The Home Service Expert Podcast - Mastering the Art of Negotiation with Chris Voss

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Chris Voss is the world's #1 Negotiation Coach and CEO at The Black Swan Group, a negotiation consultancy serving Fortune 500 companies globally. He represented the U.S. in international conferences and served as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative on the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. In this episode, we talked about negotiation techniques, ethical influence, systems thinking...

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? 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? 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, N-O-T-E-S 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. I'm excited man. You wrote the best seller, never split the difference. You've been on some of my buddies' podcasts, obviously Waste No Day, Brian Burton.

Yep. Part of the Black Swan group. Why don't you just tell us, 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. All right, 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 South side, somebody's trapped in a bank. I'm a call in and try to get them to come out. So same thing as a cold collar does, you know, cold collar call somebody on the phone person on the other end 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 use in hostage 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 master class 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, 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, 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, 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, uh, we've got two major vendors and, uh, we're with private equity and, uh, 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, just see the 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 bracing 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 say

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.

You know, 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 here or not. And that's the great thing about that particular skill label is like, this is what this sounds like. Yeah. And he might be like, oh, yeah, because some of it in negotiations, like Mark Cuban is one of my favorites. A lot of it is he's testing you. Yeah, you can tell he is. And I'm convinced that Mark, I 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? 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? Cause then you're a great ambassador. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I, 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, 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. Yeah. 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, you know, that's a little bit of the gym camp approach too, from start with no back in 2002. And that's when I first started reading camp spoke back then open 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. spoke 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 it's not 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 and what we need. And if something doesn't make sense and he, I mean, these were all long conversations. I was looking, I've read the book twice and I just looked at some of the summaries I wrote

down to the psychological awareness of understanding 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 slowed 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 books out there that claim that everything's learned the culture code by Daniel coil I think contends that everything is learned like he can't learn to be seven feet tall he 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 gonna have to wait till he answers because he's gonna 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 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, oh, 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 want 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 brokeest 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 that they're judging me 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 because guess how much this lady wanted the charge. I go, well, what did you want? So that, 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 was a hundred thousand dollars. And I'm like, they must've looked at us. The throw pillows were $250 each that I could have got two bucks. I'm going, but they judged a book by its cover and the opposite way. This is why wealthy people are guarded because they're like, I 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 in the middle Yeah, right. So judging a book by its cover you make people feel like they're commodity You know, you might be right. See here's the thing Like people never people 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, 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 why 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 that's almost horrifies the guys managing my company, my general manager, 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 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 is his head is just hanging now because he's like, there's no way we're never ever gonna hire this guy. And I should have found this out before he talk to Chris, because I'm never going to hear the end of this. Yeah. And so it's almost a contest now to see who 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 it 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. I'm like, this is gonna, 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. Cause you, the differences 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. Yeah, it's fascinating. 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 us? 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, you know, your habits are your, it's 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. You know, 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 of this? Generation doesn't want to work Not the way that you want them to work. It used to be, you know, my parents used to just go to work and 60 hours a week if they had to. They didn't like it. They didn't enjoy it. They didn't understand why they were working. What do you think the best conversation,

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 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, but you need both and ethical. You know, their hearts in the right place. By and large, if your heart's in the wrong place, it's going to catch up with you. 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 gonna catch up with you. Like, if you're a complete sociopath, you wanna have long-term relationships of trust because it's gonna catch up to you otherwise.

So even a mercenary's realize that long-term trust 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, 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 the name? Elizabeth Theranos 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. And I asked myself, so what's the explanation for that? That's ambition with no ethics.

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 and then competitive, you got to be competitive. Some, cause every now and then you need a good slap in the face when you get beat. It's inspired 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. People talk about the Roger Bannister effect. First guy that ran a four-minute mile. And then how many people ran it right after he did. And most of the philosophy is somebody showed him it was possible. Yeah, my opinion is Most are not if not all of those guys Thought they were better than banister And when banister broke the record it was a slap in the face They got beat and

They realized that they hadn't leveled up their own personal game because they were being limited by their competition More by I would argue by their belief belief system problem could be both. Could be both, but you see, you see it. If 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 on planet Earth. And they got a bar there, they got a band, and every day the celebration builds to the sunsets. Fantastic.

