354: Everything in Life Is A Negotiation. With Chris Voss.

Businessman, author of "Never Split The Difference". Former FBI hostage negotiator. CEO of The Black Swan Group. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 354 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening Echo. Good evening. In August of 2000, the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines broadcast that had captured a CIA agent.

• 0:18Jocko Willink?

  The truth was not as newsworthy or as valuable to the rebels. Abu Sayyaf had kidnapped Jeffrey Schilling, a 24-year-old American who had traveled near their base in Holo Island. A California native, Schilling became a hostage with a $10 million price tag on his head. At the time, I was a supervisory special agent attached to the FBI's elite crisis negotiation unit, the CNU. The CNU is the equivalent of the Special Forces of Negotiations. It's attached to the FBI's hostage rescue team, HRT. Both are national counterterrorism response assets.

• 1:02Jocko Willink?

  They are the best of the best.

• 1:06Jocko Willink?

  I was a natural for the Schilling case. I had spent some time in the Philippines and had an extensive background in terrorism from my New York City days assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, JTTF. A few days after Schilling became a hostage, my partner Chuck Regini and I flew to Manila to run the negotiations. Along with Jim Nixon, the FBI's highest official in Manila, we conferred with the top Philippine military brass. They agreed to let us guide the negotiations. Then we got down to business. One of us would take charge of the negotiation strategy for the FBI and consequently for the US government. That became my role.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  With the support of my colleagues, my job was to come up with the strategy, get it approved, and implement it.

• 1:58Jocko Willink?

  Our principal adversary was Abu Sabaya, the rebel leader who personally negotiated for Schilling's ransom. Sabaya was a veteran of the rebel movement with a violent past. He was straight out of the movies. A terrorist, sociopath, killer. He had a history of rape, murder, and beheadings. He liked to record his bloody deeds on video and then send them to the Philippine media. Sabaya always wore sunglasses, a bandana, a black t-shirt, and camo pants. He thought it made him a more dashing figure. If you look for any photos of Abu Sayyaf terrorists from this period,

• 2:42Jocko Willink?

  you will always see one in sunglasses. That's Sabaya. Sabaya loved, loved, loved the media.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  He had the Philippine reporters on speed dial. They'd call him and ask him questions in Tagalog, his native tongue. He would answer in English because he wanted the world to hear his voice on CNN. "They should make a movie about me," he would tell reporters. In my eyes, Sabaya was a cold-blooded businessman with an ego as big as Texas. A real shark. Sabaya knew he was in the commodities game.

• 3:22Jocko Willink?

  In Jeffrey Schilling, he had an item of value. How much could he get for it? He would find out, and I intended it to be a surprise he wouldn't like. As an FBI agent, I wanted to free the hostage and bring the criminal to justice.

• 3:40Jocko Willink?

  As a result of the Schilling case, I would become the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator.

• 3:51Jocko Willink?

  And that right there is a book, is an excerpt from a book. The book is called Never Split, The Difference, which is written by a man named Chris Voss. Chris Voss spent 24 years with the FBI, where he spent time as the lead crisis negotiator for the New York City Division of the FBI, was also the lead international kidnapping negotiator. He was trained as a negotiator not only by the FBI, but also by Harvard Law School and Scotland Yard, which is London's Metropolitan Police. He worked the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,

• 4:32Jocko Willink?

  the TWA Flight 800 explosion, the kidnapping of Jill Carroll in Iraq in 2006, as well as countless other dynamic situations around the world. Incredible experiences. And it's a privilege tonight to have Chris Voss with us here to discuss what he's been through and what he's learned. Chris, thanks for joining us.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Happy to be here.

• 5:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a

• 5:03Speaker 01

  By the way, if I ever have anybody else read my, my book, I'll have you do the reading.

• 5:08Jocko Willink?

  Um, let me know. Let me know. I'm here to, I'm here to help out. Uh, yeah. Fantastic book. Yeah. If people, if you don't have this yet, it's Never Split The Difference. The subtitle is Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. So fantastic book. And we actually tried to do this before COVID, or maybe right before COVID.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:30Jocko Willink?

  But it didn't work out. And so glad you could finally get out here and definitely looking forward to this conversation.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh, let's, before we jump into the book and all your lessons, let's, let's get a little bit of background on you and how you ended up here today. So where'd you grow up? Where'd you come from?

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Small town in Iowa. Uh, son of a, of Richard and Joyce Voss. My dad was a blue collar entrepreneur, owned his own business. My mom was Initially stay at home mom. That's what they were back in those days. And then ultimately, you know, as the kids grew up, got involved in my father's aspects of my father's business.

• 6:08Jocko Willink?

  What was the dad's business?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Uh, oil job originally. A middleman between shale oil and the end user, which would usually be um, large farms, small companies. And then really the business, when he bought it, was home heating oil. And I can remember my father going out in the middle of the night in the middle of winter because somebody's furnace shut down. He had to fix it or they're gonna freeze. And then after he got into the business, according to him, um, not, not independently verified, but it certainly was the case, gas company came in and gave everybody that had fuel oil furnaces, free natural gas service furnaces. Took away all his customers.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  By the time that I graduated high school, we were one of the only houses that I knew that was still burning uh, fuel oil for, for heat. But he adapted, you know, you, you gotta adapt. He expanded his business, bought some gas stations, built some convenience stores, saw himself as much in the energy business as a fuel oil business and just adapted.

• 7:19Jocko Willink?

  And so what were you doing growing up? Were you, were you playing sports in school? Do you like school? What was the deal there?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I played football and basketball and, and if I wanted to run track, I was allowed. There were certain things I wasn't allowed to do. Like, like, well, one, one year, one year I wanna play golf, you know, every, every high school's got a golf team. And the old man just wasn't having, he wasn't seeing that as, as a, as legitimate um, sporting activity that could divert me away from working for him. So, you know, I had to, my father believed he put a roof over your head, he fed you, he clothed you.

• 7:57Jocko Willink?

  You owe.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  You were gonna go to work. He got paid. But yeah, you're going.

• 8:01Jocko Willink?

  So what were you working at the gas stations and whatnot?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Mostly, um, I, the only time I ever worked at a gas station, it was for one that he didn't own. And it was a business associate wanted to hire me on, but most of the time it was, um, whatever needed to be done, maintenance, driving trucks, driving tractors, cutting grass, painting. Like I, I did a, painted a lot of stuff in the summertime. I, to this day, I hate to paint. He, you know, he needed, he needed a house painted. He had kids. Here, here's, here's a bucket of paint. Here's a brush. Here's a scaffold.

• 8:33Jocko Willink?

  Get busy.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Well, my favorite one was, he, um, wanted a new garage, wanted to get, build, you know, the house we bought had a single car garage. You barely fit that one in. He wants a new garage. I'm, I'm probably about 11 or 12 at the time. My older sister's 13 or 14. He hands us crowbars and says, go out in the backyard and tear down the garage. And then, and then so we're tearing, we pretty much tear the whole thing down. And then we got the foundation left. And you gotta knock the foundation out and, uh, the old man thinks, all right, well, I'll go run a jackhammer. I put my kid, my 12 year old on a jackhammer on, on the foundation. And I, I don't know. I'm like, all right, dad, you know?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And it would, the foundation was so big, I couldn't break it up with a jackhammer. So he had, finally asked to hire a contractor and this guy comes in with a backhoe. And I'm thinking, an adult man needs a backhoe to take this out and I'm out here with a hammer and nails and a jackhammer and I'm 12.

• 9:36Jocko Willink?

  Jack. So, uh, did you, you're doing good in school?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Fair. Um, I was capable of better grades than I felt like getting. Uh, mostly a B student.

• 9:49Jocko Willink?

  Did, did you have interest in going to college? What was your, what was your future looking like when you were like 16 years old?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  College, college was always part of the game plan. Like my, for whatever reason, it was just always accepted that all of us, uh, older sister and two younger, accepted we were going to go to college. Your man was going to spring for four years of tuition. If you graduated or not, that was on you. Finite amount of money, you know, got, got certain amount of money put in my checking account, start of every session. I spent it or not, it was up to me. And I just, you know, it was just, and then whatever happened after that was pretty much up to us.

• 10:29Jocko Willink?

  And so where'd you end up going to college?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Iowa State University. My older sister went there one reason ago.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  You know, I really idolized her growing up. And she was there sort of plowing her ground. It was far enough away from home that I wouldn't have to work in the evenings. Or be expected to work on the weekends. You know, because it was-

• 10:51Jocko Willink?

  You had to get out of that work radius.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  I had to get out of work radius. Three and a half hour drive. On a whim, he can't call me back at four because he needs something done at five. But I was also close enough to get back on a weekend if I needed to, for whatever reason.

• 11:06Jocko Willink?

  And no wrestling for you growing up in Iowa?

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Ah, good observation. Nah, I wasn't, I wasn't into wrestling. A home of a lot of great wrestling. Dan Gable, a bunch, a bunch of folks. Iowa State Cyclones were running championship after championship in those days.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  The, the 190 pound wrestler Frank Santana, I remember him. But no, I was a basketball player. I wasn't a grappler.

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  Those seasons clash. Now, at what point did you start looking at law enforcement?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Actually, when I was 16, a buddy of mine and I went and saw based on a true story, true life movie, The Super Cops. Two cops in New York. Somebody recently actually found me a DVD of it and sent it to me.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  These guys worked in Bed-Stuy, back when Bed-Stuy was a really bad area. White dudes, very black area, community loved them. Loved them. These guys locked up bad people and the good people in the community appreciated the heck out of it. And these guys were extremely creative. I didn't realize that at the time. The other thing that really attracted me to them, complete mavericks, like didn't pay attention to what the bosses told them. And put a lot of bad people in jail, were very, very creative about it. And the, the community actually nicknamed them Batrap, Batman and Robin.

• 12:32Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome, except for the dude that got stuck being Robin.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, who wants to be Robin, right?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  But then, me and my buddy saw this when I remember we were 16 and we both got struck at that moment in time. We wanted to be in law enforcement. And I stayed and law enforcement is occasionally a harsh reality. And my buddy went to Phoenix, got on with the police department there and the harshness of it, he just wasn't built for it, it needed last.

• 13:02Jocko Willink?

  This was the guy that saw the movie with you?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:05Jocko Willink?

  Did you, what did you study in college?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Ultimately, it was a business degree. They didn't call it that back then, they would call it industrial administration, but it was a business degree. And I started out originally, you know, I got in the engineering school, I switched out as soon as I was there, switched to sociology. But then I realized that a lot of sociologists out of work, what if I changed my mind about being a cop? So I decided to go to business, just to have the flexibility of going whatever direction I wanted to go.

• 13:39Jocko Willink?

  So did you graduate in four years?

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Four, I got out in four years.

• 13:42Jocko Willink?

  And then was it straight to the police academy somewhere?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went, well, initially, I wanted to go to Kansas City, Missouri. I, I'd never been there. But everybody in that part of the world, the three cities for choices were principally Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. Originally, I had my heart set on San Francisco. And because we had visited there, my family went there when I was about 18, and I thought, this is a cool town, this is a really interesting place. And then a thing called Proposition came through in Calif, Proposition 13 came through in California, where they cut back on all the property taxes, I figured they were going to impact the municipal budgets negatively. Probably a guy from out of state was going to have trouble getting hired.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  So then I just decided, stay local, and everybody that I knew that had been to Kansas City said, this is a great town. And so I just went and applied completely out of the blue. They were, they told me they were not hiring when I graduated. I remember when I graduated, I was really depressed because I didn't know where I was gonna go. Didn't want to go back home and work for my father, but I had nowhere else to go. And Kansas City, although they knew internally that June 1, it was gonna be a new fiscal year and a new world, they were telling me at the time, "No, we got no idea when we're gonna hire, just no idea. This is May." So they had to have known they were gonna hire you. And the new fiscal

• 15:12Speaker 01

  year came in, they started a new class. I was in a class.

• 15:15Jocko Willink?

  How'd they notify you?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Ah, interesting. I may have gotten a letter. I don't, I don't even actually remember.

• 15:22Jocko Willink?

  So you didn't think you had a job, then all of a sudden you got a job?

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Suddenly I had a job. And then, in the meantime, like, I'm, I'm back working for my dad, driving a truck.

• 15:31Jocko Willink?

  Your dad's like, got your life plotted out for you at this point.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's like, "You're fine, eh, kid," you know? And, and also, like, just to get into law enforcement, I remember, I applied for sheriff's department, got turned down, and then I had done an internship with the Iowa Department of Public Safety. And I can't remember exactly why. I don't think I wanted to be in the Iowa, I didn't want to be in the Iowa Highway Patrol. If I was gonna be uniform, I wanted to be in a city. And I remember being told from the police, uh, people at, in the Department of Public Safety, like, "You could walk right into the Highway Patrol," because I'd had an internship with them the year before. So they knew me, they knew I was an honest guy, and that, however

• 16:18Speaker 01

  innovative I was, I also really wasn't a rule breaker. You know, I was gonna follow the rules. Um, but I, I didn't want to, I didn't want to be a highway patrolman, so I held up for Kansas City, wanted to be in a city, and got in there.

• 16:31Jocko Willink?

  So you, so you end up at Kansas City. How's that, like, uh, going to the police academy? How, is that a boot camp scenario? Is it a gentleman's course? Is it, you go home in the afternoon? Are you staying in barracks? How does that all work?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they had just moved the police academy into a local community college, I think for budgetary reasons. They had their own academy in its own standalone campus where they controlled all aspects of it. And for whatever reason, which I'm sure is budgetary, um, they abandoned that. So we're in a community college.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Combination of classroom, not quite boot camp, plus you're going home to your own apartment every night. They, uh, six months, uh, PT every day. And something that I think law enforcement has really lost sight of, like the neck restraint, the carotid restraint. We worked on that every single day for six months. Like, nobody that I ever worked with ever hurt anybody by misapplication of the neck restraint. And they knew, they, they knew that it was potentially lethal, and if there was one thing they were gonna do, we're gonna be in condition, relatively speaking, not SEAL condition, but in condition.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  But we weren't gonna hurt anybody given, putting a neck restraint on them. We worked on that every day for six months.

• 17:57Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's a, just a horrible thing to see happening right now with law enforcement. I mean, I've talked to a lot of police officers around the country, and in most places right now, you cannot use a neck restraint. It's considered lethal force, and you, you, you cannot use it.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:14Jocko Willink?

  Um, and as anybody that knows anything, it is absolutely the best way to get someone under control that's out of control, without hurting them. And if somebody had to restrain my wife or my daughter, I would beg that they please use a neck restraint, cuz they'll be fine. Uh, so, it's, it's great to hear that at some point in time, you were training that way, and you did it every day, so you learn how effective it is, you also learn what to be careful of.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:47Jocko Willink?

  So, yeah, that, that makes sense.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Like, one, one, one cop and I, um, we had to corral this gorilla, uh, and just, you know, Caucasian, just for the record. But this monstrous dude at the mental hospital...

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Which means like normally somebody is nuts and big as that, once you corral them, you take them to the mental hospital. So when the mental hospital calls you to get somebody out of there, you know you got a problem. If we wouldn't have been able to choke that guy out with the proper carotid restraint, I don't know how we'd have got him out of there without shooting him. Like, and we got him out of there completely unharmed.

• 19:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a horrible escalation to go from, oh, this guy's a problem, and now I have to shoot him because I don't know what else to do, or I'm not allowed to do anything else. That escalation from this guy's gonna be perfect, literally perfectly fine, to now he's dead because I didn't have, I wasn't authorized to use the tools that I should be authorized to use and should be trained properly. That's awful. So it's a six-month school?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Six-month academy in a community college, trying to maintain quasi-military discipline, which most law enforcement kind of quasi. And it was, it was, yeah, it was a good classroom, working out occasionally a couple of times a week going to the range.

• 20:12Jocko Willink?

  And like when you're, when you're saying classrooms is like four or five hours of classroom a day, you're learning about the laws, you're learning about what you can and cannot do?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:22Jocko Willink?

  That kind of stuff?

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Combination constitutional law, some understanding probable cause, administrative rules and regulations that we're gonna have to know just to get by on the street. And I can remember the first time, the standard report form was a Form 189. And so they, they say, we're gonna learn how to fill out a Form 189. I remember thinking like, I gotta remember 189 forms. I was relieved that I didn't have to memorize 189 forms.

• 20:58Jocko Willink?

  So, did you feel pretty good? Did you feel pretty prepared when you ended up, you know, you get your badge, you go to the street? How, did you feel like you were pretty prepared for it?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Well, I felt like I was. Certainly did. There were a couple of things that took getting used to. Like initially, I was so nervous, my braking officer was scared to let me drive. And then, you know, the complexity of being on patrol, listening to the radio, and actually being on patrol. Most, initially, you can't do both. So if you're really paying attention to your environment, if you're looking around, if you're listening, you're not going to hear the radio. And finally, somebody's going to come by and say, "We've been calling you for 20 minutes." But then, and then you just keep, keep doing it every day, every day, every day, and then

• 21:49Speaker 01

  suddenly something clicks and you're pulling in all the information and you're dialing.

• 21:54Jocko Willink?

  So you have a break-in officer, is that the term you used?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, for two months, um, they, you know, they want to see, but they're not, they're going to turn you loose. Kansas City at the time ran one-man car patrols. So when you got cut loose off break-in, you were riding around by yourself. Um, which is, for a variety of reasons, actually, I'm hearing now, really, uh, good patrol strategy.

• 22:19Jocko Willink?

  Why is that?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  What I just heard recently, uh, unsourced, um, that, um, a male police officer is less likely to overreact to a challenge if he's by himself. And if there's two males there, two male police officers at the initial challenge, you're a little more likely to overreact because there's another male there that you're afraid of losing face in front of. Now, I don't know how true that is. It makes sense to me for a variety of reasons. There's, there's some more complexity to it. You know, I held off before talking to you about the different people you've had on.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Um, Huberman, I'm a huge Andrew Huberman fan.

• 23:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  And I saw you had, you had him in, I think, uh, he's brilliant, he's a brilliant dude. I happened, I, I had the good fortune to have lunch with him one day. And, um, so I'm very much into the neuroscience aspects these days. And on one of his podcasts, he was talking about, again, separating out the problems with law enforcement. And it happened to be a podcast on love and relationships, I think. And as I recall, he was talking about, uh, the basic four neurochemical hormones that, that drive us. And as I recall, it's primarily testosterone, serotonin, oxytocin, serotonin.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  And he said, if you're essentially testosterone type, you're more likely to see things as a challenge.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  So, let's get out of race and get into type. You got a testosterone driven cop, stopping a testosterone driven male, and they're both gonna see almost everything that happens as a challenge. You can expect that to turn into a downward spiral, absent better training. It's got nothing to do with race.

• 24:18Jocko Willink?

  The dynamic that I thought you were gonna say is, if I'm pulling you over and I'm by myself, well, I'm by myself, so I better de-escalate, right? I better be thinking-

• 24:29Speaker 01

  That's another point, yeah.

• 24:30Jocko Willink?

  Whereas if I'm with Echo and he's my partner, and you start getting mouthy, well, you know, we're gonna kick your ass, I feel more confident, more- just like in a bar, right? The guy that's in the bar that's by himself, oh, he's not causing any problems. It's the guy that's with three of his friends, it's all of a sudden, he's getting mouthy.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Right, no, that's exactly right. And, and most police departments are running, um, two man patrols, two person patrols.

• 24:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's weird for me because in my background in the SEAL teams, you, if any possible way, you have a buddy with you. As a matter of fact, if you don't have a buddy with you, you're kinda getting in trouble. So, you're always, cause you know, you can't watch your back, you know, you, you just can't. So, you always have someone with you. So, I've always thought to myself, man, if I was a police officer, I'd really like to have a partner.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Well, you're trained too. I mean, you're trained to not let your, your negative emotions get out, get out of control.

• 25:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I would definitely, you know, and it's the same thing in the SEAL teams. I mean, you gotta learn to de-escalate things. And it just being in a leadership position, you gotta learn to de-escalate things, cause someone comes in and they're mad about something, and if you're in a leadership position and you, all you do is go back at them, you see, see they, you know, boss, this plan sucks, and you think, oh, you're challenging me? Instead of saying, oh, what sucks about the plan? Do you wanna make some adjustments to it? Like, that's what you do, that's how you de-escalate it. You don't say, well, you don't understand the whole problem, how dare you? So-

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 25:57Jocko Willink?

  Uh, yeah, that takes some training. So, that takes some, uh, some mental gymnastics to get to a point where you can do that.

• 26:06Jocko Willink?

  So now you're out there in Kansas City, a couple of months. Was there any moment where you felt like, like, oh, I messed up? Or, or did you ever feel like, okay, now I'm a cop? You know what I'm saying?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  No, I loved it. My first year there, I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I was in a commercial area, you know, fair amount of street life, um, a little more fast paced. And that suited me. I'm, I'm not a real meticulous, super organized, super patient. By nature or nurture, I'm not sure which, but neither one. So my first year, I had, I had a ball. I mean, I had a ball. I mean, I was putting bad guys in jail. You know, I really loved it. I can remember, um, my parents came to visit me one time and we, we met at

• 27:01Speaker 01

  the, uh, yeah, I came by the precinct, uh, towards the end of my shift and I was told they were there. So we drove up and my mom said, when she saw me get out of the car, she said, the way you moved when you got out of the car, I saw a cop get out of that car. Um, so then after I was there for a year, they switched me to a residential area, which is a different kind of work. You know, you're not, you're not making, locking up multiple guys in a night. Um, you're looking for residential burglars. It's much more painstaking, meticulous, patient work. And so I went from an area that I just loved to an area that I just wasn't, I wasn't built for. And I, and I started getting bored while I was there.

• 27:46Jocko Willink?

  Is that when you started looking for something else to do?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I don't know that I looked so much for something else to do. Um, I was gonna, I was planning, I wanted to become a member of the SWAT team. And it took three years to get on the SWAT team. So I'm, I'm there, you know, two-ish years and the guys, I, I knew most of the guys that were on the SWAT team and they said, well, you know, put in for the selection process, you know, just go through it. If you put in, then the commanders, cams and sergeants are going to get to know that you're interested. They're going to keep an eye on you. Then next time around, you got a better shot. So I, cool. So I, I put in for the selection process, ended up number one on the list.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Number one, no shock to everybody. So the captains went to the lieutenant colonel and said, let's waive the three-year rule. Our number one guy here isn't going to have three years for 10 more months. And lieutenant colonel said, I don't care. Rules are rules. We're not, we're not waiving them. So I'm in a precinct on board by, they're, they're taking everybody on the list under me, one at a time. And there was even the discussion of the possibility that if they took everybody, they still wouldn't take me, they'd be a whole new selection process. So I'm a little annoyed by this. And then my father says, um, what you think about federal?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  I'm like, I'm happy in Kansas City. So he introduces me this guy with the secret service. And I talked to this guy and he says, you know, I've traveled all over the world with the secret service. And I remember thinking, somebody paid you and paid for your flights and paid for your hotel to go all over the world? Like I'm from Iowa. Like I, you know, I'd seen Canada from a distance. That was the extent of my international travel. So I'm like, that sounds cool. And so I didn't know one federal agency from another. No idea. Secret Service, I would go down there, we're not hiring, not hiring.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  So I see an article in a newspaper, FBI's first billion-dollar budget. I knew enough about budgets that I thought, it's gotta be salaries, they gotta be hiring. I went down, I put in, it was the first of a three-year hiring push and, and I got in.

