you have to get rid of that naivete because compromise splitting the difference can lead to terrible outcomes compromise is often a bad deal and a key theme will hit in this chapter is no deal is better than a bad deal even in kidnapping yes a bad deal in kidnapping is where someone pays and no one comes out to make my point on compromise let me paint an example a woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with a suit but her husband doesn't want her he prefers brown shoes so I'm going to be honest with you that was stupid that's a dumb idea that's never going to work you didn't think this thing you know the assertive anybody that describes themselves as simply open and honest and it's always a punch in the face it's always just that approach like you the other side's got to know where you're coming from you do have to be honest but she's mirroring and labeling and out of the blue it comes out that the financier owns a castle in France which would be a great setting for the next film something she never would have brought up the financier they're talking about a film being shot in LA martial arts this and that all these other little things you know female martial artists beating up bad guys like how is she gonna say oh by the way you don't have I'm working on another film we want to it's a medieval film you don't have to have a castle in France do you like that is never going to come up ever and so how much they need to have a great party that weekend that's sort of the number that you would end up looking for I mean it's awesome splitting the differences wearing one black and one brown shoe don't compromise meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process do impulsive things that are against their best interests we talked about the F word you can bend your counterparts' reality by anchoring his starting point before you make an offer emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be when you get to numbers set an extreme anchor to make your real offer seem reasonable or use a range to seem less aggressive the real value of anything depends on what vantage point you're looking at it from and last people tend people take more risks to avoid a loss than realize a gain make sure your counterpart sees that there's something to lose by inaction that's why the website says today only you'll miss out you got a section in here that's about fast forward a little bit calibrated question calibrate your questions and we kind of discussed this earlier if we were a cordon or not and you guess he wears one black shoe and one brown shoe is this the best outcome in fact no in fact it's the worst possible outcome either of the two outcomes black or brown would have been better I'm here to call bullshit on compromise right now we don't compromise because it's right we compromise because it's easy and because it saves face we compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie distilled to his essence we compromise to be safe most people in negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain to free you are driven by their actual goals so don't settle here's a simple rule never split the difference creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk annoyance confusion and conflict accommodation and compromise produced none of that you've got to embrace the hard stuff that's where the great deals are and that's what negotiators do amen at the class amen what point did you realize that was the title of the book tall came up with that the original title was killer deals we started working with tall Brandon and I my son Brandon uncredited co author of the book and tosses but he got Steve Jobs do which is even better but you anchor those emotions the other thing you say is let the other guy go first most of the time I suggest you let the other side anchor monetary negotiations the real issues that neither side is a perfect information going on the table this means if you don't know enough to open up with confidence so this is what we hear all the time in negotiations you know you don't say the number first how much do you how much will you give me for the car and we see it constantly they're hoping something good happens at the last minute everybody's saved my colleague Derek would say you know an accommodator walk you into a minefield knowing it's a minefield hoping you don't step on a mine and so the accommodators I think are the source of why in the business world people often say hope is not a strategy because the accommodator will go with hope alone and it'll work out hope alone is probably good somewhere between 20 and 45% of the time maybe that maybe that's being generous maybe 20% of the time and they're going to remember the 20% and ignore the 80% when the world turned into a disaster so the accommodators are really are very positive people they're very upbeat well actually I don't I buy like the whole thing whatever that is $1.29 sometimes so they jack the prices some key points all negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs don't let yourself be fooled by the surface once you know that the Haitian kidnappers want party money you'll be better, you'll be miles better for beer and there's a whole section in here about that about these Haitian kidnappers you worked all kinds like dozens of cases of these Haitian kidnappers one of the things you've identified is they would like kidnap early in the week they wanted that money by Friday so they could go out and party but you got influence how do you get influence to deference and that's when we really began to dial in collectively principally my son Brandon and I got Derek Gawant very involved in the development of our thinking and we really narrowed it down to how and what is a way to really get the upper hand in a negotiation fast forward a little bit here you got a couple things that are awesome points don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation I always say when you're dealing with someone give them an out you just give them an out you can say seems like this is the best way to do it and it is so effective that the manipulators have seen the good people use it and change the dynamics that they've gotten really good at using it to cover up manipulative behavior watch out for that one got a section in here bend their reality you start going to some of the methodologies of that anchor their emotions to bend your counterparts reality you have to start with the basics of empathy so start out with an accusation with an accusation audit acknowledging all of their fears by anchoring their emotions in preparation for a loss you inflame the other side's loss aversion so that they'll jump at the chance to avoid it you talk about loss aversion people are people don't want to lose right But yeah you know what I realized about you what I might have told you this before where your your interest is like it's like an 80 20 where you like how things work for sure but only like 20 percent 80 percent is you're interested in and I remember thinking that's the guy I want talking to the White House that's the guy that I want talking to the Department of State and we're in the midst of that shilling case and the last thing that we need when we're in a forward operating base is any sort of insecurity in decision from Washington DC and when you're out there on the front lines having a guy like Captain Bill McCraven Admiral Bill McCraven holding things together back in Washington DC just ridiculously reassuring feeling that he was a great guy I don't know about it that's awesome there's a big difference that's you see it and usually it's it's when the tables and gotten turned on somebody in an unexpected way that's when they'll drop the word what does that look like a person I know who's an eminently fair person was in a real estate negotiation right after the housing market where they were at drops substantially and they got the buyer to increase the offer above market by simply saying we just want what's fair now the person that uses phrase had gotten the table tables turned on them by dropping a market so it wasn't even the buyer's fault I didn't do anything buyers following the market so the number first because it's information it's gonna it's gonna tell me it's gonna tell me data it's gonna tell me mindset where you're coming from it's gonna tell me a lot none of which am I getting if I go first so it's a general rule we don't go first again a general rule it's at some point in time to keep from going around and around around I'm gonna throw a number out but when you actually have you're having conversations with him and you've got multiple people listening right because listening is so important that if you look if you can get more more than one person you get two or three or four people listening to the conversation and they're gonna pick things up that someone else might miss and studying the transcript so you had someone on the team that realize number one he was a veteran how can we utilize that and then someone realized he was like a I don't want to say fundamentalist Christian but

Most common words

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocko podcast number 354 with Echo Charles and me,
[00:00:04] Jocko willing.
[00:00:05] Good evening Echo.
[00:00:05] Good evening.
[00:00:08] In August to 2000, the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf
[00:00:12] in the southern Philippines broadcast
[00:00:15] that had captured a CIA agent.
[00:00:18] The truth was not as newsworthy
[00:00:20] or as valuable to the rebels.
[00:00:23] Abu Sayyaf had kidnapped Jeffrey Shilling,
[00:00:26] a 24 year old American who had traveled
[00:00:29] near their base in Hollow Island.
[00:00:32] A California native, Shilling became a hostage
[00:00:35] with a $10 million price tag on his head.
[00:00:39] At the time, I was a supervisory special agent
[00:00:43] attached to the FBI's elite crisis negotiation unit,
[00:00:47] the CNU.
[00:00:48] The CNU is the equivalent
[00:00:50] of the special forces of negotiations.
[00:00:53] It's attached to the FBI's hostage rescue team, HRT.
[00:00:58] Both are national counter-terrorist response assets.
[00:01:02] They are the best of the best.
[00:01:06] I was a natural for the Shilling case.
[00:01:08] I had spent some time in the Philippines
[00:01:10] and had an extensive background in terrorism
[00:01:13] from my New York city days assigned
[00:01:15] to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, JTTF.
[00:01:20] A few days after Shilling became a hostage,
[00:01:22] my partner Chuck Regini and I flew to Manila
[00:01:25] to run the negotiations.
[00:01:28] Along with Jim Nixon,
[00:01:29] the FBI's highest official in Manila,
[00:01:31] we conferred with the top Philippine military brass.
[00:01:35] They agreed to let us guide the negotiations.
[00:01:39] Then we got down to business.
[00:01:41] One of us would take charge of the negotiation strategy
[00:01:44] for the FBI and consequently for the US government.
[00:01:48] That became my role.
[00:01:50] With the support of my colleagues,
[00:01:52] my job was to come up with the strategy,
[00:01:54] get it approved and implement it.
[00:01:58] Our principal adversary was Abu Sabaya,
[00:02:02] the rebel leader who personally negotiated
[00:02:05] for Shilling's ransom.
[00:02:07] Sabaya was a veteran of the rebel movement
[00:02:10] with a violent past.
[00:02:11] He was straight out of the movies,
[00:02:14] a terrorist sociopath killer.
[00:02:17] He had a history of rape, murder, and beheadings.
[00:02:22] He liked to record his bloody deeds on video
[00:02:25] and then send them to the Philippine media.
[00:02:28] Sabaya always wore sunglasses,
[00:02:31] a bandana, a black t-shirt, and camo pants.
[00:02:35] He thought it made him a more dashing figure.
[00:02:38] If you look for any photos of Abu Saif terrorists
[00:02:41] from this period, you will always see one in sunglasses.
[00:02:44] That's Sabaya.
[00:02:46] Sabaya loved, loved, loved the media.
[00:02:50] He had the Philippine reporters on speed dial.
[00:02:54] They'd call him and ask him questions in Tagalog,
[00:02:57] his native tongue.
[00:02:59] He would answer in English
[00:03:00] because he wanted the world to hear his voice on CNN.
[00:03:05] They should make a movie about me, he would tell reporters.
[00:03:09] In my eyes, Sabaya was a cold-blooded businessman
[00:03:13] with an ego as big as Texas, a real shark.
[00:03:17] Sabaya knew he was in the commodities game.
[00:03:22] In Jeffrey Shilling, he had an item of value.
[00:03:26] How much could he get for it?
[00:03:28] He would find out and I intended it to be a surprise
[00:03:31] he wouldn't like.
[00:03:33] As an FBI agent, I wanted to free the hostage
[00:03:36] and bring the criminal to justice.
[00:03:40] As a result of the Shilling case,
[00:03:42] I would become the FBI's lead international kidnapping
[00:03:47] negotiator.
[00:03:52] On that right there is an excerpt from a book.
[00:03:57] The book is called Never Split the Difference,
[00:04:00] which is written by a man named Chris Voss.
[00:04:03] Chris Voss spent 24 years with the FBI,
[00:04:07] where he spent time as the lead crisis negotiator
[00:04:10] for the New York City division of the FBI,
[00:04:12] was also the lead international kidnapping negotiator.
[00:04:16] He was trained as a negotiator not only by the FBI,
[00:04:20] but also by Harvard Law School and Scotland Yard,
[00:04:24] which is London's metropolitan police.
[00:04:28] He worked the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
[00:04:32] the TWA Flight 800 explosion,
[00:04:36] the kidnapping of Jill Carroll in Iraq in 2006,
[00:04:41] as well as countless other dynamic situations
[00:04:45] around the world and incredible experiences.
[00:04:50] And it's a privilege tonight to have Chris Voss with us here
[00:04:54] to discuss what he's been through and what he's learned.
[00:04:58] Chris, thanks for joining us.
[00:05:00] Thanks man, happy to be here.
[00:05:02] Yeah, it's a...
[00:05:03] By the way, if I ever have anybody else read my book,
[00:05:06] I'll have you do the reading.
[00:05:08] Let me know, let me know.
[00:05:10] I'm here to help out.
[00:05:12] Yeah, fantastic book.
[00:05:13] Yeah, if people, if you don't have this yet,
[00:05:16] it's never split the difference.
[00:05:18] The subtitle is Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.
[00:05:23] So, fantastic book.
[00:05:25] And we actually tried to do this before COVID,
[00:05:28] or maybe right before COVID, but it didn't work out.
[00:05:31] And so, glad you could finally get out here
[00:05:33] and definitely looking forward to this conversation.
[00:05:38] Before we jump into the book and all your lessons,
[00:05:41] let's get a little bit of background on you
[00:05:43] and how you ended up here today.
[00:05:45] So, where'd you grow up?
[00:05:47] Where'd you come from?
[00:05:48] Small town in Iowa.
[00:05:51] Son of Richard and Joyce Voss,
[00:05:54] my dad was a blue collar entrepreneur
[00:05:56] owned his own business.
[00:05:57] My mom was initially a stay-at-home mom.
[00:06:01] That's what they were back in those days.
[00:06:02] And then ultimately, as a kid grew up,
[00:06:05] got involved in my father's, aspects of my father's business.
[00:06:08] What was the dad's business?
[00:06:10] Oil job originally,
[00:06:12] a middleman between Shell Oil and the end user,
[00:06:16] which would usually be large farms, small companies.
[00:06:22] And then really the business, when he bought it,
[00:06:24] was home heating oil.
[00:06:27] And I can remember my father going out in the middle of the
[00:06:30] night in the middle of winter,
[00:06:31] because somebody's furnace shut down.
[00:06:32] He had to fix it, they're gonna freeze.
[00:06:34] And then after he got into the business,
[00:06:37] according to him, not independently verified,
[00:06:41] but it certainly was a case.
[00:06:44] Gas company came in and gave everybody,
[00:06:45] it had fuel oil furnaces, free natural gas services furnaces.
[00:06:52] Took away all those customers.
[00:06:53] By the time that I graduated high school,
[00:06:57] we were one of the only houses that I knew
[00:06:59] that was still burning fuel oil for heat.
[00:07:04] But he adapted, you know, you gotta adapt.
[00:07:06] He expanded his business, bought some gas stations,
[00:07:12] built some convenience stores,
[00:07:14] saw himself as much in the energy business
[00:07:17] as a fuel oil business and just adapted.
[00:07:19] And so what were you doing growing up?
[00:07:21] Were you playing sports in school?
[00:07:23] Do you like school?
[00:07:24] What was the deal there?
[00:07:25] Yeah, well, I played football and basketball.
[00:07:27] And if I wanted to run track, I was allowed.
[00:07:29] There were certain things that wasn't allowed to do.
[00:07:31] Like, well, one year I wanna play golf, you know,
[00:07:36] every high school's got a golf team.
[00:07:39] And the old man just wasn't happy.
[00:07:41] He wasn't seeing that as legitimate sporting activity
[00:07:46] that could divert me away from working for him.
[00:07:49] So, you know, I had to, my father believed,
[00:07:52] he put a roof over your head, he fed you, he clothed you.
[00:07:57] You were gonna go to work.
[00:07:58] He got paid, but yeah, you're going to work.
[00:08:01] So what were you working at the gas stations and whatnot?
[00:08:04] Mostly, the only time I ever worked at a gas station,
[00:08:08] it was for one that he didn't own,
[00:08:10] and it was a business associate wanted to hire me on.
[00:08:12] But most of the time it was, whatever needed to be done,
[00:08:15] maintenance, driving trucks, driving tractors,
[00:08:18] cutting grass, painting.
[00:08:20] Like, I painted a lot of stuff in the summertime.
[00:08:23] To this day, I hate to paint.
[00:08:25] You know, he needed a house painted, he had kids.
[00:08:30] Here's a bucket of paint, here's a brush,
[00:08:32] here's a scaffold, paint down.
[00:08:34] Get busy.
[00:08:35] Well, my favorite one was, he wanted a new garage.
[00:08:40] Wanted to build, you know, the house we bought,
[00:08:42] had a single car garage, you barely fit that one in,
[00:08:46] he wants a new garage.
[00:08:47] I'm probably about 11 or 12 at the time,
[00:08:49] my older sister's 13 or 14.
[00:08:53] He hands us crowbars and says,
[00:08:54] go out in the backyard, tear down a garage.
[00:08:57] And then, so we pretty much tear the whole thing down,
[00:09:01] and then we got the foundation left.
[00:09:03] And you gotta knock the foundation out,
[00:09:06] and the old man thinks, all right,
[00:09:08] well I'll go run a jackhammer.
[00:09:10] I'll put my 12 year old on a jackhammer on a foundation.
[00:09:14] And I don't know, I'm like, all right, dad, you know.
[00:09:18] And the foundation was so big,
[00:09:19] I couldn't break it up with a jackhammer,
[00:09:22] so he finally has to hire a contractor,
[00:09:24] and this guy comes in with a backhoe.
[00:09:26] And I'm thinking, an adult man needs a backhoe
[00:09:30] to take this out, and I'm out here
[00:09:32] with a hammer and nails on a jackhammer, and I'm 12.
[00:09:36] Jack.
[00:09:37] So you're doing good in school?
[00:09:41] Fair.
[00:09:43] I was capable of better grades than I felt like getting.
[00:09:47] Mostly a B student.
[00:09:49] Did you have interest in going to college?
[00:09:52] What was your future looking like
[00:09:54] when you were like 16 years old?
[00:09:56] College was always part of the game plan.
[00:09:59] For whatever reason, it was always accepted
[00:10:01] that all of us, older sister and two younger,
[00:10:04] accepted we were gonna go to college.
[00:10:06] Your man was gonna spring for four years of tuition.
[00:10:10] If you graduated or not, that was on you.
[00:10:12] Finite amount of money, got a certain amount of money,
[00:10:16] put in my checking account, star of every session.
[00:10:19] I spent it or not, it was up to me.
[00:10:22] And I just, and then whatever happened
[00:10:26] after that was pretty much up to us.
[00:10:29] And so where'd you end up going to college?
[00:10:31] I was State University.
[00:10:33] My older sister went there one reason ago.
[00:10:38] You know, I really idolized her growing up,
[00:10:40] and she was there sort of plowing the ground.
[00:10:42] It was far enough away from home
[00:10:44] that I wouldn't have to work in the evenings,
[00:10:47] or be expected to work on the weekends.
[00:10:50] You know, because it was a trick.
[00:10:51] She had to get out of that work radius.
[00:10:52] Had to get out of work radius.
[00:10:54] Three and a half hour drive, on a whim,
[00:10:57] he can't call me back at four,
[00:10:59] because he needs something done at five.
[00:11:01] But it was also close enough to get back
[00:11:03] on a weekend if I needed to, for whatever reason.
[00:11:06] And no wrestling for you growing up in Iowa?
[00:11:08] Ah, good observation.
[00:11:10] Nah, I wasn't into wrestling.
[00:11:12] Home of a lot of great wrestling.
[00:11:14] They gave a little bunch of folks.
[00:11:16] Iowa State Cyclones were running championship
[00:11:19] after championship in those days.
[00:11:20] The 190 pound wrestler Frank Santana, I remember him.
[00:11:26] But no, I was a basketball player.
[00:11:29] I wasn't a grand player.
[00:11:30] Those seasons clash.
[00:11:31] Now at what point did you start looking at law enforcement?
[00:11:35] Actually, when I was 16, a buddy of mine and I went
[00:11:39] and saw, based on a true story, true life movie,
[00:11:44] The Super Cops, two cops in New York.
[00:11:47] Somebody recently actually found me a DVD event
[00:11:50] sent it to me.
[00:11:53] These guys worked in bed style,
[00:11:56] back when bed style was a really bad area.
[00:11:59] White dudes, very black area, community loved them.
[00:12:04] Love them.
[00:12:05] These guys locked up bad people and the good people
[00:12:08] in the community appreciated the heck out of it.
[00:12:11] And these guys were extremely creative.
[00:12:13] I didn't realize that at the time.
[00:12:14] The other thing that really attracted me
[00:12:16] to them, complete mavericks.
[00:12:18] Like didn't pay attention to what the bosses told them.
[00:12:21] And put a lot of bad people in jail.
[00:12:22] We're very, very creative about it.
[00:12:25] And the community actually nicknamed them Batman and Robin.
[00:12:33] That's awesome, except for the dude
[00:12:34] that got stuck being Robin.
[00:12:36] Yeah, who wants to be Robin, right?
[00:12:39] But then me and my buddy saw this when I remember we were 16
[00:12:42] and we both got struck at that moment in time.
[00:12:44] We wanted to be in law enforcement.
[00:12:46] And I stayed in law enforcement as occasionally
[00:12:50] a harsh reality.
[00:12:52] And my buddy went to Phoenix,
[00:12:55] got on with police department there.
[00:12:57] And the harshness of it,
[00:12:59] he just wasn't built for it, need and last.
[00:13:02] This was the guy that saw the movie with you?
[00:13:04] Yeah.
[00:13:05] What did you study in college?
[00:13:07] Ultimately it was a business degree.
[00:13:11] They didn't call it that back then.
[00:13:12] They would call it industrial administration.
[00:13:14] But it was a business degree.
[00:13:16] And I started out originally,
[00:13:20] you know, I got in the engineering school.
[00:13:22] I switched out as soon as I was there.
[00:13:24] Switched to sociology.
[00:13:27] But then I realized that a lot of sociologists out of work,
[00:13:30] what if I changed my mind about being a cop?
[00:13:33] So I decided to go to business just to have the flexibility
[00:13:36] of going whatever direction I wanted to go.
[00:13:39] So you graduate in four years?
[00:13:40] Four, you got out in four years.
[00:13:42] And then was it straight to the police academy somewhere?
[00:13:46] Yeah, I went, well, initially,
[00:13:48] I wanted to go to Kansas City, Missouri.
[00:13:51] I had never been there.
[00:13:53] But everybody in that part of the world,
[00:13:55] the three cities for choices were principally,
[00:13:58] Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago.
[00:14:00] Now originally, I had my heart set on San Francisco.
[00:14:05] And because we had visited there,
[00:14:07] my family went there when I was about 18.
[00:14:10] I thought, this is a cool town.
[00:14:11] It's a really interesting place.
[00:14:13] And then a thing called Proposition 13 came through
[00:14:15] in California where they cut back on all the property taxes.
[00:14:21] I figured they were gonna impact
[00:14:22] the municipal budgets negatively.
[00:14:25] Probably a guy from out of state
[00:14:26] was gonna have trouble getting hired.
[00:14:28] So then I just decided to stay local.
[00:14:31] And everybody that I knew that had been to Kansas City
[00:14:33] said this is a great town.
[00:14:36] And so I just went out and applied completely out of the blue.
[00:14:40] They told me they were not hiring when I graduated.
[00:14:44] Remember when I graduated, I was really depressed
[00:14:46] because I didn't know where I was gonna go.
[00:14:48] Didn't wanna go back home and work for my father.
[00:14:51] But I had nowhere else to go.
[00:14:53] And Kansas City, although they knew internally
[00:14:58] that June 1, it was gonna be a new fiscal year
[00:15:01] and a new world, they were telling me at the time,
[00:15:04] now we got no idea when we're gonna hire.
[00:15:05] Just no idea.
[00:15:07] This is me.
[00:15:08] So they had to have known they were gonna hire you.
[00:15:11] And a new fiscal year came in,
[00:15:13] they started a new class, I was in a class.
[00:15:16] How'd they notify you?
[00:15:18] Oh, interesting.
[00:15:19] I may have gotten a letter.
[00:15:20] I don't even actually remember.
[00:15:23] So you didn't think you had a job,
[00:15:25] then all of a sudden you got a job?
[00:15:26] Suddenly I had a job.
[00:15:27] And then in the meantime, I'm back working for my dad,
[00:15:30] driving a truck.
[00:15:31] Your dad's like, your life plotted out for you.
[00:15:34] Like you're fine, kid.
[00:15:36] And also, like just to get into law enforcement,
[00:15:40] I remember I applied for Sheriff's Department,
[00:15:44] got turned down, and then I had done an internship
[00:15:48] with the Highway Department of Public Safety.
[00:15:51] And I can't remember exactly why.
[00:15:55] I don't think I wanted to be in Iowa.
[00:15:57] I didn't wanna be in Iowa Highway Patrol.
[00:16:00] If I was gonna be uniform, I wanna be in a city.
[00:16:03] And I remember being told from complete people
[00:16:06] in the Department of Public Safety,
[00:16:08] like you could walk right into the Highway Patrol
[00:16:11] because I'd had an internship with them the year before.
[00:16:14] So they knew me, they knew I was an honest guy.
[00:16:16] And that however innovative I was,
[00:16:19] I also really wasn't a rule breaker.
[00:16:22] You know, I was gonna follow the rules.
[00:16:25] But I didn't wanna be a Highway Patrolman.
[00:16:28] So I held up for Kansas City,
[00:16:29] wanna be in a city and got in there.
[00:16:31] So you end up at Kansas City,
[00:16:33] how's that like going to the police academy?
[00:16:37] Is that a boot camp scenario?
[00:16:39] Is it a gentleman's course?
[00:16:41] Is it you go home in the afternoon?
[00:16:43] Are you staying in barracks?
[00:16:44] How does that all work?
[00:16:45] Yeah, they had just moved the police academy
[00:16:47] into a local community college,
[00:16:49] I think for budgetary reasons.
[00:16:51] They had their own academy in its own standalone campus
[00:16:56] where they controlled all aspects of it.
[00:17:00] And for whatever reason, which I'm sure is budgetary,
[00:17:03] they abandoned that.
[00:17:04] So we're in a community college,
[00:17:07] combination of classroom, not quite boot camp,
[00:17:10] plus you're going home to your own apartment every night.
[00:17:13] They six months PT every day.
[00:17:20] And something that I think law enforcement
[00:17:23] is really a lost site of,
[00:17:24] like the neck restraint, the carotid restraint.
[00:17:27] We worked on that every single day for six months.
[00:17:34] Like nobody that I ever worked with
[00:17:38] ever heard anybody by misapplication of the neck restraint.
[00:17:42] And they knew that it was potentially lethal.
[00:17:45] And if there was one thing they were going to do,
[00:17:46] we're going to be in condition relatively speaking,
[00:17:49] not sealed condition, but in condition.
[00:17:52] But we weren't going to hurt anybody
[00:17:53] putting the neck restraint on them.
[00:17:55] We worked on that every day for six months.
[00:17:57] Yeah, it's just a horrible thing to see happening right now
[00:18:01] with law enforcement.
[00:18:02] I mean, I talked to a lot of police officers
[00:18:03] around the country and in most places right now,
[00:18:07] you cannot use a neck restraint.
[00:18:10] It's considered lethal force and you cannot use it.
[00:18:14] And as anybody that knows anything,
[00:18:17] it is absolutely the best way to get someone
[00:18:21] under control that's out of control without hurting them.
[00:18:23] And if somebody had to restrain my wife or my daughter,
[00:18:29] I would beg that they please use a neck restraint
[00:18:32] because they'll be fine.
[00:18:35] So it's great to hear that at some point in time,
[00:18:39] you were trained in that way and you did it every day.
[00:18:41] So you learn how effective it is.
[00:18:43] You also learn what to be careful of.
[00:18:48] That makes sense.
[00:18:49] Like one cop and I, we had to corral this gorilla
[00:18:54] and just, you know, Caucasian just for the record.
