Sound Affects: How Sound and Listening Shape Our Lives | Julian Treasure | Glasp Talk #52
This is the fifty-second session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk features intimate conversations with leading thinkers and creators, revealing the stories, struggles, and insights that shape their work.
Today’s guest is Julian Treasure, a globally renowned sound and communication expert whose five TED Talks—especially "How to Speak So That People Want to Listen"—have garnered over 160 million views. Julian is the author of award-winning books like "How to Be Heard" and "Sound Business", and his upcoming book, "Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet", launches in June 2025.
In this episode, Julian shares his journey from music and branding to becoming one of the world’s foremost voices on listening. He explains how sound influences our emotions, behaviors, and health—and why most of us are “listening in a noisy world” without realizing it. He introduces the four effects of sound, the beauty of silence, and how conscious listening can transform leadership, relationships, and even democracy.
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Transcripts
Glasp: Hi everyone, welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are honored to welcome Julian Treasure, globally renowned expert on sound and communication, author of award-winning books like How to Be Heard and Sound Business, and the mind behind five TED Talks with over 160 million views, including the iconic "How to Speak so that People Want to Listen". Julian is the founder of The Listening Society and has helped over 150,000 online students, and now trains CEOs, teams, and organizations to elevate their communication and business outcomes through curious listening. And just in time for this conversation, Julian's new book, "Sound Affects: How Sound Shapes Our Lives, Our Wellbeing and Our Planet," launches June 3rd, 2025, in the US. And it's a wake-up call to the impact of listening in today's disrupted world and a practical guide to reclaiming the power of sound for a happier and healthier life. And today, we will dive into Julian's journey, his insights on effective communication, and why listening is more important than ever in our noisy world. Thank you so much for joining, Julian, today.
Julian: Well, thank you for having me, guys. It's a pleasure to be here.
Glasp: Thank you. So first of all, Julian, we have to say we love your TED Talks and books, and you've influenced millions of people around the world. But I'm personally especially curious about your own journey and what inspired you personally to make sound and listening the focus of your career.
Julian: I guess it started with music, really. For me, I had, I think, an enlightened mother who bought me, when I was only about six, give or take, she bought me records like Carnival of the Animals, Peter and the Wolf, A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, those kind of classical pieces which specifically were written for children. And I loved them, and I used to play them and play them and play them. So I connected with music very, very young. Obviously, as I grew a bit older, my musical tastes evolved and changed. I took up piano, and then I learned to play the drums, and I did that, well, for the rest of my life, really, and played professionally for a while, made records, did radio, all that kind of stuff, played lots of gigs. I think musicians listen to the world slightly differently from non-musicians, because if you're playing in a band or an orchestra, you have to listen to all the other instruments simultaneously. So it's a multi-track listening. It's a very attentive listening, very conscious listening. And by the way, you're doing that while you're doing something quite complicated yourself, whether you're playing drums, piano, violin, whatever it is, the movements are not simple. It takes years of practice. And you may also, in an orchestra particularly, be reading music, which is a complex code to decode, if you've ever seen the incredible number of dots on a classical music score, not simple. So you're doing three very complicated things all at the same time. So it's not surprising, actually, that musicians' brains, we now know, are slightly larger than non-musicians' brains. The corpus callosum is extended. That's the bit of the brain that joins the two hemispheres together. And again, that's not surprising, because there's a lot of traffic going back and forth as the artistic right side of the brain is working away on the music and the appreciation, the aesthetics, and the left side is thinking about the movements and the practicalities of it. So yeah, I think for me, it started with music. And I took that attentive multi-track listening right through my life, through a long career in magazines, marketing, branding, and so forth. And as I was working with these big brands in the 80s, 90s, I kept thinking, why don't they think about sound at all? Because they really didn't. So when I sold my magazine company in 2002, I started a company called The Sound Agency, which I ran for 20 years, and that was an audio branding company, specifically asking and answering the question, How does your brand sound? Which still a lot of brands don't engage with, but more now than they used to. You think of, oh, I don't know, Intel, dah, dah, dah, dah. Everybody knows that sound. Not many people could draw Intel's logo, but that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars to them, that little sound. Or the famous Netflix, the moment you hear that, you know what you're dealing with. So a lot of companies are doing that well and starting to deploy the power of sound. And that's what I did for 20 years. So that's where I started really researching the way sound affects us and the way it's being abused or misused or not thought about in huge numbers of situations. And the damage that's being done to us by the noise that's around us all the time. So that was, I guess, that was my journey. I stopped The Sound Agency last year in order to focus on my purpose for the rest of my life, which is to generate listening in the world. That's what I'm all about now.
