Empathy without agreement: Chris Voss on talking to kidnappers and anyone else

Lex Fridman asked Chris Voss what it is like to negotiate for a hostage, and what the hardest part of that work is. Voss did not start with a trick. The toughest part, he said, is when it looks bad from the beginning and you still have to engage. Around 2004, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was executing people on camera for publicity and still wanted to look as if it were negotiating. One demand from that period: release all Iraqi women from the jails in 72 hours, or a hostage dies. Even if the United States and the coalition had been willing, the ask could not have been met in 72 hours. It was an impossible request designed to look reasonable.

The second problem was the channel. The group made statements in the media and left no way to talk back — no phone number, Voss said. They asked for something you could not do and blocked the path to answer. In kidnappings you are often coaching family members, not speaking to the kidnappers yourself, and those families want to know whether any of this will help. His honesty was grim. There was a bunch of cases like that; the chances were “slim and none,” and when it is slim and none he will take slim, “but it’s still very, very slim.” A number of people were killed in that window before the tide turned. Dealing with the families, he said, was hard.

Can you negotiate in public? Yes, Voss said, and the choice of channel tells you a lot. If the bad guys pick the media, they are trying to appeal to someone, which means that in their world there is such a thing as good media — and therefore bad media. His team made the coverage bad for them. It took several iterations before the message landed and they quit. How you choose to speak, in other words, can matter more than the words.

Fridman asked whether there is a dollar figure on a human life. Voss’s first lesson from any hostage job, and any negotiation, is that it does not matter what the thing is worth to you. It matters what it is worth to the other side. Kidnapping for an actual ransom is a mercenary business: they take what they can get, and they are good at estimating how much money someone has. He drew a job-market analogy — market price versus what an employer can pay — and said he would work minimum wage to follow Elon Musk around, because value is not only dollars.

FBI leadership used to ask when a kidnapping would be over. The answer: when the bad guys *feel* they have gotten everything they can. Dissect that, Voss said, and you are talking about feelings, the kidnapper’s feelings, which drive everything, in any human endeavor. Fridman put it as emotion versus reason. Voss’s reply was sharper: there is no such thing as reason. You make up your mind based on what you care about, period. He offered a cartoon: a shark closing on a swimmer. If the swimmer is Adolf Hitler, you cheer for the shark, and you might even feel sorry for the shark. Care comes first; reason is built on top of it.

Fridman had just spoken with Sam Harris, who lands heavily on reason and treats empathy as somewhere between useless and misleading. Voss wanted two distinctions: what you mean by empathy, and how people actually make up their minds. If you define empathy as sympathy, he said, you have already left the original word. In his research the English term translated a German one used by people trying to figure out what an artist meant — an assessment of art, understanding where someone was coming from without sharing it. When he began collaborating with Harvard’s Program on Negotiation, Bob Mnookin’s *Beyond Winning* devoted a chapter to “The Tension Between Empathy and Assertiveness,” still the best chapter on empathy Voss has read. Mnookin’s definition: you do not have to agree, or even like the other side. Understand where they are coming from and articulate it. No agreement required. That, Voss said, becomes ridiculously powerful. Without sympathy, compassion, or agreement baked in, you can be empathic with anybody.

Putin, he said, is easy. He does not agree with where Putin is coming from or with the methodology. Early in the Ukraine war he read a dismissive piece calling Russia “basically Europe’s gas station.” Follow that thought: if you feed your people through an industry the whole world is trying to quit, and you have no other answer, the people you are responsible for die alone in the cold and the dark. That reconstruction is not endorsement. You will never get through to someone like that, Voss argued, unless you can show you understand the distorted world they are in.

