Negotiation, From The Man Who Wrote The Book On It With Chris Voss

What if the most intense, life-or-death negotiations in the world held the key to unlocking your everyday success? This episode, prepare to have your mind blown. We’re joined by Chris Voss, the former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI and author of the groundbreaking book, Never Split the Difference. Chris takes us deep into his extraordinary journey, from his roots in Iowa to the high-stakes world of hostage negotiation, and how he now empowers professionals like you to achieve more. Get ready to transform the way you approach every conversation, because this isn’t just about negotiating a deal – it’s about mastering human connection.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/chris-voss/.

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Negotiation, From The Man Who Wrote The Book On It With Chris Voss

Author of The International Bestseller, Never Split the Difference

This show is brought to you by PathWise.io. PathWise is dedicated to helping you be the best professional you can be. Providing a mix of career and leadership coaching courses, content, and community basic membership is free. Visit PathWise and join. I am honored to have Chris Voss on the show. Chris is the author of Never Split the Difference. He was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He now leads The Black Swan Group, which offers a holistic set of tactics and approaches that apply globally proven negotiation techniques to the world of business. In our discussion, we’ll cover Chris’s path into the FBI, how he got focused on high-stakes negotiation situations, and the work he’s been doing at The Black Swan Group since leaving the FBI, as well as his book, Never Split the Difference. Let’s get going.

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Chris, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me on the show.

J.R., my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Maybe start a little bit talking about how you got into the FBI. I know you grew up in Iowa. You went to Iowa State. At what point did you consider doing law enforcement as a career?

Early Career Aspiration

I first thought about it because I saw a movie when I was in high school called The Super Cops. A New York City police officer. I was blown away at the time with how creative I thought they were. They were creative. They were effective. They had a lot of fun. The community loved them. I was just really impressed by that.

It was something that you had envisioned doing even before you were in college.

Yeah. In my mid-teens is when I caught the bug, and then I just started sticking to it. I knew I was going to go to college. My plan was to go join the police department after I got out of college. It affected my choices of major, but that was planned all along.

When you went to the FBI, how did you get ready for your training experience at Quantico? One of my college roommates was an FBI agent. I think is still an FBI agent and he readied himself for it like he was trained for an NFL squad.

That’s essential. Being in shape was already part of my life, so that wasn’t that big of a deal for me at the time. I think I may have started running more, but I was running at the time. I figured I was ready to rock and roll when I got there.

What did you end up doing at the beginning before you got involved in the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York?

My first office was in Pittsburgh. At the time, the Bureau had a policy which still makes a lot of sense. They don’t do it anymore because it’s expensive, but they would start you out in a small to medium-sized office away from home. Becoming an FBI agent is very much like taking on a new identity. In a witness security program, you take on a new identity, they uproot you from your life so that you can adopt a new identity. Becoming an FBI agent, it’s the same reason in the bureau that they don’t like to promote people to be in charge of squads that they were on.

They want to put them on a new squad because all your old relationships see you as the old person. They don’t want to see you as the new person. They started me over at the first office, Pittsburgh took me out of the Midwest, never even been to Pittsburgh at all before. I started over. Originally, I was on foreign counterintelligence searching for spies. I got transferred to the surveillance squad while I was there, which is full-time surveillance. It’s what would be called a light undercover, quasi-undercover. They had another name, had IDs, but you rarely used it.

How did you like that part of your FBI experience?

Surveillance, I learned a lot. A lot more than I expected to. I did get a chance because surveillance is a light cover, so to speak, the drug squads could borrow you for buys. I did get a chance to sample undercover and find out it wasn’t for me. When you’re a baby FBI agent, you’re trying to decide what specialty you might like, there are things that sound sexy. If you’re into human communication, you’re probably thinking either undercover, you’re thinking profiler, or you’re thinking negotiator. What I found out about undercover is that I wasn’t comfortable lying. To be undercover is to lie consistently. I sampled it, and it just didn’t line up with my core values. Even though it was for a good purpose. I found that I just wasn’t happy operating as a liar.

It’s also hard to have a life when you’re undercover.

It’s impossible. Fortunately, it was a light cover in Pittsburgh, but going undercover tends to ruin law enforcement officers. It’s a necessary thing for law enforcement, but it’s so difficult. It so screws up people’s lives that they’ve got psychologists that are there. Tends to mess people up.

