Biohack Your Voice for Better Communication Instantly – Roger Love with Dave Asprey – #752

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance.

You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Now, if you thought my voice sounded amazing when I said that, in fact, if you think I sound like a radio personality, well, it's probably not because I'm a radio personality, I'm a podcaster, but I have actually been taking some voice lessons from one of the most influential voice coaches in the world. And I've learned so much about how I breathe, how my nervous system works, things that I never would have even known were a part of the world of biohacking. And so I have asked Roger Love, who is my voice coach and, well, the voice coach of some of the largest names in Hollywood and just kind of a force when it comes to understanding how we communicate, to come on the show today and teach you what you need to know to biohack your voice. And this matters for you now more than ever because you spend all day, every day. Now, if you work from home using your voice, in fact, your voice becomes much more important than the grainy video from your webcam, most likely. So this is a chance for you to say, hey, wait, I could just make a few changes and something meaningful could happen. Now, Roger has 30 years of voice coaching. He's trained 130,000 people, lots of Grammy and Oscar winners, and he's done real scientific research that go beyond just the things you would expect around singing scales and things like that to help people create their unique sound. And I'm just incredibly excited to have been able to learn from him in one on one sessions. He's probably most famous if you're not in the world of this, for most recently teaching Bradley Cooper how to sing when he was in the movie with Lady Gaga where he actually sang all of his own songs over a course about 18 months of voice training. So, no, I'm not anywhere near being a good singer, but given that I have zero singing skills whatsoever, I can tell you my voice sounds different when I speak and even when I attempt to sing when no one's listening. Roger, welcome.

Thank you so much. Fabulous intro. And to me, you're always singing even when you're speaking.

Well, thank you. You've also, I mean, I was doing my research for the show. We met through my friend Ken Ratkowski down in la and I mentioned on a small group of entrepreneurs, hey, I'm going to take some voice lessons. And Ken's like, dave, Roger Love is here in the group, you should talk. And he said, oh, let's do this. And then I find out, oh, Shailene Johnson, Simon Sinek, Tony Robbins, Brenda Burchard, a lot of people who are friends who've been on the show and people I don't know, like Gwen Stefani and the Beach Boys. I'm like, good God, man, you're a legend. Walk our listeners back. How does one become a Voice coach for 30 years to pretty much everyone who sings, how did you do that?

I always knew that singing made me happy. I realized that when I was little, if ever I was sad, I would just bust out a tune and it would immediately change the way I felt, my mentality, my physicality. And so I knew that I was always going to be involved with voice and singing. So I started taking singing lessons when I was really young. And at 16, I was studying with the number one voice teacher in the world. And what made him the number one was he had all the biggest stars. Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra and Madonna, and all the biggest singers, Stevie Wonder. And so I was taking from him and just loving it every second, Every. My voice was getting better. I was learning so much. Suddenly, he decides that he's going to go to Canada to teach a masterclass in Banff. And he says to me, roger, do you want to come over after school on Monday and teach the lessons that I'm not going to be able to teach? And I said, well, thank you. That sounds like such a lovely offer. But there's just one major drawback to that scenario. I have no idea how to teach. I. I've spent these first 16 years learning how to be a good student. He said, oh, don't let that worry you. I'm going to pay you $100 an hour. And I said, I will see the students on Monday after school. So I show up, of course, filled with excitement, but also, understandably, fear. How old were you? 16.

Oh, my God.

And my teacher was 55, so they noticed there was a little bit of an age difference. So I show up, I'm sitting there, and the first person who comes in to take a lesson is Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, then Stevie Wonder, then Earth, Wind, and Fire, then group super groups like Chicago.

And were you just intimidated as all hell? I can't even imagine that.

When I was 16, yes, intimidated. But I really had two choices. I could either say, I'm so sorry, here's the gas money that you spent coming all the way to my studio, or I would just see what. What I could do. So I literally just pretended to say the things that I Thought my teacher might say he had a big, thick, strong voice, lots of melody and lots of volume. So I said, well, I don't look like him, but I could sound like him. So I busted out what I thought my interpretation of his voice was and thinking that that would probably get me three minutes of the lesson, and then I would still have to give them gas money and send them away with a huge apology. And what happened was six months I worked through, day by day, of the most famous voices in the world. And I found that no matter what they sounded like, I actually could hear things and come up with ideas that would make them sing better. Six months later, when he comes back, every single student decides that they don't want to go back to him. So they said they want to stay with me, which, of course, shocked him.

So the student becomes the master, pretty.

Much, or the student becomes the little baby master. And I had connected with these people, and they really liked working with me. So he brought me in as a junior partner to the most famous voice studio in the world at 16 and a half. So I continued going to school, college, everything. I did everything that I was gonna do, but I was teaching every free moment. And I stayed with him for 17 years just teaching singers.

That's almost as incredible as Shep Gordon's story when he came on and talked about Janis Joplin and Alice Cooper. In the early days, you literally had the who's. Who of music? Did you have the who?

Actually, I didn't have who, no.

That would have been so cool.

I didn't have the who's, but I would regularly get calls from. From someone like Peter Matz, who was Barbra Streisand's musical director. And he'd say, barbra needs to come in. And I'd say, why? She sounds incredible. And he says, she can't sing high anymore. She doesn't think she can sing high. You just never knew who you were gonna get a call from to come in that was either having some problems with their voices or they wanted to work on songs for an album or songs for a live show. It was a great learning time for me.

If someone listening isn't a singer and probably never will be, or maybe they sing in the shower, what is the usefulness of learning this level of control of your voice? Why does it matter now?

