Waco negotiator Gary Noesner shares tips on de-escalation and reading behavior

Moving forward a couple years to the Waco situation, 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 there was a counterside within the FBI that wanted to apply more pressure and basically force them to come out. And of course because 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. 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. You know, it's like Freud used to say, 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, the day they took the photograph for that, it was very cold. And I just had a shirt on and I had my arms stuck 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. And I said, well, I don't know, maybe I was, but I think I was primarily just cold. And that would be my example. You have to be careful of drawing too much inference. That was a couple clips from my talk with Gary Nesner, who had a 30-year career in the FBI as an investigator, instructor, and negotiator. Gary is the author of the book Stalling for Time, My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator. I 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 that 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 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 sometimes. 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 sides approaches can unintentionally amplify contempt and animosity more if they're not careful. And so I've been wanting to talk to Gary for a while about that. And I also want to talk to him about 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. That was an outshoot of my time spent as a professional poker player and my writing on poker tells. Also, a 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 and gain a lot of followers selling bullshit ideas. Some of these, quote, experts are rather egregiously deceptive and unethical in their work. People like Chase Hughes and Jack Brown. I've examined some of these people in this podcast. others may be 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 so 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 and ambiguous stuff and focus on what really matters and what actually leads to useful decisions. Topics Gary and I discuss include why stalling for time is such a core tactic in highly volatile standoff 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 in return is faulty and can amplify conflict, the fact that most, quote, hostage situations are not 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 importance in law enforcement work, the importance of tone of voice in negotiation and highly volatile high-stakes 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 episodes and compilations at my site, behavior-podcast.com. Also, I'll mention that 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 others have said or what they've done? Do you have any personal stories where some small thing someone did or said changed your approach or strategy in a personal or professional situation? Send any interesting 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 form at behavior-podcast.com. A little more about Gary Nezner from his site, GaryNezner.com, and just to help you find the site, his last name is spelled N-O-E-S-N-E-R. 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 negotiated 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 incinets 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. Okay, here's the talk with Gary Nesner. Hi, Gary. Thanks for joining me. You're welcome. Glad to be here. Yeah, it's a big honor. You've done some amazing things in your career. You've written an amazing book. You've done some very interesting things. I really enjoyed your Stalling for Time book. I recommend people read it. It had so many, not just exciting stories, but so many learnings that applied outside of negotiation in personal or professional life. So yeah, just thanks a lot for joining me. And so maybe we can start with how did you arrive at the title of your book? Maybe you could talk a little bit about why you decided to to arrive at stalling for time as the title. Yeah, when I got my initial training as a hostage negotiator in the FBI, which, you know, I wasn't original person that started at all. But I was I guess you'd say the next generation. and the first three words on my note guide that I wrote down were stall for times and you know the premise being that and I thought it would make a good title because in essence primarily we deal with high emotion and people 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, it lowers that emotional content and we have better outcomes. That normally benefits from the passage of time. You know, it's very hard to keep 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 forcing the 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 be a good sort of a general title to describe in a general way what we do. Yeah, you describe one of the things you describe is how initially when all the emotions are at their peak, they're only able to see really more volatile or binary options. But 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. Yeah, I mean, we're dealing with people who are in crisis. And when you're in crisis and you're more often than not evoking high emotion, 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 schoolyard kids game, when emotions are high, rational thinking and behavior is low. And I think that's 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 we haven't always practiced it in law enforcement exchanges with citizens who are going through a difficult situation. It seems like 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 so it applies to everybody yeah yeah i think police officers fbi agents they're human beings they um they they are trained and they they have authority and they have 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 them 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 in 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 the tv coverage that you know just a more patient thoughtful exchange could diffuse a great deal of these situations. I first got interested in talking to you when I watched the recent Netflix documentary about Waco, which I think came out a couple of years ago. You were featured in that, obviously, and you talked about the paradox of power, as you called it, and you write about that in your book. 