That's a great pleasure, thank you for inviting me.

I live in a place called Orkney. If anybody wants to Google it, you can see how beautiful it is. It's an archipelago of islands off the north coast of Scotland. About 20 miles off shore and cliffs, seabirds, wind waves, gorgeous scenery, a lot of peace and quiet and a very mild climate, surprisingly. It's a beautiful place to live.

Not really. That's off the west coast of Scotland. They're quite a long way south of us and a long way west. We are off the north coast. If you go north of Scotland, you get to Orkney first, and then after that you get to Shetland. Then it's the wilds of the North Atlantic and the Faroe Islands and the Arctic.

We are pretty good. We haven't had a great deal of the virus up here because we're offshore and we're kind of cut off for a great deal of the time. Very low population density and good resources. We've been good up here and it's not a bad place to be locked down in. I'm very grateful for the fact that we've got some open space around us. We've survived pretty well in terms of wellbeing and mental health as well. I know so many people are being challenged with that over the last nine months. It's been so tough for so many.

From a very early age really, because I've been a musician since I was very young and that's the start of it. I think musicians listen to the world in a slightly different way to non-musicians. If you're playing in a band or in an orchestra, you develop a multi-track, very attentive listening. If you don't do that, you're not a very good player. So, you need to be listening to all the other instruments or players at the same time in a very attentive and intense way. So, you develop this capability. I did see some research a few years back that said that there's a part of the brain which is more developed in musicians than in non-musicians. Probably that's got a lot to do with listening in that way. I took that with me. I was still playing. I still do play from time to time. But I took that with me all the way through my career. I kind of have a double life. Running a marketing company and big magazine publishing company that I launched and then that grew and producing customer magazines for wonderful brands like Apple and Orange and so forth around the world. At the same time, playing music and listening.

When I sold the magazine business, I wanted to do something that united the two halves of me. The listening half, which was aware that the world didn't sound very good. I had read the wonderful book, The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World by Murray Schafer. That's a seminal piece of work. If anybody has never read this, I do recommend it. It's a brilliant book, and it's about the way that the world is getting noisier and noisier. It's absolutely true. I'd read that and I was thinking, I want to do something that's about making the world sound better. So, I founded The Sound Agency, and the thesis was most sound is made by organizations and most of it is not particularly pleasant because they're not thinking about it. It's not designed. It's the exhaust gas of what's going on in the world. It's just noise, a lot of it.

They spend huge amounts of money on visual branding and almost nothing answering the question, how do we sound? They don't design that. Well, they didn't back then. That has changed a great deal now. 17 years later, The Sound Agency is still going strong, and we have helped a lot of organizations. If not Dirigo, it's become normal to think about your brand in all the dimensions, in all the senses, because we experience the world in five senses, not one. Sound is very powerful. That's when I really got deep diving into this stuff when I did the research at the beginning of The Sound Agency. The question was, these organizations are making all this noise, not designing sound. Does it matter? Does it have any effect? On researching it, I assembled a model with four effects of sound. I've had no reason to change it in all these 17 years, really. I still believe those are the four powerful ways in which sound affects us. That's a long-winded answer to your question of how I got into this. But that's the way it happened.

The outcomes are three things. The outcomes are your happiness, your effectiveness and your well-being profoundly affected by your relationship with sound. Unfortunately, most of the time for most people, unconscious relationship with sound. We hear, we listen automatically. Most people don't realize that listening is a skill that you can develop, so is speaking. We have this unconscious relationship, and it has a huge effect on us in all sorts of spaces, largely indoors.

I don't know if anybody watching this would like to guess the amount of our lives that we spend indoor as a percentage as opposed to outdoor. Well, it's 93% indoors on average in the western world. 6% of that is in the car. The other 87% is in buildings. We spend a vast amount of our time inside buildings, which are designed by architects who really don't think about how they sound. A huge number of these environments are simply not fit for purpose. They don't do a very good job. They are noisy. They reflect noise back into the room. You can think of restaurants, noise in hospitals are 12 times the recommended maximum. Noise in offices, the number one complaint, and has been for a very long time, especially as we open planned the entire world. It's getting worse and worse. Noise in schools where many people simply can't hear their education, which is a tragedy, if you ask me. Noise everywhere, noise in our homes. There's 8 million people in Europe who are having their sleep disrupted night after night by traffic noise. That's way above the World Health Organization recommended maximum. All around us, this noise exists because we have designed an environment without thinking about it at all. Yet, there are these four powerful ways in which sound affects you, me and every person listening to this, every person on the planet and we need to be paying attention to that.

