Mastering the Art of Negotiation with Chris Voss
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How do you turn an opposition into a collaboration? And I think that's one of the main secrets in negotiation because in any deal, and particularly in the circumstances you're talking about, they want to know how good a partner you're going to be, how good an ambassador you're going to be. If you can't stand up for yourself, then how can you stand up for them? Right. And so I think a lot of it is either intentional or even subconscious testing behavior.

How do we disagree and still remain collaborative? Right.

And so how do you test that without making the other side, without offending the other side? And how do you stand up for yourself? Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.

Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Experts. Today, I got a very special guest, the number one coach of negotiation in the world. Chris Voss, how are you today? Fantastic, Tommy. Thanks for having me in. I'm excited, man. You wrote the bestseller, Never Split the Difference. You've been on some of my buddies' podcasts, obviously, Waste No Day, Brian Burden. Yep.

Part of the Black Swan group. Why don't you just tell us, you know, most people know who you are. They've heard of your book. They've read your book. But tell us a little bit about your history, what you're doing today and where you're going. I was an FBI agent, FBI hostage negotiator. I was in charge of all of our international kidnapping negotiation response. So domestically in U.S., domestic hostage negotiations usually sell side. Somebody's trapped at a bank.

I'm going to call in and try to get him to come out. It's the same thing as a cold caller does. Cold caller calls somebody on the phone, person on the other end of the phone doesn't really want to talk to them. International kidnapping is mostly by side. So by side all over the world in every country, pretty much every culture on the planet. It was kind of a wild thing to do because I'm originally from a small town in Iowa. So it was all over the world. That was cool. After that, wrote Never Split the Difference, taught business negotiation at Georgetown and USC.

And the book has done quite well based on the emotional intelligence stuff we used in Haas's negotiation and then proved it in the business schools and then also have a masterclass out there that's done really well, too. So the book and a masterclass have done really well.

And that's been the majority of it? What do you look at? You're out of Vegas right now. You get back to California, but you travel a lot. What's the future look like? Well, still do a lot of keynotes, do a lot of keynote speeches for corporations and associations. You know, sales kickoffs are bringing our whole professional association together. It doesn't really matter what industry. You know, anybody where people are dealing with other people. And then we coach and train a lot. And when I first started the company,

I thought all we would really do would be train and train mostly corporations. And we train mostly entrepreneurs now. Not corporations some, but entrepreneurs really want to learn. They really want to get better. They like to be innovative. And then we coach a lot. I didn't think we would be coaching that much. We coach people through deals a lot. We coach, and that's a lot of fun because it's live, skills-based. You know, the rubber meets the road right now. I love that. You know, I was...

It's so top of mind right now because we've got two major vendors and we're with private equity. And the main guy at the private equity company goes, why don't I jump on these calls? Just tell them my thoughts. And he said, look, guys, I just want to get one thing straight. We're not here to get you to race to the bottom. Our vendors got to do very good. We know that you need to deliver on time. We need to make sure we're doing the right stuff for you.

but we want a three-year approach. You can put your escalators in there when you need to raise your price, but we need to see. And he said, this is just him. He goes, each of you guys will get 30% of our business. Who gets the other 40%? That's what's up for grabs. And he had a separate meeting with each of them. And he was very nice, but he treated both of them a little bit differently. And he told me the mentality after that. And he's very good at what he does. He was in

really kind of a shrewd negotiator. But I said, listen, I don't feel right racing these guys to the bottom, but it's not only about price for me. It's about service. It's about getting us in and out of the distribution center. There's a lot of other things, order accuracy, because those create nightmares for us. But this was like just today before we jumped on here, this is what's going on. And he said, you guys, I'm not going to tell you what the other guys are doing. You got to come back with your best and final. And we'll decide where that other 40% goes.

And I thought that was pretty interesting because we're talking about $50 million. Yeah. So these guys know we're going to spend a lot of money with them. So he's like, we're not going to go back and forth again. Best and final. We'll decide where that other 40% goes. What are your thoughts on that? I'm just curious. It's kind of a real life scenario. Yeah. Well, if I was in a conversation, I dig into it a little bit deeper and you might not change it.

But my first reaction is, say something that is true based on a dynamic. It's really hard for the other side, but it's true. So to me, one of my responses would be, it sounds like you got a closed mind. Because he's telling you he's got a closed mind about a bunch of things. You're not accusing him of anything. We would call that a label. And you're slapping a label on something that's there.

And in a way where you're not making an accusation, you're making an inquiry. But to lay it all out like that, I want to know, have you really heard what you're saying? Have you really heard what you're asking me to digest? I just want to make sure as to whether or not I'm hearing it or not. And that's the great thing about it. That particular skill label is like, this is what this sounds like. Yeah. Yeah.

And he might like, oh, because some of it in negotiations, like Mark Cuban is one of my favorites. A lot of it is he's testing you. You can tell he is. And I'm convinced that Mark talked to him a couple of times. You know, I'm not on a first name basis with him, but I'm convinced that part of it is if we're going to be partners, I need to know that you can stand up for yourself without making other people angry.

So how do you push back on me without me feeling like you're pushing back? Yeah. How do you turn an opposition into a collaboration? And I think that's one of the main secrets in negotiation because in any deal, and particularly in this circumstances you're talking about, they want to know how good a partner you're going to be, how good an ambassador you're going to be. If you can't stand up for yourself...

then how can you stand up for them? Right. And so I think a lot of it is either intentional or even subconscious testing behavior. You know, how do we disagree and still remain collaborative? Right. And so how do you test that without making the other side, without offending the other side? And how do you stand up for yourself? Because then you're a great ambassador. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I tried to lay it all on the table and I said, guys, look,

These guys could call the Trump card on anything. They could put whatever they need to. We work with them. They're the ultimate decision makers. We run the business. But ultimately, you know, these guys got to understand what we're doing and putting the next year in front of us is not good enough because we're going to, this is a three-year plan.

And he said, look, guys, I don't care what you do. Do what makes sense for your business. And if you just can't give us any concessions, just say it. It's okay. You know, I'm fine with that. But ultimately, we got to do what's right for this business. And it was just crazy. Like, he's very good at what he does. I mean, that's a little bit of the Jim Camp approach, too, from start with no back in 2002. Oh, yeah. And that's when I first started reading Camp's book back then opened my eyes a lot. And Jim's approach was,

You can say no to me at any time. And people are more collaborative if they feel like they're not being forced. Jim called that the right to veto. As long as I preserve your right to veto, your autonomy, you're more likely to say yes because you don't feel shoved into it. And then consequently, you have fewer regrets if you feel like you made a decision voluntarily. So just saying that, look, man, just tell me this doesn't work, that's cool. And it's a really soft way to say take it or leave it. Yeah. No, I love that approach.

It's kind of saying, listen, we need you to do great. You know, I want my partners to do really, really amazing things. But at the same time, we're going to lay everything out here of what we need. And if something doesn't make sense and he, I mean, these were hour long conversations. I was looking, I've read the book twice and I just looked at some of the summaries I wrote down. So the psychological awareness of understanding that,

the people's predispositions over time. One of the things I've watched you a lot, and I've kind of studied a lot of your videos and everything you put out, is you really take your time to answer. You slow down and you're actively listening. You're like really trying to comprehend the conversation and trying to understand where they're coming from. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah, it's really helpful to slow down. I mean, I slowed down on purpose because you want your brain to continue to process.