• 30:17Jocko Willink?

  And just like that, so how long is it between when you get accepted and when you're going to the FBI academy?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, October 31st, I'd had three years on the police department and I would have gone to the SWAT team. The bureau hired me on October 15th.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  And I remember, you know, I'm a dumb twenty something year old. I put in for the Bureau. And I remember literally telling people, you know, whoever, whoever offers me a position first. SWAT team comes, I'm going with the SWAT team. The Bureau comes, I'm going with the Bureau. And then they kept, uh, the police department had had a, the chief at the time hated the FBI with a passion, hated the FBI. So they had a rule that if you left the police department, the only job you couldn't come back from was if you became an FBI agent.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  You go take a job as a dog catcher, they take you back. You go, you go take a job, you know, think of something, hairdresser, you know, I don't, I don't know what, but the only job, and in my exit interview, they, they, they literally told me, they said, you understand you can never come back if you join the Bureau. I'm like, well, it's not my intention to come back. But so consequently, they had to, I had to keep my application a secret till it was in the final stages. They couldn't go interview any of my commanders until just, they were sure that they were gonna hire me at the last minute. And, you know, that led, I was still a mouthy twenty something, so that led to a couple of problems as I was leaving the police department.

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  What's the beef? Where's the beef? Did this guy have a specific beef with the FBI? Was it like a case where the feds came in like straight out of a movie?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  He had, um...

• 32:15Jocko Willink?

  Jurisdiction, right?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Been seen talking on the street with ladies of the evening. And that, uh, a couple of Bureau guys spotted him on the street with these ladies of the evening on the way to a meeting. And it made it back to the city council. Cause the agents were wondering whether or not they could trust the guy. And they said, you know, I don't, I don't work with this guy. And then he, he went on to, like the FBI, this is how bad it got under this guy. Uh, I don't know if you're familiar with the FBI National Academy.

• 32:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  But if you get, if you get sent to the National Academy, Bureau pays all your expenses, pays, pays for your flights. Like, doesn't cost an agency a dime to send somebody to the National Academy. And it's a stepping stone in a lot of police departments to be, becoming chief for the next promotion. It's a big deal.

• 33:12Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I, I spoke at the last FBI National Academy meeting.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:17Jocko Willink?

  It was awesome.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  So I get there in the FBI Academy, you know, uh, October 15th. And they start talking about how they pay all expenses for cops. And I'm thinking, nobody from Kansas City has come here in 10 years. It, it, it, it can't be that it's free. Like, nah, it's free. That's, that's how much this guy hated the FBI.

• 33:41Jocko Willink?

  Wow. So you get picked up for the FBI, uh, you show up to the academy. How's the academy?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was good. Um, you know, running, shooting, mostly academic. The, um, uh, the physical aspects of it were not super challenging. You could, if, uh, it would help you, at the time, you could be in no condition at all and they'd whip you into shape. They ended up having, um, problems with that later on. And so now you can't get in unless you're in at least a minimal physical condition.

• 34:16Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  But you, you could come in and, and be fat and completely out of shape. If, if you put in the effort, you'd, you'd meet the minimums. And they weren't huge. Like FBI agents are not wrestling people to the ground on a regular basis. So they want you to be physically capable, but, you know, it was more rigorous than a police department. Cause you're, you know, you might get into a wrestling match with somebody every day. And the Bureau's tactics is to outman, outgun the bad guys so that physical confrontations are unnecessary. So they want you to be able to handle yourself, but it's not that big of a deal. They really want you, they want you to do the classroom work. They want you to be able to shoot well. My shooting improved significantly from when I was there. And it was, it was, you know, it was good solid 16 weeks.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  It was transformative.

• 35:03Jocko Willink?

  How are you looking at, cause you're a, you're a cop coming off the mean streets. And how are you looking at the college kids? Is there like a fun with that, with that interaction?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was a lot more harsh, so to speak, more aggressive, more blunt than the vast majority of them were. I, I was, and they come from all walks of life and they're gonna turn them into agents. But I was, you know, I was, I was a street cop.

• 35:30Jocko Willink?

  What, what percentage of people are previous cops rolling in there?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Pretty small. Pretty small. They, at the time, they hired in five categories. I was, cops are in the modified category, which is all others. Like you're not a lawyer, you're not an accountant, you're not a scientist, you're not a female, you're not a minority, you're not any others, you're not a language, you know, you don't, you're not already fluent.

• 35:57Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  So everybody else goes into a large category, modified, and you know, it's a more competitive, theoretically, just more, more people there. And I was modified, so not that many cops.

• 36:09Jocko Willink?

  Was there any, did you have any challenges when you were there? Was anything hard for you?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Nah, I don't think so. Not, nothing, nothing there then. I mean, I could, I was already in decent condition, took care of myself pretty well. I could study when I felt like it and I already knew how to shoot.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Do people get kicked out of the academy? Like what percentage of people make it through? I mean, they got a good screening program, program, so I'm sure it's not that many.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Nah, yeah, it's, well, it's even, it's even better now. And no, not that many did. Not, not that many did. Like if, if you got, if you got caught lying about anything, you should, you should be shown the door. Any, any, any cheating should be shown the door.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  If you, that was, they had a problem with physical conditioning. Because they tried, they wouldn't enforce the physical conditioning rules in the academy, but then not, once you join, were actually in a field office as an agent. And somebody brought up, well, if legally, you're full FBI agents, from the moment you walk in the door, you shouldn't get fired from the academy on something you won't get fired from if you're in a field office. And you should be, you shouldn't be fat and out of shape in a field office. They just weren't firing people for that. So, they, then they, then they just raised the physical minimums to get in the door.

• 37:35Jocko Willink?

  Are you, when you're there, so is, is everyone getting trained just to be an agent?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  And is there, do you go to specialty training after that? So if I'm an accountant and they think I'm going to be looking at tax fraud, do I go there, I become an agent, and then I go to an advanced school to be, you know, a tax fraud guy?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Pretty much, exactly, yeah. The theory's in, and I think it's still pretty true now. Like, be an FBI agent first, specialize afterwards. We've got to make sure that you understand how to, how to be a generalist before you, you know, you follow your bliss, for lack, lack of a better term. Like, somebody's breaking the law on every cool thing you could think of. Like, if you're into collecting postage stamps, somebody's engaged in an active criminal enterprise, making money from counterfeit post, I get it, matter. So, the cool thing about the FBI is that ultimately, if you take your time, you can

• 38:38Speaker 01

  have the best time investigating crimes around stuff you're really interested in.

• 38:46Jocko Willink?

  But if I speak Spanish or I speak Russian, are they gonna throw me into an assignment where this is my main gig as soon as I get done?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Spanish guys for a while, everybody had to, if you got hired in the Spanish program, everybody was gonna have to do a stint in Puerto Rico. Those were the only ones at the time. Puerto Rico's bureau's got its hands full in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is, doesn't know if it wants to be a state or a commonwealth. You know, infrastructure problems, on the one hand, still, you know, back in my time in the bureau, still a couple of active groups that engaging in violence for independence.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  So this, just, this crazy combination of very difficult things to work in Puerto Rico. So if you're a Spanish speaker, you're gonna do time in Puerto Rico. That was the only language.

• 39:48Jocko Willink?

  So as a normal agent, what would, for you for instance, do you get any, any say in where you're going and what you're getting assigned to?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:57Jocko Willink?

  They're just gonna give you what they're gonna give you?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Not then. At then, the bureau's policy, which made, was made complete sense. Like, starting your life over as an FBI agent's a big jump. And the easiest way effectively is to go in a witness security program. It's a complete new identity, no ties to your old identity at all. Because it's the easiest way to become an FBI agent. Like, nobody, nobody, you're not around people you went to high school with. You're not around your neighbors. You're not, not even around family.

• 40:27Jocko Willink?

  Oh, so you're saying not literally, like, it's witness protection, but they take you, and they're not gonna send you back to where you're from?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:35Jocko Willink?

  They're gonna send you to some other city, so you don't have to run into the people you used to know. You're gonna be, it's a new life.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  That was back then. Now, the problem with that, it was very expensive. To, I'm, I'm in Kansas City, they send me to Pittsburgh for two years. They get me ready to go into one of the major offices.

• 40:53Jocko Willink?

  Is this what they actually did with you?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:54Jocko Willink?

  So this is your first assignment is Pittsburgh?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Two years in Pittsburgh.

• 40:57Jocko Willink?

  You get some kind of a special assignment, like you're gonna be working gang, you're gonna be working drug, you're gonna be, or are you just working?

• 41:04Speaker 01

  Um, you, most offices start you out working, working applicants. Cause you gotta get used to laying the credentials on somebody in a low-stress environment. So if you're doing a background investigation, you're walking into a bank because somebody that used to work in a bank wants to become an agent or something else where the background's required.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  Geez, that's not the rush you were looking for, was it?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  It's a little slow to start out, but you know, the first couple of times, you know, crazy things where you hold your, your creds up in front of somebody, you gotta get used to that. And, but, or if you're going into a bank to lock somebody up, that's a whole different. So they, they warm you up in applicants and then depend upon where you are, where you're gonna get assigned to. I initially get assigned to foreign counterintelligence, FCI, working spies, which is not for me. Again, that's slow, meticulous work. And so I, within the rules, now I'm scheming on how to get out of there.

• 42:03Jocko Willink?

  Uh, you, you get there, you get assigned this foreign counterintelligence, you already know this is really not your gig. Well, so what's your scam? What do you run? How do you try and maneuver?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Well, as it turns out, the guy who's ahead of the office, his kid is getting ready to go to college at Iowa State. So I'm not that far from, out of Iowa State. I'm like, look, you know, I'll connect you with some friends. You know, we'll, we'll help make sure your landing is, is a soft landing. And, you know, I help look out for his kid.

• 42:38Jocko Willink?

  Building some relationships.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Relationship building. And so then he initially, I wanna go to the drug squad, drug and organized crime. The different choices, they got a bank robbery squad, great squad. I got no shot at the bank robbery squad. Drug and organized crime or white collar. So I'm like, let me do the drugs and organized crime. This guy, I'm told he's gonna send me to drug and organized crime. And then when the transfer comes through, I'm on surveillance. Which ended up being a great thing. It was better than FCI. But then, you know, that's, that assignment played into where I ended up in New York. And surveillance is, you get to experiment with stuff.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  And, um, in all the field divisions, surveillance is a light undercover. That you got, you got a name, different last name, you got the ID, you got credit cards. In the event that you got a, somebody you're following, whether it's a drug dealer or a spy, gets on a plane, you gotta go with him. You gotta be able to pay for it, you know, you, you gotta be able to go. So I got a chance to do some undercover work there also, because then they're, they're borrowing the guys in the surveillance teams, you've already got an undercover backstop, you go out and buy, do drug buys. And that's when I found out, to be an undercover is to lie for a living. And it didn't fit me, didn't suit me.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Some, some people, it's fine, it works for you, but lying for a living didn't work for me. And undercover sounds sexy, everybody wants to do undercover, I mean, it sounds sexy. I wanna get out there, wanna buy drugs, you know, I wanna go into organized crime, wanna do all this stuff. And until you try it, something that sounds sexy, you don't really know if it's for you. So I got a chance to try it a couple, a few times in, in Pittsburgh, and I just realized it just wasn't for me.

• 44:35Jocko Willink?

  I had, uh, two friends. One of them went to the FBI, the, or was trying to go from the SEAL teams to the FBI. The other one was going to another agency inside the government. And they both went to the screening. And the guy that was going to the FBI comes back, he's, "God, I took the freaking lie detector test, that thing was crazy." You know, as soon as they, they set up, "Pick a number between one and five, and tell us, you know, don't tell us the number when we ask you if it's the number." And he goes, "Okay." And so he's, you know, thinking of three, and they go, "Is it one?" And he goes, "No." And the, the thing's all flat. He goes, "Is it two?" And he goes, "No." As soon as he says that, he goes, the thing starts going wild. "Is it three?" He said, "It's off." He goes, "They knew exactly, because I told them that."

• 45:20Jocko Willink?

  And, and he was one of those guys like he just wasn't comfortable lying and it just, it just called him out. Now, my other friend who went to another agency, he comes back from his interview. And he goes, yeah, I took that lie detector test. And I go, how, how was that? He goes, I flat lied it.

• 45:35Jocko Willink?

  And the, the, he said he just, yeah, he just, that thing couldn't, he goes, I just, I just blew through it. And here's the thing, I actually don't know if he's lying, cause he lied a lot, this guy. He was one of those guys that told like small, small lies all the time. You know, he's talking to a girl, he's telling a crazy story. He's talking to some other dude, he's telling some crazy, even when he's talking to you, you know, you know, those kind of friends that you have where the, you know, they're kind of lying about stuff like, you know, and you're good with it. It's just white lies, but it's all the time. He was one of those guys. And so I kind of believed him when he told me he flat lined the thing.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  He probably, yeah.

• 46:07Jocko Willink?

  But he may have been even lying about that. I'm not sure. But that idea, you know, for me, I'm like you, like, I don't want to be, I don't like to have like, I don't like to have to cover, like lie about stuff and make stuff up. And it just doesn't sit well with me. I wouldn't be a good undercover guy. So how long did you have to do that for?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  I was, I worked surveillance for about a year and a half.

• 46:32Jocko Willink?

  A year and a half. Now, a lot of times you're just straight up sitting in like the plumbing van on the corner.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Just a bar.

• 46:38Jocko Willink?

  With a camera, taking pictures. That's what you're doing.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or even if, even if you're in a chase vehicle where you're following them, like they're, they're moving for, of an eight, 10 hour shift, they're moving for an hour max. So you're sitting around no matter what.

• 46:54Jocko Willink?

  So this is still not what you came in to do?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Nah, yeah, it wasn't. It wasn't, you know, I'm, and I'm, I'm biding my time in Pittsburgh at the time because I knew that, you know, I'm going to be out of there soon.

• 47:07Jocko Willink?

  What is it, a two-year assignments that you guys get?

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Roughly, at the time, it was roughly two years before they move you on to one of the top offices. They called it the top 12 at the time. But everybody was going to New York. At the time,

• 47:20Speaker 01

  every FBI agent, everywhere in the country got paid the same amount of money. If you were, if you're an agent in Kansas City, if you're an agent in my hometown, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, you got paid the exact same amount of money somebody in New York got paid. So consequently, there were people in New York who were quitting right and left. They were having trouble staffing the office. And they said, look, you're you're going to New York. I mean, the orders aren't here yet, but nine out of 10 of you coming out of this class, you guys are all gonna end up in New York. So you're going. Don't be shocked when your orders for New York come through. So I'm in Pittsburgh. I'm waiting for the orders to New York to come through.

• 47:57Jocko Willink?

  And so what year is this that you finally get orders to New York?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  1985.

• 48:03Jocko Willink?

  1985.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  The day my son Brandon was born was the exact same day I got my orders to New York were printed.

• 48:13Jocko Willink?

  You roll up to New York and what do you get assigned when you get up there?

• 48:19Speaker 01

  I catch a break. Um, since I got surveillance time and since I've been a cop, the Joint Terrorist Task Force, the surveillance team dedicated to them, uh, needed needed bodies and I, because of my surveillance time, I got put right on. So that was, that was a huge break for a whole bunch of reasons.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  It was, I saved a lot of money. Didn't have to pay for suits and dry cleaning. It's a, you know, the cost of living is now increased, so my living standard is taking a step back. And then the second thing was, at the time, the surveillance teams were the only guys that took cars home. Surveillance and SWAT took cars home. And so this takes care of all my commuting expenses, which is another significant chunk of cash. So, and then I'm with New York City cops as partners at Joint Terrorist Task Force Surveillance Team. But the coolest thing of it was, we were the only surveillance team in New York that actually got out on the street

• 49:25Speaker 01

  with people, went into the subway. You had to be prepared to end up anywhere in New York City at 1 o'clock in the morning, toughest neighborhood, by yourself, no comms with anybody, like totally on your own.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  And you develop, you know, it's a cha- in New York, very dangerous time, nineteen, mid to late eighties, very dangerous. So if you're, if you're into this job, like, this is great, this is Disney World every day. Like, how do you end up in the South Bronx and the bad guys leave you alone? I remember the first time I'm going through Bed-Stuy at about one o'clock in the morning, and we, you know, we could use payphones, you know, you had special number, you could use a payphone, not cost you. I called some friends of mine in Iowa to say, "Guess where I am at right now? I am in Bed-Stuy in a drug neighborhood, hanging out."

• 50:21Jocko Willink?

  Now, you're, you said you were the counter terrorist team, is that right?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, Joint Terrorist Task Force.

• 50:28Jocko Willink?

  Joint Terrorist Task Force.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think, I, I know there's some terms of our first, anti-terrorist versus counter terrorist, I think we were counter terrorist.

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  And, so who are you tracking? How are you ending up in, you know, some drug-infested part of the city? Who are you tracking?

• 50:44Speaker 01

  It was, it was a very cool transition time. The terrorist task force started out mostly all domestic terrorism, and had, every ethnic group had a terrorist group. Puerto Ricans had the FLAN, the March of Terrorists, Jewish JDL, bombers, um, Black Panthers had turned into the Black Liberation Army, and the most dangerous one of all, the May nineteenth Communist Organization, which was mostly white female lesbians. And they were the smartest, the most organized, the most effective of all the groups.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Like, they, we had more respect for their organization and, and the way they, and at one point in time, domestically, all the groups got together, because it's like a professional association, where you have conferences. They know, they, they hang out together, they know each other. And they did a couple of joint operations, and on May nineteenth, were so disappointed in the organization of the other groups, that they finally said, "You guys go on your own." So the first, first generation of terrorist task force, put them all in jail, I mean, knocked them out. They, they, you know, they won awards, right and left.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Books were written about all the cases they made. So I get there and I joined that just as that's going away. And simultaneously, just as the Islamic radicals are starting to come to town. Like, I get there just a couple of years before the first World Trade Center bombing, and we're seeing a shift. But the bizarre part of it was, no one believed us. No one believed you. No one, no one, FBI headquarters, New York City Police Department, they were actually in the process of disbanding the terrorist task force when the first World Trade Center bombing occurred in 93.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  Some of my supervisors, a deputy chief famously said to one of my supervisors, "You're telling me about pink elephants walking down Broadway?" Because they felt there was no terrorism in the United States, because none of the incidents were occurring on American soil. And we had all been reassigned to gang crimes. Gang crimes was a really big thing at the time. And they took us, they disbanded the terrorist task force and reassigned us all to gang cases.

• 53:20Jocko Willink?

  So you're there, they disband this terrorist task force after they kind of broke a bunch of these domestic terrorist groups up.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:28Jocko Willink?

  They say, "Yeah, there's no more threat." Were you guys already saying, "Hey, no, there's an Islamic extremist threat"? Or were you not quite there yet?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  We weren't, we weren't quite there yet. We sensed something was going on, and so we took all our terrorist cases and made them gang cases, because they qualified as gang cases.

• 53:43Jocko Willink?

  Okay, so you guys are now part of this gang task force?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  We're working gang crimes, you know, the different groups, wherever they had originated from. At the different time, at the time, there were a couple of bank robbery crews that were, they realized if we call where we hang out a mosque, then we just pulled another layer of the First Amendment over us. And it's that much harder to get, to get at us. So they said, you know, criminals, and they're, and every religion has legitimate practitioners. So it's not the legitimate practitioner's fault that the criminals changed the name of the building they hang out in to a mosque.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  And that's what a bunch of them did. And we went from literally the first World Trade Center bombing, a couple of guys that were investigating some bank robberies, were trying to get a wire in a building that the bank robbers said was a mosque, and the prosecutors wouldn't touch it. They're like, we are not, we don't care what you find. We are not putting a wire in a church. And then the Trade Center happened, and they turned right back around. And with all the probable cause we'd previously established, we got the wire that we needed right after the first Trade Center bombing.

• 55:04Jocko Willink?

  So what was your, so were you in that gang task force doing surveillance when the first World Trade Center attack happened?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I had been, I had shifted from surveillance to what we call going inside, being part of the investigative squad. So I was no longer doing light cover. And I had been doing investigations overtly for probably about two years when the first Trade Center bombing happened.

• 55:32Jocko Willink?

  How surprised were we on that first World Trade Center bombing?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  I know, yeah, completely. There were some cases that we had had working. We just, we didn't imagine, we didn't have our arms around the guys that did the bombing. We actually had, we were looking real hard at a particular group that engaged in a test blast of the Trade Center explosive. They were tricked into the test blast. They didn't even know what was going on. The opsec of the guys that hit the first Trade Center was really, really good. And Ramzi Youssef, mastermind of the first Trade Center bombing, who is

• 56:17Speaker 01

  in fact Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, 9/11 mastermind, his nephew Ramzi Youssef did the first, he came to town, he brought the plans with him, he found a bunch of disorganized guys, you know, nobody, nobody really appreciated what he was, how organized he was. He pulled the whole thing together and left New York shortly before the bomb went off.

• 56:43Jocko Willink?

  And we got lucky on that bombing.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:46Jocko Willink?

  The amount of damage that bomb could have done.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Ridiculous, ridiculously lucky. And their intention was first time was to take the tower down.

• 56:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  They placed the bomb in a position to try to drop one tower into the next. And when Ramsey came back, when we brought him back collectively, I'm told that they flew by the Trade Center and he told the guys in a plane, "Next time we're taking it down."

• 57:11Jocko Willink?

  How did this impact your job? So, once this happens, is it like full focus? Now you realize you gotta, you gotta pay, the FBI needs to pay attention to Islamic extremists?

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, well, we got, we got on them in a hurry. Um, we, we'd been working different aspects of the group for about five years. And everything they did, there was tremendous restrictions on terrorist investigations because they saw it as a political investigation. So, the oversight, like, we had to re-justify the cases every six months. And if you had, if they hadn't committed a crime or we hadn't turned up a crime in that six-month timeframe, the investigation just got shut down. You couldn't pursue it. So, but consequently, we had little bits and pieces all along that when they hit the Trade Center, we could go back to the previous cases. Well, here's a piece here, here's a piece here, here's a piece here.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  And we now saw, now saw how the, how the group had, uh, coalesced in, in the United States by not breaking the law in their own way. For example, one guy, um, one of the ringleaders got stopped in a car, pulled over in a car, stopped, trunkload of weapons.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  One of the, one of the passengers in the car had a federal firearms license. It had dealer tags on the car. Wasn't the right, the reason it got stopped was because the tags didn't match the car.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  They had legitimate reason for having a dealer tags. Dealer license plate you put on any car you want driving around. You're golden. So legitimate car stop within the laws of the United States. No reason to take anybody to jail. When we start backtracking, we see same guys in a car with a bunch of weapons on a way to a firing range. So when we could bring all the pieces together, it all came together pretty fast.

