Transcript: Former FBI Agent Joe Navarro’s Interview on DOAC Podcast

Just because we show that we’re relaxed and that we’re not coming at you with an agenda, that we’re willing to listen. It can be transformative if you apply that knowledge.

Now, some people look at knowledge and they don’t do much with it, but you can use it at home, you can use it at work, you can use it in negotiations. For instance. One of the things that I teach is the value of time. And time is actually can be used as a non verbal. So when I talk about non verbals, I’m really talking about anything that communicates but isn’t not a word.

Well, you can use time as a nonverbal to say I’m in charge. Whoever dominates and controls time controls. And so even if I change the delivery of my message to slow things down, you’re already taking charge in that negotiation. It’s a beautiful thing to witness when you execute it properly. So there are a lot of applications.

And obviously like you, you basically study human behavior. You are a business person, but you’re actually really in the people business. And once we understand the needs and some are biological, the wants, the desires, the preferences, the preferences of others, how do they like that information delivered, how do they like their coffee? All of that. But then what do they fear?

Most people don’t tell you “I have fears.” They say, “Well, you know, I’m concerned about that or that, I don’t know if that’s a good investment or we’ll have to do some due diligence.” The brain only recognizes fear. And so once you understand that it gives you such amplitude to then pursue whatever it is that you’re interested in doing more effectively and your career.

Joe’s FBI Career and the Behavioral Analysis Program

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve been an, you were an FBI agent for more than 30 years?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, I was in law enforcement for 30 years. I was in the FBI for 25 years, principally working in the area of counterintelligence. But you know, in the FBI you never wear one hat. I was also a pilot, so I flew surveillance. I was a SWAT team commander. So I did SWAT stuff and actually worked with the SAS from London. And then I was in the behavioral analysis program. So we used that skill set to work on catching spies.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the behavioral analysis program?

JOE NAVARRO: In the 89 90, the FBI developed a very secret program to analyze not people that were dead, but actually how do we use human behavior to catch spies, to catch terrorists. And then once we catch them, how do we get into their heads? How do we get them to tell us what they’re up to, what their purpose is and so forth.

So we created this program. I, along with five other agents out of 12,000 were selected from the FBI to become part of this new behavioral analysis program, which was supposed to be classified except it was accidentally leaked and our job was to look at the threats, national security threats, and then see how we can use our knowledge of human behavior to then attack that.

The Reality of Espionage

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you say much of your work was to catch spies, right. Most of us have only ever heard of spies from watching James Bond and other things like that. So we don’t actually understand the sort of reality of spies. So if I just play completely dumb for a second, other countries send people into other countries, like the United States or the UK or Australia, Canada. Right. To do what?

JOE NAVARRO: So every nation state has interests. A lot of it is obtained through diplomacy. A lot of it is now obtained through what we called espionage. So it’s nothing like television and the movies. Some nations, especially hostile nations, send what we call hostile intelligence officers, usually masquerading as a diplomat, but often masquerading as students or scientists or businessmen.

And their job is to acquire knowledge in specific areas. Military knowledge, science and research, intentions and plans. Military intentions and plans. Or they may have interest in, for instance, what is going to be the wheat production in Argentina this year, because it may affect the price of grain across the world. So there’s commercial espionage that goes on.

And so every nation defends itself by trying to identify, well, who is here trying to spy. So that’s what we do. That’s counterintelligence. That’s espionage. And it’s nothing like the movies. We don’t jump from buildings, although we do that sometimes, but it’s not as glamorous as the James Bond stuff.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So have you caught spies before?

JOE NAVARRO: I have. I’ve arrested spies. Multiple spies. Yeah.

The Case of the Shaking Cigarette

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me the most interesting example of a spy that you identified in court. And what were they here doing? In which country did they come from?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, as it turns out, it was an American, because we also have what we call turn codes. So in the case of Roderick James Ramsey, he was an individual who, in 1989, I was asked to go interview because we thought he was a witness to something that had happened in Germany. He had. A former army sergeant had been kicked out of the army. The military wanted to find out if he knew anything about some missing documents, if he had seen anything during my interview of him, which, again, I thought he was a witness.

He was smoking a cigarette at his house, and I just mentioned an individual’s name that had been at that base, but who had been under investigation by German authorities, in fact, by the Bundes Criminalum, which is the equivalent of the FBI. There’s no reason why he should react to that. It’s just a name. But when I mentioned the name, his cigarette shook.

And I knew enough about human behaviors to know that that physiological change had to be caused by something significant. Why would a name affect him? And so scientific method talked to him for 20 more minutes about something else. And then I mentioned that name. And sure enough, his cigarette shook again. And at that point I was convinced that there was something nefarious there.

As it turns out, the Germans arrested Conrad. Conrad, Clyde Conrad, that was the name of the person that had been under suspicion. The guy that I was interviewing, Rod Ramsey, was not. And so I left that interview. And then I persuaded my supervisors to continue to talk to Rod Ramsey. And that led to a 10 year investigation and the arrest of three, four, five, six, seven additional individuals.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that Roderick Ramsey guy with the shaking cigarette was a. He was spying on America.

JOE NAVARRO: What he was doing, and that’s a good question and forgive me for not explaining. While he was in the army, he and Clyde Lee Conrad were stealing military secrets from the U.S. army. They were taking U.S. army secrets and then selling it to the Soviet Union through the Hungarian intelligence service.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So he was a traitor of the United States.

JOE NAVARRO: So he was a traitor. And that is often the biggest problem for any nation state is the traitors from within. And they had elevated espionage to an industrial level. I mean to the. No longer even use 35 millimeter cameras to photograph the documents. They were actually videotaping them so that they could expedite the thousands of pages. It was the most damaging espionage case in the history of the United States because they had compromised the United States nuclear go codes in Germany and that left all of Western Europe exposed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Nuclear go codes?

JOE NAVARRO: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is that?

The Nuclear Go Code Case

JOE NAVARRO: All of our nuclear assets around the world are controlled by two things. There is what’s called a permissive action link, which is like a last minute safety lock on each device. And then there is the go code that says there is authority to use this weapon.

Ramsey was able to steal the actual nuclear go code. It’s a card. It’s made out of a special material which I cannot describe. It’s made out of special metals and plastics and other things.

The inherent danger in what they did was that, not that they could initiate a launch – that can only be initiated at the national command authority level. But if this were compromised and given to, let’s say the Russians at the time, the Soviet Union, this is before 1989, then a foreign hostile intelligence service could take that and replicate it, but put the wrong numbers in there.

And by putting the wrong numbers in there, if it’s in a pyramid structure and it’s put high enough – right, let’s say you control all of the East Coast – maybe you don’t want to spy for Russia, but for $100,000, let’s say you were willing to slip this in there and take the one that’s there out. Okay? So maybe that helps your conscience in some way. Then you basically, if it’s a pyramid sort schema, you can paralyze everything below that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so someone could have changed the codes, put a fake one in, which meant that it wouldn’t work anymore.

JOE NAVARRO: That at the highest level, then nothing would work. If you had access at the highest level.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did they go to jail?

JOE NAVARRO: Oh, yes. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the shaking cigarette guy went to jail 33 years.

JOE NAVARRO: Let me just finish it by saying this. This case put all of Western Europe in danger as well as the United States. The general who testified in this case said that had hostilities broken out, “the defeat of the west would have been assured within three days.” That’s how devastating this was. Yeah. Let that sink in. Those are his words. “The defeat of the west would have been assured” because of the damage these individuals had done.

The Flower Bouquet Spy

STEVEN BARTLETT: Not all cases are as significant in terms of catching spies. I was reading about another one where you caught a man because of the way he held some flowers.

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah. A lot of times it’s just based on the behavior. You know, you see how often somebody looks at their watch. Right. But maybe when they’re operational, they look at their watch more often.

And they filmed this guy who we thought was what we call an illegal. And in the parlance of espionage, an illegal is someone who magically appears in the United States and pretends to be an American, has always been an American, like the series “The Americans.” But we had some clues from one of our sister services from another country and said, “We think this individual may be someone who you need to look at that is pretending to be an American.”

We’re looking at the unit. We bring the whole team together, all six of us, and we’re looking at the movie. And you know, it was filmed just serendipitously. It was filmed on Valentine’s Day. And so we see him entering a flower shop and leaving the flower shop.

When he exited, I said, “Definitely, he’s not an American.” Everybody looked at me like, “Excuse me.” I said, “He’s not from here.” And he said, “How?” And he says, “Look how he’s carrying the bouquet.” Americans carry the bouquet up. Eastern Europeans carry it bouquet down and continued to carry it that way.

So I did what’s called a presumptive. So we stopped him one day, and I said, you know, “I’m with the FBI.” And I said, “Do you want to know how we know?” And that was the first trigger I was looking for to see how he reacts to it. And he fell for it. And he said, “Go on.” Most people would say, “Get out of here. Go away.”

And I said, “It was how you carried the flowers.” His chin came down, his eyelids went heavy as he was evaluating everything he had done. You know, he had practiced everything. His English was immaculate. You know, he sounded like a Midwesterner and all that. After a few hours of having nice, really a nice chat, he agreed to work with us and admitted everything.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What did he admit?

JOE NAVARRO: That he had been sent here by a foreign government. That his job as an illegal was to be in the United States, act as an American. And most people don’t understand, well, why would a country, a nation state, spend so much money training these people to be like an American?

And what they don’t understand is their purpose here is for when hostilities break out. They can report on, for instance, train traffic, what trains are carrying, munitions, what airports are being used, for what purposes. Many times, as he later told us, they’re giving caches of explosives so that they can then blow up certain things that no missile would be able to do. So that’s their role in hiding in America. It’s not to commit espionage. It’s to be here in case hostilities break out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you flipped him to working with the FBI.

JOE NAVARRO: Correct.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And does that mean he doesn’t get punished?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, he doesn’t get punished because he didn’t commit any crime other than immigration violation. But what he was able to reveal to us was nothing short of breathtaking.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which nation was this?

JOE NAVARRO: I cannot say. But obviously they would have to have enough money and enough interest to carry out an operation like this.

The Scale of Foreign Intelligence Operations

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you had to hazard a guess, how many people that live amongst us have been sent from a foreign nation and are spies? How many do you think it is?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, let’s define that. You know, if they’re hostile intelligence officers, it can be anywhere from 3% of the diplomatic staff to as many as, at one time, the Soviet Union – 85% of their staff were conducting espionage, I think numbers. So you have those.