And most of the time, people are either talking or processing, or they're talking or waiting, and there isn't that much processing. So if I slow down and I work my way through it, more thoughts will occur to me. So yeah, I'm trying to sit back. I'm trying to process. That's trainable, learnable. I mean, there's a couple of books out there that claim that everything's learned. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, I think.

contends that everything is learned. Like you can't learn to be seven feet tall. You can't learn to be as big as Shaq. But there are a lot of people as big as Shaq that were never in the NBA. So he learned something. But you can learn to slow down. You can learn to listen more. Some people are horrified at slowing down or even gaps in the conversation at all for very different reasons. Some people are horrified because when they go silent, they're indicating anger. So if the other side goes silent, they must be angry.

Well, you know, you sit down and talk to Elon Musk, ask him a question. You're going to have to wait till he answers because he's going to think the thing through. He's not angry. He's thinking. Yeah. And then other people, if they're silent, they feel out of control. I got to keep talking. I got to stay in control. So those two types have trouble keeping their mouth shut. But when you learn how much you can gain and how much more you can think just by slowing down or even having a pause in a conversation. And I've had to teach myself that I'm the type that the assertive that wants to talk all the time to stay in control.

But when I learned how much more I could get by slowing down and listening, then I'm like, oh, this is a better way. So yeah, I do it intentionally. I've noticed those pattern interrupts, those waiting to comprehend what they said. It actually helps. It shows that you're, it's actually respectful to the other person because if you're talking to me and you ask, and I'm just, I'm waiting to say something and people know that. Or when I say, no, really, that's pretty interesting.

Or you're talking to them like, oh, uh-huh, uh-huh. It's just when you could do that. Like if you were on a first date, and I always tell people this, if you're on a first date, are you smiling more? Are you genuinely interested? Are you asking more questions? Yes. Well, if you treat this like a first date when you meet a client, especially for our industry because it's more, it's not as relational. It's just the one time we fix your garage. I want to create a relationship and get you on a service agreement.

But, you know, when we're talking, I want to show, I want to show up smiling and ask, how's your day going? I offer coffee on the way. I'm in a happy mood. I'm smiling. And I don't even talk about the garage for the first hour. I want to get to know you more. I want to make sure we're giving you all the options. Black, white, Cuban, or Asian, old, young, gay street. I don't care. I'm going to treat you the same no matter what until I learn more about you. Your landscaping might be a mess. You might live in a really poor neighborhood. That doesn't matter to me.

Because I know you own a home. More than likely, I went to the brokest neighborhoods on the planet and people paid me 10 grand. They went in their bedroom and got cash. It's crazy. So a lot of people judge a book by its cover. What have you learned in negotiations when that happens? Well, which part? They're judging me a book by its cover or? People go into rich people's house. We had a person come over this week. It's a nice house. It's a big house. It's a beautiful house. Christmas arrangements. Yeah.

But he goes, guess how much this lady wanted to charge? I go, well, what did you want? She's like, you know, the Christmas trees, a couple of guys standing at the front door, you know, the drummer, whatever, the stairway. And I go, I don't know, 10 grand. She goes, $100,000. And I'm like, they must've looked at us. The throw pillows were $250 each that I could have got for two bucks. I'm going,

But they judged a book by its cover in the opposite way. This is why wealthy people are guarded because they're like, they see my cars, they see this house. The wealthiest people are the smartest. They'll still spend money, but they're very good because they kept the money. But it goes both ways. Rich, poor, or in the middle. Yeah, right. So judging a book by its cover. You make people feel like they're a commodity. You know, you might be right. See, here's the thing. People are afraid to be wrong.

Like, all right, so you can and should make somewhat of an assessment of people based on what you see. But then take that as a hypothesis and an experiment. And then there's always much more interesting stuff underneath people. Like fascinating. And I love getting underneath. Like my favorite thing is to have conversations, which I have regularly, where somebody says to me, like, I don't know that I told anybody that. Or I haven't talked about that in 20 years.

Like, I love that. You know, I want to find out what you're about. You know, I want to find out interesting things about you. And where I'm at now, this almost horrifies the guys managing my company, my general manager, you know, the integrator EOS model. When we're interviewing people, I will find out something wacky about them that he hasn't found out, which he's afraid. I'm talking to a guy not that long ago, and pretty soon we get into the conversation. He casually throws off being at a seance with

in his ex-girlfriend's house that she grew up in that was a haunted house. And I'm like, I am digging into this. And my GM, his head is just hanging now because he's like, there's no way we're ever going to hire this guy. And I should have found this out before he talked to Chris because I'm never going to hear the end of this. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's almost a contest now to see if you can find out the wackiest thing about the people that are coming to work for us. But yeah. And the guy didn't mind telling me because I was genuinely curious. Like he wasn't going to get the job, but I was fascinated. Yeah. And I think I don't remember the first thing he threw off, but it was something about the way he talked about his ex-girlfriend's house that she grew up in that was a haunted house. He said it like it wasn't that weird.

Like somebody would say, yeah, she grew up in Eastern shore, Long Island. Like that was normal. So I'm like, this is going to, I'm going to dig into this. It's going to be interesting. And I think he had a great conversation. So I love finding out about people what's beneath the surface. I think that's a talent. And it seems like that's taken years to develop because you, the difference is, is I don't think you're doing it to negotiate or be persuasive or influential. I think you genuinely enjoy doing it. You could tell you do.

Just by your expressions and just, I don't know if it's a game for you, but it just seems like you genuinely like, it's so hard to teach that unless people actually enjoy doing it. Yeah. No, that's a good point. I do enjoy it. And I find people fascinating. I looked up the definition of an anthropologist a few months ago and it said, people who are fascinated how systems work and origins. And I'm fascinated by both. I believe there's a practical reason for everything.

In many cases, you know, religious dogma was put out there as a practical solution to a problem. So, yeah, what's the practical reason? You know, what's behind this? It's going to be fascinating no matter what it is. And then, you know, I like trying to figure out life and life's about systems. You're a big systems guy? Yes. Could probably get better at it. I think anybody, as soon as they begin to realize that,

Your habits are your collection. It's your system. It's your system of approaching life. What are your habits? What are your systems? How do you get things done? And I got introduced to systems thinking probably about two-thirds of the way through my bureau career and didn't realize I was learning systems and then just started to realize that everything functions better. If you come up with a system, then you start to tweak it after that. Don't get married to it. Tweak it and things get better. Yeah, 100%.

You know, this is a really interesting topic of this idea of recruiting or hiring. I have this conversation all the time. They say, what's going to grow the company the fastest? I said the ability to find A players and culture A players and the idea of recruiting. And I've dealt with A players that have great numbers, great conversion rates, great average tickets, but they're not all in.

