A crazy thing in the kidnap business, we used to get asked by FBI leadership,
when is this going to be over? And the answer would be when the bad guys feel like they've
gotten everything they can. Now dissecting that statement, you're talking about when they feel
like they got everything they can. So the key to kidnapping negotiations are the feelings
of the bad guys. We're talking about feelings, kidnappers feelings,
which drives everything. It doesn't matter what human endeavor it is.
The following is a conversation with Chris Voss, former FBI hostage and crisis negotiator,
and author of Never Split the Difference, Negotiating as if Your Life Dependent on It.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now, dear friends, here's Chris Voss. What is it like negotiating for a hostage
with a kidnapper? What is the toughest part of that process?
The toughest part is if it looks bad from the beginning,
and you got to engage in a process anyway. What are the factors that make it bad?
That makes you nervous that if you were to observe a situation where there's general negotiation,
or it's a hostage negotiation, what makes you think that this is going to be difficult?
If they want to make it look like they're negotiating, but they're not. Like in the
2004 timeframe, Al Qaeda in Iraq was executing people on camera for the publicity. And they
wanted to make it look like they were negotiating. So they'd come on and they say, if you don't get
all the women out of, Iraqi women out of the jails in Iraq in 72 hours, we're going to kill
a hostage. That was one of the demands in one of the cases in that timeframe. Now, first of all,
even if we'd have been willing, the US government, the coalition would have been willing to do that,
it wouldn't have been able to happen in 72 hours. So is it an impossible ask from the beginning?
And so then that looks really bad. Like they're trying to make it look like they're talking
reasonably, but they're not. So your hostage is in bad shape there. If they made a demand
that you just, even if you wanted to do, you couldn't do. So then what makes that very
difficult is, and kidnappings especially, you're working with family members, you're coaching
people. Bad guys are in touch with family members, or if they're not directly in touch with family
members, the other thing that Al Qaeda was doing at that time was they didn't give us a way to talk
to them. They're making statements in the media, but then not leaving their phone number,
if you will. So that's one more thing. They're intentionally blocking you. They're asking you
to do something you can't do. They're not giving you a way to talk to them. So you got to get with
the family and discuss with the family how you're going to approach things. Now, the family
definitely wants to know, is this going to help? There's a bunch of cases like that in that
timeframe. And you got to be honest with them. It's a long shot. Our chances here are slim and
none. And when it's slim and none, I'll take slim, but it's still very, very slim. And there were a
number of people that were killed in that timeframe before the tide finally got turned. And it was,
it was hard dealing with families at the time. Can you negotiate in public versus like a direct
channel in private? Oh yeah. Bad guys pick the media. They're making statements in the media.
So, and that's a big clue. Their, their chant, their channel of choice
tells you an awful lot. And if they're choosing the media, then that means there's people they're
trying to appeal to. That means in their view, there's such a thing as good media. So if there's
good media, there's bad media. How do you make it bad? And we made it bad for them. It just,
unfortunately it had to go through a number of iterations before they got the message and quit.
In that negotiation, do you think about the value of human life?
Is there a dollar figure? Is there, how, how do you, uh, enumerate, not enumerate,
quantify the value of human life? Yeah, that's, uh, uh, it's like beauty,
it's in the eye of the beholder. So that was the first lesson on any hostage negotiation,
really any negotiation. Like it doesn't matter what it is to you matters what it is to the
other side. One of the things, especially in your, in your conversation, I listened to with
Andrew, um, by the way, you guys, uh, I, I, another thing I really liked about that conversation,
first of all, I think the world of him, Andrew Huberman. Yeah, Andrew Huberman. And, uh,
you released it on my birthday. I appreciate that. It was a nice birthday. Perfectly just for you.
Yeah. Nice job. Thank you. But, uh, empathy is in the eye of the beholder, uh, in every negotiation,
whether it's over car, a house, collaboration in your company with the bad guys,
how does the other side see it? Now, the nice thing about kidnapping for ransom,
if there, if there's an actual ransom demand, it's an actual demand is it's a mercenary's business.
They're going to take what they could get. And they tend to be really good at figuring out how
much money somebody has. So, uh, and again, I'll keep drawing business analogies. You're looking
for a job with an employer. There's a market price of the job. And then there's what the employer can
pay you. Now, maybe the market price of the job market's 150 grand employer can pay one 20,
but it's a great job. You know, we were talking about Elon, uh, a minute ago,
like I'd work minimum wage to follow him around. Yeah. You know, that would be worth it. What,
what are the value other than the dollars and how hard is it to get the dollars and how quickly can
you get to them? Those are, these are all things that the bad guys are good and kidnapping are good
at figuring out. So the value of human life to them is going to be, what can they get a crazy
thing in the kidnap business? We used to get asked by FBI leadership,
when is this going to be over? And the answer would be when the bad guys feel like they've
gotten everything they can. Now dissecting that statement, you're talking about when they feel
like they got everything they can. So the key to kidnapping negotiations are the feelings
of the bad guys. We're talking about feelings, kidnappers feelings,
which drives everything. Doesn't matter what human endeavor it is.
So it's not reason it's emotion. There's no such thing as a reason.
I should say for a little bit of context, I just talked, uh, yesterday with a guy named Sam Harris.
I don't know if you know Sam, but Sam, and because I was preparing for a conversation with you,
I talked to him about empathy versus reason. And he lands heavily on reason. Empathy
is somewhere between useless and erroneous and leads you astray and is not effective.
That reason is the only way forward. Well, let's draw some fine lines there.
And the two fine lines I would draw is, uh, first, what is your definition of empathy?
And the secondly, uh, how do people actually make up their minds and I'm, and I'm going to flip it.
I'm going to go with how people make up their minds. You make up your mind based on what you
care about. Period. That makes reason emotion based. What do you care about? You start with
what you care about. You see some guys swimming out in off the coast of the ocean and you see
a shark coming up behind him. Who are you cheering for? If it's Adolf Hitler out there,
you're cheering for the shark. You might actually feel bad for the shark because it's going to,
it's going to taste bad. Who do you care about? You mean the human will taste bad.
Yeah. You, you, you know, he eats Adolf Hitler, you know, you're going to leave a bad taste in
your mouth, even if you're a shark. So you're making up your mind on every circumstance is
based on what you care about. So then what does that do to reason? Your reason is based on what
you care about from the beginning. Now then empathy, if you define it as sympathy, which
it was never meant to be sympathy ever, you know, uh, etymology, I think is the word I keep getting
etymology and entomology mixed up etymology being right. You know where words came from
the origin entomology being bugs. Got it. Right. So I like etymology. Where did something come
from? Also like entomology anyway, uh, etymology though, my understanding from my research,
uh, the original definition of empathy was an interpretation of a German ward
where people were trying to figure out what the artist was trying to convey. It was about
assessing art. And so it was always about understanding where somebody was coming from,
but not sharing necessarily that same thing. So then when I was with the FBI and I first started
collaborating with Harvard, Bob Mnookin wrote a book beyond winning second chapters,
the tension between empathy and assertiveness still the best chapter on empathy I've ever read
anywhere. And Bob writes in his book, Bob was the head of the program on negotiation. He's also,
agreed to be interviewed for a documentary, uh, that about me and my company that hasn't been
released yet, but it should be released sometime this year. What's the name of the documentary
tactical empathy. Good name. So Bob's definition of empathy and said, not agreeing or even liking
the other side. Don't even got to like them. Don't got to agree with them. Just straight
understanding where they're coming from and articulating it, which requires no agreement
whatsoever. That becomes a very powerful tool, like ridiculously powerful. And if it, if sympathy
or compassion or agreement are not included, you can be empathic with anybody. I was thinking about
this, uh, when I was getting ready to sit down and talk to you, cause you use the word empathy
a lot. Um, Putin, I can be empathic with Putin. Easy. It's easy. I don't agree with where he's
coming from. I don't, uh, agree with his methodology early on, uh, Ukraine, Russian war.
I saw an article that was very dismissive of Russia that said Russia is basically Europe's
gas station. And I thought, all right, so if you're in charge and the way you feed your people
is via an industry that the entire world is trying to quit,
the whole world is trying to get out of fossil fuels. That's how you feed your people.
If you don't come up with an answer to that, the people that you've taken a responsibility for
are going to die alone in the cold, in the dark, they're going to freeze and they're going to die.
All right. So that doesn't mean that I agree with where he's coming from or any of his means,
but where, where, where's, how does this guy see things in his distorted word?
You're never going to get through to somebody like that in a conversation,
unless you can demonstrate to them, you understand where they're coming from, whether or not you
agree early nineties, last century, I'm a last century guy. I'm an old dude,
refer to myself as a last century guy, also deeply flawed human.
So, um, terrorist case, New York city, civilian court, terrorism does not have to be tried in
military tribunals. That's a very bad idea. It was always bad. The FBI was always against it.
I'm getting ready. We have Muslims testifying in open court against the legitimate Muslim cleric.
The guy that was on trial had the credentials as a legitimate Muslim cleric. The people that were
testifying against him didn't think he should be advocating murder of innocent people.
We'd sit down with them, Arab Muslims, Egyptians, mostly. And I would say to them,
you believe that there's been a succession of American governments for the last 200 years
that are anti-Islamic and they shake their head and go, yeah. And that'd be the start
of the conversation. That's empathy. You believe this to be the case. I never said I agreed. I
never said I disagreed, but I showed them that I wasn't afraid of their beliefs. I was so unafraid
of them that I was willing to just state them and not disagree or contradict. Cause I, I would say
that and then I'd shut up and let them react. And I never had to say, here's why you're wrong.
I never gave my point of view. Every single one of them that testified that's empathy,
not agreeing with where the other side is coming from. I'm not sure how Sam would define it,
but common vernacular is it's sympathy and it's compassion. And that's when it becomes useless.
And there's a gray area. Maybe you can comment on it is sometimes a drop of compassion
helps make that empathy more effective in the conversation. So you just saying you believe
X doesn't quite form a strong of a bond with the other person.
You're imagining it doesn't. You may be right. Yes. I'm imagining it doesn't. I'm imagining
you need to show that you're on the same side. That you're, you, you need to signal a little
bit about your actual beliefs, at least in that moment, even if those that signaling is a,
is, um, not as deep as it sounds, but at first, you know, basically patting the person on the
back and saying, we're on the same side, brother. You know, that's, that's what most people
when they're really learning the concept, that's the basic human reaction.
Yeah. And in application, especially in highly adversarial situations,
like I need, I need a regular guy Muslim, but how's that guy going to say,
buy it. If I like, you know, dude, I'm on your side. I've been there. I feel you. No, no, no, no,
people get conned by that so much. Like if we're on opposite sides of the table and I try to act
like I'm not on the opposite side of the table, that makes me disingenuous. So I would rather
be honest. My, you know, my currency is integrity. And at some point in time, if you go like,
you know where I'm coming from? My answer is going to be like, look,
I can agree on maybe where we're going, but if we're talking about, you know, am I on your side
now as a human being, I want to see you survive and thrive. Not at my expense. I think the world
is full of opportunity. I'm optimistic. And I got more than enough reason for saying that
is enough for here for both of us. So I got no problem with you getting yours, you know,
just don't take it out of my head. And I'm going to be honest about it, about both of those things.