Now, if you’re referring to, like, how many illegals, I would say at least you would have at least two dozen in the UK. Maybe a dozen in France. And you would have a whole host, a constellation of them in the United States. Simply because we span five time zones. I believe the UK only spans one.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think I asked this in part because I was reading something that said much of the illegal immigrants that had come across the southern border of the United States, many of them were Chinese. And there was an article about questioning whether that was potentially an intentional act to get illegal Chinese people into the United States for some future purpose.

JOE NAVARRO: You know, big claims require big evidence and I haven’t seen that in my experience. The Chinese intelligence service prefers to use students and scientists. We have approximately 80,000 Chinese students here at any one time.

I know that for instance, in the early 80s and early 90s they would be given allowances. It always impressed me that they were given small allowances for meals but large allowances for photocopying in the library. We call that a clue in the FBI. So they’d be given like $150 for eating, but they would be given thousands of dollars so that they could copy as much as they could from the libraries. It is much easier for them for any nation to send people here students and for instance, go into engineering or any of those things.

The Science of Body Language

STEVEN BARTLETT: On this subject of body language, it’s highly contested because some people say body language does give us clues. Some people say it doesn’t give us clues because there’s cultural differences. Is body language important?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, let me address what you just asked. Well, number one, body language is supremely important because we are born without the capacity to talk. And so we have to read the baby in front of us to argue that body language doesn’t matter or it’s subject to interpretation. I would argue that that would be a minuscule sentiment around the world amongst people who really have studied this. And I’ll say why.

So a baby is born without the capacity to speak, but the mother quickly learns through non verbals whether that child is colicky, whether or not that child needs just to be reassured, whether they’re cold or hot and so forth.

There’s a lot of junk out there. And that is probably the cleanest word that I can use about body language. That “this means that” or whatever. But we were exquisitely prepared to communicate at any time whether or not we’re comfortable or uncomfortable, whether we’re confident or not understanding. We had to evolve that precisely because we were always surrounded by predators.

For instance, Steven, when you have doubts or you want follow up to questions that I ask you, use your eyes exquisitely. You furrow your glabella. One eye rises, the other one lowers it. You’re an easy read. And so I follow it up with information. Now, you didn’t have to teach me that.

Now, what I would argue is, am I seeing constraint? Am I seeing contempt or disdain? Well, that’s a silly argument. We didn’t evolve to have perfect answers. Evolution is about approximation for success. In other words, if I can be accurate 75 to 80% of the time, that’s actually good enough. It’s good enough.

And so, you know, what I teach is, do you see comfort or discomfort? Psychological, physical, and so forth? Do I see, as in psychology, we say, is it positively valenced or negatively valenced? You see, you’re furrowing your glabella.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does a valence mean?

JOE NAVARRO: Valence really means is balanced, or how much electricity goes this way or this way. What’s the valence of it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if something’s positively valenced, what does that mean?

JOE NAVARRO: Positively valence? You’re going to see gravity defying behaviors. You’re going to see emphasis. You’re going to see a lot of humor and alacrity and broad gesture and so forth. If it’s negatively valence, it’s, you know, restraint. You’re going to see the furrowing of the glabella. You’re going to see the tightening, the diminution of the lips. You’re going to see a lot of facial touching. I don’t know. Right. All these pacifiers.

And so I would argue that stop looking for perfection. In fact, Dr. Ambati at Harvard, unfortunately she passed away. She found that we as humans are going to be accurate 75% of the time in our assessment of each other. That’s an extraordinary number. Her research is ample. You can look up her research. It was all done on the auspices of looking for what she called “thin slice assessments.” Thin slice assessments. All of your viewers should know, because it showed us that from as little as 3 milliseconds, we actually get a pretty good assessment of each other.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’re right, 75% of the time with 3 milliseconds.

JOE NAVARRO: Yes. So they did several experiments. They had people go in and watch a teacher, for instance, by just opening the door to the classroom, watching her for a few seconds and closing the door, they rated that teacher the same as people who had sat in that classroom all semester long in terms of are they a nice teacher, are they a warm teacher, are they an empathetic teacher, are they a competent teacher? And so forth.

It’s as you rub your face because there’s a lot of incredulity there. You have to appreciate this experiment was done over and over and over in many areas.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking, as you said it, I was thinking, fucking hell. Like I was thinking, if someone reads you that quickly, I was thinking about how easy it is to leave a bad first impression.

The Power of First Impressions

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah, well, you know, when I started studying body language, which was formally in 1971, had no appreciation for schoolwork, so I created my own study program. So when I started taking a look at body language in 1971, I remember people saying, you know, the first 20 minutes are the most important for making an impression. Then years later was 15 minutes. By the 1980s, somebody had said, well, it’s the first four minutes.

Timeout. That’s ancient information. We now know that that assessment is made in the first 3 milliseconds. That’s faster than your blink rate. And you can begin to do things poorly and badly and begin to negatively affect others in that amount of time because the subconscious is assessing others more quickly.

And by the way, I didn’t mention this. We are, even before we’re born, we are assessing the world around us to the point that for survival purposes, a baby in utero begins to assess the world around by the amount of noises and by the cadence and manner of speech of the mother. So that when that baby is born and you can look up the research, the baby will be born mirroring the native tongue so that as researchers found, a baby with a German mother will cry differently. The lilt of that baby will be different than a French baby.

What does that tell us? That we are already programmed to adapt to that which dominates so that we can fit better. And this goes right from that to business. Because synchrony is harmony. The faster we can synchronize, the faster we can harmonize. And so we are pre programmed. So if your viewers are interested in that, they can look at the research that’s been done on the lilt of crying babies.

The Art of Synchronization

STEVEN BARTLETT: How does one synchronize? So if synchrony equals harmony, i.e. if we synchronize with each other, then we’re going to be harmonious in business or in life or whatever, right? How do I synchronize with somebody when I meet them?

JOE NAVARRO: The first thing is at a distance. If I saw you walking down the hallway and you say, “Hey, Joe,” you know, and I’d say, “Steve, how are you?” Right. I’m mirroring you. You know, this goes back to the work of Carl Rogers in the early 1960s. And he found that synchrony puts us in, sort of locks us in, into this binding, psychological binding of where you greet with your hand and arch your eyebrows. Hey, well, that sends powerful messages.

So if I do it, can you imagine if you greeted me like this and I went, “Yeah, how you doing?” Yeah, it’s like we’re totally out of harmony. We’re totally out of synchrony. So we begin with the non verbals. We begin, for instance, with the clothing. You know, if you go to a meeting, you know, we would probably dress the same way or approximate each other.

We would probably have this look at us right now with our hand gestures. We’re literally mirroring each other’s hand gestures to the point where our thumbs are precisely the same way. Why? Because we’re comfortable with each other. We would lean in. If we are in good synchrony, our speech pattern would synchronize. And to the point where you can actually work with individuals to calm them down or to see things your way or to appreciate, let’s say, in negotiations to begin to be more receptive. People are more receptive if they can mirror your behaviors.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So people are more receptive if they can mirror your behavior. So if I let you mirror my behavior, then you’re going to be more receptive to what I have to say. Is that what you’re saying?

JOE NAVARRO: In general, we cannot be mimicking each other like it’s a game. It becomes ridiculous. But there’s no way we can negotiate if you’re screaming and I’m stoic. Yeah, it just doesn’t happen. For instance, you and I probably are doing a pretty good job of just mirroring each other in the conversation. We are likely more likely to be successful, have more face time, and achieve more if we can talk to each other this way than if all of a sudden I decide to sit sideways, kick my feet up and lean in my elbow.

That gesture alone, even though it’s a comfort display, doesn’t put us in synchrony. And everything that I have ever found was even when I was talking to terrorists, even when talking to terrorists who absolutely hated me, hated a lot of other things. If I could just get them grounded to the point where we are talking basically the same way and using the same words. If they say “my family,” don’t say “wife and kids” use “family.” Don’t use terms of art, you know, if they say, “Well, what’s the price?” Don’t come back and say, “Well, the points on this.” That’s not what they asked. That’s a great way to demonstrate that you’re not listening.

And the other thing I always emphasize is that for years people said, “Well, try to reduce everything that’s emotional.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: So.

The Role of Emotions in Business

JOE NAVARRO: That it doesn’t interfere. That’s not how we evolved. That is absolutely not how we evolved. We evolved to deal with emotions because emotions keep us alive. When our amygdala senses a threat, it is there to deal with that. And anything negative rises to prominence. That’s one of the first things I teach. If it’s really negative, it rises to prominence. We assess for it first. We deal with that first.

And often in business, what we see is somebody had a hard time finding your location, they had a hard time parking. Then they had to go to your receptionist who was on the phone and took about seven minutes to even say good morning. And when they did, they did it with no alacrity. Then they have to go through security, then they have to take the elevator that’s crowded and then finally get to your office, and you want them to jump right into the meeting without all that negativity that has been accrued.

That’s not how humans evolved. That is absolutely not how our species evolved. Our species evolved to deconflict that, to diminish that by first dealing with that. That’s where storytelling in part came from. Where we came and said, you know, “I chased it, I was able to attack me, then I attacked back,” you know, and then we go through that whole storytelling which has mythical proportions and mythical aspects as archetypes.

And if you subscribe to Jungian psychology, one of the arguments that I always use is this. How many of you have been in an argument and then 30 minutes later you remember all the clever lines you should have said, we all have. And that’s because the emotional brain hijacks neural activity. If you want the best out of people, if you want the best out of a relationship, vent that. Get that out. Give it time, okay? And yes, you’re going to have to invest that time and then move forward so that you can deal with the transactional, the business and so forth.

Reading Facial Expressions

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve referenced a few times different types of body language that I’ve exhibited that help you understand what I’m thinking and going through. I think a second ago you referenced glabular. And this brings me to something I read in your work about eyebrow knitting.

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is eyebrow knitting?

JOE NAVARRO: So this little area between your eyes is called the glabella. And the glabella is great. Because at about, I’ve seen it in babies as early as three or four days, but very early on we begin to furrow. In other words, we push this together when we have doubts or we don’t like something, or we don’t understand something. So we furrow the glabella.

Some people call it eyebrow knitting because we have nicer eyebrows nowadays, not bushy like the old days. They don’t come together like they used to. So we, a lot of those expressions of “I don’t understand” we use with the squinted eyes, the furrowed glabella. You know, sometimes we’ll touch our face or scratch our face.

