The Art of Negotiating - From Hostages to Business with Chris Voss

Hostage negotiation. Just high intensity interviewing, not interrogation. There's a big difference between interviewing and interrogation. Interrogation is kind of stupid if you ask me. Like when I saw the movie oh, Dark Dirty. When they were hunting bin Laden and they were interrogating to try to catch him, I remember thinking, no wonder it took so long. These guys are horrible.

Welcome everybody. I am Jeff Duden and we are on the home front as always, this podcast is brought to you by Homefront Brands. Simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action to transform their lives, impact communities and enhance the lives of those they care the most about. All the while delivering enterprise level solutions to local business owners out there on the home front where it matters. So if this sounds like you, check us out@homefrontbrands.com today and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. I will be waiting for you here today. We are super excited to have one of the most influential people in my life. As I read this book, you can see how torn up it is. Mr. Chris Voss, welcome.

Thanks, Jeff. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Chris Voss has spent over two decades in the FBI, including 15 years negotiating hostage situations from New York to the Philippines to the Middle East. His extensive negotiation training has included the FBI, Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. And Chris holds a master's in public Public administration from Harvard. Chris is the author of Never Split the Difference, a universally respected and world renowned book on negotiation. Never Split the Difference breaks down the means and methods developed and refined through real world application in live hostage situations, as well as collaboration with some of the greatest minds and organizations on the subject of negotiation today. Chris Voss is the CEO and founder at the Black Swan Group, established in 2008, which provides negotiation coaching to Fortune 500 companies and professionals across the globe. Chris, would you mind sharing a little bit about your backstory? I know you grew up in Iowa. A little bit of early life and then kind of how that translated into your career.

Yeah. Small town Iowa, blue collar, Midwest work ethic. My father was an entrepreneur, you know, had his own business, sole proprietorship, and we all worked for my dad. I mean, as soon as he had responsibilities, he went to work. Probably as soon as you could start carrying stuff around, you know. And I think it was my father felt like you had to earn your share and you had to figure stuff out. It was very much a figure it out pitch in life that I grew up in. And my dad had, you know, give me a list of Stuff to do and maybe give me a couple of the tools that I needed to do it and then I had to go figure out how to do it. That was, that was kind of how I grew up.

Yeah. So he was in the gas. Oil and gas business and gas stations and stuff like that?

Yeah, yeah, he was a. An oil jobber, sort of the middleman. Got the product from shell oil and then distributed it to gas stations or small companies, large farms. Home heating oil was a big part of the business. When he bought it, it disappeared almost completely entirely. And he had to adapt. And so went from supplying gas stations with product to owning them and owning convenience stores. Running into the convenience store business with my mother.

Yeah, so you had credited. I know I've wrote a book or two. And when you think about the forward of it and who you dedicated to, you dedicated it to your parents and you called out hard work and integrity inside of that.

Yeah.

So how did that translate towards, you know, your career and really pushing you forward as you went. You went to Iowa State, correct?

Yeah, mostly because. For two reasons. You know, my older sister went there and you know, she was really looked up to her and sort of followed her. And then it was far enough away from home that I was separated away from home, but also not so far that, you know, I couldn't get home on a weekend if I had to. And I did occasionally. You know, my father needed me to come back, but yeah, I was state cyclone.

Yeah, I spent a decade in Iowa. One year I went to the university.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

No, I went to. So I went to the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls for a year and it was, it was great. Didn't make it. I didn't make the grades. I lacked a little bit of the hard work and discipline at that point in time. But man went home with a buddy one weekend and shot a gun for the first time. Took my first shot out of a Dixie cup that day. I may have. I think I witnessed insurance fraud with a ball peen hammer and a Cadillac after a hail storm and then partied in a ditch in a cornfield. Now is all a Saturday.

That was, that was the first day.

That was the first day. I think we went cruising too, but. No, but it was great. Still, still have friends there and, and I'm a Midwestern guy, Chicago guy as well. So I appreciate that very much. As, as you moved forward in your career, you went to the police department first and then you had a time where you had a choice to go to the FBI or I think, to the SWAT team.

Right.

How did you make that decision?

Yeah, well, just stupid stupidity, really. I had interviewed for the SWAT team before I was technically eligible on a police department. And I just, I, you know, I just was going through the selection process mostly as to learn it, you know, to prepare for when I might actually get on the team. And for whatever reason, you know, they picked me number one. But I didn't have enough time on the job at that point in time. And lieutenant colonel in charge of administration. You know, the sergeants and the captains on SWAT figured that they could get him to, you know, loosen up. And he was like, nah, this is a rule. We're sticking to it. So I'm sitting there, number one on the list for the SWAT team, and people under the list are going, being taken, person after person after person, even to the point where the speculation was if they took everybody on the list and I still was ineligible, they were going to start over. So at about the same time, I got interested in federal law enforcement, ended up putting my application in for the FBI. I remember sitting, sitting there literally thinking and saying, you know, whoever comes to me first, you know, that's where I'm going, whether it's the SWAT team or the FBI. And so I was just too stupid to really make a great decision at that point in time. I'm grateful that the FBI came and I got hired two weeks before I would have been eligible to go to the SWAT team. Just, Just two weeks. And it's not that often you get to see the fork in the road that clearly. And I'm really happy with the way that it worked out. The bureau hired me and I went to Quantco.