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? Yeah, you know, going back to what we said earlier, when law enforcement traditionally has 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 going to make you do what I want because I have the authority and the ability to do that. But what that generally 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's it constantly has to be taught and retaught 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 or the best pathway for success. And, you know, and that's a tough sell sometimes because there's, again, there's a lot of people in law enforcement that say, I have the power and authority and I'm going to exercise it. It's a really powerful concept. I mean, 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 is. 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 have to use force. But you know what we have always been 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 function law enforcement function, saying that if we end up using force and this has an unhappy outcome, someone's hurt or killed, we want to 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 just not going to cut it, particularly in today's environment where everybody has a camera. Everybody's a newscaster, you know. So if you don't expend the time and energy into first trying everything within your power to diffuse and avoid conflict, then questions are going to be raised about, you know, what you did and why. Was it necessary? You know, I always like to ask the question in 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 articulation can we make that we have to go in now and put people in danger? Because 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 going to 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 going to go in and we're going to get the bad guy we never stop and think maybe the bad guy is going to get us no matter how well trained we are and competent we are in executing our arrest procedures and are using our tactical teams, you know, police officers get killed. 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. Was that, I was curious if that was an expression that you made up the paradox of power? No, no, it's not. You know, and I don't, I can't tell you who did. I think the first time I really I 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, well, it's so clearly speaks to the issue that we see so often in conflict with perpetrators. Yeah, on that idea of threading the line between being forceful and giving people respect and gaining rapport and such, you talked about in the book, you wrote about how it's also very important as you try to gain their trust and respect and set them at ease. It can also be important to show them that there are real limits involved. And you use kind of a funny illustration of this with a story of a hijacker who asked for a cup of coffee. Do you remember that story? You care to share that story? Yeah, it's an old story. You know, a guy's hijacking a plane in JFK many, many years ago back in the 60s or 70s. And, you know, at some point in time, an FBI agent's, you know, 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 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 going to 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 and 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. You're going to 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 going to have to let some of those hostages go. Now, that's you know, that that was the methodology that New York PD started in 73 and the FBI quickly borrowed. But when we moved into the 90s, you know, we really made a major switch towards a crisis intervention model because the realities were that that was 90 percent of what cops were doing. There's people negotiating out in the law enforcement. They've 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. But 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. If they're just saying, you know, this woman's going to 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. Right. And you talked to you write in your book about how I mean, I think it's like a large majority of these situations are just emotionally volatile. Ninety percent are just somebody snapping or getting into an escalating situation with domestic violence or whatever it might be. So, you know, that that was and what we discovered in 1990, my my partner at the FBI Academy and I went out to San Francisco area and 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 work those 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 quo bargaining in situations that are not inherently bargaining situations. They're crisis intervention. They're people that are experiencing 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. And some of these we call homicides to be there. 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 yeah maybe that's a good segue into uh you write in the book about 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 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 non-violent outcome seemed that even there even as he seemed to refuse to engage with anyone he would occasionally say something like i just want to talk to somebody which was a major clue uh you know which on the surface the team that talked to you initially about it's acted as if that was some sort of aside and not important but you saw it it was an important clue as to what he wanted in that 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 counterintuitive. I mean, what we should be doing is if he wants to talk now, let's talk now, because when he's talking to us, he's he's letting us know what his motivation is, what's driving his behavior. He's not engaged in harming the hostages when he's talking to us. You know, there's so many good things that come out of a sustained conversation with someone. And, you know, not the least of which is as law enforcement officers, instead of coming across as authoritative and commanding, you're almost more like therapists. You know, hey, you know, hey, 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 really had a big impact on you. Well, they don't expect that kind of language from 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 them or understands them. And there may not be anybody in their life. We used to call this the double whammy, Zach. You know, when most of us have a problem at work, 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 coworkers that are very supportive and nurturing. A lot of people we deal with don't have either one of those. 