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Chapter 1: What negotiations are currently happening with Iran?
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. 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 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.
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.
I have instructed the Department of War to postpone any and all military strikes against Iranian power plants.
Chapter 2: How does Trump's messaging contradict regarding Iran?
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. 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? 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 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's stance 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. 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.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Chris Voss provide about negotiation tactics?
Well, I think we're going to end it. I can't tell you for sure. You 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.
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. They're saying to people. This is a disaster. They know. That's why they're talking to us. They wouldn't talk otherwise.
Chapter 4: How does the media influence perceptions of negotiations?
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 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, life's depend on this negotiation.
I wanna 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.
well there's a lot of talk going on in the media on both sides i mean they're both both sides are very uh aware of the 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 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 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.
uh these are matters of distinction face saving characterizations in public so without 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 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, is a lot more about listening, gathering data, assessing the situation, feeling each other out, trying to find...
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Chapter 5: What are the core values that drive negotiation outcomes?
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. You 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 feel forced into it.
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 know, you have this, you know, line where we're actually, I mean, what did Trump say?
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... 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, U.S. 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 could 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.
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Chapter 6: How does autonomy impact decision-making in negotiations?
And then the war starts and the guy's 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 see all that noise. And so to back up a little bit, a 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 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 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.
And a mediator gets in the middle. 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 faked out by somebody 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 fake agree.
And mediators are famous for being suckered by that. So I don't put a lot of stock in 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 Strait of Hormuz, 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 to at that mediation.
Yeah, I doubt that that was ever...
actually agreed to by the iranians and the iranians made it quite clear to whitcoff 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 i mean well that's also assuming that whitcoff told the truth about that because the 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 Witkoff was not being fully honest as well in the room.
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Chapter 7: What parallels can be drawn between hostage negotiations and international diplomacy?
So- Right. 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 flew to Iran in 2014, in response to also having, you know, oversight. Well, now Iran gets to sell all of this oil 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 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 not just the United States, but 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 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.
You think that's a good thing?
Whether or not we force democracy on somebody? We haven't had any success forcing 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of collaboration versus confrontation in negotiations?
I'm gonna 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 all of our friends and those families that want the hostages released, 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. 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 if whether or not that's the outcome so to go back to the hostage example like if i'm if i'm talking to a guy inside a bank my first thing on collaboration is i want you to live now 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 the inside may have no desire to live. I can't change that. We actually call high-risk indicators. Gary Nesner, my boss, came up with these indicators. The person on the other side is never going to make the deal. In 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 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.
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