449. How Hostage Negotiation Can Help You Win More Cases with Chris Voss [Encore Edition]

The only thing about a first impression you gotta worry about is that you make a bad first impression because then that becomes your last impression because you're deciding to so fett up with you don't want talking. That's Chris Voss, former FBI hostage negotiator, CEO of the Black Swan Group and the best selling author of Never Split the Difference, negotiating is if your life depended on. You can get away with a mediocre first impression. You can't get away with bad first impression. And then immediately, whatever the last impression is, it colors the rest of the enratch. I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started which is $500 to my name and has grown to over 8 figures in revenue over the last few years, earning a spot on the ink 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo, and define what it means to be a true game changer. Today, we're revisiting one of our most popular episodes from the podcast where I sat down with Chris Voss to discuss why we should be skeptical of quote unquote "win win opportunities" - the transformative power of a collaborative mindset and the dangers of complacency. The growth issue is a perishable skill, there's no way around. Simply doing it is not enough to stay good at it. Now, fortunately, the only time you're really questioned whether or not you got the best system is when you lose or you lose bad. And of course, that's a problem with winning, you know, put that sort of introspective along on the win. When you should, bring it up. It's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not going to push any "made-to-order" meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five-star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. Chris, welcome back to the podcast, sir. Michael, it's my pleasure. I know we were talking about this just before we started recording, but the last time you're on the podcast, it was episode five of the podcast back in March of 2020. It was roughly around the time, maybe a week before the pandemic hit. And it was obviously a very tumultuous time. Now we've made it through all that fast forward several years. What have been some of the most significant developments or projects that you've been involved with? It's March of 2020, right? Since the pandemic. There's a documentary film that did with Nicknack and DNA Films. We got that in the can. It was finished a little over a year ago, probably going to get a distribution deal on that sometime by the middle of this year. Looking forward to that thing getting out. Nicknack, great guy. Well, you get stuff done. So Nick comes with an idea and I'm like, okay, because as you know, a great idea is a dime a dozen. I paraphrase and buff it and you deal with a plan B to genius, we're a great idea. And then of course, you got to know the landscape otherwise your plan is going to be good. But Nick understands landscape and plans. So when he's got an idea, I just feel like, okay, because I know he's already got a plan mapped out in his head and he's got an idea of the landscape. So we did the documentary. You know, there's a book that just came out with a collaboration among me and 30 other authors on empathy. And then so then it comes with me with an idea. He's like, hey, let's create a bourbon dedicated to business only the only business bourbon in the world from do make it and we'll call it the difference. And look at how. So we're working on that this year, too. It's cool. I love it. I love it. And then now also, I already want to take the Delta flight. You're on every plane on every flight. So has that been, I mean, I'm mad you've had people reach out to you saying, hey, Chris, man, I'm on this flight right now and I'm watching you. Has that happened at least once? It's happening more and more now. You know, happens on Delta because it happens to be my favorite airline. They screw up the least. So I'm on Delta every chance I get. It hasn't happened yet where the person sitting next to me is dialed it up. I'm looking forward to that moment. Yep. But yeah, I get called on a regular basis that the first time I saw the master class was on Delta and then they binge watched it. And I'm like, awesome because what are you going to do when you're on airplane? Your wife is probably not going to work. You might as well watch something that could feed your mind and selfishly feed your mind with negotiation stuff. I want to ask you a little bit about the latest book, The Collaboration You Do With Nick and several other authors, the empathy and understanding in business. I love how you open it up with the example of Harvey Spector from suits and you know, given that our audience is predominantly attorneys, can you speak to the distinction between, say, negotiating and what that looks like on TV versus what effective negotiation looks like in real life? Yeah, they look vastly different. But portrayed to us in the media on TV most of the time, slam dunk negotiations where you crush the other side. And I liken that it's very much like playing a slots at Vegas. I can celebrate the wins so much. And you forget that the algorithm for slots and Vegas is a win one in every 84 tries. But they get you to submit the wins so much. You don't pay any attention to how often you lose a victory one in every 84 tries. That's not a sustainable. It's barely sustainable. Like you're probably at best at best a C-student because you want a big victory. And great negotiation is astonishing. Another project we got going, we got to deal with Mark Wahlberg's company on realistic ideas. I'm not talking about Mark. I don't need to talk to Mark. I need to talk to the people who work for him to get stuff done. I haven't met him. At some point in time, we'll cross paths and say, hey, how are you? And that'll be it. But I'm working with his people on developing this non scripted show. And I said, you got to understand, this is not going to be real housewives. This isn't going to be health care. It's not going to be bar rescue. Nobody's going to be yelling at anybody because great negotiation isn't exciting. It's astonishing because suddenly at some point in time, you're going to be, you're going to be astonished that you make it a great deal. Like you're not going to know how you got from being adversarial to collaborative and the other side's telling you stuff. They shouldn't tell you what they do. And it's astonishing. And in the legal world, in the real