The mechanisms are; first of all, physiologically. Sound changes your heart rate, your breathing, your hormone secretions, even your brainwaves. A sudden noise induces a little shot of cortisol. That's your fight or flight hormone. Any sudden sound will do that. It's genetic. It's hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It's why there isn't a vertebrate on the planet with no ears. Plenty with no eyes. Hearing is your primary warning sense. You can hear behind you. You can't see behind you.

All animals listen carefully for danger, for opportunity, to be connected to their environment. You can't see everything, but you are hearing all the time. Equally, if you imagine gentle surf waves on a beach, very similar to the breathing of a sleeping human that will slow your heart rate down and relax you. Very good sound if you want to sleep. If anybody listening to this has problems sleeping, insomnia, put on gentle surf. It's a good one for lulling you off to sleep. Physiologically sound changes our blood chemistry, profoundly our brain chemistry and our whole physiology. If I drop you in a nightclub with pounding dance music at 140 beats per minute, your heart rate will go up. If I play you fast music in a shopping mall, you'll walk faster. Incidentally, shops and restaurants playing you fast music are shooting themselves in the foot because you leave faster as well and you spend less money unless of course, it's very appropriate for that particular shop, in which case you might like it and stay longer. These things are never simple. That's physiologically.

Secondly, we have psychologically. Our moods, our feelings. You only have to think about music to realize how true that is. Whatever your favorite kind of music is, whether it's bebop, jazz or a pop song or a raga, whatever it might be, it will have an emotional effect on you. Music has huge emotional impact on us. It's not the only sound that does, though. Birdsong has been researched now many times over and proven to be reassuring. Because we know, again, after a very long evolution, the birds have been here much longer than we have. Millions of years, not hundreds of thousands. We know that when the birds are happily singing around us, normally things are OK. There's that association. Also, when the birds sing, it's time to be awake. Anybody who's been to an all-night party knows that awful moment when the birds start singing outside then you think I shouldn't be here. Nature's alarm clock, a mind alert, body relaxed, a very good sound to work to. The one which we deploy quite often in these biophilic soundscapes. That's the second way.

The third way is cognitive. How well do you think is affected by the sound around you? Now, the most distracting sounds of all are the human voice and alarms. Those really are extremely distracting. A ringing phone will distract you, a sudden or intermittent sound, anything that's not uniform, you can habituate to a hum. But if there's a door that bangs every minute or two near you, it drives you completely bonkers, doesn't it? You end up wanting to kill the next person who comes through that door, which keeps banging. So unpredictable sounds, sound that's not constant is distracting. The human voice, most of all, though, we're programmed to decode language. Even if you can't understand the language, the voice itself is distracting. But obviously, if it's speaking a language you can decode, then your brain will do that. We have limited audio bandwidth. I've calculated roughly 1.6 human voices. There are very few people who can understand two people talking at the same time. Which means, if you want to listen to the little voice in your head that you need to listen to when you're writing or doing figure work, any kind of solo work and there's somebody behind you talking about their great night out. They're taking out one of your 1.6. That reduces your ability to think and we're all familiar with this, "Will you shut up? I'm trying to work here." You know that feeling. Your productivity can be reduced by 2/3 in that kind of scenario.

That's why open plan offices are so devastating for people who want to concentrate, which is a very important part of working. They might work well for collaboration, although the jury's out on that. There is recent research showing that people in open plan offices are more likely to email each other than speak because we don't like being overheard. There's a kind of privacy or privacy issue there as well. That's cognitive, it's incredibly damaging.

