Julian Treasure - Sound Business

Full transcript: Julian Treasure on London Real

8:31 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Julian Treasure, who is an international public speaker on the effective use of sound in business and on personal communication skills, including conscious listening and powerful speaking. Your five TED Talks have been viewed over 30 million times, and your latest is in the top 25 TED Talks of all time. You are the author of the book Sound Business, and your company, The Sound Agency, works with major brands worldwide.

8:59 Julian, welcome to London Real. Thank you so much, Brian. What a great introduction. Thank you, thank you. I’m told I’m good at those.

9:05 I might use that as a side business in the future. You could, you know, I used to live in New York City on Avenue A and Houston Street, and I was on, like, the 12th floor, and I just remember one thing about that flat. And it was the constant sirens that would go throughout the night and throughout the day, and when you live in New York City, I think you kind of have this unwritten rule that you have to deal with kind of sound. And I was kind of getting ready for this show today, and I was training yesterday at Gymbox here, and I was listening to a podcast, and I couldn’t hear it because of all the sound that was playing in that gym, and then my final epiphany was when I got home, my 11-year-old daughter said, if the music’s too loud, you’re too old.

9:49 So, what do we do? What do I do with all of these observations, and of sound, are they correct, are they incorrect? Because this is the world you live in. What it is, I, the first thing is, listen. You know, most people go around not listening very much, so sound is around us all the time.

10:07 It affects us profoundly and we can talk about the ways it affects us, and yet most people are not very conscious of it, and there’s a richness out there, and there’s a world to enjoy. It’s a new sense, almost, because we are so used to suppressing sound, largely because we’re surrounded by noise in most places. Definition of noise are just unwanted sound, pretty much, and that’s a personal thing, right? Your music might be my noise, my music might be your noise.

10:34 Very often that is the case, and probably your 11-year-old daughter’s music is your noise. So, I mean, it’s sad to hear her say that because, you know, kids are really endangering their hearing at the moment, so I think it’s becoming an epidemic of, you know, not listening and really brutalizing our ears to a degree. I, when you, you mentioned several things there. Cities, every city has its song, and they vary. New York, I remember going there when I was 15 years old, many, many years ago, and lying in bed at night with the sirens out in the streets and going, “This is cojac for real,” you know.

11:08 It was fantastic. It was so romantic and exciting and vibrant. London didn’t have those sirens at that time. We had da da da da going on now, of course. It’s the same.

11:19 So, a city’s song can be pretty intimidating at street level. I see little birds on Walk Don’t Walk signs in New York, singing their hearts out, and I feel very sorry for them, because you can’t hear them over the top of 80 dB of street thunder, but you go up 10 or 20 floors, and it suddenly becomes something that’s strangely beautiful, and many people fall in love with those songs, and they feel very uncomfortable if you take them out to the countryside, where it’s silent at night and there isn’t this heartbeat keeping them happy, right? So the noise in cities isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

11:57 No, it depends how far away from it you are. It depends on the intensity of it. It depends what you’re trying to do as well. This is quite a personal thing. So if you’re trying to work, for example, and you’re at street level, and there’s a jackhammer going in in the street, you know that’s very difficult, obviously, and I’m constantly amazed.

12:16 I watch people have conversations in streets, right, next to road drills, and I think, why don’t you just move to somewhere where you can actually talk? And that’s what we do. We tend to just discount it, but if one is conscious, you know, I said in one of my TED Talks there’s a great exercise, which is savoring sound around us, and there’s beauty in cities as well as ugliness for the eyes and for the ears. So it’s worth listening. You can pick out wonderful things, and you can steer away from the things that really aren’t doing you any good.

12:48 It seems like we don’t realize the amount of sound that we are making ourselves subject to. You know, I know you’ve done some recordings where you’re in a coffee shop, and, like, it’s it seems like they’ve added reflection everywhere. It seems like people are yelling just to hear each other, and yet no one seems to just stand up and say, “Isn’t this just madness? Here, shouldn’t we have a place that’s aesthetically pleasing, have nice food, and yet the sound seems to get forgotten so many times?

13:14 I’ve been to great restaurants in London where it’s very hard to hear who I’m with. I’ve been to, you know, great bars and nightclubs where I have to leave because there’s no conversation. How, why have we gone that way? I mean, you know, we’re smart beings. Why do we forget sound?

13:28 Well, it’s because we’ve gone a bit deaf. We really have. We’ve stopped paying attention for many years now. Architects and interior designers have focused entirely, or almost entirely, on the eyes. Very few buildings are designed to sound good.

13:41 They’re designed to look good, and unfortunately the modern trend is for hard surfaces. So they love steel and stone and, you know, glass and it’s all hard. There’s very little absorbency in most rooms. So yes, you go into a coffee shop you know, we have the theater of coffee now, thanks to Starbucks. Some years ago, well, it’s preferable to when I grew up in London.

14:04 If you went into a cafe and asked for a coffee, you’d get a scoop of powder in a cup and then some hot water on top of it. You know, we knew how to make tea in this country, but not coffee. Well, that’s changed, thanks to Starbucks. On the other hand, we have to listen to coffee being made everywhere, not just in cafes, but also in restaurants where, for some reason, they have the coffee machine in the, in the restaurant space instead of in the back room, and I honestly, I trust them to make proper coffee.

14:32 I don’t have to see it and hear it being made, so there is a lot of noise, and these places tend to be boxes. They’re hard, and the noise reverberates around, and so you and I end up shouting from a foot away at each other, trying to make each other heard, and it’s very difficult. Zagat is rating New York restaurants now by noise, which is a good thing. I remember last time I was in New York and visiting New York’s not the noisiest city in the world, but it’s a good example.

14:59 Yeah, I took my fiancé to Joe Allen. It was a restaurant my dad took me to when I first went there, and it, you know, a classic hamburger place. It’s the bar where “one for my baby and one more for the road” was written. You know, it’s a classic place. We walked in there on a Friday night.

15:16 I have never encountered such a wall of noise. It must have been 100 dB in there. I mean, screaming at somebody from 6 inches away into their ear was the only way to communicate. Now, if you’re 6 or 17 and you’re in a club, that’s heaven, isn’t it, because you and I don’t want to have to make a whole evening’s worth of witty conversation. Right?

15:36 When we ask somebody out for the first time, that’s you know, yeah, and some people are drawn to those places so they don’t have to make conversations. Exactly. So the younger you are and the more go and less you know, confident, and so forth, the more that works, but so often I sit in hotel lobbies where people are trying to do one of two things. They’re either trying to talk or trying to work, and there’s pounding music going on and terrible acoustics, and everybody shouting, and I just think, this is not fit for purpose.

16:02 Somebody designed this without thinking what people are actually trying to do in the space. So I think my third TED Talk really was all about this, and it was called designing with our ears, and that’s really something we need to do. Do you know, in the old days people used to do that a lot? The old master masons, they understood the way buildings sounded. If you went back to castles in those days, they had huge tapestries up, not to look good, but to damp the acoustics of the room down.

16:29 That’s why those things were there. Otherwise the whole place would reverberate. It was all stone. You get cathedrals, which are designed to sound huge as you enter them, and then get more and more intimate sounding as you approach the altar. So they knew what they were dealing with in those days, and we’ve kind of lost it somewhere along the way.

16:46 So the idea of aural architecture is only now being rediscovered. There are some great books on it out now, and I hope it’s going to become a thing. We need a little bolt-on package for AutoCAD, you know, the package all the architects use to design. We need something there that says, “How’s that going to sound?” so they can put headphones on. Oh no, better not do that one.

17:07 Right? Most people don’t understand how sound affects us, and I know you in, I’m going to probably ask for little bits of some of your TED Talks, and one time you’ve talked about four ways that sound does affect us, because our ears are always on, aren’t they? And I know I choose with my eyes now not to look at certain things. I’m really choosy about not watching the news. I don’t want to look at the advertisement with the model and the beer on it, but with my ears I don’t get that choice.

17:30 And what are some of the things people can kind of be aware of, of how sound is affecting them? Well, the four-way sound effects, they’re very powerful, and as you absolutely rightly say, we have no ear lids, so the ears are working all the time, even while you sleep. Your ears are working. You know, there’s a strange sound in your house while you’re asleep, you will wake up. So these things are never asleep.

17:50 So the first way sound affects us is physiologically. So if I do that, that’s a little shot of cortisol, fight-or-flight hormone. It accelerates the heartbeat. Your hormones are causing fatty acids to enter your bloodstream. You’re ready to fight or to flee, and you’re not going to do either of those two things, so it’s not very good for us.

18:10 Okay. So physiologically, sound changes our bodies all the time, right up to brain waves, in fact, which have been shown to be entrained by external sound. So if you have a speaker, they’ve done tests on this: a good speaker in a room will have everybody’s brain waves entrained with his brain waves or her brain waves by the end of the talk. Okay, second way is psychologically: moods, emotions, and that’s obvious. You just think of music.

18:33 You know, I love that scene from Bridget Jones where she’s sitting there with a tub of ice cream, playing “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen, in floods of tears. You know, we can use music to amplify mood like that, or we can put on a jolly tune to cheer us up when we’re feeling low. So we use music to change moods. Birdsong is good for mood as well. We found we use it a lot in The Sound Agency, in offices, particularly because it makes people feel secure.

18:59 It tends to be when the birds are singing, we’re safe. We’ve learned that over a long time. It’s something we’ve picked up over the last 100,000 years. Yeah, even animals know that, right? Totally.

19:09 Birds have been here much, much longer than we have. They’ve been here for millions of years, and we’ve only been around for a few hundred thousand. So we’ve grown up to birds, and you and I know when the birds are singing normally that’s a good sign. If they suddenly stop, that’s not good. That means something pretty bad is about to happen.