I'm not interested in you taking it out of my hide. I think there's plenty here for both of us.
Now, I don't, I don't need to be on your side except in a, in a human sense, but I don't,
do I have to side with you over the war? No. Or the, how we're distributing the stock or
how much you get paid or how much you make off this car. I think people, my experience
as a layman, um, is that empathy's not got a downside that you don't, you don't need me
to act like I'm on your side for us to make a great deal.
Great deal. Well, we'll talk about two things, a great deal and a great conversation.
Right. They're usually, they're often going to be the same thing, but at times they're going
to be different. That's a, you mentioned Vladimir Putin. There is some zoom level at which you do
want to say we're on the same side. You said the human level. It's possible to say, kind of zoom
out and say that we're all in this together. Not we Slavic people, we Europeans, we, but we human
beings. Same planet. Same planet. Right. Several years ago, and his name is evidently been Mudd
now. Um, but he was very nice to me, a lawyer here in town named Tom Girardi and no shortage of
bad reporting on him. Now I have absolutely no idea if any of it's true. I do know that in my
interaction with him, he was always a gentleman to me and was very generous. Um, when he'd get
into conversations with people, he'd always say like, you know, let's look at 10 years from now
where we could both be in a phenomenal place together. Now let's work our way back from there.
That's a good line. Yeah. And then, you know, I saw him do it
in simulations. He, I was teaching at USC and we were at a function together and a gentleman,
uh, at the time told me that, that who he was and he was really influential. So I walked up to the
guy cold and I said, Hey, you know, I'm going to come in and talk to my class at USC. He didn't
know me other than the fact that we had mutual acquaintance and he graciously consented to come
in. And he said, what do you want me to talk about? And I said, look, dude, dude, just from
your success here, it doesn't matter what are you talking about? You know, either I'm going to agree
or I'm going to disagree, or I'm going to learn from it. My students are going to learn from it.
So students want to role play with them. You know, they dispute and let's do a negotiation
every single time you'd go to pick a point in the future where we're both happy 10 years,
20 years from now, and let's work our way back. Now hostage negotiator, same thing.
I call into a bank, bad guy picks up on the, picks up on the phone and I'm going to say,
I want you to live. You know, I want to see you survive this, you know, whatever else goes with
that. Let's pick a point in the future that we're both good with. And then we work our way back and
people make also, um, we were talking before about emotion and what you care about. People
make their decisions based on a vision of the future. Like without question. Yeah. Uh, there's
a, I think there's a Hindu temple in the United States being, uh, has been, or being assembled
same way that the Hindu temples were in India a thousand years ago by hand volunteers by hand
that these people are knocking themselves out for a place in paradise, a vision of the future.
You will go through today. If the future portends, uh, what you want,
you'll go through incredible things today. So it's a vision of the future.
So you have to try to paint a vision of the future that the, uh, the person you're
negotiating with will like just tough to do. Let's find out what their vision of the future is
and then remove yourself as a threat. Sure. You know, if we can collaborate together at all,
if you think that I could do anything at all to help you to that point and you know,
integrity is my currency, I'm not going to lie to you. Which gets back before that I lied to you
about whether or not I'm on your side. You know, right now, at the moment we're on opposite size
defense. That's not going to stop us from being together in the future inside. You're going to
say, wow, well, you didn't lie to me about today. Maybe you won't lie to me about tomorrow.
So going back to world leaders, for example, whether it's, uh, Volodymyr Zelensky or Vladimir
Putin, you don't think it closes off their mind to show that you have a different opinion.
Depend upon when you showed it. Is that, is, are you arguing from the beginning or are you
displaying understanding from the beginning? I don't, I don't think it stops you from being
adversarial. That was the thing about, um, uh, Manukins, uh, the chapter in his book,
the tense tension between empathy and assertiveness. I remember reading that,
reading that, uh, name of the chapter thinking like, eh, you know, in my business, there is no
tension. And then I got into it and I read, I thought this is a red herring. He's drawing
people in because his entire chapter is that empathy puts you in a position to assert and
that there is no tension. It's a sequencing issue. And that's why, again, I think it's,
it was written for lawyers. Yeah. Sequencing issue. The timing is everything. So you emphasize
the importance of, in terms of sequencing and priority, uh, of listening of truly listening
to the other person. I'm sorry. What'd you say? That was a bad joke. Sorry.
Your timing is just perfect. How do you, how do you listen? How do you truly listen to another
human being? How do you notice them? How do you really hear them? I always hated the term active
listening. If anything, it's proactive. And as soon as you start to try to anticipate where
somebody is going, you're dialed in more. Um, because along the way, either you're
congratulating yourself for being right, or when suddenly they say something that surprises you,
you really notice it. Like, that's not what I expected. You're dialed in, you're listening.
So it's, it's proactive. And then one of the reasons, you know, we named the book Tactical
Empathy, um, name the, name the book, never split the difference, but we're talking about
tactical empathy, uh, calibrated emotional intelligence. What's it calibrated by?
First it was experienced as hostage negotiators, but, and we've come to find out that our
experience as hostage negotiators is backed up by neuroscience. Another reason why I listen to
Andrew Huberman's podcast all the time, heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy on the neuroscience.
And so then emotional intelligence calibrated by what we know about neuroscience. What do we know
about neuroscience? And I'll talk about it from a layman's perspective and even say we's an
arrogant thing, you know, human beings, I didn't do the research. I'm scooping up as much of it
as I can as a layman. The brain's largely negative. I think there's ample evidence.
People would argue with you as to what the wiring is and what does what and the limbic system
and all of that. But the brain is basically 75% negative is an alignment. I make that
contention. Number one, number two, the best way to deactivate negativity is by calling it out.
And I could say, look, I don't, I don't want you to be offended by what I'm getting ready to say.
That's a denial. Your guard is up, you're getting ready to get mad.
If I say, what I'm getting ready to say is probably going to offend you.
Now you relax a little bit and you go, all right, what is it? And then I say it, whatever it is,
and you're going to be like, oh, that wasn't that bad. Because we knew from hostage negotiation,
by calling out the negativity, deactivate it. And then a number of neuroscience
experiments have been done right and left by calling out negativity, deactivating the
negativity, calling out ahead of time. So like acknowledging that this is
the, that this is ahead of time that this is going to hurt. The experiments that I've seen,
um, have been when the negativity was inflicted and then having a person that it was being
inflicted upon simply identify it, just identify. Yeah. What are you feeling? I'm angry. And the
anger goes away. It's tough because I've had a few, um, and again, we're dancing between things,
but I've had a few conversations where anger arose in the guests I spoke with.
Yeah. And I'm not sure identifying it that that that's like leaning into it and going into the
depths because that's going to the depths of some emotional, psychological thing they're going
through that I'm not sure I want to explore that iceberg with a little ship we got. I,
um, it's a, you have to decide, do you want to avoid it
or do you want to lean into it? It's a tough choice. It's the elephant in the room.
It is an elephant in the room, especially when I think that's the big difference between
conversations and negotiations. Negotiation ultimately is looking for closure and resolution.
I think general conversations like this is more exploring. There's not necessarily a goal.
Like if you were to put it, like if I had to put a goal for this conversation, there's no
real goal. It's curiously exploring ideas. So that'll gives you freedom to not call out the
elephant for, for time. You could be like, all right, let's go to the next room, get a snack
and come back to the elephant. Right. All right. So I'd make a tiny adjustment on the negotiation
definition. Sure. Cause you said, I think, um, seeking closure. Um, you used two words and
closure was one of them. Goal is maybe another. Well, yeah. What is, what, what is negotiation?
Well, I would say seeking collaboration and cause closure kind of puts a little
bit of a finality to it and a real problem in any negotiation is always implementation.
It's why we say yes. As I say, we, yes, there's nothing without how
and yes. And it's at its very best. It's only a temporary aspiration. It's aspirational.
It's usually counterfeit. So if you're looking for, that's a good line. Yes. It's usually
counterfeit. It's aspirational without the how. Yeah. It's just a good line. Yeah. Thank you.
I've been working on it. I was practicing in front of the mirror for two minutes.
You got a bright future. You should write a book or something. Yeah.
Your book is, uh, excellent by the way. Thanks. Appreciate that. What am I doing here anyway?
This on earth, on you, with you. I don't know. We're collaborating. Why me though?
Why, why, why'd you, why'd you want to talk to me? I've heard you speak in a few places.
I was like, this is a fascinating human. Um, I think on clubhouse and different places and
I listened to some YouTube stuff and this is just, you meet people that are interesting.
That's, that's, that's what I love doing with this podcast is just exploring the mind of an
interesting person. You notice people sometimes you, sometimes there's like a homeless person
that's outside of seven 11. I noticed who are you? It's fascinating. It doesn't like,
I don't look at the resumes and the credentials and stuff like that. It's just being able to notice
a person. As I've been leafing through the different choices of the podcast, the, uh,
the young lady that, um, only fans and, uh, the sex workers, that's a fascinating human being.
Like I want to know what makes that person tech at thousand percent. The fascinating thing about her
is her worldview is almost entirely different than mine. And that's always interesting to
talk to a person who just is happy flourishing, but sees the world and the set of values she
has is completely different and, and is also not argumentative is accepting
of other worldviews. It's beautiful to explore that. No kidding. I would agree.
And then yeah, thought provoking. Cause I consider myself, um, uh, the word I was looking for before
is abundant. I think it's an abundant world. So I'm pretty optimistic. I consider myself,
I don't know, happy exactly describes it, but yeah, you know, I'm a, so then if I'm happy,
optimistic, abundant, I got a worldview. And then you run into somebody that has a vastly
different worldview and they're happy in a, and they think it's abundant too. And you're like,
what is going on in your head or mine or what am I missing? Yeah. So that's fascinating.
And the pie grows, which is useful for kind of negotiation. When you paint a picture of a future,
if you're optimistic about that future, there's a kind of feeling like we're both going to win here.
Exactly. And that's easy. We live in a world where both people can win.
Yeah. And in point of fact, that's the case, although it's, um, a lot of people want us to
think otherwise, mostly because of the negativity that was talking about before.
So the brain is generally cynical. Yeah. My description of it is the pessimistic caveman
survived and we're descendants of the pessimists. Yeah. The optimistic guy got eaten by a saber
tooth tiger. Yeah. But on the flip side, the optimists seem to be the ones that actually
build stuff these days. There's the switch. Like, so at what point in time do we catch on?
Cause the difference between survival and success mindset,
the success mindset is highly optimistic. So where do we switch or how do we stay switched
from survival to success? That's the challenge. Yeah. Somewhere we stopped being eaten by saber
tooth tigers and started building bridges and buildings and computers and companies.
We started to experience, we got enough data back
to collaborate and we stopped listening to our amygdala and we started listening to our gut.
Let me just return briefly to terrorists. Uh, what do you think about the policy
of not negotiating with terrorists? Well, that's not the policy. First of all,
now everybody thinks that's the policy. Yeah. It hasn't been the policy since 2002
when Bush 43 signed up national security presidential directive, NSPD at the time it
was NSPD 12, which basically said, um, we won't make concessions. That doesn't mean we won't talk.
