Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #364 – Chris Voss: FBI Hostage Negotiator About this episode Chris Voss is a former FBI hostage and crisis negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:31) – Negotiation
(12:21) – Reason vs Emotion
(27:17) – How to listen
(36:06) – Negotiation with terrorists
(38:14) – Brittney Griner
(39:53) – Putin and Zelenskyy
(47:13) – Donald Trump
(54:23) – When to walk away
(58:37) – Israel and Palestine
(1:06:16) – Al-Qaeda
(1:11:46) – Three voices of negotiation
(1:20:11) – Strategic umbrage
(1:23:18) – Mirroring
(1:26:29) – Labeling
(1:33:55) – Exhaustion
(1:36:09) – The word “fair”
(1:39:06) – Closing the deal
(1:41:03) – Manipulation and lying
(1:42:58) – Conversation vs Negotiation
(1:54:17) – The 7-38-55 Rule
(1:58:16) – Chatbots
(2:07:39) – War
(2:09:10) – Advice for young people
Transcript 21,922 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Chris Voss, former FBI hostage and crisis negotiator and author of Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It.
0:13 Lex Fridman? And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Shopify for e-commerce, Indeed for hiring great teams, and InsideTracker for biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
0:49 Lex Fridman? This show is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day-to-day operations. And it also taunts me, Lex, for being a lazy person because I should have already set up a little shop for selling merch, which people have been asking me for. Just a couple of T-shirts that allow you to celebrate a thing you're into, which I love doing. I'm into a lot of stuff. I'm a fan of a large number of podcasts. I wear their merch. I wear their shirts, bands. I have more Metallica shirts than I can count.
1:30 Lex Fridman? And it's just wonderful to share the thing that brings you joy with the rest of the world. And then it starts a conversation and then you're like, you love Metallica too? I love Metallica. And then the rest of the conversation somehow flourishes with a even a greater, bigger than it otherwise might have. I guess it's a catalyst for the initial spark of a conversation that shares a kind of thread. You start at the thread and the thread creates a garden. There you go. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. All lowercase.
2:11 Lex Fridman? Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. And also yell at me if I haven't set up a Shopify store soon. Please, I need your help. This show is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them many times for the many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led in the past. I've recently actually had to write a few recommendation letters for people who I've worked with in the past. And I really enjoy doing that because it reminds me how awesome the people are. It kind of takes me back to those times.
2:51 Lex Fridman? And those, those months, those years that you get to spend together on a difficult problem, you get to solve it together. The camaraderie of that, the struggles of that, the passions of that, the ups and downs. We're really hopeful one day and then there's all these problems and you think the ideas you're doing are totally stupid. It's not going to work out and you kind of like can't quite figure out the puzzle of it. You might have to start over completely. You have to backtrack, all of that. The full mess of that and you get to share in that together. And ultimately, at least for the things I've worked on, there's a mission, there's a dream to understand something deeply or to help a large number of people. And that just gives a whole journey of struggle together, meaning.
3:35 Lex Fridman? I mention that because the process of building up a team, the process of hiring a team is so important because a great team is so important, not just the success of the company or a research group or anything you're doing, relationships. It's also just a source of happiness. So use the best tools for the job of building the team. And Indeed is an incredible tool. Indeed knows when you're growing your own business, every dollar counts. That's why with Indeed, you only pay for quality applications that match your job requirements. Visit indeed.com/lex to start hiring now. That's indeed.com/lex. Terms and conditions apply.
4:19 Lex Fridman? Cost per application pricing not available for everyone.
4:23 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. An interesting, small-scale example of that, perhaps you can hear it from my nose at the moment, is that I've started getting allergies as nature wakes up from its winter slumber. And I think it's already a year ago, maybe a little bit over than that. I got a test for different things I'm allergic to. And they put different things on your skin. It's like this grid and you get to see what are the things that you're allergic to based on that little grid cell of the skin having an allergic reaction.
5:07 Lex Fridman? And I was not allergic to most things, but there's a few that stood out. There's an interesting little data point, right? It's probably true that over time that changes. Maybe across a period of months and years, based on the medication you take, based on the environmental conditions, based on your diet, all that kind of stuff. And so it'd be nice to do that same test over and over and over to get a sense of how my allergic reaction to the world around me changes. Okay, there's a million things like this. And the core to you making a good, effective decision on what you should do with your life, lifestyle, health, diet, whatever, is to ground that in data. So the core to the allergy thing is data. The core to everything InsideTracker does is data.
5:51 Lex Fridman? I'm really excited about personalized data, driven advice for how to make your life better. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Chris Voss.
6:31 Lex Fridman? What is it like negotiating for a hostage with a kidnapper? What is the toughest part of that process?
6:37 Speaker 01 The toughest part is if it looks bad from the beginning. And you gotta engage in a process anyway.
6:44 Lex Fridman? What are the factors that make it bad? That makes you nervous, that if you're at a situation where there's general negotiation or it's a hostage negotiation? What makes you think that this is going to be difficult?
6:57 Speaker 01 If they want to make it look like they're negotiating, but they're not. Like in the 2004 timeframe, Al Qaeda in Iraq was executing people on camera for the publicity. And they wanted to make it look like they were negotiating. So they'd come on and they say, if you don't get all the women out of, Iraqi women out of the jails in Iraq in 72 hours, we're gonna kill a hostage. That was one of the demands in one of the cases in that timeframe. Now, first of all, even if we'd have been willing, the US government, the coalition, would have been willing to do that. It wouldn't have been able to happen in 72 hours. So it was an impossible ask from the beginning. And so then that looks really bad.
7:39 Speaker 01 Like they're trying to make it, they're trying to make it look like they're talking reasonably, but they're not. So your hostage is in bad shape there. If they made a demand that you just, even if you wanted to do, you couldn't do. So then what makes that very difficult is, in kidnappings especially, you're working with family members, you're coaching people. Bad guys are in touch with family members. Or if they're not directly in touch with family members, the other thing that Al Qaeda was doing at that time was, they didn't give us a way to talk to them. They're making statements in the media, but then not leaving their phone number, if you will.
8:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
8:17 Speaker 01 So that's one more thing. Like they're intentionally blocking you. They're asking you to do something you can't do. They're not giving you a way to talk to them. So you gotta get with the family and discuss with the family how you're gonna approach things. Now, the family definitely wants to know, is this gonna help? There's a bunch of cases like that in that timeframe. And you gotta be honest with them. It's a long shot. Our chances here are slim and none. And when it's slim and none, I'll take slim, but it's still very, very slim. And there were a number of people that were killed in that timeframe before the tide finally got turned. And it was, it was hard dealing with the families at the time.
8:53 Lex Fridman? Can you negotiate in public versus like a direct channel and private?
8:57 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah. Bad guys pick the media. They're making statements in the media. So, and that's a big clue. Their, their channel of choice tells you an awful lot. And if they're choosing the media, then that means there's people they're trying to appeal to. That means in their view, there's such a thing as good media. So if there's good media, there's bad media. How do you make it bad? And we made it bad for them. It just, unfortunately, it had to go through a number of iterations before they got the message and quit.
9:27 Lex Fridman? In that negotiation, do you think about the value of human life? Is there a dollar figure? Is there, how, how do you enumerate, not enumerate, quantify the value of human life?
9:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's, it's like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. So that was the first lesson on any hostage negotiation, really any negotiation. Like, it doesn't matter what it is to you, matters what it is to the other side. One of the things, especially in your, in your conversation I listened to with Andrew. By the way, you guys, I, another thing I really liked about that conversation, first of all, I think the world of him.
10:05 Lex Fridman? Andrew Huberman.
10:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, Andrew Huberman. And he released it on my birthday. I appreciate that. It was a nice birthday present to me.
10:12 Lex Fridman? I tried to time it perfectly just for you.
10:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, nice job. Thank you. But empathy is in the eye of the beholder. In every negotiation, whether it's over a car, a house, collaboration in your company with the bad guys. How does the other side see it? Now, the nice thing about kidnapping for ransom, if there's, if there's an actual ransom demand, it's an actual demand.
10:39 Speaker 01 Is it's a mercenary's business. They're gonna take what they could get. And they tend to be really good at figuring out how much money somebody has. So, and again, I'll keep drawing business analogies. You're looking for a job with an employer. There's a market price of the job. And then there's what the employer can pay you. Now, maybe the market price of the job markets 150 grand. Employer can pay you 120. But it's a great job. You know, we were talking about Elon a minute ago. Like, I'd work minimum wage to follow him around.
11:19 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
11:20 Speaker 01 You know, that would be worth it. What are the value other than the dollars? And how hard is it to get the dollars? And how quickly can you get to them? Those, these are all things that the bad guys are good in kidnapping are good at figuring out. So, the value of a human life to them is gonna be what can they get? A crazy thing in the kidnap business. We used to get asked by FBI leadership. When is this gonna be over? And the answer would be when the bad guys feel like they've gotten everything they can. Now, dissecting that statement, you're talking about when they feel like they got everything they can. So, the key to kidnapping negotiations are the feelings of the bad guys.
12:05 Speaker 01 We're talking about feelings, kidnappers' feelings.
12:08 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
12:08 Speaker 01 Which drives everything. Doesn't matter what human endeavor it is.
12:14 Lex Fridman? So, it's not reason, it's emotion.
12:18 Speaker 01 There's no such thing as reason.
12:21 Lex Fridman? I should say, for a little bit of context, I just talked yesterday with a guy named Sam Harris.
12:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:30 Lex Fridman? I don't know if you know Sam. But Sam, and because I was preparing for a conversation with you, I talked to him about empathy versus reason. And he lands heavily on reason.
12:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:42 Lex Fridman? Empathy is somewhere between useless and erroneous and leaves you astray and is not effective. That reason is the only way forward.
12:54 Speaker 01 Well, let's draw some fine lines there. And the two fine lines I would draw is, first, what is your definition of empathy? And then, secondly, Uh, how do people actually make up their minds? And I'm, and I'm gonna flip it, I'm gonna go with how people make up their minds. You make up your mind based on what you care about. Period. That makes reason emotion based. What do you care about? You start with what you care about. You see some guy swimming out in, off the coast of the ocean and you see a shark coming up behind him. Who are you cheering for? If it's Adolf Hitler out there, you're cheering for the shark. You might actually feel bad for shark because it's gonna, it's gonna taste bad.
13:39 Speaker 01 Who do you care about?
13:40 Lex Fridman? You mean the human will taste bad?
13:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, you, you, you know, he eats Adolf Hitler, you know, that's gonna leave a bad taste in your mouth, even if you're a shark. So you're making up your mind on every circumstances based on what you care about. So then what does that do to reason? Your reason is based on what you care about from the beginning. Now then empathy. If you define it as sympathy, which it was never meant to be sympathy, ever. You know, I, uh, etymology, I think is the word. I keep getting etymology and entomology mixed up. Etymology being, right, the, you know, where words came from, the origin, entomology being bugs.
14:18 Lex Fridman? Got it.
14:19 Speaker 01 Right, so I like etymology. Where did something come from? I also like entomology. Anyway, uh, etymology. The, my understanding from my research, uh, the original definition of empathy was an interpretation of a German word where people were trying to figure out what the artist was trying to convey. It was about assessing art. And so it was always about understanding where somebody was coming from, but not sharing necessarily that same thing. So then when I was with the FBI and I first started collaborating with Harvard, Bob Manukin wrote a book, Beyond Winning. Second chapter is the tension between empathy and assertiveness.
15:02 Speaker 01 Still the best chapter on empathy I've ever read anywhere. And Bob writes in his book, Bob was the head of the program on negotiation. He's also, uh, agreed to be interviewed for a documentary, uh, that, about me and my company that hasn't been released yet, but it should be released sometime this year.
15:20 Lex Fridman? What's the name of the documentary?
15:21 Speaker 01 Tactical Empathy.
15:23 Lex Fridman? Good name.
15:25 Speaker 01 So Bob's definition of empathy said not agreeing, or even liking the other side. Don't even gotta like them, don't gotta agree with them, just straight, understanding where they're coming from and articulating it, which requires no agreement whatsoever. That becomes a very powerful tool, like ridiculously powerful, and if it, if sympathy or compassion or agreement are not included, you can be empathic with anybody. I was thinking about this, uh, when I was getting ready to sit down and talk to you, because you use the word empathy a lot. Um, Putin. I can be empathic with Putin, easy, it's easy.
16:09 Speaker 01 I don't agree with where he's coming from, I don't, uh, agree with his methodology. Early on, the Ukraine-Russian war, I saw an article that was very dismissive of Russia, that said Russia's basically Europe's gas station. And I thought, alright, so if you're in charge, and the way you feed your people is via an industry that the entire world is trying to quit. The whole world is trying to get out of fossil fuels. If that's how you feed your people, if you don't come up with an answer to that,
16:50 Speaker 01 the people that you've taken a responsibility for are gonna die alone in the cold and the dark. They're gonna freeze and they're gonna die. Alright, so that doesn't mean that I agree with where he's coming from or any of his means. But where, where, where's, how does this guy see things in his distorted world? You're never gonna get through to somebody like that in a conversation unless you can demonstrate to them you understand where they're coming from, whether or not you agree. Early 90s, last century, I'm a last century guy, I'm an old dude. Refer to myself as a last century guy, also a deeply flawed human. Yeah. So, um, terrorist case, New York City, civilian court, terrorism does not have to be tried in military tribunals.
17:35 Speaker 01 It's a very bad idea, it was always bad. The FBI was always against it. I'm getting ready. We have Muslims testifying in open court against a legitimate Muslim cleric. The guy that was on trial had the credentials as a legitimate Muslim cleric. The people that were testifying against him didn't think he should be advocating murder of innocent people. We'd sit down with them, Arab Muslims, Egyptians mostly. And I would say to them, you believe that there's been a succession of American governments for the last 200 years that are anti-Islamic. And they'd shake their head and go, yeah.