What were some of the other things you mentioned learning a lot while you were in that role?

In surveillance, I figured out how hard could it be to follow somebody around? It turns out it’s very hard. It’s a highly evolved skill. The other cool thing about it is that it makes you ultra sensitive to anybody getting behind you. If somebody accidentally takes one turn with me, if they’re on my bumper and they take one turn, I’ll pull off the side of the road. You just become hyper-conscious. You become impossible to follow. Once you’re good at following people because your radar gets so good. It turned out to be a very good thing for me when I went to New York City because you’re just not going to sneak up on me.

How long was it before you ended up moving to New York and getting involved in the terrorism task force?

Two years, roughly. The bureau’s policy would take you about two years to get used to being an FBI agent. You’d be two years in a medium-sized office, and you go through major leagues, on top twelve offices at that time. New York City was the biggest office. It still is. They were having trouble staffing it because there was no cost of living for New York. Almost everybody was getting drawn into a black hole. It felt like on the way in. It felt like a black hole, but then I loved it. It was fantastic. About two years in, I was transferred to the surveillance squad on the terrorist task force and was following people around in New York City.

When was that time period, wise?

Last century.

I guess before the first World Trade Center bombing.

Yeah, I got to New York in 1986. Just before Giuliani got elected. The ‘80s were a tough time for the city. Not as hard as the ‘70s. The seventies were just like incredibly bad. They were starting to recover in the ‘80s to some degree. AIDS came along and that kicked the city’s ass for quite a while and up to and through the ‘90s. Before Giuliani, I didn’t admire what he has become, but he was an admirable mayor.

He was a great mayor.

He saved the city. I watched Giuliani’s leadership transform the city. What he’s become is far from that, but he saved the city. He took a city that people said was ungovernable and turned it around.

I remember going to New York in those days, and you could just see it month by month, year by year, getting better and better. The buzz in the city was so positive, and I think he presided over a really good period of change for the city, but it’s changed a lot since then. He’s changed a lot since then. You got involved in some pretty high-profile cases during your time there, even before the big ones that hit New York.

New York’s a Super Bowl every day, regardless of what you work on, whether it’s terrorism, organized crime, or white-collar crime. It is the Super Bowl. It’s a major league. If you’re a worker, you’re going to get involved in some great cases. You want to sit on the sidelines, sit on the sidelines. You want to get in the game. New York City is where you get in the game.

When did you go back to Quantico and get focused on the negotiation training?

My transfer was official fourteen years to the day after I arrived in New York. It was January 2000. It was a promotion. I hung into New York a couple of months later because by sheer coincidence, my first day in New York that I set foot as part of the division was on my father’s birthday. By that time, my father had died. I wanted to leave on one of the last days, when I stepped off the boat, to be his birthday as well. It was January of 2000 when I left.

You became the guy, one of the guys.

Transition To International Kidnapping Negotiation

It took a while. I got put on another all-star team. The crisis negotiation unit, led by Gary Neosner, was a team of all-stars, and he specifically recruited the best negotiators from across the field. There were some guys that could have gone to CNU that chose to stay in their divisions and run their programs. A very talented guy who didn’t come to CNU, but it was a collection of guys that were all really good. Gary’s philosophy at the time was to let each one of us run an entire program. The program that he put me in charge of ultimately was international kidnapping.

That’s a Super Bowl in and of itself.

It was a new game. It’s great. It was exposure to cultures in a way that I never got exposed to. The Bureau’s operating principles overseas is we got to follow our rules and we got to follow their rule. There’s usually a narrow overlap. Just because it’s acceptable to them doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to us. Every country in the world has what’s called the legal attache, an FBI agent overseas assigned to help you navigate those nuances, and you show up in country, and the Lead GATT ambassador would help you stay within both our rules and their rules. What was crazy about it is that we’re very American-centric in the US.

I showed up in the Philippines, and the first thing that I was shocked by, a Magellan. A great European explorer, as far as Western Europeans are concerned. A hero, a great explorer, expanded civilization. He met his demise in the Philippines. I’m like, “Are you guys ashamed that you killed this great man?” They’re like, “No, it wasn’t a great man. He was an intruder. He was an interloper. He was destroying our culture. He had no business here. We’re proud of the fact that we taught him a lesson.” I’d be like, “Wow.” That’s what another point of view is like on the same set of circumstances.