He had used the same move in a 1990s terrorism case in a New York civilian court — a venue the FBI preferred to military tribunals. Muslim witnesses, mostly Egyptian, were preparing to testify in open court against a man with credentials as a legitimate Muslim cleric; they objected to his advocating the murder of innocents. Voss would sit down and say, “You believe that there’s been a succession of American governments for the last 200 years that are anti-Islamic.” They would nod. That was the start. He never said he agreed or disagreed. He stated the belief, shut up, and let them react. He never explained why they were wrong, never gave his point of view. Every one of them testified. That, he said, is empathy: showing you are so unafraid of their beliefs that you will speak them without contradiction.

Fridman wondered whether a drop of compassion — a pat on the back, “we’re on the same side, brother” — makes the empathy land. Voss said that is the basic human reaction when people first learn the idea, and it is how people get conned. If you are on opposite sides of the table and you act as if you are not, you become disingenuous. His currency is integrity. He can agree on where you might go. As a human being he wants you to survive and thrive, not at his expense. He thinks the world is full of opportunity; he has no problem with you getting yours, “just don’t take it out of my hide,” and he will be honest about both halves. He does not need to side with you on a war, a stock split, a salary, or a car price. Empathy, in his lay experience, has no downside that requires the performance of alliance.

The late lawyer Tom Girardi, Voss said, has since had his name dragged through reporting Voss cannot judge; in their dealings the man was a gentleman and generous. Girardi’s habit in conversation was to look ten years out, imagine both people in a phenomenal place, and work back. Voss watched it in simulations while teaching at USC, after walking up cold and asking Girardi to guest-lecture. Students wanted to role-play; every time, Girardi picked a future both would be happy with and reversed from there. A hostage negotiator does the same on a bank line: I want you to live, I want to see you survive this, let’s pick a point in the future we are both good with, then work back.

People make decisions based on their vision of the future, “without question.” He pointed to a Hindu temple in the United States assembled by hand, the way temples were built in India a thousand years ago, by volunteers knocking themselves out for a place in paradise. If the future portends what you want, you will go through extraordinary things today. The job is not to paint a future the other person will like. It is to find out *their* vision and remove yourself as a threat if you can collaborate at all. Because he did not lie about being on opposite sides today, they may believe him about tomorrow.

Does showing a different opinion close a leader’s mind — Zelenskyy’s or Putin’s? It depends when you show it, Voss said: arguing from the beginning versus displaying understanding first. Mnookin’s chapter title had made him snort; in his business there was no tension. Then he read it and decided the tension was a red herring. Empathy puts you in a position to assert. It is sequencing, written for lawyers.

How do you truly listen? Voss opened with a joke — “I’m sorry, what’d you say?” — then said he has always hated the term active listening. If anything it is proactive. Try to anticipate where someone is going and you are dialed in: either you congratulate yourself for being right, or they say something you did not expect and you really notice it. The method in the book is tactical empathy, calibrated emotional intelligence. First it was calibrated by hostage-negotiator experience; later they found the experience lined up with neuroscience, one reason he is a heavy listener of Andrew Huberman. Speaking as a layman scooping up other people’s research, he contends the brain is basically 75 percent negative.

The best way to deactivate negativity, he said, is to call it out. “I don’t want you to be offended by what I’m getting ready to say” is a denial; the guard goes up. “What I’m getting ready to say is probably going to offend you” lets them relax, and afterward they often decide it was not that bad. Hostage negotiation already knew that naming the negative deactivated it; later experiments, in the work he has seen, inflicted the negativity and then had the person simply identify it — “I’m angry” — and the anger dropped. Fridman described guests who became angry on air and his reluctance to explore that iceberg with a small ship. Voss called it the elephant in the room: you decide whether to avoid it or lean in.

Fridman distinguished a conversation, which explores without a hard goal, from a negotiation seeking closure. Voss made a small correction. He would say seeking collaboration. Closure implies finality, and the real problem in any negotiation is always implementation. That is why he says yes is nothing without how, and yes at its very best is only a temporary aspiration — usually counterfeit. He had been practicing the line in the mirror. Fridman told him he should write a book.