By the way, it's nice to take a little detour here. Music, of course, is a beautiful sound. I'm a musician. I love music, but I can't work to it. This is a personal thing, and everybody is different. There may be people out there who can work through loud death metal. I certainly couldn't. But it is down to how you feel. Most of the time, what's true to say is that music, unless it's very repetitive or very slow, something like trance music or ambient music, something really that doesn't move much and takes no attention, then music is distracting. The more intense it is, the more vocal, the more changes, the more events there are, the more distracting it is. You may enjoy working more with music on. You may work for longer. You may work at all with music on as opposed to not. It might be more productive in the long run that way. But you're not more productive per minute. You're being distracted because the job of music is to be listened to. Most music is made with that intention and sound intention in sound is very important.

The last one, the last of the four is our behavioral which changes according to the sound around. Some sounds are pleasant, and we tend to gravitate to them. Other sounds unpleasant, we move away from them if we can. If we can't, then stress is the result. Then again, that's back to the physiological where we get cortisol and noradrenaline stress hormones in noisier or unpleasant sounds. The research shows that, for example, our driving style is affected by the music we're playing in the car. Aggressive, fast paced music causes people to drive closer to the car in front, overtake more often, drive faster. There are all sorts of impacts on our behavior and plenty of research now, particularly focusing on music and its impact on people in commercial settings.

I'll give you one example of that, which is the one I really love. It was a test done by some academics in a supermarket, and they had two identical displays of wine. One was German wine. One was French wine. Nothing between them visually at all. All they did was to alternate the music. On day one, German music. On day two, French music, keep going like that for weeks and weeks. What happened? Well, on average, on the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by 5 bottles to 1, which may not be surprising. It sells more in the world on average. But on the German music days, on average, German wine outsold French wine by 2 bottles to 1. Now, that is a massive change in behavior. When interviewed, the people who had been subject to this did not have any recollection of the music, they hadn't even noticed it. It's not conscious. It's not logical. This is simply an unconscious behavioral response to a sound condition.

Now, if anybody listening to this or watching this is running a business, you need to be thinking about what sound you're making and the effect it's having on people's behavior. This is profound.

I have a very good friend called Bernie Krause. He's the world's leading nature sound recordist, former famous musician going way back to the 60s. Bernie has been recording nature sound all over the world for decades. Sadly, he records how difficult it is now to get five minutes of nature sound recording without human sound in there. This is quite an interesting way of categorizing sound. He divides sound into three classes. There's geophony, the sound of the planet. That's earthquakes, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, sea, those kinds of sounds.

Then you have biophony, which is the sound of animals. He calls it the great animal orchestra, where everything has a place, everything knows its frequency level, its frequency of singing or chirping or whatever it may be. Indeed, he wrote a book to that effect and a composer called Richard Blackford created a symphony called the Great Animal Orchestra, which uses Bernie's sound recordings and the real orchestra. It's a wonderful piece. Do have a listen.

The third class of sound, of course, anthrophony. Us. Most of it not very nice. The sound of engines, lots and lots of tire noise these days, aeroplanes, transport, this is very noisy generally, and there's only a tiny proportion of the world's surface now, which is not overflowing. You can be in the middle of Greenland, miles from the nearest person, and every two or three minutes a jet will go over the top. It's very difficult to get what you had there, which is real perfect silence for extended periods with just biophony and geophony. That's a rare event these days. A wonderful thing.

Thank you. Well, that's exactly what Moodsonic is doing. That's what we've launched. It occurred to us we've been working in retail sound for years and years. Sound and space are using innovative techniques like generative soundscapes, which are made by a computer, live in real time. It's not a recording. It's based on algorithms. Like birds in the forests tend to sing at once and fall silent, there is a probability distribution. There's a random stochastic distribution of the sound, and that's what we can emulate with us with our system.

Then we thought the place where this is needed more than anywhere else is the workspace. Because of this open planning of the world and because noise is such a serious problem everywhere, people are putting in a sound masking systems or noise masking systems, which are not very nice. It's filtered brown noise, filtered pink noise. It just sounds like coming from lots of loudspeakers above you. Although it does a job, it will stop you from hearing conversations 10 meters away or whatever it may be. It has an effect, and the research is starting to show now it has an effect. It stresses people. It's not surprising because it's not a very nice sound.

