What actually works to avoid violent outcomes when someone is armed, emotional, and on the edge? I talk with former FBI chief hostage negotiator Gary Noesner, author of Stalling for Time and 30-year veteran of the FBI, about the psychology of high-stakes crisis situations — including lessons from Waco and other cases from his career. Gary explains the “paradox of power” (why pushing aggressively often backfires), and why most so-called hostage situations are really emotional crises, not bargaining contests. We also discuss the limits of reading body language and behavior, the power of active listening, and the importance of tone of voice and how you phrase things.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Topics discussed:
- Why “stalling for time” is such a core tactic in highly in volatile stand-off situations
- The “paradox of power” and why that concept is so important in any high conflict situation
- Stories from Gary’s career that illustrate some key points about conflict and negotiation, including the Waco siege
- Why the concept of “never giving something without getting something” is faulty and can amplify conflict
- The fact that most quote “hostage” situations aren’t really hostage incidents with clear bargaining demands — but are just crisis intervention situations
- The importance of listening closely to what someone is saying; including to what may seem like minor statements
- Gary’s views on body language and its role in law enforcement work
- How Chris Voss’s negotiation ideas in Never Split the Difference relates to Gary’s points
- The importance of voice tone in high-stakes, volatile situations; how sometimes how you say something can matter just as much as what you say
TRANSCRIPT
(Transcript is generated automatically and will contain errors.)
Gary Noesner: Moving forward a couple years to the Waco situation, a couple years after that, I would argue, and I think most analysts of the situation would agree that as negotiators we had the right approach. You know, we got 35 people out when I was there, including 21 children. But you know, there was a counterside within the FBI that wanted to apply more pressure; the “paradox of power” that we just spoke about earlier, and basically force them to come out. And of course because I was resistan to that approach, I was replaced halfway through and they went with a harder line. Nobody else came out for the rest of the siege of. I was there for 26 of the 51 days.
…
Gary Noesner: Now getting back to the body language thing, I mean, I think there’s probably some folks that are just incredibly good at it, but I don’t recall an investigation that I worked in my 30 years that it played any significant role in whatsoever. It’s like Freud used to say: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
I mean, I think you have to be really careful. On the jacket of my book, the day they took the photograph for that, it was very cold, and I just had a shirt on, and I had my arms tucked like this, and my hands were under my armpits. I normally don’t stand that way, but my hands were cold. So later somebody wrote me, oh, that’s a very defensive position you were in. And I said, well, I don’t know. Maybe I was, but I think I was primarily just cold, you know? You just, you have to be careful of drawing too much inference,
That was a couple clips from my talk with Gary Noesner, who had a 30 year career in the FBI as an investigator, instructor, and negotiator. Gary is the author of the great book Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI hostage negotiator; really recommend that book; it’s got so many exciting stories but also just a lot of wisdom.
If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you probably know I’m interested in human behavior and also in conflict dynamics. I’ve written my own books on political polarization, which you can find at www.american-anger.com. I first got interested in interviewing Gary a couple years ago when I was watching the Netflix documentary Waco: American Apocalypse. Gary talked about a concept he called the “paradox of power”; the idea that, when in conflict, pushing aggressively on the quote “other side” can result in them pushing back harder on you; aggressive approaches can be self-defeating. And that’s such an important point when it comes to any conflict situation; my own writing on polarization is largely about getting people to be willing to examine how their own approaches, or their side’s approaches, can unintentionally amplify contempt and animosity more, if they’re not careful.
And so i’d been wanting to talk to Gary for a while about that, and I also wanted to talk to him for his takes on behavior – reading body language and facial expression. The main reason I started this podcast was to focus on practically useful aspects of reading behavior in various domains and professions. It was an offshoot of my time spent as a professional poker player, and my work on poker tells. And part of the focus of this podcast is to examine some of the very bad and distorted ideas about reading behavior that are spread by many self-described “behavior experts.” Because there are simply a lot of people in the people-reading space who make a lot of money selling bullshit ideas; some of these quote “experts” are rather egregiously deceptive and unethical in their work; people like Chase Hughes and Jack Brown, and quite a few others. Others are more ethical and responsible with their work but still may be selling and promoting information that has little to no practical real-world application. And that’s what I’ve tried to focus on with this podcast; where are the real-world applications of reading and understanding behavior? Let’s try to strip away the nonsense and the confusing ambiguous stuff and focus on what matters and really leads to useful decisions.
Topics Gary and I discuss include:
- Why “stalling for time” is such a core tactic in highly ** volatile stand-off situations
- The “paradox of power” and why that concept is so important in any high conflict situation
- Stories from Gary’s career that illustrate some key points about conflict and negotiation, including the Waco siege
- Why the concept of “never giving something without getting something” is faulty and can amplify conflict
- The fact that most quote “hostage” situations aren’t really hostage incidents with clear bargaining demands — but are just crisis intervention situations
- The importance of listening closely to what someone is saying; including to what may seem like minor statements
- Gary’s views on body language and its role in law enforcement work
- The importance of voice tone in high-stakes, volatile situations; how sometimes how you say something can matter just as much as what you say
If you like this talk, please consider subscribing to the People Who Read People podcast on youtube or wherever you listen. I’ve got a lot of other episodes on law enforcement, interrogation, and negotiation-related topics; you can find compilations of this at my site behavior-podcast.com.
Also, i’m currently working on a book that will be about reading people, with a focus on examples of logical deductions people have made about what people say or what they do. Do you have personal stories where some small thing someone did or someone said changed your approach in a personal or professional situation? Send any stories along to me and there’s a chance I might put the story in my book; with your permission of course. You can reach me via the contact from at behavior-podcast.com.
A little more about Gary Noesner from his site garynoesner.com, and his last name is spelled NOESNER:
Gary retired from the FBI in 2003 following a 30 year career as an investigator, instructor, and negotiator. A significant focus of his career was directed toward investigating Middle East hijackings in which American citizens were victimized. In addition, he was an FBI hostage negotiator for 23 years of his career, retiring as the Chief of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, Critical Incident Response Group, the first person to hold that position. In that capacity he was heavily involved in numerous crisis incidents covering prison riots, right-wing militia standoffs, religious zealot sieges, terrorist embassy takeovers, airplane hijackings, and over 120 overseas kidnapping cases involving American citizens.
Following his retirement from the FBI he became a Senior Vice President with Control Risks, an international risk consultancy, assisting clients in managing overseas kidnap incidents. He continues to Consult independently and speaks at law enforcement conferences and corporate gatherings around the world.