[00:18:58] But this monstrous dude at the mental hospital,
[00:19:04] which means like normally somebody is nuts and big as that
[00:19:08] once you corral him, you take him to the mental hospital.
[00:19:11] So when the mental hospital calls you
[00:19:12] to get somebody out of there, you know, you got a problem.
[00:19:15] If we wouldn't have been able to choke that guy out
[00:19:17] with the proper carotid restraint,
[00:19:20] I don't know how we'd have got him out of there
[00:19:21] without shooting him.
[00:19:23] Like, and we got him out of there completely unhooked.
[00:19:25] Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:28] That's a horrible escalation to go from,
[00:19:33] oh, this guy's a problem and now I have to shoot him
[00:19:36] because I don't know what else to do
[00:19:37] or I'm not allowed to do anything else.
[00:19:39] That escalation from this guy's gonna be perfect,
[00:19:41] literally perfectly fine to now he's dead
[00:19:44] because I didn't have, I wasn't authorized to use the tools
[00:19:47] that I should be authorized to use
[00:19:48] and should be trained properly.
[00:19:51] That's awful.
[00:19:52] So it's a six month school.
[00:19:54] Six month Academy in a community college
[00:19:59] trying to maintain quasi military discipline,
[00:20:03] which most law enforcement kind of quasi.
[00:20:06] And it was, yeah, it was good classroom,
[00:20:08] working out occasionally a couple of times a week
[00:20:11] going through the range.
[00:20:12] And like when you're saying classroom,
[00:20:17] is this like four or five hours of classroom a day?
[00:20:19] You learned about the laws,
[00:20:20] you learned about what you can and cannot do?
[00:20:22] Yeah, all that kind of stuff.
[00:20:24] Combination, constitutional law,
[00:20:28] some un-understandable probable cause,
[00:20:32] administrative rules and regulations
[00:20:35] that we're gonna have to know just to get by on the street.
[00:20:39] You know, I can remember the first time
[00:20:41] the standard report form was a form 189.
[00:20:45] And so they say,
[00:20:47] we're gonna learn how to fill out a form 189.
[00:20:49] I remember thinking like, I can remember 189 forms.
[00:20:52] I was relieved that I didn't have to memorize 189 forms.
[00:20:59] So did you feel pretty good?
[00:21:01] Did you feel pretty prepared when you ended up,
[00:21:03] you know, you get your badge, you go to the street?
[00:21:06] How did you feel like you were pretty prepared for it?
[00:21:08] Well, I felt like I was, certainly did.
[00:21:13] There were a couple things that took getting used to like,
[00:21:16] initially I was so nervous,
[00:21:18] my break-in officer was scared to let me drive.
[00:21:21] And then, you know, the complexity of being on patrol,
[00:21:26] listening to the radio, and actually being on patrol.
[00:21:30] Most, initially you can't do both.
[00:21:33] So if you're really paying attention to your environment,
[00:21:35] if you're looking around, if you're listening,
[00:21:38] you're not gonna hear the radio.
[00:21:39] And finally somebody's gonna come by and say,
[00:21:42] we've been calling you for 20 minutes.
[00:21:45] But then, and then you just keep doing it every day,
[00:21:48] every day, every day, and then suddenly something clicks
[00:21:51] and you're pulling in all the information
[00:21:52] and you're dialing.
[00:21:54] So you have a break-in officer,
[00:21:55] is that the term you used?
[00:21:57] Yeah, yeah, for two months,
[00:22:00] they, you know, they wanna see,
[00:22:03] but they're not, they're gonna turn you loose.
[00:22:04] Kansas City at the time ran one-man car patrols.
[00:22:08] So when you got cut loose off break-in,
[00:22:11] you were riding around by yourself.
[00:22:14] Which is, for a variety of reasons,
[00:22:15] actually I'm hearing now,
[00:22:17] really a good patrol strategy.
[00:22:19] Why is that?
[00:22:20] What I just heard recently,
[00:22:22] unsourced,
[00:22:25] that a male police officer is less likely
[00:22:32] to overreact to a challenge
[00:22:34] if he's by himself.
[00:22:36] And if there's two males there,
[00:22:39] two male police officers at the initial challenge,
[00:22:43] you're a little more likely to overreact
[00:22:46] because there's another male there
[00:22:47] that you're afraid of losing face in front of.
[00:22:50] I don't know how true that is.
[00:22:53] It makes sense to me for a variety of reasons.
[00:22:55] There's some more complexity to it.
[00:22:58] You know, I held off before talking to you
[00:23:01] about the different people you've had on.
[00:23:03] Huberman, a huge Andrew Huberman fan.
[00:23:06] And I saw you had him in.
[00:23:08] I think he's brilliant, he's brilliant, dude.
[00:23:10] I had the good fortune to have lunch with him one day.
[00:23:15] And so I'm very much into the neuroscience aspects these days.
[00:23:20] And on one of his podcasts,
[00:23:22] he was talking about, again,
[00:23:25] separating out the problems with law enforcement.
[00:23:29] And it happened to be a podcast
[00:23:30] on love and relationships, I think.
[00:23:33] And as I recall, he's talking about
[00:23:35] the basic four neurochemical hormones that drive us.
[00:23:39] And as I recall it primarily,
[00:23:42] testosterone, serotonin, oxytocin, serotonin.
[00:23:47] And he said, if you're essentially a testosterone type,
[00:23:52] you're more likely to see things as a challenge.
[00:23:56] So let's get out of race and get into type.
[00:24:01] You got a testosterone-driven comp,
[00:24:03] stopping a testosterone-driven male,
[00:24:07] and they're both gonna see almost everything
[00:24:09] that happens as a challenge.
[00:24:11] You can expect that to turn into a downward spiral,
[00:24:14] absent, better training.
[00:24:17] It's got nothing to do with race.
[00:24:18] The dynamic that I thought you were gonna say is,
[00:24:22] if I'm pulling you over and I'm by myself,
[00:24:26] well, I'm by myself.
[00:24:27] So I better de-escalate, right?
[00:24:29] I better be thinking.
[00:24:30] That's another point, yeah.
[00:24:31] Whereas if I'm with Echo and he's my partner,
[00:24:33] and you start getting mouthy,
[00:24:34] well, you know, we're gonna kick your ass.
[00:24:36] I feel more confident, more, just like in a bar, right?
[00:24:39] The guy that's in the bar that's by himself,
[00:24:42] he's not causing any problems.
[00:24:43] It's the guy that's with three of his friends,
[00:24:45] it's all of a sudden he's getting mouthy.
[00:24:46] Right, no, that's exactly right.
[00:24:48] And most police departments are running two-man patrols,
[00:24:53] two-person patrols.
[00:24:55] Yeah, it's weird for me because in my background,
[00:24:57] in the SEAL teams, if any possible way,
[00:25:02] you have a buddy with you.
[00:25:04] As a matter of fact, if you don't have a buddy with you,
[00:25:06] you're kinda getting in trouble.
[00:25:07] So you're always, cause you can't watch your back,
[00:25:10] you just can't.
[00:25:12] So you always have someone with you.
[00:25:14] So I've always thought to myself,
[00:25:16] man, if I was a police officer,
[00:25:17] I'd really like to have a partner.
[00:25:20] Well, you're trained too.
[00:25:21] I mean, you're trained to not let your negative emotions
[00:25:24] get out of control.
[00:25:26] Yeah, I would definitely, you know,
[00:25:29] this is the same thing in the SEAL teams.
[00:25:30] I mean, you gotta learn to de-escalate things.
[00:25:33] And just being in a leadership position,
[00:25:34] you gotta learn to de-escalate things
[00:25:35] cause someone comes in and they're mad about something.
[00:25:37] And if you're in a leadership position,
[00:25:39] and all you do is go back at them,
[00:25:41] see they, you know, boss, this plan sucks.
[00:25:44] And you think, oh, you're challenging me?
[00:25:46] Instead of saying, oh, what sucks about the plan?
[00:25:48] Do you wanna make some adjustments to it?
[00:25:50] Like that's what you do.
[00:25:51] That's how you de-escalate it.
[00:25:53] You don't say, well, you don't understand
[00:25:54] the whole problem, there you go.
[00:25:56] So, yeah, that takes some training.
[00:26:00] So that takes some mental gymnastics
[00:26:03] to get to a point where you can do that.
[00:26:06] So now you're out there in Kansas City,
[00:26:10] a couple months, was there any moment
[00:26:11] where you felt like, oh, I messed up?
[00:26:15] Or did you ever feel like, okay, now I'm a cop?
[00:26:19] You know what I'm saying?
[00:26:20] No, I loved it.
[00:26:21] My first year there, I loved it.
[00:26:23] I absolutely loved it.
[00:26:24] I was in a commercial area, you know,
[00:26:28] a fair amount of street life, a little more fast paced.
[00:26:34] And that suited me.
[00:26:35] I'm not a real meticulous, super organized, super patient.
[00:26:42] By nature or nurture, I'm not sure which, but neither one.
[00:26:47] So my first year I had a ball.
[00:26:49] I mean, I had a ball.
[00:26:50] I mean, I was putting bad guys in jail.
[00:26:53] You know, I really loved it.
[00:26:55] I can even remember my parents came to visit me one time
[00:27:00] and we met at the, they came by the precinct
[00:27:04] towards the end of my shift.
[00:27:05] And I was told they were there, so we drove up
[00:27:08] and my mom said when she saw me get out of the car,
[00:27:11] she said the way you moved when you got out of the car,
[00:27:13] I saw a cop get out of that car.
[00:27:16] So then after I was there for a year,
[00:27:18] they switched me to a residential area,
[00:27:21] which is a different kind of work.
[00:27:24] You know, you're not making,
[00:27:25] locking up multiple guys in a night.
[00:27:28] You're looking for residential burglars.
[00:27:31] It's much more painstaking, meticulous patient work.
[00:27:36] And so I went from an area that I just loved
[00:27:39] to an area that I just wasn't, I wasn't built for.
[00:27:42] And I started getting bored when I was there.
[00:27:45] And is that when you started looking
[00:27:48] for something else to do?
[00:27:49] Well, you know, I don't know that it looked so much
[00:27:53] for something else to do.
[00:27:54] I was gonna, I was planning on,
[00:27:55] I wanted to become a member of the SWAT team.
[00:27:58] And it took three years to get on the SWAT team.
[00:28:02] So I'm there, you know, two-ish years.
[00:28:06] And the guys, I knew most of the guys that were
[00:28:09] on the SWAT team and they said,
[00:28:10] well, you know, put in for the selection process,
[00:28:13] you know, just go through it.
[00:28:14] If you put in, then the commanders,
[00:28:16] cams and sergeants are gonna get to know
[00:28:18] that you're interested, they're gonna keep an eye on you.
[00:28:19] Then next time around, you got a better shot.
[00:28:23] So I, cool.
[00:28:24] So I put in for the selection process,
[00:28:27] ended up number one on the list.
[00:28:30] Number one, no, shocked everybody.
[00:28:32] So the captains went to the Lieutenant Colonel
[00:28:36] and said, let's wave the three-year rule
[00:28:38] on number one guy here, isn't gonna have three years
[00:28:41] for 10 more months and Lieutenant Colonel said,
[00:28:45] I don't care, rules are rules, we're not waving them.
[00:28:49] So I'm gonna precinct them, board by.
[00:28:54] They're taking everybody on the list under me one at a time.
[00:28:59] And there was even the discussion of the possibility
[00:29:02] that if they took everybody, they still wouldn't take me.
[00:29:05] They'd be a whole new selection process.
[00:29:08] So I'm a little annoyed by this.
[00:29:09] And then my father says,
[00:29:13] what you think about federal?
[00:29:15] Oh my God, I'm happy in Kansas City.
[00:29:18] So he introduces me to this guy with the Secret Service.
[00:29:21] And I talked to this guy and he says,
[00:29:24] you know, I've traveled all over the world
[00:29:27] with the Secret Service.
[00:29:30] And I remember thinking, somebody paid you
[00:29:34] and paid for your flights and paid for your hotel
[00:29:38] to go all over the world.
[00:29:40] Like I'm from Iowa.
[00:29:42] Like I, you know, I'd seen Canada from a distance.
[00:29:45] That was the extent of my international travel.
[00:29:47] So I'm like, that sounds cool.
[00:29:49] And so I didn't know one federal agency from another.
[00:29:53] No idea.
[00:29:55] Secret Service, I would go down there, we're not hiring.
[00:29:58] Not hiring.
[00:29:59] So I see an article in a newspaper,
[00:30:01] FBI's first billion dollar budget.
[00:30:04] I knew enough about budgets that I thought
[00:30:06] it's gotta be salaries to gotta be hiring.
[00:30:10] I went down, I put in, it was the first
[00:30:12] of a three year hiring push.
[00:30:14] And I got in.
[00:30:18] And just like that.
[00:30:18] So how long is it between when you get accepted
[00:30:21] and when you're going to the FBI Academy?
[00:30:25] Yeah, well, October 31st,
[00:30:30] I'd had three years on a police department
[00:30:32] and I would have gone to the SWAT team.
[00:30:36] The bureau hired me on October 15th.
[00:30:39] And I remember, you know, I'm a dumb 20 something year old.
[00:30:46] I put in for the bureau.
[00:30:49] And I remember literally telling people, you know,
[00:30:52] whoever offers me a position first.
[00:30:56] SWAT team comes, I'm going with a SWAT team.
[00:30:58] The bureau comes, I'm going with the bureau.
[00:31:00] And then they kept the police department
[00:31:06] and had the chief at the time hated the FBI
[00:31:10] with a passion, hated the FBI.
[00:31:13] So they had a rule that if you left the police department,
[00:31:18] the only job you couldn't come back from
[00:31:23] was if you became an FBI agent.
[00:31:25] Now you go take a job as a dog catcher, they take it back.
[00:31:28] You go take a job, you know, think of something,
[00:31:30] a hairdresser, you know, I don't know what,
[00:31:33] but the only job, and in my accident interview,
[00:31:35] they literally told me, they said,
[00:31:37] you understand you can never come back
[00:31:39] if you join the bureau.
[00:31:40] Mike, well, that's not my intention to come back.
[00:31:43] But so consequently, I had to keep my application a secret
[00:31:47] till it was in the final stages.
[00:31:48] They couldn't go interview any of my commanders
[00:31:51] until they were sure that they were gonna hire me
[00:31:54] at the last minute.
[00:31:56] And you know, that led, I was still a mouthy 20 something.
[00:31:58] So that led to a couple of problems
[00:32:00] as I was going to the police department.
[00:32:02] What's the beef?
[00:32:03] Where's the beef?
[00:32:04] Did this guy have a specific beef with the FBI?
[00:32:08] Was it like a case where the feds came in
[00:32:11] like straight out of a movie?
[00:32:12] He had jurisdiction.
[00:32:16] Been seen talking on the street with ladies of the evening.
[00:32:23] And that a couple of bureau guys spotted him
[00:32:28] on the street with these ladies of the evening
[00:32:33] on the way to a meeting.
[00:32:36] And it made it back to the city council
[00:32:39] cause the agents were wondering
[00:32:41] whether or not they could trust the guy.
[00:32:44] And they said, you know, I don't work with this guy.
[00:32:47] And then he went on to like the FBI,
[00:32:49] this is how bad it got under this guy.
[00:32:52] I don't know if you're familiar with the FBI National Academy.
[00:32:55] But if you get sent to the National Academy,
[00:32:57] the Bureau pays all your expenses,
[00:32:59] pays for your flights,
[00:33:01] like doesn't cost an agency a dime
[00:33:04] to send somebody to the National Academy.
[00:33:06] And it's a stepping stone in a lot of police departments
[00:33:09] to becoming chief of the next promotion.
[00:33:11] It's a big deal.
[00:33:12] Yeah.
[00:33:13] I spoke at the last FBI National Academy meeting.
[00:33:16] Yeah, it was awesome.
[00:33:18] So I get there in the FBI Academy, you know, October 15th.
[00:33:23] And they start talking about how they pay all expenses
[00:33:26] for cops and I'm thinking,
[00:33:29] nobody from Kansas City has come here in 10 years.
[00:33:32] It can't be that it's free.
[00:33:36] Like, nah, it's free.
[00:33:37] That's how much this guy hated the FBI.
[00:33:41] So you get picked up for the FBI,
[00:33:43] you show up to the Academy, how's the Academy?
[00:33:47] Yeah, it was good.
[00:33:49] You know, running, shooting,
[00:33:51] mostly academic, the physical aspects of it
[00:33:58] were not super challenging.
[00:34:00] You could, if it would help you, at the time,
[00:34:03] you could be in no condition at all
[00:34:05] and they'd whip you into shape.
[00:34:06] They ended up having problems with that later on.
[00:34:11] And so now you can't get in unless you're
[00:34:13] at least in minimal physical condition.
[00:34:15] Got it.
[00:34:16] But you could come in and be fat completely out of shape.
[00:34:20] If you put in the effort, you'd meet the minimums.
[00:34:23] And they weren't huge.
[00:34:25] Like, FBI agents are not wrestling people to the ground
[00:34:28] on a regular basis.
[00:34:29] So they want you to be physically capable,
[00:34:32] but, you know, it was more rigorous than a police department
[00:34:35] because you might get into a wrestling match
[00:34:37] with somebody every day.
[00:34:39] And the Bureau's tactics is to outman, outgun the bad guys
[00:34:44] so that physical confrontations are unnecessary.
[00:34:47] So they want you to be able to handle yourself,
[00:34:49] but it's not that big of a deal.
[00:34:50] They really want you to do the classroom work.
[00:34:53] They want you to be able to shoot well.
[00:34:55] My shooting improved significantly from when I was there.
[00:34:58] And it was good solid 16 weeks.
[00:35:01] It was transformative.
[00:35:03] How are you looking at, because you're a cop
[00:35:05] coming off the main streets.
[00:35:07] And how are you looking at the college kids?
[00:35:09] They're like fun with that interaction?
[00:35:13] Yeah, I was a lot more harsh, so to speak.
[00:35:18] I was more aggressive, more blunt than the vast majority of them were.
[00:35:23] I was, and they come from all walks of life
[00:35:27] and they're going to turn them into agents.
[00:35:28] But I was, you know, I was a street cop.
[00:35:30] What percentage of people are previous cops rolling in there?
[00:35:33] Pretty small.
[00:35:34] Pretty small.
[00:35:35] At the time they hired in five categories.
[00:35:40] I was copster in the modified category, which is all others.
[00:35:44] Like you're not a lawyer.
[00:35:45] You're not an accountant.
[00:35:47] You're not a scientist.
[00:35:48] You're not a female.
[00:35:50] You're not a minority.
[00:35:52] You're not any others.
[00:35:53] You're not a language.
[00:35:54] You're not already fluent.
[00:35:57] So everybody else goes into a large category, modified,
[00:36:00] and it's a more competitive, theoretically, just more people there.
[00:36:06] And I was modified.
[00:36:07] So not that many cops.
[00:36:08] Did you have any challenges when you were there?
[00:36:11] Or is anything hard for you?
[00:36:13] No, I don't think so.
[00:36:15] Nothing there then.
[00:36:16] I mean, I was already in decent condition, took care of myself pretty well.
[00:36:20] I could study when I felt like it, and I already knew how to shoot.
[00:36:23] Do people get kicked out of the academy?
[00:36:25] Like, what percentage of people make it through?
[00:36:27] I mean, they got a good screening program, so I'm sure it's not that many.
[00:36:31] Yeah, it's even better now.
[00:36:36] And no, not that many did.
[00:36:38] Not that many did.
[00:36:40] Like if you got caught lying about anything, you should be shown the door.
[00:36:45] Any cheating should be shown the door.
[00:36:50] They had a problem with physical conditioning, because they tried to,
[00:36:55] they would enforce physical conditioning rules in the academy,
[00:37:00] but they're not, once you join, were actually in a field office as an agent.
[00:37:05] And somebody brought up, well, if legally you're full FBI agents
[00:37:10] from the moment you walk in the door, you shouldn't get fired from the academy
[00:37:15] on something you won't get fired from if you're in a field office.
[00:37:20] And you shouldn't be fattened out of shape in a field office.
[00:37:26] I just weren't firing people for that.
[00:37:28] So then they just raised the physical minimums to get in the door.
[00:37:34] Are you, when you're there,
[00:37:36] so is everyone getting trained just to be an agent?
[00:37:41] And is there, do you go to specialty training after that?
[00:37:44] So if I'm an accountant and they think I'm going to be looking at tax fraud,
[00:37:48] do I go there, I become an agent, and then I go to an advanced school to be a tax fraud guy?
[00:37:55] Pretty much exactly, yeah.
[00:37:57] The theory then, and I think it's still pretty true now,
[00:38:00] like being an FBI agent first, specialize afterwards.
[00:38:02] We've got to make sure that you understand how to be a generalist before you, you know, you follow your bliss for lack of a better time.
[00:38:12] Like somebody's breaking a law on every cool thing you could think of.
[00:38:19] Like if you were into collecting postage stamps, somebody's engaged in an act of criminal enterprise,
[00:38:27] making money from kind of a postage, I get a matter.
[00:38:31] So the cool thing about the FBI is that ultimately, if you take your time, you can have the best time investigating crimes,
[00:38:42] round stuff you're really interested in.
[00:38:45] But if I speak Spanish or I speak Russian, are they going to throw me into an assignment where this is my main gig as soon as I get done?
[00:38:56] Spanish guys for a while.
[00:38:58] Everybody had that if you got hired in the Spanish program, everybody was going to have to do a stint in Puerto Rico.
[00:39:07] Those were the only ones at the time.
[00:39:09] Puerto Rico's Bureau's got its hands full in Puerto Rico.
[00:39:13] Puerto Rico is doesn't know if it wants to be a state or a commonwealth, you know, infrastructure problems on the one hand.
[00:39:24] Still, you know, back in my time in the Bureau, still a couple of active groups that engaging in violence for independence.
[00:39:35] So this just crazy combination of very difficult things to work in Puerto Rico.
[00:39:42] So if you're a Spanish speaker, you're going to do time in Puerto Rico.
[00:39:46] That was the only language.
[00:39:47] So as a normal agent, what would for you, for instance, do you get any say in where you're going and what you're getting assigned to?
[00:39:55] No.
[00:39:56] They're just going to give you what they're going to give you?
[00:39:58] Not then.
[00:39:59] At then the Bureau's policy, which made complete sense, like starting your life over as an FBI agent, it's a big jump.
[00:40:08] And the easiest way effectively is to go into a witness security program.
[00:40:12] It's a complete new identity, no ties to your old identity at all, because it's the easiest way to become an FBI agent.
[00:40:20] Like nobody, nobody, you're not around people you went to high school with.
[00:40:23] You're not around your neighbors, you're not even around family.
[00:40:26] Oh, so you're saying not literally like it's witness protection, but they take you and they're not going to send you back to where you're from.
[00:40:34] They're going to send you to some other city so you don't have to run into the people you used to know.
[00:40:39] You're going to be, it's a new life.
[00:40:41] That was back then.
[00:40:42] Now the problem with that, it was a very expensive.
[00:40:45] I'm in Kansas City, they sent me to Pittsburgh for two years.
[00:40:49] They get me ready to go to one of the major offices.
[00:40:52] Is this what they actually did with you?
[00:40:53] Yeah.
[00:40:54] So this is your first assignment is Pittsburgh?
[00:40:55] Two years in Pittsburgh.
[00:40:56] You get some kind of a special assignment like you're going to be working gang, you're going to be working drug, you're going to be, or you just working.
[00:41:03] Most offices start you out working applicants because you got to get used to laying the credentials on somebody in a low stress environment.
[00:41:14] So if you're doing a background investigation, you're walking into a bank because somebody used to work in a bank once you become an agent or something else where the background's required.
[00:41:24] Jeez, that's not the rush you were looking for was it?
[00:41:26] It's a little slow to start out with, but you know, the first couple of times, you know, crazy things where you hold your creds up in front of somebody, you're used to that.
[00:41:34] Or if you're going into a bank to lock somebody up, that's a whole different.
[00:41:39] So they warm you up in applicants and then depend upon where you are, where you're going to get assigned to.
[00:41:45] I initially get assigned to foreign counterintelligence, FCI, working spies, which is not for me.
[00:41:52] Again, that's slow meticulous work.
[00:41:56] And so I, within rules, now I'm scheming on how to get out of there.
[00:42:03] You get there, you get assigned this foreign counterintelligence.
[00:42:07] You already know this is really not your gig.
[00:42:10] So what's your scam?
[00:42:11] What do you run?
[00:42:12] How do you try and maneuver?
[00:42:13] Well, as it turns out, the guy's ahead of the office, his kid is getting ready to go to college in Iowa State.
[00:42:24] So I'm not that far from out of Iowa State.
[00:42:27] I'm like, look, you know, I'll connect you with some friends.
[00:42:30] You know, we'll help make sure your landing is a soft landing.
[00:42:35] And, you know, I help look out for his kid.
[00:42:37] Building some relationships.
[00:42:39] Relationship building.
[00:42:41] And so then he initially, I want to go to the drug squad, drug and organized crime.
[00:42:46] The different choices.
[00:42:47] They got a bank robbery squad, great squad.
[00:42:50] I got no shot at the bank robbery squad, drug and organized crime or white collar.
[00:42:55] So let me do the drugs and organized crime.
[00:42:58] This guy, I'm told he's going to send me a drug and organized crime.
[00:43:04] And then when the transfer comes through, I'm on surveillance, which ended up being a great thing.
[00:43:10] It was better than FCI.
[00:43:13] But then you, you know, that's that assignment played into where I ended up in New York and surveillance is you get experiment with stuff.
[00:43:21] And, and all the field divisions surveillance is a light undercover that you got, you got a name, different last name.
[00:43:30] You got the ID, you got credit cards.
[00:43:32] And even if you got somebody you're following, whether it's a drug dealer or a spy gets on a plane,
[00:43:39] you got to go with them.
[00:43:40] You got to be able to pay for it.
[00:43:42] You know, you got to be able to go.
[00:43:45] So I got a chance to do some undercover work there also because then they're borrowing the guys and the surveillance teams.
[00:43:52] You've already got an undercover backstop.
[00:43:54] You got by do drug buys.
[00:43:57] And that's when I found out to be an undercover is the life or living.
[00:44:02] And it didn't fit me.
[00:44:05] Didn't suit me.
[00:44:06] Some, some people it's fine.
[00:44:08] It works for you.
[00:44:10] But lying for a living didn't work for me.
[00:44:12] And undercover sounds sexy.
[00:44:14] But he wants to do undercover.
[00:44:15] I mean, it sounds sexy.