Well, instead of that, we are deploying a beautiful nature sound, biophilic sound, we call it. It's wind, water, birds, and other things which there's just an infinite variety to choose from. We've got installations in Australia using a tour around a beautiful island there called Rottnest Island with all the sounds of the local fauna, birds and so forth. It's wonderful to give people the option to move from this forest to this beach and so forth. It is proven to make people feel better. We've got 90% plus success and approval ratings in these installations. People feel healthier and people feel more productive, and they can concentrate better because we also mask unwanted conversation.

I am so excited about the future. That's going to change the lives of millions of people who are blighted by this constant noise. We're aiming to change that. It's all with nature sound. As you say, it's manna from heaven. it's the kind of stuff that our souls cry out for. So many times, I've been in New York, for example, you look up at the don't walk sign in New York City, there's a little bird sitting on top of it, singing its heart out. You can't hear it. It can't hear itself. It's mate or neighbors can't hear it, whether it's doing territory or looking for a mate. No chance. Because the traffic noise is so loud, and it breaks my heart. That's what we're trying to change.

I hope so. I mean, it's ironic because in many ways, technology is the enemy of listening. Nobody in the world can stop technology. We can't set it back. There's nobody who can say, "Well, let's just pause for five years and think about this." It's not going to happen. We have this stuff coming out all the time. We get into this way of being, which is FOMO, fear of missing out. It's always having to have several things going. How many people listening to this have in the last 24 hours truly listened to another human being? That is to say, put everything down. Look at that person and give them 100 percent undivided attention while they're speaking to you. It's rare. It's a rare gift now to give that to somebody, because 9/10, we're sort of texting away, typing, emailing, or having two conversations at the same time or watching something on a screen as we're listening, doing something else. Listening gets marginalized. That is a great shame because as you said, and it is true that this is at the core of being truly conscious.

We've designed this world faster with more inputs and a sort of numbing. Unfortunately, it makes us addicted to intensity, to speed and pace, to constant change. Being still and being fully present are becoming extremely difficult things to achieve in the modern world. Listening is a practice which can bring you back there. Just listening to another human being. There's the awful paradigm of a whole family sitting around a dinner table, everybody on a device not talking to each other at all. The other things that we do is, lying in bed doing email rather than being with your loved one.

These kinds of things creep up on us insidiously and they make us less and less present. There are huge organizations clamoring for attention, it is the currency they want. They want social media, they want attention. They want you there all the time, not listening to somebody in the real world. I think it's important to become conscious of these forces and the fact that we don't listen very well. Hearing is a capability. We can all do that. Listening is a skill and it's a skill that we can practice, become good at as long as we realize it's a skill.

As you rightly said some time ago in this conversation, if you're conscious of something, you have the opportunity to change it. But if you're unconscious of it, it's just going to carry on. My whole clarion call is for the whole world to get conscious about listening, because so much would follow naturally out of that design, the environments we live in, the way we treat each other, understanding apart from anything else, because conscious listening always creates understanding. We have never needed that more than we do now in the world.

I think it's hard to be prescriptive here. You have to be very aware this is personal, and people do differ a great deal. I'm not going to sit here and say to everybody the right sound for X is Y, because it's down to you as an individual. Where it gets more complicated is when you have large groups of people in one place, because there you have to go for sounds which are more generally acceptable. That's where we come to buy biophilic sound. Now, it may well be for you that some birds sound would really help you at work at home. Working from home, we have the complete ability to design the sound around us. You can have silence. Some people don't like silence. I love it. Some people hate it. You could have birdsong playing. You could have waves. You could have rainfall and thunder in the distance. Some people love that. Or you could have music if that works for you. You have to play with things and experiment and see what fits your particular listening profile, your spirit.

