SpyCast 10.15.24
Ep 655 | 10.15.24

The FBI Hostage Negotiator - with Chris Voss

Transcript

Andrew Hammond: Welcome to SpyCast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Hammond, the museum's historian and curator. Each week we explore some aspect of the past, present or future of intelligence and espionage. If you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review. It really helps other listeners find us. Coming up next on SpyCast.

Chris Voss: The report-based stuff connecting to a person not lying to them about who you are, being authentic, using empathy and different specifics or in different applications, not lying to somebody. It's 14 times faster.

Andrew Hammond: This week's guest is Chris Voss, master in the complicated art of negotiation. Chris's career in the FBI sent him around the globe and positioned him across the table from some of the world's most dangerous criminals and terrorists. During his tenure as the FBI's lead international hostage negotiator, Chris honed his craft and developed unique methods of communication focused on what he describes as tactical empathy. He joined me on the podcast to give us a master class on negotiation, including insights on the very basics of negotiation, including the phrase never split the difference, the art of tactical empathy, case studies from Chris's career and techniques in ethical interrogation. The original podcast on intelligence since 2006, we are SpyCast. Now sit back, relax and enjoy the show. It's a pleasure to speak to you and thanks ever so much. For taking the time to join me, Chris.

Chris Voss: It's my pleasure. Happy to be here.

Andrew Hammond: Negotiation, if you were to describe it just to the average person on the street, it sounds very instinctive. Okay, there's two parties. They're trying to reach some middle ground. You have a book called "Never Split the Difference."

Chris Voss: It's never two parties, and middle ground is a bad place to be.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Chris Voss: Well, the first thing is there's always a team on the other side. Always, always, always. There's never, you know, two parties if you're thinking that in terms of two individuals. But even on a home sale. You know, a couple goes in to buy the home. Husband does all the talking. You know, buying that house unless he works out with his wife later on or there's a father-in-law or there's neighbors. I mean, there's always people that are influencing the speaker, and the speaker is rarely the decision maker. Now occasionally, the speaker might be the most influential person on the other side of the table. But there's always a team on the other side. There's always deal killers on the other side. And the deal killers rarely come to the table. And so then middle ground, you know, there's a difference between blending and never split the difference. That's fine. The middle grounds meet in the middle. That's really a bad idea. And one of the great best analogies I could think of is steel. Steel is basically 98% iron and 2% carbon. There's no middle ground there. You know what's the proper blend of ideas. If you were imagining that, you know, the Iron Union was talking with the Carbon Union to be like, ah, we got to be fair. It's got to be 50/50, and you'd have, you'd have an unusable, unworkable product. And so the best blend is 2%/98%. I know there's some changes in there for all of you physics people out there and steel aficionados and talking about blends of chrome and all the rest of that. But let's not get too complicated. So then you go 2%/98%, and you have the best product. And then Iron says, well, we're 98% here, we're getting 98% of the profit. Carbon is, you're only 2%, and Carbon is like, yeah, but we're not at 2%. We haven't got this phenomenal blend. It's perfect. So we deserve half. So we start talking about fairness and meeting in the middle and all this nonsense, and you're not focused on what's the best outcome, what's the best combination. And then you add any additional ideas. I'm holding stuff back in every negotiation. There's never a time when one side isn't holding information back. What am I? What's my budget? What are my deadlines? And am I being threatened with being fired if I screw this up? Am I gunning for a promotion? All this stuff that I'm scared to tell you. Every time. There's never a negotiation. We're constantly asking people have you ever been in a negotiation where you weren't holding something important back? Everybody goes like no, you know, you're not going to show all your cards. Well, that means the other side is holding important stuff back that you don't know. So you can't possibly know the best outcome because there's really important things you don't know. And then sort of, you know, the quantum physics mind bending aspect of it is what's in the overlap of the unknowns? If I don't know what you're holding back and you don't know what I'm holding back, there's some really cool stuff here. If we could just show each other our cards, we have no idea what the best outcome is, none. But most people approach negotiations like, yeah, I know, you know, I've been doing this a long time. I know everything's important. You know, I know in advance what the best outcome is. There was a, there was a book a long time, a long time ago about negotiation that lasted for about two seconds. I think it was called "The 10 Commandments of negotiation." And one of the commandments was it is what it is. Well, if you don't have all the information, you can't say it is what it is. You got no idea. So take it and make collaboration. Look for the best collaboration. Now what you described before is most people's perception of what negotiation is. Two parties, adversarial, find their middle grounds, best outcome. We can declare victory and go home. And if that was the case, things like steel would never be invented.

Andrew Hammond: Let's take another example that will be something that I guess most people could relate to. You want to get up here is.

Chris Voss: Right.

Andrew Hammond: That's quite an interesting one because you have a boss who's got hierarchical control over you in an organization. You don't want to lose your job. You're maybe saying if I'm not getting what I'm valued for, then I'm going to look for another job.