19:25 It’s also nature’s alarm clock, birdsong. So, you know, anybody who’s been to an all-night party knows that moment when the bird starts singing is when the guilt kicks in. Oh, I really shouldn’t be here now. So we know it’s time to be awake when the birds are singing. Third way sound affects us is cognitively.

19:41 Nobody can understand two people talking at the same time, so office noise is extremely distracting if you’re trying to concentrate. Now, the open plan office and we can talk about this in more detail a little bit later on, is pervasive. I mean, it’s becoming one size fits all for all offices, and that’s so wrong. I’m doing a talk next week, actually, at a conference, which is being run by Professor Jeremy Myerson, who’s a guy I really respect in this field, and he’s distinguished three forms of working collaboration, for which open plan is great.

20:13 And, you know, if you want to shout across, the rule is, “Interrupt me, it’s fine. We’re all kind of loose here, you know, and move around, and, you know, Brian, could you come and have a look at this? Yeah, sure. You know, that kind of thing. Great.

20:27 Concentration? Rubbish. Open is rubbish for that. You know, “Shut up, I’m trying to think. I’m trying to write something here.”

20:33 You know, we all know that feeling of somebody talking next to us, taking out one of our 1.6 human conversations that we can understand. That’s what it is. 1.6, never two. Some people think they can do two. Well, there may be a very few people on the planet, but I’ve never met one.

20:47 I don’t know if you have. I’ve never done it. Women are better than men because the research shows their brains work side to side more, so they’re using both hemispheres simultaneously, whereas we tend to use front to back a lot more. Men particularly find it difficult. But I don’t think there are many people who can understand two, and certainly my estimate is 1.6 to 1.8 human conversations.

21:10 So there’s somebody talking here. I have no ear lids. I am pre-programmed to decode language. It’s inevitable. I can’t not listen to words in my language anyway, so he’s taking up, or she’s taking out one of my 1.6.

21:24 I’m left with 0.6 for the little voice in my head, which is, “I’m the one I’m trying to listen to when I’m writing or doing math or whatever it may be.” Okay, so that’s concentration. Bad for concentration, really. And the other form of working that Myerson distinguishes is contemplation, which is a kind of decompress. It’s after you’ve had heavy meetings, you need somewhere to sit and think or be quiet or maybe be social, so it could be a social space or it could be a Zen-type space.

21:51 Either way, open plan is not the answer for that either. Okay, so yeah, open plan offices. The biggest number I found in terms of estimating the reduction in productivity from open plan is two-thirds reduction. Two-thirds reduction, because of that open, because yeah, because people are trying to do, you know, concentrating work in an environment that’s designed for something completely different. Yeah, let me just talk about my quick open plan experience, and I want to get to the fourth part.

22:18 When I moved to New York City, I was 22 years old, and I went, uh, to the 33rd floor of Bankers Trust Plaza, which was just south of the World Trade Center when it was still there. We actually used to look right on it, cuz it was across the street, and I was on a trading floor that felt to me the size of a football field with 300 people on there, and we each had a meter of space. And this was my introduction to the professional world, and it was mind-blowing, uh, crazy, stressful.

22:43 Built that way, I think, because collaboration. We all needed to hear and see each other, where the markets were going, what was doing that. But there was no downtime, and I continued this in my last 10 years at the city when I was at IAP. I had 10 years of the same thing, and I mean, not to be graphic, but I could see these people, I could smell these people. I could hear all their private conversations.

23:02 They could hear all of mine. I got to a point where when I’d order a coffee at Starbucks, I wouldn’t want to tell people because they would hear me around me, and I’d be like, “I’ll have a latte,” because I was so used to keeping things quiet, because I was in this environment that quite honestly was very stressful, and you had to just deal with it. And so it worked for one thing, but it didn’t work for a few other totally. And privacy works both ways. I mean, now we’re into offices, we might as well carry on if you’re happy to.

23:28 Because it’s a really, really big topic. Privacy can be affected both ways, in that situation. You had a lot of noise, and a noisy office is dangerous. It’s actually bad for people to work in 65 dB or more day after day. It creates stress hormones, and people become sick, physically sick.

23:47 It also reduces helpfulness. It reduces sociability, and it, it is incredibly fatiguing. At the other end of the spectrum, if you have a pin-drop quiet office, which many offices are. You know, you get open plan offices with a finance department working away, where the turning of a piece of paper is a major event in the office. You know, you get that kind of reaction.

24:08 Well, you’ve got 20 people in there, and if one person takes a phone call, they’re putting off all 19 other people immediately because everybody can hear that phone call perfectly. Very intimidating for the person on the phone and very off-putting for everybody else. So we do need some noise in open plan if we’re trying to work in that situation. We need some masking sound. I tend to prefer nature sound of some kind, because we’re very good at setting aside stochastic sound, which would be like gentle rainfall or, you know, gentle water flowing.

24:39 Okay, something gentle like that. Birdsong is good. Stochastic means composed of many, many random events, which create a kind of pleasing wash. So the difference between one bird singing outside your window would drive you mad. The dawn chorus is beautiful.

24:55 One dripping tap, terrible. Gentle rain on leaves outside the window, everybody loves that one. Okay, so we can, we can mask sound. We can create privacy in offices as long as the noise level isn’t too high, then you get somewhere between 45 and 55 dB, which is about the sweet spot to work in. Now, I’d imagine your office was probably way louder than that.

25:15 Yeah, and I just, I’ve just dealt with, actually, a bunch of lawyers in a trading firm, which shall remain nameless, in New York, a very big one. I did some training for them on listening. They work in effectively a trading floor, so they’re doing half-hour legal conversations where they’re giving people advice on the phone. People are saying, “Here’s the big problem, what are we going to do?” and they’re sat next to other guys doing the same thing on a huge floor, which is set up actually for the whole screaming trading match.

25:42 Totally inappropriate for what they’re trying to do. Yeah, yeah. All right, we digressed on the open plan. Sure, but you went back to the fourth point of sound. The fourth one is behavioral.

25:52 Okay, yeah, sound change is the way we behave, so we may be unconsciously very often move away from unpleasant sound. We do have some sort of self-preservation instinct in this. I know, I was talking about people next to, you know, drills in the street, and the other one here in London, as you, if you’re on Waterloo station in the Bakerloo line, as the trains come in, they come around a big bend, and train wheels don’t bend, so there’s this absolutely hideous screeching sound as they come in.

26:20 Decibels on some of those, that’s like 80 dB of piercing shriek. Yeah, and I do this, and I look up and down the platform, and I’m amazed everybody else is just reading their book, standing there, as this is really killing their ears. So we tend to ignore things. Having said that, if we can move away, we will. If it’s a sustained bad sound, and this is the thing retailers are just starting to understand now, with the sound agencies working with big shopping malls all over Europe, just about to start working with a very big retailer in America to improve the sound of shopping.

26:56 Because what happens if you make bad sound in a shop? These people leave, not instantly, but sooner than they would, because, you know, here we are trying to go shopping, and we’re in this hideous cacophony. It’s not pleasant for us, and we just think, I’m tired, I’m going to go home. So we leave, and retailers know there’s an equation here: increased dwell time, they call it, how long we stay in a shop. You increase sales.

27:21 You know, there’s an old adage: if you hang around the barber long enough, you get a haircut. I’m reminded of going to the store Abercrombie & Fitch about five years ago when they came to London, which was sensory overload. They used to spray the perfume all over the clothes, and I actually could smell it. It was right behind the Royal Academy, for like a block away, and I’d be like, “Abercrombie,” and when I went in there, and yes, I was in my 30s at the time, I’m too old, but it was so loud that I couldn’t dwell in there very long.

27:46 But I guess for a younger demographic it was novel. I respect what they do, right? Both them and Hollister, and now Superdry, they’re doing the same thing, which is creating an ambience that attracts a certain type of person. They don’t want me in there. They don’t want you in there.

28:00 We, you know, we don’t want old people making it look ugly in there, of course. So, you know, my 17-year-old daughter would go into one of those places, and I’ll sit in the chairs they very nicely provide outside for the oldies to sit in, and then dive in with a credit card at the end and pay. Now, I respect that completely. That’s intelligent use of sound to filter, to select, to attract a certain sector of the population. Sadly, what we experience most of the time, if you think of a place like Marks and Spencer, which is for everybody, pretty much everybody, and they’re playing pop music, and I can’t understand that.

28:34 It’s fast-paced. The loudspeakers are not good. It’s speeding people up. Excuse me, it’s speeding people up, and they’re therefore leaving faster, and many people don’t like, you know, about a third of the people in shops, the research has shown, really dislike piped music. Yeah, one of them, yeah, they will tend to leave.

28:53 Yeah, the sound experience is so important. Even in the tube the other day, I’m looking at these speakers inside the tube, I’m sure weren’t designed for the very decibel levels. Person’s talking to me. I know the tube is probably a little bit slower on the user experience than some other places, but in so many places that sound could be thought of, it just is not, as you said, especially in tech design. It’s all been the visual experience the last 10 or 20 years, right, which is weird.

29:17 I mean, the internet is an audiovisual medium last time I looked. But they say, in film making, you know, God waits for sound, and so I’ve had the best cinematographers in the world on the side will tell me, but the sound has to be good or nothing I do is good. So they admit that sound design is important, but yet most people forget it. Yeah, totally. I think sound tends to take up like two to 5% of a film’s budget.

29:41 Right? It’s tiny. You know, we’re getting feature films now made for $150 million. Sound will be a tiny fraction of that, and yet any filmmaker will tell you it’s more than half the emotional impact. Oh yeah.