So I'm in Columbia at the same time. And I have been intimately involved with the signing of
him signing that document. I knew exactly what it said and I, and he didn't inherit it from
somebody else. He signed it and I'm in Columbia and the number two in the embassy says last night
on TV, the president of the United States said, we don't negotiate with terrorists. Are you calling
a president of United States, a liar? And I remember thinking like, all right, so
he probably said that and that's not on the document that he signed. So I said, look at,
you know, I'm familiar with what he's signed and it that's not what it says. Well, you know,
and so the argument, but that's always been the soundbite that everybody likes. We don't negotiate
with terrorists. Depends upon your definition of negotiation. If it's just communication,
we negotiate with them all the time. Number one. And number two,
like every president has made some boneheaded deal with the bad guys.
Like Obama released five high level Taliban leaders from Guantanamo in exchange for an
AWOL soldier that we immediately threw in jail. And I thought that was a horrible deal.
And that, that's putting terrorists back on the battlefield. And then Trump turned around and
topped it by putting 5,000 terrorists back on the battlefield. So we haven't had a president that
has stuck to that on either side of the aisle since people started throwing that out as a
soundbite. What do you think of that negotiation? Forget terrorists, but the global negotiation,
like with, with Vladimir Putin, the recent negotiation over prisoners, the exchange,
Brady Gardner, is there a way to do that negotiation successfully?
First of all, I agree with the idea that she was wrongfully detained and that she hadn't,
and she didn't deserve to be in jail and that you, there should be no second class citizens
ever. And whether you're a WNBA player, or you just some bonehead that walked into the
wrong situation, your government should not abandon you ever, ever. Now what they do,
um, in the meantime, um, there should have been a negotiation. They were desperate to make a deal
at a bad time. They'd been offered far better deals and prisoner swaps earlier and turned them
down. And then he gets turned up and thank God for Brittany Griner that, um, the public got enough
attention. They kept pressure on the administration. They made a deal. Now governments want to make
those kinds of deals. That's fine. As long as it, cause that was basically a political negotiation.
You're putting 5,000 Taliban back on a battlefield. That ain't negotiating with another
government. You're putting five of them back on a battlefield that ain't negotiating with another
government. That's directly contradicting this thing that you claimed. And those were all bad
deals. Now was the Brittany Griner thing, a bad deal. I think it was great for her.
If I was in the middle of it would have been better and she still would have come home.
Yeah. There's some technical aspects of that negotiation. What do you think is the value
just to linger on it of meeting in person for the negotiation? I think it's a great idea.
Can I just, just follow that tangent along? There's a war in Ukraine now. It's been going on
over a year. It's, uh, for me personally, given my life, uh, stories is, is, uh,
is a deeply personal one. And I'm returning back to that area of the world that was there.
Uh, Vladimir Zelensky said he doesn't want to talk to, uh, to Vladimir Putin.
Do you think they could get in a room together and, uh, say you were there in a room with Putin
and Zelensky and Biden is, uh, sitting in the bag drinking a cocktail, or maybe he is at the table
participating. How, how, how is it possible through negotiation, through the art of conversation
to find peace in this very tense geopolitical, uh, conflict?
I think it's eminently possible. I think the getting people together in person has always
been a good idea. Now, how many times who's getting them together under what circumstances
and how many times you're getting them together. The, um, the documentary, the human factor about
the Mideast peace negotiations, mostly through the nineties, mostly into the Clinton administration,
uh, got kicked off, uh, under Bush 41. And then the documentary continues through Trump,
but just touching basically on it, but they're getting air fat and the different
Israeli prime ministers together in person. And these guys do not want to talk to each other
and dependent upon the prime minister, you know, the mere thought of being on the same planet with
air fat was offensive. And they started getting these guys together in person regularly and they
started seeing each other as human beings. And I started realizing that there was enough room on
a planet for him and that people dying was stupid and they were, and they would slowly work things
out by getting these guys together in person. So how long does it take? Who's hosting it?
But it's a good idea, but the skill of, uh, achieving that thing that you talk about a
lot, which is empathy. And I would say in that case, not just empathy, but empathy plus a bit,
you might disagree with this, but a drop of compassion in there. I think compassion,
compassion is helpful. Um, but it's not essential. Like if, if you just know where I'm coming from,
like it, it, it, the thought, the feeling of being understood part and understood as powerful is.
Yeah. And, and again, I know I picked a vast majority of this up on, on Andrew's, um,
podcast, but it picked it up in other places. Cause early on
when we were putting a book together, tall, Roz, uh, the writer, uh, my son uncredited co-author.
So the book's really a collaboration between me, my son Brandon and tall Ross,
and we're driving for that's right. You know, when somebody feels like what you've said is completely
their position, they say, that's right. Not you're right, but that's right. So tall says,
you know, I think, I think what's happening here is you're triggering a subtle epiphany in somebody.
So I'm like, all right, I'll buy that. So I started looking up the neuroscience of,
of the feeling of epiphany, getting a hit of oxytocin and serotonin.
Oxytocin is a bonding drug. You bond to me. I don't bond to you when you feel completely
understood by me, you bond to me. Then in one of the relationship podcasts that I'm listening to
on Andrew, um, it says oxytocin, inclines people to tell the truth. You're more honest.
All right. So you feel deeply understood by me. You bond to me
and you start getting more honest with me. Serotonin, the neurochemical satisfaction
epiphany, you feel oxytocin and serotonin being understood. All right. I got you bonding to me.
I got you being more honest with me and I got you feeling more satisfied. So you want less.
What more do you want out of a negotiation? Of course, there's already with the leaders
and great negotiators, there's a walls built up defense mechanisms against that.
Right. There's you're resisting. You're resisting this basic chemistry, but yes,
you should have that. Um, you should work towards that kind of empathy.
And I personally believe, I don't actually understand why,
but I've observed it time and time again, but getting in a room together
and really talking whether privately or publicly, but really talking and like this. So I'll, I'll
comment on this. So right now this is being recorded and a few folks will hear this, but
when you really do a good job of this kind of conversation, you forget there's cameras.
And that's much better than there being even a third person in the room. But often when, um,
world leaders meet those like press or there's others in the room, like as you know, man to man
or man to woman, you have to like meet like, and like in a saloon, just the two of you and talk,
there's some intimacy and power to that, to achieve that. If you're also willing to couple
that with empathy to really hear the other person. I don't know what that is. That's like
a deep, deep intimacy that happens. And I think there's actually, cause we get asked this in a
black swan group all the time. Like how do you zoom? That's bad. You know, cause you don't have
the same visual feedback on zoom and that's not true. Like you and I, I see you from the waist
up right now. If we're on zoom, I'd be looking at you from the waist up. I'm not wearing pants.
Yeah. I apologize for that. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. You only see a small portion.
Usually that's usually where I go, but uh, anyway,
I'm glad we're both at ridiculous. I appreciate it.
But what makes this different in person? I actually think, um, I think there's energy
that we're unable, we don't have the instrumentation to define yet.
And I think that there's a feel, I think there's an actual energetic
feel that changes. And just cause we don't, we, again, just cause we can't
measure it doesn't mean it's not there. Yeah. I would love to figure out what that is. Uh,
folks that are working on virtual reality are trying to figure out that what that is.
During the pandemic, everybody was on zoom, zoom and Microsoft. Everybody was trying to figure out
how do we replicate that? I'm trying to understand how to replicate that because
it sure is not fun to travel across the world just to talk to Snowden or Putin or Zelensky.
I'd love to do it over zoom, but it's not the same. It's not the same. It's not the same.
I go in a room with Putin. You would go in and I would. Yeah. A thousand percent.
I get it. That's right. That's right. Well, first you would give him a that's right. Probably
getting and giving us to see, see that. And here's the issue that trips everybody up in
negotiation. The difference between hearing and speaking the same words are vastly different.
And what I'm looking for is what I'm the responses I'm getting out of you.
Cause if you, if you can't first that's right. Especially like if you can't appreciate
what that really means here in it is unsatisfying. So those two words are really important to you.
Talk about this in your book. What is, why is that? So what does that's right?
Mean? Why is it important? Well, it means that what you just heard, you think is
unequivocally the truth. Like it's dead on it hit the target. It's it's a bullseye.
And uh, there's been a topic of discussion, especially between my son and I a lot,
like what happens? The Sox, he told some bonding moment and he, his contention has always been like
Donald Trump is the poster child of what it means because Donald Trump's been addressing an audience,
you know, he's, he's in a debate with Hillary or he's given a speech someplace.
And when the people that are devoted to him, when they believe that what he's just said is
completely right, it's insightful. They look at him or they look at the TV and they go,
that's right. And it's a, it's what people say when they're bought into what they just heard.
Now, if you're not convinced of the way that Donald Trump's followers are bonded to him,
and he, he also just like this, in my view, destroys the idea of common ground
because when he first started to run for president, the pundits
all said eyes in New Yorker, nobody in the Republican party is going to like him.
It's middle America, you know, it's blue collar, you know, it's regular common folks,
factory workers. They're not going to like Trump cause he's from New York and he
went to war and he's an Ivy leaguer and he's a son of a wealthy real estate mogul. And he had
a million dollars handed to him when he got out of college.
He, you know, he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The rank and fire Republicans are
never going to accept this guy based on common ground. Look how, look how smart that was.
Do you think he's a good negotiator? Do you think Donald Trump is a good negotiator?
No, I think he's a great marketer. If you look at his negotiation track record. All right. So I
started following Donald Trump in the eighties when I was in New York. I'm a last century guy.
He's a last century guy. We've got mutual acquaintances. The minister that married him
to Mahler Maples was a friend of mine in a close friend of mine. And in 1998, I threw a fundraiser
in his apartment at Trump tower that he attended. So, um, no shortage of mutual friends. We went to
the same church, still have mutual, mutual acquaintances, friends. I don't know. And I've
watched his track record negotiation history, which is exactly his track record with North
Korea. Where are we with North Korea? What was the deal that he made with North Korea?
See, your, your answer is the same as everybody else's. Well, I remember it started out with a
lot of fanfare, but I don't know what happened because nothing ever happens as more public
fanfare. So marketing minded presentation starts out with a bang. If he doesn't cut the deal
in a short period, a really short period of time, he moves on and everybody wonders what
had happened because there was so much fanfare at the beginning. Now at the beginning, him even
opening that dialogue with North Korea was masterful. Like I was, I was such a fan.
When you got a president of the United States that is willing to sit down and talk with the
leader of another nation, when every other president, all our advisors are saying the
leader of North Korea is beneath you. You cannot dignify him by responding to him directly.
And consequently, the Trump administration inherits a can of worms that has been simmering
for 30 years. He didn't get us into that. And he, and he opened up a dialogue where nobody
else was capable of opening that dialogue. And then it just went away. Nobody knows what happened.
And there was no deal made. Now great negotiators make deals.
What do you think about these accusations that he's a narcissist?
If you're a narcissist, does that help you or hurt you?
Is there a more popular term these days than narcissist? Like everybody's a narcissist.
Everybody you don't like is a narcissist. Like the homeless guy down on the corner,
he's a narcissist. That's why he's there. Yeah. It's lost meaning for you a little bit.
Yeah. And first of all, most psychological terms as a hostage negotiator and really,
we were never into psychology and we steered away from it because psychology at best is soft science.