Ok here’s the talk with Gary Noesner:
Zach Elwood: Hi, Gary. Thanks for joining me.
Gary Noesner: You’re welcome. Glad to be here.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, it’s a big honor. Uh, I you’ve done some amazing things in your career. You’ve written an amazing book. Uh, you’ve done some very interesting things. I really enjoyed your your Stalling for Time book. I recommend people read it. It had so many, not just exciting stories, but uh, so many learnings that applied outside of, uh.
Negotiation in, in personal or professional life. So, yeah, just thanks a lot for joining me. Um, so maybe we can start with, um, how did you arrive at the title of your book? Maybe you could talk a little bit about why you decided to, uh, to arrive at Stalling for time as the title.
Gary Noesner: Yeah. When I, um, got my, uh, initial training as a hostage negotiator in the FBI, which is, you know, I wasn’t, uh, original, uh.
Person that started it all, but I was, uh, I guess you’d say the, the next generation. And, um, the first three words on my note guide that I wrote down were stall for times. And, um, you know, the premise being that, uh, and I thought it would make a good title because in essence, um, primarily we deal with high emotion and people.
Um, acting outside of their normal coping skills and posing a risk to themselves or someone else. So what we learned is if we are patient and engaging and empathic, um, it lowers that emotional content and we have better outcomes that normally, um, benefits from the passage of time. You know, it’s, it’s very hard to keep, uh.
Your emotions charged up for an extended period of time. So there is value alone in simply slowing the process down. We’re not intentionally trying to elongate a siege and make it last longer than it should, but on the other hand, we shouldn’t be pushing and, um, uh, forcing individual into becoming more violent in response to what we do.
We have to be patient and take our time. So I thought stalling for time would, would be a good, uh. Sort a general title to describe in a general way what we do.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You describe, uh, one of the things you describe is how, initially, when all the emotions are at their peak, they’re, they’re only able to see really, um, more volatile or, um.
Binary options, but as, as they calm down a little bit, they can start to entertain other options that aren’t as emotional driven. So I thought that was a really good point.
Gary Noesner: Yeah, I mean, we’re, we’re dealing with people who are in, in crisis and when you’re in crisis and you’re more often than not, um, evoking high emotion, uh, it’s difficult to think clearly.
I mean, you know, we use the old. Teeter totter, which is my favorite illustration. I don’t have a slide in front of me, but if you can follow my hands, you know, in the the schoolyard kids game when emotions are high, rational thinking and, and behavior is low, and, and I think that’s, uh, hard to argue against.
It’s an absolute and human condition. So what, through negotiations with the passage of time and a patient. Effort to create a relationship of trust. We lower emotions and look what happens when we do that. The person’s ability to think and behave more rationally increases. It’s a pretty simple concept, but you know, we haven’t always practiced it in law enforcement.
Uh, you know, exchanges with citizens who are, uh, going through a difficult situation
Zach Elwood: that seems like the same, the same concept applies for the law enforcement or whoever’s on the other end of such a negotiation because sometimes. They’ll also be caught up in, you know, we need to do this now for emotional reasons, or we need to solve this immediately for whatever reason.
Yeah. So it applies to everybody. Yeah.
Gary Noesner: Yeah. I, I think police officers, FBI agents, they’re human beings. They, um, they, they, they are trained and they, they have authority and they have a, a badge and a gun and they’re, when they give somebody an instruction or an order, um, uh, and that is not, uh, adhered to.
They don’t like it, you know, it makes ’em angry. And, you know, there are those police officers that aren’t particularly good at containing their emotions and, um, and, uh, engaging in a more thoughtful way. I mean, we’re certainly seeing it in Minneapolis now and other places, you know, when I see so many of these confrontations and it just, it just, uh, you know, it just leaps out of the, of, of the TV coverage that, you know, just a more patient, thoughtful exchange could diffuse.
A great deal of these situations.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. I first got interested in talking to you when I watched the, the recent Netflix documentary about Waco, which I think came out a couple years ago. You were featured in that obviously, and you talked about the, uh, paradox of power, as you called it, and you write about that in your book.
Um, can you talk a little bit about how you see the paradox of power and why it’s so important in negotiation and conflict situations?
Gary Noesner: Yeah. You know, go, going back to what we said earlier, um, when law enforcement traditionally has, um, demanded a certain behavior or an outcome, a surrender compliance, and they don’t get it, it becomes frustrating.
And then we say, okay, well I tried to do this the nice way, now I’m gonna make you do what I want. ’cause I have the authority and the ability to do that. But what that generally, uh, fails to take into account is. It’s the paradox of power, and that is the harder you push, the more likely it is that you get resistance.
So, I mean, it’s a, it’s a powerful thing and it, and it’s, it constantly has to be taught and retaught and reminded to decision makers in law enforcement. You know, this may make you feel better to show this person that you’re strong and tough, and you can harm them if you want. But is that really the most successful pathway, uh, or the best pathway for success?
And, you know, and that’s, that’s a tough sell sometimes because there, there’s, again, there’s a lot of, uh, people in law enforcement that, so I have the power and authority and I’m gonna, I’m gonna exercise it.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It’s a really powerful concept. I mean, in, in my own work on political polarization, I try to get people to see how, even if they are sure they’re right, you know, on whatever issue, you know, we’re often.
Personally often sure that we’re right, but how you approach the disagreement can actually create more pushback if you don’t handle it right, no matter what the conflict
Gary Noesner: is. Well, and it’s the old simplistic term of, you know, you get, you get more with honey than with vinegar, you know, and, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place where police officers just simply, uh, have to use force. But you know what, we have always been. Uh, taught what we say we believe in, in law enforcement and the Constitution requires of us, is that we never use any more force than is absolutely necessary.
So you, you should be able to, uh, function, law enforcement, jail function, saying that if we end up using force and this has a, an unhappy outcome, someone’s hurt or killed, we wanna be able to show that. We had no other choice but to use force. The behavior, the actions of the perpetrator left us with no court.
Anything less than that is, is just, is not gonna cut it. Uh, particularly in, in today’s environment where everybody has a camera, everybody’s a newscaster, you know? So if, if you don’t, um, expend the time and energy. Into first trying everything within your power to diffuse and avoid conflict. Then questions are gonna be raised about, you know, what you did and why was it necessary.
