9 Tools From a Hostage Negotiator That Will Get You a Raise | Chris Voss | EP 425

Hello everyone, I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024 beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.

I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, "Out November 2024: We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye.

My favorite question, actually, is to ask in job interviews: "How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of this organization?" And it completely changes the outcome, because that is not just what your skill set is for this particular job. Maybe they got a job for you in the mail room, and now you're somebody that says, "Yeah, not only will I do the little jobs to learn this from the bottom up, but I want to make everybody's life better. I want to help everybody succeed." Now, I'm willing to learn; I'm coachable. Now it's a different conversation.

Hello everybody, I'm speaking to Chris Voss today, an American author, teacher, and hostage negotiator for the FBI. We talk primarily about negotiation with a foray into the psychology of listening and the rationale of listening. We're attempting to sort out and clarify exactly what it means to negotiate successfully, positing, I suppose, that the ultimate goal of a negotiation should be something like the establishment of a productive, long-term, generous mutual collaboration.

To expand even that, to understand that a good collaboration involves the joint pursuit of mutual desire, let's say, but also the joint pursuit of the ability to expand the understanding of what that desire might be across time. That's how a relationship grows. So we talk about how to do that; we talk about how to listen and do that, concentrating as well on the fact that if you listen to people, they'll tell you what they need and want, and then you can be in a position to provide that and to be of utility in the long-term sustainable, productive, generous relationship.

So welcome to the discussion. So Chris, let's start with this: why don't you tell me and everybody who's watching and listening what it means to negotiate? Let me put a little context around that. You know, one of the things I really noticed as a clinician was that people are remarkably bad at negotiating, and they're not trained in it ever. And so that really hurts people because it means that they frequently— it means they don't know what they want; they don't know what the person who they're dealing with wants.

Even if they do know what they want, they don't know when to talk about it; they become bitter often about the fact that they're not talking about it, and they have no idea how to proceed. And that's unbelievably common. So tell me what you think negotiating means and how you got interested in it, and also if that's how you conceptualize yourself fundamentally as a negotiator or communications facilitator.

Yeah, well, for me to negotiate is to collaborate and find a better outcome. In the early days, I was always teaching the adversary, not the person on the other side of the table. The adversary is the situation, and if you're negotiating with versus against people—if you're negotiating with somebody—you're faced with two different aspects of the same problem. If you can collaborate, then not only might you solve the problem, but you might come up with a better outcome.

I kind of backed into this because I wanted to be a hostage negotiator. I didn't really know what it was about, how complicated it was going to be, or how satisfying it was going to be. I remember I was on a SWAT team with the FBI, and I wanted to switch over to hostage negotiation because I had a recurring knee injury, and I liked crisis response.

I thought, you know, I could negotiate those. I could talk to terrorists; how hard could it be? You know, my son and I have always joked that our family motto is: "How hard could it be?" So stuff that looks really easy is often incredibly challenging. So I volunteered on a suicide hotline, which is just about listening to people, and suddenly, you know, you get a change in behavior in a very short period of time by listening to people.

To your point about people not knowing what they want: in point of fact, I've learned it's impossible to know the best outcome because you don't have all the facts. So go in with an open mind, and you probably discover something new. Do it in a way that the person wants to talk to you again. And then there's a long tail to that. So those are some of the high points, I think.

Okay, okay, so well let's dive into—you mentioned a number of things here, and I'll outline them and then we'll delve into them sort of point by point, so you're paying close attention. I worked with people; I'm doing my best, man. I worked with my clients a lot practically. I did a lot of business consulting. I did a lot of work with people who were trying to develop their careers.

I did a lot of strategizing around things like, I wouldn't say raising people's salaries because that's not the right way to think about it, but helping them develop the skills and confidence to maximize their economic potential and to develop plans around that. So one of the things we could zero in on that might be of interest to people is, for example, is negotiating a raise.

Now you said that you want to collaborate and find a better solution; that you talk with someone, not against them. That reminded me as well of the necessity of developing a joint vision. Let me tell you what we used to do in practical terms when I was setting someone up to have a conversation with their boss about advancement, including raises. Sometimes people don't necessarily want a raise; they want opportunity and they want advancement. The only way they can conceptualize that is as more money, and so you have to get that straight too. But, you know, I said my principles were something like this: it's very difficult to negotiate if you are not in a position to say no, no matter what.

Okay, so I would make sure my clients had their CV well-prepped, that we had filled in any gaps, that they knew the job market around them, and that they were ready and willing to look for another job if necessary. So then they weren't terrified, right? They weren't taking themselves hostage, exactly, exactly, because, yeah, and it also meant they had a better sense of their actual market value, right? Because that's something you actually need to do if you're going to negotiate for advancement or a raise.

It's like, well, what evidence— you can't get a raise just because you want one; everyone wants a raise, right? And you have to understand that your manager is dealing with financial constraints and the fact that everyone wants a raise. So you have to make a case, and then you might say you could make a case with a threat, and one threat might be: well, if you don't give me a raise, I'll leave. But generally, all you do is put people's backs up with an approach like that. You may need to have that in your back pocket just to make you confident, but my notion was when I was dealing with people who either were incredible or who had put themselves in a position to be credible, what they would deliver to the boss was, first of all, a statement of their value and a description of that.

Because you don't know how much your boss knows about the work you do, especially if you're one of those people who does your work quietly and well and sort of invisibly, and that's even worse if you're agreeable, so that other people can take advantage of your work and pretend it's theirs. So the first thing you might want to do is make sure that your boss actually knows what you do without being chest-thumping about it.

Then you might say what it is that you could offer if you were offered additional opportunity. And that might be, you know, like the observation that if you don't believe that you're making what you're worth in the market, that your motivation is less than it might be or that you don't feel that you've been valued by the organization. So if you had a pathway forward, you'd be more committed to the joint goal that you share with your boss.

Hopefully, you have one in relationship; you have to make a case for what it is that's in it for him too, and also for her, and also ensure that if he has to go make a case to his superior, that he's completely armed and ready to do that. So there was the detail— so you don't assume that you're in an antagonistic relationship with your boss. If you are and that's intractable, then you know it might be time to think about either a radically new approach to your work or a different job.

But if not, you assume that you could present him with a solution. So anyways, those were some of the ground rules that we established, and so I'm kind of curious about how you might elaborate on that and what you think about that.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, those are great ideas—those are great great starting points. And you know what I might add to the basis of that conversation, like the first part about, you know, having a resume, knowing what the market is, not taking yourself hostage. One of the things that I loved that I learned from being a hostage negotiator is how to negotiate without a net.

My Harvard brothers and sisters would call that BATNA: what's the best alternative to a negotiated agreement? So that you release yourself of fears, that you don't take yourself hostage. You can go in with no alternative and have enough faith in the process to just be engaged, to be curious, to listen, to discover the better outcome.

