Chris Voss: Never Split the Difference

Transcript

[0:00:38] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Chris Voss, author of Never Split the Difference. Chris is an international hostage and kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. So yeah, this conversation is pretty awesome. Chris knows that even the smallest situations can feel like high stakes if you aren’t prepared. Life is a series of negotiations that we all have to be prepared for, whether we’re buying a home or working out or salaries or even just arguing with our partners. Yet most of us are unable to articulate our points and persuade. Instead, we choose to agree to disagree or split the difference. In this episode, Chris will give you the FBI’s most effective strategies which you can use to be more likeable and persuasive in any area of your life. One more thing before we begin. My friend Tucker Max was also on this call because he had a bunch of questions for Chris, so they’re basically two hosts for this episode. And now, here is our conversation with Chris Voss.

[0:02:04] Chris Voss: After you trained as an FBI hostage negotiator, you go through the school at Quantico which is an extraordinary school, it’s completely unexpected experience. You want to get trained as a negotiator, you got to go back to Quantico, you think, “This is another week isolated at the academy.” On top of that, it’s two weeks where you’re like, “I got to figure out what to do with the weekend.” You don’t know before you get there that there’s going to be anywhere from three to five cops from around the country who are experienced hostage negotiators who have been through extraordinary, jaw dropping, frightening situations. There’s going to be more than three to five guys from the international hostage negotiation community and this is going to be you know – there’s always somebody there from Scotland Yard and when I went through there, there happened to be a guy from RCMP rural Canadian mountain police, another guy from New Zealand and so then, everyone is gregarious. You’re with these extraordinary people that have been through stuff that you can’t imagine. You know, you just think it’s the guy sitting next to you and four days later and four years later you find out that he was in a siege that was horrific and everybody’s a partier. So you know, very social people and it ends up – It’s extraordinary that while you’re there, then you start hearing about these guys that travel all over the world working kidnappings and you find out that these guys are on the stint team and you just hear about them and you hear people talking about it and eluding to it. Then towards the end of the training, at the end of the two weeks, you get a presentation on the stint team, you’re like, “Jeez, I want to be with those guys. I want to jump on a plane, I want to have a ready bag. I want to be able to rock inside of four hours and get on a plane and go anywhere in the world.” Then you train as a negotiator, you get involved in a program and you’re dying for an imitation because it’s invitation only, the stint team. I mean, it’s like this secret society and you don’t know exactly how to get in and finally, but you want and finally you get the invitation, you go down there and you think they’re going to give you the secret sauce, the secret handshake, the magic words. And land at a percentage of that, it’s going to be in another range, it’s going to be very predictable and there’s also going to be an amount of time that they plan on for this to take, all you got to do is you know, start talking to local law enforcement, you figure these two things out, you can understand the dynamics. They’re explaining to me, commodities exchange. This is market. The commodity just happens to be human beings but the guys on the other side are in business in the commodity exchange and this is a business. I remember being blown away by that thought and then you know that in many ways was the beginning of me knowing that these were just business skills. Just high performance, highly evolved like ridiculous application of emotional intelligence into something, a crazy business that happened to be in the commodity exchange of human beings.

[0:05:15] Charlie Hoehn: Tell me, what were some of the things that you practice?

[0:05:21] TM: There’s a bargaining model, I mean, if you look at bargaining as offer, counter-offer then that becomes a sequential game with rules and the expectations of you know, the other side’s expectation and sometimes a meeting in the middle. If it’s a game, there’s a way to evolve and come in with a better game strategy. So they taught us the game strategy, they taught us the basic rules of it and was pretty straight forward but other than this basic sequential move, gaining strategy. They left it very open to us to see what we could do, which is basically just drag your feet, stall for time, like my former bosses, well, it’s called stalling for time. Not an incredibly sophisticated approach and so I thought, “You know, I’d be able to get smarter than this.” So then, I just went back to my crisis hotline days and I knew that empathy is a tactical application of empathy, it’s almost like an anesthesia. You can use it however you want, you can use it to lessen pain, if you turn it way up, I mean, you can use it to render the other side unconscious. What I started doing was just, I took my background which was heavy in that and I laid it into the bargaining process and then I would work on that a lot. I was constantly experimenting with it. I trained all the time. You know, I liked leading training. I was always finding ways to apply it. While I still had time, I used to volunteer on a suicide hotline, then the terrorism work there I was doing in New York, just crowded it out of the way. It was always – you know, I always was looking for ways to experiment and drop it in and my practice is really in real life. Chris, let me ask you, when did you go through what you described to us the hostage training and then get the sync invitation?

[0:07:16] Chris Voss: I was originally trained as a hostage negotiator in 1992 and then the sync team, critical incident negotiation team, I got invited to go through that in ‘98. So, I’ve been doing the –

[0:07:31] TM: With all the humility aside, how much of the modern – I have two questions, they’re kind of tied together. One is, how much of the modern FBI hostage negotiation playbook, so to speak, did you author or take part in a sort of developing and authoring and then how much of that is reflected in Never Split The Difference?

[0:07:55] Chris Voss: Right after I got to the crisis negotiation unit which is where everything was rewrote there, that was part of what our mandate was from 2000 to 2003, we literally wrote everything so I was part of the team. Everything that’s there now, I was either an author or the author. One of the things that was really gratified to see was, at the time, we didn’t have what we referred to as an active listening block which amazed me that we didn’t have a separate block of instruction, we also didn’t have a kidnapping instruction.

