Life or Death Listening

A Hostage Negotiator’s How-to Guide to Mastering the Essential Communication Skill

By: Dan Oblinger

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Authentic listening is so important, that relationships and companies die without it. In this digital age of chaos, conflict, and confusion, we are more connected than ever to other people. Yet, we may be on the brink of an epidemic of loneliness. This book contains the key to unlocking the potential for lives of trust, consensus, and community! Dan Oblinger lays out the ultimate sales pitch for creating a culture of authentic, skillful listening. It begins with you! Learn the hostage negotiator’s techniques for turning enemies in allies. Learn to be more empathetic and build stronger relationships with anyone! It is ideal for business executives, managers, parents, and community leaders. The heart of this book is the family of 8 active listening skills. These are proven, reliable, and repeatable methods of earning trust and learning critical details about people and problems. Police negotiators use them every day to save lives. Dan Oblinger has trained thousands of people just like you to use them in everyday situations to add value to business and personal relationships. Now it is your turn. Each of the techniques has its own chapter! Master these skills by reading this book and using the reference guides (included) and begin building a life of rich, engaging conversations with all you meet! Save lives, make sales, get deals, calm those in crisis, and have the tough conversations that teams need to succeed and families need to thrive. Dan Oblinger’s style is direct, warm, and uses actual tales of crisis negotiations ripped from his exotic experiences as a hostage negotiator, keynote speaker, and corporate trainer. Listening is life, so buy this book and start living better now!

Sympathetic Review

Dan Oblinger’s core message lands, listening is not a “soft skill,” it’s a survival skill for relationships, teams, and trust.

The hostage negotiator angle gives the book real weight, and the “family of eight” active listening skills is a practical framework that can help leaders, parents, and managers slow down, get curious, and actually understand what’s happening in front of them.

When the book focuses on the techniques and the why behind them, it feels useful, repeatable, and worth revisiting.

Where this audiobook stumbles is not the content, it’s the delivery and the quality control.

The narration is below standard, it sounds synthetic, and it undercuts the very thing the book is trying to teach, human connection.

On top of that, there’s frequent repetition, so much that it starts to feel like you’re stuck in a conversational loop, like the world’s politest Groundhog Day.

With tighter editing, this could easily be an hour shorter and stronger for it.

I say all that with some genuine disappointment, because the ideas themselves deserve better packaging.

If you’re here for the concepts, they’re solid, and you’ll pull value from them.

If you’re deciding based on the audiobook experience, it’s hard to recommend this version, especially for anyone considering the author as a premium speaker or trainer, because this recording does not represent “best foot forward.”

My honest, sympathetic recommendation is this, the book is worth engaging with, but not in this audio format.

If there’s a print or ebook version, that’s likely the better way to get the full value without the production issues getting in the way.

And if you’re a fellow author thinking, “Maybe I’ll just use AI voice to save time,” this is a clear reminder that shortcuts in narration often cost more in credibility than they save in dollars.

Not that great

Maybe this book is to advance or filled with filler words . The only decent chapters are 14-17 . This book reminds me of " never split the diffrance " .