Chris Voss: How to Succeed at Hard Conversations

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman talks with Chris Voss, a former FBI lead crisis negotiator, member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force and author of Never Split the Difference, about handling hard conversations of every kind: business deals, friends planning a trip, breakups and firings, online scams, and kidnappings with lives at stake. Voss explains the mindset he brings into a negotiation, why the phrase "win-win" is a red flag, how "how" and "what" questions reveal and wear down an aggressive counterpart, how to spot a lie by listening for specificity and consistency, and the practical tools behind his approach: labeling, mirroring, proactive listening and what he calls tactical empathy.

The conversation is warm, funny and packed with stories. They range from a lost-luggage clerk who climbed onto the baggage carousel to a beheading in the Philippines that changed how Voss thought about his own team. Huberman adds neuroscience, including why a low, calm voice actually calms the listener's brain. The talk moves between hostage cases, everyday tactics and personal questions about resilience, fitness and spirituality.

The Discussion Explores:

• The negotiation mindset: find out fast whether there's a deal, stay playful, and use the "late night FM DJ voice"
• Why "win-win" is a warning sign, and why guessing the other side's view out loud speeds up collaboration
• Hostage-case lessons on collaboration, specificity of threats, the "double dip" and scam red flags such as urgency
• How and what questions, exhausting an aggressive counterpart, and "vision drives decision"
• Reading lies and alignment, trusting your gut over your fear, and why texts should carry one point at a time
• Breakups and firings, ego depletion, and why deals won by exhaustion don't stick
• Small-stakes practice, venting, labeling, mirroring, proactive listening and tactical empathy
• Humanizing yourself as a hostage, family members in negotiations, and how Voss recharges

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The Mindset: Diagnose Fast, Stay Playful, Lower Your Voice

Voss's first goal in any negotiation is to find out quickly whether a real deal exists and whether the counterpart can be trusted. "It's not a sin to not get the deal. It's a sin to take a long time to not get the deal." He also finds he does best when he is relaxed and in a good mood. He says great negotiation "is not exciting. It's astonishing." His example: arriving home late to find his suitcase lost, he walked into the lost-luggage office in a good mood and told the clerk, "I need you to wave a magic wand." She laughed, climbed up the carousel ramp, disappeared into the airport for about ten minutes, and came back with his bag. She high-fived him on the way out: "how does that for a wave of the magic wand?"

When a conversation gets heated, Voss switches to his "late night FM DJ voice." It calms the other person, and it calms him too, because negative emotions "make me dumber in the moment." He believes emotions move in a kind of rock-paper-scissors sequence. You can't jump from sadness to elation: anger can pull you out of sadness, then you go from anger to calm, and only from calm can you shift to something positive. One reframe he used with a counterpart he knew was lying: "I'm lucky to be in this negotiation," since nobody would try to hustle them without a great product. Huberman adds research he learned from auditory neuroscientist Dr. Eddie Chang: low-frequency voices drive neurons in the listener's brain to fire at low frequencies, so a deep, calm voice pulls the listener toward calm involuntarily. Voss also recalls that blasting music at a besieged compound, used in Panama and at Waco, was something hostage negotiators always opposed as counterproductive.

"Win-Win" and the Power of Guessing Out Loud

Voss warns that someone who opens by proposing a "win-win deal often correlates, in his experience, with someone trying to pick my pocket. It's a way to get you to drop your guard, much like the offer to speak in a room with all these billionaires for no fee. Real collaboration is about how both sides feel. In friendly negotiations, such as where to eat or which route to drive, People really just want to be heard out."

His technique is to describe the other person's perspective first: "here's what I think you're thinking." People love to correct you, and they are far more candid when correcting you than when answering your questions. Guess that Huberman wants the fastest route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and he'll immediately say he prefers the coastal Highway 1 for the scenery and his favorite taco and burger stops. That turns information gathering and rapport building into one step, and it may produce a better idea than either person started with. Huberman compares it to hypothesis testing in science. The best openers, Voss adds, are generous: people who offer something valuable with no strings attached, like Joe Polish of Genius Network ("life gives to the giver"). Huberman recalls a lab technician who lent equipment freely but never borrowed, which left nothing but goodwill when the lab moved.

