#132 — Freeing the Hostages
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Summary
Chris Voss was a hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years, and we spend most of our time talking about his experience in the field there, negotiating with terrorists and ordinary hostage takers and bank robbers. And then he has distilled some of the lessons he s learned from those extreme conversations for more ordinary ones. And he s written a book on negotiation titled, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on it. And he has lectured at many leading institutions, Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern, and perhaps most relevant to our conversation today, he was a Hostage Negotiator for the Federal Bureau of Investigations (B.I.I.) for twenty-five years. And now he s an expert in negotiation, and he s the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group, which consults with Fortune 500 companies about negotiation. He also teaches at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and Georgetown University s School of business, and at Georgetown University's School of Law and Diplomacy, and has a Ph.D in negotiation from the Harvard Business School. He s a regular lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Diplomacy and the Harvard School of Economics and Political Science, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and the New England Journal of Negotiation. and the National Association of Negotiators. He s also the author of a book called, Negotiation as if your life depended on it . and a keynote speaker at Harvard University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard University. and Harvard Law, where he has been invited to speak at a number of events, including the Harvard, Yale, and MIT. to talk about his experiences, including a dinner party he attended with President John McCain. in 2015. with President Obama, and his new book, Never Split The Difference, which he recently wrote about negotiation as if you really do have to do it as if it s your job, not your life depends on it, not if it does. or if you do it because it's your calling. In this episode, he talks about how he got into the business and how he s found his calling to be a negotiator, and why it s not your job because it s his calling, not yours. after all, it s just a job you should do it and why he s a good one, not what you should be doing it in order to get good at it.
Transcript
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He's the founder and principal of the Black Swan Group, which consults with Fortune 500
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He also teaches at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and
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He's lectured at many leading institutions, Harvard, MIT, and Northwestern.
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And perhaps most relevant to our conversation today, he was a hostage negotiator for the FBI
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And we spend most of our time talking about his experience in the field there, negotiating
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with terrorists and ordinary hostage takers and bank robbers.
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And then he has distilled some of the lessons he's learned from those extreme conversations
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And he's written a book on negotiation titled, Never Split the Difference, Negotiating as if
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And now, without further delay, I bring you Chris Voss.
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Sorry I made it so hard getting all my tech set up.
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So let's just jump into your background because you have more than the usually fascinating background
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How is it that you became a hostage negotiator?
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So the pivot point in the FBI, because I was an FBI hostage negotiator, and you have to be
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an FBI agent first to be an FBI hostage negotiator.
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I was on SWAT, FBI Pittsburgh, and I had a recurring knee injury, and I realized that
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there was only so many times they could put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
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I'd had my knee reconstructed for the second time.
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And so then, before I blew it out entirely, I thought, you know, I talk to people every
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Is this the usual path to becoming a hostage negotiator?
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Do they just draw from the ranks of existing law enforcement or, I guess, for the FBI, you
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Or do most people seek it out through a, in a very deliberate way, through a separate track?
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It's a little bit more that people seek it out after becoming whatever law enforcement
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I mean, every law enforcement agency has additional specialties that if you get into it, there
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And there are kind of four basic specialties and there are four basic real different types.
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And you can be a hostage negotiator with the FBI.
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You can be a hostage negotiator with New York City Police Department.
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So you got to be a law enforcement guy with that agency first.
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And then if you find it, if it finds you, you know, whatever serendipity lines up and
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And I originally thought SWAT was my calling and thank God I hurt my knee because negotiation
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I mean, I got on the Pittsburgh SWAT team actually before I'd actually gone to our SWAT
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school, but there was a lot of local training with the Pittsburgh team.
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So I was used to running around waving guns responsibly as opposed to not paying attention
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So I was a Pittsburgh SWAT for about, about a year and a half, two years.
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So you went from Pittsburgh SWAT to FBI SWAT or, or FBI negotiation?
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So Pittsburgh FBI office has its own office and they got their own SWAT team.
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Each field office, about 56 of them have their own teams, if you will.
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And I had gotten transferred to New York in the interim and then, uh, worked to get on
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And how many hostage negotiations were you involved in?
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Is this the kind of thing you, you keep count of?
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I would imagine it might be, well, Hey, yeah, you know, not just on a bedpost, right.
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Um, or on, on the, uh, on the belt or the totem pole or wherever you want to put it.