I think as you travel, you’ve probably traveled around the world more than I have. I’ve been dead 50 odd countries around the world. You realize culture matters. When you go someplace else, you have to understand and respect their culture, even if you don’t agree with it, because it’s the way that you get by.

Core Principle Of Empathy in Negotiation

The critical issue is that you don’t have to agree. Understand it, respect it, don’t violate it. That’s effectively the definition of empathy. What’s your perspective that I can completely disagree with, but I can completely see it and articulate to you simultaneously?

When you are on your way to becoming the lead hostage negotiator, what were some of the big a-ha moments for you in terms of honing your negotiation craft and developing the perspective that you ultimately did?

It’s two things. First of all, there’s always the team on the other side. Do not underestimate the power of the people behind a table on the other side. Do not underestimate the influence of the deal killers. Everybody talks about the decision maker. Decision makers may be 50% of the goal. The deal killer, the guy that waits in the wings on the other side, looking to disrupt the deal, who never comes to the table. You’ve got to account for them.

You’ve got to figure out how to communicate and influence them through your point of contact, because you never talk to them. It was in the same case that I realized that. The other thing was, Gary used to always say, “What we’re doing has the best chance of success?” Which means you’re going to fail. Now, at that point in time, I hadn’t had anything go bad yet.

I hadn’t had that many cases where I was directly responsible for and second major operation in the Philippines. Everything went wrong. Everything. In collaboration on both sides of the table. It was like most sports teams when they win a championship, the problem with repeating is that everybody who participated in the championship didn’t think they’d get enough credit afterwards. I was more important than everybody thought.

Since I didn’t get my due in the last championship, I’m not going to be that collaborative this time around. We had a phenomenal success in the Philippines. The interagency cooperation on both sides of the table, very good. Cross-government cooperation, very good. Afterwards, nobody thought they got enough credit, and it was no collaboration. Everybody was only interested in their own agendas, and a bunch of people got killed.

Were these all hostage negotiations?

Yeah.

Typically with drug cartels or terrorists or a mix of others?

Criminals and terrorist groups. Almost all terrorist groups ultimately become criminals because it becomes very lucrative, and people abandon their principles, and they just go for the money. The interesting thing, the dynamics these days with Hamas, a lot of what I’m reading, the leadership of Hamas has all made themselves billionaires. They all stole massive amounts of money, all the aid money that was going into Gaza.

Hamas either used it to build up their military complex or steal, but they simultaneously remain dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Usually, that’s the first group that I’ve heard of that’s stuck to their original core values, got to kill the other side, eradicate them from the face of the earth. These guys enrich themselves, turn themselves into billionaires, but then continue to do everything they could do to destroy Israel. Hamas is a little bit different in that regard, but mostly terrorism is so lucrative that they turn into complete mercenaries. They just want to make money.

There were all these hostage situations trying to get Americans back, or were there non-Americans in the mix as well?

The only time that the Bureau could get involved is under one of two conditions. An American is a hostage, or there’s a demand against the US government. Most frequently, there was an American hostage. In the 2004 timeframe and also the 2012 timeframe, Al-Qaeda then ISIS were making demands against the US government and holding and killing hostages. Mostly it’s a ransom demand.

You did something like 150 hostage situations over your time?

I guesstimated it on the low end. There was one year in Haiti where we logged in, we dealt with over 100 kidnappings in that year. When I started totaling up other things that I’ve been involved in, I figured 150 is a low number.

Separate it from the movies. What’s it like to be the point person in one of those situations? How long do they typically take to play out? What’s the back-and-forth that goes on between the sides?

Criminal kidnapping is usually fairly short. They want to get paid. Criminal kidnapping is a business. Internationally, the domestic US is very different. Criminal kidnapping is not a business because we squash kidnapping. As an operation, as a way to make money, we pretty much put kidnappers out of business in the US in the 1920s. The creation of the FBI was designed to stop kidnapping as a lucrative business opportunity in the US, and that was very effective. Externally, it’s a business. Criminal kidnapping, typically kidnapping for ransom for money, is going to be less than 21 days, probably 14 or less.

Rarely is it over 21. Now there are some changes. Criminal terrorist organizations in South America continue to improve their infrastructure. FARC in Colombia, one of the last cases I worked on there, the hostages have been held for six years. Generally, criminal kidnapping doesn’t last as long. Generally, terrorism lasts longer because they have the infrastructure to sustain it. It sounds stupid, but criminals want to get paid, want to go out and have a good time. Terrorists they got longer-term reigns.