Glasp: Is that a reason you are launching your new book, Sound Affects?
Julian: Yes, I talk about Sound Affects as a plea to listen in a world that's forgotten how. It's a book that focuses, actually, on a really good and not often thought-about reason to listen. I mean, we can talk about the reasons to listen in a moment. One of the big reasons to listen is that sound is wonderful. It's amazing. It's extraordinary, powerful. And unfortunately, most of the sound around us is because it's like the exhaust gas of the economy. It's just noise. It's not designed, thought about. It's not intentional. It's just accidental. Most of the sound around us is doing us harm, but sound can do wonderful things for us as well. So the book is, I guess, a plea to engage in what I call conscious listening, to explore the wonders of sound. And there's a lot of that in the book, the sound of living things, the extraordinary sounds of our planet, the sounds of us, humanity, most of which aren't terrific, and even the sounds of space. Actually, space is full of sound. Most people don't appreciate that. It's just very, very low frequency. Everybody thinks space is a vacuum. It's not. It's a very dilute plasma and very, very low frequency sounds with really long wavelengths. I'm talking about light years, wavelengths, that can perfectly well transmit through that very dilute plasma. So even intergalactic space is full of sound. And so there's a lot about that, right up to and including the extraordinary and spooky sound of a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster. And with all the sounds I talk about in the book, they're all keyed with numbers, and you can go to the book's website and hear them. So it's a really nice sort of multimedia experience. And then the last chapter is about silence, one of the most important sounds of all, and one which not many people have contact with these days.
Glasp: And I saw you mentioned like four types of sound, like a geophony, a biophony, an anthropophony, sorry if I pronounce it wrong, and silence.
Julian: Thank you. Biophony and silence, yes. So I guess five kinds of sound. That's a taxonomy which was invented by my old and wonderful friend, Bernie Krauss, who lives in San Francisco, actually, and Oenone, just up the coast. And Bernie came up with this taxonomy of biophony, geophony, and anthropophony. And I've added cosmophony to my book. There isn't a word ending in ophony that describes silence. So the last chapter is just called silence.
Glasp: But you, sorry, you've written several books in the past, right, like How to Be Heard and Sound Business, and what's the difference, and what inspired you to write this one? Could you tell us a little bit about the backstory or scene of this book? If you could share.
Julian: Sure, well, Sound Business came along, I think that's back in 2007 or thereabouts. I started the sound agency in 2003. And I did a lot of research in the early time of the sound agency and came up with my model of the four effects of sound, which I've never had any reason to change, actually, since then. And I started writing the book, and I think I got the opportunity to do my first TED talk a bit later than that, which was about the four effects of sound. So just to describe them, because people are probably working for effects. The first is physiological. So sound changes our bodies from a sudden noise, which will give you a shot of cortisol, your fight-or-flight hormone, to a gentle soothing sound like gentle surf, which is a brilliant sound to go to sleep to if you ever have a problem sleeping. Sound changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions, and even our brainwaves. So it's physiological. The second effect is psychological. So you only have to think of music. That's fairly obvious to most people. Sound changes our mood, our feelings, and our emotions. Music's not the only sound that does that. Actually, I've often used birdsong in client locations for the sound agency. In fact, we put birdsong in service station toilets for BP all over Europe. And customer satisfaction went up 50%. So, you know, it's a sound we like. It's a sound we don't hear that much of. And in fact, tragically, it's a sound which is dying on this planet. I don't know if you have seen these numbers, but I was shocked to learn that in the last couple of decades, the US has lost one-third of its bird population. One third, gone. Because we are killing what they eat with insecticides, and we're destroying their habitats, so they don't have places to live and rear their young. So, birdsong is something that maybe our children won't ever hear. You know, the morning chorus, which to me is very, very sad. But it's a lovely sound. And it's a good sound to work to because it's nature's alarm clock, time to be awake when the birds are singing. And it's very good for stimulating your neurology and making you feel secure because we know when the birds are singing, things are normally safe and fine. The third way sound affects us is cognitively. You can't understand two people talking at the same time. So if you're trying to work in an office and somebody is speaking behind you, that unwanted conversation is massively distracting and reduces productivity by up to two-thirds for people who are trying to think and work. So that's no surprise that noise is the number one problem in modern offices because we're open planning the whole world, and it's having a devastating effect on productivity. And the final way sound affects us is behaviorally. It changes what we do. So there's a wonderful piece of research that demonstrated this better than anything I can think of. They