• 59:02Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you get interested or start to get involved in negotiation?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had, I had, I would say, it would be fair to say utterly no interest in being a hostage negotiator. When I first joined the Bureau, I was on a SWAT team in Pittsburgh. I got to New York, I tried out for HRT. I was ridiculously underprepared when I tried out for HRT. I was just like sad, but knew that I could do it if I worked at it, you know? You can't train a couple of weekends. You gotta, you gotta train your tail off for a year. It's gotta become a lifestyle. I don't have to tell you that. I mean, that's what it is. It's a lifestyle. So I tried out for HRT and failed miserably.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  And then started working out again and re-injured my knee. Had my knee put back together for the second time. And then I thought, alright, so, and as probably as you well know, there's a shelf life. There's special operations, special forces.

• 1:00:11Jocko Willink?

  And you were expired.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  You're gonna expire at some point in time. You know, something's gonna break too many times and you're not gonna be able to do it anymore.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  So then I thought, alright, so we got negotiators. I've seen these guys out there, they're there all the time, crisis response. I'll be a negotiator because crisis requires a decision.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  Somebody's gotta decide what to do and decide now. And I wanted to stay in that game and do it. So I thought I, I thought I would angle myself towards the negotiation team. And had to jump through some hoops, but eventually made it.

• 1:00:47Jocko Willink?

  So this is, what year is this that you, that you make it to the negotiation team?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  I got trained in ninety... Two.

• 1:00:55Jocko Willink?

  Ninety-two.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Nineteen, last century. Nineteen ninety-two, before cell phones.

• 1:01:01Jocko Willink?

  And, and so this is inside the FBI, there's a detachment of negotiators, is that the way it's set up?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  You can do it as an additional duty, like when you're a street agent. There, there's something in you, there's four basic additional assignments, something in you is gonna resonate with one of those four. You can be an undercover, you could be a negotiator, you could be a SWAT, you could be a bomb tech. Each one of those a little bit different breed of cat. And something in you is really gonna line up with one of those things. And so.

• 1:01:37Jocko Willink?

  SWAT was out for you.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, SWAT, SWAT's out cuz the knee. And I was interested in negotiation. And what you do, if you, if, if they take you on the team, then they send you to Quantico for two weeks to get that training. There, there's three schools in the world that every hostage negotiator wants to go to. You wanna go to the Bureau School, you wanna go to London Mat Scotland Yard. And then you're either gonna wanna go down to Australia, you're gonna wanna go to Canada, cuz both of those run great, great courses. So the Bureau, the Bureau's course. As opposed to Scotland Yard's course, the Bureau's course will turn you into the best hostage negotiator you could be. Scotland Yard turned you into a great team player, which I had no idea was, there was a difference then.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  But there's a huge difference. So I went to the Bureau School and learned how to negotiate.

• 1:02:29Jocko Willink?

  So you're, this is when you're still part of the gang task force. You get this collateral duty as a negotiator. So if something was to pop up where a negotiator was needed, they'd call, you'd, you'd get brought in.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:40Jocko Willink?

  Whereas some other guy that became a bomb tech, all of a sudden there's a bomb, they find a pipe bomb somewhere, they needed someone to go work on that. They call one of the bomb tech guys that's been to that school.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:02:50Jocko Willink?

  And so forth. Okay, so you've been trained, now, once you've been trained in that, did you start to realize this is kind of something that you're good at? Did you realize it was something you were more interested in, you thought you would be?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Well, I had volunteered on a suicide hotline before I went to the negotiation training.

• 1:03:05Jocko Willink?

  Wait, you volunteered on a what?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Suicide hotline.

• 1:03:08Jocko Willink?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  That was the hoop I had to jump through. Cuz I, I went to the head of the negotiation team in New York. Said I want to be a hostage negotiator.

• 1:03:18Jocko Willink?

  Oh, this is in the book, the woman that you did that said.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Turned me down.

• 1:03:22Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  And so I volunteered on the hotline. So then when I get to the Bureau's Negotiation School, and they're playing tapes, I say to myself, I've been doing this for a year and a half. I just didn't have a SWAT team outside. So I've already felt that it was something that I was going to be good at and enjoyed while I was there.

• 1:03:42Jocko Willink?

  How was that learning curve at the suicide hotline?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really counterintuitive. Um, I had, like, it's an invisible skill. It's ridiculously effective, and it's completely invisible.

• 1:03:56Jocko Willink?

  And you go to training for that? Did they train you to be?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  At the hotline?

• 1:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Not only they train you, but at the, at the beginning of the, the training, they give you a piece of paper with ten, ten possible statements that somebody in a hotline might make. So write down what you think a good response is. They're going to give you back this piece of paper at the end of the training. They gave me back the piece of paper at the end of the training. Now, I, I write like, it looks like I write with my feet. My handwriting is very distinct. Like, there's no way you could fake my handwriting. So they hand me this piece of paper, and I know that's my handwriting. And I remember thinking like, what moron wrote those responses? That was, that was how far they take you in two months, and you don't, you don't even know.

• 1:04:38Jocko Willink?

  What, what's an example of what you, what in two, what you instinctively might think you should say to what you actually should say?

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Um, so, and one, one call that I did get, this guy calls in and says, look, look, I, you know, I just, I'm just, you know, I'm trying to put a lid on this night. I'm trying to put a lid on this night. Now, before training, I might have said, have you tried watching some TV? Uh, have you tried working out? Like, when I'm really stressed, I know if I go get a good workout, it clears my head. Or have you tried meditation? Like, jumping right into problem solving?

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  That is the wrong way to do it. That is, that will prolong the situation. Like the speed accelerator, which is neuroscience based, I didn't know at the time, is to deactivate the negatives by calling them out. So I just say to this guy, because I've been taught to just like, call out what you're hearing. So I go, he sounded frantic. So I said, "You sound frantic." And immediately his voice started coming down several notches. Instantaneously. And that, that tiny, like, people listening to that conversation would be like, what he, the guy, what he just said seems unhelpful.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  However, if I'm watching the person that he said it to, it instantaneously came down. And since you don't see examples of that in real life, or on the movies or TV, on the movies or TV, the guy'd say, "Look, have you tried working out?" And, and then on the movies or TV, they'll depict it as the guy, as the other person saying like, "Wow, that's a great idea. I'll do that."

• 1:06:31Jocko Willink?

  So what's psychologically going through my head when I tell you, "I want to put a cap on this night, I gotta put a cap on this night," and you say, you say back to me, "You sound like you're frantic." What's going through my head that's making me de-escalate?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Right, so, um, it's probably a neurochemical reaction. There's a, there's, and from listening to Huberman and others, I'm fascinated by what, finding the science behind it. It's been duplicated in a number of experiments that if I put you in an FMRI, where I can watch the electricity moving around in your brain, and I show you a picture that induces some sort of negative thought. And what the picture is, it doesn't matter. The experiment's been done a number of times. They might have shown them puppies in the rain, a starving child in Africa, anything that'd induce a negative thought. And so, seeing the picture, they watch areas in your brain light up

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  that either for you or predicted in advance where the negativity in your brain is housed. That bounces around a little bit based on person, but it's essentially about three quarters of the amygdala and a couple of other things that are involved. So they watch it light up when you see the picture. Now they just say to you, "What are you feeling?" Just asking you to label it, call it out, simply call it out. And every time they ask a person to simply identify the negative emotion that they're feeling, the electrical activity in the areas that had lit up start to diminish. Every time. Not sometimes, not 75% of the time, every time.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Now, the amount they diminish changes, which is why I happened to hit the nail on the head with this guy on the hotline. He starts coming down significantly. Sometimes you can call out somebody's negative emotion and there won't be any perceivable response. It doesn't mean it didn't work. It means you just need to do it some more. But it happens every time. Now, what triggers it is, is it a neurochemical response? Is it a conscious response? It's probably some sort of neurochemical response. But what we learned in hostage negotiation and on the hotline, actually, we do this extremely aggressively now in all our business negotiations. Like, you know, I've got some contentious to talk about.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I'm gonna call you on a phone, send you a text, send you an email, saying like, "You're not gonna like what I have to say." You know, this is gonna be harsh. This is going to be insulting. And so, I started, in a funny kind of way, I started applying this when I'm running our international kidnap response. I go to an embassy that's kidnapping the Philippines, a thing you read about earlier. I am unwelcome. Because somebody from Washington DC shows up, the locals in the embassy, the message they get is they're screwing up. You're either screwing up, or you're inadequate. Somebody from DC is not welcome. And I'm walking into a hostile environment every time.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  And because they were new to it, they didn't know exactly the response, they'd usually be doing something wrong. And I'd walk in, I'd start pointing out what they were doing wrong. And my partner, Chuck Regini, who you, uh, who's in the story, whenever we'd walk into a room, he would start to flinch because he knew that I was getting ready to lay into these guys. And somewhere along the line, I learned to say, before I started criticizing him, I'd say, "This is gonna sound harsh."

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  And then I'd criticize them. And they'd be, okay. They'd go from being mad to, you know, it preempted the negativity by letting them know what was coming. And I've seen it, seen it work on a regular basis. Something about it makes it worse. The, you, you could say, you could probably get away with seeing, saying this, uh, in the Navy, in the teams. You could say, you know, Captain, this is gonna, I don't want you to think I'm being disrespectful. And you're probably not gonna get to say the sentence second, sentence second, second sentence. Or he's gonna have shut you off.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  But if instead you said, Captain, I know this is gonna sound disrespectful. He'd sit there and listen to you. He'd appreciate being warned. And there's something about that reaction, that tiny little shift that I learned way back on a hotline.

• 1:11:05Jocko Willink?

  So you worked this suicide hotline for a year?

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  I was, I was actively on the line for probably a little over two years, two and a half years. I stayed very involved when, um, when the first Trade Center kicked off. Then our follow-on case, which was a larger, larger, broader conspiracy on a couple of different groups that were all linked together. Um, through the course of that following year, I just didn't have time to volunteer on a hotline anymore.

• 1:11:39Jocko Willink?

  So this is how, this is kinda how you get started in this negotiation, learning this skill. Um, and I kinda told you this before we started recording and we're gonna see all kinds of overlap between what I talk about from a leadership perspective. You know, there's a lot of skills that are transferred. It's like if you're good at baseball, there's a lot of things that are gonna transfer over to softball. If you're good at wrestling, there's a lot of things that are gonna transfer over to, uh, you know, jujitsu. So there's a lot of stuff that's really, really similar and there's some, some differences as well. But this skill of negotiation, as I read through the book, it's evolved a lot in the last forty, fifty years.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Um, and it, you know, some of the stuff that you talk about in the book. You know, hostage negotiation used to mean, you know, stall them until we get a chance to assault. Like, that was what it was. There was a mindset change that you outline in the book, uh, that occurred around 1971. October 1971, a guy named George Giff, am I saying that right? He's a, he's a guy that took a, took, took a plane, took a plane, took hostages on the plane. The plane lands to refuel. The hostages had actually negotiated their own release. But the FBI got frustrated and shoots the engine of the plane.

• 1:13:08Jocko Willink?

  The guy loses his mind, kills the hostages. The FBI gets sued and actually loses the lawsuit. So, so all of a sudden they realized they needed to make some adjustments to their, the way they're negotiating. Right. Uh, another thing that you kind of detail in the book is 1979 Harvard starts this negotiation project. And they're starting to look at negotiation theory and practice. They're trying to improve it. Uh, a book ends up coming out of that. The book is called Getting to Yes. That was written by Roger Fisher and William Urie, who were also the co-founders of that project.

• 1:13:52Jocko Willink?

  And, and the theory that they had was that, look, the, you know, people are emotional and they're animalistic and they're unreliable and they're irrational. And you just need to overcome that. Right. With, you know, rational, logical, you know, problem solving mindset.

• 1:14:14Jocko Willink?

  Which is, which is actually an idea that doesn't turn out to work so well. Because it's a lot harder to overcome that irrational, emotional, animalistic human. So those are some of the, uh, those are some of the evolutions that start to take place. When, in the book that you, that you run through, um, And in fact, going to the book here, you say, you say this about their system was easy to follow and seductive with four basic tenets. One, separate the person, the emotion from the problem. Two, don't get wrapped up in the other side's position, what they're asking for, but instead focus on their interests, why they're asking for it. So you can find

• 1:14:53Jocko Willink?

  what they really want. Three, work cooperatively to generate win-win options. And four, I'm putting a little tone on those, aren't I? Sorry. And four, establish mutually agreed upon standards for evaluating those possible solutions. So this is like one of those just detached academic things. It was a brilliant, rational and profound synthesis of the most advanced game theory and legal thinking of the day. For years after that book came out, everybody, including the FBI and the NYPD focused on problem solving approach to bargaining interactions. It just seemed so modern, modern and smart. So that was what was kind of happening. Then you go on to say halfway across the United States,

• 1:15:36Jocko Willink?

  a pair of professors at the University of Chicago was looking at everything from economics to negotiation from a far different angle. They were economists, Amos Tversky, am I saying that right? Tversky and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Kahneman, Kahneman, yeah. And he wrote, Thinking Fast and Slow. Together, the two launched the field of behavioral, behavioral economics and Kahneman won a Nobel Prize by showing that man is a very irrational beast. Feeling, they discovered, is a form of thinking. As you've seen, when business schools like Harvard's began teaching negotiation in the 1980s, the process was presented

• 1:16:18Jocko Willink?

  as a straightforward economic analysis. It was a period when the world's top academic economists declared that we were all rational actors. That means on both sides. That means considering that both people on both sides are rational. And so it went in negotiation classes, assuming the other side was acting rationally and selfishly, trying to maximize their position. The goal is to figure out how to respond in various scenarios to maximize one's own value. This mentality baffled Kahneman, who for years, from years in psychology, knew that, in his words, quote, "It is self-evident that people are neither fully rational nor completely selfish, and that their tastes are anything but stable," end quote.

• 1:17:00Jocko Willink?

  So there were these two schools going on with negotiation and one of them took this kind of logical approach and the other one realized that you had to deal with these emotional, the emotions was a way of thinking, you're gonna have something you're gonna have to deal with. And you must have realized that on the suicide hotlines as well.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and I didn't really understand why. All I knew is that taking that approach accelerated things. Just complete acceleration in situations that I thought would have taken hours. And so I just saw, and again, Kahneman doesn't win the Nobel Prize like 2002-ish. So just saw that it worked, didn't understand why, didn't really care. My first issue has always been what works. Now, understanding a mechanism is important sometimes to, people need to understand a mechanism. Some people need to understand a mechanism. I care about

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  number one, what works. Number two, secondarily, is it moral? You know, missionaries and mercenaries. Mercenaries, if it works. Missionaries, if it follows your basic moral code. If it qualifies on both of those, then I'm good.

• 1:18:15Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Now, you go into the book a little bit about how the FBI sort of started to adopt this. You know, the FBI, they were deep into that book at one point, getting to yes, that was what they were using. A lot of guys were using that. But then, you know, you get Ruby Ridge up in Idaho, you get the Waco, Texas, right? These things are kind of disaster. These things are actually, they're very disastrous. And you throw this in the book, I'm gonna go to the book here. I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he's the Messiah?

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  It was becoming alarmingly obvious that getting to yes didn't work with kidnappers. No matter how many agents read the book with highlighters in hands, it failed to improve how we as hostage negotiators approached deal making. There was clearly a breakdown between the book's brilliant theory and everyday law enforcement experience. Why was it that everyone had read this bestselling business book and endorsed it as one of the greatest negotiating texts ever written, and yet so few could follow it successfully? Were we morons?

• 1:19:28Jocko Willink?

  In 1994, then fast forward a little bit from the book, and again, I'm reading excerpts for the book. The book is awesome. I mean, we're hitting some wave tops. So just order the book right now. So you can get all these details. In 1994, FBI Director Louis Free. Louis Free. Louis Free. Announced the form, the, the formation of the Critical Incident Response Group, a blended division that would combine crisis negotiation, crisis management, behavioral sciences, and hostage rescue teams, and reinvent crisis negotiation. The only issue was, what techniques were we going to use? And you go on to say, what were needed were simply, were simple psychological tactics and strategies that worked in the field to calm people down, establish

• 1:20:11Jocko Willink?

  rapport, gain trust, elicit verbalization of needs, and persuade the other guy of our, of our empathy. We needed something that was easy to teach, easy to learn, and easy to execute. In the early years, the FBI experimented with both new and old therapeutic techniques developed in, by the counseling profession. These counseling skills were aimed at developing positive relationships with people by demonstrating an understanding of what they're going through and how they feel about it. It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. And by the way, again, I talked about like leadership. This is exactly what I talk about from a leadership perspective. I mean, if you don't know me at all, I'm absolutely trying to get you to trust me. How do I get

• 1:20:56Jocko Willink?

  you to trust me? I put some trust in you. I listen to what you have to say. You're going to listen to me. Same exact thing here. Back to the book. Listening is the cheapest yet most effective concession we can make to get there. By listening intensely, a negotiator demonstrates empathy and shows a sincere desire to better understand what the other side is experiencing. Exactly why you listen to your subordinates. Exactly why you listen to your peers. Exactly why you listen to your boss. What are you, what are you trying to tell me, boss? Let me listen. Whenever I get asked the question, you know, my, my team's not listening to me. What should I do? Yell louder.

• 1:21:32Jocko Willink?

  It's like, no, you want your team to listen to you, listen to them. Be quiet, listen to them, hear what they have to say. Uh, you go on to say psychotherapy research shows that when individuals feel listened to, they tend to listen to themselves more carefully and openly evaluate and clarify their own thoughts and feelings. In addition, they tend to become less defensive and oppositional and more willing to listen to other points of view, which gets them to calm, to the calm and logical place where they can be good getting to yes, problem solvers. So again, this is one of the things that I am talking about all the time with people.

• 1:22:12Jocko Willink?

  I always say, you know, if I'm, if I want you to see something, if I want to, if I know the truth about something, if I've got some great plan and I want you on board with my plan, the best thing I can do is not tell you what the plan is, is let you come up with a plan, let you, let the truth be revealed to you by you, not, not by me.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:32Jocko Willink?

  That's my goal.

• 1:22:34Jocko Willink?

  And, and you go on to say, this whole concept, which you'll learn as the centerpiece of this book is called tactical empathy. This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and assertive skills of influence to gain access to the mind of the other person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do. Once we started developing our new techniques, the negotiating world split into two concurrents, two currents. Negotiation as learned at the country's top school continued down the established road of rational problem solving, while ironically, we meet heads at the FBI began to train our

• 1:23:15Jocko Willink?

  agents in an unproven system based on psychology, counseling and crisis intervention. While the Ivy League taught math and economics, we became experts in empathy and our way worked.

• 1:23:31Jocko Willink?

  So that's how the, that's how the shift, the shift took place.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  That's good stuff in that book. What, what book you reading from?

• 1:23:38Jocko Willink?

  Good stuff.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  I'm impressed.

• 1:23:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Who the hell wrote that?

• 1:23:42Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's great. And I'm telling you, I mean, I just, I was really, uh, really stoked to read it and, and got so much out of it, just seeing, you know, that whole section right there. I mean, this is what I, I'm talking to people all the time about from a leadership perspective. You know, the, the, the big difference, the big difference between what, when I talk about leadership and if you and I are negotiating, the big difference is as a leader, I don't really care at the end of the day, what plan we use. I just want the best plan. So I, I, you know, if we're going to attack a target, at the end of the day, I don't care if we attack it from the north or from the south. I just want which one is best. So I don't really have, I'm not trying to make you think something.

• 1:24:27Jocko Willink?

  I actually just want to find the best solution. Now there's a chance that my solution is the best. There's a chance that your solution is the best. If I go and try and ram my solution down your throat, what are you going to do? You're going to get defensive. We might not get to the best solution.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:40Jocko Willink?

  If I hang on to my idea too tightly, we're not going to get the best solution. So the main thing that I can do to help us get to the best solution, not to my solution, not to your solution, but just to the best solution.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:24:53Jocko Willink?

  The best thing for me to do is listen to what you have to say. Cause I, I can't make you listen to me. I can't. But I can listen to you. That's going to open up your mind. It's going to move us in the right direction. So that's, that's probably the, the, the big difference between the two is that when you're negotiating, you have a goal that you're trying to get to.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  Well, and here's what I'd add to that, because that description is really, the way we negotiate is we're just looking for the best deal. Like you said, you're looking for the best plan.

• 1:25:21Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Like the, the, the real hard part in negotiating is your goal, you need to see it merely as a suggestion.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  If you get too goal oriented, you get tunnel vision and you miss better answers. Never be so sure of what you want that you wouldn't take something better.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  And by definition, you're never gonna know the best possible outcome. It's not possible because the other side's holding stuff back. You're holding stuff back. Getting people to accept that intellectually is often really difficult with really experienced business people.

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  And I'll say, when are you not holding something back? Budgetary problems, pressures to make the deal, pressure to not make the deal. Internal politics, personal pressures. Is there ever a time you're not holding something back? And no one ever said, I negotiate and I'm completely honest all the time. Nobody ever says that. People are always holding stuff back. So if you are, they are too.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  And you're both holding back information that would change the course of the deal if revealed. That's why you're holding it back. Now, so now what happens if you exponentialize this, so to speak? There's an overlap of the unknowns. So it's impossible to know the best deal going in. It's not possible. But very few business people will accept that. It is what it is. I know what it is. I'm experienced. I know what the outcome's gonna be. I know what they're being driven by. You know, you are stroking your own ego when you say stuff like that.

• 1:27:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, that that means this stuff is even more in line with what I talk about all the time.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  It's completely in line.

• 1:27:10Jocko Willink?

  The other thing that's interesting is, you know, and I forget if we'll cover this today, but I talk to business people and occasionally, and it's usually, it's very rare that, you know, you and I are working at a company and and we can't come to a conclusion. We can't come to an agreement. You want to do it this way. I want to do it that way. And when that happens, and the reason it happens so rarely in business is if you and I work for the same company, well, we both want to make money. We both want to take care of our client. We both want to take care of the team, right? Like, we're ultimately aligned. And so we're trying to do something that's gonna make us money and take care of the client and take care of our team. We're gonna figure out a solution.

• 1:27:54Jocko Willink?

  That's 99% of the time. 1% of the time. You don't wanna, you either, you either don't wanna help the client, you, there's someone on the team you don't wanna take care of. There's some, something going on where we're truly not aligned. Maybe you wanna break off and start your own company, so you want us to fail. And if it comes to a point where I'm saying, Chris, hold on a second. This is gonna make us money, it's gonna take care of our team, it's gonna take care of the client, and, and we can't come to an agreement. That means we're not aligned. And you know, you talk about that, there are some deals where, you know, you wanna sell the car and I wanna buy the car. But we just can't, there's no, there's no possible way that we're gonna do it, cuz you want, you know, thirty thousand dollars for the car. And I literally can only pay twenty thousand dollars, it's not gonna happen.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:38Jocko Willink?

  We're not aligned. So that does occasionally happen.

• 1:28:42Jocko Willink?

  But yeah, it's, it's, it's very interesting that the meatheads at the FBI were the ones that started trying to

• 1:28:52Jocko Willink?

  listen and empathize and see the other people's perspective.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:28:57Jocko Willink?