And sometimes A players become very difficult of, well, depending on how you define an A player. It's not just a top performer. It's someone that buys it. Someone that bleeds the company. You know, they want to grow in the company. They want to be involved. Like I love millennials. I love Gen X. Like the people say there's no good workers anymore. How do you find them? This generation doesn't want to work. Oh, not the way that you want them to work. It used to be, you know, my parents used to just go to work 60 hours a week if they had.

They didn't like it. They didn't enjoy it. They didn't understand why they were working. What do you think the best conversations, let's just go into recruiting in general, because this is like the lifeblood of a company is who's on your team. Right. This is any sports team, any type of team. Right. Yeah. And then comment on the generations, whether it be millennials, baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, whatever. I think the top performers of each group are, I have the same attributes. Top performers are ambitious and competitive and,

but you need both and ethical. You know, the heart's in the right place. By and large, if your heart's in the wrong place, it's going to catch up with you. Like if you're a complete sociopath, you want to have long-term relationships of trust because it's going to catch up to you otherwise. So even the mercenaries realize that long-term trusted relationships are more profitable eventually. But yeah, I look for, I'm hoping to find people that are coachable as opposed to being divas, you know, being a team player. Are you coachable?

And it's not connected to age, generation, ethnicity, or religious preference. None of the demographics. And they're hard to find. And then do they want to learn? Do they want to get better? If you're just competitive, there's a real problem with being just competitive. You're limited by the success of your peers. And you'll quit when you're number one. And if you're just competitive, professionally, you might be an A player. But for you, what you're capable of is

You might be a C player of your capability or even a B player. So you need ambition. You know, the person who ultimately they're measuring stick is what they did yesterday, not the people around them. I remember when I was younger, I saw Nike ad saying there is no finish line. And I remember thinking like, no finish line. Why should I run? Yeah. But now like I'm, yeah, there is no finish line, which means there's no limit to what you could be if you stop judging yourself by other people.

So you ambition without ethics gets you, what was her name? Elizabeth Thanos and everybody to work for tremendous ambition, blood tests. You know, they, they were faking the blood tests. They're using other people's machinery. Like everybody in that company knew. Yeah. And I asked myself, so what's the explanation for that? That's ambition with no ethics. Yeah. They were more than competitive. You know, they want to rule the world. They want to be the best possible, but they dropped their ethics. Yeah.

And then competitive. You got to be competitive some because every now and then you need a good slap in the face when you get beat. It's aspire to be number one right here. What's the point of playing if you don't plan on winning? You got to win. And then, but winning limits you if you're limited to your competition, how well they could do. But every now and then you got to get beat. Like people talk about the Roger Bannister effect.

you know, first guy to run a four minute mile. Yeah. And then how many people ran it right after he did. And most of the philosophy is says somebody showed him it was possible. Yeah. My opinion is most are not, if not all of those guys thought they were better than Bannister. And when Bannister broke the record, it was a slap in the face. They got beat. Yeah.

And they realized that they hadn't leveled up their own personal game because they were being limited by their competition. Or I would argue by their beliefs. Belief system could be both, could be both. But you see it, somebody does something nobody else ever did. And the next thing you know, four, 10, 12 people do it in a very short order. And so why do I see it as a slap in the face? Personal, personal experience. I'm in Jamaica a number of years ago. Tell these guys I want to go cliff diving.

I'm doing training for the FBI. So cops go, yeah, we got a place you can go cliff diving. Take me to Rick's Cafe, like one of the most beautiful sunsets on planet Earth. And they got a bar there. They got a band. And every day is the celebration builds to the sunsets. Fantastic. And they got this cliff diving platform. And, you know, I'm shooting my mouth off. I hadn't stepped up to a cliff before. And, you know, I get up top of that thing. It's a long way down.

So the first time I jump, you know, I want to dive, but I'm going to jump just to experiment with it. And first time you go through this, like you, it seems like you step out into space and then suddenly you're the coyote hurtling for the ground at a hypersonic speeds. Yeah. And I can't quite bring myself to dive till I see this other dude come up, not as good a shape as me, not taking care of himself, dives, falls over backward, cracks his back on a water and

And Emerge is intact. And I looked at myself and I said, if that guy can dive, I can dive. And I needed a slap in the face. And the next thing I did was I dove off the top of the thing. Because somebody beat me. Yeah, I feel like, so we're in 43 markets. And a lot of times what I hear is this market's not like that market. You don't understand Milwaukee. A lot of alleyways.

A lot of the homes are connected to the garage. No one cares about their garage. The dispatcher doesn't like me. It's not possible here. Lower credit scores, worse areas. So I'll take, you know, I've got several dozen really great A players, best of the best. And I'm like, listen, do me a favor. Can you go out there for a week? And the managers will call me. They're like, no preferential treatment. I'm like, you're the dispatcher this week. Give him or her whatever jobs you want. And every single time, this has never failed me.

They look at it as a personal challenge to go out there because I tell them, I'm like, take off the training wheels, rip their head off, they're betting against you. There's never been once that they didn't like completely, I don't care where I send these people. They're going to murder it. They don't care what city, what state. And it changes the belief system quite a bit. And what I found is when I have somebody move there and they do it every day, every week, every month, every quarter, it's like, it is possible. They just need to know it's possible. They think...

We get inside of our own heads sometimes and we say, yeah, you know, they don't understand this and this, but that's a limiting belief system. Instead of saying I can and I will, and I'm going to do this and I'm not going to give up and I'm going to go for no. This idea is like, I would hate to be average and just not think I deserve more.

And that's the biggest fear when you were just in my training center. I said, guys, I hope you realize you're worth more than you ever thought possible. I hope you don't have imposter syndrome. I hope you'd love yourself enough because this is an amazing opportunity. It took one out of a hundred interviews for you even to be here. And you're already here. When you leave here, you're going to be on SEAL Team 6. You're an official badass if you treat it like it or you'll fade out. We groom winners here or they fade out. Yeah. So...

Well, I think what you're doing there too is I'm convinced that everybody's got like two lines of code in their head. I don't know what it is. Somebody said something to you when you were little, probably before the age five or six somewhere that either made you believe in yourself or said, hey, you know, you're not going to do that much, you know, all this nonsense. They put something in there. So then the challenge as an adult is how do I change that two lines of code? Get them to believe in yourself. What's their belief system? As you said, the belief system.

which then might be reinforced by who they're hanging out with. And then if you start discarding the people that are dragging you down, if you believe in loyalty, then you feel like you're betraying one of your own beliefs, one of your core values. I believe in loyalty. I believe in my friends. So, and the people that you're talking about in whatever market, you know, they got, they got naysayers in their lives that have been there forever. And if they walk away, if they stop talking to them, they question, am I disloyal?

So, yeah, how do you replace that two line of code and get people to level up and then surround themselves with winners? Yes. And it takes a while to get there. And my early days in L.A., about 2015 or so, I bring this really successful guy into the class I'm teaching at USC, guest speaker. And he says, here's my one piece of advice to all you. He says, fire your flaky friends. And I remember thinking like, that's hard. Your friends.