Babies at 47 seconds, which I have directly observed. If you shine a light at a newborn baby, it will furrow the chin that they don’t like it. And in my presentations I have a matching one of a 47 year old man and a 47 second old baby, both doing the same thing when they hear things they don’t like. So we begin to communicate quite a lot actually with our faces.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about eyelid touching?

The Science Behind Facial Touching

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah. So for a long time, including in some of my writing, the theory was a lot of people cover their eyes, touch their eyes when they hear bad news. You said, “Hey Joe, can you help me move this weekend?” “Oh, gee, Steve.” Right. You see a lot of that. And I started to think about that about five or six years ago. And so I took some classes in anatomy, human anatomy.

And I’m pretty much convinced now that a lot of the facial touching, including the touching of the eyes and so forth, has to do with the innervation of the fifth cranial nerve and the seventh cranial nerve. Now some of your viewers may find this interesting. That nerve, which goes to our forehead and actually goes into our eyelids and so forth, and the seventh, which is the facial, is very short in distance to that part of the brain where it is received.

And so I think, you know, I postulated, I wrote for Psychology Today that a lot of the reasons why we touch our face and why we touch our eyes. “Oh, no.” Is because that pressure immediately goes to the brain and helps to relieve stress. And because the nerve is so short. Right. We could massage our feet and achieve the same, but it’s very far away. So I think a lot of facial touching, including eye touching, we do because of its ability to. Anytime there’s stress, we pacify ourselves.

And by the way, it’s very interesting, in 1974 I was bored at the university, so there was a lab where you could actually watch children and study them. And they had some children there that were born blind, so they had never seen. And I was just blown away the first time I saw a blind child who had never seen, heard some news that was not very good and immediately covered their eyes, having never seen.

And that’s when I realized, okay, we are 2.4 million years old. This is hardwired in our DNA. This is part of our Paleo circuits, as Dr. David Gibbons later taught me. And it has to do with how it feels. And that’s why we touch our faces so much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s typically a negative emotion and a form of self soothing for that negative emotion.

JOE NAVARRO: I think that’s a good synopsis. But also keep in mind how often we touch our faces when we’re having a nice time. Like when I’m reading, I find myself turning pages because I read very fast. I turn with my left hand, but I pacify or soothe myself by touching my toes. Pensive pose. Women will play with their hair all day long. Our brain is asking us to do things to contribute to that.

But when there’s something stressful, then, for instance, we go from like in negotiations, when somebody throws a number we don’t like, we’ll go from touching our face to scratching our face because the brain is saying, “Hey, do something more powerful that will keep me in what we call homeostasis.” So to answer your question, yes. But it also applies to when we’re really enjoying a moment.

The Emotional Seismograph of the Body

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about our lips? You talked a second ago about like pursed lips and stuff. What kind of clues do the lips give away?

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah, so for me, the lips are the seismograph. The lips are like the emotional seismograph of the body. When we are comfortable and confident, our lips are full of blood. Their color changes. The minute we hear something we don’t like, blood actually begins to leave the lips and they become narrower and then we begin to tighten them.

You know, if somebody says something I don’t like, I might go, right? Or we begin to bite the lips because we’re stressed, or we pluck it, pull on it, do all sorts of things to soothe it. But the lips get very. Show a lot of nervous emotion when we’re under stress. So they’re very much as this is the jaw. Like for instance, if you said something I might not agree with, I probably shift my jaw. Because when you shift your jaw, it puts pressure on the tmj. And that alone says to the brain, “Go somewhere else, don’t, don’t, you know, don’t struggle too much with that.” So we’re always doing something physical to counter anything that the brain might be undergoing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Tell me about the super sternal notch.

The Suprasternal Notch: The Body’s Most Vulnerable Point

JOE NAVARRO: So the suprasternal notch. It has other names. You could call it the little neck dimple. This little area right at the bottom of your throat, it’s a deep indentation. This is the most vulnerable part of the human body. All air, food, nutrients, blood, electricity, oxygen, everything goes through there.

And what happens is, and one of the things that I found was that there was nothing in the literature in 1970, 75, 76. I’m looking and I’m noticing that when people are nervous, they immediately cover their neck. They touch their neck. You know, in the literature, you hear about, “oh, she clutched her pearls,” right? Rubbing that. Men tend to do it more robustly because of testosterone. Women tend to more directly touch the suprasternal notch.

And what I found is when there’s lack of confidence, insecurities, fear apprehensions, or concerns that people will go, “oh, my God, did you see that?” Right? “Oh, it’s gone. It’s back.” And why is it all directed at this little area of the neck? And why do men clutch their necks and massage their necks when they’re…

The worst thing you can do in negotiations, by the way, is touch your neck because what you’re transmitting is weakness. Somebody whose confidence never touches the neck, you just don’t. You don’t go anywhere near the neck, and you don’t ventilate. Because what you’re saying is, you’re getting to me. Ventilating behaviors.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wait, sorry, when you say ventilate, you mean giving yourself air?

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it could be so.

Evolutionary Survival Behaviors

JOE NAVARRO: Ventilating behaviors are behaviors of weakness because your body temperature has changed at 1/250th of a second, and what you’re revealing is something negative is getting to you, so you don’t do that.

But here’s the behavior. The neck touching, neck covering, covering of the suprasternal notch. And there’s another behavior. You know, earlier we talked about we were surrounded by predators, and one of the behaviors we did was to cover our mouths or hold still when we hear a noise. The third behavior is to cover the neck. To cover the neck because large felines always go for the neck.

And so the brain doesn’t have a closet full of ties. It has about four choices. And those four behaviors are exquisite. It’s proven over time that if we cover our mouth, cover the neck, don’t move, they work pretty well. So we don’t have to choose a lot of colors.

And the other thing, sometimes you’ll see people do, is when you see this here in Florida, and we certainly saw it in November after the hurricane, people come to see their house and they cover their head. Hands are up here. “Oh, my God,” why do we do that again? Large felines. These are shortcuts. This is heuristics that have prevailed and say, “oh, no.” Right.

And you say, “well, we’re no longer surrounded by them.” Well, go to India. There were 238 attacks last year. It is in our DNA. It is performed out of necessity to keep us alive. So we have these reactions. But so I look at the, certainly I look at the lips and the neck as good places for information.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was just thinking then about why you hold your head. But you also hold your head when you see something that’s fallen over. So if you see, like a building falling down in an earthquake, you immediately…

JOE NAVARRO: The other day, it was an old car, and it was parked at an angle on a road that was at an angle, and they forgot to set the brake. And I’m watching it slowly slide. And I found myself, I teach this stuff, with my hands up here. And unfortunately, it was across the street, and I couldn’t get to it fast enough, and it didn’t do any damage. But you realize the shortcuts are with us for a purpose.

Negotiation as Effective Communication

STEVEN BARTLETT: Much of the work you do as an FBI agent is some form of negotiation. And you spend a lot of time teaching people how to be good negotiators as well. You mentioned negotiation a second ago. I’m a business person. I do lots of negotiations, whether it’s with clients or suppliers or interviews. You know, I’m interviewing people all the time, which I consider to be a negotiation. How do I improve my negotiation skills? What are the things I should be thinking about as I go into the negotiation?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, you know, they warned me. You ask profound questions. And you’re right. In the FBI, I mean, when you’re trying to convince someone to tell us the truth and put themselves in jeopardy, that is nothing but negotiations. You may look at it as interviewing, but like you said, even a conversation, you know, I look at negotiations in the same way that I look at interviewing.

In the simplest form, it’s effective communication with a purpose. So you say, “well, that’s highly simplistic. I’ve never heard that.” Well, think of it. Well, what is the purpose? Okay, well, we’ll get to that in a minute. Either you have something I need or want or that. But there has to be communication, and there has to be an understanding of what I mean and what I intend and so forth.

So for me, it’s a reminder. When I first came into the FBI, an old timer said to me, “interviewing isn’t about the confession.” And I looked at him like, what? Excuse me, what do you mean, not about the confession? He says, “you’ll get the confession. Interviewing is about face time. If you can get people to talk to you for two hours, three hours, four hours. In one case, I interviewed an individual for 12 hours. They’ll tell you everything you need to know, but you got to keep them in the room.”

And so I always view negotiations of, number one is how do I communicate with you in a way that you’ll want to talk to me for however long it takes to get to that purpose, which is the transaction now. You know, if I’m evaluating you for your services, or if I’m negotiating for prices, you know, I want to hear what you have to say, and I want to lay out what I’m interested in achieving. And then reconciling or working around whatever discrepancies or issues there may be.

I think when we look at negotiations that way, we can say, “well, that means I got to do a lot of stuff up front,” which is, who am I communicating with? Who am I going to negotiate with? What’s the negotiating style? Are they stoic? Do they come in? Are they, do they throw things down? I mean, I’ve been in negotiations where opposing counsel came in and literally walked into the room, didn’t even say, “good morning.” Just threw the things down and said, “I want to hear the numbers.” Okay, then how do we begin to deal with that? Because someone that comes in and is aggressive and so forth, you’ve got to deal with.

Controlling Time in Negotiations

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you do? Do you rise to their aggression, or do you try and bring them down to your position?

JOE NAVARRO: Great question. The worst thing you can do is rise to that. You begin to dominate them by taking control of time. Whoever controls time controls. And so they come in, they throw the things down. So usually, you know, we’ll start with, “well, good morning to you too.” “Yeah, yeah, let’s cut to the chase.” And then the whole team I’m working with knows we’re going to slow things down. We are not going to be working at that pace. Because if you work at that pace, they’re taking control.

And so we slow things down. And there’s several strategies. You can become, all of a sudden, you can become very visual and say, “all right, we’re going to write this down. And we’re going to put this here. We’re going to put…” you know, and then this is the difference of, you know, there’s a lot of strategies, but the first thing is we’ve got to get that person to understand that we negotiate, hopefully as equals. But if the perception is always that that person is negotiating as the bully or is always in charge, you’re never going to have equity.

Now, I’ve had a lot of clients that have said, “hey, you know, I’ve tried all your strategies. And, you know, this guy I’m dealing with is, he’s crass. He’s just a bully. He comes in and he…” And so one of the questions I always ask is, is he the only source? Is he or she the only source, number one? And number two is, how long are you willing to tolerate this person? Because we failed to look at that. He gives you headaches, you don’t sleep well. Every time you go to this, I’m thinking of one client in particular. You come away with a nervous stomach, and, you know, how long are you willing to tolerate that?