had two displays of wine in a supermarket, identical displays at the ends of an aisle. One was French wine, one was German wine. They looked the same, nothing between them. And all they did was alternate music. So on day one, French music, on day two, German music, keep that going for weeks and weeks and weeks and look at the results. And the results were that on the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one. Now it sells more in the world. So that may not be a huge revelation, but, and it's a very big but, on the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one. Now that is a massive shift in behavior. And most people had not noticed the music. So this is not, ah, German music, therefore I should buy German wine. No, no, no. This is how powerfully sound affects what you and I do below the level of our consciousness, if we're not listening. So I think that's another good reason to listen, don't you? That sound has that kind of power over us. So those are the four effects of sound. And I put those into the book, Sound Business, and a lot more. And that book really is a guide to anybody running a business. It's a manual about how to use sound to your benefit, how to sell better with sound, how to make a better customer experience with sound, how to make more productive environments for your people with sound, and so on and so on. So that's what sound business is all about. The clues in the title, I suppose, really. And I went on after that TED Talk, which was the first time anybody had ever used sound in a TED Talk. So they were quite excited about that. And then I got the chance to do another one the next year, which was about sound and health. And then the third one was about listening. And then the fourth one was a plea to architects to start listening to the buildings they are designing. So it was called Designing with the Ears. And the final one was how to speak so that people want to listen, which was the one about speaking. And that's the one that went completely ballistic. The others had done well, million views plus, but how to speak so that people want to listen, well, they didn't release it for a year, actually. And I thought they hadn't liked it. And then when they let it out, it went mad. And I don't know how many views it's got now. Chris Anderson says, whatever the talk has got on TED.com, you need to double roughly to allow for the embeds and YouTube and all the rest of the views it's getting all over the internet. So yeah, I think the total on all five is now 160 million, which is mind-blowing really. And it's interesting, though, really interesting to me. And this is kind of where I did a U-turn, or not a U-turn, but a left turn maybe. The TED Talk on speaking has been seen by five times as many people as the TED Talk on listening. Now we've moved a long way from Epictetus' old adage of we have two ears and one mouth. And so we should be listening twice as much as we speak. Not anymore. And of course, a world where everybody wants to be heard and nobody's listening, that doesn't work very well. So the next book I came up with was called How to Be Heard, which is a slight cheat because yes, it is about speaking, but it also is about listening. Don't tell anybody it mentions listening a fair bit in there because by that time, I had developed my basic model of communication, which is that speaking and listening are in a circular relationship. It's not linear, it's circular. The way I speak affects the way you listen. The way you listen affects the way I speak, round and round. And that happens within a context, which very often is far from ideal. I mean, right here we have an ideal context, no noise, it's all clear, but would you want to have a really important business conversation in a noisy Starbucks? I don't think so. That kind of difficult context is often around us in noisy cities, and more than half of humanity lives in cities now. So, How to Be Heard is a kind of manual for speaking and listening. It's got, I don't know, 30 plus downloadable exercises, I think, or exercises in the book anyway. And it's very similar to my online course, How to Speak So That People Want to Listen. So those two things kind of go hand in hand. Now, Sound Affects is my mission for the rest of my life. And yes, it's about listening fundamentally and primarily. It's a tour of many of the wonders of sound, and it's a manual for listening in a noisy world. So, just in the same way that How to Be Heard had exercises in it, so does Sound Affects. It's got plenty of practical tips and hints and so forth for listening better in a world where we're so distracted, we're so overcome by noise, we've lost contact with silence and natural sound. And the effects on our relationships are dramatic and devastating in families, in teams, in businesses, in society, democracy as a whole. You only have to look at the world's politics right now to see the effects of not listening. You know, politicians go off and have talks. I wish they'd go off and listen instead. So there you are. That's the journey through the TED Talks and the three books for you.
Glasp: Thank you. Thank you. And this is the question I had always in mind, but you've spoken about the connection between sound and the mind and body, but do you think our emotional responses to sounds such as feeling sadness when listening to Beethoven or Chopin are innate, or are they learned through experience like a couple of dogs? And in other words, are we born with certain emotional reactions to music, or do we develop them because of the way we are taught to interpret sounds by our teachers, parents, and people around us when we are young?