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But, uh, um, I was, while I was in New York, uh, I was involved in probably about off the
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top of my head, three sieges, um, of varying sizes.
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Fortune, fortunate for me, one of them was a bank robbery with hostages, which is really
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a really extremely unusual event, uh, happens in the movies all the time in real life.
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Bank robberies where hostages are taken and negotiations subsequently ensue are very rare.
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It happens about, uh, it does once every 20 years in New York city, about the same amount
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So yeah, I'd, I'd been in one of those and a couple of, um, some fugitives in a, in a
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high rise in Harlem, um, smaller situation in, uh, upstate New York.
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Um, so that was a fair amount, relatively speaking.
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Um, most negotiators don't get that many in an entire career.
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And then when I became a full-time hostage negotiator at the FBI Academy Quantico, you
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And I probably worked counting the kidnappings I worked internationally.
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My rough guess is no less than 150 situations around the world.
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And can you generalize about the dynamics of a hostage negotiation or do they change radically
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and maybe even totally invert depending on the context?
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Cause I can imagine there are, I'm kind of thinking in international terms here where there
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are countries where they routinely take hostages as a kind of, you know, cottage industry where
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it's just, it's, it's not routine to kill the hostages and it's very routine to, to just
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negotiate until you get some economic completion.
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Whereas, you know, if ISIS is taking hostages now, we know all too well that it's, it's very
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What can you say about the different kinds of situations people are in?
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contains situation inside a bank, inside somebody's house, inside an apartment in Harlem.
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You know, that resembles a family holiday dinner.
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Lots of people upset, you know, past wrongs that other people have completely forgotten
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You know, like all the, you know, every year there's, there's a movie out about a holiday
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dinner at somebody's house and with siblings mad at each other and parents trying to hold
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That's, that's, that's a little more common, uh, contained situation, if you will.
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Uh, very much as you, uh, observed, uh, international kidnapping mostly is a commodities business.
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Commodity cold heartedly happens to be human beings.
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Even with ISIS reality, it's a financial transaction.
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You know, ISIS, their commodity was a lots of different citizens and they got what they
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could out of them, whether it be publicity or money.
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They get, they get money for Western Europeans.
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They get publicity for Americans, but there's always a commodity there.
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The challenge is spotting what the commodity really is in any negotiation.
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Yeah, well, that, that's an interesting point because with respect to international hostages,
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even with a group like ISIS, you have the effect of the different countries' policies.
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So we, we have a policy, if I'm not mistaken, that we don't pay ransom under any conditions.
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And there were, there were a few well-publicized cases where the U.S. even made it illegal for
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Whereas these Western European countries, many of them routinely pay ransoms.
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And so it, it becomes this, you become a very unlucky hostage if you are the American
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What, what is the, the current U.S. policy with respect to negotiating and paying ransom
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Well, the U.S. policy is all gray and that's why it's been reported so many different ways
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in the media and there, and it was actually funneled back to the families improperly by
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I mean, there was, there was a bonehead at the, uh, and I'm happy to say it was a bonehead
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at the National Security Council that was quoting it wrong the entire time.
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You know, what nobody knew was that nobody from the Department of Justice ever told the
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families it was illegal for them to pay ransom.
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And the Department of Justice, people responsible for prosecution, uh, the National Security Council
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Bozo was not responsible for prosecution and was ultimately essentially relieved of his
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position because he handled the family so badly.
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What all that really means is the U.S. doesn't make concessions.
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Um, and there's, there's some real fine nuancing to that, but there is room to allow ransoms
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to be paid, but the U.S. government officials aren't always smart enough to know that.
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Um, the issue is what's the long-term consequences as opposed to the short-term expediency.
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And of course, there's the way the Europeans do it and, you know, they back up to the hostage
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takers strongholds with truckloads of money and dump it all out on them, which makes it
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And, and that's what, what turned it into chaos.
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I mean, all the Western European nations are famous for showing up with suitcases, if not
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And that, that's where things really get, really get out of control.
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Because yeah, it's easy to see how we would be creating this industry by rewarding it so reflexively.
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And yet when you are in a specific situation where, you know, especially if it's your loved
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one who's hostage, you can imagine that there's just this moral and psychological imperative
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to just pay at any cost where, and you really don't care about the, the external effects
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of creating higher risk for other people in the future.
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What do you think if we could get everyone on the same page with respect to how to treat
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these situations, everyone being all the relevant countries, what should people do?