18:20 Speaker 01 And that'd be the start of the conversation. That's empathy. You believe this to be the case. I never said I agreed. I never said I disagreed. But I showed them that I wasn't afraid of their beliefs. I was so unafraid of them that I was willing to just state them and not disagree or contradict. Because I would say that and then I'd shut up and let them react. And I never had to say, here's why you're wrong. I never gave my point of view. Every single one of them that testified, that's empathy, not agreeing with where the other side is coming from. I'm not sure how Sam would define it, but common vernacular is it's sympathy and it's compassion. And that's when it becomes useless.
19:01 Lex Fridman? And there is a gray area, maybe you can comment on it, is sometimes a drop of compassion helps make that empathy more effective in the conversation. So you just saying you believe X doesn't quite form as strong of a bond with the other person.
19:24 Speaker 01 You're imagining it doesn't.
19:26 Lex Fridman? Maybe you're right. Yes, I'm imagining it doesn't. I'm imagining you need to show that you're on the same side, that you're, you need to signal a little bit about your actual beliefs, at least in that moment, even if those, that signaling is a, is a not as deep as it sounds. But at first, you know, basically patting the person on the back and saying, we're on the same side, brother.
19:50 Speaker 01 You know, that's, that's what most people.
19:54 Speaker 01 When they're really learning the concept, that's the basic human reaction.
19:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
20:00 Speaker 01 And in application, especially in highly adversarial situations. Like, I, I need, I need a regular guy, Muslim. But how's that guy gonna say, buy it if I like, you know, dude, I'm on your side. I've been there. I feel you. No, no, no, no, no. People get conned by that so much. Like, if we're on opposite sides of the table and I try to act like I'm not on the opposite side of the table, that makes me disingenuous. So I would rather be honest. My, you know, my currency is integrity.
20:43 Speaker 01 And at some point in time, if you go like, you know where I'm coming from? My answer is gonna be like, look, I can agree on maybe where we're going. But if we're talking about, you know, am I on your side now? As a human being, I want to see you survive and thrive, not at my expense. I think the world is full of opportunity. I'm optimistic. I got more than enough reason for saying that. There's enough here for both of us. So I got no problem with you getting yours. You know, just don't take it out of my hide. And I'm gonna be honest about it, about both of those things. I'm not interested in you taking it out of my hide. I think there's plenty here for both of us. Now, I don't, I don't need to be on your side, except in a, in a human sense.
21:28 Speaker 01 But I don't, do I have to side with you over the war? No. Or the, how we're distributing the stock? Or how much I get paid? Or how much you make off this car? I think people, my experience as a layman, is that empathy's not got a downside. That you don't, you don't need me to act like I'm on your side for us to make a great deal.
21:55 Lex Fridman? Great deal. Well, we'll talk about two things, a great deal and a great conversation.
22:00 Speaker 01 Right.
22:00 Lex Fridman? They're usually, they're often going to be the same thing, but at times they're going to be different. And that's a, you mentioned Vladimir Putin. There is some zoom level at which you do want to say we're on the same side. You said the human level. It's possible to say, kind of zoom out. And say that we're all in this together. Not we Slavic people, we Europeans, we, but we human beings.
22:27 Speaker 01 We're on the same planet.
22:29 Lex Fridman? Same planet.
22:29 Speaker 01 Right. Several years ago, and his name has evidently been mud now. But he was very nice to me, lawyer here in town named Tom Girardi. And no shortage of bad reporting on him now. I have absolutely no idea if any of it's true. I do know that in my interaction with him, he was always a gentleman to me and was very generous.
22:54 Speaker 01 When he'd get into conversations with people, he'd always say like, you know, let's look at 10 years from now.
23:01 Speaker 01 Where we could both be in a phenomenal place together. Now let's work our way back from there.
23:08 Lex Fridman? That's a good line.
23:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, and then, you know, I saw him do it in simulations. He, I was teaching at USC. We were at a function together. And a gentleman at the time told me that, that who he was, and he was really influential. So I walked up to the guy cold and I said, hey, you know, I'm gonna come in and talk to my class at USC.
23:29 Speaker 01 He didn't know me, other than the fact that we had mutual acquaintance and he graciously consented to come in. And he said, what do you want me to talk about? And I said, look, dude, dude, just from your success here, it doesn't matter what you're talking about. You know, either I'm gonna agree or I'm gonna disagree or I'm gonna learn from it. My students are gonna learn from it. So students wanna role play with them, you know, they dispute, and let's do a negotiation. Every single time he'd go to pick a point in the future. Where we're both happy.
23:59 Speaker 01 10 years, 20 years from now. And let's work our way back. Now hostage negotiator, same thing. I call into a bank. Bad guy picks up on the, picks up on the phone. And I'm gonna say, I want you to live. You know, I want to see you survive this. You know, whatever else goes with that, let's pick a point in the future that we're both good with. And then we work our way back. And people make also, we were talking before about emotion or what you care about, people make their decisions based on their vision of the future. Like, without question. Yeah, there's a, I think there's a Hindu temple in the United States being, has been
24:43 Speaker 01 or being assembled the same way that the Hindu temples were in India a thousand years ago. By hand, volunteers, by hand. These people are knocking themselves on for a place in paradise, a vision of the future. What you will go through today, if the future portends what you want, you'll go through incredible things today. So it's a vision of the future.
25:07 Lex Fridman? So you have to try to paint a vision of the future that the person you're negotiating with will like, which is tough to do.
25:16 Speaker 01 Let's find out what their vision of the future is, and then remove yourself as a threat.
25:22 Lex Fridman? Sure.
25:23 Speaker 01 You know, if we can collaborate together, at all, if you think that I could do anything at all to help you to that point, and, you know, integrity is my currency, I'm not going to lie to you, which gets back before that I lied to you about whether or not I'm on your side. You know, right now, at the moment, we're on opposite sized defense. That's not going to stop us from being together in the future. Inside, you're going to say, oh, well, you didn't lie to me about today, maybe you won't lie to me about tomorrow.
25:50 Lex Fridman? So going back to world leaders, for example, whether it's Volodymyr Zelensky or Vladimir Putin, you don't think it closes off their mind to show that you have a different opinion?
26:05 Speaker 01 Depending upon when you showed it. Is that, is, are you arguing from the beginning, or are you displaying understanding from the beginning? I don't, I don't think it stops you from being adversarial. That was the thing about, um...
26:18 Speaker 01 Manoukian's, the chapter in his book, the tension between empathy and assertiveness. I remember reading that, reading that name of the chapter, thinking like, eh, you know, in my business, there is no tension. And then I got into it and I read, I thought, this is a red herring. He's drawing people in because his entire chapter is that empathy puts you in a position to assert and that there is no tension. It's a sequencing issue. And that's why, again, I think it's, it was written for lawyers.
26:54 Lex Fridman? Yeah, sequencing issue. The timing is everything. So you emphasize the importance of, in terms of sequencing and priority of listening, of truly listening to the other person.
27:07 Speaker 01 I'm sorry, what'd you say? That was a bad joke.
27:09 Lex Fridman? I forgot. Your timing is just perfect. How do you, how do you listen? How do you truly listen to another human being? How do you notice them? How do you really hear them?
27:23 Speaker 01 I always hated the term active listening. If anything, it's proactive. And as soon as you start to try to anticipate where somebody's going, you're dialed in more. Because along the way, either you're congratulating yourself for being right, or when suddenly they say something that surprises you, you really notice it. Like, that's not what I expected. You're dialed in, you're listening. So it's, it's proactive. And then, one of the reasons, you know, we named the book Tactical Empathy. Name the, name the book, never split the difference, but we're talking about tactical empathy.
28:05 Speaker 01 Calibrated emotional intelligence. What's it calibrated by? First, it was experiences hostage negotiators, but, and we've come to find out that our experience as hostage negotiators is backed up by neuroscience. Another reason why I listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast all the time. Heavy, heavy, heavy, heavy on the neuroscience. And so then, emotional intelligence calibrated by what we know about neuroscience. What do we know about neuroscience? And I'll talk about it from a layman's perspective and even say we is an arrogant thing, you know, human beings. I didn't do the research. I'm scooping up as much of it as I can as a layman. The brain's largely negative.
28:47 Speaker 01 I think there's ample evidence, people would argue with you as to what the wiring is and what does what and the limbic system and all of that. But the brain is basically 75% negative. As an layman, I make that contention, number one. Number two, the best way to deactivate negativity is by calling it out. And I could say, look, I don't, I don't want you to be offended by what I'm getting ready to say. That's a denial. Your guard is up, you're getting ready to get mad. If I say, what I'm getting ready to say is probably going to offend you.
29:23 Speaker 01 Now you relax a little bit and you go, all right, what is it? And then I say it, whatever it is, and you're going to be like, oh, that wasn't that bad.
29:33 Speaker 01 Because we knew from hostage negotiation by calling out the negativity, deactivate it. And then a number of neuroscience experiments have been done right and left by calling out negativity, deactivating the negativity.
29:47 Lex Fridman? Calling out ahead of time. So like acknowledging that this is, that this is go ahead of time that this is going to hurt.
29:55 Speaker 01 The experiments that I've seen have been when the negativity was inflicted and then having the person that it was being inflicted upon simply identify it.
30:04 Lex Fridman? Just identify.
30:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, what are you feeling? I'm angry and the anger goes away.
30:11 Lex Fridman? It's tough because I've had a few, and again, we're dancing between things, but I've had a few conversations where anger arose in the guests I spoke with.
30:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:24 Lex Fridman? And I'm not sure identifying it.
30:29 Lex Fridman? That, that, that's like leaning into it and going into the depths. Cause that's going to the depths of some emotional, psychological thing they're going through that I'm not sure I want to explore that iceberg with a little ship we got.
30:47 Lex Fridman? It's a, you have to decide, do you want to avoid it?
30:52 Lex Fridman? Or do you want to lean into it? It's a tough choice.
30:54 Speaker 01 It's the elephant in the room.
30:55 Lex Fridman? It is an elephant in the room. It is an elephant, especially when, I think that's the big difference between conversations and negotiations. Negotiation ultimately is looking for closure and resolution. I think general conversations like this is more exploring. There's not necessarily a goal. Like if you were to put, like if I had to put a goal for this conversation, there's no real goal. It's curiously exploring ideas. So that'll gives you freedom to not call out the elephant for, for time. You could be like, all right, let's go to the next room, get a snack and come back to the elephant.
31:34 Speaker 01 Right. All right, so I'd make a tiny adjustment on the negotiation definition.
31:40 Lex Fridman? Sure.
31:41 Speaker 01 Cause you said, I think, um, seeking closure. You used two words and closure was one of them.
31:50 Lex Fridman? Goals, maybe another. Well, yeah, what is, what is negotiation?
31:53 Speaker 01 Well, I would say seeking collaboration. And, cause closure kind of puts a little bit of a finality to it. And a real problem in any negotiations, always implementation. It's why we say yes is, I say, we, yes is nothing without how. And, and yes, at its, at its very best is only temporary aspiration. It's aspirational. It's usually counterfeit. So if you're looking for.
32:18 Lex Fridman? That's a good line. Yes is usually counterfeit. It's aspirational without the how.
32:23 Speaker 01 Yes.
32:23 Lex Fridman? It's just a good line.
32:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. Thank you. I've been working on it. I was practicing. I, in front of the mirror for a couple minutes.
32:29 Lex Fridman? Doing pretty good. You got a bright future out of you. You should write a book or something.
32:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:40 Lex Fridman? Your book is excellent, by the way.
32:42 Speaker 01 Thanks. Appreciate that. What am I doing here, anyway?
32:45 Lex Fridman? This and Earth in general?
32:46 Speaker 01 On you, with you.
32:47 Lex Fridman? I don't know. We're collaborating.
32:51 Speaker 01 Why me, though? Why, why, why'd you, why'd you want to talk to me?
32:55 Lex Fridman? I've heard you speak in a few places. I was like, this is a fascinating human.
33:01 Lex Fridman? I think on Clubhouse and different places and I, I'll listen to some YouTube stuff and this is just you meet people that are interesting. That, that's, that's what I love doing with this podcast is just exploring the mind of an interesting person. You notice people, sometimes you, sometimes there's like a homeless person that's outside of 7-Eleven. I notice, who are you?
33:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:26 Lex Fridman? It's fascinating. It doesn't like, I don't look at the resumes and the credentials and stuff like that. It's just being able to notice a person.
33:32 Speaker 01 As I've been leafing through the different choices of the podcast, the, the young lady that OnlyFans and the sex workers. That's a fascinating human being. Like, I want to know what makes that person tech. A thousand percent.
33:47 Lex Fridman? The fascinating thing about her is her worldview is almost entirely different than mine. And that's always interesting to talk to a person who just is happy, flourishing, but sees the world and the set of values she has is completely different. And, and is also not argumentative, is accepting of other worldviews. It's, it's beautiful to explore that.
34:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, no kidding. I would agree. And then, yeah, thought provoking, because I consider myself,
34:17 Speaker 01 the word I was looking for before is abundant. I think it's an abundant world. So I'm, I'm pretty optimistic. I consider myself, I don't know, happy exactly describes it, but yeah, you know, I'm a, so then if I'm happy, optimistic, abundant, I got a worldview and then you run into somebody that has a vastly different worldview and they're happy and a, and they think it's abundant too. And you're like, what is going on in your head or mine? Or what am I missing? Yeah. So that's fascinating.
34:43 Lex Fridman? And the pie grows, which is useful for kind of negotiation. When you paint a picture of a future, if you're optimistic about that future, there's a kind of feeling like we're both going to win here.
34:55 Speaker 01 Exactly.
34:55 Lex Fridman? And that's easy. We live in a world where both people can win.
