Stripping Off with Matt Haycox
Welcome to 'Stripping Off with Matt Haycox,' where we bare it all on business, money, and life. Get ready to peel back the layers of success with entrepreneur, investor, funding expert, and mentor with over 20 years of experience building and growing businesses, Matt Haycox.
Tune into steamy conversations with industry titans, celebrities, and successful entrepreneurs as they strip down their stories of triumphs, setbacks, and the raw realities of their journey to the top. Matt is going down on business, money, and life, and will take DMCs to new heights!
Stripping Off with Matt Haycox
FBI Negotiator’s Secret to Winning Any Conversation┃Chris Voss
Tell us what you like or dislike about this episode!! Be honest, we don't bite!
What if you could convince anyone to say yes—without them even realising it? Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference, spent decades talking down terrorists, kidnappers, and criminals. In this episode, he reveals the exact negotiation tactics that will make you more persuasive in business, relationships, and everyday life.
From high-stakes hostage situations to closing million-dollar deals, Chris breaks down the psychology of influence, why compromise is a losing strategy, and how your emotions can make or break a negotiation. If you’ve ever wanted to negotiate like an FBI agent—this is your masterclass.
🎧 Listen now to learn the secret FBI techniques that will give you the upper hand in any deal.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro
0:39 - From Cop to FBI: Chris Voss’ Journey
3:57 - The FBI vs. Local Law Enforcement: Who Has the Power?
8:12 - How Chris Voss Became an FBI Negotiator
13:41 - The Evolution of Hostage Negotiation & What Really Happens
21:20 - Why Hostage Negotiators Never Let Criminals Escape
23:14 - The Most Intense Cases & The Psychological Toll of Negotiation
25:24 - Understanding Terrorists: How Extremist Groups Operate
32:18 - Why Chris Voss Left the FBI & His New Mission
42:25 - Business vs. Hostage Negotiation: What Works in Both Worlds
45:24 - The Power of Fear: How Loss Drives Every Decision
52:21 - The Art of Persuasion: How to Win Any Negotiation
55:56 - The Dark Side of Negotiation: Manipulation vs. Influence
01:00:10 - Why “Splitting the Difference” is a Bad Negotiation Strategy
01:04:12 - Hidden Information: The Key to Negotiation Success
01:07:06 - Chris Voss’ Most Unexpected Negotiation Wins & Lessons
01:14:20 - How to Negotiate Like an FBI Agent
01:20:06 - The Negotiation Tactics of Donald Trump
01:23:30 - Final Thoughts & Where to Find Chris Voss
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Who Is Matt Haycox? - Click for BADASS Trailer
Are you ready to unlock your full potential and take your business to the next level? I’m Matt Haycox—entrepreneur, investor, mentor, and your go-to guy for no-bollocks advice on business and personal growth.
With over 25 years of experience building and funding businesses across industries, I’ve faced it all—wins, losses, and the ultimate comeback story. Through my podcasts, No Bollocks with Matt Haycox and Stripping Off with Matt Haycox, I cut through the bullshit to bring you real, actionable strategies and raw conversations with entrepreneurs, celebrities, and industry leaders.
Whether you’re looking to scale your business, secure funding, or avoid the mistakes I’ve learned the hard way, my goal is simple: to help YOU create YOUR success story.
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Ready to make moves? Let’s go—your success starts here.
It ain't easy to live with. I've had hostages get killed. I worked enough cases. You're successful about 93, 94% of the time.
Speaker 2:All right, guys, this episode is going to change the way that you do business forever. Think about this If you don't know how to negotiate, you're getting screwed in every single deal, every contract and every conversation. But maybe you just don't even realize it. And today I've got the world's leading expert in negotiation, the man behind the best selling playbook used by top CEOs and dealmakers worldwide with nearly 1 million followers and, by the way, that book has sold over 5 million copies. There's 1 million followers hanging on to his every word.
Speaker 2:This guy is Chris Ross. He's the ex FBI hostage negotiator, he's the best-selling author of Never Split the Difference and he's a guy who has negotiated with terrorists, with kidnappers and with high stakes criminals and he's won. But here's the thing he's taken these same skills and he's turned them into the ultimate playbook for business, sales and deal making. So if you think you know how to close a deal, you're probably doing it wrong. And if you think negotiation is about haggling on price, that is why you're leaving money on the table. By the end of this episode, you're going to know the number one mistake that people make in negotiations how to get anyone yes, anyone to say yes without them even realizing it and why compromise is the worst thing that you can do in business. Trust me, this is not just another business chat. This is an absolute fucking masterclass in getting what you want. Let's get into it, guys.
Speaker 2:Matt Haycox here for a podcast episode. I am super, super excited, for we tried to get this in a few months back. It got delayed, but it is undoubtedly worth the wait. I've got Chris Voss in the house ex-FBI negotiator, author of the very famous book Don't Split the Difference.
Speaker 1:Never split the difference.
Speaker 2:You did that on purpose so I had to say never right, never split the difference Trainer, author, speaker, and we've been talking a little bit before we came on camera. All around great guy, and I'm super, super excited for the stories and the learnings that are going to come from today. So, Chris, thanks a lot for finding the time for us while you're in Dubai.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm grateful to be here. I really am.
Speaker 2:Listen, I guess from a business perspective for my audience you know we're going to be excited to talk about the negotiating side of things, but I think also for setting the scene. And from a personal perspective, I'm really fascinated by your earlier life and the, I guess, your time in the FBI, the hostage negotiation. I'm thinking out loud now about some hostage movies I've watched, you know, Samuel L Jackson, what's that movie called?
Speaker 1:It's called the Negotiator, isn't it the Negotiator? Yes, Great film.
Speaker 2:Some of these movies, which I'm always fascinated to know if that's what it's really like in real life. But take us back a bit in your journey to how you ended up in the FBI and how you got into the negotiation side of things.
Speaker 1:Well, from about mid-teens I wanted to be in law enforcement, saw a movie that I was inspired by the Super Cops about a couple of police officers in New York City that were wildly innovative, had a great time, threw a lot of bad guys in jail. It really resonated with me, their creativity and how much fun they had. And in hindsight one of the things I realized that also resonated. You know, they were mavericks, they were very entrepreneurial and I ended up loving that. You know, sort of carving my own path, if you will. And to be entrepreneurial in a bureaucracy is difficult, whether it be corporate bureaucracy or government bureaucracy. I'm stumbling over my words, sorry, but yeah, just very entrepreneurial. So then I wanted to be a cop. Ended up a police officer, kansas City, missouri. My father was disappointed that I was only a cop. You know, I didn't think it was only, I thought it was an honorable thing. But he wanted to get me interested in federal law enforcement. Figured it was a step up. You know whether or not it is, you know that's the way he saw. It Introduced me to this guy from the Secret Service.
Speaker 1:I grew up in Iowa, in a small town in Iowa. I'd never been anywhere Like where I grew up in iowa, in a small town in iowa. I'd never been anywhere like where I grew up. Crossing into illinois, you know, crossing a river and crossing state lines, that was a big deal for me. So the secret service guy says you know, I travel all over the world with the secret service. And I remember just going like wow, wow, you got a job where somebody pays for you to go all over the world. So uh, I got interested. Secret service was not hiring, the fbi was. I didn't know the difference. You know the federal alphabet soup. You know fbi, dea, cia didn't, fda, didn't know any of those. But put in for the bureau at the time the bureau was hiring.
Speaker 1:So I got in, got on the SWAT team Pittsburgh, moved to New York, tried to get on to another SWAT team, the Tier 1 hostage rescue team, re-injured myself my knee, you know, had a reconstructive surgery on my knee for the second time and realized they couldn't do that very many times. So we had hostage negotiators. Always went out with SWAT. I thought, yeah, I could do that. How hard could it be? Took me a while to get in, had to jump through some hoops, but finally got into it and found out. It was far more satisfying than SWAT and I love SWAT, but hostage negotiation was far more satisfying and challenging and fun than SWAT ever was.
Speaker 2:Just before we talk hostage negotiation. Then you mentioned Secret Service, FBI and, I guess, normal police.
Speaker 1:That makes FBI abnormal. I go with that. I resemble that remark.
Speaker 2:But I imagine there's, let's say, political differences between the two, between the different departments, in the way that the Army hate the Navy and the Navy hate the Air Force and all that. But what are the material differences? And I especially ask this as, let's say, an English person, where we don't have these things. I mean, what does the FBI do that the police don't? Or? Or? Or local police force don't? You know how? How do the different forces end up doing different crimes?
Speaker 1:yeah right, well, um, the fbi really started to gather momentum in the uh 20s, principally in the 20s, when the us actually had a kidnap problem and so all the local law enforcement, they all had their separate jurisdictions. They didn't cross state lines and it was a lot of crime that was developing that crossed state lines and nobody had the jurisdiction to deal with it. So there was, you know, however, the wisdom was that developed out of Washington at the time, j.
Speaker 2:Edgar.
