The transformative art of kissing frogs. Sir Tim Smit, The Eden Project

pocket oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay uh welcome everyone to this week's uh seminar and before I introduce today's speaker I'll just mention the next few uh seminars that we have uh next week we're not going to have a seminar there's been a a cancellation of the speaker so no no talk by Amy Dickman next week we'll have it we'll have it sometime next time I'm sure uh then the week after we've got uh Edith Hammer from Lun University on soil ecology from the microbes IE View and that's on the 8th

of March and then the following week on the 15th you've got Jerome Lewis from UCL on build building collaborations with indigenous and local communities using extreme citizen science so do and then we've got more things come after that but do do come along to to either of those while I'm mentioning seminars next week for those of you here in Oxford uh next Wednesday there is a talk by John shelen Huber at the Natural History Museum at 4 p.m. on how to survive the anthropos flat overshoot or dee

p restoration so some of you may want to come along to that one in the Natural History Museum uh as well uh so it gives me a great pleasure to introduce uh to today's speaker just uh trying to go to Wikipedia to introduce you so Tim we had an interesting lunch with with Tim so Tim's had an interesting career starting off as an archaeologist before working as a songwriter and producer in the 80s for which he received seven platinum and gold discs uh and then in ' 87 he moved with his family to Co

rnwall and became involved and started the Lost Gardens of helan in Cornwall and then in the uh 90s he started the Eden Project I'm sure we'll hear more about this there's an image of it I think there was earlier on there in Cornwall and which has become iconic and both as a center for understanding connecting with with nature but also in terms of local regeneration and economic regeneration of an area I'm sure we'll hear more about that uh and more recently Eden has been expanding out of that t

hat Cornwall Hub to to uh areas in the north of England and in Scotland and others as well and Tim's just come back on his way back from moram where he was discussing some some some of these these issues there and he was made a a CBE and then and he was kned in 2011 there's many other things we could talk about but thank you for joining us Tim how about you it's a great pleasure hello everybody um I I'm going to be a huge disappointment to you because if if you've come expecting deep science you

should leave now um the subject of my conversation which is what it will be uh is about my hobby of kissing frogs which is that I think the greatest the greatest pleasure I know is taking something and transforming it from being apparently hopeless into something really hopeful and I hope during the course of my chat I will tell you about some of the things I'm working on we have projects as ad said we got we're about to start building an Eden Project a very different Eden Project I ought to sa

y that at my huge age I am a really old fart I'm 69 and I promised myself at the age of 50 I was never going to do the same thing twice because why would you you know and it's but so each Eden although it has the name Eden attached to it is if you like uh an evolved form of what we did before uh moving somewhere else and I I feel very privileged that I've lived through a period all of you being young you know I you will not see it as going through a massive change but the siloing of the way of p

eople think uh which is dying all around us which is a really really good thing means that for example an Eden Project imagined say in 1990 is almost irredeemably oldfashioned when you now look at the way we're thinking about um uh life and the inter relationships between all life forms being concentrating in a sense on a botanic collection or whatever feels a rather primitive and unsophisticated way of going bear in mind when I was young when I was young um and I had really long hair hard as th

at is to believe and there was a musical called hair in 1969 and so I wasn't making any link between the word hair and my state now um and for those of you who don't know which is the majority the theme song of hair was we are Stardust um which was a play on words um on Carl Sean's phrase uh we are all made of star stuff um isn't it amazing that what was considered if you excuse my Greek hippie [ __ ] in 1969 has in the space from 1969 to now become established science in the that um if you if y

ou start in process of the understanding well understanding the discovery and the evolution of an understanding into um uh you the microbiome of the human and then over the last um four or five years the revelation of the uh communicative I'm not sure what the correct word is but how the world of melium and fungus uh is so much bigger than we ever thought Did You Know by the way there are 3,000 times more fungus mycelium in the ocean that there are on land I learned that last week I mean that's

just crackers isn't it absolutely amazing I'm going to interrupt my speech and tell you something else which is really amaz I've had probably the most astonishing month of my entire life I've been privileged to go and see things which just made the hair stand up on the back of my neck you I spent um three days in Woods Hole in Massachusetts in their Marine Laboratories with young scientists people of your age who don't want the constraints of the past and they want to exper experim I went into a

