Chris Voss

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 wands 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'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.

And the big mistake with the American government at that point in 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 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.

Actually, 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.

That 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.