[0:08:31] Charlie Hoehn: What is an active listening block?

[0:08:34] Chris Voss: There is a list of eight skills of hostage negotiation like motion labeling, open ended questions, minimal encouragers, there were eight of them, we have the list but we didn’t have the actual instruction written that explained, clearly defined each one, explained how they worked, explained why they worked and gave very clear, specific examples. Upon myself, I just wrote it and then when I was down there for training just a couple of years ago, I wondered, whether that block would survive because there were some people that I worked with that were jealous of what I had done. I thought maybe as soon as I was gone, they would throw that in the trash and the block is still there, word for word. Not only is a block still there. The FBI instructional material is not copyrighted. When you write for the government, you can’t copyright it. Anybody can steal it. We still do, still did still liberally Scotland Yard, the four big players internationally, the FBI Scotland Yard, the Australian’s K. We each have our own school and we steal form each other liberally. I’ve seen my stuff not only word for word in Scotland Yard, negotiation training. Typically, when negotiators retire and leave, they take the intellectual property with them and they open up their own shop and then they copyright it because it wasn’t previously – I’ve seen my stuff word for word copyrighted from hostage negotiators that have gone on to the private sector around the world. I was teaching in the United Arab Emirates and retired, guy from Scotland Yard put up a block of instruction and it was word for word what I had written.

[0:10:31] Charlie Hoehn: That’s awesome, did you tell him that? And call him out about that?

[0:10:34] Chris Voss: No, you know, it wouldn’t have done any good and he wasn’t that good at teaching it anyway. I knew he was missing some insights and nuances to it. The funny thing that happened was when it caught me so off-guard, you know, every now and then, you look up at the sky and you go like, “Alright universe, this is a way – I’m not going to complain about this. I just know this is what happens.” I lean back in my chair and I was looking up at the sky and the major from defense forces the United Arab Emirates, he tapped me on the shoulder and he goes, “Are you okay?” I said, “No, I’m fine. I just thought of something back home that really was blowing me away.” I couldn’t say, you know, “This guy, he thought he stole his material from Scotland Yard but since Scotland Yard stole it from me, he actually stole it from me.” Just the way it is.

[0:11:33] Charlie Hoehn: That’s a high compliment though and –

[0:11:36] Chris Voss: Yeah.

[0:11:38] Charlie Hoehn: The book is so rich with such amazingly effective tactics and I’m curious, Chris, what do you think is like the number one take away that listeners could actually try out this week, the people listening to this. What would you give them to give a shot?

[0:12:00] Chris Voss: Alright, like the simplest thing to learn is the mirror technique, repeating the last rewards or what someone has just said. It’s like literally repeating the last one to three words of what they just said, nothing more complicated than that. You do not have to – if you can make a complete sentence, you understand what that is. It’s not mirroring your effect, it’s not mirroring their body language, the hostage negotiators literally just last one or three words, nothing could be simpler. Some people find that ridiculously awkward and frightening and they won’t do it because it scares the hell out of them. Those that do it, there are some people, there are certain skills that are so effective that that’s all anybody does and there are mirroring addicts out there.

[0:12:49] Charlie Hoehn: Mirroring addicts?

[0:12:50] Chris Voss: There you go, Mirroring addicts, that was a nice mirror on your part. I mean, of all places, we get invited to a yoga retreat to teach negotiation. And my son, my Director of Operations says, “You know, this is going to open up an area of business that we’re just not into. You know, let’s go do it and see what happens.” We run across a guy, I called him Johnny Mirrors. He had read the book and all he was doing was mirroring whatever people say. We actually had a conversation with them for about 20 minutes before I realized that’s what he was doing and he was having the best time and every time he would mirror, his wife would look at him and go, “Stop doing that” because she’d been attached to him this entire weekend and everybody loved him. People just said, “Your husband is so nice, he’s so interesting, we love talking to him, he’s the best guy, he’s so pleasant.” And he had this big dopy smile in his face because all he was doing was mirroring people and he was the most popular guy the entire weekend.

[0:13:56] TM: Chris, let me ask you, I didn’t just read the book. I really read it. Because most books, I probably have 3,000 books in my house and it’s like, I would say, at least two thirds of them, I didn’t even get through half of it or a quarter because I just thought, “Okay, this is boring or I get this” or whatever. But yours is like one of the few that I had to go back and reread because it was so much. But mirroring is actually one of the things that I thought, I don’t want to say – I disagreed with but I thought it was not simplistic. Let me tell you what I do instead of mirroring. Maybe this is like kind of what you meant but like, if I just repeat the last three words people say, one, it definitely does feel awkward so there’s that element. But then also, a lot of times, people don’t end on sentences, like if you say the last three words, it sounds weird. Instead, what I do is, I’ll say three words that kind of summarize like kind of what the point they were making, right? What you just talked about with Johnny Mirrors, I would say something like, “That’s all he did? That’s really all he did?” Even though those weren’t the three words you end on, does that make sense?