Chris Voss: Right.

Andrew Hammond: You want to make them feel like they're going to lose something significant, but you could call their bluff, and they're like, yeah, that's fine. We'll find someone else. You've maybe got a fallback position. I don't, I don't want to settle for less than this. But you want to kind of reach for something else. So and the boss is approaching it from a different point of view. We've got a pat structure, you know. Does this person deserve a raise, et cetera, et cetera. So help me kind of unpack that through the art of negotiating as you, as you would approach it. What advice would you give to the person, the listener who wants to get a pay raise?

Chris Voss: So the first question is who you're working for. Are you working for somebody that wants you to grow and develop? Are you working for a company that values you? I have frequently gotten questions from females saying like, you know, I'm working in a company that's famous for underpaying women, paying men more. How do I get them to pay me more? And my answer is quick. So first of all, the approach is, do your values line up with your employer's values? Does you employer value you as an employee? Now you need to quit that job if they don't because that's a bad company corporate value, and they're going to go out of business, eventually. They're going to get gobbled up by somebody else. They're going to have problems. Your position is coming to an end eventually, and you want to get out of there while you can position yourself for the market best as opposed to suddenly coming back to work and finding the doors locked. Now in the interim, what are you faced with? How do I get paid more? Be more valuable internally. Great negotiation is about understanding how the other side sees things. You don't have to like how they see it. But you got to recognize reality, ignore human nature, your peril, ignore reality, your peril. What's the reality that no employee likes? Your boss sees you as selfish. How does that happen? The only time you ever walk into his or her office and you want something for yourself. Bosses are conditioned that the people that work for them, the only time they make an appointment to come into the office to have a sit down is because they want something for themselves. So you got a human being you're dealing with. You conditioned him that you don't walk in there to help him out or her. You don't walk in there going like, hey, boss, how can I get more work without getting paid any more so I can make your life easier? That is not the approach. The approach is, hey boss, how do I get paid more for doing the same amount of work? So that's what people walk in the door for. I'm not getting paid enough. So then, recognizing that now gives you the strategic tactical advantage to approach them. A very close friend of mine, guy grew up with in Iowa, I'm originally from smalltown, Iowa. And the point of this is my buddy Tom McCabe is the head of an international bank. Now Tom and I both started in the same spot, smalltown, Iowa. No great family connections, you know. Didn't, didn't brunch at mom and dad's country club with the other rich people. Now set Tom back even a little more, like he went to a tiny school. His undergraduate degree, only an undergraduate, you know, not a PhD, not from impressive university. Tiny school in Missouri. What does that mean? No great alumni network. Head of an international bank. Great emotional intelligence. Not just for the people he works for, with, and who work for him and his customers, but his people he works for. What am I driving at? Every single job interview he's ever had and is consistently in his annual reviews, he asks this question. How can I be guaranteed to involve, be involved in projects that are critical to the strategic future of our organization? And bang. Now he's, he's basically asking a question. How can I be the most impactful employee you have? How can I make everybody's life better? How can I be the ultimate team player? Now the approach is you get paid more when you add more value. As long as the value you bring to the company exceeds where you're getting paid, there's no limit on to how much they can pay you. Now strategic projects, critical to the future of the organization, that broadens the view of how they see you. You're no longer selfish. You're not just a team player. You want to move the whole organization forward. Now you got to mean this. This can't be lip service. You have to ask to play in a championship game. You got to be asking to play in the Super Bowl and want to play in the Super Bowl. Pressure makes diamonds. You got to want to be a diamond.