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Well, you know, the best analogy, um, is the bank robbery analogy.
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We give bank tellers bait money and that way you give the bank robber a little bit of money.
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Uh, the money's marked and the bank robber gets his money and he leaves.
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Or I just, or I just haven't watched the right movies.
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All bank tellers have money that they can just hand over.
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All bank tellers have bait money and every single one of them.
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Bank robber comes in a bank, you reach for the bait money, you hand them that money.
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It's not worth losing the life of a bank teller over a couple of hundred, few thousand dollars.
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The bank robber gets some of what he came in for.
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He just wants to take some money, take the money and run.
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So the great thing about that is there's probably an exploding die pack inside the bait money.
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And as soon as the bank robber steps out, it goes pout poof and it puts all sorts of
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But even if the die pack doesn't go off and he goes back to his hideout and he splits the
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money up among his co-conspirators who didn't go to the bank, money's ridiculously easy to
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Yeah, you know, it's only in the serial numbers.
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I mean, it's in those of us that aren't in the business of tracing money.
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We figure it's complicated because we don't keep close track of our money.
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But ever since, you know, the U.S. Watergate days, the refrain was follow the money.
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Well, it's follow the money because the money is insanely easy to follow.
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You can find out, you know, who else had the money.
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It actually is a great way to round up the entire gang instead of just, you know, the
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guy that they thought was expendable enough to send into the bank to get the money for
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So you can round up the whole gang if you follow the money.
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There was a kidnapping in Ecuador in about 2000, the first time the U.S.
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This kidnapping gang had been hitting oil platforms every year around October and had
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been getting away with money because there's insurance money for kidnapping.
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And the third time they hit it, unfortunately, an American was executed.
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government decided, like, all right, so we're going to get behind this payment and we're
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And what ended up happening, because it only takes about five or six guys to conduct the
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This was the first time the entire organization had ever been taken down.
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But what they did was save countless lives on down the line by following the money and
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taking out the entire gang of 50 instead of maybe taking five, you know, had they gone
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Maybe they'd have gotten three, four, five kidnappers.
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You know, the long-term solution is to be smarter than the bad guys.
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And that's the way you're smarter than the bad guys.
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Walk me back to the analogy from bank robbing to other hostage situations.
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So what should be the international policy with respect to terrorist organizations?
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Well, first of all, yeah, you go ahead and engage in the conversation.
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The U.S. policy actually is explicitly stated these days that we shouldn't be afraid to communicate
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We should, the old John F. Kennedy line, you should never be afraid to negotiate, never
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negotiate out of fear, but never be afraid to negotiate.
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The communication process becomes an intelligence gathering process.
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They tell you who they are inadvertently by their word choice.
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You can narrow down where they're from, how old they are, where they grew up by their choices
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And you talk to multiple people on the other side.
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You actually give yourself a better chance to conduct a rescue if you engage in communication.
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Then, you know, if you get into some bargaining, you bargain them down.
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You find out about how they pick up money, where they go, what they do with it.
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You follow the money and you follow them back to their hideout.
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What's the illegal markets they're spending their money in?
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In some place, you want to know who they're buying them from.
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You not only bring the kidnappers to justice, but you bring justice to their colleagues that
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But how does one trace money in these kinds of transactions?
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I mean, for instance, I just walked into a market and used a $20 bill.
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Had I gotten that from a bank robbery, I can only imagine that just disappears into the
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The guys that do white collar round all these people up.
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I mean, the greatest investigations in the world that...
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Al Capone was taken down by a white collar investigation following the money.
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Watergate was unraveled by following the money.
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You know, our brothers and sisters in forensic accounting work magic on following the money.
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The rest of us think it disappears into oblivion when we walk into a 7-Eleven and drop a $20
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So when the 7-Eleven sends their cash to the bank, it gets scanned as coming from the
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So you want me to reveal to the bad guys right now that we're tracking their money?
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So you talked about the highly personal hostage situation.
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I mean, just a boyfriend taking his girlfriend hostage.
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This is clearly a situation born of real emotional distress.
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And I could imagine that has a very different character than the routine hostage taking overseas
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done by people who do this all the time as a business.
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Do they require radically different approaches?
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Or can you generalize about the commonalities between those situations?
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And the answer is every hostage negotiation team in the world and every situation that they
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approach, whether it be contained, emotional, or transactional kidnapping, they all use the
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Now, the commonality is there's going to be an emotion, and there aren't that many emotions.
