Ben Debates Top Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss on Iran War

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2:00from the voices you trust, all in one place. Whether you're at home or on the go, stay connected to the stories shaping our world. Stream Fox News on Fox One, download today. Our negotiations happening with the Ron, are they not happening with the Ron? It seems like every 24 to 48 hours, we're getting different messaging, contradictions. On the one hand, you'll have a post like this, March 22, 2026, from Donald Trump's social media account. If Ron doesn't fully open without threat, the straight of her moves within 48 hours, from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various power plans, starting with the biggest one first. Thank you for your attention to this matter. 24 hours later, right before the markets open, in all caps, you get the following message.

3:01I am pleased to report that the United States of America and the country of Iran have had over the last two days, very good and productive conversations, regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East, based on the tenor and tone of these in-depth, detailed and constructive conversations, which will continue throughout the week. I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plans. It should also be noted that back in June of 2025, Donald Trump had stated that Iran's nuclear facilities had been totally obliterated and any suggestion otherwise would be completely fake news. Now, Iran responded by saying this was Donald Trump trying to engage in market manipulation. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi says there are no negotiations. The fact that they are now talking about negotiations in the first place is an admission of defeat. Didn't they say unconditional surrender?

4:03So why are they now mobilizing their highest officials to negotiate with us at all? For countries we have identified as friends, we will allow them to pass through these straight-of-war moves, including China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan. But there is no reason to allow our enemies to pass through these straight-of-war moves. The enemy must learn a lesson. Never dare attack again and the damages to the Iranian people must be fully compensated. International guarantees are not 100% guarantees. The intrinsic guarantee we have created ourselves means no one dares go to war with the Iranian people anymore. So far, no negotiations have taken place. And a ceasefire without guarantees is a vicious cycle that repeats the war. Many foreign ministers in the region have contacted Tehran and Iran stands has been principled and firm. This war clarified many facts. If the US has bases in your Arab nation countries, it only makes you a target.

5:05Meanwhile, you have Donald Trump saying that the war has essentially been won. Here's a statement that Donald Trump made, March 24th, 2026. He says it's over. We've won it. It's ours. They'll play this clip. Well, I think we're gonna end it. I can't tell you for sure. You know, I don't like to say this. We've won this war has been won. The only one that likes to keep it going is the fake news. I mean, the New York Times, you read the New York Times. It's like we're not winning a war where they have no Navy and they have no Air Force and they have no nothing. And we literally have planes flying over to Iran. Then you have Donald Trump saying, the following on Iran, this was from a cabinet meeting that was on Thursday. They are saying to the people, he's saying the Iranians are saying, this is a disaster. That's why they're talking to us. They're facing disaster. Let's play it. The Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated.

6:06They're saying to people, this is a disaster. They know, that's why they're talking to us. And they're only, they wouldn't talk otherwise. But they're talking to us because they've got a disaster on their hands. They're defeated. I want to bring on a guy by the name of Chris Voss. Chris Voss writes one of the, or has written one of the preeminent books on negotiation that's out there. Never split the difference. Negotiating as if your life dependent on it. And Chris, as we have thousands of marine expeditionary units now heading to the strait of Hormuz, as they're talks about a ground invasion potentially of Karg Island, the 86 airborne division being sent in. This is one of those moments where quite literally life's depend on this negotiation. I want to take your temperature and your approach on the status of these negotiations generally and how you kind of view a framework of negotiations

7:10here through the present. And I'll make this disclosure. I've read your book back in 2019. It was a book that I actually teach in my law school class as well. So I'm fascinated and interested to hear how your mind thinks about the framework for this negotiation. Yeah, well, there's a lot of talk going on in the media on both sides. I mean, both sides are very aware of the position of their conversation in the media is more to affect their supporters and their allies more than it is to affect the other side. That's why in the media, most of the time, what's being said, it's hard to understand and hard to interpret because you don't know what ears they're trying to target at the moment. Most of the time, it's not the ears that you expect it to be. So it's really hard to get a firm read on this based on context without also knowing what's going on behind the scenes of conversations. You know, one side is calling it negotiations, the other side saying, well, we're talking, we're not negotiating.