How early in your career did you know that you wanted to be in negotiation?

Yeah, no, that was, that was totally out of left field. I was on the SWAT team, FBI Pittsburgh, and enjoyed SWAT a lot. It was great. I mean, being a SWAT team is a lot of fun. It's close to being a professional athlete. And you get to shoot guns and you get to blow stuff up and you get to repel down the side of buildings. You get do all kind of stupid, crazy adrenaline things, and it's a lot of fun. The training aspect of it is operations aspect of it. You know, I went on two operations while I was on a team. You know, you lay in a mud and somebody shows up with a bullhorn and tells people inside to come out, which is actually what happened. We raided a motorcycle gang clubhouse. And in order to, you know, you lock People up first thing in the morning, they tend to be the most docile then. It's the very best time to, to get somebody while they're still waking up. So, you know, we went out to this motorcycle gang clubhouse out in the woods. We went out about 11 o' clock the night before and some distance away and trekked through the woods, you know, went through the, the power line routes and surrounded a place early in the morning and laid out there on the ground till the sun came up and the negotiators came in and called them out. But then I tried out for the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, the Tier 1 counterterrorist SWAT team based out of Quantico and re injured my knee and then thought, yeah, I went in for my second reconstructive knee surgery and figured that it couldn't happen too many more times. So I thought we had hostage negotiators. They're always there. I like crisis response because I like decision makings. I think, you know, comfortable in action is. Defeats people more than any than make a mistake says, you know, it's a paraphrase of the Kennedy quote from way back when. So I figured negotiators, you know, how hard could it be? I talk to people all the time and I was a bit of a security for that. I was initially rejected, did what I needed to do to get on. And when I got trained, it was phenomenal. It was as satisfying as SWAT was. Hostage negotiation was much more for me. I enjoyed it more than anything else I ever did.

One thing that landed with me in the book was the time between live situations. I think you were training for a year and a half before you got your first action. It was a bank situation. What do you do in the, in the downtime, Was that the time? I like to say the music's made between the notes, right? So you have this time. You're, you're, you're looking at how the FBI does things. You're, you're, you're, now you're, you're putting that into live situation and then you're iterating on it. You're figuring out what works and what doesn't work. You really led some powerful thinking inside of the, you know, how negotiation evolved. What kinds of things did you do, you know, between the live activities and then after you had a live situation? How did you break that down and learn from it?

Well, everything. I designed my life at that point in time so that everything kind of interacted. You know, it was all interlocked. If you will. Hostage negotiation. Just high intensity interviewing and not interrogation. There's a big difference between interviewing and interrogation. Interrogation is kind of stupid if you ask me. Like when I saw the movie oh, Dark, Dirty, when they were hunting bin Laden and they were interrogating to try to catch him, I remember thinking, no wonder it took so long. These guys are horrible. This interrogation is just stupid. I mean, I really thought that, and I believe that to this day. Anyway, so I volunteered on the suicide hotline. And it was before the term emotional intelligence had been coined or we really knew what, you know, empathy in its purest form was. And I was just astonished at the instantaneous impact it had on people's behavior. Like on the hotline, it was 20 minutes or less with somebody who was completely suicidal. And I remember they told us that in advance. I thought, you know, that can't be. It's, you know, there's no way, you know, people are famous. You talk to somebody who's distraught overnight. You know, there's always all these stories, hours, 20 minutes. You got to be kidding me. But when I saw how powerful and how quickly it changed people's behavior, I thought, you know what? If this worked in everyday life, it sounds like the regular interviews that the guys that I admire do regularly. And so between learning hostage negotiation, toying with it, in my personal and professional life, everything's sort of interlocked. And I was constantly learning about it, fascinated by it. The ability to impact somebody, the ability to catch somebody and read their emotions and literally have them say, you're reading my mind. And I remember thinking like, no, well, I read your emotions. They're all over your face and your actions and your voice. And you think, I'm reading your mind. So by the time I finally got, you know, with the bad guy, the bank robber in Brooklyn, about a year and a half, two years later, I've been practicing like crazy. Cause I was fascinated by it.