Speaker 1:Hoover, who's more infamous than famous. But he had the vision for the FBI being sort of a cross-border, cross-state law enforcement agency to have the ability to cross state lines. Originally they built it around laws involving interstate commerce, so it was really interstate crime, which then made it more adaptable for what would ultimately be organized crime of any kind. So the FBI was originally designed to be kind of a coordinating agency. Now they worked in have always worked in competition with local law enforcement mostly Different violations. Local law enforcement enforces state and local laws. The FBI is supposed to enforce federal law Like, for example, murder is not a federal crime. However, if you're murdering within a criminal enterprise, then the criminal enterprise across the state lines makes it a federal crime.
Speaker 2:Or serial killing in different states.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so then, as the world has evolved, really the best law enforcement are task forces. There are task forces in nearly every FBI office, where it's the feds and the locals working together to solve the crimes, and then everybody's bringing to the table what they're really best at. You know, when I was in the Bureau, a lot of times we would say the locals own the streets, we rent them.
Speaker 2:And do the FBI kind of outrank, from a jurisdictional perspective, the state police, because, again, when we watch the movies, the state police are there around the perimeter. And then you, you know, you see the, the Cadillac appear and the and the FBI get out and the local police go. Oh fuck, it's just, you know the FBI you know it's like this is our jurisdiction. Fuck you.
Speaker 1:This is our jurisdiction well, a lot of that happens on a regular basis. You get competitive locally but but technically federal law supersedes state law, but in point of fact you got to collaborate to get stuff done.
Speaker 2:I mean Best man for the job, best situation for the situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then you know, like the first terrorist task force was in New York City where I was assigned, and it started because there were terrorist bombings in New York City and there were great FBI investigators and there were great NYPD detectives showing up at crime scenes seeing each other at the other side of the crime scene going like I keep seeing you, I keep seeing you. Maybe at some point in time we ought to join forces. We'll be better off together. And I don't know how many task forces there were for what crimes, but kind of the original it was actually the Bank Robbery Task Force in New York and then the Terrorist Task Force and it was so successful collaborating with state and local that it ultimately spread to offices all across the US and the best squads in any FBI agent has got local cops on it.
Speaker 2:Hey, matt, here just interrupting myself to say can you believe that 62% of listeners to this podcast don't actually subscribe? Now, I know you like it because you listen to it, you come back and the stats are great, but 62% of you don't actually subscribe. So make sure you subscribe, whether that's on YouTube, spotify, itunes, wherever you listen to your content or watch your content, and make sure that you never miss a future episode. So one of the things.
Speaker 2:Again, I'm talking from movies here, so it might be laughable to you but one of the things we always see in the movies is when you've got a case as an FBI person, this agent, they live and breathe the case. They never seem to go to bed. It's like one single case.
Speaker 2:It's consuming their life. I, you know they never seem to go to bed. It's like one single case. It's consuming their life. I mean, is that what it's like? Or are you running multiple cases at any one time? And you know people, fbi agents, or you know they never seem to be able to hold down relationships because they're always wedded to the case and working you know, working eight days a week? I mean, is is, does that kind of stuff happen or is it just yeah, I'm dipping into this, I'm dipping into that now for those of us.
Speaker 1:You know our desire to make a great case and it wasn't everybody in your bureau, a lot of guys, a lot of guys, you know nine to five evenings or weekends off, but some of us would get obsessed and yeah, it was very hard on personal life. Like people have asked my son you know, because my accomplishments as an fbi they were pretty good. I won the Attorney General's Award, made some participative co-case agent in landmark terrorist cases.
Speaker 2:What did you get?
Speaker 1:the Attorney General Award for it was right after the World Trade Center bombing in 93. It was several cells of, you know, al-qaeda related terrorists in and around New York and then a competing cell. They were colleagues with the guys that hit the Trade Center. They decided, in order to outdo their colleagues, they were going to blow up four locations simultaneously. They were going to assassinate a couple of political leaders, I mean, and they wanted to hit the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, the New York FBI office, 26 Federal Plaza and the UN simultaneously.
Speaker 1:And we stopped all of that and tried them in civilian court and then ended up. It was a very creative prosecution Southern District of New York. They used a Civil War law that was still on the books and to prosecute them as a criminal enterprise. And then we ended up also locking up the imam that had blessed all the activities. Legitimate imam, but from their perspective the guy had legitimate credentials and in order to do the crime their rules were they needed a blessing from two people. They needed a religious blessing and then the local emir, whoever was a tactical influence. They needed his blessing too. And so we locked them all up, got the Attorney General's award for that, prosecuted them in civilian court, not Guantanamo Bay military court stuff, successful terrorist prosecution in a civilian court, and myself and my co-case agent we got the Attorney General's Award for that.
Speaker 2:Amazing.
Speaker 1:And we did get obsessed, like people would ask my son you know what was it like? You know, first your dad's locking up terrorists in New York and then he's working international kidnappings all over the world saving people's lives how was that? And he was like it wasn't cool at all. Dude was never home. You know, it was really hard on him and it was uh, it was also hard on the woman who was then Mrs Voss, who no longer is. So yeah, sometimes you get obsessed at work and you're never home and it is really hard on the people in your life.
Speaker 2:And how did you move into the hostage negotiation side of things?
Speaker 1:Well, when I was in New York working terrorism, I had been on the SWAT team and, for a variety of knee injury reasons, I decided to take a shot at being a negotiator.
Speaker 2:It looked like any verbal communication if you're good at it, but did they have training for it specifically? Oh, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, it's sort of a combination of volunteer selection and luck. You tell whoever's in charge of the team in your division you want to be on, do they select you as a potential, and by what criteria? And then the training academy at Quantico has to give your division, you know, an opportunity to go train. So even if the head of the team wants you on the team, if Quantico doesn't give you a training slot, you don't get trained. And so I went to the head of the team and she rejected me appropriately, because I was completely, eminently unqualified. And so then I said how do I get qualified? She said well, you know, based on your experience, really, the only thing you could do is go volunteer at a suicide hotline, which I did, which was a phenomenal experience. Basically, it was teaching emotional intelligence under intense circumstances, but it was just emotional intelligence. And I was so taken with the ability to influence, with what we now call empathy, which isn't sympathy or compassion. I'm like you know, this stuff, you could work this, this might work everywhere, and in point of fact it does. And so because I did that, I got the next training slot.
Speaker 1:A couple of good things, serendipity. I negotiated a bank robbery with hostages, which you know, like the Samuel training slot. A couple of good things, serendipity. I negotiated a bank robbery with hostages which, you know, like the Samuel Jackson movie, happens all the time in the movies and in real life. It's rare Like there hadn't been a bank robbery with hostages that were negotiated out for 20 years in New York, when it happened to me, you know, you think it happens every day?
Speaker 1:It does not, and so, you know, I continued to pursue it. I loved it. I ended up running all of our international kidnapping operations and then, when the time came, I left.
Speaker 2:And I've read your book and I believe I can't remember the exact story. But at the beginning of the book you talk about a reason, a reason where, uh, the negotiation um hostage negotiation training came in. I want to say there was an airplane that um where hostages got killed and and the oh and the police stormed, or the fbi or the police stormed the plane. What was that story?
Speaker 1:yeah, that was you know it originally started? Um, uh, there was an incident in the 70s. Well, it originally started. There was an incident in the 70s and the Bureau didn't have hostage negotiators. There were some locally. It really starting hostage negotiation in the US is attributed to NYPD in about 1972, before the Bureau had it and then there was sort of a domestic dispute, hijacking that happened in an airport. The Bureau was responding because it was an airport and it ended up being a bit of a debacle and people got killed and most of the time law enforcement governments don't actually change until there's, you know, a disaster of some sort.
Speaker 1:So the Bureau decided they needed hostage negotiators, actually went to NYPD. They had the guys that started the negotiation program and the Bureau were profilers. One of them, a guy who's now deceased, became a friend, tom Strentz. Tom wrote several interesting books, one of them entitled the Mad, the Bad and the Sad, and Tom is a profiler. They connected with NYPD and said what are you guys doing? And you know, the Bureau just damn near stole the whole program from NYPD and Tom was never hit it. What NYPD was doing was so good and such a well-thought-out program that when they collaborated on it, you know, tom, always Tom Strentz always teased Frank Boltz, the guy Boltz who started it with NYPD like, yeah, you know what we stole everything you guys came up with, because you know you don't be afraid of somebody else's idea. I mean, just don't, don't care where you learn. Everybody learned from somebody else. I learned all this stuff from somebody else. So yeah, that's how the Bureau got into it. They borrowed from the best.
Speaker 2:Hey, matt, here Just interrupting myself quickly to say thank you for listening to no Bollocks. But did you also know I've got another podcast, stripping Off, with Matt Haycox, very different? No Bollocks is the quick daily business tactics that you need, but Stripping Off, we go deep, deep, deep with a CEO, with a celebrity, with an athlete, with just an international inspiring character. We find out what makes them tick, we find out how they got to where they got to and we find out how you can learn and benefit from them too. So jump on over to spotify, itunes, youtube, wherever you listen to your content, and I'll see you on a future episode. So let's I mean let's talk about some specific hostage negotiations, because I guess one of the things I can never get my head around is it's a call it a bank robbery you've got a bank robbery.