8:10I mean, sir, these are matters of distinction, face saving, characterizations in public. So without being told, what's being said explicitly, and clearly there's conversations going on through Pakistan at this point in time as media ears, relaying information. So there are conversations taking place and different sides are characterizing in different ways. You know, at 100% sure what ears are trying to hit with their statements. Yeah, you know, Chris, one of the things that I think was a real revelation to me when I read your negotiating book, though, that negotiation, despite it being often portrayed on TV as a lot of fast-talking people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is a lot more about listening, gathering data, assessing the situation, feeling each other out, trying to find the known unknowns, and ultimately why your group is called the Black Swan group is these unknown unknowns that are out there,

9:12which if you can really identify those. So your framework, I think, could apply here. Can you talk about the framework of thinking about negotiations and data gathering in situations like this or in hostage crises in general? Yeah, well, you're trying to find out what really deep down inside matters to the other side. What are the core values? The real issue in many cases is autonomy. Nobody likes to be forced to the table. They like to feel like that they made a choice to be there. Autonomy is actually more important than survival. Maslow's higher, our required needs, our hypothesis that survival was number one with Maslow isn't 100% accurate, and what I usually ask people is name a civilization in the history of mankind has been content in slavery. You can't find one. United States is a country that give me liberty or give me death. We didn't invent that phrase or that attitude, but what that tells you is autonomy

10:13is more important than survival. At the end of the day, people are going to really make decisions whether or not they feel they were autonomous in that decision or whether or not they will feel forced into it. And that's kind of the concern that I have amongst a lot of other concerns in the negotiations where you have somebody like a Pete Hegseth saying, we negotiate with bombs. And then one of the things you always talk about in your book, Chris, is this idea of do not set arbitrary deadlines that you can't meet against yourself. So when you have the threat of force and then you say, we're going to bomb the hell out of you, I mean, that's the language that Hegseth uses. We're going to bomb the hell out of you, we're going to whatever, we're going to do it right away. And then you have this line where we're actually, I mean, what did Trump say? He said, I want to control the straight of her moves

11:15with the Ayatollah and we can do it together as a joint venture. And you could say, that's just a lot of noise and that's part of the cloud inspector of these negotiations, but setting deadlines against yourself that you ultimately can't meet. I always think that's a problem in a negotiation if that's actually what's happening. And then removing the autonomy from the other side and the negotiation by saying, hey, we want to talk to you, but we're also about to kill you and we're planning on killing you. And then this guy, Ali Larjani, who was one of the people we were purportedly talking, we just, you know, you knew us and Israel killed the guy. So I guess the Iranian perspective on a lot of this though is is every time you say you're negotiating with us, you then kill somebody or you bomb. So how could we even start the negotiations? And then finally, Chris, you have the Oman Foreign Minister who was the hand-picked mediator, right? There's a lot of noise as you say from the outset, true. But there was a guy that we hand-picked the Oman Foreign Minister who went on CBS

12:17before this war started and said, hey, we had a productive conversation. We need to iron out the technical details on Monday and then the war starts and the guys like from Oman, what happened? I mean, we thought we had a deal and that doesn't, does that complicate the negotiation? Well, it does if you, if you see all that noise. And so to back up a little bit, as hostage negotiator, I mean, when I got a guy inside of a bank, I still got a SWAT team on the outside. Now, I'm not, a SWAT team is a part of the negotiating team. Now, we're not going to go to violence first, but at some point in time, they're minor incremental things to be done to remind the other side that, you know, they can't, they can't toy with you. They can't lengthen this out, manipulate you from now till eternity. Which is kind of what the Iranians are famous for doing. You know, half measures and agreements that they don't intend to comply with.

13:17And a mediator gets in the middle of a mediator's ego gets more invested in getting some kind of deal as opposed to a deal that's going to be workable and they can be, they can be faked out by somebody that who says, well, I'll try. Well, a mediator says, oh, we're close to a deal. The other side said, I'll try. Well, I'll try means I have no intention of complying. I'm just going to, I'm going to fake a greet. And mediators are famous for being suckered by that. So I don't put, I don't put a lot of stock in what a mediator's assessment in any negotiation that if mediators were phenomenal at settling things, then everything would be settled by mediators. Right, although right now it does seem that the primary objective is to open the straight of hormones, right? That's the main, not regime change anymore, to enter into an agreement where Iran would agree to not enrich its uranium, which was apparently agreed

14:20to at that mediation. But now open the... Yeah, I doubt that that was ever actually agreed to by the Iranians. And the Iranians made it quite clear to what call in a face-to-face meeting that they felt that they had the right to enrich a uranium from now until the end of time. So regardless of what the mediator said, the Iranians never said that in face-to-face negotiations. I mean, well, that's also assuming that Woodcoff told the truth about that, because all I know is that the foreign minister said that that's not the case. And then the British National Security Advisor who was also in the room said that he was surprised, that there, I mean, if you don't believe the Oman Foreign Minister, sure, it wasn't there a British National Security Advisor in the room who also says that Woodcoff was not being fully honest as well in the room. But I guess one of the broader points, though, is we've also now removed the sanctions on Iranian oil and Russian oil from this war.

