Thank you Hitendra. It's wonderful to be back and to talk to you again. I'm very excited.

Great questions. The answer to the first is I think some people are auditory primarily, and I am one of those. We have five senses. Some people are much more visual. Some people are tactile. My ears are definitely my frontier to the world, my main connection to the world. More than that, and possibly because of that, I became a musician very young. My mother was quite enlightened. I think when I was six, seven, eight years old, she would bring home and play me records like "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" or "Carnival of the Animals", or "Peter and the Wolf", the great classics which were written for children. I remember listening to those avidly. And then of course, my tastes changed as I became cool or tried to. I listened to a lot of very different music, but I spent hours and hours in a darkened room with headphones on, really listening to music. The albums I bought became great friends, part of my family, almost.

It's a different way that people relate to music now. I saw an interview recently with the great producer and musician Steven Wilson. He was saying that the young people he meets now, they listen to a track, they don't even care very much who it was by. It's just a song. The idea of listening to an album, almost religiously turning the record over and then listening to it, listening to the other side, reading the back of the LP, understanding who was on it and what else they were on and how they were on, people don't do that so much anymore. It's just a tune. I think that's a bit sad.

There's more written music released in a single day now than was released in a year back then, so it's very hard to keep up. Nevertheless, that was my grounding. And then I became a musician. I learned to play the drums and played in bands and did that professionally for a while and then got very broke, as most people do, doing that, unless you're very lucky. But if you're a musician, you also have to develop a form of listening, which is multi-track and very attentive, because if you're not listening to all the other players in the band, the group, the orchestra, whatever it is, you're not going to play very well. So there's this attentive multi-track listening. At the same time, you're doing something very complicated. Normally you're moving your fingers, your arms, your legs, whatever it might be, in quite complicated ways. And of course, if you're reading music at the same time, you're reading a code. So it's not surprising that musicians, the research now shows, have bigger brains than non-musicians. Particularly the corpus callosum, the bit of the brain that connects the two hemispheres because you're using them both doing that.

My advice to anybody listening to this is take up an instrument if you haven't already. It's very good for your brain. It has lots of very good benefits for you in your life in terms of processing, problem solving, being able to think creatively fast and so forth. This is all research based now, as well as it being a very good social thing. If you're in a group of band and orchestra. It may be just a local choir, a drum circle, a chant group, whatever it might be. It's all very good for you.

Sound has been my major interface with the world since then and all the way through my career in first magazine publishing, then running my own business, I realized that most brands, most companies weren't listening at all because they weren't concerned with sound. They think about how they look, not how they sound. And that's still true of most companies. That's when I formed a sound agency 20 years ago, which actually I closed last year. I should have told you because my mission now, I've moved on from working with companies. That was great for years, but I'm now absolutely passionate about generating listening in the world for individual people. That's where it comes from. Companies aren't very good at sound because they're full of people who aren't listening. So it comes down to listening, listening, listening every time now. "Great speaking," my TedTalk, the really successful one, was about speaking. But I also believe that any great speaker has first to be a great listener. Listening to me is the foundation of everything. It places us in space. You can hear what's going on in the room around you. The acoustics tell you who's there, what's happening, how big the room is. We're always aware of the space around us, places us in time. Hermann Hesse said, "Music is time-made, aesthetically perceptible," which is a lovely way of thinking about music.

There's no such thing as a photograph in sound. Sound always has time embedded in it. I could make a pretty good argument to say that actually, the ears are the main way that we perceive the passage of time. You could be sitting with not much changing visually, but if you're listening to a talk, for example, like people are to this, not much is going to change visually, but by remembering what you've heard, you have a sense of how much time has passed. So that's important.

And finally, of course, it places us in spirit. There's no spiritual tradition I'm aware of that doesn't have somewhere at the heart of it, listening, quiet contemplation, whether it's meditation, praying, whatever it may be. So, sound, listening is absolutely fundamental, I think, to our existence. The answer to your "why now" question, we've forgotten how to do it. For 300,000 years, pretty much of the development of Homo Sapiens on this planet, listening, hearing sound was critical. It was our primary sense. It's a primary warning sense because I can hear what's behind me and I can hear in the dark. You can't see what's behind you, you can't see in the dark. Which means hearing is more important for survival than the eyes.

