Master Negotiation With These Tactics & Mindsets | Chris Voss & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | If I'm in a great mood, if I'm just going to be playful, a couple of really huge personal

00:00:11.400 | negotiation wins recently was when I was just trying to be playful.

00:00:16.440 | I was in a great mood, and I'm joking around.

00:00:19.720 | Great negotiation is not exciting, it's astonishing.

00:00:25.280 | We're in conversations right now with a possible non-scripted TV show.

00:00:30.640 | I was telling the producers, "This ain't going to be Real Housewives."

00:00:36.400 | To make the show properly, there ain't going to be any screaming.

00:00:39.640 | It's not going to be Bar Rescue where we're yelling at people.

00:00:42.000 | We're not going to be Hell's Kitchen where we're yelling at people.

00:00:45.340 | It's never going to be exciting, but it is going to be astonishing.

00:00:50.040 | You'll get outcomes where suddenly you find yourself in a place like, "What in the world?

00:00:56.860 | How did that just happen?"

00:01:00.800 | I lose a suitcase in an airport the other day.

00:01:05.200 | I'm walking into a lost luggage place, and I'm in a great mood because I'm home and I'm

00:01:09.560 | happy to be home.

00:01:10.560 | I'm going to get a good night's sleep, and even though it's late in the day, I'm just

00:01:14.680 | happy.

00:01:15.840 | I get ready to walk into the lost luggage store where these people are battered children.

00:01:22.020 | They know that you expect them to wave a magic wand, and poof, your luggage is going to be

00:01:28.880 | there.

00:01:29.880 | For whatever reason, that's what I say when I walk in the doors.

00:01:33.400 | Young lady says, "How can I help you?"

00:01:35.400 | Well, first of all, how you could help me is obvious because I'm in a lost luggage.

00:01:38.520 | There's only one reason I'm in here, so that's kind of a silly question.

00:01:42.600 | I go, "I need you to wave a magic wand."

00:01:45.640 | She just laughs, and she looks at me.

00:01:48.540 | She ends up walking me out to the carousel, climbing up on the carousel, and she walks

00:01:54.240 | down a ramp the luggage comes out of.

00:01:56.840 | I guarantee you they're not supposed to do that.

00:01:59.200 | She sticks her head, and she looks around.

00:02:01.320 | She comes back out.

00:02:02.520 | I've never seen any of these people leave the office, let alone walk back to the carousel.

00:02:07.040 | She says, "Wait here."

00:02:09.160 | She disappears into the bowels of the airport, which looks like a superhighway down there.

00:02:13.960 | God knows what it looks like underneath the airport.

00:02:17.880 | Pretty soon, the carousel starts up again, and my bag and another bag pops out.

00:02:23.240 | This other poor schmuck is sitting there waiting.

00:02:25.160 | I'm like, "I have never seen anybody do this, ever."

00:02:29.880 | Normally, they say, "Here's a number.

00:02:33.120 | We'll call you in 24 hours.

00:02:34.320 | It might show up at your house."

00:02:37.200 | I look around.

00:02:38.560 | There's another young lady there, and I say, "Please tell her thank you for me.

00:02:42.880 | I got to go because she doesn't come back out for almost 10 minutes."

00:02:47.200 | On my way out, she comes out the door, and she high fives me.

00:02:51.720 | She says, "How's that for waving a magic wand?"

00:02:56.600 | That was the magic phrase, and I never would have said it to her if I wasn't playful in

00:03:01.160 | a moment.

00:03:02.840 | I've got a couple of others like when I was just playful, and I'm joking with people almost

00:03:08.080 | at my expense, it's shocking, astonishing what you can get people to do if you hit them

00:03:14.440 | the right way.

00:03:16.340 | So interesting.

00:03:17.340 | I wonder what it tapped into, but it sounds like it might have tapped into her sense that

00:03:21.900 | everybody's always asking me for a magic wand kind of ability, but finally, somebody just

00:03:28.280 | said it directly, and that would be fun to actually play that role because normally,

00:03:32.620 | they're restricted to their keyboard and their phone.