Speaker 2:You've got the um the criminals in there this.
Speaker 1:You're thinking about some supplemental income here.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, this will be the bit we cut from the episode just in case it uses evidence. So bank robbery's on and the whatever you want to call them the kidnappers or robbers they're in there, They've taken charge of the bank and they've got the money they want to get out.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And they've got the hostages, but a couple of hostages have died.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You are there obviously to negotiate the next best outcome for the situation.
Speaker 2:I say next best because there's already a couple of people dead. But as one of the kidnappers, as one of the robbers of the bank, I can't get my head around how I would ever be interested to torture you, because I know that if I get caught I'm the rest of my life in jail or death penalty or whatever, because I've not only robbed a bank, I've fucked up and there's people died. So I mean, okay, you could say, look, you'll keep me alive. But do I really want to be alive and in prison for the rest of my life? Probably not, you know. I mean how? How does that negotiation play out?
Speaker 2:and I'm right I want a helicopter, I want a clear path to a, to a desert island, and 16 pizzas waiting for me. When I come out the door I mean, like, do I really believe it's going to happen?
Speaker 1:well, the first issue is whether or not anybody's died or gotten hurt before the negotiations start, or at all. Okay, because somebody's death is clearly a turning point in what they're looking at long term. Now the crazy thing is and the reality is like, when you go to jail you don't know when you're going to get out. I mean, you just don't know, regardless of what crime you've committed. A good friend of mine, a guy I hold in very high esteem, is a guy named Andre Norman who was convicted of attempt to homicide eight times.
Speaker 2:And Andre says it ain't Eight separate times.
Speaker 1:Eight separate times he said it ain't my fault, they didn't die Like he was a bad bad guy. He was a black guy, prison gang leader. He was number three guy in the state. It's really interesting how organized in a prison system, across prisons, prison gangs are. So you can be the number three guy in a state and it could be 20 prisons in the state and you're in charge of all of them as a bad guy, in charge of your crime.
Speaker 1:And Andre decided that he was going to get out when he never should have got out, but he took the steps that was necessary to get himself out to redeem himself. So, in point of fact, why am I driving at this? No matter what you go to jail for, unless you kill 20 people, you don't know how long you're going to be there. So, with that being a reality in the US, that's part of the negotiation for the bad guy on the inside, a bank robbery that I negotiated, there were some minor injuries among the hostages which we did not know about until after. We talked everybody out, but nobody did the kind of jail time you would have expected.
Speaker 2:Well, because you were making assurances to them that you actually had the power to deliver on them.
Speaker 1:Do not make those assurances at all. Okay, like first of all, in a bank. If they're talking to you at all, then the idea of living appeals to them. Then, depending upon what the demands are, you know how, but I assume the demands are.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to hurt any hostages, but I want to get away from this to somewhere you're not going to find me and keep the money well, in point of fact, if they, if they make a demand for escape, that's a clear signal they want to live like if and there's such a thing called suicide by cop. Now they may get you on the phone, but they may not demand to escape. Now you got a problem because living is not in their head. So escape demand is really good news. Like escape demand is like ah cool, all right, it's just a matter of time. We're not letting them out.
Speaker 1:Eventually, reality is going to sink in and they've already told us that long-term survival is the primary concern. So now there's a discussion, the reality, of how long is it going to be for long-term survival, how much jail time you're going to do. And, point of fact, just because you caught them in a bank doesn't mean you're going to convict them. If they plead, they're looking at less time. What are the sentencing guidelines? Did anybody get hurt? How badly did they get hurt? Now there's an overall discussion of how much time you're going to do and if your basic instinct to live is there, and I'm going to know that in the first 10 minutes. Now we're going to try to minimize the amount. I'm not going to make any promises, but the reality is now. It's a discussion of minimizing your jail time.
Speaker 2:I know this may sound like a potentially stupid question, but depending on the quantum of, let's say, the hostages and what's going on in there, is there ever any perspective, any let's say scenario where they are getting out of that bank?
Speaker 1:no, you, you got in the us.
Speaker 2:You could never let that happen. There's I don't know, there's whatever. There's 50 bank, 50 hostages in there, me and my three co-conspirators, and I'm like, right, I'm not going to harm any hostages, but you know I need it because you see on the movies again, this is where my conversation is coming from. You know, I want a car and a clear path to an airfield, right, is that all?
Speaker 1:that's never happening well, yeah, and here's why you didn't. Law enforcement was not responsible for putting those hostages in harm's way. This is not a scenario that we created now. We showed up to try to minimize loss of life, but we didn't start it. We let the bad guy out. We now have people in harm's way that weren't before, and law enforcement is culpable for that. So we let this guy out to save 50, and on the way to the airport, wherever he's going, he kills one. That's on us.
Speaker 2:So whenever you see on the movies going, he kills one. That's on us. So so whenever you see on the movies, you know them on the way to the airfields and that's just total bullshit, that's just, that's just for the movies. That right you.
Speaker 1:You never, then you never let them get past that front door of the bank if you, if they come to the car, the original sort of movie, one of the things that's uh started hostage negotiation for the us. Not the only thing, but one of them.
Speaker 1:Dog Day Afternoon, al Pacino film from the early 1970s, and this was before they had hostage negotiators. Bureau didn't have them. I don't think the PD had them either, so they got people there talking to them that are not negotiators. They did allow them to come to what they thought was an escape car in front of the bank because they were gonna kill him in the car. But that car ain't moving.
Speaker 2:Right, and what were some of your biggest wins in your hostage days?
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah Well, the bank robbery with hostages domestically Chase Manhattan Bank. We got everybody out. Bad guys all went to jail, worked some smaller stuff, got involved in a barricade in Dobbs Ferry where the school teacher was accused improperly of inappropriate contact with a student, a young teenage female student. They were good friends and to my knowledge there was no inappropriate contact, but it looked bad and so he barricaded himself and helped talk him out. I mean, kept the guy from killing himself who was on the verge. A lot of it is crisis intervention. You can keep somebody from killing themselves. You know that's a win. A lot of it is crisis intervention. Then advised on some domestic cases across the country and then when I started working kidnappings not not everybody got out, but my job was, if we could get them out, to try to get them out sooner and minimize the damage to the families that were supporting the hostages do you um?
Speaker 2:do you take losses very personally or do you get to compartmentalize it because it's business?
Speaker 1:It ain't easy to live with, one of the most sobering moments actually for me, because I've had hostages get killed. I worked enough cases. You're successful about 93, 94% of the time, which means once you get past 10, just based on the numbers of the time, which means once you get past 10. Just based on the numbers. You know your numbers coming up at some point and I worked about 150 cases. So there were people that got killed. Some al-qaeda killed a bunch of people in a short period of time. All we could do was try to minimize the damage and yeah it wears on you.
Speaker 1:But at some point in time you realize it wasn't your dad, it wasn't your brother, wasn't your family member and as much as it might hurt you, you got nothing on what it hurt the family. It was blood relatives and that moment is a little sobering.
Speaker 2:I mean you mentioned Al Qaeda a couple of times. I mean I would imagine you know, groups like that, organizations like that, must be very difficult from a negotiations perspective because I mean they really my assumption would be, they don't give a fuck about living or dying, they're there for the cause, they're there for the mission.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what everybody thinks. Not true, there's a difference between being willing to die and wanting to die, which is actually, fascinatingly enough. It's a management problem that terrorist groups have because they recruit people for suicide missions. You know they try to get them all, you know, enthusiastic the way you will at any religious revival.
Speaker 1:You know get everybody excited, get them jumping up and down, you know, get them willing to give their lives for the cause, you know. And that that the spirit wears off, especially when, yeah, I'm willing to die until somebody's actually faced with the prospect of dying and and the terrorists know that that's a problem.
Speaker 1:So you never know. You you'd be surprised at the point of decision, the number of bad guys that think to themselves. You know, maybe this isn't such a good idea and you know that's why you reach out to them. There was a, there was a siege in a school in, uh, in a russian republic, former soviet republic back in. I don't know when it was. Well, it was quite obviously after the Soviet Union broke up and you got all these terrorism pundits saying like, yeah, these guys, you know they're there to die. Well, when the assault came on that school, fully a third of the quote suicidal bad guys on the inside made a run for it.
Speaker 2:So that's enough to want to engage in conversation and find out if a third of them aren't really going to go down with the ship you might want to call inside, find out which third that is it's funny I'd never really thought about it in these terms until we're having this conversation, where there's me thinking I've got enough trouble trying to get my staff to work past 5 pm and these guys have hired people to uh, to take their own lives. And when it comes, down.
Speaker 1:They're not prepared to do it. You know how many guys in al-qaeda just want the t-shirt they think it's a way to get chicks you know I got status. Now I got a t-shirt. You know popular in the neighborhood, I don't have to die.
Speaker 2:So how did you end up leaving the fbi and why um?