[0:15:06] Chris Voss: You know, there’s a couple of different things there. First of all, you’re listening and you go in after, now some of the gist and the heart of the matter. I mean, what you’re talking about is a slightly different skill. In and of itself, I mean, there are a couple of different reasons for doing it like word for word. One of the guys that I think without question, a guy named Randy, Randy’s got to be the smartest guy we ever trained. He loves mirroring so much because it’s so easy to see when it’s being done if you’re watching. He mirrors every single time, on the other side’s position because he says, that will always tell me how firm or soft their position is, their reaction to the merits. A great diagnostic tool. He also loves – he pulled his people together in advance and he’s going to say throughout this conversation, all I’m going to do is mirror. One to three words the entire time because he loves showing off, he loves deploying the skill that have been pointed out by everybody but the listeners, it’s just like, blatantly obvious. One of the other real big things for a mirror – which I don’t mirror that much but I do it when I need to buy myself time like if I get caught insanely off-guard, completely off-guard by what somebody said. That’s actually one of the stories in the book. The Chase Manhattan bank robbery. I confronted the bank robber because we ID’d him and he was hiding form us who he was, and we found his vehicle, we found his van and we ran the registration and we got somebody there that gave us a voice ID. In trying to back slightly into that we got him to try to limit the shock of a gut you. WE got a van outside, we’ve ID’d everybody, all the owners of the van. I said, “But the van is registered to your Chris Watts.” This guy’s name is Chris Watts. He goes, “Well, you know, we don’t have more than one van.” I said, “More than one van?” He says “Yeah, we only have one van.” “Did you only have one van?” He says “Yeah, you chased my driver away.” I said, “We chased your driver away?” He said “Yeah, when he saw the police he cut and run.” Now, what he just did there was that vomiting of information, there was the third bank robber, we didn’t even know was involved. Up until – he was the getaway driver who got away. I had no idea the guy was there, none of us know he was there, we convicted that guy on the strength of the spontaneous utterances that are lead bank robber who was one of the most manipulative people we ever came across, he also did a great CEO’s move or you know – When somebody on the other side has got outside influence and they’re actually at the table, they’ll only use plural pronouns. Never say I, me, my. They’ll always say you know, we, they, them, the other guys, my board of directors, I got so many people I’m accountable to, that’s where they avoid getting pinned into a corner at the bargaining table. This guy and a bank robber did that completely. He kept saying, “You know, these other guys here are more dangerous than I am, you know, I’m the reasonable guy here, you know, these guys, I don’t know what they’re going to do.” “They’re in charge, I mean, they’re telling me what to do and as a matter of fact, I got to get to the phone right now because you know, they want me to get off the phone.” He was the guy. And he used it the entire, he was the most together, manipulative bank robber that we’ve ever run across and straight out of the CEO’s, the smart CEO’s playbook and the mirrors got him. As controlled as he was, the mirrors caused him to vomit information that he had no control over and we nailed the getaway driver just because of that.

[0:18:57] Charlie Hoehn: Wow. I can definitely see how mirroring is helpful especially in those instances from a practical standpoint, apart from making people just like you more and feel more connected to you. What are some everyday situations you find yourself using mirroring and that improved the relationship with your coworkers, your spouse, that sort of thing?

[0:19:24] Chris Voss: Well, the main one I use in substitution always instead of “What do you mean by that?” Because a lot of times if somebody said something to you, especially if they’re thoughtful and most people are, not everybody is but most people are. They’d chosen their words very specifically. They may be the type that think that what they’ve said is so blatantly obvious that when you say to them, “What do you mean by that?” Repeat it word for word, maybe only louder, like an American overseas. Because they think what they’ve said it’s just the definition that the words are so well selected, it’s blatantly obvious. But if you mirror what you want to ask, “What do you mean by that?” Like if somebody says, you know, “This is a fluid situation” and I might say “What do you mean by a fluid situation?” Instead if I say, “A fluid situation?” The might say “Yeah, there’s four or five players involved here in the timelines, they’re moving around and you know, the first player this and the second player that…” And they’ll lay it all out and give me a much better answer than if I finally said, you know, “What do you mean by a fluid situation?” I find it really expanded stuff that I don’t understand.

[0:20:44] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I’m noticing that your tone when you have the mirroring is a certain way, it doesn’t come across awkward because you say it very sort of calm and that sort of brings me to –

[0:20:56] TM: And you up talk at the end, right Chris? You have the inverted sort of finish which implies a question.

[0:21:02] Chris Voss: That’s a good question because I usually upward inflict on it. Usually, not always but most of the time.

[0:21:09] Charlie Hoehn: When do you not? Why would you not?

[0:21:10] Chris Voss: If I would not, it would be because I’m simply trying to convey a complete understanding on what was just said and it’s not as encouraging. So I probably have a couple of times but I probably almost always upward inflect.

[0:21:24] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:21:25] TM: You were saying a second ago that you like to replace, “What do you mean by that?” Then also, in the book, this is another thing that kind of took me by surprise. Not like, it wasn’t like, there’s a lot of things too – I’m surprised, I’m like, “It’s genius, I never thought about that.” But there were a couple that took me by surprise that I wasn’t sure I agreed with and one of them is this sort of “Why?” question, right? They never ask why. I get that like why you say it’s an accusation because definitely in corporate environments, if you’re asking “Why?” a lot, people like – take it a certain way. But I don’t know, I feel like this might just be specific to me but in my life, I’ve been able to sort of maybe frame my inquisitiveness in a way that hasn’t come off that way as much. Is that – do you think that’s just specific to me, it’s not really, it’s nothing to do with “Why?” It’s just that I’m better reframing?

