Thank you guys for meeting with me today. Very excited to get into this material. This book, Never Split the Difference, written by Chris Voss, who is the ex FBI lead hostage negotiator. His first case was a New York bank robbery, in which he used some skills that he refers to as "tactical empathy" to increase his ability to win negotiations and hear people's perspectives so that he can create some empathy and use it tactfully. So that is the whole case of Never Split the Difference. He uses a situation in the book where he says, a wife and a husband are arguing about what shoes the husband should wear to the interview. The wife wants him to wear brown shoes, he wants to wear black shoes. A Splitting of the difference between one black shoe and one brown shoe and nobody wins in that situation. He says, "Never split the difference."

So in the sequence of events when it comes to negotiating real estate, there's obviously lots of events that can happen, but for simplicity's sake, there is five that I've recognized. There's the gathering information and this is when you're initially meeting somebody that you're going to doing or thinking about doing a transaction with. You're going to be labeling that info that you gathered from them and seeing how you can use it. Then you want to use the information to uncover their true motivation for the transaction. That way you can win and they can win, and find a win-win situation. Then you will introduce solutions that may or may not bring conflict, but until you reach a solution there's no potential transaction, and of course, in order to do that, you want to present the benefits of that solution.

So Chris Voss would say that you have to be a mirror in order to gather the information that will really utilize and be utilized at best. And all that is, really, is having a conversation and just repeating the crucial three or four words of their sentence. Someone tells you, "Hey, I'm really wanting to sell my property because, you know, I'm just tired of these tenants." "You're tired of these tenants?" "Yeah, you know, these tenants, they're religious. They suck, man. I hate them. They're the worst."

And they just tell you all this information and you just keep going, mirroring their words. And you can do that with your phone, you don't even have to necessarily use the words, like, "I'm so pissed." "What? You're mad?" And so you talk all of it really plays into the mirror. So if you mirror somebody they're going to automatically feel a rapport with you and exchange information more easily. And then you're just going to go ahead and take that information and you're going to label it. And they're obviously going to talk about their pain with you. And you don't want to feel their pain because that's a little bit into the sympathy. And you don't want to sympathize with it, you want to empathize, so you want to label it.


"It sounds like you're really frustrated with these tenants." And then they might go off and tell you some more things. And the better you are and mirroring and labeling their emotions and their information, the faster you're going to be able to uncover their true motivation because inside every single transaction there's a black swan. And a black Swan is the idea that, well a little bit of history.


We used to, as a human collective, think that all swans were white until we traveled to Australia in the 15th century and we found that there was a black swan, and it ruined our entire concept that all swans are white. And every transaction has something similar that. There's a piece of information, if not more, more like three or four pieces of information, that totally changed the whole landscape of the transaction, and you need to find these pieces of information, because in every single transaction there's incentives to the other party that may or may not be monetary, and you need to uncover those so that the other person feels like they're getting what they want because they're obviously doing something for their true motivations. And that it's is a black swan.


And after you introduce those solutions, you have to be careful of people just telling you, "Yes". Because there are types of yeses. I've told my mom yes many times when I've never intended to do whatever I was intending or what I told her. "Hey, will you clean your room?" "Yes." No, I wasn't going to clean my room. So it's actually learning to be okay with no and [inaudible 00:04:48] so that you have some conflict and that way you can work to build solutions. Because if they're just saying yes, well, they might not intend to actually follow through with their yes.


So it's once again being a mirror and labeling it so that you make them feel comfortable to say no and then you can understand more of the motivation going forward. And after you present the solutions, you want to present the solutions in a way that they say, "That's right." Because if you ever resonate with something, you're watching TV and people are watching, you know, political debates that are going on right now and they bring up a strong talking point, you're in the same room as your mom and she sees it and she's like, "That's right!" She gets all fired up because she really agrees with it.


People don't say yes or yeah or sure or you're right. No, you're right is just a segue to get you to stop talking so that they can just move forward, but when they say that's right, that's something that they agree with. And all of these things are, you know, instruments, and you have to conduct this symphony in a way that we can all play together and will allow each party to come to an agreement. [Inaudible 00:05:57] so that they feel [inaudible 00:05:59] towards one another. And then after all those things come together, assume the close. And that's the deal.

Speaker 2:
Love it.

Speaker 3:
Love it. No, it's great.

Speaker 2:
That was awesome.

Speaker 3:
On a scale of one to 10, what would you rate the book?

Speaker 1:
Oh, it's nine. It's a great book.

Speaker 3:
Do you feel it was a lot of good information?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. I've gone through the book probably 11 times.