Julian: That is a fantastic question, Kazuki. And I would say I would lean on the side of learned. And the reason I say that is because there are musical traditions on the planet that have very different interpretations of similar harmonic or melodic intervals. There are some musical pieces where a minor key, a minor scale, is happy. And joyful, others were its sad and maudlin, just as colors have got interpretation. So in China, white is the color of death and funerals. In my country, white is the color of weddings. It's a joyful color and purity. Also, I think, for example, in your country, in Japan, sound is something people pay a lot more attention to sometimes. I mean, I know there's a ceremony somewhere in Japan where people come out to listen to the sound of a flower opening, which is very beautiful. I don't think they hear much, but it's a lovely idea. But then you have things like the tea ceremony, where it is about the Zen of not talking and every little moment, every little trickle of liquid, and the placing of a cup, and so forth. These are all sounds that are incredibly significant. And the kind of thing that in a noisy life we don't notice at all. So I do think, you know, a lot of our response to sound is associative. And I think those associations tend to be learned from when we're in the womb, you know, when obviously the first sound we experience is our mother's heartbeat. And we experienced that from probably just 12 weeks after conception, when we have no ears, we have no eyes, but we're hearing it with every cell in our body. And as we develop and we do get eyes and ears, you know, we are hearing this kind of muffled experience of the outside world, particularly our mother's voice, the language she speaks, the cadences of that language, and perhaps the music that she likes. Because every time she likes something, she's getting, you know, happy hormones through her blood, which go through the baby as well. So the baby's associating in there, you know, every time if she's listening to, I don't know, Mozart, she loves a bit of Mozart, it makes her happy, that's gonna affect the baby. It's gonna feel happy when that sound is on. So that association is formed very early. And I often think one of the biggest shocks of childbirth must be the absolutely terrifying change in the sonic world that the baby has. You know, one moment you're in this lovely, muffled, warm environment, which you've been used to since you had any consciousness at all. And the next moment, suddenly, all these high frequencies occur that you didn't hear in there at all. The whole top end of your hearing suddenly is opened up as you come into the outside world, often in a hospital with hissing and beeps and people talking and noise and so forth. And my goodness, that must be terrifying. You know, babies can't see very well at all. They can hear perfectly. And so hearing is not only the first sense we develop, it's the last one many people think that gets switched off when we die. It's an amazing sense. And I do have a chapter on hearing in the book because it is really something we need to pay attention to, especially now we've got, according to the World Health Organization, a billion young people killing their hearing with headphone abuse. You know, way too loud music going into their ears for hours a day, flattening those tiny little cells, hair cells that we use to decode sound. And hearing degrades as you get older. Well, if they're doing that to those cells now, as they get older, we may well be raising an entire future deaf generation because of headphone abuse, which is a big concern. So, yeah, where did I get started on that? I've forgotten where I started.
Glasp: Oh, yeah, but you answered, thank you. Yeah, you answered my question, and thank you. And then related to that, and I was wondering, like, do you think that the kind of emotional reaction to sound is unique to humans or to other animals, like monkeys or dolphins, something similar?