world, the real world, legal world, way back where just before I left the FBI, young man came through and he was a White House fellow. And he got detailed to the FBI and he got detailed to my unit. And they gave him to me because in intern, because they knew I'd put him to work. I was famous for putting people to work. And through serendipity, he kind of got to shaft and becoming an FBI agent. He got somebody that was overly critical of his attempts to get in. And at first time when he should have got in, they rejected him physically, even though he was in front of our condition. And they said, you got to come back and try this again. In an era when he was going back to train, he was a law school graduate and a law firm in his hometown contact with him. And he said to him, his bright say, you know, maybe it's just sign for the universe. Yes, yes, not for me. I'll go become a practicing intern. But he got really exposed to collaborative negotiation. He saw me do it as a hostage and got a shout out. It took him with me as I was negotiating a couple of kidnappings. And he watched me do it. He's got some good stories from some stuff I thought of true. You know, he found himself in a dark hallway in a high rise in a bad neighborhood at Bronx, where if there was gunfire, it was going to get killed. And I just shrugged that. I'm like, ah, you trust me. But he goes down and as a lawyer, it was already in his DNA to be collaborative. And then he applied what he learned from collaborative skills. And he was never argumentative as a lawyer at all. And being highly collaborative and not fighting every negotiation, he made more money than any other associate did. And he made partner faster than anybody else in his firm ever did. And he wasn't combative. And what did that look like? He wouldn't fight every point. Consequently, he made his, the deals he came to, what she would have come to in a range anyway, came quicker because it wasn't collaborative. But then when he stood up and pushed, he had a reputation for pushing only when he was totally justified and not because it's what he always did. And because of that, he made more deals. He made more money for his law firm. He wasn't exciting. He didn't slam his hands on the table. He was just vastly more profitable being collaborative than he was being combative. So I'm curious, why do you think that is? I mean, because obviously there's going to be a lot of people listening to this podcast that say, look, our whole value proposition for all these years has been that we're going to fight hard on behalf of our clients and then we're going to win, right? And there's winners and then there's losers. So why do you believe that this collaborative approach is more successful? What's an example of it as well? - Yeah, you're gonna make your deals fast. People aren't gonna push back and fight you only because you're fighting. There's a neuroscience approach. If I approach you being combative, there's gonna be a neurochemical change. It's gonna cause you to be combative in return. It's why law enforcement officers being trained to shout orders is kind of a product. Because everybody's IQ drops. When you get into the fight or flight mode, you're a dumper. And you're more likely to push back. Which is gonna lengthen the amount of time it's gonna take you to the deal that you could have gotten to anyway. 'Cause the other side's gonna push back. People are gonna dig in. And it's just gonna take longer for you to get to your deal. Now you're gonna feel better about it. They're gonna feel better about it. 'Cause they fought hard. And they felt like they earned it. And in many cases, we used to say kidnapping negotiations when we asked how long it's gonna take to get the deal to get the hostage out. We'd say when the other side feels like they've got everything they can't feel slept. So if you're combative trained negotiator, you gotta feel like you gotta fight for a given period of time. You gotta go through phases. But it's actually gonna take long. Now the collaborative negotiator, the fights never gonna get in there. So we're gonna get to the same deal. We're gonna get there fast. When I kind of feel like we've fought every inch of away, a jogger, a thick dog, a heel, a zander, a jogger, put our fingernails in a wall. But it's gonna come quicker. So your deal velocity comes fast. Then consequently, if your relationship is being collaborative, when you do push back, it has integrity to it as opposed to it being attacked. Your push back is a tactic. Everybody knows it's a tactic. Okay, we're gonna box with each other. We're gonna go 15 rounds. But if it's not your tactic, if it's integrity, then the inside goes way to me. It's probably something to this 'cause this guy doesn't have a reputation of pushing back as a general rule. They only push back when he's really something there. So I better listen. And it's a completely different dynamic. Now it doesn't lengthen the process, what it does is it actually gets your side attention more quickly and makes them open to listening to you 'cause you only push back when you got a real point when it's justified. Do the side actually listens? Yeah. So I recall you saying at one point that when it came to hostage negotiations, the absolute best thing you had to offer someone was jail time. And I'm curious what makes a negotiation more or less difficult and how much of it, if any, it has to do with what you even have to offer someone. Well, I was down to a vision of the future and what vision you got is it short term is a long term and where do you think this is taking you long term? I know an extremely successful attorney in Los Angeles that any time he got into an argument with somebody or it became combat. And this guy started with nothing and ended up with a law firm that was successful enough to make him a bogey. Because I heard what a great negotiator was asking him to come speak at a class at a USC and he looked at him and he says, "What do you want me to talk about?" And I'm like, "Look, instead of a negotiation class "based on your success and your reputation, "you can talk about anything. "You could read us the dictionary. "We're gonna learn from. "I don't care what you say." You come in and you talk about whatever you want. He's not really super-prapid. He's not an instructor. So he gets to the role place with the students right away. And why not role play instead of lecture? And every single time somebody wanted to argue with him, he'd say something that is a fact. I