Great question. I taught singers for 17 years, and then speakers started coming to me, like Tony Robbins and all of these. John Gray, who had just written Men Are From Mars, Women Are Famous.

I love John. He was Just on. Right.

All of these famous. And Susie Orman, they all kept. They were coming to me, and they said, we heard you're a voice guru, and we want you to work with us. And in the beginning, I said, thank you so much, but no. And I just sent them away because I said, I'm a singing teacher. And then I would send them to who I thought would help them more. A speech pathologist if they were having some kind of a scientific. A physical problem, speech therapists if they were having other issues. But then I would say, reach back out to me in a month or so and let me know if they fix the problem. A month later, every single one of them started reaching out to me saying they didn't fix it. So I said, come in. Let me see what I can do. And then I started realizing that I had to learn everything that I could possibly learn about the speaking voice. So I read every book I could think of, and I just immersed myself studying with laryngologists and other doctors and really trying to understand the physicality and how singing was different than speaking. After all of that, I realized that singing and speaking is basically the exact same thing. When you sing, you have control over pitch. How high or how low you go pace, how fast or how slow you go. Melody. Does it go up like this or does it go down like this? Volume and tone. So singers and speakers actually have the same ingredients like great chefs have. So it's about how you mix those ingredients. And so I decided to start taking all of those speakers. And then I divided my practice into 50% singers and 50% speakers. And it was the greatest fork in the road I could have ever imagined. Because when you train someone to be a good singer, they sell more T shirts, they sell more records. When you've helped someone find their speaking voice, you change who they are as a person. So I loved working with speakers, and I've continued that model working with speakers and working with singers and teaching speakers how to put the music into the voice. Because, look, singers. Singers. You love singers. I love. They're very good at one thing, moving people emotionally, right? You go to a concert, and one minute you're standing on the chair, There's Dave Asprey at the forum standing on the chair, going, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. And then that sounds more like Brendan Burchard just to say, okay, you sitting next to Brendan, and then 10 minutes later, Brendan, and you are sitting down and you're listening to this ballad and you're crying. There's a little Bit of a tear in your left eye, and you're thinking about the first time that you had your heart broken. How did a singer have the ability from one song to the next to move you from elation and happy to remembering heartache and sorrow and grief? And. And I realized that I could do the same thing with speakers and voice.

Give me an example.

Okay, really simple. The first example is singers are really good at melody, usually because they have songs written for them, right? So when you. When you love a song, you love it for two reasons. The melody is haunting to you. It's memorable. The chorus comes, and you sing along with it. And also, the words mean something to you. So great. Singing and songs is really about listening to the words and the melody. So what happens is when people go to speak, they forget about those same elements. So most people, when they speak, they think they only have one note, that they're a piano and they only have one note, and so they just kind of stay on that one note the whole time. And they wonder why people are falling asleep and why people don't care and why their attention span for everybody else is like three seconds when the national average is eight. And then sometimes they get really excited and they go, oh, and then they come back to this note that's called monotone. About 85% of the population speaks in a monotone or just a limited couple of notes. But you wouldn't buy any record by somebody who only had one note. They could only do one note. So I teach people what melodies they should have to showcase certain emotions and connect with people. So, for example, melody has three basic paths that it can follow to make people feel things. If your melody stays on one note, like I said, that's called monotone. Monotone is the fastest way to sound like you are boring. You have no personality. When they think they know what note you're gonna make next, they think they know what you're gonna say next. And when they think they know what you're gonna say next, boom, onto the next podcast. So if you just staying on the same note, that's monotone, boring. Okay, lifeless.

It's at 85% of people listening to this do that and don't know they're.

Doing it exactly right. That's a big deal. They think that's ridiculous, but then they need to record themselves and hear just how many notes are exactly the same. And one or two notes doesn't count. When the Average piano has 88 keys, so one or two notes is still monotone, then there are People. Most people actually do another type of melody path called a descending scale. We were taught when we were in elementary school to when we got to a comma, we would go down. When we got to a period, we would go down. That's a descending scale. I love my wife. It's my birthday, like, the Eeyore birthday. I didn't get any presents. Descending scales. Science and music proofs make people sad. They make the person speaking descending scales sad, and they make everyone who's listening to the person who's using descending scales feel sad. Why in the world do we want to make people sad? Because. Because we're following some grammatical thing that our elementary school taught us. You don't want to go down. The third way of melody is ascending. I love my wife. I love Dave. I love chocolate. When you go up from lower notes to higher notes, that's called ascending scales. It makes you happy, and it makes everyone who listens to you feel happy, Happier. They assume you're happy, and they like that. People like listening to happy people. Who really wants to tune in to listen to anyone who is totally depressed and gonna make you sadder than you felt?

You can feel the difference when you say that. In the first lesson, you showed me that, and I went through some. Some stuff that was really fascinating over the course of several of our lessons. You'd say, do this, and I'd say, well, I can do that, but it feels wrong. And when I say it feels wrong, it feels unnatural, because I'm not used to going up at the end of a thing, and it still sounds a little bit awkward to me. But what was also interesting is that there was a little twinge in there that was more like, I don't want guilt or shame or like, thou shalt not do this. So this was an unconscious rule that's built into my breathing system, into my diaphragm, that I was following, that I was entirely unaware of. And, dude, I spent four months with the electrodes on my head. Like, I have looked at my systems more than most humans on Earth as a part of my personal development. I couldn't see this. I didn't know that I had inhibitions built in there, and you started pointing those out. I'm like, every time I do that, why do I feel either anxiety or discomfort or, like, guilt or what's going on here?

