Quick Cut: S2E373 Never Split the Difference with Chris Voss

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Welcome to It's a Good Life with Brian Buffini, founder of America's largest business coaching company. Here's a short classic cut from one of our all-time favorite episodes.

**Brian Buffini** (0:17)
Today, I have a real treat for you. We have the pleasure of chatting with a master negotiator, Mr. Chris Voss. Chris retired after 24 years with the FBI, as the lead international kidnapping negotiator. And so, Chris has written a fantastic book called Never Split the Difference, best negotiating book I've read in the last 20 years. He's with us here today to share some knowledge on, I believe, the most referrable skill in the service industry, and that's negotiation. Chris, the top of the morning to you, and thanks for joining us.

**Chris Voss** (0:48)
Brian, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.

**Brian Buffini** (0:50)
Which should be a lot of fun, I'm a big fan of negotiation, and I've often thought myself as a good negotiator, but after reading your book, I thought, you know, I've never had to negotiate with somebody's life on the line. You know, mine was real estate transactions, where it was whether we were going to get the price we wanted, the terms we wanted, or some of the personal property involved. So, how did you end up in the negotiation side of things?

**Chris Voss** (1:14)
Well, I had a recurring knee injury. I was on the SWAT team. I was on the FBI SWAT team in Pittsburgh, and then I was in the process of trying out for the hostage rescue team, which is the FBI's tier one counter-terrorist guys, and I re-injured my knee. So, I had it re-constructed for the second time, and I thought, you know, there's only so many times I can put this thing back together. So, we had negotiators. I figured out how could that be? I talk to people every day.

**Brian Buffini** (1:43)
But they have exhaustive training, and you went through not only a whole bunch of training, but you kind of real time got to experience, okay, that training doesn't work in the field this way, or you know, all the different dynamics. You've had to kind of work this out on a stage where the stakes were very high and you were dealing with people's lives.

**Chris Voss** (2:03)
Yeah, well, you know, like anything else, I mean, if you learn the process, you know, you learn the game plan, you learn the strategy. You know, we read all the time, learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage for anybody. And Coyle points out, I mean, it's his contention, and he backs it up, that there is no natural born anything. I mean, the people that we think that suddenly exploded on the scene or prodigies, they just got interested before anybody knew it and started putting in 10,000 hours, and they enjoyed it, they had fun with it. That's also a key to success. It's not become successful and be happy. If you're happy, you become successful faster.

**Brian Buffini** (2:39)
You bet. Talk about, just right off the bat, why the whole principle never split the difference. Why is that so important when it comes to negotiating?

**Chris Voss** (2:47)
There's two really big reasons. Number one, there's an old saying, the person who wants to meet you in the middle is usually a poor judge distant.

**Brian Buffini** (2:54)
Oh wow, that's a good one. Love that, love that.

**Chris Voss** (2:58)
Yeah, so splitting the difference, if the other side is offering it, it's probably a scam, it's probably a con. It probably, they move the goalposts on you, to get you to feel like it was fair. I mean, it's an experimental move. An awful lot of the cultural negotiators do it because it's quick, easy, simple, and works. You know, people sucker for it on a regular basis. That's the first problem. It's probably a con. Second problem is, let's say the other person is not a con artist, and neither are you. Unfortunately, with the way we're wired as human beings, we can never split the difference and feel okay about it. And the reason for that is, Danny Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for something called Prospect Theory, and Prospect Theory says, a loss thinks twice as much as an equivalent gain. What does that mean? It means if I give up $5, I'm going to feel like I gave up $10, which now means since I feel like I got the short end of the stick, I got to get you back for an equal amount that I felt like I lost. And then it becomes a death spiral, because if I hit you for $10, you're going to want to get me back by $20, and it just goes on and on and on. So you can never have a great relationship. You can't have a great relationship splitting the difference. You just can't.