I wouldn't make any general rules. What I would say as an absolute rule is please be conscious about it. Experiment with it to try and find the right sound. There's a great exercise you can do in your home for example, I call it savoring, which is to walk into every room in your home. Close your eyes and listen and say, is this the best sound I could have for the activity I want to do in this room. If it's sleeping, for example, that buzzing thing that's been there for years and I've never noticed it before. Close your eyes, remove the visual impact and you can listen more acutely. When I used to travel, I'm the person who goes into hotels, out into the corridor and unplugs the ice machine, which makes an irritating noise all the time. I can't sleep with that going on. I do things like that, I'm afraid. I complain about air conditioning and vibration and things like that. I'm always listening in a room.

Even if you aren't listening and you don't notice these things, you might say, "Oh, he's listening too much." You're just not conscious of it. It has an impact on you. My plea is to become conscious of that impact, and then you can start to take responsibility for the sound you're consuming. You can change the context around you. That's important.

The fundamental model underpinning all of my work on communication skills is that speaking and listening are in a circular relationship. The way I speak affects the way you listen. The way you listen affects the way I speak. The way I speak affects the way you speak, the way you listen affects the way I listen, so on and so forth. It's dynamic, organic. It's circular all the time. Most people think it's a straight line. I speak. You listen. It's not as simple as that. The circle is going on all the time inside of a context. These days, this context that we're in right now is a very familiar one. It's becoming the norm. Once upon a time, we would have been face to face having a chat. Now, not so much.

We must get good at these tools. We must start understanding how to do this, how to relate to somebody when you're not physically with them. I don't think the world is ever going to go back quite to where it was. We've made to see change. This is a permanent thing. It's saving vast amounts of carbon, money and time, which is great. On the other hand, we lose some stuff too.

Yes. A couple of things just before we get into how to become a better listener overall, I would recommend to everybody, first, turning off alerts wherever you can if they're not really crucial to you. All apps, they will say allow notifications. That's death. If you have something popping up every few seconds telling you that there's a news flash of something not really having happened, which is not really very interesting, but you've got to go and check it out. Notifications are death to conscious presence. Turn as many off as you can.

Secondly, if you're an email user, which almost everybody is these days, batch the emails up. Do it a couple of times a day. Never have the email alert sound on because that'll ping every minute or two and you'll have to go off and your life will be run by email. I think there are millions of people, unfortunately, in the world whose job description is two words. Answer email. Because that's what we do all day and quite often we let that thing take over and control us.

My recommendation with email is don't look at it. Twice a day, go and do it for half an hour or an hour, depending on what you need to process. That's enough. Then you get the rest of the time, the rest of your life back away from it. That's a couple of thoughts on technology. Try spending a bit of time away from your phone. I mean, it is difficult these days. You kind of feel like somebody has just cut your leg off when you leave your phone behind, and you go out. "My God, somebody might be calling me, somebody might be texting me. I might miss something." Well, I grew up in a world where mobile phones didn't exist, and people sent letters to each other. It was a much slower pace of life and still the world turned, everything got done. It's amazing.

I think it's important to control technology. There's a really good book by Eyal called Indistractable. I highly recommend it. Very good, it's about not letting the world distract you and being more present. That's something about technology. About listening, in my TED Talk, I recommended five different practices, very simple things which can help to improve your conscious listening. I've mentioned one of them already, which is savoring sound. Closing your eyes, becoming more conscious of the sound around you.

There's another similar exercise called the mixer, where in a multisensorial environment, like a cafe, for example, if we have to go back into these places or an office, you can start to unpick how many individual sounds am I listening to as opposed to it's just a mush. That's a really good way of becoming more sensitive to the sound around you.

There's a very important exercise, which something that people have told me has been helpful to them. RASA, which I believe is the Sanskrit word for juice. In this context, it's a little acronym. It stands for Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask. Receive means paying attention. That means looking at the person who's speaking as opposed to doing something else at the same time or speech writing, I call it, writing my next brilliant bit of monologue while you're babbling away in front of me and I'm not paying attention, which is just dismissive and rude and tends to upset people. Pay attention. That is, your body facing the person, your eyes looking at the person and not your feet pointing out at the door. There are subtle signs to let me out of here. Just pay attention to the whole thing. Leaning forward slightly shows attention, leaning back tends to show that I'm not very engaged.