34:58 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and in point of fact, that's the case, although it's, a lot of people want us to think otherwise. Mostly because of negativity that I was talking about before.
35:07 Lex Fridman? So the brain is generally cynical.
35:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, my description of it is the pessimistic caveman survived. And we're descendants of the pessimists.
35:17 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
35:18 Speaker 01 The optimistic guy got eaten by a saber-toothed tiger.
35:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but on the flip side, the optimists seem to be the ones that actually build stuff these days.
35:27 Speaker 01 There's a switch like, so at what point in time do we catch on? Cause the difference between survival and success mindset. The success mindset is highly optimistic.
35:41 Speaker 01 So where do we switch or how do we stay switched from survival to success? That's the challenge.
35:48 Lex Fridman? Yeah, somewhere we stopped being eaten by saber-toothed tigers and started building bridges and buildings and computers and companies.
35:56 Speaker 01 We started to experience, we got enough data back to collaborate. And we stopped listening to our amygdala and we started listening to our gut.
36:06 Lex Fridman? Let me just to return briefly to terrorists. What do you think about the policy of not negotiating with terrorists?
36:13 Speaker 01 Well, that's not the policy, first of all. Now, everybody thinks that's the policy.
36:17 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
36:18 Speaker 01 It hasn't been the policy since 2002, when Bush 43 signed a national security presidential directive, NSPD. At the time it was NSPD 12, which basically said, um, we won't make concessions. That doesn't mean we won't talk. So I'm in Columbia at the same time, and I have been intimately involved with the signing of him signing that document. I knew exactly what it said and I, and he didn't inherit it from somebody else. He signed it.
36:53 Speaker 01 And I'm in Columbia and the number two in the embassy says, last night on TV, the president of the United States said, we don't negotiate with terrorists. Are you calling a president of the United States a liar? And I remember thinking like, all right, so.
37:11 Speaker 01 He probably said that, and that's not on the document that he signed. So I said, look, you know, I'm familiar with what he's signed, and that's not what it says. Well, you know, and so the argument, but that's always been the soundbite that everybody likes. We don't negotiate with terrorists. Depends upon your definition of negotiation. If it's just communication, we negotiate with them all the time. Number one, and number two, like every president has made some boneheaded deal with the bad guys. Like Obama released five high level Taliban leaders from Guantanamo in exchange for an AWOL soldier that we immediately threw in jail.
37:56 Speaker 01 And I thought that was a horrible deal. And that that's putting terrorists back on the battlefield. And then Trump turned around and topped it by putting 5,000 terrorists back on the battlefield. So we haven't had a president that has stuck to that on either side of the aisle since people started throwing that out as a soundbite.
38:14 Lex Fridman? What do you think of that negotiation? Forget terrorists, but the global negotiation like with Vladimir Putin, the recent negotiation over prisoners. They exchange the Brittney Griner. Is there a way to do that negotiation successfully?
38:29 Speaker 01 First of all, I agree with the idea that she was wrongfully detained and that she hadn't, and she didn't deserve to be in jail and that you should be no second class citizens ever. And whether you're a WNBA player or you're just some bonehead that walked into the wrong situation, your government should not abandon you ever, ever. Now, what they do, in the meantime, there should have been a negotiation. They were desperate to make a deal at a bad time. They'd been offered far better deals and prisoner swaps earlier and turned them down. And then he gets turned up and thank God for Brittney Griner that the public got enough attention. They kept pressure on the administration, they made a deal.
39:16 Speaker 01 Now governments want to make those kind of deals. That's fine. As long as it, because that was basically a political negotiation. You're putting 5,000 Taliban back on a battlefield. That ain't negotiating with another government. You're putting five of them back on a battlefield. That ain't negotiating with another government. That's directly contradicting this thing that you claimed. And those were all bad deals. Now, was the Brittney Griner thing a bad deal? I think it was great for her. If I was in the middle of it, it would have been better. And she still would have come home.
39:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah, there's some technical aspects of that negotiation. What do you think is the value, just to linger on it, of meeting in person for the negotiation?
39:51 Speaker 01 I think it's a great idea.
39:53 Lex Fridman? Can I just, just follow that tangent along? There's a war in Ukraine now. It's been going on over a year. It's a, for me personally, given my life stories is a, is a deeply personal one. And I'm returning back to that area of the world that was there. Vladimir Zelensky said he doesn't want to talk to, to Vladimir Putin. Do you think they could get in a room together? And say you were there in a room with Putin and Zelensky. And Biden is sitting in the bag drinking a cocktail. Or maybe he is at the table participating.
40:36 Lex Fridman? How, how, how is it possible through negotiation, through the art of conversation, to find peace in this very tense geopolitical conflict?
40:48 Speaker 01 I think it's eminently possible. I think the, getting people together in person has always been a good idea. Now, how many times, who's getting them together? Under what circumstances? And how many times you getting them together? The, um, the documentary, The Human Factor, about the Middle East peace negotiations, mostly through the 90s, mostly under the Clinton administration.
41:12 Speaker 01 Got kicked off under Bush 41. And then the documentary continues through Trump. But just touching basically on it. But they're getting Arafat and the different Israeli prime ministers together in person. And these guys did not want to talk to each other. And depending upon the prime minister. You know, the mere thought of being on the same planet with Arafat was offensive. And they started getting these guys together in parts and regularly. And they started seeing each other as human beings. And they started realizing that there was enough room on a planet for them. And that people dying was stupid.
41:54 Speaker 01 And they were, and they would slowly work things out by getting these guys together in person. So how long does it take? Who's hosting it? But it's a good idea.
42:04 Lex Fridman? But the skill of achieving that thing that you talk about a lot, which is empathy. And I would say in that case, not just empathy, but empathy plus a bit. You might disagree with this, but a drop of compassion in there.
42:18 Speaker 01 I think compassion, compassion is helpful. But it's not essential. Like if you just know where I'm coming from. Like it, it, the thought, the feeling of being understood.
42:32 Lex Fridman? Yeah, heard and understood. That's powerful.
42:35 Speaker 01 Is, yeah. And, and again, I know I picked the vast majority of this up on, on Andrew's podcast, but I picked it up in other places because early on, when we were putting a book together with Tal Roz, the writer, my son uncredited co-author. So the book's really a collaboration between me, my son Brandon and Tal Roz. And we're driving for that's right. You know, when somebody feels like what you've said is completely their position, they say that's right. Not you're right, but that's right. So Tal says, you know, I think, I think what's happening here is you're triggering a subtle epiphany in somebody. So I'm like, all right, I'll buy that.
43:18 Speaker 01 So I start looking up the neuroscience of, of the feeling of epiphany. Getting a hit of oxytocin and serotonin.
43:31 Speaker 01 Oxytocin is a bonding drug. You bond to me. I don't bond to you. When you feel completely understood by me, you bond to me. Then in one of the relationship podcasts that I'm listening to on Andrew, it says oxytocin inclines people to tell the truth. You're more honest. All right, so you feel deeply understood by me, you bond to me, and you start getting more honest with me. Serotonin, the neurochemical of satisfaction. Epiphany, you feel oxytocin and serotonin. Being understood. All right, I got you bonding to me, I got you being more honest with me, and I got you
44:16 Speaker 01 feeling more satisfied, so you want less. What more do you want out of a negotiation?
44:22 Lex Fridman? Of course, there's already with leaders and great negotiators, there's walls built up, defense mechanisms against that. Right, there's, you're resisting, you're resisting this basic chemistry, but yes, you should have that. You should work towards that kind of empathy. And I personally believe, I don't actually understand why, but I've observed it time and time again, but getting in a room together and really talking, whether privately or publicly, but really talking, and like this. So I'll comment on this. So right now, this is being recorded, and a few folks will hear this, but when you really do a good job of this kind of conversation, you forget there's cameras.
45:06 Speaker 01 Right.
45:07 Lex Fridman? And that's much better than there being even a third person in the room, but often when world leaders meet, there's like press, or there's others in the room.
45:17 Speaker 01 Right.
45:18 Lex Fridman? Like, as, you know, man to man or man to woman, you have to like meet, like, in a saloon, just the two of you, and talk. There's some intimacy and power to that, to achieve that, if you're also willing to couple that with empathy, to really hear the other person.
45:35 Speaker 01 Yep, yep, yeah.
45:36 Lex Fridman? I don't know what that is. That's like a deep, deep intimacy that happens.
45:39 Speaker 01 And I think there's actually... Because we get asked this in a Black Swan group all the time, like, how do you, you know, Zoom, that's bad, you know, because you don't have the same visual feedback on Zoom. And that's not true. Like you and I, I see you from the waist up right now. If we're on Zoom, I'd be looking at you from the waist up.
45:59 Lex Fridman? I'm not wearing pants, yeah. With the internet. I apologize for that.
46:07 Lex Fridman? Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You only see a small portion.
46:12 Speaker 01 Usually, that's usually where I go. But anyway.
46:16 Lex Fridman? I'm glad we're both have ridiculous sense of humor. I appreciate it.
46:20 Speaker 01 But what makes us different in person? I actually think, I think there's energy that we're unable, we don't have the instrumentation to define yet. And I think that there's a feel. I think there's an actual energetic feel that changes. And just because we don't, we, again, just because we can't measure it, doesn't mean it's not there.
46:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I would love to figure out what that is. Folks that are working on virtual reality are trying to figure out that, what that is. During the pandemic, everybody was on Zoom, Zoom and Microsoft, everybody was trying to figure out, how do we replicate that? I'm trying to understand how to replicate that because it sure is not fun to travel across the world just to talk to Snowden, or Putin, or Zelensky. I'd love to do it over Zoom. But it's not the same. It's not the same.
47:10 Speaker 01 No, it's not the same.
47:13 Speaker 01 I'd go in a room with Putin.
47:15 Lex Fridman? You would go in a room?
47:16 Speaker 01 I would, yeah, 1,000%. I'd get a "that's right" out of him.
47:20 Lex Fridman? That's right. Well, first, you would give him a "that's right," probably.
47:25 Speaker 01 Ah, getting and giving. See, and here's the issue that trips everybody up in negotiations. The difference between hearing and speaking, the same words are vastly different. And what I'm looking for is what I'm, the responses I'm getting out of you. Because if you, if you can't, first, "that's right," especially, like, if you can't appreciate what that really means, hearing it is unsatisfying.
47:48 Lex Fridman? So those two words are really important to you. You talk about this in your book. What is, why is that, what does "that's right" mean? Why is it important?
47:55 Speaker 01 Well, it means that what you just heard, you think is unequivocally the truth.
48:01 Speaker 01 Like it's dead on, it hit the target, it's a bullseye. And it's been a topic of discussion, especially between my son and I, a lot, like, what happens? This oxytocin bonding moment? And his contention has always been like, Donald Trump is the poster child of what it means, because Donald Trump's an address in an audience, you know, he's in a debate with Hillary, or he's giving a speech someplace. And when the people that are devoted to him, when they believe that what he's just said is completely right, it's insightful, they look at him, or they look at the TV and they go, that's right.
48:46 Speaker 01 And it's what people say when they're bought in to what they just heard. Now, if you're not convinced of the way that Donald Trump's followers are bonded to him, and he also, just like this, in my view, destroys the idea of common ground. Because when he first started to run for president, the pundits all said, ah, he's a New Yorker. Nobody in the Republican Party is gonna like him. It's middle America, you know, it's blue collar, you know, it's regular, common folks, factory workers. They're not gonna like Trump because he's from New York and he went to Wharton, he's
49:26 Speaker 01 an Ivy Leaguer, and he's a son of a wealthy, real estate mogul, and he had a million dollars handed to him when he got out of college. You know, he's born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The rank and file Republicans are never gonna accept this guy, based on common ground. Look how, look how smart that was.
49:49 Lex Fridman? Do you think he's a good negotiator? Do you think Donald Trump is a good negotiator?
49:53 Speaker 01 Uh, no. I think he's a great marketer. If you look at his negotiation track record, all right, so I started following Donald Trump in the eighties when I was in New York. I'm a last century guy, he's a last century guy, we've got mutual acquaintances. The minister that married him to Mahler Maples was a friend of mine, and a close friend of mine, and in 1998, I threw a fundraiser in his apartment at Trump Tower that he attended.
50:21 Speaker 01 So no shortage of mutual friends. We went to the same church. Still have mutual mutual acquaintances, friends. And I've watched his track record negotiation history. Which is exactly his track record with North Korea. Where are we with North Korea? What was the deal that he made with North Korea? See, your answer is the same as everybody else's. Well, I remember it started out with a lot of fanfare.
50:51 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
50:51 Speaker 01 But I don't know what happened. Because nothing ever happens.
50:56 Lex Fridman? It's more public fanfare, so marketing minded.
50:59 Speaker 01 Starts out with a bang. If he doesn't cut the deal in a short period, a really short period of time, he moves on. And everybody wonders what had happened because there was so much fanfare at the beginning. Now, at the beginning, him even opening that dialogue with North Korea was masterful. Like, I was, I was such a fan. When you got a president of the United States that is willing to sit down and talk with a leader of another nation. When every other president, all their advisors are saying, "The leader of North Korea is beneath you. You cannot dignify him by responding to him directly." And consequently, the Trump administration inherits a can of worms
51:42 Speaker 01 that has been simmering for 30 years. He didn't get a sense of that. And he, and he opened up a dialogue where nobody else was capable of opening a dialogue. And then it just went away. Nobody knows what happened. And there was no deal made. Now, great negotiators make deals.
52:00 Lex Fridman? What do you think about these accusations that he's a narcissist? That if you're a narcissist, does that help you or hurt you?
52:09 Speaker 01 Is there a more popular term these days than narcissist? Like, everybody's a narcissist.
52:13 Lex Fridman? Everybody you don't like is a narcissist.
52:14 Speaker 01 Like, the homeless guy down on the corner, he's a narcissist. That's why he's there.
