I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear Invidit, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Sympathy doesn't actually help anybody.

Sympathy makes us feel good, but I feel bad for you.

And then I go back to my daily life, but that doesn't help them.

Clarity helps other people.

Sympathy is a clear vision of what they're seeing, how they feel about it.

And that's just empathy.

It's completely understanding with no judgment where the other side's coming from.

I've been looking forward to having Chris Voss as a guest, even though to a lot of people

he seems like an unlikely person to be talking about empathy and communicating because he's

a leading hostage negotiator.

It turns out that his story is about negotiating for the release of hostages is just what

we need to hear for our everyday lives.

Chris, thank you so much for talking with me.

You know what?

What this is really, this is going to be good because you've been spending your life negotiating

for hostages, which turns out to be pretty much the same thing as trying to communicate

with somebody.

Yes, I'm afraid so.

The thing that hit me first was you have the same idea about empathy that I do when I

try to help people communicate better, which is you use the understanding you can have

of somebody else in a tactical way.

...