  Let's get, let's get into the book, and I'll tell you what, when I was reading the book, one thing that was a little bit tricky for me, is as I was reading the book, I'm like, I wanna read a bunch, you got, you, it's kinda written, you know, I've written a couple of books too. And in my books, I tell the story, the combat story, the business story, and then give the principle. And that's what your book is too, there's a lot of that, hey, here's a combat story, an FBI story, or a business story. And here's the negotiating principle that comes out of it. And I kinda was going back and forth, you know, do I read a bunch of the stories, cuz the stories are great. But I figured since you're here, it'd be great, you know, I'm sure you'll tell some of those stories, but just to get into

• 1:29:41Jocko Willink?

  the techniques, the techniques, the negotiation techniques that you outline in the book. And that's kinda what I decided to do. May or may not have been the right decision, we're not sure yet. Maybe you'll have to come back just for pure story time. But I wanted to get into the tactics that you talk about, because again, I think they're so prevalent. And at, you know, in, in your intro to the book, you talk about negotiating being, negotiation is life, you're negotiating all the time.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:09Jocko Willink?

  So these are things that you, that everybody can use all the time. And, and the other thing is kinda like leadership, people think leadership, you either have it or you don't. But really, leadership is a bunch of skills that you can learn. Right. And negotiation, you know, how often you hear, oh, that guy's a great negotiator. You can, you hear that a lot, or that guy's not a good negotiator, negotiator, but you, what you don't realize is negotiation, just like basketball, or just like playing guitar, there's a bunch of skills that you can learn. There's a bunch of moves that you can make, and once you know those skills, once you know those moves, you can utilize them. And so this book, awesome book for pointing out some of these tactics, techniques, and procedures. So, let's get into a little bit.

• 1:30:52Jocko Willink?

  The first technique that you talk about, or the first one that I'm gonna highlight is called mirroring. Yeah. And you say mirroring, also called isopraxism, is that right? I had a lot of syllables in that word, huh? There you go. Luckily, you've only got in here once. I don't have to say it again. Is essentially imitation. It's another neurobehavior that humans and other animals display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, tone of voice. It generally, it's generally an unconscious behavior. We're rarely aware of when it's happening, but it's a sign that people are bonding in sync and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust.

• 1:31:36Jocko Willink?

  It's a phenomenon, and now a technique that follows a very basic but profound biological principle. We fear what's different and are drawn to what's similar. As the saying goes, birds of a feather flock together. Mirroring, then, when practiced consciously, is the art of insinuating similarity. Trust me, a mirror signals to another unconscious, you and I, we're alike. Once you're attuned to the dynamic, you'll see it everywhere. Couples walking on the street with their steps in perfect synchronicity. Friends in conversation at a park, both nodding their head and crossing legs at about the same time. These people, in a word, are connected. While mirroring is most often associated with forms of nonverbal communication, especially body language,

• 1:32:19Jocko Willink?

  as negotiators, a mirror focuses on the words and nothing else. Not the body language, not the accent, not the tone of delivery, just the words. It's almost laughably simple. For the FBI, a mirror is when you repeat the last three words or the critical one to three words of what someone just said. Of the entirety of the FBI's hostage negotiation skillset, mirroring is the closest one gets to a Jedi mind trick. Simple, yet uncannily effective. By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct, and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting. Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was more effective,

• 1:33:05Jocko Willink?

  what the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers, mirroring or positive reinforcement. One group of waiters using positive reinforcement, lavish praise and encouragement on patrons using the words such as "great," "no problem," and "sure" in response to each order. The other group of waiters mirrored their customers simply by repeating their orders back to them. The results were stunning. The average tip of the waiters who mirrored was 70% more than those who used positive reinforcement. So, that's pretty amazing.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  It's nuts, isn't it?

• 1:33:38Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. You point out later in the book that it can feel weird to mirror when you first start doing it.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels weird to everybody, pretty much. Yeah, it feels weird to everybody. You know, and I don't know why that is. Maybe because it seems so obvious to the user.

• 1:33:54Jocko Willink?

  It seems obvious.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I feel like saying some more based on you doing it. I don't know what it is.

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just, uh... And that's one of the ones... Again, I was talking about Huberman before. Like, if I could get him to do a ton of experiments, like, "try this, try this, try this, I gotta find out this." And that'd be one of them as to what makes a mirror work so effectively with so many people. And, and it does. And then who's attracted to it? I find interesting who's attracted to it. And then I also find it's different circuits in the brain. Like, the majority of the people on my team, we get really good at labeling. And I find as a performance skill, then in myself and others, we not might not mirror enough.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  And then those that are really attracted to mirroring and will use it almost exclusively. Like, what isn't that makes you tick, that makes you like that mirroring so much? And I think it's they're attracted to the simplicity of it and then they're not offended by simple concepts, which actually in many cases takes a more sophisticated approach to really like simple stuff. And I'm seeing regularly people that really, mirroring is a sophisticated skill. And if somebody rejects it off, off the, off the top of their head, I think you're worried about appearing stupid.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  And if you're so confident in your intelligence that you got no problem looking stupid, then you're happy to mirror.

• 1:35:39Jocko Willink?

  Got it. Uh, one piece of advice that I give to people is when Chris rolls into my office and you're pissed about something, I gotta talk to you right now. One thing I tell people is like, cool, I get out my notebook, get out my pen. And like, well, what's going on, Chris? Talk to me. And to me, that's showing you that I'm listening to what you have to say and I'm taking it seriously. And it seems like mirroring is a, is another way of doing it. If you're repeating what I'm saying, then I'm like, oh, he's paying attention to me. He's listening to me. You're proving that you're listening to the person, which also is a really positive thing. Never mind the whole psychological connection that we're making.

• 1:36:22Jocko Willink?

  Just the fact that when I'm repeating what you're saying back to you, it shows you I'm listening to what you're saying.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:36:29Jocko Willink?

  I often, when I talk about listening and how important it is.

• 1:36:35Jocko Willink?

  People don't realize how important it is, and I think one of the ways that I use to explain how important it is, is I use the opposite, which is if you're talking and I cut you off, everyone knows that's disrespectful. Everybody knows it. It's like a sign of disrespect. If someone's talking, I jump in there and cut them off. Oh, you're not listening to me. That's being disrespectful. The opposite of that is when I actually listen to what you have to say, and now we've got a little technique to prove to you that I'm listening to what you say. I'm gonna mirror those last couple words back to you.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  So there's no doubt that you got the words if you repeat them back.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Nice little technique.

• 1:37:17Jocko Willink?

  Moving on a little bit.

• 1:37:20Jocko Willink?

  Again, we're hitting the highlights of this book. You got, you gotta get the book. The book is definitely going to, is definitely going to leave a mark on your brain. So get the book.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  In a good way.

• 1:37:31Jocko Willink?

  Yes, in a good way. Yeah, not psychological damage, but in a positive way. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit here. The language of negotiation is primarily a language of conversation and rapport, a way of quickly establishing relationships and getting people to talk and think together. Here are some key lessons from this chapter. Remember, a good negotiator prepares going in to be ready for possible surprises. A great negotiator aims to use her skills to reveal the surprises she is certain to find.

• 1:38:06Jocko Willink?

  My note next to that was role play. How often are we role playing if we're negotiating?

• 1:38:16Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 1:38:17Jocko Willink?

  So, let's say from a leadership perspective, you know, it's you and me, we're peers and I go, hey, Chris, I gotta, I gotta go meet with Echo. You know how he's all mad about, you know, us cutting his hours? I'm gonna gotta go talk to him right now. I know he's pissed. Can we run through this a couple of times? So I'm just gonna role play. So that way I think about what could Echo possibly say? You know, he might, he might get mad about this. He might talk about his family. He might talk about how long he's been here. And I wanna kinda have some contingency plans here, right? To do what you said. Prepare, be ready for possible surprises and actually be ready to take those surprises. And when he says, you know, what about my family? And I say, well, the important thing is Echo, I know we gotta give you some less hours right now,

• 1:39:00Jocko Willink?

  but the main thing I wanna do is keep you here. The only way you can do that is if Cut back your hours a little bit. It's hopefully going to be temporary. It should be when the market picks back up.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Are we in an actual negotiation?

• 1:39:12Jocko Willink?

  See where I'm going here? Echo's nodding his head. He's kind of on board. Let's take care of the family.

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  He's thinking, I get more free time.

• 1:39:20Jocko Willink?

  So there you go, you know, there's another point. Hey, now's a little time to make all those baseball games you gotta make. So that's a point that you made role play something that we did, that we do with our clients all the time.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  If you're with a good role player.

• 1:39:37Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  Great tool.

• 1:39:38Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:39:38Speaker 01

  Like if you get somebody who has who's dialed in enough emotional, enough emotional intelligence to make some good predictions for you. It's probably not bad, even if they're not good at it.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  You just gotta make sure that that's not exactly the way you expect it to go down.

• 1:39:53Jocko Willink?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  Like, all right, so this is a possibility, not this is how it's gonna happen.

• 1:39:58Jocko Willink?

  Definitely.

• 1:40:01Jocko Willink?

  You say, don't commit to assumptions. Instead, view them as a hypothesis and use the negotiation to test them rigorously. To me, my note I wrote down on this one was

• 1:40:14Jocko Willink?

  the most important characteristic for a leader to me is to be humble. And if you're not humble, you know, I go and think, and I'm right, you're wrong, or I'm just right. It doesn't even matter what you are, because I know I'm right. This, this word of, or the way you put it, viewing your ideas as a hypothesis. Have you my plan as a, it's beautiful.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that one, that a thousand percent I'll attribute to my son, Brandon. Cause he, we'd be talking about this, developing it after I left the FBI and kicking the ideas around. And he'd have an insider, he'd say something. And I know that use the word hypothesis in our vernacular came from him.

• 1:40:53Jocko Willink?

  And it's a good word when you're going into a discussion with somebody. Don't say, this is my idea. Say, this is just a hypothesis. It's one I came up with. Could be right, could be wrong. Let's see where it's at. Uh, you say, people who view negotiation as a battle of arguments become overwhelmed by the voices in their head. Negotiation is not an act of battle. It's a process of discovery.

• 1:41:19Jocko Willink?

  The goal is to uncover as much information as possible. And it goes back to what we already talked about. I'm looking for the best way of doing it. You're looking for a deal that works.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Best deal, best plan. What's the difference, right?

• 1:41:31Jocko Willink?

  Uh, to quiet the voices in your head. Make your soul and all encompassing focus. The other person and what they have to say. Which means we're listening.

• 1:41:44Jocko Willink?

  The most underrated tool of leadership.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Jocko Willink?

  Is listening. Uh, slow it down. Going too fast is one of the mistakes. All negotiators are prone to making. If we're in too much of a hurry, people can feel as if they're not being heard. You risk undermining the rapport and trust you've built. Got to get used to that silence.

• 1:42:15Jocko Willink?

  And you talk about it in here.

• 1:42:18Jocko Willink?

  Many, many people are uncomfortable with silence.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, for a variety of reasons.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  It's just happened in the last seventy two hours, last few days.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  What I love about what I do for a living now is I get in interesting conversations with people. With fascinating people that I just like aspire to be in the same room with. So Ari Emanuel. You know, the, the art, that, that Ari from Hollywood, the guy that, you know, uh, the character on, um, Entourage is based around.

• 1:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 1:42:57Speaker 01

  So he gives me a call. He wants to talk about something and he says, you know, Speaker's Bureau, Don Walker runs it. We'll get on the phone with him. Cool. So I get on the phone with, with Don and Ari at the same time. And Don has done his homework. But he's one of those guys that's not comfortable with silence.

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  So fortunately, he's so smart about what he's doing and he's done it for so long that everything that's coming out of his mouth is exactly what I'm thinking. However, I've done a talk a couple of times that you get seven to 10 seconds to get somebody's attention, or you'll lose it. And so he starts out by saying, I know I got seven to 10 seconds to get your attention. And he must have talked for about three minutes and finally Ari goes, that's the longest seven seconds I ever heard in my life. Cause I just couldn't stop talking.

• 1:43:48Jocko Willink?

  Next one, put a smile on your face. When people are in a positive frame of mind, they think more quickly and are more likely to collaborate and problem solve instead of fight and resist. Positivity creates mental agility in both you and your counterpart. All good stuff. Now you got, you go into this section here and you talk about it in the book already. You tell, and again, I'm skipping the stories that you wrap around these where people can get the examples of what you did and where you use these. So get the book so you can get some of those examples. Three voice tones available to negotiators. Number one, the late night FM DJ voice.

• 1:44:33Jocko Willink?

  Use selectively to make a point. Inflect your voice downward, keeping it calm and slow. When done properly, you create an aura of authority and trustworthiness without triggering defensiveness. Number two, the positive playful voice. This should be your default voice. It's a voice of an easygoing, good natured person. Your attitude is light and encouraging. The key here is to relax and smile while you're talking. Number three, the direct or assertive voice. Use rarely will cause problems and create pushback.

• 1:45:11Jocko Willink?

  We did a podcast a while ago on something called psychological reactance. And what this is, is the instinct that everyone has that when I tell you to do something, you don't want to do it.

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:22Jocko Willink?

  It's just a natural reaction that everybody has and it causes, that's what allows reverse psychology to work. Cause when I say, "Oh, Chris, you can't do this," you go, "Yes, I can," right? When I say, "You couldn't paint that fence all by yourself," you go, "Yes, I could," and you go do it.

• 1:45:41Jocko Willink?

  So that direct voice is something to watch out for.

• 1:45:49Jocko Willink?

  Moving on to this next section. And you already mentioned this, the, the idea of labeling.

• 1:45:59Jocko Willink?

  You say, "Don't, don't feel their pain, label it." Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out the window. That's why instead of denying or ignoring emotions, good negotiators identify and influence them. They are able to precisely label emotions, those of others and especially their own. And once they label the emotions, they talk about them without getting wound up. For them, emotion is a tool. Emotions aren't obstacles, they are a means. The relationship between an emotionally intelligent negotiator and their counterpart is essentially therapeutic. It duplicates that of a psychotherapist with a patient.

• 1:46:41Jocko Willink?

  The psychotherapist pokes and prods to understand his patient's problems and then turns the responses back onto the patient to get him to go deeper and change his behavior. That's exactly what good negotiators do. Getting to this level of emotional intelligence demands opening up your senses, talking less and listening more. Can learn almost everything you need and a lot more than other people would like you to know simply by watching and listening, keeping your eyes peeled, your ears open and your mouth shut.

• 1:47:14Jocko Willink?

  Talk to me about labeling a little bit. How are we using it? What does it look like?

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Um, simple again. It seems like, it sounds like, it looks like. Seems like something's bothering you. Seems like you don't know when you're gonna need me. Seems like you've given this a lot of thought. Just hanging a label on something. It hits the brain in a different way than anything else does.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  And even questions, like, me and another guy, Steve Shaw, we're doing a lot of stuff with the real estate agents these days. Got a book coming out, Four Residential Real Estate Agents, in about two months.

• 1:47:52Jocko Willink?

  What is the name of the book, so everyone can preorder it?

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  The Full Fee Agent.

• 1:47:56Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  And the agents we've coached, for example, you go through an open house. You walk around, you look around, and the agent says to you on the way out the door, "What'd you see that you liked?" Basically, pretty good question, as questions go. Starts with the word "what," not a great way, good word to start a question with, calibrated question, if you will. And people stop and think, and they go like, "Ah, well, you know, we kinda like the kitchen..." They'll give you a thoughtful answer. Same scenario, somebody's walking out the door, the agent says, "Seems like you saw some stuff you liked." "Oh yeah, look, I gotta tell you something. We were looking at the bedroom, and we could see our daughter in there,

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  and, you know, the backyard is perfect for the way our kids are..." And like, a complete download of what's going through somebody's brain. Like, just straight, like, from layman's perspective, bypassing the prefrontal cortex, entirely shoving a, uh, listening device in the side of your head and hearing what's going on in your head. Another example, in the labels, when you're exhausted, when you're tired, it's hard to give a good answer. So, I'm on my way back from a trip to the UAE a couple of months ago, and I'm in Seattle waiting to get on a plane, and I'm exhausted. Shoot a text to a buddy.

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  "Take care of this." Now, he could've come back at me with a good question, "What makes you ask?", to make sure that we're aligned, but instead, he texts me back, "Seems like you have a reason for asking."

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Now, I was so tired at that point in time that I saw the difference. Seems like you have a reason for asking. I must have thrown back at him a 10-line text. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then afterwards, I thought, if he'd have said, "What makes you ask?" I was tired enough that I'd have thought, you know, just, I'd have texted him back, "Just do it. Stop bothering me." There's something about the way the label hits the brain, that there's a complete mental change in the response and the amount of information you get out of somebody.

• 1:50:15Jocko Willink?

  It seems like we're danger close on this one to the borderline catastrophic mistake that we can make, which is, you come into my office, you're all mad, and I look at you and say, "Calm down. You're mad."

• 1:50:34Jocko Willink?

  So, the difference here is, it seems like you're really mad about this.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it seems like, seems like this is important. Because the great skill works with your boss also. There's one of the students in my class at Georgetown. Boss comes by, "Come on, we gotta go right now. We got, we got something we gotta take care of right now." He called it the boss drive-by. Now, "we" is "you." "We got something we gotta do right now." That means, "I got something for you to do right now." And he's in a really, he's loud about it, you know? So, this guy gets drug into his boss's office, and immediately says, "Sounds like this is important."

• 1:51:21Speaker 01

  Well, the boss is coming at you like that because it is important, which is the first thing he wants, or she wants you to understand. So, if you demonstrate, "Sounds like this is important," right away... Boss immediately comes down three notches, starts thinking things through. If somebody's angry, you know, sounds like this has made you angry, sounds like this is important, sounds like this is upsetting. You want them, you want them to come down several notches. See, the lizard brain is out of the driver's seat and the human brain is back in, right?

• 1:51:55Jocko Willink?

  I got a, this book here, Leadership Strategy and Tactics, I talk about, one of the tactics I talk about, I call it reflect and diminish, which means when Chris comes into my office and he goes, "I can't believe the supply department didn't get this stuff here on time." What I do is reflect some of that anger, but I diminish it. So I say, "Oh, are you serious? It didn't show up yet? What, how much gear is it that you're missing?" So immediately, I show you that I'm on your side, I show you that I'm also mad about it, but we start moving towards a solution. As opposed to like, "Well, you need to calm down before you come in here," or, "Hey, you need to take ownership of this." Like, cool, we can get there, but little, this is like a very similar idea to reflect and diminish.

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and I love that question, how much gear is mission, missing? Because like, on our list of calibrated questions, we hold people almost exclusively to what and how.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  And so how feels good to the other side. And to touch on what Kahneman would talk about, it triggers in-depth thinking. So the how question, to immediately even think about the answer, let alone answer it, you put them in a completely different frame of mind, which takes all, you know, all the steam out, takes all the gas out of the tank, takes all the wind out of the sails, whatever you want of their reptilian brain, and you've now got them in a deep thinking mode. How's a great question, how is a great question.

• 1:53:28Jocko Willink?

  Talk me through the next sexual here, tactical empathy. What's, how do you, how do you, how do you use that? What does it mean?

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Um, first of all, it was, we put the word tactical in front of it to de-stigmatize the word. Because in common usage, the word is thought of as sympathy or compassion. And it's not. In, in usage, it's been convoluted and distorted. Ah, I can empathize. You know, I've been there. I feel that way. I agree. That was, that was not the original origin of the word or how it was meant to be applied. That was why I started collaborating with Harvard in the first place. Cause Bob Manoukun wrote in his book, empathy's not even liking the other side. It's not agreement. It's not liking. It's demonstrating that you understand.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  Now, and people equate understanding to agreement. In my terrorism days in New York, we're trying to get Muslims to testify against other Muslims in open court. And they were shocked by that, by a whole bunch of reasons. One of, you know, if you want to be proud to be an American, you know, have, have a, an Arab Muslim who's in this country, just trying to work really hard. They said to us after the trial, you know, when you told us ahead of time, this was about the truth, we thought you were kidding.

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  And having gone through the process, we realized that your system is about the truth. And so how do we get, how do we get those Muslims to come in and testify honestly? I would sit down with them and I'd say, right off the bat, you think for the last 200 years, there's been a succession of American governments that have all been anti-Islamic? And they would go.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Now, that's empathy. I never said it was true. I didn't say I agreed. I didn't say I disagree. I took no position whatsoever on that statement. I'd say, "You think this." And I'd nail it on the head. And none of it is that hard when you really realize, you know where the other side's coming from? You're just scared to say it. Like, I'd say it to these guys and you'd just watch them be shocked. And then dial in with me. Having said what was in the back of their mind. That's all it is.

• 1:56:03Jocko Willink?

  And that's, and that is a similar thing to labeling.

• 1:56:09Jocko Willink?

  You say here, "Labeling is a way of validating someone's emotion by acknowledging it." Give someone's emotion a name and you show that you identify with how that person feels. It gets you close to someone without asking about external factors you know nothing about. Think of labeling as a shortcut to intimacy, a time-saving emotional hack. So this is similar to, "Oh, this is what you think about a certain subject." Which now I'm reading back to you, "Hey, you think that the past 200 years has been anti-Islamic governments." This would be, "It seems like you're angry about the way the Islamic world's been treated."

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'd be, that'd be a great start.

• 1:56:49Jocko Willink?

  A good start.

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  Like, some of this stuff is ridiculous, too, and especially talking about politicians. Like, I'm surprised more politicians don't, don't get this. Mario Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo's father, Chris Cuomo's father, governor of New York. I saw him address a hostile crowd of African-Americans that were waiting for Winnie Mandela. This is just before Nelson Mandela gets out. Winnie Mandela's doing a world tour, they're keeping the pressure on the South African government, make sure they let him go. She's in New York. Heavy-duty African-American crowd, almost all African-American. Mario Cuomo isn't just not African-American, he's Italian, which in New York is a much different dynamic.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  At the time, a couple of black guys had been chased out of an Italian neighborhood into traffic and had gotten killed by getting hit by cars. Tensions with the Italians are very high. Cuomo steps up into a crowd that is just short of throwing rocks at him before he said a word. He starts out and he starts going, "You see a world that doesn't take your skin color into account. You see a world that doesn't give you a chance because of where you came from and how they perceive you." And he just started laying out thing after thing after thing after thing, that they were in fact feeling and thinking, not agreeing with any of it. I guarantee you, before he stepped out on the stage, he probably said to one of his aides, said, "Watch me turn this crowd around."

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  They start cheering him inside of about five minutes. Before he's finished with them, they loved him, like they were so in favor because he dialed into them and what they were thinking and feeling, and he wasn't afraid to say it. And to this day, I'm shocked that more politicians don't do that. Because it's not agreement. He takes no position on it whatsoever. This is what you see.

• 1:58:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah, it lets that person understand that you understand at a minimum. That's what we're looking for. You say here, "As you try and insert tools of tactical empathy into your daily life, I encourage you to think of them as extensions of natural human interactions and not artificial conversational tics. In any interaction, it pleases us to feel that the other side is listening and acknowledging our situation. Whether you are negotiating a business deal or simply chatting to a person at the supermarket butcher counter, creating empathetic relationship and encouraging your counterpart to expand on their situation is a basis of healthy interaction." Now, this is something I say to people a lot.

• 1:59:28Jocko Willink?

  I say, "Hey, listen, you can't pretend to do this stuff. You're not Robert De Niro and you're not Meryl Streep." So don't pretend to be curious about them. Don't pretend, just really feel that way.

• 1:59:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Jocko Willink?