True. You’re in the middle of all of these situations. Not all of them go well. How do you protect your mental health?

You rely on a process, you practice. Doing it doesn’t keep you sharp. You’re only playing in the game. Your skills slowly erode. Every great player practices constantly. They spend more time practicing than they ever spend in the games. First of all, you’ve got to believe in the process. You’ve got to do what you can to get your practice time in. Secondly, you realize that the best chance of success which means you’re going to fail occasionally.

When you fail, you don’t just shake it off. People get killed. You cannot just shake that off. You have to make the decision that it’s either going to make you better for the next round, or you’ve got to get out, because otherwise, why stick around? When people got killed, yeah, it bothered me. Until finally I realized I felt I was being selfish because who am I to feel bad? I’m not a family member. I’ve got nothing on what the family members are going through. For me to feel sorry for myself is a little bit self-centered.

Coming back to some of the situations, how often were they business people who were there? How often were they tourists? How often were they government people working for the US? What was the mix in that respect?

You get kidnapped as a result of bad decision-making, and nobody has the monopoly on that.

Fair enough. How often did you end up paying a ransom in those situations, or did somebody pay a ransom?

If the ransom is lured, a ransom is going to get paid. There’s no way around that. It’s burying your head in the sand that doesn’t make it go away. What burying your head in the sand does is that the Western European governments and the Japanese are famous for throwing suitcases of money at the bad guys, which then they go like, “This is a great way to make a living. Let’s do it some more.” What you really have to do, the smart approach, is to treat it like a bank robbery.

You give a bank teller bait money so the bank teller doesn’t get killed. You don’t give the bank teller a million dollars in bait money. You give them a few hundred dollars, a couple thousand maybe, and you make it mark bills. The bank teller doesn’t get killed. The bank robber leaves with evidence, and then when he takes it back to his hideout and he spreads it around with his buddies that weren’t there. Now you’ve tainted the whole group.

You can take the entire group down and shut the problem off. There was a case around 2000. There was a kidnap gang in Ecuador area that was hitting oil platforms every October. They hit the oil platform two Octobers in a row, kidnapped a bunch of people, and got paid a lot of money. Third time around. The US government was like an American citizen was executed.

They had multiple hostages. The US government says, “Let’s do a lure operation. Let’s see what might happen if we send them a small amount of money, enough to satisfy them and let the hostages go, and then see what happens when we follow the money.” When we took that approach, they wiped the whole gang out. They arrested over 50 people. They took the whole organization out.

They didn’t get back all the money, but they got back about half of it, and there were no more kidnappings. They had an instance where they used the sting operation, used the bank robbery example, wiped out the problem, and it doesn’t recur. That’s hard to see, that’s why you treat it like a sting operation, like a bank robbery, because you can wipe out a whole organization when otherwise you cannot.

Did you ever feel like you had to make trade-offs between you’ve got a particular person who’s being held hostage, or a group of people being held hostage, and you’re trying to play the broader game, and obviously, their family members don’t care about the broader game. How did you navigate that?

People come first.

You talked about practicing earlier. How did you guys practice this?

Honing Negotiation Skills & Practice Methods

The second-best way to practice is to teach it. The first best way to practice it is really to volunteer on suicide hotlines. That’s where I originally learned the skill because that’s live, it’s real. It’s very difficult to simulate emotional reactions. I try to find lots of ways to get people to simulate emotional reactions. At one point in time, when I was running the team in New York, I brought in actors. There’s a specific type of actor called a psychodramatist who’s supposed to be good and emulated emotions, and they just weren’t.

They were reacting in ways I knew from the hotline were just wrong, and so unless you’ve got somebody, it’s very rare for somebody to be able to appropriately simulate the emotion. The number one way is a suicide hotline. Number two is to teach it because you got to really know what you’re talking about. You’ve got to study. You got to dive in deeply and teach it. We taught it a lot.

Negotiation: You have to know what you’re talking about. You have to study and dive in deeply and teach it.

Did you consult on any of the films that go on with have these postage negotiations? Did you ever do that?