And yet, in just the last couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, with the democratization of reading, which wasn't really there for everybody until quite recently, and suddenly electromechanical noise, we've lost contact with that primal critical relationship, which, incidentally, was also very important because it places us in nature. We've developed with the sounds of wind, water and birds around us. Now we spend 93% of our lives indoors. More than half of humanity lives in cities. There are millions of people on this planet who simply don't experience the sounds of nature. So it's not surprising that we're now kind of divorced from it. We tend to see ourselves as separate from nature, not part of it. Which was exactly what happened when we were surrounded by those sounds. You only have to look around now at the political situation in the world to see the effects of forgetting to listen. Of losing contact with that. It's shouting, shaming. It's a conflict. It's being right, making other people wrong. Polarization. Echo chambers on the internet. All of this stuff, which is getting worse almost by the month, is about not listening.

So I would suggest that never have we needed to listen more than we do right now in the world as we're seeing societies fragment and conflict escalate. And I, for one, am quite worried about where this is going and how fast it's going in that direction. All of that really was what prompted me to leave the Sound Agency behind and focus on this one mission to generate listening in the world, and that's what this book is all about. I describe it as a plea to listen in a world that's forgotten how.

It's very interesting. First of all, hearing is the first sense we develop in the womb before we have ears. We are hearing with our entire body. We still do that now. The great percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, who many people listening to this, I'm sure would have come across plays in symphony orchestras, is a brilliant musician. She's profoundly deaf. She learned to listen with a very enlightened teacher, as her hearing was fading, who taught her to sense vibrations with all of her body. So we do that now, and in the womb, just maybe 12 weeks after conception, you're very conscious of, particularly the sound of your mother's heartbeat, of course, which is three times if you think about it, lub dub pause. So that's I think why waltz time is always usually a happy comforting time signature to be in 3/4. So there's that enormously powerful and comforting sound. Everything else is quite deadened in the womb because you're hearing in liquid. We're not very good at that, the ears aren't great at that. But you do learn to recognize your mother's voice, even your mother's language in the womb. I think part of the trauma of birth when you come out must be this transition from this muffled, comforting soundscape that you've had all of your life with the mother's heartbeat at the heart of it, and suddenly you're out in the open air with high frequency. And probably if it's in a hospital, hissing and people talking and all sorts of absolutely, unbelievably different sounds and the whole profile of sound suddenly has changed. No wonder babies cry. I would say, because that's very shocking. Sound, just in terms of being the first sense we develop, is primal.

Then, of course, babies don't see for weeks and weeks after they're born, but they're hearing. So it becomes the foundational sense in terms of how we're born and how we develop. According to a lot of things I've read, it's the last sense to go when we die. So it's there all the time. And it is a remarkable thing, the sound waves come into your head, they touch you physically, they vibrate this tiny membrane the size of your little fingernail, which decodes everything from a Beethoven's symphony to a motorbike going past, and that activates these tiny little bones, which are oscillating thousands of times a second for years and years. It's an incredible piece of engineering that is always working, even as we said, when you sleep. You respond far faster to sound than you do to visual input, 20 times faster, actually. Sound lights up a huge number of areas of your brain. It's dealt with in a kind of gestalt way by your brain. It's not one place that decodes sound.

First of all, it goes to your very oldest part of your brain, which is asking, is this a threat? So if a car backfires before you have a chance to process that in your cortex and say that's a car backfiring, I'm okay. Your body has already gone into fight or flight response. That, of course, is happening to us a huge amount in urban settings because there's a lot of unfamiliar noise or strange or threatening or loud or sudden noise going on around us and putting us into a cortisol, noradrenaline overdose, which is not good for you in the long term. That's happening a lot.

Then as you process the sound, you've got this entire enormous database of sounds, every sound you've ever heard, and your brain is comparing what you hear with what you've heard in the past and then making meaning from it. So I define listening as making meaning from sound. You select certain things to pay attention to and then you make them mean something. We all do that differently.

One of the most profound things to understand about listening is that everybody's listening is unique. It's one of the most common errors I see in the modern world. The assumption most people have that everybody listens like I do. They don't. And really, if we can understand that one thing, it changes everything, because then you suddenly realize you're not speaking to yourself the whole time. You're speaking to different people with different listenings, different upbringings, languages, cultures, values, attitudes, beliefs, intentions, expectations, emotions, all sorts of differences and that changes over time and from person to person. So what a wonderful world we'd be living in if we became sensitive to that and started speaking appropriately to each listening that we're speaking into. That's a very different way of thinking about listening and really important. Because of course, we're now in the mode of invalidating so many people, anybody we disagree with, most of the internet is full of invalidation now, criticism, blaming, judging, condemning and so forth. How much more interesting is it to validate people?