[0:22:20] Chris Voss: No, you hit the nail on the head, I mean, When it’s genuine curiosity then it’s going to come across in your tone of voice and it’s going to take this thing off the word. There’s a difference between, “Why did you do that?” And “Why did you do that?” Same words, different tone and when you’re genuinely actually really curious, then that’s going to come across in your tone. I could tell by the way you said it even when you described, I mean, you’ve got a genuine curiosity. Really want to know why. You’re not using that as an accusation.

[0:22:56] TM: Right, but for most people, it’s better to substitute – what do you say instead of “Why?” It wasn’t the three questions, it was more “What?” You just ask “What?” But not, “Can you explain it more, can you elaborate or what do you mean by that?” Because those can come off as accusatory too, right?

[0:23:13] Chris Voss: Again, it’s kind of come to your tone of voice more than anything else. You know, technically by definition, you know, “Can you explain that?” comes really close to a close ended question, it’s almost a statement. In helping people really grasp some of this, we try to get them to understand like word for word, the definition of a closed ended question means it starts with a verb by definition. So that, “Can you,” is verb –

[0:23:43] TM: Right, of course. Because I could just say “Yes” or “No” and then stop.

[0:23:47] Chris Voss: Yeah.

[0:23:47] TM: Yes, I can explain it.

[0:23:51] Chris Voss: Then also, you know, there’s certain issues that I like an approach you can use with anybody and that is to a certain people. You are not going to say to your boss, “Can you explain that?” He’s going to throw you out of his office. He’s going to say, “I don’t got to explain nothing to you, you work for me,” he or she. There’s certain wording that people who perceive them to be above you in the hierarchy or the pecking order, either you know, actually by definition, they’re going to be over sensitive to the way that it’s phrased. Which means there’s a limitation there, what happens if they think they’re above me in the hierarchy and I don’t think that. Or I’m trying to prove to them that they’re not. I may choose some phraseology to – by design that asserts. Now, it’s silly to get over a wrestling match or who is in charge when I just need the information.

[0:24:44] TM: Right. This actually brings me to a question I had reading this book was like, you remind me so much of people like in the sin celeb and Oren Klaff, coming to understanding through practitioner as supposed to theory and study, right? Not that you haven’t studied. There’s just a different way that practitioners approach knowledge than sort of academics, right? In the broader sense. Obviously, you have a ton of experience with different things like you were saying, the suicide help line, you start as a cop and then all these other sorts of things. What I’m curious about is, what things did you study, aside from experiential things. Were there books or academic sources or things you read that you think really helped you kind of be the dude that wrote the book on negotiation for the FBI?

[0:25:36] Chris Voss: Well, on a crisis hotline, you know, I really wanted to learn that and there was just a basic manual, you know. I dug into that really hard, I mean, if wherever I was getting training, they gave me a book, I read the book, you know, I dug in to the reading material. But most of the places that I was learning it, It was mostly the instruction, I would dig hard to the instruction I would participate fully in what they wanted us to do. That first book that I can remember making a difference to me that I read, that I dug into hard. I mean, we start with no but that wasn’t until about 2002 when I came across that book. I was always looking at business books and there were some – in hindsight, her book from way back when, you can negotiate anything, I remember having that. Roger Dawson had his audio tape series, The Secrets Of Power And Negotiation, I mean, I listened to that, I tried to apply that stuff. But I’m not sure that you know, start with Noah who is probably the first book that I started per se that I started to really dig in to in this stuff. I’m envious, I got the 3,000 books in your library, I wish I had that many. I’m building my library now.

[0:26:56] TM: Here’s the thing though, I mean, the point I’m trying to make is, I feel like I’d read – I thought, not that I’m some negotiation expert. but I thought I pretty much read everything about it until I read your book and I was like, it felt like it unlocked the whole different perspective on the world. That’s sort of my question for you is you got there really, pretty much primarily you’re almost totally through experience, you did stuff, you watch what happen, you tested other things, you watch what happen, it was almost all experiential or were there any things that you read that kind of helps get you there. Aside from like you said, aside from the manual.

[0:27:46] Chris Voss: It was mostly experiential but then also, I mean, trying to learn as much as I could for the people that were teaching it. You know, it wasn’t like it was all trial and error on my part. I mean, I listened real hard, you know, even if instruction at the suicide hotline was really good instruction, it wasn’t terribly well organized. That there were a lot of nuggets in there that I tried to figure out from the people that were doing it who were good at it. I try to learn from the people who were good at it, I think is primarily it.

[0:28:10] TM: Let’s take that, that’s a good example. The suicide hotline, you pretty much learn from the instructors. You kind of, apposed to the manual, like you kind of learn between the lines as it’s called?

[0:28:22] Chris Voss: Yeah, I can remember, like they put you through one night a week, eight weeks, two months of training before we went through and for whatever reason, just because the training, the coaching and I think I’m open to learning. I know that the distance that I traveled and their training was huge, mostly because, at the very beginning of the training, they gave us a list if 10 possible statements of somebody on a hotline might say, and write down what you would say in response and so they take that – you hand them that piece of paper and at the end of the training, they give it back to you. I remember looking at that piece of paper and if I didn’t recognize my handwriting, I’d have called you a liar. If you just said that I would have ever have advocated any of t hose things to be said. Then I went like wow, they really took me a long way here. I’ve got a vastly different perspective on how to do this.