  You need to say, hey, I really want to learn what you know, I really want to understand what you're thinking here. Cause if you're trying to act, you're gonna fail. Most people are gonna fail when they're trying to act. And I always say intent has a smell. So if you come in there and you're just trying to butter me up with some little conversation, I'm gonna smell it. Most people are gonna smell that. I know when I, the reason I know that's because when I was a young SEAL, I was the youngest and most junior guy in my first two SEAL platoons. So when, you know, the boss would come in, we all, we, you know, whatever bullshit he was throwing, we'd see right through it. Like, okay, I see what's really going on here. Intent's gonna have a smell. So it should be earnest. All this stuff should be earnest.

• 2:00:27Jocko Willink?

  You go on to say some key points here. Imagine yourself in your counterpart's situation. The beauty of empathy is that it doesn't demand that you agree with the other person's ideas. You may well find them crazy, but by acknowledging the other person's situations, you immediately convey that you're listening. And once they know you are listening, they may tell you something you can use. So boom. The reasons why a counterpart will not make an agreement with you are often more powerful than why they will make a deal. So focus first on clearing the barriers to agreement. Denying barriers or negative influences gives them credence. Get them into the open. What do you mean by that?

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Which part?

• 2:01:12Jocko Willink?

  You and I are talking and what barriers are you looking at? What barriers? Sometimes you're saying barriers, the reason I'm not gonna agree to a deal isn't because I can't find common ground. It's just that there's these barriers that I have that are, that are worse.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. So first of all, uh, there's kind of three different things there and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to drive this state through the heart of common ground to start with. And this is my theory on common ground. First of all, the strongest common ground is usually ethnicity or geography, and geography is more powerful than ethnicity. Like, if you and I grew up in the same neighborhood, um, and I don't know what old combination of ethnic groups you are, cause like, if you were in New York, you'd be one of five, and I wouldn't know which one it is.

• 2:01:56Jocko Willink?

  He's talking Echo Charles right now, by the way.

• 2:01:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, but if we grew up in the same neighborhood, like, you and I'd resonate. Now, if you and I had the exact same ethnicity, and you grew up in New York City, and I grew up in Mississippi, we're gonna like, I don't know what this dude is talking about. There's gonna be some resonance, but geography is stronger. Now, then, common ground also. Why do I wanna have common ground with you? So you understand me. So we share core values. You understand where I'm coming from. If, so if I just demonstrate that I understand, I don't gotta be what, I don't gotta be from your neighborhood. You, because what common ground is, does this guy or gal understand me?

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  So that, just show somebody you understand, and common ground is unnecessary. Not a barriers. Example, one of my favorites, uh, Bob Iger's book, The Right of a Lifetime. He's sitting down to negotiate what ends up being the sale of Pixar to Disney. At the time, Jobs hates Disney. Sees with hatred for Disney. And when I went to school, everybody writes up that purchases, you know, it was obvious, it was a great move, it was great for both companies. Not how this thing goes down. Iger gets to put in charge of Disney, he reaches out to Jobs, cause he, he knows there's been bad blood.

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  Iger's been the number two guy at Disney for nine years. Reaches out to Jobs, and on some congratulatory thing, and Jobs immediately shoots back at him, "How long were you Michael's number two?" Cause he, he's blaming Mike Eisner. "How long were you the number two guy?" "Well, this was always going down." Not willing to accept any compliment. So Iger says, "Let's talk about this." Jobs says, "Come on down." "Yeah, you wanna talk to me? Come into my backyard. Go to the Apple campus. Think you're ready to set up." Jobs wants to work off a whiteboard. Pros and cons. Offers the pen to Iger. Says, "You go first." Now, Iger knows how much bad blood there is here.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  He is not anxious to say a word. And this is in his book. So he says, "No, Steve, go ahead." Steve gets up. Jobs starts writing all the reasons why not to do it. All the barriers. He effectively does this approach on himself. And writes some nasty stuff about Disney. Like just short of out and out profanity, insulting. "Your culture sucks. You guys suck. Everything about you is horrible. Your children, you know." I mean, he, everything. He's laying all this stuff out there. And he, and he kinda gets done. And he looks to, uh, hand the pen back to Iger, who's, who's not just crestfallen.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  Cause he just think, feels like he's gotten the stuffing kicked out of him. And he says, "Well, I guess there are a lot of negatives there." And Jobs looked back at him and says, "You know, sometimes the positive outweigh the negative." Because he deactivated all the barriers. They got all the barriers out. They got them out into the open air. They cleared their head by first discussing and just calling them out. Like Bob Iger does not offer a bit of explanation for any of this. No, Iger never says, "But that wasn't true." Or "But, oh yeah." You know, nothing. He doesn't say a word. He just lets all the negatives get out there.

• 2:05:38Speaker 01

  And when he, when he lets Jobs run the full course of the reasons for not doing it.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  Then jobs is left with the positives, which is in fact, the way humans make decisions. You will reconcile in your head, how do you live with the negatives, deal with them, deactivate them, before you decide to do something. If you can reconcile all those negatives, as soon as you do, your brain then goes to the positive. And then the positive picks up this tremendous amount of velocity, having been unshackled from the negatives. That's, it's, we do it all the time. We do it constantly.

• 2:06:22Jocko Willink?

  I've had this thought a couple of times already during this discussion. It's, and it just hit me again. The idea of talking about the negatives, you know, right now in the veteran community, there's a huge, you know, issue with PTSD and veteran suicide. And I've, I've talked about this before, when I've lost my friends in combat, every time I've been a guy that was like, okay, you're giving the eulogy, you're giving a memorial speech. So I had to go and sit down in the, in the pain and sorrow and write down what I'm gonna

• 2:07:05Jocko Willink?

  say to a crowd of people, you know, in a day or two days. And what you end up doing is you end up thinking through and putting on paper like, you know, this terrible situation. Um, and then, you know, coming out of the military, when I got out of the military, I was talking to people, telling the leadership lessons that I've learned, but in telling the leadership lessons that I've learned, you're also talking through some of the really bad things that happened. So as I hear you say that, look, you gotta get those negatives out there. I tell veterans that a lot, you know, get, it helps when you talk through these things. You know, they say that about World War II versus Vietnam. World War II, you got done with World War II, what did you do?

• 2:07:48Jocko Willink?

  You got on a ship with a bunch of other guys that just were in combat and you sailed back to America for six weeks and you sat below decks and told stories to each other about the friends that you lost and all the stuff that you've been through. Well, in Vietnam, what did you do? You got done with your tour, you got on a plane for 15 hours, and then you got dropped off in Main Street, America. You didn't get to process it, you didn't get to talk about any of this stuff. And you got yelled at. Yeah, and then you got yelled at. So, yeah, this idea of getting the negatives out there, even though it's uncomfortable, and it is uncomfortable, sucks. No one wants to do it. But if you do it, you start to deal with them. You start to contend with it. And I can tell you right now, the more you do it, the more you process it, and the better you're gonna feel.

• 2:08:33Jocko Willink?

  So, it's not even just a negotiation thing. This is like a life thing. Yeah.

• 2:08:43Jocko Willink?

  Another note, you make a pause. After you label a barrier or a mirror or mirror a statement, let it sink in. Don't worry, the other party will fill the silence. Getting used to that silence thing. Label your counterpart's fears to defuse the power. We all want to talk about happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart's amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust. Same idea, right? Yeah. If we talk about that thing that is pissing you off, or that thing that's scaring you, the minute you let it out of that cage, it like loses some of its power. Right. You know, when we work with explosive, we do something called tamping the explosives, which means you compress that, you hold that thing in, and it's gonna cause more damage.

• 2:09:29Jocko Willink?

  So, when you cover up an explosive, it creates a bigger explosion. That's why you see like a kid puts a firecracker in a microwave oven, and it causes some, because the microwave oven is shut, and there's massive overpressure, and it blows the door, you know, 150 yards. Because you compressed it. Well, it's the same thing with this fear that you're talking about. You let that thing out, let it breathe.

• 2:09:56Jocko Willink?

  It's gonna take the sting off of it. Uh, that's why, you know, you just talked about this with Steve Jobs. List the worst things that the other party could say about you, and say them before the other person can.

• 2:10:06Jocko Willink?

  This is counterintuitive, counterintuitive. What's counterintuitive about this is I think to myself, you know, if I actually tell Chris that it seems like I'm ripping him off, what if he doesn't think that he probably won't know and why should I admit to it? It's like, he knows, he knows, he's thinking that. You're thinking, if I'm thinking that, hey, this price is probably high, he's definitely thinking the price is high. Uh, remember you're dealing with a person who wants to be appreciated and understood. So use labels to reinforce and encourage positive perception dynamics. There you go. I mean, this is just some awesome techniques here. Uh, the opening to chapter four here is kind of a surprise. Beware of yes and master no.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:10:49Jocko Willink?

  At some point in their development, all negotiators have to come to grips with no. When you come to realize the real psychological dynamic behind it, you'll love the word. It's not just that you lose your fear of it, but that you can come to learn what it does for you and how you can build deals out of it. Yes, and maybe are often worthless, but no always alters the conversation. Talk us through that.

• 2:11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I think I first came across this idea. Jim Camp wrote a book in 2002 called, Start With No. And I remember seeing that on a bookshelf and like doing a double take on like, start with no. Well, I thought we were supposed to get the yes. Like, yes, it was a magic word. And he had discovered inadvertently that if you just tell people it was okay to say no, that they were more likely to agree. He's right up front. He called it the right to veto and he'd say, you know, I just want you to know before we get into this, you can say no at any time. Say no to me anytime and, and I'll go away. And he made more deals. So accidentally, one of my

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  hostage negotiators in Pittsburgh tells me, she says, you know, because I'm making everybody read this book. Did I do this? Now, she was going to be removed, removed from the negotiation team in Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, because her boss was jealous of how much the police department loved her.

• 2:12:15Speaker 01

  So she finds out she's gonna get removed, which is gonna hurt the office's relationship with the police department. But this guy doesn't care, cuz he's jealous. She sits down with him and she says, "Do you want the FBI to be embarrassed?" Now, I remember when she first told me that, I remember thinking through it at the moment, like, I would never have had the guts to say that. Like, that sounds so manipulative. I imagine this guy just bursting into flames on the spot. But instead, this guy relaxes, he leans back in his chair, you know, he steeples with his hands, like, that's what people do when they feel really good about themselves. And, uh, he goes, "No."

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  She says, "What do you want me to do?" And he says, "Well, you know, stop letting this stuff interfere with your investigations, now, go back to work." So, he calls her in to fire her from the team, she walks out, no problem. So I'm like, "There's something here." And then I start thinking about other conversations I've had. Lieutenant on a police department, that I thought got in this guy's way a lot, cuz he was, uh, over-managed him. I remember him saying to me once, "You know, a lieutenant's job is to say no." And I thought, "No, it's not. You know, lieutenant's a leader, a leader's job is to encourage people, not to say no."

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  So why is he saying this? It makes you feel good to say no, it makes him feel safe, it makes him feel protected. And we start experimenting with, instead of letting people say no, what happens if you actually get them to say no? Like, how does that change feelings, the way they react? And it, it makes such a massive difference, like, instantaneous, like, if it's important, I don't say, "Do you disagree?", I say, "Do you disagree?" I don't say, is this a good idea? Is this a ridiculous idea? I don't say, you know, what? I'm never going for yes, I'm always going for no. And, you know, if I can, because I know I'm all over the place here.

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  I'm on a plane from JFK to LA where it's a red eye. And a black businessman sitting next to me. He's kind of loud. He's got a, he's got a big colorful sweater on, but I just, you know, not, not, not crazy out there, but I just think, you know, interesting, interesting cat. Clearly a businessman. He's got people on his team because people that are sitting, you know, back in economy are walking by and, you know, hey, boss, how you doing? And finally, but I hear him on the phone and he's just trying to force people to say yes. And finally, I can't take it anymore in between calls.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  And I tap him on the shoulder and I said, look, get him to say no. Change your questions. You drive me crazy. I can't take it anymore. I can, I'm hearing you shove this down people's throats. Switch from yes to no. And I go and said, and again, instead of do you agree, do you disagree? Instead of would you do this? Are you against doing this? And I give him a quick rundown of how to make the switch and he's a smart dude, picks it right up really fast. So he gets back on the phone. And I also say, you know, the reason you should listen to me is because I wrote this book, Never Split the Difference. So just do it. Smart dude, learnable, coachable, does it, instantaneous. Looks back at me and says, thanks. He says, let me introduce myself. My name's Trevor. You may know me by my stage name Buster Rhymes.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  And I'm like, wow. Okay. You know, your hair's a little shorter right now. Didn't recognize you right off the bat, but I do recognize that name.

• 2:16:01Jocko Willink?

  You go on to say, no has a lot of skills. No allows real issues to be brought forth. No protects people from making and lets them correct ineffective decisions. No slows things down so people can freely embrace their decisions and their agreements they enter into. No helps people feel safe, secure, emotionally comfortable, and in control of all their decisions. No moves everyone, everyone's efforts forward.

• 2:16:33Jocko Willink?

  And there's a, there's a, a thing that you point out here, which is important. Cause you say, "Using this chapter's tools in daily life is difficult for many people because they go directly against one of society's biggest social dictums, that is, be nice." Right? Especially because in the book, you're like, "Hey, smile, be pleasant." And, and you know, getting people to say no is one of those things. You say, "We've instrumentalized niceness in a way, as a way of greasing the social wheels, yet it's often a ruse. We're polite and we don't disagree to get through daily existence with the least degree of friction. But by turning niceness into a lubricant, we've leached it of meaning.

• 2:17:16Jocko Willink?

  A smile and a nod might signify, 'Get me out of here,' as much as it means, 'Nice to meet you.'" That's death for a good negotiator, who gains their power by understanding their counterpart's situation and extracting information about their counterpart's desires and needs. Extracting that information means getting the other party to feel safe and in control. And while it may sound contradictory, the way to get there is by letting the other party, by getting the other party to disagree, to draw their own boundaries, to define their desires as a function of what they do not want. In other words, getting them to say no.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nuts. It's just, it's of the, of the, you know, the different skills are counterintuitive to the, to their own degree. Like, the extremely strong degree that getting somebody to say yes makes them uncomfortable, concerned, worried about what kind of traps they're walking into, where's the hook? What have I forgotten? Complete different 180-degree turn on getting them to say no. Like, the comfort level from saying no...

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  And then the ability to think things through immediately. Like if I were to say to you, disagree, do you disagree? You go, no, I don't disagree, but here are the following problems. And you'd lay them right out, one, two, three, four, five, right off the top of your head. Have no problem. If I'd have said, do you agree? And you'd want to say, yes, I agree, but here are the following problems. You won't do it the second way. Cause you would have felt that the mere utterance of the word yes hooked you. And so then, anything that you lay out after that feels like you're digging yourself in deeper. But having said no, you don't feel hooked.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  So now you're gonna lay out the next four or five things that you might need. Because you don't feel like you're digging yourself in deeper. And the next four or five things after the yes or no are what's critical. It's never, never right there. It's never at the point of decision. It's really, here are the problems, or here's what you gotta accomplish. And you gotta get past that. And you get past it freely when people say no. Because they feel safe and protected. They feel no sense of obligation. They don't feel like they're digging themselves in with each thing they say after that.

• 2:19:52Jocko Willink?

  I got the, that emotion from that. You, you got an example in the book, real common example. The two, the two examples you, is now a bad, is now a bad time to talk?

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:04Jocko Willink?

  Versus, do you have a few minutes to talk?

• 2:20:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:07Jocko Willink?

  Like when someone calls you up on the phone and says, hey, do you have a few minutes to talk right now? I, I wanna say no, but I also kinda feel like when I say yes, like what do we get? But when someone says, hey, is it a bad time to talk right now? I'm like, no, it's not a bad time. I'm like, okay with it. It's just one of those things. The other thing that you got in here that really aligns a lot with, with what I talk about a lot is, negotiate in their world. Persuasion is not about how bright or smooth you, or forceful you are. It's about the other party convincing themselves that the solution you want is their own idea. So don't beat them with logic or brute force. Ask them questions that open past your goals. It's not about you. I say all the time, written in these books, make it their idea. Right? How can I make this their idea? Yep.

• 2:20:52Jocko Willink?

  And the other thing I say a lot is the truth doesn't matter if I punch you in the face with it. Right? I mean, if I punch you in the face with the truth, you're not going to be open to it. You're going to be pissed and you're going to find a way to defend yourself. And you're probably going to stab me in the neck with your facts from your perspective. So. With a dull spoon, right? Stab you in the neck with a dull spoon. Yeah.

• 2:21:16Jocko Willink?

  Now we get into this section here. Trigger the two, the chapter five, trigger the two words that immediately transform any negotiation.

• 2:21:26Jocko Willink?

  You say, "The crisis negotiation unit, the FBI crisis negotiation, negotiation unit, developed what is a powerful staple in the high stakes world of crisis negotiation, the behavioral change stairway model, BCSM, behavioral change stairway model. The model proposes five stages, active listening, empathy, rapport, influence, and behavioral change that take any negotiator from listening to influencing behavior. The origins of this model can be traced back to the great American psychologist Carl Rogers, who proposed that real change can only come when a therapist accepts that the client, as he or she is, an approach known as unconditional positive regard.

• 2:22:09Jocko Willink?

  The vast majority of us, however, as Rogers explained, come to expect that love, praise, and approval are dependent on saying and doing things people consider correct. That is, because for most of us, positive regard, for the positive regard we experience is conditional. We develop a habit of hiding who we really are and what we really think, instead calibrating our words to gain approval, but disclosing little."

• 2:22:34Jocko Willink?

  So they come up with this thing, active listening, that's the first step. Empathy, alright, I kinda see where you're coming from. Rapport, now we're starting to understand each other. Influence, you're starting to listen to what I have to say. And then behavioral change, you're actually gonna do something different based on the influence here. Uh, if you successfully take someone up the behavioral change stairway, each stage attempting to engender more trust and more connection, there will be a breakthrough moment when unconditional positive regard is established and you can begin exerting influence. After years of refining the staircase and its tactics, I can teach anyone how to get to that moment. But as legions of B-school grads weaned on the most famous negotiating book in the world, Getting DS, have ultimately discovered,

• 2:23:18Jocko Willink?

  you more than likely think, more than likely haven't gotten there yet. If what you're hearing is the word "yes", you'll soon learn the sweetest two words in any negotiation are "actually", "that's right".

• 2:23:34Jocko Willink?

  That's what you're looking for. You're looking for the other person, the person that you're negotiating with, to say, "that's right". The "that's right" breakthrough usually doesn't come at the beginning of a negotiation. It's invisible to the counterpart when it occurs and they embrace what you've said. To them, it's a subtle epiphany.

• 2:23:54Jocko Willink?

  So, talk to us about "that's right".

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's what people say when they're completely all in on what was just said. Like, and if you look for it, you see it everywhere. And, and one of the great examples that I like to use is people that are devoted to Donald Trump. And my son pointed this out, I mean, if that isn't the proof of the "that's right" moment, somewhere in a speech or in the presidential debate, when he articulated something, when you bought in completely, you looked at the screen and you pointed at it and you said, "that's right". And it, it's not just Trump, it's any charismatic leader anywhere. When the charismatic leader has articulated something that you believe is totally true and it totally gets you,

• 2:24:43Speaker 01

  nobody ever says "you're right". They always say, "That's right." And that statement is when you were totally bought in on what was just said. And our co-author Tal was the one that pulled out the description of it being a subtle epiphany. Tal contributed brilliantly to the book. I mean, he brought a lot to the table besides just being a writer. And so then, as I was getting more into neuroscience, I look up neuroscience, the neuroscience of epiphany. What neurochemicals do you get hit with? You get hit with serotonin and oxytocin.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  And oxytocin is the bonding drug. So hence, people bonded to Donald Trump or any other leader. You're bonded to Obama. You're bonded to whoever has uttered the things that you believe to be completely true. There's this, it's a one-way bond and there's a feeling of a bond. And then, again, back to Huberman's podcast, you know, for me, just being bonded is enough. On another one of his podcasts, he points out oxytocin inclines people to tell the truth. So now, not only are you bonded to me, you're more likely to tell me the truth.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  And then he points out on yet another podcast, serotonin, the feeling of satisfaction, which means you're not as demanding. So if I can get a "that's right" out of you, you're gonna bond to me, you're gonna tell me the truth, and you're gonna make fewer demands. What else do I want?

• 2:26:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the example, and again, the details in the book are outstanding, but the example that you give goes back to the thing that I opened up with. You had Sabaya, this mastermind terrorist, and you were in negotiations with him, and you're actually working through a translator, and the translator was hard-ass, you know, pretty much, "We need to go at him" type of attitude, and you kind of convinced him over time to take a less, a more indirect approach. And eventually, the negotiator kind of read back, "Hey, look, you've been oppressed for this long. The Spanish came here, they converted your people against their will, and you've been suffering underneath this government."

• 2:27:08Jocko Willink?

  And Sabaya says, "That's right."

• 2:27:12Jocko Willink?

  And that's what changes it. That's what changes his attitude.

• 2:27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And if I can, a couple of tangents, because, you know, we, that was also when I was working with McCraven.

• 2:27:23Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 2:27:23Speaker 01

  Not Admiral, but Captain McCraven.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  And he was phenomenal. And he chaired, he created the hostage working group, the National Security Council. His leadership, you know, what a great guy to work with. I can remember in particular when we were working that case and the one that followed on. Like, there was some stuff that the US government was very nervous about. And you needed a guy who stood up properly for everybody and for the right thing, if you will. And I can remember being at one meeting in particular. Captain McCraven, McCraven, I don't mean to be disrespectful. I'm sure it sounds disrespectful. Just call him McCraven. But McCraven stands up and he says, you know what, I'm not going to stop talking about this till somebody tells me to sit down and shut up. And they're gonna have to tell me twice.

• 2:28:12Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking, that's the guy I want talking to the White House. That's the guy that I want talking to the Department of State. And we're in the midst of that Schilling case, and the last thing that we need when we're in a forward operating base is any sort of insecurity, indecision from Washington DC. And when you're out there on the front lines, having a guy like Captain Bill McCraven, Admiral Bill McCraven, holding things together back in Washington DC, it's just a ridiculously reassuring feeling to have. He was a great guy.

• 2:28:52Jocko Willink?

  No doubt about it. That's, that's awesome.

• 2:28:57Jocko Willink?

  There's a big difference, and you pointed out in the book. There's a huge difference, and you mentioned it, but I just want to cover it again, just to make sure people catch this. There's a huge difference between that's right and you're right.

• 2:29:11Jocko Willink?

  Cause you're right. And here's a good way to, here's a good way to translate this, you know, you're talking to your wife and you know, you say something, she goes, oh, you're right. That is not what we're looking for. That means she wants you to shut up and she's going to carry on and you haven't come to any kind of conclusion.

• 2:29:29Jocko Willink?

  So there's a big difference. Getting someone to say you're right. In fact, there's a lot of times where that's in an increase in hostilities. That just means they're looking for another way to attack you.

• 2:29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they haven't quite got it yet, but they're, they're waiting, they're laying in wait and it is, if they're giving you your right, um, you, you got problems.

• 2:29:55Jocko Willink?

  Be careful with that one. Look for that's right.