So the BATNA idea or the alternatives idea is a good starting point if you feel like you're taking yourself hostage, but what it really is, is it's to create this psychological construct so that you don't freeze up, so that you don't take yourself hostage. And as hostage negotiators, you know, we just never—we never theoretically had a BATNA; you got to make the deal; you got to work it out. And kind of get used to walking that tightrope without a net.

Then it's no big deal, but the principle to begin with is how to not take yourself hostage, and that's a brilliant principle to start with.

Okay, what does it mean? Give me some examples of what it would mean for someone in a practical situation, or even in a dire situation, to take themselves hostage, and maybe a story or two about that and also some illustration of how you circumvent that error.

Yeah, well, it's like there aren’t— I don’t have a better job; I got to take this job. I'm coming out of, you know, I did— right after I left the Bureau to sharpen up my resume and to create some better opportunities, and I went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I got a master's there which is astonishing that they let me in, you know, a very average blue-collar dude from the Midwest.

And then afterwards, the job market was horrible. I come out of Harvard in 2008, during the financial crisis—I mean, no jobs anywhere. One of my colleagues, a fellow student, was like, "Look, I'm trying to negotiate for a job, and I got to take the job; there aren't any jobs out there, and they're going to ask me what I made at my last job, and it's going to be half of what I need to make now, and I can't answer that question."

And I said, "All right, so here's what we're going to do: you're going to go in with some great calibrated questions." Calibrated questions in my vernacular, Black Swan method, are not questions to get answers but questions to create thoughts in the other side's mind, open their brain up a little bit.

You want to get completely out of the concept. The fact that you don't have alternatives doesn't change your value to this company, and the fact that you don't have alternatives does not change anything about their ability to pay you and how much you could contribute if you're the right guy that gets dropped into the right job.

And so you got to ask them, "What happens if you guys don't fill this role? How can I be most successful for you? And how am I supposed to accept a salary that's half of what I'm worth?" You know, these are differential questions.

Okay, so let me ask you about that. So one of the things I want from someone that I partner with—and this would include someone I'm hiring as well, say as a peer relationship—I want to know what agreement we can come to that I'm thrilled about, that I know they're equally thrilled about.

And there's a technical reason that I want that. I mean, there are two sources of motivation fundamentally: there's going in by negative emotion like pain and fear, and there's enticement by positive motivation, and that's usually associated with hope in relationship to a goal.

And so for the gentleman that you just described, who's feeling constrained because he only has one option, which is to take the job or leave it, and he thinks the only option is to take it, he still has a question to ask himself and this is a really profound question. It requires honesty, and the profound question is: what circumstances do I have to have in place so that I can devote myself wholeheartedly to this job?

So how can I exit the interview and accept this new job feeling that I have a landscape of opportunity in front of me and bereft of resentment? And that will require, if someone's going to ask themselves that, that will require that they prioritize their needs and wants. And salary may be one of those things, but you could imagine that there might be other ways of even moving around that, so to speak.

Because you might be able to offer your new employer the following deal: it's like, "Well, I’ll take a starting salary that's less than I would regard as optimal or even necessary, but I want to know that if I hit a certain set of standards within a certain time, that there's a pathway to improve financial returns that opens up to me, that we all agree on." And you tell the person you're negotiating with that the reason you want that is because: like we're not playing around here; we're trying to negotiate optimal motivation.

And I want to be able to assure you when I leave the negotiation that I am thrilled with the outcome because who the hell wants to hire someone who starts the job feeling like they've been taken advantage of and being resentful? Like that's a really bad way to get things going.

Okay, so you pointed out that the guy who thought he had to have the job still was in a position to tell his potential employers what it was that he had to offer, to make a case for the value of his services, and to point out what that is not only worth from the market perspective but also in terms of his own motivation.

And there's a fit issue too, and like any other relationship—like a personal relationship, you know, business relationship, close relationship, significant other—you got to get a fit.

And my favorite question actually is to ask in job interviews, every job interview and every annual review: "Talk to me," by a friend of mine, Tom Maab, an extraordinarily successful guy, CEO of an international bank. We talked about this extensively; we went to high school together.

His question is: "How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of this organization?" And I said before, the calibrated question is designed to trigger thought. That question immediately changes their perspective of you when you ask it like you're telling them: "Look, I want to advance everybody's life here. I want to play a big game; I want to be with the people that are at the highest levels of performance in your company, and I want to move everybody forward with that one question."

And it completely changes the outcome, because then it's not just what your skill set is for this particular job. Maybe they got a job for you in the mail room, but you want to be the head of the division and you want to know how to get there, and you want to get there by succeeding in taking everybody with you.

Now that's a completely—that's a game-changing conversation. That's a completely different conversation. Maybe they thought they were bringing somebody in to push a mail cart around, and now you're somebody that says, "Yeah, not only will I do the little jobs to learn this from the bottom up, but I want to make everybody's life better. I want to help everybody succeed." Now, I'm willing to learn; I'm coachable. Now it's a different conversation.

So say that question again.

"How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to our strategic future?"

And I said, "I'm doing a virtual keynote a couple of years ago, the CEO of the company and his entire sales team, and we got a keynote going, and one of his sales team literally asked me, while he's on the call, 'How do we negotiate with this guy to get more money?' and everybody's kind of holding their breath; what am I going to say? Am I going to say it in front of him? And I said, 'Ask him this question.' And it was a question that I just gave you: 'How can I be guaranteed to be involved in projects that are critical to our strategic future?'

And when I said that question, he interrupted and said, 'I wish everybody on this call would ask me that.'

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Absolutely. Well, you know, psychologically speaking, so again, with regard to motivation, people live on hope and opportunity to a large degree. And hope and opportunity are experienced in relationship to a goal.

And so to have hope and opportunity, you need two things: you need a goal, and then you need to observe yourself walking on a pathway to that goal. And so the lines that you just laid out there—how can I be positioned? I'm going to paraphrase it; if I get it wrong, let me know—how can I position myself so that I'm in the company of and accompanying those who are moving forward to the destination the company actually wants to achieve?

How can I make sure that I'm doing that? Well, you said, on the one hand, you're opening up the vision of the people that you're speaking to and you're indicating to them very clearly that you want to be where the action is and you're going to be a part of that. But for yourself, what you've done is you've opened up the door to meaningful engagement with the company.

Now, the price you're going to have to pay for that is responsibility, like— and that's why you can't use these sorts of questions as a technique, right? If it's a technique, you're a liar. If you've thought this through, and that's what you want, well then you're also the sort of person that anyone with any sense would want to hire.

Because it's certainly the case that when— if you have any sense as a manager, when you hire someone, what you're actually doing is offering a set of indeterminate opportunities, and you're hoping that the person you're hiring is more qualified than they would need to be for the position that you're hiring them for. Now, you may not regard that as a requirement, but you're certainly hoping for it.