Hitendra, I don't agree with what you just said, but I totally understand why you would think that, that's a different conversation from you're wrong. That's rubbish and so forth. It's another reason why I think we need listening so much. I've gone slightly off piste because you were talking about the spirituality of listening.

Yeah, very much so. I think there's a lot that we can learn from contemplating sound, hearing, listening and being more connected in that way. For example, I think one of the reasons that we've become so ocular and this is a question a lot of people ask me, "Why is our society so ocular"? Well, we invented writing, obviously 5,000 years ago, and that's really taken over from sound. I mean, for hundreds of thousands of years, the only way humanity communicated was through sound. It was speaking and listening. It's how we learned, how we communicated, how we connected with one another. Writing has taken over from that to the point where many young people now are much more comfortable sending texts than they are having a conversation using their voice in their ears, which is a concern, I think.

Also, we have become much more divorced from the ineffable, from the invisible. Sound is invisible. And we've become much more about, "I don't believe it if I can't see it." Our society is very much about how things look. Architects design the way buildings look. They think hardly at all about how they sound, which is unfortunate because it means we end up with many spaces, schools, hospitals, offices which are not fit for purpose. They're so noisy, you can't really do what you're supposed to do in them. But the entire society has become ocular like that.

I think if you go back 100,000 years or so to when we were congregating in perhaps caves and spaces like that, they used to congregate in spots. There's a whole science of archeo-acoustics, which is quite interesting. They would congregate in spots where there was a particular resonance or reverberation because there was chanting, there were communal activities going on, and voices sound a lot better with a bit of reverb on them, any engineer will tell you that these days. Well, in those days they found the reverb by going to larger spaces which had it naturally. You'll find a lot of cave paintings are located in spaces which have got particular resonances or reverberations. So they were sensitive to these things then. And I think if you were chanting in a dark space with all that reverberation, you're dissolving the barriers between the visible, tactile, real world that we're in and the ineffable, invisible spiritual world. They were much closer to death. They lived choppy lives, of course, but they're much closer to it. They were closer to the unknown, to the spiritual than our very secular, visual, tactile world that we've created now. I think that's part of the reason we've kind of disconnected from sound.

I certainly talk about that in the book and the history of architecture and how it's affected the way we perceive sound. Of course, all of this is not helped by our education system. We teach children how to read and write. We don't teach them how to speak and listen. How crazy is this? If we taught children how to listen in the first place, how to be brilliant listeners, how much more of their education would they receive, especially if we taught them how to listen to people you disagree with? I've always loved that quote by Barack Obama when he said, "I will listen to you, especially if we disagree." That's a rarity these days. Most people are now only interested in listening to the people with whom they agree. So that's where we get these echo chambers on the internet, and we get this polarization, we get groups of ever more extreme people reinforcing each other's extreme views. "There you are. I knew I was right. Thousands of people agree with me." "Yeah, but you're not talking to the millions who don't," unfortunately.

I think there are a lot of reasons why we've become divorced from sound. We've lost our listening. That's really what this book is about. I describe it as a plea to listen in a world that's forgotten how.

Very much so. I think music has been an enormous connector in that way. It's used in all sorts of social rituals, births, deaths, funerals, weddings, whatever it may be, but also very much, as you said in the spiritual journey, whether you're talking about chant in the eastern traditions or the kind of beautiful devotional music you've just mentioned right through to worship songs, there's a huge industry now of Christian worship songs. All of it can do what you've just said. It can achieve that transcendent moment. But it doesn't have to be religious, music has been used in cultural settings all over the world. There's not a human society that's ever been discovered that hasn't generated music. To be human is to be musical. The reverse of that's not true, because there are plenty of other lovely animals that make music apart from us, from nightingales to blue whales. The book certainly talks about those. There is a whole chapter in the book about biophony, the sound of living things on our planet. We are fundamentally musical.