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 appreciates their point of view. So if we can do that in a compressed and albeit dangerous confrontation, we stand a decent chance of demonstrating to them that we're not there to make their day worse. We want to help them. We don't want to see them get hurt. You know, as I said, we're generally pretty successful, not 100%. 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. Chris worked for me. I hired him at the crisis negotiation unit. Great guy. Good man. I was just curious if there was a good amount of map over that you saw between what he writes about and what you talk about. There certainly is some. I mean, I think Chris also talks about empathy and creating empathy, and that's pretty much the standard throughout the business. And I think he focuses 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 can drive your behavior. And that's good stuff. And, you know, some of it I agree with. Some of it I think is perhaps overstated. But for me, I focus on the larger picture of building a relationship. You know, my success is not going to be based on what I say here, there or the next time, but how I say it overall, how I come across. I have a firm belief that people want to work with people they like and respect. And if you can be a likable, respectful person, you're likely to elicit that from the other person. One thing I read in Chris's book, I was curious for your thought on because I so he basically just read a little snippet from his book. He wrote after the fatally disastrous sieges of Randy Weaver's Ruby Ridge Farm in Idaho in 1992 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 breakdown between that and everyday law enforcement experience, end quote. My understanding, though, is that he might be being a little bit too hard on the current thinking back then because my understanding is, you know, for example, like if you had had your way, that Waco negotiation would have, and approach would have played out a lot different, and that you had the tactics at that time, and other people had the tactics at that time to handle such things, but I'm curious for your take on that. Well, I don't think Chris was criticizing negotiations. I think he was pointing out that in both those cases, the individuals we're dealing with were extremely challenging people 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, a tremendously challenging situation. I mean, there had been a Marshall killed, Weaver's son. And then when the FBI shows up, they end up shooting Weaver and wounding his friend. I mean, wounding a friend of his and killing his wife, 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 Bo Grites to be an intermediary. So I would hardly characterize that as a failure of negotiations or not realizing. And then again, as you mentioned, moving forward a couple of years to the Waco situation, a couple of 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 forced them to come out. And of course, because I was a resistant, 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. I was there for 26 of the 51 days. so i i would say i'm not sure what chris meant by that i think he probably would be happy to expand on that but but i think um you know i i don't think either one of those incidents in any way shape or form couldn't be characterized as negotiation failure or lack of uh ability yeah reading it again i think he was actually trying to say like there were these older things, ideas about purely logical, rational things, like in the book, Getting to Yes. And I think he was mainly trying to criticize that, but it came, he might've just not worded it optimally, but yeah I think he was mainly just trying to criticize that and not say that that was the only approach taken at Waco But There another thing I mean business negotiation there are some parallels and similarities in business and crisis negotiation But there's also a whole world of differences, you know, and you have to keep that in mind. So a lot of the books, the majority of books out there are business oriented. And what works in that contest is not necessarily the model we would follow in a law enforcement crisis situation. When I was reading parts of your book, you write in your book about the importance of giving people your trust, like showing trust to them also. And that made me think of the movie The House of Games about the con artists. There was a scene where they talk about the importance of, you know, in cons, you, you know, you giving people your confidence first. So they have a scene where he goes into a cash, you know, a cash, a check cashing place and basically gets in a conversation with somebody and says, oh, I'm waiting for money, you know, and starts 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 money gets here first, I'll give you some. You can pay me back later. So then showing that, you know, it really does a lot to give people trust and make them feel trusted. And in your book, yeah, I'll talk about that. Yeah. Now, if you mentioned it's it's the reciprocity is what it is. Yeah. It's the same reason, you know, back in the 70s, the Moonies would be at the airport and they 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 the scenario you mentioned, how a con can exploit that. You grease the skids a little bit by incentivizing the person to make themselves a bigger mark for you. But you have to be careful. When