[00:44:16] I want to get that one to buy drugs.
[00:44:18] You know, I want to go in and organize crime.
[00:44:20] I want to do all this stuff.
[00:44:22] And until you try it, something that sounds sexy, you don't really know if it's for you.
[00:44:27] So I got a chance to try it a couple of, a few times in Pittsburgh.
[00:44:31] And I just realized it just wasn't for me.
[00:44:34] I had two friends.
[00:44:37] One of them went to the FBI.
[00:44:40] The, or that was trying to go from the SEAL teams to the FBI.
[00:44:43] The other one was going to another agency inside the government.
[00:44:47] And they both went to the screening.
[00:44:49] And the guy that was going to the FBI comes back.
[00:44:51] He said, God, I took the freaking lie detector test.
[00:44:53] That thing was crazy.
[00:44:55] You know, as soon as they, they said, pick a number between one and five and tell us, you know, don't tell us the number when we ask you if it's the number.
[00:45:02] And he goes, okay.
[00:45:03] And so he's, you know, thinking of three and they go, is it one?
[00:45:06] And he goes, no.
[00:45:07] And the, the, the thing's all flat.
[00:45:09] He goes, is it two?
[00:45:10] And he goes, no.
[00:45:11] And as soon as he says that, he goes, the thing starts going wild.
[00:45:14] Is it three?
[00:45:15] He said it's off.
[00:45:16] He goes, they knew exactly.
[00:45:17] Because I told him that.
[00:45:18] And, and he was one of those guys like he just wasn't comfortable lying.
[00:45:22] And it just, it just called him out.
[00:45:24] Now my other friend who went to another agency, he comes back from his interview.
[00:45:28] And he goes, yeah, I took that lie detector test.
[00:45:30] And I go, how was that?
[00:45:31] He goes, I flat lied it.
[00:45:32] And the, the, he said, he said, he said, you know, I'm not lying.
[00:45:35] He said, he just, yeah, he just, I, that thing couldn't, he, I just, I just blew through
[00:45:39] it.
[00:45:40] And here's the thing.
[00:45:41] I actually don't know if he was lying, because he lied a lot.
[00:45:43] This guy, you know, he was one of those guys that told like small, small lies all the time.
[00:45:47] You know, he's talking to a girl.
[00:45:48] He's telling a crazy story.
[00:45:49] He's talking to some other dude.
[00:45:50] He's telling some, even when he's talking to you, you know, you know, those kind of
[00:45:54] friends that you have where the, you know, they're kind of lying about stuff.
[00:45:57] Like, you know, you're good with it.
[00:45:59] It's just white lies, but it's all the time.
[00:46:02] He was one of those guys.
[00:46:03] And so I kind of believed him when he told me he flat-lined the thing.
[00:46:06] You probably, yeah.
[00:46:07] But he may have been even lying about that.
[00:46:09] I'm not sure.
[00:46:11] But that idea, you know, for me, I'm like you, like, I don't want to be, I don't like to
[00:46:17] have like, I don't like to have to cover like lie about stuff and make stuff up.
[00:46:21] And it just doesn't sit well with me.
[00:46:23] I wouldn't be a good undercover guy.
[00:46:26] So how long did you have to do that for?
[00:46:28] I was, I wore surveillance for about a year and a half.
[00:46:32] Now, a lot of times you're just straight up sitting in like the plumbing van on the
[00:46:37] corner, with a camera, taking pictures.
[00:46:41] That's what you're doing.
[00:46:42] Yeah.
[00:46:43] Or even if you're in a chase vehicle, where you're following them, like they're moving
[00:46:47] for of an eight, 10 hour shift, they're moving for an hour max.
[00:46:51] So you're sitting around no matter what.
[00:46:54] So this is still not what you came in to do?
[00:46:56] No, yeah, it wasn't.
[00:46:58] You know, I'm, and I'm, I'm buying my time in Pittsburgh at the time because I knew that,
[00:47:03] you know, I'm going to be out of there soon.
[00:47:06] What is it a two year assignments that you guys get roughly at the time it was roughly
[00:47:10] two years for the movie on to one of the top offices.
[00:47:13] They called it the top 12 the time, but everybody was going to New York at the time.
[00:47:19] Every FBI agent, everyone in the country got paid the same amount of money.
[00:47:22] If you were, if you an agent in Kansas City, if you're an agent in my hometown,
[00:47:26] Mount Pleasant, Iowa, you got paid the exact same amount of money somebody in New York
[00:47:31] got paid.
[00:47:32] So consequently, there were people in New York were quitting right and left.
[00:47:35] They were having trouble staff in the office.
[00:47:37] And they said, look, you're, you're going to New York.
[00:47:40] I mean, the orders aren't here yet, but nine out of 10 of you coming out of this class,
[00:47:45] you guys are all going to end up in New York.
[00:47:47] So you're going.
[00:47:49] Don't be shocked when your orders for New York come through.
[00:47:53] So I'm in Pittsburgh, I'm waiting for the orders to New York to come through.
[00:47:57] And so what year is this that you finally get orders to New York 1985.
[00:48:04] 1985.
[00:48:05] The day my son Brandon was born was the exact same day I got my orders to New York were
[00:48:10] printed.
[00:48:12] You roll up to New York and what, what do you get assigned when you get up there?
[00:48:18] I catch a break.
[00:48:22] Since I got surveillance time and since I've been a cop, the joint terrorist has forced
[00:48:27] the surveillance team dedicated to them.
[00:48:31] Needed, needed bodies.
[00:48:33] And I, because of my surveillance time, I got put right on.
[00:48:37] So that was, that was a huge break for a whole bunch of reasons.
[00:48:44] It was, I saved a lot of money.
[00:48:47] Didn't have to pay for suits and dry cleaning.
[00:48:50] That's a, you know, the cost of living is now increased from my living standards,
[00:48:55] taking a step back.
[00:48:57] And then the second thing was at the time the surveillance teams were the only guys that took cars home surveillance and SWAT took cars home.
[00:49:06] And so this takes care of all my community expenses, which is another significant chunk of cash.
[00:49:12] So, and then I'm with New York City cops as partners that joined terrorist task force surveillance team.
[00:49:18] The coolest thing of it was we were the only surveillance team in New York that actually got out on the street with people went into the subway.
[00:49:28] You had to be prepared to end up anywhere in New York City at one o'clock in the morning, toughest neighborhood, by yourself, no comms with anybody, like totally on your own.
[00:49:44] And you develop, you know, it's a chat in New York, very dangerous time, 19, mid to late 80s, very dangerous.
[00:49:52] So if you're, if you're into this job, like this is great. This is a Disney world every day.
[00:49:57] Like how do you end up in the South Bronx and the bad guys leave you alone?
[00:50:01] I remember the first time I'm going through bedside about one o'clock in the morning.
[00:50:06] And we, you know, we could use pay phones, you know, you had special number, you could use a pay phone, not cost you.
[00:50:11] I called some friends of mine in Iowa to say, guess where I am at right now?
[00:50:16] I am in bedside in a drug neighborhood hanging out.
[00:50:22] Now you're, you said you were the counter terrorist team. Is that right?
[00:50:26] Yeah. Well, joint terrorist task force, which is task force.
[00:50:29] Yeah. Yeah. I think I know there's some terms of art versus anti terrorist versus counter terrorist. I think we're counter terrorist.
[00:50:37] And so who you tracking? How you ended up in, you know, some drug infested part of the city? Who you track it?
[00:50:44] It was, it was a very cool transition time. The terrorist task force started out mostly all domestic terrorism.
[00:50:53] And had every ethnic group had a terrorist group. Puerto Ricans had the FLIN, the March Taros, Jewish JDL bombers.
[00:51:05] Black Panthers had turned into the Black Liberation Army and the most dangerous one of all, the May 19th Commence Organization,
[00:51:16] which was mostly white female lesbians. And they were the smartest, the most organized, the most effective of all the groups.
[00:51:28] Like they, we had more respect for their organization and the way they, and at one point in time, domestically, all the groups got together.
[00:51:39] Because it's like a professional association where you have competencies. They know, they hang out together. They know each other.
[00:51:44] And they did a couple of joint operations and a May 19th were so disappointed in the organization of the other groups that they finally said,
[00:51:52] you guys go on your own. So the first, first generation of terrorist task force put them all in jail. I mean, knocked them out.
[00:51:59] They, they, you know, they won awards right and left. Books were written about all the cases they made.
[00:52:06] So I get there and I join that justice that's going away and simultaneously just as the Islamic radicals are starting to come to town.
[00:52:20] Like I get there just a couple of years before the first World Trade Center bombing and we're seeing a shift.
[00:52:26] But the bizarre part of it was no one believed this.
[00:52:32] No one believed.
[00:52:34] No one, no one, no one, FBI headquarters, New York City Police Department, they were actually in the process of disbanding the terrorist task force.
[00:52:43] When the first World Trade Center bombing occurred in 93, some of my supervisors, a deputy chief famously said to one of my supervisors,
[00:52:56] you're telling me about pink elephants walking down Broadway because they felt there was no terrorism in the United States because none of the incidents were,
[00:53:04] were occurring on American soil.
[00:53:07] And we had all been reassigned to gang crimes. Gang crimes was, was a really big thing at the time.
[00:53:14] And they took us, they disbanded the terrorist task force and they reassigned us all the gang cases.
[00:53:20] So you're there, they disband this terrorist task force after they kind of broke a bunch of these domestic terrorist groups up.
[00:53:27] They say, yeah, there's no more threat.
[00:53:29] Were you guys already saying, hey, no, there's an Islamic extremist threat or were you not quite there yet?
[00:53:34] We weren't, we weren't quite there yet. We sensed something was going on.
[00:53:37] And so we took all our terrorist cases and made them gang cases because they qualified as gang cases.
[00:53:43] Okay, so you guys are now part of this gang task force?
[00:53:46] We're working in gang crimes, you know, the different groups, wherever they originated from, at the different time, at the time, there were a couple of bank robbery crews that were,
[00:54:00] they realized if we call where we hang out a mosque, then we just pulled another layer of the First Amendment over us.
[00:54:09] And it's that much harder to get to get at us.
[00:54:12] So they said, you know, criminals and their, and every religion has legitimate practitioners.
[00:54:22] So it's not the legitimate practitioners fault that the criminals changed the name of the building to hang out in to a mosque.
[00:54:31] And that's what a bunch of them did.
[00:54:34] And we went from literally the first World Trade Center bombing, a couple of guys that were investigating some bank robberies.
[00:54:40] We're trying to get a wire in a building that the bank robbers said was a mosque and the prosecutors wouldn't touch it.
[00:54:47] Like, we are not, we don't care what you find. We're not putting a wire in a church.
[00:54:53] And then the Trade Center happened and they turned right back around.
[00:54:57] And with all the probable cause we'd previously established, we got the wires that we needed right after the First Trade Center bombing.
[00:55:04] So were you in that gang task force doing surveillance when the first World Trade Center attack happened?
[00:55:11] I had been, I had shifted from surveillance to what we call going inside being part of the investigative squad.
[00:55:18] So I was no longer doing light cover.
[00:55:20] And I had been doing investigations overtly for probably about two years when the first Trade Center bombing happened.
[00:55:32] How, how, how surprised were we on that first World Trade Center bombing?
[00:55:38] Like, no, yeah, completely. There were some cases that we had had working.
[00:55:45] We just, we didn't imagine, we didn't have our arms around the guys that did the bombing.
[00:55:53] We actually had, we were looking real hard at a particular group that engaged in a test blast of the Trade Center explosive.
[00:56:01] They were tricked into the test blast. They didn't even know what was going on.
[00:56:07] The obsec of the guys that hit the First Trade Center was really, really good.
[00:56:12] And Ramsey Youssef, mastermind in the First Trade Center bombing, who was in fact Khaled Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, 9-11 mastermind.
[00:56:22] His nephew Ramsey Youssef did the first, he came to town.
[00:56:26] He brought the plans with him.
[00:56:28] He found a bunch of disorganized guys.
[00:56:32] You know, nobody, nobody really appreciated what he was, how organized he was.
[00:56:37] He pulled the whole thing together and left New York shortly before the bomb went off.
[00:56:43] And we got lucky on that bombing.
[00:56:45] Yeah.
[00:56:46] The amount of damage that could have done.
[00:56:48] Ridiculous, ridiculously lucky.
[00:56:50] And their intention was, first time was to take the tower down.
[00:56:53] They placed the bomb in a position to try to drop one tower into the next.
[00:56:57] And when Ramsey came back, we brought him back collectively, I'm told, that they flew by the trade center and he told the guys in a plane next time we're taking it down.
[00:57:10] How did this impact your job?
[00:57:13] So once this happens, is it like full focus?
[00:57:16] Now you realize you got to pay, the FBI needs to pay attention to the Islamic extremists?
[00:57:21] Yeah.
[00:57:22] Well, we got on them in a hurry.
[00:57:24] We, we'd been working different aspects of the group for about five years.
[00:57:30] And everything they did, there was tremendous restrictions on terrorist investigations because they saw it as a political investigation.
[00:57:38] So the oversight, like we had to re-justify the cases every six months.
[00:57:43] And if you had, if they hadn't committed a crime, or we hadn't turned up a crime in that six month timeframe, the investigation's got shut down.
[00:57:51] You couldn't pursue it.
[00:57:53] So, but consequently, we had little bits and pieces all along that when they hit the trade center, we could go back to the previous cases.
[00:58:00] Well, here's a piece here, here's a piece here, here's a piece here.
[00:58:03] And we now saw how the group had coalesced in the United States by not breaking a law in their own way.
[00:58:13] For example, one guy, one of the ring leaders got stopped in a car, pulled over in a car, stopped trunkload of weapons.
[00:58:22] One of them, one of the passengers in a car had a federal fire license.
[00:58:27] It had dealer tags on a car.
[00:58:29] Wasn't to write the reason it got stopped was because the tags didn't match the car.
[00:58:34] They had legitimate reason for having a dealer tags.
[00:58:37] The, the license plate you put on any car you want driving around.
[00:58:40] You're golden.
[00:58:41] So legitimate car stop within the laws of the United States.
[00:58:45] No reason to take anybody to jail.
[00:58:48] When we start backtracking, we see same guys in a car with a bunch of weapons on a way to a firing range.
[00:58:55] So we, when, when we could bring all the pieces together, it all came together pretty fast.
[00:59:02] At what point did you get interested or start to get involved in negotiation?
[00:59:09] Yeah, I had, I had, I would say it would be fair to say utterly no interest in being a hostage negotiator when I first joined a bureau.
[00:59:20] I was on a SWAT team in Pittsburgh.
[00:59:23] I got to New York.
[00:59:25] I tried out for HRT.
[00:59:27] I was ridiculously underprepared when I tried out for HRT.
[00:59:34] I was just like sad.
[00:59:36] But knew that I could do it if I worked at it.
[00:59:41] You know, you can't train a couple of weekends.
[00:59:44] You got to, you got to train your, your tail off for a year.
[00:59:46] It's got to become a lifestyle.
[00:59:48] I don't have to tell you that.
[00:59:49] I mean, that's what it is.
[00:59:50] It's a lifestyle.
[00:59:51] So I tried out for HRT and failed miserably and then started working out again and re-injured my knee and my knee put back together for the second time.
[01:00:02] And then I thought, all right, so, and as probably as you well know, there's a shelf life, there's special operations, special forces.
[01:00:10] Then you were expired.
[01:00:12] You're going to expire at some point in time.
[01:00:14] You know, something's going to break too many times and you're not going to be able to do it anymore.
[01:00:20] So then I thought, all right, so we got negotiators.
[01:00:22] I've seen these guys out there, they're there all the time.
[01:00:24] Crisis response.
[01:00:26] I'll be a negotiator because crisis requires a decision.
[01:00:31] Somebody's got to decide what to do and decide now.
[01:00:35] And I wanted to stay in that game and do it.
[01:00:38] So I thought, I thought I would angle myself towards the negotiation team and had to jump through some hoops, but eventually made it.
[01:00:46] So this is what year is this that you, that you make it to negotiation team?
[01:00:51] I got trained in 92.
[01:00:54] 92.
[01:00:55] 19 last century, 1992 before cell phones.
[01:01:01] And so this is inside the FBI.
[01:01:04] There's a detachment of negotiators.
[01:01:06] Is that the way it's set up?
[01:01:08] You can do it as an additional duty.
[01:01:10] Like when you're a street agent, there's something in you.
[01:01:13] There's four basic additional assignments.
[01:01:16] Something in you is going to resonate with one of those four.
[01:01:18] You can be an undercover, you could be a negotiator, you could be in SWAT.
[01:01:23] You could be a bomb tech.
[01:01:26] Each one of those a little bit different breed of cat.
[01:01:29] And something in you is really going to line up with one of those things.
[01:01:34] And so if you're going to- Swat was out for you.
[01:01:39] Yeah, Swat's out because of me.
[01:01:41] And I was interested in negotiation.
[01:01:44] And what you do if they take you on the team, then they send you to Quantico for two weeks to get that training.
[01:01:50] There's three schools in the world that every hostage negotiator wants to go to.
[01:01:55] You want to go to the Bureau's school, you want to go to London, Matt, Scotland Yard.
[01:02:00] And then you're either going to want to go down to Australia, you're going to want to go to Canada.
[01:02:04] Because both of those run great courses.
[01:02:07] So the Bureau's course, as opposed to the Scotland Yards course,
[01:02:13] the Bureau's course will turn you into the best hostage negotiator you could be.
[01:02:18] And the Scotland Yard turned you into a great team player, which I had no idea there was a difference then.
[01:02:24] But there's a huge difference.
[01:02:26] So I went to the Bureau's school and right now I'm negotiating.
[01:02:29] So this is when you're still part of the gang task force.
[01:02:32] You get this collateral duty as a negotiator.
[01:02:35] So if something was to pop up where a negotiator was needed, they'd call- you'd get brought in.
[01:02:40] Whereas some other guy that became a bomb tech, all of a sudden there's a bomb.
[01:02:44] They're trying to pipe bomb somewhere, they need someone to go work on that, they call one of the bomb tech guys that's been to that school.
[01:02:49] Exactly.
[01:02:50] And so forth.
[01:02:51] Okay, so you've been trained.
[01:02:53] Now, once you've been trained in that, did you start to realize this is kind of something that you're good at?
[01:02:58] Did you realize it was something you were more interested in than you thought you would be?
[01:03:01] Well, I had volunteered on a suicide hotline before I went to the negotiation training.
[01:03:05] Wait, you volunteered on what?
[01:03:07] Suicide hotline.
[01:03:08] Okay, got it.
[01:03:09] So I was the hoop I had to jump through, because I went to the head of the negotiation team in New York.
[01:03:15] I said, I want to be a hostage negotiator.
[01:03:18] Oh, this is in the book, the one that you-
[01:03:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:03:22] And so I volunteered on a hotline, so then when I get to the Bureau's negotiation school and airplane tapes, I say to myself,
[01:03:30] I've been doing this for a year and a half, I just didn't have a SWAT team outside.
[01:03:35] So I've already felt that it was something that I was going to be good at and enjoyed while I was there.
[01:03:42] How was that learning curve at the suicide hotline?
[01:03:45] Yeah, it's really counter-intuitive.
[01:03:49] I had, like, it's an invisible skill.
[01:03:52] It's ridiculously effective, and it's completely invisible.
[01:03:56] And you go to training for that?
[01:03:57] Did they train you to be-
[01:03:58] At the hotline?
[01:03:59] Yeah.
[01:04:00] Not only they train you, but at the beginning of the training,
[01:04:04] they give you a piece of paper with 10 possible statements that somebody in the hotline might make.
[01:04:09] So write down what you think are good responses.
[01:04:12] They're going to give you back this piece of paper at the end of the training.
[01:04:15] They give you back the piece of paper at the end of the training.
[01:04:17] Now, I write like, it looks like I write with my feet.
[01:04:21] My handwriting is very distinct.
[01:04:23] Like, there's no way you can fake my handwriting.
[01:04:25] So they hand me this piece of paper, and I know that's my handwriting.
[01:04:28] And I remember thinking like, what moron wrote those responses?
[01:04:34] That was how far they take you in two months, and you don't even know it.
[01:04:38] What's an example of what you instinctively might think you should say to what you actually should say?
[01:04:46] So, one call that I did get, this guy calls in and says, look, look, I'm just trying to put a lid on this night.
[01:04:55] I'm trying to put a lid on this night.
[01:04:58] Now, before training, I might have said, have you tried watching some TV?
[01:05:04] Have you tried working out?
[01:05:07] Like, when I'm really stressed, I know if I go get a good workout, it clears my head.
[01:05:13] Or have you tried meditation?
[01:05:15] Like jumping right into problem solving.
[01:05:18] That is the wrong way to do it.
[01:05:21] That will prolong the situation.
[01:05:24] Like the speed accelerator, which is neuroscience based, I didn't know at the time,
[01:05:30] is to deactivate the negatives by calling them out.
[01:05:33] So I just say to this guy, because I've been taught to just like, call out what you're hearing.
[01:05:39] So I go, he sounded frantic.
[01:05:41] So I said, I'm sounding frantic.
[01:05:44] And immediately his voice started coming down several notches, instantaneously.
[01:05:51] And that tiny, like people listening to that conversation would be like,
[01:05:56] what he, the guy, what he just said seems unhelpful.
[01:06:03] However, if I'm watching the person that he said it to, instantaneously came down.
[01:06:11] And since you don't see examples of that in real life, or on the movies or TV,
[01:06:17] the guy'd say, look, if you tried working out.
[01:06:21] And then on the movies or TV, they'll depict it as the other person saying,
[01:06:27] like, wow, that's a great idea.
[01:06:29] I'll do that.
[01:06:30] So what's psychologically going through my head when I tell you,
[01:06:33] I want to put a cap on this night, I got to put a cap on this night.
[01:06:36] And you say, you say back to me, you sound like you're frantic.
[01:06:39] What's going through my head that's making me deescalate?
[01:06:43] Right, so it's probably a neurochemical reaction.
[01:06:49] There's a, and from listening to Huberman and others, I'm fascinated by what's
[01:06:55] finding the science behind it.
[01:06:57] It's been duplicated in a number of experiments that if I put you in an fMRI,
[01:07:02] where I can watch the electricity moving around in your brain,
[01:07:05] and I show you a picture that induces some sort of negative thought.
[01:07:10] And what the picture is, it doesn't matter.
[01:07:13] The experiment's been done a number of times.
[01:07:15] They might have shown them puppies in the rain, a starving child in Africa,
[01:07:19] anything that would induce a negative thought.
[01:07:22] And so seeing the picture, they watch areas in your brain light up that either
[01:07:29] for you or predicted in advance where the negativity in your brain is housed.
[01:07:34] That bounces around a little bit based on person,
[01:07:37] but it's essentially about three quarters of the amygdala and a couple of other things
[01:07:42] that are involved.
[01:07:44] So they watch it light up when you see the picture.
[01:07:46] Now they just say to you, what are you feeling?
[01:07:49] Just asking you to label it, call it out, simply call it out.
[01:07:53] And every time they ask a person to simply identify the negative emotion that they're feeling,
[01:07:59] the electrical activity in the areas that had lit up start to diminish.
[01:08:04] Every time, not sometimes, not 75% of the time, every time.
[01:08:09] Now the amount they diminish changes, which is why I happen to hit the nail on the head
[01:08:15] with this guy on a hotline, he starts coming down significantly.
[01:08:19] Sometimes you can call out somebody's negative emotion and there won't be any perceivable response.
[01:08:25] It doesn't mean it didn't work.
[01:08:27] It means you just need to do it some more.
[01:08:29] But it happens every time.
[01:08:31] Now what triggers it is, is it a neurochemical response?
[01:08:36] Is it a conscious response?
[01:08:38] It's probably some sort of neurochemical response.
[01:08:41] But what we learned in hostage negotiation and on the hotline, actually we do this extremely aggressively now
[01:08:48] in all our business negotiations.
[01:08:51] Like you know, I get some contentious to talk about.
[01:08:55] I'm going to call you on a phone, send you a text, send you an email saying like,
[01:09:01] yeah I like what I have to say.
[01:09:03] You know, it's going to be harsh.
[01:09:05] This is going to be insulting.
[01:09:07] And so I started in a funny kind of way.
[01:09:10] I started applying this when I'm running our international kidnap response.
[01:09:15] I go to an embassy, there's a kidnap in the Philippines, I think you read about earlier.
[01:09:20] I am unwelcome because somebody from Washington D.C. shows up, the locals in the embassy,
[01:09:28] the message they get is they're screwing up.
[01:09:30] You either screw it up or you're inadequate.
[01:09:33] Somebody from D.C. is not welcome.
[01:09:36] And I'm walking into a hostile environment every time.
[01:09:39] And because they were new to it, they didn't know exactly the response, they'd usually be doing something wrong.
[01:09:44] And I'd walk in, I'd start pointing out what they were doing wrong.
[01:09:47] And my partner, Chuck Regini, who's in the story,
[01:09:52] whenever we walk into a room, he would start to flinch because he knew that I was getting ready to lay into these guys.
[01:09:58] And somewhere along the line, I learned to say before I started criticizing him,
[01:10:03] I'd say, this is going to sound harsh.
[01:10:07] And then I criticize him.
[01:10:09] And they'd be, okay, they'd go from being mad
[01:10:14] to, you know, it preempted the negativity by letting them know what was coming.
[01:10:20] And I've seen it work on a regular basis.
[01:10:23] Something about it makes it worse.
[01:10:26] You could say, you could probably get away with saying this in a Navy, in the teams.
[01:10:33] You could say, you know, captain, this is going to, I don't want you to think I'm being disrespectful.
[01:10:39] And you're probably not going to get to say the sentence second, second sentence,
[01:10:44] or he's going to have shut you off.
[01:10:47] But if instead you said, captain, I know this is going to sound disrespectful,
[01:10:52] he'd sit down and listen to you.
[01:10:55] He'd appreciate being warned.
[01:10:58] And there's something about that reaction, that tiny little shift that'll learn way back on Hotline.
[01:11:04] So you worked this suicide hotline for a year?
[01:11:08] I was actively on the line for probably a little over two years, two and a half years.
[01:11:14] I stayed very involved when the first trade center kicked off.
[01:11:20] Then our follow on case, which was a larger broader conspiracy
[01:11:27] on a couple of different groups that were all linked together.
[01:11:32] Through the course of that following year, I just didn't have time to volunteer on a hotline anymore.
[01:11:38] So this is kind of how you get started in this negotiation, learning this skill.