There was a big change that happened at some point in human history a few hundred years ago. We kind of invented the idea of musicians. Before that, everybody was a musician. And indeed, if you go to them and say, "I don't sing", they'll look at you as if you're crazy. What do you mean you don't sing? Everybody sings. But we've kind of created this divorce where there's musicians and there's an audience, and we're in the audience. I was going on about the benefits of being a musician earlier on. I mean, it is wonderful to be a musician. In primal societies, everybody was. You'd have big events where everybody would sing, dance, come together, chant, whatever it would be. It was a huge expression of our connection with each other, whether it's spiritual or simply communal. There's not a lot of that that goes on so much anymore.

I think I wrote in the book that one of the few communal sonic expressions these days is, certainly in the UK, football chants, where people come together and they do that, they chant together in thousands, and it makes a feeling of unity and identification and common purpose and so forth. There's not that much of that going on anymore. Folk music is not as big as it once was, although I'm glad to say up here in Orkney, where I live off the North coast of Scotland, it's still very strong. There's not many people up here who don't play a fiddle or a boron or something. However, I think it's another dangerous thing when we lose that connection where we're in the audience not making it. And if we are making it now, music, unfortunately, is starting to be made in a very solitary way and consumed in a very solitary way. So it's made by somebody sitting in their bedroom on a Macintosh and then consumed by somebody sitting in their bedroom wearing headphones. We've lost the social communal function of music a great deal, and I think that's very sad, too.

Well, the interesting thing about Hitendra is that they are right. Cosmologists now, when they're thinking about the very early period of the universe, the first few hundred thousand years from the moment that the singularity expanded rapidly to the cooling of the superheated plasma, there was nothing to see. Photons couldn't move. They were bundled. It was like a white fog, nothing. But what there was going on in there was sound waves. And if those sound waves hadn't existed and created inhomogeneities in the particles that were there working with dark matter, then we wouldn't have the structure of the universe that we do now. We wouldn't exist. If it had been completely homogeneous with no sound waves, nothing would exist. It was sound waves driving through that plasma which is perfectly workable medium for sound, which created, or were very largely instrumental in creating the inhomogeneities, the clumps of rather denser matter which then worked through gravity over a long period of time, and then at, I think it was 600,000 years or something like that, the photons unbundled, and we get the cosmic microwave background radiation that we can see 13.8 billion light years from us, which is the limit of our visible universe that we can see. It's a sphere around us, but it's not the whole universe of course. We don't know how big it is, might be infinite, or that lady might be right, that it's turtles all the way down. Who knows what shape it is. Nevertheless, sound was primal in creating the universe as we know it now.

All of those traditions which talk about the universe being spoken or sung into existence, they were right. And I think that's quite spooky that people actually were able to understand that in some unfathomable way, because they all say the same thing.

Well, yes, in many ways actually, Hitendra. Not with our ears so much, because we're limited by the physical equipment we've been given. We hear from 20Hz to 20kHz if we've got great hearing, in my case, 20Hz to 12kHz, because I've been hitting cymbals for a long time and I don't have the top end of my hearing anymore like many people, 1 in 4 people on our planet has got impaired hearing. And that's getting worse with a billion young people joining them, having abused their ears with headphones and putting loud sound into their ears for hours. So not with our ears, but with technology, very much so.

He is right. The universe is alive with sound. You know the old slogan from the film "Alien" that "in space no one can hear you scream." Well, that's true, we can't hear that. But that's not to say the universe isn't full of sound. It is. Sound requires what's called a mean free path to move. It needs to be able to bounce particles against each other in order to transmit through a medium. Now, in air, that's very easy, because there are an incredible number of particles in any given cubic centimeter of air. In the universe, it's not a vacuum. Everybody thinks the universe is a vacuum. No, it's a very dilute plasma. It's the same plasma that was there that had all those sound waves in it. It just expanded massively and became very dilute.

For a human voice, the sound waves are way too short in wavelength to meet particles. So you can't hear anything at our frequencies. But there are plenty of sounds out there with frequencies with wavelengths of light years. Very low frequencies that we can't hear. But they exist and we can detect them and we can pitch shift them up 40 or 50 octaves and then listen to them.