If you’re willing to tolerate it, then, you know he’s not going to change his style. Then you come in, and we change our exposure. So we’re not going to expose all of our staff to that kind of negativity. We send in our first person and say, “look, here are the numbers.” And we work with that. But there are ways to dealing with the very toxic. But we don’t allow them to get away with everything or think that they’re in charge. And we do it in subtle ways, and we sort of derail their agenda. Maybe their agenda, based on past meetings, was to come in and just throw these things at us very quickly. Then we have to adjust to that. So there has to be rehearsed strategies for dealing with that.

The Power of Preparation and Body Language

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things your work made me think about is how important it is to literally, like, write down the goal of my negotiation before I go into the negotiation, or else you might get swept up in the emotion of it and the sort of heat of the moment.

JOE NAVARRO: You wouldn’t be the first one to find yourself in a meeting negotiating, and all of a sudden you’re, you know, it’s like, “what are we actually negotiating for?” And so that’s why I like the simplicity of effective communication with a purpose as a form of negotiations, but to also understand what is my role? What is my role, and what is my purpose in being there because many times we go into negotiations and the chief financial officer is there. Sometimes we go in there and your first assistant is always there also. But you also have in office counsel that is in attendance. What’s their role and what is my role?

You know, something so simple as what are you going to do? Look straight ahead the whole time your attorney is speaking or are you going to look at him? Well, we know from the research that by looking at the person who’s actually talking on your side actually potentiates the gravity of what he’s saying. That at the most emphatic points, when that attorney makes, and you did this earlier, you want to steeple, because steeple is the most powerful gesture that we have to convey confidence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Steepling is in this sort of handshake is this.

JOE NAVARRO: Former German chancellor Angela Merkel did this a lot. You see Musk do this a lot. You see Steve Jobs used to, a lot of pictures of Steve Jobs doing that. But, you know, you reserve that for that point in time when you want to emphasize. And so the worst thing you can do is just to sit there dormant.

The Still Face Experiment

And in fact, we have research and it’s called the still face experiments. And that is that the worst thing you can do is sit at a meeting and hold a still face. You’re perceived as a threat, you’re perceived as less trustworthy, you’re perceived as insignificant. Corner of your mouths are down. Eye roll to the right, Steven. That’s how you’re perceived and that’s what happens.

The experiments which were done first with babies, found that if you take a baby, and it’s called the still face experiments, if you take a baby and you look away and look back and smile, the baby’s content, you can do that several times. But on the last one, you turn around and you hold very still, the babies become uncontrollable. They have fits. They’re really troubled by that.

So the experimenters said, “well, yeah, but at what age does that leave us?” So they decided to do it with adults. Adults do the same thing. If you and I are talking and we’re exchanging faces, the worst thing I can do is then sit there. You see, you find it disconcerting and what the brain perceives is a threat and you lose trustworthiness because you can’t…

STEVEN BARTLETT: Read what this person’s thinking. Either way, I’d rather you be unhappy. Then at least I can put that in a box.

The Psychology of Control in High-Stakes Interviews

JOE NAVARRO: Well, that’s one way to look at it. I’m not sure that anybody knows the precise reason for it. But what we do understand is that the still face, which, if you’re in a virtual call, you want to nod, you want to tilt your head, you want to make different gestures, but the worst thing you can do is hold still.

And then in negotiations, when you’re talking to the team and saying, “Look, when we’re going in there, I don’t want anybody to just sit there. I want expressions.” And when someone is speaking, you’re looking at them in the same way that the other side would do. But you have to plan.

Now, the other thing I find with negotiators, one thing I did in the FBI is I always planned my interviews in exquisite detail. Who would enter the room first, who would say what, where I would sit, who gets offered water and when, because I need to be in control, who’s going to say what. These are things people don’t think about.

But at the levels with the people that I deal with, you have to have a certain amount of advantage. You have to have a certain amount of psychological leverage to say, “Look, you may be the world’s largest manufacturer of this, and I’m just starting out, but I am not down here. And so I would appreciate if you would begin to value me.”

And I do that by doing certain things in the manner that I walk in. Who walks in first? Where do I sit? What gestures do I use to point? Right, so you never use your finger. You always use the full hand in the vertical position. You take command of the situation, and it looks aesthetically pleasing.

“Oh, isn’t it nice? He’s offering me something to drink.” Or the assistant or someone says, “Would you like some tea? How would you like it?” And so forth. And what we’re actually witnessing is the transformation of. You have now become the dominant person by becoming the archetypal, the father or mother figure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you’re offering something, because you’re offering.

JOE NAVARRO: It, and you’re in control of the food and the brain. People often wonder, well, why was it in Stockholm, Sweden, back in the 70s that the Stockholm syndrome took hold so fast with those bank robbers, where they had such an effect on their victims that within hours, the victims were defending the bank robbers. It was very simple. They became the father figure, and the hostages became the children.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I actually don’t know that story.

The Stockholm Syndrome Phenomenon

JOE NAVARRO: What happened was there’s a bank robbery in Stockholm, and the bank robbers went in, held the victims hostage. Eventually they were rescued. But what they found was that in a matter of hours, the victims were rising to the defense of the criminals. And it became known as the Stockholm syndrome. And what it showed us was the robbers became the archetype of the parent, and the hostages became the children, and in an instant, they became subservient.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that what happens in domestic abuse cases as well?

JOE NAVARRO: You nailed it. You nailed it beautifully. You’re the first person to get that right away. And that’s why you often see this in domestic abuse cases. And you say, “How can she just got beat up? How can she defend him?” Usually the case. And you realize, oh, my God, we have like a Stockholm syndrome where he’s the provider, he’s the only one working or this or that.

But getting back to negotiations, I think it’s one of those things that I insist that if you go into negotiations, that you be treated at least as an equal. And that the minute people start to look down on you, it makes for a very difficult conversation.

Strategic Room Entry and Positioning

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when you’re thinking about walking into the room and all these where you sit, if you’re walking into the room to interview a terrorist, right, Are you trying to walk into the room first, or are you trying to walk into the room last? Do you send your team in to walk in first, Then you show up last. And what are you thinking about? Seating positions?

JOE NAVARRO: Right. So one of the things that I always insisted is I would walk into the room first.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they would already be in there?

JOE NAVARRO: No, no, no. We would walk to the room.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, with them, with them.

JOE NAVARRO: And then I would just make them wait there a minute. I’d open it, I’d take a look, and I’d say, “Just want to make sure the room is safe. And there’s nobody in here.” I’ve walked into people before that begins to establish my dominance.

And then I would say, “Why don’t you take a seat right there?” People ask me, “Well, why are you being so nice to these criminals?” Well, first of all, I go back to what that old timer said. I want FaceTime. I don’t care what it takes to get FaceTime, but I also want to be in charge. And if by being nice to him and pointing to the nice chair there achieves that, than so much for me.

And then I always try to sit in a way that I sit higher. Now, in the case of Ramsey, we’d literally get the room ahead of time, and we would change the furniture so that I always set about an inch to 2 inches higher than he did. He never noticed that Ramsey was the.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Guy whose cigarette was quivering.

The Ramsey Interviews: 37 Sessions of Psychological Control

JOE NAVARRO: In the end, we ended up doing 37 interviews. They were all done in hotel rooms, mostly in the Orlando area. And we would go in ahead of time, and we would just arrange the furniture or bring in furniture. But I always sat higher than him. He never understood that. He always sat on the couch, which somehow about that much was shaved from the couch so that it always sat a little lower. And so he was always literally slightly looking up to us.

And then we controlled when we would take breaks. And I would say, “Would you like something to drink now?” I said, “Well, this is such a good subject. Why don’t we take the break now? And you have the drink now, and then we’ll. So we can continue.”

What he didn’t realize was that I was establishing control over him by sort of dictating. It would be, no. I’m sure your listeners might be saying, “Boy, that’s manipulative.” Yeah. But in the transactional phase, it’s no different than you saying to your crew, “I need to take a break right now and go to the restroom.” “Okay, take a break.” I don’t think that much of it, but okay.

Over time, what happens is he begins to relinquish a lot of that forcefulness that he’d love to exhibit. He’d love to be in charge, but I’m not permitting it. And sometimes he would say, “Well, I could use a smoke break right now.” And I’d say, “Hang on a second, because what you just said was really interesting.”

And my partner, Mrs. Terry Moody, I loved her. She was a great partner. She looked at me like, “Really? You’re going to push it that much further?” But it worked to the point where, I mean, here’s a guy who had his attorney’s phone number on him at all times, and he never used that.

The Height Advantage: Physical Psychology in Business

STEVEN BARTLETT: You mentioned the height of the chairs. What does height matter in this context? Because I was thinking as well, about zoom. And the interesting thing about now about zoom, and we’re talking about this before we start recording, and the fact that most of our conversations are happening digitally now is we don’t often think about height. And I’m sometimes on a call with one of my colleagues or partners, and I’ll often ask them before the client or whoever we’re doing business with joins the call to adjust the height, because they are, like. They’re, like, looking down into the lens, or they’re looking up into the lens, which I think is also suboptimal.

JOE NAVARRO: Good term. Suboptimum. There’s a lot to be said about height, just as there is a beauty dividend, right? So the beauty dividend, and you can look this up, the beauty dividend, well researched, basically says you’re going to earn 8% per year the rest of your life, just if you are good looking. That’s the beauty dividend. You can go online and look at all the studies and the statistics that go with it.

There’s also a height dividend and it is universal. If you look at Americans that are 6ft 2 inches, so a little taller than me accounts for about 3% of the population, unless you go to the Fortune 500 companies and then they account for 39% of all CEOs at 6, 2. Whoa. That, my friend, is an order of increase. And you say are taller people smarter? No, no. It has to do with the benefit of being tall. There is a dividend. And so we tend to see that across the world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The word dividend, for anyone that doesn’t know, basically means like a benefit or a reward.

JOE NAVARRO: One could think of it as an advantage. You have an advantage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So with Ramsey, what was the dividend by you making your chair just an inch taller? What were you doing to him? You were taking away his power a little bit, making you more powerful.

Dealing with Superior Intellect and National Security

JOE NAVARRO: I had to, because he had all the cards. He was the spy. He had all the evidence in his head or in his possession or the Russians had it. The Russians weren’t going to give it to us. They’re the enemy. They said, “Too bad, mates, we’ve got all your secrets.” They had so many secrets that they measured it in weight, not just in pages.