If it's not informed these days, if it's not informed by real studies or
neuroscience, the guys that I'm impressed with these days, psychologists, neuroscientists,
now I'm interested in that guy or gal. But then the psychology convention,
do you get them all together and they all agree? No. But also the interesting thing about
psychology is each individual person is way more complicated than the category psychology tries to
create. And there's something about the human brain. The moment you classify somebody as a
narcissist or depressed or bipolar or insane in any kind of way, for some reason, you give
yourself a convenient excuse not to see them as a complicated human being, to empathize with them.
I had that when I was talking to, I did an interview with Kanye West and then there's a lot
of popular opinions about him being mentally unwell and so on. And I felt that kind of way
of thinking is a very convenient way of thinking to ignore the fact that he's a human being
that again, wants to be understood and heard. And that's the only way you can have that conversation.
Yeah, I agree completely. That's right.
I feel so close to you now. It might be because I'm not wearing pants.
All right. You're funnier than I am. That bothers me.
I'll say something stupid soon enough. Don't worry about it. We were talking about terrorists
and non-negotiating with terrorists. Nice job going all the way back to where that rabbit hole
started. We're Alice in Wonderland right now. Is there something about walking away
of not negotiating? Is there power in that? All right. So it depends upon whether or not
you're doing it with integrity or a tactic to start with. And then also,
hostage negotiators are successful 93% of the time, kind of across the board,
which means that the 7% of the time is going to go bad. And that was my old boss, Gary Nesner.
I learned so much from Gary, but one of the phrases that he used over and over and over
again until I finally worked the case and went bad was this is going to be the best chance of
success, best chance of success. And then something went bad. And I remember thinking like, well,
best chance of success is no guarantee of success. So your question is, are there
negotiations you should walk away from? If you got no shot at success, then don't negotiate.
And you have to accept the fact there's some deals you're never going to make. We teach my company,
it's not a sin to not get the deal. It's a sin to take a long time to not get the deal.
And Gary, in his infinite wisdom, they realized that there was something
called suicide by cop and that it might have, Gary was very much into clusters of behavior.
He kept us away from psychological terms and there would be clusters of behavior
that would be high risk indicators. And he wrote a block of instruction called high risk indicators,
which meant if you start seeing this stuff show up, this thing's probably going bad.
And you're going to need to recognize that from the very beginning and adjust accordingly.
And it's the same way in business and personal life. I'm talking to the head of a marketing
company I have tremendous respect for. I admire that what this guy in this company does
started from scratch. He borrowed space in the back of a drug store to start his company.
And now it's hugely successful. And he's laying out to me that he finally had to confront
a potential client and walk away from him. And he said, how do you think I handle this?
My answer was 1000% correct. And as a matter of fact, the behavior that he indicated, he's a type
and you should have walked away sooner than you did because this guy was playing you the
whole time. Al Qaeda, 2004, they're playing us. They're not negotiating. We need, we called them
out on it. I don't think you're negotiating. You wouldn't say it exactly like that, but that was,
that was absolutely the approach. You know, confront people on their behavior in a respectful
way. And signal that you're willing to walk away. And mean it a thousand percent. And mean it. Isn't
that terrifying? I mean, it's scary because you don't want to really walk away or do you have to
really want to walk away? Well, this gets core values, your view of reality. If it's an abundant
world, it's not scary to walk away. If it's a finite world with limited opportunities,
then it's horrifying. But you have to use that worldview to be willing to actually walk away.
Yeah. It could be walking away from a lot of money. It could be walking away from something
that's going to hurt people. Because if you lose a hostage. Yeah. Well,
but if they're not going to let the hostage out. Yeah. Suicide by cop. They didn't let them go.
The 7%, how do most negotiations fail?
The bad guys were never there to make a deal in the first place. If it was suicide by cop.
If they were there to, if they're on a killing journey, it's an Israeli phrase.
If they're on a killing journey and the actions that they're
currently engaged in are part of that killing journey. Killing journey. Is there advice you
can give about, you mentioned Israel, Palestine, the Middle East, taking on a few conversations
on that topic. Is there hope for that part of the world? And from that hope,
is there some advice you could lend? Yeah. I think there's hope. Then I got friends on both sides.
And also, after I left the FBI, most people listen to this, probably not going to remember who Rodney
Dangerfield was. Oh, come on.
But he's a comedian. Still doesn't get any respect.
Yeah. New Yorker? Is he a New Yorker?
I think he was a New York guy. Like Jersey or something, yeah.
Yeah. And he did a movie a long time ago called Back to School. He went back to school. He's an
old guy back to school. So I went back to school after I left the FBI. I did get a master's at
Harvard Kennedy. And that's where I'm running across people on both sides of that. And when
they could talk, they said, let's start from the premise that both sides want a better life for our
kids, which is this version that I was telling you earlier from Tom Girardi. Let's pick a point
in the future that we're both happy with. And they found that they could talk. All right,
so it might not be better for us. How do we make it better for our kids?
And that's where the hope derives from. Because I think both sides ultimately
want it to be better for their kids, which is why they still engage in interactions and which is
why I think the leadership, regardless of how compromised they might be on either side,
there are few straight players in the game in the Middle East or anywhere for that matter.
But they want a better future for their kids. You get people to agree that you want a better future
for your kids. And then you start talking about, well, how do we work our way back from that?
And then, all right, so we've got a mutual point in the future. The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
are also, for me, interesting because you mentioned Clubhouse about almost two years ago now
when Israel was shelling Gaza. They hit the UPI office. They got fed up with the rocket attacks
from Hamas. And of course, Hamas is putting rockets in the UPI office or the AP office,
whichever press office it was there. How's that office going to be there otherwise? Hamas is
running a show. You're not going to run that office unless you let them store weapons there.
That's just part of the game. And are they going to store them in specially designated
ammunition dumps? No. They're going to put them in schools. They're going to put them in hospitals.
They're going to put them in all places that when Israel hits them, they're going to look really bad.
So after a while, Israel gets fed up and they start shelling Gaza and they're hitting these
places. A friend of mine, Nicole Benham, is hosting rooms on Clubhouse and she says,
you got to come on. The vitriol is killing me. These are all turning into screaming matches.
Nobody's talking to anybody. I said, all right, cool. We'll go on. We'll do it and watch. We
won't have a single argument. We'll invite people on from both sides. There was one rule
before you started to describe what you thought of the other side.
You had to say, before I disagree with you, here's what I think your position is.
And you got to continue to state the other side's position until they agree that you've gotten it.
Now what happened? No agreement and no arguments. That was what we were really going for.
We wanted to show that people on both sides in one of their emotional timeframes,
if your only requirement was you had to state the other side's position first,
nobody got out of control. Did it work? That's exactly what happened. We wanted to show people
that you can have conversations that do not devolve into screaming matches with vitriol,
talking about how you're dedicated to the destruction of the other side.
Just first, see if you can outline where they're coming from.
That's really impressive because I've just, having seen on Clubhouse,
people, which part of the reason I liked Clubhouse, you get to hear voices from all sides.
They were emotionally intense. Right.
I'm sweating just in the buildup of your story here. I thought it could go to hell,
but you're saying it kind of worked. Not one person lost control. Now of the two sides,
the people that were speaking on behalf of the Israelis were a little better at articulating
supportive positions for the Palestinians. Most of the people that want to speak up on behalf
of the Palestinians, they'd want to start in like, you're doing this. I'd say, no, no, no,
you can go there. Just not yet. Before you go there, you can say that all you want.
Before you go there, you've got to try to articulate to them where they're coming from.
They got to tell you you got it right. What would consistently happen is there's a leveling out
of a person to try to see the other side's perspective and articulate it.
It's enormously beneficial to the person who's trying to do it,
which was really the point that we were trying to make.
It's a really interesting exercise. I mean, by way of advice, so if it works at Clubhouse,
for people who don't know, that's a voice app where you can be anonymous. So it's really
regular people, but regular people who can also be anonymous. It's just, it can be chaos.
If it works there, that's really interesting. When you sit down for a conversation across
the table from somebody, don't have them even steel man the other side. Have them just state
the other side. Just explain your understanding of it. That's it.
And every now and then I would jump in, like somebody supporting Israel,
whoever the heck they were, and they'd say a couple of things.
And the Palestinian guy would be like our guy or supportive of them would say, you know,
you missed some stuff. And I'd say, let me jump in. First of all, I know what the Nakba is.
The Nakba is a catastrophe. That's the day Israel was born. For the rest of the world,
the birth of Israel for you is the Nakba. I said, you've got members of your family
that is still walking around carrying keys to the front door of the house they abandoned.
And it'd be like, yeah. And I'd say you feel bad that in point of fact, that in World War II,
the world stood back and watched while the Nazis threw the Jews off a building.
The only problem was they landed on you. And they'd be like, yeah,
that's where they're coming from. So articulating, you know, deeply
what the other side feels is transformative for both people involved in a process.
What's the toughest negotiation you've ever been a part of or maybe observed or heard of?
What's a difficult case just stands out to you? Or maybe you just want one of many.
Well, the stuff we went through with Al-Qaeda in and around Iraq, Iraq and Saudi,
first one was in Saudi in 2004 timeframe. The hardest part about that was working with
family members and not deceiving them about the possibility outcome.
Yeah. How do you talk to family members? Is that part of the negotiation?
Yeah. Empathy, learning empathy the hard way. And then being able to take it up to higher levels
because at its base level, um, a guy that we're working with now that's coaching us in the US
and is a business partner, his name is Jonathan Smith. He pointed out to us
that there's kind of, there's a shoe Hari concept. Have you, are you familiar with shoe Hari?
It's martial arts concept. And she was, um, do it exactly as the masters telling you to do it,
wax on wax off credit kids stuff. Uh, ha is when you've done the repetition repetitions enough
times, you're getting a feel for it. And you begin to see the same lessons coming from other masters.
You're seeing the same thing show up in other places. And at the re-level, you're still in
the discipline, but you're making up your own rules. It's almost a flow state. And you don't
realize that you're making up your own rules. And if somebody asks you where you learned that,
you probably say, I, you know, my, my sensei taught it to me, my master taught it to me.
Um, this will come back around the neuro shame with families pretty quick. We did this once
because there's a bunch of people that we coach, um, business people that are scared of the amount
of money that they're losing. If we're not coaching them regularly, one of these guys,
Michael, we're interviewing them for a social media posting about two years ago.
And Michael says, yeah, you know, you got to gather data with your eyes.
And I remember thinking, and I went, Ooh, I like that. I said, where did you hear that before?
And he goes, you know, I don't know. I heard it from you. I think. And I'm like, no, no, no, no,
I didn't remember saying that for that first time I've heard that he's in re so what's this got to
do with families, empathy at its base level in a shoe level. I learned it on the suicide hotline
is saying like, you sound angry. I'm just calling out the elephant in the room,
your emotions, what's driving you. I'm throwing a label on your affect. And I'm saying you sound,
or it sounds like you are. Cause that's the basic karate kid wax on wax off approach.
Now there are a lot of hostage negotiators that will tell you empathy doesn't work at home. Not
true. They've never gotten out of shoe. You're getting ready to talk to your significant other
and you want to go someplace that you know, it's going to make her angry.