52:18 Lex Fridman? Yeah. It's lost meaning for you a little bit?
52:20 Speaker 01 Yeah. And first of all, most psychological terms.
52:25 Speaker 01 As a hostage negotiator, and really, we were never into psychology. And we steered away from it because psychology, at best, is a soft science. If it's not informed these days, if it's not informed by real studies or neuroscience, the guys that I'm impressed with these days, psychologists, neuroscientists, now I'm interested in that, that, that guy or gal. But then, psychology convention. Do you get them all together and they all agree?
52:58 Lex Fridman? But also, the interesting thing about psychology is each individual person is way more complicated than the category psychology tries to create. And there's something about the human brain, the moment you classify somebody as a narcissist, or depressed, or bipolar, or insane in any kind of way, for some reason, you don't, you give yourself a convenient excuse not to see them as a complicated human being, to empathize with them. I had that when I was talking to, I did an interview with Kanye West, and then there's a lot of popular opinions about him being mentally unwell and so on. And I felt that that kind of way of thinking is a very convenient way of thinking, to
53:40 Lex Fridman? ignore the fact that he's a human being, that, again, wants to be understood and heard. And that's the only way you can have that conversation.
53:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree completely. That's right.
53:55 Speaker 01 I feel so close to you now.
53:58 Lex Fridman? It might be because I'm not wearing pants.
54:02 Lex Fridman? All right, so what we're...
54:04 Speaker 01 You're funnier than I am. That bothers me.
54:06 Lex Fridman? All right.
54:08 Lex Fridman? I'll say something stupid soon enough, don't worry about it.
54:12 Lex Fridman? But you said, we were talking about terrorists and not negotiating with terrorists. Is there something...
54:17 Speaker 01 Nice job, going all the way back to where that rabbit hole started.
54:20 Lex Fridman? There's, we're Alice in Wonderland right now. The, is there something about walking away of not negotiating? Is that, is there power in that?
54:31 Speaker 01 All right, so it depends upon whether or not you're doing it with integrity or a tactic, to start with. And then also, hostage negotiators are successful 93% of the time, kind of across the board.
54:49 Speaker 01 Which means that 7% of the time is going to go bad. And that was my old boss Gary Nessner, I learned so much from Gary.
55:00 Speaker 01 But one of the phrase that he used over and over and over again, until I finally worked the case and went bad, was this is going to be the best chance of success, best chance of success. And then something went bad. And I remember thinking like, well, best chance of success is no guarantee of success. So your question is, are there negotiations you should walk away from? If you got no shot at success, then don't negotiate.
55:23 Speaker 01 And you have to accept the fact that some deals you're never going to make. You know, we teach in my company, it's not a sin to not get the deal. It's a sin to take a long time to not get the deal. And you know, Gary, in his infinite wisdom, you know, they realized that there was something called suicide by cop.
55:43 Speaker 01 And that it might have, Gary was very much into clusters of behavior. He kept us away from psychological terms and there would be clusters of behavior that would be high risk indicators. And he wrote a block of instruction called high risk indicators, which meant if you start seeing this stuff show up, this thing's probably going bad. And you're going to need to, you're going to need to recognize that from the very beginning and adjust accordingly. And it's the same way in business and personal life. I'm talking to the head of a marketing company I have tremendous respect for. I admire that what this guy and his company does started from scratch. He borrowed space in the back of a drugstore to start his company.
56:29 Speaker 01 And now it's hugely successful and he's laying out to me that he finally had to confront a potential client and walk away from them.
56:41 Speaker 01 And he said, how do you think I handle this? And my answer was thousand percent correct. And as a matter of fact, the behavior that he indicated, he's a type. And you should have walked away sooner than you did. Because this guy was playing you the whole time. Al Qaeda, 2004, they're playing us. They're not negotiating. We need, we called them out on it. I don't think you're negotiating. He wouldn't say it exactly like that, but that was, that was absolutely the approach. You know, confront people on their behavior in a respectful way.
57:15 Lex Fridman? And signal that you're willing to walk away.
57:18 Speaker 01 And mean it a thousand percent.
57:20 Lex Fridman? And mean it. Isn't that terrifying? I mean, it's scary because you don't want to really walk away. Or do you have to really want to walk away?
57:27 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, this, this gets core values, your view of reality. If it's an abundant world, it's not scary to walk away.
57:35 Speaker 01 If it's a finite world with limited opportunities, then it's horrifying.
57:42 Lex Fridman? But you have to use that worldview to be willing to actually walk away.
57:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:50 Lex Fridman? It could be walking away from a lot of money.
57:54 Lex Fridman? It could be walking away from something that's going to hurt people. Because if you lose a hostage.
58:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, but if they're not going to let the hostage out.
58:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
58:04 Speaker 01 Suicide by cop, they ain't letting them go.
58:10 Lex Fridman? The seven percent, how do most negotiations fail?
58:14 Speaker 01 The bad guys were never there to make a deal in the first place. If it was suicide by cop. If they were there to, if they're on a killing journey. It's an Israeli phrase.
58:28 Speaker 01 If they're on a killing journey and the actions that they're currently engaged in are part of that killing journey.
58:36 Lex Fridman? Killing journey. Is there advice you can give about? You mentioned Israel, Palestine, the Middle East. Taking on a few conversations on that topic. Is there hope for that part of the world? And from that hope, is there some advice you could lend?
58:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think, I think, I think there's hope. There's, then I got friends on both sides. And also.
59:01 Speaker 01 When I got my, after I left the FBI, um, most people listen to this, probably not gonna remember who Rodney Dangerfield was.
59:09 Lex Fridman? Oh, come on.
59:10 Speaker 01 But he's a comedian.
59:11 Lex Fridman? Still doesn't get any respect. Yeah.
59:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And, and, uh.
59:14 Lex Fridman? New Yorker? Is he a New Yorker?
59:16 Speaker 01 I think he was a New York guy.
59:17 Lex Fridman? Or like Jersey or something, yeah.
59:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, um, he did a movie a long time ago called Back to School. He went back to school. He was an old guy back to school. So I went back to school after I left the FBI. I did get, um, a master's at Harvard Kennedy. And that's where, you know, I'm running across people on both sides of that.
59:37 Speaker 01 And when they could talk, they said, let's start from the premise that we, both sides want a better life for our kids, which is this version that I was telling you, um, earlier from Tom Girardi. Let's pick a point in the future that we're all happy with. And he found that they could talk. You know, we, all right, so it might not be better for us. How do we make it better for our kids?
1:00:01 Speaker 01 And that, that's where the, the hope derives from because I think both sides ultimately want it to be better for their kids, which is why they still engage in interactions and which is why I think the leadership, regardless of how compromised they might be on either side, there are few straight players in the game in the Middle East.
1:00:22 Speaker 01 Or anywhere for that matter.
1:00:26 Speaker 01 But they want a better future for their kids. You get people to agree that you want a better future for your kids and then you start talking about, well, how do we work our way back from that? And then, all right, so we got a mutual point in the future. The Israeli Palestinian negotiations are also, uh, for me, interesting because you mentioned Clubhouse about almost two years ago now. Um, when Israeli, Israel was shelling Gaza, they hit the UPI office. You know, they were hitting, they, they got fed up with the rocket attacks from Hamas. And of course Hamas is putting rockets in the UPI office, the AP office, whichever press office it was there. How's that office gonna be there otherwise? Hamas is running a show. You're not, you're not gonna run that office unless they let you, unless you let them store
1:01:11 Speaker 01 weapons there. That's just part of the game.
1:01:14 Speaker 01 And are they gonna, are they gonna storm in specially designated ammunition dumps? No, they're gonna put them in schools, they're gonna put them in hospitals, they're gonna put them in all places that when Israel hits them, they're gonna look really bad. So after a while, Israel gets fed up and they start shelling Gaza and they're hitting these places. Friend of mine, Nicole Benham, is hosting rooms on Clubhouse and she says, you gotta come on. The vitriol is killing me. These are all turning into screaming matches. Nobody's talking to anybody. I said, all right, cool. We'll go on, we'll do it and watch. We won't have a single argument. We'll invite people on from both sides.
1:01:54 Speaker 01 The only, there was one rule. Before you started to describe what you thought of the other side,
1:02:03 Speaker 01 you had to say, before I disagree with you, here's what I think your position is. And you gotta continue to state the other side's position until they agree that you've gotten it.
1:02:15 Speaker 01 Now, what happened? No agreement and no arguments. That was what we were really going for. We wanted to show that people on both sides, in one of their emotional timeframes, if your only requirement was you had to state the other side's position first,
1:02:34 Speaker 01 nobody got out of control.
1:02:36 Lex Fridman? Did it work?
1:02:37 Speaker 01 That's exactly what happened. Not one, we wanted to show people that you can have conversations that do not evolve into screaming matches with vitriol, talking about how you're dedicated to the destruction of the other side. Just first, see if you can outline where they're coming from.
1:02:57 Lex Fridman? That's really impressive because I've just, having seen on Clubhouse, people, which part of the reason I liked Clubhouse, you get to hear voices from all sides. They were emotionally intense.
1:03:12 Speaker 01 Right.
1:03:15 Lex Fridman? It was, I mean, I was, I'm sweating just in the buildup of your story here. I thought it's gonna go, go to hell, but you're saying it kind of worked.
1:03:24 Speaker 01 Not one person lost control. Now, of the two sides, the people that were speaking on behalf of the Israelis were a little better.
1:03:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:03:33 Speaker 01 At articulating supportive positions for the Palestinians. Most of the people that want to speak up on behalf of the Palestinians, they just, they'd, they'd want to start doing like, you're doing this. And I'd say, no, no, no, you can go there, just not yet. Before you go there, you can say that all you want.
1:03:53 Speaker 01 Before you go there, you've got to try to articulate to them where they're coming from. They got to tell you got it right. And what would consistently happen is there's a leveling out of a person to try to see the other side's perspective and articulate it. It's enormously beneficial to the person who's trying to do it, which was really the point that we were trying to make.
1:04:16 Lex Fridman? It's a really interesting exercise. I mean, that, by way of advice, so if it works at Clubhouse, for people who don't know, that's a, so like a voice app where you can be anonymous. It's really regular people, but regular people who can also be anonymous. It's just, it can be chaos. If it works there, that's really interesting for, when you sit down for a conversation across the table from somebody,
1:04:41 Lex Fridman? don't have them even steel man the other side, have them just state the other side. Just, just, you're, explain your understanding of it.
1:04:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:04:52 Lex Fridman? That's it.
1:04:53 Speaker 01 And every now and then I would jump in, like, you know, and somebody supporting Israel, you know, whoever the heck they were. And they'd, they'd say a couple of things. And the Palestinian guy would be like, our gal, or supportive of them, would say, you know, you missed some stuff. And I'd say, let me jump in. First of all, I know what the Nakba is. The Nakba is a catastrophe. That's the day Israel was born. You, you know, for the rest of the world, it's the birth of Israel, for you, it's the Nakba. I said, you've got members of your family that is still walking around carrying keys to the front door of the house they abandoned.
1:05:36 Speaker 01 And he'd be like, yeah. And I'd say, you feel bad that, in point of fact, that in World War II, the world stood back and watched while the Nazis threw the Jews off a building. The only problem was they landed on you. And they'd be like, yeah. That's where they're coming from. So articulating, you know, deeply what the other side feels is transformative for both people involved in a process.
1:06:16 Lex Fridman? What's the toughest negotiation you've ever been a part of or maybe observed or heard of? What's a difficult case you just stands out to you? Or maybe just one of many?
1:06:30 Speaker 01 Well, the stuff we went through with Al Qaeda in and around Iraq, Iraq and Saudi, first one was in Saudi in 2004 timeframe. The hardest part about that was working with family members and not deceiving them about the possibility outcome.
1:06:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah, how do you talk to family members? Is that part of the negotiation?
1:06:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, empathy, learning empathy the hard way. And then being able to take it up to higher levels. Cause at its base level, a guy that we're working with now that's coaching us in E O S and is a business partner, his name is Jonathan Smith. He pointed out to us that there's kind of, there's a shu-ha-re concept. Have you, are you familiar with shu-ha-re? It's martial arts concept. And shu is do it exactly as the master's telling you to do it. Wax on, wax off, cruddy kid stuff. A ha is when you've done the repetitions enough times, you're getting a feel for it. And you begin to see the same lessons coming from other masters.
1:07:38 Speaker 01 You're seeing the same thing show up in other places. And at the re level, you're still in the discipline, but you're making up your own rules. It's almost a flow state.
1:07:53 Speaker 01 And you don't realize that you're making up your own rules. And if somebody asks you where you learned that, you probably say, I, you know, my, my sensei taught it to me. My master taught it to me.
1:08:07 Speaker 01 Um, this will come back around to negotiating with families pretty quick. We did this once because there, there's a bunch of people that we coach, um, business people that are scared of the amount of money that they're losing if we're not coaching them regularly. One of these guys, Michael, we're interviewing him for a social media posting about two years ago. And Michael says, yeah, you know, you gotta gather data with your eyes. And I remember, and I went, ooh, I like that. I said, where did you hear that before? And he goes, you know, I don't know. I heard it from you, I think. And I was like, no, no, no, no.
1:08:44 Speaker 01 I didn't remember saying that.
1:08:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:08:46 Speaker 01 For, at that first time I've heard that. He's in re, so what's this got to do with families? Empathy at its base level and a shoe level, I learned it on the suicide hotline, is saying like, you sound angry. I'm just calling out the elephant in the room. Your, your emotions, what's driving you? I'm throwing a label on your affect. And I'm saying you sound, or it sounds like you are. Cause that's the basic Karate Kid wax on, wax off approach. Now, there are a lot of hostage negotiators that'll tell you empathy doesn't work at home. Not true. They've never gotten out of shoe.