It's an interesting thing to reflect on actually with this technology that when we're in a conversation like video conferencing, it is much ruder to be doing something else. If we were face to face, then you'd be more tolerant because I'm there and you can always whack me over the head if you want to. But if I start looking around or picking up a piece of paper or something and you say, "Are you listening?" "Yeah, you know, I am listening to you." There's a wider range of tolerance there. Whereas, if you're speaking to me online and I'm just sitting doing something else, it's pretty clear that I'm not paying attention. That would be considered rude.

I think there is a higher degree of attentiveness, one to one. Not so much, if you've got 50 people's faces on the screen in front of you, because you really can't see very much about all of them. Always pay attention.

A is appreciate. That's the little noises that we make or gestures that we make to show we're still there. Bobs of the head, raises of the eyebrows, smiles, nods. Mmm, Oh, really? Wow! OK. That kind of stuff, which just makes conversation flow.

The S is summarize. The words "so" which is hugely abused now. It's a synonym for, therefore. There's a logical flow, whereas huge number of people now start every sentence with the words So for unknown reasons. I've even seen TED Talks where the person walks on stage and goes So. It's a word that I think needs to be reclaimed because it's very powerful. You can summarize in a conversation. So, what I just heard you say is dot, dot, dot. It's reflective listening or, "So, what we've agreed, if I'm right, is this? Now we can move on to that." If you don't have a 'So' person in the meeting, it can be a very long meeting going round around. What is it they say about meetings, places where you take minutes and waste hours. They can be like that without a 'So' person.

Then, the A is ask. Ask open ended questions. Why, what, when, which, where, who? Those kinds of questions which do not permit the answer, yes or no, which engage people. Or, "Tell me more about. That's fascinating. Tell me more." That's a great way to engage people for anybody who feels they don't get good at conversation, where they struggle to be engaged, showing that interest in somebody. If you really listen to somebody, you draw them out, they are much more likely to listen to you. You're much more likely to understand them and therefore to be able to speak appropriately and powerfully to them.

That's RASA. That's a good exercise for conscious listening in conversation, which is one of the most important places to be listening.

Yes, I mentioned The Soundscape: The Tuning of The World by Murray Schafer.

Well, if it's about communication, then How to be Heard is the book that focuses on speaking and listening skills and our personal relationship to sound.

If it's about using sound in every aspect or any aspect of business, then my first book is Sound Business, which is all about that. It's not technical. It's designed for business managers who are curious about sound. But it goes a lot deeper into what sound actually is and some of the ways you describe it, to measure it and so forth, as well as lots of ways you can use sound in business to your advantage.

I travelled the world after the TED talks. I started in 2009, I did 5 in a row at TED, which is amazing. The last one went completely ballistic. As you said at the beginning, I think together they've been seen by more than 100 million people. Because I was zooming in on personal relationship with sound, the third one was about listening. The fifth one was about speaking. I have to say, looking back on it, I think it was very brave because if you're going to stand on the TED stage and speak about powerful speaking, you better be speaking powerfully, hadn't you? That was kind of leading with my chin, definitely putting my head above the parapet. But it went well. I've done four. So I think I was getting quite good at doing it by then. Then I got requests and I started a parallel life to my life with The Sound Agency, which I still run. But I had another life which was traveling around the world speaking to organizations and at conferences about the importance of listening, the skill of listening and how to speak powerfully.

I was on planes a huge amount. Two years ago, I had a deep vein thrombosis in my left leg, which traveled up the leg and became a pulmonary embolism, which is a very dangerous thing to have. Not nice either. It's a blood clot in the lung. The clot actually passed through my heart, which is how people die of this. Then, I was ill for some time and understandably, that made me rather less cheerful about the prospect of getting on aeroplanes every five minutes. Then Covid happened as well, which has really knocked it on the head. In a way, I'm grateful for the P.E. because that was two years ago. As a result of that, I spent a lot of last year putting together the video course, which was a way of getting the work out to as many people as possible, really in the world without having to be on aeroplanes all the time.