Mid-conversation Voss asked why he was even there. Fridman said he had heard Voss on Clubhouse and YouTube and wanted to explore an interesting mind; he does not pick guests by résumé, and he has been stopped by a homeless person outside a 7-Eleven the same way. Voss had leafed through the catalog, including an OnlyFans sex worker whose flourishing, non-argumentative worldview barely overlapped Fridman’s. That collision, for an abundant optimist, produces the useful question: what is going on in your head, or mine, and what am I missing? The pie can grow. A lot of people want us to think otherwise, Voss said, mostly because of that negativity bias. His cartoon: the pessimistic caveman survived; we are descendants of the pessimists; the optimistic guy got eaten by a saber-toothed tiger. Then the switch. Success mindset is highly optimistic. Somewhere we stopped being eaten, started building bridges and companies, got enough data that collaboration worked, and stopped listening only to the amygdala.

Back to terrorists. The policy of not negotiating with them, Voss said, is not the policy, and has not been since 2002, when George W. Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 12. It said the United States would not make concessions. That does not mean it will not talk. Voss was in Colombia, intimately involved with the signing, and knew the text. The number two at the embassy asked whether he was calling the president a liar after a television line about never negotiating with terrorists. Voss’s answer: he probably said that, and that is not what he signed. The sound bite is what everyone likes. If negotiation means communication, governments talk to terrorists all the time.

Every president, he added, has made some boneheaded deal. Obama released five high-level Taliban leaders from Guantanamo for an AWOL soldier who was immediately jailed — putting terrorists back on a battlefield, in Voss’s view a horrible deal. Trump “topped it” by putting 5,000 terrorists back on the battlefield. No president on either side, he said, has stuck to the slogan since it became a slogan. Putting people back on a battlefield is not negotiating with another government. It is contradicting what you claimed.

Fridman asked about the prisoner exchange that brought Brittney Griner home. Voss agreed she was wrongfully detained and did not deserve jail. There should be no second-class citizens: WNBA player or “some bonehead that walked into the wrong situation,” a government should not abandon you. There should have been a negotiation. Instead they were desperate to make a deal at a bad time, having turned down far better swaps earlier. Public attention, he said, thank God for Griner, kept pressure on the administration until a deal happened. Political swaps of that kind can be fine; putting thousands of Taliban on a battlefield is a different category. Was the Griner trade a bad deal? Great for her. If he had been in the middle, it would have been better, and she still would have come home. Meeting in person, he thinks, is a great idea.

Could Putin and Zelenskyy find peace in a room, with Biden in the back or at the table? Voss thought it eminently possible. The documentary *The Human Factor*, mostly about 1990s Middle East talks, shows Arafat and Israeli prime ministers who did not want to be on the same planet being put together in person until they started seeing each other as human beings and noticing that people dying was stupid. How long it takes and who hosts matter; the idea is still good. Compassion helps, he said, but is not essential. The feeling of being understood is the payload. When they were writing the book — a collaboration among Voss, his son Brandon, and Tahl Raz — Raz suggested that a “that’s right” (not “you’re right”) is a subtle epiphany. Neuroscience Voss later gathered: oxytocin, a bonding chemical that inclines people to tell the truth, plus serotonin, satisfaction. You bond to the person who understood you, you get more honest, you want less. “What more do you want out of a negotiation?”

World leaders have walls against that chemistry. Fridman still thinks a private room, two people, no press, is where it happens; cameras disappear when a conversation is going well. Voss’s Black Swan Group gets asked about Zoom. From the waist up the picture is similar, he said, but in person there is an energy we do not yet have instruments for. Just because you cannot measure it does not mean it is not there. He would go in a room with Putin, “1,000 percent,” and try to get a “that’s right” out of him — getting and giving. The trap, he added, is that hearing those words and speaking them are vastly different. What he is watching is the response.