Fire your friends. And the more you think about it, the more it's true. It's hard. But if you got people around you, and almost everybody does, until you've really made it a point to cultivate your life so that there are positive people around you who believe in themselves and believe in your ability to work miracles. And then suddenly, yeah, everybody's working miracles.

it's a theory of the clawfish. And I tell these guys, I'm like, you got that friend. They're pulling you back in. Hey dude, what happened to my buddy? They used to drink a case of beer with me. Yeah. What happened to the guy that used to go to the strip club? And I go, guys, by the way, your friends and you didn't pick each other. So you turned 18, you were born next to them, but at the house next door, you have a choice. And I'm not going to say never talk to your buddies again, but I'm going to say this. When I find myself hanging out with successful people,

I jump from mountain to mountain to mountain. I'm at this mountain. I go back to base camp. I hang out with a new crew that says, here's how to get to the top of the mountain. And they're all circles. And if you don't get inspired by your circle, it's a cage. Yeah. Well said. And it is a cage. And most people are living in this cage. And I find myself in cages.

Very periodically, like pretty often. And I got to move, shift the circle. And it's not easy because look, we've got long-term relationships, but the minute somebody starts talking negative, I've used so many times in my past negativity to push me to do stuff. And it was coming from a place of darkness of you say, I can't do that. Watch this. It's got to turn to love at some point.

And the self-love. Yes. But I don't mind what inspires you. Whatever gets you going. If your wife told you you're always going to be a fat ass and it gets you in shape, you're going to have to turn around at some point and use that inspiration and say, I deserve this. I feel better. Yeah. I think people have a hard time with that, but they usually use something like mom said, I would never be anybody. Look at this. And sometimes that motivation goes further than just, I want to be better in life.

Do you ever think that sometimes negative people, you know, there's somebody saying something like, yeah, you wish you'll never, you'll never do that. Yeah. Well, some of what you're saying, yeah, negativity can be used to inspire you, you know, negativity, anger, there's energy and anger. And at some point in time, if it moves you forward, then, but it's got to turn into joy, self-love, so to speak, some version of joy.

And yeah, there are people who, when you were little, like, I don't know if my mom told me, it was probably your mom. Somewhere along the line, my mom made me believe that anything was possible. And I know other moms are probably saying like, don't let yourself be disappointed. The world's going to disappoint you. You know, it's this kind of world. It's that kind of world where you don't fit in.

And yeah, did you hear that? And is it holding you back or did it inspire you? Did it want you to prove the other person wrong? At what point in time did you reconcile it? It's a question I would love to see everybody understand and grapple because I believe it's a highly positive world. It's not perfect. There are bad stuff's going to happen. But by and large, just rolling a dice,

the world's going to take it easy on you and give you an opportunity to succeed. And just play in the numbers. And if it's fair, you didn't kick your ass. Yeah. Or we have an outsized memory for the negative. And then that holds us back. You know, I was reading an article by Tom Brady and he said, when I started playing professional football or it was college football, because I was by far the slowest guy.

Slow, slow, slow. Like I was literally last place as speed. And he goes, my mom.

My mom was there watching me from the silence and said, you were like flying. You were just so fast. And he goes, mom, I'm the slowest. No, no, no. You don't understand. You were faster than everybody. And she's just, I do think it's a lot of how your parents set you up in your belief systems or whoever raised you. If you could do whatever you want. And just my mom always told me, I know for a fact, and I always say this, that if something happened bad and this would never happen, but if I went to prison,

My mom would move anywhere on this planet to be right next to there to come visit. And she would love me. I really feel like it's unconditional. And I feel like if I told my mom, she's a piece, you know, and I cussed her out and I fist fought her, she would come back for more. I mean, to a certain extent, you could only take so much abuse, but that's just the woman she is. She's like unconditional love. And when you feel that, and a lot of people don't have that. And I was very fortunate. My mom and dad got a divorce, whatever, but

She always made me feel like I was number one. And that's why I'm like, I set these impossible goals. But I always say, if you shoot for the stars, you land on the moon, you're doing okay. And I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I never get burnout or like too stressed out. I'm not like, oh, I'm never going to make it. I'm never going to be, but I talk to myself all the time. I always got a calculator. I got the app open on my phone, the calculator app. I'm reversing engineering my goals.

People are like, dude, there's no way you could do that. And I'm like, yeah, I could. I want to hit a billion dollars of revenue. I need 2,000 texts doing 500,000. And I got to do that over the next four years. Here's who I would need to hire each month. And then it progresses up and they're like, wait, you're serious, aren't you? I'm like, yeah, it's a mathematical equation. It's a formula. It works every time. Do the math. I think a lot of people, I don't understand. I think it's,

A lot about people don't know how to focus. They say, I got ADHD. They just, they literally, they don't know what to do next. They don't have manual or SOPs or systems and they don't have a plan. And they're just like, I just want to do good. Like, you just want to do what is good. What does that even mean? I'm interested by watching people, but I've started studying success.

And I think that's the big difference. When you interview people, what kind of questions are you asking to see if they're ambitious, competitive, ethical, and coachable? Shout out to our mutual friend, Joe Polish, because at one of the sessions that I was at at Genius Network a while back, what I'm asking now is I'm going to ask you to name three people you admire and each person, you got to give me three reasons why you admire them. Now, there's a pretty good chance the first person they talk about

or the reasons they admire them, they may be answering what they think you want to hear. But that exercise is exhaustive enough that by the time they get into the second person, they're giving you real answers. And then they're going to start to tell you what their core values are without realizing it. And you run them all the way through it, you are going to find out really quickly what they're about. And I've heard enough stories

I think it might have been the haunted house Ouija board guy. Yeah. His answer was, you know, I admire the future of me. So first of all, it's a bullshit answer. Secondly, that's a rip off of something Matthew McConaughey said. Yeah, the 10 year old me. And so what you've just told me is you're a plagiarist. Yeah. You're a copycat. You don't have an original thought.

You admire an answer that seemed to be completely self-absorbed and self-centered. And like, that ain't the truth. But I didn't even bother going all the way through the three things. Because I already knew this, at this point in time, this dude is up. You know, sometimes I wonder, like, what are the chances I haven't already heard that? Sometimes people talk to me and they hit me with a cliche thing that's a ripoff of somebody else's story. And I've been around long enough, I've probably heard the story. Yeah.

So we got into some other stuff and I just said to myself, all right, so this dude's really interesting. I want to find out more about this guy. You know, how did he get, how did he get to this point? And we can abandon this because the job interview is over now and I'm just curious about using human bank, but that's kind of what I'm going for. And then I just got to ask my gut instinct, are they ambitious? Are they competitive? And the more you just ask yourself that gut, then the more accurate it's going to be.

No interview process is flawless. You tell people we work hard and then I've had people say, "You guys are working harder." And I, "Yeah, this job's harder than I thought." And my answer to them when we have a conversation is, "What promise did I break?" 'Cause I promised you we were gonna work hard. And in point of fact, if you come to work for me, I really believe the sky's the limit. If I gotta create an entire division of my company that you could head,

You know, what would make you happy? You know, how could I grow you into that? And there's anybody that's going to say that, yeah, you know, sounds great. Yeah, I'd love to do that. And I'll say pressure makes diamonds, but you got to want to be a diamond. Yeah. And then when they really get into it, they go like, ah, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. I'm like, okay, we're just a bad fit. That's all. Where you want to be is not that would make you happy someplace other than here. So I'm trying to guess at it to answer your question. I'm guessing at it.

