If I'm in a great mood, if I'm just going to be playful, a couple of really huge personal negotiation wins recently was when I was just trying to be playful. I was in a great mood, and I'm joking around. Great negotiation is not exciting, it's astonishing. We're in conversations right now with a possible non-scripted TV show.

I was telling the producers, "This ain't going to be Real Housewives." To make the show properly, there ain't going to be any screaming. It's not going to be Bar Rescue where we're yelling at people. We're not going to be Hell's Kitchen where we're yelling at people. It's never going to be exciting, but it is going to be astonishing.

You'll get outcomes where suddenly you find yourself in a place like, "What in the world? How did that just happen?" I lose a suitcase in an airport the other day. I'm walking into a lost luggage place, and I'm in a great mood because I'm home and I'm happy to be home.

I'm going to get a good night's sleep, and even though it's late in the day, I'm just happy. I get ready to walk into the lost luggage store where these people are battered children. They know that you expect them to wave a magic wand, and poof, your luggage is going to be there.

For whatever reason, that's what I say when I walk in the doors. Young lady says, "How can I help you?" Well, first of all, how you could help me is obvious because I'm in a lost luggage. There's only one reason I'm in here, so that's kind of a silly question.

I go, "I need you to wave a magic wand." She just laughs, and she looks at me. She ends up walking me out to the carousel, climbing up on the carousel, and she walks down a ramp the luggage comes out of. I guarantee you they're not supposed to do that.

She sticks her head, and she looks around. She comes back out. I've never seen any of these people leave the office, let alone walk back to the carousel. She says, "Wait here." She disappears into the bowels of the airport, which looks like a superhighway down there. God knows what it looks like underneath the airport.

Pretty soon, the carousel starts up again, and my bag and another bag pops out. This other poor schmuck is sitting there waiting. I'm like, "I have never seen anybody do this, ever." Normally, they say, "Here's a number. We'll call you in 24 hours. It might show up at your house." I look around.

There's another young lady there, and I say, "Please tell her thank you for me. I got to go because she doesn't come back out for almost 10 minutes." On my way out, she comes out the door, and she high fives me. She says, "How's that for waving a magic wand?" That was the magic phrase, and I never would have said it to her if I wasn't playful in a moment.

I've got a couple of others like when I was just playful, and I'm joking with people almost at my expense, it's shocking, astonishing what you can get people to do if you hit them the right way. So interesting. I wonder what it tapped into, but it sounds like it might have tapped into her sense that everybody's always asking me for a magic wand kind of ability, but finally, somebody just said it directly, and that would be fun to actually play that role because normally, they're restricted to their keyboard and their phone.

I love that. On the opposite side of that spectrum, if ever you're feeling tense, stressed, jet-lagged, angry, I can think about negotiations where people are trying to keep their egos in check, they want to be right, breakups, negotiations, not necessarily romantic breakups that could include that, but also professional breakups, the dissolution of a contract or something like that, do you ever have to check yourself like, okay, I need to – I mean, I imagine being calm is better than not being calm for most all things.

Do you have a process of doing that? You seem like a pretty steady guy. I've never seen you – Overall, I'm pretty steady. The late night FM DJ voice that – I'm not sure that I coined the phrase, but kind of famous for – to calm you down also calms me down.

So if I get bent out of shape, I will – and the conversation gets heated, I'll switch into that voice with the intention of calming you down because that's the hostage negotiator's voice. But it'll calm me down too. Intentionally going to that voice tamps down the negative emotions, which I'm convinced make me dumber in the moment, interfere with my capacity to process information.

Got reasons for that, layman's reasons, no scientific, academically rigorous studies that have been in any journals. Well, after you're done, I'm going to tell you something that will perhaps be astonishing to you as to why there's real neuroscience behind that late night FM DJ voice having an impact on other people's brains.

But yeah, and I'll do that because it calms me down. Now if I can make the shift, the hard part is to shift into a positive mindset. If I can make that shift, but I can only make it from a calm voice. I also think it's – the emotions are kind of a rock, paper, scissors sequence.

I don't think you can go from sadness to elation directly, sad, depressed, down. I think there's something to getting angry to pull you out of sadness. And I think if you're angry, you've got to go to calm next. And so – but if I can get out of anger and go to calm, then I can say something to myself like the reality is this is a luxury problem.

Or I was in a negotiation with a counterpart that I knew was deceiving, lying to me. And I remember saying to myself, you know, I'm lucky to be in this negotiation. I mean, they wouldn't be trying to hustle me if we weren't really good. If we didn't have a product that was phenomenal, I wouldn't be targeted at all.

So I'm actually lucky to be in this conversation. So if I can make that next shift emotionally, then I'm good. The hard part is making those shifts. I'm going to just share with you what I learned recently about sound and emotion. I'm researching an episode on music in the brain, fascinating topic.

Believe it or not, there's a lot known. And the auditory system has this property where of course there are neurons, nerve cells that respond to different frequencies of sound, low frequency, you know, deeper tones and high frequency squeals and that sort of thing. Okay. That's pretty straightforward. Just like we have neurons that respond to different colors or different, you know, angles of light in the room.

But what I learned and I confirmed with a good friend of mine who's an auditory neuroscientist and neurosurgeon, his name's Eddie Chang, he was a guest on this podcast previously, is that low frequency sounds of the sort that your voice is, that late night FM DJ voice are responded to in the brain by neurons, no surprise there.

But the frequency that those neurons fire is also low frequency. In other words, when you speak in your low voice, the other person's brain hears that and starts firing in a low frequency tone. In other words, it entrains to your voice, not just the timing, but it's actually like you're essentially playing an emotional piano down in the low keys of their mind.

Now when you go up to the high frequencies, the neurons can't follow that high frequency. So there's something special about low frequency sound that actually changes the emotional tone of the people that hear that low frequency sound. This is wild, right? I mean, of course the content of the words matters too, but anyway, there's real neuroscience to support the voice that you were endowed with and that you employed for your work.

- Well then, and then also the point then too is it's not, the other side is not making a choice. It's an involuntary reaction. - That's right. This is not something one can override, except by perhaps plugging their ears. - Right, right, right. - So when they're hearing that, their mind is getting shifted toward a state of low frequency oscillation, which is one of more calm.

So that's a real thing. And were you to have a high squeaky chipmunk's voice, you might not have been the negotiator. You would, although who knows, maybe there'd be another tactic there. I mean, I think back to the, I guess it was during one of the Gulf War campaigns, weren't they trying to squeeze out Saddam and some of his people by playing like Milli Vanilli at high volume for hours and hours?

Is that tactic actually used? - So that was Panama when they were trying to get Noriega. - Okay, so I'm only a few, I'm only a few countries over. - You see, you know, I get the trivia, you know, I was telling you before, and the wacky yet fascinating useless information around terrorism and stuff like that.

I tried that at Panama and for whatever, the military guys, they were playing music and sounds. And then also among the many stupid things that the FBI did at Waco, then late at night, they tried that in the Waco compound too. And it was just, that was one of the things that the hostage negotiators were adamantly against, adamantly against, but they got overruled by on scene command among the many stupid things that were done at Waco, that was also done at Waco.

It was stupid, it's counterproductive, hostage negotiators were always against it. - So for those of you who don't remember Waco, Waco was Branch Davidians, David Koresh, right? - Yeah, there was a Netflix series that was out about it recently that's fair about how it went down. - It had a sad ending.

He eventually set the building ablaze, killed himself and everybody else. - People inside set the building on fire. - Including a lot of children perished. - Including some children. There are some FBI agents that have still not gotten over that. (upbeat music)