[01:11:46] And I kind of told you this before we started recording, we're going to see all kinds of overlap
[01:11:52] between what I talk about from a leadership perspective.
[01:11:56] You know, there's a lot of skills that are transferred.
[01:11:58] Like if you're good at baseball, there's a lot of things that are going to transfer over to softball.
[01:12:02] If you're good at wrestling, there's a lot of things that are going to transfer over to, you know, Jiu Jitsu.
[01:12:08] So there's a lot of stuff that's really, really similar.
[01:12:11] And there's some differences as well.
[01:12:14] But this skill of negotiation, as I read through the book, it's evolved a lot in the last 40, 50 years.
[01:12:22] And, you know, some of the stuff that you talk about in the book, you know, hostage negotiation used to mean, you know,
[01:12:31] stall them until we get a chance to assault.
[01:12:34] Like that was what it was.
[01:12:36] There was a mindset change that you outlined in the book that occurred around 1971.
[01:12:45] October 1971, a guy named George Giff.
[01:12:47] Am I saying that right?
[01:12:48] He's a guy that took a plane, took a plane, took hostages on the plane.
[01:12:55] The plane lands to refuel.
[01:12:58] The hostages had actually negotiated their own release.
[01:13:04] But the FBI got frustrated and shoots the engine of the plane.
[01:13:08] The guy loses his mind, kills the hostages.
[01:13:11] The FBI gets sued and actually loses the lawsuit.
[01:13:16] So, so all of a sudden they realized they needed to make some adjustments to their, the way they're negotiating.
[01:13:23] Right.
[01:13:25] Another thing that you kind of detail in the book is 1979 Harvard starts this negotiation project.
[01:13:32] And they're starting to look at negotiation theory and practice.
[01:13:37] They're trying to improve it.
[01:13:39] A book ends up coming out of that.
[01:13:41] The book is called Getting to Yes.
[01:13:44] That was written by Roger Fisher and William Urie, who were also the co-founders of that project.
[01:13:51] And, and the theory that they had was that, look, the, you know, people are emotional and they're animalistic and they're unreliable and they're irrational.
[01:14:03] And you just need to overcome that.
[01:14:05] Right.
[01:14:06] With, you know, rational, logical, you know, problem-solving mindset.
[01:14:13] Which is, which is actually an idea that doesn't turn out to work so well.
[01:14:20] Right.
[01:14:21] Because it's a lot harder to overcome that irrational, emotional, animalistic human.
[01:14:25] So those are some of the, those are some of the evolutions that start to take place when, in the book that you, that you run through.
[01:14:34] And in fact, going to the book here, you say, you say this about their system was easy to follow and seductive with four basic tenets.
[01:14:42] One, separate the person, the emotion from the problem.
[01:14:45] Two, don't get wrapped up in the other side's position, what they're asking for.
[01:14:49] But instead focus on their interests, why they're asking for it.
[01:14:52] So you can find what they really want.
[01:14:54] Three, work cooperatively to generate win-win options.
[01:14:58] And four, I'm putting a little tone on those, aren't I?
[01:15:01] Sorry.
[01:15:02] And four, establish mutually agreed upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions.
[01:15:08] So this is like one of those just detached academic things.
[01:15:13] It was a brilliant rational and profound synthesis of the most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day for years after that book came out.
[01:15:19] Everybody, including the FBI and the NYPD focused on problem solving approach to bargaining interactions.
[01:15:26] It just seemed so modern, modern and smart.
[01:15:30] Right.
[01:15:31] So that was what was kind of happening.
[01:15:34] Then you go on to say halfway across the United States, a pair of professors at the University of Chicago was looking at everything from economics to negotiation from a far different angle.
[01:15:44] They were economists, Amos Tversky, am I saying that right?
[01:15:49] Tversky.
[01:15:50] And psychologist Daniel Kahneman.
[01:15:52] Kahneman.
[01:15:53] Kahneman.
[01:15:54] Kahneman, yeah.
[01:15:55] And he wrote, thinking fast and slow.
[01:15:57] Together, the two launched the field of behavioral economics and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize by showing that man is a very irrational beast.
[01:16:07] Right.
[01:16:08] Feeling they discovered is a form of thinking.
[01:16:12] As you've seen when business schools like Harvard's began teaching negotiation in the 1980s, the process was presented as a straightforward economic analysis.
[01:16:21] It was a period when the world's top academic economists declared that we were all rational actors.
[01:16:28] That means on both sides.
[01:16:30] That means considering that both people on both sides are rational.
[01:16:33] And so it went into negotiation classes, assuming the other side was acting rationally and selfishly trying to maximize their position.
[01:16:40] The goal was to figure out how to respond in various scenarios to maximize one's own value.
[01:16:45] This mentality baffled Kahneman, who for years from years in psychology knew that in his words, quote, it is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish and that their tastes aren't anything but stable.
[01:16:58] End quote.
[01:17:00] So there were these two schools going on with negotiation.
[01:17:05] And one of them took this kind of logical approach and the other one realized that you had to deal with these emotional, the emotions was a way of thinking you're gonna have some you're gonna have to deal with.
[01:17:16] And you must have realized that on the suicide hotlines as well.
[01:17:19] Yeah, you know, and I didn't really understand why all I knew is that taking that approach accelerated things.
[01:17:25] Just complete acceleration and situations that I thought would have taken hours.
[01:17:30] And so I just saw and again Kahneman and doesn't win the Nobel Prize like 2002 ish.
[01:17:38] So just saw that it worked.
[01:17:40] Didn't understand why I didn't really care.
[01:17:43] All my first issue has always been what works now understanding a mechanism is important sometimes to people need to understand a mechanism.
[01:17:53] Some people need to understand a mechanism.
[01:17:56] I care about number one what works number two.
[01:18:00] Secondarily is is it moral, you know, I missionaries and mercenaries in mercenaries if it works missionaries if it follows your basic moral code, if it qualifies on both of those and I'm good.
[01:18:15] Got it.
[01:18:17] Now you go into the book a little bit about how the FBI sort of started to adopt this, you know, the FBI, they were deep into that book at one point getting to yes, that was what they were using a lot of guys were using that.
[01:18:31] But then you know you get Ruby Ridge up in Idaho, you get the the Waco, Texas, right?
[01:18:38] These things are kind of does that these things are actually kind of does that they're very disastrous.
[01:18:44] And you throw this in the book I'm going to go to the book here.
[01:18:49] I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he's the Messiah.
[01:18:55] It was becoming alarmingly obvious that getting to yes didn't work with kidnappers no matter how many agents read the book with highlighters in hands it failed to improve how we as hostage negotiators approach dealmaking.
[01:19:09] There was clearly a breakdown between the books brilliant theory and everyday law enforcement experience.
[01:19:14] Why was it that everyone had read this best selling business book and endorsed it as one of the greatest negotiators in text ever written and yet so few could follow it successfully.
[01:19:25] Weren't we morons?
[01:19:28] In 1994, fast forward a little bit from the book and again I'm reading excerpts for the book.
[01:19:33] The book is awesome.
[01:19:34] I mean we're hitting some wavedops.
[01:19:36] So just order the book right now so you can get all these details.
[01:19:38] In 1994 FBI director Louis Free announced Louis Free announced the form the formation of the critical incident response group a blended division that would combine crisis negotiation crisis management behavioral sciences and host address you teams and reinvent crisis negotiation.
[01:19:58] The only issue was what techniques were we going to use and you go on to say what were needed were simply were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down established rapport gain trust elicit verbalization of needs and persuade the other guy of our of our empathy.
[01:20:18] We needed something that was easy to teach easy to learn and easy to execute.
[01:20:22] In the early years the FBI experimented with both new and old therapeutic techniques developed and by the counseling profession.
[01:20:30] These counseling skills were aimed at developing positive relationships with people by demonstrating an understanding of what they're going through and how they feel about it.
[01:20:39] It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted.
[01:20:44] And by the way, again, I talked about like leadership.
[01:20:47] This is exactly what I talk about from a leadership perspective. I mean, if you don't know me at all, I'm absolutely trying to get you to trust me. How do I get you to trust me?
[01:20:56] I put some trust in you. I listen to what you have to say. You're going to listen to me. Same exact thing here.
[01:21:01] Back to the book listening is the cheapest yet most most effective concession we can make to get there by listening intensely a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing.
[01:21:13] Exactly why you listen to your subordinates. Exactly why you listen to your peers. Exactly why you listen to your boss. What are you trying to tell me, boss? Let me listen.
[01:21:22] Whenever I get asked the question, you know, my team is not listening to me. What should I do? Yell louder.
[01:21:30] It's like, no, you want your team to listen to you, listen to them. Be quiet, listen to them. Hear what they have to say.
[01:21:37] You go on to say psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings.
[01:21:50] In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to calm to the calm and logical place where they can be good getting to yes problem solvers.
[01:22:05] So again, this is one of the things that I am talking about all the time with people. I always say, you know, if I'm if I want you to see something, if I want it, if I know the truth about something, if I've got some great plan and I want you on board with my plan,
[01:22:21] the best thing I can do is not tell you what the plan is, is let you come up with a plan. Let you let the truth be revealed to you by you, not by me. That's my goal.
[01:22:33] And you go on to say this whole concept, which you'll learn as the centerpiece of this book is called tactical empathy.
[01:22:42] This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and assertive skills of influence to gain access to the mind of the other person.
[01:22:52] Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do. Once we started developing our new techniques, the negotiating world split into two concurrence, two currents.
[01:23:04] Negotiation, as learned at the country's top school, continued down the established road of rational problem solving.
[01:23:11] While ironically, we meet heads at the FBI began to train our agents in an unproven system based on psychology, counseling and crisis intervention. While the Ivy League taught math and economics, we became experts in empathy and our way worked.
[01:23:31] So that's how the, that's how the shift, the shift took place.
[01:23:35] Good stuff in that book. What book are you reading from again? That's good. I'm impressed. Who the hell wrote that?
[01:23:42] Yeah, no, it's great. And I'm telling you, I mean, I just, I was really, really stoked to read it and got so much out of it, just seeing, you know, that whole section right there.
[01:23:54] I mean, this is what I'm talking to people all the time about from a leadership perspective. You know, the big difference, the big difference between what when I talk about leadership.
[01:24:04] And if you and I are negotiating, the big difference is as a leader, I don't really care at the end of the day what plan we use.
[01:24:13] I just want the best plan. So I, I, you know, if we're going to attack a target at the end of the day, I don't care if we attack it from the north or from the south.
[01:24:21] I just want which one is best. So I don't really have, I'm not trying to make you think something. I actually just want to find the best solution.
[01:24:29] Now there's a chance that my solution is the best. There's a chance that your solution is the best. If I go and try and ram my solution down your throat, what are you going to do?
[01:24:37] You're going to get defensive. We might not get to the best solution. If I hang on to my idea too tightly, we're not going to get the best solution.
[01:24:44] So the main thing that I can do to help us get to the best solution, not to my solution, not to your solution, but just to the best solution.
[01:24:52] The best thing for me to do is listen to what you have to say because I can't make you listen to me. I can't. But I can listen to you.
[01:25:01] That's going to open up your mind. It's going to move us in the right direction. So that's, that's probably the, the big difference between the two is that when you're negotiating, you have a goal that you're trying to get to.
[01:25:12] Well, here's what I'd add to that because that description is really the way we negotiate is we're just looking for the best deal.
[01:25:19] Like you said, you're looking for the best plan. The real hard part in negotiating is your goal. You need to see it merely as a suggestion.
[01:25:31] If you get too goal oriented, you get tunnel vision and you miss better answers. Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better.
[01:25:39] And by definition, you're never going to know the best possible outcome. It's not possible because the other side's holding stuff back.
[01:25:49] You're holding stuff back, getting people to accept that intellectually is often really difficult with really experienced business people.
[01:25:58] And I'll say, when are you not holding something back? Budgetary problems, pressures to make the deal, pressure to not make the deal, internal politics, personal pressures.
[01:26:09] Is there ever a time you're not holding something back and no one ever said, I negotiate and I, I, I'm completely honest all the time.
[01:26:18] Nobody ever says that. People are always holding stuff back. So if you are, they are too. And you're both holding back information that would change the course of the deal if revealed.
[01:26:31] That's why you're holding it back. Now, so now what happens if you exponentialize this, so to speak? There's an overlap of the unknowns.
[01:26:42] So it's impossible to know the best deal going in. It's not possible. But very few business people will accept that.
[01:26:50] It is what it is. I know what it is I'm experienced. I know what the outcome is going to be. I know what they're being driven by.
[01:26:57] You know, you are stroking your own ego when you say stuff like that.
[01:27:02] Well, that, that means this stuff is even more in line with what I talk about. I think it's completely in line. The other thing that's interesting is, you know, and I forget if we'll cover this today, but I talk to business people and,
[01:27:17] and occasionally, and it's usually it's very rare that, you know, you and I are working at a company and, and we can't come to a conclusion.
[01:27:28] We can't come to an agreement. You want to do it this way. I want to do it that way. And when that happens, and the reason it happens so rarely in business is because if you and I work for the same company,
[01:27:38] well, we both want to make money. We both want to take care of our client. We both want to take care of the team, right? Like we're ultimately aligned.
[01:27:45] And so we we're trying to do something that's going to make us money and take care of the client and take care of our team. We're going to figure out a solution.
[01:27:53] That's 99% of the time. 1% of the time you don't want to you either. You either don't want to help the client. You there's someone on the team you don't want to take care of.
[01:28:04] There's some something going on where we're truly not aligned. Maybe you want to break off and start your own company. So you want us to fail.
[01:28:10] And if it comes to a point where I'm saying, Chris, hold on a second. This is going to make us money. It's going to take care of our team. It's going to take care of the client.
[01:28:17] And and we can't come to an agreement. That means we're not aligned. And you know, you talk about that. There are some deals where, you know, you want to sell the car and I want to buy the car.
[01:28:26] But we just can't. There's no there's no possible way that we're going to do it because you want, you know, $30,000 for the car. And I literally can only pay $20,000.
[01:28:36] It's not going to happen. We're not aligned. So that does occasionally happen. But yeah, it's it's it's very interesting that the meat heads at the FBI were the ones that started trying to listen and empathize and see the other people's perspective.
[01:28:55] Right.
[01:28:56] Let's get let's get into the book. And I'll tell you what, when I was reading the book, one thing that was a little bit tricky for me is as I was reading the book, I'm like, I want to read a bunch. You got you.
[01:29:07] It's kind of written, you know, I've written a couple of books to and in my books, I tell the story, the combat story, the business story and then give the principle.
[01:29:16] And that's what your book is to there's a lot of that. Hey, here's a combat story, an FBI story or a business story. And here's the negotiating principle that comes out of it.
[01:29:26] And I kind of was going back and forth, you know, do I read a bunch of the stories because the stories are great. But I figured since you're here, it'd be great.
[01:29:35] You know, I'm sure you'll tell some of those stories, but just to get into the techniques, the techniques, the negotiation techniques that you outlined in the book. And that's kind of what I decided to do.
[01:29:48] May or may not have been the right decision. We're not sure yet. Maybe you'll have to come back just for pure story time.
[01:29:55] But I wanted to get into the tactics that you talk about, because again, I think they're so prevalent. And at you know, in your intro to the book, you talk about negotiating being negotiation is life, you're negotiating all the time.
[01:30:09] So these are things that you that everybody can use all the time. And the other thing is kind of like leadership. People think leadership, you either have it or you don't.
[01:30:19] But really leadership is a bunch of skills that you can learn and negotiation. You know, how often you hear, oh, that guy is a great negotiator.
[01:30:26] You hear that a lot or that guy is not a good negotiator negotiator. But what you don't realize is negotiation, just like basketball or just like playing guitar.
[01:30:34] There's a bunch of skills that you can learn. There's a bunch of moves that you can make. And once you know those skills, once you know those moves, you can utilize them.
[01:30:41] And so this book, awesome book for pointing out some of these tactics, techniques and procedures. So let's get into a little bit.
[01:30:52] The first technique that you talk about or the first one that I'm going to highlight is called mirroring.
[01:30:58] Yeah.
[01:31:00] And you say mirroring also called isopraxism. Is that right?
[01:31:05] It's a lot of syllables in that word.
[01:31:07] Luckily, we've only got in here once. I don't have to say it again is essentially imitation. It's another neuro behavior that humans and other animals display in which we copy each other to comfort each other.
[01:31:18] It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, tone of voice. It generally it's generally an unconscious behavior.
[01:31:26] We're rarely aware of when it's happening, but it's a sign that people are bonding in sync and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust.
[01:31:35] It's a phenomenon and now a technique that falls a very basic but profound biological principle.
[01:31:41] We fear what's different and are drawn to what's similar as the same goes birds of a feather flock together mirroring then when practice consciously is the art of insinuating similarity.
[01:31:53] Trust me, a mirror signals to another unconscious. You and I, we're alike.
[01:31:59] Once you're attuned to the dynamic, you'll see it everywhere. Couples walking on the street with their steps in perfect synchronicity.
[01:32:06] Friends in conversation at a park both nodding their head and crossing legs at about the same time.
[01:32:11] These people in a word are connected while mirroring is most often associated with forms of nonverbal communication, especially body language.
[01:32:18] As negotiators, a mirror focuses on the words and nothing else, not the body language, not the accent, not the tone or delivery, just the words.
[01:32:27] It's almost laughably simple. For the FBI, a mirror is when you repeat the last three words or the critical one to three words of what someone just said.
[01:32:39] Of the entirety of the FBI's hostage negotiation skill set, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick.
[01:32:47] Simple yet uncannily effective. By repeating back what people say you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustained.
[01:32:56] The process of connecting. Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was more effective, what the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers.
[01:33:08] Mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters using positive reinforcement lavish praise and encouragement on patrons using the word such as great, no problem and sure in response to each order.
[01:33:20] The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning.
[01:33:27] The average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70% more than those who use positive reinforcement.
[01:33:34] So that's pretty amazing.
[01:33:37] It's nuts, isn't it?
[01:33:38] Yeah.
[01:33:39] You point out later in the book that it can feel weird to mirror when you first start doing it.
[01:33:45] Yeah, it feels weird to everybody pretty much.
[01:33:47] Yeah, it feels weird to everybody. I don't know why that is. Maybe because it seems so obvious to the user.
[01:33:53] It seems obvious.
[01:33:55] Yeah, you know, I feel like saying some more based on what you're doing.
[01:34:02] Yeah, it's just...
[01:34:06] And that's one of the ones... Again, I was talking about Hubertman before.
[01:34:11] Like, if I could get him to do a ton of experiments, like, try this, try this, try this, I got to find out this.
[01:34:17] And that'd be one of them as to what makes a mirror work so effectively with so many people.
[01:34:22] And it does. And then who's attracted to it?
[01:34:26] I find interesting who's attracted to it.
[01:34:29] And then I also find it's different circuits in the brain.
[01:34:33] Like, the majority of the people on my team, we get really good at labeling.
[01:34:40] And I find, as a performance skill, then in myself and others, we might not mirror enough.
[01:34:50] And then those that are really attracted to mirroring, and will use it almost exclusively,
[01:34:56] like, what is it that makes you tick, that makes you like that mirroring so much?
[01:35:03] And I think they're attracted to the simplicity of it, and then they're not offended by simple concepts,
[01:35:11] which actually in many cases takes a more sophisticated approach to really like simple stuff.
[01:35:17] And I'm seeing regularly, people that really are mirroring as a sophisticated skill,
[01:35:23] and if somebody rejects it off the top of their head, I think you're worried about appearing stupid.
[01:35:31] And if you're so confident in your intelligence that you got no problem looking stupid,
[01:35:38] then you're happy to mirror.
[01:35:41] One piece of advice that I give to people is when Chris rolls into my office and you're pissed about something,
[01:35:49] I got to talk to you right now. One thing I tell people is like, cool, I get out my notebook,
[01:35:55] get out my pen, and like, what's going on, Chris, talk to me.
[01:35:58] And to me, that's showing you that I'm listening to what you have to say, and I'm taking it seriously.
[01:36:03] And it seems like mirroring is another way of doing it.
[01:36:07] If you're repeating what I'm saying, then I'm like, oh, he's paying attention to me, he's listening to me.
[01:36:13] You're proving that you're listening to the person, which also is a really positive thing.
[01:36:18] Never mind the whole psychological connection that we're making, just the fact that when I'm repeating what you're saying back to you,
[01:36:25] it shows you I'm listening to what you're saying.
[01:36:28] Right.
[01:36:30] I often, when I talk about listening and how important it is, people don't realize how important it is.
[01:36:37] And I think one of the ways that I use to explain how important it is is I use the opposite,
[01:36:43] which is if you're talking and I cut you off, everyone knows that's disrespectful. Everybody knows it.
[01:36:49] It's like a sign of disrespect. If someone's talking, I jump in there and cut them off.
[01:36:53] If they're not listening to me, that's being disrespectful.
[01:36:55] The opposite of that is when I actually listen to what you have to say.
[01:36:59] And now we've got a little technique to prove to you that I'm listening to what you say.
[01:37:03] I'm going to mirror those last couple words back to you.
[01:37:06] Right.
[01:37:08] There's no doubt that you got the words if you repeat them back.
[01:37:11] Nice little technique.
[01:37:17] Moving on a little bit.
[01:37:20] Again, we're hitting the highlights of this book. You got to get the book.
[01:37:24] The book is definitely going to leave a mark on your brain.
[01:37:29] So get the book. In a good way.
[01:37:31] Yes, in a good way. Not psychological damage, but in a positive way.
[01:37:36] I'm going to fast forward a little bit here.
[01:37:38] The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport.
[01:37:42] A way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together.
[01:37:48] Here are some key lessons from this chapter.
[01:37:50] Remember a good negotiator negotiator prepares going in to be ready for possible surprises.
[01:37:56] A great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises.
[01:38:02] She is certain to find my note next to that was role play.
[01:38:08] How often are we role playing if we're negotiating?
[01:38:16] What do you mean?
[01:38:18] Let's say from a leadership perspective, it's you and me.
[01:38:22] We're peers and I go, hey, Chris, I got to go meet with Echo.
[01:38:25] You know how he's all mad about us cutting his hours?
[01:38:29] I'm going to go talk to him right now. I know he's pissed.
[01:38:31] Can we run through this a couple of times?
[01:38:33] So I'm just going to role play.
[01:38:35] So that way I think about what could Echo possibly say.
[01:38:38] He might get mad about this. He might talk about his family.
[01:38:42] He might talk about how long he's been here and I want to kind of have some contingency plans here, right?
[01:38:48] To do what you said, prepare, be ready for possible surprises and actually be ready to take those surprises.
[01:38:54] And when he says, you know, what about my family?
[01:38:57] And I said, well, the important thing is, Echo, I know we got to give you some less hours right now.
[01:39:00] But the main thing I want to do is keep you here.
[01:39:03] The only way you can do that is if we cut back your hours a little bit.
[01:39:06] It's hopefully going to be temporary. It should be when the market picks back up.
[01:39:10] Are we in an actual negotiation?
[01:39:12] See what I'm going here? Echo's not in his head. He's kind of on board.
[01:39:15] Let's take care of the family.
[01:39:17] What are you thinking? I got more free time.
[01:39:19] We'll have some more.
[01:39:21] So there you go. You know, there's another point.
[01:39:23] Hey, now's a little time to make all those baseball games you got to make.
[01:39:27] So that's a point that you made role play something that we did.
[01:39:31] What we do with our clients all the time.
[01:39:33] Right.
[01:39:35] If you're with a good role player.
[01:39:37] Right. Great tool.
[01:39:39] Who has dialed in enough emotional intelligence to make some good predictions for you.
[01:39:46] It's probably not bad. Even if they're not good at it.
[01:39:49] You just got to make sure that that's not exactly the way you expect it to go down.
[01:39:53] Yep. Yep.
[01:39:55] All right. So this is a possibility. Now this is how it's going to happen.
[01:39:58] Definitely.
[01:40:00] You say don't commit to assumptions. Instead view them as a hypothesis.
[01:40:05] And use the negotiation to test them rigorously.
[01:40:09] To me, my note I wrote down on this one was the most important characteristic for a leader to me is to be humble.
[01:40:17] And if you're not humble, you know, I go in thinking I'm right, you're wrong.
[01:40:22] Or I'm just right. It doesn't even matter what you are because I know I'm right.
[01:40:25] Right.
[01:40:27] This word of the way you put it, viewing your ideas as a hypothesis.
[01:40:31] Are you my plan? It's beautiful.
[01:40:33] Yeah. And that is one that 1000% I'll attribute to my son Brandon.
[01:40:38] Because he we'd be talking about this developing it after I left the FBI and kicking the ideas around.
[01:40:44] And he'd have an insider. He'd say something.
[01:40:47] And I know that using the word hypothesis in our vernacular came from him.
[01:40:52] And it's a good word when you're going into a discussion with somebody.
[01:40:58] Don't say this is my idea.
[01:41:00] Say this is just a hypothesis. It's one I came up with. Could be right. Could be wrong.
[01:41:05] Let's see where it's at.
[01:41:06] You say people who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head.
[01:41:13] Negotiation is not an active battle. It's a process of discovery.
[01:41:18] The goal is to uncover as much information as possible.
[01:41:22] And that goes back to what we already talked about.
[01:41:24] I'm looking for the best way of doing it. You're looking for a deal that works.
[01:41:27] Best deal. Best plan. What's the difference right?
[01:41:31] To quiet the voices in your head. Make your soul and all encompassing focus the other person and what they have to say.
[01:41:40] Which means we're listening.
[01:41:43] The most underrated tool of leadership is listening.
[01:41:50] Slow it down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making.
[01:41:58] If we're in too much of a hurry people can feel as if they're not being heard.
[01:42:01] You risk undermining the rapport and trust you've built.
[01:42:06] Gotta get used to that silence.
[01:42:10] And you talk about it in here. Many, many people are uncomfortable with silence.
[01:42:23] Yeah, for a variety of reasons.
[01:42:27] It's just happened in the last 72 hours, last few days.
[01:42:34] What I love about what I do for a living now is I get into interesting conversations with people.
[01:42:39] With fascinating people that I just like aspire to be in the same room with.
[01:42:44] So Ari Emanuel. That Ari from Hollywood.
[01:42:50] The character on enthrallage is based around.
[01:42:57] So he gives me a call and he wants to talk about something.
[01:42:59] And he says, speakers bureau, Don Walker runs it. We'll get on the phone with him.
[01:43:04] Cool. So I get on the phone with Don and Ari at the same time.
[01:43:09] And Don has done his homework. But he's one of those guys that's not comfortable with silence.