29:51 There was the Robert Redford movie where he was on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and they filmed this whole thing. It’s just him in the boat, right? It’s whole journey that he goes through, and I remember reading that they didn’t take any ambient sound. It was all created in the studio later, and with all of these, you know, non-diegetic pieces, created all out of thin air to create that emotion. Um, and it’s fascinating to know that none of it was water and wind.

30:14 All something else. Yeah, it’s an art form, that. And of course it’s got even bigger in gaming. Right, oh, because that’s, I mean, it, give you, unroll a game, it’s many many many hundreds of times longer than a feature film, and I know sound designers who’ve designed, you know, 10,000 sound effects for a game. So there’s a huge amount of really careful sound design going into these things now.

30:36 You’re a specialist in, you know, the idea of sound, how it makes us feel, and that’s why I was a little surprised at your last TED Talk, your most popular one, where it is, it is, titled “How to Speak So That People Want to Listen,” and it was a very interesting transition, where you went from almost that sound to that human connection, and I know it’s been your most popular talk, probably, you know, nine million views, soon to be more. Why did you go there and why was it so well received? Ten-minute talk.

31:04 Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? I have one of the slides I show sometimes when I’m training people, is a slide of yin and yang, and, you know, yin being the, yielding, the dark, the feminine, the moon, and passive, and receiving. Yang being the male, hot, white energy, you know, and more kind of out there. And if you replace those two words with listen and tell, I think you get some idea of the way our culture is focused at the moment, and we’re much into tell, much more into telling than we are into listening.

31:39 So it didn’t surprise me that the TED Talk on speaking is about five times as popular as my TED Talk on conscious listening. That’s about the kind of balance. I mean, it’s a rough barometer, but that’s about the kind of balance I think we have in society generally, which is a bit of a shame, and, you know, certainly it’s very important to be able to speak powerfully, and in that talk I was talking about this wonderful instrument that we all use, the human voice, which very few people think about.

32:08 We don’t train kids how to use it more. So in the States than we do here. I know, you know, American kids do a lot more public speaking than we do here, but, you know, the joys of prosody and intonation, and, you know, and of register and of pace and pitch, or these kinds of things, we barely touch on these things at school. This is an instrument we just are expected to pick up and learn how to play on our own. When you went through those things you just described in your talk, I didn’t know that they were named that.

32:36 I hadn’t heard of prosody yet. Yet I knew exactly what you were talking about right away. Prosody is fantastic. I mean, I adore it. Is that so?

32:42 People, prosody is the sing-song of language. So if I speak in a monotone, absolutely on one note, then it becomes incredibly tedious, and that’s where the word monotonous comes from, monotone, one note. So we need it to give our speaking emotion, and it varies from culture to culture. You know, if you know Rio de Janeiro, it’s almost like a song. Oh, it would be.

33:03 I love Brazilian prosody. And then if you go to Scandinavia, for example, you’ll get people saying, “We’re very excited about this,” you know, “Is it extremely exciting?” and they, you, they have a much more restrained prosody that’s got certain cadences that work there. So it varies culture to culture, it varies individual to individual. Some Latin cultures enormously vibrant. I think I regret one thing that’s happening in the world at the moment, which is the kind of invasion of what’s called high-rising terminal.

33:34 It’s a very repetitive prosody where everything’s said as if it were a question. Okay, is that a British thing or a global? It came from, um, originally Australia, and then it went into Los Angeles, and then through Miley Cyrus and all those kids’ TV programs, who will speak like this, like, you know, “I’m like this,” and he’s like this. Okay. The Valley girls.

33:53 Yeah, it’s the Valley girl speak, and unfortunately that became enormously popular, so now it’s really become very prevalent. And, you know, two reasons why I regret it. I’m not saying it’s bad and wrong, but it’s slightly regrettable. I think one, it’s repetitive, so it robs us of the richness of prosody, which I think is such a glorious song. And the second is it’s also slightly weak, because what’s in there is a hidden question.

34:22 Is that okay? So when I’m doing this, I’m asking you, is this okay? Every statement. “I really want to go to the pub tonight?” And it’s kind of, yeah, you’re asking permission, begging permission.

34:33 Yeah. As opposed to, “I want to go to the pub tonight.” which is a completely different, you know. We can say the way we say things is enormously influential. You think about the way you say no when somebody’s tickling you, compared to the way you say no when a kid steps out in a road.

34:47 We can really change the meaning of what we say with the way that we say it, and it’s worth paying attention to that. The other ones you mentioned were register, timbre, pace, pitch, volume. Most people understand the pace, I guess, the pitch, register and timbre. What are those? Well, we’ve got, there are four registers that you can speak in.

35:09 Now, I can’t do the top one, which is called, I forgot what it’s called now. I’ll come back to it. Mariah Carey can do it. It’s very, very, very high indeed. Okay.

35:20 Then down below that you’ve got falsetto register, which is this one again, not terribly useful if you’re trying to speak powerfully to somebody. It’ll remind people of Monty Python. He’s a very naughty boy, you know. That’s register. It’s used by a lot of singers.

35:36 If you think about Coldplay or many, many bands, they sing in falsetto register, so it’s popular for that, and it obviously hits us with certain emotion when we hear it. Yeah. It is used by quite a lot of elderly ladies. “Hello, dear, how are you?” You know, speaking here.

35:49 It’s very soft and very unthreatening register to speak in. Then you got the modal register, which is where most of our speaking comes from, and we can move our voice in the modal register. So it’s very powerful to learn how to do that, to move from the nose voice or the head voice up here, or the throat voice here, and then move down into the chest voice here, which resonates. This is a big resonating chamber. Again, these things are cultural, but there’s an effect, because we tend to vote for politicians with deeper voices.

36:20 Research has shown that’s a fact. Okay, that’s a fact. Right? There’s been quite a lot of blind, double-blind studies now done with show keter is parabus. I mean, it’s not the only thing in play.

36:30 Nevertheless, if you, if you’re like this, we tend to go for the one with a deeper voice, because we associate deeper voices with authority and power, because big things are deeper. Like elephants have a deep voice, mice have a very high voice. I’m thinking of the classic, uh, James Earl Jones, “This is CNN,” you know? Or Darth Vader, right? Yeah, or, yeah, Darth Vader, yeah, absolutely.

36:52 Uh, or, inner world, you know, this kind of deep voice is taken to be authoritative. So if you want to speak powerfully, it’s worth practicing coming down here a little bit. But in your TED Talks you don’t do that intentionally? No. Okay.

37:05 I notice that I use my regular voice, although, you know, it is something I’ve worked on over the years, so I probably speak more from down here than once I did. I’m, once upon a time, I was probably more up here, like this. You know, now it’s probably more down here. And then there’s another register, which again is a thing I rather regret coming into common parlance a lot now. It’s called vocal fry, and it sounds like this.

37:30 You know, we’re all stoked about this, and again, very much a West Coast wave, American, right? And you get, um, largely females. I mean, I did hear a man yesterday. I was at a restaurant, and there was a guy at the next table who was, who was in this the whole time. He was just speaking like this the whole time.

37:47 You pick up everyone’s voice. Yeah, I do, unfortunately, but it’s not very pleasant to listen to, and it robs you, you know, the voice of all this richness and beauty. I think that the voice, it’s also not very good for your vocal cords to speak like that, right? And it’s being lazy, and you said, I think I heard one of your podcasts where you said it’s a meme, and it’s kind of lazy meme that people are just resorting to. They probably don’t know they’re doing it, but they’re robbing themselves and everyone around them from the richness of their voice.

38:11 I think so. Yeah, I think so. I mean, that’s an opinion, but I’m not telling anybody how to behave. I think, you know, if you’ve got a voice, why not explore the full fullness and richness of it? It’s a shame to limit it to a tiny, tiny part of its capabilities.

38:25 Right. So you talked about all these pieces in your, in your most famous TED Talk and just talked about how people should use these things, and then you went into the art of listening as well. Yeah. Well, listening to me is even more important, and after all, what’s the point of speaking if nobody’s listening? And that is very largely the case, and I’ve just developed a full-day course on listening.

38:48 Actually, it was fascinating. I started out thinking I can’t do a full day on this, and at the end it was just like, what can I leave out? I’ve got to take stuff out of this. There’s too much for a day. We tend to indulge in faux listening, you know, a lot of people do that, because really listening is an extraordinary thing.

39:05 I mean, literally extraordinary. It’s not usual for the real listener, the person speaking is the only thing that matters in the world at that point. So real listening is not, yeah, I’m listening to you. I am listening to you. Yeah, no, carry on.

39:19 That’s not real listening. Real listening is absolutely focused. It’s conscious, because listening is an activity. We tend to think of the ears as passive. Excuse me, because sound comes in here and we don’t do anything.

39:35 You know, it’s not like looking, where you’re actually doing something. Always on. It’s not passive. Hearing is passive. There’s not much you can do about hearing.

39:43 I mean, I can hear what’s going on around me all the time. Listening is making meaning from sound. It’s deciding what I’m going to pay attention to and what it means to me, so it’s ascribing value and meaning to symbols, if you like, sonic patterns that we recognize, the most obvious of which is your name. So if somebody says, “Brian, you go.” Was that for me?

40:07 Excuse me. So we use our ears all the time, unfortunately, a lot of the time we’re very lazy about it, so we might look like we’re listening. There’s a lot of pretend listening that goes on, you know, somebody nodding and thinking, what am I going to have for lunch? Yeah, when can I, when can I talk? Exactly.

40:28 There’s a lot of interrupting that goes on. I get very frustrated with journalism now, because I think, um, the whole meme of attack journalism is a very sad thing. You know, there’s a kind of death dance between politicians and journalists now, where the politicians get 10 or 15 seconds before they’re interrupted by the journalist, so they get their sound bite in, or you get this nonsense of, “I’m very glad you asked me that question, because I’m going to say something completely different now.”