In the book, I talk about some of these sounds. I mean, there's a wonderful sound that professor Mark Whittle made of the first few hundred thousand years of the universe speeded up into about five seconds. There are sounds of black holes colliding, which we detect because these events are so unbelievably powerful and massive, they ripple the fabric of space time itself. They make what are called gravitational waves. And black holes make sound. If there's a gas cloud around, of course, then sound can travel very well through it, we would actually hear it. But even if we can't hear it, these sounds exist and space is alive with them. The cataclysmic sounds of supernovae exploding, if you had ears the size of a galaxy, you'd be able to hear this stuff. So this is kind of speaking into the quote you just read. We don't, but we can use technology to extend our hearing down into these enormously infrasonic ranges of light-year long wavelengths, and then we can start to decode the universe. Stars sing like bells. Each star has its own note. Pulsars are spinning at thousands of times a second and creating sounds that we can detect. Maybe in the radio frequencies, we have to shift those down. But there is a huge area of astronomy that I talk about in the chapter on cosmophony, the sound of the universe, where it's all about pitch shifting. It's about sonifying these vibrations that we can detect in the universe, and then we can move them into our range of hearing and hear them. So yes, that is possible. And maybe that is what that quote actually was leading to.

Well, a lot of the medicines that we've got now have been derived from ancient herbal remedies. Because we've discovered, "Oh, yes, in that leaf that people have been using for thousands of years is this chemical, we now put it in a pill and people take it." So there's been truth in the ancient wisdom in plants, certainly, and living things around us that we have distilled and now made scientific. And now it's kind of accepted.

I have a strong suspicion the same will be true of sound. There's little research on it, yet. There's thousands of years of people using sound to heal, whether it's chant, song, gongs, bells, whatever it might be. There have been people doing that for a long time. We are more than 50% water. Water is an extremely good medium for sound. Sound travels six times faster through water and a lot further, which is how whales have been able to communicate virtually across entire oceans. Well, until we deafened them with all our ships, which we have done now, sadly, that's also something I talk about in the book.

I think given that everything is vibrating right down to cells, I mean, I talk in the book about cells that are sensitive to sound. That's pretty much all of them. They make sound and they perceive sound. There are experiments people have done with sound, fostering the growth of cells or inhibiting the growth of cells. Plants respond to sound. For some reason, if you play certain frequencies, the roots of certain plants grow towards the sound. So we don't understand why, but pretty much everything responds to sound and the atoms within your cells are vibrating, the particles within the atoms are vibrating. And if you go right down to what a lot of physicists believe are the very basic elements of life, the strings which make up the particles, well, they're obviously vibrating. So you could think of yourself as an orchestra, really. One interesting definition of health would be that the orchestra is playing in harmony. That's a concept which has been around for a very long time as well.

Pythagoras, the ancient Greeks, know the idea of harmony, harmonium in the whole cosmos and the idea that music is pleasing to us because it's a kind of pale reflection of the innate harmony of the universe. Kepler was a big one on that as well. I think there seems to be something there that we haven't investigated yet in a scientific way, but I am pretty convinced that when we do start doing that, we'll discover that there's been as much truth in the ancient practices as there was in the ancient herbal practices, and that we'll be able to start using sounds to foster healing in many more ways. I mean, obviously, we use it now for things like breaking up kidney stones, looking at babies, ultrasound is commonly used for healing, physiotherapy and all of these kinds of things we're using sound for. There's a far greater possibility out there, I think, of starting to see health as harmony and illness as disharmony, discord, and teasing the body back into harmony may be a really great future for medicine. Who knows? I certainly have a suspicion that's going to be the case.

Yes. And indeed that 4-way split lasted for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was called the quadrivium and still was being taught in medieval times. It's quite interesting to see music being considered as a form of science there. The connection between mathematics and music is enormously interesting. As Pythagoras discovered, supposedly he had this thing called a mono chord, which is one string on a piece of wood, like a single guitar string. If you pluck it, it's got a note. If you stop it halfway down, exactly and pluck it, you get a note that is an octave higher. And then there are numerical relations, where if you stop it at various different points, like a 1/3 and then, 2/3 and so forth, you get consonant or harmonic notes, a fourth, a fifth, the notes that are used in creating music, virtually all classical music goes the first to the fourth, the first to the fifth, and back again in some way, shape or form. And most pop songs will do the same thing. These are very common intervals to us, and they are numerical. So there's this enormous resonance between mathematics and music, just as there is between mathematics and the cosmos.