lab where there were these guys working with skate yeah they were working with skate and melium in the same place and it was great because one of my best friends is a guy called Merlin sheldrake who wrote um a book on fungi which you may have seen in Tangled life it's a great book um and um so the moment I said I'm a friend of Merlin shelder they wanted to open up every cupboard they have and show me everything they had but there they were working there was one group of people working on um on

on these skate there must have been 5,000 skate in this enormous tank right and they were looking at skate because of sports injuries skate are as you know I'm telling you what you already know but it's really pleasing because then you feel clever okay um skate a car what they called caragen fish and their cartilage grows in a really unusual way and what they done is they' done the um do correct me as we go they' done the the the the the the gene testing on the skate and we're trying to create i

f you like it to me as a pagan a sort of almost tracing paper overlay to go over the human genome to see where the various things that were affecting the cartilage growth would overlap with certain things in the human just for an ignoramus like me I was just going wow that's me and then then I went into another room get this and there are thousands of horseshoe crabs yeah big horseshoe crabs and there's a rig with maybe a hundred crabs that have had underneath their tails sliit and they're bleed

ing like stuck pigs and they're all these vat they're sucking blood out of the horseshoe crabs I said what are you doing that for and they said $3,000 a pint you see it was worth coming already wasn't it you've heard something you didn't know you can now go to the pub over the week and said I've met a guy who actually saw people cutting horseshoe crab Tails bleeding them and selling it for all that money for a pint because it's 300 million year old blood what I mean is you know in terms of it it

s Origins and they sell it to blood testing places all over the world to find a whole range of conditions that I can't we've reached the limit of my knowledge I think you're getting it but what I want to explain to you is the excitement of seeing young people going bananas studying thinking working across systems and you got this real Buzz of a sense of it's a cliche that phrase Skunk Works you know which came out of the locki Martin work in the 60s but but this sense that the quest was the thin

g that was important it was the it wasn't simply linear process it was a frontier to be crossed fantastic and then I went into the other the last room I've got to describe I haven't even started my talk yet right but but the last room you will not believe there were several thousand axotal right yeah you haven't heard that sentence before have you no well for those of you unfamiliar with an aelole it's got It's like it's a a sort of albino looking salamander fad with pink gills it's it's an imma

ture it's an immature salamander which if you do something to it I forget what it is and you put it somewhere else it will then turn into something else completely but these salamanders guess how weird this was they were in these flat um you can't even call them Aquaria they were like only this tall because they can't climb they can't climb well they certainly couldn't climb because they their their legs cut off you see I'm shocking you already but this is astonishing they had got the legs of th

ese salamanders which they chopped off and they had put them on it wasn't blotting paper but it looked like blotting paper with some liquid that permeated and kept the whole thing moist and the the woman who was in charge of the experiment she says look at this and she brought this really big magnifying glass and put it down over over the axotal I've never seen anything like it from the shoulder the cut shoulder of the Axel notle these fibers were growing out from the cut cut off arm that wasn't

even part of the main body were fibers moving towards the fibers coming out the shoulder how astonishing is that and then they went to the Little Foot and the same same Principle as I was telling you about the skate but they were working there they they they felt they were within a measurable period of time I mean serious researchers don't say we're within 3 months or whatever but they felt that they were within touching distance of breaking the secret of we've all known haven't we that it's re

ally weird that a lot of the crab fishermen they rip the claws off and then throw the cab back and then six weeks later eight weeks later the crabs got a new claw the same you've always known about lizards haven't you you can try and catch a lizard as a kid and sudden your e with a tail and the lizards Bugg it off but this so we everybody's known there's something in there that if humans could somehow work out how that happened to regrow it could be fundamental I mean there's something like 30 m

illion people in the world I'm not making the figure out someone told 30 million people in the world whose backbones have been snapped or they can't work some particular way and that's what all this is about to see whether you can repair the human body by knowing which switches to to pull as you as you would have noticed there's not a single jot of Science in what I'm saying because that's not the point I'm just trying to get you excited for the journey you can do the science there are lots of w

izard people you're you're in Oxford you may have realized there's been quite clever people but the point is to remind us that life is utterly thrilling and if you to ask me quite honestly I don't think there has ever been a more exciting time to be alive than now as all of these forces that we've been talking about in terms of the melium in terms of the the microbiomes and things starting to get understood I actually feel really jealous I was saying to my young son the other day I think you're