Andrew Hammond: So it sounds like part of the art of negotiating is understanding where the, like having some kind of situational awareness about where the other person's coming from and then also both of your position within a broader ecosystem. Is that right? >> Yeah, that's, you know, that's very well said. Situational awareness is really important. And then, then realize that there's going to be stuff about your situational awareness you got to be willing to be corrected on. Like it's a guess. It's a hypothesis. So you know, the whole point of the way we've structured labels like it seems like something's bothering you. That's effectively a hypothesis, and I'm willing to articulate that I'm willing to be corrected on. You know, be willing to be corrected. The fear of being corrected is one of the things that I think holds people back the most from looking at negotiation as an exploratory process that I'm going to get data from. Essentially, there's three types of negotiators, analysts, asserters, and accommodators. Fight, flight, make friends. Analysts are flight. They think combat is very costly, wasteful, counterproductive. So I don't like to fight. Fighting is an, a possibility and it's highly, highly costly. The asserters are the fight types. Best represented by Donald Trump. Looks at negotiations at combat, you know, wants to wants to defeat the other side. Make friends, accommodators, very hope focused, want the interaction, will be extremely pleasant. Each one has a different approach to how, how they see negotiations and how they look at it and what they're looking to take away. But what the original point was, the information that you get at the table, the analysts. They hate getting caught off guard at the table. Unexpected information scares the hell out of them. And so they want to know everything before they get to the table. What does that mean? If you're an analyst, you're going to spend two or three months preparing for the negotiation. To dig up all the information that you could have found out in 20 minutes at the table. So if you work for me, and I think time is money, and it is. Elon Musk said recently, like he said, time is the ultimate commodity. It's the most valuable commodity. Do I want you spending two months achieving something you could get done in 20 minutes? No, I want you to get to the table and find out what you're looking for. But if you're a highly analytical type, that horrifies you. You don't want to get caught off guard at the table. So looking at negotiation as an information gathering process, it's helpful because they'll get you to the table. It's data you have to have that you can only get from the other person. LinkedIn profiles, company websites, those are dating profiles. You need to meet that person in person to find out how accurate that dating profile is. No matter how, you know, no matter how much research you do, you ain't going to find out until you get to the table. And that's one of the critical aspects of negotiation. It's not to sit at the table and do offer counteroffer. It's to sit at the table and gather information. Establish a relationship. Develop rapport so that you can tell me things, the stuff you're hiding that you're scared to tell me. Now we get a good collaboration of information going. Now we can put our cards together and come up with the best outcome. So we've spoke about negotiation. Then we've had examples of iron and salary. And could you give us a couple of examples from your career that helped to illustrate your broader approach to negotiations? So if I understand correctly, 100, over 150 cases that you worked on, are there any that particularly stand out as instructive or as learning experiences for people that want to understand negotiation? I mean, I'm sure they all have their own unique elements to them, but we can't discuss all 150, unfortunately.

Chris Voss: Yeah, right, that'd take a while. No, what you, you learn the most from a bad situation. There's posttraumatic stress disorder, and there's posttraumatic stress growth. So things going bad are often the most instructive. The great, the great Irish philosopher, Conor McGregor said --

Andrew Hammond: I haven't heard him called that before, but I like it.