Hard Lessons From Hostage Cases

Voss's early Philippines work included the case of Jeffrey Schilling, who went free after negotiators stalled the Abu Sayyaf captors long enough. Afterward, one of the kidnappers even called the negotiator Voss had coached to say they still had a good relationship. The next case, involving the Burnhams, went badly for 13 months. An American hostage was beheaded on a Philippine national holiday that no one had told the U.S. team about. They arrived to find police headquarters closed, their counterpart negotiator absent, and each side withholding information from the other. The case ended with remaining hostages killed by friendly fire. Voss and his team reviewed everything and concluded they hadn't made mistakes by their own strategy, which meant "we're not smart enough we got to get better." That led him to collaborate with Harvard. His lessons: demand to be told everything by your own side, and remember that the other side's team is often no more unified than yours.

He looks for specificity in threats. A kidnapper warning that a father would lose his son was vague, with no who, what, when or where, so there was time. After a botched ransom delivery, "if we don't get paid tomorrow, your son dies" was specific. The team advised paying, and the son came out. He also warns about the "double dip, where kidnappers call a payment a down payment. Online scams follow the same rules. Check proof of life" (do they actually have your account or data?) and treat urgency as a red flag. When a scammer hijacked a friend's number and asked for money, Voss tested him with made-up memories of a wild gambling night in Vegas. The scammer went along, exposing himself, and Voss sent the whole exchange to his real friend, whose reply was that his mother does think Voss is attractive. Voss adds that asking whether complying will really lead to the promised outcome is always a fair question, even with kidnappers.

How and What Questions, Exhaustion, and "Vision Drives Decision"

A counterpart gives in when they feel they've gotten everything they can, so the job is to make them feel it sooner. Everyone wants to feel they earned the outcome. That's why someone offering full asking price for your car makes you want to ask for more. How and what questions trigger slow, deliberate thinking (Voss cites Daniel Kahneman). Their real value is diagnostic: how someone answers "how much money do you think you deserve?" tells you more than what they say. An instant "ten million dollars" marks a shakedown artist, while a thoughtful pause marks a different kind of person.

Against an aggressive, cutthroat counterpart, Voss peppers them with how and what questions, a deferential, "passive aggressive way to wear them out. He cites John Giandomenico Picco's Man Without a Gun, which says one of the great secrets of negotiation is learning to exhaust the other side. The key question is How do I know you're going to follow through?" because "vision drives decision." Someone who intends to comply has already pictured what implementation looks like. In one case in Venezuela, kidnappers agreed to march their hostage to a distant river crossing, and that investment made release much more likely. Kidnappers were asked to promise to release the hostage only at the very end. By then negotiators knew how they sounded when telling the truth, because "People lie 20 ways. They tell the truth one way."

Lies, the Gut, and Reading People in Person and in Text

Huberman describes years of physical unease around someone whose lies surfaced five years later. Voss teaches people to tell the difference between their gut and their fear centers (their "amygdala, loosely speaking), and says the gut is ridiculously accurate. It may draw on cues we can't consciously name, even smell. Huberman adds evidence of magnetoreception in some humans, a study showing people's heartbeat intervals synchronizing when they listen to the same story in separate rooms, and psychiatrist Paul Conti's view that the subconscious, not the forebrain, is the super computer."

Face to face, Voss mentions the rough 7-38-55 rule (words, delivery, body language) but cares mostly about whether they line up. He doesn't assign fixed meanings to cues. He once assumed a sideways glance meant a counterpart had more money, when in fact they were stretched to the limit. He should have said, "seems like something just crossed your mind." Because there's more information than anyone can take in at once, labels, mirrors and questions let you cover the ground again without making people feel interrogated. In text and email, put one point per message, like one move in a game of chess by text, and soften, because long messages come across as cold. When he realized his documentary Tactical Empathy was missing his colleague Derek, he texted the filmmaker Nick Nanton two lines: "It's now bad time to talk. I got something you don't want to hear." Nanton went straight into problem-solving mode, and it was sorted out in under ten minutes. Voss calls this being a "straight shooter rather than blunt: telling the truth in a way that lands softly, without the praise-criticism-praise sandwich."

Breakups, Firings and Ego Depletion

When ending any relationship, Voss says, most people are trying to save themselves, not the other person. The person being let go usually senses it coming. A minister once told him, "there's no gentle way to cut somebody's head off." Do it quickly: warn them bad news is coming ("You're not going to like what I have to say"), give them about three seconds to brace, then deliver it. "Rip the bandaid off." Never fire on a Friday, which leaves a miserable weekend with nothing to do about it; fire on a Monday so they can start looking for work. People are "ridiculously resilient" to pain if they're warned first.