[01:43:16] So fortunately he's so smart about what he's doing and he's done it for so long.
[01:43:22] That everything that's coming out of his mouth is exactly what I'm thinking.
[01:43:26] However, I've done a talk a couple of times that you get seven to 10 seconds to get somebody's attention or you'll lose it.
[01:43:34] And so he starts out by saying, I know I got seven to 10 seconds to get your attention.
[01:43:39] And he must have talked for about three minutes and finally Ari goes, that's the longest seven seconds I've ever heard in my life.
[01:43:45] Because Don just couldn't stop talking.
[01:43:50] Next one, put a smile on your face.
[01:43:56] When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly and are more likely to collaborate and problem solve instead of fight and resist.
[01:44:02] Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. All good stuff.
[01:44:07] Now you got you go into this section here and you talk about it in the book already you tell.
[01:44:11] And again, I'm skipping the stories that you wrap around these where people can get the examples of what you did and where you use these.
[01:44:20] So get the book so you can get some of those examples.
[01:44:24] Three voice tones available to negotiators.
[01:44:29] Number one, the late night FM DJ voice.
[01:44:32] You selectively to make a point and flex your voice downward keeping it calm and slow.
[01:44:37] When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness.
[01:44:46] Number two, the positive playful voice.
[01:44:49] This should be your default voice.
[01:44:51] It's a voice of an easy going good natured person.
[01:44:53] Your attitude is light and encouraging.
[01:44:55] The key here is to relax and smile while you're talking.
[01:44:59] Number three, the direct or assertive voice use rarely will cause problems and create pushback.
[01:45:06] We did a podcast a while ago on something called psychological reactants.
[01:45:15] And what this is is the instinct that everyone has that when I tell you to do something, you don't want to do it.
[01:45:21] Right.
[01:45:22] It's just a natural reaction that everybody has and it causes that's what allows reverse psychology to work.
[01:45:28] Because when I say, oh, Chris, you can't do this.
[01:45:31] You go, if I can, right?
[01:45:33] When I say you couldn't paint that fence all by yourself, you go, yes, I couldn't.
[01:45:38] You go do it.
[01:45:41] So that direct voice is something to watch out for.
[01:45:48] Moving on to this next section.
[01:45:51] And you already mentioned this, the idea of labeling.
[01:45:59] You say, don't feel their pain, label it.
[01:46:03] Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication.
[01:46:07] Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window.
[01:46:12] That's why instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them.
[01:46:18] They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own.
[01:46:24] And once they label the emotions, they talk about them without getting wound up.
[01:46:29] For them, emotion is a tool.
[01:46:30] Emotions aren't obstacles, they are a means.
[01:46:32] The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic.
[01:46:38] It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient.
[01:46:41] The psychotherapist pokes and prots to understand his patient's problems and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior.
[01:46:51] That's exactly what good negotiators do.
[01:46:54] Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less and listening more.
[01:47:01] You can learn almost everything you need and a lot more than other people would like you to know simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled, your ears open and your mouth shut.
[01:47:14] Talk to me about labeling a little bit.
[01:47:16] How are we using it?
[01:47:17] What does it look like?
[01:47:19] Simple again.
[01:47:21] It seems like it sounds like it looks like.
[01:47:23] It seems like something's bothering you.
[01:47:25] It seems like you don't know when you're going to need me.
[01:47:28] It seems like you're giving this a lot of thought.
[01:47:31] Just hanging a label on something.
[01:47:33] It hits the brain in a different way than anything else does.
[01:47:39] And even questions like me and another guy, Steve Scholl, we're doing a lot of stuff with the real estate agency these days.
[01:47:47] We're still coming out for residential real estate agents in about two months.
[01:47:52] What is the name of the book so everyone can pre-order it?
[01:47:55] The full fee agent.
[01:47:57] Okay.
[01:47:59] And the agents we coach, for example, you go through an open house, you walk around, you look around, and the agent says to you on the way out the door,
[01:48:07] would you see that you liked? Basically, pretty good question as questions go, starts with the word what, not a great way, good word to start question with, calibrated question, if you will.
[01:48:18] And people stop and think, and they go like, oh, well, you know, we kind of like the kitchen.
[01:48:25] They'll give you a thoughtful answer.
[01:48:27] Same scenario, somebody is walking out the door, the agent says, seems like you saw some stuff you liked.
[01:48:33] Oh, yeah, look, I can tell you something. We were looking at the bedroom and we could see our daughter in there.
[01:48:38] And, you know, the backyard is perfect for the way our kids are, like, a complete download of what's going through somebody's brain.
[01:48:47] Like, just straight, like, from layman's perspective, bypassing the prefrontal cortex entirely, shoving up, listening device in the side of your head and hearing what's going on in your head.
[01:49:02] Another example, in the labels, when you're exhausted, when you're tired, it's hard to give a good answer.
[01:49:10] So I'm on my way back from a trip to the UAE a couple of months ago, and I'm in Seattle waiting to get on a plane and I'm exhausted.
[01:49:21] Shoot a text to a buddy. Take care of this.
[01:49:25] Now, he could have come back at me with a good question, what makes you ask, to make sure they were aligned.
[01:49:34] But instead, he texts me back, seems like you have a reason for asking.
[01:49:40] Now, I was so tired at that point in time that I saw the difference. Seems like you have a reason for asking.
[01:49:46] I must have thrown back at him a ten-line text, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
[01:49:51] And then afterwards, I thought, if he just said what makes you ask, I was tired enough that I thought, you know, just, I'd have texted him back, just do it, stop bothering me.
[01:50:01] There's something about the way the label hits the brain that there's a complete mental change in the response and the amount of information you get out of somebody.
[01:50:14] It seems like we're danger close on this one to the borderline catastrophic mistake that we can make, which is you come into my office, you're all mad, and I look at you and say, calm down, you're mad.
[01:50:33] So the difference here is it seems like you're really mad about this.
[01:50:40] Yeah. Well, it seems like this is important because the great skill works with your boss also.
[01:50:50] He's one of the students in my class at Georgetown. Boss comes by, come on, we got to go right now. We got something we got to take care of right now.
[01:50:59] He called it the boss drive-by. Now, we is you. We got something we got to do right now. That means I got something for you to do right now.
[01:51:08] And he's in a really, he's loud about it, you know, so this guy gets drug into his boss's office and immediately says, sounds like this is important.
[01:51:21] Well, the boss is coming at you like that because it is important, which is the first thing he wants or she wants you to understand.
[01:51:28] So if you demonstrate sounds like this is important right away, boss immediately comes down three notches, starts thinking things through.
[01:51:38] If somebody's angry, you know, sounds like this is made you angry sounds like this is important. Sounds like this is upsetting.
[01:51:45] You want him to come down several notches. See, the lizard brain is out of the driver's seat and the human brain is back in, right?
[01:51:54] I got a this book here, Leadership Strategy and Tactics. I talk about one of the tactics I talk about. I call it reflect and diminish, which means when Chris comes into my office and he goes, I can't believe the supply department didn't get this stuff here on time.
[01:52:08] What I do is reflect some of that anger, but I diminish it. So I say, are you serious? It didn't show up yet.
[01:52:17] How much gear is it that you're missing? So immediately I show you that I'm on your side. I show you that I'm also mad about it, but we start moving towards a solution as opposed to like, you need to calm down before you come in here or hey, you need to take ownership of this.
[01:52:32] Like, cool, we can get there. But little this is like a very similar idea to reflect and diminish.
[01:52:40] Yeah, well, I love that question, how much gear is missing? Because on our list of calibrated questions, we hold people almost exclusively to what and how.
[01:52:51] And so how feels good to the other side. And through touching on what Connemann would talk about, it triggers in-depth thinking.
[01:53:01] So the how question to immediately even think about the answer, let alone answer it, you put them in a completely different frame of mind, which takes all, you know, all the steam out, takes all the gas out of the tank, takes all the wind out of the sails, whatever you want,
[01:53:19] of their reptilian brain, and you've now got them in a deep thinking mode. How's a great question? How is a great question?
[01:53:27] Talk me through the next section here, tactical empathy. How do you use that? What does it mean?
[01:53:37] First of all, we put the word tactical in front of it to destigmatize the word.
[01:53:45] Because in common usage, the word is thought of as sympathy or compassion, and it's not. In usage, it's been convoluted and distorted. I can empathize. You know, I've been there. I feel that way. I agree.
[01:54:00] That was not the original origin of the word or how it was meant to be applied. That was why I started collaborating with Harvard in the first place, because Bob Mnookin wrote in his book,
[01:54:11] Empathy's Not Even Liking the Other Side. It's not agreement. It's not liking. It's demonstrating that you understand.
[01:54:19] Now, and people equate understanding to agreement. In my terrorism days in New York, we're trying to get Muslims to testify against other Muslims in open court.
[01:54:32] And they were shocked by that by a whole bunch of reasons. If you want to be proud to be an American, you know, have an Arab Muslim who's in this country just trying to work really hard.
[01:54:49] They said to us after the trial, you know, when you told us ahead of time, this was about the truth we thought you were kidding.
[01:54:57] And having gone through the process, we realized that your system is about the truth.
[01:55:06] And so how did we get how did we get those Muslims to come in and testify? Honestly, I would sit down with them and I'd say right off the bat,
[01:55:16] you think for the last 200 years there's been a succession of American governments that have all been anti Islamic. And they go, yeah.
[01:55:30] Now that's empathy. I never said it was true. I didn't say I agreed. I didn't say I disagree. I took no position whatsoever on that statement.
[01:55:40] I say you think this and I'd nail it on the head and none of it is that hard when you really realize you know where the other sides come from you just scared to say it.
[01:55:50] Like I'd say it to these guys and you just watch them be shocked and then dial in with me having said what was in the back of their mind. That's all it is.
[01:56:02] And that's and that is a similar thing to labeling. You say here labeling is a way of validating someone's emotion by acknowledging it.
[01:56:13] Give someone's emotion a name and you show that you identify with how that person feels it gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about.
[01:56:22] Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time saving emotional hack. So this is similar to oh this is what you think about a certain subject, which now I'm reading back to you.
[01:56:33] Hey you think that the past 200 years has been anti Islamic governments. This would be it seems like you're angry about the way the Islamic world has been treated.
[01:56:45] Yeah, that'd be a great start.
[01:56:48] A good start like some of this stuff is ridiculous to an especially talking about politicians like I'm surprised more politicians don't don't get this.
[01:56:57] Mario Cuomo Andrew Cuomo's father Chris Cuomo's father governor of New York.
[01:57:03] I saw him addressed a hostile crowd of African Americans that were waiting for Winnie Mandela. This is just before Nelson Mandela gets out.
[01:57:12] Winnie Mandela is doing a world tour they're keeping the pressure on the South African government make sure they let him go.
[01:57:18] She's in New York. Heavy duty African American crowd almost all African American.
[01:57:24] Mario Cuomo isn't just not African American he's Italian which in New York is a much different dynamic.
[01:57:33] At the time a couple of black guys have been chased out of an Italian neighborhood into traffic and it got killed by getting hit by cars. Tensions with the Italians are very high.
[01:57:44] Cuomo steps up into a crowd that is just short of throwing rocks at him before he said a word.
[01:57:50] He starts out and he starts going you see a world that doesn't take your skin color into account.
[01:57:57] You see a world that doesn't give you a chance because of where you came from and how they perceive you and he just started laying out thing after thing after thing after thing that they were in fact feeling and thinking.
[01:58:08] Not agreeing with any of it. I guarantee you before he stepped out on the stage he probably said to one of his aides and watch me turn this crowd around.
[01:58:18] They start cheering him inside of about five minutes before he's finished with them they loved him like they were so in favor because he dialed into them and what they were thinking and feeling and he wasn't afraid to say it.
[01:58:35] And to this day I'm shocked that more politicians don't do that.
[01:58:39] This is not agreement. He takes no position on whatsoever. This is what you see.
[01:58:45] Yeah. Yeah. It lets that person understand that you understand at a minimum. That's what we're looking for.
[01:58:56] You say here is you try and insert tools of tactical empathy into your daily life. I encourage you to think of them as extensions of natural human interactions as not and not artificial conversational ticks in any interaction.
[01:59:09] It pleases us to feel that the other side is listening and acknowledging our situation whether you are negotiating a business deal or simply chatting to a person at the supermarket butcher counter creating empathetic relationship and encouraging your counterpart to expand on their situation as a basis of healthy interaction.
[01:59:25] Now this is something I say to people a lot. I say hey listen you can't pretend to do this stuff. You're not Robert De Niro and you're not Meryl Streep.
[01:59:35] So don't pretend to be curious about them. Don't pretend. Just really feel that way. Yeah. You need to say hey I really want to learn what you know I really want to understand what you're thinking here because if you're trying to act you're going to fail.
[01:59:47] Most people are going to fail when they're trying to act. And I always say intent has a smell. So if you come in there and you're just trying to butter me up with some little conversation I'm going to smell it.
[01:59:59] Most people are going to smell that. I know when I the reason I know that is because when I was a young seal I was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two seal platoons.
[02:00:08] So when you know the boss would come in we all we you know whatever bullshit he was throwing we'd see right through it like OK I see what's really going on here. Intense going to have a smell.
[02:00:20] So it should be earnest all the stuff should be earnest. You go on to say some key points here. Imagine yourself in your counterpart situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn't demand that you agree with the other person's ideas.
[02:00:37] You may well find them crazy. But by acknowledging the other person situations you immediately convey that you're listening. And once they know you are listening they may tell you something you can use.
[02:00:48] So boom the reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal. So focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence.
[02:01:06] Get them into the open. What do you mean by that.
[02:01:10] Which part. You and I are talking and what barriers are you looking at. What barriers. Sometimes you're saying barriers. The reason I'm not going to agree to a deal.
[02:01:21] Isn't because I can't find common ground. It's just that there's these barriers that I have that are that are worse. Right. Right. Right. So first of all kind of three different things there and I'm going to I'm going to try to drive the state through the heart of common ground to start with.
[02:01:34] And this is my theory on common ground. First of all the strongest common ground is usually ethnicity or geography and geography is more powerful than ethnicity.
[02:01:44] Like if you and I grew up in the same neighborhood. I don't know what all combination of ethnic ethnic groups you are. Because like if you were in New York you'd be one of five.
[02:01:54] And I wouldn't know which one it is.
[02:01:56] He's talking to Echo Charles right now by the way. Yeah. So but if we grew up in the same neighborhood like you and I resonate.
[02:02:04] Now if you and I had the exact same ethnicity and you grew up in New York City and I grew up in Mississippi. We're like I don't know what this dude is talking about.
[02:02:12] There's going to be some resonance but geography is stronger. Now then common ground also. Why do I want to have common ground with you. So you understand me.
[02:02:22] So we say we share core values. You understand where I'm coming from. And so if I just demonstrate that I understand I'm going to be what I don't got to be from your neighborhood.
[02:02:36] You because what common ground is does this guy or gal understand me. So that just show somebody you understand and common ground is unnecessary.
[02:02:47] Not a barriers. Example one of my favorites Bob Iger's book The Ride of a Lifetime. He's sitting down to negotiate what ends up being the sale of Pixar to Disney.
[02:03:02] At the time jobs hates Disney sees with hatred for Disney.
[02:03:11] And when I went to school everybody writes up that purchases you know it was obvious it was a great move. It was great for both companies. Not how this thing goes down.
[02:03:20] I could get support in charge of Disney. He reaches out to jobs because he knows there's been bad blood. I just been the number two guy at Disney for nine years.
[02:03:29] Reaches out to jobs and some congratulatory thing and jobs immediately shoots back at him. How long were you Michaels number two because he's blaming Michael Eisner.
[02:03:42] How long were you the number two guy. Well this was always going down. Not willing to accept any compliment. So I guess is let's talk about this job says come on down.
[02:03:53] Yeah you want to talk to me. Come into my backyard. Go to the Apple campus. Think you're ready to set out jobs once you work off a whiteboard.
[02:04:01] Pros and cons. Offers the pen to Iger says you go first. Now Iger knows how much bad blood there is here. He is not anxious to say a word.
[02:04:15] And this is in his book. So he says not Steve go ahead. Steve gets up. Jobs starts writing all the reasons why not to do it.
[02:04:25] All the barriers. He effectively does this approach on himself and writes some nasty stuff about Disney.
[02:04:35] Like just short of out now profanity insulting your culture sucks. You guys suck. Everything about you is horrible. Your children you know.
[02:04:45] I mean he everything he's laying all this stuff out there and he kind of gets done and he looks to hand the pen back to Iger who's who's not just crestfallen because he just
[02:04:57] thinks feels like he's got the stuffing kicked out of him. And he says well I guess there are a lot of negatives there. And Jobs look back at him and says you know sometimes the positive outweighs the negative
[02:05:11] because he deactivated all the barriers. They got all the barriers out. They got him out into the open air. They cleared their head by first discussing and just calling him out.
[02:05:25] Like Bob Iger does not offer a bit of explanation for any of this. Iger never says but that wasn't true or but oh yeah you know nothing he doesn't say a word he just lets all the negatives get out there.
[02:05:38] And when he when he lets jobs run the full course of the reasons for not doing it. Then jobs is left with the positives which is in fact the way humans make decisions.
[02:05:52] You will reconcile in your head how do you live with the negatives deal with them deactivate them before you decide to do something.
[02:06:02] If you can reconcile all those negatives as soon as you do your brain then goes to the positive. And then the positive picks up this tremendous amount of velocity having been unshackled from the negatives.
[02:06:18] We do it all the time. We do it constantly.
[02:06:24] I've had this thought a couple times already during this discussion. And it just hit me again. The idea of talking about the negatives.
[02:06:36] You know right now in the veteran community there's a huge issue with PTSD and veteran suicide. And I've talked about this before when I've lost my friends in combat.
[02:06:51] Every time I've been a guy that was like OK you're giving the eulogy you're giving them a moral speech so I had to go and sit down in the in the pain and sorrow.
[02:07:02] And write down what I'm going to say to a crowd of people you know in a day or two days. And what you end up doing is you end up thinking through and putting on paper like this terrible situation.
[02:07:18] And then you know coming out of the military when I got out of the military I was talking to people telling the leadership lessons that I've learned but in telling the leadership lessons that I've learned you're also talking through some of the really bad things that happened.
[02:07:31] So as I hear you say that look you got to get those negatives out there. I tell veterans that a lot you know get helps when you talk through these things. You know they say that about World War two versus Vietnam World War two.
[02:07:45] Wow. You got done with World War two. What did you do. You got on a ship with a bunch of other guys that just were in combat and you sailed back to America for six weeks and you sat below decks and told stories to each other about the friends that you lost and all the stuff that you've been through.
[02:07:59] Well in Vietnam what did you do. You got done with your tour you got on a plane for 15 hours and then you got dropped off in Main Street America you didn't get to process it. You didn't get to talk about any of this stuff.
[02:08:10] And so we got there. Yeah and then you got yelled at. So yeah this idea of getting the negatives out there even though it's uncomfortable and it is uncomfortable. It sucks. No one wants to do it.
[02:08:22] But if you do it you start to deal with them. You start to contend with it. And then I can tell you right now the more you do it the more you process it the better you're going to feel.
[02:08:33] So it's not even just a negotiation thing. This is like a life thing. Yeah.
[02:08:40] Another note you make pause after you label a barrier or mirror or mirror a statement let it sink in don't worry the other party will fill the silence getting used to that silence thing label your counterparts fears to diffuse the power.
[02:08:58] We all want to talk about happy stuff but remember the faster you interrupt action in your counterparts amygdala the part of the brain that generates fear the faster you can generate feelings of safety well being and trust same idea right.
[02:09:11] If we talk about that thing that is pissing you off or that thing that's scaring you the minute you let out out of that cage it like loses some of its power right.
[02:09:20] You know when we work with explosive we do something called tamping the explosives which means you compress that you hold that thing in and it's going to cause more damage.
[02:09:29] So what you cover up an explosive it creates a bigger explosion. That's why you see like a kid puts a firecracker in a microwave oven and it causes them because the microwave oven is shut and there's massive over pressure and it blows the door.
[02:09:44] You know the hundred and fifty yards because you compressed it. Well it's the same thing with this fear that you're talking about you let that thing out let it breathe.
[02:09:56] It's going to take the sting off of it. That's why you know you just talked about this with Steve job list the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can.
[02:10:06] Counterintuitive counterintuitive what's counterintuitive about this is I think to myself you know if I actually tell Chris that it seems like I'm ripping him off.
[02:10:14] What if he doesn't think that he probably won't know and why should I admit to it. He knows he knows he's thinking that you're thinking if I'm thinking that hey this price is probably high he's definitely thinking the price is high.
[02:10:29] Remember you're dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood so usually able to reinforce and encourage positive perception dynamics there you go.
[02:10:36] I mean this is just awesome techniques here.
[02:10:41] The opening to chapter four here is kind of a surprise beware of yes and master no.
[02:10:48] At some point in their development all negotiators have to come to grips with no when you come to realize the real psychological dynamic behind it you'll love the word.
[02:11:00] It's not just that you lose your fear of it but that you can come to learn what it does for you and how you can build deals out of it.
[02:11:04] Yes and maybe you're often worthless but no always alters the conversation talk us through that.
[02:11:11] Yeah I think I first came across this idea Jim Camp wrote a book in 2002 called start with no.
[02:11:19] And I remember seeing that on a bookshelf like doing a double take on like what start with no.
[02:11:24] I thought we were supposed to get the yes. Yes it was a magic word.
[02:11:28] And he had discovered inadvertently that if you just tell people it was OK to say no.
[02:11:35] They will agree. He's right up front he called the right to veto and he'd say you know I just want you know for before we get into this you can say no at any time.
[02:11:42] Say no to me any time and I'll go away and he made more deals.
[02:11:48] So accidentally one of my hostage negotiators in Pittsburgh tells me she says that you know because I'm making everybody read this book.
[02:11:59] Did I do this. Now she was going to be removed removed from the negotiation team in Pittsburgh.
[02:12:05] Pittsburgh because her boss was jealous of how much the police department loved her.
[02:12:14] So she finds out she's going to get removed which is going to hurt the office's relationship with the police department.
[02:12:22] But this guy doesn't care because he's jealous.
[02:12:26] She sits down with him and she says do you want the FBI to be embarrassed.
[02:12:31] Now I remember when she first told me that I remember thinking through at the moment like I would never have had the guts to say like that sounds so manipulative.
[02:12:39] I imagine this guy just burst into flames on the spot.
[02:12:43] But instead this guy relaxes he leans back in his chair you know he steeples with his hands like it's what people do when he feels really good about themselves.
[02:12:53] And he goes no.
[02:12:57] She says what do you want me to do.
[02:13:01] And he says well you know stop letting this stuff interfere with your investigations now go back to work so he calls her into fire from the team.
[02:13:09] She walks out no problem.
[02:13:11] So I'm like there's something here and then I start thinking about other conversations I've had Lieutenant on a police department.
[02:13:19] That I thought got got in this guy's way a lot because he was over managed him.
[02:13:25] I remember him saying to me once you know a lieutenant's job is to say no.
[02:13:31] And I thought.
[02:13:34] No it's not.
[02:13:36] You know Lieutenant's the leader.
[02:13:38] The leader's job is to encourage people not to say no.
[02:13:41] So why is he saying this it makes it feel good to say no it makes him feel safe it makes him feel protected.
[02:13:47] And we start experimenting with instead of letting people say no what happens if you actually get him to say no.
[02:13:55] Like how does that change feelings the way they react.
[02:13:59] And it makes such a massive difference like instantaneous like if it's important I don't say do you disagree I say do you disagree.
[02:14:09] I don't say is this a good idea is this a ridiculous idea.
[02:14:12] I don't say you know what I'm never going for yes I'm always going for no.
[02:14:17] And you know if I can't because I know I'm all over the place here.
[02:14:21] I'm on a plane from JFK to LA where it's a red eye and black businessman sitting next to me.
[02:14:31] He's kind of loud.
[02:14:33] He's got a he's got a big colorful sweater on but I just you know not not not crazy out there but I just think you know interesting
[02:14:41] interesting cat clearly a businessman.
[02:14:44] He's got people on his team because people that are sitting you know back in the economy or walking by and you know a boss a doing and finally
[02:14:53] but I hear him on a phone and he's just trying to force people to say yes.
[02:14:59] And finally I can't take it anymore in between calls and I tap on a short I said look.
[02:15:06] Get him to say no change your questions you drive me crazy I can't take it anymore I can I'm hearing you shove this down people's
[02:15:13] throats switch from yes to no.
[02:15:15] And I go and set and again instead of the greed the disagree instead of would you do this are you against doing this.
[02:15:22] And I give him a quick rundown of how to make the switch and he's smart dude picks it right up really fast.
[02:15:27] So he gets back on the phone.
[02:15:29] And I also say you know the reason you should listen to me is because I wrote this book never split the difference.
[02:15:34] So just do it smart dude learnable coach will does it instantaneous looks back to me says thanks.
[02:15:41] He says let me introduce myself my name is Trevor you may know me by my stage name Buster rhymes.
[02:15:50] Wow.
[02:15:51] Okay.
[02:15:52] You know your hair is a little shorter right now didn't recognize you right off the bat but I do recognize that name.
[02:16:01] You go on to say no has a lot of skills.
[02:16:04] No allows real issues to be brought forth no protects people from making and lets them correct ineffective decisions.
[02:16:12] No slows things down so people can freely embrace their decisions and their agreements they enter into.
[02:16:19] No helps people feel safe secure emotionally comfortable and in control of all their decisions.
[02:16:25] No moves everyone everyone's efforts forward.
[02:16:33] And there's a there's a thing that you point out here which is important because you say using this chapters tools and daily life is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society's biggest social dictums that is be nice.
[02:16:51] Right especially because in the book you're like hey smile be pleasant and and you know getting people to say no is one of those things you say we've instrumentalized nicest in a way as a way of greasing the social wheels yet it's often a roost we're polite and we don't disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction but by turning nice
[02:17:13] into a lubricant we've leached it of meaning a smile and a nod might signify get me out of here as much as it means nice to meet you that's death for a good negotiator who gains their power by understanding their counterpart situation and extracting information about their
[02:17:29] counterparts desires and needs extracting that information means getting the other party to feel safe and in control.
[02:17:37] And while it may sound contradictory the way to get there is by letting the other party by getting the other party to disagree to draw their own boundaries to define their desires as a function of what they do not want.
[02:17:53] In other words getting them to say no.
[02:17:57] Yeah it's nuts it's just it's of the of the you know the different skills are counterintuitive to the end to their own degree.