Chris Voss: I win or I learn. You know, you don't learn from victories. You learn when things go bad. If you try to analyze it and you try to learn to move on. So I'm, I'm, a series of events. And the point that I'm going to is if you got, if you got a great process, it creates great outcomes unexpectedly wonderful outcomes fall out of the sky. You got a great process Black Swan. Forget, forget about, you know, what is it, one of the seven habits is begin with the end in mind. Well, no, let that go. With a great process, you got to let the end in mind go because you get tunnel vision if you get too focused on the end. The end is a suggestion maybe. Maybe. And then realize you could do better because you're, you're in the dark about all the information. So I'm working on a case in the Philippines, Burnham/Sobero case. We, I talk about it, there's a documentary out about me and my company now called "Tactical Empathy." It's on Amazon. Burnham Subero case is in the documentary. It's also in my book. Went bad, went really bad. Lots of people got killed. Botched rescue attempt at the end. Accidental rescues, if you can imagine that. Philippine scout rangers opened fire on an encampment of terrorists. Abu Sayyaf terrorists, they didn't know that there were any hostages there. They just thought it was bad guys. They opened up fire on them and shot and killed everybody, and two out of three remaining hostages were killed. Gracia Burnham was wounded, and she lived. Martin Burnham was killed. Deborah was killed, friendly fire. But among the bizarre things that happened through the course of that case, you know, I get back from an unnamed government agency that one of our hostages has been overheard on a phone call. And I'm like what? Like overheard on a phone call. Like, the hostages aren't ordering pizza, they're not calling DoorDash. What the hell are they doing on the phone? And that's all the information I got. And I go back to my boss at the time, Gary Nestler and I go, what the hell's going on here? He goes, hostages are only on the phone to provide proof of life. Like proof of life? I get, here's what is short circuiting my brain over this. First of all, we never get hostages on the phone. Who's out there getting them on the phone succeeding a proof of life with a verbal confirmation that I, I haven't gotten. And secondly, who the hell's getting proof of life on my hostages, because that means there's another buyer out there? There's more than one buyer here? This is, this is crazy. So this kind of blows me away. And you know, in the midst of the case, but it always bothered me. Like who was it? We found, we found out later on that it was a Philippine politician that was very corrupt and wanted to reach out to the bad guys to ransom out the hostages in order to embarrass the government. And then how that got nixed is a whole separate story of the bizarre nature of intergovernmental kidnappings and crises. But afterwards I'm thinking to myself, how the hell, how did they get them on the phone? Like we asked the proof of life question which is, we used to, which is, you know, what's, like your security question. Like what street did you grow up on? You know, who was your teacher in the first grade? It's a question only you can answer, which is why it's a security question, and we use that as proof of life. You know, what was the name of the first pet, that kind of stuff. I didn't do it at the time because I knew the hostages were alive. I didn't need proof of life, and I also didn't want to put us in a position where we owed the bad guys. Because if you ask for something, there's a legitimate human dynamic of reciprocity, and you don't want to put yourself in that position. So I'm flummoxed by this thing. And then a couple months later there's a kidnapping in Pittsburgh, drug dealer and drug dealer, bad on bad. And in the United States, who do you go to when you're in real trouble? Go to the FBI, even if you're a drug dealer. Your girlfriend's been kidnapped by another drug dealer, you know, who do you go to? And so the Bureau guys are riding around with the drug dealer who's trying to get his girlfriend away from the other drug dealer. And on his own spontaneously. He says the immortal words, hey dog, how do I know she's alive? Since he's not a sophisticated hostage negotiator, what he just does is ask the legitimate question. Yeah, you know, how do I know, why are we even talking? It's a question the other side has to say to themselves, it's actually a good question. And there's this long silence and the drug dealer on the other end of the phone says, I'll put her on the phone. I'm like, that's how it's done. And in the change in tone of voice, I realize that who's got the upper hand in the negotiation just changed in that instant. The great how question. So I'm talking to my colleagues at CNU, we worked as a team, we thought as a team, even though when I was in charge of the International Program, I'm not making any changes unless I'm bouncing it off everybody I'm working with. And I'm saying like hey guys, this is what I'm thinking of doing. I'm going to change our proof of life dynamic to the how question. This is how, you know, this is how I got there. This is what my thinking is. Get everybody internally on the team, brilliant guys, I worked with a bunch of brilliant guys. I worked for a great guy, Gary Noesner, there's a number of brilliant guys, Vince, Chuck, John, brilliant, brilliant guys. And I go am I smoking something here? And they're like no, no, no, no, you're on the right track. So you know, I waved the magic wand, make the change, field negotiators are working a case in Ecuador at the time. Now the field negotiators have not been, they're not deployed on the case. The guys that are deployed down range. They have not been part of this process. All they know is suddenly Voss is flipping a switch, and we got a new strategy and new without context and background scares the hell out of people. They're like, ah, I don't know. And I was kind of like I'm in charge here. You're going to do that or I'm going to pull you out of the country. I'll replace you with somebody that will. So they went along with it, but the local negotiators in Ecuador, the Gaula, they're like nah, that's not the way we do it. And it was really hard to tell the Gaula like the proof of life question that you're used to, we actually taught that to you 15 years ago. You didn't think that up on your own. You know, we taught it to you. It didn't matter. In the, in the case afterwards, our hostage ultimately escapes, which is a great thing that happened out of the sky. Created a great process. The bad guys on the end that we had the wife saying, how do I, how do I know my husband is even alive. How do I know he's alive? How am I supposed to pay you if I don't know he's alive? Legitimate questions. And they never gave us proof of life. And I was initially, extremely, ah my God, this is my new strategy. We didn't get him on the phone about 28 days, and he escapes on his own. Goes out, goes out a window in a hut in a jungle, driving rainstorm, 2:00 in the morning, saves himself. But the wanky thing that happened was halfway through the kidnapping, this guy's first name is Pepe, they start referring to him as Don Pepe. And we're like, Don Pepe, that's a sign of respect. What in God's name is going on? But he's no longer a hostage. Number one, he's Don Pepe. And so between flummoxing them, respectfully and deferentially, and then his own emotional intelligence skills, the alchemy of that combination combines to create him escaping. So he escapes, and I go to Upstate New York, sit down with him and his family to do what we call a hostage survival interview. You know, what did you think about? How did you get yourself through? It ends up being highly therapeutic for kidnap victims to not be interrogated about their experience but to be curiously asked about the dynamics. Very therapeutic for every hostage we ever did it through. But I really want to know what happened to my proof of life strategy. I really want to find out how come we never go them on the phone. And so I'm sitting down with his, his, him and his family, and I'm like hey, you know, and I kind of back into it. And he says yeah, he says, you know, the dynamic was they send a rep from the Guerrillas to a local town to make the phone calls, to make the deal. Then when he's got a deal, he comes back out in the jungle, presents it to the boss, and it's either thumbs up or thumbs down. Which is actually what happens in every business negotiation. You're negotiating with a rep, and you come to an agreement, and then the rep takes it back and either, either the boss agrees or the lawyers on their side agree or they do thumbs down. Like I heard a long time ago that fully 50% of the deals that Verizon cuts never gets implemented because they get killed in terms and conditions. That's them taking it back to the boss in a jungle and asking him if he likes a deal. But they're not supposed to do it until they got a deal. In this particular case, Pepe said yeah, you know, the guy was supposed to be in town kept coming back out to the jungle. They kept having conferences as to whether or not they were going to take me to town and put me on a phone. What that did was change the internal dynamic from how do we get a deal to present to the boss to how do we show he's okay so we can get a deal. It's a sequencing change. And afterwards, I realized we never forced the other side into an internal collaboration that favored us ever before. And their collaboration on showing he was okay then changed their entire approach to him, which then he sensed, and then he brought his own acumen to bear to create the opportunity to escape. So the very long story of saying, if you got a great process, good things are going to fall out of the sky. And finding the faults in your process are going to come from your disasters.