Julian: Well, I just interviewed my old friend, David Rothenberg, Professor David Rothenberg. I interviewed him for the Listening Society, where we have, I'm doing little half-hour mini-podcasts, really, but only for the members of the Listening Society. And David's a fascinating guy. He has played; he's not only a professor of philosophy and music, but he's also a jazz musician who's released numerous jazz recordings, CDs, and so forth, and plays clarinet. And he has played his clarinet with birds, bugs, whales, all sorts of animals, and experienced whether they respond or not. And his total conviction is that birds have an aesthetic sensibility. And he's got a book called Why Birds Sing. And the conclusion at the end of that is, because they don't have to, you know, crows core, many, many birds don't sing and they do the same sort of stuff, territory defense and, you know, mating and all that kind of finding food, whatever it might be, warning. They can do all that without singing. The ones that sing, he thinks, sing because they love it. And so, yes, I mean, there was once a recording of a sperm, sorry, a humpback whale, which sang for 23 hours nonstop. I don't think you'd do that unless you were really enjoying yourself, would you? I mean, that's quite a marathon. So I think we don't know until the work that's being done right now using AI to decode animal languages. I mean, they're working on dolphins, whales, and other animals. You know, I met a lovely guy at TED this year called Jeff Reed, who gave a great TED talk about wolf language. And he's recording and trying to understand the basic sounds that, I mean, obviously they're not talking like we do, but there's a lot of subtlety in the tones and pace and so forth that they use. So, yeah, we may find out, one day, we may find out that whales are actually talking and that dolphins are actually talking. They've got very big brains. I mean, dolphins, we know, call each other by name. Did you know that? Dolphins have names for each other. There's only one other, apart from human beings, the only other creature that does that, that we know of, is parrots, who also have names for each other in a flock of parrots. But in a pod of dolphins, it's very useful. You know, the mother will have a name for them, for her, what do you call them? Calf, thank you, I just remembered. The mother will have a name for the calf, and then that will stick. And as the dolphin grows and becomes a mature adult, it can still call to its mother, it can still call, and the rest of the pod will know that name. So, very useful, because they can spread out over a very large area in search of food and speak to each other and say, hey, I've got something here, come over here, guys, and the whole pod will move that way. So, yeah, I think when we decode animal language, I'm pretty sure we'll find there's some aesthetic there, just in the same way that you find dolphins dancing in surf and doing things, you know, having fun bouncing through the wake of a boat or whatever they do, they're not doing that for evolutionary purposes, they're doing that to have fun. So, we shall see, the jury's out, but I strongly suspect we are not the only animal on this planet that has an aesthetic sensibility. We're certainly not the only animal that makes music, that's for sure.
Glasp: Really? Yeah, really interesting. I didn't know that dolphins have names, yeah, and they are singing. So, and you mentioned about sound health care, so, in the article and books, but, so, I'm just curious, so, your sound routine, so, if you have, like, you know, you wake up with music or you don't listen to any sounds, so, in a typical time, and so, you use, like, headphones or by some specific manufacturer, do you have something, some routines or rules?
Julian: I, with music, I'm very intentional. I don't do background music because music is so captivating to me, I can't have it on in the background and do something else; I just listen to it. So, I have a wonderful stereo system at home, which, you know, that's a really big thing to me, to have, you know, something that can create gorgeous, amazing, glorious sound, and I'm very into spatial sound at the moment. I've been listening to a lot of music by an artist I admire a great deal, a guy called Stephen Wilson, who is a UK, he's categorized as prog rock, which would be my youth, but it's not really fair to him, but he's very much experimenting with spatial music, and he mixes everything in Atmos and 5.1, and I think this is the future of music because it is fabulous. And, you know, the only reason we've been stuck with two loudspeakers, a point source like that, for a long time is technical, because that's what we could do. Well, now we can do more, and we are doing more. So, I've done work with my friends at Elle Acoustics, who have an amazing multi-speaker in-room system called Hi-Ris, which is, you know, absolutely blows your brain, it's incredible. It's got height and width and depth, and, you know, you can do all sorts of things, change the acoustics of a room, turn it from a nightclub into a concert hall, and back again, it's beautiful. So, spatial sound is very, very important. Um, so coming back to your question, when I listen to music, I listen to music. When I'm working, I don't have anything. I like silence. I wake up to, well, the sound of Orkney. I live on an Island off the North coast of Scotland, and we're very lucky that if the windows open, what we can hear is birds, breeze, the distant surf, uh, from the beach, and that's it really. Uh, so I like nature sounds. I like peace and quiet. Uh, I'm not saying this is right for everybody, by the way, we're all individual people, often say to me, what's the best sound to work to? I can't answer that because it depends on who you are. I'm sure there's somebody in the world who works at their very best to incredibly loud death metal music. And that would not be me, but you know, we're all different. Um, I do listen to music on headphones when I'm flying, which I have to do a lot. I'm just off tomorrow. I've got three flights back to back tomorrow, and I'll have my, um, Sony WHX, what are they called? 