40:55 Um, or you know, it isn’t normal conversation, not like this, right? Like a news panel where everyone else was looking to jump in and cut, cut things off. Yeah, interrupting is just rude, actually, and it’s very unfortunate that journalists have started doing this as a matter of course. Actually, um, there’s a very, very good practice people can take, if there’s anybody watching this who’s an interruptor, because it does become a habit. The three-second rule is fantastic, and that is to count to three before you say anything.

41:26 Okay, it after you’re done, or just, uh, after I finish, count three. I mean, I’m not telling you to do it now, but for an interruptor that’s a really, really difficult thing. Sometimes they may have to start with a one-second rule, or just breathe in before speaking. That helps, because that gives that moment to pause. Then there’s kind of what I call speechwriting listening, which is where we look like we’re listening, but actually we’re composing our next brilliant witty piece of repartee while this inconvenient noise over there is going on.

41:57 So you get lots of non sequiturs. If you’re doing that, from those kinds of people, there are many, many. I mean, I’ve listed lots and lots of errors and obstacles to listening. Emotion gets in the way of listening, you know, when we’re upset. I think there’s actually an inverse relationship between emotion and listening, which is to say, if you’re upset and I really listen to you, you’ll get less upset.

42:20 What I’m hearing is, I hear that you’re really upset, you know, and then it tends to go into a normal conversation. Uh, if somebody’s not listening, somebody can get more and more and more upset at the same time. If you’re really, really upset, it’s hard to listen. It really is. We’re much more interested in giving our point of view.

42:37 And yeah, I remember a couples therapist one time. I actually went to couples therapy, I think, like 10 years ago, and he said we’re going to do this exercise, and this was a fascinating one. He said, “Your girlfriend’s going to talk for a minute, and she’s going to say what’s bothering her. You are going to listen to it, and then you are going to talk for a minute and say what’s bothering you, and then neither one of you are allowed to say anything for 24 hours.”

42:58 Wow. And, uh, and I think they might have added that only thing I could say was to summarize what she said about me, and she did the same about her, so you know that they actually heard you, and they said it in a way, active listening, and then you actually had to sit with it for 24 hours. Fantastic. Uh, yeah, fascinating listening exercise. Yeah, I mean, I have been in places where, um, it, it’s not quite listening, stick, but the rule is somebody talks and then that’s it, everybody, you know, and then somebody else talks and There’s no, I don’t agree with that.

43:27 There’s no interrupting. There’s just respectful listening, and it’s an amazing process to indulge in respectful listening like that. One of the great points you made is that you said in this culture, since we know everything’s being recorded, including this, that we can always come back to it later, that we just don’t necessarily take the time to sit and listen. And also there’s this whole immediate time frame, as in that news journalist you’re talking about knows they have 30 seconds before you move on to the next YouTube clip, so it’s this constant sound bite, not to mention news loves to promote bad news and aggression.

44:02 Are we losing touch with our own consciousness since we’re not actually taking the time to take it all in and listen the first time? Well, to a degree, I think yes. Uh, I think listening is in danger big time, and from technology apart from anything else. We’re becoming very impatient. We’re in a multi-stream world.

44:21 Now, I can’t sit on a tube and read a book and listen to music at the same time, but I see people doing that all the time, and I do think the human brain is very plastic, and it adapts very quickly to things, so I’m sure that kids are now able to take three inputs where I can’t, because that’s not the way I was brought up, and it’s not the way my brain works. I’m not sure it’s a good thing. I don’t know. We shall have to see. It’s like the long-term effects of using mobile phones or playing rugby union, or whatever.

44:52 The jury’s out on many of these things. We’ll have to wait 10, 20, 30 years to see, see what the effects are on the human body of many of these things. Multiple inputs, I do think, are making us impatient and shallow. There’s a great quote from Oscar Wilde. It was an insult he gave about the marus of somebody or other.

45:10 He said his mind is like a soup dish, wide but shallow, and that is pretty much a good description, I think, of social media in many ways. You know, the word friend doesn’t quite mean what it used to, and we tend to have now a lot of shallow relationships, as opposed to a few deep ones, where there’s not a lot of listening going on. You know, I’m on the train, who cares, really? Who cares? It’s personal broadcasting, so we set ourselves up as little mini TV, radio, whatever stations, and broadcast our every move to our six followers or six million followers.

45:44 It doesn’t really matter. I want to ask you about that headphone culture in the tube, but, uh, but did we finish up with the point you kind of made in your TED talk as far as people listening to each other, how to speak and have people listen to you? Well, and just to say the importance of listening, because you know it’s all very well to rant about listening being in danger in the modern world, but does it matter? And I think it does, because conscious listening is the doorway to understanding.

46:10 This is how we relate as human beings best. I mean, I would strongly argue that text and email are much shallower forms of communication than spoken communication, where somebody’s really listening to you. You feel heard, understood and valued, which are the three things that we want in relationships. Uh, whereas with text, it’s more superficial. You don’t get the prosody, you don’t get the tone, the pace, the pitch.

46:38 There’s so much richness that’s disappeared. It’s like reading a play instead of seeing a play. You know, you see a play performed, you get the full power of it. So I would argue strongly that human voice is a very powerful and important interaction for us, and it’s a great shame if we stop listening, because we start being able to marginalize people, and if we can dismiss people and, you know, lump them together, then all sorts of human evil becomes possible.

47:04 I wouldn’t like to live in a world where people weren’t listening to each other at all. You said politicians should do a bit more listening. Yeah, they go for talks. Why don’t they go for listens? I mean, I just think it’s that very noun, that they’re having talks.

47:18 It says it all to me. Right, right. That 5 to 1, are men more visual and women more auditory, or is that a myth? I’ve never seen any research which has shown that that’s the case. It wouldn’t surprise me.

47:31 We all have a primary kind of representational system that we prefer, you know, input that we like. So I’m very auditory. Other people are visual. Other people are kinesthetic. They like touch, or, you know, so, and you tend to, that’ll come through in what you say.

47:44 I mean, I always write, how does that sound to somebody if I’m bouncing an idea off them? Or that’s what I’ll say. Other people would say, um, how does that look? Other people say how does that feel? So you know, we have a way of relating to the world pretty evenly, actually, according to the research in, um, the book Brand Sense which came out years ago, um, which was based on an interesting and big piece of research by Millward Brown.

48:08 They tend to find that the senses tend to be relatively easy. I mean, visual is the highest, sound after, but then it doesn’t fall off that much, whereas the way we spend our money on marketing, for example, is almost entirely. It’s 83% on the eyes, so we’re out of kilter. The eyes have taken this dominant position, and nobody’s challenging it. Well, that’s kind of what I try to do.

48:32 I guess I describe myself now as a sound evangelist. You know, sound is a fascinating medium, because many people right now are just listening to us, you know, through the beauty of iTunes. And I know you have podcast experience. One of my former guests, Max Keiser, who has a show on Russia Today, he also has a radio show that he and his wife do, and he said, Brian, he said, it’s radio that’s actually almost more challenging and more intimate, because, like you said, people really close down and pay attention to one thing, the voice, whereas when he’s, you know, up with the Tower Bridge, you know, in the background, and da da da da, people, they’re just being visually stimulated and not necessarily listening to you.

49:08 And people say there is a rebirth of radio with this whole audio medium. Some of the greatest experiences I’ve had from a media standpoint have been listening to someone, you know, in a dark room, or even walking home, and I feel really absorbed. Yeah, definitely. Radio is holding its own despite the fragmentation and despite all of the new media coming at us. The share of radio is holding its own, which I think is really fascinating, and I’m sure it’s to do with that intimacy.

49:35 It’s also to do with convenience, because of course when you’re listening to the radio, you can be doing the ironing, cooking, something, you know? It’s not taking up your whole attention. So whilst it’s intimate, we think the radio is talking just to us. We’re not aware of the other million people. It is a very intimate medium.

49:53 Plus, primary warning sense, you know, you can upset people far faster through their ears and through their eyes, and there’s a big visceral effect of the ears on our emotions. At the same time, we can be doing something else, driving a car, for example. You know, audiobooks are tremendously popular for that reason. I do think with tech now there’s the possibility of a Renaissance in speaking and listening, because there are billions being invested all over the world by big organizations, and we all know who they are, in speech recognition and voice synthesis, or is it voice recognition and speech synthesis?

50:27 I can never remember which way around those go. Um, they really are putting lots of money in. So whatever Siri is doing now, you know, wind forward five years and we’re going to be more like Jarvis from Iron Man. And I think that’s very interesting, because we’ll be talking to the internet of things. I don’t want to talk to my fridge.

50:44 I don’t want to program my fridge. I wouldn’t mind having Jarvis where I can say, “Jarvis, could you put the iron on, the oven on? I’ll be home in 20 minutes.” So an avatar, a personal assistant, which is auditory, which we can talk to all the time, that I think is going to change everything, and that’ll bring conversation back to a good degree. Right?

51:05 I like to see that happen. Let’s talk about TED and let’s talk about public speaking. So many people in general, and definitely London Realers, always think about themselves as speakers. Um, I had the honor of giving my own, you know, TEDx talk in January, and it was transformative to me. It was stressful.

51:23 I practiced it upwards, backwards. I was walking around Primrose Hill at midnight talking it to myself and practicing. You know, I see you on the stage of TED five times. TED Talks. Um, that’s nothing, nothing small.

51:35 You’ve had a relationship with the organization since 2004. As you said, it is the Olympics of public speaking. And I asked you earlier if you were at the TED Talk in Vancouver where Esther Perel was, and I was like, oh, was Bill Gates there, and Al Gore? And you’re like, yeah, yeah, I think they were there. I mean, there’s so many high-powered people there, and you are there, and yet when I watch you, Julian, and you don’t seem over-rehearsed, you don’t seem like you’re projecting a personality, you don’t go bassy.