Andrew Hammond: It's very, it's fascinating the way that you describe that. So it sounds almost like you go into a negotiation, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" begin with the end in mind, put that to one side as a suggestion. When you enter into a negotiation, you actually want to go into it with the mindset of entering an open ended process --

Chris Voss: Yeah.

Andrew Hammond: -- where you're constantly picking up on tidbits of information.

Chris Voss: Yes.

Andrew Hammond: And you're applying them to a process or a model that you've worked out previously based on experience. You're applying those datapoints to that model that you have, and you're trying to reach the, the, the optimum combination of steel and carbon. Is that like --

Chris Voss: Yeah, and then, that's a great description. And then just having the faith that number one you're going to find something better. And number two, that it's actually going to accelerate the process. Those two things scare the hell out of people because they're afraid it's going to take longer. Human beings engage in interactions and negotiations in something that I have come to refer to as DPO, duration, path and outcome. Where do I want to be? How long is it going to take me to get there? How am I going to get there? Duration, path and outcome. And that is to let all of those things go. Now this is highly destabilizing. I don't know where I'm going to end up. Oh my God. I could end up in a bad place. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get there. Oh my God, it could take me five times as long. I don't know how I'm going to get there. Oh my God, I'm going to get lost. And to engage in a great process is from experience, from having done it, finding out that all those things get better. Now I originally had that forced on me when I volunteered on a suicide hotline. Great training. And, you know, you imagine a conversation to talk somebody off a ledge or out of suicide. And anecdotally you hear stories about somebody stayed up all night with their friend. There's a Collective Soul song about that very thing, stayed up all night, you know, trying to talk people into something. Richard Branson has a story in "Losing My Virginity." He was into crisis intervention in his younger days and being up all night trying to save people's lives. But you know, a virtuous thing to do, phenomenal. So you get to the hotline, and I go yeah, you got a 20 minute time limit. You go 20 minutes? In the song by Collective Soul they're up all night. How are we going to do this in 20 minutes? And they say no, as a matter of fact, it'll take less time than that if you do it right. So they put you through this training, and you're exposed to it little by little, and you start seeing this magic happening, 20 minutes or less. And then the first time you get on a line and somebody is genuinely suicidal or they're in crisis, somebody can be completely in crisis and not be suicidal. And I was on a crisis hotline, because, you know, you could be in crisis but not being wanting to kill yourself. And in less than 20 minutes, you're in a much better place. And you're saying like yeah, yeah, that's the step I'm going to take, and I'm going to be okay. So I got it forced on me to learn that. I'm going to create a better outcome in far less time if I let go of the, these constraints that I think is going to happen.

Andrew Hammond: That's fascinating. What if you get into a negotiation with someone that, you know, and we all have this experience, you get into a negotiation with someone that's clearly an egomaniac or is clearly very obnoxious and just don't really want to learn from you or read for you or pack up the data that you're dropping down. Like how do you deal with those different types of human personalities that you must inevitably come across as a negotiator?

Chris Voss: Yeah, well, if I diagnose them early on being that kind of mode and I can't get them out of it, and I'm going to do a couple things to try to get them out of it. But I'm not going to spend a lot of time. If I can't get them out of it, then I terminate the negotiation. A friend of mine, Joe Polish, runs an operation called Genius Network, and he categorizes clients' counterparts into one of two categories, ELF, easy, lucrative and fun, HALF, hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. And he says stop doing business with the HALFs and do business with the ELFs. So probably about four or five years ago, maybe six years ago, I run across this and I say to my team, we're going to adopt and we're going to operationalize this. The HALFs are going to be imminently predictable. And I learned this from hostage negotiation because a hostage negotiator has a success rate of about 93%, which means there's a 7% failure rate, not quite one in 10. And my old boss Gary Noesner came up with a block of instruction called high risk indicators, which are the nine indicators of somebody's never going to make a deal. And it's your job to see that at the very beginning. It will make, if you're willing to be open, and there are patterns, they will manifest themselves and you'll see it. So I'm like alright, so we got high risk indicators at HALF. Let's operationalize it, let's live it. What are the indicators? So I lay this on my sales team, and I say start working on a profile of the HALFs, and I hereby authorize you to walk away from them as soon as you diagnose somebody as a HALF. Now they are working for, you know, Chris Voss negotiator, and they think they got to make every deal, so they don't embrace this immediately. But what they do is they develop a profile and sure enough the profile will manifest itself in the first hour, half hour conversation. And then instead of immediately walking away, they start pulling data, which is what you should do. And the data they're pulling is if they meet the HALF profile, what's the timeline for making the deal, if we make it. What's the timeline for implementing the deal, if we implement it. They came back to me and they said, every HALF costs us from two to five times the amount of time to make the deal and implement. So what does that mean? You just took a 50% cut in pay for the HALF. Or is that person who's hard, annoying, lame and frustrating, do you say oh yeah, do I only make the deal if you pay me half, if I take a 50% cut. Because that's what's happening if it takes twice as much time. Secondly, alright, so you would take a pay cut for reoccurring business, in a long tail they would say in business. You know, repeat business for the next 20 years. Well no, the HALFs don't repeat. If they were hard, annoying, lame and frustrating for you, you won't cut another deal with them, or you were hard, annoying, lame and frustrating for them, and they won't cut another deal for you. So the reality of the person you're talking about, the person who's an egomaniac, who is obtuse, who just won't listen or just won't collaborate, you have to take a 50% cut in pay to deal with them, at least. And you get no repeat business. Why would you do that? Well, I'm desperate for money. As it turns out, the nature of the universe is the HALFs, the hard, annoying, lame and frustrating people are blocking you from the ELFs, the people that are easy, lucrative and fun. The people that want to do business with you. They're standing in line. You can't see them. You don't imagine they're there. But the HALFs are keeping you from them. And so the amount of time that you spent on the one deal with the HALF who doesn't repeat, you could have made anywhere from two to five deals with the ELF, and they will repeat because you guys loved each other. And that's really hard to wrap your mind around when you're first beginning. You think I'm desperate for a deal. You know what, I don't care about this long term thing. I got rent due now. I got a, I got a rent payment coming up. And the minute you shift over to at least instead of tomorrow, six months from now, then this dynamic begins to manifest, and your life will accelerate, and things will work out much better.