4,000 mark four, five, whatever it is. I can never remember the complicated name, but they're brilliant. I think they, they pip the Bose headphones at the moment, but it's a very close run thing and they're both very, very good. And active noise cancellation is such a gift. If you're flying particularly, it takes away that debilitating noise of the window for the fuselage of the plane. Um, so yeah, then I do listen to music when I'm flying. Definitely do that. Um, what else in terms of routine silence, very important, just being with silence. I mean, I recommend to everybody to have three minutes of silence, a couple of times a day, and I definitely do that. Just sitting quietly, not doing anything, just being like meditation. Well, you can meditate if you like, um, you know, meditating is a mental process where you're trying actively, um, or passively, if you prefer, you're trying to empty your mind of thoughts. Uh, so that, that actually is work and it takes a lot of practice to meditate, meditate, and I know a lot of people who find it very frustrating. You know, they get angry when a thought comes, and that's not the point. You just go, there's a thought put to the side, start again, patiently building and building. You can do that if you like. I just like enjoying the silence. So, you know, I might think about things. I'm not, I don't have a problem with thinking about stuff as long as it's not, Oh, I've got to do this. I've got to do that. I must get on with this. You know, not that kind of thinking. Um, so yeah, silence is, you know, I, I, I use meditation as something I use as, um, a metaphor, actually more what I'm talking about, conscious listening. Because I think there's a strong parallel between conscious listening and meditation. When you're listening to somebody consciously, you have to be empty. Just like when you're meditating, you have to be still, you have to be humble because you're giving them your attention, which is a great gift. You know, it's not something we do all the time to everybody. And when you give somebody your attention, it is a really potent gift. And it's a gift of humility because you're saying you're more important than I at this moment. Which is why listening gets rather more difficult as people get more senior in organizations. Because that kind of innate, inherent humility of listening, of giving your attention to, so giving the gift of your attention to somebody perhaps isn't what we associate with being a dynamic leader where you're supposed to know the answers and tell people what to do and be driving the whole thing, not listening. Well, interesting, that is because I spoke to Hiram Smith, who is the former CEO of the Covey organization, for my book, How to Be Heard. And Kai, you might know, you might remember this if you've got the book there. And he said to me, he thought that of all the skills of a leader, listening was the most important one. And he recounted a story where somebody on their production line, very, very low down, just a, you know, a menial worker on their production line had an idea and had an idea and fortunately had an enlightened boss who listened rather than saying, don't be stupid, just get back to work. What are you talking about? Listened. And that idea, I think he said, made them $4 million a year after that. So, you know, listening can be very, very profitable. And I think it's also very important for leaders to be able to listen to diverse opinions and bad news. Because if you have a listener, if you have a leader who won't accept bad news, people stop giving it, and you have to know the bad news. You have to know what's going on. And if you're just protected from it, you know, you think of Putin, who I'm sure does not get half the news of what's going on with his assault on Ukraine. You know, if you surround yourself with people who all agree with you and don't tell you bad news and only tell you good news, you're living in a fantasy land and you cannot lead an effectively, you cannot lead an organization in that way. So, and diversity as well. You have to have people, you have to be able to listen to people who disagree with you and who have different perspectives because, you know, it may well be they're right, or they have something of value to contribute. And if we just dismiss anybody who doesn't agree with us, that's very unidimensional, it's very monocultural, isn't it? And you're not going to get great leadership that way.
Glasp: That all makes sense. And I think our listeners, some listeners are, I think, still struggling with, like, listening and speaking. And as you mentioned, like conscious listening is a key to become a good leader, but, and you mentioned, remember you mentioned like five components, like a silence, the mixer, savoring, listening positions, and LASA as acronym, but I mean, receive, appreciate, summarize, ask, those like five components, but if you say one thing to tell them to become a conscious listening, what would you emphasize? What was the most important thing, or in one sentence, one voice, how would you describe it?