52:02 It seems very like you and I was wondering, um, how do you get to that level? Is it something you always practiced on, or you know, what can you tell people about what it’s like to kind of be in the Olympics in public speaking? Well, I have to say that talking at TED about talking is putting your head above the parapet big time. Um, that was quite Scary. Because you know, you youbody be doing that quite well, haven’t you?

52:28 Fortunately, that went down really, really well, and it’s done great, so I’m delighted about that. That was the fifth one, and it’s not a mistake that was the fifth one because I don’t think I could have done that at the beginning. Yes, I practiced a lot. Uh, I think if you’re interested in public speaking, the first thing to do is just do it. You know, there are organizations like Toastmasters out there, things like that.

52:50 There are meetup groups where you can go and just practice with people, and it’s like anything. It’s like riding a bike. It’s like driving a car. The more you do it, the more comfortable and effortless it becomes. So now, you know, there would have been a time when I got really nervous in front of anything more than 50 people.

53:07 Now, you know, thousands of people, I don’t really get nervous. Excited, yes, adrenalized, yes, but not shaking nerves. I have to say, the TED audience is still pretty intimidating, and, uh, you know, for all of those talks breathing was important. And for anybody out there who gets nervous and suffers from the voice, doing this, a little bit a big breath before you go on is the most important single thing, because it tends to subtle all that down, and you have after all, the breath, it’s the fuel for the voice, and if you don’t breathe, you know, we most of us breathe like birds most of the time.

53:43 Yeah, so big deep breath is a really good one to do, and apart from that, practice, practice, practice, and then if you have a specific talk to give, prep, prep, prep. And I did what you did. I mean, I think, I think my first TED Talk, which was on the effects of sound, my daughter knew it backwards, because she must have seen it 30 times. I was at home, and if you’re going to rehearse, rehearse for real, like until you bleed. Rehearse for real.

54:07 So rehearsing isn’t like, if you’re going to do that on a stage, you come out onto a stage and you go, “What we really need to do is this,” and it just doesn’t travel at all. If you’re going to do this on stage, then in front of your daughter or your couch or whoever your audience is at home, you do the gestures just for real, so it’s in the muscle memory, right? Give it just as real. Don’t give a private version for her. Exactly.

54:31 Okay, exactly. That’s important. Warm up the voice. That’s very important too. And I, uh, gave a set of vocal warm-up exercises in the talk, uh, well, the one I would do if I can’t do all of them, and they’re all important.

54:45 Can you do a few? Yeah, well, I mean, I’ll tell you the most important one, which I would always do, uh, before any kind of speaking. It’s called the siren, and it’s well known to actors and singers and so forth, and it’s going “eore,” with E being high and O being low. So it goes like that, up and down. How many cycles?

55:04 As many as you feel comfortable, as many as the people in the toilet with you will stand. So it’s high as you can go, and it extends the range. It’s like doing push-ups for the voice. It really gives you greater range, and you may hear immediately, my voice has got darker and deeper. Okay, and it settles your voice.

55:31 It kind of grounds it. Is that something you do even daily, as opposed to before you speak? Could do daily. I mean, I don’t necessarily do it every single day, but if I’m going to speak in any kind of situation where it’s relatively important, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that’s one.

55:45 What do we call that? That’s the siren. Siren. Okay, yeah, so it’s a good one to remember. Okay, and I really do go into toilets and do that, and I don’t care.

55:54 You know, that’s the beauty. Yeah, you can look at the cubicle, and then people would be really concerned about what’s going on in there. What’s the second exercise you doing? Well, there are other ones. Okay, so we can do them all.

56:06 There’s, um, the lips need to be, um, brought alive, really, and there are two for the lips. There’s saying b, b, b, b, b, b in a very pronounced way, like aive conc. Yeah, exactly. And then the other one for the lips is just getting them kind of exactly, and then suddenly you feel your lips come alive. And then for the tongue, there are two as well.

56:29 There’s la la la, a very pronounced la, flicking the tongue right forward, la la la la la, which again brings your tongue to life. And the other one is rolling an R, which not everybody can do. I had to practice for months to get this, because I couldn’t roll an R before, but that brings your tongue alive. Exactly. Okay, getting that vibration going.

56:52 Exactly. And then you really feel that your mouth is on your side, and you’re not going to come on stage and be a bit, you know, um, soggy around the mouth. It gives you a lot of precision. Okay, um, and there’s another one, which is lifting your arms up above your head, breathing in, and then sighing out with a big sigh, which opens your rib cage, sort of like that. Best done standing.

57:18 And, um, okay, that’s extremely good for getting a deep breath in, which we don’t do very often. Right, so these things help, and there are many, many, many others. I mean, I’m not, you know, the world expert on vocal warm-ups. There are coaches out there who’ll give you lots of different things to do. My advice to anybody who wants to speak in public seriously is to go and have a session or two with a vocal coach, a singing coach, or a drama coach, and they will open your eyes to what your voice can do, have you doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things, which will have a major effect and change, perhaps, timbre.

57:50 For example, some people, you know, we tend to prefer timbre. That’s the way you would describe a hot chocolate: rich, dark, warm, smooth, velvety, sweet. Anything you can describe a hot chocolate as is good for voice. Okay, some people have a, you know, scratchy little voice like that. Well, you can change that, because a lot of that is habit.

58:08 We all have vocal cords, we all have resonating chambers, and a lot of it’s breathing. Posture is important too. If I put my head right forward, it has a big effect on my voice. If I put my head right back, it has an effect on my voice. Okay, so we need our vocal cords to be nicely balanced.

58:24 Okay, so all those things are important. I think what you said originally, the rehearsing is possibly the most important thing of all, because what’s the biggest fear people have about public speaking? Is forgetting, right? Not having anything to say. I’ve seen that on the TED stage several times over the years, even on the TED stage, where people come on and they go for memory.

58:46 Well, memory is a tough call. I don’t do memory. I have slides and I have a presenter view, so I know what’s coming next, and I feel very comfortable with that. And you don’t rehearse every word. Then it’s, you have ideas and you go.

59:00 Exactly. Okay, so because that’s speaking. Speaking. Yeah, I’m not a great fan of reading. Um, a text, apart from anything else, if you’re nervous, holding a piece of paper is pretty obviously communicating that, but also, if you read what’s, you’re reading, writing, that’s not the same as speaking.

59:15 Yeah. Uh, speaking is extemporaneous. It’s it should be, really. And there’s a relationship here where you’re speaking into a listening. There’s always a listening, and if you look at a room, you can pretty much pick up what the listening is, and if people are starting to go, you may need to get up a bit and, you know, really give it some more energy, or if people are sat back like this, you might just need to be gentle with them.

59:37 So there’s a relationship between the speaker and the audience all the time. There’s a dynamic there, and if you’re reading on a podium and looking up from time to time, I think you lose that, right? Obama has the, uh, the C, the aut, the autocues, which simulate that, don’t they? And he’s such a pro that they could, I feel like they could give him a speech that morning, and he could just hammer it out. Totally.

59:59 I mean, I was at TED when Bono did his last speech, and they had the stage set up with a massive, um, extension on the stage, which he stood at the front of, and I was right at the front of the stage, so I was turned around and looking at his back, and I could see him reading these two big autocues up at the back of the auditorium. Now, if you watch that speech on TED.com, you would never know he’s a pro. It looks like he’s making it up. He’s passionate, he’s absolutely fluid with it.

1:00:27 You know, there’s no sense in which he’s reading. So, having said what I said about reading, if you’re very, very good and you’ve got an autocue, you can make that work. Okay, so yeah, I think it’s dangerous to go with memory unless you’ve got a terrific memory. Again, one of the best TED talks I ever saw is Alain de Botton at Oxford in 2005. I think brilliant came on stage, talked for 20 minutes of total genius, fluid, brilliant, every idea in place, not a word out of place.

1:00:56 No arms and rs at all, and walked off, no notes, no visual aids at all, just an amazing brain. Well, he is, you know, a philosopher of some repute, so if you can do that, it’s great, but I’ve seen people dry up on head stage and just go, and what happens? Spontaneous applause breaks out as the audience all go: we love you. Don’t worry, it’s okay. We’re with you.

1:01:21 Take your time. You know, that comes across. It’s a very warm audience, actually. Okay. Albeit there’s Jeff Bezos and there’s Sergey Brin, but nevertheless, they do that.

1:01:29 Yeah, I mean, that’s got to be one of the most intimidating audiences in the world, because you see these huge figures. The stakes are very high. Um, and yet also you’ve got another 9 million people that are going to watch this later that you can’t necessarily play to, because they’re not in the audience. I mean, that’s a lot of decisions for you to make. It is, and people don’t always realize that not every TED Talk gets onto the website.

1:01:53 Some they don’t like, and they do edit them, so people do dry up, and then it can be made to look good. So, um, there is editing that goes on afterwards to give people the best chance of looking and sounding good. What I love about TED, you know, I’m quite an evangelist for TED, really, and, you know, there are people out there who are quite cynical about it, and they think it’s elitist or cabalistic or whatever. Actually, I know it costs a lot of money to go, and people go for the networking, but the website is free, and the talks, there’s 2,000 talks up there, which have added massively to richness of the world’s understanding of many, many topics, and they genuinely are about ideas worth spreading.

1:02:33 That is what Chris Anderson’s all about, and his team are passionate about that. It’s a charity, it’s not for profit. All the money gets recycled into it, or into the TED Fellows, young people who are supported, or the TED Prize. So I mean, I can’t see there’s a bad bone in its body, really. Okay, and you like the fact that it intersects all these different ideas and fields, and you said when you’re there, your brain connects synapses that never would have happened before in your normal peer group, in your normal environment.