No, they want you to do that for free. That’s why so many of those films are so bad, because the Hollywood establishment gets used to certain consultants for everything. These guys tend to be like lawyers. What I mean, you go to a lawyer who’s never handled a copyright infringement case in his whole life. All he’s ever done is get divorces. You say, “Can you handle this copyright infringement case?” I’d be like, “Yeah, I’ll handle it for you.” Never having done it at all. He’s going to try and learn on the job on you, why you pay him. Most of the movie consultants, and they get a lot of forward special forces guys in there, and they’re like, “We could explain negotiations. We saw it happen.” No, you cannot.

Do you feel like any movie’s got it close to right?

The Negotiator was Samuel Jackson, and Kevin Spacey had a long time ago. I do not remember the director, but if it was a good film, the writer and the directors, the actors are saying the lines that the writers and the directors told them to say and told them how to say it. That movie had a lot of stuff in it that was good. Not perfect. There was applause, but it wasn’t bad.

What ultimately led you to say, “I’ve done this for enough time and am ready to go on and do something else with my life?”

The universe lined up, and it was no longer a supportive environment for what I was doing. The universe lined up on me when I was in New York, and it was no longer a supportive environment for my approach to the job. I was 50-50, stay in New York or go become a hostage negotiator. I left because there was a critical senior manager in New York that just had no use for me. I thought, “Gary’s beckoning Gary keeps bothering me, asking me when I’m going to come down.” This guy here doesn’t like me, Gary does, I’m going to go with Gary, and my life got exponentially better. When the universe lined up in a negative fashion again, I was like, “Last time this happened and I left, my life got better.” I left, and my life got better.

Sometimes, making a change is the best approach.

All those cliches, the door closes, and a window opens. Don’t be so wedded to the future that you’re going to ignore what the universe is trying to tell you.

You’ve taught a lot of people how to be better negotiators. What are the 2 or 3 things, the most foundational things, that you have to hammer into their heads?

Let the other side go first and show them you understand. Listening is an advanced skill, and everybody treats it like it’s not. There isn’t a negotiation book out there. Even the guys whose approach I find is too academic to be useful. We all agree that listening is an advanced skill. Just because you go around not talking all day doesn’t mean you listen. Just because you have hearing doesn’t mean that you listen. Listening is analysis. That takes brain power. Most people are too lazy to do it. If you can listen first, then there’s literal magic that begins to happen. That’s the biggest issue.

The real listening comes when you give up your agenda. For most people in most situations, that’s hard because you’re thinking about what they want to get out of the discussion or what they want to say, and that tunes out the listening.

Here’s why it’s hard for everybody. I didn’t realize this for the longest time. I’m listening to the Huberman Labs podcast, which I’m an avid listener of, I recommend it all the time. I cannot remember who was talking to, but there was decision-making, and I’m paraphrasing, and I made up my own acronym, but it was DPO, Duration, Path, and Outcome. Every human being thinks about where they want to be, how they’re going to get there, and how long it’s going to take them to get there. There’s all this guidance that is helpful and handicaps.

Like they say, pick out a goal or Covey, begin with the end in mind. That means you think you know the answer, and therefore, you’re not listening or you have on blinders, you’ve got tunnel vision, and you’re discarding everything along the way. You’re not picking up clues. Like begin with the end of man. That’s the outcome. Here’s what I think I want. Letting go of that is because humans were wired to do that and were reinforced to do that. When point of fact, the end should just be a suggestion. Most people don’t see it that way. They see it as the objective that must reach. There’s a lot of guidance that we realize that we think is great guidance when it’s meant to be food for thought, not the final answer.

Especially in negotiations, it’s a great point. I think in negotiations, you come in with a very clear point of view on what you want to get out of it.  Oftentimes, the best negotiations are the ones that yield an unexpected area of convergence that maybe neither side had thought about at the beginning. You end up coming out with something even better than what you thought you were going to get. It’s to do that if you’re not listening.

I agree completely.

You went through the FBI’s negotiation training. I know you did some training at Harvard and at Scotland Yard. What was similar and different about their schools of thought on negotiation?

Scotland Yard was the world, and probably still is the world’s best school for running a negotiation team. The Bureau School of Quantico really is the world’s best school for being a negotiator. If you go to both, then you become appreciative of that. Having gone through the Bureau’s program and I’d also volunteered on a suicide hotline, I got as good a training as you could get to be a negotiator.

I didn’t realize how much I failed to underestimate the value of all the other roles on the team. When I got to Scotland Yard and went through their course, they spent a massive amount of time making you work hard at every role. I was like, “That was eye-opening and the two were very complimentary.” That helped in my journey, thinking about how to run a team.