[0:29:21] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Going back a little bit. So I read The Secrets Of Power Negotiating by Dawson and Tucker is right. I mean your book and his – your book unlocked another level that just isn’t mentioned in those types of books. What is the number one thing that most people who are caught up in negotiations are getting wrong? What do those books teach that isn’t quite on point that people should stop doing?

[0:30:39] Chris Voss: Well kind of like preview up on the book, getting to “Yeses” is intellectually flawless but negotiation is not an intellectual process and that’s where that begins to breakdown and it doesn’t in factor into the wackiness of emotional intelligence. I think I had an advantage because hostage negotiators, we’re taught from the very beginning look for the loss, look for the loss, look for the loss. It’s most likely happened in the last 24 to 48 hours.

[0:31:12] Charlie Hoehn: Hold on, what does that mean look for the loss?

[0:31:15] Chris Voss: If somebody is engaged in some form of extreme behavior, there is going to be a recent trigger and we didn’t know it at the time but there’s no bigger trigger than a loss. We just thought that it just triggered that behavior. It in fact, based on Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory, he won the Nobel Prize for it relatively recently, you know after all of these negotiation books were written most of them, Kahneman points out that the biggest motivator of human behavior is loss. Not just somebody waving a gun around but every human being on the planet. So I ended up getting first trained on the this whole loss idea and I just thought it was hostage negotiation. Then I came to learn that getting the guy to agree to come out and getting them out were two different things, which is really an implementation issue. So shortly after I left the FBI, I also came across the book called The Point Of The Deal: How To Negotiate When Yes Is Not Enough. And that is one of the first lines in there, “A deal that can’t be implemented isn’t worth making.” I remember reading that in a bookstore at Cambridge, a Harvard bookstore and I remember laughing out loud. I said, “Okay this is a 1000%. I’m on track here”. So you know there are certain things that have been discovered along the way that I think I learned as a hostage negotiator that I thought was unique to hostage negotiation. But I found out that’s unique to everything else. So some of the books that have been written in getting TF’s, sort of pre-prospect theory. Those guys have disadvantage because it just hadn’t been – it wasn’t in the body knowledge yet and if they were academics then it’s not in the academic literature either. The other thing also is like Stewart Diamond’s book, Getting More. Stewart Diamond is a dead on analytical guy. He’s one of the three types. It’s a great book if you want to understand how an analyst thinks through negotiation but that gives you one of the three types. I don’t know how aware he is of that that is a playbook for the analyst. Jim Camp’s book, Start with No, Jim Camp’s Dead On Assertive. That’s the playbook of how assertives think. There are some books that may be get a blind spot they don’t know about it. It’s not that it’s a bad book but it’s got a blind spot. I fortunately was lucky enough to come across enough of those things in advance and then also, I think the biggest thing that I was lucky about is I get Tahl Raz as a co-author. I mean he’s a freaking genius and through the process of putting the book together, he found a blind spot and he’d say, “You guys got a blind spot here and you’ve got to address this.” I think some people who have written their own books miss having a great partner to points that out to them.

[0:34:18] Charlie Hoehn: I am interested in what you said about – if loss is the biggest motivator for all human beings, how can we tactically use that in a way that doesn’t feel, I don’t know, gross. That doesn’t make the other person feel bad and worried but is realistic, acknowledges the reality of the future, do you have any thoughts on that?

[0:34:48] Chris Voss: Yeah, a couple of things. It also gives it to like there’s a bit of a moral dilemma here and I just wrote some instruction for real estate people. I said, “You know, understand you’re not putting loss at them, it’s there. That driver is already there and it’s already got the gas pedal on the floor. So you might not like it but they are being driven by in an outside way, by loss and fear. So you’re not doing anything on that to go by tapping into motivation and so you didn’t put it there.” So then if you are going to do it then that’s really where empathy comes. You know a tactical application of empathy comes in. You know without an emotional intelligent compassion empathic approach, then yeah you are taken them hostage. You run the risk of being very threatening and being a bully and being a bad guy. So what’s the precursor to your assertion? If you assert bluntly then it’s going to go bad. A lot of people here, you’re going to wear people out. I mean these days what’s the biggest difference between Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan?

[0:36:02] TM: Emotional intelligence.

[0:36:05] Chris Voss: Yeah and look at how it comes off. I mean I don’t know if Donald Trump is as assertive as Ronald Reagan was and Ronald Reagan is one of the most beloved presidents in the history of the United States. I mean the first thing that Ronald Reagan did after he took office is to fire every air traffic controller in the United States. I mean talk about You’re Fired, every traffic controlling? Putting the risk of every airplane in the sky. Putting every airplane in the sky at risk by firing all of these people? I mean that’s something that Donald Trump would be proud of but look at with emotional intelligence and the same basic tactics, look at the different human beings in here.

[0:36:49] Charlie Hoehn: Getting back to the loss component, how do you deliver that or how would you frame that sentence and I know it requires compassion in your voice so the tone matters but how might you say something like that to gently guide somebody?