15:21So they've made billions of dollars. Like, is that rewarding them? And they go, wow, this is the first time that we've got sanctions removed. We're making billions of dollars. We were critical of Obama's deal, say, because $1.4 billion flew to Iran in response to also having oversight. Well, now Iran gets to sell all of this oil that it wasn't able to sell before. And now the US says, well, they were selling it anyway. But then what's the point of sanctions in general if that's the case? Yeah, well, I mean, I think the one thing that everybody continues to miss here, which is different about this American president, is he's just interested in collaboration. He doesn't really care who's in charge on the other side, as long as you collaborate in collaborations the two ways street. Now, they're not, you notice he's not calling for democratic elections in Iran. And he's trying to get rid of, he's trying to leave intact the people that want to collaborate with, with, with not just the United States,

16:23but with the rest of the world. I mean, opening the Straits of Hormuz in collaboration with the Iranians. He's constantly trying to indicate, look, just collaborate fairly across the board. And it'll be relatively easy life. This is the first American president that any time that we've ever gotten into a conflict with another country hasn't demanded a change of government to become democracy. And that's actually refreshing. He's taken an unusual approach of collaboration separate from what form of government you have. You think that's a good thing? Whether or not we force democracy on somebody. No, we have an need to force a democracy on anybody. No, I mean, to give the example of hostage negotiations, right? No. Yeah, okay. You know hostage negotiations. There's that rumor, yes. So isn't what Trump's doing would basically be like,

17:23if you and the hostage taker, rather than coming up with a plan to release the hostages. You're said, you know what? Let's do some collaboration. I'm going to collaborate with you, the hostage taker. Let's take the hostages together. Let's make a ton of money. And I'll become the hostage taker with you and we'll sell the hostages out. And then you know, all of our friends and those families that want the hostages released. We'll, we'll, we're the United States, we're the FBI and we're the hostage taker. If you were able to get a million bucks for it, imagine what we could do together. We'll get 20 million bucks for those hostages. So don't you have to though talk about values and principles in any negotiation, rather than just the transactional outcome because then the hostage negotiator and the hostage taker could collaborate. Isn't that what happened in Venezuela with Trump and Delci Rodriguez? And now the top torturer has become the defense minister there.

18:24Is that a good outcome? I mean, it's a resolution, but is that an outcome that we wanted? Well, I mean, those are great questions. And it's worth asking that and wondering if whether or not that's the outcome. So to go back to the hostage example, like if I'm talking to a guy inside a bank, my first thing on collaboration is I want you to live. If we can both agree on a collaboration that you live, then let's work our way back to where we are now and then so that everybody lives. That's the real collaboration from a hostage negotiator. Now, the bag on the inside may have no desire to live. I can't change that. We actually called high risk indicators. Gary Nessner, my boss came up with these indicators and the person on the other side is never going to make the deal.

19:25In the black swan group, we call them seven percenters. Why do we say seven percenters? Because hostage negotiators are successful 93% of the time, which means seven percent that deals never going to happen. And in any given negotiation, there are three kinds of negotiation that deals you should make. The deals you shouldn't make and the deals that you're never going to make. And your first job is to try to sort out which of those three bucket you're in. If the other side's never going to make a deal, no matter what kind of magic ones I have, I got to be able to recognize ahead of time that it's never going to happen. Then I have to reassess the situation. So the first part, the second part I like to talk about it and when you mentioned Venezuela, let's compare Venezuela to Iraq. The problem with taking out an entire regime is that the country falls into chaos. And Iraq falls into chaos and drags the vast majority

20:25of the Sunni Middle East down with it. And we get ISIS, which is one of the worst things that we thought Al Qaeda was bad. And ISIS was even worse. So the big mistake with the American government at that point of time is we decided that the debathification of Iraq we had to take out all of their politicians, all of their bureaucrats, the entire government structure. And it became a black hole that the Middle East hasn't still fully come back out of. So the avoidance of these black holes of anarchy and chaos and murder and bloodletting without end, which is still what's going on in different parts of the Middle East, avoiding that in Venezuela is probably a good idea. Right, if though the hostage taker was told, you know what, you get to stay in the bank. I mean, imagine if you said, here's what we're going to do. You stay in the bank, we're going to make money together.