1:03:02 Okay, yeah, no question. How, when I see you, I see the term that I call a key person of influence. We had a guest on the show named Daniel Priestley, who wrote a book, you know. Dan, and I see, and I see Julian, I watch your stuff, I’m like, he’s a KPI. Obviously you’ve had a, you know, 11-year relationship with TED.

1:03:19 They obviously see something in you, and they’re like, we need to have him around. We want him back in a couple of years. Did you ever think to yourself, you know, how did I become that key person of influence, or do you have any ideas for people that are watching that think that, themselves, when will I get invited to TED? You know, what, what kind of things does it take, and is that something that you sought out when you were younger? Well, I think I was lucky, and it does pay to be fortunate, and to have a message which is appropriate for the time, and my first talk was about sound and how it affects people, which is relatively straightforward.

1:03:52 I was running a business at the time. I suppose I, I had guts as well as being lucky, because this is the second time around for me starting a business. I launched a contract publishing, custom publishing, to the Americans, a contract publishing business in ’88, when there wasn’t much of that around, and that was uphill for quite a while. Um, so I sold that in 2001, and I’d been a musician all the way through that. So when I sold that, I wanted to bring the two halves of me together, because musicians, I think, listen to the world in a slightly different way to non-musicians.

1:04:24 You have to listen to all the instruments at once, so it’s kind of multitrack listening, and I was conscious the world didn’t sound so good, so it was bringing those two things together. So, um, the message of sound being important, I think I was quite lucky in that it had its time, around 2007, 2008. I have to say I was also very stubborn, because I started The Sound Agency in 2003, and there were four years of breaking rocks there before I wrote my book and did the first TED Talk in 200N.

1:04:55 I think it was. Um, that kind of time was when people started paying attention to this, so I’d been thumping the table for years, before putting all of the money I made out of my publishing business into keeping this thing going. You know, very, very stubborn. So I think sheer pig-headed stubbornness is quite important. Were you finding your micro niche, or finding your voice, over that four-year period?

1:05:18 Yeah, because I was researching, and again, it, it pays to be diligent and to pay attention to people, to get mentors, to talk to people, to understand what’s going on out there. Um, it doesn’t all come from inside our heads. So there’s a lot, successes. Oh, no, well, I mean, there are some. Now, um, there’s a, I kind of, we were talking earlier, there’s a tried and tested way of doing that: you chuck stuff out there, and then somebody likes something and you run with it, and raise a few million, and sudden you’re a billionaire.

1:05:46 Well, okay, good for those people. That’s not the way I’ve ever done business, and it’s not the way I’ve ever understood it. I think for me, the core of this was a passion, a passion for sound, which has been with me all my life, actually. You know, I’ve been playing drums since I was 12, give or take, in in bands and making music and around musicians and listening to the world and loving sounds around me. So I guess that passion was at the core.

1:06:13 So you got passion, luck, guts, um, sheer pig-headed stubbornness. I mean, all those things kind of are in the mix, aren’t they? Uh, writing a book is a good idea, and it’s very easy to do these days. Uh, you can do an internet book. You can self-publish.

1:06:28 You can digitally print. Um, so you know, my book’s done reasonably well over the years, and I’m planning to do another one actually now, because I think the speaking-listening axis, which is very different from the book Sound Business, is about using sound as a corporation, and that’s where I came into this. Is look, the noise around us is largely being made by companies. Let’s help them to make sound that’s effective and appropriate and pleasant, so that we all don’t have to suffer this noise everywhere we go.

1:06:55 And it turns out, fortunately for me, that good sound is good business, and we’ve done amazing things for big organizations, and we’re changing the sound of shopping and stuff like that. At the same time, what I’ve really got exercised by is this speaking-listening access, because you know, reading, writing, speaking, listening. We teach two of those in school. We test two of those in school. We bother about two of those in society.

1:07:20 All the new communication protocols we invent tend to be text based, and I just really want to put speaking and listening back where they were in human development, which is the absolute pinnacle of communication, not kind of things we’d rather not do. And there’s sad research showing that teenagers, for example, would always rather ask somebody out by text than in a conversation, because it’s safer. You know, if you get rejected, it’s not so hurtful, right?

1:07:45 And yet we don’t teach these things, and yet there, our key people of influence, our TED speakers, our Bonos, and Julian Treasures of the world are there because they’re great speakers. Yeah, so that’s, and the politicians are there because they can speak. Yeah, so it’s extremely necessary. Yeah, I don’t think there are that many people running big businesses who can’t communicate and can’t inspire people. Um, I’m looking forward to seeing the Steve Jobs film, which is just about to come out, uh, and I you know, he could do that.

1:08:11 I mean, maybe temperamental, difficult, and so forth, but certainly also inspiring. Yeah, I’m very curious if you broke down all of his timbre and all those pieces, because he had a very interesting way of owning the stage. Um, making it feel non-rehearsed, although the word is it was extremely rehearsed, as you would expect. Um, and he had a very good way about him. Um, the way he would introduce things and, you know, make it feel that way.

1:08:36 Um, I want to cover the Sound Business really quickly, because when I think of the business of sound, and I’m sure you’ve heard this all the time, you know, I think of one tiny aspect of it, which is, you know, the Intel Pentium inside, da da da, or the McDonald’s “I’m loving it,” or something like that. But I think you talk about eight different pieces of sound in business. Can you just give me a quick education about CU? So many people listening, either are starting businesses or own businesses, and they probably have never once thought of their sound.

1:09:04 I think of our sound, but it’s only from a sound production standpoint. I bet there’s probably 80% of my own business sound I’m not thinking of. Well, there are eight that we’ve discovered or, um, cataloged, I suppose, along the way in The Sound Agency, expressions of a brand sound. We’re talking about here, and at the center, I would strongly suggest some guidelines. You know, every brand has a big book, and you say, okay, so it’s about logos and typefaces and colors, and so for how many pages are about sound?

1:09:32 None. It’s always none, which is a bit weird, if you ask me. The at are brand voice, literally human voice. You know, there’s a lot of brands that we talk to, uh, we communicate with only inv voice. You think of your bank or your credit card or your utilities phone calls, and there’s no consistency.

1:09:49 You might talk to somebody who’s really depressed, and though that, you know, then somebody who’s really, um, you know, they don’t actually train people. They may tell them what to say, but they don’t talk about, this is how we are. Okay, so a customer service, standard, anything. Yeah, it could be your corporate receptionist in headquarters. Okay, we are lively, or are we laidback, you know?

1:10:09 We’re formal, or are we a bit cheeky? Um, you know, the story I always tell about that is the first time I ever got on a Virgin Atlantic plane many years ago, the steward said, “Hello, sexy,” which I remember very well, because it’s the only time anybody’s ever said that to me, and also because it somewhat surprised me. Now, she got the Virgin brand in two words. If she worked for British Airways and said that, she would have been sacked, but those days, Virgin was her, a cheeky challenger, irreverent, fun, young, dynamic.

1:10:36 I mean, everything was in those two words. Brilliant. That’s brand voice to a tee. Uh, then we got brand music, which is important, and there are many brands that use music very well, a lot that don’t. Uh, it can be very transitory.

1:10:51 It can be like, uh, oh, let’s use this piece of music, because it’s the creative director of the advertising agency’s favorite track right now. You know, it comes and goes. Uh, nevertheless, when it’s well done, British Airways with the Flower Duet from Lakmé. You know, if you, the moment you think of British Airways, you can hear those opera voices singing. Um, so that’s brand music.

1:11:10 Um, Sonic logo, you mentioned, absolutely key. I mean, I don’t think many people could draw the Intel logo, but most people can go, oh my gosh, so pervasive. Absolutely. And it, it, that was done by a guy called Walter Werzowa. Um, and it, he was lucky, he was kind of the first in there, so he had Intel Inside for the rhythm.

1:11:29 That’s the rhythm of it, and then the notes are first to fourth, one to fifth, which is the classic resolution. It’s away and home. Okay, so that’s, you know, most symphonies have that. Okay, and it’s saying you can tell inside. Okay, that’s exactly it.

1:11:44 So you can, again, sonic logo is not applicable to everybody. Um, but if you, you’ve, want to make public announcements, I mean, there’s, uh, I just noticed, for example, um, Dave Gilmour has just released a song which is based on the sonic logo of French SNCF Railways, which goes D, and it’s on the, the platforms and in the train and everywhere, and he heard it on the platform and he thought, I like that so he’s taken it and put it into a song, which I saw recently on Later with Jools Holland. It was very strange to see a sonic logo being made into a song.

1:12:17 Yeah, somebody did that with The Price Is Right tune, the old show with Bob Barker. Somebody put it in a song, and immediately I stopped what I was doing, and it brought me back to where I was 10. These things can become what are called earworms, where they’re very familiar to us, and they go through our head, and Coca-Cola and people like that have used such things in the past. Um, so then we’ve got, um, we’ve got brand, uh, branded audio, we call it, which is podcasting really, and this is, you know, the field that you’re in and that I’m in, where sound is actually a very big part of the brand, and it’s creating sound.

1:12:55 It could be video as well, but I’m focused on sound, sound which has got value, and giving it to people as a podcast. For example, a retailer could do that and say, well, you know what? We’re doing this. You can create your own radio show with things like Audioboom. Now it’s possible to do this in a very cheap way on an iPhone or, uh, an Android.

1:13:11 Uh, costs almost nothing, goes up onto iTunes. It’s really, really effective, and it’s, I think, much more effective than email marketing. Product sound, very important for some products. Harley-Davidson, right? Of course, Ferrari, bu that, yeah, Ferrari absolutely.