You know, I always like to ask the question in these, in my, my past life when we would be dealing with a tough situation and someone would suggest, well, it’s time for us to go in. And I would ask a question, well, what has changed from before? What? What articulation can we make that we have to go in now and put people in danger?
’cause when people with guns go in against other people with guns, bad things happen. And they don’t always just happen to the bad guys. So we’re putting police officers in harm’s risk. Are we able to articulate that? We have no choice. There’s nothing else we could do. We have to do it now. Failure to do it now is gonna cause someone to be seriously harmed.
You know, and if you ask yourself those kinds of questions, it can be a real break on, you know, automatically thinking, well, we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna get the bad guy. We never stop and think maybe the bad guy’s gonna get us. No matter how well trained we are and, and, and competent we are in executing our AR arrest procedures and our using our tactical teams.
You know, police officers get killed.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: So the question I always ask is, okay, did we have to go in? Was it absolutely necessary? Sometimes it is, but quite often we find it’s not.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Was that, uh, I was curious if that was, um, an expression that you made up the paradox of power?
Gary Noesner: No, it’s, no, it’s not. I, you know, and I don’t, I can’t tell you who did, I think the first time I really.
Heard it was from Dr. Mike Webster, a Canadian psychologist that they used to work very closely with. I think that’s the first time I heard it and I said, wow. It’s so, it’s so, um, clearly. Mm-hmm. Uh, it speaks to the issue that we see so often in, uh, conflict, uh, with perpetrators.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Uh, on that, on that, uh, idea of.
Threading the line between, uh, being forceful and, and giving people, um, respect and gaining rapport and such. Uh, you talked about, in the book, you wrote about how, you know, it’s, it’s also very important as you try to gain their trust and respect and, and, um, set them at ease. You, it can also be important to show them that there are real limits involved and you use kind of a funny illustration of this.
Uh, with a story of a hijacker who asked for a cup of coffee, could, do you remember that story? Do you care to share that story?
Gary Noesner: Yeah, it’s an old story. Um, you know, uh, guys hijacking a plane and, uh, JFK many, many years ago, back in the sixties or seventies, and the, you know, some point in time an FBI agents.
On the ground speaking to him up at the cockpit and, you know, amongst his demands for fuel and flying somewhere else with his hostages on the plane, he wants a hot cup of coffee cream and two sugars, you know, and about an hour later, he gets a cold cup of coffee, no cream, no sugar. And at some subsequent point, not far from there, he, he surrenders and they said, well, what made you come out?
And he said, well, I figured if I couldn’t get a decent cup of coffee, the other things weren’t gonna work out. You know, a great story that kind of illustrates the point. You know, when people, particularly in the hostage taking realm, and let me come back to how much of it’s really hostage taking, but in the hostage taking realm, people feel empowered.
I’m holding this person and I’m threatening their lives. I can control and make the police, the authorities, the government, whatever, do whatever I want. And then when time passes and they don’t get the things that they want, it slowly conveys to them that guess what? Scooter, you don’t have as much power over us as you think.
You don’t say jump, and we do it. Um, you’ve gonna have to work for everything you get from us. This is quid pro quo bargaining. You know, you want food in there, fine. You’re gonna have to let some of those hostages go. Now that’s, you know, that that was the, the methodology that New York, uh, PD started in 73 and the FBI quickly borrowed.
But when we moved into the, the nineties, you know, we really made a major switch towards a crisis intervention model because the realities were that that was 90% of what cops were doing. Um, there’s. People negotiating, uh, out in the law enforcement community have been doing it their whole careers, and they’ve never done an actual hostage situation.
But I need to differentiate too, because a man’s inside with his wife and kids, that’s not necessarily a hostage situation, they’re victims.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: But it, it really requires that there be a demand, if I don’t get this from you, I will kill this person or harm this person. Uh, if they’re just saying, uh, you know, this, this woman’s gonna take my kids and leave me, and you guys go away.
You know, I’ll take care of this. That’s not a hostage situation by definition.
Zach Elwood: Right. And you talked in, you write in your book about how, I mean, I think it’s like a large majority of these situations are just emotionally, uh, volatile. 90. Yeah. 90% are just somebody Yeah. Snapping or getting into an escalating situation with domestic violence or whatever it might be.
Yeah. Um,
Gary Noesner: so you know that that was, um. And what we discovered, uh, in, in 1990, my, my, uh, partner at the FBI Academy and I went out to San Francisco area and we, we taught an advanced negotiation course and we, we asked the class, here’s our definition of a hostage situation. And, you know, uh, and how many of you worked those?
And in this advanced class, nobody had worked one. And, and then we sort of had an epiphany saying, you know, we’re kind of teaching the wrong stuff. We’re teaching them quid pro quote bargaining. In situations that are not inherently bargaining situations, they’re crisis intervention. They’re people that are experiencing a sense of loss, loss of relationship, loss of job, loss of finances, loss of self-esteem, you name it.
That’s the powerful trigger to the motivation that they’re exhibiting, which is often go away, leave me alone. Um, and some of these we call homicides to be, they’re. They’re intending to kill someone else and possibly themselves. They just haven’t done it yet. And that, of course, gives us the proverbial salesman’s foot in the door to try to intervene and steer them away from violence.
And we’re, we’re pretty, pretty good at that. Not a hundred percent, but we’re pretty darn good with that.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Maybe that’s a good segue into, uh, you write in the book. The high importance of paying close attention to the language that people use. You know, you, one story you tell in the book was about a case of a, a police officer who had snapped.
He had raped a woman, then went to the bank where his wife worked and shot someone. And you mentioned there that even as hopeless as it superficially seemed and how unlikely a good outcome or nonviolent outcome seemed that even there, even as he seemed to refuse to engage with any anyone, he would occasionally say something like, I just wanna talk to somebody, which was a major clue.
Uh, yeah. You know, which, which on, on the surface, the team. That that talked to you initially about, it acted as if that was some sort of aside and not important, but you saw that it was an important clue as to what he
Gary Noesner: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Wanted and how he might
Gary Noesner: respond in that incident. And, and we certainly have had many more like that.
The law enforcement approach is you come out and then we’ll talk, and that’s, uh, counter. Intuitive. I mean, what we should be doing is if he wants to talk now, let’s talk now. Because when he is talking to us, he’s, he’s letting us know what his motivation is, uh, what, what’s driving his behavior. He’s not engaged in.