And I'm saying things to people up front in case I missed, where I can say, what promise did I break? I promise you we're going to work hard. I promise you we're going to help people. I promise you there's no limit to what you could do if you're willing to work hard. And when they say, yeah, this is harder than I thought, I'm like, okay, I didn't lie to you. Dave Ramsey talks about, and I love this, I would try this out one time, is if you really like somebody, say, look, you have anybody that, you know, significant other,

Most people I've married, they've got a girlfriend. You can learn a lot more about somebody when you go to dinner and watch the way they treat their significant other. Because they're having tension at home. And some people are. Some people are just in a toxic relationship. And that's okay. It doesn't mean they're toxic. But it means you've got to overcome these every day you come to work. And so if you watch this, I'll call it mutual admiration and respect for one another. You could read right through this.

The way, especially if it's a couple, I mean, you could see that they have a great life together. And the people that have a great life together tend to perform better because you come to work happy. You had a great day. Mutual respect at home. You've heard happy wife, happy life. And then the other thing is I do a 30 day trial. This is a test. You got to come to work sober, not be on your cell phone, not be chain smoking. You got to ask great questions, be curious, smile more. And I tell them up front what we're looking for. You got to, you got to want to win too.

And this is, I tell everybody in the company, this is their test. If they made it to me in Phoenix and I'm not impressed, then you fail. And I'd rather hire slow and quality over quantity. Right. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I hadn't thought of it in those times, but as you see what their home life is like, when they come to work, are they trying to overcome what they went through over the last eight to 10 hours or they launched over the weekend?

Yeah. It's, it's interesting. And I've seen some crazy things and I'll tell you, it's not easy to be, I always say it's hard to be in a relationship, but it's hard to be single. You know, we were just in the training center. One of the most favorite things you talk about is why saying no is a fundamental weapon. You talk about, are you against this or would you have a problem with it? A lot of times we were always taught, nod our head and say, would you agree? Right. And,

You want to make sure this is safe, right? But it has become that everybody was trained in that way. And now we put our guard up. And you talked to me a little bit. I think that's probably one of the most favorite things is you said you had a nurse or no, you said you had a student go from,

12% conversion is 60% conversion, but just changing it from yes to no questions. Right, right, right. Guy running a service business. Yeah. Entrepreneurial guy and tracking his numbers. And he just had all his salespeople switch from yes to no questions. You know, again, do you disagree? Are you against this? Does this look like a bad idea? Have you given up on, is now a bad time? You know, have you given up on finding the man of your dreams? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's the dating advice, right? But I think at one point in time, probably what you're referring to, getting people to say yes, the yes momentum, I think it was probably was valid at one point in time. And everybody in sales has learned it. And many of the people that have learned it went from making no sales to some sales. You know, again, they went from being an F student to a C student.

But they had no idea they were only a C student because if you're an F student and you become a C student, suddenly life looks great. Like if you're an F student in college, they throw you out. If you're a C student, you get a degree. You go from totally failing to get a degree. And you measure yourself by the progress you made. And then you start to measure yourself by the people around you. And most people are handed in C-level performance. So you're like, I'm doing okay. You know, I'm following best practices.

But it's, there are those that are exploiters and there's, there's a number of things that gone on my team starts talking about, you know, common ground is weaponized against us. The word yes is weaponized against us. There are a lot of things that people that don't care about us, they found it to be successful. You know, the throat cutters, people are just trying to take the money out of our pockets and not care about the longterm relationship.

And so then you start getting stung by it. And I don't know anybody that hasn't been stung by the yes momentum. Talked into something. Yeah, I'd like to make more money. Yeah, you know, yeah. I would like to stay in a five-star resort whenever I wanted to, anywhere in the world. Yeah, I'd love that. And the next thing you know, they're saddened with something. It's killing them. And they didn't really realize it was, consciously it was the yes momentum that got them. But their gut instinct processed it.

Gut instinct is an extremely accurate supercomputer. And listening to your gut versus listening to your amygdala feel centers is kind of the struggle that we all go through. But you get stung a couple of times with the S-momentum, then you're going to be suspicious of everybody that tries to get you to say yes. The same way a battered child is suspicious of every adult the minute their hands raise. Some adults are trying to give them a genuine hug, and a hug is actually good for you.

And if you're that adult who's trying to give a battered child a hug, it doesn't matter what your intention is. The battered child is still going to react to their bad experiences. And that's why I think this yes momentum stuff is so harmful. Yeah. Like across the board, I'm seeing it. No matter who it is, as soon as you start trying to get somebody to say yes, people's guard starts to go up. So that's a Pavlovian response. The stupid idea is...

Since you always feel safe and protected when you say no, then it clears your mind. You're more willing to listen. Any parent that's got a teenage kid, dad, can I? No. But then you start to listen after having said no. So I think the mythology of kids don't take no for an answer with their parents, it's not they don't take no for an answer. They've seen over and over again that once a parent has said no, they're more open to listening. And so don't be deterred.

Because dad or mom said no, they feel protected. They're actually willing to listen to what the kid has to say at that point. And I'm seeing it with adults across the board. And so, you know, the guy that was at our training went from 12 to 60 percent, just no other change other than switching from yes to no and the way they form their questions like a ridiculous jump. And the funny thing about it is like everybody comes to work for me.

I work on them to learn all the skills. Some take more practice. Instantly, within two weeks, they all got no oriented questions down. It's now a bad time to talk. Would you be against? They're hitting me with them constantly. Now, why do they pick those up so quick? Because they'd started using it with their family and friends and got an instantaneous response.

increase in their life, a massive amount of friction in their life disappeared the moment they switched from yes to no. And that's why you pick up a skill because you get feedback that it works. And that's the simplest one to get the most immediate feedback on. I'm trying to think how I want to use this because we always, my big thing is if you're not giving options, you're giving ultimatum. Good point. You're only able to say yes or no. Right. So I would say Chris or Mr. Voss, I say, look, we're going to go over six options. You can pick one you like. How does that sound?

And that's so much easier. Right. We can do anything you want. Just pick when you like. But would you be against me giving you some options and then you could pick when you like? I guess we could. That's what I want to work on with our business here. So you talk about a few things, voice mirroring and the strategic use of FAIR. Yeah.

I love the word fair. Does that sound fair? I love the idea of, you know, I just want to make sure you're getting a fair handshake. What is the best way? So I understand mirroring. It's when I'm repeating the order back to you. I'm a server. I understand voice inflections. Talk to me about the right use of fair. Well, so first of all, the way you put that, you know, we talked about this earlier. Intention has a smell.