1:13:27 Uh, not so much for a pair of trousers, but for some products it’s really, really important to think of, and there was an interesting exercise some years ago. They ranked, um, there was a bunch of hair dryers, and they had consumers, I hate that word, potential customers, rank them by looking at them, one, and then when they turned them on, the ranking went completely around the other way, because the, the one that looked the most beautiful had a terrible noise to it, and people hated it. So it’s important how things sound.

1:13:53 Uh, then we’ve got, um, soundscapes in spaces, which is our speciality. Yes, many, many spaces. You know, walk into corporate receptions, you go to the toilet in a, in a, in a corporate headquarters, uh, you walk into a shop or a shopping mall or an airport or a train station, and very often you’re bombarded with completely inappropriate sound. Who does a good job of sound in, in, in a space? Yeah, I just thought of Terminal 5, British Airways.

1:14:20 It’s not bad. Terminal 5 is pretty good, because they don’t bombard you with too much stuff, although when you get downstairs, it’s a bit frenetic, actually. Okay, um, but nevertheless, it was quite well designed, and we nearly put a piece by Brian Eno in Terminal 5. Actually, that was very close to happening originally. Um, it’s a soundtrack.

1:14:37 It would have been a soundscape. Yes, uh, but it didn’t quite happen. Um, nevertheless, um, we’ve just worked on a mall in, in Stockholm called Mall of Scandinavia, which is the biggest shopping mall in, in the whole of Scandinavia, where they have nodes. There’s wind, water, and earth nodes, and the sound in each of those nodes reflects the, the design of that node, so it’s all completely um, congruent visually and in terms of sound, and I think they’ve done smell as well.

1:15:06 So the idea is that you have a congruent experience in all the senses. So this is happening. I’m glad to say people are starting to design for all the senses, not just the eyes, right? I want to go there. And, uh, Cafe Nero sounds like the worst place not to put them out, but I just remember going in there, and I’m just hearing, like, you know, a lot of retail spaces in London.

1:15:24 I, I can’t think of the ones that, that have it right. No, there aren’t many. I mean, Apple don’t, for example, really. It’s loud there. Yeah, really.

1:15:33 I was in the Apple Store in New York recently, and it’s, it’s really painful down there, because they’re a visual design company, right? So it’s all about how it looks. Beautiful long benches, hard stone floor, hard walls, hard ceiling, everything hard, and people demoing product everywhere. It’s pretty difficult, right? But their device sound is very good.

1:15:52 They spent time on their iPhones being sounding great, their iMacs, and there are microphones as well, and when you boot up a Mac, everybody knows you booted up a Mac, right? Whereas Windows changes every time they launch a new version, which is odd, if you ask me. Did I go around all eight? Uh, I think pretty much we did. Yeah, I think you covered a lot of them.

1:16:12 We hear with our bodies as well, right? And we hear when we’re 12 weeks old in the womb as well. Uh, what should we know about that? Well, I think it’s important to realize that sound is a physical phenomenon. It touches us.

1:16:26 You know, I love the fact that sound is such an intimate sense. Uh, it is incredible, when you think about it, that all of the sound that we decode around us, it could be a symphony orchestra or Led Zeppelin, it could be a road drill, or it could be a beautiful bird singing, it could be the sound of gentle surf. All of that richness is turned into vibrations in one little membrane in our ear, which then pushes fluid backwards and forwards, which makes little cells vibrate, each one tuned to a different frequency, which fire neurons, and we decode it all and create this reality in our heads of the soundscape around us.

1:17:00 I think that is a miracle. There are three tiny little bones vibrating thousands of times a second in there, which do that from the moment they’re formed until when we die, and that would be pretty tough to engineer if you were trying to make such a thing. So the sense of hearing is extraordinary. It really is extraordinary, and we do hear with our whole body. I had the honor of interviewing Evelyn Glennie, Dame Evelyn Glennie, the wonderful percussionist, as part of my podcast series.

1:17:25 She listens with her body. She learned to do that as a child, because she is profoundly deaf, so she’s a symphonic percussionist who can hardly hear, and she plays barefoot, and she senses vibrations with her whole body, and she had a very enlightened teacher who started with a drum skin, and then, can you hear the difference between that and that, and so forth, and she got more and more sensitive. Well, we all do that. We’re just not so aware of it, but it is important to realize that sound is visceral.

1:17:53 Sound affects our whole body, and we need to look after ourselves. So really, the whole model I’ve got going is, if we can consciously listen, then we can take responsibility for the sound around us, and that I call soundscaping. So we can design context. This is a very good context for conversation. It’s quiet.

1:18:13 There’s no people banging baristas. You know, none of that’s going on around us very often. The context we’re in is not appropriate, and if we’re listening, we can take responsibility for that and move somewhere where it is more appropriate, and, and, and more healthy. Uh, then if we’re speaking consciously, listening consciously, and designing the context consciously, we’ve got a chance of having understanding, of improving our health, because sound affects our health dramatically.

1:18:42 So it’s about well-being. It’s about our effectiveness and productivity, massively about that, and also about our happiness and our relationships, because I mean, what’s the biggest complaint people have in relationships? He doesn’t listen, or she doesn’t listen. You never listen to me. You know, we’ve all heard that one.

1:18:59 We’re doing our best, but without working on this, you know, these things are not necessarily natural. They don’t just happen. We need to think about them, and so ultimately I guess it becomes a conversation about consciousness, about awareness, about mindfulness. That’s really the root of the whole thing, which is a theme we hit all the time on the show. I can’t get away from it.

1:19:20 Maybe it’s partly due to my fault, but what I find is that everyone is really looking for a connection, maybe more so in this world where we’re all connected via Facebook and all these other means, where we’re not really connected, and so people tune in to find people they can really connect with. And it seems that sound is the original way of really connecting with some. It is, totally. It is the most natural and the richest form of communication we have.

1:19:46 You know, if I want to warn you about something, I don’t wave, I’ll shout. It is so fundamental to us. If you were in a 150,000 years ago sharing it with a couple of tigers and a bear, you better be listening. You know, that’s where we come from, with our ears. They’re protecting us all the time, and they’re seeking out, you know, richness and nourishment all the time, and we need to start listening to our ears.

1:20:10 Really, talk to me about headphone culture. I, uh, I’ve watched one of your talks where you said that, um, people who, uh, talk very loudly about their lives are sodcasting, and I used to always keep a pair of headphones, because I would, I used to go to lunch alone. It’s something I love to do, and sometimes someone would sit next to a table next to me, and I’d have to tune them out, and now um, my, uh, my, my girlfriend’s mother, she travels from Europe, and she looks at London and she says, you’re all walking around in these bubbles, everyone’s plugged in to some, uh, reality in their own head.

1:20:42 Uh, you design huge spaces, and yet you have to probably be aware that maybe 30% of the people are tuned out. Um, how do you feel about headphones? Well, they’re good and bad, like anything else. So first piece of advice, if you’re going to use headphones, is buy the best ones you can possibly afford, because cheap headphones will kill your hearing. The reason for that is that if we, if we’ve got cheap headphones, the quality is not so good, and the temptation is to turn them up, and turn them up, and turn them up, to get the frequency response and the effect that we want, whereas with more expensive headphones, you can have it quite quiet and still get the glory of the music.

1:21:18 The other thing is, um, as a rule, you should be able to hear somebody talking to you quite loudly from, say, three feet away, a meter away. If you can’t hear that, the headphones are probably too loud, certainly too loud for extended listening. So if you’re on a, a subway somewhere and you can hear somebody’s going on all the time, they’re probably killing their hearing. And the sad thing is, there are kids out there who wear headphones for many hours a day.

1:21:45 Now, it’s the intensity and the duration which are the problem. Uh, 85 dB is the level at which you should offer hearing protection to your employees, if that’s the space they’re in. Well, there are kids putting a 100 dB into their ears for hours a day, and that is killing their hearing, and the way this happens is it’s like eroding ice from underneath, so you’re fine until one day you go through, and when that happens, you lose chunks of your hearing, or you lose all of your hearing in an ear.

1:22:13 Maybe there’s no coming back. There is no cure for these hairs being flattened, the little hairs in your ears, which is what happens. They get flattened. They get knocked out. They don’t work anymore.

1:22:23 So you talk to somebody like Pete Townshend. He’s got very limited hearing in one ear and partial in the other, and he would say that’s because of headphones. It’s not standing in front of stacks of Marshall amps and playing the loudest concert ever recorded, not sure if it still is, but it was, uh, The Who did once, right? He says it’s because of being in studios with headphones on when somebody hits a fader wrong and you get a piercing noise into the headphones.

1:22:49 That’s what killed his hearing. Okay, so we have to be careful. I think one in six American teenagers has got noise-induced hearing loss, and that’s coming from headphone abuse. It’s not from going to Van Halen concerts or whatever it might be. It’s from headphones all day, every day.

1:23:04 We, we may be raising a whole deaf generation. It’s a serious concern. Having said that, yeah, if you’re in a noisy office and you want to think, you know, going back to where we started, putting a pair of headphones on with some stochastic noise like rainfall, birdsong, natural, you know, a stream, that can restore your productivity immediately, back up from one-ear to the full whack. Okay, and hopefully, as the, as sound design evolves in workspaces, retail spaces, we’ll be, uh, doing less of that in the future.

1:23:36 I do hope so. People will have thought about it. Yeah, because headphones are intrinsically antisocial. I mean, they do preclude conversation, and I’m quite a big believer, as you are, Brian, in conversation as an art form. You, uh, it drives black cab drivers mad, because they’re used to having that conversation with you.