Andrew Hammond: And I want to ask a few questions about the applicability of this methodology to the intelligence community. But before we get there, just one final question on, along the vein that we've been travelling. So I, I think that you, you know, you could understand all of this stuff cerebrally or intellectually. But speaking to you, you know, you've got a radio voice. You're, you've got very considered body language and eye contact.

Chris Voss: So do you.

Andrew Hammond: So I'm just wondering like how much is that a part of it too? Like is that something you were trained in? Are negotiators like you made? Are they created?

Chris Voss: I'm of the school of thought that everything is learned.

Andrew Hammond: Okay.

Chris Voss: I think Daniel Coyle wrote a book called, "The Talent Code," and Coy's central premises is that everything is learned. The people we see as prodigies just started that 10,000 hours before anybody else did. Now if there's anything that's innate I think it's whether or not your cultural. Maybe that's innate. I'm imminently cultural, and I've learned the hard way who to listen to and who not to listen to. Never take advice from somebody you wouldn't trade places with. Never take directions from somebody who hasn't been where you're going. You might trust them. They still might not know what they're talking about. You trust your parents. You know, I'm, I'm telling a Lyft driver a couple years ago, he had this great voice. He says yeah, my mom says I should do voiceover work. I know enough about voiceover work. I know it's very hard. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of work. Like being good at anything else, people do it make it look easy. So he says this to me and I go, is your mother in a voiceover industry? He's like no. I said okay, never take advice from, I'd say don't take advice from somebody who hasn't been where you're going. Your mother loves you. She doesn't know what she's talking about. That doesn't change the fact that she loves you. So what am I driving at? I'm coachable, but I know who to be coached by. And my voice, my approach, my demeanor, I learned it. There were some people I listened to that were wrong. There's still very many people trained in negotiation and communication that are wrong. So who do I look for? Who do I listen to? The people that their track record is demonstrated to me. They know what they're talking about.

Andrew Hammond: So there was someone that I know who was involved in a case with a, a, a spy in the American government, and they went into be one of the people that interrogated or spoke or, or debriefed or whatever you want to call it. They went into the spy and the person in the room was doing the old like, you know, bad cop routine.

Chris Voss: Right.

Andrew Hammond: You know, you're a disgrace. You betrayed your country, et cetera, et cetera. His approach was he found out that she didn't like the food that was being given to her. He went to Whole Foods and got like some of the food that she liked and gave it to her. You know, never tried to suck up to her but just tried to like, I guess, meet her more on her level. And eventually, she opens up to him and starts talking to him.

Chris Voss: So is this the good cop? Is it good cop/bad cop. Because there's bad cop.

Andrew Hammond: So it was, I guess it was a bad cop, but he wasn't, it wasn't a concerted good cop/bad cop routine. He just, he just read the room. He was like a sort of, I guess, a kind of bit part player that took up the space when the other mean person left.

Chris Voss: The bad cop left.

Andrew Hammond: And he kind of like figured out a way to like try to get her to open up. And do you ever get brought in to help people that are involved in these types of situations, and does that stuff have applicability for that type of stuff?