want this moment to be something that we look back on 10 years from now. It realizes this is a moment that was the beginning of a great relationship between the two of us. So that's a visual future. He's placed a moment in the future where both sides are in wonderful condition. He never said where we split the difference. He never used a term win win. Although effectively you could argue that that's what he was proposing. But when he was was painting a picture and vision of the future to get us out of the present moment, now all we gotta do is walk away there, collaborative. So there's a high sense of negotiate, even though it's on the jail time. The vision of the future is where you live. I want us to talk about you coming out alive. You live and at some point in time your life gets reset and you get to start over. Now what happens between here and there could be puppy, could be difficult. But here's why I'm going on the future. You're okay. Now the conversation opens up. You have to say it's a little more collaborative 'cause you're not there for their demise. On that note, I knew you mentioned earlier this idea of a win-win deal, which is, I think a lot of entrepreneurs just, we're all promoters of selling, they like to position a win-win deal, but I've heard you say that if someone comes to you with a win-win deal, your spidey sense goes off and you immediately think, "This person's trying to pick my pocket." That hasn't failed me yet. And what I've gotten anybody likes to use a phrase of win-win right off the bat, maybe is their opening line. I know privately, we'll get into a conversation, never be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." I just want to come in high so I can end up where I want to be all along. I'll really split the difference. I just lie about what I want so I can get my way and they don't even know it. I mean, it is just such a profile that has yet to fail me. What's an alternative way that someone should position? Let's say a true win-win deal, where there's benefits to both parties, but obviously not using those words, not coming in hot, saying like, "Hey, this is good for you and this is good for me." And what's an alternative way to do this? Well, typically, however you might want to start your conversation, should be the way that you end. Because the last impression is the last thing you're pushing. Whatever I say to you last is going to carry us forward to the next conversation. There's so much emphasis placed on a first impression. And I've gone back and forth and back and forth and looked at all the information. And in a point of fact, the only thing about a first impression you got to worry about is that you make a bad first impression because then that becomes your last impression because the insight is so fed up or you don't want to talk it. The other side's going to give you some rope. You can't get away with a bad first impression. So how are people doing it wrong? They'll start up by saying like, I value our relationship. You know, I don't want this to be competitive. I want you to know when it works something out. That might be their opening statement, their opening phrase, the opening line of an end. And then immediately they'll become competitive and they'll start arguing and they'll start making points. And then the last thing they'll say, I would remind you, we still have other rights and remedies that we could avail ourselves up at any time. Love Chris. That, you know, that is a threat. I mean, come on. If you're going to say something negative, it should be a front and you should warn the other side is coming, whether it's verbal or an email. And then what you said at the beginning, which was genuine, unless you were saying I want to win with deal. I know that's a setup. But what did you mean by a win with deal? Write that out and finish that way. That's the real difference. If you say you want to win with deal, you start out by telling me what that looks like. If that looks like the only way I win is I do all the work and you reap all the benefits, which is every time I've come across it, that's what it means. Yep. Don't pull my leg here. You know, don't deceive by omission. Don't leave out of the material facts. That will affect everything. You get a lot more far farther when people view your words with integrity as opposed to people viewing all your words as tactics. Now, when it comes to the power of generosity, whichever you mentioned more and more recently, especially when it comes to negotiating, like in what ways can generosity be perceived as a strategic advantage? I'm gonna be appreciative of your generosity. That's a critical issue of empathy. What I might be is you being stingy. You might view as being generous. There's a pretty good chance that most people start making concessions before they get to the tape. Almost everybody does. So to some degree, you view your opening approach as being generous. And empathy, again, that fine line here is it's not about my perspective. It's about yours. It's not about whether it's an accurate or fair perspective. It's about your perspective. And as a pretty good chance, you think that you've already made a concession. And you probably have as a human being because as a general rule, we start making concessions before we ever get to the table because we're afraid to find out. You know, you get together people on your side. Somebody says, I can't say that. That's a non-starter. So you decide not to go with it. Well, you just started negotiating against yourself. And most of the B level negotiators and below are going to do that on a regular basis instead of having the courage to find out. So my appreciation of generosity on New York part, when you really feel it, is going to encourage it. And for me, I'm trying to encourage something. And to you, I'm simply being appreciative. So generosity is a critical element. of the DNA component, but it's not the only component and it's not the most driving component. I want to be aware of it. I also want to be aware it's not the biggest component. It's a little bit like the molecule for water, it's 2o. There's twice as much hydrogen as there is oxygen all through essential, but there is twice as much hydrogen. So this twice as much negativity is there is positivity and ignoring either element is going to make any complete deal and it's going to mistomark. I'm not going to get as much as I possibly can. So being aware of what generosity is and what really looks like to you is critical on my