“That’s right,” for Voss, means what you just heard is unequivocally true, a bullseye. His son has long treated Donald Trump as the poster child of that bonding: devoted listeners look at the set and say the phrase when they are bought in. Trump, in Voss’s view, also wrecks the common-ground theory of politics. Pundits said a New Yorker, an Ivy Leaguer, son of a wealthy mogul, would never be accepted by blue-collar Republicans. Look how smart that was. Is Trump a good negotiator? No, Voss said. He is a great marketer. Voss followed him from the 1980s in New York, shared a church and acquaintances, threw a 1998 fundraiser in Trump’s apartment that Trump attended. The North Korea file looks like the rest of the track record: masterful opening of a dialogue every other president had been told not to dignify, then fanfare, then nothing anyone can name, no deal. Great negotiators make deals. If it does not close in a very short window, Trump moves on and people wonder what happened.

Accusations of narcissism have, for Voss, lost meaning; everybody you dislike is a narcissist. Hostage negotiators steered away from psychology as a soft science unless it was tied to real studies or neuroscience. Fridman added that classifying someone as narcissist, bipolar, or unwell is a convenient excuse not to see a complicated human being. He had felt that around Kanye West. Voss agreed, and deadpanned “that’s right.”

Is there power in walking away? It depends whether you are doing it with integrity or as a tactic. Hostage negotiators succeed about 93 percent of the time, which means 7 percent go bad. His old boss Gary Noesner kept saying “best chance of success” until a case went wrong and Voss learned that best chance is not a guarantee. If you have no shot, do not negotiate. Accept that some deals you will never make. The company line: it is not a sin to not get the deal; it is a sin to take a long time to not get the deal. Noesner taught clusters of behavior as high-risk indicators — including suicide-by-cop — so you recognize from the beginning that it may go bad. Al-Qaeda in 2004 was playing them, not negotiating; they called that out, respectfully, and meant the walk-away. If the world is abundant, walking away is not scary. If it is finite, it is horrifying. Most failures, Voss said, happen because the bad guys were never there to make a deal. An Israeli phrase he used: they are on a killing journey.

Is there hope for Israel and Palestine? Voss thinks so. After the FBI he did a master’s at Harvard Kennedy and met people on both sides. When they could talk, they started from the premise that both want a better life for their kids — Girardi’s future-back move again — and hope, for him, derives from that. Leadership may be compromised; few straight players anywhere; they still want a better future for their children, which is a place you can work back from.

When Israel was shelling Gaza after rocket fire, hitting a press office Voss said Hamas could not have left standing unless weapons were stored there — schools and hospitals included, so that Israeli strikes would look bad — a friend, Nicole Behnam, was hosting Clubhouse rooms that had become screaming matches. Voss went on with one rule: before you describe the other side, say “Before I disagree with you, here’s what I think your position is,” and keep going until they agree you have it. Result: no agreement, and no arguments. Not one person lost control. Speakers supporting Israel were somewhat better at articulating Palestinian positions; people speaking for Palestinians often wanted to start with accusation, and he made them wait. The exercise, he said, is enormously beneficial to the person forced to do it. He would jump in himself: the Nakba as catastrophe on the day the rest of the world calls Israel’s birth; families still carrying keys to abandoned houses; the feeling that the world watched Nazis throw Jews off a building and “the only problem was they landed on you.” Articulating what the other side feels, deeply, is transformative for both.

The hardest work around Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 2004, he repeated, was families, and not deceiving them about the odds. Empathy has levels. A business partner, Jonathan Smith, mapped them onto the martial-arts idea of shu-ha-ri: copy the master, then see the lesson elsewhere, then make your own rules in something like flow. On a suicide hotline, shu is “You sound angry.” At home that can blow up — you made me angry, do not play innocent. Higher: “This is probably going to make you angry.” With families whose husband or brother had been grabbed by people in the business of beheading, he already knew the affect. He would walk in and say he knew they were angry, abandoned, alone, horrified, and felt the United States government had abandoned them. The facts might be that the loved one had gone into a war zone against government warnings. That does not change the feeling. They would look at him and ask what to do now.