1:09:28 Speaker 01 You're getting ready to talk to your significant other. And you want to go someplace that you know is going to make her angry. You want to go do something.
1:09:38 Lex Fridman? Now, that's real negotiation right there.
1:09:40 Speaker 01 You could say to her, you sound angry, in which case she's going to blow up because her reaction is, you made me angry, bozo.
1:09:50 Speaker 01 How can you act like you're an innocent third party? Or that you were independent of how I feel bad? And you learn, learn a little bit more and you say, the, the high level is, this is probably going to make you angry.
1:10:06 Speaker 01 And then what I did with families, I knew how they felt before I walked in the door. I knew that they were scared to death. You find out that your, your, your husband, your father, your brother has been grabbed by Al Qaeda, who are in the business of chopping people's heads off? You're gonna be horrified. I can't walk into them and go like, you sound angry. Of course I'm angry, you idiot. But knowing what they are, I used to walk into families' houses and I'd say, I know you're angry. Now, what, now, what do the circumstances dictate that they should also feel? They're gonna feel abandoned by their government.
1:10:50 Speaker 01 They're gonna feel totally alone. They're gonna be scared. And they're gonna be angry because they feel their government abandoned them. Now, there, in point of fact, is this an accurate statement? That their loved one voluntarily went into a war zone and voluntarily went someplace their government told them not to go? Are the facts that the government abandoned them? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, the government tried to get them to not go, and they went anyway. But that doesn't change how they felt in the moment. And I'd walk into a house and I'd go, I know you're angry. I know you feel abandoned and alone. And I know you're horrified, and I know you feel the United States government has abandoned you.
1:11:34 Speaker 01 And they would look at me and go like, "Yeah. What do we do now? Now we're ready to rock."
1:11:47 Lex Fridman? Is there, with Al Qaeda or in general, is there a language barrier too? It could be just barriers of different communication styles. I mean, you got like a New Yorker way about it. That might make somebody from like, I don't know, Laguna Beach uncomfortable.
1:12:07 Lex Fridman? Do you feel that language barrier in communication is that language and communication style in itself creating a barrier?
1:12:17 Speaker 01 You got a barrier when you think that your way is the way.
1:12:21 Lex Fridman? Sure, that's the biggest barrier.
1:12:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that happens all the time. When people talk about what about cross-cultural negotiations? You know, what hand do I got to shake hands with?
1:12:33 Lex Fridman? Sure.
1:12:33 Speaker 01 So that I can get my way? Well, if you strip it all down, we're all basically the same blank slate when we were born. Everybody's got a limbic system. Everybody's limbic system works pretty much the same way. People are driven by the same sorts of decisions. How does this affect my future? What am I at risk of losing? How does this affect my identity? You're not kind of kidnapper. You're a New York City businessman. You're a tobacco farmer in the South. All making those same decisions based on those same things. So as soon as I start to navigate that and I tailor my approach, which is what empathy is, to what you think, how you see things.
1:13:17 Speaker 01 So I can be the biggest goofball ever from, if you live in the South, yeah, maybe I'm a New Yorker or I'm somebody from LA or somebody from Chicago. But my geography is foreign to you, but as soon as I start dialing in on how you see things, suddenly you're listening.
1:13:38 Lex Fridman? What about the three voices you talk about? The different voices you can use in that communication?
1:13:46 Speaker 01 Right. The assertive voice, direct and honest. I'm a natural born assertive.
1:13:51 Lex Fridman? Natural born? I thought we're all blank slate. You're born.
1:13:56 Speaker 01 Stop catching me on what I said. How dare you throw, accuse me of what I've said. To quote Bono, I stand accused of what I've said, the things I've said.
1:14:03 Lex Fridman? That's a good line. He's got a few good lines.
1:14:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:08 Lex Fridman? So assertive voice, you're born that way. Which one, what are the other ones?
1:14:14 Speaker 01 Analyst. You're an analyst.
1:14:16 Lex Fridman? And I could tell you're assertive.
1:14:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:22 Lex Fridman? What's an analyst's voice?
1:14:24 Speaker 01 Well, an analyst is close.
1:14:26 Lex Fridman? Smarter? More thoughtful?
1:14:29 Speaker 01 No, as a matter of fact.
1:14:35 Speaker 01 Look, you ever do a decision tree?
1:14:37 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:14:38 Speaker 01 See, you like it too, don't you?
1:14:40 Lex Fridman? So decision trees, you know, I'm a computer scientist, so I like mathematical systematic ways of seeing the world.
1:14:50 Speaker 01 He's an analyst. You think Donald Trump would ever say that? Unlikely.
1:14:57 Lex Fridman? Well, is he more the assertive kind?
1:14:59 Speaker 01 He's a natural born assertive, yeah.
1:15:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Are all New Yorkers like this? Is this something in the water?
1:15:05 Speaker 01 Nah, it's a crazy thing. I mean, there's an affect that a city can have.
1:15:10 Speaker 01 And, you know, New York's northeast, not just New York, but the northeast is a little more the affect of the area, of the culture of the area. The individuals, individuals still boil down into the three types cross the board.
1:15:27 Lex Fridman? What's the third one?
1:15:29 Speaker 01 Accommodator, smiling, optimistic, hopeful. I'm 1,000% convinced that the phrase "hope is not a strategy" is designed at people's frustration over a third of the population being accommodators that are hope driven. I hope this works out.
1:15:51 Speaker 01 And they're very relationship, on the surface, they're very relationship oriented, they tend to appear to be very positive, and they are, but it's really built around hope.
1:16:01 Lex Fridman? And the idea is you can adopt these three voices.
1:16:03 Speaker 01 You can, yeah, you can learn them, they're all learnable. Analysts are often mistaken for accommodators.
1:16:13 Speaker 01 Because as you said before, analysts are more introspective, more analytical, they're looking at the systems at work. And if they like to learn, they notice that accommodators make more deals than they make. They also notice that there's a higher failure rate of the deals. But since they notice stuff and they think about it, they catch on faster than assertives do, that the pleasant nature of an accommodator contributes strongly to them making deals. Like my daughter-in-law. Is an analyst, you know, another, another descriptor we have in that an analyst are assassins.
1:16:58 Speaker 01 You know, an analyst will snipe you from a thousand yards out in the middle of the night. And you never know what hit you and they're really happy with that.
1:17:07 Lex Fridman? But has, how has assertiveness, the assertive voice served you in negotiation?
1:17:14 Speaker 01 Poorly. That's the sort of voice is almost always counterproductive. It feels like getting hit in the face with a brick.
1:17:23 Speaker 01 And that's almost always counterproductive. So for me to be more effective, especially in a negotiation, I'll need to slow, slow down and smile.
1:17:35 Lex Fridman? You know, I heard that Teddy Roosevelt was a good negotiator and that he was extremely stubborn. And perhaps the right term for that would be assertive, but he picked his battles. Is there some value to
1:17:51 Lex Fridman? holding strong to principles? So I don't even know if that's probably the opposite of empathy. Are there times when you can just stick, be extremely stubborn to your principles?
1:18:02 Speaker 01 Oh, I, we do it all the time. We just, you know, we're just nice about it.
1:18:06 Lex Fridman? Okay, it helps to be nice, you're saying?
1:18:08 Speaker 01 Well, yes, because I need you to hear me. And the assertive tone of voice, so when, when we do our training, typically we do an exercise called 60 seconds or she dies. And I play the bad guy bank robber and I ask you to be the hostage negotiator. And your job is to, I'll give you the four real world constraints. And then you gotta try and negotiate me out of the bank. Now we're doing this, now the first voice that I always use in that exercise is the assertive voice.
1:18:41 Speaker 01 Which is the commanding voice. It's the voice that all police officers are taught to use in the street. Issued loud and clear commands. You know, it doesn't, to me, I don't feel like I'm attacking you. I just feel like I'm being direct and honest and clear. You on the other hand feel attacked. Now, we're doing this exercise in Austin a couple of years ago. The first participant has an Apple Watch on. He tells us afterwards that sitting still, not even answering, when he first gets hit in the face with the assertive voice, his heart rate jumped to 170, which is a typical fight or flight reaction.
1:19:25 Speaker 01 I come at you like I'm fighting you. Your, your fight-flight mechanisms all kick into gear, which clouds your thinking. You're automatically dumber in the moment. So if I want to make a great long-term deal with you, highly profitable, I'm agnostic to you being profitable. You be profitable, that's fine. I'm, I'm here to make money for me. Me making you dumber will always hurt me. Me making you feel attacked will always hurt me.
1:20:01 Lex Fridman? So there's never a value in being, in you making me afraid?
1:20:08 Speaker 01 There's never a long-term value in it. That's, um, it's another thing that Tall Roz, when we were writing a book, braced me on. Cause he said, there's scientific data out there that's called strategic umbrage. Well, there's data. Well, whether or not it's scientific, I would call that into question. But he said, there's studies out there that show that strategic umbrage works. And another thing that I also enjoy, you probably get tired of me saying wonderful things about Andrew. He taught me-
1:20:43 Lex Fridman? There's never, there's never enough wonderful things to say about the great Andrew Huberman, the host of the Huberman and Lab podcast that everybody should subscribe to. You should talk to Andrew.
1:20:53 Speaker 01 You're funnier than he is, though. I'll give you that.
1:20:55 Lex Fridman? Hear that, Andrew?
1:20:56 Speaker 01 He's funny accidentally. He makes me laugh all the time, not when he's trying to be funny.
1:21:01 Lex Fridman? He's a really, uh, he's one of the people in this world that's tr- truly legit. He's a really strong scientist and a really strong communicator and a good human being. And it, those, those together don't come often and it's nice to see.
1:21:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:21:17 Lex Fridman? Yeah, he's a treasure, national treasure. Anyway, your saying?
1:21:20 Speaker 01 Well, he, he, he sort of taught me how to think about data and studies and science and, and also from different, uh, books that he's turned me on to. It's really helped me think about this stuff. So the studies about strategic umbrage were done, the ones that I've seen that show it's effective, there were simulated negotiations with college students. Now here's the problem with that. A simulated negotiation with a college student, college students are going to sit down as part of their assignment. They're going to sit down one time, they're going to sit down for 45 minutes and they're going to think that if they didn't come to a deal at all, that they failed. And there's no ongoing implementation. There's just the deal and then they walk away of a pretend
1:22:04 Speaker 01 situation. So they got no actual real skin in the game. There's, uh, no deal on earth. Do you sit down and come to an agreement 45 minutes and never see each other again? Cause there's the implementation of the deal. If, even if it's only payment.
1:22:21 Speaker 01 So the data is flawed based on the way it was collected. It's a highly flawed study and all data is flawed, as you know, as a scientist, you just got to be aware of what the flaws are and decide whether or not that destroys the study. Or, or what do you think? You take a look at the data, there's no such thing as perfect data. Look at the data, see what you think of it. The data that says that strategic umbrage works is based on flawed circumstances.
1:22:49 Lex Fridman? Can you explain strategic umbrage?
1:22:51 Speaker 01 Getting mad scaring the other side into a deal. Getting mad at using anger strategically
1:22:59 Speaker 01 to bully the other side into an agreement.
1:23:03 Lex Fridman? That's nice to hear, in some sense. It's nice to hear that empathy is the right way in almost all situations.
1:23:11 Speaker 01 It's like best chance of success. Not that it works every time, just it works more than anything else does.
1:23:18 Lex Fridman? What is the technique of mirroring? There's a lot of cool stuff in your book, they just kind of jump around. What's mirroring?
1:23:23 Speaker 01 Mirroring is like, it's, it's, it's one of the most fun skills because it's the simplest to execute. You just repeat one to three-ish words of what somebody said, usually the last one to three words. Um, what I've found about it is the people that really like mirroring, love it because it's so simple and so effortless and invisible. They typically, for lack of a better term, tend to be both high IQ and high EQ. Like, I'm not a high IQ guy. I'm, I'm an average dude. I like to think that I can learn. And EQ, emotional intelligence, is a skill you can build, and I'm always working on building it.
1:24:07 Speaker 01 But a lot of really regular, average people, we're like, mirroring, that's stupid, I'm not doing that. And I don't know why they don't like it. But when I find somebody that loves to mirror, I'll always ask them, you know, how'd you, how'd you go on IQ? And typically, their IQ's pretty high. Now, I don't know why that combination attracts people to mirroring, because there's nine skills, um, eight from hostage negotiation, and we, and the ninth really was tone of voice, and we just define that as a skill. And each one is different and focuses on different components of the conversation. And a lot of people don't like to mirror, they found it so awkward.
1:24:51 Speaker 01 Like, I, I don't particularly, I'm not particularly strong in mirroring, I gotta do it intentionally, I'm good at labeling.
1:24:57 Lex Fridman? But does it almost always work?
1:24:59 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
1:25:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's, it feels maybe awkward, but there's, it's true, there's gotta be ways to signal that you're truly listening.
1:25:09 Speaker 01 That's important.
1:25:10 Lex Fridman? I think you can do body language. You can, yeah, there's a lot of ways to signal that, but mirroring is probably just this trivial little hack.
1:25:18 Speaker 01 It kind of is.
1:25:20 Lex Fridman? You know, there's a situation, I had a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, he's this historian, and he would say my name a lot throughout the conversation. He would be like, well, you have to understand Lex, is that, and for some reason that was making me feel really good. I was like, he cares about me. And I wonder if that key, if everyone has that key, that could be name, just using people's name could be powerful.
1:25:48 Speaker 01 Using a name is really context driven. It can be extremely powerful with someone who's genuine, and it comes across in their demeanor, and it's used in a way that you can tell is meant to encourage you.
1:26:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:26:07 Speaker 01 As opposed to exploit you.
1:26:08 Lex Fridman? Sure.
1:26:09 Speaker 01 And the people that are really into exploiting will also use it and do the same thing.