Speaker 1:serendipity. You know, when I left, when I left, I left new york because there was a senior manager in new york that didn't like people, that was entrepreneurial as I was. You know, in hindsight I have described myself as a loose cannon that always hit the target. And so if you're my boss, you know you get some surprise phone calls in the middle of the night. It's always good news, but it's always a surprise. And the guy that was running things terrorism in New York at that time didn't like surprises, he didn't care what they were, he just he didn't like them. So the negotiation unit were he just he didn't like him. So the negotiation unit, gary Nessner uh, they've been. He'd been trying to get me to come down and to apply. You know I had to apply, had to get promoted, been trying to get me to come down for a while and I thought, you know this guy here in New York doesn't like me. Uh, I love New York. I there's a point in time that I envisioned finishing my career there. But I thought, you know, this door is clearly slammed in my face and this one over here is open. I'm going to go down there. And I went down and it was phenomenal. I got to go on adventures that I never imagined.
Speaker 1:So a few years later, somebody my immediate supervisor and I didn't see eye to eye on operational administration, anything that was going on. We didn't see eye to eye, and this dude was in charge. I mean, he has a right to make those calls. You know, I believe I like the thought that everybody has a mutual right to say no, and for you to say no to that, that means you got to move on and I was close to eligible to retirement. I remember thinking, well, the last time I had a boss that didn't like how I did things and I left, my life got exponentially better. So I'm like, oh awesome, you know, god, the universe, whatever, is telling me time to go. We got something better for you telling me time to go. We got something better for you. Hit the door and I did and it was perfect. I mean phenomenally great things happened to me. That would only happen if I left when I left.
Speaker 2:And where did you go straight into after leaving? Did you go into the corporate side of things at that point? No, not right away.
Speaker 1:I had been eyeing a there was a degree that you could get at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. You there was a degree that you could get at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. You could get a master's degree in one year, and they were bringing people in that had significant enough life experience that they could qualify you with all the academic credentials of what would normally take two years. If you came down and you were a full-time student for one year and I'd run across this program before and the people that were in it it I was blown away at how experienced they were and how sharp they were. And so I knew about the program and I and I'd been eyeing it for a while and it would had been my plan at when I left the bureau. I wanted to do that and so I thought well, look, let me go do this Harvard thing. And I and I did, and I was there for a year and that was in the depths of the recession. The 2007-2008 reception was when I got out of that Went in, the economy was roaring and it looked like there was no end of opportunities just before I started that program. And we were about to hit the depths of reception.
Speaker 1:When I finished, with nowhere to go, I turned around and went back to DC. And then opportunity to teach witha friend, john Richardson gave me the opportunity to teach alongside with him at Harvard, came back co-taught, john carried me through that and gave me full credit. And then I had a teaching credential from Harvard. And then turned around and opportunity fell out of the sky at Georgetown. They said where have you taught? Well, I just taught at Harvard, and Georgetown is like where I'm living. I used to fly back and forth to Harvard to teach up there and John made it easy for me to do that because the fee didn't cover transportation and hotel. So he said look, come, stay at Sheila and I's house and you don't have to pay for hotels. So the thing turned up at Georgetown and then I started teaching, recreated the approach to teaching, made my students use hostage negotiation skills in their businesses and they all achieved levels of success they hadn't achieved before.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of how that happened well, I obviously want to move on to talking about the talk about the tactics and the skills, but you made me think of something that we can't exit from before we say you talked about the fact that your bosses were always getting uh getting surprise calls about um about what you know, what you did tell.
Speaker 2:Tell me a maverick story or two then, about, uh, about. You know something that got you the result that was the right result, but that you know pissed off or or shook the powers that be well, they always got shook a little bit, but um it was.
Speaker 1:It was either the third or fourth kidnapping. I worked in the Philippines, a 17-year-old.
Speaker 2:Physically in the Philippines.
Speaker 1:Kidnapping in the Philippines. But since the communication is largely over the phone, it don't matter where your phone is.
Speaker 2:Oh, so you're calling from the US to the Philippines?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, at the time, well, coaching, because kidnapping international kidnapping is about coaching someone who appears to be an innocent, which is going to be a family member, a friend. Usually a family member could be a friend, could be a colleague. Bad guys don't know. You're there, all you need to do is find somebody that's coachable. They're going to give the family friend, the colleague, a lot of latitude because they think they're talking to somebody that you know is new to the game and you can coach them behind, and if they're coachable, then that's the best way to influence the outcome.
Speaker 1:So this uh filipino youngster is staying with his grandma in the philippines, which is pretty common for a lot of filipino um families, um, mom and dad may have to work so hard that a lot of kids are raised by grandpa or grandma, and so it's acceptable and it works, and families living in the US. But because of this tradition you know the kids in the Philippines, a little more dangerous area he gets snatched. Grandma's a tough chick and'd make demands of ransom on her and she's like I ain't paying. She's calling her bluff, tough, tough woman and I'm sure that at some point in time she'd have stepped up if necessary, if she'd have sensed the bad guys were desperate enough.
Speaker 2:How did you get involved?
Speaker 1:Well, he's an American citizen. He was born in the US and his family's in Florida. So we start coaching a family in Florida. You know I got a hostage negotiation team out of the Florida Orlando division. They know me, I know them, I trust them. They're working their investigations in the daytime. Kidnapping's on the other side of the world, which is the other side of the clock, so they're coaching the negotiations overnight and then I'm coaching them from DC. Now we start running into some static on the approach both from FBI headquarters and a local office in the Philippines. One of the underlings in the Philippines office doesn't like what we're doing. I happen to be personal friends with the guys ahead of the office. He's given everybody some latitude. Kidnapping is getting a little bit rough. The guys I'm coaching out of the Orlando division are scared because they're headquarters guys that are mad at them. And finally I realize we're starting to cut this really close. Bad guys are getting upset. We're going to have to send some bait money downrange to get the kid out Bait money.
Speaker 2:What do you mean by bait money? Well, it's like in a bank.
Speaker 1:You give a bank teller bait money so the bank teller doesn't get shot.
Speaker 2:It's real money, it's real money.
Speaker 1:It's marked money. The bad guy gets some money and doesn't shoot the bank teller and leaves the bank. And then, if the dye pack doesn't explode which it should, but the money's still marked, you got the serial numbers and money's ridiculously easy to trace. So you want to do a bait money thing to get the hostage out and the headquarters. People are pushing back on this and I realize and the guys in florida get a little bit scared because you know I'm just a voice on the phone, five hour flight away. So I realized I gotta, I gotta go down and I gotta shove this thing through personally.
Speaker 1:And uh, five o'clock in the morning my boss gets a phone call uh, waking, wake me waking saying I'm getting on a plane. I didn't ask to go to Florida, I just went and got on a plane. But he trusted me, he had latitude, he knew that, I knew what I was doing. I said I'm getting on my plane, I'm going down to Florida, we're going to shove this thing through, this thing's going to go down today. He's like, okay, and we went down. We had pushed the bad guys into a minimal amount of bait money. The payment was made, the youngster got out on his 17th birthday. We flew him back to the US, celebrated his birthday with his family, and Philippine National Police did a follow-on investigation, caught the bad guys on down the line. Amazing, it's a good case, but you know if I was, working for you.
Speaker 2:You'd bad guys on down the line.
Speaker 1:Amazing. It's a good case, but you know, if I was working for you, you'd get those calls in the middle of the night. Like hey this is what's going on.
Speaker 2:Well, let's move into the world of business, or I say business, I guess maybe negotiation in general. I mean, are the parallels of negotiation in all different sectors the same, you know, when you're negotiating, uh, in the fbi for hostages, or in a bank, or when you're negotiating a multi-billion dollar corporate deal, when, a when, a dad is trying to get his kid to go to bed on time? I mean, is it, is it the same principles that sit behind all of this?
Speaker 1:The absolutely crazy thing is is that human beings make up their minds along the same principles, regardless of the situation. You know. More pressure just makes you more intensely stick to however you make decision making and there's some basic principles that, no matter who you are, it's how you make up your mind. A lot of them is how does it affect how you see your identity?
Speaker 2:there's well as in. If I say yes to this, does this make me look like a pussy?
Speaker 1:right, yeah, or if I say yes to us, is this lead to a trap? So you know, maslow's hierarchy of needs makes a big deal out of survival, but autonomy is what is really more important to survival as a human being, because you'll die over your autonomy. There isn't, there isn't a, there isn't a civilization, there isn't a country, there isn't a tribe in the history of mankind that was content in slavery. Every one of them was willing to die trying to get out. That's autonomy.
Speaker 1:And then, after your autonomy, agency. How can I affect my future? Am I involved in what my future looks like, in my vision of the future? Again, again, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter your gender, your ethnicity, your religion, nothing. That's the way human beings make up their mind. Autonomy and agency first. What am I doing? What does it mean about who I am? What does it mean about where my life's going? Then, as I think about agency, daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for behavioral economics in 2002 over something called prospect theory, and one of the essential elements is loss stings twice as much as an equivalent gain. What?