The other problem I was dealing with was, is his IQ. He had the second highest IQ that the army ever recorded since World War II. He could talk on any subject, quantum physics, to whatever, when you have a superior intellect. In his case, which was true, or you’re dealing with someone, let’s say, who is malignant narcissist. So they account for about 2% of the population, but about 20% of CEOs.

So your malignant narcissist who overvalues themselves and tends to devalue others. And in my case with him, he had narcissistic traits which I could deal with, but his superior intellect was breathtaking and he had perfect recall. So in a way it was frightening because all he had to do was transport himself to another country and he could sell all the secrets that he had memorized.

So I had to play a certain role. But I also couldn’t let him take charge of the investigation, and not one that had put England, Germany, all of Western Europe in jeopardy, as well as Canada and the United States. I could not afford the United States government, couldn’t afford to have him be flippant with the knowledge that. That he knew, especially once we knew, that he had compromised the nuclear go codes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about posture? Because that’s kind of one way to make yourself taller. Are there any clues in someone’s posture? And how important is sort of playing with our posture to create a different impression?

Building Confidence Through Posture and Territory

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah, absolutely. Not just posture, but territory. So I look at posture. When we look confident, the shoulders back our breathing. To me, posture starts with the brain, how calm we are in our breathing.

I was again in Valencia at this event, and a lady came up to me and she says, “You’re getting ready to go on the stage. How can you not be nervous?” And I said, “Well, I am nervous. I’m just hiding it. I’m acting like I’m in control.” But I’ve learned to do that because you don’t want to look like a nervous FBI agent. Trust me. You want to look cool, calm, and collected.

In negotiations, you don’t want to look needy. You don’t want to look desperate. And at the same time, you don’t want to come across as you’re indifferent. And sometimes that demeanor, that posture, those gestures, the totality of it has a lot of meaning.

Now you have to keep in mind, a lot of successful businessmen I’m running into are actually on the spectrum. Right. So the autism spectrum. And so they don’t make as much eye contact. They may have behaviors that are irregular. I have one I deal with who has Asperger’s and so he sometimes jerks. And so there’s a lot of discomfort I find from others in reading him. I don’t have any problem. I just see it, okay, this is his normal behaviors and we get on.

But you can tell a lot about a person when you’ve invested in things. You’re doing your diligence and you’re talking to people. Yeah, you can look at the numbers all day long, but you also are looking at the non verbals and saying, you know, are they communicating confidence or are they communicating desire or need or any kind of frailty?

Reading Body Language in High-Stakes Interviews

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was just reflecting on a few of the interviews I’ve had recently. We’ve been interviewing for one particular very, very senior role and there were two final stage candidates. And I was just reflecting as you were saying how one of the final stage candidates was extremely calm and sat back in their chair and the other one was very much leaning forward.

And upon reflection, the second candidate wanted the job a lot more. But the first candidate was probably more experienced, more confident and had higher self worth. And their ability to be so relaxed in that environment and kind of own the chair in my boardroom was actually, it actually made me kind of want them more because they were signaling to me that they had lots of options. They weren’t intimidated, they weren’t scared, they weren’t nervous about this opportunity.

JOE NAVARRO: You know, that’s an interesting observation, Steven. And it’s very good that you observe the discrepancy. One of the things that I look for is what is their role going to be. I don’t mind that somebody is nervous. I myself early on, coming from a humble background, was often nervous.

I tend to focus on the things that most organizations don’t put into their plan to look for. One of them is problem solving. Give me a list of the problems you have solved. Most people when they hire, they never ask that question. They tell, you know, “I can do Excel, I know Microsoft,” that’s great. Please tell me what problems you have solved at your last job and you know, how efficiently did you do it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you know if they solved the problem or they were on a team where someone else solved the problem?

The Emotional Signature of Problem Solvers

JOE NAVARRO: Because one of the things that I look for is how many instances they tell and how they describe it. Because here’s what’s interesting. The person who solves the problem goes into the detail and feels the emotion of the person that’s telling the story, only conveys it, but doesn’t know the emotion that is attached to solving it.

So when you, when that little child finally figures out how to, you know, you give them a trick lock where wood things have to go this way or this way. And then the little thing opens when they come back and tell you that you see the gravity defying behavior, the arching of the eyebrows, the bright eyes, and saying, “I solved it, I solved it. I got in there.” Yeah, right. The person that’s just telling you this story doesn’t know the emotion that goes with it.

The other thing that I look for is, and they may be nervous or whatever is how good are they at observing? This is the one question that has actually saved a lot of companies. When I say, make sure that from now on, you ask, “How good are you observing?” And they’ll say, “Well, observing what?” Everything that matters. People, events, opportunities. Right.

If you come to me and say, “Well, I can code this,” okay, that’s great. But in the position that you’re going to be in, you’re going to be managing people. How good are you at observing people? The great thing about companies that seek this is, all right, so when you go and you business, you go see your subsidiary. What are you looking for? What are you observing? “Well, I want to look at the books.” How about the attitude of the people? Are people content? Are they happy? Or do they all look like they’re constipated?

I mean, I’ve been into companies that the minute I walk in, I go, “Oh, geez, you got management problems here.” And the guy goes, “Did somebody tell you?” I said, “Well, you know, I’d have to be clinically stupid not to recognize that all these people are walking around with their heads hung low, that they make no eye contact, nobody. They pass each other in the subway and they don’t talk to each other. You got management issues here.” And you know, and it’s like they hired for this skill, but is that really what you need when you actually need somebody that is a great observer?

Building Confidence From the Ground Up

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about confidence? Is this something that you’re born with, or do you think confidence can be trained into somebody?

JOE NAVARRO: I think confidence can absolutely be trained. Coming from Cuba, where we lost everything, arriving as a refugee, having nothing. And then all of a sudden the FBI asked me to become an. I didn’t apply to the FBI. The FBI actually came to me and asked me to apply. And then all of a sudden I said, “Are you guys serious? It’s like, I’m 23 years old, you know, I’m barely learning how to shave.” And with no confidence whatsoever. And they teach you to be confident. You can teach confidence.

And what I tell people is the easiest way to learn confidence is to be confident about one thing. I don’t care if it’s you stack papers better than anybody else. I don’t care if it’s the way you make your bed. Any small thing. Show me that you’re confident. Show me that that’s better than anybody else’s. And the minute you can be confident about one thing, now you can be confident about two things, and then you can be confident about three things.

This nonsense that I often see people say, “Well, just come in and be confident.” I think that’s nonsense. I think you have to learn and your physiology has to learn to be confident about one thing. You know, with me, I was confident in playing football. Okay? I was fast, I could do certain things. I was confident about that. I knew that in basketball I could shoot a three pointer. Okay, confident about that, but not confident about a host of other things.

To be in a room full of executives, I remember when I had no confidence. So how do I work on that? You cannot, unless you’re a world class actor. You cannot walk into a place and all of a sudden pretend you’re confident. I tell people, learn to be confident about one thing. And sometimes it’s knowledge. I always, there is no meeting, I go into that. I am not well read on that subject. If you want to achieve confidence, know everything that you can about a particular subject. And that gives you so much great confidence.

And I’ve seen young people come right out of college and they’re sitting there, you know, their elbows are in, they’re almost mousy looking, they’re nervous, they’re looking about constantly. They don’t know where to look. And I tell them, know your subject, know your subject. Because the minute they begin to talk about that, they begin to flower and change.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So, so competence in a particular area or vertical creates confidence, which then kind of permeates.

JOE NAVARRO: Yes. And that’s what the military, in the, you know, the military, you know, like the British military, that’s what they take young people, 17, 18, 19 years old. And they say, you know, “We’re going to change you into a warrior.” Well, how’s that? By running, by getting you to climb up that rope by doing any number of things where you can come away and feel that confidence.

The Power of Voice and Command Presence

STEVEN BARTLETT: You talked in a video that I watched for Wired about a variety of different ways we can exhibit and be more confidence and show confidence. One of them is really looking at the leaders in your life who are confident and trying to sort of replicate some of those confident behaviors.

JOE NAVARRO: Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The other one was about your voice. Use a deeper voice and do not rise at the end of the sentence as if it’s a question.

JOE NAVARRO: Right. So let me talk about those. Don’t try to reinvent what’s successful. A confident person doesn’t have to talk fast and doesn’t talk high. Right. I remember the first arrest I made, and I said, “Stop. This is the FBI.” My voice was, nobody was going to stop. Nobody. Nobody. And the guys that were with me said, “Joe, you got to work on your voice. You have to have a command voice.” Well, a command voice is down.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like.

JOE NAVARRO: Like, “Stop right there.” I’ll give you an example. You talk to most executives and you say, “No, that’s not acceptable.” It’s too high. “No” is always said down. “No.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are we.

JOE NAVARRO: Are we going to. “No.” That sounds like a complete sentence.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you get. You get them to practice saying no?

JOE NAVARRO: Absolutely. I did it at, you know, for 10 years, every February, the guy that Brian Hall, who encouraged me to write one of my books called “Louder Than Words,” invited me to go to Harvard. And I’ll never forget, I had a complete Harvard class. I think there was 76 students, and I had them all saying the word “no, no, no.” Going lower and lower. He had stepped out of the room to take a call. When he came back, he thought I had a cult going. I said, “No, Brian. I just. I’m teaching them the right way.”

Because these are going to be future executives that you don’t say, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” Now that sounds like a complete sentence. “No, no.” That’s not how it’s going to work. And it’s always lower. So we work on the words. More importantly, we work on the gestures, how much territory you occupy. Because the territory that you occupy, if.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re here sort of like shriveled and tight.

JOE NAVARRO: You’re shriveled. You want to. You don’t want to be excessive. You don’t want to look like a clown, but you want to have the space that you’re entitled to. And then I think it’s very important to learn to speak in cadence. When you speak in cadence, and I do, it is. People listen. They have time to process what you’re saying, but they can also attach the emotion that goes with it.

Who spoke in cadence? Churchill, Martin Luther King. “I have a dream that one day, one day.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: “This nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creeds.”

The Art of Speaking in Cadence

JOE NAVARRO: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,” powerful. Imagine if he stood up there, say, “I have one dream that one day might.” It’s like, who would listen to that? But he was a preacher, and he knew how to command an audience.

And when Churchill said, “We will fight them in the air, we will fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.” The cadence is not just seductive, it is powerful.