How do.

How do so many people get taught to have those really strong negative emotions? Or am I the only guy like that?

No, you're every guy like that. And you're. You're special because at least you're talking about it and thinking about it. Here's the problem. We think that we are the voice that we were born with, but none of us are the voice we were born with. We were born with an instrument. When we learned words, we heard the sounds that were attached to those words. And whether we realized it or not, we memorized the sounds and the words together. So if your mother spoke like this and you really liked breast milk and you wanted to be fed, then as soon as you could speak, because you wanted to be fed and because you wanted to create a connection, because we live in a mirroring culture, so that's how we learn things. That's how we connect with people. So as soon as you could say something, you tried to sound like your mom, and you're like, mommy hungry, milk mommy. And if dad spoke like this, dad was like, ha, ha ha, you're so cute, Roger. And you wanted to go fishing. As soon as you could say it, you were like, dad, fishing, Take me fishing. Because you connected to people that way. Fast forward. You're an adult, and you are stuck in the combination of your dad's voice, your mom's voice, your cousin's voice, whoever raised you, whoever you were around. And you think that's the voice you were born with? No, that's the voice you imitated. When I meet people wherever they are in their life, and I meet people at the top of the mountain, and they can't even imagine a higher mountain, I say, here's what you sound like. And there are better ways that you could sound. That you could change the way that people perceive you, that you're still making sounds that are not cohesive with your brand, your core values, your intelligence, your. Your desires, your gratitude. The sounds you're making make you sound, like, different than who you are. Think about this. When is the last time you listened to your outgoing voicemail message on your smartphone? Now, you're a professional speaker, but imagine. Imagine 99% of the population, when they go to listen to the voicemail greeting. Do they like the way it sounds.

If you listen to it? Most people record it a hundred times because they think it sounds stupid.

Exactly right. So they buy a new phone, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna record a new voicemail message. And I just. This phone was like, I had to get a second mortgage on my house, and now I have this phone. It probably has an amazing microphone in it. So I'm gonna record my message, and everyone is gonna call me back. Because I'm gonna sound like a podcaster or a radio announcer. And then they recorded. Hi, this is Roger Love. I'm a nice guy. Just leave me a message and let's hang out. And they listen back, and he goes, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah. Even their name. Hi, this is Ro. And they're descending melodies, so they're like, oh, I hate my name. And they're giving all of these subliminal messages, which are not that subliminal. And then they record themselves over and over and over again. The average is 20 minutes. The average executive, CEO, doctor, lawyer, professional person spends 20 minutes recording it. And here's what happens at the end of 20 minutes. Ugh. Ugh. This phone is no better than my last phone. Ugh. I can't spend any more time doing this. I got things to do. I have the world to save. I'm settling. Well, that voice that you put on your voicemail message after 20 minutes of practice is settling. And that's the voice that is introducing you to the world. That's the voice. And if you don't love it, how are you supposed to speak up and not have fear? Fear of rejection, fear of misunderstanding, fear of not being connected to people. And that voice, science has proven, is actually when you make sounds that are particular sounds, like descending scales, sounds that make sounds of sadness, it changes you physically, it changes you emotionally. There is so much scientific evidence that says you are making sounds that is either making you happy and healthy, and the sounds you're making are either making other people happy or unhealthy. So the science proves, actually, that they say that if you sing and breathe the way that I teach. And by the way, it's the same way I teach speaking. If you do it for 20 minutes a day, you can increase your life expectancy 8 years by singing every day. By singing every day for 20 minutes, you can increase your life expectancy eight years. But I also teach people to speak exactly the way that they sing, so it's the same. So I feel like I'm. I'm giving people another eight years to influence. Eight years to change the world. Eight years to save the world.

Does it matter what song you sing?

No, absolutely not. It has to do with.

Come on. There's got to be some Rage against the Machine song that even if you sing it, you're so angry when you're done, it cancels out the eight years. I love Rage against the Machine by the way.

You live longer, but your vocal cords are more red and puffy and swollen, and you Sound more trashed, but that doesn't decrease your lifespan.

In your book, you talk about seven things your voice says about you that I didn't know about. And some of those are kind of obvious. If you talk like you're from New Mexico, where I grew up, which I don't sound like anymore. But you can have a little bit of a twang if you're. Especially towards the Texas side and things like that. So there's an accent, but that's not really your voice. That's something different. So what does your voice say about you and everyone who's listening to the show? This is. It's like your calling card. You're putting it out there, and you don't know you're putting it out there, and I didn't know that. So tell me how we judge a voice on these seven factors.

Great. When we speak, sound comes out of our mouths, and it rides out on a bed of air. The vibration, and it rides on a bed of air. It's physical. So speaking is actually physically connecting with people. Because I'm. I'm vibrating your body. If the sounds hit you, they vibrate your body. So those sounds go into the first part of the brain. That's called the amygdala. And the job of the amygdala is to only let things through to the prefrontal cortex. If it's emotional. The amygdala does not think words have any emotions. I love you, you love me. I love golf. I hate golf. The amygdala says, I don't know how he feels about us or golf. So the amygdala says, we're not letting it in. But if I make sounds aside from the words that are emotional, if my melodies and my volumes and my tonal qualities are right and they're emotional, then the amygdala sends it right to the prefrontal cortex, where it gets processed, thought about, felt about, and stored into memory. And then the person can take action on it. So all of this is based on how do you communicate someone? That it actually gets to the prefrontal cortex so that they can decide instantly whether they like you, whether they trust you, whether you're intelligent, what they think your success level is. There's all of these factors that they immediately decide about you. And here's the scary thing. How long do you think it takes people to make value judgments about you without knowing you? As soon as you start to speak, how long?