You want to go do something. Now that's real negotiation right there.
You could say to her, you sound angry in which case she's going to blow up. Cause her reaction is
you made me angry bozo. How can you act like you're an innocent third party
or that you were independent of how I feel bad. And you learn, learn a little bit more and you say
the, the high level is, this is probably going to make you angry.
And then what I did with families, I knew how they felt before I walked in the door.
I knew that they were scared to death. You find out that your, your, your husband, your father,
your brother has been grabbed by Al Qaeda who are in the business of chopping people's heads off.
You're going to be horrified. I can't walk into them and go like, you sound angry.
Of course I'm angry, you idiot. But knowing what they are, I used to walk into family's houses
and I'd say, I know you're angry. Now what, now what are the circumstances dictate that they
should also feel they're going to feel abandoned by their government. They're going to feel totally
alone. They're going to be scared and they're going to be angry because they feel the government
abandoned them. Now they're in point of fact, is this an accurate statement that their loved one
voluntarily went into a war zone and voluntarily went someplace or government told them not to go
or the facts that the government abandoned them? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact,
the government tried to get them to not go and they went anyway.
But that doesn't change how they felt in the moment. And I'd walk into a house and I go,
I know you're angry. I know you feel abandoned and alone. And I know you're horrified. And I
know you feel the United States government has abandoned you. And they would look at me and go
like, yeah, what do we do now? Now we're ready to rock.
Is there, with Al-Qaeda or in general, is there a language barrier too? It could be just barriers
of different communication styles. I mean, you got like a New Yorker way about it.
That might make somebody from like, I don't know, Laguna Beach uncomfortable.
Do you feel that language barrier in communication? Is that language and communication style in itself
creating a barrier? You got a barrier when you think that your way is the way.
Sure. That's the biggest barrier. Yeah. And that happens all the time. When people talk about,
what about cross-cultural negotiations? You know, what hand do I got to shake hands with
so that I can get my way? Well, if you strip it all down, we're all basically the same
blank slate when we were born. Everybody's got a limbic system. Everybody's limbic system works
pretty much the same way. People are driven by the same sorts of decisions. How does this
affect my future? What am I at risk of losing? How does this affect my identity? You're not a
kidnapper. You're a New York City businessman. You're a tobacco farmer in the South. All making
those same decisions based on those same things. So as soon as I start to navigate that,
and I tailor my approach, which is what empathy is, to what you think, how you see things.
So I can be the biggest goofball ever from, if you live in the South, yeah, maybe I'm a New Yorker,
I'm somebody from LA, or somebody from Chicago. But my geography is foreign to you,
but as soon as I start dialing in on how you see things, suddenly you're listening.
What about the three voices you talk about, the different voices you can use in that communication?
Right. The assertive voice, direct and honest. I'm a natural born assertive.
A natural born. I thought we're all blank slate.
Stop catching me on what I said. How dare you accuse me of what I've said. To quote Bono,
I stand accused of what I've said, the things I've said.
That's a good line. He's got a few good lines. So assertive voice, you're born that way. What are
the other ones? Analyst. You're an analyst.
I can tell you're assertive.
Yeah. What's an analyst voice?
Well, an analyst is closer. The smarter, more thoughtful.
No, as a matter of fact. Look, you ever do a decision tree?
Yeah.
See, you like it too, don't you?
So decision trees, you know, I'm a computer scientist. I like mathematical,
systematic ways of seeing the world.
He's an analyst. You think Donald Trump would ever say that? Unlikely.
Well, is he more of the assertive kind?
He's a natural born assertive. Yeah.
Yeah. Are all New Yorkers like this? Is this something in the water?
No, that's a crazy thing. I mean, there's an affect that a city can have.
And, you know, New York's Northeast, not just New York, but the Northeast is a little more,
the affect of the area, of the culture of the area. The individuals still boil down into
the three types, cross, abort. What's the third one?
Accommodator, smiling, optimistic, hopeful. I'm a thousand percent convinced that the phrase hope
is not a strategy is designed at people's frustration over a third of the population
being accommodators that are hope-driven. I hope this works out.
And they're very relationship. On the surface, they're very relationship oriented.
They tend to appear to be very positive. Then they are, but it's really built around hope.
And the idea is you can adopt these three voices.
Yeah, you can learn them. They're all learnable. Analysts are often mistaken for accommodators.
Because as you said before, you know, analysts are more introspective, more analytical.
They're looking at the systems at work. And if they like to learn, they notice that
accommodators make more deals than they make. They also notice that there's a higher failure rate of
the deals, but since they notice stuff and they think about it, they catch on faster than assertives
do, that the pleasant nature of an accommodator contributes strongly to them making deals.
Like my daughter-in-law is an analyst. Another descriptor we have in that an analyst are
assassins. An analyst will snipe you from a thousand yards out in the middle of the night,
and you never know what hits you. And they're really happy with that.
But how has assertiveness, the assertive voice, served you in negotiation?
Poorly. The assertive voice is almost always counterproductive. It feels like getting hit
in the face with a brick. And that's almost always counterproductive. So for me to be more effective,
especially in a negotiation, I'll need to slow down and smile.
You know, I heard that Teddy Roosevelt was a good negotiator and that he was extremely stubborn.
And perhaps the right term for that would be assertive, but he picked his battles. Is there
some value to holding strong through principle? So I don't even know if that's probably the
opposite of empathy. Are there times when you can just stick, be extremely stubborn to your
principles to win a negotiation? Oh, we do it all the time. We're just nice about it.
Okay. It helps to be nice, you're saying. Well, yes, because I need you to hear me.
And the assertive tone of voice. So when we do our training, typically we do an exercise
called 60 seconds or she dies. And I play the bad guy bank robber. And I ask you to be the
hostage negotiator. And your job is to, I'll give you the four real world constraints.
And then you're going to try and negotiate me out of the bank. Now we're doing this.
Now, the first voice that I always use in that exercise is the assertive voice,
which is the commanding voice. It's the voice that all police officers are taught to use in the
street, issued loud and clear commands. To me, I don't feel like I'm attacking you. I just feel
like I'm being direct and honest and clear. You on the other hand feel attacked. Now we're doing
this exercise in Austin a couple of years ago. The first participant has an Apple watch on.
He tells us afterwards that sitting still, not even answering, when he first gets hit in the
face with the assertive voice, his heart rate jumped to 170, which is a typical fight or flight
reaction. I come at you like I'm fighting you. Your fight flight mechanisms all kick into gear,
which clouds your thinking. You're automatically dumber in the moment. So if I want to make a great
long-term deal with you, highly profitable, I'm agnostic to you being profitable. If you
be profitable, that's fine. I'm here to make money for me. Me making you dumber will always hurt me.
Me making you feel attacked will always hurt me. So there's never a value in being,
and you make me afraid. There's never a long-term value in it. That's, um,
it's another thing that Tal Raz, when we were writing a book,
braced me on because he said there's scientific data out there that's called strategic umbrage.
Well, there's data. Well, whether or not it's scientific, I would call that into question.
But he said there's studies out there that show that strategic umbrage works.
And, uh, another thing that I also enjoy, uh, you probably get tired of me saying wonderful things
about Andrew. He taught me. There's never, there's never enough wonderful things to say about the
great Andrew Huberman, the host of the Huberman Lab podcast that everybody should subscribe to.
You should talk to Andrew. You're funnier than he is though. I'll give you that. He's funny
accidentally. He makes me laugh all the time. Not when he's trying to be funny. He's a really,
uh, he's one of the people in this world that's truly legit. He's a really strong scientist and
a really strong communicator and a good human being. And those, those together don't come
often. And then it's nice to see. Yeah. He's a treasure, national treasure. Anyway, you were
saying, well, he sort of taught me how to think about data and studies and science and, and also
from different books that he's turned me on to. It's really helped me think about this stuff. So
the studies about strategic umbrage were done, the ones that I've seen that show it's effective.
There were simulated negotiations with college students. Now here's the problem with that.
A simulated negotiation with a college student, college students are going to sit down as part
of their assignment. They're going to sit down one time. They're going to sit down for 45 minutes.
And they're going to think that if they didn't come to a deal at all, that they failed.
And there's no ongoing implementation. There's just the deal. And then they walk
away of a pretend situation. So they got no actual real skin in the game. There's
no deal on earth. Do you sit down and come to an agreement in 45 minutes and never see
each other again? Cause there's the implementation of the deal. If it, even if it's only payment.
So the data is flawed based on the way it was collected. It's a highly flawed study.
And all data is flawed, as you know, as a scientist, you just got to be aware what
the flaws are and decide whether or not that destroys the study or, or what do you think?
Take a look at the data. There's no such thing as perfect data. Look at the data,
see what you think of it. The data that says that strategic umbrage works is based on flawed
circumstances. Can you explain strategic umbrage? Getting mad, scaring the other side into a deal,
getting mad at using anger strategically to bully the other side into an agreement.
That's nice to hear in some sense. It's nice to hear that empathy is the right way in almost all
situations. It's nice. Best chance of success. Not that it works every time, just it works more
than anything else does. What is the technique of mirroring? There's a lot of cool stuff in
your book. There's just kind of jump around. What's mirroring? Mirroring is, is like,
it's, it's, it's one of the most fun skills because it's the simplest to execute. You just
repeat one to three ish words of what somebody said. Usually the last one to three words.
What I've found about it is the people that really like mirroring love it because it's so simple and
so effortless and invisible. They typically, for lack of a better term, tend to be both high IQ
and high EQ. Like I'm not a high IQ guy. I'm an average dude. I like to think that I can learn
in EQ, emotional intelligence is a skill you can build and I'm always working on building it.
But a lot of really regular average people will be like mirroring that stupid. I'm not doing that.
And I don't know why they don't like it, but when I find somebody that loves to mirror,
I'll always ask them, you know, how'd you just go on IQ? And typically their IQ is pretty high.
Now I don't know why that combination attracts people to mirroring because there's nine skills,
eight from hostage negotiation. And we, and the ninth really was tone of voice. And we just
define that as a skill and each one is different and focuses on different components of the
conversation. And a lot of people don't like to mirror. They found it so awkward. Like I
don't particularly, I'm not particularly strong in mirroring. I got to do it intentionally.
I'm good at labeling. But does it also always work? Oh yeah. Yeah. It feels maybe awkward,
but there's, it's true. There's gotta be ways to signal that you're truly listening.
That's part of it. I think you can do body language. You can,
yeah, there's, there's a lot of ways to signal that, but mirroring is probably just this trivial
little hack. It kind of is. I, you know, there's a situation that I had a conversation with
Steven Codkin. He's this historian and, uh, he would say my name a lot throughout the
conversation. He would be like, well, you have to understand Lex is that, and for some reason
that was making me feel really good. I was like, he cares about me. And I wonder if that key,
if everyone has that key, that could be named, just using people's name could be powerful.
Using the name is really context driven. It can be extremely powerful with someone who's genuine
and it comes across in their demeanor. And it's used in a way that you can tell is meant
to encourage you as opposed to exploit you. And the people that are really into exploiting
will also use it, do the same thing. So you have to be, you have to avoid using the things that
people that are exploiters manipulators use. Cause it's, it might signal to others that this person
is, uh, try and trick me. Gotta be very conscious of it. Yeah. Uh, what's labeling that you
mentioned the thing you like? Uh, you know, I said earlier that that whole progression from
you sound angry to this is probably going to make you angry too. I know you're angry.