And a lot of executives don’t know how to use it. They just. I’ve been to presentations where people just let go. They’re not even listening to what’s being said. And yet somebody begins to talk to them in cadence and says, “This is our offer. It is not final, but for the moment, it is our best offer.” Now you’re paying attention. You’re paying attention not just to what I said, but the emotion behind it. That’s a lot better to say, “Well, this is not our last offer. But, you know, we.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a real authority when you slow things down just that little bit and.

JOE NAVARRO: Provide the gaps, which goes back to what I said. Who controls time, controls. You’re establishing control over the theater of the negotiations. They don’t teach that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your hand gestures as well. You’ve got very complimentary hand gestures to what you’re saying. Even as you’re speaking to me, you just went, “Who controls time controls?” And so it’s. I’m wondering how.

Hand Gestures and Emotional Expression

JOE NAVARRO: And my fingers are spread out, establishing how much we care about something. When we fear, our fingers come together. When we fear a lot, our thumbs tuck in. I’ve seen people in negotiations give up a lot of information because all of a sudden they tuck their thumbs in. I say, “Okay, they’re scared” because dogs tuck their ears in. Humans tuck their hands.

No matter how dark you are, your hands, the palm of the hands, are very visible. That evolved with us because they’re exposed, expressive. So even in low light, we can use our hands to communicate. The more confident we are, the further our fingers are. I care. Imagine if I said, “I care about you” versus “I care about you.” It’s a big difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So in the first example, you kind of had your fingers together, and the second you spread them out.

JOE NAVARRO: “I care about this.” And so they potentiate the message. And the human brain evolved also to look for the hands, because the hands, number one, can be used as a weapon. But number two, they are also emblematic of the emotions that we feel.

The Power of Eye Contact

STEVEN BARTLETT: And eye contact. Lots been said about eye contact and the importance of it. What should I understand about eye contact? Confidence.

JOE NAVARRO: Eye contact in some ways is – I mean, we could spend about 40 minutes on it because – and as a teacher, I can tell you, because you want to have good eye contact. For instance, if you’re dealing with a woman, you don’t want it to go – you know, normal eye contact is here. You don’t want it going down to here, to the breast.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So stay looking at the face.

JOE NAVARRO: Right. So you want to keep it in the face, but you also don’t want to intimidate unless you want to intimidate. So you have to employ things like eye gaze behavior. You have to employ things such as looking away.

Now, you and I both look away as we’re thinking about examples and different things. You can use eye contact for emphasizing look. How often we use eye contact or our eyes to communicate opinions, maybe with your partner, you said, “What do you think?” And immediately they’ll look. He or she may look at your partner, not yours specifically, but somebody you live with. And they go. So with our eyes. With our eyes, we often give our opinions. So in negotiations, it’s an important area.

Analyzing First Impressions and Rapport Building

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things I think a lot about is about rapport building very, very quickly. You know, someone that does this podcast a lot, I sometimes overthink it a little bit, especially when I’m meeting people like you, because I’m like, “Oh, my God, this guy’s going to be reading everything about me.”

JOE NAVARRO: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So sometimes I’m like, I think I overthink it when I meet someone like your body language expert, someone who’s good at behavioral science, and I want to talk about rapport building. We actually videoed our interaction today. So when I walked in.

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I’ve got the video here. Let me have a look at this. See if there’s – we’ll put it on the screen for anyone that’s watching. But I just want you to analyze my interaction with you when I met you and tell me how it could have been better.

JOE NAVARRO: All right. Hello, Joe. So first of all, you were waiting for me with arms akimbo, which is, “I’m in charge. I’m the big guy.” And so your arms were here. Yeah, I got it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. But I actually do remember that. I remember thinking, “Get your hands off your fucking hips.”

JOE NAVARRO: No, no, no. But it’s fine. This is your domain. I expect this from you in your domain. But one of the things you immediately did was you immediately went around the table and you went forward to shake my hand. Right? So one of the things that I say is how much people matter to us is determined by how fast we act.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay?

JOE NAVARRO: So the fact that you actually went from there to here and you did it immediately, it demonstrates that you care. As early as 11 months, a baby will recognize individuals or even inanimate objects that care just based on how quickly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They move towards them.

JOE NAVARRO: Towards them, to do something for them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

JOE NAVARRO: It’s called a pro social act. And babies as young as 11 months recognize that. So this is something that I – it doesn’t surprise me because you’ve been successful. You know, success is, for me, is measured on how well people get along with others.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you for the work. Appreciate it. Thank you. You’re very, very smart. You look like someone who worked in the FBI.

JOE NAVARRO: The FBI uniform.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is the.

JOE NAVARRO: Well. Well, I be miked, or is it just this?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just that one.

JOE NAVARRO: Just that one. Perfect. Okay. You said something charming about how I was dressed, which I appreciated. This is always a good reminder to me of how old I look now. And the only note that I would add is I would have remained standing a little longer and then made sure that, you know, as I’m sitting, then you sit at the same time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. So I invite you to sit and.

JOE NAVARRO: Sit with you at the same time rather than allow me to all. Now, if you can see, in that instance, I’m actually still over you while you’re already seated, that is in negotiations. That would be, as we say, contraindicated.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

JOE NAVARRO: It is. It’s a. No, no. It’s a big word. It’s a big word for Steve. Don’t do that.

The Art of Note-Taking in Meetings

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about taking notes? This is something that I’ve started doing actually in the last six months when I’m in meetings in my companies in the UK is I have an iPad now. And when someone’s speaking, it actually helps me because of the way that I think and process and learn. And it helps me also to be listening to speak, I.E. If they say something and I immediately have an idea that I’m worried I’m going to lose. Instead of, you know, that kind of behavior, I can write down what I’m about to say, and it gives me more time to listen. But one of the things I noticed in your work is you say that in terms of showing someone you care. Taking notes is a really effective way to do that.

JOE NAVARRO: Well, what I would say to you is what I would tell the therapist. One of the biggest mistakes therapists have started making is they sit there and because a lot of them are earning a lot less money and they don’t have a secretarial pool like they used to, they now type their observations as they’re talking to their client. I think that’s a big mistake.

And from my, the studies that my company did in surveying, not the therapists, but their clients, the ones that were willing to talk, it’s terrible. What I tried to emphasize is have material in front of you, and if there’s a particular note, write a little something. Or if you have somebody with you that’s going to be the note taker. I don’t want to miss anything. If you’re writing, you’re not observing. And observing is actually more important than writing.

Now, if you started talking and mentioned, if you had mentioned the suprasternal notch, I might have. “Okay, is that supra or suprasternal notch?” Okay, that’s a worthy note. And then I come back and revisit. But if I’m writing all the time, I, you know, I have young people tell me, “Well, you’re just an old timer. This is how we’ve grown up.”

I can tell you that from an evolutionary standpoint, we cannot outdo our DNA. We just cannot. Simply, for instance, schools come in and say, you know, “Well, you can’t hug the students anymore.” Okay, don’t expect, you know, why do we have depressed students? Why do we – there’s any number of things, but I can tell you this. We evolved to hug, to touch, to greet each other, you know, your best mate, all that stuff when we used to wrestle with our buddies, right? That play, that play, wrestling. All that is is covert touching. It’s because our species needs it.

Humans need to touch. There are certain things that humans need, and one of them is this facial interaction. When you’re focused on writing, you’re actually taking away from that.

The Perfect Handshake

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you think about handshakes then? Because handshakes are how we kind of touch strangers in a socially acceptable way. Is there a good way to handshake?

JOE NAVARRO: There is, and there’s bad ones. So I always say when you shake hands, the fingers are down, right? A lot of people put their finger up. And so when they shake hands, let’s see if we can reach each other. And so when they go like this, now you have their finger in this erotic. This is an erogenous area of your body. This is what you kiss. Yeah. Well, the inside of the wrist is an erogenous area. And so now you have this man’s finger here. And it’s just weird.

So the fingers are low and the pressure is applied equally. Don’t try to Donald Trump hit this question. Yeah, don’t do a Donald Trump handshake. Or don’t jerk the hand. Don’t squeeze it too tight. Don’t play jiu jitsu. People my age have arthritis. I’m never impressed. I’ve had men come in, and they’re big and burly, and they squeeze my hand, and it’s like, “Are you serious?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about the cupping where they cut with your hand?

JOE NAVARRO: So cupping of the hand is okay with really people, you know, but most people don’t like to have their hands engulfed. If you want to touch somebody else’s hand. So you shake the hand and then you touch the upper arm and all of that.

Reading Body Language Under Pressure

JOE NAVARRO: So he starts out with an arm down, but he’s touching his neck, covering his neck. He’s crimping the left side of his face, and he’s massaging his forehead and his neck. So, I mean, we look at and we say, “Okay, these are all emblematic of psychological discomfort.” Now why that is, we see his blink or eyelid flutter. He’s touching his face. Why is that? I don’t know. It’s not. Now there’s a cathartic exhale. Looks like he’s reading one of my books.

What I would tell you is these are all the behaviors you wouldn’t want from a leader. You would certainly see that from a follower, but not a leader. You’ll never see a general do any of that. Certainly not in the US army or the British Army. All the behaviors that he’s doing, which are pacifyings or indicators of some sort of psychological discomfort are also all the behaviors that we equate with lack of confidence.

The Path to Self-Mastery

STEVEN BARTLETT: Leaders are often exceptional. And you say that exceptional individuals are made, not born. And that’s a good thing because that puts this level of excellence within reach of you and me. And you’ve identified several traits that make someone an exceptional person. One of those is self mastery.

JOE NAVARRO: Self mastery, whether it was Alexander the Great who sought the learnings of, let’s see, Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who Alexander. So Aristotle taught Alexander the Great and he pursued the knowledge. Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors in America, 1300 patents, left school at age 6, sought the knowledge.

I mean, as humble as I came from, we were so poor, I literally had to go to garbage cans to see, steal books and magazines to learn. You can create your own apprenticeship program and you can learn to master a skill or a knowledge or an athletic move, whatever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Someone who is self mastered, what have they accomplished?

JOE NAVARRO: They have accomplished something that nobody can take from them. Nobody can take that from me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is it?

JOE NAVARRO: All that knowledge, all that skill, all that experience, nobody can take from me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why is the word self in there? Self mastery?

The Power of Self-Mastery and Continuous Learning

JOE NAVARRO: Because so much of it, nobody stops telling me to do that. And so it’s self. Why? Because I wanted to know. Because, you know, why did Leonardo da Vinci want to know? The eddies. Water eddies in the water or the length of a woodpecker’s tongue? Who cares? It doesn’t matter. It was self imposed.