Cross-cultural barriers, Voss said, appear when you think your way is the way. Strip it down and everyone has a limbic system; people decide from the future, from loss, from identity, whether they are an Al-Qaeda kidnapper, a New York businessman, or a tobacco farmer. Empathy is tailoring to how they see it. He uses three voices: assertive (his native setting, direct and honest), analyst (systems, decision trees — he pegged Fridman here), and accommodator (smiling, hope-driven, relationship-on-the-surface). “Hope is not a strategy,” he is convinced, was coined in frustration at the third of the population that is hope-driven. The voices are learnable. Analysts notice that accommodators close more deals, with a higher failure rate, and catch on faster than assertives that pleasantness helps. Analysts he also calls assassins: a thousand yards out at night, and happy about it.

The assertive voice has served him poorly. It feels like a brick in the face. To be effective he has to slow down and smile. Stubborn principles are fine; be nice about them, because you need to be heard. In a training exercise, “60 seconds or she dies,” he plays the bank robber and opens with the commanding police voice. He feels direct; the other person feels attacked. In Austin a participant’s Apple Watch showed a resting heart rate jump to 170 — fight or flight, which clouds thinking. Making someone dumber, or attacked, always hurts you in a long-term deal. He is agnostic about their profit; he is there to make money for himself. There is never long-term value in making the other side afraid.

Tahl Raz had braced him with studies on “strategic umbrage” — getting mad to bully a deal. The ones Voss has seen used simulated negotiations with college students: one 45-minute sitting, no implementation, no skin in the game, failure defined as no deal. No real deal on earth, he said, is agreed in 45 minutes by people who never meet again. Flawed circumstances, flawed claim. Mirroring is the simplest skill: repeat the last one to three words. People with high IQ and high EQ tend to love it; many average people think it is stupid. Voss is not strong at it and has to do it on purpose; he is good at labeling. Using someone’s name can encourage or exploit, depending on demeanor. Labeling hangs a name on an emotion and calls it out, along the progression from “you sound angry” to “this will probably make you angry” to “I know you’re angry.” It goes bad only when the label is so obvious it proves you were not listening — the USC student in an outlet mall who, after two nos, said “Sounds like we can make a deal.” The core of the toolkit, Fridman and Voss agreed, is still empathy: sit, listen, look for insight.

Fridman likes silence — two people with a drink, looking at the stars, the intimacy of not filling the gap. Voss is comfortable with it because he has seen it work; his son Brandon, “king of dynamic silence,” tells clients to go quiet and count thousands until they run out of numbers. The other types fear it until they have felt it. Accommodators signal fury with the silent treatment, so your silence scares them. Assertives think an analyst’s silence is a prompt to talk more. What-and-how questions, once sold as giving the other side the illusion of control, also trigger exhausting deep thought. Exhaustion as a tactic has a lineage: Giandomenico Picco, the UN negotiator who got Western hostages out of Beirut, wrote in *Man Without a Gun* that one of the great secrets is exhausting the other side, with ridiculous patience. If exhaustion tamps down negative emotion, it can help, because you are dumber in a negative frame. The long-term chase is still positive emotion, the chemistry of “that’s right.”

“Fair” is the F-bomb. It is usually a weapon, dropped when someone feels boxed in and has no legitimate criteria. Cutthroat negotiators use it to knock you off your game. In an NFL strike, owners would not open the books and sent a rep to tell the press they had given players a fair offer. If it were fair, Voss said, they would open the books. The phrase then echoed until people on the players’ side started to doubt themselves. He does use the word, but as a promise: I want you to feel treated fairly, and if you think I am not, stop me and we will address it. Closing is a pivot to agreed implementation — “How do you want to proceed?” — because the big problem in all negotiations is a lack of discussion of next steps. The best negotiator he has met is probably Brandon, immersed since he was two, now spinning out of the company as a licensee. Manipulation, for Voss, is whether you are trying to exploit or hurt; talking a bank robber into letting you save his life counts. A fake compliment on ugly shoes is manipulation. Lying is a bad idea: they may be better liars, they may be testing you, and they will probably find out, with a higher tax than the original gain.