Uh, harming the hostages when he is talking to us. You know, there’s so many good things that, uh, come out of a sustained, uh, you know, conversation with someone, and, you know, not the least of which is as law enforcement officers, instead of coming across as, uh, authoritative and commanding, we’re almost more like therapists, you know, Hey, you know, Hey, I’m Zach.
It sounds like you really had a difficult time today. Can you tell me more about. The argument you had with your wife, it sounds like it’s, uh, really had a big impact on you. Well, they don’t expect that kind of language from a, a law enforcement representative, and a lot of the people we deal with, you know, believe it or not, they don’t feel like anybody listens to ’em or understands them, and there may not be anybody in their life.
We, we used to call this the double whammy, Zach, you know, when, when most of us have a problem at work, we, we go home to our nurturing families and they’re supportive and encouraging and all that. And conversely, when we have problems at home, in our home life, we may have, uh, coworkers that are very supportive and and nurturing.
A lot of people we deal with don’t have either one of those. They don’t, they don’t have a family support structure and they don’t have a steady employment structure, and they have issues and concerns and problems, and they feel nobody understands them. Nobody’s listened to them, nobody’s. Appreciates their point of view.
So if we can do that in a compressed and albeit dangerous, uh, confrontation, we stand a decent chance of demonstrating to them that we’re not there to make their day worse. We want to help ’em. We don’t wanna see ’em get hurt. You know, as I said, we’re generally pretty successful, not a hundred percent.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Uh, I was recently reading Chris Voss book on negotiation, never split the difference. And I understand that you were a trainer of his at some point. I was curious.
Gary Noesner: Chris worked for me. Uh, I hired him at the crisis negotiation unit. Great guy. Good, good man. Yep.
Zach Elwood: This is, do you, oh, go ahead. Go
Gary Noesner: ahead.
Zach Elwood: I was just curious if there was a good, a good amount of map over between that you saw between what he writes about and what you talk about
Gary Noesner: there.
There are certainly is some, I mean, I think Chris, uh, also talks about, uh, empathy and, and, and creating empathy. And that’s pretty much the standard throughout the business. And, uh, I think he focuses is a bit more on business and. The way you say something in order to elicit the kind of response that you hope to get by how I pose a question or how I respond to something you say, uh, can drive your behavior.
And, and, and that’s good stuff. And, and you know, some of it I agree with, some of it I think is perhaps overstated, but for me, I, I focus on the larger picture of building a relationship. You know, it’s, it’s, my success is not gonna be based on. What I say here, there, or the next time, but how I say it overall, how I come across.
Mm-hmm. You know, I have a firm belief that, uh, people wanna work with people they like and respect, and if you can be a likable, respectful person, you’re, you’re likely to, uh, elicit that, uh, from the other person.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Uh, one thing I read in Chris’s book, I was curious for your thought on, because I. So he, I’ll basically just read a little snippet from his book.
Uh, he’s, he wrote after the fatally disastrous seizures of Randy Weaver’s Ruby Ridge Farm in Idaho in 1982 and Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas in 1993. There was no denying that most hostage negotiations were anything but rational problem solving situations. I mean, have you ever tried to devise a mutually beneficial win-win solution with a guy who thinks he’s the messiah?
There was clearly a breakdown between the book’s. Brilliant Theory. He was talking about a popular negotiation book, getting to yes and a, a breakdown between that and everyday law enforcement experience. End quote. My understanding though, is that, um, he might be being a little bit too hard on the, the current thinking back then because my understanding is.
You know, for example, like if you had had your way, the Waco negotiation would’ve, an approach would’ve played out a lot different. And that it, you know, you, you had the tactics at that time and other people had the tactics, had time that time to handle such things. Uh, but I’m curious for your take on that.
Gary Noesner: Well, I, I think, uh, I don’t think Chris was criticizing negotiations. I was think, I think he was pointing out that in both those cases, the individuals we’re dealing with were, were. Extremely challenging people to, to deal with. You know, a funny note, I wasn’t at Ruby Ridge. I was out of the country when that happened.
But in reality, uh, uh, a tremendously challenging situation. I mean, there had been a, a Marshall killed, uh, Weaver’s son. Uh, and then, then when the FBI shows up, uh, they end up shooting Weaver and, uh, wounding his friend. I mean, uh, uh, wounding a friend of his and, and killing, uh, his wife, uh, not intentionally, but a shot.
Went through the door and killed her. Now. Despite that, and one could say really incredibly challenging situation to respond to that was negotiated out after eight days. I mean, the FBI was patient and brought in, uh, Bo Gritz to be an intermediary. So I, I would hardly characterize that as a failure of negotiations or not realizing.
And then again, as you mentioned. Moving forward a couple years to the Waco situation, a couple years after that, I, I would argue, and I think most, uh, analysts of the situation would agree that, uh, as negotiators we had the right approach. You know, we got 35 people out when I was there, including 21 children.
But, uh, you know, there was, uh, uh, a counterside within the FBI that wanted to apply more pressure, the paradox of power that we just spoke about earlier, and basically force them to come out. And of course. Because I was a resistant, uh, I was resistant to that approach. I was replaced halfway through and they went with a harder line.
Nobody else came out for the rest of the siege of, I was there for 26 to the 51 days. So I, I would say I’m, I’m not sure what Chris meant by that. I’m, I think he probably would be happy to expand on that, but I, but I think, um. You know, I, I, I don’t think either one of those incidents in any way, shape or form could be characterized as negotiation failure or lack of, uh, ability.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Reading it again, I think he was actually trying to say like there were these older things, ideas about purely logical, rational, uh, things like in the book getting to Yes. And I think he was mainly trying to criticize that, but it came, he, he, he might have just not worded it optimally, but yeah, I think he was mainly just trying to criticize that.
And not say that, you know, that that was the only approach taken at Waco or
Gary Noesner: Rent here. Here’s another thing. I mean, business negotiation. There, there are some parallels and, um, similarities in business and crisis negotiations, but there’s also a whole world of, of differences, you know? And, and you have to keep that in mind.
So a lot of the books, the majority of the books out there are business oriented.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: And, and what works in that contest. You know, is, is not necessarily the model we would follow in, in a law enforcement crisis situation.
Zach Elwood: Uh, when I was reading parts of your book, um, there, you write in your book about the importance of giving people your trust, like showing, uh, trust in them also.