Chris Voss: Oh well it does. I mean all of, all of what I'm doing for business people is now all grounded in those methodologies or the mistakes or the deviations from those methodologies. So when, the greatest, and I don't like, even like the word interrogators. The greatest investigators are great interviewers. And they're rapport-based. And nobody can really understand what they did because it was invisible. It was rapport-based stuff. And they weren't magic. They developed, you know, confidential sources without being a bad cop. The bad cop stuff is highly ineffective. There was, there was a study done, Derek Gaunt's on my team, he wrote a book about tactical empathy and leadership called "Ego, Authority and Failure." And especially after 9/11, and harsh interrogation techniques were how to control. A subsequent study was done that said rapport-based interviewing was 14 times more effective than harsh interrogation techniques, 14 times. Not even close. So the bad cop stuff is, is punishing. It's, it's self-stimulating. I remember when I saw, finally saw the movie "O Dark Thirty" about, largely based on reality. The SEALs finally catching up to him, killing bin Laden. And I'm watching the depiction of the interrogation, harsh interrogation techniques, thinking like, no wonder it took us so long. This is everything that the intelligence community is doing to try to track him down is highly counterproductive. It creates terrorists. And like maybe you could live with creating terrorists if it worked, but it doesn't work. It took them way too long to catch bin Laden than they should have. Because using harsh interrogation techniques. Like I'm not going to take a position on it morally. I'm just going to say what works. It doesn't work. So the rapport-based stuff, connecting to a person. Not lying to them about who you are, being authentic. Not being threatening. Actually being understanding, using empathy in different specifics or in different applications. Not lying to somebody. It's 14 times faster. And, and another study referred to it as the closest thing, rapport-based interviewing. The closest thing to a truth serum that law enforcement had. That's a wild statement, and simultaneously, neuroscience now, because this was pre-neuroscience, listening to Andrew Huberman, one of my favorite podcasters, a person I happen to think the world of personally. Andrew is a friend.

Andrew Hammond: You've been on his show.

Chris Voss: I've been on Andrew's show, and I think he's a phenomenal human being. But I also listen to his show because it's science-based stuff. So he's talking, there's a relationship podcast he's talking about, so it's relationships, you know, romantic relationships. And he starts talking about oxytocin, the bonding drug. And when you feel I understand you, not when I understand you but when you feel I understand you, oxytocin is triggered. It's a neurochemical. It's not psychology. It's science. You bond to me. But then the additional kicker that nobody knows about on oxytocin is it also inclines you to tell the truth, hence the comment about it being a truth serum. So rapport-based approach to interrogation or a negotiation, you bond with me and you're more honest with me. Well this gets us back in a business deal you hiding information from me. If I can make you feel understood, suddenly it's as if I've waved a magic wand. You're opening up. That's why it's 14 times faster, whether it's in law enforcement, in terrorists or businesses. When, when I first got to New York, there was an agent on a terrorist taskforce named Larry Whack, and he was famous for getting really bad guys to openly cooperate with them. And people always shook their head going like, how did Larry get Eddie to talk? Like my God, Eddie was a terrorist and a really, really bad guy. And the next thing you know he's opening up to Larry. And Larry was this nonthreatening, you know, he wasn't quite aw-shucks, but he didn't stare anybody down. You know, he used a little bit of self-effacing humor. He was really easy going. And not just Larry but the other guys there made case after case after case, and everybody else just went like, I don't know how they do it. Because this rapport thing, this empathy thing, true empathy, not sympathy, is you don't see it in the moment and then suddenly somebody's opening up and nobody, nobody knows like five years ago, or five minutes ago this guy was angry. Now, now he's opening up? But nobody saw the transition. It's invisible. Well that's probably why tactical empathy as an approach is not that adopted because if he was a bad cop, you know, you're, you're having a good time being a bad cop. Very satisfying to you in the moment. And you forget that it didn't result in cooperation. But empathy in the moment is not satisfying, but it's astonishing, and it's a fact. And when you get used to it, then you just sit back and you wait and you just sit there going like it's coming. It's coming. It's coming. Hey, we're collaborating.

Andrew Hammond: Just as we get towards the end of the interview and counterintelligence, so you're in the FBI for many years.

Chris Voss: Right.

Andrew Hammond. And there's a whole part of it that's devoted to counterintelligence. Right. Is there any bleed over between the world that you inhabited in that world? Or were any of the skillsets that you would use be taught to them? Or was it kind of closed off? Help me understand the --