And the best conversations I have with people that I might want to work with, or have work for me, let's say, are the conversations where they clearly indicate that they know where the enterprise is going and why. They're perfectly willing to do the tasks that are part and parcel of the specified job, but they've got an eye to the broader vision, and then they have enough perspicacity and intelligence now and then to contribute.

Perspicacity—come on now, I'm a regular guy!

From there you go, there you go! Yeah, you went to Harvard, you should be able to have perspicacity!

And then you know you’re well—if you surround yourself with people like that, then you always have people who are looking out for where you're going with fresh sets of eyes and who are offering opportunities for you to go there too.

And that speaks to the idea that you had that a negotiation is a collaboration. You might say, "Well, I'm not collaborating with my boss." It's like, well, if you're not collaborating with your boss—well, that's it— if you're not, you should think about if that's your problem or his problem or both your problems, or maybe it's time really to go look for some greener pastures.

Exactly right, because if it is an adversarial relationship all the way to the bottom and you're being forced or compelled to do things you don't want to do against your wishes, then you're not optimally situated in your life.

Now, I know that sometimes by necessity people can be stuck in situations like that for some period of time, but man, you need an escape route. Like you need to plot an escape route if you're in a situation like that.

Yeah, yeah, and I'd like to touch on something else you mentioned just real quickly, and talking about that. You know, when you ask that question that you really mean it—I mean, we've had these discussions in my company and with the people that are running my company and who were hiring, and one of the things we make clear is, like, if you come work for me, you're going to work hard.

We're going to work you hard; you got to want it. And the phrase that I'm using now is: "Pressure makes diamonds." But you got to want to be a diamond, and we're telling people that up front.

You want to be a diamond; we're going to take you there, but you got to want to be a diamond, and you got to be willing to do the work. And you want to coast; you want it to be, you know, something you do when you're not at home. Alright, there are jobs out there like that, but it ain't with me, you know? Pressure makes diamonds; you got to want to be a diamond!

Yeah, well, one of the things I would also do to prepare with my clients to prepare them for movement forward was to work through the blind spots in their vision, let's say, in the knots in their life that might be interfering with their desire to be a diamond.

You know, because people will also misconstrue that; they'll think, "Well, I don't want to work too hard." It's like, you're not thinking about the work properly if that's your attitude because, first of all, if you love what you're doing, you might really want to work hard.

And if you don't love it, that means you don't really see the point; you don't see the end goal; you don't see the value in it. And then you know, maybe you do see the value, but you're lazy and undisciplined, and maybe you have your rationales for that too, and so all that needs to be worked through.

You know, because I do think that first of all, most of the meaning in people's lives comes from the adoption of voluntary responsibility, and most people do actually want to be diamonds, but they're afraid of the work, and they're also afraid that it's going to be imposed on them, right, and they're going to be forced into it, and they don't have a vision of their own.

And so one of the things that everyone who's listening and watching might want to understand is that before you go into a job interview, you know, you might want to have done some serious thinking about just exactly why it is that you want this job.

And if the answer is, "Well, I need to pay next month's rent," like, fair enough, you know, but that is not a good enough reason. That's not a vision for your life, and that's not the sort of vision that's going to make you a compelling interviewee because you're shallow, right? You haven't thought through why it is that you're going to do what you're doing.

You know, we have this program online called Future Authoring, and it helps people develop a vision for their life.

And so the game is this: and you can think about this as preparation for a crucial job interview. It's like, imagine yourself five years down the road, okay? So here's the game: you can have what you want, but you have to specify what it is.

And then someone might say, "Well, you know, I don't really know what I want," and fair enough, because that's a pretty vague global question, but the program then asks people seven questions. It's like, "What would your relationship look like, your primary relationship, your marriage, if it was functioning the way that you would want it to? What about your friendship? What about your business relationships? Are you educating yourself? How are you going to do that? How do you keep yourself in mental and physical shape? What are you going to do with your time outside of work? How are you going to serve the community?"

So those are—and so that starts to differentiate it, right? And then the game you play there with yourself is, "Okay, under what conditions would I be motivated to pursue success in those areas?" You know, and people are scared of this, partly because they don't want to reveal to themselves what they actually want because they might betray themselves or be betrayed by the world, and partly because they're afraid of the responsibility and they don't have enough faith.

But it's impossible to hit a target that you don't aim at. And then you might say, "Well, why is that relevant to a job interview?" And there's a bunch of reasons: is that if the job interview goes well and you actually start to have a discussion rather than just a staged interview, if you have a vision for your own life, you're going to be able to see if this job will work for you.

And that also puts you in a good position in the interview because, you pointed out earlier as we were talking, that, you know, even in a job interview, that's a negotiation. And the reason it's a negotiation is because, well, you want the job, but hopefully they want you and you're the right person, and so really the interview should be establishing the preconditions for the collaboration that you described rather than, you know, pulling the wool over some idiot's eyes so that they'll hire you so you can slack off, which seems like a pretty damn dismal vision of what your life might be, right?

Yeah, agreed, agreed. And thinking those things through, I mean, we've interviewed— I've had some interviews for assistants of my job recently that were cut short because the people that were doing the interviews didn't know what company they were interviewing for. They got it mixed up and I'm like, "Alright, so there's a certain lack of degree of preparation here; thank you very much for your time."

Right, right. Yeah, well, you know, because yeah, well you're going to ask yourself, aren't you, if someone comes in and they don't know what it is that you do or what they would do, then the first question that would come to mind is something like, "Well, then what do they know?" Because that's such an elementary error that it—essentially catastrophic.

Well, that's an indicator of what they're going to put into the job. How you do anything—how you put— That's right; it's well what they what they already did put into the job because the most important task they had as a potential hire was preparation for the interview, and if they failed that, well, that's not a great start.

And then that's especially true, you know, another thing for everybody watching and listening to think about too is that it is the case that first impressions are lasting. There is a very long and dense psychological literature establishing that, you know, and so you want to be prepared enough in the interview, so that people walk away from talking to you thinking, "Geez, you know, it would be a good thing if we got that guy."

And certainly you're in a much better position to do something like salary negotiation if that's the impression, and the valid impression, right? That's another thing; this can't be, look man, if you're going to start your new job on a stack of lies, you've already ensured your failure in some fundamental sense, and so if you're afraid before you go into the interview that you're not prepared, you want to get prepared so that you're not afraid like that, so that you can go and you can admit your inadequacies honestly as long as they're not so, you know, absolutely multitude, there's not so many of them that you're obviously not the candidate for the job.

So hey Jordan, I’m going to have you coach me on my next job interview. You talked about listening.

Yeah, okay, so tell me, tell me about that and about paying attention and tell me how you learned why that was so important and tell me what you learned about how to listen.