And that made me think of, um, the, the movie, the House of Games about the con artists. There was a scene where they talk about the importance of, uh, you know, in, in cons. You, you know, co you giving people your confidence first. So they have a scene where he goes into a, uh, a cash, you know, a cash, uh, a check cashing place and basically gets in a conversation with somebody and says, oh, I’m waiting for money, you know, and starts get building rapport and then says, well, if my money gets here first, I’ll give you some and you can pay me back later.
And they, of course. You know, do something similar and say, oh, same, same for you. If my GI money gets here first, I’ll give you some, you can pay me back later. So then, uh, showing that, you know, it really does a lot to give people trust and make them feel trusted. And in your book, um, yeah, if you wanna talk about that Yeah.
Analogy.
Gary Noesner: Well, again, uh, if you mention it’s, it’s the reciprocity is what it is. Yeah. Reciprocity, you know, it’s, it’s the same reason, you know, back in the. Seventies, the moonies would be at the airport and they’d give you a flower and ask for a donation. And because they gave you something, people were more likely to give them a donation based on the, well, you did something for me, now it’s my turn to do something for you.
And that’s exactly, uh, the scenario. You mentioned how a con can exploit that. You know, you grease the skids a little bit by. You know, incentivizing the person to, to, uh, to make a, make themselves a bigger mark for you. You know? But you have to be careful. When I was trained as a negotiator, originally, going back to the seventies, it was all about bargaining.
And the premise was never give something unless you get something in return.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: Now, in a pure quid pro quo bargaining situation, that has a lot of merit. However, and, and where I, I tried to make the shift in the business was. In a crisis intervention, um, a gesture of, uh, positive intent. It does not weaken your bargaining position.
And, and I always tell a story about, you know, a, a guy climbs up a a a TV tower and he’s gonna jump and he wants a cigarette, and the police don’t wanna give him a cigarette because, you know, some executive remembers, well, you never give something unless you get something back. And, you know, and you kinda had to explain to him, you know, I don’t think the man crawled up the tower today just to get a cigarette.
All you have to do is stand out. In front of a seven 11 and ask, and no more than two or three people go by than somebody. Yeah. What,
Zach Elwood: what, what are you really losing by? Yeah. Doing
Gary Noesner: that. Yeah, exactly. And that’s the point. But what, what you. Potentially could gain, you know, we’re somebody that may have had, uh, bad engagement with law enforcement in the past.
Now all of a sudden this police officers saying, yeah, no problem. I’ll get you a cigarette. I mean, it doesn’t weaken us. It doesn’t give anything away. And in fact, I would argue that it helps to build rapport.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But
Gary Noesner: it’s a hard, it, it has been hard. I don’t know how it stands in the industry now.
I’ve been retired, but for a long time a lot of police negotiators resisted that because they remembered the old. Never give unless you get something back. You know what, the guys doesn’t have anything. He’s barricaded by himself or he is suicidal. What’s he, what’s he gonna give you, you know? Right. In that particular case, I said, okay, he’s up in the tower, what do you want him to do?
Pull an arm off and then throw it down to you. I mean, you know, you know, think about it. So.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The context is important. Yeah. Um, the, in, in the first story you tell in the book, it involved a. Very volatile situation with a man holding his wife and son hostage. And, uh, and, uh, it had been determined that, you know, an app, an aggressive approach was necessary that he, you know, this wasn’t gonna end well and he should just be killed.
So, uh, one of the parts of that story, uh, was you telling him a lie about giving him a helicopter, allowing him to leave, and you had to try to make him believe that. And one thing you did was to tell him, the helicopter pilot is my friend. You have to promise to not hurt him. And you mentioned that it helped sell your story because it was
Gary Noesner: Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Real realistic that you might be worried. But it also struck me that getting back to the idea of like. Giving trust to someone is, is so important. Like he, he felt like not only was that a realistic de request that helped sell your story, he, he felt like, oh, trust has been put into me, therefore I’m more likely to show trust too.
Yeah, yeah.
Gary Noesner: In that particular case before, before the, the helicopter portion of it, you know, we, I sent up some food. We sent up some clothes he had that he wanted, uh, that were downstairs. He was stuck upstairs with his. Ex, uh, common law wife and child. So I did a number of things to say, Hey, I’m not here to make your day worse and, and try to minimize the seriousness of the situation.
So all those positive things. Now while we ended up, I ended up setting him up for a tactical resolution. It didn’t mean I ever, at any time gave up on the opposite. So it, you run a parallel track. It’s not like, it’s not black and white. Well, we were trying to save him now, and now we’re gonna set him up to die.
I mean, you’re constantly trying to give him opportunities mm-hmm. To do the right thing. Um, and, and that’s how it worked. In that case, it was unfortunate. We don’t like to, to, I certainly am not keen about taking anyone’s life and, and I don’t think most police officers are and but to save a woman and child sometimes, uh.
Real tough and difficult decisions have to be made.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. And I like the fact that you started the book out with that showing that, you know, there there are those, you know, sometimes you got, you have to draw a very firm line and that, you know, that doesn’t take away from the fact that your other points about, you know, building more rapport in, taking less aggressive approaches are, are just as valid depending on the, yeah.
Depending on the context, but
Gary Noesner: Yeah. Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Um, so I wanted to pivot to behavior related topics. One focus of this podcast. Has been examining, uh, behavior related topics, body language, facial expressions, uh, in, in how those apply and can be used in various real world endeavors. And we sometimes hear claims that body language plays a big role in law enforcement and interrogations, such that can come from alleged experts in behavior, who’ve worked in law enforcement.
They can come from fictional movies, TV shows like Lie to Me. It can come from people who are. Just straight up con artists, like some people that I’ve examined on this podcast. Uh, so there, there can be, I think it can be hard to get a sense for people like me who are outside of law enforcement or uh, military or these kinds of context to get a sense of how reading body language actually plays a role in high stakes scenarios, like the kind you’re so experiencing.
So I’m curious for your take. About the realm of, of body language and behavior? Um, maybe how, how big a role you see it playing in your work or in law enforcement in general, and maybe how big of a role it takes in, uh, you know, law enforcement training and such.
Gary Noesner: Yeah. I mean, overall today in the training, I’m not sure how much emphasis they put on it, but I have viewed it, have viewed it, always have viewed it as just one of the tools in the toolbox.
You and I are assessing each other’s facial and body language right here. More so facial than body ’cause we’re just seeing from the chest up. But. We sort of innately do that as human beings. You know, it, it goes back to, you know, the dawn of time where we’re trying to assess is this friend or foe? Does this person present, uh, a risk to me or is this somebody I can trust and, and engage with and cooperate with so that we have some of those abilities when I used to, uh, teach people about over traveling overseas and avoiding kidnaps.