I looked through the toolkit in the book. Is tactical empathy really the center, really the core of it? And I, I say that. So I've built multiple franchise companies over the years and, and empathy was something like we, I talk about it in training because for us, we use it inside of like our servant leadership value that we have. And you need to give people what they truly need, not what they say they want in the moment. So to do that, you've got to be in the pocket with people. Like a boxing term. Like, you got to be close enough to them so that they trust you, they believe you understand what they're going against. Even though in franchising we've done it like 500 times now. And it's the same pattern of, of conversation back. Because what we're truly trying to do is make sure that we're working on the right problem. So for example, somebody might say, well, you know, it's my market or it's the marketing or my staff that's the problem with the business or competition or anything like that. But in the face of great validation, they're really holding themselves hostage. And you know, and then you, you might dig behind and, and it might be like, well, I'm going through a divorce. So the real problem is their eye is off the ball because they're going through a divorce. It's not any of these other things that they kind of threw out as little landmines to not answer your question. So the way I look at it is people are arguing with themselves for their self limitations, things they're uncomfortable with. I don't like to do sales. I don't like to do this. I don't like to do this other thing. So it's up to us to get close enough to them to really make them internalize and accept responsibility for the problem that they're really having. So, you know, and I know you do a lot of business consulting and I don't know if any of that resonates with the things that you come across in corporate America and your coaching today.

Yeah, it all does. And it's very layered grappling with it for you personally. I mean, everybody, they begin to understand it pretty much based on their experiences up to that point, on being understood or genuinely understanding someone. And those instances tend to be so rare in everyday life that we don't have a lot of models around us. The vast majority of the models are really bad. The movies and TV are horrible. I mean, just absolutely horrible. And one of the first commandments of negotiation that we're teaching now is Dial Shelton. I focus on common ground. The movies teach us that common ground is the key to everything. In a point of fact, it actually interferes with your ability to be empathic. Because if you share common ground with somebody and they're struggling with what you perceive to be the problem. It's one of the few Harvard studies that I ever agreed with. It said that if you, if you solve the problem yourself, somebody else struggling with the same problem, you'll either more likely to look at them go like, look, I solved this. Pick yourself up off the ground, you know, stop being a crybaby. And fix it because I fixed it. Or if you were defeated by that problem, your likely reaction is like, oh, man, you're in trouble. I mean, yeah, it's. That's insurmountable. I mean, I came up against that and I couldn't solve it either. Neither one of those are empathy, but the feeling of being genuinely understood. If you're lucky, it's happened to you a couple times and you remember that moment and it's. It's transformative. And if you can't recall in a moment what was said, you might not have any idea what happened or how to duplicate it or how to do it again. One of your original points, servant leadership, you're kind of getting out of your own way to really genuinely make the other person feel understood to serve them. You lose your agenda about moving forward. And in that mind frame, you're much more likely to be there for them, to nurture them, to coach them, to give them the coaching and the support that they need in that moment, to sort of come to grips with whatever they're struggling with internally.

Look, I just did it. I just tripped on myself. I said, I've seen it 500 times before. But to this person, that's a unique situation.

Yes.

That's, you know, that's how hard it is to stay, is to stay in there with these people. We're training our coaches. We're doing the best we can. I've worked with a guy called Michael Reddington. He wrote a book called the Discipline Listening Method. And he was a loss prevention guy who would get confessions, you know, six what, Wicklander, Zaleski, Wicklander out of Chicago. And they would 76% confession rate when they would find, you know, corporate theft or whatever it was. And, you know, he would say, encouraging people to share sensitive information under vulnerable circumstances in the face of consequences. And that a person will confess when they believe a reasonable person facing similar circumstances might have behaved the same way. So that's basically saying you have to get to a point of understanding where they. Those people feel like maybe even this person faced with these circumstances, this opportunity to take something, when is the first time you took something? You know, I meant to bring it back when things were better. I was going to pay it back. But they never did. They never got caught. So it created this pattern of, you know, justification of continuing to take. I enrolled all of my coaches into one of his classes because what I was trying to get at, and we haven't gotten there yet, is how can we be empathic inside of these conversations and very quickly help these business owners do what they need to do in, in the best way possible. So is that the core of what you do? What's a typical assignment for the black swan group when you go in?

Well, wherever people need to communicate better to solve a problem that they're just really stuck on. Now that sounds really vague, but we end up, we co, we train and we coach. We do a lot of coaching, much more than I ever thought we would for everything other than divorces. We don't get in the middle of divorces just because we're a threat to your attorney. Your divorce attorney does not get paid to resolve if he resolves a problem. You know, attorneys don't get paid to resolve problems. They get paid to bill. They get paid to run. The bill. If somebody comes in is going to shorten the process, which tactical empathy always does. Always, always, always. We're the enemy of that attorney's livelihood.

Exactly. Well, it's like big pharma. They don't really get paid to cure you. They just want to make sure you're healthy enough to continue to take the medicine.

Yeah, it's a big pharma is a whole separate conversation.

Yeah.

But yeah, so we coach people settle in insurance claims on their own. We coach business partners. One of our high level coaching clients, and we've got some, a few people that are extremely high level. He used to the skills in, in the midst of a mediation through attorneys to the other side not that long ago. And he knows he saved himself $8 million on the application of the skills because they're invisible. If, if you're doing it really well, the other side just thinks they're in a conversation. And then if you're not out to cut their throat, if you're not out to cheat people, then they have no reason ever to feel otherwise because you remove yourself as an enemy. So it could be anything. I'm, I negotiated a change in seats on the airplane just the other day. My girlfriend and I were separated on, on the plane. And like you hear these, these, you know, would you swap with my husband or my wife or my girlfriend? And I see about 50% success rate. But then the issue is not what your success rate is. How does a person feel when it's done? And that's, that's a real critical issue. I don't, I don't want somebody to have swapped seats with my girlfriend to convenience us and have them be in a negative mood the entire airplane ride and get off the plane unhappy. Now in Some kind of way that's going to come back on me. I'm, I'm a big believer in a karma bank, and I got the karma bank working in my direction on a regular basis. But we, we coach in every kind of negotiation there is. Anytime you want collaboration from somebody, you're in a negotiation.