blood. So when it comes to how people make decisions, I mean generally from what I've read, and it might explain correctly if I'm wrong, that the reason why we believe what we believe is typically the summation of the information we consume and the personal experiences we've had. And the expression that generally people don't pick a side out of thinking, they pick a side out of feeling. So how do you navigate various subconscious biases and different perceptions when you're in a negotiation? Well, I simply being aware of it for two reasons, because then if that's true and it is, then my conclusions are based on incomplete information and so are yours. And we can both think we're completely right. And intellectually, it's an imperfect world. No matter what, it's an imperfect world. I'm having a conversation with Daniel Pankbath that long ago, and he says, look, I'm a flawed human being making difficult decisions in a complicated world, with imperfect information. I get that's exactly the summer. So being aware that the other side might have a better idea. And if being aware that, if you get the right pieces of information across to the other side, you might in light, which is another reason to not be combative. Because if you're combative, then that could have been a light when somebody's combative. Their IQ goes down. There's no two ways around that. You're 31% smarter in a positive frame of mind and nobody's in a positive frame of mind when they're combative. Your survival mechanisms have been triggered. Your fight, Moe has been triggered. Your dumber. And the kicker on that is there's a lot of self-righteousness involved. So not only are you dumber, but you're even more convinced that you're right than you were before. So if I'm gunna enlighten you, the chances of me doing it by attacking you are just about zero. So I want to enlighten you. I want to share with you pieces of information that will change your money because I've got and conversely, vice versa, you got them too. So it's really a skin into a conversation where we can share the information more quickly and come to an outcome, or quick. I don't you speak a lot on tactical empathy. I recall that you, I think even in the most recent book you mentioned, like Daniel Goldman wrote a book called Focus and in there there's the empathy triad and he talks about the different types of empathy is like cognitive, emotional, empathic, you know, concern. Cognitive empathy you mentioned is the first cousin of tactical empathy. And I'm just curious how would you define it? And then I've got a great follow up because you also mentioned that the best people at this tend to be sociopaths. Yeah, how kind of a total of is that, right? Yeah, it's a really close cousin cognitive empathy. And you know, what Goldman does it really point out really, really well is cognitive empathy is about an accurate reading of the other side. And the reasons why sociopaths are best at it is because they don't get in their own way. They don't think about how you should feed or how you should react. I don't ask somebody, all right, so how does the other side see this? And they'll go, this is how they should see it. Which means that ain't how I see it. It's how they actually see it. And your sense of right and wrong, you know, your sense of justice, your moral compass is going to get you way of recognizing how the other side sees this little bit like the Israeli-Palestinian thing. Each side is going to get their feelings about the injustices that they've suffered. It's going to get in their way of seeing how the other side actually sees it. And so it's going to color their conversation. So cognitive empathy, you know, theoretically sociopath, their moral compass is not there. They get all the same emotions. They don't have guilt and they probably don't have a moral compass. Which means the stuff that gets it in their way of seeing what your reaction actually is is not there. They're free to make a clear read of you. And because of that, they often make extremely accurate reads. The difference to in cognitive tactical empathy is I'm going to say it out loud. Instead of me just reading you accurately, I'm going to articulate what that read is. And then it's going to be guided by what we know to be true from neuroscience. Which even though this is a neuroscientifically accurate, it's, you know, an application, it's neuroscientist, I can disagree with me. Your 75% negative. Everybody's so everybody's survival thinking is 75% negative. Now where rests and what organs in a brain, the amygdala, I'm listening to a fasting and conversation on human right now, where the neuroscientist psychologist, he's having a conversation with is talking about how the amygdala is not all fear centered. You know, we look at the amygdala is being like where all our fears are reptilian brain are, survival reactions are based. And she's saying like, yeah, that's mostly true, but not entirely. But then at the end of the day, in terms of application, she says we're still principally negative because that's how we survive. Predatory threat. What could kill you? You've got to react to it and get away from it. The caveman right now, or you dead in terms of, you know, the positive stuff, which are procreation and eating kind of depends upon how long it's been since you've eaten. They are two since you've eaten. You're going to want to eat before you have sex. If you got a full belay, you're probably going to want to procreate. But in any instance, if there's a saber-toothed tiger there, you don't get away right now. You're dead. We've inherited that wire. No matter how it's composed in a brain, we're mostly negative. Tactical empathy takes it into account. And we've learned what buttons to push to deactivate your negativity to put you in a much more collaborative thing with months. I'm curious. I don't know if you've ever had this thought, but what would a world look like where everybody practiced with tactical empathy? Would we still have the same degree of conflict? Is it just in our nature, right? Does some extent, or would that be diminished significantly? Oh, if I could wave a magic wand, the manager world is highly positive and highly collaborative. Everybody's borderline flow state on a regular basis. We're creating great stuff. The book I read recently, Walter Isaacson's book about Musk. He's driving people to create things that may kind of never see. It's burning them out. Everybody would be doing it. We wouldn't be getting burned out. What Tesla's