[0:37:05] Chris Voss: I would say look, this is – I would start out by saying, “Look this is going to sound harsh. You are not going to like this,” and I did this in a negotiation. I had some contractors, I had to cut their pay by 75%. 75%, I don’t know the last time you went to a 75% pay cut, that ain’t easy. That ain’t an easy pill to swallow. I call all of these guys up front, I said, “I got a lousy proposition for you. By the time we got finished with this conversation you’re going to think I’m the worst business man on the planet.” “You’re going to think Chris Voss, big talker, all these years been talking about going into business…” because I was dealing with hostage negotiation college that I’ve known for years, people that I had relationships with for years. I had been talking about going into business with starting my own consulting firm for years.” So you know, all these big talk all these years and Chris wants the big talkers very first project after he leaves the FBI, he doesn’t know how to manage a project.” “He’s a bad business man and he may even had lied to me” and then I just let it sit and then I said, “But I wanted to make this offer to you before I took it to somebody else.” Now if I started with, “I wanted to make this offer to you before I take it to somebody else,” without that emotional intelligence precursor, a thousand percent of those guys would have been like, “You know what? Take it to somebody else and don’t ever call me again,” bang and they hung up the phone. Literary every single one of those guys took the deal, all but one took it in their conversation. There was no argument, there was no counter offer, there was no complaint. You only get an intake within that conversation, called me back the next day and said, “You know my wife says I can stay at home and do nothing, or I could go out and do this with you.”

[0:38:52] Charlie Hoehn: That’s incredible. Chris this leads me to my next question, I’m really curious to hear what have been some of your reader’s results? What have been some of the stories you’ve heard from people who have implemented these tactics into their lives that you’ve been really gratified, really grateful to hear about?

[0:39:14] Chris Voss: What I get the biggest kick out of lately, you know I get a kick out of when a woman has read the book and has gone out and gotten a raise because these days to stereotype the perception, first is the woman don’t negotiate well and it’s their fault or that they can’t or that somehow they’re constrained. If they negotiate, they get penalized and so then I found out about a woman who shared to me on Facebook recently, a big fan of the book. She said, “I gave your book to my daughter. My daughter read your book and she got a 30% raise.” I’m like, “Yeah that’s right.”

[0:39:53] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great.

[0:39:53] TM: Well let me ask Chris because I feel like one of those books, like I said like Oren Klaff in the sense of what the truly like completely disrupts and redefines an entire niche of thought or category actually a thought because negotiation is not a niche. It’s a full category, what are you working on now? Are there any big projects coming from you? I don’t necessarily mean the next thing because I think you still have a long way to go with just the stuff in Never Split The Difference. In terms of what you can do with it and where, so what are you working on at least that you can tell us about?

[0:40:31] Chris Voss: Well we are trying to keep up with how people are applying what we are doing and smart interesting people are taking the ideas and sort of reassembling them in their own way or in their own application and then hitting them out of the park. So when somebody comes across something that I was like, “Holy cow! I never thought of that combination before but that’s awesome!” And a lot of it, a lot of the real cutting edge stuff is being done now that I am getting back is on cold calling and cold email and about three months ago a guy, put some of the skills in an email which was a called approach and it was brilliant and he got the appointment.

[0:41:16] TM: Oh, you mean with you?

[0:41:18] Chris Voss: No, he said that appointment was somebody else and then came back and presented what he’d done. He sent me the emails and says, “Hey this is what I did with a potential client and I threw it together and did I do it right?” And I said, “Not only did you do it right. That’s a combination I haven’t seen before” and that solves a problem, the cold email problem.

[0:41:40] TM: You’ve got to tell me what it is. Now I’m all interested in it.

[0:41:42] Chris Voss: Well what was a really thin thread, it started out with a no oriented question then with the label and then with an open-ended question and you know the no oriented question in an email is going to get a response, right? And the person responding in two consecutive emails you could tell from his writing that he thought he was sending rejections, but he sent a rejection and the reason for his rejection is with a reason. The reason for his rejection revealed another more important issue. So what my cold emailer did was he focused enough to what the reason for the rejection was and picked out something that was even more important that was being unaddressed. He followed this thread and what the guy was really after was in a long term relationship with a previous vendor and he just didn’t want to reinvent the relationship if it was going to be with somebody that wasn’t actually going to pay attention to him. So through the email the guy showed him how quickly he could pay attention to him and hone in on what was important to him through three emails. Three short emails and now suddenly the guy who sent the emails is honing-in and paying more attention to the potential client than any of his existing vendors are and he’s refreshed by that. He’s like, “Yeah I want to talk. You’re actually hearing needs that I’m expressing that I need to realize that I was expressing” and he couldn’t wait to get the appointment.

[0:43:26] TM: So that actually brings up a really good point, something that I wanted to ask you about was like labelling emotions, right? Which is like identifying needs and labelling them, right?

[0:43:36] Chris Voss: Yeah.

[0:43:37] TM: So I feel like I am okay with that but I definitely meet a lot of people who are bad at it. So they ask me how do I learn how to get better and my answer is always like, “I don’t know. Learn how to read people better.” I don’t know. That’s not a skill that I don’t know how to teach someone. First of all, I don’t think I am good enough at it but also, I don’t even know where to begin with that. So what do you do when someone asks you that or how did you get better?