going to go through a period now over the next 20 30 years where this generation is going to get religion but not religion as we know it it's going to be an understanding of our connection to the natural world and that we are all star stuff of some kind and that in itself will lead to thoughts and processes being develop which are going to be good for the planet and actually suddenly reveal a whole lot of stuff which is really exciting and I hope I hope that your experience before head going for

the weekend of listening to me speak that you'll leave here feeling flipping out it's a really amazing time to be Al I didn't think about that I didn't think about that when I tell you about my day spent with a lake of cow [ __ ] and how exciting that was you see you're already suspending disbelief you never thought you'd find that exciting by the time I finished describing a lake of cow [ __ ] and why it should excite you you're going to go wow really you are I did wow I don't even know anythi

ng about cowshit and by the time I'd finished the day with it I thought I'd seen almost you know some kind of Guru coming from on high but we'll come on to that later um I explained about the Axel Lal the skate and the um orho crabs simply because one of the other things that's happening is a breakdown in those silos uh where those who study those things are starting to embrace things which I would never ever have thought so for example one of the the the cultural gods of the American young scie

ntist is a poet an Irish poet called David White if none of you have read David White he he wrote he's written some marvelous books but look him up online he writes poetry that makes even people who don't like poetry feel Misty eyed really white wh yte by the way just in case you're taking notes um no actually what I'm trying to say is there's a cultural thing going on here to do with um it's almost like an act of Revelation so let us now talk about frogs I'm going to tell you at a speed which i

f there's anybody who's hard of hearing I'm really sorry I'm going to tell you my life story so quickly so I can then go on to ideas all right I was born that's the start buff I went to a university and when I got to University I um was poor and I noticed a rock band that came to play for the May hops was paid a lot of money so I decided because I paid the piano I had to have a rock band so I could earn money as a May ball I formed a rock band I became an archaeologist I then after I had become

an archaeologist I got even poorer so I decided that London must be paved with roads of gold so I went to London and was immediately unemployed because when you get to London you discover that on any night of the week there are 30,000 musicians better than you already there however none of them was as cunning as me and on one of my first weekends in London I went down to clap them common to play football there was a scratch team of people in the entertainment business and I hacked somebody down

very bad tackle it was and I was really mortified at what I done and someone said do you know who you've just nearly crippled and I said no and they said that's Pat Stapley he's the lead sound engineer at ABY Road Studios so I went hello and so anyway Pat and I would become firm friends but he he then let me record at Abby Road for free and we were really lucky because we got record deal after record we didn't have any hits we had record deal after record deal after record deal um so we were abl

e to pay our way and that gave us kind of a credibility with the studio and now many of you will find this impossible there was once a period of time when there was no such thing as a mobile phone my greatest success occurred because the very first night I had taken my wife out to dinner after we'd had our first child we needed a babysitter and I asked my sister in-law to come and babysit she said could you bring a friend she brought a friend at the end of the evening the friend said I understan

d you're in the music business I'm an opera singer would you like my card inside I was saying I hate Opera I'd never I'd actually cross the road to not hear Opera but I put it in my top pocket right card and the following day I go to Abby Road and the singer that was supposed to be singing for us phones in ill so I only had two other phone numbers and well in those days of course people weren't just sitting at home by the phone hoping it would ring so they were all out and I reached for the card

and I found this lady and she came and four weeks later the record she'd the record she'd sung on went to number one in Belgium then number one in Holland then all across Scandinavia then Germany then it became the biggest selling record in French history the album went platinum went the top 10 in America all because a woman I had met for no longer than a five minutes just happened to be free and gave me a card magic believe me magic comes through being open to the unexpected one of the other t

hemes of what I'm going to be talking about is when parents send their children to a posh school or here to Posh University well of course you got here on your own steam but the idea behind it is my loved child will meet people will meet people and they make their career go forward and the rest of it and the thing I would say is that is so oldfashioned because I think most of the people I know and I know a lot of people the magic of their life has been in meeting the people they didn't know they