And we in this world are the beneficiaries of Leonardo da Vinci’s interest in water eddies, which then helped him to draw hair of the Mona Lisa, were the beneficiaries of that. I think self mastery is more important than I think what a university can teach you. A University can teach you how to think, but it doesn’t teach you mastery.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So is this because I’m hearing, obviously learning and the pursuit of knowledge. And then there’s this other part of self mastery, which feels like self awareness, being aware of oneself.

JOE NAVARRO: Well, I think you’re an example of self mastery. It’s the only word around the, in the universe of languages that encapsulates being able to take what is available and making it a part of your life.

And so whether it was my grandmother teaching me how to talk to people, or my mother or my father, my mother showing me how to actually shake hands, my sister showing me how to dance, this is all part of self mastery. Now, I could have rejected all of that. And a lot of people do. A lot of people reject science or reject, “Oh, I don’t want to learn how to dance, I don’t want to learn to do that.” Okay, that’s your option.

But there’s an exquisite elegance in being able to look at the world around you and learn from it, which you have done, and say, “I’m going to put that to work. Why should I reinvent what other people have experienced? I’m going to adopt that which I like and prefer, and then I’m going to put it to good use.”

The Art of Observation

STEVEN BARTLETT: The second one is observation, which I…

JOE NAVARRO: I think we’ve talked about observation. You know, the great example is a parent who can observe the immediate needs of children and so forth. And I see people now that they’re so… I was at the airport yesterday, coming here, and there was a family that the whole time they were waiting, not once talked to each other, nor were they aware of what the others were doing.

I find that difficult because when my daughter was growing up, I never took my eyes off of her. I see people on their devices, as this whole family was. And they’re missing out on a lot of things, a lot of information.

The great inventions are made through observation. Velcro. Do you know the story of Velcro? In the middle of World War II, a Swiss guy goes up in the mountains and comes back hiking, right? And he looks at his socks and he says, “Man, these chiggers, these little…”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it a plant?

JOE NAVARRO: Yeah, it’s just the little seedlings that they give off that stick to things. Here in America, we call them stickers. There’s all sorts of names. And he looks at it under a microscope and he notices that they don’t just stick out, they’re actually curved. And in curving, they get stuck on everything. So he says, “I’ll just invent this.”

Now what’s interesting, we talk about observation is he had seen this one time how many millions of people had seen it. But it’s the observer that can capitalize on it. And that’s why I tell executives when you hire, hire good observers because they’re going to save you. They’re the ones that are going to say, “Hey, I’m seeing some trends here that are bad.” So observation is key.

And then we transition right into the next one is most people think communication is just about words. And communication is principally, most effectively and most influential a non verbal across every culture. And the misconception that words triumph over nonverbals. Go to a funeral. Go to a funeral and see how well words work versus putting your arm around somebody and let them sob on your shoulder. It’s the primary means by which we communicate, it’s the primary means by which we show we care. And it’s the primary means by which we show empathy.

The Power of Action

STEVEN BARTLETT: The fourth one is action. And for me it really links to both the second point, which was observation, but also to your story about Velcro because there must have been many people that thought, “Oh my God, that thing’s sticking to me.” And they did nothing. Maybe even some people who thought, “Oh, that could be useful.” But then the hard part often is…

JOE NAVARRO: Doing something about the action, is doing something. As I talk in the book, be exceptional, do something that is pro social or beneficial, but don’t wait. Right? The worst thing we can do if you want to let people know that you don’t care, take your time.

And this happens all the time. You go to a counter, you walk up to a counter and say, “Hey, you know, I’d love some help with this, you know.” And then they just, “Well, I don’t know, let me check in the back.” And they take their time walking to the back and then they take time walking back. You might as well be shouting, “I don’t care.”

What I tell managers is that’s your responsibility. Why did you hire someone who can’t move at the speed of light? Because movement is equated with caring. So if that’s their attitude, you might as well have a sign that says “I don’t care.”

Now you could say, “Well, you know, maybe they have a mobility problem.” Fine fronted. I’d say, “You know what, it’s going to take me a minute because I just had my hip replaced, but I’m going to address it right now.” We can forgive, but when we don’t show we care by action, that is so immediate.

Psychological Comfort: The Ultimate Human Need

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the fifth one is psychological comfort. And you write in the book that this is the most powerful strength humans possess?

JOE NAVARRO: Absolutely. What’s interesting about humans in the years that I’ve studied them is that humans don’t seek perfection. A baby doesn’t care if it’s sucking its own thumb or the twin sister’s thumb. Interchangeable. Humans don’t seek perfection. What we seek is psychological comfort. And whoever provides that, that is the soonest winner. It is as simple as that.

If you can, you’re too young. But I remember when computers came out and they were in ugly boxes and they were in ugly stores and they were behind the counter and they were ugly. Steve Jobs comes around and says, “No, we’re going to put them on these lab tables like we have, and we’re going to make them accessible.” So this mysterious device. That is such a ugly word that you forget that people hated computers so much, they used to come in at night and cut the cords. That’s how scared people were of computing.

And he went from 4% shares of the computer market to whatever it is now 67 or whatever the number is. Why psychological comfort? And I tell this to businessmen. When you’re negotiating, what you’re negotiating for is, can you create enough psychological comfort that the other person can live with that so that I can feel, “Okay, maybe I didn’t get everything I wanted, but for this period in time, I can live with that psychological comfort. I can go back to the board and report that this was the best that I can do, and so forth.” Aim for psychological comfort.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does one go about creating psychological comfort in any context?

JOE NAVARRO: You started it today. You welcomed me in, and then you said, “What would you like to drink? Would you like some water? Would you like some tea? Would you like some coffee?” That begins the process of psychological comfort. We’re in a quiet environment. Less noise, more psychological comfort. Less lighting. It doesn’t hurt the eyes. Anything that starts at a biological, physical, physiological, and then cognitive level.

So psychological comfort, we’re negotiating. So you want to offer 3,000? I think I’m worth 6,000. So how do we achieve that? Well, I’m going to let you tell me your side of why you can only provide 3,000, and I’m going to provide you my side. Okay. The fact that we actually get to tell our story begins the process of psychological comfort.

Now, in the end, I may have to abide by that because there’s only so much money, and if it’s not in the budget, it’s not in the budget. But there may be some things that you can add to say, “Look, this is all we have at this time, but we’re going to reevaluate this in three months. And if we can, then, depending on earnings, get you another $500 a month, we will do it.” Then we do it incrementally. But always thinking about what provides psychological comfort, Being harsh, being indignant, not being attentive to needs, wants, desires, and even preferences creates psychological discomfort.

Dealing with Narcissists in the Workplace

STEVEN BARTLETT: In 2009, you wrote a book called Narcissists among Us.

JOE NAVARRO: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And earlier on you said that roughly 2% of people are narcissists, but then 25% of CEOs, 22% as high as…

JOE NAVARRO: 22% of CEOs, have narcissistic traits.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. Okay. And if someone’s dealing with a narcissist, what do they have to do in order to manage that situation? Because according to those numbers, roughly 98% percent of people aren’t narcissists, but probably will deal with them in their lifetime. And then, you know, a significant amount of people work with them, even though…

JOE NAVARRO: They account for 2% of the population we will work with or for somebody like that. So what we have to keep in mind. Well, what do we mean by narcissist? We’re not talking about the person that looks in the mirror and likes to splash on cologne and comb their hair. This is the person that overvalues themselves but has to devalue others. This is the person who only thinks about themselves and doesn’t care of what suffering or what’s going on through your life.

Wants you to be loyal, but is not loyal to you. Is disinterested in your personal affairs, but wants you to be interested in their. There is your malignant narcissist. Oh, and by the way, they inherently tell lies, but expect you to tell the truth to them.

Now, the effect is, well, if they’re only 2% of the population, but we see them in a lot of corporations, we’re going to work for them. Then, you know, how do we get along? Or first is recognizing that they’re going to devalue us. Now, sometimes they devalue you by not inviting you to meetings or sharing information. But many times it’s by the way they treat you, yelling at you, being disparaging. I mean, I have some things that are horrific.

So what do we do when we have people like that? Number one is recognize what you’re dealing with. And that’s why I wrote the Dangerous Personalities, because I have These robust checklists in there, which have been tested many times. So you can see, “Oh, wow, out of 125 things, this person has 75 of these traits. You’ve got a problem.”

But now, here’s the thing. When we live with somebody like this, let’s say they can be very charming, but then they turn on you and they become who they really are. Then how do you deal with that? What I can tell you is that the arc of the trajectory does not favor you. That these individuals are so caustic, they’re so toxic, that eventually they will victimize you physically, mentally, emotionally, physiologically, or financially. You’ll be victimized.

The question then is, and I tell this to a lot of executives who work for these individuals who they’re bullied. And this stuff is, how long are you willing to tolerate it? If you can set a number and say, six months or a year, okay. But then do something, because you will pay a price. You know, there’s a great book called the The Body keeps the Score. The Body will definitely keep the score. You will pay a price for being in the proximity of a toxic individual. And if you become that person’s chew toy, you will suffer immensely.

And so I say, you know, there’s no pill to cure them. There is nothing you can do to make them like you. They expect no loyalty. Try to get out as soon as you can. And that’s the only advice that you know. Obviously, I’m not a clinician, but I think most clinicians, if they’re honest, will say, you got to get out of there. This is not tolerable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So don’t try and win in any respect. Don’t try…

JOE NAVARRO: And I don’t think you can win. First of all, these individuals are severely flawed of character. They have no introspection. They see themselves as perfect. They don’t see any imperfection in themselves. And so because they’re flawed of character, you cannot expect normal behaviors from them. And so why expose yourself to them? They will be like that all their lives.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a particular chapter where you say, one is bad, two is terrible, three is lethal.

Multiple Personality Traits and Historical Examples

JOE NAVARRO: Oh, you know, people. I get this question all the time. Well, can you have multiple traits? Yes, you can have. You can be pathologically narcissistic, so you overvalue yourself. And you can also have traits of the paranoid personality where that you are very rigid in your thinking, and you’re always suspicious of everybody’s intentions.

In history, you look at Hitler. Hitler was pathologically. He was a malignant narcissist he was clinically paranoid. Who did he fear? Minorities. The Roma was then called the gypsies and of course the Jewish people. That is clinical paranoia. And he was a psychopath.