[0:44:05] Chris Voss: Well first is practice, which sounds too trite but you know I realized recently that the learning curve is steep. We’ve always said the learning curve is steep but it’s not high. If you look at the bell curve that’s exactly right, the learning curve is steep initially but all you’ve got to do is get halfway and then suddenly, you take off like a rocket. So when people get started on a scale and it’s really difficult at the beginning, they figure it’s always going to be that way. Nobody understands, connects the shape of the learning curve with knowing it’s only going to be steep for a brief period of time and then as soon as it levels out, not only is it going to be easier but my progress is going to take off and I am going to start laughing by everybody else really, really fast. But since you are blind with that progression when you are trying to learn something, people started going, “Ah, I was good at it. It didn’t work out.” They don’t understand how close they are to remarkable breakthroughs first off. So that keeps people going in. another thing that actually helps get people quicker, get them fast quicker is when somebody says something I’ll ask myself, “You know what’s the flipside or opposite of what they are saying?” And what we like to do all the time is a real exercise. So we practice with this, we do the attacking exercise. So, I am going to attack something that is important to you and you are supposed to label in the mirror. In any group if I got more than 20 people in a room, I know the easiest people to attack are going to be people from the Boston area and they’re going to be ridiculously emotional about the Patriots and Red Sox and that’s a ground ball. I mean picking on them and so who’s here from Boston? Raise your hand. I would say, “Alright so I want you to label and mirror me. Now say you know the New England Patriots are a disgrace to the NFL,” and you watch their face get red. But we can do that, when you can exercise people with that is like, “I can say the New England Patriots are cheaters,” and your label can be like, “It sounds like you hate cheaters.” Or you can immediately diffuse that by saying, “It sounds like you love the rules. It sounds like you love integrity.” And if you get into an exercise of let me label the flipside positive that’s really fun and then plus it leaps your skills ahead like in big chunks.

[0:46:41] TM: That’s like the sub-skill there is framing because labeling is what they’re feeling and then how do you frame that, either positively or negative.

[0:46:52] Chris Voss: Right. Yeah, exactly.

[0:46:54] TM: Is this what you guys teach in your – not to advertise for you guys but I will anyway, is this what you guys teach at Black Swan or is this something you’re thinking about doing like book wise? Because the obvious follow up to this book could be something like, “All right, here is how you…” like what you just described, what’s the workbook for this, the exercise for this because I have been struggling to teach my team, my company a lot of this stuff. Because a lot of it, it was like I got it right away or the things I didn’t get I could at least orient it into but so many of them they’d be like, “Oh yeah that’s really smart” and then we’d be doing something like, “Well why didn’t you do it?” they’d be like, “What? That doesn’t apply here” and I’m like, “Of course it applies here” like there’s a gap that I –

[0:47:37] Charlie Hoehn: Is it because Tucker, it’s not called like Never Split The Difference For Sales People for instance like they don’t think, “Oh this is all about me.”

[0:47:45] TM: I don’t know, what do you think Chris?

[0:47:48] Chris Voss: Well a couple of different things. Sometimes people need the phraseology from their immediate frame of reference to apply stuff really quick. Then so I will say, “Yeah, alright so let’s never split the difference for sales people.” They go like, “Oh okay, so it applies.” So there is a certain amount of familiarity that sometimes people need just in the decorations around it and we do teach it when we do in person training. Since our focus was on teaching before it was on any of this, when I sit down with a group I will say, “Alright labels are it seems like it sounds like it looks like or you seem you sound you look” and then I’ll say, “Take out a pencil and write it down” and I mean take out a pencil now and write it down now and I will walk around the room. I’ll see who’s writing it down and I’ll say, “Because if you do the activity and actually writing it down that is actually building your neuro pathways now.” So I will look around in the room and I’ll see who didn’t write it down and then that’s who I would pick on for the verbal exercises and then I will make them label because I know I have the – in order to build the habit I’ve got to actually make the synapses in their brain fire. So then on top of everything else, whoever didn’t write it down everybody in the group knows that that is a typical recall centric learner and so if I can get a good label out of that person in front of everybody else then they go like, “Wow he got a label out of Tucker and we know how tough Tucker is. I must be able to do it.”

[0:49:36] Charlie Hoehn: So Chris what is our listeners future going to look like if they don’t read your book?

[0:49:46] Chris Voss: You’re not going to know how much time you’re wasting. The future is going to look – take a look at your present and figure that ain’t going to change much because there is a saying that whatever system you are working in now is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you have. So, you want a bigger house? The house you’re in now is the house in your future. You want a nicer car? The car you’re driving now, you’re driving a four-door Chevy that’s 10 years old that’s what you are going to be driving. You know it’s really hard to see what you’re missing out on, or how much you’re leaving on the table and since the vast majority of people are just not great at communicating, you’re not going to get that much better at this to make a big difference. That’s the crazy thing like I am shocked at how much bad communication is out there and how little you have to do to jump ahead.

[0:50:58] Charlie Hoehn: And my final question is – well I have two questions, if you could give this book to only one organization or one individual in hopes that it will transform them, who or what would that be?

[0:51:14] Chris Voss: You know it would probably be a woman’s organization, or an individual or be Sheryl Sandberg because the faster women and their continuing to be integrated in the business world, you know the Rising Tide raises all boats. The more women that are competitive in the business market, in the market place then the more competitive the rest of us have to be. So it’s going to raise everybody and they are the ones that will probably be least represented across the board. The more successful they are, the more – I got to raise and deliver my game to keep up with women and business will continue to advance. So they’re going to by and large bring the biggest infusion and evolution and success in the way the business is done over the next – for the rest of – until business is done. They’re going to have the most impact over the next 10 years because their integration is at an ever-accelerating rate.