21:27You keep the hostages. We sell the hostages. I ain't going to, sorry brother. We take the host. I mean, that's, you know, that's, look, doing the other work is very hard. And it almost raises the question, though whether you talk about Iraq or Iran, or Venezuela or anywhere, and I think this is the broader question and it's not necessarily a negotiation question, but I think we're seeing it at home. Should we even be doing this stuff in the first place? And if ultimately the whole goal of spending billions of taxpayer dollars is to basically take out one Ayatollah and put in another Ayatollah who's more extreme and they now control the straight of her moves, yes, we did a deal, right? It was the negotiate, you're 93% number. I could do 100% negotiations if I just gave the other side, you know, a deal that was mutually beneficial for war.

22:28That's true, that's true. Not true. You can't, and that was a hard thing that I learned in negotiations was, the guy's never going to make a deal and is never going to give up exploiting you. As soon as you give him what they asked for, the response is, oh, you misunderstood. That was a down payment. We weren't asking for that to settle the deal. We were asking at just as the beginning, as an opening, that was simply a down payment. And that's a hard thing to recognize. When you got somebody playing that kind of game on the other side, it's an endless game of exploitation from that side, the seven percenters, you'll never make the deal because whatever you give them will never be enough. Now, isn't that, though, precisely the problem with what Trump is doing with Putin, that every time, you know, Whitcoff, who you mentioned, it's a question, Ben, if Trump cured cancer, would you say that he was wasted and his time he shouldn't have been doing that? No, I would say it's great, but if he spread cancer,

23:31I would say it's bad. But, you know, I think you're picking on him a little bit. I think it feels like that whatever he's done, you're going to find a way to say it's wrong. No, I think that if there are positive accomplishments that are made, if there aren't, name a positive accomplishment so far. Look, I think that if there could actually be peace, that could be brought to the Middle East, if there could be stability that's there, I think that could be a good thing. I mean, right now, if Trump could actually, if gas prices were down, gas prices being down, are zero positive accomplishments. Right now, I don't think there's any, I really don't. Right now, and you're trying to compare it to, I can't name one. In comparison to say, any American president since World War II, because that's when the Western, the West remade the Middle East at their whim. Yeah, Donald Trump, in my view, and my humble view right now is

24:32destroying the post-World War II framework. I think he's making America weaker. I think he's harming our alliances. I think, you know, the great nation of Canada being one of the first places that he attacks. It's very damaging. I believe in free trade agreements generally speaking. I obviously want to make sure we protect our domestic businesses, but we've been pulled out a lot of deals. Even a deal that he negotiated. I mean, he negotiates the United States, Mexico, Canada agreement. He says it's a stupid agreement. If you're going to negotiate, if you're going to attack your own deals as stupid, you know, it's a tough one for me. And I'll just say this before we go. Although I'm happy to keep on talking, I just think the American people right now are very curious what the hell's going on. And I just think the American people are suffering. And they're saying, we can't afford things. We're psychologically tortured,

25:33live in paycheck to paycheck. We're out there struggling. Why are we in this war? Why is there all this chaos? What's happening? You know, that's how I feel about it. But these are fair questions. I mean, these are fair questions and trying to gain a perspective on it is definitely a struggle. I think these are fair questions. Well, I appreciate your book. I appreciate the book. I think it does give a great framework into thinking about things, data gathering, and truly thinking about negotiation not as violence and beating you and destroying you and crushing you, but that you can gain tactical advantage by listening, hearing other sides, you know, and trying to forge a middle ground. So the book is called Never Split the Difference, negotiating as if your life depends on it by Chris Voss. And Chris is also the head of the Black Swan group. Thanks, Chris. You've been very kind.

26:33I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the conversation too. It's a good discussion. Come back. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Wanna stay plugged in? Become a subscriber for our substack at MidasPuzz.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Philakowski, add three episodes of our podcast and more exclusive content only available at MidasPuzz.com. Some days call for some oomph to amplify your everyday look, like when you want the look of false lashes without the extra effort. Reach for Thrive Cosmetics Liquid Lash Volumizer Mascara. Or when you want all eyes on your smile, keep empowered gloss ultra glossy lip serum in your bag. It's a burst of 24 hour hydration that smooths like a serum, shines like a gloss and can be worn sheer or layered. You'll also look and feel your best with Thrive Cosmetics. Plus every product is 100% vegan, cruelty free and made with clean skin loving ingredients that work with your skin, not against it. And for every product purchased,

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