• 2:30:01Jocko Willink?

  Next section, bend their realities and, and you get into this here, don't compromise, which is an interesting thing. We're going to talk through.

• 2:30:14Jocko Willink?

  The win-win mindset pushed by so many negotiation experts is usually ineffective and often disastrous. At best, it satisfies neither side. And if you employ it with a counterpart who has a win-lose approach, you're setting yourself up to be swindled. Of course, as we've noted previously, you need to keep a cooperative rapport building, empathetic approach, the kind that creates a dynamic in which deals can be made, but you have to get rid of that naivete because compromise, splitting the difference can lead to terrible outcomes. Compromise is often a bad deal and a key theme we'll hit in this chapter is no deal is better than a bad deal. Even in kidnapping, yes, a bad deal in kidnapping is where someone pays and no one comes out.

• 2:30:57Jocko Willink?

  To make my point on compromise, let me paint an example. A woman wants her husband to wear black shoes with his suit, but her husband doesn't want to, he prefers brown shoes. So what do they do? They compromise. They split the difference. They meet half ways, halfway, and you guessed it, he wears one black shoe and one brown shoe. Is this the best outcome? In fact, no. In fact, it's the worst possible outcome. Either of the two outcomes, black or brown, would have been better.

• 2:31:23Jocko Willink?

  I'm here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We don't compromise because it's right. We compromise because it's easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Two for you are driven by their actual goals. So don't settle. Here's a simple rule. Never split the difference. Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion, and conflict. Accommodation and compromise produce none of that. You've got to embrace the hard stuff. That's where the great deals are, and that's what negotiators do.

• 2:32:08Speaker 01

  Amen.

• 2:32:12Speaker 01

  At the class, say amen.

• 2:32:13Jocko Willink?

  At what point did you realize that was the title of the book?

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  Tal came up with that. The original title was Killer Deals. We started working with Tal, Brandon and I, my son Brandon, uncredited co-author of the book. And Tal says, right, so we're gonna, we'll start with Killer Deals, and at some point in time, the proper title of the book will occur to me, and I'll tell you what it is. Now, you're free to disagree. But I can tell you, when I get deeply into this enough, I'll give you the title. And probably about halfway through the whole writing process was when he said, titles never split the difference. Says that's the essence of what you guys are talking about. If you completely

• 2:32:59Speaker 01

  understand it and understand why, he says, that's what the title is. And we're like, you got it. That's right. Yeah, he came, Tal came up with it probably about halfway through the writing process.

• 2:33:16Jocko Willink?

  Now, how is that? And we're gonna get into, I think I'm gonna cover it, but the Ackerman approach?

• 2:33:23Jocko Willink?

  Now, in the Ackerman approach, you're shooting for a specific number.

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:33:31Jocko Willink?

  And, you know, you're kind of compromising to get to that number.

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  Nope. Why? Well, if you're shooting for a specific number, why is that a compromise?

• 2:33:39Jocko Willink?

  As long as you get your number, but that, that's my number. Uh, meaning you wanna, you wanna sell me this car for $10,000? I only want to give you $7,000. My first offer is a lowball offer.

• 2:33:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  And then I come up, well, my first offer 65% of what I want to pay. Then I go 85, 95, then 100% of what I want to pay.

• 2:34:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:34:04Jocko Willink?

  So I guess we didn't, we didn't split the difference.

• 2:34:06Speaker 01

  No, it's not, and, and there's also a very specific, um, uh, sort of rationale behind the offers. Each offer has to be effectively half as much as the previous increase. You gotta, you gotta always have diminishing increases. The other side's gonna feel like they're beating you into a position. They're gonna be very gratifying for them.

• 2:34:29Jocko Willink?

  Deadlines. You talk about here, time is one of the most critical, crucial variables in any negotiation. The simple passing of time and its sharper cause, cause in the deadline are the screw that pressures every deal to conclusion. Whether your deadline is real and absolute or merely a line in the sand, it can trick you into believing that doing a deal now is more important than getting a good deal. Deadlines regularly make people say and do impulsive things that are against their best interests because we all have a natural tendency to rush as a deadline approaches.

• 2:35:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, not only rushes the deadline approaches, but not rush at all until it's looming. Like, and people lose track of that it's the process. And deadlines are really just designed to kick the process into gear. But human beings, being what they are, if you give somebody a deadline of Friday, don't expect to get into any kind of conversation before Thursday.

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  She's not gonna ask.

• 2:35:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. I've done a lot of deals like on the way to the airport or on our way out. And that's when the discussion actually starts.

• 2:35:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:40Jocko Willink?

  Not optimal.

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Skipping ahead a little bit in the book, the F word, why it's so powerful, when to use it and how. The most powerful word in negotiations is fair. Right. As human beings, we're mightily swayed by how much we feel we have been respected. People comply with agreements if they feel they've been treated fairly and lash out if they don't. Once you understand what a messy, emotional and destructive dynamic fairness can be, you can see why fair is a tremendously powerful word and you need to use it with care. In, in fact, of the three ways that people drop the F-bomb, only one is positive. The most common is a judo-like defensive move that destabilizes the other side.

• 2:36:28Jocko Willink?

  This manipulation usually takes the form, something like, "We just want what's fair." Think back to the last time someone made this implicit accusation of unfairness to you, and I bet you have to admit that it immediately triggered feelings of defensiveness and discomfort. These feelings are often subconscious and lead to irrational concession.

• 2:36:49Jocko Willink?

  The second use of the F-bomb is more nefarious. In this one, your counterpart will basically accuse you of being dense or dishonest by saying, "We've given you a fair offer." It's a terrible little jab meant to distract your attention away from, oh, distract your attention manipulating to giving in. If you find yourself in this situation, the best reaction is to simply mirror the F that has just been lobbed at you. "Fair," you'd respond. Pausing to let the words "power" do to them what it was intended to do to you. Following that with a label, it seems like you're ready to provide evidence that supports that, which alludes to the opening of their books or otherwise handing over information that will either contradict their claim to fairness or give you more data to work with than you had previously. Right away, you declaw the attack.

• 2:37:32Jocko Willink?

  The last use of the F-word is my favorite because it's positive and constructive. It sets the stage for honest and empathetic negotiation. Here's how I use it. Early on in a negotiation, I say, "I want you to feel like you're being treated fairly at all times, so please stop me at any time if I'm being unfair and we'll address it." It's simple and clear and sets me up as an honest dealer. With that statement, I let people know it's okay to use the word with me if they use it honestly. As a negotiator, you should strive for reputation of being fair. Your reputation precedes you. Let it precede you in a way that paves success.

• 2:38:14Jocko Willink?

  When I read all that, I was like, oh, we all, it seems like human beings have this sort of natural, we're just raised that fairness is a big thing for us. And you know, when I, what I, sometimes when I think of, when I can't quite make a connection, I think of the opposite and what that triggers in people. So what's like the epic insult? That guy's a cheater, right? That guy's a cheater. Oh yeah, you won, but he cheated. You know, you hate that guy. You don't want to be that guy. When someone says you cheated, you get all defensive. So it's the same thing here, this, this F-bomb. When it gets dropped on you, someone goes, hey, we just want what's fair. What do you mean I'm not being fair?

• 2:38:58Jocko Willink?

  And it could trigger you to make an deal you shouldn't have made.

• 2:39:02Speaker 01

  A lot. And the amount of time, like it's rare that in a, a negotiation that has any sort of contentiousness to it at all, the word will always come up.

• 2:39:16Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a great manipulative device and people often say it out of defensiveness. But for the same, for the same ends, you know, get the other side to change their mind. Providing no evidence whatsoever as to why they should.

• 2:39:34Jocko Willink?

  That's not fair.

• 2:39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's a, you see it and usually it's, it's when the tables have gotten turned on somebody in an unexpected way. That's when they'll drop the word.

• 2:39:48Jocko Willink?

  What does that look like?

• 2:39:53Speaker 01

  A person I know who's an eminently fair person was in a real estate negotiation right after the housing market where they were at dropped substantially.

• 2:40:04Speaker 01

  And they got the buyer to increase the offer above market.

• 2:40:10Speaker 01

  By simply saying, "We just want what's fair." Now, the person that used this phrase had gotten the tables turned on them by a drop in a market. So it wasn't even the buyer's fault. Buyer didn't do anything. Buyer's following the market. So this person out of simple defensiveness, having had the tables turned on them,

• 2:40:35Speaker 01

  they felt that it was an unfair series of circumstances. Now, is that the buyer's fault? Buyer's just buying in a real estate market that is dictated by the dynamics of the market. And that was the first time it really jumped out at me. And then I started looking for it across the board. Because the person that told the story got the buyer to raise the price. And I remember thinking like, "Wait, wait, wait. As an innocent bystander here, that, you know, that's not fair." There's no fairness there.

• 2:41:08Speaker 01

  And I thought, "If a good person can do this and change, completely change the dynamics in a relationship, in the negotiation, how often does it come up?" And then you start looking for it, and you see it over and it is so effective that the manipulators have seen the good people use it and change the dynamics that they've gotten really good at using it to cover up manipulative behavior.

• 2:41:35Jocko Willink?

  Watch out for that one.

• 2:41:39Jocko Willink?

  Got a section in here, "Bend their reality." You start going to some of the methodologies of that. Anchor their emotions. To bend your counterpart's reality, you have to start with the basics of empathy. So start out with an accusation, with an accusation audit, acknowledging all of their fears. By anchoring their emotions in preparation for a loss, you inflame the other side's loss aversion so that they'll jump at the chance to avoid it. You talk about loss aversion, and people are, people don't want to lose.

• 2:42:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:42:08Jocko Willink?

  And this accusation audit is sort of what Steve Jobs put up on the board when he did it himself.

• 2:42:14Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:42:15Jocko Willink?

  Iger could have done it if he if he had stepped up to the thing and said, "Well, you're probably going to say this and this and this." But he got Steve Jobs to do it, which is even better. But you anchor those emotions. The other thing you say is, "Let the other guy go first" most of the time. I suggest you let the other side anchor monetary negotiations. The real issue is that neither side has a perfect information going on the table. This means if you don't know enough to open up with confidence. So this is what we hear all the time in negotiations. You know, you don't say the number first. How much do you want? How much will you give me for the car? Well, what do you think it's worth? Like, we do this around and around, right?

• 2:42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:56Jocko Willink?

  Uh, what are the disadvantages, advantages of opening? Or giving the number?

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  Well, very much as a general rule, I'm, I'm gonna want the other side to throw the number first because it's information. It's gonna, it's gonna tell me, it's gonna tell me data, it's gonna tell me mindset, where you're coming from. It's gonna tell me a lot. None of which am I getting if I go first. So as a general rule, we don't go first. Again, a general rule. At, at some point in time, to keep from going around and around and around, I'm gonna throw a number out. Now, I'm gonna characterize it before I throw it out. And if, I'm gonna say this is a lot. When, when we quote prices for our coaching, first of all, our coaching is more expensive.

• 2:43:46Speaker 01

  If you can find negotiation coaching anywhere, which is very hard to find, we're gonna charge you more than anybody else does. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that. I'm gonna charge you more than anybody else does. Somebody, somebody wants to bring me in for a talk. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna be so expensive, and we're gonna quote you a heart-stopping price. Now then, you get, that causes you to reflect on your value. It causes you to run the numbers. One of two things, you're gonna, you're gonna ask me what the number is. And you're either gonna say, "I, well, you said it was expensive."

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  Or you're gonna say, wow, it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. And then we don't bargain. So if I gotta throw a number, I like to refer to it as I never throw the number out naked. If I, and if, otherwise, I wanna know where you're coming from, I also wanna give you a price that you want. Cause price is a term. And I need to hit the sweet spot on your price. If I go too high, you're not gonna over-deliver, you're gonna feel like you undervalued yourself and you're gonna do the same amount of work if I pay you too much. I found that out the hard way. If I go too low, you're gonna do a lousy job.

• 2:45:14Speaker 01

  So what I need, what I really want, besides just throwing a number first, I wanna know what number do you think a good number is? That you're gonna work really hard for? And feel like you earned your money? And not change? That you just undervalued yourself in the past and now, now all of a sudden I'm, I'm worth this much more money? Which means you're not gonna put in an extra effort.

• 2:45:40Jocko Willink?

  You're also talking here about if people are, are stuck on the money, you can start talking about other things.

• 2:45:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:47Jocko Willink?

  The non-monetary terms.

• 2:45:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:49Jocko Willink?

  So like if you're negotiating for a job, you start talking about things that don't have anything to do with money.

• 2:45:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:45:54Jocko Willink?

  And that can be a good way to start to move the conversation forward. The, uh, this is just interesting psychology. The biggest thing to remember, and when you start, when you, when you do get to numbers, you say the biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in zero inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guestimates that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded, say thirty-seven thousand two-hundred-and-sixty-three dollars, feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart. So use them to fortify your offers.

• 2:46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nuts, right? I mean, it's just, that's voodoo. That is so true, and it's just complete voodoo.

• 2:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Ah, that's and yet go look at the prices in a store, right?

• 2:46:48Speaker 01

  We see examples of it everywhere.

• 2:46:50Jocko Willink?

  They're all nine dollars and ninety five cents or whatever. And there's a psychological thing to be, you know, ten dollars seems like a ton of money. Nine ninety five, I can afford all day.

• 2:46:59Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Yeah. Well, the the original magic one that I love, like iTunes, ninety nine cents for a song. Back when Napster and you could get all your music for free. Like Jobs and Apple, like, let's put a number on this. That seems so small and it's not, it's not a round number. And suddenly people were paying for music again. Ninety nine cents.

• 2:47:28Jocko Willink?

  Still ninety nine cents for a song, isn't it? Some songs, yeah. I guess it's all like streaming and all this stuff now. You don't really buy, well, actually, I don't. I buy like the whole thing, whatever that is. One twenty nine sometimes. So they jack the prices. Some, some, yeah.

• 2:47:45Jocko Willink?

  Some key points, all negotiations are divined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don't let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers want to party, want party money, you'll be better. You'll be miles better prepared. And there's a whole section in here about that. About these Haitian kidnappers. You did, you worked all kind, like dozens of cases of these Haitian kidnappers. One of the things you've identified is they would like kidnap early in the week. They wanted that money by Friday so they could go out and party. And so how much do they need to have a great party that weekend? That's sort of the number that you would end up looking for. I mean, it's awesome. Uh, splitting the differences, wearing one black and one brown shoe. Don't compromise, meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides.

• 2:48:29Jocko Willink?

  Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process. Do impulsive things that are against their best interests. We talked about the F word. You can bend your counterpart's reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your real offer seem reasonable. Or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you're looking at it from. And last people tend, people take more risks to avoid a loss than realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there's something to lose by inaction.

• 2:49:14Jocko Willink?

  That's why the, that's why the website says today only.

• 2:49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:20Jocko Willink?

  You'll miss out.

• 2:49:24Jocko Willink?

  You got a section in here that's about, fast forward a little bit, calibrated quest, calibrate your questions. And we, we kind of discussed this earlier, if we were recording or not, but I talked about asking earnest questions. As a leader, you're asking earnest questions and you've got this little bit similar approach, but uh, different verbiage here. Calibrated questions are not just random requests for comment. They have a direction. Once you figure out where you want a conversation to go, you have to design the question that will ease the conversation in that direction. While letting the other guy think, think it's his choice to take you there. That's why I refer to these questions as calibrated questions. You have to calibrate them carefully. Just like you would calibrate a gun sight or a measuring scale to target a specific problem.

• 2:50:10Jocko Willink?

  The good news is, is that there are rules for that. First off, calibrated questions avoid verbs like can, is, are, do, or does. These are closed ended questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no. Instead, they start with a list of words. People know as reporters questions, who, what, when, where, why, and how. Those words inspire your counterpart to think and then speak expansively. But let me cut that list even further. It's best to start with what? How? And sometimes why? Nothing else. Who, when, and where will often just get your counterpart to share a fact without thinking. And why can backfire regardless of what the language, what language the word why is translated into. It's accusatory.

• 2:50:55Jocko Willink?

  There are very rare moments when this is to your advantage. The only time you can use why successfully is when defending, when, when defensiveness that is created supports the change you are trying to get them to see. Why would you ever change from the way you've always done things to try my approach is an example.

• 2:51:15Jocko Willink?

  So. I found this very useful. Because.

• 2:51:22Jocko Willink?

  You know, I often talk about something from a military perspective called the indirect approach, which means I don't want to attack you head on. I want to, you know, I want to attack you from a flank where you're not defensive. And this applies to everything. It applies to leadership, it applies to approaching people, it applies to, you know, if you've got an ego, which everyone does, and I attack your plan, that means I'm attacking your ego, you're going to get defensive. So, you know, oftentimes, it's in order to get around your ego, I'm going to ask you earnest questions about the situation. But the key thing that you've got here is, I don't say, "Well, why do you think this is a good plan?" Because that's an accusatory question. Instead, a better question would be, "Hey, can you

• 2:52:05Jocko Willink?

  help me understand the outcome that you're looking for with this plan?" And all of a sudden, we've got, we've taken away any possibility that you can see that I'm accusing or attacking your plan, which thereby is attacking your ego. How did you come across this calibrated questions, idea?

• 2:52:24Speaker 01

  Camp's book, 2002, he called them interrogatives, the reporter's questions. In the FBI, we called them just open-ended, you know, the list, what, who won, when, where, how, and why. And I noticed that he leaned heavily on one in particular, which was, "What's the biggest challenge you face?" And I didn't realize it at the time. First of all, it's a what question, what's deferential, people like to be asked what to do. Secondly, now, we now know, the Black Swan Method, what is principally designed to uncover problems?

• 2:53:03Speaker 01

  What's the biggest challenge you face? What gets in the way? I'm coaching some dentists recently. People are balking at how much their dental work's going to cost. The question is, what happens if you do nothing? You know, it's a what question, it's deferential. And so then began to look harder at the questions. I thought that was the only overlap between business and hostage negotiation at the time. Then in the Burnham case in the Philippines, it goes bad, train wreck all the way around. And somebody got proof of life on our hostages

• 2:53:45Speaker 01

  in the midst of that case. And I just remember, it blew my mind.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Because a hostage was overheard on a phone. And I'd never gotten a hostage on a phone. So between how does somebody get a hostage on a phone? And who the heck is getting proof of life on our hostages? Like, there was more than one buyer. Like, I didn't know what to do with this. So the case is an ongoing 13-month-long train wreck. A lot of people died, including two out of three of the total Americans that were taken. Listen to a drug dealer kidnapping in Pittsburgh a few months afterwards. Drug dealer on drug dealer. One drug dealer's got the other drug dealer's girlfriend hostage. Who do you go when somebody important to you's been kidnapped? Even if you're a drug dealer, you go to the FBI.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  So our hostage negotiators are riding around, listening to the drug dealer talk to the other drug dealer. And just on his own, he goes, "Hey, dog, how do I know she's okay?" And the change in the tone of voice, the kidnapper drug dealer went from thinking he was in charge to being, having lost all control of the negotiation and not knowing it at the time. And it was just a how question. So then we changed all of our negotiation kidnapping strategy to how and what questions. Just hammering them with how and what questions. Because you want to test it out in the kidnapping.

• 2:55:17Speaker 01

  And finally, I'm coaching another kidnapping in the Philippines. Coaching a brother, his brother's been grabbed by a serial killer. Lone kidnapper. Only time in my entire experience with one kidnapper. They're always operating gangs. And the guy was a, we found out after the fact because we caught him. He was a multiple kidnappings and had killed at least, well, didn't have the evidence that he killed a hostage in another case. Just the ransom was paid and the hostage never appeared. So there's only one conclusion. We're coaching, coaching a brother, again, a good guy who would learn, pick up fast. How and what questions, how and what questions, how and what questions.

• 2:56:01Speaker 01

  And at one point in time, the kidnapper wants a daily per diem to keep the hostage alive. Which, we gotta fight over that because it's a way to test financial resources. Not to keep the hostage alive, test the family's resources. So on his own, the brother says, "When we run out of money paying the daily amount, what's gonna happen?" And there's a silence and this serial killer on the other end of the phone says, "It'll be alright." My negotiators in country called me, they, "We think we got a positive breakthrough today, but we're not sure what it is."

• 2:56:45Speaker 01

  And they told me that, I said, "This guy just promised never to kill a hostage." Like, I had no idea that it was a lone guy, I thought we were just talking to the boss. Didn't know he was a killer. It was another case where he chopped a victim's ear off, sent the ear and video of him chopping the ear off to the victim's company, they got paid, I knew about that, I'd been told for a variety of reasons, I'd heard about that, I didn't know it was this guy. Take him completely out of his game with a version of a what question. Saw another one, took another guy completely out of his game with a version of the how question. And a dynamic where you'd have said, "We had no leverage," if you thought in terms of leverage, "but you got influence." How do you get influence?

• 2:57:30Speaker 01

  Through deference. And that's when we really began to dial in collectively, principally, my son Brandon and I, another guy Derek Gaunt, very involved in the development of our thinking. And we really narrowed it down to how and what is a way to really get the upper hand in a negotiation.

• 2:57:53Jocko Willink?

  Um.

• 2:57:55Jocko Willink?

  Fast forward a little bit here. You've got a couple of things that are awesome points. Don't try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation. I always say when you're dealing with someone, give them an out. You know, you just give them an out. You can say, ah, you know, it seems like this is the best way to do it, but I know you you're smart on this stuff, too. Does it make sense? And they go, yeah, you know, go ahead and do it that way. You know, they you give them an opportunity that they don't have to say, I was I'm wrong, you're right. Go do it your way. No, never do that. And the other one.

• 2:58:34Jocko Willink?

  Again, this isn't just for negotiation. This is for life. Bite your tongue. When you're when you're attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question. Just such a such a solid move that will keep you out of trouble. You want to say something back? You know, I I actually go, I I tell people, you know, someone starts attacking you or someone someone starts getting aggressive with you. You know, take a step back, kind of nod your head, show them that you're listening. Don't say anything back to them. Instead, ask them a question. You know, that's going to be a good way to go forward. Uh.

• 2:59:19Jocko Willink?

  The seven thirty eight fifty five percent rule. In two famous studies on what makes us like or dislike somebody, UCLA psychology professor Albert Mahabirian.

• 2:59:32Speaker 01

  Man, huh?

• 2:59:33Jocko Willink?

  Totally murdered that one.

• 2:59:34Speaker 01

  You're not Persian.

• 2:59:36Jocko Willink?

  I'm not.

• 2:59:36Speaker 01

  You'd know how to say that if you were Persian. I don't know how to say it either.

• 2:59:40Jocko Willink?

  Arabian. Okay, we'll go with it. Sorry there, Albert. We'll call him Albert, Dr. Albert. Uh, created the seven thirty eight fifty five rule. That is only seven percent of a message is based on the words, while thirty eight percent comes from the tone of the voice and fifty five percent from the speaker's body language and face. While these figures mainly relate to situations where we are forming an attitude about someone, the rule nonetheless offers a useful ratio for negotiators. You see, body language and tone of voice, not words, are our most powerful assessment tools.

• 3:00:19Jocko Willink?