[02:18:07] Like the extremely strong degree that getting somebody say yes makes a comfortable concern worried about what kind of traps are walking into where's a hook what have I forgotten.
[02:18:19] Complete different 180 degree turn on getting them to say no like that the comfort level from saying no.
[02:18:29] And then the ability to think things through immediately like if I were to say to you disagree do you disagree.
[02:18:37] You go no I don't disagree but here the following problems and you'd lay them right out one two three four five right off the top of your head have no problem if I just said do you agree.
[02:18:47] And you do want to say yes I agree but here the following problems you won't do it the second way.
[02:18:53] Because you would have felt that the mere utterance of the word yes hooked you.
[02:19:00] And so then anything that you lay out after that feels like you're digging yourself in deeper.
[02:19:07] But having said no you don't feel hooked.
[02:19:12] So now you're going to lay out the next four or five things that you might need.
[02:19:17] Because you don't feel like you're digging yourself in deeper.
[02:19:21] And the next four or five things after the yes or no are what's critical it's never never right there it's never at the point of decision it's really here are the problems.
[02:19:33] Or here's what you got to accomplish and you got to get past that and you get past it freely when people say no.
[02:19:42] Because they feel safe and protected they feel no sense of obligation they don't feel like they're digging themselves in with each thing they say after that.
[02:19:51] I got that emotion from that you got an example in the book real common example.
[02:19:58] The two the two examples you is now a bad is now a bad time to talk versus do you have a few minutes to talk.
[02:20:07] Like when someone calls you up on the phone and says hey do you have a few minutes to talk right now.
[02:20:10] I want to say no but I also kind of feel like when I say yes like what do we get.
[02:20:15] But when someone says is it a bad time to talk right now I'm like no it's not a bad time.
[02:20:18] I'm like OK with it.
[02:20:20] Just one of those things.
[02:20:23] The other thing that you got in here that really aligns a lot with what I talk about a lot is negotiate in their world persuasion is not about how bright or smooth you or forcefully you are.
[02:20:33] It's about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea.
[02:20:39] So don't beat them with logic or brute force ask them questions that open past your goals it's not about you.
[02:20:45] I say all the time written in these books make it their idea right how can I make this their idea.
[02:20:51] And the other thing I say a lot is the truth doesn't matter if I punch you in the face with it right.
[02:20:57] If I punch you in the face with the truth you're not going to be open to it.
[02:21:00] You're going to be pissed and you're going to find a way to defend yourself and you're probably going to stab me in the neck with your facts from your perspective.
[02:21:08] So with a dull spoon right stabbing an egg with a little spoon.
[02:21:13] Yeah. Now we get into this section here trigger the two or the chapter five trigger the two words that immediately transform any negotiation.
[02:21:25] You say the crisis negotiation unit the FBI crisis negotiation negotiation unit developed what is a powerful staple in the high stakes world of crisis negotiation the behavioral change stairway model BCSM behavioral
[02:21:41] change stairway model the model proposes five stages active listening empathy rapport influence and behavioral change that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior.
[02:21:55] The origins of this model can be traced back to the great American psychologist Carl Rogers who proposed that real change can only come when a therapist accepts that the client as he or she is an approach known as unconditional positive regard
[02:22:09] the vast majority of us however as Rogers explained come to expect that love praise and approval are dependent on saying and doing things people consider correct.
[02:22:19] That is because for most of us positive regard for the positive regard we we experience is conditional we develop a habit of hiding who we really are and what we really think instead calibrating our words to gain approval but disclosing little.
[02:22:33] So they come up with this thing active listening that's a first step empathy alright I kind of see where you're coming from rapport now we're starting to understand each other influence you're starting to listen to what I have to say and then behavioral change
[02:22:45] you're actually going to do something different based on the influence here.
[02:22:48] If you successfully take someone up the behavioral change stairway each stage attempting to engender more trust and more connection there will be a breakthrough moment when unconditional positive regard is established and you can begin exerting influence after years of refining the staircase
[02:23:08] and its tactics I can teach anyone how to get to that moment but as legions of B school grads weaned on the most famous negotiating book in the world getting to us have ultimately discovered you more than likely think more than likely haven't gotten there yet if what you're hearing is the word yes you'll soon learn the
[02:23:26] greatest two words in any negotiation are actually that's right that's what you're looking for you're looking for the other person the person that you're negotiating with to say that's right the that's right big breakthrough usually doesn't come at the beginning of a negotiation it's
[02:23:45] a subtle epiphany so talk to us about that's right well it's what people say when they're completely all in on what was just said like and if you look for you see it everywhere and and one of the great examples that I like to use is people that are devoted to
[02:24:10] and my some point of this I mean if that isn't the proof of that's right moment somewhere in a speech or in the presidential debate when he articulated something when you bought in completely you looked at the screen and you pointed at it and you said that's right
[02:24:29] and it's not just trump it's any charismatic leader anywhere when the charismatic leader is articulated something that you believe is totally true and it totally gets you nobody ever says you're right they always say that's right
[02:24:48] and there's that statement is when when you were totally bought in on what was just said and as is and our co-author tall was one that pulled out the description of it being a subtle epiphany tall contributed brilliantly to the book I mean he brought a lot to the table besides just being a writer
[02:25:07] and so then as I was getting more into neuroscience I look up neuroscience the neuroscience of epiphany what neurochemicals do you get hit with you get hit with serotonin and oxytocin and oxytocin is the bonding drug
[02:25:26] so they hence people bonded to Donald Trump or any other leader you're you're bonded to Obama you're bonded to whoever has ordered the things that you believe to be completely true there's this it's a one way bond and there's a feeling of a bond
[02:25:45] and then again back to you were men's podcast you know for me just being bonded is enough and another one of his podcast he points out oxytocin and clients people to tell the truth so now not only you bonded to me you're more likely to tell me the truth
[02:26:05] and then he points out on yet another podcast serotonin the feeling of satisfaction which means you're not as demanding so if I can get it that's right out of you you're going to bond to me you're going to tell me the truth and you're going to make fewer demands what else do I want
[02:26:24] yeah the the example and again the details in the book are are outstanding but the example that you give goes back to the thing that I opened up with you had subaya this mastermind terrorist and you were in negotiations with them and you're actually working through a translator
[02:26:42] and the translator was hard ass you know pretty much let's we need to go at him type of attitude and you kind of convinced him over time to take a less a more indirect approach and and eventually the nego the negotiator kind of read back
[02:26:58] they look you've been oppressed for this long the Spanish came here they converted your people against their will and you've been suffering underneath this government and subaya says that's right and that's what changes it that's what changes his attitude yeah yeah
[02:27:16] and if I can couple of tangents because yeah you know we that was also when I was working with McCraven okay not Admiral but captain McCraven and he was he was phenomenal and he chaired he created the hostage working group the National Security Council his leaders you know what a great
[02:27:36] guy to work with I can remember particular when we're working that case in the one that followed on like there was some stuff that the US government was very nervous about and you needed a guy who stood up properly for everybody and for the right thing if you will
[02:27:52] and I can remember being at one meeting in particular captain McCraven McCraven I don't mean to be disrespectful I'm sure it sounds disrespectful just call McCraven but McCraven stands up and he says you know what I'm not going to stop talking about this to somebody tells me to sit down and shut up and they're going to have to tell me twice
[02:28:12] and I remember thinking that's the guy I want talking to the White House that's the guy that I want talking to the Department of State and we're in the midst of that shilling case and the last thing that we need when we're in a forward operating base is any sort of
[02:28:34] insecurity in decision from Washington DC and when you're out there on the front lines having a guy like Captain Bill McCraven Admiral Bill McCraven holding things together back in Washington DC just ridiculously reassuring feeling that he was a great guy
[02:28:52] I don't know about it that's awesome there's a big difference and you pointed out in the book there's a huge difference and you mentioned it but I just want to cover it again just to make sure people catch this there's a huge difference between that's right and your right
[02:29:10] because you're right and here's a good way to translate this you're talking to your wife and you say something she goes oh you're right that is not what we're looking for that means she wants you to shut up and she's going to carry on and you haven't come to any kind of conclusions
[02:29:28] so there's a big difference getting someone to say you're right in fact there's a lot of times where that's in increase in hostilities that just means they're looking for another way to attack you
[02:29:41] yeah and they haven't quite got it yet but they're they're waiting they're laying in wait and it is if they're giving you your right you got problems
[02:29:51] be careful with that one look for that's right
[02:29:58] next section bend their realities and and you get into this here don't compromise which is interesting thing we're going to talk through
[02:30:12] the win-win mindset pushed by so many negotiation experts is usually ineffective and often disastrous at best it satisfies neither side and if you employ it with the counterpart who has a win-lose approach you're setting yourself up to be swindled
[02:30:26] of course as we've noted previously you need to keep a cooperative rapport building a pathetic approach the kind that creates a dynamic in which deals can be made but you have to get rid of that naivete
[02:30:37] because compromise splitting the difference can lead to terrible outcomes compromise is often a bad deal and a key theme will hit in this chapter is no deal is better than a bad deal
[02:30:50] even in kidnapping yes a bad deal in kidnapping is where someone pays and no one comes out
[02:30:56] to make my point on compromise let me paint an example a woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with a suit but her husband doesn't want her he prefers brown shoes so what do they do they compromise
[02:31:05] they split the difference they meet half ways halfway and you guess he wears one black shoe and one brown shoe is this the best outcome in fact no in fact it's the worst possible outcome either of the two outcomes black or brown would have been better
[02:31:22] I'm here to call bullshit on compromise right now we don't compromise because it's right we compromise because it's easy and because it saves face we compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie distilled to his essence we compromise to be safe
[02:31:38] most people in negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain to free you are driven by their actual goals so don't settle here's a simple rule never split the difference creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk annoyance confusion and conflict
[02:31:56] accommodation and compromise produced none of that you've got to embrace the hard stuff that's where the great deals are and that's what negotiators do
[02:32:07] amen
[02:32:09] at the class amen
[02:32:13] what point did you realize that was the title of the book
[02:32:16] tall came up with that the original title was killer deals we started working with tall Brandon and I my son Brandon uncredited co author of the book and tosses right so we're gonna we'll start with killer deals and at some point in time the proper title of the book will occur to me and I'll tell you what it is now you're free to disagree
[02:32:37] but I tell you when I get deeply into this enough it I'll give you the title and probably about halfway through the whole writing process was when he said titles never split the difference says that the essence of what you guys are talking about it if you completely understand it and understand why he says that's what the title is
[02:33:04] and we're like you got it that's right
[02:33:11] yeah he came he tall came over that probably about halfway through the writing process now how does that we're gonna get into I think I'm gonna cover it but the the acrimony approach right now in the acrimony approach you're shooting for a specific number
[02:33:29] right and you know you're kind of compromising to get to that number no why well if you shoot for specific number was that a compromise as long as you get your number but that that's my number
[02:33:43] meaning you want to you want to tell me this car for $10,000 I only want to give you $7000 my first offer is a low ball offer right and then I come up on my first offer 65% of what I want to pay then I go 8595 then 100% of what I want to pay right so I guess we didn't we didn't split the difference
[02:34:05] no it's not and there's also a very specific sort of rationale behind the offers each offer has to be effectively half as much as the previous increase you got you got always have diminishing increases the other side is going to feel like they're beating into a position they can just be very gratifying for them
[02:34:24] deadlines you talk about here time is one of the most critical crucial variables in any negotiation a simple passing of time and it's sharp because cousin the deadline are the screw that pressures every deal to conclusion
[02:34:43] where your deadline is real and absolute or merely a line in the sand it can trick you into believing that doing a deal now is more important than getting a good deal deadlines regularly make people say and do impulsive things that are against their best interests because we all have a natural tendency to rush as a deadline approaches
[02:35:02] yeah not only rushes a deadline approaches but not rush at all until it's looming like in people lose track of that it's the process and deadlines are really just designed to kick the process in the gear but human beings being what they are if you give somebody a deadline of Friday
[02:35:24] don't expect to get into any kind of conversation before Thursday should not get out yeah I've done a lot of deals like on the way to the airport or on our way out and that's when the discussion actually starts right not optimal right
[02:35:42] I'm skipping ahead a little bit in the book the f word why it's so powerful when to use it and how the most powerful word in negotiations is fair as human beings were might least swayed by how much we feel we have been respected people comply with agreements if they feel they've been treated fairly
[02:36:05] and lash out if they don't once you understand what a messy emotional and destructive dynamic fairness can be you can see why fair is a tremendously powerful word and you need to use it with care in in fact of the three ways that people drop the f bomb only one is positive the most common is a judo like defensive move that destabilizes the other side this manipulation usually takes the form something like we just want was fair
[02:36:32] think back to the last time someone made this implicit accusation of unfairness to you and I bet you have to admit that it immediately triggered feelings of defensiveness and discomfort these feelings are often subconscious and lead to irrational concession
[02:36:48] the second use of the f bomb is more nefarious in this one your counterpart will basically accuse you of being dense or dishonest by saying we've given you a fair offer the terrible little jab meant to distract your attention away from distract your attention manipulating to giving in
[02:37:06] if you find yourself in this situation the best reaction is to simply mirror the f that has just been a lot that you fair you respond positive let the words power do to them what it was intended to do to you following that with a label seems like you're ready to provide evidence that supports that which eludes to the opening of their books or otherwise handing over information that will either contradict their claim to fairness or give you more data to work with
[02:37:29] then you had previously right away you declaw the attack the last use of the f word is my favorite because it's positive and constructive it sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation here's how I use it early on in a negotiation I say I want you to feel like you're being treated fairly at all times so please stop me at any time if I'm being unfair and will address it
[02:37:53] it's simple and clear and sets me up as an honest dealer with that statement I let people know it's okay to use the word with me if they use it honestly as a negotiator you should strive for reputation of being fair you represent reputation precede you let it precede you in a way that paves success
[02:38:14] when I read all that I was like oh we all it seems like human beings have this sort of natural we're just raised that fairness is a big thing for us
[02:38:26] and you know what I sometimes when I think of what I can't quite make a connection I think of the opposite and what that triggers in people so what's like the epic insult that guy's a cheater right that guy's a cheater oh yeah you want but he cheated you know you hate that guy you don't want to be that guy when someone says you cheated you get all defensive
[02:38:50] so it's the same thing here this this f bomb when it gets dropped on you so I'm just hey we just want what's fair we need I'm not being fair and it could trigger you to make an ideal you shouldn't have made
[02:39:02] a lot and the amount of time like it's rare that in a negotiation that has any sort of contentiousness to it at all the word will always come up I mean it's a great manipulative device and people often say it out of defensiveness but for the same for the same ends you know get the other side to change your mind
[02:39:29] providing no evidence whatsoever as to why they should that's not fair yeah exactly yeah yeah that's you see it and usually it's it's when the tables and gotten turned on somebody in an unexpected way that's when they'll drop the word
[02:39:48] what does that look like a person I know who's an eminently fair person was in a real estate negotiation right after the housing market where they were at drops substantially and they got the buyer to increase the offer above market
[02:40:09] by simply saying we just want what's fair now the person that uses phrase had gotten the table tables turned on them by dropping a market so it wasn't even the buyer's fault I didn't do anything buyers following the market so this person out of simple defensiveness having had the tables turned on them
[02:40:34] they felt that it was an unfair series of circumstances now is that the buyers fault buyers are spying in a real estate market that is dictated by the dynamics of the market and that was the first time it really jumped out at me
[02:40:51] and then I started looking for it across the board because the person had told the story got the buyer to raise the price and I remember thinking like that wait wait wait as an innocent bystander here that you know that's not fair there's no fairness there
[02:41:07] and I thought if a good person can do this and change completely change the dynamics in a relationship in the negotiation how often does it come up and then you start looking for it and you see it over and it is so effective that the manipulators have seen the good people use it and change the dynamics that they've gotten really good at using it to cover up manipulative behavior
[02:41:34] watch out for that one
[02:41:38] got a section in here bend their reality you start going to some of the methodologies of that anchor their emotions to bend your counterparts reality you have to start with the basics of empathy
[02:41:47] so start out with an accusation with an accusation audit acknowledging all of their fears by anchoring their emotions in preparation for a loss you inflame the other side's loss aversion so that they'll jump at the chance to avoid it you talk about loss aversion people are people don't want to lose
[02:42:06] right
[02:42:07] and and this accusation audit is sort of what Steve Jobs put up on the board when he did it himself
[02:42:13] right right
[02:42:14] I could have done it if he if he had stepped up to the thing and said well you probably going to say this and this and this but he got Steve Jobs do which is even better
[02:42:25] but you anchor those emotions
[02:42:28] the other thing you say is let the other guy go first most of the time
[02:42:35] I suggest you let the other side anchor monetary negotiations the real issues that neither side is a perfect information going on the table this means if you don't know enough to open up with confidence so this is what we hear all the time in negotiations you know you don't say the number first how much do you how much
[02:42:50] will you give me for the car well what do you think it's worth like we do this around and around yeah
[02:42:56] what are the disadvantages advantages of opening
[02:42:59] or giving the number
[02:43:01] well as very much as a general rule I'm I'm gonna want the other side so the number first because it's information it's gonna it's gonna tell me
[02:43:11] it's gonna tell me data it's gonna tell me mindset where you're coming from it's gonna tell me a lot none of which am I getting
[02:43:18] if I go first
[02:43:20] so it's a general rule we don't go first
[02:43:23] again a general rule it's at some point in time to keep from going around and around around I'm gonna throw a number out and I'm gonna characterize it before I throw it out
[02:43:33] and if I'm gonna say this is a lot
[02:43:39] when when we quote prices for our coaching first of all our coaching is more expensive if you can find negotiation coaching anywhere which is very hard to find
[02:43:50] we're gonna charge you more than anybody else this
[02:43:54] so I'm gonna say I'm gonna say that
[02:43:56] I'm gonna charge you more than anybody else this somebody somebody wants to bring me in for a talk
[02:44:02] I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna be so expensive and we're gonna quote you a heart stopping price
[02:44:11] and then you get that causes you to reflect on your value
[02:44:16] it causes you to run the numbers one of two things you're gonna you're gonna ask me what the number is
[02:44:23] and you're gonna say I well you said it was expensive
[02:44:30] or you're gonna say wow it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be
[02:44:35] and then we don't bargain
[02:44:38] so if I got a thrown number I like to refer to as I never throw the number I'd naked
[02:44:45] if I and if otherwise I want to know where you're coming from I also want to give you a price that you want
[02:44:51] because price is a term
[02:44:54] and I need to hit the sweet spot on your price
[02:44:58] if I go too high
[02:45:01] you're not gonna over deliver you're gonna feel like you undervalued yourself and you're gonna do the same amount of work if I pay you too much
[02:45:08] I found that out the hard way
[02:45:10] if I go too low
[02:45:12] you're gonna do a lousy job
[02:45:14] so what I need what I really want besides just throwing a number first
[02:45:18] I want to know what number do you think a good number is
[02:45:23] that you're gonna work really hard for
[02:45:26] and feel like you earned your money
[02:45:29] and not change that you just undervalued yourself in the past and now now all of a sudden I'm worth this much more money
[02:45:36] which means you're not gonna put in extra effort
[02:45:39] you're also talking here about if people are stuck on the money
[02:45:44] you can start talking about other things
[02:45:46] the non-monetary terms
[02:45:48] so like if you're negotiating for a job
[02:45:51] you start talking about things that don't have anything to do with money
[02:45:54] and that can be a good way to start to move the conversation forward
[02:45:58] the
[02:46:01] this is just interesting psychology
[02:46:04] the biggest thing to remember
[02:46:06] when you start when you do get to numbers
[02:46:08] you say the biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in zero
[02:46:11] inevitably feel like temporary placeholders
[02:46:13] guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of
[02:46:17] but anything you throw out that sounds less rounded
[02:46:21] say $37,263
[02:46:24] feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation
[02:46:29] such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart
[02:46:33] so use them to fortify your offers
[02:46:36] yeah it's nuts right
[02:46:38] I mean it's just that's voodoo
[02:46:40] it is so true and it's just complete voodoo
[02:46:43] and yet go look at the prices in a store
[02:46:47] we see examples of it everywhere
[02:46:50] they're all $9.95 or whatever
[02:46:53] and there's a psychological thing to be like $10 seems like a ton of money
[02:46:56] $9.95 I can afford all day
[02:46:59] right
[02:47:01] the original magic one that I love like iTunes
[02:47:05] $0.99 for a song
[02:47:08] back when the app store and you could get all your music for free
[02:47:12] like Jobs and Apple like let's put a number on this
[02:47:16] that seems so small and it's not a round number
[02:47:20] and suddenly people were paying for music again
[02:47:24] $0.99
[02:47:27] still $0.99 for a song isn't it
[02:47:30] some songs yeah
[02:47:32] I guess it's all like streaming and all this stuff now
[02:47:35] you don't really buy well actually I don't
[02:47:37] I buy like the whole thing whatever that is
[02:47:39] $1.29 sometimes
[02:47:41] so they jack the prices
[02:47:43] some key points
[02:47:46] all negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs
[02:47:50] don't let yourself be fooled by the surface
[02:47:52] once you know that the Haitian kidnappers want party money
[02:47:56] you'll be better, you'll be miles better for beer
[02:47:59] and there's a whole section in here about that
[02:48:01] about these Haitian kidnappers
[02:48:03] you worked all kinds like dozens of cases of these Haitian kidnappers
[02:48:08] one of the things you've identified is they would like
[02:48:10] kidnap early in the week
[02:48:12] they wanted that money by Friday so they could go out and party
[02:48:16] and so how much they need to have a great party that weekend
[02:48:20] that's sort of the number that you would end up looking for
[02:48:22] I mean it's awesome
[02:48:24] splitting the differences wearing one black and one brown shoe
[02:48:26] don't compromise meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides
[02:48:29] approaching deadlines
[02:48:31] entice people to rush the negotiating process
[02:48:34] do impulsive things that are against their best interests
[02:48:37] we talked about the F word
[02:48:39] you can bend your counterparts' reality by anchoring his starting point
[02:48:45] before you make an offer emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be
[02:48:49] when you get to numbers set an extreme anchor to make your real offer seem reasonable
[02:48:55] or use a range to seem less aggressive
[02:48:57] the real value of anything depends on what vantage point you're looking at it from
[02:49:03] and last people tend people take more risks to avoid a loss than realize a gain
[02:49:09] make sure your counterpart sees that there's something to lose by inaction
[02:49:13] that's why the website says today only
[02:49:18] you'll miss out
[02:49:21] you got a section in here that's about fast forward a little bit calibrated
[02:49:28] question calibrate your questions
[02:49:30] and we kind of discussed this earlier if we were a cordon or not
[02:49:35] but I talked about asking earnest questions as a leader you're asking earnest questions
[02:49:38] and you've got this little bit similar approach but different verbiage here
[02:49:44] calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment
[02:49:47] they have a direction
[02:49:49] once you figure out where you want a conversation to go you have to design the question
[02:49:52] that will ease the conversation in that direction while letting the other guy think
[02:49:57] it's his choice to take you there
[02:50:00] that's why I refer to these questions as calibrated questions
[02:50:03] you have to calibrate them carefully just like you would calibrate a gun sight
[02:50:07] or a measuring scale to target a specific problem
[02:50:10] the good news is that there are rules for that
[02:50:12] first off calibrated questions avoid verbs like can is are do or does
[02:50:18] these are close ended questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no
[02:50:22] instead they start with a list of words people know as reporters questions
[02:50:27] who, what, when, where, why and how
[02:50:30] those words inspire your counterpart to think and then speak expansively
[02:50:34] but let me cut that list even further it's best to start with what, how and sometimes why
[02:50:42] nothing else who, when and where will often just get your counterpart to share a fact without thinking
[02:50:47] and why can backfire regardless of what the language, what language the word why is translated into
[02:50:53] it's accusatory there are very rare moments when this is to your advantage
[02:50:59] the only time you can use why successfully is when defending, when defensiveness that is created
[02:51:05] supports the change you are trying to get them to see
[02:51:08] why would you ever change from the way you've always done things to try my approach as an example
[02:51:14] so I found this very useful because you know I often talk about something from a military perspective
[02:51:26] called the indirect approach which means I don't want to attack you head on
[02:51:29] I want to, you know, I want to attack you from a flank where you're not defensive
[02:51:33] and this applies to everything it applies to leadership it applies to approaching people
[02:51:37] it applies to, you know, if you've got an ego which everyone does and I attack your plan
[02:51:42] that means I'm attacking your ego you're going to get defensive
[02:51:44] so, you know, often times it's in order to get around your ego
[02:51:49] I'm going to ask you earnest questions about the situation
[02:51:52] but the key thing that you've got here is I don't say well why do you think this is a good plan
[02:51:58] because that's an accusatory question
[02:52:00] instead I'm a better question would be hey can you help me understand the outcome that you're looking for with this plan
[02:52:09] and all of a sudden we've got, we've taken away any possibility that you can see that I'm accusing
[02:52:14] or attacking your plan which thereby is attacking your ego
[02:52:19] how did you come across this calibrated questions idea?
[02:52:24] Camps book 2002 he called them interrogatives, the reporters questions
[02:52:30] and the FBI we called them just open ended, you know the list, who, what, when, when, how and why
[02:52:35] and I noticed that he leaned heavily on one in particular which was
[02:52:41] what's the biggest challenge you face?
[02:52:44] Now, and realize that at the time, first of all it's a white question
[02:52:50] what's differential people like to be asked what to do?
[02:52:54] Secondly, now we now know in a black swan method what is principally designed to uncover problems
[02:53:03] what's the biggest challenge you face?
[02:53:05] What gets in the way?
[02:53:07] I'm coaching some dentists recently
[02:53:11] people are balking at how much their dental work is going to cost
[02:53:16] the question is what happens if you do nothing?