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Now, it's either going to be anger, it's going to be greed, it's going to be excitement,
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it's going to be a sense of loss, it's going to be a fear of loss.
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Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in behavioral economics, said that human beings
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around the planet, regardless of situation, are most driven by fear of loss.
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Not exclusively, of course, but most driven by fear of loss.
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So this encompasses human behavior, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's a kidnapping,
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whether it's a bank robbery, whether it's a business transaction.
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So human beings have the same basic set of emotions, and they're all driven from the caveman
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days by the same survival instincts and fear of loss.
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Fear of loss is the biggest single driver of human behavior globally, and I mean globally
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by age, gender, ethnicity, or globally in terms of situations.
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So you start with those rules, and then you begin to look for commonalities, you start to
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find them really quick, regardless of whether or not it's a bank or it's a kidnapping.
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Well, we'll get into the general principles that you've extracted here in a minute, and
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these don't just apply to hostage negotiations, but to negotiations of any type.
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But let's just talk about your experience in the trenches here a little bit more.
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Are there any negotiations that stand out for you as far as having taught you the most
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or having been the most intense or impactful on you?
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Well, yeah, I mean, kind of try to learn from all of them, but let's go to the bank robbery
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first, the bank robbery with hostages, Chase Manhattan Bank.
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The ringleader in that group was a ridiculously controlling guy.
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Interestingly enough, right on, you call into a bank, you expect the bank robbers to be upset,
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He actually said to the NYPD negotiator, who was the first negotiator on the phone with
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him, he literally says to him, I'm the calmest one here.
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Crazily enough, he exhibited the same negotiation approach as a really smart CEO.
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He tried to diminish how influential he looked on a phone when he was talking on a phone with
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There's a lot of other guys here, and they're more dangerous than I am.
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What's the guy who's in love with plural pronouns going to do?
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He's trying to hide his influence, he or she, so that you don't pin him down at the table.
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By the time I got onto the phone with him, I used a hostage negotiation technique that
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we refer to as mirroring, which is just repeating what someone has said, kind of word for word.
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Because he said stuff that startled me, and it's a great verbal reflex when you're caught
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And the other side ends up just blurting stuff out that they wouldn't blurt out otherwise.
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When I mirrored this guy, because I was asking him about the getaway van, and he said, we don't
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He said, yeah, well, you chased my driver away.
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Now, what he did when he said, you chased my driver away, he just roped in a third guy
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that we didn't even know was involved in a bank robbery, which is, you know, he was so
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controlled, he involuntarily blurted out admissions of guilt, not just on him, but on other people.
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It took about 12 hours from start to finish, which is kind of par for the course when you
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begin to understand a profile of situations, if you will.
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You know, once he realized that he'd voluntarily given us stuff that he wished he hadn't said,
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he actually handed off the phone to another guy.
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They'll get frustrated, but they won't get angry in a way that damages the situation.
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He got so frustrated and flustered, he just handed off the phone to his colleague who had
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I got that guy to surrender to me in about 90 minutes.
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And when he came out, he admitted to everything that was going on, told us who was inside and
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Then it was just a matter of time for us to continue to work our process and get everybody
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So is it common in these situations that you're able to exploit different levels of
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commitment or different goals on the part of the people involved, the hostage takers?
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And you start out just sort of feeling your way through the situation, you know, looking
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And then, you know, with a gentle sort of patient approach, you can unravel the situation
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And if you work the process, you'll actually negotiate through the entire situation with
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patients faster than you will by being in a hurry.
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There were a few cases in your book where you essentially give the blow by blow for some
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of these negotiations where it's a family who is in the loop with, I guess, the FBI in this
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case, and you're trying to negotiate the price down.
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This is not a bank robbery, but some international hostage kidnapping.
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In a situation where the initial demand is so sky high that no one involved could possibly
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But at a certain point, it must begin to seem unethical to be driving a hard bargain in dialogue
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with someone who is threatening to kill or dismember your loved one.
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I mean, what is the point of, you know, when you, you know, get it down to whatever it is,
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$50,000 that the family can pay, to be driving it lower than that?
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I mean, some of these negotiations that you detailed continued past the point where I thought,
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okay, this seems like it's just raising the risk to the hostage.
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I mean, some of the issues of ethics, morality, any negotiations?
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