Physicists adore the beauty of the cosmos revealing itself through simple and elegant, beautiful equations, whether it's E=MC squared or whatever. There's an interview in the book with David Hykes, the supremely talented chant master, he's a master of the Tuvan overtone chanting tradition and also has studied Tibetan undertone chanting too. I did a workshop with him years ago, which was absolutely fascinating. There's a quote from him about the importance of the harmonic series and number, and these things are enormously related. You could disappear down a huge rabbit hole here. I mean, numbers, of course, are related to so many aspects of our life. But very much so with music, and I think that's enormously interesting in many ways, I mean, visually, there's a beautiful graphic in the book of the harmonic series of a guitar string, effectively, which is just absolutely beautiful. You can express this visually and you get something beautiful.

The harmonic series itself resonates with us. There aren't many musical traditions on the planet that still have the pure harmonic series, because we invented the well-tempered keyboard a couple of hundred years ago. A bit more than that now, which is not quite true to the harmonic series. There are a lot of people who also get upset about concert A being tuned at 440Hz instead of I think it's 432Hz, isn't it? The concert, the harmonic series version? Personally, I have to say I can't tell the difference between music that's made in the old way and music that's made in the well-tempered way, or at least I don't feel the difference, but I know there are people who claim they do feel a difference. There is just so much to inquire into, when you start to lift the lid on all aspects of sound, whether it's the sound of living things and our relationship with them, or the whole topic of music and the theory of music, the relationship of music to humanities, to spirituality, to mathematics. The level of inquiry is enormous. And all of this really comes back to the fundamental thesis of the book, which is that sound is wonderful, amazing, magnificent, extraordinary, primal. Why have we lost contact with it? It's so sad that we've moved away from it. We've become deaf. Our ears have gone numb. We're not listening to the world around us, particularly living things. We spend 93% of our lives indoors now. We're hermetically sealed. We invented glass and windows, and we've sealed ourselves off from the outside.

More than 50% of humanity live in cities now. A lot of those cities, particularly in the East, and you probably would remember this from your childhood, they're very noisy places. Some of them are frighteningly noisy. I mean, literally deafening. There's a couple of cities I can't remember names, I have a table in the book of the noisiest cities in the world. I think Dhaka is the number one. But you're talking about average noise levels of well over 100dB. That is literally deafening. And living in a place like that, you're not going to hear wind, water and birds. You're not going to hear these health giving sounds that have nurtured us for thousands and thousands of years. They've gone. More than half of humanity is divorced from them. This is a great concern to me, because this connection with nature, which comes through our ears, largely helps us to be part of nature. Not above it, not separate from it, but part of it. I think that disconnection has got a lot to do with the way that we're treating the world now and the terrible, devastating effect we're having on it with our noise, quite apart from anything else.

Yeah, very much so. Well, I did help with the launch of Moodsonic, which is out there doing really good work in workspaces. That's for corporations and that's a biophilic sound that's generative. So it's not recorded, it's created live by computer. So there's no loop. People don't like loops. They get frustrated. If you spot a loop it becomes irritating. That's happening, and I'm very glad that they're doing such good work there.

For individuals, I recommend in the book also a wonderful website run by a good man called Stephane Pigeon. It's called mynoise.net, and it's full of some really beautifully sampled nature sounds that you can create your own soundscapes from, and you can make them move and change as well. That's a great resource. If you're at home and you want something that's inexpensive and available on the internet. And of course, if you go on to YouTube, there's infinite numbers of videos of hours of recording of water, birds or all sorts of lovely things that you can put on in the background. So it's very easy now to access nature sounds. The good news is that recorded nature sounds better than nothing. It's good for you. Not quite as good as the real thing, because then you're surrounded by other senses feeding in. There's a thing called cross modality. The senses affect one another. So you have a thing called super additivity, when you align all the senses you have similar messages in all of them. Nevertheless, it's better to have nature sound around you in your home than not to have it at all, even recorded. So that's important.