done is extraordinary. What Starlink is done with space access stuff. I mean, it's almost incomprehensible. The stuff that we're now taking for granted. Every car company is put now electric vehicles now because of Musk. And when he got into the industry, every car company had given up on electric vehicles. But it takes his people and he demands beyond performance and beyond excellence. And they create extraordinary things. But only as company. Everybody be doing that. If we can get into a highly collaborative mindset where instead of getting burned out by it, we were energized and we felt better and we couldn't get enough. The whole world would be doing. It will never happen because we're wired the way we are. We'd colonize beyond Mars by now if we were all doing it. So curiously, this is like somewhat of a deeper question. But what prevents people from adopting tactical empathy, meaning that I'm sure you see in the news whether there's some war going on and like you have to think these aren't stupid people, right? Like at least the leaders of these organizations are some, you know, based on low intelligence experience and so on that they've kept to understand the cycle of violence. We know where that goes. And yet, you know, do you ever wonder how could you get involved and say this is how we could resolve this, right? What prevents someone from adopting this level of tactical empathy? Is it ego? Is it other political pressures? Why are these things going on for years and years? Yeah, well, first of all, have you ever seen it? How it's supposed to have been? Have you ever been, have you been exposed to a success and known? What was the success? You know, like I said before, tactical empathy is astonishing. The practitioners are going to know what happened, but the people that observed it were involved in it aren't. They're not going to have any idea that's what it was. It tells somebody clue to man on. This is emotional intelligence. And in many cases, at what point of time do you adopt it? I'm hearing now about some extremely successful world renowned human beings that are aware of never split the difference that they're talking about. Now their history is not having been collaborative. And one person in particular has been described in very visible ways is his bite is way worse than his bark. This guy had a reputation for kicking people's ass and having gone through that now. He's like, yeah, this emotional intelligence stuff. This is what I meant. So nobody knows that. Or what was the journey that got him? Because he's got a history of big [BLANK_AUDIO] highly successful by being highly combative. So if you don't know, you're looking around, for example, you see this guy who's ridiculously wealthy and you think of him as a combative guy, you want his money. So let me emulate what I know about him publicly, what he may not be in that game at all in. And I think that's one of the issues. - Yeah, yeah, I think if you're rewarded for that behavior, then there's really not much emphasis to change said behavior, but if obviously, it's not working, you're thinking, okay, maybe there's a different approach. There's not as many people that say, maybe there's a better approach as opposed to saying that this isn't working, I need to do something different. - The truly ambitious, when, especially experienced, ambitious and experienced, when I'm finding out a regular basis when they run across, never split the difference in tactical empathy, the light bulb goes on instantly. I mean instantly, and you can see behind me the book The Full Free Aging, we're putting on a real estate conference in LA in a couple of weeks, and we've been doing joint coaching with Steve Shaw, former NFL player, he was a Super Bowl captain, on a losing team, but they made the Super Bowl, and he was a captain. And so what we're doing on a webinar just a couple of weeks ago is top people, who are art, art disciples of tactical empathy, and in particular proof of life, method knowledge. Now when Steve started coaching them, they were making tons of money before one of them is a top real estate broker in San Francisco, and she had no shortage of money and success before she was exposed to the method knowledge. But because she was ambitious, and always looking for better ways to do something, as soon as she came across it, she was like, "Oh my God, yeah, "this is the answer to the riddles that I've been struggling with, "that I just all went with the territory." But it doesn't. Yeah. And to some degree, it may require a journey to get to the point where you suddenly are given an answer to a question that you've been asking deep down inside that you didn't even know you were asking. Yeah, I guess true learning is not gaining new information. It's changing your behavior, and that's not easy. I mean, with what we were talking about, even before we started recording the podcast, of just like how difficult it is to adopt certain habits, and the mettle consistency, and it's different skill sets, there's a lot of psychology behind it. I wanted to ask you, coming back to negotiations in this digital age, right? Let's say a negotiation taking place digitally, written form, maybe you're going back and forth with someone through an email or text, or talking them on the phone, like you're not seeing them in person. What changes there? How can people be better when they're not looking at someone directly? Each mode of communication is being complimentary, not your own, your soul mode. And then don't be lazy. And what do I mean by that? People are going to want to put seven things in an email. They're going to want to put seven things in a text. A great conversation is where you say one thing, you communicate one thing, and you wait for it to land, and then you wait for the reaction from the other side. If you chunk your emails and your text messages down that way, most people don't. Most people only want to text. Most people only want to email. They only want to send one text, they only want to send one email. You know, they thought a long time about an email, they're thinking about for three or four days, and three or four days where the thought goes into a single email. Or maybe think what everybody's guilty of, myself included, when you reach your epiphany moment, you just want to share the epiphany. And you forget about how long it took you to get there, or thinking journey you were all, and because it's now so clear to you, that you expect it to be crystal clear when you communicate