Chris Voss

Voss was born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, and studied industrial administration at Iowa State University.⁠[1]

Before joining the FBI he policed the streets of Kansas City.⁠[2]

In 1992 he took his first FBI hostage negotiator training and recognized his aptitude for negotiation.⁠[3]

In 1993 he worked on the Chase Manhattan bank robbery and hostage-taking in Brooklyn, negotiating with the hostage takers by phone.⁠[4]

In that case he negotiated the surrender of the first hostage taker to give up.⁠[5]

He was lead crisis negotiator for the FBI’s New York City division and spent 14 years on the New York City Joint Terrorist Task Force, serving as case agent on TERRSTOP (the Omar Abdel-Rahman case) and the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe.⁠[5]

He was assigned to the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit from 2000 to 2007 and was the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator from 2003 to 2007.⁠[6]

He was also the FBI’s hostage negotiation representative to the National Security Council’s Hostage Working Group and represented the U.S. government as a kidnapping expert at two international conferences sponsored by the G8.⁠[7]

In the early 2000s he took part in hostage negotiations with the militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, a crisis that lasted more than a year; in 2002 the American missionary Martin Burnham and the Filipino nurse Ediborah Yap were killed in an operation to free them. He has called it “the darkest moment” of his professional career.⁠[1]

In 2006 the American journalist Jill Carroll was released after being kidnapped in Iraq. Speaking as a special agent with the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit, he said of the case: “One of the most effective weapons against terrorism is the truth.”⁠[8]

Since 2009 he has also been managing director of Insite Security’s Kidnapping Resolution Practice.⁠[5]

In February 2015 he described The Black Swan Group as a strategic business advisory firm focused on negotiation, with four full-time employees; he argued that kidnappers run their operations as a business, so hostage-negotiation principles apply directly to business negotiation.⁠[6]

On May 17, 2016, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It was published; the publisher describes it as setting out nine counterintuitive principles to help readers become more persuasive at work and in their personal lives.⁠[2]

He wrote the book with the journalist Tahl Raz.⁠[9]

On December 17, 2019, MasterClass announced a negotiation class taught by him, covering techniques such as mirroring, labeling, bargaining and calibrated questions, in which he recounts FBI cases including his work to free Jill Carroll.⁠[3]

The course has 18 lessons and includes recordings of his 1993 phone calls with the bank robbers.⁠[4]

On November 15, 2022, The Full Fee Agent, written with Steve Shull for real estate professionals, was published by the Black Swan Group.⁠[10]

On March 10, 2023, he appeared on episode 364 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast; the outline covers reason versus emotion in negotiation, listening, negotiating with terrorists, Brittney Griner, Putin and Zelenskyy, Donald Trump, Israel and Palestine, Al-Qaeda, mirroring and labeling, the 7-38-55 rule, chatbots and war.⁠[11]

In May 2023 he launched the Black Swan Network, an interactive live-streaming channel on the Fireside platform costing $999 a year, offering group coaching led by Black Swan Group coaches, with monthly appearances by Voss and guests.⁠[12]

He has taught business negotiation as an adjunct professor in the MBA programs of the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, and has also taught it at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

The Black Swan Group calls Never Split the Difference a multimillion-copy bestseller and has published a companion, Fight Less, Win More, by its instructors Jonathan B. Smith and Derek Gaunt.⁠[9]

The firm runs the weekly interactive Black Swan Network live stream and offers self-paced and live online courses.⁠[13]

X: Public account: https://x.com/fbinegotiator (opens in a new window)⁠[11]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophervoss/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

Federal Bureau of Investigation: Official website: https://www.fbi.gov/ (opens in a new window)⁠[2]

The Black Swan Group: Official website: https://www.blackswanltd.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[11]