Wow, alright, so actually listening as opposed to staying silent accelerates a process, and you need a set of tools to keep you on track to dig into the information without the other side feeling interrogated. And that was really what I learned way back when on the hotline. You know, I get there first day; we get into the training. And I remember the thing that struck me first was they said, "Alright, your calls are limited to 20 minutes," and I remember thinking, "Like what? 20 minutes? You got to be kidding me."

Like, you know on TV, they're on the phone with people for hours if not days and 20 minutes and they said, "No, as a matter of fact, if you actually use the skills correctly, it'll take less than that." And so you get taught a set of listening skills on how to dial in and the clues of what to listen for and then how to get the person interacting with you without making it feel—feel interrogated.

And suddenly there were astonishing changes in behavior in the person on the other side; you get somebody on the phone who's genuinely suicidal and 15, 17, 18 minutes later, they're in a good place and they're ready to go back and take on the world based on the experience.

So, and then I started learning some of the science after it. You know, science—pseudoscience—I'm a layman, I'm not a scientist. But in our capacity, our capacity to hear words exceeds the amount of information we can keep in our head, but the amount of information in your tone of voice is going to tell me more than the words are.

So how I learned to listen was the words are the starting point, but the tone of voice and body language and what's the alignment. And then if there's a shift in the alignment in that moment, you know to look for it and then anticipate. I know now that you're—a human being you—in general term, the negativity is going to cloud your thinking more than anything else.

So I'm listening for those negatives, and from the hotline and now what we do in the Black Swan method; how do I deactivate those negatives to clear your head? Or even anticipate them, so it's supplied emotional intelligence and then why listen? Because the change of behavior—and you referred to hostage negotiation—change of behavior, and in business negotiation or personal interactions, you changing your mind as to the best outcome is going to come much more quickly and effectively and in a lasting way than if I talked you into it or if I misled you.

You know, I want whatever agreement we come to to be durable, to last without me having to come back to you daily to see where we are, and that's what listening is really about: understanding the nuances of what's now backed up by neuroscience.

And what people in hostage negotiation, and you as a practitioner in a field of human nature for years, came to learn was the reality of how human beings think and how they react.

Yeah, well, you said you want to negotiate a durable solution, and that means one that will sustain itself without you having to come back, and so you could put it this way: barring, you can become a micromanager because you have a certain obsessiveness of character, let's say, and a certain intrinsic distrust, and then that's something you should work on.

But you can also become a micromanager if you negotiate a very bad agreement with someone; because if you've talked them into it or forced them into it, then—and they feel that they've been taken advantage of—then their heart won't be in the task and what that will mean is that they will be looking for escape routes all the time instead of doing what they're supposed to be doing, and that you'll have to go back to them in the most frustrating of manners and use up all your valuable time and energy trying to enforce a stupid agreement that you shouldn't have made to begin with.

You know, and this is part of the problem—you said, you know—you don't want to talk someone into something. Now, that's not the same as informing them about an opportunity that they might not have conceptualized and laying out a different route, but really what you're aiming for is voluntary agreement, like full voluntary agreement.

Part of the reason—and you touched on this—part of the reason that listening is so necessary is because if you listen to the person, you can find out and help them find out what it is that they actually want and how that could conceivably be delivered to them.

And you know, you might think the person already knows that, but it's not necessarily the case; you know, people think, "Well, they're talking," and in fact, that's how most people think, period, is when they're talking. And it also means if no one's listening to them, they almost never have an opportunity to think.

You can imagine, like even if you're running a restaurant— I shouldn't say "even," it's very difficult to run a restaurant. If you're running a restaurant, you're hiring a dishwasher, one of the things you're going to be concerned about is whether that kid is going to show up to work because absenteeism in entry-level jobs, like dishwashing, is rife and the probability that the guy won't show up is pretty high, and so that drives restaurateurs mad.

So what you want to find out from the dishwasher, at least in principle, is how can we get you here 15 minutes early every day—it's got to be a serious question. It's like, I want you to think about this for a minute: you're 15—let's say you're a dishwasher—you're an entry-level dishwasher job—it's like, under what conditions would you be pleased enough to come to this workplace so that you actually come?

And what impediments can you imagine that might arise, and how can we set the situation up so that that probability is decreased? And that is all you want to know from the kid—that what he thinks might sideline him so that you can circumvent it if possible.

And obviously, the same thing applies as you scale up the sophistication of the negotiations: how can we make this work? That's a good guideline for a successful negotiation, not how could I come out of this ahead. That's such a stupid way of looking at a situation because it's temporary, right?

If I screw you over while we're talking because I'm better at verbally manipulating you and I think you won't take that out on me opportunity by opportunity as we move forward into the future, I'm an absolute bloody damn fool!

Exactly, yeah. You're going to take it out on me; you're going to look for outs, or even when problems arise, you're just going to keep silent. You’re like, "Ah, you know what? I know people will hurt you by doing nothing," and you don't want that to happen either.

The Black Swan technique that you referred to—tell me about that.

Well, it's a collection of the emotional intelligence skills that started with hostage negotiation. There were eight FBI hostage negotiation skills, and I came out thinking, "You know, there's some adaptability here." After I went through the Kennedy School, I got into Harvard Law School's negotiation course as a student when I was an FBI agent, and I worked with some brilliant people there: Sheila Heen, Doug Stone, Bob Mnookin, Bob Bordone—brilliant people.

And I just did my hostage negotiation thing while I was going through the course, and they said to me, "You know, you're doing the same thing we are. The stakes are different, but the dynamics are the same." So I thought, "Alright, so I'll use these FBI—called them active listening skills." Harvard called them active listening skills; we made them very definable, very practical, and very usable because when you're teaching skills to cops, if it's not usable and practical and clear, like you get booed off the stage fast. They want practical stuff.

And when Harvard really gave me the green light, like, "This stuff works," I started teaching at Georgetown afterwards. My son Brandon was a critical part of the development of those skills, and we just took the eight skills we made them—we got them nine now—made some slight tweaks in some of the thoughts as we applied them to business and personal life. But it's a collection of emotional intelligence, tactical empathy skills that work because the way human beings are wired—worldwide just, they work on a liyc system, which is the emotional components, the circuitry, the wiring, and the brain that everybody has by virtue of the fact that they're human, and it pretty much operates the same regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, geography, diet—because you're human.

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Now that—but you talked about active listening skills and you mentioned that there were—there were nine components to that. Is it possible to walk through those nine?

Sure. Yeah, and I think a better term these days is really proactive. You know, you're anticipating; you're paying really close attention; you're understanding how the person is wired, and you're understanding how what sort of neurochemical changes take place when you feel understood.