Harvard was just to disabuse me of my being intimidated by academic credentials or smart people. Harvard has this very wonderful academic approach that people are not academically sound. They have tried very hard to factor emotional intelligence into their training and their philosophies. They have some instructors up there who possess massive amounts of emotional intelligence. They’ve got this dogma that they’ve decided that they cannot violate.

Is getting to yes, that negotiation?

It’s getting to yes or a whole love affair with yes. One of the things that they like to talk about is construct a yesable proposition. “All you got to do is sit down and construct this yesable proposition. You’ve taken the other side’s needs and desires and wants into account, and you tie it up in a bow, and you hand it to them. All they got to do is say yes.” The huge fundamental flaw with that is that the other side doesn’t feel involved. They’re like, “This wasn’t my idea. I got no investment in this. You decided for me what I should say yes to, without ever consulting with me.” That’s just so massively counterproductive. It’s something I just won’t let go of.

The team thing that you brought up about Scotland Yard is also really interesting. You make a point in the book about there always being multiple people listening to one of these calls. Everybody hears things differently. It comes back to the listening point. This is where two heads or three heads or four heads or five heads can definitely be better than one, because we all digest what somebody else is saying through our own lenses, and you put all that together, and you probably get a better sense of what’s going on.

You make one of many great points because you hear things differently. Number two, there’s more information coming off the other side than I can absorb. It is, in fact, if I know where all the data and the information is coming from, body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, hesitation, choice of words, use of adjectives, and what personal pronouns I’m selecting. If I’m only listening, not talking, there’s more information coming than I can keep up with. Now, if you say something that triggers a thought in my head, while that thought is going through my head, I’m not hearing your words. If I need to construct a sentence, basically, I take my listening offline to throw the sentence together. There are all these reasons why it’s impossible individually to keep up with the information.

Let’s even, I mean, doing this interview. I’m thinking about what you’re saying. I’m trying to think about what I want to ask next. This is the challenge I think that you have in one of these situations is it’s hard to be listening and preparing to respond. Our brains can only really do one at a time. You’re in the switching back and forth thing, which is difficult, which is why people want to have a note taker. They want to have somebody else listening who has no job other than to listen to what the other side is saying. The team approach in that construct makes a ton of sense.

When my son was involved in my company, an important negotiation, we’d always have the two of us on the phone. I was always a primary spokesperson, and he was there principally to listen and analyze. More than once, and the listener’s job is to jump in with an insight that they’ve heard. More than once, I’m talking, and Brandon would come up with a label. When he uttered the label, I would think to myself, “Dude, what conversation were you listening to? That’s got nothing to do with anything that I’ve heard.” They would respond that he had just hit a gold mine of information that I had completely missed. He did that all the time. It’s to your point, you need another set of ears.

All of these different, you had your own experience FBI, the suicide hotlines the different training programs you went through. How does that ultimately lead to your approach and how you teach negotiation to other people now?

I think it’s just an overwhelming awareness of actually applying emotional intelligence and the massive lack of it day to day. We’ve always thought as a team. We haven’t changed anything that we’ve thought, but we’ve evolved it a lot and discovered more and more applications and more and more nuances. We figure something out new probably monthly, a subtle insight, if not a major breakthrough, because we think as a team. The team is a hostage negotiator. All guys that breathe it, love it, and we talk about it ad nauseam. We’re fascinated by it. We have the best time with it. We continue bringing that approach and awareness of emotional intelligence and the consequences of misapplying it.

When did you decide you’ve got your blockbuster book behind you, Never Split the Difference? When did you decide to write the book?

Leaving the FBI & Writing “Never Split the Difference”

I felt like I had to after I got out of the bureau, teaching at Georgetown. I knew that what we had was life-changing, and I thought, “This stuff is just so good. All we got to do is teach you to catch on.” I don’t know that I need a book. The flip side is if you’re trying to hire somebody to train you, they don’t have a book. You’re like, “Why don’t you have a book?” We, myself, Brandon, and Derek Gaunt, were very much involved all along the way.

We took our time refining the process. I left the bureau in 2007. I started teaching in 2009 at Georgetown. The book wasn’t published until 2016. We took our time getting it right, getting as close as we could, bringing in a great team. I’m not a writer. A lot of people have life-changing material, but they’re not writers. You got to get the right writer. That’s not an easy thing to do. We ended up with the right writer. Tahl Raz is the guy for business books.