00:03:35.680 | I love that.

00:03:38.240 | On the opposite side of that spectrum, if ever you're feeling tense, stressed, jet-lagged,

00:03:43.840 | angry, I can think about negotiations where people are trying to keep their egos in check,

00:03:50.120 | they want to be right, breakups, negotiations, not necessarily romantic breakups that could

00:03:57.480 | include that, but also professional breakups, the dissolution of a contract or something

00:04:03.040 | like that, do you ever have to check yourself like, okay, I need to – I mean, I imagine

00:04:10.320 | being calm is better than not being calm for most all things.

00:04:16.520 | Do you have a process of doing that?

00:04:17.600 | You seem like a pretty steady guy.

00:04:19.280 | I've never seen you –

00:04:20.280 | Overall, I'm pretty steady.

00:04:33.680 | The late night FM DJ voice that – I'm not sure that I coined the phrase, but kind of

00:04:35.680 | famous for – to calm you down also calms me down.

00:04:41.560 | So if I get bent out of shape, I will – and the conversation gets heated, I'll switch

00:04:48.960 | into that voice with the intention of calming you down because that's the hostage negotiator's

00:04:56.000 | voice.

00:04:57.000 | But it'll calm me down too.

00:04:58.840 | Intentionally going to that voice tamps down the negative emotions, which I'm convinced

00:05:05.640 | make me dumber in the moment, interfere with my capacity to process information.

00:05:10.280 | Got reasons for that, layman's reasons, no scientific, academically rigorous studies

00:05:15.320 | that have been in any journals.

00:05:16.800 | Well, after you're done, I'm going to tell you something that will perhaps be astonishing

00:05:20.840 | to you as to why there's real neuroscience behind that late night FM DJ voice having

00:05:26.300 | an impact on other people's brains.

00:05:29.080 | But yeah, and I'll do that because it calms me down.

00:05:32.760 | Now if I can make the shift, the hard part is to shift into a positive mindset.

00:05:39.940 | If I can make that shift, but I can only make it from a calm voice.

00:05:44.120 | I also think it's – the emotions are kind of a rock, paper, scissors sequence.

00:05:50.600 | I don't think you can go from sadness to elation directly, sad, depressed, down.

00:05:58.240 | I think there's something to getting angry to pull you out of sadness.

00:06:03.580 | And I think if you're angry, you've got to go to calm next.

00:06:08.660 | And so – but if I can get out of anger and go to calm, then I can say something to myself

00:06:12.920 | like the reality is this is a luxury problem.

00:06:18.240 | Or I was in a negotiation with a counterpart that I knew was deceiving, lying to me.

00:06:24.780 | And I remember saying to myself, you know, I'm lucky to be in this negotiation.

00:06:27.600 | I mean, they wouldn't be trying to hustle me if we weren't really good.

00:06:33.560 | If we didn't have a product that was phenomenal, I wouldn't be targeted at all.

00:06:39.280 | So I'm actually lucky to be in this conversation.

00:06:41.560 | So if I can make that next shift emotionally, then I'm good.

00:06:44.920 | The hard part is making those shifts.

00:06:46.960 | I'm going to just share with you what I learned recently about sound and emotion.

00:06:54.040 | I'm researching an episode on music in the brain, fascinating topic.

00:06:59.880 | Believe it or not, there's a lot known.

00:07:01.920 | And the auditory system has this property where of course there are neurons, nerve cells

00:07:06.800 | that respond to different frequencies of sound, low frequency, you know, deeper tones and

00:07:11.640 | high frequency squeals and that sort of thing.

00:07:15.280 | Okay.

00:07:16.280 | That's pretty straightforward.

00:07:17.280 | Just like we have neurons that respond to different colors or different, you know, angles

00:07:22.320 | of light in the room.