I said, trust your instincts. If you see a situation ahead of you, it just doesn’t look right. It doesn’t feel right. Pay attention to your, your instincts, and that speaks to that issue. Now getting back to the body language thing, I mean, I think there’s probably some folks that are just incredibly good at it, but I don’t recall an investigation that I worked in my 30 years that it played any significant role in.
Whatsoever. It, it just, um, you know, it’s like Freud used to say, uh, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I mean, I think you have to be really careful. I mean, on the cover of my, the jacket of my book, uh, the day they took the photograph for that, it was very cold, and I just had a shirts shirt on, and I had my arms tuck like this, and my hands were under my armpits.
I normally don’t stand that way, but my hands were cold. So later somebody wrote me, oh, it’s a very defensive position. You were. And I said, well, I don’t know. Maybe I was, but I think I was primarily just cold, you know? Right. And, and that would be my example. You just, you have to be careful of drawing too much inference, you know, um, in the, uh, in the eighties particularly.
Law enforcement negotiators began to really cozy up with the mental health field, mental health professionals, and more and more police negotiation teams would work with a mental health, uh, consultant. And before you know it, we had police officers who were feeling like they were junior psychologists, you know, well, that’s a paranoid schizophrenic, or, this guy’s a manic depressive, he’s this, he’s that.
And you know, and I used to say, be careful because number one. Your diagnosis may not be correct, and number two, if you pigeonhole this person as being a particular uh, diagnosis, now you are gonna be dealing with them as though. He behaves like every other paranoid schizophrenic. And guess what? They don’t, they don’t all behave the same.
They might have some common features that, that help, uh, uh, achieve the diagnosis, but to say everyone can be reliably expected to do this and to do that and respond this way. I mean, I certainly wouldn’t put any money on that. And, and I think that that becomes very dangerous. So I think, you know, obviously people are selling books and they’re talking about, they can predict this, and they can predict that.
Okay. That’s all well and good. I, I just, um, I go with a more basic, you know, through, through my career. I, I feel as though I, I could read people fairly well. Was I wrong sometimes? Absolutely. Um, but generally speaking. You know, you could get a good sense of, in an interrogation or an interview, this person’s lying or just, just they’re holding something back.
You know, I viewed it as more instinctual and experiential than, than, you know, than, than a, a real hard and fast. Okay? He’s ticked off these five things. He, he touched his nose on the left side and, you know, he’d wiggle his ear. And that means this, and that means that, uh, I don’t have that. Do that. And I, I, I kind of doubt that many do if anyone.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Um, I imagine, uh, well obviously in, in, uh, hostage and standoff negotiation situations, the audio elements is much more important than seeing them, I would imagine, because you’re doing a lot. Talking. I’m curious if, uh, if you have anything much to say about either reading the tones and, and, uh, you know, emotions in people’s voices or else you know, that the separate subject of, you know, obviously it’s good to have a calm speaking voice and do a good presentation and delivery when you’re doing that kind of work, but I’m curious if you have anything to say about the, the audio element of, of that work.
Gary Noesner: Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. In historical negotiations where we’re on the telephone, um. We are denied. Uh, the, the facial, uh, gestures were, uh, denied access to the body language, you know, except in rare situations there’s some face-to-face negotiations. We generally negotiate over a phone because it’s safer. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s a safety issue, but I think there, there’s a side benefit to it, and that is it kind of taught us to learn to listen more carefully.
Uh, to the one thing we had to go, you know, I used to hear things like, uh, you know, somebody was blind, has, uh, better hearing. Right. And, and I think to some extent, uh, whether that’s true or not, I mean, I don’t have personal experience there, but, but I think to some extent, negotiators are, are forced to really focus on what’s being said.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: Be more so than we were if we’re being flooded with a, a wider range of, of, uh. Inputs from that person.
Zach Elwood: Right. It really helps focus your attention on the content, the word, the, the specific words are being said. Yeah. All these things. Yeah. Yeah,
Gary Noesner: I think so. Yeah.
Zach Elwood: Was, uh, was it part of your work or, or a natural part of your work to work on your delivery of, of your tone or, or was that not a big deal in your career?
Gary Noesner: I think I. Uh, obviously, I mean, like anyone else, I’ve, I’ve improved through the years and I’m sure when I retired I was a much better negotiator than, than, than when I started. But I, I think I tended, uh, me personally to, to talk more than I should have, uh, in, in the early days. And then you learn, you know, you, you gotta be a better listener than a talker.
If I’m talking, I’m not learning anything about him. I mean, there’s a time and a place where you have to use some self-disclosure and, and kinda share with that person what you’re thinking, but you kind of have to earn the right for that. You know, I created the behavioral change stairway model that I don’t know if you’re familiar with, but it’s a, it’s widely used across the world for negotiations, and it’s a stairway and it, and it basically says we use active listening, you know, to, um, you know, to to, to create a relationship.
Of, of trust that leads to inner influence and then cooperation. You know, we build some rapport and that can take time going back to our earlier theme, but the process, you don’t just automatically show up and say, Hey, I’m Gary Nester. I’m the chief negotiator of the FBI do what I want. I mean, I have to earn the right to be of influence.
I have to demonstrate. Through repeating in my own words, paraphrasing what the person said, I have to label their emotions, how they feel about what they’re going through. Um, you know, I have to, again, earn the right to be of influence. And you, you see this happening, Zach, because what’ll somebody will say like, you know, Gary, I, I just dunno how to get out of this.
Well, to me that’s when I hear something like that, you know, it shows that I have now. Uh, gotten to a certain level where now this person’s even soliciting my input, you know, and I might respond a little bit, uh, carefully and say something like, well, you know, I, I do know that hurting somebody is, is not gonna make this any better.
I think we can both agree with that. So it’s, it’s just, um, it’s just the process. Negotiations aren’t typically resolved because you come up with a brilliant argument. You, you, you know, in fact, the favorite thing, I, I teach classes. I start off almost every class is through all the years I did this, we typically would ask a perpetrator when they surrendered, what was it that we said that made you come out?
Because we wanna learn and replicate.
Zach Elwood: Good question.
Gary Noesner: But you’d be shocked that the answer was almost always the same and, and it’s really an amazing thing when you think about it. The answer is, I don’t remember what you said, but I like the way you said it. Now you think about that. That is. So powerful.