When did you decide to bring him into the process?

I tried to bring him in early on, and I hit him up cold, and he was open to it. He says like, “I think I’m intrigued. This is an interesting idea. Here’s the problem. I got a family, got a wife. I cannot do this for free. In my life today, this is what I get paid, and I am accountable to my family. If I don’t get paid this, I cannot do your project.” He was just being honest with me.

Sounds like a negotiation, Chris.

It was an exchange of honesty. He wasn’t positioning. This wasn’t a bargaining scenario. At the time, I’m like, “Dude, I cannot do it.” I had a life savings at that point in time. I had no idea what the book was going to do. It would take such a chunk out of my savings. I’m like, “I respect it. I cannot do it.” We had another guy write the book proposal, and the publishers went bananas, and the publishers are like, “Our only problem is we don’t think the guy that wrote your proposal could do the book.”

As the publishers went bananas and balked on the deal over the guy that wrote the proposal, then that put us in a ball game to hire tall. In order to get the deal, we had to change writers. We went back and we said, “Publishers were only going to the book if we switched writers.” At that point, we could hire Tahl, and we did.

It’s clearly at that point you had a sense the book was going to be a big hit.

No.

Despite the publisher’s interest.

With a publisher’s interest, we got enthusiastic, but up to that, nobody thought the book was going to do well, which was one of the reasons why I wasn’t willing to gamble on Tahl, because all the feedback I got was, “Why does the world need another negotiation board?” Even my agent, who was very supportive, said, “I don’t appetite there is here domestically, but I know I can sell the heck out of this overseas because the overseas market loves FBI stuff.”

He was the first agent that ever said anything encouraging to me. Every other agent I spoke to, and I spoke to a bunch, they’re like, “I don’t think the world needs another negotiation book.” “Why?” Steve Ross was the first guy that offered me any encouragement. He had a basic game plan. When he dangled the book in front of the publishers, that’s when the publishers went nuts. He was shocked by the response. He said, “This is the way we’ve got to handle it.” Everything changed.

It’s been an incredible success since then.

It’s because I try to get the word out one way or another every day. It was another great piece of advice. Tahl gave me when we got started. He said, “Look, when this is published, you cannot sit back and count your royalties.” He says, “You’re going to have to knock yourself out for at least a year to get this book to catch on.” I remember thinking at the time, “Yeah, I’ll do two easy. You want me to do a year? I’m going to do two.” That has just become an approach where we have never stopped trying to get the word out.

People I know who’ve written books will say in some ways, writing the first draft of it is the easiest part of the process, as difficult as it is for people to sit down and start writing, the editing process. People usually find grueling in the publicizing part of the process as to after the book is out. I think they’re also surprised, and your books are a great example of how these books can have like a very long shelf life. They’re not the hot book for a month, like a fiction novel would be. Summer beach read, and the next year, everybody’s forgotten about it. It has a lot of staying power.

A couple of things are that everybody wants passive income. Write a book, get passive income. Don’t stop knocking yourself out. When you stop working, then maybe the passive income you find wasn’t passive as a result of your efforts.

Talk about some of the other things you’re doing now, Black Swan Group and otherwise.

It’s absolutely nuts. I don’t know when this is going to be published, but I’m doing a one-man, one-night-only show on Broadway. I thought that that’s nuts. The mere idea that I’m doing that. We found a bourbon. The guy did a documentary film on my company. He says, “Man, what do you say we’ll do a bourbon and call the difference?” It just came out subscription-only. You’ve got to buy a membership to get it. It’s won tasting awards in the last few months in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

Good for you.

Two guys on my team, brilliant negotiators, Jonathan Smith and Derek Gaunt. I’m doing the introduction for the book they’re putting out later this year, which is complementary to Never Split the Difference. I’m in Disneyland. I’m having a great time. There’s cool stuff going on all around me.

When’s the new book coming out?

Probably in the fall. As of right now, I think the title is going to be Fight Less, Win More. Jonathan Smith, Derek Gaunt. Derek is the head of coaching and training in my company. He is my sounding board for this stuff now, and even advancing the ideas. Jonathan has been a longtime business partner that just adapted our stuff. He’s having the best time with it. These two guys are booked, so they’re going to put out. It’s going to be brilliant.

What’s your Broadway thing that you’re doing in a week?