needed to meet it wasn't organized like that meeting people you don't know you need to meet is a very interesting thing I'll give you an example of two things that have changed my life through accepting I I've forgotten to tell you the main Mantra of my life is that I accept every third invitation I receive I do it doesn't mean I don't accept the first but I accept the third if you're as smart as you think you are you will make a note to yourself that single sentence is worth a life and the rea

son for it is this there's a wonderful book by David Eagleman called some Su which is the single best short book I have ever read in my life and I'm not alone in that 42 visions of paradise it is absolutely hilarious but it starts it starts with imagine you have to die you know you have to die but you can plan it you're going to have you're going to be in heaven with your good friends and your family and you're going to be all together it's going to be great then it finishes by saying now imagin

e eternity well people of my age when you talk to them about this you say come let's be honest all those afternoons and nights you've used up over your life with your old friends the mates you made at school and University bathing in that wonderful soft romantic Haze that you make your best friends at school and at University and the life you have wasted remaining with total BS that you have pasted over by trying to pretend they're interesting making allowances for them laughing at the same joke

s I've just told you the truth it really is the truth um I didn't say all your friends were like that by the way just in case you know so okay I was invited third invitation to go and talk in a Nissen Hut it's an old military Hut uh near tton in Somerset all right I was told there would be 50 people in a dog and my PA went Bonkers she said that's 170 miles you're going to drive to talk to a few people in a a dog and you got to be in London the following day and um anyway I couldn't help myself I

had to go I went I spoke and indeed there were 50 people and the dog loved it by the way dog was very happy and the talk went well three months later I am in a horrible building in Plymouth for a meeting of European Commissioners who are in charge of something called the EU erf 5B Secretariat you're impressed by that aren't you I mean you're impressed I remembered that but it was it was actually burnt into my soul it was the time when they were dishing out money to the five counties of the Sout

h Southwest which were relatively impoverished to various projects in each of the counties we discovered early on we were going to get nothing because Cornwall was behaving really badly they decided there was a risk that if they gave the Eden Project money the money for the new har xter University going to Corall might be threatened therefore everybody battened down the hatches and suddenly our friends in cmore so we're really sorry but we' we've been put under a three9 whip you know so I was lo

oking at the end of the Eden Project the end of it then this old guy gets up everybody's silent and they just look up him he says my name is Humphrey templey and I am the chairman of Somerset County Council and just three months ago I saw this man come out to Somerset because he believed that we're part of the wider West country and he spoke to us for an hour and a half and I've just spoken to my colleagues and we've decided to drop one of our projects if each of you will drop one each this is o

bviously a project that's good for all of us collapse of stout party they all went unanimous that talk to the the dog and the 50 people was worth 12.7 million pounds and it happens every time I know you will think I can't be doing with the stress of ending up being a judge of the west of England ballroom dancing championships and you don't know anything about ballroom dancing I've done all that stuff I've opened old people's homes I've judged dog shows I've judged the worst the most dangerous th

ing that you must never do even if it's a third invitation I said that there are no Exceptions there are do not judge Orchid shows no no no because what you forget is that for every person that Ador you for your good taste there's now a 100 people would like to have your end Trails put up on the front door no it's a very risky risky business so where was I oh yes yes so I um I had this this hit record and everything and I I I ended up in a limousine one night um and this limousine was taking me

um to the T D where I was going to pick up a whole bunch of Gold Records um and um the driver put on the radio and it was my song that felt pretty cool and then the second song that came on was a record I'd written for another French singer that was soon going to knock my record off number one and go to number one itself how cool is that I was made up and I started to cry and I never went to the T you know it is a really weird thing when you think you want something to the bottom of your being a

nd you get it and it feels like ashes going through your fingers it's really funny when you fake up the notion of your self-image through the success or perceived success was supposed to compensate for something I don't know what but it was totally not doing that and it was actually it felt so tragic having it and then not feeling everything you thought so I decided that I was going to change my life and I've changed my life very radically I decided I was going to work my life by not only accept

ing the third invitation which I was already doing but I was um uh I was going to just tra Chase my instincts because the one thing I'd learned from the music industry which you can all relate to I'm sure is that if you love something and you're not a freak and most of us aren't I mean we like to joke we might we don't right if you love something there will be millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of other people who love it too therefore the issu