[02:53:20] You know it's a what question, it's differential
[02:53:23] and so then we begin to look harder at the questions
[02:53:28] I thought that was the only overlap between business and hostage negotiation at the time
[02:53:33] then the Burnham case in the Philippines
[02:53:37] it goes bad train wreck all the way around
[02:53:41] and somebody got proof of life on our hostages in the midst of that case
[02:53:46] and I'm just going to blow my mind
[02:53:50] because a hostage was overheard on a phone
[02:53:53] and I'd never gotten a hostage on a phone
[02:53:56] so between how does somebody get a hostage on a phone
[02:54:00] and who the heck is getting proof of life on our hostages
[02:54:03] like there was more than one buyer
[02:54:05] like I didn't know what to do with this
[02:54:07] so the case is an ongoing 13 month long train wreck
[02:54:11] a lot of people died including two out of three of the total Americans that were taken
[02:54:16] listen to a drug dealer kidnapping in Pittsburgh a few months afterwards
[02:54:21] drug dealer on drug dealer
[02:54:23] one drug dealer's got the other drug dealer's girlfriend hostage
[02:54:26] who do you go when somebody important to you has been kidnapped
[02:54:29] even if you're a drug dealer you go to the FBI
[02:54:33] so our hostage negotiator is right around
[02:54:35] listen to the drug dealer talk to the other drug dealer
[02:54:39] and just on his own he goes
[02:54:42] hey dog how do I know she's okay
[02:54:48] and the change in the tone of voice
[02:54:51] the kidnapper drug dealer went from thinking he was in charge
[02:54:54] to being having lost all control of negotiation
[02:54:58] and not knowing it at the time
[02:55:00] and it was just a how question
[02:55:02] so then we changed all of our negotiation
[02:55:06] kidnapping strategy to how and what questions
[02:55:10] just hammering them with how and what questions
[02:55:12] because you want to test it out on the kidnapping
[02:55:16] and finally I'm coaching on another kidnapping in the Philippines
[02:55:20] coaching a brother his brother's been grabbed by a serial killer
[02:55:25] loan kidnapper
[02:55:27] only time in my entire experience
[02:55:30] with one kidnapper they're always operating gangs
[02:55:34] and the guy was a we found out after the fact because we caught him
[02:55:38] he was a multiple kidnappings and it killed at least well
[02:55:43] didn't have the evidence that he killed a hostage in another case
[02:55:46] just a ransom was paid and the hostage never appeared
[02:55:49] so there's only one conclusion
[02:55:52] we're coaching a brother again a good guy who would learn
[02:55:57] pick up fast how and what questions how and what questions how and what questions
[02:56:01] and at one point in time the kidnapper wants a daily prudence to keep the hostage alive
[02:56:08] which we had to fight over that because it's a way to test financial resources
[02:56:14] not to keep the hostage alive
[02:56:16] test the family's resources
[02:56:19] so on his own the brother says
[02:56:21] when we run out of money paying the daily amount
[02:56:26] what's going to happen
[02:56:30] and there's a silence and a serial killer on the other end of the phone says
[02:56:36] it'll be alright
[02:56:39] my negotiators in country call me they think we got a positive breakthrough today
[02:56:43] I'm not sure what it is
[02:56:46] and they told me that I said this guy just promised never to kill a hostage
[02:56:49] like I had no idea that it was a lone guy I thought we were just talking to the boss
[02:56:54] didn't know he was a killer
[02:56:56] it was another case where he chopped a victim's ear off
[02:56:59] sent the ear and video of him chopping the ear off to the victims company they got paid
[02:57:04] I knew about that I've been told for a variety of reasons I'd heard about that
[02:57:07] I didn't know it was this guy
[02:57:10] take him completely out of his game
[02:57:13] with a version of what question saw another one
[02:57:16] took another guy completely out of his game with a version of the how question
[02:57:20] and a dynamic where you said we had no leverage
[02:57:25] if you thought in terms of leverage but you got influence
[02:57:29] how do you get influence to deference
[02:57:32] and that's when we really began to dial in collectively principally my son Brandon and I
[02:57:38] got Derek Gawant very involved in the development of our thinking
[02:57:42] and we really narrowed it down to how and what
[02:57:46] is a way to really get the upper hand in a negotiation
[02:57:55] fast forward a little bit here you got a couple things that are awesome points
[02:58:00] don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right
[02:58:05] aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation
[02:58:09] I always say when you're dealing with someone give them an out
[02:58:13] you just give them an out you can say seems like this is the best way to do it
[02:58:18] but I know you're smart on this stuff too does it make sense
[02:58:21] and they go yeah you know go ahead and do it that way
[02:58:24] you give them an opportunity that they don't have to say I was I'm wrong you're right
[02:58:28] go do it your way no never do that
[02:58:31] and the other one again this isn't just for negotiation
[02:58:36] this is for life bite your tongue
[02:58:39] when you're attacked in a negotiation
[02:58:42] pause and avoid angry emotional reactions instead ask your counterpart
[02:58:47] a calibrated question
[02:58:50] just such a solid move that will keep you out of trouble
[02:58:56] you want to say something back
[02:58:59] you know I actually go I tell people you know someone starts attacking you or someone
[02:59:03] someone starts getting aggressive with you you know take a step back
[02:59:06] kind of nod your head show them that you're listening
[02:59:09] don't say anything back to them instead ask them a question
[02:59:12] you know that's going to be a good way to go forward
[02:59:17] the 738 55% rule
[02:59:24] and two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody UCLA psychology professor
[02:59:30] Albert Mayhabrian
[02:59:33] totally murdered that one
[02:59:35] you're not Persian
[02:59:36] I'm not
[02:59:37] you know how to say that if you're a Persian
[02:59:39] I don't know how to say it either
[02:59:40] Myhrabian
[02:59:41] okay we'll go with it
[02:59:42] that's good
[02:59:43] sorry there Albert we'll call him Albert
[02:59:45] Dr. Albert
[02:59:46] created the 738 55 rule
[02:59:49] only 7% of a message is based on the words while 38% comes from the tone of the voice
[02:59:56] and 55% from the speaker's body language and face
[03:00:00] while these figures mainly relate to situations where we are forming an attitude about someone
[03:00:04] the rule nonetheless offers a useful ratio for negotiators
[03:00:08] you see body language and tone of voice not words are our most powerful assessment tools
[03:00:15] important to remember that
[03:00:21] important to pay attention
[03:00:23] a lot of us a lot a lot of people
[03:00:27] your face it gives away so much and it doesn't even matter what you're saying
[03:00:32] the look that you have on your face is just giving away the way you feel
[03:00:37] and it doesn't even matter what your words are
[03:00:39] did you feel like you had to learn to you know control your facial expressions
[03:00:46] my business partner and my friend Leif Babin
[03:00:50] you know he when we first started working together when he was pissed
[03:00:56] you knew it and so did everybody else
[03:00:59] it was like his face would turn red you could see how mad he was
[03:01:03] and you know over time you know as you know he started to realize that that didn't help him
[03:01:08] started to learn how to not do that
[03:01:12] is that something that you see people have to recognize and then get themselves trained up on
[03:01:18] yeah and depending upon the person there's underlying currents
[03:01:24] so it could be for different reasons
[03:01:28] the short answer is yes
[03:01:30] and the longer answer is how do you align your thinking in the moment
[03:01:36] a little bit of what you mentioned earlier like if you're really interested in what the other person is saying
[03:01:41] and then you worry about evaluating after the fact you don't have to worry about the look on your face
[03:01:45] as a matter of fact if you're really interested the more interested you look the more they're going to talk
[03:01:52] so if you can separate the two things out from evaluating judging what somebody said to just being
[03:01:58] making sure you fully understand then facial expressions are not a problem
[03:02:02] the people that have a problem with them and you know your guys faces turn red
[03:02:08] making all that's a characteristic principally of the assertive negotiator who can't wait to disagree
[03:02:16] and is holding it in
[03:02:20] the highly analytical type
[03:02:23] you know the people that seem completely emotionally detached
[03:02:28] when they think you're not looking they reveal everything
[03:02:32] and like their facial expressions their body language I mean they almost sometimes they look like they're twitching
[03:02:40] and so if you know who's highly analytical if you're faced with a team of people
[03:02:48] do not talk to the analytical guy or gal but keep an eye on them
[03:02:54] you gotta kind of watch them out of the corner you're right because they're going to be rolling their eyes
[03:02:59] and they're going to be sneaking peaks at people and moments
[03:03:03] I mean like they are the most honest most unguarded body language you ever saw in your life
[03:03:08] if they don't think they're being stared at
[03:03:10] let me ask you this so I've been talking about leadership you're talking about you write about negotiation
[03:03:17] how much interaction because there's also a ton of similarities with interrogators
[03:03:24] how much interaction did you have with interrogators I mean I obviously worked with a ton of interrogators
[03:03:30] and a bunch of different organizations how much work did you do with interrogators
[03:03:35] fair amount and there's probably about three schools of thought out there
[03:03:40] the great well the bad ones are just brute force you know I'm going to make you uncomfortable physically or emotionally
[03:03:51] and I'm going to try to force something out of you and that's just that just doesn't work
[03:03:56] it's counter it's counterproductive if you if you only care about what works then you won't be harsh
[03:04:02] because it doesn't work now the other two that are left there's one thing called the listening information
[03:04:09] which there are a fair amount of interrogators out there that like it
[03:04:13] and they they want to get you into a very short term mindset and get you to say things that you know to be against your interests
[03:04:19] the problem is if you're getting somebody into a short term mindset they're going to come a point in time when they regret saying it to you
[03:04:25] and you're going to lose their cooperation everything's going to fall apart so it has a shelf life
[03:04:29] now the rapport based people those are the magic magic magicians
[03:04:36] that make cases nobody else can make or make deals no one else can make
[03:04:41] and the other side still wants to talk to them
[03:04:44] like when I left surveillance in New York and went inside to investigate what we were talking earlier became an inside you know
[03:04:52] open investigator I was surrounded by guys that had gotten cooperation from witnesses voluntarily that people would just say like
[03:05:04] I got no idea how that guy got that cooperation one agent particularly his name is Larry Wack
[03:05:10] and even on the task force people admired how he got people to cooperate because he was he was he developed a rapport relationships with people
[03:05:21] even if he had a hammer the rapport and the relationship you know the belief that we will always be able to talk to one another
[03:05:31] as opposed to me tricking you into a short term mindset which at some point in time you're going to feel betrayed
[03:05:37] like the rapport based approach to deal making interrogation wins every time
[03:05:44] same thing with leadership we might as well throw leadership in there as well
[03:05:48] agree the time I say well you know if you don't do this I'm going to fire you or whatever it'll work for that task
[03:05:55] but eventually you're looking for another job so yeah those those similarities building relationships across the board
[03:06:04] so you just mentioned the analyst that's one type of person you got a whole section here about not only you what kind of negotiator are you
[03:06:13] because you got to know yourself but then also how are you going to interact with these people you got the analyst that you talked about
[03:06:19] which is methodical diligent they're not in a big rush you talked about them tell me about the accommodator just
[03:06:27] the so being an assertive the accommodators is weird animal that neither the analysts nor the assertive can really figure out
[03:06:36] but the accommodators really is a very hope based person and very focused on that the moment is pleasant
[03:06:46] and then if the moment is pleasant and we hope hard enough then everything will be fine
[03:06:53] now when we wrote when we wrote the book we said the accommodator was focused principally on the relationship
[03:06:59] having a positive relationship and that's pretty close to true like they want the relationship to be positive but
[03:07:08] you know we worked with people that would see a train coming at us rhetorically
[03:07:17] federal figuratively not literally his problem coming at us this person was on a team and we had a training and all the books that were supposed to be there were gone
[03:07:26] this guy knew about it for days the last minute tells us none of the manuals were here because he'd been and we're like you know this is the train is getting ready to hit us
[03:07:37] we've been here for three days you haven't said a word for three days that's not relationship focus because I'm standing on a railroad track and you see a train coming my way and you're not warning me
[03:07:47] so you know this relationship is coming to a close and then we realize in hindsight and we see it constantly they're hoping something good happens at the last minute everybody's saved
[03:08:00] my colleague Derek would say you know an accommodator walk you into a minefield knowing it's a minefield hoping you don't step on a mine
[03:08:09] and so the accommodators I think are the source of why in the business world people often say hope is not a strategy because the accommodator will go with hope alone
[03:08:20] and it'll work out hope alone is probably good somewhere between 20 and 45% of the time maybe that maybe that's being generous maybe 20% of the time and they're going to remember the 20%
[03:08:39] and ignore the 80% when the world turned into a disaster so the accommodators are really are very positive people they're very upbeat and they're very hope focused which is in and of itself it's not a strategy it's a necessary element you got to be hopeful it's going to work out
[03:08:58] it's what it is is inadequate now simultaneously people love dealing with somebody like that so we'll see on a regular basis the accommodators will make more deals overall than anybody else will
[03:09:13] but there'd be mostly really sloppy deals that are nowhere near as profitable for either side as they should have been because they simply hope that things would fall into place
[03:09:27] and then the last one which I think you just self identified as a assertive so what's the deal with the assertive negotiator
[03:09:36] just honest I'm just being honest with you you know I'm saving you a lot of trouble because I want you to be honest with me so I'm going to be honest with you that was stupid
[03:09:47] that's a dumb idea that's never going to work you didn't think this thing you know the assertive anybody that describes themselves as simply open and honest
[03:09:58] and it's always a punch in the face it's always just that approach like you the other side's got to know where you're coming from you do have to be honest
[03:10:08] but it's how you deliver it and the assertives are the typically the worst and making you I had I had my partner once tell me dealing with you is like getting hit in the face with a brick
[03:10:23] and I remember thinking like how could that be I'm the nicest guy I know
[03:10:33] you know it's like what I said what I talked about earlier like me punching you in the face with the truth is not a good way to get you listen
[03:10:40] exactly echo always brings up the example of the person that says you know I'm just a direct person but I gotta tell you you were totally screwed up and again
[03:10:47] there's not a lot of people like oh thank you for being that direct person telling me how jacked up I am usually a look the occasion to get someone that loves to get coached and love to get told what they
[03:10:57] but yeah you get some people a lot of times it just a friend so that is so so when you take these three different personality types negotiators are we looking to blend
[03:11:08] yes that's what the goal is each type has something really critical they bring to the table the the sort of I mean you gotta tell the aside where you come from otherwise you're making them gas
[03:11:21] you don't make good deals based on guesswork the analyst you gotta think things through you gotta come up with it run some number you don't have to run them all run any run some
[03:11:33] and the accommodator like so many people look at the accommodators and say that person's making tons of deals what are they doing it's in their demeanor it's in their approach
[03:11:47] the just FYI for people that are about to order this book you also kind of give how do you deal with the accommodator how do you deal with the assertive so you give both sides of the spectrum
[03:11:58] fast forward a little bit we mentioned this briefly this this Ackerman bargain bargaining and this is the I call the system the Ackerman Ackerman model because it came from this guy named Mike Ackerman
[03:12:10] the ex CIA guy who founded a kidnap for ransom consulting company based out of Miami on many kidnappings we constantly pair paired with Ackerman guys
[03:12:19] never Mike himself who helped design this Haggle and you lay out this Haggle though how it's a systemized and easy remember process that has only four steps
[03:12:28] well you go to six steps here number one set your target price which is your goal
[03:12:35] then you set your first offer at 65% of your target price then you calculate three raises of decreasing increments 85 95 and 100%
[03:12:45] use lots of empathy in different ways of saying no to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer when calculating the final final amount use precise non round numbers
[03:12:55] 37893 rather than 38000 it gives the number credibility and weight on your final number throw a non monetary item that you probably don't want to show you're at your limit
[03:13:09] so this is a pretty cool little system is that is that something you could advise someone to use when they're going to shop for a new car or used car yeah yeah it's not a bad model
[03:13:20] it's if you if you're gonna bargain it's the most effective bargaining model out there nothing beats it
[03:13:31] getting into this last might be the last chapter find the black swan and we haven't mentioned this yet but you've got the black swan group this is your consulting firm
[03:13:42] and quick description of the black swan black swan theory tells us that things happen that were previously thought to be impossible or never thought of it all
[03:13:53] this is not the same as saying that sometimes things happen against a one in a million odds but rather that things never imagined do come to pass
[03:14:03] the idea of the back black swan was popularized by the same to lab in his best selling books fooled by randomness and the black swan
[03:14:12] but the term goes back much further until the 17th century people could only imagine white swans because all swans ever seen had possessed white feathers
[03:14:20] in the 17th century London it was common to refer to impossible things as black swans but when the but then the Dutch explorer William Devlamin sorry people of Holland
[03:14:34] went to Western Australia I did indeed apologies down went to Western Australia in 1697 and saw a black swan suddenly the unthinkable and unthought was real
[03:14:49] this is a crucial concept in negotiation and every negotiation session there are different kinds of information there are those things we know like our counterparts name and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations
[03:14:59] those are known knowns there are those things we are certain that exist but we don't know like possibility that the other side might get sick and leave us without another counterpart
[03:15:09] those are known unknowns and they are like poker wildcards you know they're out there but you don't know who has them but most important are those things we don't know that we don't know
[03:15:21] piece of information we've never imagined that would be game changing if uncovered maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail because he's leaving for a competitor these unknown unknowns are black swans
[03:15:38] so this is obviously something highly important to you since you named your company the black swan how did you stumble upon this idea
[03:15:48] the first Talib's book in 2007 a black swan got me thinking about it I like his stuff I mean his highly in depth thinker he's got a writing tone that is not for everybody but really in depth and so I saw that the idea like the impact of the highly improbable
[03:16:11] well that's what we did all the time in negotiation it's a combination of two things we're going to change ourselves and subtle little ways that the other side is never going to see and we're going to gain the upper hand
[03:16:21] we're going to steer it we're going to steer the negotiation and to the best possible outcome now that that doesn't mean that everything's going to a positive outcome
[03:16:31] but you got to recognize what the best possible outcome is so it's a great metaphor for making tiny little subtle changes in your negotiation approach the other side is never going to see where you're going to make all the difference it's completely invisible
[03:16:45] and then while you're in the middle of it there's always stuff the great stuff will fall out of the sky if you let it the other side is going to say something that works for you they're going to talk to you they're going to be softer in a position and you realize there's going to be pressures on them that you don't understand
[03:17:02] something is always always there and in many cases the other side doesn't imagine it and to draw a real fine point on this that a lot of people miss it's a reason why reading body language to detect deception is almost a waste of time
[03:17:22] because for you to deceive me you've got to know it's important to have a tell you have to be consciously covering it up but a significant amount of the time you don't even know it's important
[03:17:35] so if I'm just looking for towels and not getting you talking the stuff that you didn't know is important is never going to come out so so what if so what if you're lying number one that doesn't tell me what the truth is and if we're only focused on what you're hiding
[03:17:55] rambling conversation what might that look like a woman who's getting funding for a film she's doing in Los Angeles a couple years ago trying to get $300,000 out of investor very focused on this film being shot in LA very focused on this amount of money very focused on what they're trying to point to trying to make in a film
[03:18:17] but she's mirroring and labeling and out of the blue it comes out that the financier owns a castle in France which would be a great setting for the next film something she never would have brought up the financier they're talking about a film being shot in LA martial arts this and that all these other little things
[03:18:40] you know female martial artists beating up bad guys like how is she gonna say oh by the way you don't have I'm working on another film we want to it's a medieval film you don't have to have a castle in France do you like that is never going to come up ever
[03:18:56] but she's talking and she's labeling and marrying the next thing you know this this this thing comes out that the other person has no idea makes any difference changes the structuring of the whole deal now instead of talking about one film they're talking about multiple films completely changes the complexion of the the finances that are needed on the first
[03:19:16] if she go back out she's already got partial packaging on a second film like it changes everything and there's no way that she would have known to ask it and the person on the other side was well instead of 300 grand what about my castle because that's not going to do any good for a film in LA just little things like that
[03:19:34] one thing that emphasize the importance of listening is you know at one point you're talking about a case you got a guy that's you know drives to drives to Washington DC and a tractor he's gonna blow himself up he's gonna blow up some of the white ones yeah
[03:19:52] and you know he's saying he's gonna blow himself up but when you actually have you're having conversations with him and you've got multiple people listening right because listening is so important that if you look if you can get more more than one person you get two or three or four people listening to the conversation
[03:20:10] and they're gonna pick things up that someone else might miss and studying the transcript so you had someone on the team that realize number one he was a veteran how can we utilize that and then someone realized he was like a I don't want to say fundamentalist Christian but a very strong Christian and you had a certain religious thing going on so you able to utilize these things that people caught just through listening and it changed the dynamics of the whole of the whole negotiation
[03:20:38] right right kept him from getting killed got him out a day early and so that was you know short in a timeline because he was he was really at the end of his rope and each hour went by had less sleep which increases the likelihood that he's gonna do some stupid we're still not 100% sure that there are bombs there
[03:20:58] and so if he'd made a particular move towards where the possibility yet he had his Jeep and a flatbed they said we don't know their own explosives in a Jeep and a flatbed if he goes there we got to take him out
[03:21:12] and we're talking to him and this comes up and he's agreed to come out 72 hours we want to cut try to cut 24 off of it and one of the female negotiators when he Miller says you know tell him to Mazadon of the third day which is 48 hours and I'll come out
[03:21:36] and he had talked so much about the military and his 82nd Airborne experience somebody else listening heard the underlying strong Christian beliefs in his religion if you will everybody's got a religion everybody everybody he's got a religion just to put up on what it is and how broadly you define it
[03:21:58] just gonna hit some of these last section of the book I'll cover but I just want to hit some of these highlights here
[03:22:08] let what you know your known knowns guide you but not blind you every case is new so remain flexible and adaptable black swans are leverage multipliers remember the three types of leverage and you go over these in the book positive which is the ability to give someone what they want negative the ability to hurt someone and normative using your counterparts norms to bring them around
[03:22:34] again there's more detail on the book inside the book work to understand the other sides religion what you just mentioned everybody's got a religion
[03:22:45] digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond negotiation table and into life emotional and otherwise of your counterpart that's where black black swans live
[03:22:57] you know you hear everything you hear from your counterpart you will not hear everything the first time so double check compare notes with team members use backup listeners exploit the similarity principle people are more apt to concede to someone when they share a culture someone they share a cultural similarity with
[03:23:15] you know dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground when someone seems irrational or crazy they most likely aren't faced with the situation search for constraints hidden desires and bad information and last get face time with your counterpart 10 minutes of face time often reveals
[03:23:35] than days of research pay special attention to your counterparts verbal and non verbal communication at unguarded moments at the beginning and the end of the session or when someone says something out of line
[03:23:51] so really good really just awesome points that apply to me they apply to business they apply to interacting with any human obviously they apply to negotiations but there you go I mean we hit the the wave tops of some of the last I mean probably read less than 5% of this book
[03:24:12] so many good stories and again I felt I feel kind of bad that I skipped a lot of the lot of the stories themselves but get the book and then that way you can hear some of the examples behind this so what so what so what are you up to right now what we got we got the black swan group right
[03:24:33] yeah we're coaching and training negotiations some of all the companies out there you get training from very few more culture which sort of shocks me
[03:24:43] like how do you how do you how do you not believe in your stuff enough where you you'll you'll coach I mean literally the real definition of a coach is somebody
[03:24:53] you go into the game but the coaches right there prepping you you come out of the game you could talk like how do you teach this stuff and not be willing to coach it and so we coach across the board it's a much bigger aspect of the business
[03:25:10] than I ever thought it would be we got a just finished the documentary film called tactical empathy looking premiered at Beverly Hills about 10 days ago taking our time on a distribution deal see what happens with that
[03:25:27] outlining a lot of stuff is it full full length documentary 54 minutes 54 minute documentary got a book for real estate agents the full fee agent coming out Steve Schull the guy that did the book with me interesting cat I know Steve for well over a year before I find out he played in the NFL like most NFL guys you know the first five minutes
[03:25:56] not only that Steve was a Super Bowl captain. He didn't just play in the NFL he is playing on a team that went to the Super Bowl he was a captain of the team. I think I finally found that out after I knew him like four years like he just he doesn't
[03:26:14] he doesn't lead with that stuff. But understand the value of coaching because he played for Don Schula he played for some real coaches. So he shares a coaching philosophy that you know the stuff that we coach you on if you do what we ask you to do it's going to work.
[03:26:35] So the full fee agents coming out about two months and then my son Brandon and I and another colleague are working on a follow up to never split the difference should be at about a year. Nice.
[03:26:46] Yeah the coaching piece. I always tell people with with leadership it's not an inoculation you don't just get like a shot and now you're good now you get it. You don't go to the gym one time and now you're in shape you don't pick up a guitar get taught and now you know how to play it. It's the same thing with the
[03:27:02] go you're not going to say oh I read the book and now I'm good to go. No you actually need to train it you need to get coached on it. That's why that's why you got to do that follow up. So that's awesome. We do the same thing at our company. I mean most of the companies that we work with we do long term
[03:27:17] engagements with them. Black Swan LTD dot com. That's what that's where people if they want coaching if they want to get deeper on this stuff you're also on social media. You got on Facebook and Instagram you're at black swan LTD.
[03:27:36] You're on Twitter at black swan g r p. You personally aren't on Instagram. Big social media guy over here. At the FBI negotiator. So I get all those things right or anything else we need to know about. Yeah those those are good.
[03:27:55] On the website black swan LTD dot com. We got a lot of free stuff. To get your skill level up like wherever you are we can meet you where you are. Another thing we put out that is free.
[03:28:10] But that's not what makes it valuable. We got a we got a weekly newsletter. Concise actionable. Not 10 articles where you're trying to decide what to do next. Like one article roughly 700 words complete actionable concise stuff.
[03:28:27] The newsletter is free. You sign up for on the website. You get an email to you on Tuesday mornings wherever you in the world you are.
[03:28:35] Take the free stuff. You can get a you can get a long way with the book and free stuff alone. Yeah and everybody that's listening. Just beat the king of negotiation because you're getting the stuff for free.
[03:28:48] So just get in there and get it take it from him otherwise you don't win. Right. You want to get one up on the FBI negotiator you got to go. Hey I got this from the. I got this from the master of negotiation. I got it for free.
[03:28:59] That's how good you are. Get in there and sign up for that. That seems that's like it's up us up to present day. Yeah. Masterclass is out there. You know you and I were talking earlier about the masterclass is good.
[03:29:11] It's also it's insane how cheap that is as far as costs like the masterclass might be the best deal on earth and my negotiation course and a whole bunch of other cool stuff.
[03:29:24] I got a course and so it's got a course like if whatever you want to learn you're going to find it on masterclass. So you're on there as well. Awesome. All right.
[03:29:34] Well now you know what time it is. Echo Charles. Yes. Do you have any questions. Yes. Oh here we go. What do you I took the masterclass by the way. Very help very good.
[03:29:43] Very well done. What's your thoughts on like good the whole good cop bad cop interrogation. Anything that's a manipulation or were you not being genuine and honest.
[03:29:56] And if you're good cop bad cop you're probably one of you's play acting. Yeah. And it's as a long term strategy like you might get short term what you need.
[03:30:06] But you're always going to find always going to find you need long term cooperation and to engage in something that's guaranteed to cause it to go bad.