So your intent from the very beginning in everything that you do and your approach, and approach that you teach, is to have a customer that's happy with everything you've done and want to call you back if they need you for anything else or refer you. - Right. - So you're driving for a long-term relationship one way or another, even if they never need the garage door ever again. If the neighbor does, what are they gonna say to the neighbor? - Raving fans, hopefully. - Yeah, you need raving fans. So that's your intention, which means by definition,

You want a long-term relationship. You want to be thought of well. So fair is another word that's often weaponized against people. And mostly, you know, we're giving you a fair offer or what you're doing is very unfair. Like one of my favorites, and it's in the book, a number of years ago, NFL is locked out, Players Association, trying to get the NFL owners to open their books. What do the NFL owners say? We've given the players a fair offer.

So that puts everybody, the thought in everybody's mind, maybe the players are being unfair. It puts a thought in their mind. You know, the players started to fragment a little bit as a result, but it can be used in that context. Look, if it was a fair offer, open your books and prove it. You know, I'm not saying it's not fair. Just show me. And to try to gain the upper hand in a contentious negotiation, there are people that would say, I've given you a fair offer.

Which means if you reject that you're unfair, you're the one, it's an emotional button that you're pressing. Now, your approach is to lay it out from the very beginning that you want to be fair. And so from the very beginning, you're inviting them to tell you where you've been unfair. And that's a completely different set of circumstances. So it's mostly context-driven and the people that are manipulators are

We'll use fairness because if I toss it out there, it's going to get you to question yourself. And the last thing you want to do is be unfair. Oh, I like this stuff, man. I told you I was just recently with Robert Cialdini and he talks a lot about just the switch of words. Very, very subtle. And they did this experiment. And I love this one at a restaurant.

They brought the check presenter and they said, thank you for your business tonight. The next one, they put one mint in. The tip didn't change. The next one, they put two mints in. The tip went up 2%. The next one, the server walked away after giving the check presenter a walk back and said, for you two gentlemen, each of you deserve a mint for coming in tonight. And the tip doubled.

And what I love about what these guys do at colleges and universities is they'll do like a thousand. They'll do like a whole case study around it and they'll have like a double blind study and all these things. And it's just these little subtleties, these little things that just change the whole dynamic of the conversation. Even with this idea of just reversing instead of a yes question, no question. And you add it all together and you practice it enough.

I was with Larry Fitzgerald and he said for every ball I've caught during a game as a wide receiver, I've caught over a hundred in practice. Right. And I just love the idea. So you were telling the guys next door, you said, first, you got to see yourself doing it like Tiger Woods. I think you said Michael Jordan or LeBron James. Right. You got to see yourself doing it. Then you got to go like use it and then you got to practice it. And then you got to put it into like deployment. Yeah.

that's tough for people because most of the time, most of us in the home service industry, we don't build a culture of practice where we're coming in every day. And I hate to use this word because I don't like it, but it is role play. How do you feel about that role play? I think it's a good start because you got to get some practice actually getting it out of your mouth. And then, you know, imagining it is helpful, but the actual feel of doing it, whether it's a real person there,

At the same time, you know that you're taking it up a notch each time. Now, ideally, in your role play, you don't have a counterpart who's got an agenda to prove that you're wrong. And so that doesn't help. And we run into that sometimes we're doing a training because the mirror thing that you mentioned before, repeating just, you know, a couple of words, there'll be somebody in training that'll be like, I'm going to prove this doesn't work.

And no matter how much mirroring or any skill that gets used on them, they just go, yep, nope, yep, nope. One word answer. It's not opening up at all. So you got to have somebody working with you that's not there to prove you wrong. You need them encouraging you. And it helps to have somebody doing it live. And then you practice it a couple of times and you got to go out and try it in real life. You don't do it in real life. There's real life stuff all over the place.

I think the biggest thing in practice is people imagine getting it wrong. And when in point of fact, in real life, if you get these skills wrong, it works in a different way. And it tells you that getting it wrong ain't bad. Like I, I practice on a TSA people all the time because I go through airports all the time, you know, and they're there and they get tough jobs. So I'm rolling through TSA one day.

And I realized I haven't, you know, thrown a label on verbal observation on anybody. Here's my bags coming out. I look at this guy's kind of standing there like it's just an average day. And I go, tough day. Cause usually it is a tough day, but you need the data showing you. And he just, so I missed, I was wrong. And he reacts, like shakes it off. Like, no, but not angry. Yeah. And I go, oh, just another day. Huh? He goes, yeah, it's just another day.

So that was practice for me. And then as it turns out, because I got that practice in at that moment, five minutes later, phone rings, call, I got to take. Normally I don't take calls when I'm going through the airport because you deserve my entire attention. Right. And if I'm in an airport, you ain't got my entire attention. But this guy's really hard to get on a phone and a good friend. So I talked to him anyway. If I hadn't warmed up on the TSA guy and missed earlier, I wouldn't have been as sharp as I was in that call. Hmm.

I like that. I kind of want to do a field day once a week with the guys and go to Costco or go practice. Throw a mic on them, like a hit them up. Just have them listen to themselves, like practice in the real world. Because so often we talk about these, how do you use this at home? How do you make this part of your DNA? Not just learn the circumstantial when this happens, then this. But how do you use this where it's just a skill that you could use forever?

Yeah. And it's like, look, give me a I always tell the guys, do me a favor. Smile right now. Just stand there and smile with me. I'm like, the first time I looked in the mirror and started talking, it was really tough. And then I started practicing and practicing in front of a mirror. And I got way more comfortable with it. It's just moving cheek muscles. You're not used to moving. Yeah. But, you know, some of us feel like we look like idiots when we're smiling and talking.

But it's so nice when you're talking to somebody like I always tell the story, I go, can you imagine guys before you were married or when you were single and you just saw the most gorgeous girl at a bar? She's standing by the jukebox and she's gorgeous. She's dressed to kill and she's just angry. Would you walk up to her? Would you do it? Like if she didn't smile, she didn't make eye contact. She didn't want anything to do with anybody that just kind of comes off as conceited or unattractive.

So like, what do you think you are perceived at when you just don't smile at all? Right. It looked like you hate your life. You look like you don't enjoy the company or what you do. And I always tell the guys, when you walk in that garage, you're the doctor. And by the way, when I go to the doctor, what do they do? They ask me how much you've been drinking. Are you smoking? They give me some tests. They say, what's your food like? Are you exercising? They run. They look at my eyeballs, my ears, my nose, you know, everywhere. Check my heartbeat. And then they say, they write a prescription.

You know what they do? They say, what's closer to you, CVS or Walgreens? They give me the prescription. I go, I've never asked the doctor that looks me in the eyes and asked me all these questions and diagnosed me that I need to get a second opinion because they're the authority. They know what's going on. They never talk or hesitate or say, hmm, I'm not really sure. I want to make some recommendations, but we don't really know. I don't get that from the doctor. So we're the doctor. They called us out to be the doctor.

And that confidence level, I was with my buddy, this buddy, I haven't been with him, like got out with him a while. He lives on the East coast, but I go, this guy picks up the most hottest chick everywhere we go. And he always walks away and comes back and introduces me to whatever girl that he just met that night. And one night I'm like, I'm going to go with this asshole, find out what he's doing. So he walks up to these girls and,

And he looks them in the eyes, relentless. And he's talking to them. But what I watched is they weren't no eye contact, not digging it. He literally looked at me. He goes, went over the next group of girls. He did not care. He did not care.