A situation like that, you just met somebody, it's going to be a 30 second negotiation. What are some keys for quickly developing rapport and then maybe disarming some disarming statements that you can make?

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what I said to this guy. And I don't know, big smiles first. Typically, a big smile makes a big difference and it's a little bit situational, like the playful attitude. Being playful is a superpower. It's not what you want to go with all the time. And I did not go with playful with this guy. On same set of circumstances. Somebody's, you know, they got their luggage in your leg room, which happens on a regular basis. Being playful about it, that then is critical because you got to sit next to this person the whole time. But actually what I said to this guy, that I'm in, I'm in a, I'm in a bulkhead. We're both in bulkhead seats. He's got bulkhead aisle, I got bulkhead window, which means, you know, you can't put the bags in the seat in front of you because you got to go overhead, which is really inconvenient for some people. So I wait for this, this guy to finally show up. He's one of the last people on, on a plane in this section. And I just look at him and I go, I got a lousy proposition for you. And I was not playful.

Yeah, you're not going to like this.

Yeah, yeah, because I'm, you know, I got to, I need what I want to be a relief. And I don't, I don't want him to give it to me and be angry and, you know, any of that stuff. Plus he's less likely to give it to me. So he stares at me. And this is a moment that we call dynamic silence. I, no matter what, I, I cannot break this silence. So he stares at me and he goes, I'm listening. And I go, my girlfriend is four rows back on a window. Would you swap seats? And before I finish my next sentence, he has grabbed his bags and is headed in her direction. Like, I had three or four more things I wanted to say. I want to be brilliant here. You know, I, I go, I've almost been like, hey, hey, hey, I'm not done yet. You know, I still want to work on this. But he is back and moving towards his seat before I have even finished. In hindsight, I got a pretty good idea what probably went through his mind. You know, I, I got it quickly. And there was one of the few times when being playful was not my approach. I think I'm probably playful about a good 90% of the time. And this one I was.

People get in trouble when they let things go too fast. That's my problem when I like, I have deal fixation. So if I was going to be really self critical, I would say I already know the deal that I want when I'm going into it. So now I've got deal fixation. I think it's a good deal for everybody, which is probably a bad way to go into it. So I'm not going to anchor somewhere, I'm not going to anchor and then I'm not going to do the work to come up with like why we're anchoring there. So now I'm already setting myself to lease something up on, leave something on the table and then I can't wait to get it done. And if you're in a hostage situation or a really important negotiation, that's probably the wrong approach, I would say. So how do you coach people to slow themselves down?

That's a hard one because you know what you talked about on deal fixation, that's what people do as human, as human beings, compromise.

We want compromise or, or you know.

You get, you get goal focused and that, that, that gives you tunnel vision, you get blinders on. And I'm listening to a big fan of the Andrew Huberman podcast. In a couple of podcasts back, he's talking to a neuroscientist and they, and they say this is how people think of things. And I call this dpo. Duration, path and outcome. You think about where you want to be, you think about how you're going to get there and you think about how long it's going to take you to get there. Duration, path and outcome. That is a tendency of just how we as human beings are wired. We pick out a target, we figure out how we're going to get there, we figure out how long it's going to take. And so that is one of the big challenges to teach people this stuff because you got to let go of the target to start with because intellectually I can explain to you why you don't have all the information and by and large as a human being, you're not going to care. Like, I know where this is going. It is what it is. I think somebody wrote a book probably about 10 years ago, the Ten Commandments of Negotiation, which failed miserably. And one of this guy's commandments was. Is what it is. No, it's not. There are all sorts of variables here that you don't know, that the other side is intentionally holding back from you because they're important, and you're intentionally holding stuff back from them because it's important. So consequently, it can't be. It is what it is because they're keeping you in the dark, no matter how smart you are. And if you're the smartest person on earth, you're keeping them in the dark, which has this. The opposite of synergy. You know, you're losing synergy by keeping each other in the dark. So if you get deal focused, which is hard not to be because you're wired to do that, you're leaving money on the table every time.

I have found that the last thing people say at the end of a phone call is the first thing they wanted to say, and they just been holding it the long time.

Yeah.

And it's. It's, you know, and I coach people that. And I'm just like, oh, one more thing. Right. That's actually the thing that they've been holding. They never got to it, but they had to spit it out before they hung up the phone. And it kind of goes along with your, you know, your. Your black swan things. Three things inside of a negotiation that would you have known, they would have changed everything. Have you developed techniques to make sure that when people are negotiating, they identify those things or they can at least prompt people to give them up?