it as such. I find that to be a shortcoming of me, leading an organization, to communicate, you know, the outcome of the equation, and assuming not realizing what kind of a thinking journey I want to get to that moment, and then not wanting to allow the other people to go on the same thinking journey. I think those are some of the issues trying to communicate too much at once. And then also you talked about the pandemic. The real struggle today is, getting people to come back to work. Black Swan group was almost all virtual before the pandemic. And now I'm trying to get as in person as much as possible. I'm hiring people to work with me in person, 'cause the in person time is here with place. I mean, you need it. So it doesn't have to be all your time, but it needs to be some of it, 'cause there's something special about being in person, but I'm in agreement. And what's interesting is that we've never been more connected, let's say from a digital standpoint, and yet one would argue that the relationship, the depth of new relationships has never been more shallow, right? And I think it's because to your point being lazy, it's much easier to, I mean, sometimes you don't even need to send the text, you can just like the message, right? You don't even have to say anything. And obviously if you're looking at like growing an organization, trying to build a culture, at least from my experience, my perspective, I could be wrong, but I've just found that there's something to be said about having that little cohesion in person that you just need, it's very difficult. If not impossible, replicate virtually. And I'm not talking about virtual happy hours, and we meet up once a year. I hear all the time from my friends that run virtual companies, don't get you wrong, but they have team members that graduated from college to work out of their apartments, and it's just odd to me. Yeah, and it's not best for everybody, and use a leader. I mean, you got insights to communicate that's just not gonna happen digitally, even in a Zoom call. 'Cause a Zoom call everybody's gotta be sitting together, it's gotta be at the same time, it's not spontaneous. You gotta look at your computer, and you know, every now and then, the people that I have that I see when we're all in Vegas at the same time, I'll be getting up to get a cup of coffee. And I'll say, hey, look, you know, let me explain this wacky thought that I just shared with you a few minutes ago. And that never would happen if I could find it, even to Zoom, which is simultaneous, but it's not spontaneous. That's right, that's right. I know you mentioned when you got this habit of small stakes practice for high stakes results, if you could speak to that of what it looks like for someone to get ready for negotiations, what it's like to hone the skill or any examples that you have. Yeah, well, so negotiations of perishable skill is no way around it. Jim can't, it was a friend by the colleague, Collabrider, but a book in 2002 called "Star with No." And having been a coach, you called negotiation to human performance event, and it is. Which means simply doing it is not enough to stay good at it. You know, Tiger Woods spent more time on a practice courses than he ever did in tournaments. If the only thing that Tiger Woods, when he was at the top of his game, dominating the world, if he had only played in tournaments, we would know he was. And he was famous for being coachable. He was famous for the massive amount of time he spent practicing. He even changed his swing. At the height of his game, he changed his swing. That's how coachable he was. So he's always getting in the small stakes practice. You know, what does that mean for a human bit? I gotta have a conversation with a lift right. You know, I gotta throw something out with a Starbucks purse. You know, I gotta do my cold reads. I gotta try to read the emotions. I don't say how I'll argue it today to anybody ever. Right. I read how I think they are. And I go, looks like you have a tough day or looks like you're enjoying yourself today. Whatever the read actually is. And you read those and you even have to be accurate when I'm traveling all the time. I'll throw a read on the guys at TSA. And I'm rolling through TSA one day. And I realize I haven't thrown a read on it. I'm like, I'm gonna go to the other guys. And so as I went from my bag to come out, those guys stand there. And he's got kind of, you know, just an in different look on his face. And I go a tough day. Now that was an inaccurate read. It just happens to be one of my go-to reads with TSA. 'Cause it's almost always a tough day for them. And he gets his, 'cause shoes look on his face. Like, no, I adapt and I go just another day. And he goes, yeah, yeah, just another day. Now, 10 minutes later, I'm in the middle of an adotation that I did not plan. I'm sitting in a business class lounge, the phone rings and it's somebody I gotta talk to 'cause I, it's how I get the monofo. And I was successful because I loosened up my negotiation muscles with the TSA guy 10 minutes earlier. And I was still loose. And when that call came in, and I got to where I wanted to go collaboratively with the guy, I remember thinking, thank God I threw that read out on the TSA guy a little better. 'Cause now I'm ready to go. I'm loosened up, I'm ready to go into the game. So, your Tiger Woods, or you never know when that call is gonna come in and you gotta be loose when you're so many tapped on and show a little bit or go into the game. - Right. So would you say somebody that, let's say they've been in a number of negotiations and they've been doing negotiations for years, is there any correlation between that and them being a good negotiator? - It's defensible on how introspective they were on the negotiations. Did they learn everywhere along the way? Did they think they could pat it in between? It's kinda sound like I'm bad mouth and some people, but I'm gonna compare Patrick Mahomes with Kirk Cousins and watch it Netflix show quarterbacks. - Great show. - Yep. you know, they compare them and the other guy, the reason why I'm having trouble remembering his name is because he's struggling. I think he's one. He's like the only someone. Oh, yes, it's Marcus Mariotta. He must have the one best agent who got him on that show somehow. Yeah, and it's good contrast. So cousin's perfectionist. What's wrong with being a perfectionist. First of all, if you have a great game, the next game you have is probably going to be lousy because you