A good conversation and a good negotiation sit on a fine line. Voss arrived without a problem to solve, only curiosity; a negotiation, he suggested, is when both are aware of a problem they are trying to solve. Training is small-stakes practice for high-stakes results: labels, mirrors, paraphrases on Lyft drivers, grocery clerks, airline counters, because emotional intelligence is perishable. One of his favorite labels, maybe ri-level, is “Tough day?” At LAX a clerk avoiding his eyes snapped into helpfulness; a TSA officer’s body said no, so he corrected to “Just another day,” and the man felt seen. Two conversations still echo: a colleague at Quantico, Lionel, who said “It sounds like your family’s really close,” gathering everything Voss had been circling; and a rattled man on a suicide hotline twisting himself into knots before a family car trip, who came down when Voss tried “You sound anxious,” then the same family line, then “You sound determined,” and said he would be fine tomorrow. There are not that many things people want to be understood about. Guess, and see.

Fridman asked about the 7-38-55 rule: 7 percent of a message from words, 38 from tone, 55 from body. Albert Mehrabian at UCLA originally framed it around liking, Voss said, and people like him have extrapolated it to meaning. Speakers such as Tony Robbins swear by the ratio; writers hate the 7. Voss believes it is accurate enough. The critical issue is not the percentages but the message when they are out of line — tone that does not match words. An Elon Musk story from executives who love working with him: on a conference call Musk joked “You’re fired!” People in the room could see the face; the person on the phone could not, and was dying. Words and tone without the visual.

Could AI become a better negotiator than humans? About five years earlier a company building a negotiation chatbot told Voss they had already tried “the Harvard methodology,” the rational approach, and it did not work. Their bots still had deeply flawed emotional intelligence, but around 80 percent of interactions showed a higher success rate because the bots were never in a bad mood and were always available. Negotiations go bad when people are negative. A bot answers “your price is too high” with a smiley; a person goes off the deep end. Fridman argued that passing a Turing test means having the capacity to be an asshole and choosing not to be. Voss distinguished boundaries from negativity: “I’m sorry, that just doesn’t work for me” is a clear line without name-calling. He is not pro-conflict, but he knows some of the best thinking comes from it — U2 near a breakup making “One,” and years in the FBI crisis negotiation unit arguing with a colleague named Vince until a new boss asked them to stop. Both men said the battles produced better work.

Will there always be war? Yes, Voss said, because we are basically 75 percent negative, and because of what he calls two lines of code planted in childhood — mean or merely stupid adult sentences that stuck. The chance that most people get those lines out, even after an epiphany of the sort Joe Dispenza writes about, is small. Advice for a young person: a take on doing what you love, but figure out your ideals and stick to them when they cost you. Michael Mogill of Crisp Video: core values are what you stick to that cost you money. In the FBI the number-one mission was protect and defend the American people; Voss could pursue that value at all times, or follow the rules, and you do not have time for both. He knew he loved the work on that suicide hotline, when a short conversation could move another human being that much. Talking someone off a ledge, he said, is clearing clutter and letting them make up their own mind — if they called for help, not some other agenda. Very few people who die by suicide are physically at the wall; it is emotional. He contrasted that with Mark Pollock, who lost his sight and then was paralyzed and still leads others toward being alive.

Why live? Voss has strong religious beliefs. Confined to a box he would be a Christian, with tremendous respect for Judaism, and no sense that any religion has it exactly nailed. He called himself a Bono Christian, and butchered a line he likes: belief in Jesus as what is left after Christianity leaves the room, after dogma, man’s application of spiritual beliefs. He believes his life was a gift, that he wakes because his creator still has cool, interesting things for him to do, and he has gratitude for the day. Fridman closed with John F. Kennedy: never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.