Labeling is, is hanging a label on an emotion or an affect. And then just calling it up.
Is that almost always good? Could it be a source of frustration when a person is being angry and
you kind of put a label on it? Um, call out the elephant.
Is it possible that that will lead to escalation of that feeling versus a resolution? Well,
the con what would make it bad? Like, um, if I'm pointing out like that blatantly obvious,
like if I say, look, I need you to get up and go down to the bank and make the deposit. Let's say
I'm talking to my, somebody works in my company. I need you to get on the phone with this person
and make the appointment. And they go, sounds like you want me to talk to this person.
Yeah. That would be annoying if it's just so absurdly obvious that there's no insight in your
label at all. And as soon as you're demonstrating an awareness or a subtlety or an insight,
either to you or to them, now we're making progress. So the only time a label could
ever potentially be counterproductive is like, if you weren't actually listening and the label
is indicates that you're not listening. You know, um, I'm teaching USC and I'm teaching labels and,
you know, one of the kids in a class, he just wants to take the skills and make his deals
and just hustle them. And he's just looking for the hustle. So he writes up a paper about,
you know, he goes, there's some malls, I think over by Palm Springs or someplace,
some Allen malls, a lot of people go to buy suits. So he goes in there and he immediately
starts the bargaining, uh, that my book teaches with no empathy. And he's like, um,
throws a price to the guy and the guy's like, no. And he throws another price to the guy and
guy's like, no. And then, then he says to the guy behind the counter, sounds like we can make a deal.
Like, no, it doesn't. I just shut down everything that you just said. If anything,
it sounds like we're never going to make a deal. But he tried to use this label for manipulation.
Now the guy didn't get mad on the other side, but it's like, clearly this dude is not listening to
me. And at the core of everything, you have a bunch of like, uh, you know, almost like hacks,
like techniques you can use, but at the core of it is empathy. That's the main thing. And be able
to just sit there and listen and perceive. Yeah. And look for insights. You know what? I like
silence or like you're both sitting there chilling with a drink, looking up at the stars.
There's a moment the silence makes you kind of zoom out and realize you're in this together,
as opposed to playing a game or some kind of like chess game of negotiation. You're in it together.
I don't know. There's some intimacy to the silence. And like, if I, I'll ask a question
and just let the other person sit there in silence before they answer or vice versa.
They asked me a question. I sit there in silence. That's a, that's a big,
feels like a big intimate thing. Yes. And the other two types, until they've experienced that,
are afraid of it. And what I'm actually going to do is for whatever reason, I'm really,
I'm really comfortable with silence. I think because I've experienced its effectiveness and
also my son, Brandon, like he's a king of dynamic silence. Like he, he coaches people. He says,
you go silent, count thousands to yourself. Don't stop till you run out of numbers.
That's a good line. He's also good for good lines.
That is. And so there's so much to it, but the other two types are natural wiring against the
white until they've experienced it. And you know, your gut instinct intuition is giving you data
once you've experienced it, but your amygdala is kicking into gear again. Sorry. I realized
it's more complicated than that until you've experienced it. So accommodators hope-based
how do they signal fury? The silent treatment. So when you go silent, they're scared to death
you're furious. Cause that's how they indicate it. The assertive thinks to use the analyst when
silent cause you want them to talk some more. When a point of fact, you're either, you're thinking
you're thinking or, and I, I love your description, the feeling of intimacy and silence
and experiencing the moment. Cause I'm actually going to factor that into trying to get the
accommodators love shared intimacy. They love, would love to experience a moment. And I can see
that being very compelling than be willing to cross that chasm and experience silence and see
how, see how it works for them. Yeah. It's nerve wracking, which is why it's intimate.
Cause you start thinking, what's the other person thinking? We're actually going to do this. And
we're going to sit here for 10 seconds and go, I mean, there's tricks to it. I guess,
like Brandon says is to could just count it out and realize through data that there's intimacy
to it. I had, um, uh, a friend of mine, he, uh, lost his voice cause singing. So he couldn't,
the doctor says he can't talk for a week just to heal the voice, the vocal cords. But he, uh,
he hung out with other people with friends and didn't talk to them. He just hung out.
And he said it was really intimate. They both, they both didn't talk to each other.
They just sat there and enjoy time together. I don't know. It's a, it's a wake up call. It's
the thing to try maybe with, uh, with people in your life, just hang out and don't say anything
like as an experiment, don't say anything the entire day, but it's interesting. I haven't tried
it myself. It seems, uh, uh, it's kinda like a silent retreat, but more, um, active as part of
like regular everyday life. Um, anyway, the, is there other, uh, other interesting techniques
we can talk about here? So, um, for example, creating the illusion of control. Yeah,
it's principally, you know, by asking what and how questions,
cause people love to tell others what to do or how to do it. Um, it does a lot. That was,
that was really the way when the book was first written that we really thought about what and how
questions is given the other side, the illusion of control. And there's a lot more to it than that
that we've discovered. I mean, it triggers deep thinking. It wears people down. Deep thinking is,
could be exhausting. And you want, so what's the, what's the role of exhaustion in negotiation?
Is that ultimately one? You gotta be careful with that. Um, some people, uh, exhaust intentionally.
Uh, one of my negotiation heroes, uh, a guy now who's unfortunately suffering from, um, dementia
and Alzheimer's, John Domenico Pico is the UN hostage negotiators that got all the Western
hostages out of Beirut in the eighties. And he wrote a book called man without a gun.
And I acquainted with Johnny at this point in time, I don't think I don't think he has
any memory of who I am at all, but he writes in his book. Uh, uh, uh, one of the great secrets
of negotiation is exhausting the other side political negotiations that could be Johnny
was very deferential. He was in the middle of, in, in the eighties leading up to about 1986 ish,
every negotiation involving, uh, warring parties in the middle East that you can imagine.
He was in Cyprus. He was in, um, um, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The Iranian government had
tremendous, uh, trust in him as a Westerner, a representative of the UN got all the Westerners
out of, out of Beirut. And he was just ridiculously patient in which I'd found exhaust would often
find exhausting. So exhaustion is a, can't be a component of finding resolution in negotiation.
If it's, if it tamps down the negative emotions, often exhaustion will tamp down negative emotions.
And if it puts you in getting the real trick is really getting negative emotions out of,
out of, out of the way. Cause you're dumber in a negative frame of mind.
So the goal is always positive emotion. As you talk about, that's what you're always chasing
together. I think, I think so. Yeah. And that's what the that's right. It's about. Yes.
Like whatever you're triggering, whatever the chemistry you're triggering in your brain,
like, yeah, yeah. We're doing good here. Yeah. I think for long-term success. Absolutely.
How's the word fair used and abused? The F-bomb. The F-bomb as you call it. How's it used and
abused in negotiation? It's usually, uh, uh, used. It's most frequently used as a weapon.
It's abused as a point of manipulation. It's what people say when they feel backed into a corner
and they can't, um, come up with any legitimate reason as to why they're being backed into a
corner. Like nobody uses the word F the F-bomb. Nobody uses the word fair when they've got
criteria to back them up. So consequently, when somebody starts dropping it, you got to realize
the other side has got no legitimate outside criteria. They're they're feeling very vulnerable.
They can't explain it, but they feel defensive. And it saying, Hey, look, I've just, I've given
you a fair offer is a way for me to knock you off your game. If you're, if you're not,
not aware of it. So a lot of cutthroat negotiations, negotiators are going to use it on
you to knock you off your game. The, um, uh, the NFL strike probably now it's been a good 10 years
ago. Um, and maybe even longer than that. One of those sticking points was the owners were not
opening their books to the players. Players want to see the numbers. And in order to not open their
books, they just sent a rep, held a press conference saying we've given them players a fair
offer. Well, if it was fair, you'd open your books. Yeah. If, if you gave them a fair offer
and it was justified by what was in your books, you'd open them to prove your point.
So what ends up happening though, that, well, the owners gave the players a fair offer starts
to get picked up in the media and then it starts getting repeated. And now, now that different
people on a player's side are going like, yeah, maybe, maybe they have given us a fair offer. It
caused people to be insecure about their own position. It's an enormously powerful word
that can be used and abused. And it almost always comes up in every negotiation. It's
shocking the number of times it comes up with people who don't really understand
how or why it's coming up. So usually it's a signal of, uh, of a, not a good place in the,
in negotiation. Without question, I'm completely convinced that if the person is using the word
as a means of getting what they want, then either accidentally or on purpose, either in their gut,
or they know they've got a bad position or their gut is afraid that they are.
Do I use the word? What I'll say is I want you to feel like I've treated you fairly. And if
any given point in time, you think I'm not treating you fairly, I want you to stop me
and we're going to address it. Big ridiculous question, but how do you, uh, close the deal?
How do you take the, um, negotiation to its end? Is it implementation ultimately? You got to,
you got to pivot to agreed upon implementation to re to really move out and out on the negotiation.
Um, and I may say, how do you, how do you want to proceed? And if you don't know, I might say,
no, we're into question. Is it a ridiculous idea if I share with you some ideas of how to proceed
and then you agree on the actual steps and that's the implementation. It's not just
the philosophical agreement. It's actual steps. The big problem in all negotiations is a lack of
discussion of next steps. That's deep. Who is the best negotiator you've ever met?
Yeah, actually probably my son, Brandon. Yeah. Yeah. He's ridiculously talented.
I mean, he's ridiculously talented and he, yeah, he's, you know, and what was it, uh,
Coyle's book, the culture, the talent code says that, you know, people just noticed it and started
getting good at it. There's no such thing as a child prodigy. He just got interested when they
were a kid. I mean, Brandon started learning how to negotiate when he was two years old
and he's been in it and immersed in it, you know, since he can make complete sentences,
even before it can make complete sentences, he's ridiculously talented. What's, uh, what's his
future? What's he want to do? Uh, he's, uh, he has been involved. He's, he run and built my company
and now he's going to be an affiliated licensee run his own operation. He's pretty,
he's pretty much going to end up doing very much, uh, it's going to open his
entrepreneurial opportunities to do whatever he wants and not have his dad say no.
And do a better job than his dad. Most likely. Yeah. Okay.
Do you see some of the techniques that you talk about as manipulative?
Manipulation is whether or not I'm trying to exploit you or hurt you.
Um, am I trying to manipulate a bank robber into letting me save his life? Yeah.
So manipulation is like, what am I, what am I trying to do to you?
Yeah. So, but you don't see the negative connotation if you're trying to, uh, bring a
better future, it's not manipulation. Stop me. If I'm trying to bring a better future,
from being genuine and honest, like I compliment you. Yeah. If, if my compliment is genuine,
that's not manipulation. Like, but, but, you know, if I think,
you know, you're, you got a pair of shoes that are the dumbest looking things I've ever seen.
And I go, wow, those are great shoes. Now that's manipulation.
So there's, uh, there's guys like, uh, Warren buffet, who are big on integrity and honesty.
What's the role of, um, lying in effective, bad idea line is just a bad idea for a variety of
reasons. First of all, um, there's really a chance the other side is a better lie than you are.