It's got to be within a second or two. Kind of like when you make A visual assessment of someone.

Exactly right. Within about three seconds, they've already created their own answers to your story. They look at you and they say, oh, he's probably this old. He probably has this much money in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands. He's probably married. He might have this number of kids. He probably went to this level of education. They make all of these decisions based on they want to have a story. They don't know you. So they. They fill in all of the details you haven't given them yet. That's part of great storytelling. So whatever details you don't give, they fill in. And so the problem is, is that you need to control the way you are perceived instantly in every conversation you have, or you've already lost them. You can't influence them at all because they don't know you. They've already made all of these preconceived notions about you just on the way that you sound.

Okay, so let's say we're on a Zoom call or Skype or God knows all the other competitors to zoom out there. Right now you can see someone, right? And you at least know the shirt they're wearing. They may or may not have pants on, right? And then you hear. You hear their voice. I'm not saying if I do or don't, I've got my, you know, my Zoom shirt on. But there's a visual side, and that includes what you're wearing and your haircut and, you know, whether you're hunching and all that. And then there's an audio side. Do you know which one hits first or which one is more important?

I know that in the 70s, they tried to figure out when you speak to someone and they see you, what is it that immediately helps them perceive truth and honesty and whether they like you and how they feel about you. And in the 70s, it was thought even though those statistics were stretched, it was thought that 55% of your physicality, what you do with your body, your body movement, made people believe you or like you or trust you. And that 7% of whether they made those opinions positively or negatively were based on the words you chose. And that 38% was tonality. But since then, science has really gotten smart. And I've been saying for about 30 years that those statistics were all wrong. Because here's the thing, what we've learned. I mean, think about some of the articles that you read last month. Giant manufacturers have decided to stop putting cameras in the cars and trying to get facial recognition because it's a privacy issue. And we don't want to make people feel like we're always watching them. It's not just a privacy issue. It's because it doesn't work. We've learned to lie with our physicality. So I could be in the worst mood in the world. I could be on death's door, but I put a smile on my face and smile on my eyes, and. And I say today's the greatest day ever. And so the physicality lies and words lie. We say we've all gotten to the point that we're. Some of us are more responsible for the words we use than others. But. But in general, words don't tell the truth unless we're telling the truth, because we can choose words that lie. And physicality, gestures, hand gestures, eye movements, facial, even smiling, that doesn't tell the truth either. Science now says that it's all about the sound of your voice, that that's the most revealing thing that you have to connect you with other people. And that's probably 93%. And the physicality and the words probably make up another 7 to 10%. But it's sound that actually makes people connect with other people and believe them and feel things.

So you would say for anyone listening to this, if you had 100 bucks to spend on a better webcam or a better microphone, they should buy the microphone and people will trust them more.

Exactly right.

By the way, this is a $700 microphone setup that I'm using here because I noticed it made a difference on the podcast to invest in audio quality more so than video quality. But I gotta say, I think my video is decent. But it's because people actually complain if it sounds like crap. So it bothers us at some level.

Exactly right. There are misconceptions. Here's another misconception. People are worried about volume because they think volume makes them sound angry. So we've become a world of whisperers. Somehow people got it in their heads that if you spoke more airy, more air would sound like you cared more. But more air doesn't sound like you care more. It just sounds like you're weak. So unless air. Unless you're a massage therapist who also wants to be thought of as having really weak fingers, air doesn't really work. But people are afraid of volume because they think if it gets loud, that people perceive angry. Here's what they don't understand. All emotions. All major and subdivided emotions. All major emotions have sounds already attached to them. So that when you make those sounds, people perceive certain Things. So what are the sounds of angry? Increased volume. When you're angry, your blood pressure is boiling and you speak louder because you just can't contain it. You're mad and you speak louder. Volume. So increased volume is the sound of anger. What's another sound of anger? Monotone. Only staying on one note because I don't have time for melody. I'm too mad for melody, so I stay on the same note. I get louder. And what's the third component of anger? Fast. When I'm angry, I've held it in so long, I have to get it out right now. So I speak faster, I speak louder, and I have no melody. If you don't have all three of those elements, you can never sound angry. For example, here's me being. Here's me being loud. Loud as I can be. But if I have melody, you don't think I'm angry, you think I'm happy. So if I mix melody in with volume, it doesn't sound angry. Here's volume and fast. But. But, but here. Here's me speaking with melody. I just did that. Volume and fast. And I'm speaking with melody, and I'm happy. Now I'm gonna speak with no melody with volume, but I'm gonna speak slower. Well, I'm not mad. I'm just really serious about how I feel about you, Dave. So as long as I don't rush, I can't sound angry either. So people are afraid of getting louder, and they're missing the physical connection of sound. So they're whispering, they're speaking with their sort of inside voice, and that there's not enough sound coming out of them to vibrate the bodies of the people they're talking to. And that's why they're not moving them. You have to create a certain amount of volume. I tell people not to speak as if they were trying to get from here to the microphone or here to the microphone or here to the phone. They have to pretend that they're. They're speaking to people eight feet away, that they fill up the room. This is a very good mic to this Neumann mike that I have.

Oh, yeah.