I stand up in front of a group of business people on a regular basis, and I'll say to them, "How much time do you have for somebody who's not listening to you?" And they don't have any time for it. Now, they'll test them a little bit; they'll interact shortly, but somebody's only pitching or somebody's only got answers—it doesn't even matter how good those answers are, because if somebody's not listening at some point in time, they're going to need an adjustment, and if they're not listening, they're not going to make that adjustment.

You know, a salesperson counterpart of any kind, you come up to me with the perfect answer; maybe you got four perfect answers you're most interested in giving me your answers as opposed to hearing me out first. I know at some point in time you're not going to have a perfect answer and if you haven't been listening, you're not going to catch it, and we're going to have some real problems.

So you start showing how you listen intermittently, proactively; then it's really going to accelerate our conversation. And I know that when there's a problem, you're going to catch it instead of me having to come back to you after the problems become very damaging.

It's about anticipating and staying ahead of the game. In general terms, part of establishing a relationship—yeah, instead of selling. You know, I went out to sell 20 years ago probably out of academia; I was still practicing as a professor, but I also started to sell some products that I had designed, and I had the wrong idea about sales, really, to begin with.

I had a solution to a set of problems that I thought were rife in the business world, and I wanted to convince probably with evidence that the solution I had developed was going to work. And it was a hiring solution, but what I didn't understand— it took me a while to understand—was that I was actually introducing a problem into the mix because they already had a way of hiring.

And so if they were going to switch to me, there was a lot of retooling that needed to be done, and I didn't actually know what their problems were. And so I learned eventually that there was no such thing as selling; there was the establishment of a relationship.

And also the feeling out—it's like if you go talk to someone in a given company, it isn't necessarily the case that they're going to want what you're buying. You got to figure out what their problems are.

And one of the things that's really cool about that too is that if you're entrepreneur-oriented and you've made a product and you go out and you try to sell it to ten people and they don't buy it, but all ten of them tell you about a different problem and all of them have it, you now know what your next product could be, at least in principle because you know where the actual Marketplace problem is.

And I learned after that that software designers, for example, who have a track record if they're designing a new piece of software, they do it in collaboration with their customers. They build a bit of it; they go ask them, "You know, how do you think about this? Does it solve the problems that you have?"

And if they say no, they modify it like there's a constant dialogue between the market, let's say, and the producer. You don't build a better mousetrap and have the world beat a path to your door; you do it in collaboration.

And if you can get people to tell you their problems, then you can be the person who can work with them for a solution, and then they're going to be pretty damn happy when you show up for a sales call, right?

So, and you talked earlier about iterability too, you know, that you want to make sure that you've conducted the conversation so that the person would like it if the conversation happened again.

And that is the—that's like the definition of a relationship: like you have a relationship with someone with whom you would like to continue the conversation indefinitely, and the great salespeople, they're relationship managers, man. That's what they do, and they have their Rolodex full of the people they know, and they listen to them.

They don't go sell them junk that doesn't work to rip them off to make a quick buck and vanish; that's what psychopaths do, and it's not a very good strategy.

So alright, so you talked about proactive listening and you give the person an opportunity to lay out what they have to say. What other steps are associated with this nine-step process?

Well, it's kind of—it's nine tools as opposed to nine steps. The step you want to gather information and establish a relationship simultaneously. Now, most people think you do one or the other. "Hey, how are your kids? Where'd you go to school?"

The small talk—that's people—the common ground thing—which is—it’s for C players. In my opinion, was designed initially, like, if we got similar common ground, then ideally, you understand where I'm coming from.

But in point of fact, it's highly inefficient. Look at your siblings; how much more common ground could you possibly have than with the people you grew up with? Talk about common ground of geography, ethnicity, diet, religion—all of it. And how many family gatherings around Holidays or screaming matches? That's what common ground will get you.

But people really want to know is: do you understand what my problems are? Do you understand my perspective? Do you understand where I'm coming from?

So, if I dial in to start out understanding and feel you out and I’m going to say, "Seems like this whole process has frustrated you. Seems like there's a reason that you're struggling with this." You know, I'm actually—I'm taking emotionally intelligent, educated guesses, and I’m listening.

Now that gives me—gets me into an information gathering process and relationship-building process simultaneously. Instead of one and then the other, which is highly inefficient, which is why this ends up being a much—this indirect route ends up being much faster.

I'll look at you and I say, "Look, it seems like you're having a good day." If you look like you're having a good day, I don't ask people how they are; I make a guess as to how they are based on what I'm seeing because that tells them right away I'm dialing into you.

I'm seeing you as you are; I'm not trying to make you something you're not. That gives me an advantage right off the bat. I get help in airports and in places where people are constantly interacting with people in customer service faster than anybody else does because if I see the lady behind the counter at LAX who's clearly worn out and distressed by the last five people that were demanding, I walk up and I go like, "Seems like it's been a tough day," she's helping me right off the bat.

I don't walk up and say, "How are you today?" as if I'm trying to make her happy. I’m letting her know that I see her as a human being and I'm starting off much faster with far less friction by actually paying attention to people with this proactive listening set of skills than other people would.

You're putting yourself in her position, really, and by using nonverbal cues and so forth to occupy the same conceptual space that she has, right?

Well, and I was thinking too while you were saying that, you know, that you’re also approaching— 'cause if you’re selling something, you might think that your goal is to sell the product, right? But you see, the thing is too, you don't know if that's your goal because you might not want to establish a short, medium, or long-term relationship with the person that you're talking to.

You might really want to, but you might not. You might not be the right vendor for them. You might not be offering a solution to a problem they have.

They might be a psychopathic son of... that’s unlikely but it’s possible—like it could be a real problem. Well, and also, especially if you're dealing with big companies. You know, if you enter into a sales agreement with a company, so you've hit a home run from the monetary perspective, you can easily end up as the employee of someone you don't want to work for, right?

So you have to be very careful. And so one of the things I try to do this with my podcast is, like, we haven't talked before, and I want to get myself in the headspace before the podcast, like, "Well, who is this person? Like, what is it that they're up to, you know, and why have they had the course of success that they've had?"

The encounter, in some ways, is open-ended. It's like, I’m here because I think something might arise out of this that’s positive, but I’m not exactly sure what it might be. And so I need to know what they want for sure, maybe more than anything else.

And then I want to see if there's something here for both of us that we couldn't accomplish on our own. And that, it also stops you from using the club; say if you're a sales—if you're selling or if you're negotiating, and that's a very ineffective way of moving forward anyways.

People hate that fundamentally, and they get resentful and bitter about it.

And so, okay, so you try to put yourself in another person's position, and that's not a technique again; you’re doing that by actually paying attention. And there's a bit of an open-endedness about what it is that you're aiming at and how you're going to go about it.

So you have the proactive listening element, you have the close attention. You're not too concerned with that sort of formulaic small talk that might establish a false consensus or similarity, and that can easily become manipulative.