Speaker 2:does that mean Like gamblers, for example, the prospect of winning 10 grand is much less exciting than the pain of losing five grand or something?
Speaker 1:Right. Or once you start losing, you're hooked Because that loss plays heavily on your mind and so you keep throwing bad money after good, because losing that $5 felt like losing 10. So you got to double down. I mean, that's the way hustlers hustle people, you know get them to double down. A hustler will let you win a little bit, so you get hungry, but then they start losing. You start losing. A hustler intentionally lose to you once or twice and then they up their game so that you lose by the smallest margin, but that loss eats at you. It's so close. Then they get you to double down and double down and they clean you out over how badly those losses stung and how badly you wanted to get them back. That's the way human nature works.
Speaker 1:The fear of loss is not the only thing that affects your decision making, it's just the biggest. I heard a salesperson quote to me a statistic I don't know the source, but that 70% of buy decisions the decision to buy something 70% are to avoid losses. Not to accomplish gains, but to avoid a loss. What do you do when you're buying insurance, protecting yourself from loss? All the data out there says that it's cheaper to be self-insured, whatever your insurance costs you. If you take that same premium and put it in your bank account on a regular basis, the losses will be less expensive than what you saved.
Speaker 1:Nobody self-insures, but self-insurance, in point of fact, by the numbers, is the smartest way to go, because we fear loss and some insurances you know could be catastrophic. So, yeah, we buy the insurance, but it also plays on the fear of loss. So, humans, whether you're taking hostages or negotiating a merger, what do you stand to lose in your brain is going to affect the outcome more than anything else, which is why some salespeople and some hustlers are really good at manipulating people, because they find a way to gently get the fear of loss in somebody's head and then they can clean them out. Just, they convince themselves they're trying to avoid that loss. So you wrap your minds around around it. Now you got. You got a key to the single biggest influencer in human decision making so are you.
Speaker 2:Do you think, then, it's possible to teach people, to make people do something they don't want to do, and I'll give you a bit of context on that question. So a lot of people tell me that I'm a good negotiator, but the reason they tell me that is because of the outcome of many things. Many stories of mine, for example, which typically revolves around buying big assets at small prices or doing good business deals that maybe other people think I don't know how you got that deal. So their view of me as a negotiator is based on that outcome. I always say I don't think I am a good negotiator in that I'm not a manipulator, I'm not a brain fucker negotiator in that I I can't. I'm not a manipulator, I'm not a brain fucker, but what I do do is I do phenomenal amounts of research and preparation.
Speaker 2:So if I go and buy an asset, if I go and buy an asset for 50 of its value, I can't force someone to sell me something at a price that they don't want to sell me at that. But what I can do is go and find 20 people selling the same asset, offer them all an insulting price and work under the perspective that, whilst 18 of them are going to tell me to off, maybe one or two of them are going to, you know, are going to be on the right on the right day. You know there's been a divorce, a death, a credit card bill has landed or something.
Speaker 2:But you know I I kind of work from the perspective that you can't make someone buy something they don't want to buy or you know you can't fall. You can't unless you're holding a gun to someone's head. But you you think there's clear tactics out there to manipulate someone to do something they really don't want to do um, short term, yeah, it's, it's absolutely possible.
Speaker 1:And so then you're talking about and and that that seduces a lot of people to want to learn those short-term tactics tactics, but then long term it tends to be a very bad strategy. But, yeah, short, I mean, there's even. There's even a strategy which I don't subscribe to in, uh, in some some law enforcement called eliciting information, and it's actually based on some really old manipulation techniques. It's not that new, but it's. You get somebody to tell you in law enforcement to stuff that they, if they realized long-term what it was going to do to them to talk to you, you gain a trust like you know, you're their friend and I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and if you just tell me this, it'll help you.
Speaker 1:And, uh, you know there's a fair amount of law enforcement that's seduced by that. But once you start believing in long-term relationships, you should never do anything that the other side is not that you got to hide from the other side. That's a bad long-term strategy. So you can be really successful with manipulation short-term and it's going to catch up with you and it's going to catch up with you and it's going to catch up with you in a way that costs you much more long term than than you ever gain short term. So manipulation works on over a very short term period of time and then it tends to destroy relationships now, forgive me if I'm wrong, but the title of your book never split the difference, right I?
Speaker 2:I believe that's because, let's say, um amateur negotiators say, oh, the price is 100 quid, I'll give you 50 quid, let's split the difference and call it, call it 75 and with the background that you've come from, you can't split the difference because if you've got 10, 10 hostages to get out, you can't go fuck it, kill two and I'll take the other eight Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's no ratio there.
Speaker 2:But putting that into business context if I want to sell something for 100 grand and you want to buy it for 80 grand and I say I'm not selling it for a penny less than 100 grand, right, when does that conversation go?
Speaker 1:Well, so let's back up just a little bit. The prospect theory that I was talking about before. Splitting the difference is guaranteed for both sides being unsatisfied.
Speaker 1:Guaranteed, which means there's no way to maintain a long-term relationship, is compromise is a guarantee of both sides being unhappy but not a compromise is a guarantee of one side being very unhappy and it depends upon exploring that the interaction and a lot of people are happy to collaborate once they felt heard and feel like you understand, there's always something more important than the deal itself. For every type, we believe there's three types Assertive, analyst, accommodator Say that again.
Speaker 2:Assertive analyst accommodator. Say that again assertive.
Speaker 1:Assertive analyst, accommodator, fight, flight, make friends. The assertive what's more important than making a deal is being heard, being respected and if I know you've heard me and you treated me with respect. I'm gonna be remarkably collaborative. The issue is how did I feel as stupid as it is? How did I feel as stupid as it is? How did I feel about the interaction, and do I really know for sure what the best outcome is now? Secondarily, it's impossible to know the best outcome because everybody's hiding information.
Speaker 1:So if there's hidden information, then all your conclusions are based on flawed data, significantly flawed, because the gaps in what you've made up your mind is best. So the real job is I need to find out what kind of hidden information you have that may bring out a whole separate outcome. A woman excuse me, a woman I'm coaching in negotiations about eight years ago. She's uh, she's shooting her own films. She's an actress, she's fun, she's trying to fund a film. She's person, another female she's talking to. She needs 300 grand from a woman to fund a film, that portion of the film and I taught her you know, just engage her in conversations, because there's a pretty good chance this woman knows something that she doesn't even know is important. So through the course of the skills they begin to have a conversation.
Speaker 1:That sounds like small talk, but it's really information gathering. She finds out the woman that she's trying to get 300 grand from owns a chateau in france. That would be the perfect location for the other film that she wants to make that she's not even thinking about in this instance. So if she gets access to the chateau in france, this 300 grand need goes away entirely. It is not part of the original conversation. This turns into a multi-picture deal. She's got funding and location that she never imagined she could be asking for, and both sides end up finding a much better deal than either one of them imagined before they began the conversation. So never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better. If you split the difference that's based on flawed information, you probably missed a better opportunity because you were so sure you knew what you were doing and I guess I'm gonna keep bringing my thoughts back to business situations I've been in and would that?
Speaker 2:would that be an example of, let's say, your price and my terms and I, I, I was, I think of a situation, you know, many years ago, when I there was a guy I've been trying to trying to do business with for a long time, uh, and my core business is raising money from people to go and to go and deploy into into business opportunities and this particular guy, uh, you know I've been pitching him for a while. You know, like invest this, whatever the figure, was 250 grand and you'll get, you know, 10 a year, and he had four or five watches he wanted to sell and this and this guy, he was. He's somebody who, you know, when he's selling something, the price is at this, when he's buying it, the price is down there, so you're very, very, very delusional. And he had these four or five watches and that he, in his mind, were worth 150 grand all right I think because he paid 150 grand for him and
Speaker 2:these watches never lose money and he's saying I've been offered 90 grand for them. It's an insult. I said let me speak to my watch guy. And I spoke to my watch guy and he was like, yeah, these are like 85 90 grand watches. And I said so. I said to the guy I I tell you what you want to sell those watches. I'll buy those watches off you for the 150 grand that you want.
Speaker 2:I said, but in return, can you please invest, whatever the figure was, 250 grand in this opportunity of mine that, by the way, I'll give you 5% interest on, which was a ridiculously low rate of interest. He jumped at that. I mean he just jumped at the deal because it was much more important to him to to win, to get 150 grand for these watches, than it was for the fact that the, the five percent interest on the 250 grand is is is abysmal. And okay, maybe I lost a little bit of extra money because I because all I did I bought the watches for two, sold them immediately to my watch guy for 90. Yes, I lost the money there, but I effectively made it back because I was paying less interest and kind of going around the houses.