Yeah, well, there's. There's things that you know are important and things that. That are important, you just don't know because the other side's holding you in the dark. So the. The basics. We got nine negotiation skills, but we call the quick two plus one the essentials. Like, you could. If you can master labeling and mirroring dynamic silence, you probably do extremely well all the time. Like, your batting average will go way up. Yeah. Now, what those things are designed to do is to dig into what was said and get people to expand, to reward, to add on. Like the mirror. Just repeating one to three words of what you just said. Exactly. Just repeating those words, whether the last three words or whether selected three words, it causes people to expand and go on. Now, there's two advantages to this. And this is exactly what you were just talking about. You're probably going to add stuff to it that you didn't think of. So there's new information there. By definition, you're giving off more information to me than I can soak in and speak. So it's also a way continuing to cover the ground and dig in. But neither one of us feels like we're repeating ourselves. We think we're expanding. I'm gathering information and you're feeling good about giving it to me. So it's information gathering and rapport building simultaneously instead of one or the other, which is what most negotiations are. So I'm going to get a lot more information, you're going to feel good about giving it to me, and it's going to accelerate us towards the outcome, you know, hence why back on the suicide hotline, I can get to where I want to go in 20 minutes when other people are taking four or five, six hours in regular conversations.

Yeah, you, you would use things like. You sound anxious. Yeah, yeah, I'm anxious. Using those techniques to, to basically play back to people and get them to kind of internalize how they're coming across.

It's a, it's a combination of a couple things, especially with negative emotions. It's self awareness and deactivation simultaneously, which until you've seen it in action, you, you, you can't imagine that, you know, calling out, anxiousness, frantic feelings, concern. You think that that causes a downward spiral, an increase in an amplification in those emotions when a point of fact calling them out, not denying it, but calling them out causes a self awareness, you know, denying it. See, I don't want you to feel anxious. I don't want you to feel frantic, frantic. Well, that's, that's combative and challenging. It's telling somebody not to feel what they're feeling. So it triggers them in a bad way to start with and it doesn't increase their awareness. But you know, you seem anxious, you seem frantic. That actually calms people down because they become self aware. And there's some interesting neuroscience that shows that it deactivates it simultaneously. Yeah, well, why to be negative. I mean, it's what kept us alive in the caveman days and we've all inherited that wire.

How often are you surprised by outcomes in negotiations that you participate in?

Regularly, when we're using tactical empathy, I'm really surprised at how quickly we got there or where we suddenly find ourselves. I don't do most of our negotiations. I do some, but most of the most of our coaches and our salespeople are getting surprised on a regular basis that suddenly people are being collaborative. The first salesperson we ever hired way back when, a young lady named Davey who was a superstar as a salesperson. She's no longer with us. She had a different path to take. But I remember she told my son Brandon, who trained her, she said, you know, when I first started working for you, there are a lot of real jerks that called us on the phone and now six months later, there aren't as many jerks. She just got good at it and she was being surprised at how much more pleasant people are when you're no longer the enemy and how quickly you can make deals.

Brandon works with you at Black Swan?

He used to, he went out on his own.

Oh did.

He's cut from the same cloth I am. I didn't want to be told what to do by anybody, especially my father and he helped me build the business and now he's out on his own.

Yeah, it's a double edged sword. My 25 year old is running a big part of our company, franchise development piece of it. And he's an econ and finance guy, so. But it's, it is interesting working with family. I will tell you and I'm interested to know if you shared it, but early entrepreneurial experience in people's lives is the number one indicator whether they're going to have entrepreneurial success later in life. So Brandon watching you have a great career, write the book, build the business and all of that stuff probably had a major impact in the way that he views what he wants to do. And, and congratulations. I understand you're a grandfather.

Oh yeah, I am. I actually got two grandchildren now, so. Granddaughter and a grand grand grandson who's just a few months old.

That's one. I can't wait. I can't wait. I got at least my daughter just started law school at nyu so that's at least three or four years out. And then my, my son's fiance is pre med at Wake, so that's three or four years out. So I'm gonna have to rent them or borrow them or get another dog. One of the three.

You got hardworking kids, man. Those are, those are some impressive, impressive educational credentials.

Well, they're working well, you know, coming from, you know, they found my, they found my bag of, of high school as a football player. They found my bag of credentials in a trash bag in the attic and they pulled out that 2.6 grade point average. So they They've all basically doubled it.

Very good. All right.

Yeah. I blame my wife. I blame my wife. As you think back to your career, are there any cool stories that didn't make your book? And I will say that the book is perfectly done. Every chapter just about starts with an impactful story. And then the lessons that. That are taught apply directly to how it helped resolve that situations. But is there anything on the cutting room floor that. That didn't make the books?