Okay, so what else? What else?

Yeah, well, then I’m going to tease out: you know, never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn’t take something better, which is a little bit of the point you were making a moment ago. What do you really want from the person? What they like—friend of mine Joe Polish has a phrase: "Don't deal with people who are half."

And Joe says, "Half is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. They suck the life out of you, and they're very inefficient, and they make your life miserable." So I’m going to want to try to find out what kind of person you are, how good of a match we are, how our core values line up because I want a long collaboration that is prosperous for both of us.

Now, you might not want that, and you're entitled to not wanting that; but then I'm entitled to move on because I want to find somebody that wants that.

Well, and you also definitely want to figure that out because if that's your goal, because that is the establishment of a productive, generous, collaborative, goal-oriented relationship that's mutually desirable.

And you want to let the other person reveal—they're not—because you don't want to delude yourself even as a consequence of your own verbal ability. You don't want to delude yourself into thinking you've established the kind of relationship you wanted and find out that you were wrong.

That's another reason to listen; it's like you want to be sure you got the picture.

Yeah, so, you know, what sort of thing you're stepping into, right? Right, and I know it’s going to sound very harsh but when I was teaching at USC, I had a female come up to me to class and she's like, "You know, there are a lot of employers out there that want to pay me less because I'm a female.

If I got an employer that's paying me less because I'm a female, how do I negotiate a better deal?" And I said, "Alright, so I'm going to answer you as if I was your dad, and you just asked me, 'Hey, the guy I'm in a relationship with treats me badly; how do I get him to treat me better?'"

My answer to you is: "Go someplace else." There are plenty of places. You want to be somewhere where they value you, and if their core value is to pay you less based on your agenda, they're going bankrupt anyway.

That's a bad strategy. They're going—and you don't want to go down the tubes with it, so you want to be someplace where somebody values your work. Don't try to fix a bad employer any more than you try to fix a bad significant other.

There's somebody out there better for you, and you're far happier and far more productive and have a far better life by moving on.

So if the person—whether you're in sales or whether it's your employer—if their core values don't line up with yours, they're entitled to their core values. Move on and line up with a team that's going to move you farther ahead in your life than anybody else that doesn't line up with you ever would.

You said that you shouldn't try to fix a bad employer, you know, and the managerial literature indicates very clearly too that you shouldn't try to fix a bad employee. So two relationships—I like your thoughts on this, but...

Well, absolutely. Well, so first of all, it’s not easy to fix someone, and it takes a long time. It's a dubious enterprise, and they need to be bloody well fully on board with that and willing to make the appropriate changes.

And the probability that you're going to have an errant employee with a history of bad behavior and that you, as a manager say with twenty people to attend to, are going to make substantive changes in that person's basic psychological makeup—while the evidence suggests very strongly that you're just not going to.

And all the literature I read that was at the crossover between the clinical and the managerial suggested that you spend all your time as a productive manager with your best people, and what that also implies is those are the people that you hire.

You know, and with regards to firing people, which is also a kind of negotiation, you know, I had this friend who's one rough guy and companies used to hire him to fire people.

And I didn't like firing people, and I still don't. And I asked him how he tolerated the emotional stress that came along with that. And he said that he liked doing it, and I said, "What do you mean you like doing it?"

'Cause that was just like outside of my wheelhouse, but I knew this guy, and I respected him, and he said, "Look, I go into companies, and I find the people who kiss up and punch down. I find the people who take all the credit; I find the people who don't distribute any of the benefits; I find the manipulators; I find the people who are lying about their motivation or even who are just in the wrong place doing something they shouldn't be doing, and I let them know that I see what they're doing.

And I'm pretty damn happy when they leave." And I thought, "Hey man, fair enough." You know?

And the negotiation there, like if you do have an employee that isn't performing well, part of the negotiation there is to say something like, "Look, it should be evident to both of us that there's something that isn't right about what's happening here, and we could drag this out painfully, kicking and screaming, bitter and resentful for the next fifteen years, or we could just cut our losses, and maybe you could go find something that would suit you."

And you know, I’ve seen this in my clinical practice, 'cause I had lots of people who came to me in the aftermath of being fired, and of course, that was often—almost always, to some degree, devastating. But it wasn't that uncommon for people, six months later—especially if they actually did try to put themselves back together—to be immensely relieved that they no longer had that particular noose around their neck.

Yeah, there are so many reasons why the severing of a bad relationship is good for both parties, and who has to do the severing is often a hard part. I was involved in trying to let somebody at a charitable organization go a number of years ago, affiliated with a church, and I'm going to the minister of the church for guidance, and I'm expecting him to say to me because this was a great man—his name was Arthur Calandro, minister of Marble Collegiate Church, New York City—phenomenal human being, one of the best guys I've ever known.

And I thought Arthur was going to counsel me on, you know, guidance and, you know, all the stuff I expected, and he looked at me and he said, "There's no gentle way to cut somebody's head off."

And I thought, “Wow!” You know? And for Arthur to tell me that was the reality of business relationships, personal relationships—like if it's bad for you, it's bad for them too, and they're going to be better off without you.

If they're half for you, if they're hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, you are for them too. So you're not doing anybody a favor by hanging on to a bad relationship.

It's hard to separate, and in many cases, the jolt that comes from it leaves both sides much better off.

Yeah, well, I know I know a phrase like that too. I don't know if this was something specific to northern Alberta, but if you have to cut the tail off a cat, you don't do it an inch at a time.

Yeah, well said!

That's rough, but it makes sense.

Alright, so we wanted a fair ways through the nine tools that you associated with proactive listening— is there more to flesh out there?

Well, they're mostly the different skills; labeling is a verbal observation. "It sounds like there's something on your mind."

Sounds like what I just said is causing you hesitation. There's something we refer to as a mirror: that's just repeating one to three-ish words of what somebody just said. It’s not the body language mirror, it actually—really opens up people's thinking.

Paraphrasing—you're kind of putting yourself in a position to come up with a great summary for the other side.

Summarize their perspective—if you can summarize the other side's perspective, the two of you are on the same sheet of music. There’s calibrated questions—what and how questions that are designed to cause somebody to think about something.

I might say in order— instead of me saying to you, like, "Look, you got to take action because the status quo is killing you," instead of that, if I want to put that thought in your head, I'm going to say what happens if you do nothing? How are you better off by failing to address this problem?

You know, those are two different questions designed to uncover the same thing, which is pointing out to you the comfort of inaction.

I think Kennedy made some statement about that, "The long-range consequences of comfortable inaction far outweigh addressing the problem."

That's an absolutely crucial point. I mean, one of the things that—and this is an impediment to negotiation in marital relationships constantly, and it's an absolute killer. You know, like I don't like conflict, but I learned something a long time ago, and I learned that conflict delayed was conflict continued and multiplied.