1:26:15 Lex Fridman? So you have to be, you have to avoid using the things that people that are exploiters, manipulators use, because it's, it might signal to others that this person is trying to trick me.
1:26:27 Speaker 01 You gotta be very conscious of it, yeah.
1:26:29 Lex Fridman? What's labeling that you mentioned, the thing you like?
1:26:31 Speaker 01 Well, you know, I said earlier, that whole progression from you sound angry to this is probably going to make you angry, to I know you're angry. Labeling is, is hanging a label on an emotion or an affect, and then just calling it out.
1:26:47 Lex Fridman? Is that almost always good? Could it be a source of frustration when a person's being angry and you kind of put a label on it, call out the elephant?
1:27:00 Lex Fridman? The, is it possible that that will lead to escalation of that feeling versus a resolution?
1:27:06 Speaker 01 Well, the, what would make it bad? Like, if I'm pointing out like that blatantly obvious, like if I say, look, I need you to get up and go down to the bank and make the deposit. Let's say I'm talking to my, somebody who works for my company. I need you to get on the phone with this person and make the appointment. And they go, sounds like you want me to talk to this person.
1:27:36 Speaker 01 Yes. That would be annoying if it's just so absurdly obvious.
1:27:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:27:42 Speaker 01 That there's no insight in your label at all. And as soon as you're demonstrating an awareness or a subtlety or an insight, either to you or to them, now we're making progress. So the only time a label could ever potentially be kind of productive is like if you weren't actually listening.
1:28:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:28:04 Speaker 01 And the label is, indicates that you're not listening. You know, um, I'm teaching at USC and I'm teaching labels and, you know, one of the kids in a class, he just wants to take the skills and make his deals and just hustle them. And he's just looking for the hustle. So he writes up a paper about, you know, he goes, there's some, some malls, I think over by Palm Springs or someplace, some outlet malls, a lot of people go to buy suits. So he goes in there and he immediately starts to bargaining that my book teaches with no empathy. And he's like, um, throws a price to the guy and the guy's like, no.
1:28:48 Speaker 01 And he throws another price to the guy and the guy's like, no. And then, then he says to the, the guy behind the counter, it sounds like we can make a deal. Like, no, it doesn't. I just shut down everything that you just said. If anything, it sounds like we're never going to make a deal.
1:29:03 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:29:03 Speaker 01 But he tried to use this label for manipulation. Now, the guy didn't get mad on the other side, but it's like, clearly this dude is not listening to me.
1:29:12 Lex Fridman? And at the core of everything, you, you have a bunch of like, uh, you know, almost like hacks, like techniques you can use, but at the core of it is empathy.
1:29:22 Speaker 01 At the core of it is empathy, yeah.
1:29:24 Lex Fridman? That's the main thing is you can be able to just sit there and listen.
1:29:28 Speaker 01 And perceive. Yeah. And look for insights.
1:29:32 Lex Fridman? You know what? I like silence. Or like you're both sitting there chilling with a drink, looking up at the stars. There's a moment, the silence makes you kind of zoom out, realize you're in this together as opposed to playing a game or some kind of like chess game of a negotiation, you're in it together. I don't know. There's some intimacy to the silence. And like, if I, I'll ask a question.
1:29:58 Lex Fridman? And just let the other person sit there in silence before they answer, or vice versa. They ask me a question, I sit there in silence. That's a, it's a big, it feels like a big intimate thing.
1:30:11 Speaker 01 Yes. And the other two types, until they've experienced that, are afraid of it. And what I'm actually gonna do is, for whatever reason, I'm really, I'm really comfortable with silence. I think because I've, I've experienced its effectiveness and also my son Brandon, like, he's the king of dynamic silence. Like, he, he coaches people, he says, "Go silent, count thousands to yourself. Don't stop till you run out of numbers."
1:30:40 Lex Fridman? That's a good line. He's also good, full of good lines.
1:30:44 Speaker 01 He is, that he is. And so,
1:30:49 Speaker 01 there's so much to it. But the other two types are natural wiring against it, why, until they've experienced it. And, you know, you got instinct, intuition's giving you data, once you've experienced it.
1:31:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:31:00 Speaker 01 But your amygdala's kicking into gear, again, sorry, I realize it's more complicated than that,
1:31:06 Speaker 01 until you've experienced it. So, accommodators, hope-based. How do they signal fury? The silent treatment.
1:31:15 Speaker 01 So when you go silent, they're scared to death you're furious.
1:31:20 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:31:20 Speaker 01 Cause that's how they indicate it. The assertive thinks, they use the analyst when silent, "Cause you wanted to talk some more."
1:31:31 Speaker 01 When in point of fact,
1:31:34 Speaker 01 you're either, you're thinking, or, and I, I love your description, the feeling of intimacy in silence, and experiencing the moment. Cause I'm actually gonna factor that into trying to get, the accommodators love shared intimacy. They love, would love to experience a moment. And I can see that being very compelling, them be willing to cross that chasm, and experience silence and see how, see how it works for them.
1:32:02 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it's nerve-wracking, which is why it's intimate. Cause you start thinking, what's the other person thinking? Are we actually gonna do this? Are we gonna sit here for 10 seconds and count? I mean, there's tricks to it, I guess, like Brandon says, is to just count it out, and realize through data that there's intimacy to it. I had a, a friend of mine, He lost his voice because singing, so he couldn't, the doctor says he can't talk for a week, just to heal the voice.
1:32:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:32 Lex Fridman? The vocal cords, but he, he hung out with other people, with friends, and didn't talk to them. He just hung out.
1:32:40 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:32:41 Lex Fridman? And he said it was really intimate. They both, they both didn't talk to each other. They just sat there and enjoyed time together. I don't know. It's, it's a, it's a wake up call. It's a thing to try maybe with, with people in your life. Just hang out and don't say anything. Like as an experiment, don't say anything the entire day, but hang, spend.
1:33:01 Speaker 01 Or try. Yeah, definitely.
1:33:02 Lex Fridman? It's interesting. I haven't tried it myself.
1:33:06 Lex Fridman? It seems, uh, uh, it's kind of like a silent retreat, but more active as part of like regular everyday life. Anyway, the, is there other, other interesting techniques we can talk about here? So, um, for example, creating the illusion of control.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's principally, you know, by asking what and how questions. Cause people love to tell others what to do or how to do it.
1:33:34 Speaker 01 It does a lot. That was, that was really the way when the book was first written, that we really thought about what and how questions is giving the other side the illusion of control. And there's a lot more to it than that, that we've discovered. I mean, it triggers deep thinking. It wears people down. Deep thinking is, could be exhausting.
1:33:54 Lex Fridman? And you want, so what's, what's the role of exhaustion in negotiation? Is that ultimately one?
1:33:59 Speaker 01 You gotta be careful with that. Um, some people, uh, exhaust intentionally. Uh, one of my negotiation heroes, a guy now who's unfortunately suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's. John Domenico Pico is the UN hostage negotiators that got, got all the Western hostages out of Beirut in the eighties. And he wrote a book called Man Without a Gun. And I'm acquainted with Johnny. At this point in time, I think, I don't think he has any memory of who I am at all.
1:34:32 Speaker 01 But he writes in his book, uh, uh, uh, one of the great secrets of negotiation is exhausting the other side. Political negotiations that could be Johnny was very deferential. He was in the middle of, in, in the eighties, leading up to about 1986 ish. Every negotiation involving, uh, warring parties in the Middle East that you can imagine. He was in Cyprus. He was in, um, um, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. The Iranian government had tremendous, uh, trust in him as a Westerner, a representative of the UN, got all the Westerners out of, out of Beirut.
1:35:17 Speaker 01 And he was just ridiculously patient. And then which the other side found exhaust would often find exhausting.
1:35:26 Lex Fridman? So exhaustion is a, can be a component of finding resolution in a negotiation.
1:35:33 Speaker 01 If it's, if it tamps down the negative emotions, often exhaustion will tamp down negative emotions. If it puts you, if it, and getting, the real trick is really getting negative emotions out of, out of, out of the way. Cause you're dumber in a negative frame of mind.
1:35:48 Lex Fridman? So the goal is always positive emotion as you talk about. That's what you're always chasing together.
1:35:52 Speaker 01 I think, I think so. Yeah.
1:35:54 Lex Fridman? And that's what the, that's right. It's about.
1:35:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:35:57 Lex Fridman? Think whatever you're triggering, whatever the chemistry you're triggering in your brain, like, yeah, yeah, we're doing good here.
1:36:05 Speaker 01 I think so. Long-term for long-term success. Absolutely.
1:36:09 Lex Fridman? How is the word fair used and abused?
1:36:12 Speaker 01 The F-bomb.
1:36:13 Lex Fridman? The F-bomb, as you call it. How's it used and abused in negotiation?
1:36:17 Speaker 01 It's usually, uh, uh, used, it's most frequently used as a weapon. It's abused as a point of manipulation. It's what people say when they feel backed into a corner and they can't, um, come up with any legitimate reason as to why they're being backed into a corner. Like, nobody uses the word F, the F-bomb. Nobody uses the word fair when they've got criteria to back them up. So consequently, when somebody starts, starts dropping it, you gotta realize the other side's got no legitimate outside criteria. They're, they're feeling very vulnerable. They can't explain it, but they feel defensive.
1:36:55 Speaker 01 And it saying, hey, look, I've just, I've given you a fair offer is a way for me to knock you off your game if you're, if you're not, you're not aware of it. So a lot of cutthroat negotiations, negotiators are gonna use it on you to knock you off your game. The, um, uh, the NFL strike probably now, it's been a good 10 years ago. Um, and maybe even longer than that. One of the sticking points was the owners were not opening their books to the players. Players wanted to see the numbers. And in order to not open their books, they just sent a rep to the press conference saying, we've given the players a fair offer.
1:37:40 Speaker 01 Well, if it was fair, you'd open your books.
1:37:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:37:47 Speaker 01 If, if you gave them a fair offer and it was justified by what was in your books, you'd open them to prove your point. So what ends up happening though, that, well, the owners gave the players a fair offer starts to get picked up in the media. And then it starts getting repeated. And now, now there are different people on a player's side are going like, yeah, maybe, maybe they have given us a fair offer. It caused people to be insecure about their own positions. It's an enormously powerful word that can be used and abused. And it almost always comes up in every negotiation. It's shocking the number of times it comes up with people who don't really understand how or why it's coming up.
1:38:27 Lex Fridman? So usually it's a signal of, uh, of a not a good place in the, in negotiation.
1:38:32 Speaker 01 Without question, I'm completely convinced that if the person is using the word as a means of getting what they want, then either accidentally or on purpose, either in their gut, or they know they got a bad position, or their gut is afraid that they are.
1:38:51 Speaker 01 Do I use the word? What I'll say is, I want you to feel like I've treated you fairly. And if at any given point in time, you think I'm not treating you fairly, I want you to stop me. And we're gonna address it.
1:39:06 Lex Fridman? Big ridiculous question, but how do you close the deal? How do you take the negotiation to its end? Is implementation ultimately?
1:39:19 Speaker 01 You gotta pivot to agreed upon implementation to really move out of the negotiation. And I may say, how do you want to proceed? And if you don't know, I might say, no, I want you to question, is it a ridiculous idea if I share with you some ideas of how to proceed?
1:39:37 Lex Fridman? And then you agree on the actual steps and that's the implementation. It's not just the philosophical agreement, it's actual steps.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 The big problem in all negotiations is a lack of discussion of next steps.
1:39:53 Lex Fridman? That's deep. Who is the best negotiator you've ever met?
1:39:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, actually, probably my son, Brandon.
1:39:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah?
1:40:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, he's ridiculously talented. I mean, he's ridiculously talented. And yeah, he's, you know, and what was it? Coyle's book, The Culture, The Talent Code, says that, you know, people just noticed it and started getting good at it. There's no such thing as a child prodigy. He's just got interested when they were a kid. I mean, Brandon started learning how to negotiate when he was two years old. And he's been in it and immersed in it, you know, since he can make complete sentences, even before he can make complete sentences. He's ridiculously talented.
1:40:32 Lex Fridman? What's his future? What's he want to do?
1:40:35 Speaker 01 He's gonna, he has been involved. He's run and built my company. And now he's gonna be an affiliated licensee, run his own operation. He's pretty much gonna end up doing very much. He's gonna open his entrepreneurial opportunities to do whatever he wants and not have his dad say no.
1:40:56 Lex Fridman? And do a better job than his dad.
1:40:58 Speaker 01 Most likely.
1:40:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Okay.
1:41:04 Lex Fridman? Do you see some of the techniques that you talk about as manipulative?
1:41:09 Speaker 01 Manipulation is whether or not I'm trying to exploit you, hurt you.
1:41:15 Speaker 01 Am I trying to manipulate a bank robber into letting me save his life? Yeah.
1:41:22 Speaker 01 So manipulation is like, what am I, what am I trying to do to you?
1:41:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:41:27 Lex Fridman? So, but you don't see the negative connotation? If you're trying to bring a better future, it's not manipulation?
1:41:35 Speaker 01 Stop, if I'm trying to bring a better future, if I'm being genuine and honest, like, I compliment you.
1:41:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:41:42 Speaker 01 If, if my compliment is genuine,
1:41:46 Speaker 01 that's not manipulation. Like, but, but, you know, if I think,
1:41:52 Speaker 01 you know, you're, you got a pair of shoes that, that are the dumbest looking things I've ever seen. And I go, wow, those are great shoes. Now that's manipulation.
1:42:03 Lex Fridman? So there's, there's guys like Warren Buffett, who are big on integrity and honesty. What's the role of lying in effective?
1:42:13 Speaker 01 Lying is a bad idea. Lying is just a bad idea for a variety of reasons. First of all,
1:42:22 Speaker 01 there's a really good chance the other side is a better liar than you are. They're going to spot it right off the bat.