And they got this cliff diving platform. And I'm shooting my mouth off. I hadn't stepped up to a cliff before, and I get up to the top of that thing, it's a long way down. So the first time I jump, I wanna die, but I'm gonna jump just to experiment with it. And 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. And I can't quite bring myself to dive until 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 emerges 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, uh, the homes are connected to the garage. No one cares about their garage. The dispatcher doesn't like me. It's not possible here. The lower credit score is worse areas. So I'll take, you know, I've got several dozen really great a players, like 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. You give them, give them 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. Cause I tell them, I'm like, take off the training wheels, rip their head off their bed and 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, you know, 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 six, your official bad-ass. If you treat it like it it or you'll fade out. We groom winners here or they fade out. Yeah. So yeah. 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. They 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 is an adult is how do I, how do I change that two lines of code, get them to believe in herself? 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 the people that you're talking about in whatever market, they get 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, 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 LA, 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 of you. He says, fire your flaky friends. And I remember thinking like, that's harsh.

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, they're pulling you back in. Hey dude, what happened to my buddy that 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 to hang out with a new crew that says 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 the fastest. 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 periodic, like pretty often. And I I gotta 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. It was coming from a place of darkness.

Of you say I can't do that, watch this. It's gotta turn to love at some point, and to 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, but 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 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 gonna 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 that it, 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? That'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 that'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 playing the numbers and if failure 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,

he goes, I was by far the slowest guy. Slow, slow, slow. Like I was literally last place as a speed. And he goes, my mom, my mom was there watching me from the sideline 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 me. 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 burned out or 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,, 200, 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, I 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 Is it one of the sessions that I was at a 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 ripoff of something Matthew McConaughey said. Yeah, the 10 year me. And so what you've just told me is you're a plagiarist.

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 yeah the three three things and the three because I already know 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 probably heard the story. Yeah

So we got into some other stuff and I just said to myself alright, 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 interviews over now and I'm just curious about using human being 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. And that 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 going to work hard. And in point of fact, if you come to work for me, I really believe the sky's the limit. If I got to 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 was anybody that's going to say that, yeah, you know, it 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. And I thought it was going to be like, okay, this is harder than I thought it was gonna 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 Upfront in case I missed where I can say what promise that I break I

Promise you we were gonna work hard. I promise you we're gonna 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 ass is harder than I thought like okay, I didn't lie to you Dave Ramsey talks about 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 have married, they got a girlfriend, is you can learn a lot more about somebody when you go to dinner and watch the way they treat their significant other. Right. 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 this mutual admiration and respect for one another and there's smile. You could read right through 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 life, happy life. Then the other thing is I do a 30 day trial. This is a test. You gotta come to work sober, not be on your cell phone, not be chain smoking. Gotta ask great questions, be curious, smile more. And I tell them upfront what we're

looking for. You gotta, you gotta want to win too. And this is, I tell everybody in the company, this is their test. If they made it to me and Phoenix and I'm not impressed, then you fail. And I'd rather hire slow and quality over quantity. Right. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I hadn't thought of it in those times, whereas you see what their home life is like when it comes to work. Are they trying to overcome what they went through over the last eight to 10 hours or they launched or the weekend? Yeah, it's, um, 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? A lot of times we were always taught nod our head and say, would you agree? 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 talk to me a little bit. I think that's probably one of the most favorite things that you said you had a nurse or now you said you had a student go from 12% conversion to 60% conversion. Right. Just changing it from yes to no questions. Right, right, right. Guy running a service business, 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 it's now a bad time? You know, if you've given up on finding the man of your dreams. Yeah. Yeah. That's the dating advice, right? Yeah. 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 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 following best practices but it's there are those that are exploiters and there's there's a

number of things they're going on my team starts talking about you know common ground is weaponized against us the word yes 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. The throat cutters, people are just trying to take the money out of our pockets and not care about the long-term 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, the saddle was something it's killing and They didn't really realize it was consciously. It the S-momentum that got them. But the gun instinct processed it.

Gun instinct is an extremely accurate supercomputer. And listening to your gut versus listening to your amygdala field 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 gonna react to their bad experiences And that's why I think this yes momentum stuff is so harmful. Yeah, I 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 know, you're more willing to listen. You know, 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. And 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 out of training went from 12 to 60%, 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, you know, I work on them to learn all the skills. Some take more practice like instantly within two weeks, they all got no oriented questions down is now 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 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 best thing is if you're not giving options, you're giving ultimatums.