Speaker 2:But is that the kind of thing we're talking about, where? Getting to understand the psyche of the people you want sorry, the psyche of the people you're dealing with to understand what they want? There was no splitting a difference in that situation. There was I got what I wanted and he got what he wanted, which were two effectively very different things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a completely different transaction than what either one of you had in mind to begin with. So yeah, absolutely. There's. Possibilities like that are always out there, and if you don't engage with people in a way where it's designed to both create trust, build a relationship, gather information, kind of all at the same time instead of one or the other, then you discover these great opportunities. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:So what kind of people do you teach now? Do you teach everything from CEOs to salespeople, to middle management? I mean, does everybody in business need to learn how to negotiate?
Speaker 1:Without question. Now, how much do they recognize that need and what kind of capacity they have for it? I've got a. You probably know I don't know. I've got a masterclass like the masterclass yeah. And my negotiation masterclass is the number one masterclass Of all the masterclasses, of all the masterclass. Yeah, and my negotiation masterclass is the number one masterclass.
Speaker 2:Of all the masterclasses.
Speaker 1:Of all the masterclasses.
Speaker 2:More than Gordon Ramsay's cooking class.
Speaker 1:You know? Surprisingly, yes, but all right. So what's the point? First of all, the first point early on, masterclass told me that the profile of the perfect Masterclass customer is the cat, the curious, ambitious, 30-something. The first two things are critical words. Curiosity is a superpower. Like it's a superpower, you start looking for it and you find out that curiosity is the critical component of the most successful entrepreneurs and most successful people on earth, for a whole variety of reasons. Put you in a positive frame of mind. You could absorb more information. If you're genuinely curious, you're not judgmental in the information. You're curious, you're trying to suck in as much information as you possibly can. Curiosity makes you incredibly resilient. That same Nicholas Tyler wrote a book called anti-fragile, which is people who post-traumatic stress growth not post-traumatic stress disorder, but growth and he says curiosity is key to being anti-fragile.
Speaker 1:So, curious, ambitious, 30-something I look up the word ambition. Ambition is, by definition, to be innovative. You don't follow best practices, you create them. These are the attributes of the great entrepreneurs. Ambition and competition are not the same thing. Competition you find out the best practices you try to do better than the people around you, and as long as you beat the people around you, that's good enough. That limits your ability, ambition, you, you create the best practices none of the people around you are doing because you invented them. You're the person everybody else is copying. You're the true innovator. So the curious, the curious and the ambitious those those are, those are our clients ideally.
Speaker 1:Hard working this is kind of the definition of somebody who's truly entrepreneurial. When I was in a bureau, the thing I loved the most was working investigations in areas that nobody had worked in before, because you're plowing new ground. Also, if it's an area nobody's worked in before, there are fewer critics. There are a few people that are saying, well, I did it and I did it differently and you're doing it wrong. It actually frees you up from a lot of the critics. So those are the people that we're best at coaching.
Speaker 1:You got to want to be innovative. You know life has got to be fun. All the challenges, all the mistakes you made made you smarter. It's easier to say that the vast majority of people are horrified at making mistakes. They don't want to. They don't want to have challenges. They don't want to get out of their comfort zone. They're curious and ambitious. They love their comfort zone because it's an adventure. It new that, again, they're not following best practices, they're creating them, and these are the people that love the kind of negotiation that I teach how do people practice negotiation?
Speaker 2:because I mean, I know like in day-to-day. So if you've taught someone something, because I know obviously in sales you know we have role play where we'll practice objections and stuff. But I mean, to me a role play negotiation kind of sounds a bit fake, because you know, you know where the ending is going to end up? I mean, do you say go into that shop and go and go and get a 20 discount, or something?
Speaker 1:well, not per se. Um, you know, you what we're looking to do with people. First of all, you want to try the skills in a business scenario and it's brand new to you. It's going to scare the hell out of you. What does that mean? You're not going to do it in an important negotiation. So I got a new skill for you. Let's say, getting somebody to say no instead of yes. How do you do that? You say it's now a bad time to talk instead of have you got a few minutes to talk. Instead of saying do you agree, you say do you disagree. You switch your questions from yes to no, which horrifies some people.
Speaker 2:And so just to go deeper on that what, what, what is that? Because obviously I, I I know the the logic of getting people to say yes to things you have to put, to put them in that, in that positive mindset. Why are you trying to get people to say no?
Speaker 1:because that's been done to them so many times, they know it's a trap. Okay, there isn't anybody on earth that hasn't been trapped with the yes momentum like nobody.
Speaker 2:So once you've got them in the no, in the no game, where do you take them?
Speaker 1:So it's a Pavlovian response, if you will. They've learned that every time they say no, it protected them.
Speaker 1:So the act of saying no makes you feel safe and protected. You're calmed down. If you're calmed down, you're more willing to listen, because talking doesn't make you commit to anything more. So there's no way around it. There's a Pavlovian response, a feeling of safety by saying no. So you won't be on your guard. If I say you know, is this a stupid idea to do this? And you go no, it's not a stupid idea. I just need to know some more things On the flip side. If I were to say, is this a good idea to do this, you won't say yes, because you feel that every time you say yes, you dig yourself deeper into a hole. What I need to know is what you say after yes or no. I need that to be free and you won't go yes. But what I need to know are the following things because you see the other side going aha, you said yes gotcha.
Speaker 1:There ain't no, gotcha with no. So you're happy to tell me no, it's not a ridiculous idea. But I need the following You're honest with me about what those things are, so to get people to try that. Your original question how do I teach somebody that If it's in business, start with either a deal that, no matter what you say, they're not buying Now?
Speaker 1:you got nothing to lose because you can't hurt yourself by trying something new. The fear of loss thing. Am I going to lose if I do this? So there's two kinds of people. You won't lose anything with the person, no matter what you say, you're not getting the deal. Or the person, no matter what you say, you're getting the deal. Either way, you can't hurt yourself. So if you're going to do it in a business scenario, you practice where you haven't got anything at stake. In the meantime, you practice in your personal life. You practice with your family and friends. You say something like look, is it ridiculous if I idea if I get home a little late tonight? No, it's not ridiculous.
Speaker 2:You were like oh wow, or you're waiting for your significant other.
Speaker 1:If you're a male, you're waiting for your significant other. If you're a male, you're waiting mostly for a female to come home girlfriend, wife, whoever it may be. As soon as she shows the door, you want to order some food. I used to say, would you like to order Cheesecake Factory? And it's going to be a 45-minute discussion then we're going to order Cheesecake Factory. One time a girl I'm with in LA at at the time she rolls in her door and I say are you against ordering a Cheesecake Factory?
Speaker 1:she says no and we order five minutes later.
Speaker 2:I've got to say that is such a personal one to me because I am obsessed with Cheesecake.
Speaker 1:Factory and my missus fucking hates Cheesecake.
Speaker 2:Factory but on the rare occasions she has it, she always goes this is so good, but now I'm gonna. I'm gonna go and brain fuck her into it's having cheesecake.
Speaker 1:Hopefully she doesn't listen to your podcast?
Speaker 2:exactly, she doesn't. She doesn't like listening to me or eating cheesecake factory. What? What are some? What are some common uh mistakes that people make in negotiating?
Speaker 1:well, first of all, being a yes addict is a problem, because everybody's been hustled with yes, like everybody. The next thing most people are afraid to hear the other side out first. You know, there's this thing out there called ZOPA Zone of Possible Agreement and I wanna throw out a number first because I'm gonna affect the zone of possible agreement, I'm gonna set the zone, and so you're scared to let the other side throw a number out first. Well, the other side's number is information, like you don't know, of course, you don't know what the zone is.
Speaker 2:I'd always want the other side to tell me the number so I know where I'm at.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. But a lot of people say no, no, no, you got to go first. Well, you know, I got a student in Georgetown and this is a number of years ago, so $85,000 a year was a pretty good salary and he's working for 85, and he decides the next job he wants to go to. He's going to demand $110,000. And at the time he's getting ready to go do the interview and he's talking to his dad on the way and his dad's saying like I don't know, you know, you know that's a big jump. I mean, that's a big jump for you to make that ask right off the bat. He's like you know what? I'm going for? 110. I'm going for it, I'm going to set that bar high, I'm going to get that bar. So they ask him his salary expectations which you know they do one way or the other and he probably says 110. I want 110. He's adamant about it. And they kind of go like okay okay, you know what you got it.
Speaker 1:And he's there working. About three months later he's talking to a colleague, brought in same kind of job as him, same time frame, and his colleague says what do you think of what we're getting paid? And he says you know, I negotiated my own deal. I can't really tell you what I'm getting, but I negotiated my own deal. I can't really tell you what I'm getting, but I negotiated my own deal. And his friend says you're getting more than 125?
Speaker 1:Like you got a watch throwing a number out. You may think you're going high and you're low. That's problem one. Problem two, which is actually the bigger problem problem like if you're making 20 offers and you're coming in an extreme number, then all right, so you're, you're, you're playing the numbers and that ain't, that ain't a bad. You got one of 20. You got an experience that, based on conditions that you don't know behind the scenes, the one in 20 that actually may stave off bankruptcy for them, which is why those people will take that and you save their life and you don't know which one in 20's life you're going to save. So the that low offer save somebody's finances. That's when you got 20. But let's say you got one or two, you go on an anchor, you drive a deal from the table you'd have got otherwise.