Yes. Again, a sound that we are losing contact with. There's not a great deal of silence in cities. You're talking about billions and billions of people who probably don't experience silence at all. Silence is the baseline. It's what creates meaning because it's the gaps between the words. It's the gaps between the notes that give meaning. You have to have the valleys to have the peaks. And without the valleys, without the gaps, everything becomes cacophony and meaningless. So silence is very important from that point of view. And also, of course, because silence resets and recalibrates, recording engineers will have to take breaks every hour or two to reset their ears, because otherwise you just go deaf. You can't tell the difference anymore. Your ears become tired. That, again, is something which is probably very familiar to most people who live in cities where you're surrounded by noise the whole time. If it's noisy all the time, you start to lose your discernment, your ability to listen to the small, quiet, important things. That's sad too. So silence is necessary for recalibration, for refreshment, for rest and peace.

Some people I know find silence threatening. They live in a city. And if they go and stay with a friend in the country, they say, "It's so quiet. It's spooky." Whereas, of course, the country person goes to the city and goes, "It's so noisy, how can you sleep?" So habituation has a big part of this, and I don't think it's good for us to habituate to constant din in a city. This is not how we evolved. This is not the environment our systems are designed to deal with. We're designed to live in a much quieter world than we have created. So health wise, we have to be careful.

I say this in the book and I've said it in Ted talks in the past. I do recommend for everybody to seek out silence, even just a few minutes a day. And if that means you have to go into a bathroom or a closet, wherever it is, just give yourself that little gift. And then, of course, you can start to explore the different qualities of silence. There are lots of very different silences. The silence of being up in a mountain above the tree line, with no birds and no wind, a vast, expansive silence compared to the silence deep in a cave, which is cloying and enveloping and oppressive silence. The silence of an argument. The silence of love. There are so many different silences. Silence can mean so many different things. It's a wonderful sound to explore, and I do reproduce it in the book "A Lovely Walk of Silence," which is on the island of San Giulio in Lake Orta in Northern Italy. It's a convent. There's a walk around the convent called the Walk of Silence that you are supposed to do in silence. And every 100m or so, there's a sign with a reflection for you to meditate on as you walk the next part. I took photographs of them as I was doing that. I've reproduced them in the book, and I think it's a wonderful thing to do. Just spend a minute or two on each of those reflections and they really help to center you. Again, Dame Evelyn Glennie said, silence is a sound and it's one of the most important sounds and one which again, we're losing contact with. Shinrin-yoku, I'm very glad to say, is becoming more and more popular for forest bathing, an idea which has been around for a long time, taking a nice walk in a forest or any natural place. But it got kind of rebranded in Japan as Shinrin-yoku and is now coming to all sorts of countries. There are Shinrin-yoku centers in the US, the UK all over the place. Again, that's something people can seek out, where people go for a walk in nature in forests, don't say anything and just listen and connect again with nature, which is something we so need to do.

Yes. "In the silence, you meet the master." That's what I remember. "In the silence, you meet yourself." That may be why some people find silence quite threatening. Because, a lot of our modern civilization is about distraction and not meeting ourselves. Doing stuff, being busy, being distracted, having lots of inputs going on at the same time. This is all about keeping ourselves away from ourselves. And, it's important to do that. As you well know Hitendra, there's so many of the great spiritual traditions, particularly in the East, that are exactly about that. They're exactly about going inside, meeting yourself and coming to some sort of compassionate reconciliation with yourself, acceptance, compassion, gratitude, all of those things as opposed to running away from yourself from being permanently distracted and thinking happiness is over there, which I think is so endemic in the Western civilization now. Of course, happiness is never over there. It's only ever here now and that again we can get more back in contact with if we explore silence.

The inner voice speaks very quietly wherever it comes from. It's a quiet voice, and you do have to be quiet to hear it.

One of the most common mistakes that I see people making when they're giving public speaking, is gabbling, is filling every second with sound, which may come out as you knows, uhs, ahs, ums, and all the rest of it, or just constant verbiage. I've done a thing for years when I give my keynotes about speaking. I've done that for a long time, and it's interesting to reflect on how my TEDx talk on speaking has been seen by five times as many people as my TEDx talk on listening. But even in the talk about speaking, I talk very much about silence, and I can be standing on a stage in front of a thousand people and just stop. Now, I won't do it for long now, because that's called dead air when you're on a medium like this and people get uncomfortable, but standing on the stage, I can stop for 30 seconds, even a minute, and I'm just looking perfectly comfortable. And they're all going, "Oh, that's nice. He stopped. What shall I have for lunch?" It's all fine as long as I'm not looking flustered and there's no visual cue that something's wrong. People are perfectly happy with that. I mean, there's a limit to how far you can push it, but becoming comfortable with that silence is really important as a speaker. Because as I said, as you've just quoted in the book, it's using silence for impact, letting things settle like that just a second or two make such a difference. Not having to be speaking the whole time, filling every gap. Very important. So yes, silence is the base for everything. And becoming friends with silence, becoming comfortable with silence can make you a much more powerful speaker as well, of course, as a much better listener.