e is marketing it is it's how do you tell people about about the thing that you love and why they should like it and it's a really interesting thing a lot of people don't actually realize how to convey their love of something I'm quite good at that that's actually pretty much what I do you know someone asked me what my job was I'd have to say well I'd probably have kisser of frogs in there um Exorcist I do that um and that's probably all I do but it's fun it's fun so I moved to corot by accident

because I went on holiday it was raining I ducked into an estate agent I went in to wait for the rain to stop and there was a house for sale I picked it up and looked at it the guy who was the estate agent said sir won't like that and took it out of my hands and I thought W I took it back on him and anyway the following day it was raining as well so I I decided I'd go and see this house this is crazy this is 280 miles from where I lived in brickton in London I went to see this Farm in the rain

and as I'm driving this tractor crosses my path and it blocks my my my my my way and this guy comes out in a sester and this rain streaming down his face and I wind down the window he says what you do in your old buck and I went this is really embarrassing I understand there's a farm for sale and I just wanted to have a look at the farm house he said that's my AR that's my farm come and have a cup of tea anyway two and a half hours later I bought his house and it was just crazy so I had to sell

my house and then and then I had to move to Cornwall and then the terror I'd moved to cmore and I had to address the issue that I was now leaving the music industry and I wasn't trained to do anything do you know how terrifying that is to actually know hardly anything that's useful you know when I'm I'm so useless that when I look I've got a toolbox that anybody who knows me whenever I make any move towards it they immediately grab it and take it away because they're just worried I'm going to de

value the property you know you know he'll put up a shelf that falls down and so on so anyway I moved to cmore it was a money pit I used up all my money to make this house livable and it was really good I was now broke I'd spent everything on this house right I then go to the dentist you probably don't know where I'm going with this doe I go to the dentist what are the chances that in a dentist surgery that is a copy of this week's the stage it should be last year's Country Life or something lik

e that but no was this week's the stage I open up the stage just waiting to have some deep Canal work done or something whatever it was and I open up at random and it's a picture of the football player Jackie Charlton now sadly dead holding a huge salmon and it announced that ITV were making an enormous documentary of 10 parts about the pleasures of fishing called go fishing this ladies and gentlemen was a sign I need to go back in a drunken Haze some six seven years before I had been in my stud

io in faram in in in Su and a friend of mine had a banjo was playing a banjo and we just made up a song on the spot unbelievably this song which sounded not dissimilar to that [ __ ] Jerry hit in the summertime you know the one with the band playing a little I won't sing it for you I don't want to clear the audience this early but but I found the cassette I sent it to the TV company they said we want that as the theme song and by the way have you written any more music that we could use we haven

't chosen any music for the show so from a situation of abject I had nothing going to the dentist yielded everything so then what happened is a guy turned up in a white van with a pig a really big black pig and this black pig he told me was going to go to slaughter if I did not take it as a pet well I thought that was harsh you know was giving me all the guilt he said I do know because I come here quite often that you've got a garage but you haven't got a car good enough to go into it therefore

it's empty so um all you need to do is put a bit of fencing in front of it and the pig will have a nice home that's how Horus came to live with me but Horus hated the garage and as soon as Rob the guy who delivered him driven off I heard this grunting noise and Horus had just walked straight through his fence and worse was now at the back door of the farm and with his nose he unhinged the back door of the Farmhouse and walked in and lay down next to the ARA and there he remained for a week I'm s

erious he would I couldn't get him out and but he he was very he I could get him out he would go out and do a crap in the same spot and then come back because they're really clean I I knew that the only way I could get Horus out of The Farmhouse was to go and find him a mate so I found Doris and after I found Doris Doris and Horus they just they went Bazookas with each other I tell you what the noise it was deafening so so anyway I still didn't you will you're still with the story right you reme

mber I haven't got a job I don't know what I'm doing so Doris then gave birth at 2:00 in the morning in 19 1990 uh in November the something I can't remember what day it was under under a heat lamp and lots of hay and I knew that was a sign I was going to start a rare breed Park I was going to find some land I was going to get Rare Breed uh domestic animals I was going to breed them and that was going to be my future a week later I go and see the man who owns the land that would have been perfec