had a great game and you you reach your goal and you relax and you drop your guard. Number one, number two, you're off when you're not perfect, you're very harder. So negative frame of month and cousins, very successful quarterback, by the way. Plenty of teams should have cousins at the helm because he does win games. You know, there's no way around affected. Kirk cousins is a winner. Now, how many Superbolts does he have? And in the same episode, one of the episodes are walking through his trophy room at home. You know, the I love me room, which everybody's entitled. There's nothing wrong with that. You need to have a room that makes you feel good. Remind you who you are. And he pulls down the scouting report from high school and he reads the scouting report from him as a quarterback. And he looks at the camera and says, yeah, this is pretty much me today. What does that mean? Kind of admitted he hasn't grown that much. Now, my home's he's delighted with the game. I mean, he's having a poll is nothing but creativity. And if he has a great game in an upbeat sex, he's like, yeah, you know, okay, so it was a great game, but I could have done this. I could have done that. And he's talking about it. He's not down on himself. But this is much borderline flow state where he's delighting and exceeding himself every step of the way. And he's strong side arm. He's strong other arm. He's throwing behind it back. He's doing stuff that nobody ever had seen before. And if you didn't understand the difference between ambition and perfection, cousins of perfectionists and largely unhappy and not winning Superboys, my home is ambitious and delighted and having the best time. And God knows how many rings he's going to have by the time this guy gets done until you really understand the contrast. How do you get better? You can't be a perfectionist. It's like it's really looking at, I mean, you mentioned that show. It's like how does someone handle losing or how does someone handle something not going their way. And I think that tells you a lot about someone who would have been interesting to have quarterback show for this season with the Chiefs, right? Because they were struggling, you know, and they kind of the early middle part of the season. And I think, obviously they turned around and won a Super Bowl, but it's just fascinating to see that when someone's winning, it doesn't really tell you a whole lot about someone just in general. Just the same way where we were talking about negotiations. If someone has had great outcomes, they may believe that they're right. And as a result, they can believe they're going to be right all the time. It creates this hubris or false sense of, you know, of confidence. What are your thoughts, though, in terms of like, what is the correct way to respond when something doesn't go your way and negotiation doesn't go your way? Like, you know, anything in the business. First of all, just because it could have done it better, it doesn't mean it would have changed you out. That was very definitely my approach to Hassel's year. I'm glad you mentioned this. By the way, this is timely because last night my wife and I were watching Beckham also on Netflix. I don't know if you watched that show. And they talk about the time where I like, I believe like England is playing. We were Spain and Beckham gets a yellow card, then he gets a red card. He's out of the game. This is like a major World Cup event and everybody just dogs back. I'm saying like, how could you do this? We lost because of you. This is our chances are opportunity. And then they mentioned, and by the way, yes, he did get a red card. He was out for the game, but they didn't lose at that point. They lost on the penalty kicks, right? So, and what's to say that if, you know, if he stayed in the game that they would have won? Right. Yeah, exactly. How do you look at it? Are you always looking to get better? We're gonna lose. I can't go learn what it meant. Best chance of success. Have I ever got the best system? Right? Now, fortunately, the only time you're really question whether that you got the best system, is when you lose or you lose bad and most human beings, it's the only time they're really digging down on what we could have done better. When you're rocking a rolling and you're winning, you know, most of the time, you're not 100% sure what you could have done better because the outcome was a victory. And you be like, ah, you know, all right. So, you know, I want let's celebrate. Let's be happy. And so, by and large, you don't most put that deep of analysis in it unless not only you lost, but if you lost bit, I didn't really think about our system and hostage negotiation until I had a really big loss, a really ugly chase that several Americans that a bunch of Filipinos get killed. And as I'm sitting back there thinking about it, I realized that my boss always said, best chance of success, which means by definition, there's no guarantee of success. You're gonna lose some. And then for me, personally, it was all right. So, can we get better? Gotta get better. Gotta figure out a way to get better. And of course, that's a problem with winning. You don't put that sort of introspective on the win when you should, but you don't. What do you think happens? I mean, this is, I guess, someone who will feel a philosophical discussion of maintaining competitive edge, I think, is one of the most difficult things if not impossible over the longer, you know, in the longer to period, the more difficult it gets, right? There's like gaining a competitive advantage and maintaining set advantage. Now, obviously, we were talking about the chiefs. They won several super balls before. That was the Patriots. They had their dynasty. You know, they've got the University of Alabama. You can look at, you know, even great organizations that thrive for many years because nothing is forever. I don't know that any organization or any person has maintained a competitive advantage forever, right? Or for the entire time that they were playing whatever game that they were playing. What do you think happens when you maintain this competitive advantage for so many years and then things drop? What is that? First of all, there's a big difference between whether you're competitive or whether you're ambitious and competitive is you're measuring yourself against your competition, right? As opposed to yourself. And this has been something, I've been thinking about, talked about what the people in my company are a