Chris Voss: Well people always, you know, in law enforcement agencies, intelligence, counterintelligence fields, they're always trying to understand how to best connect, how to be, how to be most effective. And I think that short term gains can often be misinterpreted because they work short term. Like in, in the intelligence community now, they've gone from harsh interrogation techniques to, I can't think of the name of the terminology. It'll come to me in a minute. But it's manipulative. And it's, it's not that far off of the old, a long time ago there was, there was another interrogation program that I took some, I took a look at. Because I was trying to learn to be a better interviewer. And it was basically getting someone to believe in something short term, but, I'm going to be your friend short term, but I'm really trying to hurt you. Manipulation, it's a manipulation technique. Because people are trying to be more effective. And I don't believe in it. You know, I believe that you're, you should be long term open with somebody and not promising things or not try to, you know, deception by omission. Are you my friend? Yeah, I'm your friend until I put the handcuffs on you and put you away for life. Are bad things going to happen to me? Well, I don't know. I'm just trying to help you. That's, you know, that's manipulation. Are bad things going to happen to me? Yeah, you're looking at some time. You know, there's, there's an issue as to how long you'll be in jail. I'm not trying to tell you you're not going to jail. The first guy that I brought out of the Chase Manhattan Bank, a bank robber that surrendered to me personally outside. He's like I don't want to go to jail. Then my response to him was well, the longer you stay in there, the more likely you're going to be in there for a longer time. Which means I'm not trying to kid him about going to jail. You know, yeah, I never said, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to help you. I said you know, I'll stand up for you in court, and I'll be happy to tell the judge how you helped bring this to an end. But by me saying I'm going to stand up for you in court is not you ain't going to jail. If you're going to court, you're going to get locked up. You're going to stand in front of a judge, and you're going to be judged. Now what you do from this point forward, we can't change what you've done in the past, but we can change how this is going to go forward. I'm being honest. And eliciting information I think is what it's called that the intel community likes. What are the techniques so that I elicit information from you, but it's not in your interest. And I, I think they went there because we, we did and should have, and waterboarding is a bad idea. Any sort of harsh interrogation techniques is a bad idea because it's counterproductive. And point of fact, let's take the morality out of it. I want to know does it work and then is it moral? And rapport-based interviewing and being open and honest works, and it's moral. Eliciting information works short term. It's questionable whether or not it's moral. And then it's counterproductive long term. So the original question was do the intelligence community, the counterintelligence, is this applicable? It's applicable, it's nuanced by what your goals are. My goal, if you're a bad guy and I've got you in custody, is I'm going to be honest with you. And you're going to cooperate with me for a longer period of time because I was honest.

Andrew Hammond: Just out of interest, why would the FBI as an organization, why would they use elicitation in one division but in another division it's the approach of just being radically honest. Listen, I'm not going to soft pedal it for you. You're going to do some time. But from this point forward is going to determine how long you're going to do and how it's going to shake out.

Chris Voss: Well, the intel community gets to set what their values are. And when you're in the intel community, they're going to say, they're going to, they will have vetted it. You know, they're going to say this is legal. It's not unconstitutional, it doesn't violate any of our laws. Our prerogatives at this point in time is prevention is more important than apprehension, which is often the default case in terrorist cases. It's better we prevent it than apprehend them. Because apprehension has a certain degree of risk. Then the problem is if you're just into prevention, you never lock the terrorists up, then they just get smarter every time you prevent them. They scatter, they learn, they get smarter. But when you're working in an organization and they tell you what the core values are, and they are legal. They pass all legal scrutiny. You start getting into real gray areas when you're talking about morality. And then your choice then is, right, do I want to work intel with the Bureau or do I want to go back, I want to work criminal cases because I can't live with this. Or if I want to work intel, do I have to do eliciting information, or can I just stick with rapport-base and integrity? And I'll stack my track record up against anybody's. And most of the people that I know in government that are highly entrepreneurial will say you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to do the rapport-based stuff, and I'll let my record speak for itself. And those are the Larry Whacks of the world that rack up one phenomenal success after another. And while the eliciting information guys are getting small amounts of information. They're effectively C players. And if you're a C player, you stay employed. You never failed. But you were never an A player. And the A players are always rapport based, honesty based, always.

Andrew Hammond: Wow, that's a good place to close off. This has, this has been really incredible. Thanks so much for speaking to me, Chris.

Chris Voss: I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me.

Andrew Hammond: Thanks. [ Music ] Thanks for listening to this episode of SpyCast. Please follow us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next week on SpyCast.

Unidentified Speaker: It's formally known now as criminal investigator analysis. And, and its basic precept, it's an investigative technique to identify the major personality, behavioral and psychological characteristics of an offender based upon the crimes that he or she has committed.

Andrew Hammond: If you have feedback, you can reach us by email at spycast.spymuseum.org or on X at into SpyCast. If you go to our page at thecyberwire.com/podcasts /spycast, you can find links to further resources, detailed show notes and full transcripts. I'm your host Andrew Hammond, and my content podcast partner is Erin Dietrick. The rest of the team involved in the show is Mike Mincy, Memphis Vaughn, III, Emily Coletta, Emily Rens, Afua Anokwa, Ariel Samuel, Elliott Peltzman, Tre Hester and Jen Eiben. This show is brought to you from the home of the world's preeminent collection of intelligence and espionage related artifacts, the International Spy Museum. [ Music ]