Yeah, well, you know, there was a bunch of stuff for a variety of reasons, depending upon how, you know, how it fit into. You know, what? Tall Ross, by the way, the guy, you know, the co writer, and my son Brandon, an unofficial co author. But Tall Tall knows how to tell. Read it, write a business book that's interesting to read. And I will tell you, you know, the first time I worked at kidnapping directly that Al Qaeda was involved, there's a Saudi kidnapping guy named Paul Johnson. It was being grabbed by Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia at the time. I'm on a secure video conference call right after it gets started in D.C. with a bunch of, you know, the policymakers and decision, decision people. And, you know, they were like, I, you know, I don't know what good you guys are going to do us in this. I was insistent that, that I deployed a Saudi on this. And the ambassador, a guy named Oberwater Oberweider, as I recall. Smart guy. Ran the best meeting I'd ever seen run in an embassy. Once I showed up in, in Riyadh. But he was, his reaction was kind of like, look, I don't know how you guys are going to help, but you want to, you want to fly all the way out here, then go ahead and get on a plane. It's not coming out of my budget. So en route while I'm in the air, my team is writing a negotiation position paper. It's. It's a way that we assess situations, and we're using versions of it now to assess business opportunities, to make decisions in the business. And when I got there, Oberweider had a position paper in his hand and met me when I got to the embassy. And he said, when you said you guys were coming out here, I didn't know what good you were going to do us. And now that I have this, I wish you'd have gotten here two days earlier. And I remember thinking like, you just give us a chance to show us how we can impact your thinking and your decision making. And that was exactly the stamp that I needed. And point of fact, Paul Johnson was murdered by Al Qaeda on deadline. And the Saudis rounded them all up and killed them in a, in a, in a tactical assault. But afterwards, the Arab media portrayed the kidnappers as criminals and not terrorists, not freedom fighters. If you want to be a terrorist, you don't want to be called a criminal, a thug. And that's what the Arab media referred to these guys as. So that was a PR victory for us. And Oberweider wrote a letter to the director of the FBI saying that we made the world see them as the thugs and criminals that they were. And that was very gratifying as well, because while we didn't save Paul Johnson's life, it began to turn the tide against Al Qaeda.

At that point in time, 93% of hostage negotiations end well, 7%. The outcomes are predetermined because the people that are involved, they have no outcome. You can't get them to an outcome. Can that be changed or outcomes somewhat predetermined? And so if, if somebody says, you know, I'm going to do. I'm going to die by police, suicide, and I'm just not coming out of here in any way. Is there any crack that you can get psychologically to get them to change their mind at that point? What's your experience?

No, is the short answer. I mean, there's, there's a killing journey. Vision drives decision. What does that mean? People have, have got a clear view of how they want things to go before they engage in, in a process. And you have to recognize whether or not they're on a killing journey and whether or not, and, and whether or not this process is part of the, the destination. Communication process is part of the destination. Your best chance of success is to simply stop communicating because they've taken that into account and they need that to be part of the journey. So you'll stop talking to somebody, you'll put them on ice, you'll hang up on them, and then, then that's your best chance of success. Now, your best chance of success might be infinitesimal, but you take your best chance of success and then realize that it was the best chance of success and that it was really low. So there are certain things you're never going to completely throw in the towel on. Any negotiation, any hostage negotiation. You have to recognize it for what it is and then take your best chance of success, which might be 1000ths of 1%, and then you let the universe take its course. You play your role to the best of your possible ability and don't kid yourself about the way the deck was stacked before you got started, involved in.

Training the FBI and their negotiators.

I was. As soon as you're out, a friend of mine once said, the water rushes in quickly behind you.

Right.

And however, they did ask me to come back earlier this year and I, and I spoke, I spoke to them at Quantico briefly. You know, they had some other people in it. Brene Brown in, which is cool. I'd never met her. She's. She's genius. I mean, she won me over like immediately and how insightful she was. They don't look to me for a lot. They look to me for an occasional conversation. They're fine on their own without me.

Yeah. So how has the transition to business life been, you know, what do you see for the Black Swan group going forward? Are you expanding the business? I know the book continues to be widely referenced and I'm sure continues to be purchased and used. What's, what's next for you?

Yeah, well, it's been great. I mean, the transition, you know, I started over as a baby entrepreneur when at age 50, in a public sector, you got no idea how the private sector runs and vice versa.

Right.

You know, some similarities in bureaucracies, corporate bureaucracy, government bureaucracy. There are similarities, but entrepreneur life is a whole nother thing. It's just, it's a great adventure and we probably change and adapt every year. Right now we're in discussions to develop a non scripted TV show, reality TV show. We'll see where that goes. You know, that might be in production next year. So. Working on another possible book. Working on. The book sells globally well in every country. Like we're in 36 countries. I mean literally globally. And probably we're starting to consult and train and teach more in Dubai on the other side of the world. Dubai is a great business hub and it's a, it's a great place to be for business and one of the more fascinating places on Earth Coast. I think every place is interesting and I came to New Jersey. Every place is interesting to me because we're human beings are doing cool stuff. So next couple years could be very interesting. We're still going to train and teach negotiation at all levels.