I was trained as a negotiator originally, going back to the 70s, it was all about bargaining, and the premise was never give something unless you get something in return. Now, in a pure quid pro quo bargaining situation, that has a lot of merit. However, and where I tried to make the shift in the business was in a crisis intervention, a gesture of positive intent does not weaken your bargaining position. And I always tell a story about a guy climbs up a TV tower and he's going to jump and he wants a cigarette. And the police don't want to give him a cigarette because some executive remember as well, you never give something unless you get something back. And, you know, and you kind of 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 7-Eleven and ask and no more than two or three people go by. What are you really losing by doing that? Exactly. And that's the point. But what you potentially could gain, you know, for somebody that may have had bad engagement with law enforcement in the past. Now, all of a sudden, this police officer 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. But it's a hard 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, you know, never give unless you get something back. If the guy doesn't have anything, he's barricaded by himself or he's suicidal, what's he going to give you? 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 throw it down to you? I mean, think about it. Yeah, the context is important. 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 it had been determined that an aggressive approach was necessary, that this wasn't going to end well and he should just be killed. So one of the parts of that story 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 realistic that you might be worried. But it also struck me that getting back to the idea of like giving trust to someone is so important. Like he felt like not only was that a realistic request that helped sell your story, he felt like, oh, trust has been put into me. Therefore, I'm more likely to show trust too. In that particular case, before the helicopter portion of it, we sent up some food. We sent up some clothes he had that he wanted that were downstairs. He was stuck upstairs with his ex-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 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 tactical resolution. It didn't mean I ever at any time gave up on the opposite. So 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 going to set him up to die. I mean, you're constantly trying to give him opportunities to do the right thing. And that's how it worked in that case. It was unfortunate. We don't like to – I certainly am not keen about taking anyone's life and I don't think most police officers are. But to save a woman and child, sometimes real tough and difficult decisions have to be made. And I like the fact that you started the book out with that showing that there are those – sometimes 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 and taking less aggressive approaches are just as valid depending on the, yeah, depending on the context. But so I want to pivot to behavior related topics. One focus of this podcast has been examining behavior related topics, body language, facial expressions and 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 interrogation and such that can come from alleged experts in behavior who've worked in law enforcement. It 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. so there can be I think it can be hard to get a sense for people like me who are outside of law enforcement or military or these kinds of contexts to get a sense of how reading body language actually plays a role in high stakes scenarios like the kind you're so experienced in so I'm curious for your take about the realm of body language and behavior maybe 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 law enforcement training and such. Yeah, I mean, overall, today in the training, I'm not sure how much emphasis they put on it, but I have viewed it, always 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 because we just see him from the chest up. But we sort of innately do that as human beings. You know, 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 a risk to me or is this somebody I can trust and engage with and cooperate with? So that we have some of those abilities. When I used to teach people about traveling overseas and avoiding kidnaps, I said, trust your instincts. If you see a situation ahead of you 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 just um And, you know, it's like Freud used to say, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I mean, I think you have to be really careful. I mean, on the cover of 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. Later, somebody wrote me, oh, it's a very defensive position. And I said, well, I don't know. Maybe I was. but I think I was primarily just cold. Right. And that would be my example. You have to be careful of drawing too much inference. You know, in the 80s 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 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 diagnosis, now you're going to be dealing with him 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 help 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 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. OK, that's all well and good. I just I go with a more basic, you know, through my career, I feel as though I could read people fairly well. Was I wrong sometimes? Absolutely. But generally speaking, you know, you could get a good sense of in an interrogation or an interview. This person's lying or they're holding something back. You know, I viewed it as more instinctual and experiential than a real hard and fast, okay, he's ticked off these five things. He touched his nose on the left side and, you know, he'd wiggle his ear and that means this and that means that. I don't have that ability to do that. And I kind of doubt that many do, if anyone. Yeah. Yeah. I imagine, well, obviously in hostage and standoff negotiation situations, the audio elements