lot lately. And I think you need both. Because you're going to start to fall short at some point in time. You're going to get complacent. And you're not going to notice it if you're beating it. Then when you get beat, something you wake up, it's a bit of a cliche. I think that guy that broke the four-minute mile might have been Roger Banster. But whoever first broke the four-minute mile, then suddenly in the next year, like four or five more people just broke it. And my view is they needed to get beat by somebody they thought they were better than. They needed a good slap in a face because they were only competitive. And you need to get beat every now and then to remind you that, you know, you got to replace it. You got lazy, you got fat, you got drunk on your success because you're only measuring yourself against your competition. Now when you're at best, just measuring yourself against yourself and you're always looking to get better. You're always looking for a little bit of a homes. Now in organizations, what happens? By and large, I think the team erodes, you know, the Patriots, the coaches, their assistant coaches that are, you know, doing a Patriot way with Bellachick, you know, they're getting head coaching jobs, other places. They got to turn over on the team. And they're not as diligent on training and bringing along the members of the team as we were when we first built the team. You know, that's kind of my hypothesis. What I find most interesting about the chiefs and most dangerous about them is until they lose people in the organization because they give moms a max contract, which is almost a guarantee of a demise of the organization. Seahawks give Russell Wilson for a max contract and they can't afford to pay anybody else. They don't replace the players. And suddenly, Seahawks run a downwards bar, the downward spiral, they haven't pulled themselves out. Or the last soup, or the Ravens one, they give the quarterback a max contract. And they can't hold the team together. And it's the demise of the organization and the quarterback. They give them a homes a max contract and these guys turn around and pull things back together. So that means they got a great organization. They got a GM and a general management team that sits, find in players who are coachable and they got a coaching staff from end to end. It's bringing out the best in the players and it put winning teams on the field. Having undergone massive roster changes because they can't afford the superstars that they had when they first won, but they maxed my home's contract out. So as we're talking about it now, it's did you maintain the team, the integrity of the team into end, the level of players. And when you lost people, they went on to bigger and better things. How could we replace you? Yeah, this is why I think business is the ultimate sport. I mean, there's no off season. You're going up against in the case of other organizations if you have competition about people who are also very ambitious, they are very intelligent, they're very creative. In the end, I think they can also drive the best entrepreneurs. When you have that in an industry, I think it's very good for everyone. Just because I think it was too easy, then at some point you would get complacent. The goal I think is to avoid that. The thing that I always worry about is that, do you have to be endlessly paranoid to never become complacent? Yeah, that's a good question. And I get to tell you something, man. I mean, studying your methodology and learning from you about how you run crisp in the organization, how you're building the team, and where you came from. I mean, I will very unashamedly offer that we know more about negotiation than anybody else does. And it's only one component in the DNA of molecule and building teams, building an organization. We are studying the hell out of what you are doing and picking up everything we possibly can and emulating it because it's impressive. I talk about you and your organization all the time. Well, thank you Chris. I appreciate it. Always learning. I mean, that's been my experience. Never, you know, you never stop learning. And if it looks easy, this is what I've learned to respect other organizations or even like we're talking about the chiefs. Whenever they make it look easy, I have so much respect for that because you know that it's not because you know internally that if the fact that someone's making something look easier simple means that they have done so much internally that they they have a level of hesitate to say mastery, but just like a level of the adaptant preparation that makes it look simple. So yeah, agree. Yeah, agree. I agree. 100%. So that's right. Oh, thank you. That was my go. I just wanted to get it. That's right. I have the whole podcast. So Chris, as we come to a close, I know you answered this back in 2020. I don't know if your answer has changed, but this being the game changing attorney podcast, what does being a game changer mean to you? Yeah, really plowing new ground. I've realized that when I was in the FBI, we're plowing new ground on a regular basis. This tremendous amount of freedom. There are fewer people that are criticizing you and naysayers because you're out in new ground. I can't say you're breaking a rules because you're out someplace where there was no that had been established. Now, there's no status quo. And to me, the one thing that that we're constantly doing and we're believing is we're plowing new ground and emulating the people who's envy in a good way like I envy the success and growth of your organization. You know, what can we learn from that? And then what can we add to it to plowing new ground like the world's problems are not going to be solved by governments ever. They're going to be solved by businesses. So how do we plow new ground and have a positive impact in new ways on everything in the world where people want to do well and collaborate. And to me, it's a lot of fun. And changing a game is plowing new ground. I hope you enjoyed revisiting this episode of the game changing attorney podcasts with our guest, Chris Voss, and have gained new insights from our timeless conversation. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book absolutely free at gamechangingatourney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got for me. And finally, number three, if you can lead this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Chris Voss, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com.