Very sensitive. Okay. I have it on a very, very low level because I speak in a way that that makes you feel like I'm actually taking my sound and sending it to you at your geographical location. So people just don't understand that by learning a little bit about pitch, pace, tone, melody and volume, they decide what sounds they make, they decide what emotions they showcase, they decide what. How people react to those emotions. And then they're not afraid. Because, Dave, I've spent a lifetime figuring out what are the sounds I need to make so that people think the best of me. So that people think, Roger, he's a nice guy, he's happy, he's grateful, he has a lot of interesting information. So how worried am I when I go on a podcast like yours or when I take the stage in Calgary before COVID happened and there were 8,000 people in the audience and it was Tony Robbins after me and I was the warm up act for Tony Robbins and there's 8,000 people. How worried am I when I get up to speak? 0. 0. Why? Because I already know that I'm going to give them love in the form of sounds and the things I teach and they're going to receive that love and they're going to give me love back to say, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being you. Thank you so much for being authentic. Thank you so much for having empathy. Thank you so much for being grateful because I use those sounds. It's not enough to just know what empathy is. You need to know the sounds. It's not enough to know what happy is. You need to know the sounds of happy. So I've eliminated the fear of perception. Once you take that fear away. And by the way, speaking in public is still the number one fear in America. Canada's a little smarter. It's the number two fear. The number one fear in Canada, Heights.

But there you can say moose, but okay, no heights.

So the bottom line is speaking in public is still the number one fear. Why? Because you're afraid of being judged improperly, harshly. You're afraid of people not liking you, not wanting to learn from you, not caring about you, thinking that there's something negative about you or they just judge you harshly. That hurts. Well, I give people the way of totally controlling how everyone sees them and feels about them. And by the way, there's nothing fake about it because I'm showcasing the best of each person.

It seems like a lot of work though. Say, okay, I want the audience to know that I'm feeling X, so I have to be aware that I'm feeling X. And then I'm choosing to do that. So I have to make my voice go up at the end or whatever the right technique is. I don't feel like I have the map of techniques there. And I used to have Asperger's syndrome. Like I spent two years studying business, networking, like standing in the corner eating cheese, watching People interact so I could figure out how they did this mystical thing and then copied it and faked it until I actually could do it. But it was a lot of cognitive burden. And I feel like I mostly have that automated. But for me to change my voice to match the way I want my emotions to be perceived seems like a master's degree in emotional manipulation. Is it, Matt?

It is not. Okay. Let me tell you why so many people come to me and they think that the goal is to become unconsciously competent at a skill. And I explained to them that that is the worst goal that they would ever want. Because if you become unconsciously competent, the most you could probably ever achieve is one skill. The people that are truly unconsciously competent are the professional tennis players, professional athletes that you do. Your goal isn't to become consciously, unconsciously competent. Your goal is to become consciously competent so that you can do many things. And here. Here's the second part of that answer. So everything that I do is designed so simply that you barely have to even guide your voice. Because I have my programs. They all. What the anchor is, is I have like a 10 minute warm up of warm up exercises, specific sounds that you do because I gave them to you. And that all my hundreds of thousands of students do. And when they just. In the shower, they. They practice that for 10 minutes. Or when they're in the car and they're driving. It literally changes the way air comes in and out of the body. It changes the way the vocal cords work. Do they get long and thin or do they get short and fat? And can you. It puts all of the range together so that you have the low notes and the high notes and the stuff in between. So I build the instrument without you even knowing. It's more fun. John Gray used to tell me that he used to meditate for 10 hours a day when he was a celibate monk. And I think he was wearing pants at that time, or not.

I think you have to wear pants when you're a celibate monk.

Otherwise, yeah, there's a. No pants. He used to tell me that in the. In the vocal exercises that I gave him, he could. It was like meditation. And it took him to the same place that 10 hours of meditating would do. So with the exercises, I train your instrument and all you're doing is making some fun sounds and imitating me. Suddenly an hour from then, a couple of days from now, a week from now, your voice isn't different instrument. You can go higher, you can go lower, you can make more volume. You've gotten rid of the nasality. You've gotten rid of. If you sound like your nose is clogged, you've gotten rid of talking. Like with this squeaky hinge, you've gotten rid of talking airy. Because I trained the instrument, I tuned it up just with the exercises. And then everything else is so simple. If you have an amazing instrument, it is so much easier to learn how to play. Voice is one of the easiest instruments in the world to learn. Do you know how many hours a day it takes to get good at being a classical pianist?

Oh, it's a lot. I don't know.

If you're not prepared to practice 10 hours a day, you're never going to be a great pianist. 10, 10 hours a day. John Mayer, my student John Mayer, people used to ask him, they'd say, hey, John, where's the next John Mayer? And they said. And he would always say the same thing. They're in their room practicing all day and night, and when they're ready, they'll come out singing is minutes a day and being thinking about one thing. But I make it fun. I say, here's what we're going to work on today. We're going to stop going down at commas. And then I show you how to do it. And then I show you how to record yourself on your phone, listening to whether you did it and whether you think you're tone deaf or whether you tried to play the guitar in elementary school or you got kicked out of the choir. Anyone can do it. I have literally taken all levels of human instruments and shown that they could be masterful voices. You know how long I had when I took Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix and I was supposed to make him sound like Johnny Cash and her sound. Not like June Carter, but have a great voice. You know how long there was about 32 songs altogether. Bits of songs in Walk the Line. You know how long it took me?

I can't even imagine.