is much more important than seeing them, I would imagine, because you're doing a lot of talking. I'm curious if you have anything much to say about either reading the tones and emotions in people's voices or else the separate subject of – 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 audio element of that work. Yeah, obviously, yeah. in historical negotiations where we're on a telephone, you know, we are denied the facial gestures were 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 a safety issue. But I think there's a side benefit to it, and that is it kind of taught us to learn to listen more carefully to the one thing we had to go. You know, I used to hear things like, you know, somebody who's blind has better ears. And I think to some extent, whether that's true or not, I mean, I don't have personal experience there, but I think to some extent, negotiators are forced to really focus on what's being said, maybe more so than if we're being flooded with a wider range of inputs from that person. Right. It really helps focus your attention on the content, the specific words being said, all these things. I think so. Yeah. Was it part of your work or a natural part of your work to work on your delivery of your tone or was that not a big deal in your career? I think I – obviously, I mean, like anyone else, I've improved through the years and I'm sure when I retired, I was a much better negotiator than when I started. But I think I tended, me personally, to talk more than I should have in the early days. And then you learn, you know, you've got to 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 do some self-disclosure and kind of 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 basically says we use active listening, you know, to, you know, to create a relationship 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 Nestner. 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, uh, again, earn the right to be of influence. And you, you see this happening, Zach, because little, somebody will say like, you know, Gary, I, I just didn't know 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 even soliciting my input you know and I might respond a little bit carefully and say something like well you know I do know that hurting somebody is not going to make this any better. I think we can both agree with that. So it's just the process. Negotiations aren't typically resolved because you come up with a brilliant argument. You know, in fact, the favorite thing 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 want to learn and replicate. Good question. But you'd be shocked that the answer was almost always the same. 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. And I've seen various 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 tone and demeanor, how we sound. And that's an important thing. You know, I have a friend that, you know, his wife used to have these big arguments with their teenage daughter, you know, and he said, you know, she says all the right things. Everything she says makes sense. It's absolutely right. But she's not saying it the right way, you know. And you stop to think about it, you know, how you present something. You know, I used to, when I was consulting after the FBI, would teach workplace violence and how we avoid it. when these companies, these corporations are downsizing, how you go to Zach and say, Zach, I'm sorry, we have to let you go. It could be a world of difference whether Zach is unhappy, but, you know, resigned to the situation versus Zach's going to 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're empathic about, I'm sorry, this happened. It's a, you know, corporate decision. We resisted it. There's nothing we could do about it. We're going to help you write a resume. We're going to, 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 helps to soften the blow and make you a bit more accepting than you would be otherwise. Yeah, it's much more – the way we communicate is much more important than I think most people tend to think. Yeah, the how and the framing around it. Yeah, getting back to the behavior thing, I want to say I'm curious if you would agree with this. This is – so because I work on poker tells, 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. 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 want to learn how to read people better I want to learn how to read body language or you know 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 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 clues, you know, so I'm but I'm curious if you'd agree with me there. 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 want to make sure i understand could you explain that to me further right 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 yeah that has no that has no very little analogy to poker and games and sports in general exactly right exactly right but but you We're showing you curiosity. We're showing you an interest. We want to learn more. 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 worrisome, I might ask you more about that. And I don't understand. And I might say it sounds like you really want to hurt your wife. you know and you may say um no i just want to teach her a lesson well that's important for me to know i mean you know uh 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 want to kill her so you know you still want to kill her you know we've been talking for an hour and we we wouldn't bring up bad things that have in the rearview mirror now but yeah i think i think that is an advantage we have if we don't understand ask and generally they'll fill in the the gaps for us and it's 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 yeah and i could i could go on for a while about the differences but i see between game slash 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 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, so, yeah. The only thing you can control and fully understand are your own actions, you know, I mean, that's, I was always confident in success in the negotiation, not because I was always successful, but