Huberman raises ego depletion, the idea that defending your position wears down a dopamine-linked drive. Voss agrees it's real but says exhausting someone into a deal only works in a contained siege, where the person comes out in handcuffs. In business and personal life, which are "uncontained," the other side's ego recharges during implementation, and they either deviate or back out. The same goes for the advice never to go to bed angry: a 3 a.m. resolution often looks different after sleep.

Readiness: Small Stakes Practice, Venting, and Staying Well

Voss prepares through "small stakes practice for high stakes results." He practices labels on Lyft drivers, TSA agents, hotel clerks and baristas ("seems like a tough day"), and tries to leave people better than he found them. His favorite question starts with "What do you love about" It triggers what Tony Robbins calls a state change and quickly reveals who someone is. A sullen Lyft driver opened up about personal struggles. A clean-water CEO listed leading teams and shareholder returns before the mission, which told Voss he was a corporate CEO rather than a mission-driven entrepreneur.

He is wary of venting because it often spirals. People vent because they feel ignored, so he labels what he guesses is driving them ("It sounds like this is very frustrating for you"), distinguishing frustration (a blocked future goal) from anger (something in the past). If a guess is wrong, "that's just the way it seems." For himself, he does a gratitude exercise most mornings, prays morning and night, and considers spirituality of any kind an important part of health. He uses the cold plunge and sauna as a "state shifter," keeps a mostly good diet, and relies on humor and supportive teammates. In long crises, such as the three-day 2003 standoff with Dwight Watson, who drove a tractor into Washington, D.C. and falsely claimed to have bombs, he learned to hand off to trusted colleagues and sleep. He recounts British negotiator David Veness keeping a terrorist talking at the Princes Gate siege even as the SAS broke in.

Humanization, Tactical Empathy, Mirroring and Proactive Listening

Captors dehumanize hostages before harming them, for example by putting bags over their heads, as happened in the Good Guys electronics store siege in Sacramento around 1990. So Voss's advice to anyone taken hostage is to comply while humanizing yourself: "I'll do whatever you say, I'm Chris." Negotiators drop hostages' names into conversations for the same reason. Huberman notes that primate researchers are discouraged from naming animals for the same effect.

Voss's tactical empathy follows Steven Kotler's framing that empathy is the transmission of information and compassion is the response to it, and Robert Mnookin's definition that empathy isn't agreeing with or even liking the other side. Defined that way, it becomes an "unlimited skill that doesn't depend on feeling compassion. When interviewing Muslim witnesses in terrorism cases, he opened with You believe that there's been a succession of American governments for the last 200 years that have been anti-Islamic." That neither agreed nor disagreed, and it disarmed them.

Mirroring means repeating one to about three of the person's key words, usually with an upward inflection. It isn't mimicking body language. It replaces "what did you mean by that?", which only gets the same words repeated louder, and prompts people to expand using new words, hear themselves, or pick up a lost train of thought. Huberman notes that the brain actively suppresses the sound of our own voice, which may be why hearing our words spoken back helps. Proactive listening builds on research that naming an emotion reduces it (Voss cites The Upward Spiral). Because reactions are largely negative, you name the predictable negative before it appears ("it's probably going to seem like I'm being greedy"). He says this inoculates rather than plants the idea. When he prefaced an answer to a clueless audience question with "this is going to sound harsh," the man replied, "that wasn't harsh. Huberman recalls his late graduate advisor saying you're going to hate me for what I'm about to ask" before small requests. On family members of hostage-takers: their taped words can land powerfully, but live conversations can reopen old wounds. Voss's son still remembers being told Santa Claus wasn't real, a conversation Voss has no memory of.

What Voss Is Doing Now

Voss describes his weekly group coaching on Fireside, an interactive platform founded by Falon Fatemi and Mark Cuban, where one caller said the tools had helped save his marriage. He is also working on a companion operations manual to Never Split the Difference, a Black Swan method book for real estate agents, his weekly newsletter and the upcoming documentary. Huberman calls the book one of his favorites and ends with a wish that children learn to speak from a "sounds like" perspective.

Conclusion

Chris Voss treats every hard conversation, from a lost suitcase to a kidnapping, as a problem of making the other person feel heard while staying calm and clear yourself. The toolkit is simple: diagnose early, stay playful, lower your voice, guess the other side's view and let them correct you, ask how and what questions, look for specificity and consistency, name the negatives before they grow, mirror a few words, and deliver bad news fast after a brief warning. Beneath these tactics is a view of empathy as understanding rather than agreement, backed by daily small-stakes practice and habits that keep the negotiator steady.

This is a summary of "Chris Voss: How to Succeed at Hard Conversations" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.