I get a sense too that experientially I never thought I would get to kind of meet the kind of people that I get to meet and I get to talk to on a regular basis now. And that's a reward in and of itself and you know, bigger table having you on this podcast and I mean, we got Vern Harnish coming on next and it's. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just great. I mean, I, I mean I created a business that was insurance restoration and I was doing, I was cleaning up toilet spills. Like that's how I started, you know, and, and now to, to, you know, those. We can have many, many seasons to our lives and you know, to, to go through this season and for this to be the season that I'm in, I'm just thoroughly excited about it now. I read your book, never split the difference. It's gotta be seven or eight years ago now. And I committed at that time to become a better negotiator. Ultimately, I talked myself out of it. But what was the trigger for you ultimately to write that book? Was it you knew you were transitioning into private sector, you needed it as a tool or like when I wrote my, I wrote, I have a book called the Business Athlete's Regimen for a Great Life through Better Decisions. And what it is, is it's models of thought that I've learned over 25 years of building business that people can apply to their present day situations. And like, what are the filters? What are values as a filter? You know, what are the filters in decision making that. Right, that improve your decision making? Because nothing is 100%, anything can go to zero. And the quality of your decisions determines the quality of your life and the velocity of your business. So, man, I had so many lessons to put in there, but I really wrote it just to make sure that I got it all down, you know, what was the trigger for you to sit down and say, I've got to get this stuff all on paper finally think.

When we finally. And we really, Brandon and I, when we thought we had a whole system, if you will, to put together a book. Like, as soon as I got out of the FBI and I knew I was going to be consulting and training, no shortage of people saying, like, look, you got to write a book. I mean, you got to get a book out there. Get it out there. Now that's good advice. And I didn't want to get a book out. I wanted to make sure that we had a system that worked. There was a hostage negotiator. NYPD put out a book right after he got out. But it was more like, here, try this and see if you can adapt it into your life. Here's how I did in hostage negotiation. Now you figured out a business negotiation. And that to me, that was Too soon. So I was lucky enough to start teaching business negotiation at Georgetown. And so I was teaching there with my son Brandon as a sounding board. And after we've been doing it for several years and teaching straight hostage negotiation for business application, we had, you know, 200 written papers of examples of everything from a Wall street negotiation to a negotiation between a husband or wife over Christmas tree that, you know, we had all the models that we needed. And then finally you got to find the right writer. Went through a lot of writers, learned what the wrong writer looks like, and wanted Tall Roz all along and finally got him. And Toll was a genius. Most writers just write. And Tall is actually a great researcher and a great thinker. And in having worked with other writers, I had no idea how valuable him doing the research was going to be. And, and giving him insight and asking us hard questions, you know, we, you forget what it's like to not know. And Tall really brought that to the table a lot. Also, I had dinner with him the other night and we talked about, you know, why I think high anchoring is a bad idea. And when we're working on the book, he'd say, you know, everybody else, all the academics say you shouldn't high anchor. And I go now anchoring is stupid. And he said, that's not enough of an explanation. You're gonna have to go in a lot more depth than that because there's some really credible, credible people out here that disagree with you. And that working, having Tall bring stuff up like that was really great work. So that, that journey led me to Tall after I'd been out for, geez, five, six years before I finally got Tall on board as a, as a collaborator.

I'm interested to know, have you developed anything about the high anchoring? Can you, can you expand on that for just a minute? Because I always was, was taught like, hey, anchor high, right? And now you've, you've set a new normal and that's where the negotiation's going to start.

Unless you drive the deal from the table. Like, it was always my gut instinct that high extreme anchoring drives deals from the tables. And if you look at the studies, and you should look at all the studies, and first of all, every study is flawed and all data is flawed. So you have to just decide whether or not the flaws are fatal and you're in your point of view and how much data there is and whether or not you like your source. Like, there's a couple things that I truly believe in and I got one source on it. Only, But I'm not satisfied with the source. Now, the high anchoring data is all on artificial negotiations among students in business schools or in classes. Now, why is that flawed? First of all, they're not themselves. They don't have it. They don't have anything in the game. It's a pretend situation. The bigger flaw is from having done all these. You put two students together in a simulated negotiation, they're going to talk one time, they're going to talk for 45 minutes. The only way they're going to feel like they failed is if they get no deal. And they also are not going to negotiate with each other again in the same scenario. It's not a series of negotiations. So somebody starts high anchoring and it does reset the zone of possible agreement, as my Harvard brothers and sisters call it, the Zopa, in artificial situations or in one offs or in stuff where you're never going to deal with anybody again, which is not the norm in reality. What it does is drive deals from the table. And I'm looking for this right and left. I finally I pick up Ned Colletti's book, the Big Chair. Ned Coletti was GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers his first year. They went from worst to first. Phenomenal business, sports mind. And he's got a story when he was with the Cubs that they had a free agent they really wanted to retain. They really wanted this guy. And this guy's agent came in with a ridiculous off, a ridiculous ask, and a Cubs went F you and walked away. And then Ned's book is literally littered with instances where somebody came in with a high anchor, an extreme anchor, and the other side just went like, f you and walked away. And I'm sitting with Ned in LA at dinner a couple of years ago, and I go like, you know, this is what I've seen in your book. I'm convinced that high anchoring makes deals disappear that you should have made. And Ned is one of the most successful negotiation practitioners ever. Hence, by, based on his track record, agreed with me completely. And every business negotiation person that I've spoken to that has come to learn that lesson, and they've learned that they're making more deals staying away from extreme anchoring. You know, there's another reason to avoid it. Like your extreme anchor might not be extreme, it might be low. And you cost yourself money thinking you were coming in and extreme, and instead you hit the other guy's sweet spot and there was more money on the table you left on the table.