  Important to remember that, important to pay attention. A lot of us, a lot, a lot of people, their, your face gives away so much and it doesn't even matter what you're saying. The look that you have on your face is just, just giving away the way you feel and it doesn't even matter what your words are. Did you feel like you had to learn to, uh, you know, control your facial expressions? I got my, my business partner and my friend, Leif Babin, you know, he, when he, when we first started working together, when he was pissed, you knew it and so did everybody else. It was like his face would turn red, you could see how mad he was.

• 3:01:04Jocko Willink?

  And you know, over time, you know, as you know, he started to realize that that didn't help him, started to learn how to not do that. Is that something that you see people have to recognize and then get, get themselves trained up on?

• 3:01:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, depending upon the person, there's underlying currents. Um, so it could be for different reasons. The short answer is yes. And the, the longer answer is how do you align your thinking in the moment? A little bit of what you mentioned earlier, like if you're really interested in what the other person is saying and then you worry about evaluating after the fact, you don't have to worry about the look on your face. As a matter of fact, if you're really interested, the more interested you look, the more they're going to talk. So if you can separate the two things out from evaluating, judging what somebody said to just being, making sure you fully understand, then facial expressions are not a problem.

• 3:02:02Speaker 01

  Now, the people that have a problem with them and you know, you, you, your, your guys' faces turn red, making all, that's a characteristic principally of the assertive negotiator who can't wait to disagree. And is holding it in. The highly analytical type, you know, the people that seem completely emotionally detached. When they think you're not looking, they reveal everything and like their facial expressions, their body language, I mean, they almost, sometimes they look like they're twitching.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  And so if you know who's highly analytical, if you're faced with a team of people, do not talk to the analytical guy or gal, but keep an eye on them. You gotta kind of watch them out of the corner of your eye, because they're gonna be rolling their eyes and they're gonna be sneaking peeks at people at moments. I mean, like, they are the most honest, most unguarded body language you ever saw in your life, if they don't think they're being stared at.

• 3:03:10Jocko Willink?

  Uh, let me ask you this, so I've been talking about leadership, you're talking about, you write about negotiation, how much interaction, because there's also a ton of similarities with interrogators, how much interaction did you have with interrogators? I mean, I obviously worked with a ton of interrogators in a bunch of different organizations. How much, how much work did you do with interrogators?

• 3:03:35Speaker 01

  A fair amount, and there's probably about three schools of thought out there. The great, well, the bad ones are just brute force, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make you uncomfortable physically or emotionally, and I'm gonna try to force something out of you, and that's, that's just, that just doesn't work. It's counter, it's counterproductive. If you, if you only care about what works, then you won't be harsh, because it doesn't work. Now, the other two that are left, there's one thing called eliciting information, which there are a fair amount of interrogators out there that like it, and they, they want to get you into a very short-term mindset, get you to say things that you know to be against your interests.

• 3:04:19Speaker 01

  The problem is, if you're getting somebody into a short-term mindset, they're gonna come a point in time when they regret saying it to you, and you're gonna lose their cooperation, and everything's gonna fall apart, so it has a shelf life. Now, the rapport-based people, those are the magicians.

• 3:04:36Speaker 01

  That make cases nobody else can make, or make deals no one else could make, and the other side still wants to talk to them. Like, when I left surveillance in New York, and went inside to investigate, what we were talking earlier, became an inside, you know, uh, open investigator. I was surrounded by guys that had gotten cooperation from witnesses voluntarily, that people would just say like, "I got no idea how that guy got that cooperation." One agent in particular, his name was Larry Whack, and even on the task force, people admired how he got people to cooperate because he was, he was,

• 3:05:18Speaker 01

  he developed rapport, relationships with people. Even if he had a hammer, the rapport and the relationship, you know, the belief that we will always be able to talk to one another, as opposed to me tricking you into a short-term mindset, which at some point in time, you're gonna feel betrayed. Like, the rapport-based approach to deal-making interrogation wins every time.

• 3:05:45Jocko Willink?

  Same thing with leadership. We might as well throw leadership in there as well.

• 3:05:48Speaker 01

  Agreed.

• 3:05:49Jocko Willink?

  The time I say, "Well, you know, if you don't do this, I'm gonna fire you," or whatever, it'll work for that task, but eventually, you're looking for another job. Uh, so, yeah, those similarities, building relationships across the board. So, you just mentioned the analyst. That's one type of person, and you got a whole section in here about, not only what kind of negotiator are you, because you gotta know yourself, but then also, how are you gonna interact with these people? You got the analyst that you talked about, which is methodical, diligent, they're not in a big rush, you talked about them. Uh, tell me about the accommodator.

• 3:06:26Speaker 01

  Just, uh, so, being an assertive, the accommodator is this weird animal that neither the analyst nor the assertive can really figure out. But the accommodator is really, is a very hope-based person, and very focused on that the moment is pleasant. And then if the moment is pleasant, and we hope hard enough, then everything will be fine. Now, when we wrote, when we wrote the book, we said the accommodator was focused principally on the relationship, having a positive relationship.

• 3:07:03Speaker 01

  And that's pretty close to true. Like, they want the relationship to be positive, but, you know, we worked with people that would see a train coming at us rhetorically, figuratively, not literally. This problem coming at us, this person was on a team and we had a training and all the books that were supposed to be there were gone. This guy knew about it for days. The last minute tells us, none of the manuals were here. Cause he'd been, and we're like, huh? You know, this is, the train is getting ready to hit us. We've been here for three days. You haven't said a word for three days. That's not relationship focused, cause I'm standing on a railroad track and you see a train coming my way and you're not warning me.

• 3:07:47Speaker 01

  So you know this relationship has come into a close. And then we realize in hindsight, and we see it constantly, they're hoping something good happens at the last minute. Everybody's saved. My colleague Derek would say, you know, an accommodator will walk you into a minefield, knowing it's a minefield, hoping you don't step on a mine. And so the accommodators, I think, are the source of why in the business world, people often say, "Hope is not a strategy." Because the accommodator will go with hope alone. And it'll work out. Hope alone is probably good somewhere between 20 and 45% of the time.

• 3:08:32Speaker 01

  Maybe that, maybe that's being generous. Maybe 20% of the time. And they're gonna remember the 20% and ignore the 80% when the world turned into a disaster. And so the accommodators are really, are very positive people. They're very upbeat and they're very hope-focused, which is in and of itself, it's not a strategy, it's a necessary element. You gotta be hopeful this is gonna work out. It, what it is, is inadequate. Now simultaneously, people love dealing with somebody like that. So we'll see on a regular basis, the accommodators will make more deals overall than anybody

• 3:09:12Speaker 01

  else will, but they'll be mostly really sloppy deals that are nowhere near as profitable for either side as they should have been, because they simply hoped that things would fall into place.

• 3:09:28Jocko Willink?

  And then the last one, which I think you just self-identified as.

• 3:09:32Speaker 01

  Assertive.

• 3:09:33Jocko Willink?

  Assertive. So what's the deal with the assertive negotiator?

• 3:09:36Speaker 01

  Just honest. I'm just being honest with you. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm saving you a lot of trouble because I want you to be honest with me, so I'm gonna be honest with you. That was stupid. That's a dumb idea. That's never gonna work. You didn't think this thing, you know, the, the assertive, anybody that describes themselves as simply open and honest. And it's always a punch in the face. It's always just that approach. Like you, you, the other side's gotta know where you're coming from. You, you do have to be honest. But it's how you deliver it. And the assertives are the, typically the worst at making you, I had, I had my partner once tell me

• 3:10:20Speaker 01

  dealing with you is like getting hit in the face with a brick.

• 3:10:25Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking like, how could that be? I'm the nicest guy I know.

• 3:10:34Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's like what I, what I talked about earlier, like me punching you in the face with the truth is not a good way to get you, listen.

• 3:10:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:10:40Jocko Willink?

  Echo always brings up the example of the person that says, you know, I'm just a direct person, but I gotta tell you, you were totally screwed up. And again, there's not a lot of people like, oh, thank you for being that direct person and telling me how jacked up I am. Usually, oh, look, do you occasionally get someone that loves to get coached and love to get told what they, yeah, you get some people, a lot of times it just offends them. So that is, so, so when you take these three different personality types, negotiator types, are we looking to blend?

• 3:11:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:11:09Jocko Willink?

  That's what the goal is.

• 3:11:11Speaker 01

  Each type has something really critical they bring to the table.

• 3:11:16Speaker 01

  The, the assertive, I mean, you gotta tell the other side where you're coming from, otherwise you're making them guess. And you don't make good deals based on guesswork. The analyst, you gotta think things through. You gotta come up with it. Run, run some numbers. You don't have to run them all. Run any, run some. And the accommodator, like so many people look at the accommodators and say, that person's making tons of deals. What are they doing? It's in their demeanor. It's in their approach.

• 3:11:47Jocko Willink?

  Just FYI for people that are about to order this book, you also kind of give, how do you deal with the accommodator? How do you deal with the assertive? So you give both sides of the spectrum.

• 3:12:00Jocko Willink?

  I'll fast forward a little bit. We mentioned this briefly, this Ackerman bargaining. And this is the, I call the system the Ackerman model because it came from this guy named Mike Ackerman, an ex CIA guy who founded a kidnapped-for-ransom consulting company based out of Miami on many kidnappings. We'd constantly be paired with Ackerman guys. Never Mike himself, who helped design this haggle. And you lay out this haggle. It's a systemized and easy remember process that has only four steps. Well, you go to six steps here. Number one, set your target price, which is your goal. Then you set your first offer at 65% of your target price. Then you calculate three raises of decreasing increments, 85, 95, and then 100%.

• 3:12:45Jocko Willink?

  Use lots of empathy and different ways of saying no to get the other side to counter before you increase your offer. When calculating the final amount, use precise, non-round numbers like 37,893 rather than 38,000. It gives the number credibility and weight on your final number. Throw a non-monetary item that you probably don't want to show you're at your limit.

• 3:13:10Jocko Willink?

  So this is a pretty cool little system. Is that, is that something you could advise someone to use when they're going to shop for a new car or a used car?

• 3:13:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:13:19Jocko Willink?

  It's not a bad model?

• 3:13:21Speaker 01

  It's, if you're gonna bargain, it's the most effective bargaining model out there. Nothing beats it.

• 3:13:32Jocko Willink?

  Getting into this, it might be the last chapter. Find the black swan. And we haven't mentioned this yet, but you've got the Black Swan Group. This is your consulting firm. And a quick description of the Black Swan. Black Swan theory tells us that things happen that were previously thought to be impossible or never thought of at all. This is not the same as saying that sometimes things happen against a one in a million odds, but rather that things never imagined do come to pass.

• 3:14:05Jocko Willink?

  The idea of the black swan was popularized by Nassim Taleb in his bestselling books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. But the term goes back much further. Until the 17th century, people could only imagine white swans because all swans ever seen had possessed white feathers. In the 17th century, London, it was common to refer to impossible things as black swans. But then the Dutch explorer William de Vlamin, sorry, people of Holland, went to Western Australia.

• 3:14:36Speaker 01

  I did, indeed.

• 3:14:38Jocko Willink?

  Went to Western Australia in 1697 and saw a black swan. Suddenly, the unthinkable and unthought was real. This is a crucial concept in negotiation. In every negotiation session, there are different kinds of information. There are those things we know, like our counterpart's name and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations. Those are known knowns. There are those things we are certain that exist, but we don't know, like possibility that the other side might get sick and leave us without another counterpart. Those are known unknowns, and they are like poker wild cards. You know they're out there, but you don't know who has them. But most important are those things we don't know that we don't know. Pieces

• 3:15:22Jocko Willink?

  of information we've never imagined that would be game changing if uncovered. Maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail because he's leaving for a competitor. These unknown unknowns are black swans. So this is obviously something highly important to you, since you named your company The Black Swan. How did you stumble upon this idea?

• 3:15:47Speaker 01

  Well, the idea first, Taleb's book in 2007, A Black Swan, got me thinking about it. I like his stuff. I mean, he's a highly in-depth thinker. He's got a writing tone that is not for everybody.

• 3:16:05Speaker 01

  But really in-depth and so I saw that I the idea like the impact of the highly improbable. Well, that's what we did all the time in negotiation. It's a combination of two things. We're going to change ourselves in subtle little ways that the other side is never going to see. And we're going to gain the upper hand. We're going to steer it. We're going to steer the negotiation and to the best possible outcome. Now, that that doesn't mean that everything's going to a positive outcome. But you've got to recognize what the best possible outcome is. So it's a great metaphor for making tiny little subtle changes in your negotiation approach. The other side is never going to see. Where you're going to make all the difference. It's completely invisible. And then while you're in the middle of it, there's always stuff to eat.

• 3:16:50Speaker 01

  Great stuff will fall out of the sky if you let it. The other side's going to say something that works for you. They're going to talk to you. They're going to be softer in a position than you realize. There's going to be pressures on them that you don't understand. Something is always, always there. And in many cases, the other side doesn't imagine it. And to draw a real fine point on this that a lot of people miss. It's the reason why reading body language to detect deception is almost a waste of time.

• 3:17:23Speaker 01

  Because for you to deceive me, you've got to know it's important to have a tell. You have to be consciously covering that up. But a significant amount of the time, you don't even know it's important.

• 3:17:36Speaker 01

  So if I'm just looking for towels and not getting you talking, the stuff that you didn't know was important is never going to come out. So, so what if, so what if you're lying? Number one, that doesn't tell me what the truth is. And if we're only focused on what you're hiding, rambling conversation, what might that look like? A woman who's getting funding for a film she's doing in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. She's trying to get $300,000 out of an investor, very focused on this film being shot in LA. Very focused on this amount of money, very focused on what they're trying, the point they're trying to make in a film. But she's mirroring and labeling.

• 3:18:22Speaker 01

  And out of the blue, it comes out that the financier owns a castle in France.

• 3:18:29Speaker 01

  Which would be a great setting for the next film.

• 3:18:33Speaker 01

  Something she never would have brought up. The financier, they're talking about a film being shot in LA, martial arts, this and that, all these other little things. You know, female martial artists beating up bad guys. Like, how is she gonna say, "Oh, by the way, you don't have, I'm working on another film, we wanna, it's a medieval film. You don't happen to have a castle in France, do you?" Like, that is never gonna come up, ever. But she's talking and she's labeling a marriage, and the next thing you know, this, this, this thing comes out. That the other person has no idea it makes any difference. Changes the structuring of the whole deal. Now, instead of talking about one film, they're talking about multiple films. Completely changes the complexion of the, the finances that are needed on the first.

• 3:19:16Speaker 01

  If she can go back out, she's already got partial packaging on a second film. Like, it changes everything. And there's no way that she would have known to ask it, and the person on the other side was, "Well, instead of 300 grand, what about my castle?" Because that's not gonna do any good for a film in LA. Just little things like that.

• 3:19:34Jocko Willink?

  Well, one thing that emphasized the importance of listening

• 3:19:40Jocko Willink?

  is, you know, at one point, you're talking about a case, you got a guy that's, you know, drives to, drives to Washington DC in a tractor. He's gonna blow himself up, he's gonna blow up, uh, some of the...

• 3:19:51Speaker 01

  Dwight wants to.

• 3:19:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And, you know, he's saying he's gonna blow himself up, um, but you actually have, you're having conversations with him, and you've got multiple people listening.

• 3:20:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:20:04Jocko Willink?

  Because listening is so important that, if, look, if you can get more, more than one person, you get two or three or four people listening to the conversation, and they're gonna pick things up that someone else might miss. And studying the transcript, so you had someone on the team that realized, number one, he was a veteran, how can we utilize that? And then someone realized he was like a, I don't wanna say fundamentalist Christian, but a very strong Christian. And you had a certain religious thing going on, so you're able to utilize these things that people caught. Just through listening and it changed the dynamics of the whole of the whole negotiation.

• 3:20:38Speaker 01

  Right, right. Kept them from getting killed, got them out a day early. And so that was, you know, shortening the timeline. Because he was, he was really at the end of his rope. And each hour went by, he had less sleep, which increases the likelihood that he's going to do something stupid. We're still not 100% sure that there aren't bombs there. And so if he'd have made a particular move towards where the possibility, he had his Jeep and a flatbed. And I said, "We don't know there aren't explosives in the Jeep and a flatbed. If he goes there, we gotta take him out." And we're talking to him and this comes up and he's agreed to come out 72 hours. "We want to cut, try to cut 24 off of it."

• 3:21:23Speaker 01

  One of the female negotiators, Winnie Miller, says, you know, "Tell him tomorrow's the dawn of the third day." Which is 48 hours. And "I'll come out." That's what he says. And he had talked so much about the military and his 82nd Airborne experience. Somebody else listening heard the underlying strong Christian beliefs in there. His religion, if you will. Everybody's got a religion. Everybody, everybody has got a religion. Just depending upon what it is and how broadly you define it.

• 3:22:01Jocko Willink?

  Just gonna hit some of these, last section of the book I'll cover.

• 3:22:06Jocko Willink?

  But I just want to hit some of these highlights here.

• 3:22:10Jocko Willink?

  "Let what you know, your known knowns, guide you, but not blind you. Every case is new, so remain flexible and adaptable. Black swans are leverage multipliers. Remember the three types of leverage," and you go over these in the book. Positive, which is the ability to give someone what they want. Negative, the ability to hurt someone. And normative, using your counterpart's norms to bring them around.

• 3:22:36Jocko Willink?

  Again, there's more detail on the book, inside the book. Work to understand the other side's religion, which you just mentioned. Everybody's got a religion. Digging into worldviews inherently implies moving beyond negotiation table and into life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. That's where black swans live. Review everything you hear from your counterpart. You will not hear everything the first time, so double check. Compare notes with team members. Use backup listeners. Exploit the similarity principle. People are more apt to concede to someone when they share a culture, someone they share a cultural similarity with. So dig for what makes them tick and show that you share common ground.

• 3:23:20Jocko Willink?

  When someone seems irrational or crazy, they most likely aren't. Faced with a situation, search for constraints, hidden desires and bad information. And last, get FaceTime with your counterpart. 10 minutes of FaceTime often reveals more than days of research. Pay special attention to your counterpart's verbal and nonverbal communication at unguarded moments, at the beginning and the end of the session, or when someone says something out of line.

• 3:23:52Jocko Willink?

  So, really, really just awesome points that apply. To me, they apply to business. They apply to interacting with any human. Obviously, they apply to negotiations, but there you go. I mean, we hit the wave tops of some of the last. I mean, I probably read less than 5% of this book. So many good stories. And again, I felt, I feel kind of bad that I skipped a lot of the, lot of the stories themselves, but get the book. And that way you can hear some of the examples behind this. So, what, so what, so what are you up to right now? What do we got? We got the Black Swan Group, right?

• 3:24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're coaching and training negotiations. Of all the companies out there that you can get training from, very few of them will coach you, which sort of shocks me. Like, how do you, how do you, how do you not believe in your stuff enough where you, you'll, you'll coach? I mean, literally, the real definition of a coach is somebody, you go into the game, but the coach is right there. Prepping you, you come out of the game, you could talk, like, how do you teach this stuff and not be willing to coach it? And so, we coach across the board. It's a much bigger aspect of the business than I ever thought it would be.

• 3:25:13Speaker 01

  We gotta just finish the documentary film called Tactical Empathy, looking, premiered at Beverly Hills about 10 days ago. Taking our time on a distribution deal, we'll see what happens with that. Outlining a lot of the stuff that we talked about.

• 3:25:29Jocko Willink?

  How long is it? Is it a full-length documentary?

• 3:25:31Speaker 01

  54 minutes.

• 3:25:32Jocko Willink?

  54-minute documentary.

• 3:25:33Speaker 01

  Got a book for real estate agents, The Full Fee Agent, coming out. Steve Schull, the guy that did the book with me, interesting cat. I know Steve for well over a year before I find out he played in the NFL. Like, most NFL guys, you know, the first five minutes. Not only that, Steve was a Super Bowl captain.

• 3:26:01Jocko Willink?

  Dang.

• 3:26:02Speaker 01

  He didn't just play in the NFL, he didn't just play on a team that went to the Super Bowl, he was a captain of the team. Like, I think I finally found that out after I knew him like, four years. Like, he just, he doesn't lead with that stuff, but understands the value of coaching. Because he played for Don Shula, he played for some real coaches. So, he shares a coaching philosophy that, you know, the stuff that we coach you on, if you do what we ask you to do, it's gonna work. So, The Full Fee Agent's coming out in about two months, and then, my son Brandon and I and another colleague are working on a follow-up to Never Split the Difference, should be out in about a year.

• 3:26:45Jocko Willink?

  Nice. Yeah, the coaching piece... I always tell people with, uh, with leadership, it's not an inoculation. You don't just get like a shot and now you're good. Now you get it. You don't go to the gym one time and now you're in shape. You don't pick up a guitar, get taught, and now you know how to play it. It's the same thing with the, you're not gonna say, oh, I read the book and now I'm good to go. No, you actually need to train it. You need to get coached on it. That's why, that's why you gotta do that follow-up. So that's awesome. And we, we do the same thing at our company. I mean, most of the companies that we work with, we do long-term engagements with them. Uh, blackswanltd.com. That's where, that's where people, if they want coaching, if they wanna get, uh,

• 3:27:29Jocko Willink?

  deeper on this stuff. You're also on social media. You got on Facebook and Instagram, you're at Black Swan LTD. You're on Twitter, at Black Swan GRP. You personally aren't on Instagram. Big social media guy over here.

• 3:27:48Jocko Willink?

  At the FBI Negotiator. So did I get all those things right? Is there anything else we need to know about?

• 3:27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, those, those are good. The, the, on the website, blackswanltd.com, we got a lot of free stuff. There's, to get your skill level up. Like wherever you are, we can meet you where you are. The, another thing we put out that, that is free, but that's not what makes it valuable. We got a, we got a weekly newsletter. Concise, actionable. Not 10 articles where you're trying to decide what to do next. Like one article, roughly 700 words, complete, actionable, concise stuff. The newsletter's free. You sign up for it on the website. You get it emailed to you on Tuesday mornings, wherever in the world you are. Take the free stuff.

• 3:28:38Speaker 01

  You can get, you can get a long way with the book and the free stuff alone.

• 3:28:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and everybody that's listening just beat the king of negotiation because you're getting the stuff for free. So just get in there and get it. Take it from them. Otherwise you don't win. Right? You want to get one up on the FBI negotiator, you gotta go, hey, I got, yeah, I got this from the, I got this from the master of negotiation. I got it for free. That's how good you are. Get in there and sign up for that. Uh, that seemed, that's like, gets us up to present day.

• 3:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty much. Um, the master classes out there, you know, you and I were talking other, but the master class is good. It's also, it's insane how cheap that is as far as costs. Like the master class might be the best deal on earth. And my negotiation course and a whole bunch of other cool stuffs on there. Iger's got a course. And Sorkin's got a course, like if, whatever you want to learn, you're gonna find it on master class.

• 3:29:31Jocko Willink?

  So you're on there as well. Awesome. All right. Well, now you know what time it is. Echo Charles.

• 3:29:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:29:38Jocko Willink?

  Do you have any questions?

• 3:29:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:29:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, here we go.

• 3:29:40Speaker 02

  What do you, I took the master class, by the way. Very helpful, very good. That was a very well done one. Um, what's your thoughts on like good, the whole good cop, bad cop, uh, interrogation?

