Original subtitles

[PHONE DIALING]

MAN: Hello.

CHRIS: Hi, is this is Billy?

MAN: Joe?

CHRIS: This is Chris.

My name is Chris.

Joe's gone now, and I'm going to be talking to you now.

MAN: Listen, we'll turn ourselves

in if you do what we tell you.

NEWSCASTER: The scene unfolding yesterday

was like one from a movie.

A woman taken hostage in the middle of the day

by a criminal claiming to be armed.

In situations like this, hostage negotiators

are charged with making split second decisions that

could mean life or death.

JOURNALIST: Negotiators are working around the clock

to help secure her release.

BROADCASTER: A tense hostage crisis

that is now entering its fourth night.

REPORTER: The deadline for her execution has passed.

NEWSPERSON: With us now to help break down the investigation,

retired FBI Special Agent hostage negotiator Christopher

Voss.

ANNOUNCER: He is former FBI lead international kidnapping

negotiator.

WOMAN: He is very much informed on these matters.

Chris, I wanted to go to you with things

I heard in that press conference just moments ago.

CHRISTOPHER VOSS: Everything in life is negotiation.

Life is a negotiation.

The human nature rules that apply to all people,

it doesn't matter if you're a terrorist or a businessman.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You're in negotiations all day long.

If you want somebody to say yes to anything,

you're in a negotiation.

If somebody is trying to get you to say yes to something,

you're in a negotiation.

If you say, I want or you think I need,

you're in a negotiation.

You're probably in three to seven negotiations

every single day.

The stereotype of negotiation is that it's

about being the biggest jerk in the room,

that it's who's the loudest, who's the most aggressive,

who takes the most at the other person's expense.

The stereotype is that I win means you got to lose,

and I beat you.

That is not the case.

Great negotiation is about great collaboration.

It's about several people faced with different aspects

of the same problem.

The adversary is not the person across the table.

The adversary is the situation.

The person across the table is a counterpart

that's struggling with some aspect of the same problem

that you are.

You work with them and solve that problem together,

and you're both better off.

In my class, I'm going to give you all of the strategies

and tactics that I developed as one of the top hostage

negotiators in the world.

You're going to learn everything from bargaining

to reading body language and speech

patterns to the neuroscience that can literally

bend people's reality.

Most importantly, you're going to learn

how to achieve your goals through collaboration

and the use of tactical empathy that

creates trust-based influence.

I'm Chris Voss, and this is my MasterClass.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Empathy is becoming completely aware of the other side's

perspective, their point of view,

their take on things, how they see it, and what they feel.

It's not agreement in any way.

It's not compassion.

It's not sympathy.

Let's tactically take what we know to be the case

and apply it in our interactions.

You know, the human nature rules that apply to all people,

it doesn't matter if you're a terrorist or a businessman.

And if you can really get at what's driving someone,

you can change their outlook, and you can

change their decision making.

You have to understand what their rules are.

I have to understand what your rules are,

and I have to respect those.

I don't necessarily have to adopt those rules,

but I've got to understand and respect what they are.

The clock is ticking in Iraq for kidnapped American

journalist Jill Carroll.

This morning, new video of Carroll

was aired on Al Jazeera television.

It showed Carroll surrounded by armed men.

Her captors threatened to kill her tomorrow

if their demands are not met.

CHRISTOPHER VOSS: The Jill Carroll case really

helped me understand the psychology of what's

at stake in a negotiation.

What are they really bargaining for?

What are they really after?

Who are they really trying to talk to?

Jill Carroll is a journalist working in Iraq shortly

after the end of, quote, the end of the Second Iraq War.

So she's on her way to interview an official,

and she's kidnapped.

And she was taken by what appeared to be Al-Qaeda.

And Al-Qaeda, at the time, was in the business

of kidnapping people, putting videotapes of them

on the internet, threatening their lives,

and then shortly thereafter cutting off their heads.

So this happens.

She disappears.

And shortly thereafter, they put a video of her.

They have three people standing around her, three men.

They're masked.

Two of them are holding rifles.

One of them is holding what appears to be a book.

She's seated on a floor in front of them,

and her hair is uncovered.

So they had orchestrated a video of her

that made her look like she'd been judged

by an appropriate authority and therefore

was acceptable to execute her for her crimes

for her sentence.

What is the commodity at stake?

What are they really negotiating for?

They're trying to show themselves

as a legitimate authority that can pass sentence on people

and execute them like any other legitimate authority.

That's what that video was about.

So we needed to approach it from that level.

And what were their rules that they violated?

You know, I can live by your rules.

Can you?

Well, let's see if we can turn your rules against you.

So what we noted in the video was

that they had complete control of her,

and they videotaped her with her hair uncovered, which

was a violation of their rules.

So we began to, through third parties, point out to them

to various media outlets that they were breaking their rules,

that they disrespected her, and then we did a videotape

with her father.

I want to speak directly to the man holding my daughter

Jill.

Her life as a reporter will better serve your purpose

than her death.

We coached her father.

He had the option to take our coaching or not.

And we said, what we need to do is we need

to tell the indisputable truth.

We need you to go on camera.

We need you to not engage in any predictable dialogue.

They've already said in advance that you're

going to go in the media, and you're

going to say she's innocent.

Leave her alone.

These are trigger words that they have predicted

that you will say in advance.

And as soon as you say that your daughter was innocent,

regardless of whether or not it's true,

you feed into their justification for killing her.

He went on the media and said, my daughter Jill

is not your enemy.

She was reporting on what was happening in Iraq

and, if released, would go back to reporting

on what is happening in Iraq.

Things that are indisputably true.

We know from their culture that they believe that honor

flows from the father.

We didn't know it at the time, but we found out

after she was released that the terrorists saw

her father in the media and said to her,

your father is an honorable man.

Now, not knowing at the time, but at that point in time,

we'd won the negotiation.

It was over.

She was safe.

When they say to her, your father's an honorable man,

they now can't hurt her because honor flows from the father.

And their view of her has completely changed.

And lo and behold, the very next video we saw of her,

she was by herself on camera.

There were no executioners standing around her,

and her hair was covered.

And about 88 days I believe or so

after the day that she was taken,

she appeared on the streets of Baghdad

very close to a location that she'd originally

been grabbed because they didn't know what to do with her.

They'd lost a negotiation.

They sensed that they had.

They didn't know who to blame.

It had taken place in the media.

It had taken place in the arena that they chose.

And we understood what was going on,

and ultimately, they just let her go.

We didn't have the term emotional intelligence

back then, but it was emotional intelligence.

And it was the tactical application

of emotional intelligence.

And so I knew that that was the key

to unraveling these situations.

Emotional intelligence, what I call tactical empathy,

is the bedrock of my negotiation approach

and comes from years of dealing with hostage crises.

Most of the tools you're about to learn

are rooted in the idea of demonstrating understanding

of the other side's position and in so doing building rapport

and ultimately gaining trust.