1:42:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:42:28 Speaker 01 Secondly, they could be luring you into a trap to see if you will lie.
1:42:34 Speaker 01 Thirdly, the chances are they're going to find out that you lied to them eventually is really high. And then the penalties and the taxes are going to be way higher than what you had in the first place.
1:42:46 Lex Fridman? So long-term, you want to have a reputation of somebody with integrity. And the more you lie, the harder it is to maintain that reputation.
1:42:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. And, and word's going to get out.
1:42:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So what's the, we can just return to that question. What's the difference between a good conversation and a good negotiation? Can we, because I think just reading your work, listening to you, there's a sense I have that the thing we're doing now and just conversation on podcasts and so on, is different than negotiation. It feels like the purpose is different. And yet, having some of the same awareness of the value of empathy is extremely important. But it feels like the goals are different. Or no?
1:43:36 Speaker 01 Really close, fine line. I mean, I, you know, I ruled in here not having any expectations, not looking for anything other than to have an interesting conversation. And to hear what was behind the questions that you were asking me and what interests you. And then also your description of silence and the power of silence, something I'm going to take away as a learning point and help learn to teach others. But I didn't come in here, I suppose, the negotiation is when we're both aware of a problem we're trying to solve.
1:44:10 Lex Fridman? Right. There's no problem in the room.
1:44:12 Speaker 01 Right.
1:44:12 Lex Fridman? Just to solve, except maybe like the human condition and.
1:44:18 Speaker 01 Insight, you know, wisdom.
1:44:19 Lex Fridman? Insight.
1:44:20 Speaker 01 Learn.
1:44:22 Lex Fridman? How do you train to become better at negotiating?
1:44:29 Lex Fridman? In business, in, in life?
1:44:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, just small stakes practice for high stakes results. I mean, decide what, what kind of negotiating resonates with you. I mean.
1:44:39 Lex Fridman? What's that mean? Small stakes practice for high stakes or small stakes? So small, little incremental, like picking up girls at a bar? What are we talking about?
1:44:48 Speaker 01 Well, it can be. For some people, that's, that's high stakes practice.
1:44:53 Speaker 01 Well, you know, labeling, labeling mirrors. What are the basic tools of great negotiation? Labeling, mirroring, paraphrasing, summarizing. So you start, you start labeling and mirroring people that you're just having regular interactions with just to gain a feel for whether or not you can read somebody's affect or how accurate your read is to get better at it.
1:45:16 Speaker 01 And so, you know, label the, the Lyft driver, or the grocery store clerk,
1:45:25 Speaker 01 or the person behind the airline counter at the, at the airport.
1:45:29 Lex Fridman? So putting a label on their affect.
1:45:31 Speaker 01 Or throwing something at them that, because negotiation is a perishable, perishable skill. Emotional intelligence is perishable. So seeing if you can indicate that you understand their label. One of my favorite labels to throw out on somebody, which, you know, maybe re-level, I might look at somebody who looks distressed and I'll go, tough day?
1:45:53 Speaker 01 So several years ago, I'm at the counter at LAX. Well, I'm waiting in line to get to the counter. And a lady behind the counter is clearly making an appointment to not meet my eyes so that I don't approach. And she looks, and so like, you, you know, you know, when you're next in line and they're making sure that you don't meet eyes. And I'm thinking to myself, all right, so they're having a bad day. So I walk up and as soon as I approach the counter, I go, tough day? And she kind of snaps around and she goes, no, no, no, how can I help you? And goes out of her way to help me. Now I'm practicing, but I also know it made her feel better. It relieved some of the stress.
1:46:37 Speaker 01 So now I'm going through TSA, want to look for, for people who are having a tough day.
1:46:41 Lex Fridman? It's a good place to find them.
1:46:42 Speaker 01 Good place to find and practice. And I'm, and I'm rolling through the line and I realized I haven't tossed a label out on any one of these guys. And, and there's this guy watching the bags come out of the x-ray machine. And he's just kind of got an indifferent look on his face. And I go, tough day? And he kind of goes, I can see from his body language, like, no. And I go, just another day, huh? And he goes, yeah, just another day. You know, he felt seen, but I missed and I'm practicing and I'm trying to stay sharp.
1:47:12 Lex Fridman? So these are the few words, with just a few words, you're trying to like, quickly localize the affect and put a label on it.
1:47:19 Speaker 01 Very, very, very analytically said. Thank you.
1:47:25 Speaker 01 I'm not letting it go.
1:47:26 Lex Fridman? I love it.
1:47:30 Lex Fridman? It does the same apply to just conversation in general? Just how to get better at conversation? I think a lot of people struggle. They have insecurities, they have anxiety about conversation. I, as funny as this to say, I have a lot of anxiety about conversation. Is that it basically do the same kind of practice? Practice some of the techniques.
1:47:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, genuinely, just trying to make sure you heard somebody out.
1:47:52 Lex Fridman? Yeah. What's the best conversation you've ever been in? Except this one, of course.
1:47:59 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:48:00 Lex Fridman? What, what, I mean, not the best conversation, but what stands out to you? As conversation that changed you as a person, maybe?
1:48:08 Speaker 01 Well, there's probably been a lot of them along the way. I mean, but one that, when that I remember on a regular basis, there's actually there's two. But when I was in the bureau, I'm at Quantico, I'm there for an in-service. There's another guy from New York, buddy of mine named Lionel. And we're both trying to decide whether or not we want to be, try to get into profiling or negotiation. Cause they're both about human dynamics and both of us really like human dynamics. And we're sitting around talking about it and we're talking about several things and he labels me and I knew he didn't know what he was doing. I think, I think he was just, he had picked it up and I'd been talking about my family, quite a few things.
1:48:49 Speaker 01 And he said to me, and I never said this directly, that we were close. But he said to me, it sounds like your family's really close. And I can remember in the moment, like this feeling, just like I felt great in the moment. I mean, what he said just drew together everything that I'd been saying and nailed the essence of it. And I have a very clear recollection of how good that felt in the moment.
1:49:15 Speaker 01 So a couple of years later, I'm on a suicide hotline. Now I got, I got this line in the back of my head, you know, line, technique, reaction, read, whatever you want to call it. Guy calls in on the hotline and I could tell the dude is rattled by his tone of voice. I mean, just, just amped up. And he goes, you know, I'm just trying to put a lid on the day. I need, I need your help putting a lid on the day. I gotta, I gotta put a lid on the day. And I go, you, you sound anxious.
1:49:45 Speaker 01 And he goes, he goes, yeah. And he, and he came down a little bit and he was a guy that was, he was telling me about, he was battling a disease, disease of paranoia. And he's gonna go on a car trip with his family the next day. And he knew that on the car trip, he was gonna, you know, twist himself into knots. And so the night before, he's twisting himself into knots. And he's laying out everything that he's done to try to beat paranoia. And how much his family's helping him. And, and he's going on a car trip with the family because they're gonna take him to see a doctor. And he, and so I, I hit him with the same thing that my buddy Lionel said. I said, it sounds like your family's close. He goes, yeah, we are close.
1:50:28 Speaker 01 And he leveled out a little bit more. And then he started ticking off all the things that he was doing to try to beat paranoia. And he sounded determined. And so I said, you sound determined. And he goes, yeah, I am determined. I'll be fine tomorrow. Thanks. And that was all I said. So those two conversations, which are overlapping conversations, those two things really stick out in my mind.
1:50:57 Lex Fridman? Do those things, like through all the different negotiations and conversations you've had, do you, do they kind of echo throughout? Like you basically, because when you empathize with other human beings, you start to realize we're all the same. And so you can start to pick little phrases here and there that you've heard from others, little experiences that were all about, like we all want to be, to be close with other human beings, we all want, want love. The world, I think we're all deeply lonely inside, looking for connection.
1:51:41 Lex Fridman? We're just, if we're, if we're honest about it. And so all humans have that same, all the same different components of.
1:51:51 Lex Fridman? Or it makes them tick. So you you kind of see yourself basically just saying the same things to connect with another human being?
1:52:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, there aren't there aren't that many different things that we're looking for understanding on or connection on or satisfaction of. There just aren't that many of them regardless. And so, yeah, you're looking for it to manifest itself in some form or another, and you're willing to take a guess on whether or not that's what you're seeing or hearing.
1:52:20 Lex Fridman? What advice would you give to me to be better at these conversations? To me and to other people that do kind of interviews and podcasts and so on?
1:52:34 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:52:36 Lex Fridman? Because I really care about empathy as well. Is there a kind of, is a lifelong journey in this process?
1:52:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I think I would advise you to take that approach, which is the approach you're taking. You care about it. You're very curious about it. You see it as a lifelong journey. You're fascinated by it. You enjoy learning about it. And you definitely do see it as a lifelong journey as opposed to this is what I can, if I can acquire this, then I can manipulate people.
1:53:05 Lex Fridman? No, I mean, I I fall in love with people I talk to. There's a kind of deep connection. It lingers with you, especially when I'm preparing. The more material there is in a person, the more you get to fall in love with them ahead of time. You get to really understand, not understand, but what I mean by fall in love is
1:53:26 Speaker 01 Well, appreciate, huh?
1:53:27 Lex Fridman? Appreciate, but also become deeply curious. That's what I mean by fall in love. Like, you appreciate the things you know, but you start to see like Alice in Wonderland. You start to see that there's all this cool stuff you can can learn if you keep interacting with them. And then when you show up and you actually meet, you realize it's like more and more and more and more. It's like in physics, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And it's like, it's really exciting. And then it could also be heartbreaking because you have to say goodbye. Goodbye. I hate goodbyes. I hate goodbyes.
1:53:58 Speaker 01 Seems terminal, right?
1:53:59 Lex Fridman? Yeah. It makes, it reminds me that I'm gonna die one day. Like, things end, good things end. It sucks. But then it makes the the moment more delicious, you know, that you do get to spend together.
1:54:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:54:15 Lex Fridman? Okay, I just want to, I completely forgot I wanted to ask you about this. The 73855% rule. It's really interesting. Does this, is there at all truth to it? That 7% of a message is conveyed from the words used 38% from the tone of voice and 55% from body language.
1:54:37 Lex Fridman? Is there really truth to that?
1:54:38 Speaker 01 All right, so Albert Merabian, I think is the name of the UCLA professor that originally proposed a 73855 ratio and discussed it in terms of that it wasn't the message, but how much, he called it liking. Like, are you, not that you're, the meaning is coming across, but your liking of the message. And so it's been extrapolated heavily by people like me to this meaning of the meaning in 73855, from liking to the meaning. What I've seen regularly is people that communicate verbally, if their speakers, Tony Robbins,
1:55:23 Speaker 01 73855 guy, he throws the ratio out there.
1:55:29 Speaker 01 Go, that's it exactly. That's exactly how the message comes across. This is how we got to balance it. This is how we got to do it. Those that communicate principally in writing, the meaning of the words are much more important to them. So they're deeply uncomfortable with seven being the words. Cause the content, the words, the meaning of the words. When you're writing, it's so important that you hate to poo poo it that way. So I, first of all, I thousand percent believe it's an accurate ratio. But the real critical issue is not what the ratio of those three things are, it's what's, what's the message when they're out of line?
1:56:12 Speaker 01 Like, what's the message when the tone of voice is out of line with the words? Like, it don't matter what your ratio is. You got a problem if their tone does not match their words.
1:56:22 Lex Fridman? And that's, that's hard to really put, um, put a measure on exactly. Even in writing, there's a tone. I mean, it's not just, even in writing, it's not just the words. There's the words, but there's like a style underneath the whole thing.
1:56:35 Speaker 01 Right.
1:56:35 Lex Fridman? And there's something like body language, the presentation of the whole thing. I mean, they're, yeah, I'm a big fan of, uh, constraint mediums of communication, which writing is, or voice, like clubhouse. There's a personality to a human being when you just hear their voice. That there's, it's not just, you could say it's the tone of voice, but there's, you can like, what is it? The imagination fills in the rest. Like when I'm listening to somebody, I'm like, I'm imagining some amorphous being, right, doing things. When they get angry, I'm imagining anger. I don't know what exactly I'm visualizing.
1:57:09 Speaker 01 If you, well, and so you, you may think of a funny story because we were talking about your buddy Elon before.
1:57:14 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:57:14 Speaker 01 And I told you, you know, about, you know, that I'd interacted with some of the senior executives. So I know that they, that they, that, that they love working with him. And I think he's an interesting guy and they realized that he can be funny and he jokes around.
1:57:27 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:57:27 Speaker 01 So that, they're telling me, they're on this conference call, just words. And a guy on the other end of the line says something, um, you know, that wasn't, wasn't, was wrong, but wasn't bad.
1:57:42 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:57:43 Speaker 01 And so they said, they're on a, they're on a phone and Elon goes, you're fired. And then everybody in the room with him can see that he's joking.
1:57:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:57:50 Speaker 01 But the person on the other side, and they're all going, wait, wait, wait, wait. They can't see your look on your face right now. You gotta stop, you gotta stop. Cause the guy on the other side is dying right now. He doesn't realize you're joking.
1:58:00 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:58:01 Speaker 01 So there was, you know, there were the words and the tone of voice and, but it lacked the visual to go with it.
1:58:08 Lex Fridman? Nevertheless, it was probably funny.
1:58:10 Speaker 01 I'm sure it was very funny at the time.
1:58:14 Lex Fridman? Maybe not to him. Just, just as a interesting to ask, I don't know if you're following along the developments of large language models. There's been something called Chad GPT. There's just more, more and more sophisticated and effective and impressive chatbots essentially.
1:58:32 Speaker 01 Right.
1:58:32 Lex Fridman? They can talk and they're becoming more and more human like.
1:58:37 Speaker 01 Right.
1:58:38 Lex Fridman? Do you think it's possible in the future that AI will be able to be better negotiators than humans? Do you think about that kind of stuff?