Good point. You're only able to say yes or no. Right. So I would say Chris or Mr. Voss, I'd 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 one 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. 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, and we talked about this earlier intention has a smell. So your intent from the very beginning and everything that you do in 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. 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 going to say to their 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. Yeah. So fair is another word that's often weaponized against people and mostly, you know, 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 getting re is locked out players association, trying to get the NFL owners to open our books. What are 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 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 other 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 will 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. 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 Chedini 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 minutes in the tip, went up two percent. The next one, the server walked away after giving the check presenter, walked 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, uh, 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 were 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, you got to get some practice, actually getting it out of your mouth. And then, you know, imagining it is helpful, 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, 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 a couple of words,

there'll be somebody in training that'll be like, I'm gonna 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 is not opening up at all. Yeah So you got to have somebody working with you that's not there to prove you wrong Yeah, you need them encouraging you and it helps to have somebody doing it live and then you practice it a couple times And you got to go out and try to real life, you know do in a 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 they 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. There'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 because 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 Just another day. 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 a 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, go practice, throw a mic on them. Like I hit him, just have them listen to themself 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 and this happens than 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 a 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? 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 that when you just don't smile at all? Right. It looks 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'm gonna 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 doc and that

that confidence level I was with my buddy, this buddy, I haven't been with him like, 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 day 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 he looks 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 kids 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, know that are afraid to get rejected.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Ed cotton, most catamels cotton, most book, the guy who found a Pixar, his book, creativity, 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 that I think it's drilled into us early on that this failure is this horrible thing. And so we get out in a 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 it 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. 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 out of watching like FBI. Like 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 defuse the situation, get a good outcome, but it was, uh, what's the longest you've ever gotten? 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 a 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 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 kidnapper, 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. If I hadn't heard of it, at the time I knew about as much about kidnapping as anybody in the world did. If I hadn't heard of it, it probably hadn't happened. That's what we got on this case. He's already given proof of life, but 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 them for a year if we're paying them to keep them 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, 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 the Philippine National Police. They tried to rescue once. The night they tried to rescue the first time I was convinced I was going to wake up in

the morning with that hostage. They missed by so far that night. This guy was really cagey, hooked up an antenna on top of another house. It 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 do 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 going to hurt the hostage. We're down to within a reasonable amount that we can make a payment, a bait money, just like in a bank. You use amount that we can make a payment of bait money Just like in a bank use bait money. Yeah, 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 and they say why don't we just let Them pay I'm like man. We're gonna 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. That'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's is, but we do own this other house. They go hit the other house. Bad guys not there, but the hostages 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 the better one and faster than we ever thought 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 them from hurting anybody else.

I'm sure he is, you know, Philippine, you go to jail in the Philippines. You're not doing good. You, uh, 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 gotta 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. Right. 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 asked for another kind of bite.

Too easy. They didn't, they didn't negotiate the agreement upfront. So obviously they shut you down. Every minute counts. You're out of capacity. They proven they could shut you down. You're shut down. How do you move quickly on that? What, 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, is 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 go, I'm not paying you. But you don't wanna 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 wanna intimidate, they wanna press 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 a negotiation.

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, how 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. Cause 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 cyber security, interesting fact, covers up to 30 million. So if I were on the opposite, that would be the bad guy. I would probably say 30 million would be the number I'm going for. No one's assured.

But what they want to 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've got a policy for 30 mil, their job's gonna be to get the 30 mil. Well, 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, cause they got other people that have taken hostage and they get 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 in CIA? I guess if it's international, I guess FBI works in international too, but are they pretty good about recovering? Cause it's gotten pretty crazy with Bitcoin at these different things to track this stuff that 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 gonna say things inadvertently. They're gonna identify them You know, whoever you're talking to you don't want to find to find out what his nickname is. You're going to want to get on it. It sounds stupid. If you can't, you want to get on a first name basis with us. And I won't give you his first name, but it gives you his nickname. Nickname is an identifier. When they want to talk, it's 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?

And I'll go to my website, black swan, L T D.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 could get your, so Tuesday, what else is available on there? More training you could sign up for. Yeah, we got training across the board.

I put a lot more clips, 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, you know, there's the go-tos, but is there anything like kind of uncommon that you read recently that you'd say, this is amazing reading? For different reasons. I've been reading the book Chip War about the development of semiconductor industry in Southeast Asia, which has changed my thinking on the world's problems.

They make the comment in that book that the US military lost the war and the chip industry won the peace in Southeast Asia. And 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've 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. And so it's fascinating when you wanna 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 it from the east or the west. We're going to see 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 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's, uh, it seems like a huge waste of time to repeat back what people have told you

about where they're coming from. Cause 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 and it accelerates things so fast that once you start saying out loud

to somebody what you hear him saying, you know, here's what I think you're saying. Here's how you see this. 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. Well, thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure. Tommy, this is 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. Amen. 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 help 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.