00:07:24.800 | But what I learned and I confirmed with a good friend of mine who's an auditory neuroscientist

00:07:31.120 | and neurosurgeon, his name's Eddie Chang, he was a guest on this podcast previously,

00:07:34.880 | is that low frequency sounds of the sort that your voice is, that late night FM DJ voice

00:07:44.040 | are responded to in the brain by neurons, no surprise there.

00:07:48.840 | But the frequency that those neurons fire is also low frequency.

00:07:53.760 | In other words, when you speak in your low voice, the other person's brain hears that

00:08:02.400 | and starts firing in a low frequency tone.

00:08:05.760 | In other words, it entrains to your voice, not just the timing, but it's actually like

00:08:11.160 | you're essentially playing an emotional piano down in the low keys of their mind.

00:08:18.380 | Now when you go up to the high frequencies, the neurons can't follow that high frequency.

00:08:23.760 | So there's something special about low frequency sound that actually changes the emotional

00:08:29.420 | tone of the people that hear that low frequency sound.

00:08:34.020 | This is wild, right?

00:08:35.020 | I mean, of course the content of the words matters too, but anyway, there's real neuroscience

00:08:40.160 | to support the voice that you were endowed with and that you employed for your work.

00:08:45.440 | - Well then, and then also the point then too is it's not, the other side is not making

00:08:49.000 | a choice.

00:08:50.000 | It's an involuntary reaction.

00:08:51.000 | - That's right.

00:08:52.000 | This is not something one can override, except by perhaps plugging their ears.

00:08:55.640 | - Right, right, right.

00:08:56.860 | - So when they're hearing that, their mind is getting shifted toward a state of low frequency

00:09:02.320 | oscillation, which is one of more calm.

00:09:06.640 | So that's a real thing.

00:09:08.920 | And were you to have a high squeaky chipmunk's voice, you might not have been the negotiator.

00:09:14.300 | You would, although who knows, maybe there'd be another tactic there.

00:09:16.720 | I mean, I think back to the, I guess it was during one of the Gulf War campaigns, weren't

00:09:23.440 | they trying to squeeze out Saddam and some of his people by playing like Milli Vanilli

00:09:31.120 | at high volume for hours and hours?

00:09:33.040 | Is that tactic actually used?

00:09:35.360 | - So that was Panama when they were trying to get Noriega.

00:09:39.140 | - Okay, so I'm only a few, I'm only a few countries over.

00:09:42.200 | - You see, you know, I get the trivia, you know, I was telling you before, and the wacky

00:09:46.800 | yet fascinating useless information around terrorism and stuff like that.

00:09:51.000 | I tried that at Panama and for whatever, the military guys, they were playing music and

00:09:59.080 | sounds.

00:10:00.080 | And then also among the many stupid things that the FBI did at Waco, then late at night,

00:10:06.480 | they tried that in the Waco compound too.

00:10:09.200 | And it was just, that was one of the things that the hostage negotiators were adamantly

00:10:12.640 | against, adamantly against, but they got overruled by on scene command among the many stupid

00:10:20.760 | things that were done at Waco, that was also done at Waco.

00:10:23.360 | It was stupid, it's counterproductive, hostage negotiators were always against it.

00:10:27.400 | - So for those of you who don't remember Waco, Waco was Branch Davidians, David Koresh, right?

00:10:32.280 | - Yeah, there was a Netflix series that was out about it recently that's fair about how

00:10:41.600 | it went down.

00:10:42.600 | - It had a sad ending.

00:10:43.600 | He eventually set the building ablaze, killed himself and everybody else.

00:10:47.160 | - People inside set the building on fire.

00:10:49.120 | - Including a lot of children perished.

00:10:50.600 | - Including some children.

00:10:51.600 | There are some FBI agents that have still not gotten over that.

00:10:55.480 | (upbeat music)

Master Negotiation With These Tactics & Mindsets | Chris Voss & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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