Less than three weeks. Really? That fast? Yeah. And she won an Academy award for best actress. You know how long it took me to get Jeff Bridges and Colin Farrell ready to. And Jeff Bridges, by the way, won the Academy Award as well for Crazy Heart. You know how much time I had, Jeff? I had a little bit more time. Colin, I only had two hours with. And he'd never really sung before. And he won the Grammy that year for best song from a film. How is that even possible?

Two hours.

Two hours. Now, when I did Bradley Cooper, I had six months, actually.

Oh, I thought it was 18 months or so, six months to just teach him. And he was rocking it on stage. It was pretty incredible.

All live. None of that was done in the studio. All of that was live. The band's playing and he's singing. Gaga singing. It was all live. I'm, I've, I've biohacked it. I've hacked it so that I literally can change anyone's voice in minutes. Minutes. Whether you stutter and you, and you. And you've been to every doctor in the world, but they didn't explain to you that it was an airflow problem. I can fix it. Whether you, whether you have a nasal voice or something about your voice you don't like, whether you still sound like you're eight years old, but you're a 45 year old woman, whether you, whether you sound too high or too low or whatever you don't like about your voice, it's a quick fix. I call myself the king of quick fix. And people are like, is that good? And I'm like, is it good? Do you want to go to the doctor? And if the. Do you want the doctor to say, we got a treatment of eight years and you take this and you're going to be in pain all eight years and you're not and you're going to have a hard time going to the bathroom, or do you want the doctor to say, here, boom, take this pill once and you could.

That's why I like neurofeedback and EMDR versus therapy. Like, 20 years of sitting on a couch is kind of expensive and inconvenient and it may or may not work, but I kind of want to get in there and just get it done. So I really noticed a difference. Even, like I said, I have zero seeing experience or anything like that, but my voice is different than it was before. And I don't know if people. If you're listening to this and you actually think I sound different over the last three, four months, tell me on Instagram, on direct messages, because I'm kind of curious. But all I know is my perception of it is very different and it's better.

The goal is just to make people find their voice, the voice that they choose to have, the voice that makes them feel confident, the voice that allows them to lose their fears. I can't change someone's voice without changing their mental state and their physicality. So it's a whole body thing. I change the way they hear themselves, I change the way they think about sounds. I Change the way the body works to create those sounds. And I will just tell you, I mean, I just had a, my first giant virtual event, voice of success live. And I had 1200 people that stayed with me two weekends ago at that, that were with me for Friday starting at Friday morning at 8am New York time. And then they left me at Sunday, 2:30 Pacific time. Now I had zero dropouts.

That's impressive for 1200 people.

The producers who do Tony and all of these giant experts they were said they'd never seen zero dropout of 1200 people. Maybe one or two people were there or more or less over three days. But the rest of the time they were like, oh my goodness. I had no idea that my voice was the greatest communication tool that I had. I thought the words would make a difference. I thought if I had the right words, I could have the relationships I want, I could close the business deals I want, I could have the influence I want. But the words hardly matter and they don't matter at all unless they have the right sounds attached. So, I mean, it was a great experience. And it literally proved that most people are not thinking about their voice until they lose their voice and they wake up in the morning, they're like, I can't speak. That's how Brendon Bouchard came to me. He called me from the parking lot of an event and he was three hours into a three day event and he had lost his voice.

Yeah, he burns his voice out a lot. He's talked about that.

Used to, used to. He hasn't burned his voice out in years. Once I fixed it, he was good. He's been good to go for seven years. Never canceled. Never canceled one day. That's an old rumor. That's seven years old. And that's when we started. I fixed him in 15 minutes on the phone from the parking lot. He went back in and he spoke for three solid days. His voice never felt better. And he's had seven years of never having one issue with his voice. It's simple. It's just knowing what the hack is.

So how many hacks are there, would you say? Is it just like 10 of them or is this hundreds and hundreds?

The good news is there's only five variables. Pitch, pace, tone, melody and volume. So there are only five things that we can control with our voice. And those are so easy. I mean, look, let's look at one of them. Volume. It's pretty easy to know when you're louder and softer, isn't it?

Oh, sure, of Course.

I mean, everybody knows when they're loud. Everybody knows when they're soft. So all you have to be told is to when should you be loud and when should you be soft? Kind of easy. The next one. Everybody knows when they're speaking fast or speaking slowly. If I'm talking to you like this, Dave, thinking that I'm a scientist and I have to make sure you understand, but because I'm speaking so slowly, you think he thinks I'm an idiot? He thinks I'm what, he can't speak normal speed? Does he think I'm not as intelligent as he is? So we can control how fast or slow we speak, but nobody knows. I know when to do what. We all know melody. We're either on the same note or the melody goes up or it goes down. These are all such simple variables. It's just I've chunked them in a way that I teach you how to do. Pitch, paste, tone, melody, volume. Totally. So you can control them. And then the rest falls into place. It literally is. One of my students and friends is Kat Cora, who's the first female Iron Chef. And we talk about this all the time. And I said, did you know how to cook? She goes, roger, I don't even know how to boil water. She goes, nobody's born knowing how to cook. So I said, how'd you learn how to cook? She goes, I had a love for it, a passion for it. I thought it could bring my family together. It did bring my mother cooked for me, and it brought us closer to dinner table. There was an emotional attachment, so I connected emotion and connection with food. And then I learned recipes from my mom. And then I started reading recipe books, and then I taught myself how to mix the ingredients, and boom. She's the first female Iron Chef. And the things she's doing in the world of feeding the world and helping out or she has amazing charitable organizations, like a lot of my students do. She's making a real difference in the world. Nobody is born a great chef. No one is born a great speaker. If you. Or singer. If you're Beyonce and you're born Beyonce, don't you think early on in your life you'd sort of know you had a good voice? Oh, wait, I got a better example. If you were born Pavarotti, if you were Luciano Pavarotti and you had that voice, don't you think you would have known you had a good voice? You know, when he decided he wanted to be a singer, like in his 30s, really? Yeah. So he made it into his 30s, and he wasn't even thinking, I'm Luciano Pavarotti, and I'm the greatest tenor in all of opera. Don't you think he would have. No. Because he started learning about voice, and he started working on his voice, and he was like, oh, I'm pretty good. But if you don't do that, you never end up where you're supposed to end up, which is a voice that actually helps you get the life you want, helps you from communication to communication, have the result you want, helps you have the relationships you want. You just have to understand that life, a great life, happens one conversation at a time. Because one sound at a time, one conversation at a time builds relationships at a time when. Which then strings you together and connects you with everyone else in your life. And everything you say and everything they say makes your life. So do you want to have control over the way your life turns out because of the way the things you say and the way people perceive you? Or do you not? Or do you just want to still keep blaming it on your parents or your choir teacher who kicked you out of the choir and said, you can't sing? I've never had anyone that I couldn't teach to sing. Never. Not one person, not in my whole life have I ever had someone who I couldn't teach to sing.