You know, and I’ve, I’ve seen, you know, various, uh, you know, uh, representations by people that shows that a very significant part of our communication process. You know, you talked about body language before, but a lot of it is, is tone and demeanor.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: You know, how we sound, you know, and, um, you know, and that’s, that’s an important thing.
You know, I, um, I have, um, I have a friend that, uh, you know, his wife used to have these big arguments with, with. With their teenage daughter, you know, and, and, and he said, you know, she says all the right things. Uh, everything she says is makes sense. It’s, it’s absolutely right, but it’s, but she’s not saying it the right way, you know, you know, and you stop to think about it, you know how you present something.
You know, I used to, uh, when I was consulting after the FBI. Teach workplace violence and how we avoid it. And when these companies, these corporations are downsizing, how you go to Zack and say, Zack, I’m sorry. We have to let you go. It could be a world of difference whether Zack is unhappy, but. You know, resigned to the situation versus Zach’s gonna come back in with a gun and, and let you know how unhappy it is, you know?
And part of that is, you know, you, you explain to them what’s happening. You explain what their benefits are. You, you are empathic about, I’m sorry this happened. It’s a, you know, a corporate decision. Um, we resist it. There’s nothing we could do about it. We’re gonna help you write a resume. We’re gonna, you know, help you with job placement.
We’ve got counselors available. None of those things make you feel better about losing your job, but it, but it, it helps to soften the blow and make you a bit more accepting than you would be otherwise.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, it’s much more the, the, the way we communicate is much more important than I think most people tend to think.
Yeah. The how, um, and the, the framing around it. Um, yeah. Getting back to the, uh, the behavior thing, I, I want to say, I, I’m curious if you would agree with this. This is so, because I work on, uh, poker tells, uh, because I used to play poker for a living and wrote some books on. Poker tells, which by the way, I see applications of behavior as very different in game scenarios versus non-game real world scenarios.
Um, and, and because I have this, also because I have this podcast that’s focused on behavior, I often get people asking for my take on, oh, I wanna learn how to read people better. I wanna learn how to read body language or, uh, you know, uh, nonverbal things, facial expressions. And my answer is, you know, for real world non-game scenarios, I tend to say I think that’s a waste of time.
I think you’d be much better off thinking about the deductions you can make from what people say and what they avoid saying, and all of these kinds of things, the actual content, logical deductions around the content. I think it’s a big waste of time to focus on the behavior because I think that’s so much, so ambiguous and it’s very hard to get any meaningful, uh.
Uh, clues, you know, so I’m, but I’m curious if you’d agree with me there.
Gary Noesner: Absolutely. And the other thing is the advantage perhaps that we have versus what you were doing as, as a poker player, we can say, you know, Zach, you just said something and I, I wanna make sure I understand. Could you explain that to me further,
Zach Elwood: right.
Gary Noesner: That you said so and so what, can you tell me what you meant by that? That, that’s a powerful tool we have. Um, you know
Zach Elwood: Yeah. That, that has no, that has no very little analogy to, to poker in games and sports in general.
Gary Noesner: Yeah. Oh, exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. But, but, you know, we’re, we’re showing a curiosity.
We’re showing an interest. We wanna learn more. And, you know, and that’s why I think one of the most powerful tools is paraphrasing when you said something perhaps in the context of crisis. That’s, that’s, you know, worrisome. I might, I might ask you. More about that, you know, and, um, you know, I, I don’t understand.
And, and, and if I might say, you know, it sounds like you, you really wanna hurt your wife, you know, and you may say, um, no, I just wanna teach her a lesson. Well. That’s important for me to know. I mean, you know, uh, and, and, and it’s okay to ask those questions even if they’re unpleasant questions, you know?
Now, you know, we don’t repeat when somebody says, I wanna kill her, so, you know, you still want to kill her. You know, we’ve been talking for an hour and now we, we, we wouldn’t bring up bad things that have in the rear view mirror now. But yeah, I think, I think that is an advantage we have if we don’t understand, ask.
Uh, generally they’ll fill in the, the gaps for us and give us a more complete picture of what’s going on in their lives, how they feel, what their plans are, you know, and that’s all good stuff.
Zach Elwood: Yeah, and I could, I could go on for a while about the differences, but I see between game slash sport sports scenarios and non-game scenarios, because in games you have like.
Granular, discrete actions you’re trying to take that has no application or no, no analogy to real world non-game situations. And you have like polarized spots where you might be bluffing or non bluffing, which I don’t think has any direct correlation to like an interrogation room. Right. So I think that there’s many of these things that make it a very different scenario.
That and the main thing being. In like interrogation or interview settings, uh, it’s just so hard to determine what somebody is anxious about. Right? So, so many of these things get down to anxiety, but there’s just so many reasons. Somebody could be anxious for a multitude of reasons, which makes it really hard to get any meaningful deductions about, oh, they did this, which means anxiety and, you know.
Gary Noesner: Right. That’s
Zach Elwood: great. Yeah.
Gary Noesner: The only thing you can control and fully understand are your own actions. You know, I mean that that’s, I was always confident in success in the negotiation. Not, not because I was always successful, but because I knew I would be in absolute control of what I was trying to do, and that I would be able to convey that I wanted the situation to come out favorably for everyone I wanted to help.
I wasn’t there to make it worse. I wasn’t there to condemn them. I was there to help resolve the crisis, you know, and that’s gonna work, uh, uh, an incredibly, uh, high percentage of the time. But I go back to probably the most problematic area for police negotiators is suicides. And, and, and you know, I used to tell when training negotiators, listen, if you respond to enough of them, you know somebody’s gonna kill themselves.
And, and it’s not because you failed, you weren’t empathic enough, you, you didn’t. Do all the things you need to. So don’t take ownership of this. You don’t control that person. You can try to influence ’em. And usually we’re successful in being a positive influence, but we’re not a hundred percent. And anybody in the, and it applies to business world, to anybody in any negotiation, and it can tell you, I can guarantee a certain outcome.
You know, I, I kind of discount that sort of absolutism because I just, I just don’t see it in the real world. I mean, you know, you’re gonna, when even when I was consulting, you know, I did real well with, uh, generating business for the company I worked for, but not a hundred percent of the time. You know, and, and it may be because there’s factors you don’t even see the person you’re dealing with, you know, you’ve got a great relationship with, but they’ve gotta report to somebody that maybe has already made a decision and they’re just.