Let’s just lay that out there. What is psychopathy? Psychopathy is where you have no remorse, no empathy, no conscience, you can do whatever you want and you sleep well at night. There, that’s your Robert Hare. The researcher is the best one that defines psychopathy. Hitler had it all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s a thin line probably there between like narcissism and self belief. Because when you’re describing narcissism you’re talking about like over importance, like really believing one’s important. And it sounds somewhat like someone who is extremely self believing.

The Rise of Narcissistic Society

JOE NAVARRO: Well, narcissism, by the way, narcissism, which has been studied since the 1950s, we now have a narcissistic society like we never did before. We see it in the way we talk about ourselves more than anything. We get on TikTok and other forums and we espouse all sorts of things. And so we’re way more narcissistic now than in the 1920s.

They look at even the words we use now. We use the word “me” and “I” more than we did in the 1950s. We used to say “we” and “ours.” Now we say “me” and “I.”

And the true narcissist has a belief system that is so corrupt they’re truly flawed of character. And they not only have the traits of narcissism but they truly believe how they see themselves as infallible as “I only have the answers. I’m the person that can make us great again.” And I know what you’re going to ask me next.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I’m not going to ask you that. Thank you.

JOE NAVARRO: Thank you. But if the traits fit, then you know what I tell people is as you, whether you’re going into an organization or if you’re looking at who’s leading your country, ask yourself, do they have these traits? And if they have the traits, then it’s not a difficult equation.

Psychology is, especially when it comes to people. Flawed of character is not that difficult, is do I want to work for somebody that values me or someone that devalues others? And you start with that.

How Law Enforcement Changed My Perspective

STEVEN BARTLETT: In all these decades of you doing all these incredible things, hunting terrorist spies, aerial surveillance, working in partnership with the SAS, interviewing people, chasing down terrorists, how has it changed you as a human being? How has it shifted your perception of human behavior and what it is to be a human and meaning and all of these bigger questions of life.

JOE NAVARRO: I’ve never been asked that question. So thank you for asking a most profound question. I guess the best answer is that I learned a piecemeal, and I’m glad I learned piecemeal. And by that I mean that my first homicide was just a regular homicide that I responded to. My first suicide, which was a police officer, was, you know, it was in increments.

I think if I had been presented with everything that I had been presented with all at once, I think I would have had a mental break, breakdown. I’m glad that it was episodic, that I was able to learn from each.

And what I have learned is, number one, that who were most of the people that I talked to, the majority were witnesses or victims. And these were nice people. They were kind people. Some of the nicest people were these poor farmers out in Arizona. They grow cotton. They don’t earn very much. They’re good people. You learn that everything you’re doing in law enforcement is really for them.

You know, later on, when I got into counter espionage. And now you’re dealing with nation states and the equities of different nations. And, yeah, each country has their own priorities, but you realize that when you’re dealing with extremists and they have their own belief system and there’s nothing really you can do to change them, but we also have our belief systems.

And you have to realize, okay, I can’t fix all the problems as a law enforcement agent. I can only attend to that which I can help or resolve or so forth. I couldn’t find all the suspects that either raped or killed or bombed. I was at Brigham Young University when a girl was abducted by a serial killer. And to this day, I am in pain that I was on duty that night when she was abducted. I still feel it.

And these things, they weigh on you. But I’m also very. You know, when I get with students, I mentor people. I mentor a lot of executives. But I also mentor young people who are curious, and I see the eagerness in which they pursue life and knowledge, and that gives me great hope.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why are you still in pain about being on duty that night?

The Weight of Traumatic Memories

JOE NAVARRO: Because you can’t get it out of you. I can’t get the smell of. Sometimes you go to a crime scene and the smell is so bad that you can’t wash the smell away. You have to burn your clothes. Forensic examiners know this. There’s just some things that you can. You know, the first person I saw killed was in Cuba. And you just can’t.

There’s, you know, biologically, you have the hippocampi. You have two of them. And that retains everything negative you ever experience. That’s why you can’t take a pill for post traumatic stress, because the hippocampi makes sure that the first time you burn yourself touching that stove doesn’t occur again. So all things negative are retained, sometimes forever, but usually around a decade.

But I’m also lightened by the fact that people still pursue good things. I hear from people who work with dogs or who work with the handicapped with no expectation of any reward. And I think most people have a good heart, a kind heart. And so I try to focus on those people that I met which gave me the examples for “be exceptional.”

That woman in Brazil who at the age of six became blind. She went on to have 12 children. She had more, but only 12 survived. And who could still do needlework blind by feeling. I will never forget that experience either. To sit in her presence was a bestowed pleasure upon me. To understand a woman who could sense people moving in and around her just by how the hairs on her hand moved as they interacted with the space around her. It was a great experience.

Career Highlights and Transitions

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what day of your career are you most proud of? Or were you most happy?

JOE NAVARRO: Oh, wow. Well, I was. I’ll tell you. I was really happy when I graduated from the FBI Academy. Imagine at any time, at any one time, there’s 27,000 applicants to the FBI and they will only accept 220 maybe or so a year. So I was elated.

I was also very happy the day I left the FBI because at that point I had done it all and I wanted to do other things. I wanted to write, which is very difficult to do when you’re in the Bureau. And I wanted to continue teaching. Yeah. So I think those two events were, when it comes to career, was good times in my life, Joe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: My audience are very much people that want to learn that love stories, that want to change their life, improve their lives so that they can achieve the objectives they have. So you’ve written a lot of books. I think it’s what, 15 in total?

JOE NAVARRO: Well, 14 published. The 15th comes out next year.

The Most Important Lesson: Connection

STEVEN BARTLETT: So my last question then is of everything in the 14 pending 15 books that you’ve written and everything you’ve learned. What is the most important thing that I didn’t ask you about that would be helpful to somebody who’s looking to improve their life? Their communication skills, their body language, to be more effective in the pursuit of their goals that I should have asked you about.

JOE NAVARRO: Well, I hate to ruin this for you, but I think you asked really in however many minutes or hours we’ve been doing this, a lot of great questions and I think in your questions the essence is what is the importance of connecting your audience? Are all in the people business. I mean unless they’re working as they write code, but even they we’re all in the people business.

And what your questions really circled around is what’s the importance of connecting? What’s the importance of connecting properly and then how do we make maintain those connections? And we’ve talked about this, the importance of non verbals to communicate. “I trust you, I value you, I care about you” and all that. But then creating that psychological connection comfort that allows us to then have this long time together, that relationships are invaluable.

I think that’s the greatest lesson. Every time I go anywhere I say we are in the people business. And I think you are exemplary in demonstrating what you can achieve if only you have that.

Being Approachable

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s a great compliment. Thank you so much. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is interesting. What do people say that they like about you?

JOE NAVARRO: I think that one is easy and it’s easy because I hear it so often and they say “you’re so approachable.” I think they see pictures of me, you know, where I’m looking sternly or they think an FBI agent. And wherever I go around the world they say, “well, you look so average, you look approachable.”

And I’ve always tried to make myself approachable. Whether you’re a student, whether you are the security guard or whatever. I am always accessible. I’m always approachable and I treat everybody the same.

The Importance of Human Connection in a Digital Age

STEVEN BARTLETT: Joe, thank you. It’s a really interesting time that we’re living in. We talked about it a bit before we started rolling. We’re more digital than ever before. We’re living behind screens and connection is somewhat of a lost art. And that’s why people are so I think in part so keen to learn more about how to connect better, how to not be misunderstood and how to communicate how they truly feel.

Because it’s not something that now comes naturally to this digital from birth generation. And that’s something that I think your work does so profoundly. It kind of brings us back to what it is to be human, that through line of anthropology and understanding our evolution and where it all came from as well is the reinforcer of everything that you say.

And it’s incredibly important and it’s so incredibly resonant. I’ve seen it across the videos that you’ve been in and the interviews that you’ve done. They’re just so unbelievably resonant. And that’s because people are so thirsty for this information.

And many of the problems I think we often find in our lives stem from being ineffective at communicating to someone else how we feel and what we truly think. Maybe because we haven’t learned, but also maybe we’re learning another behavior. And maybe we’re becoming more individualistic and more withdrawn and more trapped behind screens.

So I really applaud you for the work that you’re doing, and I highly recommend people go and read these books. There’s a lot of them, but I’m going to link them all below and with a little synopsis so you can decide which one best suits you. I read a few of them. One of my favorites is “the exceptional” one is so accessible. But they’re all very good at different things, depending on what it is you’re looking for in your life, whether it’s body language, whether you just. You’re the type of person that wants to hear more about hunting terrorists or understanding psychopaths or generally more things about the FBI and the life that you’ve lived. So I’ll link them all below. Is there anything we’ve missed?

Final Thoughts and Resources

JOE NAVARRO: Well, my wife would tell me, please be nice and say that if they can mention my. I now have a YouTube channel to address a lot of these things. Just go to joanavarro.net and there’s a link there to my YouTube channel, which you would think I would know, but we’ll link it below. I don’t know, but I want to thank you for what you do.

You’re going to realize one day, as I realize, that you’re helping to change lives, even though that wasn’t your intention, your intention was probably to educate. But 10 years on, 20 years on, or as I recently found from 40 years on, somebody will write to you and said something you said, or your example affected me and it changed my life. And you’ll go, “wow, I never thought about that.” And that’s what you’ve done and you’ll realize it one day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you. I mean, it’s what you’re doing, too. Jay, thank you for being so generous with your time. I really, really appreciate it. It’s been an honor to meet you and I’m excited to finish the rest of your books and to explore more on your YouTube channel, which I’ll link below. You also do lots of speaking. You work a lot with companies and organizations, and if people want to reach you, they should go to your website and send you an email there.

JOE NAVARRO: Absolutely. Just through the website and we’ll attend to it. And I’m happy to share that knowledge journey with whoever’s interested.

The Power of Small Improvements

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to let you into a little bit of a secret. You’re probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird, but I can still remember to this day when Jemima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio and right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel.

This might sound crazy, but at the diary of CEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show. And that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding one percents, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn’t about drastic transformations or quick wins. It’s about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes.

So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it’s truly beautiful. Inside, there’s lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well some interactive elements. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on developing consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life.

So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for a colleague or for your team, then head to thediary.com right now. I’ll link it below.

This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven’t yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button.

My commitment to you is if you do that, then I’ll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We’ll listen to your feedback, we’ll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we’ll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

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