It seems like for things like job interviews or if you work in sales or marketing or something, it'd be really important. But, yeah, maybe it's as important as having the right suit, doing your hair right, whatever else you do.

One would argue that it's way more important than having the right suit. People go in for a job interview. Let me break this myth, okay? Let me bust this myth. You go into the. Here's the old school. You go into a job interview, the person is not there yet. You're sitting in that person's office. You look around, you see a picture of a poodle, and you're like, oh, poodle, this person likes dogs. And you see another picture with that person. Skiing. They like skiing. They like dogs. They come in and they say, hi, I'm such and such. And you say, hi, I love poodles. I love skiing. I see you love skiing. I love skiing. So they're trying to do something to make the person think that they're like them. They're trying to connect by making the person think that they're sort of like them, thinking that the person might hire you if they thought you were like them. That's not how it works.

Right?

The Way to get hired is you come in and you lead with happy. And then the person says, this person is happy. I better spend more time listening to why so I can find out why. That's the first thing. So you get more time if you sound happy because the person's like, what the. Why is Roger so happy? That buys me an extra 20, 30 seconds, maybe two minutes just by showcasing happy. Then I move to grateful, the sounds of grateful. And then the person is thinking, wow, Roger's grateful to be here, all of that. I showcase everything that he should want to be or she should want to be. I showcase that I'm special, that I'm the gift, that they don't, I don't need them, they need me. That I'm so unique and special and so heart based and so grateful and so happy and so qualified that they feel like they want to be more like me. How can they be more like me? They're have to spend time with me. They're going to have to hire me. That's how it works. That's how it works. One of my students, Simon Sinek, who wrote a book called Pitch Anything is one of the.

Yeah, he was just on the show. I interviewed him last week.

Sorry, Oren Klaff. Simon's my student too, by the way. Simon's my student too. But this example is Oren Klaff who wrote a book called Pitch Anything and he thinks how people, they over pitch themselves and their products and they over pitch themselves and their products. But his key to being a successful pitch person, one of the most in history and writing the most material on it, is that you have to almost immediately flip it back to them, that they're pitching to you, that they see you're the gift, that they realize you're special and they have to have you and they need to step up, that you can go someplace else and get that another job that's better that you go someplace else and get more funding from someplace else. You have to be the gift. The best way to do that is by controlling the way that people perceive you. Best way to do that, science says, is by sound.

Wow, this is groundbreaking. Now I'm assuming some number of people listening are going to read your book or do your programs or something, or just go to YouTube and learn something. But what I want to know is low hanging fruit. So what is the biggest mistake that men make and what is the biggest mistake that women. Women make or is it the same for both?

No, the biggest mistake women make is when they go into A corporate situation. And there's a lot of men, they try to make their voice sound more.

Masculine and in the end, like the lady from Theranos.

Well, just like, like almost every woman that moves into a. A male dominated business situation and they don't know whether they should sound more feminine or try to sound more masculine. So they get lost in between masculine and feminine. So the biggest mistake that women make is sounding like a guy trying to sing. Look, Trying to speak lower and edgier and sound more like a dude. But the problem is, is that the guys are never going to be able to disconnect. There's a disconnect. If I'm looking at a woman and she sounds like a man, I'm thinking there's something inauthentic about that person because.

They look like a woman and they have a feminine energy because women do. And. Okay, I got it. So your brain, before you can think about that, is going to create the sense of like something's out of harmony.

Yeah. So I teach women how to have this full range of down low when they're closing the deal, but up higher in plenty of wonderful parts of what the feminine voice sounds like when they want to sound beautiful and kind and sweet and loving and still powerful.

So it's full range for women. Okay.

Full range. That's the biggest mistake that women make. Trying to sound like guys when they're talking to guys. They shouldn't do that. Okay. The biggest mistake guys make is they just try to go volume and showcase that they're like mansplaining, that they just raise their volume, thinking that if they're louder than anyone else, that no one else is going to butt in, that no one else is going to dissent, that everyone's going to follow them if they have the loudest voice. So men are the biggest blunderers of how to use volume. And women are trying to lower their voices to talk to men. This is really interesting. It's worth a minute.