And so if I have an issue with my wife, I would rather ha—you know, I read a paper yesterday—I really like this paper; it was really smart. They were doing an fMRI scanning, looking at the activation of pain systems in relationship to other people's pain, and there's quite a variability in that.

So people high in trait agreeableness, who are easy to get along with and who who are sympathetic and empathetic—but who can be easily taken advantage of, by the way—that's one end of the distribution. The other end is disagreeable people who can be callous and hurtful, blunt.

Now slightly somewhat disagreeable managers, by the way, are more successful. And many people who seek therapy are agreeable people who are being taken advantage of.

So the fact that you're empathetic and sympathetic is not a virtue without its vices or dangers. The brain research revealed that the more empathic people had a larger degree of pain activation in the pain systems when they saw the pain of other people.

Okay, so now if you don't like conflict, part of the reason you don't like conflict is because if you see the person you're having conflict with in pain, you're going to mirror that pain, so that's uncomfortable.

And I’m an agreeable person, so if I see someone in pain, it strikes me to the core. But I learned that if I deferred conflict, then it's like the cat with its tail being cut off an inch at a time; it's like we don't have the blowout, and so we're minimizing the pain in the present, but we're radically prolonging it across our iterated interactions.

And so it's much better just to call a spade a spade and to say, "Look, I see the elephant under the rug; I see the snake's tail," you know, poking out from the cabinet. We're going to sort this out right here and now, and we're going to straighten it out, and that's going to be delving into the depths, and there's going to be discomfort in that.

But if we can negotiate, if we can identify the problem and negotiate a compelling mutual solution, we don't have to have this problem anymore.

And man, it's such a—you know, I saw couples all the time who had the same bloody fight every day for thirty years. You know, it's just—that's hell.

And it much better just to have the discussion, even though that inaction, you know, that you pointed to, that you described Kennedy as pointing to, it's the classically speaking—even theologically—there is much more stress placed on sins of commission, right? Things you do that are clearly wrong, but avoiding doing something, right?

That does people in, man, especially if they do that repeatedly, and they do it because they don't want to cause trouble, because they want to avoid conflict. It's like there's no avoiding necessary conflict; it's a downward spiral.

Yeah, yeah. It ends up—you end up having your discussion in divorce court, right, for $200 an hour, right, while your bank accounts are drained making the lawyers rich.

Yeah, yeah, lawyers buying a new car. We're keeping the argument going. Yeah. Now you said, when you were trying to circumvent the proclivity for inaction, you'd ask questions like this.

This is something I used to do when I was talking to people about, say, negotiating for a raise if they were resentful about their current situation, something like that. One of the things we would do is say, "Okay, think about how you feel about the situation you're in right now.

Okay, now imagine yourself ten years older—you’re in the same position—okay, except you're ten years old, ten years older.”

Yeah, you bet man—you've put yourself through a lot of misery for ten years. You're weaker because you've backed off, right? You're more bitter, you're more hopeless; you're suffering from more pain.

Like think about that! Like empathize with that future person and tell me what you do in the present to avoid that fate.

People would think, "Oh my God, you know, that's the last thing I want," because everyone thinks, "Well, I'll deal with it tomorrow." But you can say, "Well, you haven't dealt with it for the last five years, and how's that going for you?"

Like would it have been better if you would have dealt with it five years ago? And now, you know, stretch that out ten years into the future.

See, 'cause that's such an interesting thing to do because the person has this impediment of the conflict in front of them that's causing them to be afraid, and what you do is you swing that behind them.

It's like getting the devil behind them. "Get the behind me, Satan!" I think is the right word; it's like, right, right. This is the thing you're afraid of, but you should have a different fear pushing you forward that way, more profound, and that would be the fear of the consequences of inaction.

Right, and how do you get people—when you're doing that, how you said you ask them open-ended questions—is that how you get them to explore and realize the costs of inaction?

Yeah, the first one is the what and how questions; I can trigger you into a really sort of narrow, confined mental state without you feeling it's narrow or confined. I can put you right there with a what question or how question.

You know, one of my favorite ones these days is if somebody—whatever they're doing for a living—and if I ask them what they do for a living, they're going to give me pretty much a canned response; I help people do this or I help people do that, or they're going to give me a memorized response.

It's not a conversation. First time I did this, I'm at a Hollywood party a couple of years ago, fundraiser for Forest Whitaker, I believe, and I'm talking to one of the self-involved people there. Force is a great human being, by the way—phenomenal human being—but I'm talking to the self-involved guy, and I don't want to hear a self-involved conversation, so instead of asking him what does he do for a living, I go, "What do you love about what you do for a living?"

Now, what I've done with that what question is I have put him right square into a part of his brain focused on love, and he transformed in front of my eyes, and I saw him light up.

So, you know, I took the what question, and I put him right there, and he lit up, and he started talking to me about all the things that made him come alive as a human being, and it ended up being a really satisfying question.

Now it's one of my stock questions in nearly any interaction because I want to find out about what you're about, what you’re into. It's going to give me my core—your core values almost right off the bat in a very quick way.

Now can you ask what people are afraid of? Well, the same way, or do you focus on the positive now?

You bring no, you're bringing it—you’re bringing in the secondary point, which I know you know that many psychologists, many human nature practitioners believe that everything we do is motivated by either love or fear.

So I can—I will also ask in a business context when I'm trying to find out what the motivations are, I’ll say, "What are you afraid of happening here?" Because then now I've got them in a different headspace, and I know that fear is a very substantial, significant motivating factor in people's lives.

I'm not going to wield it like a weapon. I'm going to want to become aware of it with you in a collaborative way, and I will ask a question is very similar to that in business conversations when we're talking about whether or not we're going to collaborate, because I need to know the fears, are going to drive you, the love is going to drive you, but fear has a tendency to overcome—fear of loss, you know, a limited number of fears that will overcome the love if you're not careful.

So I want to know what the fears are so I can map out better how I can help you.

Well, I would say, you know if you're having a conversation with your wife and it starts to get choppy, this probably occurs in any conversation, I suppose. What the way you would construe that from a psychoanalytic point of view is that you're starting to encounter resistances, right?

The person doesn't want to move in that direction, maybe that's even a direction that you jointly had negotiated would be desirable at least in principle, but then you do want to find out, "Okay, what are the obstacles? What are the fears?" Because the fears will become obstacles, and if they're not cleared out, they'll be invisible barriers to progress, right?

And it's so interesting; you know when you get people to lay out what it is that they're afraid of, and then what they perceive as obstacles—sometimes merely letting them describe what it is that they're afraid of will make the fear evaporate because they realize that that's a fear that applied in a different situation or that, you know, that they've actually grown out of without really noticing or that you've already established a pattern of behavior that indicates that they don't have to be afraid of that from you.