[03:30:15] Is not just from a mercenary standpoint you don't do stuff you know it's going to hurt you in the long run.
[03:30:23] So back to the accommodator. So if I'm running late not that I ever run late but hypothetically if I'm running late and then jockeau text me how long.
[03:30:34] Is it going to be till you get here. And I know probably it's going to be like 20 minutes probably but I say in my head.
[03:30:42] If there's no traffic lights stopping me if traffic is good I could probably be there in six. So I tell him about five minutes.
[03:30:50] Because I want to avoid giving him the bad news up front. It seems saying that I'm hopeful that I make it in the five. Is that me being the accommodator.
[03:30:58] Yeah I think so and I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes people make on a regular basis constantly like and the fix is the opposite.
[03:31:07] Like if you know if you know you're 20 minutes away tell him 25.
[03:31:11] Yeah here's my thinking if I would ever that ever were ever to happen.
[03:31:16] I'm thinking I give him the good news so he's not that mad at me.
[03:31:21] So if I give him the worst possible news for that 10 minutes or whatever he's gonna be mad.
[03:31:28] Then he's already mad when I walk in there but if the small chance arises that I get there in the five minutes.
[03:31:34] Easy money.
[03:31:36] Yeah that's how it plays on your head.
[03:31:39] And that is so common.
[03:31:42] My girlfriend is an accommodator.
[03:31:45] She's a wonderful human being brilliant entrepreneur like so many things about her that are just brilliant.
[03:31:51] She's gorgeous.
[03:31:54] I'm talking to her on the phone the other day she's having you know she's nice enough she's in the middle of the zoom call she takes a call anyway.
[03:32:00] She says hey I'm in the middle of business call I'll carry you back in 15 minutes.
[03:32:05] I go OK.
[03:32:07] And then that night I called her and I said that was the longest 15 minutes I ever heard.
[03:32:11] Like I didn't I knew when somebody gives me a vague amount of time and it's not just her anybody.
[03:32:16] I go on about my day because you're trying to be nice.
[03:32:22] You know you're trying really hard to keep the other person from being in a bad place.
[03:32:27] And time after time after time after time the lights are not all in line.
[03:32:33] And the data that you get overwhelmingly says that's going to go bad and they're almost everybody still does it.
[03:32:41] That was one of my favorite stories from McCraven's book Sea Stories.
[03:32:45] And you might have been one of those guys out there.
[03:32:48] They're running some op in a Caribbean and a helicopter is a late picking them up.
[03:32:53] And they are not outfitted for the water temperature.
[03:32:56] Water is warm but it still ain't ninety eight point six.
[03:32:59] And a chopper is one of the choppers going to show.
[03:33:02] And a chopper is 15 minutes.
[03:33:06] And they were there for three hours.
[03:33:08] They would you know and that's that's that's not a military op.
[03:33:12] That's human beings trying to be nice to other human beings.
[03:33:16] And I you know it just doesn't work out.
[03:33:20] So the flip side is overestimate the time.
[03:33:26] You tell him 25 minutes you're here in 20 he's delighted with you.
[03:33:31] He thinks you're great.
[03:33:33] Delighted might be a strong.
[03:33:35] But I'll tell you you know someone else the airlines do this.
[03:33:39] Oh yeah.
[03:33:40] There's a last time.
[03:33:41] No but the opposite now they caught on because their biggest criticism was whether or not their planes are late.
[03:33:47] So it doesn't matter what airline it is.
[03:33:50] I fly all the time.
[03:33:52] Plane lands and they go like well our gates not open yet.
[03:33:56] So we got to wait another 20 minutes before we get at the gate.
[03:33:59] And the first couple of times that happened I remember and I said out loud in the airport was it a surprise that we showed up.
[03:34:06] Like this plane is really big.
[03:34:08] I know they picked it up on radar.
[03:34:10] They saw us coming from a long way away.
[03:34:12] How is the gate still occupied.
[03:34:14] We're not here as a surprise.
[03:34:17] The airline knew all along when they were going to get there.
[03:34:21] But to fool you they told you they were going to be there at three o'clock.
[03:34:25] You made your plans around three o'clock.
[03:34:27] The airline at two thirty which is a half an hour early.
[03:34:30] You think the airline is great.
[03:34:31] You're mad at the airport.
[03:34:34] Nobody ever blames the airline knew all along when they were really going to get there.
[03:34:38] So when you show up early when you overestimate at the time the people you're doing business with love you.
[03:34:44] They think you're fantastic.
[03:34:45] You put time back in their day.
[03:34:49] This thing goes deep man.
[03:34:52] Plus just like building a relationship with people more you tell them things that's really going to happen.
[03:34:59] You know the higher the trust level goes.
[03:35:02] As opposed to telling someone you're going to be there in six minutes and you show up in sixteen minutes.
[03:35:07] Over time.
[03:35:09] This is a hypothetical.
[03:35:12] What about if someone has food in their teeth and you don't want to tell them accommodate it right.
[03:35:18] Yeah that's going to go bad.
[03:35:20] You got to know right.
[03:35:22] Just got to tell them right.
[03:35:23] It helps them out big picture but you don't want to deliver that bad news is kind of the deal.
[03:35:27] That's the plight right of the accommodator just hopeful.
[03:35:30] If you're like fall out and no one has to say if you're over there trying to figure out if you're an accommodator or not.
[03:35:35] I'm going to go ahead and say let's solve that riddle for you right now.
[03:35:39] You're an accommodator for sure.
[03:35:41] Hey we're all doing the best we can.
[03:35:43] Right on right on anything else.
[03:35:45] Charles that is it is honor.
[03:35:46] I followed you.
[03:35:47] I actually got that book right when it came out.
[03:35:50] Thank you.
[03:35:51] That's cool.
[03:35:52] I appreciate it.
[03:35:53] When did the book come out.
[03:35:54] 2016.
[03:35:55] Been out for a while.
[03:35:56] Awesome.
[03:35:57] Chris any closing thoughts from you.
[03:36:00] No I've enjoyed the conversation.
[03:36:05] Delighted at how thoroughly you understand how this applies to leadership and everything else.
[03:36:13] I mean you've seen a parallels right away.
[03:36:16] You know I've listened to your other podcast where you talk about like you know I left high school not educated dude.
[03:36:22] But you're a learner.
[03:36:24] Which is really cool.
[03:36:26] Which is really cool.
[03:36:27] Well thank you.
[03:36:28] Appreciate it.
[03:36:29] And thanks for coming on.
[03:36:31] Thanks for coming down here.
[03:36:32] And thanks for sharing your experiences and all these lessons learned with everybody.
[03:36:37] I mean it's just awesome that people can pick up this book and learn what you've learned over the decades of work you've put into this.
[03:36:43] And of course more important thanks for your service.
[03:36:47] Thanks for your service in law enforcement and the FBI.
[03:36:50] Thanks for fighting terrorists and kidnappers and drug dealers and criminals to keep us safe here on the home front.
[03:37:00] And the same deal brother.
[03:37:02] It was an honor to be able to serve.
[03:37:04] Yeah amen.
[03:37:05] Exactly.
[03:37:06] It was a privilege.
[03:37:07] All right.
[03:37:08] Thank you.
[03:37:10] And with that Chris Voss has left the building.
[03:37:14] Echo Charles.
[03:37:15] Yes sir.
[03:37:16] Excited about that one huh.
[03:37:18] Yes.
[03:37:19] You liked that one.
[03:37:20] I liked that one.
[03:37:21] Lot to learn.
[03:37:22] Yeah.
[03:37:23] What was your big takeaway besides the fact that you're an accommodator.
[03:37:26] I know.
[03:37:27] I felt it right when he was explaining it.
[03:37:29] I was like that's.
[03:37:30] Well he also said they make the most deals.
[03:37:32] There you go.
[03:37:33] Right.
[03:37:34] Establishing rapport all that.
[03:37:36] And I look am I am I an accommodator.
[03:37:39] But if I'm not I know I have accommodator traits from time to time.
[03:37:44] We know that you're not analytic.
[03:37:46] Okay.
[03:37:47] We know that you're not assertive.
[03:37:49] There's only three options.
[03:37:51] Yeah.
[03:37:52] Okay.
[03:37:53] Whoa.
[03:37:54] No no no.
[03:37:55] Blend blend blend.
[03:37:56] But your high percentage accommodator maybe.
[03:37:58] We'll go with that from now on.
[03:37:59] I'm gonna keep an eye on it because I like to know what I don't know.
[03:38:02] So it seems same.
[03:38:03] So it did shed some light.
[03:38:04] That's a good idea.
[03:38:05] On that thing.
[03:38:07] The interesting takeaway.
[03:38:10] Geography is more influential than ethnicity.
[03:38:13] Building and it makes sense because in Hawaii everybody's mixed and you know there's all
[03:38:19] different kind of community.
[03:38:20] But if you're from.
[03:38:22] Waimanalo and I'm from Waimanalo.
[03:38:24] Yeah.
[03:38:25] We're good.
[03:38:26] We can be in Dubai mean your brothers.
[03:38:28] Yeah.
[03:38:29] 100%.
[03:38:30] So.
[03:38:31] So that made a lot of sense to me.
[03:38:33] And what did what did did shed some light on is some of your tactics as well.
[03:38:38] Oh.
[03:38:39] In a good way.
[03:38:40] So.
[03:38:41] Um.
[03:38:42] Okay.
[03:38:43] One time you called me out for clicking the pen.
[03:38:46] I edited it out so it's not on the episode but it's.
[03:38:50] And the way you said it was.
[03:38:53] Is that clicking going to show up on the recording.
[03:38:57] Do you think.
[03:38:58] You said you think like me it was like my idea kind of a thing you know.
[03:39:02] Like I have to figure out for myself.
[03:39:04] If it's gonna as opposed to hey that clicking is annoying and it's going to ruin the take
[03:39:09] or whatever you know.
[03:39:11] I was like.
[03:39:12] Oh.
[03:39:13] I see because it was effective and if you look back on the video I think I published
[03:39:17] that outtake somewhere.
[03:39:19] Okay.
[03:39:20] Um.
[03:39:21] If you look on the video I responded like totally like it worked.
[03:39:25] Mm hmm.
[03:39:26] That little tactic.
[03:39:27] I did.
[03:39:28] You know the it really was cool to read the book and to identify all these things that
[03:39:34] they're they're psychological.
[03:39:37] They're psychological traits or psychological characteristics or psychological maneuvers.
[03:39:42] So they work again they work with human beings so it doesn't matter your leadership your
[03:39:46] interrogation your your negotiation they're all they're all going to have some similar
[03:39:55] similar approaches and they are.
[03:39:57] And so yeah it was really cool really cool to read about really cool to go through and
[03:40:01] then be able to sit here with Chris and talk through it.
[03:40:05] And you know it's awesome he and again I kind of did go through I talked about it on the
[03:40:10] podcast but like the book has a bunch of cool stories in it right.
[03:40:14] And is there a temptation just to jump into like negotiation hostage negotiation all that
[03:40:19] stuff.
[03:40:20] But I felt like I was like really kind of want to dive into the tactics the principles themselves.
[03:40:26] So maybe I was a little bit selfish on that one.
[03:40:29] But yeah you know what I realized about you what I might have told you this before where
[03:40:37] your your interest is like it's like an 80 20 where you like how things work for sure
[03:40:43] but only like 20 percent 80 percent is you're interested in OK so what do we do about it.
[03:40:48] So like and I think I'm kind of the if I'm like really trying to be introspective I'm
[03:40:54] kind of the opposite so I'm like a 20 80 kind of a scenario.
[03:40:58] So anytime I start going deep on how things work I see your eyes kind of glaze over and
[03:41:02] then you snap to and you be like OK this is what you do this is what you do.
[03:41:05] It's like you you interrupt it with the next step kind of a thing.
[03:41:10] So so I can see why you'd be really into the the stories.
[03:41:14] But yeah I think the tactics are the ones that a lot of the time anyway if you listen to them
[03:41:18] it's like OK now I can use them in my particular life.
[03:41:22] I think they're both together are the most effective for sure.
[03:41:24] Yeah the other thing that I thought about look I don't care how long a podcast is going
[03:41:28] to be.
[03:41:29] I don't care for 12 hours but I also you know you have to think all right if we start getting
[03:41:35] into all these cool stories he's gotten here they all have their own branches and you know
[03:41:41] sub stories and details that's going to be you know we get to a point where diminishing
[03:41:47] returns right.
[03:41:48] You just have a 19 hour podcast in which point just get on just just go and read the book
[03:41:53] yourself or go get the audio book and go with it that way.
[03:41:57] So that's kind of the kind of how I went with it.
[03:42:00] But just just awesome to have him on here and and learn from you know the subtitle
[03:42:07] book is negotiating as if your life depends on it.
[03:42:10] Depended on it right.
[03:42:11] So he is countless times negotiated stuff that is where someone's life or lives were
[03:42:17] on the line.
[03:42:19] Doesn't get more you know I used to say about extreme ownership combat is like life but
[03:42:24] amplified and intensified.
[03:42:26] Well if you can negotiate for someone's life you can negotiate for the car that you want
[03:42:33] the used car that you want to pay you know twenty seven hundred bucks for instead of
[03:42:37] the forty two hundred bucks that they're offering it.
[03:42:40] So there you go.
[03:42:43] Thanks for joining us everybody.
[03:42:44] If you want to if you like this podcast and you want to support it and you want to actually
[03:42:49] support yourself cognitively you want to be cognitively ready for those moments.
[03:42:54] That's why I'm three deep right now with jockel fuel with discipline goes now normally you'd
[03:43:01] be thinking oh you drank three energy drinks today.
[03:43:05] You've had a bad day.
[03:43:07] You have to you have to mark this down as a negative on your overall health.
[03:43:11] We're actually not doing that at all.
[03:43:13] We're not even doing that at all because I had one what times it's four o'clock right
[03:43:17] now.
[03:43:18] I had the first one at like 1030 prior to a echelon front Academy call then I had another
[03:43:26] one as we kind of started this thing and then I had another one as we kind of got halfway
[03:43:30] through this thing.
[03:43:32] So what does that mean I've had does that mean I've had a bunch of sugar.
[03:43:34] I mean I've had 82 grand.
[03:43:36] No I've had zero sugar.
[03:43:37] I've had some monk fruit which is a beautiful thing.
[03:43:41] I've had have I had what would that be three times have I had 600 milligrams of caffeine.
[03:43:47] No I haven't even had 300 milligrams caffeine.
[03:43:52] So we're good.
[03:43:53] Over here plus I got some vitamin B6.
[03:43:55] Well you know I'm good.
[03:43:58] No doing good.
[03:43:59] So if you want to be good too but you want that energy.
[03:44:03] Go to jocofuel.com get yourself some milk which is dessert get yourself some go.
[03:44:11] You can also go to Wawa.
[03:44:14] We got the ready to drink protein available available in Wawa.
[03:44:22] You can you jocofuel.com you can check it.
[03:44:25] We're getting there but the ready to drink stuff is kind of a game changer.
[03:44:28] Yeah it's good.
[03:44:31] I told you about the chocolate milk versus milk right.
[03:44:34] With my daughter who is not going to pull any punches.
[03:44:39] She looked Pete we know we sat down at day bullet camp and Pete was all like oh it's
[03:44:44] better than chocolate milk and she looked at him like he was a liar.
[03:44:50] I was like get her to settle down you know.
[03:44:54] You can't look at a you know a grown man like he's a liar but she kind of looked at him
[03:44:58] like yeah right but the good thing is Pete was like oh let's go yeah let's go get him
[03:45:04] out.
[03:45:05] So we got out the straight regular like chocolate milk and milk side by side taste test well
[03:45:13] blind taste test she she was like dang that's the that's the true that's probably the truest
[03:45:22] and most awesome test that's ever been performed for taste in the world in the world probably
[03:45:27] right.
[03:45:28] There you go get yourself some more get yourself some ready to drink more vitamin shops got
[03:45:32] this stuff as well go in there.
[03:45:34] Thing is hey I remember about Wawa somebody hit me up on social media they cleared the
[03:45:38] shelves in Wawa.
[03:45:41] Thank you because look it's a war out there.
[03:45:45] Have I explained the war to you a little bit.
[03:45:47] It's a war.
[03:45:48] The big companies don't like the little companies.
[03:45:51] The big companies have overwhelming firepower in the term in the form of cash money that
[03:45:58] they can throw to try and crush the the the up and comers.
[03:46:04] They don't want that competition.
[03:46:06] They want to smash.
[03:46:08] They want to smash jocco fuel.
[03:46:09] They want to smash discipline go.
[03:46:13] So what they do is they make maneuvers they throw money at at stores and the stores like
[03:46:21] to offer something else but they got to be able to got to make sense.
[03:46:25] So when you go and you clear the shelves at Wawa thank you when you go any of these any
[03:46:28] of these stores when you go in there and get after it it shows them that there's demand
[03:46:32] signal to retail and they want to keep us as opposed to when somebody throws a bunch
[03:46:37] of money and say we want you to we want you to get rid of those guys.
[03:46:43] Think about that.
[03:46:44] That's called a monopoly.
[03:46:46] Yeah.
[03:46:47] Right.
[03:46:48] Those are monopoly moves.
[03:46:49] Yeah.
[03:46:51] And so we appreciate it when you help us fight the man.
[03:46:54] Yeah.
[03:46:55] Right.
[03:46:56] The corporate entity.
[03:46:58] That's not a person.
[03:46:59] There's no person.
[03:47:00] There's those other companies not people.
[03:47:02] Yeah.
[03:47:03] They're not people.
[03:47:04] They're just big corporate entities.
[03:47:05] There's big giant corporate entities.
[03:47:08] No people there.
[03:47:10] No humans.
[03:47:11] Yes.
[03:47:12] We're human.
[03:47:13] We're here.
[03:47:14] We're getting after it.
[03:47:15] So anyways appreciate it.
[03:47:16] So get some of that origin USA.com.
[03:47:20] Get yourself some American made everything.
[03:47:25] Hunt gear.
[03:47:26] We're getting it out.
[03:47:29] Certain pieces are out.
[03:47:31] The pants are out.
[03:47:33] The some of the shirts are out.
[03:47:35] Just get on there and order it.
[03:47:37] If it's not available right now we're making it and if you want to get it you got to order
[03:47:41] it now.
[03:47:42] I'm sorry.
[03:47:43] But you got to order it now and then we'll get it to you as soon as it's ready.
[03:47:45] As soon as it's been made here in America by American hands jeans boots jujitsu geese.
[03:47:53] We'll put that jujitsu on sometimes.
[03:47:55] Rash guards.
[03:47:56] Put that on.
[03:47:57] So that's what we're doing origin USA.com.
[03:48:00] Get yourself some of that support America and support yourself.
[03:48:04] It's true.
[03:48:05] Also.
[03:48:06] Choco store.
[03:48:07] Choco store called jacos store.
[03:48:08] This one equals freedom shirts.
[03:48:09] New one is out.
[03:48:10] It's been out.
[03:48:11] It's a good one.
[03:48:12] In terms of standard issue one standard issue.
[03:48:15] Multiple forms.
[03:48:16] Multiple forms.
[03:48:17] Get one.
[03:48:18] Look is Christmas near.
[03:48:20] It's Christmas near technically.
[03:48:22] Maybe maybe not.
[03:48:23] But bro they already have Christmas stuff available.
[03:48:26] Where was it.
[03:48:27] My wife came up and said they like she went to Target or Walmart or something.
[03:48:30] And they were like she's like Christmas gear is up.
[03:48:33] You know available.
[03:48:35] So is it near.
[03:48:36] This is something to think about.
[03:48:38] We'll say that.
[03:48:39] So yes.
[03:48:40] We've got some good stuff on there.
[03:48:41] Some kids stuff on there.
[03:48:42] Warrior kids stuff on there as well.
[03:48:43] So we kind of got everything something for everybody if you want to check it out.
[03:48:46] Let's face it.
[03:48:47] The warrior kids need that Christmas hit.
[03:48:48] It yeah.
[03:48:49] That'll be a good clothing gift.
[03:48:51] I don't got some accessories.
[03:48:52] We got some good stuff on there.
[03:48:54] Also we got the shirt locker.
[03:48:56] Halloween one is lit.
[03:48:59] Halloween kind of something like that one.
[03:49:01] Let's say we like it.
[03:49:03] Another good gift idea by the way.
[03:49:05] Got some gift cards too on there.
[03:49:06] The gift that keeps on giving.
[03:49:08] That keeps on giving.
[03:49:09] Give somebody the shirt locker and then they get a new t-shirt.
[03:49:13] Every month.
[03:49:14] Yep.
[03:49:15] That has layers in it.
[03:49:16] Layers.
[03:49:17] Could be one layer.
[03:49:18] Could be seven layers.
[03:49:19] You get seven layers.
[03:49:20] Do we charge by the layer?
[03:49:21] No.
[03:49:22] No.
[03:49:23] The layers is just part of the package.
[03:49:24] Included.
[03:49:25] You're right.
[03:49:26] But yes.
[03:49:27] Good.
[03:49:28] Cool designs.
[03:49:29] People like really like the designs.
[03:49:30] This is what I'm finding out and thank it.
[03:49:31] Thanks for everyone for the feedback.
[03:49:32] So yeah.
[03:49:33] Really good shirt locker.
[03:49:34] Men's stuff.
[03:49:35] Women's stuff.
[03:49:36] Hoodies hats.
[03:49:37] All that cool stuff.
[03:49:38] Just stuff.
[03:49:39] Just stuff across the board.
[03:49:40] Subscribe to the podcast.
[03:49:41] You know that.
[03:49:42] So we've been recording those.
[03:49:44] Putting word out answering your questions.
[03:49:47] If you go to jockeauunderground.com, the people are getting censored right now.
[03:49:51] People are getting banned.
[03:49:52] Whatever.
[03:49:53] We're not going to.
[03:49:54] That's not going to happen to us at least on the platform that we could happen on this
[03:49:56] platform, whatever platform you're listening to.
[03:49:58] They could ban us.
[03:50:01] If that happens, we'll be on jockeauunderground.com.
[03:50:03] It costs $8.18 a month.
[03:50:06] If you can't afford it, no big deal.
[03:50:08] We still are.
[03:50:09] We're still here to support.
[03:50:10] We know hard times right now, right?
[03:50:13] If you can't afford it, email assistance at jockeauunderground.com.
[03:50:17] If you can't afford it, cool.
[03:50:18] Support the cause.
[03:50:20] Capital T-H-E.
[03:50:22] The capital C-A-U-S-E.
[03:50:25] The cause.
[03:50:27] Freedom.
[03:50:29] Psychological warfare.
[03:50:30] We've got flipsidecanvas.com.
[03:50:31] Books obviously never split the difference.
[03:50:34] By Chris Voss, check that book out and then all the books out.
[03:50:37] Get that book, Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay.
[03:50:41] Just a great book.
[03:50:42] We put it out on jockeaupublishing.
[03:50:44] Check that one out and then all the books I've written.
[03:50:46] You know what they are.
[03:50:49] So go get them.
[03:50:50] Get the Warrior Kid books.
[03:50:51] Let's face it, that book would have helped you set out so much if you had it when you
[03:50:55] were a kid.
[03:50:56] It would have helped me.
[03:50:57] And if you know kids, any kids, get them that book.
[03:50:59] Once again, Christmas, cool.
[03:51:01] Get it.
[03:51:02] Make it happen.
[03:51:03] And then we'll go to the front.
[03:51:07] You heard me talking a lot about leadership today.
[03:51:09] Well, we solve problems through leadership at Ashland Front.
[03:51:14] Go to ashlandfront.com.
[03:51:16] And also up and coming, we've got a little something that we call the roll call, which
[03:51:26] roll call is an event.
[03:51:30] And we've got one.
[03:51:31] Had to just check this because they told me they still got some seats.
[03:51:34] Our stuff sells out quick.
[03:51:35] So roll call is for police law enforcement, first responders, military, October 17th,
[03:51:44] St. Louis, Missouri.
[03:51:45] If you're in that category, go and check that out.
[03:51:49] It's going to be, it's our leadership principles kind of geared toward that group of people.
[03:51:56] Also we have online training.
[03:51:58] Said this today.
[03:51:59] We're going to get good at leadership with one book or with one rehearsal or one practice.
[03:52:07] No, you need to get in there.
[03:52:10] Go to extrememownership.com.
[03:52:12] Learn about life.
[03:52:15] Square your life away.
[03:52:17] Extreme ownership.com.
[03:52:19] And if you want to help service members active and retire, you want to help their families,
[03:52:25] check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.
[03:52:27] She's got a charity organization.
[03:52:28] If you want to donate or you want to get involved, go to americasmightywarriors.org.
[03:52:33] Also check out Mike Affinck.
[03:52:35] He's got his program taking you up and taking vets up in the wilderness so they can find
[03:52:41] themselves again and rebuild heroesandhorses.org.
[03:52:48] If you want to follow Chris Voss and the Black Swan group, it's blackswanltd.com.
[03:52:57] Facebook and Instagram is blackswanltd.
[03:53:02] Twitter at blackswangroup.
[03:53:05] And Chris is on Instagram.
[03:53:07] He's at the FBI negotiator.
[03:53:11] And of course, we are also on social media and whatnot.
[03:53:16] Twitter, Graham, Facebook.
[03:53:19] Echoes at Echo Charles.
[03:53:20] I'm at Jocko Willink.
[03:53:21] Of course, watch out because that algorithm is sitting there waiting to grab you by the
[03:53:25] throat and drag you into oblivion.
[03:53:28] Don't let it.
[03:53:30] Thanks once again to Chris Voss for joining us, for teaching us about negotiation.
[03:53:34] And thanks to Chris for his service in the police department and the FBI.
[03:53:40] Thanks to all the FBI agents that are out there right now doing their best to keep us
[03:53:46] safe.
[03:53:47] And the same goes to the rest of our police and law enforcement firefighters, paramedics,
[03:53:52] DMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all first responders.
[03:53:57] Thanks for everything that you all do to keep us safe.
[03:54:00] And of course, thanks to our military men and women who are on the front lines around
[03:54:04] the world right now.
[03:54:07] We live in freedom because of the sacrifices you make.
[03:54:12] Thank you for your service.
[03:54:14] And everyone else out there, life is a negotiation.
[03:54:20] And people are not rational.
[03:54:23] They are filled with emotions and biases and judgments.
[03:54:26] And that includes you.
[03:54:32] So pay attention and listen more than you talk, not just in negotiation, but in leadership
[03:54:40] and life.
[03:54:41] And until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.