Ben Debates Top Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss on Iran War

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2:01Ben Meiselas:Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments? When the killer's identity is about to be revealed. During that perfect meditation flow. On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes. so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath. Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime. Are negotiations happening with Iran? Are they not happening with Iran? It seems like every 24 to 48 hours, we're getting different messaging, contradictions.

2:46Ben Meiselas:On the one hand, you'll have a post like this. March 22nd, 2026 from Donald Trump's social media account. If Iran doesn't fully open without threat, the Strait of Hormuz 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. I 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.

3:40Ben Meiselas:I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants. 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 Aragji, 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?

4:22Ben Meiselas:So 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 the Strait of Hormuz, including China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan. but there is no reason to allow our enemies to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. 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 ourself means no one dares go to war with the Iranian people anymore.

4:59Ben Meiselas: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's stance has been principled and firm. This war clarified many facts. If the U.S. has bases in your Arab nation countries, it only makes you a target. Meanwhile, 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. Here, play this clip. Well, I think we're going to end it. I can't tell you for sure.

5:45You know, I don't like to say this. We've won this. 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 Tehran.

6:04Ben Meiselas: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. The Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated. They're They'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.

6:43Ben Meiselas: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 depended on it. And Chris, as we have thousands of marine expeditionary units now heading to the Strait of Hormuz, as there are talks about a ground invasion, potentially of Karg Island, the 86th Airborne Division being sent in. This is one of those moments where quite literally lives 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 here through the prism 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.

7:49I mean, both sides are very aware of the positioning 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 a target at the moment. Most of the time, it's not the years 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.

8:29I mean, 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 mediators um relaying information so there are conversations taking place and different sides are characterizing it in different ways you're not 100 sure what ears are trying to

8:55Ben Meiselas: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, which if you can really identify those. So your framework, I think, could apply here.

9:38Ben Meiselas: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 try 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 hierarchy of 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 that's been content in slavery.

10:22You can't find one. The 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 is more important than survival. And 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.

10:42Ben Meiselas:And that's kind of the concern that I have amongst a lot of other concerns in the negotiations where you have somebody like 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 know, you have this, you know, line where we're actually, I mean, what did Trump say?

11:30Ben Meiselas:He said, I want to control the Strait of Hormuz with 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 in 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, you know, this guy, Ali Larajani, who was one of the people we were purportedly talking, we just, you know, the U.S.

12:11Ben Meiselas:and Israel killed the guy. So I guess the Iranian perspective on a lot of this though is every time you say you're negotiating with us, you then kill somebody or you bomb. So how can we even start the negotiations? And then finally, Chris, you have the Oman foreign minister who was the handpicked mediator, right? There's a lot of noise, as you say, from the outset. True. But there was a guy that we handpicked, the Oman foreign minister who went on CBS before 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?

12:49Ben Meiselas: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, hostage negotiator, I mean, when when I got a guy inside of a bank, I still got a SWAT team on the outside. Now, I'm not. The 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, there are 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 for 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.

13:37And 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, media says, oh, we get, you know, 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 agree. 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 mediators assessment in any negotiation that if mediators were phenomenal at settling things, then everything would be settled by mediators.

14:15Ben Meiselas:Right. Although right now it does seem that the primary objective is to open the Strait of Hormuz. right that's the main if not regime change anymore um to enter into an agreement where iran would agree to not enrich its uranium um which was apparently agreed to at that mediation but now i doubt that i doubt that that was ever actually agreed to by the iranians and the iranians made it quite clear to whitkoff in a face-to-face meeting that they felt that they had the right to enrich uranium from now until the end of time. So regardless of what the media said, the Iranians never said that in face-to-face negotiations.

15:01Ben Meiselas:I mean, well, that's also assuming that Whitcoff 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, wasn't there a British national security advisor in the room who also says that Whit cough was not being fully honest as well, you know, 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.

15:41Ben Meiselas:So 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 if we were critical of obama's deal say because 1.4 billion dollars flew to iran in in response to also having you know oversight well now iran gets to sell all of this oil uh that it wasn't able to sell before and now the u.s says well they were selling it anyway but then what's the point of sanctions in general if that's 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 and the collaboration is a two-way 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 uh with not just the united states but with the rest of the world I mean, opening the Straits of Hormuz in collaboration with the Iranians.

16:47He's constantly trying to indicate, look, just collaborate fairly across the board and it'll be a 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.

17:16Ben Meiselas:You think that's a good thing? Whether or not we force democracy on somebody? We haven't had any success force of democracy on anybody. No, I mean, to give the example of hostage negotiations, right? Yeah, okay. You know hostage negotiations? There is that rumor, yes. So isn't what Trump's doing would basically be like if you and the hostage taker, rather than coming up with a plan to release the hostages, you 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.

18:04Ben Meiselas: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 Delce Rodriguez? And now the top torturer has become the defense minister there.

18:43Ben Meiselas:Is 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 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 bad guy on it on the inside may have no desire to live i can't change that we actually call high risk indicators gary nessner my boss came up with uh with these indicators of the person on the other side is never going to make the deal.

19:44In 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 7 % of the deal is never going to happen. And in any given negotiation, there are three kinds of negotiation, the 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.

20:23So the first part, the second part I'd like to talk about, 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 of the Sunni Middle East down with it, and we get ISIS, which is one of the worst things. We thought al-Qaeda was bad, and ISIS was even worse. So, and the big mistake with the American government at that point in time is we decided that the de-Baathification of Iraq, we had to take out all of their politicians, all of their bureaucrats, the entire government structure and that 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

21:34Ben Meiselas: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. You keep the hostages. We sell the hostages. I ain't going to. Sorry, brother. We take the hostages. 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 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?

22:19Ben Meiselas: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 Strait of Hormuz. Yes, we did a deal, right? It was the negotiation, your 93 % number. I could do 100 % negotiations if I just gave the other side, you know, a deal that was mutually beneficial for - Actually, not true. Not true. Not true. And that was a hard thing that I learned in negotiations was the guy is never going to make a deal and is never going to give up exploiting you. As soon as you give them what they asked for, their response is, oh, you misunderstood.

23:06That was a down payment. We weren't asking for that to settle the deal. We're asking that just as a beginning, as an opening. That was simply a down payment. And that's a hard thing to recognize. When you've 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.

23:29Ben Meiselas:now isn't that though precisely the problem with what trump is doing with putin that every time you know whitkoff who you mentioned let me ask you a question ben if trump cured cancer would you say that he was wasting his time he shouldn't have been doing that no i would say it's great but if he's but but if he spread cancer i would say it's bad but you know what yeah i i think you're picking on him a little bit i think i think uh it feels like that whatever he's done you're gonna find a way to say it's wrong no i i think that if there are positive accomplishments that are made which ones are name 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 i think that could be a good thing i mean right now if trump could actually bring if gas prices were down gas prices so far zero zero positive accomplishments right now i don't think there's any i really don't right now under trump right now 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 in my humble view right now is destroying the post-World War II framework.

24:55Ben Meiselas: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 your, if you're going to attack your own deals as stupid, you know, it's a tough one for me.

25:34Ben Meiselas: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 living 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.

26:13Ben Meiselas: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. I appreciate the conversation. I appreciate the conversation, too.

26:56Ben Meiselas:It's a good discussion. Come back. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, add free episodes of our podcast and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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