• 3:29:51Speaker 01

  Anything that's a manipulation or where you're not being genuine and honest. And if you're good cop, bad cop, you're probably, one of you is play acting.

• 3:30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:30:01Speaker 01

  And it's as a long-term strategy, like you might get short-term what you need. But you're always gonna find, always gonna find that you need long-term cooperation. And to engage in something that's guaranteed to cause it to go bad.

• 3:30:16Speaker 01

  Is not just, from, from a mercenary standpoint, you don't do stuff you know is gonna hurt you in the long run.

• 3:30:24Speaker 02

  So the, oh, back to the accommodator. So if I'm running late. Not that I ever run late, but hypothetically, if I'm running late and then Jaco texts me, how long? Is it gonna be till you get here? And I know probably it's gonna be like 20 minutes, probably. But I say in my head. If there's no traffic light stopping me, if traffic is good, I could probably be there in six. So I tell him about five minutes.

• 3:30:51Speaker 02

  Because I want to avoid giving him the bad news upfront, you see what I'm saying? And then I'm hopeful that I make it in the five. Is that me being the accommodator?

• 3:30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. And I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes people make on a regular basis. Constantly, like, and, and the fix is the opposite. Like, if, if you, if you know you're 20 minutes away, tell him 25.

• 3:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Here's my thinking if I would have ever, that ever were ever to happen.

• 3:31:17Speaker 02

  I'm thinking, I give him the good news so he's not that mad at me, see what I'm saying? So if I give him the, the worst possible news for that 10 minutes or whatever, he's gonna be mad. See what I'm saying? Then he's already mad when I walk in there. But if the small chance arises that I get there in the five minutes, boom, easy money.

• 3:31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how it plays out in your head.

• 3:31:40Speaker 01

  And that, that is so common. Like, and my girlfriend is an accommodator, a wonderful human being, brilliant entrepreneur, like so many things about her. That are just brilliant. She's, and she's also, she's gorgeous.

• 3:31:55Speaker 01

  I'm talking to her on the phone the other day. She's having a, you know, she's nice enough. She's in the middle of a Zoom call. She takes a call anyway. She says, hey. She says, I'm in the middle of a business call. Okay, you're back in 15 minutes. I go, okay. And then that night I called her and I said, that was the longest 15 minutes I ever heard. Like, I didn't, I, I knew when somebody gives me a vague amount of time, and it's not just her, anybody, I go on about my day. Because you're trying to be nice. You know, you're trying really hard to keep the other person from being in a bad place. And time after time after time after time, the lights are not all in, in line.

• 3:32:33Speaker 01

  And the data that you get overwhelmingly says that's going to go bad. And they're, almost everybody still does it. That was one of my favorite stories from McRaven's book, See Stories? And you might've been one of those guys out there. They're, they're running some op in the Caribbean. And the helicopters are late picking them up. And they are not outfitted for the water temperature. Water's warm, but it still ain't 98.6. And the chopper's, when are the chopper's gonna show? And the chopper's, uh, 15 minutes. And they were there for three hours. They wait, you know, and that's, that's, that's not a military op. That's human beings. Trying to be nice to other human beings.

• 3:33:17Speaker 01

  And I, you know, it just doesn't work out. So the flip side is, overestimate the time. You tell him 25 minutes. You're here in 20, he's delighted with you. He thinks you're great.

• 3:33:33Jocko Willink?

  Delighted might be a strong.

• 3:33:35Speaker 01

  But I'll tell you, you know, the airlines do this.

• 3:33:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:33:39Speaker 01

  Like, when was the last time? When was the last? No, but the opposite. Now they caught on. Cause their biggest criticism was whether or not their planes are late. So it doesn't matter what airline it is. I fly all the time. Plane lands. And they go like, well, our gate's not open yet. So we gotta wait another 20 minutes before we get at the gate. And the first couple of times that happened, I remember, and I said out loud in the airport, was it a surprise that we showed up? Like, this plane is really big. I know they picked it up on radar. They saw us coming from a long way away. How is the gate still occupied? We're not here as a surprise. The airline knew all along when they were gonna get there.

• 3:34:21Speaker 01

  But to fool you, they told you they were gonna be there at 3 o'clock. You made your plans around 3 o'clock. They land at 2:30, which is a half an hour early. You think the airline's great and you're mad at the airport. Nobody ever blames you. The airline knew all along when they were really gonna get there. So when you show up early, when you overestimated the time, the people you're doing business with love you. They think you're fantastic. You put time back in their day.

• 3:34:49Speaker 02

  This thing goes deep, man.

• 3:34:52Jocko Willink?

  Well, plus just like, uh, building a relationship with people, the more you tell them things that's really gonna happen, you know, the higher the trust level goes. As opposed to telling someone you're gonna be there in 6 minutes and you show up in 16 minutes. Over time, over time.

• 3:35:09Speaker 02

  This is a hypothetical. What about if someone has food in their teeth? And you don't wanna tell them? Accommoder, right?

• 3:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's gonna go bad. You gotta know, right?

• 3:35:22Speaker 02

  Just gotta tell them, right? It helps them out, big picture, but you don't want to deliver that bad news is kind of the deal. That's the plight, right, of the accommodator? Just hopeful. Hopefully it'll like fall out and no one has to say.

• 3:35:33Jocko Willink?

  If you're over there trying to figure out if you're an accommodator or not, I'm gonna go ahead and say, let's, I'll solve that riddle for you right now. You're an accommodator, for sure.

• 3:35:42Speaker 02

  Hey, we're all doing the best we can.

• 3:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Right on, right on. Anything else, Echo Charles?

• 3:35:45Speaker 02

  That is, it is honor. I've followed you. Actually, I got that book great when it came out, so.

• 3:35:50Speaker 01

  Thank you. That's cool. I appreciate that.

• 3:35:52Jocko Willink?

  What year did the book come out?

• 3:35:53Speaker 01

  2016.

• 3:35:54Jocko Willink?

  Damn, it's been out for a while. Awesome. Uh, Chris, any thoughts, any closing thoughts from you?

• 3:36:00Speaker 01

  No, I've, I've enjoyed the conversation. Um,

• 3:36:06Speaker 01

  delighted at how thoroughly you understand how this applies to leadership and everything else. I mean, you've seen the parallels right away. You know, I've listened to your other podcast where you talk about like, you know, I left high school, I'm not an educated dude. But you're a learner, which is really cool.

• 3:36:26Jocko Willink?

  Which is really cool. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. And, uh, thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming down here. And thanks for sharing your experiences and, and all these lessons learned with everybody. I mean, it's just awesome that people can pick up this book and learn what you've learned over the decades of work you've put into this. And of course, more important, uh, thanks for your service. Thanks for your service in, in law enforcement and the FBI. Thanks for fighting terrorists and kidnappers and, and drug dealers and criminals to keep us safe here on the home front.

• 3:37:01Speaker 01

  And the same to you, brother.

• 3:37:02Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it was an honor to be able to serve.

• 3:37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, amen. Exactly. It was a privilege.

• 3:37:07Jocko Willink?

  All right. Thank you. And with that, Chris Voss has left the building.

• 3:37:15Jocko Willink?

  Echo Charles.

• 3:37:15Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Excited about that one, huh?

• 3:37:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:37:18Jocko Willink?

  You liked that one?

• 3:37:19Speaker 02

  I liked that one.

• 3:37:19Jocko Willink?

  Lot to learn.

• 3:37:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:37:21Jocko Willink?

  What was your, uh, big takeaway besides the fact that you're an accommodator?

• 3:37:26Speaker 02

  I know. I'm a guy, I felt it, right? When he was explaining it, I was like, "Bro, that's..."

• 3:37:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, he also said they make the most deals.

• 3:37:32Speaker 02

  There you go, right? Establishing rapport, all that. Uh, and I, eh, look, am I, am I, am I an accommodator? I don't know. But if I'm not, I know I have accommodator traits from time to time.

• 3:37:44Jocko Willink?

  We know that you're not analytic.

• 3:37:47Speaker 02

  Dang, okay.

• 3:37:48Jocko Willink?

  And we know that you're not assertive. There's only three options.

• 3:37:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, well, no, no, no, we go for a blend, right?

• 3:37:54Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you blend, blend. But you're high percentage accommodator, maybe?

• 3:37:58Speaker 02

  We'll go with that from now on. I'm gonna keep an eye on it, cuz I, I like to know what I don't know. So he seemed saying, so it did shed some light on, uh, on that thing. Um, it, the, the interesting takeaway. Geography is more influential than ethnicity in building. And it makes sense because in Hawaii, everybody's mixed and, you know, there's all different kind of community. But, but if you're from Waimea Nalu, and I'm from Waimea Nalu, yeah. We, we, we can meet in Dubai, me and you brothers, 100%.

• 3:38:30Speaker 02

  So, boom. Um, so that made a lot of sense to me. And what did, what did, did shed some light on is some of your tactics as well.

• 3:38:38Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 3:38:39Speaker 02

  In a good way.

• 3:38:39Jocko Willink?

  Explain.

• 3:38:40Speaker 02

  So, um, okay, one time you called me out for clicking the pen. I edited it out, so it's not on any episode, but it's, and the way you said it was,

• 3:38:54Speaker 02

  "Is that clicking gonna show up on the recording, do you think?" You said, "You think." Like me, it was like my idea kind of a thing, you know? Like, I have to figure out for myself if it's gonna, as opposed to, "Hey, that clicking is annoying, and it's gonna ruin the take," or whatever, you know? I was like, "Oh, I see." Cuz it was effective. And if you look back on the video, I think I, uh, published that outtake somewhere.

• 3:39:19Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 3:39:20Speaker 02

  If you look on the video, I responded like totally like it worked. That little tactic.

• 3:39:28Jocko Willink?

  It really was cool to read the book and to identify all these things that they're psychological. Their psychological traits or psychological characteristics or psychological maneuvers. So they work with human beings. So it doesn't matter your leadership, your interrogation, your, your negotiation, they're all, they're all gonna have some similar, similar approaches and they are. And so, yeah, it was really cool, really cool to read about, really cool to, to go through and then be able to sit here with Chris and talk through it. And you know, it's awesome. And again, I kinda did go through, I talked about it on the podcast, but like the book has a bunch of cool stories in it, right?

• 3:40:14Jocko Willink?

  And there's a temptation just to jump into like negotiation, hostage negotiation, all that stuff. But I felt like I really kinda wanted to dive into the tactics, the principles themselves. So maybe I was a little bit selfish on that one. But.

• 3:40:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what I realized about you? I think I might've told you this before, where your, your interest is like, it's like an 80/20 where you like how things work for sure, but only like 20%. 80% is you're interested in, okay, so what do we do about it? So like, and I think I'm kinda the, if I'm like really trying to be introspective, I'm kinda the opposite. So I'm like a 20/80 kind of a scenario. So anytime I start going deep on how things work, I see your eyes kinda glaze over and then you snapped and you'd be like, okay, this is what you do. It's like you, you interrupt it with the next step kind of a thing.

• 3:41:09Speaker 02

  So, so I can see why you'd be really into the, the stories. But yeah, I think the tactics are, are the ones that a lot of the time anyway, if you listen to them, it's like, okay, now I can use them in my particular life. I think they're both together are the most effective for sure.

• 3:41:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. The other thing that I, I thought about, look, I don't care how long a podcast is gonna be. I don't care if it's 12 hours, but I also. You know, you have to think, all right, if we start getting into all these cool stories he's gotten here, they all have their own branches and you know, sub stories and details. That's gonna be, you know, we get to a point where diminishing returns, right? We just have a 19 hour podcast, in which point just get on, just, just go and read the book yourself, or go get the audio book and go with it that way. So that's kind of the, kind of how I went with it. But uh, really, just, just awesome to have him on here and, and learn from,

• 3:42:06Jocko Willink?

  you know, the subtitle of the book is negotiating as if your life depends on it, depended on it, right? So he has countless times negotiated stuff that it, where someone's life or lives were on the line. Doesn't get more, you know, I, I, I used to say about extreme ownership, combat is like life, but amplified and intensified. Well, if you can negotiate for someone's life, you can negotiate for the car that you want. The used car that you want to pay, you know, 2,700 bucks for instead of the 4,200 bucks that they're offering it. So, there you go. Uh, thanks for joining us, everybody. If you want to, if you like this podcast, if you want to support it,

• 3:42:48Jocko Willink?

  and you want to actually support yourself cognitively, you want to be cognitively ready for those moments. That's why I'm three deep right now with Jaco Fuel.

• 3:42:58Speaker 02

  I dig it.

• 3:42:58Jocko Willink?

  With Discipline Goes. Now, normally you'd be thinking, oh, you drank three energy drinks today? You've had a bad day. You have to, you have to mark this down as a negative on your overall health. We're actually not doing that at all, not even doing that at all. Cause I had one, what time is it? It's four o'clock right now. I had the first one at like 10:30 prior to a Echelon Front Academy call.

• 3:43:25Jocko Willink?

  Then I had another one as we kind of started this thing and then I had another one as we kind of got halfway through this thing. So what does that mean I've had? Does that mean I've had a bunch of sugar? Does it mean I've had eighty two gram? No, I've had zero sugar. I've had some monk fruit, which is a beautiful thing. I've had, have I had, what would that be? Three times? Have I had six hundred milligrams of caffeine? No, I haven't even had three hundred milligrams caffeine.

• 3:43:51Jocko Willink?

  Haven't, so we're good over here. Plus I've got some vitamin B6, B12. Yep. You know, I'm good. Yep, doing good. So if you want to be good too, but you want that energy? Yeah. Go to Jacofuel.com, get yourself some mulk, which is dessert. Get yourself some go. You can also go to Wawa. We got the ready to drink protein. Available? Available in Wawa.

• 3:44:21Jocko Willink?

  You can, Jacofuel.com, you can check it. Um, we're getting there, but the ready to drink stuff is kind of a game changer. Yeah, it's good. I told you about the chocolate milk versus mulk, right? Yes, sir. With my daughter? Yeah. Who is not gonna pull any punches. Yeah. She, she looked Pete, you know, we sat down at table at camp and Pete was all like, bro, it's better than chocolate milk. And she looked at him like he was just a liar. You know what I mean? I almost had to like get her to settle down, you know? I'm like, you can't look at a, you know, a grown man like he's a liar, but she kind of looked at him like, and he, the good thing is Pete was like, oh, let's go. Yeah.

• 3:45:03Jocko Willink?

  Let's go. Get him out. So we got out the straight, regular, like chocolate milk. Yeah. And mulk, side by side. Taste test. Well, blind taste test. She, she was like, dang. That's the, that's the true, that's probably the truest and most awesome test that's ever been performed for taste in the world. Yep, in the world. Probably right. So there you go. Get yourself some mulk, get yourself some ready to drink mulk. Vitamin Shoppe's got this stuff as well. Go in there. Thing is, hey, you gotta remember about Wawa? Somebody, somebody hit me up on social media. They cleared the shelves in Wawa. Thank you. Cause look, it's a war out there. Have I explained the war to you a little bit?

• 3:45:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:45:47Jocko Willink?

  It's a war. The big companies don't like the little companies.

• 3:45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:45:51Jocko Willink?

  The big companies have overwhelming firepower in the term, in the, in the form of cash, money, that they can throw to try and crush the, the, the up and comers. They don't want that competition. They want to smash, they want to smash Jaco Fuel. They want to smash Discipline Go.

• 3:46:13Jocko Willink?

  So what they do is they make maneuvers. They throw money at, at stores.

• 3:46:19Jocko Willink?

  And the stores like to offer something else, but they gotta be able to, gotta make sense. So when you go and you clear the shelves, they're wah wah, thank you. When you go in, any of these, any of these stores. When you go in there and get after it, it shows them that there's demand signal to retail and they want to keep us. As opposed to when somebody throws a bunch of money at them and say, we want you to, we want you to get rid of those guys.

• 3:46:43Jocko Willink?

  Think about that. That's called a monopoly.

• 3:46:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:46:46Jocko Willink?

  Right?

• 3:46:46Speaker 02

  Yep. Those are monopoly moves.

• 3:46:48Jocko Willink?

  Those are monopoly moves.

• 3:46:51Jocko Willink?

  And so we appreciate it when you help us fight the man. Right? The corporate entity. That's not a person. There's no person. Those, those other companies are not people.

• 3:47:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:47:02Jocko Willink?

  They're not people. They're just big corporate entities. There's big, giant corporate entities. No people there. No humans. We're human. We're here. We're getting after it. Ah, so anyways, appreciate it. JacoFuel.com, go get some of that. Uh, OriginUSA.com.

• 3:47:20Jocko Willink?

  Get yourself some American-made everything.

• 3:47:24Jocko Willink?

  Hunt gear. We're getting it out. Certain pieces are out. The pants are out. The, some of the shirts are out. Just get on there and order it. If, if it's not available right now, we're making it. And if you want to get it, you gotta order it now. I'm sorry. But you gotta order it now. And then we'll get it to you as soon as it's ready, as soon as it's been made here in America by American hands. Jeans, boots.

• 3:47:52Jocko Willink?

  Jiu Jitsu Gi's. We don't put that Jiu Jitsu Gi on sometimes. Rash Guards, put that on. So that's what we're doing. OriginUSA.com. Get yourself some of that. Support America. And support yourself.

• 3:48:04Speaker 02

  It's true. Also, Jaco's store. Jaco's store called Jaco's store. This one equals freedom shirts. New one is out. It's been out. It's a good one.

• 3:48:12Jocko Willink?

  What, the standard issue one?

• 3:48:14Speaker 02

  Standard issue.

• 3:48:14Jocko Willink?

  Multiple forms?

• 3:48:15Speaker 02

  Multiple forms. Uh, get one. Look, is Christmas near? Is Christmas near technically? Maybe, maybe not, but.

• 3:48:24Jocko Willink?

  Bro, they already have Christmas stuff available. Where was it? My wife came home and said they, like, she went to Target or Walmart or something. And they were like, she's like, Christmas gear is up.

• 3:48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48:34Jocko Willink?

  Available. So is it near?

• 3:48:36Speaker 02

  This is something to think about. We'll say that. So yes, we've got some good stuff on there. Some kids' stuff on there. Warrior kid's stuff on there as well. So we kind of got everything. Something for everybody if you want to check it out.

• 3:48:46Jocko Willink?

  Face it, the warrior kids need that Christmas hitter.

• 3:48:48Speaker 02

  It, yeah, it, that'll be a good clothing gift. I've got some accessories. We've got some good stuff on there. Also. We've got the Shirt Locker.

• 3:48:57Jocko Willink?

  I saw that Halloween one is legit.

• 3:48:59Speaker 02

  Halloween, something like that on that one. No, another good gift idea, by the way. Got some gift cards too on there.

• 3:49:06Jocko Willink?

  The gift that keeps on giving.

• 3:49:07Speaker 02

  That keeps on giving every month.

• 3:49:09Jocko Willink?

  Get somebody the Shirt Locker. And then they get a new T-shirt every month.

• 3:49:14Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:49:14Jocko Willink?

  That has layers in it.

• 3:49:15Speaker 02

  Layers.

• 3:49:16Jocko Willink?

  Could be one layer, could be seven layers. You get seven layers. Do we charge by the layer? No, no. The layer is just part of the package.

• 3:49:23Speaker 02

  Included. You're right. But yes, good, cool designs. People like, really like the designs. That's what I'm finding out and thank you. Thanks for everyone for the feedback. So yeah, really good. Shirt Locker, men's stuff, women's stuff, hoodies, hats, all that cool stuff.

• 3:49:36Jocko Willink?

  There's stuff.

• 3:49:37Speaker 02

  Jaco's store.com.

• 3:49:37Jocko Willink?

  Stuff across the board. Subscribe to the podcast. You know that. JacoUnderground.com. We've been recording those.

• 3:49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49:44Jocko Willink?

  Putting word out, answering your questions.

• 3:49:48Jocko Willink?

  If you go to JacoUnderground.com, the people are getting censored right now. People are getting banned, whatever. We're not gonna, that's not gonna happen to us, at least on the platform that we, it could happen on this platform, whatever platform you're listening to. They could ban us.

• 3:50:01Jocko Willink?

  If that happens, we'll be on jockunderground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. If you can't afford it, no big deal. We still, we're still here to support. Look, we know hard times right now, right? If you can't afford it, email [email protected]. If you can't afford it, cool. Support the cause. Capital T H E, the, capital C, A U S E. The cause. Freedom. Psychological Warfare, we got flipsidecampus.com. Books, obviously, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. Check that book out. And then all the books I've written. Get that book. Only Cry for the Living by Holly McKay. Just a great book. We put it out on Jocko Publishing.

• 3:50:44Jocko Willink?

  Check that one out. And then all the books I've written. You know what they are. So go get them. Get the Warrior Kid books. Let's face it. That book would have helped you sell out so much if you had it when you were a kid. It would have helped me. And if you know kids, any kids, get them that book. Once again, Christmas, cool. Get it. Make it happen. Echelon Front. You heard me talking a lot about leadership today? Well, we solve problems through leadership at Echelon Front. Go to echelonfront.com. And also, up and coming, we've got a little something that we call

• 3:51:22Jocko Willink?

  the Roll Call, which Roll Call is an event. And we've got one. October 17th in St. Louis, Missouri. Had to just check this because they told me they still got some seats. Our stuff sells out quick. So Roll Call is for police, law enforcement, first responders, military, October 17th, St. Louis, Missouri. If you can, if you're in that category, go and check that out. It's gonna be, it's our leadership principles kind of geared toward that group of people. Also, we have online training. Said this today. You're not gonna get good at leadership with one book, or with one rehearsal, or one practice.

• 3:52:07Jocko Willink?

  No, you need to get in there. Go to extremeworship.com. Learn about life. Square your life away.

• 3:52:17Jocko Willink?

  Extreme ownership.com. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. She's got a charity organization. If you want to donate, or you want to get involved, go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org. Also, check out Mike Affink. He's got his program, taking you up and taking vets up into the wilderness. So they can find themselves again and rebuild. Heroes and horses.org. If you want to follow Chris Voss and the Black Swan Group, it's BlackSwanLTD.com.

• 3:52:57Jocko Willink?

  Facebook and Instagram is Black Swan LTD. Twitter, at Black Swan Group. And Chris is on Instagram. He's at The FBI Negotiator. And of course, we are also on social media and whatnot. Twitter, Graham, Facebook, Echo's at Echo Charles, I'm at Jocko Willink. Of course, watch out because that algorithm sitting there waiting to grab you by the throat and drag you into oblivion. Don't let it. Thanks once again to Chris Voss for joining us, for teaching us about negotiation. And thanks to Chris for his service in the

• 3:53:37Jocko Willink?

  police department and the FBI. Thanks to all the FBI agents that are out there right now, doing their best to keep us safe. And the same goes to the rest of our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, all first responders. Thanks for everything that you all do to keep us safe. And of course, thanks to our military men and women who are on the front lines around the world right now. We live in freedom because of the sacrifices you make. Thank you for your service. And everyone else out there, life is a negotiation.

• 3:54:19Jocko Willink?

  And people are not rational. They are filled with emotions and biases and judgments. And that includes you.

• 3:54:32Jocko Willink?

  So pay attention and listen more than you talk, not just in negotiation, but in leadership and life. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco, out.