[0:52:17] Charlie Hoehn: Just curious, does Sheryl have your book? Because Adam Grant, her co-author blurb your book and he said, “This book blew my mind.”

[0:52:26] Chris Voss: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know if she does or not. She seems to be, for a very good reason, one of the more revered thought leaders in women and business people out there. I don’t know if she’s got it or not. I hope she doesn’t because if she did, I wish she would have reached out for me.

[0:52:45] TM: Honestly, it’s the one that I came back to you really didn’t get to Chris is are you guys doing a workbook, like an implementation workbook or a video guide? I know you have the little email course thing but that really just runs through the book, more like a video course or workbook implementation type of thing.

[0:53:03] Chris Voss: We’re in the process of doing a bunch of online training with a very specific company that we hope to have done over the next couple of months. Now the workbook question has come up before and it’s something that I’ve had in the back of my mind and the mirror fact that you just bring this up to me again now, lets me know that it needs to be on our list of stuff to do.

[0:53:27] TM: Yeah because we could probably afford to bring you in for a day or two of consulting but I would much rather pay 10 or a 100 times less than that for the workbook or the video course, to be honest.

[0:53:42] Chris Voss: No, I don’t blame you for that. Yeah, I don’t blame you at all plus on top of that a workbook is a resource that stays there, whereas if we come in for training we’re only there for a couple of days.

[0:53:53] TM: Yeah and the thing with training too that always annoys me is like I always feel like when you bring in someone even if they’re fucking brilliant and they really know their stuff, it’s like people go into vacation mode a lot of times, you know? It depends on who the person is and how well they’re engaged but I was worried about that. It’s like, “Oh yeah, that was real fun. That person taught us smart things,” and then everyone puts it away. I guess a lot of us starts with a leader too but if it’s the leader or teaching it and everyone is engaged then it’s like, “Okay I’ve got to take this seriously. I’m going to be graded on this. I’m going to be judged on this,” this isn’t a thing that we’re doing for a day or two, you know?

[0:54:38] Chris Voss: That’s a really interesting point and it also plays a lot more to culture too and if your leader is taught or it’s more infusion than culture where it was a visitor and the visitor is gone.

[0:54:48] TM: Yeah, right. Exactly, at least for us I feel like it would be more effective coming from – I am not the CEO of my company. I hired a guy who is actually good at being the CEO to do it. But if he or I or someone like that taught it, then if it came from leadership then it would like, because we would teach it sort of in our style, you know, with our gnome and clay chair, are sort of – like you were talking about earlier, the sort of decoration around it would be familiar. Then we would like kind of like, make it ours, you know? Even though it’s your material.

[0:55:20] Chris Voss: No, yeah, I absolutely get what you’re saying but that truly helpfully here. It’s really helpful over here. That makes a lot of sense to me.

[0:55:31] TM: Yeah, I mean, do either video course or workbook, or really both, like a good video course has a workbook component with it but dude, that would be like – because I’ve struggled to – not implement your stuff in my own life. I’ve actually done it really well but like I’ve struggled to get I think some of the concepts across and I’ve got a smart team of really good, hardworking people but there are things like. For some of them, it’s just the bridge too far or I don’t know how to communicate it, you know, they aren’t getting it and I’m not communicating it in a training way. But even the one thing you told me, the labeling things, that makes total sense. I just hadn’t – it’s obvious I hadn’t thought about using that simple practice.

[0:56:15] Chris Voss: Yeah, you have my wheels turning there too. I appreciate that.

[0:56:18] TM: Of course, man. I’ll make the offer. If you want us to look at the beta stuff, you want me to have like take your beta stuff, whatever it is and train my team on it and tell you exactly what went right, what went wrong, things we would do different. Offer will be there as long as you want it.

[0:56:34] Chris Voss: Thank you very much.

[0:56:36] TM: Of course.

[0:56:36] Chris Voss: Okay, I’m going to figure out how to take you up on that.

[0:56:38] Charlie Hoehn: Chris, how can our listeners follow you, connect with you, bring you in to their company?

[0:56:44] Chris Voss: You know, the easiest way is to subscribe to our weekly newsletter. It comes out once a week and it’s free. One of my favorite hostage negotiators, I used to always love this saying “If it’s free, I’ll take three.” It’s called The Edge, comes out once a week, short digestible articles that are easy to read, you know, it’s not going to take you 10, 15 minutes to get through it, it’s going to take you three to five minutes. Plus, on top of that, we put training announcements in there, we put product announcements in there, it’s a gateway to our website, blackswanltd.com. It’s the gateway to everything that we’re doing, it’s the way we’re staying in touch with people, letting people know what we’re getting started with, how we can help people. The easiest way to subscribe to it is you can go to the website and hit the tabs and fill out the form or you can just send a text, the word fbiempathy all one word, no space. Spellcheck, autocorrect it and put a space in there. Fbiempathy22828. That will sign you up and that will keep you up to speed on everything that we’re doing.

[0:58:01] Charlie Hoehn: Fantastic. Well, this was really great and we really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us. Thank you so much Chris.

[0:58:09] Chris Voss: I enjoyed the conversation, I appreciate being on.

[0:58:12] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely.

[0:58:13] Chris Voss: It was a pleasure.

[0:58:13] TM: Definitely. Thank you man.

[0:58:16] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Chris Voss for being on the show. You can buy his book, Never Split The Difference on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.