Yeah.

When we're little boys and little girls before puberty, our voices are exactly the same. Exactly same notes. We're hitting exactly the same notes. We're making the same vibrations, same we sound. So when. When Billy brings Sally home and says, this is my best friend Sally, then Billy's mom says, hi. And there's no gender difference. They're not thinking gender differences because they make the same sounds. So when a little boy talks to a little girl, the sounds, the vibrations, the physical connection actually feels like they're talking to the same person. So if I Make the same sounds. You feel like we're connected. Now puberty happens, and at that point, the, The. The vocal cords and the larynx for a man continue to grow, and the Adam's apple continue to grow at the same rate. That's why a man's Adam's apple sticks out farther. And a woman's Adam's apple and larynx and chords, they slow down the size of the growth slower than a man's. So a man's voice drops an octave. All of a sudden, the guy's talking down here like this chest hair. But the women are. The women are still up here. So that at that moment, I believe that when a man is speaking to a woman, they're speaking completely different tones, different frequencies, different vibrations. And none of this is, is. Is a. Is silly. This is all scientific. And that actually separates them. And then most men stay down here and never are great at talking to women because they never share any of the same frequencies. And most women stay up here and they're never really good talking to men. I've uncovered this area in between called overlapping frequencies. And it's funny that I'm the only person that's ever done this, but I realized that there's a range where men and women come back together. And so I teach all of my speakers, men and women, how to go from all the way up and down the range and to learn about that special part of overlapping frequencies.

I haven't had that lesson yet, by the way, so you've been holding out on me.

I haven't been. I've been creating it. Because the exercises that I've been giving you move into that range. I just didn't tell you how I was going to use them yet. I've already been training your instrument. So I show men and women how to operate in that overlapping frequency. Here's what happens. You can talk to anyone of any age and any gender because you can make sounds that they feel are similar to the sounds that they make. And you cannot believe how much connective tissue that actually creates. It's unbelievable.

Pretend that I'm a woman here. Whatever my age is, you know, I don't know, woman like me. Talk to me like that. What would be different?

Okay, so a woman doesn't. Women can't get down here low where I can. So when a woman. When a woman hears a man speak like this, they. She feels very far away from that. Okay, then. And she might think, well, that's sexy, but only in a manly way, because no, women are really talked down here like this. So that feels too far away from where. Where she. She speaks. So then I bring the man. That's that part of the range. That lower part of the range is called chest voice.

Okay.

Okay, then, then. So I bring the man. I don't want to bring the man up here to head voice, because if the man was up here, he'd sound freakishly silly. So the woman would say, well, that. That the guy who talks like that, the way Michael Jackson spoke, that wasn't normal. So I can't bring him up there, can I? That's called head voice.

Okay.

But there's an area called middle voice which lives in between, where I can go right around here. Right around. That's amazing. That's incredible. And in this range right around here that the vocal exercises already build for you, that I've already built for you, and you just didn't know it yet, that range in middle allows the woman to feel the same sounds that she makes. And when she speaks, you're going to have the same notes. So for a man, it's right around here. Does that make sense?

Makes great sense. Okay, I think I get that.

So let me just say they absolutely can go to my website, rogerlove.com, but I brought a special gift today. Okay. Oh, cool.

We didn't plan this either. What is it?

I love to bring gifts. I not only love to bring gifts, at gift giving, I like to be the person who brings the gift that everyone wants. So the fact is, I came today because, of course, I wanted to help people use their voices to achieve their next level of success, both personally and professionally. And if they want to speak or sing or this interview has somehow inspired them to do both, because I'm telling you, you can do both. Here's what I'm offering. There's a $50 gift certificate with your name on it@RogerLove.com Dave. Can't be any easier than that. RogerLove.com Dave, you just go there and claim the gift certificate and use it. Once you have it in your hands, use it to create the. And pick the perfect program for you. You can pick a program and get $50 off speaking. You can pick a program that gets $50 off singing. You can pick a program that has both. Because if you're like you, Dave, a learner, and you're always growing and exploring new things, I don't want you to have to choose. So claim the $50 gift certificate. It's my gift. Go to RogerLove.com, dave. And pick singing, speaking, or both and start to realize how simple it is to change your voice and literally change your life. Even though that sounds cliche, the truth is you're going to be saying it back to me in a week. Oh, my gosh. I actually did it. And Roger Love changed my life.

Yeah.

Who knew?

There's a. There's a real difference there. And thanks for offering listeners 50 bucks off. That's. That's kind of you. And if you're listening to this, we don't have a preset of deal or anything like that. I just. I think if you pay attention to your voice now that you are communicating with your voice and much less visual presence than you had before because we're on webcams with bad lighting and all that stuff, it's probably one of the most important, highest ROI things you can do to show up or at least change how you're perceived as showing up. Although actually you feel like you're showing up differently as well. So consider that in your whole set of things you're doing to improve yourself or be stronger or just, hey, tread water, wherever you are right now, communicating better is worth it. And I wish I had known this stuff a long time ago. It would have been really useful. But I'm happy that I know it now and Roger has taught it to me. So I wanted to share it with you. Roger, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for your gift. It was rogerlove.com Dave.

Yep.

Have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to this episode, and I will see you on the next one. I'm committed to finding cool stuff to share with you. Cool people, new technologies, new techniques, and whatever else I can find that I think is worth your time. You should always get more out of the hour or so you spend with me than you put into it. And that is my bar for you. And if you're not getting it, tell me and I'll fix it.