It’s just negotiating life. Illustrating the principles. How the same ideas apply, whether it’s a husband or a wife, a parent or child, or a boss or employee. Ideally, we’ll have it’ll be a fun night. People will enjoy themselves, be entertained, and be inspired by it.

I would have hung around for that. I’ll be back in the UK by then, but that sounds like a really interesting evening.

It’s going to be a lot of fun.

The Black Swan Group Philosophy

How did you choose The Black Swan Group for your company? Obviously, the concept got made particularly famous by the book, The Black Swan, but how did you choose it, and how is it relevant to what you’re doing in your work?

That book is by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I recommend anything that he’s written. I was inspired by his book. Among his other books that I’ve gotten a lot out of, another one is called Antifragile, which I particularly love. I highly recommend reading his books. He took the concept of The Black Swan thing, which is not supposed to happen. The impact of the highly improbable. What are the little things that change everything? Black Swan is, what do I find out about you, from you that I didn’t know that’s going to change our deal, make it better for both of us, as you were talking about earlier, or what are the little changes that I can make in my negotiation? It’s going to massively change the outcome to get those tidbits from you. I was inspired by the concept to name my company.

I do a lot of reading, and that is a book I could not get through. I’m generally very good at finishing books, but I clearly need to go back and give it another shot because I got about a hundred pages into it I just got worn down.

Taleb’s writing, I find myself in some sections, I’m highlighting every other sentence because it’s so brilliant and insightful. There are other sentences that, for me, are a heavy read, and it is a struggle to get through. It has been tough for me at moments, but it’s always been worth whatever I read in it. You don’t even have to read the whole book to get a massive amount out of it.

It was a while ago, so I’ve changed a lot since then. I’ll go back and give it another shot. Thanks for doing this, Chris. This has been great. I really appreciate it.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Look, anybody who wants to follow up with us also, the website is BlackSwanLTD.com. We just started to implement this year, something we’re calling the community, which is meant to be a really self-reinforcing, self-accelerating group of people that are helping each other, exchanging information. It’s a combination of marketing, sales, and coaching all wrapped into one operation. We’re very excited about it. Come and find out about the community. Come find out about a way we can help make you a better negotiator. Have as much fun as the rest of us are.

Again, thank you. I look forward to hearing about your show and seeing the new book, and reading it when it comes out. Sounds like you’ve got a lot. I’m not a bourbon drinker, but my son-in-law is. Maybe I’ll get him to join your membership and get himself a bottle of it.

I promise you he’ll enjoy it.

Sounds good. Thanks. Have a day. Good weekend.

You too. Bye.

—

I want to thank Chris for joining me on the show to discuss his path into the FBI, how he got focused on hostage and other high-stakes negotiation situations, and the work he’s been doing at The Black Swan Group. His book is Never Split the Difference. I did not expect that we would be talking about bourbon, but we did. If you’d like to work on your own career journey, visit Pathwise.io. You can become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the Pathwise newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Chris Voss
• Chris Voss on Instagram
• Chris Voss on X
• The Black Swan Group
• Never Split the Difference
• The Black Swan
• Antifragile
• PathWise on LinkedIn
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• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram

About Chris Voss

Chris Voss used his many years of experience in international crises and high-stakes negotiations to develop a unique negotiation training program. The Black Swan Method® has since grown into a holistic set of tactics and approaches that apply globally-proven negotiation techniques to the world of business.

Prior to 2008, Chris was the lead international kidnapping negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative for the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group. During his career, he also represented the U.S. government as an expert in kidnapping at two international conferences sponsored by the G8.

Before becoming the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator, Christopher served as the lead Crisis Negotiator for the New York City division of the FBI. Chris was a member of the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force for 14 years. He was the case agent on TERRSTOP (Omar Abdel-Rahman/”The Blind Sheikh” case) and the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe. He also negotiated the surrender of the first hostage taker to give up in the Chase Manhattan Bank robbery.

During Chris’s 24-year tenure with the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI, but also Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. He is also a recipient of the Attorney General’s Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement and the FBI Agents Association Award for Distinguished and Exemplary Service.

Chris has taught business negotiation in MBA programs as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, and at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business. He also taught business negotiation at Harvard University and guest lectured at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Goethe Business School in Frankfurt, Germany.

Since 2009, Chris has also worked with Insite Security as their Managing Director of the Kidnapping Resolution Practice.