I love Orkney. I love living here, and I'm quite keen to stay here now. I put the course together with my wonderful fiancé, Jane, who is a 4 time world champion martial artist and contributed a brilliant chapter on being fit to speak on wellness, breathing, stretching and all those really important things which I've learned so much about now. We created this 7.5-hour course. My website is www.juliantreasure.com. I do invite people to take a look at it. it's everything I know about speaking and listening skills. There are 43 downloadable exercises, 67 videos. It's comprehensive, I have to say.

Totally. I mean, if you look at all of the words for breath, prana, chi. These words also mean life in most languages. Breath and life are very closely associated. Your voice is just breath. It's your breath, externalized. It's the sound of you. Only you can make the sound of your voice. It is unique. There may be people with similar voices, but we are very sensitive to words. It's how we tell the difference between a flute and the trumpet playing the same note. Sound is complex. It has harmonics. Harmonics are very important, and your voice is unique. That is why we can use voice print technology to identify people. Nobody else has quite got the harmonics that you have.

It is amazing that you remembered those harmonics from 25 years on. We do remember. Sound like scent goes very deep, very fast. It goes to the very oldest part of the brain immediately and then it can reawaken, circuits that perhaps haven't been active for a long time. If somebody played your recording of your grandmother's voice, for example, or a ticking clock from a house used, these things can really bring back experiences to us. It's a very emotional, connected sound like that.

Also, I'd like to say your listening is unique. Yes, the voice is the instrument we all play, and most people don't learn how to play it at all. We're surrounded by people thumping away on pianos, having had not a single lesson in a very unmusical way, unfortunately. I do urge anybody for whom their voice is an important part of their life, go get some professional coaching. If you sell, if you want to persuade people, lead people or speak to large numbers of people or even just be powerful in your family, your voice is the biggest tool you've got. Go and get some coaching work with a drama coach, singing coach, whatever it might be, find somebody local and work with them and liberate your voice to get the most out of it. You deserve it.

Your listening is also unique. You listen through a set of filters and those filters your life. It's the values, attitudes, beliefs that you've accreted your intentions and expectations right now, your emotions right now. Also, the language you learn to speak, or the languages you speak, they all fashion the way you listen. That's unique.

We've got two unique things going on. I'm speaking with a unique voice. You're listening with a unique listening. This will never happen again because, the listening also changes over time. It's very important to be very present to all of that. The biggest mistake I see people make is thinking everybody listens like I do. They don't. That is a powerful and transformative revelation. When you get that, you can start to say, "Ah, what listening am I speaking to right now? Where does this person come from? Let me find out more about it." It tends to stimulate curiosity, which is a very big part of effective listening. It also allows you to speak in a way which is going to hit the bull's eye, not miss the target altogether. Many people do a great deal of the time by thinking, "I want to speak in the way I would like to receive it." That doesn't always work.

Totally. When you look around at what's happening in politics right now, never has it been more needed. Listening creates understanding. If you live in a democracy, listening underpins that, because we must have civilized disagreement. If there's more of you than of me, I may disagree with you, but I live by your rules. If we get onto this slippery slope of caricature and demonization and depersonalization, the bottom of that slope is if you disagree with me, I'll kill you. That's not the world I want to live in. I would love to move back up that and to have everybody listening. I think it's very important that we resist as much as possible in our personal lives. We control or become conscious of the lure of technology, because if we get numbed out and lose consciousness, it is so easy then to get into being right, making people wrong, judging, condemning. It's a very tempting way to be, as a human being, highly judgmental and very distracted. And let's not go there, guys. Let's become more present, more understanding, more listening. That is a happier world. That's the one I'm trying to help people to create. So, yes. It is my calling.

Definitely. I bet everybody is WFH. After you stop watching this, go and listen to somebody in your family. Put everything down. Look at them and listen. They'll probably say something like, "What are you doing?" Because they're not used to it. It's a great gift. Try it out. It does work.

Yes, www.juliantreasure.com. Do come by and there is free stuff on there that you can pick up. There is a lot about speaking skills as well. If you're interested in the biophilic sound, www.moodsonic.com. That's also fascinating.