Speaker 1:I was trying to think of Ned's name earlier. Ned Colletti, friend of mine, used to be the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. We were talking about this one time and when he was with the Cubs they failed to sign a free agent that they should have signed. Because the agent came in so high, the Cubs said screw you. And he signs with another team and for the rest of his career he hated that he wasn't with the cubs and he he ends up being friends with ned in a long term and Ned writes right about it in his book, the Big Chair Great book about professional sports in general, let alone professional baseball. And that's what coming in high does. You know. The agent thinks he's raising the bar, setting the zone for his client and his client gets more money elsewhere and is miserable and it drove a deal away that they would otherwise have made if they had come in too high. And I said to net I think high anchoring drives deals from the table.
Speaker 2:He says absolutely how would you deal with somebody who has been very, very confrontational?
Speaker 1:I want to see, uh, what's behind a confrontation. Um and that's a great question because I'm coaching a couple some business executives, international business executives a lot of money at stake. They negotiated in South Africa a year ago. Executive on the other side is extremely confrontational. I mean pretty much shouting at them, calling them names. The lawyer involved says you know what that's in violation of our contract. Happy to read the contract to you if you'd like, which, of course, infuriates the guy even more. You know you count on a lawyer to do that and make things worse. And so the other guy I'm coaching uses the late night FM DJ voice to put some soothing into the anger and then says maybe it's better if we take a break and resume the negotiations at another time. Calming, soothing voice. They calm down, take a break, they're out of the room.
Speaker 1:Two executives are meeting the hall and the guy I'm coaching says seems like you're under a lot of pressure. That's why he was being so confrontational massive pressure on him based on other deals. There's nothing wrong with these, this deal and the executives that I'm coaching have done nothing wrong are eminently uh, dealing with him with integrity. They're, they got a great product. They're delivering everything they could, they could deliver. But this dude is under so much pressure on other stuff that he's kind of losing it with them and he's trying to fix things by putting pressure on all his deals because he's getting killed elsewhere. And so the late night FM DJ voice, followed by, seems like you're under a lot of pressure, because if they're very confrontational it's either manipulation or they're under tremendous pressure.
Speaker 1:Whichever one it is is a completely different response. You need to diagnose which one it is. The late night FM DJ voice brings things down a little bit. Then the right label sounds like you're under pressure. The guy was tremendously relieved that they felt it. If it's a manipulation tactic, the guy's going to shrug it off right away. He's going to stay angry, because anger is a way to manipulate. And so you got to know which guy you're dealing with, and more than likely eight times out of 10, not 10 out of 10, but eight times out of 10, they're under massive pressure. You don't want to treat them as if they're manipulating you. So you need to use the skills to diagnose which animal you got on your hands and then deal with that appropriately.
Speaker 2:And tell me I mean, obviously you talked a minute ago about high anchoring and letting someone else put the price out, for example there's obviously different negotiating experts who all have not necessarily all of them have got different ideas, but you know, different people have different strategies and they obviously believe their strategies work and hence why they teach them. I mean, what would your, what would your comments or views be on that that you know you're saying, oh, this is the way to do it. And another guy's teaching no, no, no, chris is talking rubbish, this is the way to do it. And another guy's teaching.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, chris is talking rubbish. This is the way to do it. I mean, right, you've both got some, say, foundational beliefs of why you're thinking that you know you've obviously seen it work for you, but then he's seen his thing work for him. I mean, you know, is it? It's clearly not a industry it's the wrong word, but let's say it's not a a situation where a one size fits all.
Speaker 1:No, and what you really want to look at is track record and what's the evidence in support of their contention. Do they have a consulting business where their coaches are teaching across the board, or are they the only ones that ever made their methodology work? I got a bunch of coaches, you know. I took my skills and taught them in multiple business schools and then the students in my classes didn't do pretend negotiations, which the vast majority of negotiation courses at Harvard like. When I went to Harvard, every negotiation exercise was a pretend exercise.
Speaker 2:Well, like a role play.
Speaker 1:A role play, yeah, which is pretend. You know, if you want to get right down to it, you know. Is there stuff based on pretend exercises? There's a lot of data out there about negotiations from academics that's based on pretend exercises. So did they? My book is all of real life examples of people using the skills as I prescribed them in their businesses. Not maybe no more than a third of the success stories in that book is me negotiating. It's my students that I taught the methodology to negotiating in a wide variety of circumstances. So what's the track record? The methodology have other people been taught to do it and made it work? I mean, that's the beginning of it. The book Never Split the Difference is now over five million copies globally.
Speaker 2:I was just about to ask you how many I saw. Five million, that's phenomenal, it is, I mean, in point of fact. When was it?
Speaker 1:published 2016.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And we just crossed over $5 million recently. It's still number one in its category on Amazon and has been every day for the last eight years Now. Occasionally somebody jumps in there and knocks me out at number one. So another possible criteria for believing in what I teach is how well has the book sold? How many recommendations does it have? It has more than we've got. Almost $47,000, 47,000 positive reviews, I think. The number two book has 10,000 positive reviews and has been published longer than mine has. So I have basically 10 times the positive reviews.
Speaker 2:I won't ask you to name the number two book, but no, there's a couple of books out there that still sell. But what I was going to say? Is their techniques wildly different to yours, or there's some fundamental similarities?
Speaker 1:I mean the underlying similarities of most of them is there's some degree of emotional intelligence in most of these. Um, jim camp's books start with no 2002. It's still usually in the top 25. A lot of, a lot of similarities. I work with jim. I read his book, I learned from his book. We wrote some stuff together.
Speaker 1:Jim's stuff has got a lot of soundness to it. The word empathy does not appear in his book but he says you got to negotiate in the adversary's world. That's empathy. So he believed in a lot of the same concepts. He believed in telling people it was okay to say no. We took that idea and said what happens if you actually get them to say no. So it was inspired by a lot of his work.
Speaker 1:That book is worth reading. Getting to yes is an academically sound book that sells very well now and human beings are not academically sound, but for insight and food for thought it ain't a bad read. Crucial Conversations is a big seller, you know I'm so. So on that book, jefferson Fisher has a book out fairly recently. I can't remember the title and Jefferson's got legitimate reason for me having a mental block on it, because I know Jefferson and his book is worth reading and it ranks very high in the categories, and he's about emotional intelligence, insight into human nature and really concise conversations and being non-confrontational. So I'm a big fan of Jefferson's work, so there are a number of other books out there that are worth reading.
Speaker 2:Have you found over, let's say, the latter parts of your life, despite the fact that you're so successful in your strategies? But do you still find tweaks coming in?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:You'll still change a strategy here and there.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say we're changing it. We're evolving it, we're growing from it. We've got a concept that we put a lot of emphasis on since the book came out, called Proof of Life and kidnapping. Proof of life is do they have the hostage and are they going to release them to you?
Speaker 2:And that's a day, one job you do.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's no point even continuing before that, right, right. There's no point even continuing before that, right, right.
Speaker 1:If they don't have them because some people don't have the hostage, and will they sell them to you? Is there a deal and is there a deal with you? That's actually a problem in the private sector. There's always a fool in the game. There's always a competing bid. If you don't know who the fool in the game is, then it's you. There's always a favorite. You got to know whether or not you're the fool in the game. Is there a deal and is it a deal with you?
Speaker 1:There might be a deal, they just might have no intention of making it with you. It's actually far more common in a private sector than most people realize. The data says it happens at least 20% of the time that the deal is not with you at all and there may not be one anyway. They want to preserve the status quo. They're doing due diligence just to maintain exactly where they are. So that has been we found that to be very significant since the book came out. After Proof of Life, there's an issue that we just formulated and realized called the agreement graveyard. There may be a deal, but when it goes to the other side, how are they going to navigate their internal politics? That's the agreement graveyard. How do you anticipate that in advance and head it off so your deal doesn't go to the agreement graveyard? That's not a never-split-the-difference. So we've taken a lot of ideas and really learned a lot more since we've been applying them, and that's why we have live in-person training and we have online training.
Speaker 2:Who are some famous named individuals that you would consider good negotiators? I guess I'm talking politicians, big business people.
Speaker 1:Well, warren Buffett phenomenal Low-key guy, clearly ridiculously successful. I think Oprah Winfrey is a great negotiator.
Speaker 2:Just using Warren as an example. I'm reasonably well-read on Warren in terms of his deals and etc. But I wouldn't it would never have come to mind as a negotiator what what makes him a good negotiator?
Speaker 1:because he's quiet and he makes deals and people don't hate him like who's who do you know it's bad mouth. And warren buffett and the, the, the degree of wealth and influence that he's accumulated globally like that dude is a deal-maker machine.
Speaker 2:But are the two things necessarily interlinked? So I mean, for example, with Warren Buffett I mean he will often talk about you know he finds a great business with a great management team and a moat around it and you know great cash flow et cetera. And he would you know cash flow etc. And he, he would you know potentially I mean not in the old days when he was doing Benjamin Graham's cigarette book methodology, but you know, with Charlie Munger's influence of you know, maybe potentially paying a higher price than he would have done, he would arguably at times overpay for a great business that he knows would, would, would be very, very profitable, very cash-generative for long into the future.