They're going to spot it right off the bat. Yeah. Secondly, they could be luring you into a trap to
see if you will lie. Thirdly, the chances are, they're going to find out that you lied to them
eventually is really high. And then the penalties and the taxes are going to be way higher than what
you had in the first place. So long-term you want to have a reputation of somebody with integrity
and the more you lie, the harder it is to maintain that reputation. Exactly. And we're just going to
get out. Yeah. So what's the, we can just return to that question. What's the difference between
a good conversation and a good negotiation? Can we, uh, because I think just, uh, reading your
work, listening to you, there's a sense I have that the thing we're doing now and just conversation
on podcasts and so on is different than negotiation. It feels like the purpose is different.
And yet having some of the same awareness of the value of empathy is extremely important,
but it feels like the goals are different or no. Um, really close fine line. I mean, I, you know,
I, I ruled in here not having any expectations, not looking for anything other than to have an
interesting conversation and, um, to hear what was behind the questions that you were asking me
and what interests you. And then also, um, your description of silence and the power of silence,
some I'm going to take away as a, as a learning point and help learn to teach others. But I didn't
come in here. I suppose the negotiation is when we're both aware of a problem we're trying to
solve, right? There's no problem in the room, right? Just to solve, except maybe like the human
condition and insight, you know, wisdom insight, learn, how do you, uh, train to become better in
negotiating, um, in business and, um, in life? Yeah. Just small stakes practice for high stakes
results. I mean, decide what, what kind of negotiating resonates with you. I mean,
what's that mean? Small stakes practice for high stakes or smallest. It's a small little,
incremental, like picking up girls at a bar. What are we talking about?
Well, it can be, uh, for some people that's, that's high stakes practice.
Well, you know, label labeling mirrors, what are the basic tools of great negotiation,
labeling mirror and paraphrasing summarizing. So you start, you start labeling a mirror people
that you just have regular interactions with just to gain a feel for whether or not you can read
somebody's affect or how accurate your read is to get better at it. And so, you know, label the,
the Lyft driver or the grocery store clerk or a person behind the airline counter at the,
at the airport. So putting a label on their affect. Or throwing something at them that,
cause negotiation is a parable, perishable skill. Emotional intelligence is perishable.
So seeing if you can indicate that you understand their label, um, one of my favorite labels to
throw out on somebody, which, you know, maybe re-level, I might look at somebody who looks
distressed and I'll go tough day. So several years ago, um, at the counter at LAX, well,
I'm waiting in the line to get to the counter and a lady behind the counter is clearly making
it a point to not meet my eyes so that I don't approach. And she looks, and so like, you know,
you know, when you're next in line and they're making sure that you don't meet eyes
and I'm thinking to myself, all right, so they're having a bad day. So I walk up
and as soon as I approach the counter, I go tough day. And she kind of snaps around and she goes,
no, no, no. How can I help you? And goes out of her way to help me. Now I'm practicing,
but I also know it made her feel better. It relieves some of the stress. So now I'm going
through TSA. I want to look for people who are having a tough day. That's a good place to find
a good place to find them practice. And I'm, and I'm rolling through the line and I realized I
haven't tossed a label out on any one of these guys. And there's this guy watching the bags
come out of the x-ray machine and he's just kind of got an indifferent look on his face.
And I go tough day. And he kind of goes, I can see from his body language, like, no.
And I go, just another day, huh? And he goes, yeah, just another day. You know, he felt seen,
but I missed and I'm practicing and I'm trying to stay sharp. So these are the few words with
just a few words. You're trying to like quickly localize the effect and very, very, very analytically
said, thank you. I'm not letting it go. I love it.
Does the same apply to just conversation in general? Just how to get better conversation.
I think a lot of people struggle. They have insecurities. They have anxiety about conversation.
As funny as this to say, I have a lot of anxiety about conversation. Is that it basically do the
same kind of practice, practice some of the techniques. Just trying to make sure you heard
somebody out. Yeah. What's the best conversation you ever been in, except this one, of course.
Wow. I mean, not the best conversation, but what stands out to you as conversation that changed
you as a person, maybe. Well, there's probably been a lot of them along the way. I mean, but
one that I remember on a regular basis, actually there's two, but when I was in the Bureau,
I'm at Quantico. I'm there for an in-service. There's another guy from New York, a buddy of
mine named Lionel. We're both trying to decide whether or not we want to be trying to get into
profiling or negotiation because they're both about human dynamics and both of us really like
human dynamics. We're sitting around talking about it and we're talking about several things and he
labels me. I knew he didn't know what he was doing. I think he had picked it up and I'd been
talking about my family quite a few things. He said to me, and I never said this directly that
we were close, but he said to me, it sounded like your family's really close. I can remember in a
moment like this feeling, just like I felt great in the moment. I mean, what he said just drew
together everything that I'd been saying and nailed the essence of it. I have a very clear
recollection of how good that felt in the moment. A couple of years later, I'm on a suicide hotline.
Now, I got this line in the back of my head, line, technique, reaction, read, whatever you
want to call it. A guy calls in on a hotline and I could tell the dude is rattled by his tone of
voice. I mean, just amped up. He goes, I'm just trying to put a lid on the day. I need your help
putting a lid on the day. I got to put a lid on the day. I go, you sound anxious. He goes, yeah.
He came down a little bit and he was a guy that was telling me about it. He was battling
disease of paranoia. He's going to go on a car trip with his family the next day.
He knew that on the car trip, he was going to twist himself into knots. The night before,
he's twisting himself into knots. He's laying out everything that he's done to try to beat
paranoia and how much his family's helping him. He's going on a car trip with the family because
they're going to take him to see a doctor. I hit him with the same thing that my buddy Lionel said.
I said, it sounds like your family's close. He goes, yeah, we are close. He leveled out
a little bit more. Then he started ticking off all the things that he was doing to try
to beat paranoia. He sounded determined. I said, you sound determined. He goes, yeah,
I am determined. I'll be fine tomorrow. Thanks. That was all I said.
So those two conversations, which are overlapping conversations,
those two things really stick out in my mind.
Do those things like through all the different negotiations and conversations you've had,
do they echo throughout? Because when you empathize with other human beings,
you start to realize we're all the same. You can start to pick
little phrases here and there that you've heard from others, little experiences that we're all
about. We all want to be close with other human beings. We all want love. I think we're all deeply
lonely inside and looking for connection if we're honest about it. So all humans have that same,
all the same different components of, or it makes them tick. So you kind of see yourself basically
just saying the same things to connect with another human being? Yeah, there aren't that
many different things that we're looking for understanding on or connection on or satisfaction
of. There just aren't that many of them regardless. And so, yeah, you're looking for it to manifest
itself in some form or another, and you're willing to take a guess on whether or not
that's what you're seeing or hearing. What advice would you give to me to be better at
these conversations? To me and to other people that do kind of interviews and podcasts and so on?
Wow. I really care about empathy as well. Is there kind of as a lifelong journey in this process?
Yeah. Well, I would advise you to take that approach, which is the approach that you're
taking. You care about it. You're very curious about it. You see it as a lifelong journey. You're
fascinated by it. You enjoy learning about it. And you definitely do see it as a lifelong journey
as opposed to, this is what I can, if I can acquire this, then I can manipulate people.
No, I mean, I fall in love with people I talk to. There's a kind of deep connection and it
lingers with you, especially when I'm preparing. The more material there is in a person,
the more you get to fall in love with them ahead of time. You get to really understand,
not understand, but what I mean by fall in love is-
Well, appreciate, huh?
Appreciate, but also become deeply curious. That's what I mean by fall in love. You appreciate
the things you know, but you start to see like Alice in Wonderland. You start to see that there's
all this cool stuff you can learn if you keep interacting with them. And then when you show
up and you actually meet, you realize it's like more and more and more and more. It's like in
physics, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And it's like, it's really
exciting. And then it could also be heartbreaking because you have to say goodbye. Goodbye. I hate
goodbyes. I hate goodbyes.
Seems terminal, right?
Yeah. It reminds me that I'm going to die one day.
Like things end, good things end. It sucks. But then it makes the moment more delicious,
you know, that you do get to spend together.
Yeah.
Okay. I just want to, I completely forgot. I want to ask you about this, the seventh 38,
55% rule. This is really interesting. Is there at all truth to it that 7% of a message is conveyed
from the words used 38% from the tone of voice and 55% from body language? Is that really true
to that?
All right. So Albert Morabian, I think is the name of the UCLA professor that originally proposed
the 7-38-55 ratio and discussed it in terms of that it wasn't the message, but how much,
he called it liking. Like, are you, not that you're, the meaning is coming across,
but you're liking of the message. And so it's been extrapolated heavily by people like me
to this meaning of the meaning in 7-38-55 from liking to the meaning.
What I've seen regularly is people that communicate verbally, if they're speakers,
Tony Robbins, 7-38-55 guy, he throws a ratio out there.
Go, that's it exactly. That's exactly how the message comes across. This is how we got to
balance it. This is how we got to do it. Those that communicate principally in writing,
the meaning of the words are much more important to them. So they're deeply uncomfortable with
seven being the words because the content, the words, the meaning of the words when you're
writing, it's so important that you hate to poopoo it that way.
So I, first of all, a thousand percent believe it's an accurate ratio, but the real critical
issue is not what the ratio of those three things are. It's what's the message when they're out of
line. Like what's the message when the tone of voice is out of line with the words, like it
don't matter what your ratio is. You got a problem if their tone does not match their words.
And that's, that's hard to really put, uh, put a measure on exactly. Even in writing,
there's a tone. I mean, it's not just, even in writing, it's not just the words,
there's the words, but there's like a style underneath the whole thing. And there's something
like a body language, the presentation of the whole thing. I mean, there, uh, yeah,
I'm a big fan of, uh, constraint mediums of communication, which writing is, or voice,
like clubhouse. There's a personality to human being when you just hear their voice,
that there's, it's not just, it's, you could say it's the tone of voice, but there's like,
you can like, what is it? The imagination fills in the rest. Like when I'm listening to somebody,
I'm like, I'm imagining some amorphous being right. Doing things when they get angry. I'm
imagining anger. I don't know what exactly I'm visualizing. Well, and so you may think of a
funny story because we were talking about your buddy Elon before. And I told you, you know,
about, you know, that I'd interacted with some of the senior executives.
So I know that they, that they, that, that, that they love working with him.
And I think he's an interesting guy and they realize that he can be funny and he jokes around.
Yeah. So they're telling me, they're on this conference call, just words. And, uh,
a guy on the other end of the line says something, um, you know, that wasn't, wasn't, was wrong,
but wasn't bad. And so they said, they're on a phone and Elon goes, you're fired.
And then everybody in the room with him can see that he's joking.
But the person on the other side, and they're all going away, wait, wait, wait, wait. They can't
see your look on your face right now. You got to stop. You got to stop. Cause the guy on the
other side is dying right now. He doesn't realize you're joking. So there was, you know, there were
the words and the tone of voice and, but it lacked the visual to go with it. Um, nevertheless,
it was probably funny. Uh, maybe not to him. Uh, just, just as a interesting task. I don't know
if you're following along the developments of large language models. There's been something
called Chad GPT. There's just more, more and more sophisticated and effective and impressive
chat bots, essentially. They can, they can talk and they're becoming more and more human-like.