1:23:52 I mean, when I first got to England, that it was always a conversation with a black cabbie, and now I’m always tuned out into something else, but let alone my smartphone or something I’m listening to, and there’s no conversation. Um, because everyone always has their own something more important to be doing. Yeah, right. But I mean, I do think great headphones are a joy. I was given a pair of Allzy headphones recently, and, um, you know, I sat there with a stupid grin on my face for several days, you know, not too loud, not too many hours a day, but nevertheless, oh my goodness, you know, you can get wonderful, wonderful feelings from headphones.

1:24:22 Uh, we do have to put them in context. So, just like anything else, can I ask you a few of your own personal success secrets, or how you’ve managed to structure your life, you know, to find certain successes? Is there anything in your daily routine, whether it’s waking up early or meditation or exercise or anything that you do regularly, that you rest of the show. Julian, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end, and I’m going to ask you the same.

1:25:16 If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Julian Treasure and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Where was he? Cambridge? Uh, yes, yes, Cambridge University at that time, having a great time rowing, playing drums. Um, I think it would be, um, to be true to yourself and not be swayed.

1:25:39 There have been times in my life where people have persuaded me of things, and looking back, I was doing the right thing. So I think it’s very important to have confidence in your own, um, intuition, actually, more than anything else. It should take a lot to knock you off course, and there’s been certainly two or three times in my life where I’ve regretted having changed something because everybody said, oh no, this is the way to go, and actually it turns out I was doing the right thing.

1:26:06 If I go a little deeper on that intuition, talk to me about sound intuition, because you know we all have heard and spoken with that person, and and everything adds up, but the voice, or there’s something wrong, because we hear something that’s not congruent with the words or with the facial features. Um, is that something that you’re, you must be highly in tune with? Yeah, and I think you can tell a great deal from somebody’s voice. Generally there’s a, there’s a lovely TED Talk on lie spotting by Pamela Meyer, is it?

1:26:34 I think, um, that’s a really good one, and she talks about some of the tells that people give when they’re not being truthful. Not just that, but I think you can resonate. I mean, the voice is the breath. It’s our expression in the world. Uh, I often listen to people with my eyes shut, actually, um, you know, um, Pythagoras in his classes originally, for the first year, had a screen up, so you weren’t allowed to see the teacher.

1:27:01 You had to listen to the teacher, and then when you could listen properly, they would take the screen down so you could see it. But it was, the eyes were seen as a distraction, not as the way of learning. So I think you can learn a lot about people from listening to them very carefully, and when we are seeing people, we tend to get distracted. Oh, they look great. They, you know, it’s designer this, it looks terrific.

1:27:19 You know, we’re in Shoreditch. They’ve got a beard, they’ve got a bicycle, they’ve got a messenger bag, they’ve got tattoos. Do they must be all right? You know, not necessarily. So listening is a really good way of hearing the heart and hearing what’s inside of somebody.

1:27:32 So when you meet someone, you’ll close your eyes when they’re talking, a little bit, if I can. I will very often, if I’m listening to somebody in the meeting, I’ll close my eyes, and people think I’m asleep, but I’m not. I’m listening, right? And that’s telling you the real truth. Yeah, again, that tone of voice: are they being apologetic in what they’re saying?

1:27:48 Are they insecure about what they’re saying? Totally. Little words get in there. You know, I train people on these, like, just, I just like to start with, is so much more apologetic than I’d like to start with, and that word just gets in there all the time. We, we apologize for things, so people tend to put these little words in when they’re not confident about something.

1:28:05 Second part of my question is, best advice you’ve ever received, could be business, could be personal. Something that sticks out? I think from my father, many, many years ago, he said a wonderful thing to me, which is, the best is the enemy of the good. That has been very profound in my life all the way through because it’s made me pragmatic. You know, we can all get very perfectionist about things, and if we have to get it right, it puts a huge load on.

1:28:32 I taught this to my son a long time ago, because he used to get very cross when he couldn’t do things first time. I said, this is called learning. You know, failure is very important in learning. Being prepared to fail, you know, it’s Ken Robinson’s talk as well. Being prepared to fail is necessary to be creative and to learn anything.

1:28:49 So I think that was a beautiful phrase, the best is the enemy of the good. You know, the good sometimes is what we need. Okay, we can go for the best later, but there are many people who won’t do anything because it can’t be the best, and I think they lose. Yeah, I mean, your talks at TED were the, were the, you know, the culmination of many, many, many uh public speaking engagements, which I’m sure were not the best. Oh, many times, yes.

1:29:13 Fallen flat on my face, and, you know, had disasters, and so forth. So yes, definitely. Last part of that question is, you know, to the 18-year-old or 20-year-old that’s listening out there, you know, in Brazil or in China or in America, who looks at you and says, “I would like to be on that TED Talk, the big TED, the TEDx stage, one day, and I want to be a key person of influence,” which is what you are. Um, what do you tell them? Well, it does require having an idea, and you know, what can change the world?

1:29:43 And there are people coming up with these things all the time. It’s amazing to me. It’s like you know, the three-chord trick, which can be done in pop songs forever, and you would think we’ve done those chords, but no, somebody comes up with a new way of doing them. Ideas are all around us, and I think if somebody can create an idea that’s going to change the world in some way fundamentally, uh, then they have a chance, because TED is about ideas worth spreading.

1:30:09 It’s not the only platform in the world, but that is what that is. Um, people criticize TED for not following through and making these ideas into reality sometimes. Well, that’s not TED’s job. TED’s job is to have the ideas. Let’s get some other structures out there, which make them happen.

1:30:23 So I would say the first thing is, is to have an idea, and then have a passion, and then, yes, let’s learn to communicate that. Speaking, listening, context, you know, get those right, and then you have a chance to get that idea out there and inspire people. There’s a wonderful TED Talk by my old friend Derek Sivers about, um, how to create a movement. Have you seen that one? No.

1:30:44 Oh, it’s brilliant. Some crazy guy starts dancing on a mountain, on a hillside, and everybody just looks at him, and then another guy gets up and starts dancing with him, and then some others join, and by the end of the video, about 3 minutes in, everybody on the hillside is doing this crazy dance. And he says the person that’s important there is the second person. First person is just a crazy, looney person. When you get the second person up there, it’s interesting, so the second person creates the momentum.

1:31:11 So you need to inspire somehow just one person to join you, and then the momentum comes. And this is a good point. Don’t just concentrate on the public speaking, uh, proficiency. Focus on the idea. Idea, yeah, absolutely.

1:31:25 Oh, totally. The idea, you, you can’t. Content is vital, you know. It’s, it is what you say as well as the way that you say it, to paraphrase the old song. So you need to have content.

1:31:36 I mean, I’ve seen people come onto the TED stage and be very practiced and rehearsed, and it’s artificial. You know, in my talk on speaking, I talk about honesty, authenticity, integrity, and love, and authenticity is really important. Integrity to being your word, and love is giving to the audience. It’s not about me, you know. When I did those TED Talks, it wasn’t about me, it was about them and about giving them something.

1:31:58 So when you do that, then you can make a connection, right? And you need to give away those ideas. That’s one thing I noticed about you, and we’ve talked about that so many times on the show. So many people think of their ideas as proprietary, but you know, you’ve gotten to where you are because you’ve given all this information out there, and then people come to you as the expert, right? Yes.

1:32:18 Well, and I do seminars now in the UK for small groups of people who pay to come and go deeper. So there’s always deeper you can go, and everybody I’ve seen has been successful with content, like Dan, for example. You know, you write a book that’s giving it away, isn’t it? Well, pretty much. I mean, the book doesn’t sell for that much.

1:32:35 He doesn’t make the money out of the books. He gets the money out of the people coming to the courses, where they’re, they’re going deeper, and they’re, they’re being taught stuff that’s not in the book, and you can always, always, always go deeper. You know, I’m learning all the time about sound. There’s so much I, I need to learn and understand, and, uh, it’s a constant struggle to have time to read and, and to absorb things. So there’s always deeper, and I don’t have any compunction about giving good ideas away.

1:33:01 If you engage people with great ideas, then they come back and they want to do more stuff. And are you still training people? Are you still teaching? Yeah, okay, definitely. Yes, and we’re about to launch a club, uh, very soon in the UK.

1:33:13 Well, it’ll be juliantreasure.com. Is that, yeah? juliantreasure.com. There’s going to be, um, a club of people where I’ll be mentoring them and giving them exercises to do every month, so that’ll be a membership-based thing, which is a new departure for us. So very excited about that. Excited about the new book next year.

1:33:28 Excited about the conscious listening course I’ve just started. It’s all going. Yes, you’re a very busy man. Um, thanks so much for coming and speaking with us. It’s been a joy, Brian.

1:33:37 You know, we have all this input that’s hitting us all the time and affecting our mood and changing the way we feel and making me avoid certain places or go towards the other, and, and ultimately it’s a real way to connect. Sound is, and, uh, it’s hard to break down the details of it, but when you kind of break them down, it makes sense. Um, whether it’s the HAIL acronym that you’re talking about with the love and integrity and authenticity, which is so important, to even the little basics of a voice that I’ve never thought of.

1:34:04 Yeah, so um, you know, thanks for bringing this. I had dinner with someone two weeks ago, um, that I met, and he said you should have Julian Treasure on the show, and it was one of the few times where I took a step back and I said, he’s on next week. And so you know, people are synchronic. Yeah, it is. People are tuning into to this being a super important piece.

1:34:22 And it’s funny when you talk about Pythagoras, I mean, that was almost the original podcast, you know, with the screen up and forcing people to listen. Exactly, you know, exactly. Definitely. So, uh, thanks so much. Keep us posted on what’s going on.

1:34:34 Absolutely. And, uh, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. Uh, I wish you well in yours. Can’t wait to see your next TED Talk. And both: oh, thank you so much.

1:34:49 Thank you