That's true.

So there's all these reasons to let the other side go first and just gather information, see where you are.

Yeah. If you throw an implausible offer out at me, I don't. I think you just threw something up there, and you're not taking me seriously. You really didn't think about it, maybe. I think you're lazy. And I'm not really insulted. I just think, well, you know, this. This is a. I'm going to throw 9, 20 deals out there, lose 19, and see if I can get one one idiot to take it.

Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of people think they're very successful doing that, and they just have no idea how much money they're leaving on the table, how many deals are walking away, because that's their approach. Yeah.

Yeah. And in the example of the students, neither one of those kids wants to go back into the classroom without a deal. Yeah, they're gonna get a deal. It's just a matter of where is it?

Time after time after time, they're gonna sit down once for 45 minutes, and at the end of 45 minutes, wherever they are, they're gonna shake hands and they're gonna go back to getting ready to go drinking or working on the other homework they're working or whatever else they're doing.

Yeah. Well, Chris, we're. We're heading towards the end of our time, and I really enjoyed this very much. I really appreciate you jumping on. I'll ask you, with all of your experience and worldly experience, if you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what might that be?

Take the time to make somebody feel understood and just see where that takes you. You know, people used to say, your negotiation very Zen like. And I'd be like, zen? What the hell is Zen? I don't know what that is. You know, leave me alone. But it's really letting go of the outcome to find a better outcome. It makes life much more interesting. Makes my life much more of an adventure. Like, if you don't really know where this is going, you'll be delighted far more than you're frustrated.

Well, I tell you what I thought of immediately when you said that is my marital life. And after so many.

Or your.

Your. Your whoever your key relationship is in your life, man, after a while, you just forget to understand where they're coming from, and you gloss over it. And that's probably one of the biggest. You know, he doesn't get me. She doesn't get me. They don't understand me. It's probably where it Starts to unravel a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said. Yeah.

So what's going on with Fireside?

Fireside is this new Web3, if you will, application. You find it on your, on your iPhone or on your Android in the, in the app store. It was originally pitched us as an interactive podcast, a live interactive podcast. And what it really has turned out to be for my company is group coaching. So we do, we do an hour a week. Every week. I'm on once a month. You know, some of our cut, we're talking about our cutting edge topics, our most salient, you know, what's most important at the time. You'll get short discussion of whatever that topic is and then it's a Q and A session which really ends up to be group coach. And we normally charge, and I charge $5,000 an hour for group coaching. If you wanted individual coaching, it's going to cost you about that much for an hour, which means a month's worth of this coaching is going to cost you $20,000.5cent is $1,000 a year for an entire year's worth of coaching. People sign on from all over the world. When I was on just about two weeks ago, one of the people that was on it was asking me questions was on a mountaintop in Tibet. So you get, you get on with like minded entrepreneurs. People are getting better at negotiation. They want to learn. Somebody asks a question that's exactly what you were thinking or a different take on what you're struggling with. And it has been, it's filled in a real gap for people on the learning journey with us pretty much after the book and masterclass, because that's static learning. Like. Yeah, no matter how many times you turn that page, page is still going to say the same thing. The master class, episodes, lessons, they're the same every time. And you need to get into live group coaching and otherwise. The live group coaching is extremely expensive and this is a way to get it at a ridiculous price.

There's always more power when the group comes together, always more powerful. So that sounds fantastic and those prices sound very reasonable to me. And I, I bet people don't negotiate you off of them very often.

What we do is we, we over deliver.

That's right.

Make it a bargain.

That's right. That's right. Chris, this has been awesome, man. Thank you.

Jeff, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on, man. It's been a real pleasure. Enjoyed the conversation.

Yeah, me as well. So where can you direct people to either get the information on fireside or to reach out to you or the Black Swan group.

Well, the website is blackswanltd.com b l a c k s w-a n l t d.com upper right hand corner is a tab for a newsletter which comes out weekly. It's complimentary and there's one actionable article every Tuesday morning. Plus notifications about training Fireside, a new video that we might have out. But it's actionable and it's useful. It's concise and that's really what you need from an information source. Concise and actionable.

Awesome. And as always, I have been Jeff Duden with Chris Voss and we have been on the home front simply building the world's most responsible franchise platform, encouraging entrepreneurs to take action and transform their life. This sounds like you. Check us out today@homefrontbrands.com and start your next chapter of greatness, building your dynasty on the home front. I will be looking for you here. Thank you.