Julian: Um, well, I think silence is my number one, because it's so difficult with half of the humanity living in cities now, and having lost contact with silence and nature sound, you know, we are getting very numb and that's a big problem because the number we get, the noisier it gets and the less connected we become to each other. So it's kind of the antithesis of having something in your hand the whole time and picking up your phone every 20 seconds to check what's going on. You know, this kind of technology is so addictive that, you know, we have that lovely book, um, Alone Together by Sherry Turkle, uh, which I strongly recommend to everybody, which she's another Ted speaker and the professor at MIT, who was a big fan of technology and then discovered that actually no technology is not putting us together into a big, happy global family. It's dividing us, you know, the, the, the paradigm of a family sitting around a meal table or looking at their hands, nobody talking to anybody or having conversations with somebody who's not there. And this kind of overriding feeling that the person who's not there is more important than the person in front of me. Uh, so, you know, I think silence is the antidote to all of that. It takes us away from that. And that's why many people feel uncomfortable with it because we're so addicted to distraction and intensity, you know, five or six things going on at the same time. Uh, and that is, you know, it is an addiction, it's dopamine addiction, and we've got to watch out for it. So, you know, if you, if you struggle to sit for three minutes in silence, that's a big giveaway. That's, really tells you that's what you need to be practicing. The other one, I think, um, which is one step removed from that, um, savoring, which I now have tweaked a little bit, and savoring is not just disentangling. It's not just, it's not just, um, tasting the sound around you anymore. Uh, I've got three questions to ask when you're doing that. So, the exercise is in any room that you're inhabiting regularly, close your eyes, listen, and ask yourself three questions. Is this sound healthy? Is it good for me? Is this sound helpful? Is it supporting me in doing what I want to do in this space? And is this sound making me happy? So three H's: healthy, helpful, and happy. And if you ask those three questions and you get a no, then you can start to change what's going on around you, which I call sound healthy. And if you ask those three questions and you get a no, then you can start to change what's going on around you, which I call soundscaping, designing the sound around you. And that's really, I mean, it's a huge reason to start listening consciously, is that you can become responsible for the sound you create and the sound you consume, start designing your sonic environment to be healthier, happier, and more helpful.
Glasp: You mentioned that, you know, like listening and speaking are really important skills, but the school and teachers don't teach them at school. And do you have any ideas? We can, how to say, how we can teach these skills and a mindset to people like students, younger people. And yeah, of course, you know, watching your TED talks and reading your books is one way, but how can schools or teachers teach these things to students?
Julian: Well, I have, I've developed a short syllabus for very young children, which is where we need to start. I worked on it with an American counselor teacher, a psychiatrist, who helped me a great deal. And we've got that, and it's available to anybody who wants it. Actually, I'll put it, I haven't done that yet. I will put it into the Listening Society. So it'll be there for anybody who wants to access it in the Listening Society, which is my online community for people who are, who care about listening, want to listen better, or are interested in sound and communication in general. So that's one thing. I mean, there are some signs of improvement. There's a word that's been bandied about in the UK, and that word is oracy, which is the equivalent of literacy. And they're, they're talking there about listening skills. And I think, you know, it's nice to hear people talking about that and acknowledging the importance of it. The problem, of course, is changing a curriculum. It's like turning an oil tank around. And typically, unfortunately, the curriculum changes more slowly than the world. You know, if you've seen Ken Robinson's wonderful TED talk, you know, he's basically saying we're teaching children all the wrong things. We're teaching all these legacy subjects. And that was before AI. Now we've got AI. What on earth are you doing learning how to compute? We don't need to know how to compute. We've got things that can compute for us. We need to know how to codify things and solve problems, and be creative. But not what, when I say compute, actually it's the wrong word, calculate. We don't need to learn how to calculate. We've got calculators, we've got computers, we've got AI now that can do all that for us. But, to, computing probably is the right thing actually. I shared a stage a couple of weeks ago with Conrad Wolfram, who's a fascinating genius of a man who's developed a whole language that helps us to do exactly this, to compute, to take real world multivariable problems and turn them into symbols and ways we can understand them and actually come up with clear answers to them. Now that's useful. We don't even teach most children how to code. Well, I don't think we need to do that anymore because AI can code faster and better than we can, although you need to know how to code in order to check what it's doing. So you know, we can't just leave it to it. Nevertheless, you know, the curriculum is so slow to change. So we're still, you know, there are still public schools in the UK teaching Latin. I mean, really. So it's going to take some time to shift the direction of travel with education. But as I say, I'm encouraged by people at least starting to talk about this new word, oracy.
Glasp: Thank you. Yeah. And you mentioned the, you know, about AI. So, now AI is getting, you know, popular, and many people are using it. So yeah, from your perspective, so how does AI impact our communication, like speaking and listening?