t for a rare breed Park I go there um he says he will see me he instant ly tells me I can't have the land but I can't go because he's just given I've got very sensitive lips right you don't need to know that but it's got a purpose for the story I got very sensitive lips so I'm holding this really hot coffee and I know that it'd be really rude if I just put the whole cup down and walk out so we start engaging in small talk during the course of which I just happened to mention in my dim and distan

t past I had been an archaeologist he said the immortal words that I've never heard before or since I have need of an archaeologist I mean you know it was so um I said why is that he said well I've inherited this huge estate next to where we're standing look were you wanting a rare be part all that buried up stuff there there's a very famous garden in there but no one's been in there for 70 years would you like to come with me tomorrow because I could use some help analyzing the plates of time s

o I took I put on my my archaeologist voice as if I knew a thing or two and the following day was rather amazed to be given a machete for a garden visit and we we cut our way in and 45 minutes later we came to this huge brick wall probably as tall as that yeah um and there was a door in the middle of it you know this sort of classic secret gardeny door painted in green paint which is just peeling and the hinges are bleeding rust and slightly a jar shoulder inside romance fell in love it's like S

leeping Beauty and I knew then and there that I was going to restore this place it was as well that I didn't know anything and I the reason I'm telling you this part of the story is I knew nothing about what I was doing except I loved it I just loved what it was if I'd known something I wouldn't have dared do it that's the problem most of us don't do things because we think our intelligence is telling us you can't do it but everything I have done and being successful at I I didn't have a clue ab

out because my skill was finding people who really did know about things and forgetting to tell them the qu asking them the question can we do it I just said if I was doing it what would I do and that's a very different way of approaching it all the top horticulturists in the whole of cor more were in when I called they were in I said could you come over to see this place they all came over we just had a we got on really really well and I said I think this is going to be the bestest Adventure yo

u've ever seen and the only thing we got to do is Market it and so I found up a guy I'd met socially called Stephan batky who was a famous garden writer and he was at the BBC doing gardeners world and I phoned him up and I said Stefan this is a very short phone call I'm going to give you one chance before I go to the other channel this is the greatest Garden restoration probably of the century and I'm about to undertake it I've got all the big people coming to do it are you in he just said immed

iately yes so we were in play so for the next year we had a group from the BBC filming everything we did it was easy to get sponsors to do various things or lenders diggers or dumper trucks or whatever it was needed we had a huge our ha day we had over 100 volunteers and all the time the cameras were wiing and anyway it came out it was 10-part part documentary came out of it it won the uh documentary of the year the book that I wrote became book of the year and we got first 100,000 then 200 then

300 and now it's nearly 400,000 visitors a year coming to it and it's fantastic I mean it is really F I know I own it actually I don't now own it because I've given it to my children but but um the Fantastic thing is that you think again it's going back to me being in a limousine and crying you think that owning it is the thing it isn't what is amazing is when you realize you're a kind of Trustee of a place we've now had over 400 people have wanted their ashes scattered there and I go there pro

bably three or four times a year and I meet people people who have broken in uh in the evening and they will have set up a dining room table on our lawn and they'll be there dressed to the nines and you'll leave crying they're there because it's the last meal they're going to have together it's fantastic own a place that people believe is their if I change anything I get letters like nobody's business how dare you you know and then we have the issue we had the issue of the otter should I kill th

e otter boy I was Public Enemy Number One on our film screen we managed to catch an otter there should be no otter at helan at all there's no river right this otter broke into the northern summerhouse and in plain sight of our CCTV goes in over a period of two hours and takes every single ornamental goldfish it then sits on its ass right under the screen munching very slowly across the backbone and then it throws the next bit away in it come unbelievable cheek anyway it had to be dealt with it h

ad to be dealt with and I told the friends of helan we got a lot of friends of helan that we're going to deal with it and they said um you we can't we'll stop coming if you do that so you know what we did I started something with I am now in Britain the biggest buyer of lion dong in the world in Britain I mean not in the world because um otter really hate lion [ __ ] you think about it that's pretty wacky I mean you know I mean there's a lot of scientists in the room okay what's the answer how c

ome a creature a whole species that has never seen a lion can tell that it should be [ __ ] scared so to speak you know seeing smelling Lon [ __ ] it works also I have to tell you this is again because I know you need to leave here pretending it was legitimate coming to hear me talk right um I then subsequently three years ago ago bought a bankrupt golf course because I wanted to turn it into an orchard right so I got rid of most of the holes keeping just a few and the problem was we had Badgers