Speaker 2:So I guess, as the recipient of that money, you could think well, I'll go and take Warren's money. I mean, he didn't drive a hard bargain. He came to me, he gave me what I wanted and I just went with him, Whereas I guess, from maybe a stereotypical negotiating perspective, you would expect someone to be driving a, to be driving a bargain and you know you know I want 10 million dollars.
Speaker 2:Warren goes yeah, I'll give matt 10 million dollars because matt's a great guy, we're trustworthy with a great business, and I'll make a lot more than that over the future, whereas I guess, from a negotiating perspective, you'd expect someone who was a talented negotiator to drive me down to eight million.
Speaker 1:Right, right. And then that gets into your definition of what's really a talented negotiator. Is a talented negotiator a guy that makes a deal that falls apart in six months? Like, first of all, you know, one ain't automatically giving them what they ask. There's going to be a courtship. And then he's smart enough to know that if I cut their throats and I need them to operate this business for me successfully, they're going to resent the hell out of me, they're going to do a horrible job and the low price is going to be extremely expensive. So what I need to do is what you should do with any employee is you should find out what the sweet spot price is for an employee so that they don't. You know you don't want to overpay, but you want to pay them at the high end, where they're grateful and they want to continue to work for you and they feel like they got extra. They feel like they got a premium, but they don't go back and re-evaluate how much they're worth. I have overpaid people in the past. Also. You want to pay people someplace at a number. They're grateful to have gotten it. You have a bit of a courtship if you will.
Speaker 1:Getting there, you find out what their core values are. You find out whether or not you could trust them the way you would do in any business deal, because there's no such thing as a one-off. There is no such thing as a one-off. You thing as a one-off. Like there is no such thing as a one-off. You buy a car I. You got to come back to the car dealership for service. You slaughtered them on a price you know they were given. When you come in for service we're going to give you a car to drive while your car's in service and you come back in six months later for, you know, for your service and like I don't know, you know, uh, you know that car, that car rental, we're not doing that anymore because you slaughtered them on the price.
Speaker 1:You slaughter home depot on the price of cabinets. I had a student of mine do this at georgetown just slaughtered home depot installation. There were some issues. They had to come back to home depot and work with them again over the contractor, the guy that sold him the original price on a, on a, on a cabinets in the first place. Remember how badly he got killed on that deal. There was no help on a contractor issues like they're just no such thing as a one-off. So you don't want to overpay, but you know you don't want to. You drive a hard bargain. You drive people out of business.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's, it's very interesting what you say, because it's obvious. Well, it's maybe not obvious to some, but it's some very obvious statements you make that I would never have initially associated with negotiation, because I guess people think of negotiation as that act of one-upmanship not necessarily the long-term value of getting what you want.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and that's exactly it. And a lot of people they see the model of one-upmanship, or I had them over a barrel.
Speaker 1:There's nothing they can do and they lose sight of how much more profitable it is to think long-term. And we've got a small cadre of people that we coach, that coach with us every week because negotiation is a perishable skill and they have enough money at stake and if their skills slip at all, it could cost them a million dollars. So one of the guys we're coaching, he tells me at one of the gatherings we have him he said you know, in the last year rings we have and we said you know, in the last year, being collaborative versus cutthroat, and I was cutthroat before. I found you guys, and I was really good at being cutthroat over the last year being collaborative, I made eight hundred thousand dollars more and so you could. You can make a lot of money being cutthroat. You could beat everybody around you being cutthroat. You get no idea how much money you're leaving on the table.
Speaker 2:Well, I can't wrap up without asking you about, let's say, what most would probably consider the world's most famous negotiator Donald Trump.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Good negotiator or bad negotiator? Well, here's what.
Speaker 1:I admire. I was thinking about that a lot lately, because here's what I admire about donald trump um, he says what he means. You know, there's a lot of politicians and a lot of discussions these days or whether or not somebody. What they say in private lines up with what they say in public, and most of the politicians that preceded him do not, you know, joe biden I'm never gonna pardon anybody in my family bang.
Speaker 2:He lets those pardons out which, just as an aside to me, is it was a ludicrous situation, because I think, maybe, maybe you disagree, coming from a more, let's say, upright law enforcement world, but I can't really imagine many circumstances in the world that would prevent me pardoning my family you know right I mean, it's just gonna happen. You're my, you're my kids. I don't really, yeah, especially if I'm walking out of office. I don't give a fuck what's going on. You're my kid and I'm gonna look after you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well he issued some other pardons too that are were not as publicly in violation of what he talked about, but most, most presidents, when they get to the end of the line, they start handing out pardons right and left. Like you know, it's Halloween and they're handing out candy at the front door because they're trying to curry favors for when they get out of office. And there's been a lot of really embarrassing pardons handed out there. Biden and his son is not the most embarrassing and the most offensive pardons that he handed out.
Speaker 1:Trump ain't going to pardon anybody that you don't know he's not going to pardon. You're not surprised by that, and there's something about consistency that make people trustworthy Substitute. Take out the word trust, put in predictability, and you trust somebody, and one of his great appeals is he's eminently predictable, which makes him eminently trustworthy. Number one. Number two he's not above speaking to anybody. His first term. One of the problems he inherits a north korean problem. Principal problem with north korea is every american president prior to that, the north korean leader was beneath them. I can't talk to him. He's beneath me.
Speaker 1:Donald trump, it gets into office and he's like ain't nobody beneath me, i't talk to him. He's beneath me. Donald Trump. It gets into office and he's like ain't nobody beneath me, I'll talk to anybody who wants to talk to me. You want to make a deal? Let's have a conversation. That puts him in another trustworthy position where no one is beneath him.
Speaker 1:Secondly, go talk to him. Like, look at the number of people that have publicly had feuds with him. You know, don't throw a rock at him in public. He doesn't like that. He's going to launch a missile at you if you throw a rock and anybody that respects him enough to go see him. It's astonishing how many deals he makes if you go talk to him one-on-one without having a public spat. So there's so many things about him to be respected. Yeah, do I like every decision he's made? You know, in Immortal Wards of Kanye West, I don't like every decision I make, and I know it's risky quoting Kanye he's become so controversial, but you know he's a colorful dude. I like some of the things he says. So, yeah, nobody's going to be perfect, but by and large, trump is consistent. He's honest, he believes in a two-way street, he believes in reciprocity and if you go talk to him in person, it seems to be remarkably easy to smooth things out. And I think those are all great attributes.
Speaker 2:Listen, chris. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here, buddy. I've been, like I say, waiting for a long time and I'm very excited it's finally happened. We've spoken about your book multiple times during the conversation. What? Was the name of that book. Again, was it Downton?
Speaker 2:I think it was Never Split the Difference. I was just too excited to be speaking to you, that I was tripping up over my words. You've got your book. You've got the masterclass For people who aren't big corporates who want to hire you one-on-one. How else can people get in touch? How else can people benefit from you?
Speaker 1:Our website is a goldmine. It doesn't matter how much you make. It doesn't matter what level you're at BlackSwanLTDcom B-L-A-C-K-S-W-A-N-L-T-Dcom Now. You might not have the resources right now to go to the summit we're holding next month in Louisville, but we got free stuff that'll help you get there. All you got to do is be willing to learn and be willing to put in the effort and ask yourself to get 1% better every day. If you try to get 1% better every day and you got throwaway days in there too, you have a bad day. You only lost down on one percent. You get back at it the next day. Don't put huge pressure on yourself. Go to our website, find something free.
Speaker 1:We got the, the pdf of the 10 most popular, most common no oriented questions. Instead of your yes questions, switch from yes to no. I guarantee you an instantaneous improvement. Let yourself get one percent better every day a year from now coming to our summit. It's going to be cheap money because you will have saved so much over a year and now you got a glimpse at where you could go. So come to the website blackswanltdcom, find a place to get started and start what is actually a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Chris, it's been a pleasure, mate, and I hope you've enjoyed Dubai, and I hope I can catch up with you in Vegas sometime.
Speaker 1:Yeah, amen, I look forward to it. Thanks man, thanks buddy, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks for tuning in to no Bollocks with Matt Haycox. Today's conversation was packed with actual insights and I'm super, super grateful that you joined us Now. Our community now boasts 160,000 downloads a month of this podcast, and that is a testament to entrepreneurs just like you who refuse to settle for mediocrity. So don't miss out. Subscribe now and gain exclusive access to the conversations that can transform your business and transform your life. Also, while you're at it, if you could visit wwwmatt-haycoxcom or click the link in the show notes below, and please sign up to the no bollocks newsletter. That's like the sister newsletter that lives with this podcast. Every week I send two emails and in just 10 minutes, you're going to gain more knowledge than most people doing a three-year mba. So please subscribe, rate, share this episode with someone who needs a no bollocks boost and until next time, keep hustling and keep winning.
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