1:58:49 Speaker 01 Well, so definition of better or versus less flawed. Like they're, you know, chatbots have been out there for a long time and probably about five years ago now, a company approached us because they were doing a negotiation chatbot. And they said two things. First, first of all, I said, you know, why are you talking to us? So well, in point of fact, we already spoke to the people that are teaching, quote, the Harvard methodology. And, you know, the rational approach to negotiation just doesn't work. Rational approaches does not work. It's our chatbots are not getting anywhere.
1:59:28 Speaker 01 But we're showing in, in around about 80% of the interactions, a higher success outcome with these chatbots. And they showed me what they were doing and it was still a lot deeply flawed emotional intelligence wise. But the reason why that they were having higher success rates is the chatbots were never in a bad mood.
1:59:51 Speaker 01 And you could reach out for a chatbot in the middle of the night. So if you were talking to somebody that was never upset and was always available.
2:00:00 Speaker 01 Then you're gonna have a higher success rate. Negotiations go bad when people are in a negative frame of mind.
2:00:05 Lex Fridman? So the po- the natural ability of a chatbot to be positive is just going to give you a higher success rate.
2:00:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, and and they're not they're not gonna get mad and argue with you. You know, you you say you say to a chatbot, you know, your price is too high. Chatbot is designed to come back with a smiley face.
2:00:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:00:25 Speaker 01 You say to a person, your price is too high. They go, how dare you? I'm trying to make a living. You know, they they could go off the deep end.
2:00:32 Lex Fridman? Unfortunately or fortunately, I think the way chatbots are going now, they will come back negative. Because they're becoming more hu- more and more human like. That's the whole point. To be able to pass the Turing test, you have to be negative. You have to be an asshole. You have to have boundaries. You have to be insecure. You have to have some uncertainty.
2:00:50 Speaker 01 Well, it's the difference between being having boundaries and being negative. Like, I can, like, you you threw a proposal to me.
2:00:59 Speaker 01 But, you know, before I say no, I'm gonna say, look, I'm sorry, that just doesn't work for me. I'm gonna set up a real clear boundary without being negative.
2:01:10 Lex Fridman? Sure.
2:01:11 Speaker 01 So then a lot of people really struggle with setting boundaries without being negative, without name calling, without indignation, without getting upset.
2:01:23 Lex Fridman? But see, there's a, when you are, when you show that you're not getting upset,
2:01:31 Lex Fridman? I'm not just seeing that. I'm seeing a flaw- I'm seeing a flawed human that has underneath it a temper, underneath it the ability to get upset.
2:01:41 Speaker 01 Right.
2:01:41 Lex Fridman? But chooses not to get upset. And a chatbot has to demonstrate that. So it's not just going to be cold and and, you know, be this kind of corporate, blank, empty sort of, like, vapid creature that just says, oh, thank you. Thank you for saying that. No, it's basically, you have to, the chatbot has to be able to be.
2:02:08 Lex Fridman? Mean and choose not to be.
2:02:12 Speaker 01 Interesting. I don't know.
2:02:13 Lex Fridman? Maybe not.
2:02:14 Speaker 01 I'd be, I'd be willing to, to see that play out and see, see how it plays out.
2:02:21 Lex Fridman? But I guess what I'm saying is to be a good negotiator, you have to be, have the capacity to be a bad person and choose not to be.
2:02:28 Speaker 01 Really?
2:02:28 Lex Fridman? I think so.
2:02:29 Speaker 01 I, see, I, I think you just gotta have the capacity to set a boundary and stick to it.
2:02:35 Lex Fridman? Interesting. I, cause I think it's hard for me to trust a person who's not aware of their, their own demons.
2:02:42 Lex Fridman? Cause if you say you don't have any demons, if you don't have any flaws, I can't trust you.
2:02:48 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, it's first of all, it's a lie, right?
2:02:49 Lex Fridman? Right.
2:02:49 Speaker 01 Somebody's lying.
2:02:50 Lex Fridman? Right.
2:02:51 Speaker 01 This is, this is back to lying.
2:02:52 Lex Fridman? Yes. So you have to have a self-awareness about that. But he'd be able to control it, demonstrate they're able to control it. I mean, this is humans. I just think humans, intelligent, effective humans are able to do this well and chatbots are not yet. And they're moving in that direction. So it, it makes me think about what is actually required for effective negotiation. That's what AI systems do is they make you ask yourself, what is it that makes humans special, any discipline? What is it that makes humans special at chess and go games? Which AI systems are able to beat humans at now? What is it that makes them effective at negotiation? What does it make them effective at?
2:03:39 Lex Fridman? Something that's extremely difficult, which is navigating physical spaces. So doing things that we take for granted, like making yourself a cup of coffee is exceptionally difficult problem for robots.
2:03:50 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:51 Lex Fridman? Because of all the complexities involved in navigating physical reality. We, we have so much common sense reasoning built in just about how gravity works, about how
2:04:07 Lex Fridman? objects move the.
2:04:11 Lex Fridman? What kind of objects there are in the world. It's a, it's, it's really difficult to describe because it all seems so damn trivial, but it's not trivial.
2:04:19 Speaker 01 Right.
2:04:19 Lex Fridman? Because a lot of that we just learn as babies. We keep running into things and we'll learn about that. And so AI systems help us understand what is it that makes humans really, what is the wisdom we have in our heads? And negotiation to me is super interesting because negotiation is not, it's about business. It's about geopolitics. It's about running government. It's basically negotiating, how do we, the different policies, different bills and programs and so on. How do we allocate money? How do we reallocate resources? All that kind of stuff. That seems like AI in the future could be better at that. But maybe not.
2:05:01 Lex Fridman? Maybe you have to be a messy, weird, insecure, uncertain human and debate each other and yell at each other on Twitter. Maybe you have to have the red and the blue teams that yell at each other. In, in the process of figuring out what is true, maybe AI systems will not be able to do that. They figure out the full mess of human, of human civilization.
2:05:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, interesting. Well, I mean, the, the two thoughts that I had along the way was, I mean, anytime you're talking about systems or scaling, you know,
2:05:36 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:05:36 Speaker 01 you're talking, my belief is chatbots, systems, things that don't require decision making, just following the instructions. At least 80% of what's going on. Now, the remaining percentage, whatever it is, does it, does it require the human interaction and what's required? Like, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not like, I am not pro-conflict. And I also know that there's a case to be made in the creative world that some of the best thinking came out of conflict.
2:06:11 Speaker 01 Reading interviews of Bono, U2. You know, their admiration for some of the Beatles' best music came when they were fighting with each other. And the song one, "Ock Toon Baby," which is, I believe, from the album "Ock Toon Baby." Those guys were fighting. I mean, they were on the verge of breaking up. And their appreciation that conflict could create something beautiful. And then when I was in the crisis negotiation unit, you know, my last seven years in the FBI, there was a guy that, um, named Vince, brilliant dude, brilliant, brilliant negotiator. And he and I used to argue all the time. And then when we had a change in the guy who was in charge, the guy who was in charge took me off to the side.
2:06:56 Speaker 01 He's like, you know, I can't take you and Vince fighting all the time. And I said, well, I got news for you. I think we come up with much better stuff as a result of our battles. And he said, you know, Vince said the same thing to me. And I'm like, so if we don't have a problem fighting, why do you have a problem? But, you know, there is, there is something there that sometimes the most difficult insights, you rack your brains as to why someone is so dug in on something that so you think is so wrong. Yeah, maybe there's something to it. I think there's something to it.
2:07:31 Lex Fridman? There's something about conflict, even drama, that might be a feature, not a bug of our society.
2:07:37 Speaker 01 Interesting.
2:07:38 Lex Fridman? Uh, do you think there will always be war in the world?
2:07:42 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:07:43 Lex Fridman? Uh, so there will always be a need for negotiators and negotiating?
2:07:50 Speaker 01 Well, as it turns out.
2:07:52 Lex Fridman? Uh, why do, why do you think there will always be war? Is it, what's your intuition about human nature there?
2:07:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, just because we're basically 75% negative. And then, for lack of a better term, I call it two lines of coat. Like somewhere when you, everybody when we were little, somebody planted in two lines into our head, we don't know when it got in there. But somebody said something to us, it stuck. And there are a lot of people that had some really negative garbage dumped in their brain when they were little.
2:08:29 Speaker 01 And just based on the numbers.
2:08:33 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:08:34 Speaker 01 What kind of opportunity they were given afterwards? Did they ever have an epiphany moment? When they genuinely believe they can get, get themselves out of it? Like, what is it? One of Joe Dispenza's book is breaking the habit of being yourself.
2:08:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
2:08:50 Speaker 01 You know, like, how do you get at that two lines of code that that, that either mean or well intentioned, but stupidly speaking, adults said to you at the wrong moment and planted in your brain? Like, how? The chances of everybody on earth getting out, getting that out, even the majority of people on earth getting that out of their heads is, is really small.
2:09:11 Lex Fridman? What advice would you give to a young person today? About how to have a career they could be proud of or a life? Maybe somebody in high school, college, trying to figure out their way in this world?
2:09:24 Speaker 01 It's probably a take on a cliche of do what you love. But if you, if you figure out your ideals and pursue your ideals and stick to them when it costs you.
2:09:42 Speaker 01 Like, a guy I admire very much, Michael Mulgill, runs this Operation Crisp video in Atlanta. In one of his talks, he would say core values are what you stick to that cost you money. It's not a value that really matters to you unless it's costing you. And stick to your values. Now, when I was in the FBI, I worked really hard at, you know, the number one core mission of the FBI is protect and defend the American people.
2:10:15 Speaker 01 So I could pursue that value at all times, which I did. Or I could follow the rules.
2:10:24 Speaker 01 You don't have time to do both.
2:10:28 Lex Fridman? When did you know you you found what you love?
2:10:36 Lex Fridman? When did you fall in love with whatever this process is that is negotiating?
2:10:42 Speaker 01 I think it was in a conversation on the suicide hotline that I was telling you about earlier with the guy who was paranoid. When I thought, I can have that significant of an impact on another human being in this short of a period of time. That's really cool.
2:11:01 Lex Fridman? How hard is it to talk somebody off the ledge? So this question, this is a big question. Why, why the hell live at all?
2:11:11 Lex Fridman? How do you have that kind of deeply philosophical, deeply psychological, and also practical conversation with somebody and convince them they should stick around?
2:11:20 Speaker 01 Well, it's more clear, clear the clutter in their head.
2:11:27 Speaker 01 And let them make up their own mind. That was what volunteering on a suicide hotline was really about. Just let me help, let me, let me see how quickly I can clear out the clutter in your head. If you're willing to have it cleared out. Like, did you call here because you're actually looking for help? Or did you call here to fulfill some other agenda?
2:11:51 Speaker 01 So, are you, you know, are you, are you willing to have, are you willing to clear the clutter in your head? Not everybody is.
2:11:57 Lex Fridman? So, once you clear out the clutter, is there at least somewhat hopeful chance that you'll, you'll continue for another day?
2:12:05 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and like, if you step back, like, very few people that commit suicide physically are up against it that hard.
2:12:20 Speaker 01 Like, most of them, by and large, are pretty intact, physically, human beings. They're struggling with emotional stuff.
2:12:28 Speaker 01 But the, it's, it's an emotional issue. It's not a physical issue. So if you were to be a complete mercenary, like, a guy, I'm a very big fan of a guy named Mark Pollack. Born great athlete, lost his eyesight, and then became paralyzed. Like, he's an emotional leader. He's about helping people thrive and live great lives.
2:12:56 Speaker 01 Like Marx was born, he was a spectacular athlete. And first he lost his sight in one eye, then he lost his sight in the other eye. And then he fell out a window in a tragic experience. Like if there was ever a dude that was saying like, living sucks. You know, and if there's any doubt in my mind, something worse happens to me every few years. But Marx about being alive and inspiring other people. So the hard part with navigating with somebody who's tossing it in because there's a chemical imbalance or it's the way they're interpreting the world. There's clutter in their head. Like, can you help clear that clutter in their head?
2:13:38 Lex Fridman? And help them by themselves, inspire them to reinterpret that world.
2:13:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:13:44 Lex Fridman? As one worth living in.
2:13:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:13:48 Lex Fridman? What do you think is the meaning of life?
2:13:50 Speaker 01 What?
2:13:51 Lex Fridman? Why live? What's, why, what's the good reason?
2:13:57 Speaker 01 Well, I have, I have, I have very strong religious beliefs. Spiritual, you know, I don't a thousand percent. If you were to try to confine me in a box, I'd be a Christian. I have tremendous respect for the Jewish. I don't think any religion's got it nailed exactly. Again, you know, I keep mentioning him, I'm kind of a Bono Christian. I think Bono's like, what? And I'm gonna butcher it, but you know, my belief in Jesus is what I've got after Christianity leaves a room. You know, the dogma of man's application of spiritual beliefs. So, but that being said, I truly believe that my life was a gift and there's a purpose
2:14:42 Speaker 01 here and, you know, for my creator decided that I woke up in the morning because he still had some cool, interesting things for me to do.
2:14:49 Lex Fridman? And you have gratitude for having the opportunity to live that day?
2:14:55 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:57 Lex Fridman? Well, you do one heck of a good job at living those days. I really appreciate your work. I appreciate the person you are. Thank you for just everything you've done today for just being empathic. Honestly, you're a great listener. You're a great conversationalist. It's just an honor to meet you and to talk to you. This was really awesome.
2:15:16 Speaker 01 My pleasure.
2:15:18 Lex Fridman? Thanks for listening to this conversation with Chris Voss. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from John F. Kennedy. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Previous #363 – B-Team Jiu Jitsu: Craig Jones, Nicky Rod, and Nicky Ryan Next #365 – Sam Harris: Trump, Pandemic, Twitter, Elon, Bret, IDW, Kanye, AI & UFOs Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