eating leather jackets and leather jackets like that little bit of soft ground just around the edge of a green and they were just tearing the whole place up again lit a badger has never met a lion knowingly unless they live near a zoo you maybe but it's but it's foolproof our greens have got no Badger damage at all they're scared scared scared I don't know how I got onto that subject of the lhip anyway um helan became what it is and um I learned also about the transformative nature of building

a community we have a lot of Staff we have more gardeners at helan than it did in the Victorian Heyday and you know how your capitalist friends who are good at business that been to you know done an NBA they always tell you labor is a big cost you got to deal with labor you know I found something really weird the more people I employ the better the business is isn't that really weird the better cared it is the better are the happier it is so um it's very interesting we have 24 gardeners at helan

which per capita is more per scale of thing isit more than um at Eden um but it's great it's transformed this is the whole point of my talk by the way I'll get round to it minute but me which is this the town that is is is below us right when we started the restoration of helan Mesi was a tough tough Town it was a place with a few hard drinking pubs and a chippy today there's about half a dozen restaurants all the pubs have been done up you might say that's been gentrified but it's not the two

factories have moved in fish processing places have moved into Mei an art gallery the school schol has been done up it's really hard to get labor there and it's successful as a tourist destination there's money in the place and there's the sense of a future and that's really really important because they get an awful lot of visitors now because they come to helan in the middle of all this I decided I wanted to do something bigger I'd fallen in love with the idea of something big and I've been in

the clay District uh of of China you know Clay is degraded Granite as you know and the spine of coral which goes right down the middle of it is granite which is degrading in all of the money the big wealth of corn would come from China clay extraction Kalin and um I went up there thinking that we might do something like one of the um do you remember they when when in 1984 they had the riots in Liverpool the dox death riots and they decid Michael heseltine thought that the way to stop people bea

ting each other up was to have a garden festival which I thought was a bit left field but anyway but to be fair to be fair it started a tradition which is actually quite good and so every few years they would have a garden festival for which lasted for a year they did there they did Stockton they did Glasgow they did Stoke and eventually they ended up at Ebu Veil uh in in in uh Wales and I went to see the civil servants in in Wales to find out about a garden festivals and how it work and they we

re the nicest people I've ever met they said we completely screwed up they told me everything they'd done wrong everything and the real nice thing is nice I don't know that's the right word the truth is I would have made a lot of mistakes that they made if they hadn't warned me in advance they told me um about uh the biggest mistake they made was all this money came in to create this garden festival and they were so concentrating on building something out of bricks and mortar that they hadn't co

ncentrated on jobs the people who'd have to operate it and work it they hadn't thought about what they might put in the shop or what they do for food or anything like that so when they came to open it they they literally you're not going to believe this three months before they opened it suddenly occurred to them they should get those things sorted so they had to hire staff from outside Wales food even their uniforms they got from outside Wales they were so they were so embarrassed at this mista

ke but I knew immediately that one of the things we needed to do if we were going to build a project was to plan you you just have to start by saying we are going to be successful right we're going to be successful let's plan on success and another rule I made for myself was never ever again use the word if never use the word if it's really interesting when you use the word when it doesn't take long three months four months for people to start using the word when as well about the subject and th

e moment a whole group of people are using the word when it becomes it is going to work it's going to happen um and each of the projects I've worked on since then that has been the case and um so I I spent few months looking for a hole in the ground I eventually found a hole in the ground um which is called bed delva and it's absolutely perfect and we raised uh 144 million PS uh which everybody said couldn't be done in a place like Coral what's a little guy like you doing it it's really interest

ing when you talk to civil servants everybody says you say Visionary Tim you well what a Visionary you are that's rubbish there isn't a school in this country that isn't full of 8 to 12 year olds who could have invented the Eden Project it's not very difficult no the the genius my genius is that I realized that the secret was to see whether I could seduce people who only knew how to use the word no to say yes and I discovered there are a number of techniques in this the first is to mention peopl