When I go to Mexico and the little kid's asking to sell blankets, if I say no thanks, he's not insulted. He doesn't ruin his life and call his parents up and say, didn't get a sale. Why is it that us as Americans, and sometimes we just feel like this fear of rejection. Right.

I don't know what it is, but so many people are afraid of no, they're afraid to get rejected. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, Ed Kottemel's book, the guy who founded Pixar, his book Creativity Inc., he drills into that, the fear of failure a lot. One of the reasons that he lays out, which I think, like when you're in grade school, if you fail, like your teachers, like there's so many penalties for failing, right?

that I think it's drilled into us early on that this failure is this horrible thing. And so we get out in the real world, we realize just on percentages, if you discard the failures, you move on to the successes if you don't let them hold your back. But we got all this conditioning, however long we were in school, that every failure was horrible. And if we didn't have a certain amount of fear of it to begin with in our DNA, what we're wired with, then much of the educational system reinforces it. So by the time we're adults, we have a hard time with it. Yeah. Yeah.

Let's ask a couple of final questions. I just want to hear from your perspective. What was one of the real life scenarios? This always gets, I love watching like FBI. This is, that's my jam of like hostage negotiations. Like this is the coolest thing. What was one of the stories that maybe you haven't shared in a long time?

that you were against some really difficult odds. I'm sure you got your go-tos, but what was one that like, you don't bring up very often that you were able to diffuse the situation, get a good outcome, but it was, what's the longest you've ever gone? Well, I mean, I was involved in one kidnapping that lasted over six years. Oh shit. Columbia, the FARC. And I worked there for multiple years and I left the Bureau before it was resolved.

Because at that point in time, I'd lost any ability to influence the outcome of the case. And some other things happened where I was working for a supervisor that was undermining everything I did. So not only did I lose the ability to do the case, like I had a boss that he and I just didn't align. And the last time I had a boss that I didn't align with and I left, my life got better. So this was another one where I'm saying, all right, the universe is telling me to move on. I'm good with that. So that case lasted over six years.

But one I really loved, I had changed our approach in our kidnapping negotiations from the old standard proof of life to sort of a more innocent question. How do we know the hostage is alive? Basically, which is a powerful thing to ask. So we start this case and the guy gives proof of life right away. And I'm like, oh, man, this guy just screwed up my new idea. I want I want to implement this.

But there was something about this guy that bothered me. Kidnapping is a company activity, a gang activity, a group activity. And they're organized like any other business, which means the boss is never on the phone. There's an underling with constraints handling the negotiations. And this dude was, I thought, we're talking to the boss. We don't have an underling here. We got the boss on in connection. Now, this guy turns out to be a lone man.

The only one I'd never heard of a case, let alone dealt with one where there was only one bad guy on the other side, lone kidnapper. And if I hadn't heard of it at the time, I knew about as much about kidnapping as anybody in the world did. So if I hadn't heard of it, it probably hadn't happened. And that's what we got on this case. And he's already given proof of life, but I got a highly coachable. I'm coaching a brother, highly coachable.

And we have hammered him so much on opening the questions, what we now call calibrated questions, designed to accomplish, to make you think as opposed to make you answer. Going back and forth, guy wants a daily rate to keep the hostage alive. We're arguing about that because it's going to be, they're going to hold him for a year if we pay him to keep him alive. And finally on his own, the guy I'm coaching comes up and he says, when we run out of money, paying the daily rate, what's going to happen?

And there's a long silence and bad guy says, it'll be all right. Now my negotiators in country call me on the phone and go like, this sounds significant, but what just happened? I go, are you kidding me? We got him. He just promised never to hurt the hostage. We didn't know it at the time. This guy was also a serial killer. So we got a serial killer on the other end of the line who's just promised not to hurt the hostage. We're going back and forth with Philippine National Police. They try to rescue once.

The night they tried to rescue the first time, I was convinced I was gonna wake up in the morning with a dead hostage. They missed by so far that night. This guy was really cagey, hooked up an antenna on top of another house that was three blocks away. When the guy calls the next morning, he's just like, hey, you know, where's my money? Like nothing happened. And like, how the hell did we have a rescue last night? They missed by so far. He didn't even know what happened. So we're going back and forth on this. We got the hostage. A bad guy promising he ain't gonna hurt the hostage.

We're down to within a reasonable amount that we can make a payment of bait money. Just like in a bank, you use bait money, you make a payment, you know, it's bait money. It's a trap if you get them to take it. And my negotiators call me, I'm getting ready to switch them out, pull the people out of in-country, put two more in. They say, why don't we just let them pay? And I'm like, nah, we're going to push the bait money down even lower. Philippine National Police come up with another location to hit. And the intel the second time looks really good.

Now, it's not up to me whether or not they hit the place. It's a family decision. Family wants to know what we think. And I'm like, I'm not going to hold them back. I think there's good odds here. They hit the house. It ain't the right house. But it is a house the bad guy owns and his wife is there. They roll up the wife. Where's your husband? Well, I don't know where he is, but we do own this other house. They go hit the other house. Bad guy's not there. But the hostage is in the basement.

They rescue the hostage and they sit there and wait for the bad guy to show up and they lock him up. And that's when we found out that he was a serial killer too. Oh my gosh. So we rolled everybody up. I had a change in strategy. Good strategy creates great outcomes that you might not expect. Let something good happen. It did not achieve the intended objective. It achieved a better one and faster than we ever thought possible.

we would have been possible. So that was one of the ones that I was happiest about because we got a rescue. We got the bad guy, kept him from hurting anybody else. Yeah. I'm sure he is, you know, Philippine, you go to jail in the Philippines. You're not doing good. You're going to end up under the jail. Yeah, I can imagine. I got a couple of closing questions. One other quick one. I got to get this in.

Everybody's going crazy right now about cybersecurity. I know some massive, massive, massive, multi, multi, multi-billion coming on a trillion dollar get hacked. Sometimes it goes so deep. It goes into their complete operating system. They can completely shut you down. They can shut down the planes. They can shut down your bank. They can shut down the railroads.

That's a different type of negotiation. It's kind of like you're a hostage to them because you can't run the business without it. I mean, the government's been... Those are the same dynamics as an overseas kidnapping. And if you pay, they still got something in there that they could just... I've heard of people paying and then one month later they ask for another... Because they paid too easy. They didn't negotiate the agreement up front. So...

Obviously they shut you down every minute counts. You're out of capacity. They've proven they can shut you down. You're shut down. How do you move quickly on that? What's the right way to be thinking about if your whole business is inoperable? Well, first of all, the other side, although they want a minute, they have a timeline too. They're running a business. You're a commodity. It's their job to get as much as they can as quickly as they can. It's not did they get as much as they could, it's did they feel like they did.