They’re just talking to you because they wanna get three bidders under, under their belt. And they can say, we, we, we, we, we talked to three different companies, but they’ve already decided they’re going with company A.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: You know, and your company B or company C. Yeah. You
Zach Elwood: don’t know all the fact, you can’t know all the factors.
Yeah, yeah,
Gary Noesner: yeah. You, you just don’t know. All you can do is again, control yourself and b, the best you can. And, uh, you know, and, and hopefully it’ll come through. And the other thing I used to tell people, you know, particularly in the business context, don’t burn a bridge because. You know, you are giving them a good opportunity and a good deal and they didn’t take it.
Don’t say, well screw you. You know, you, you gotta say, listen, I’m sorry. Uh, it didn’t work out this time. Uh, it’s been my experience that sometimes when someone goes with the lowest bidder, they don’t necessarily get the product they want. If you find down the road that, um, you know, you’re not really satisfied with the direction you went, and I hope you’ll think to call us back and maybe we can try to see if we can come together and make this happen in the future, that’s fine.
You know, it’s okay. It’s not a big loss. Like, you know, it’s not that. It’s, it’s not the end of the world, you know? Mm-hmm. We used to say you should care, but not that much.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It’s good to protect your own, I mean, when doing such high stakes Sure. Uh, situations. It’s good to protect your own mental health and, and have realistic expectations about what’s,
Gary Noesner: what’s possible going to the suicide area.
I mean, I know a lot of negotiators who’ve been. Almost, uh, become dysfunctional is negotiating anymore because of a suicide, you know? Mm-hmm. And suicide is always, not always some bad old bank robber. I mean, it could be a nice grandma, it could be a, a, a, a teenage girl jumping from a bridge ’cause she didn’t get a date to the prom.
I mean, it could be a lot of things. And, and, you know, and, and when we’re not successful, we can take it real hard, you know, we can take it real hard. Mm-hmm.
Zach Elwood: I was curious if you had, say you only had a few hours to train somebody up, say for whatever reason, some person off the street, you were gonna train them for like four to eight, four to eight hours on, uh, dealing with an intense, uh, standoff situation with somebody who was emotionally unstable and such, uh, what would be the main, you know, one or two, three principles you’d focus on educating them on, would you say?
Gary Noesner: Well, we mentioned one, and that’s the self-control. And you know, I, I lived a lot of my career by the Serenity Prayer. You know, knowing what you can do and what you can’t do and understanding the difference. I think that’s a vital, I think that’s a vital thing to embrace and appreciate. I’m gonna come to the situation not of my creation, and I’m gonna do everything I can to help it, uh, end in the way I’d like it to, but I don’t control it.
And, and if it doesn’t end the way I would like. I’m not gonna own it. It’s not because I screwed up. You know, I used to tell people nobody can make a verbal mistake. And somebody says, oh, okay, now I’m gonna kill myself. ’cause Zach said the wrong word. That just doesn’t happen that way. So, self-control would be a big part of it.
The other part is, you know, really, really focus on not what you wanna say, but what they’re saying, and think about how you’re gonna feed back to them through a paraphrase, a summary of, of what you are hearing from them. Not only what you’re hearing, but how they’re responding to that emotionally. You know, there’s, there’s a whole bunch of, we teach seven or eight, uh, active listening skills in the FBI, but I think the two most important are paraphrasing and emotion labeling.
So you do those two things and you’re gonna come across as an engaging, empathic, caring person. Think about your voice, think about being likable, you know, don’t respond to a verbal attacks. Um, you know. You could do pretty good. I, and there’s, there’s people, frankly, Zach, who are naturally good at this and probably would succeed in the tense negotiations without any training.
Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.
Gary Noesner: And then there’s other people that, for whatever reason, they’re just never gonna be competent. They’d
Zach Elwood: ramp it up. Yeah. They’d ramp
Gary Noesner: it up. It’s, it’s never gonna work out for them.
Zach Elwood: Yeah.
Gary Noesner: But I would say that probably, you know, on the bell curve, the, the majority of us in the middle. If we think, uh, carefully, we work with team support and we take our time, we’re, we’re gonna be successful more often than not, and we’re gonna benefit from that kind of negotiation training.
So, yeah. I like to think, keep things simple. You can load people up with too much information and, um, they get analysis paralysis.
Zach Elwood: Right. And they get frozen. Yeah. Uh,
Gary Noesner: and they get frozen.
Zach Elwood: Yeah. Oh, this has been great, Gary. I, I thought it was a great talk. Do you wanna share any other last tidbits of thoughts about anything we touched on or anything you’re working on these days?
Gary Noesner: No, I just, um. You know, I, I, I just think, uh, the things I’m working on now, I’m, I’ve started another book. I’m not sure if I’ll finish it, but it, it’s about negotiating with yourself. You know, get, get right with yourself about what is it you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it. And don’t be so hard on yourself.
I mean, people are what the number one fear is fear of public speaking or something like that. You know, just get out there and do it. Don’t worry about it. Of course, you’ll make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. It’s all right. But overall, you, you should be comfortable in saying, you know, I’m not a perfect person.
Guess what? No one else is either. I can’t throw a football like Tom Brady, but I can do some things. Maybe he can’t, you know, I can’t, uh, sing like, uh, you know, uh, Beyonce, but, you know, okay, I can do some other things, you know, so don’t hold yourself up to some unrealistic, uh, example of, of which we do in society because of, you know, all, all the mass media.
But just focus on being a good, likable person. And guess what? There are people that won’t like you. Okay? There’ll be people that disagree with you. Um, okay, fine. That’s, that’s the way it is. But I’m a good person and I’m confident. I’m happy, you know, whatever. I think those are good life lessons for everyone.
Zach Elwood: Well, I do think you have a lot of great lessons that apply to so many areas. I mean, they, they apply to conflict and so much of life is about conflict, whether it’s external conflict or conflict. Within ourselves. So I think, I think you do have lots of great wisdom to share on so many, uh, on so many fronts.
Yeah. So really appreciate talking to you.
Gary Noesner: Okay, Zach, it’s a pleasure to speak with you today.
Zach: That was a talk with retired FBI hostage negotiator Gary Noesner, author of Stalling for Time. His website is at garynoesner.com.
I’m Zach Elwood and this has been the People Who Read People podcast. Learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com. Send me a message with any interesting stories you have about reading people, whether that’s interpreting something they’ve said or something they’ve done in some practically useful way.