I think I say this in the book that true listening is very close to meditation, because you have to be empty and not composing your next bit of dialog. The opposite of what you just said would be somebody shares something significant and you come straight in with a fix or an observation and opinion, whatever it may be. You've probably been preparing that as they were speaking. And that's not the best way to listen. Listening is being empty. There's also a humility in listening which is very important. Listening is a very humble experience. You are giving somebody else your full attention and thereby you're making them as important as you by doing that. It's a great gift to give people, which doesn't get given that often in our very busy civilization, we're normally looking at something in our hand. "Yeah, I'm listening to you." "No, no, you're sending a text." That's different. That's partial listening. I'm not saying it's bad, but the key thing is to be conscious of the way you're listening. And sometimes it is important to put everything down and give somebody your full attention. And in that humility, in that place of emptiness and humility, let them fill you and trust that your mouth is going to know what to do when it comes to your turn, as opposed to creating your next brilliant piece of monologue, which is a form of listening I call speech writing. It's not really listening.

Well, the book took two years to come to fruition. But while I was gestating the book, and particularly towards the end of it, I was thinking, what now? Getting the book out there is wonderful because my mission is to generate listening in the world. But what now? And I thought there isn't really a place. I mean, there are certain things out there in the world, there's the International Listening Association who were very kind enough to give me an award a few years ago. Lovely organization, very academic. It's full of professors and people who are academically engaged in the whole concept of listening and writing papers about it and so forth. There's nothing there for the average person. Evelyn Glennie has got a wonderful community which does fantastic social programs to help children listen and so forth. I was looking at a place where people can go and hang out with people who are fascinated by, engaged in listening, want to listen better or engage in sound and are really interested in sound.

So I'm creating an online community called the Listening Society, which will be opening its doors on May the 1st. So I'm very busy right now, setting it up, populating it with all the content I can to start it off with, which will be a lot. Nevertheless, what it's going to take off, as I hope is that as people come into the community and start to express themselves and contribute, it will become this unbelievable resource. Whether you're interested in sound, whether you're a professional with it, a musician, a sound engineer and acoustician, or whether you're interested in listening. You're a parent, you're a professional who wants to sell better, whatever it may be, somebody who's concerned about ecology, about our effect on the planet with noise. All sorts of different people will be able to come in there, hang out, ask questions, put their problems in there, have somebody who's similar to them, solve them, suggest things, bring gifts for other people. I'm so excited about it.

This to me is going to be legacy. I'm obsessed with legacy. But I really wanted to do something which is going to outlast me and foster listening in the world and become a force on its own, really. I can start it, but I hope this is going to grow and grow. So that's what we're doing to make the book kind of last in the world, if you like. And I'm very excited about it.

Well, yes, I think evolution is a bit concerning because as I look around at the world right now, I'm very worried that our lack of listening is driving so much conflict. You just look at the politics that we've got around us, the degree of polarization, shouting, judgments, condemning, the conflict that's going on is escalating almost month by month. That's a slippery slope. So, I do think that if we care about democracy, if we care about civil society, it's really crucial that we rediscover our listening faster than evolving it. If you gave me one wish, it would be that we would start teaching our children to listen tomorrow in school, because if we were to put a whole generation of children out in ten years time, who have been taught to listen and particularly to listen to people they don't agree with and how to synthesize that and how to validate people without conflict, and how to accept and understand difference, what a different world we'd be living in. And it could happen almost overnight.

Well, that's what it comes down to. I hope it's not going to be at the speed of evolution. I hope it's going to be much faster than that. Within a few years, we'll be teaching children how to listen and the importance of listening and taking it seriously. If this book and the community I'm putting together make a tiny dent in that, I'll be very happy. If we can move the mountain just a few inches, that'll be great. We do need to start, though, because time is short and I do worry for the world we're being in 10 or 20 years if we stay on this slippery slope that we're on right now, so let's get listening.

Thank you, Hitendra. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.