And in point of fact, they have a timeline. It's not open-ended for the other side. So you ask a legitimate question. How can we pay you if we don't know that you're going to let us go? That's an unavoidable question because the answer there is like, if you're not going to let the hostage go, if there's no point in me paying you and you're not going to let us go, I'm not paying you. But you don't want to say that. It's triggering a thought in the other side's mind.

So the approach is, and this happens all the time, business executives are used to their normal way of doing business, which is just, they want to intimidate. They want to impress with their, how smart they are, their business acumen, like business executives dig themselves. I know a couple of companies that actually negotiate these deals based on the principles of my book, because they've come to me and told me that.

And so it's a realization about who's really on the other side. They, in fact, have a timeline and stop trying to show off your resume, which works really good at whatever bar you drink at, but these guys are not impressed by it. And then there becomes an unavoidable issue, which is if you're not going to give us our company back, how are we supposed to pay you? And that's a question they can't get around. And then as you communicate with them, one of the points always was in negotiation is

It's not whether or not you're going to lie to me. My job is to pick up when you're telling the truth. So you engage with the other side so that you get a really good assessment of what words they use, what adjectives they use when they're telling the truth. Anything other than that is a lie. So the question, are we supposed to pay you if we don't know we're going to get our company back?

It's not so much the answer, but how they answer. And then you've asked it multiple times. Now you draw a bead on which part was true and which part was false. Because if you're not going to get your company back, why should you pay? Yeah. And that's the question. It's a legitimate question. And when you ask the bad guys legitimate questions, it's not disrespectful. It's a legitimate question. Well, I know that cybersecurity, interesting fact, covers up to 30 million. So...

If I were on the opposite end of being the bad guy, I would probably say 30 million would be the number I'm going for, knowing it's insured. - But what they wanna do is, you say it covers up to 30 mil. Their job is to find out how much you have and take it. So if you got a policy for 30 mil, their job's gonna be to get the 30 mil. But what happens if you got a policy for 10, 15, less? What if you don't have a policy? They wanna interact with you to find out what it is.

Their job is to find out what you have, which could be separate from what the market is, and then to get it from you in a set period of time. Yeah. Because they got other people that have taken hostage, and they got more other people they want to take hostage, and they can't afford to burn up a lot of time on you. So they want to find out what you got. And believe me, they got a timeframe. Whoever's talking to the company has a boss who's standing behind him saying, how's it going? When are we going to get paid?

you need to move on to the next job, just like any other boss. Is the FBI pretty good and CIA, I guess, if it's international? I guess FBI works international too, but are they pretty good about recovering? Because it's gotten pretty crazy with Bitcoin and these different things to track this stuff. I've heard of a lot of stuff that it's almost impossible to track. The more you can lengthen the negotiations out, the more potential evidence is acquired, which is why if I was coaching you,

You know, I would lengthen it out. They're going to say things inadvertently. They're going to identify them. You know, whoever you're talking to, you're going to want to find out what his nickname is. You're going to want to get it. It sounds stupid. If you can, you want to get on a first name basis with us. And I won't give you his first name, but I'll give you his nickname. Nickname's an identifier. When they want to talk is going to give you somewhat of an indication. They're always going to want to talk within that same timeframe.

which is that the patterns that you pick up will tend to identify where they are and who they are. And if the Bureau's not engaged with you at the time, you still got a fair amount of evidence to hand over to them should you choose to do so in the future. Yeah, I love this stuff. I could do this all day. When people want to get ahold of you, Chris, what's the best way to do that? You know, go to my website, BlackSwanLTD.com. A number of choices you can make. You can subscribe to our newsletter, which is free.

It's concise, actionable negotiation strategies that you get for free on Tuesday mornings. Wherever you are in the world, Tuesday is a good day to get new information. Monday, you get, you know, it's a buffer day. Tuesday, you're ready to rock. Then the newsletter will let you know about what training we have. We are going to do a large negotiation mastery summit conference in March, St. Patrick's Day.

This coming year, 2025 in Louisville. Yeah. So I don't know if you want to be someplace where you could drink bourbon on St. Patrick's day, but might not be a bad idea. Okay. So we got that. We'll have that in the show notes. We can get your, so Tuesday, what else is available on there? More training. You can sign up for, yeah, we got, we got training across the board. It put a lot more clips on,

Short video clips of negotiation advice on my Instagram. Okay. At the FBI negotiator. I've been really happy with that because there are a number of really, really good negotiators that we coach that have told me informally they love the clips that we're putting on Instagram. Okay. Short, concise, helpful ideas. And any books out there? It's something you recently read. Obviously, there's zero.

There's the go-tos, but is there anything kind of uncommon that you read recently that you'd say, this is an amazing read? For different reasons. I've been reading the book Chip War about the development of the semiconductor industry in Southeast Asia, which has changed my thinking on the world's problems. They make the comment in that book that the U.S. military lost the war and the chip industry won the peace in Southeast Asia.

And I'm like, oh yeah, as a matter of fact, governments don't win wars, industries win peace. So that was perspective. A good book on international perspectives is Prisoners of Geography, contending that whatever geography you grew up in will shape a national identity. And it's fascinating to me as to how accurate it is in terms of how after you were born with the original equipment of being a human being,

how your culture evolved into thinking like it thinks. For example, Russia's been invaded more times than they've invaded other countries. They got no natural land barriers like the US has. The geography encourages, Germany invaded them twice, Japan two or three times. And they've got no deep water ports that are open year round. So what does that mean? They're a country that's invaded easily by others. And if their ports get cut off, they could starve.

So, all right, so I don't agree with what they're doing, but maybe I get a better feel for where they're coming from as a country. And that's just one example. So it's fascinating when you want to learn about other cultures and anthropology, how did a culture develop? What were the pressures on them? And we forget about it in the U.S. because look at our borders. You can't come at us from the east or the west. We're going to see you from 200 miles away. We've got deep water ports everywhere. Up to the north, we've got a great barrier, Canada, Rocky Mountains, the Arctic.

From the south, it's a narrow land bridge, very difficult to cross. We forget about how, like, we have the best strategic location on planet Earth for a safe country. So prisoners of geography is one of those things that points it out. I thought, I found it was fascinating. Oh, I love this stuff. Last final question is, we talked about a lot of stuff and I'm such a big fan of yours. Like, we're going to implement a lot of these things.

We talked about a lot. Is there anything we didn't talk about? Any final thoughts? I'll give you the stage to finish this out. You know, it seems like a huge waste of time to repeat back what people have told you about where they're coming from. Because a lot of people, if you understand, you might just want to say, I understand, because you want to save time. And people are afraid to summarize the other guy's perspective if they disagree with it. Like, there's so many fears, right?

And it accelerates things so fast that once you start saying out loud to somebody what you hear them saying, you know, here's what I think you're saying. Here's how you see this. Or even before I disagree, here's how I think you see it. You'd be shocked at how it accelerates the conversation to where you want to go. Shocked. So take the time to do it.

Love it. Well, thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure. Tommy, this was amazing. Thank you for being here. And to all the listeners, pick up Never Split the Difference. Make sure you subscribe to Chris's newsletter. And hopefully you'll be there drinking bourbon in Louisville. Thanks, guys.

Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper

to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.