Julian: Well, we're about to enter dawn. We're at the dawn of a new age where we are going to be communicating with technology using our mouths and our ears. So the oral, the sonic interface, the user interface is going to be in sound. It's going to be in speech, and it's going to be, we talk and we listen. So a little bit like Jarvis in Iron Man, these will be completely human, totally indistinguishable, really, from talking to a human being, except that they won't empathize. They won't have empathy. They won't have feelings. They won't know what it's like to be human, to stub a toe, to have a relationship breakup, to have a hangover, whatever it might be, you know. So I think that's coming. I mean, there's a TED talk from TED, I think it was last year, not this year, because I was at this one, so it wasn't there. It was last year, 2024. Mark Ruggalo, who had, who demonstrated technology, he's a former Google lab guy. It's worth having a look at you, if you want to see the future, because he demonstrated this technology, where it's a little wearable device. You speak to it, it speaks to you. And, you know, if you were speaking Japanese, I could just say to it, Hey Fred, can you translate what Kay's saying to me into English, please? And it'll do that in real time, that kind of thing. It'll pick out one person in a noisy room and let you listen to them and dull everything else, that kind of stuff. So it's kind of like enhanced speaking and listening, but it gets us away from this enslavement of our fingers and our eyes, which has been going on for a long time. And to be honest, I can't wait not ever to have to enter another six digit blooming code to prove I'm who I say I am, not to have 150 apps on my phone, not to have to enter credit card details and, you know, all that kind of stuff, because we will all have a personal intelligent agent who knows everything about us, has all our biometrics and deals with the outside world for us. So it won't be any longer, you know, firing up an app to book a hotel and then, you know, another one to book a restaurant and so forth. It'll just be, Fred, I need to get to Buenos Aires next week. I need to be there on Wednesday. And could you book that restaurant I went to last year, and see if Alfonso can join me? Boof. So it'll be natural language, and I haven't used my fingers or my eyes, which means I can look at the world. I can look at you and we can be, you know, much more present to each other, albeit, you know, going to have this slightly surreal thing of people wandering off and having conversations with somebody who's not there the whole time. We have to get used to that.
Glasp: And so two more questions, by the way, short questions. And one is advice. You shared many advice already, but if you have any one small tip or advice to people who are struggling with listening and speaking, if you can add something, I'd love to.
Julian: Speaking is getting a coach. You know, in two weeks, I'll be in Copenhagen talking to 2000 CEOs, and I always do this when I talk to senior people. I'll say, how many of you use your voice at work in important ways? You know, for how many of you is your voice important? And they'll all put their hands up because they do media. They do. They stand in front of teams. They stand on stages. You know, they do interviews. They do interviews. They do interviews. They do interviews. They do interviews. They stand on stages. You know, they do interviews, all that kind of thing. Everybody. Okay. How many of you have had formal vocal training? About three. I just think, what? What are you doing? This is, would you go on stage and give a piano recital at Carnegie Hall, having never had a lesson? I don't think so, unless you happen to be the greatest genius in the world. So really, I mean, get a coach. If your voice is important and it is for everybody, that's the secret, but you know, it's even more important if you're selling, persuading, leading, any of those kind of things in work or your parenting, even if your voice is important, go and get some lessons, deal with a professional voice coach, singing coach, drama coach, presentation coach, you know, just look them up. There are lots and lots and lots of them around, and do some work and give your voice the attention it deserves. It's not the way it just sounds. That's your natural voice. You can do all sorts of wonderful things with your voice to improve your pace and delivery and projection and timbre and tone, and everything else. So that would be my biggest tip because it's something that almost nobody does, and it'll give you a big advantage. And for listening, it is simply understood that listening is a skill. It's not a capability. Hearing is a capability. Listening is a skill, and it's a skill that you can practice and master. And if you have mastery of the skill of listening, it gives you the most enormous advantage in life to be a great listener. People love being with great listeners. Great leaders are great listeners. Great speakers are great listeners as well. It's the foundational skill. So there you are. Those two tips.
Glasp: Thank you so much. And the last question is about the legacy and impact. Since GLASP is a platform where people share what they are reading, learning, as the digital legacy, you know, we want to ask this question: What impact or legacy do you want to leave behind for future generations?
Julian: Oh my goodness. Well, you know, as you can tell from this. It's all about listening now for the rest of my life. My passion is to generate listening in the world. And if I leave behind the world that's listening better and you know, my goodness heaven would be a world that's really listening where we teaching children how to listen where we have politics that's in based on listening where we are listening and connecting with other people respecting differences all this kind of stuff understanding that you know, two people can be right and have different views. It's not that I'm right. You're wrong. You know, it's not this how this addiction. We've got another addiction we've got in the world now, which is making people wrong to be right themselves. So, you know if I can move the world discernibly in that direction, that will be a good job. I'll be happy.
Glasp: Beautiful answer and legacy, and thank you. Thank you so much for joining today.
Julian: Thank you for having me, guys. It's been an absolute pleasure.