Right. Do you think it's possible, uh, in the future that AI will be able to be better
negotiators than humans? Do you think about that kind of stuff? Uh, well, so definition of better
or versus less flawed, like they're, they're, you know, they're chat bots have been out there
for a long time. And, um, probably about five years ago now, a company approached us cause
they were doing a negotiation chat bot. And they said two things. First, first of all, I said,
you know, why are you talking to us? So well, in point of fact, we already spoke to the people
that are teaching quote, the Harvard methodology and you know, the rational approach to negotiation
just doesn't work. Rational approaches does not work. It's our chat bots are not getting anywhere,
but we're showing in, in around about 80% of the interactions,
a higher success outcome with these chat bots. And they showed me what they were doing. And it
was still a lot deeply flawed, emotional intelligence wise. But the reason why that
they were having higher success rates is the chat bots were never in a bad mood and you could reach
out for a chat bot in the middle of the night. So if you were talking to somebody that was never
upset and was always available, then you're going to have a higher success rate. Negotiation is
go bad when people are in a negative frame of mind. So the pot, the natural ability,
um, of a chat bot to be positive, it's just going to give you a higher success rate. Yeah. And,
and then they're not going to get mad and argue with you. You know, you, you say,
you say to a chat bot, you know, your price is too high. Chat bot is designed to come back with
a smiley face. Yeah. You say to a person, your price is too high to go, how dare you,
I'm trying to make a living. You know, they could go off the deep end. Uh, unfortunately,
or fortunately, I think the way chat bots are going now, they will come back negative
because they're becoming more human, more and more human. Like that's the whole point
to be able to pass the touring test. You have to be negative. You have to be an asshole.
You have to have boundaries. You have to be insecure. You have to have some uncertainty.
Well, it's the difference between being, having boundaries and being negative. Like I can,
like you, you throw a proposal to me, but you know, before I say no, I'm going to say,
look, I'm sorry. That just doesn't work for me. I'm going to set up a real clear boundary
without being negative. Sure. So then a lot of people really struggle with setting boundaries
without being negative, without name calling, without indignation, without getting upset.
But see, there's a, when you are, when you show that you're not getting upset,
I'm not just seeing that. I'm seeing a flawed human that has underneath it, a temper underneath
it, the ability to get upset, but chooses not to get upset. And the chat bot has to demonstrate
that. So it's not just going to be cold and, and, uh, you know, be this kind of corporate
blank, empty sort of, uh, like vapid creature that just says, Oh, thank you.
Thank you for saying that. No, it's basically, uh, you have to be, the chat bot has to be able to be
mean and choose not to be interesting. I don't know. Maybe I'd be, I'd be willing to, to see that
to see that play out and see, see how it plays out. But I guess what I'm saying is to be a good
negotiator. You have to be, have the capacity to be a bad person and choose not to. Really?
I think so. I see. I think you just got to have the capacity to set a boundary and stick to it.
Interesting. I, cause I think it's hard for me to trust a person who's not aware of their own
demons. Because if you say you don't have any demons, if you don't have any flaws,
I can't trust you. Yeah. Well, it's, first of all, it's a lie, right? So somebody's lying.
Right. It gives back the line. Yes. So you have to have a self-awareness about that.
Uh, but you'd be able to control it and demonstrate the able to control it. I mean,
this is humans. I just think humans, intelligent, effective humans, they're able to do this well.
And chatbots are not yet. And they're moving that direction. So
it makes me think about what is actually required for effective negotiation.
That's what AI systems do is they make you ask yourself, what is it that makes humans special?
Any discipline? What is it that makes humans special? Chess and go games, which AI systems
are able to beat humans at now. What is it that makes them effective at negotiation? What is it
that makes them effective at, um, something that's extremely difficult, which is navigating
physical spaces. So doing things that we take for granted, like making yourself a cup of coffee
is exceptionally difficult problem for robots because of all the complexities involved in
navigating physical reality. We, we have so much common sense reasoning built in
just about how gravity works, about how, um, objects move, the,
what kind of objects there are in the world. It's like, it's, it's really difficult to describe
because it all seems so damn trivial, but it's not trivial because a lot of that we just learn
as babies, we keep running into things and we'll learn about that. And so AI systems help us
understand what is it that makes humans release? What is the wisdom we have in our heads? And
negotiation to me is super interesting because negotiation is not, it's about business. It's
about, uh, geopolitics. It's about running government is basically negotiating. How do we,
the different policies, different, uh, bills and programs and so on. How do we allocate money?
How do we reallocate resources, all that kind of stuff that seems like AI in the future could be
better at that, but maybe not, maybe you have to be a messy, weird, insecure, uncertain human
and debate each other and yell at each other on Twitter. Maybe you have to have the red and the
blue teams that yell at each other, um, in, in the process of figuring out what is true.
Maybe AI systems will not be able to do that. I figure out the full mess of human,
uh, of human civilization. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I mean, the, the two thoughts that I had
along the way was, I mean, anytime you're talking about systems or scaling,
you know, you're talking, my belief is chat bot systems, things that don't require decision-making
just following the instructions, at least 80% of what's going on now, the remaining percentage,
whatever it is, does it, does it require the human interaction and what's required? Like I'm not,
I'm not, I'm not like I am not pro conflict. And I also know that there's a case to be made in
the creative world that some of the best thinking came out of conflict. Um,
uh, reading interviews of Bono, U2, you know, the, their admiration for some of the Beatles
best music came when they were fighting with each other and the song one octave, which is,
I believe from the album octave baby, those guys were fighting. I mean, they were on the verge of
breaking up and their appreciation that conflict could create something beautiful. And then when
I was in the crisis negotiation unit, you know, my last seven years in the FBI, there was a guy
that, um, they Vince brilliant dude, brilliant, brilliant negotiator. And he and I used to argue
all the time. And then when we had a change in the guy who was in charge, the guy who was in charge
took me off to the side. And he's like, you know, I can't take you and Vince fighting all the time.
And I said, well, I got news for you. I think we come up with much better stuff as a result of our
battles. And he said, you know, Vince said the same thing to me. And I'm like, so if we don't
have a problem fighting, why, why do you have a problem with it? But, you know, sometimes there
is, there is something there that sometimes the most difficult insights you rack your brains as
to why someone is so dug in on something that so you think is so wrong. Yeah. Maybe there's
something to it. I think there's something to it. There's something about conflict, even drama,
that might be a feature, not a bug of our society. Oh, interesting.
Do you think there will always be war in the world? Yeah.
So there will always be a need for negotiators and negotiating. Well, as it turns out.
Why do you think there will always be war? What's your intuition about human nature there?
Yeah, just because we're basically 75% negative. And then for lack of a better term, I call it two
lines of code. Like somewhere when you, everybody, when we were little, somebody planted in two lines
into our head. We don't know when it got in there, but somebody said something to us. It stuck.
And there are a lot of people that had some really negative garbage dumped in their brain
when they were little and just based on the numbers. Yeah. What kind of opportunity they
were given afterwards? Did they ever have an epiphany moment when they genuinely believe
they can get themselves out of it? Like, what is it? One of Joe Dispenza's book is Breaking
the Habit of Being Yourself. Yeah. You know, like how do you get at that two lines of code that
that either mean or well intentioned, but stupidly speaking, adults said to you at the wrong moment
and planted in your brain. Like how the chances of everybody on earth getting that out, even the
majority of people on earth getting that out of their heads is really small. What advice would you
give to a young person today about how to have a career they could be proud of or a life? Maybe
somebody in high school, college trying to figure out their way in this world.
It's probably a take on a cliche of do what you love. But if you figure out your ideals
and pursue your ideals and stick to them when it costs you. Like a guy I admire very much,
Michael Mulgill runs this Operation Crisp video in Atlanta. In one of his talks, he would say,
core values are what you stick to that cost you money. It's not a value that really matters to
you unless it's costing you. And stick to your values. Now, when I was in the FBI,
I worked really hard at, you know, the number one core mission of the FBI is to protect and
defend the American people. So I could pursue that value at all times, which I did,
or I could follow the rules. You don't have time to do both.
When did you know you found what you love?
When did you fall in love with whatever this process is that is negotiating?
I think it was in a conversation on the suicide hotline that I was telling you about earlier with
the guy who was paranoid. When I thought I can have that significant of an impact on another
human being in this short of a period of time. That's really cool. How hard is it to talk
somebody off the ledge? So this question is a big question. Why, why the hell live at all?
Do you have that kind of deeply philosophical, deeply psychological, and also practical
conversation with somebody and convince them that they should stick around?
Well, it's more clear and clear in the clutter in their head and let them make up their own mind.
That was what volunteering on Suicide Island was really about. Just let me see how quickly I can
clear out the clutter in your head if you're willing to have it cleared out.
Like, did you call here because you're actually looking for out or did you call here to fulfill
some other agenda? So are you willing to clear the clutter in your head? Not everybody is.
So once you clear out the clutter, is it at least a somewhat hopeful chance that you'll
you'll continue for another day?
Yeah. And like, if you step back, like very few people that commit suicide
physically are up against it that hard. Like most of them by and large are pretty intact,
physically human beings. They're struggling with emotional stuff.
But it's an emotional issue. It's not a physical issue. So if you were to be a complete mercenary,
like a guy, I'm a very big fan of a guy named Mark Pollock, a born great athlete,
lost his eyesight and then became paralyzed. Like he's an emotional
leader. He's about helping people thrive and live great lives.
Like Mark was born, he was a spectacular athlete. And first he lost his sight in one eye, then he
lost his sight in the other eye. And then he fell out a window in a tragic experience. Like if there
was ever a dude that was saying like, living sucks. You know, and if there's any doubt in my
mind, something worse happens to me every few years. But Mark's about being alive and inspiring
other people. So the hard part with navigating with somebody who's tossing it in because
there's a chemical imbalance or it's the way they're interpreting the world.
There's clutter in their head. Like can you help clear that clutter in their head?
And help them by themselves, inspire them to reinterpret that world as one worth living in.
Yeah.
What do you think is the meaning of life?
Why live? What's the good reason?
Well, I have very strong religious beliefs. Spiritual. You know, I don't, a thousand percent,
if you were to try to confine me in a box, I'd be a Christian. I have tremendous respect for the
Jewish. I don't think any religion's got it nailed exactly. Again, I keep mentioning,
I'm kind of a Bono Christian. I think Bono is like what, and I'm going to butcher it, but my
belief in Jesus is what I've got after Christianity leaves the room. You know, the dogma of man's
application of spiritual beliefs. So, but that being said, I truly believe that my life was a
gift and there's a purpose here. And you know, for my creator decided that I woke up in the
morning cause he still had some cool, interesting things for me to do.
And you have gratitude for having the opportunity to live that day.
Yeah.
Well, you do one heck of a good job at living those days. I really appreciate your work. I
appreciate the person you are. Thank you for just everything you've done today for just being
empathic. Honestly, you're a great listener. You're a great conversationalist. It's just
like an honor to meet you and to talk to you. This was really awesome, Chris.
My pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Voss. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from John
F. Kennedy. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.