because I knew I would be in absolute control of what I was trying to do. And 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 going to work an incredibly high percentage of the time. But I go back to probably the most problematic area for police negotiators are 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 going to kill themselves and it's not because you failed you weren't empathic enough you you didn't do all the things you needed to so don't take ownership of this you don't control that person you can try to influence them and usually we're successful in being a positive influence, but we're not 100%. And anybody in the – and that supplies the business world. Anybody in any negotiation that can tell you I can guarantee a certain outcome, I kind of discount that sort of absolutism because I just don't see it in the real world. I mean, you're going to – even when I was consulting, I did real well with generating business for the company I worked for, but not 100% of the time. And it may be because there's factors you don't even see. The person you're dealing with, you've got a great relationship with, but they've got to report to somebody that maybe has already made a decision. And they're just talking to you because they want to get three bidders under their belt. And they can say, we talked to three different companies. But they've already decided they're going with company A, and you're company B, you're company C. Yeah, you can't know all the factors. You just don't know. All you can do is, again, control yourself and be the best you can. And, you know, and hopefully it'll come through. And the other thing I used to tell people, you know, particularly in the business content, 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 got to say, listen, I'm sorry. It didn't work out this time. 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 you're not really satisfied with the direction you went, 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. It's okay. It's not a big loss. It's not the end of the world. We used to say you should care, but not that much. Yeah, it's good to protect your – I mean when doing such high-stakes situations, it's good to protect your own mental health and have realistic expectations about what's possible. I mean for the suicide area, I mean I know a lot of negotiators who have been – almost become dysfunctional as negotiators anymore because of a suicide. And suicide is not always some bad old bank robber. I mean it could be a nice grandma. It could be a teenage girl jumping from a bridge because she didn't get a date to the prom. I mean it could be a lot of things. And, you know, and when we're not successful, we can take it real hard. We can take it real hard. 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 going to train them for like four to eight hours on dealing with an intense standoff situation with somebody who was emotionally unstable and such. what would be the main you know one or two three principles you'd focus on educating them on would you say 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 going to come to this situation not of my creation and i'm going to do everything i can to help it end in the way I'd like it to, but I don't control it. And if it doesn't end the way I would like, I'm not going to 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 going to kill myself because 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 want to say, but what they're saying and think about how you're going to feed back to them through a paraphrase, a summary of what you're hearing from them, not only what you're hearing, but how they're responding to that emotionally. You know, there's a whole bunch of we teach seven or eight 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 going to come across as an engaging, empathic, caring person. Think about your voice. Think about being likable. Don't respond to verbal attacks. You could do pretty good. And there's people, frankly, Zach, who are naturally good at this and probably would succeed in intense negotiations without any trade. and then there's other people that for whatever reason they're just never going to be confident and they'd ramp it up yeah they'd ramp it up it's never going to work out for them yeah but i would say that probably you know on the bell curve the majority of us in the middle you know if we think carefully we work with team support and we take our time we're going to be successful more often than not and we're going to 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 right and they get frozen yeah uh and they get frozen yeah oh this has been great gary i thought it was a great talk do you want to share any other last tidbits of thoughts about anything we touched on or anything you're working on these days no i just um you know i i just think the things I'm working on now I've started another book I'm not sure if I'll finish it but it's about negotiating with yourself you know 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 is 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 alright you know but overall 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 sing like, you know, Beyonce, but, you know, OK, I can do some other things, you know. So don't hold yourself up to some unrealistic example, which we do in society because of 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 will be people that disagree with you. Okay, fine. 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. Well, I do think you have a lot of great lessons that apply to so many areas. I mean, they apply to conflict and so much of life is about conflict, whether it's external conflict or conflict within ourselves. So I think you do have lots of great wisdom to share on so many fronts. Yeah, so really appreciated talking to you. Okay, Zach, it's a pleasure to speak with you today. That was a talk with retired FBI hostage negotiator Gary Nesner, author of Stalling for Time, a great book. His website is at GaryNesner.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. Thanks for listening. Music by Small Skies.