And you know, sometimes you can have a dialogue about that and clear away the obstacles, but often listening is sufficient to clear those away by itself.

You know, these active, proactive listening skills that you have been discussing, many of them have their roots in Carl Rogers' work.

You know? Ah yes, of course! Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. He was really quite brilliant at detailing out the preconditions for a conversation, you know? And that other point you made about mirroring and summarizing, that's really—that's one of the only things I've ever really discovered that actually works in some ways as a technique now; it still has to be honest but there is almost nothing more useful in a conversation than keeping track of what it is that the person is saying and then at the right moment saying, "Here's what I think you just said," you know, compressing it.

Because that's also a favor to you, because you can remember it then, but also to them, right? To compact it in a more elegant casing, let's say, and it's such a relief to the person.

It's a mark of respect because it shows that you've been paying attention, and it's such a relief to the person because they now know that you have decided their concerns are sufficiently worth attending to that you actually did in fact pay attention, right?

Exactly!

When you're negotiating with a hostage—in a hostage situation—what because that's a high-stakes situation, what have you found has had the most effective consequence? Is it—is it listening? Like, what do you do in a situation like that that would be different, perhaps, or the same, for that matter, that you would do in a business negotiation or marital negotiation?

Yeah, well, to some degree, every interaction that somebody's frustrated with, where they've chosen an action that's adverse to some degree, there's an element of driving them of not being heard.

I'm going to deactivate the adversarial responses to some degree—either a little or a lot—just by making them feel heard. And whatever I don't deactivate is going to get us down to the real issues. It's going to separate the wheat from the chaff, if you will.

So, I'm going to start listening right off the bat, and I'm also going to start listening for, you know, what's a deep-seated problem here?

And as you said before, you know, identifying the elephant in a room often makes the—and if it doesn't make the elephant disappear, makes it diminish far much more.

And then the negativity that we talked about—and you mentioned the fMRI scans—it’s been shown consistently in a number of fMRI studies that simply describing negativity diminished it every time.

Now the degree it diminishes it changes, but it diminishes; describing it, labeling it, calling it out—not denying it, not explaining it, just describing it—always moves you closer to the deal.

Always. Now how much it moves you partly it's 'cause—you know—partly what happens is that imagine you're being chased by something. One of the reasons you're afraid of it is because you observe yourself running. Now imagine you turn around and face it; you've instantly signaled to yourself that you have faith in the part of you that's looking at the problem, and that will immediately produce positive emotion and diminish negative emotion.

It's unbelievably reliable, and the psychophysiological transformation is systemic; like it's been mapped from literally the level of DNA upward. So there's a complete—you're inhabited by a different spirit when you're running from something that's chasing you than when you turn around to confront it.

And so if you do that collaboratively, you also indicate to the person—let's say if the person's terrified, they're the hostage taker, but they're still terrified at the situation they've got themselves into—if they see that you're brave enough to face the reality of the situation, they're going to trust you a hell of a lot more than they would otherwise.

And so you do indicate that by listening.

So what kind of situations have you been in on the hostage front? Tell me a story or two.

Yeah, well, I was very early in my career; I was lucky enough to be involved in a bank robbery with hostages. While it happens in the movie all the time, in the real world it’s a very rare event: usually, the bank robbers are long gone before the police show up, and there’s almost never a situation where there’s a negotiation of a bank with hostages.

It happened in New York City early in my career, and it had been 20 years since one had happened in New York City prior to that—that's how rare they are— and there were, there were two bank robbers inside. One guy was a highly manipulative person who figured all along that he could outwit everybody, and he actually demonstrated a lot of techniques that I would refer to as a great CEO negotiator.

He was constantly diminishing his influence on the inside. We got on the phone with him early on, and he was like, "These guys I'm in here with, they're more dangerous than I am! As a matter of fact, I'm afraid of them." It's like a CEO saying, "Look, I can't make this deal because my board's going to fire me. I don’t have any influence in my company; I'm a figurehead."

That's an important guy! The guy who's diminishing their influence has a lot of it and doesn’t want to get cornered.

And that's exactly what this bank robber was about. Now, I gently confronted him. I was a second negotiator on the phone, and I was coached into some gentle confrontation by the NYPD Lieutenant Hugh McGowan—a brilliant guy. He said, "I want you to do this, this, and this, and I want you to confront this guy on his name at first chance you get."

Because this guy wouldn't even give us his name. What happens when you give up your name? When you give someone your name, you agree to influence. And if you refuse to give your name voluntarily, then you're holding a barrier up. And this guy had refused to give us his, even his first name all along.

And about five hours in, when I was called in to be the next negotiator on the phone, we'd figured out who he was, and Hugh said, "You know, I want you to brace him with his name." You know, not accusingly, but let him know that we know who he is and see what happens.

Triggered a bunch of changes. He immediately first went and got a hostage and put her on the phone to show us that he still had live hostages inside without making a threat.

I'm talking to him, and suddenly this female comes on the phone, and she says, "I'm okay," and I'm completely caught off guard. And he takes the phone back away from her, and it was his way of reminding us he had hostages without making a threat because he was smart enough that he knew that if he tempted fate too much, there’s a pretty good chance that a sniper would take him out.

He didn’t want that; he wanted to figure his way out. I gently confronted him on a couple of other things. It was definite confrontation, but it was gentle.

He hands off the phone to the other bank robber who does not want to be there— this guy is more concerned with surviving than getting away—and I dial into him very quickly and just with what I often refer to as a late-night FM DJ voice.

About ninety seconds into my conversation with this guy, he says, "I trust you," and two hours later, he was surrendering to me outside of the bank.

What happened to the other guy who was more manipulative and smarter and more in control?

Well, he never... right up to the last minute about twelve hours into the scenario. He got talked out. Now the second bank robber comes out, explains everything to us about what's going on there. There aren’t seven people inside; there aren’t seven bank robbers from different countries.

There's one guy left in, and even though he still won't admit what his name is, that is the name that you have. So we get back on the phone with him, and now I'm out of the game because I'm debriefing the guy who surrendered to me.

The next negotiator up is a hostage negotiator named Dominic Maso, NYPD negotiator— that to this day—Dominic has since deceased, but Dominic was one of the world's great closers. Dominic was a closer, and he just, he gently—narrowly kept taking ground away from the other guy that was inside.

And his first conversation with him was gentle confrontation. He said, "Alright, so we've got your partner out here. We know who you are; we know what's going on. What do you want me to call you?"

And even being told that we had his name, this guy comes back and says, "Call me Billy," which is not his name. Dominic is smart enough to go, "Like, you want me to call you Billy? Okay, I'll call you Billy."

Dominic continued to talk to him. We start working on this guy to come out. So what does he do to continue to maintain control inside and buy himself time? He lets a hostage go.

He’s got three of them inside; he’s got host