e's tombstones you just mention it gently in passing their Tombstone and it would be nice wouldn't it if people visited your tomb and you'd done good things and then you and then you you you slip into that mix the thing which is utterly lethal you start talking about the Beatles and you talk about the guy at Deca Records who didn't sign the Beatles with the immortal words guitar bands will never catch on and then you look at people and say you don't want to be on the wrong side of history now do

you and it's amazing how in a very short period of time a whole bunch of nose started to move from maybe into a yes and we raised we raised the money um and we were very popular in fact we we decided to open uh the year before we finally opened opened for an exhibition there was such a lot of press about us um we phrased it yeah we we phrased it the eighth wonder of the world right and the media are so lazy that once you've decided to call it something they just follow you so you know the New Y

ork Times had it on its front page the eighth wonder of the world is due to open next year and then pictures of it um thanks guys that's really trific but in that year we opened on March the 15th for five months we had over half a million people came and what did they want to do they wanted to put on yellow jackets and they wanted a plastic crash hat and if they were able to have tea out of a tin mug that was so much the better and if they could have a bacon sandwich as well oh blind me we made

a fortune out of people who wanted to buy the safety jackets what they did with them when they got home Lord only knows but it's very interesting the reason it's interesting is that if ever you're doing a project don't underestimate how much people like to see the adventures that other people are going on don't feel you have to just wait for it to be finished it's actually the journey in fact if you go back to my story about the limousine the truth of life for me and I'm sure for many of you it'

s the journey the actual getting there you'd end up like gertude Stein once famously said trouble with getting there is that when you get there there's no there there and I think it's a tragic truth actually and that's why I called Eden a project so it couldn't end it shut up to me whether it's ended that way I I have the comfort that I can always change it it's my story yeah so anyway Eden then opened we had 1.8 million people which was crazy coming through the door um and we had to advertise t

o people say please don't come crazy British I mean we actually put adverts in the major newspapers one day saying when it's raining please don't come what happened they all come they want to know why they shouldn't have come when it's raining it's just the British thing so anyway we've now settled down we have about a million visitors a year we the thing about it is it cost 144 million to build but we've put about 2.5 billion back into the Cornish economy what did we learn well we learned from

Abu Vil so if you're going to a shop with organic food right and you discover that cornall doesn't have a factory that is licensable to make organic food pickles and all the rest of it do you buy it from somewhere else or do you speak to the local Enterprise partnership and say can we find a company train them how to do it get the stuff get the farmers to supply it and then you'll creating substance so today having done that I'm very capitalist I love building businesses is that create General w

ealth yeah so the companies you may have heard of kesic ice cream Sharps beer have you heard of Sharps beer they're huge now they all came out working with us and and and doing their environmental testing on anything from their labeling to the quality of their Hops and stuff and you feel a bit like an Old Testament Prophet with the sort of standard you're trying to get to but the thing is that once people buy into it and they make money it's that old Mafia saying many of you would have seen the

Godfather film yeah Godfather one there's a magnificent scene right at the end after the with the gang Warfare has come to an end and they come for a peace conference in Florida and they're going down they're going down the moving staircase and they this very old guy shuffles across the apron of the the marble apron in front of them and Pacino says something like I thought he was dead and the his sidekick is consiliary he said no no no everybody around him made money and it's it's true it sounds

filthy but actually it's the truth if you create a community and you create wealth for all the people around you in that community and you pay for training you actually do the right thing it pays you back it really pays you back so you can actually have the moral compass of being if you like a champion of social Enterprise but having a social Enterprise does not mean you have to make a loss I'm terrible I I have i' I've got so many enemies and one of the reasons I've got enemies is I hate a lot

of NOS I hate the guys and gals who run Nos and they look at you as if you should admire me because of the cause that I'm a champion of is marvelous and you go yeah the cause is great you're terrible you couldn't hold a piss up in the brewery your charity should be really changing people's lives and you can't even add up you see a lot of that in our country by the way that's why I don't have as many friends as I may be like but actually bearing in mind the book some you know I still got enough

for hell and heaven um so I got bored Eden was doing really well we persuaded AEG to enter a partnership with us we've got the best outdoor Music Arena in the world pure accident um the mine was carved with a perfect acoustic um and so it's the only place Elton has ever played and allowed his live performance outside to direct to go broadcast loads of bands record their life and all the big bands want to play Eden because the Acoustics are so good so that was all going well and we got approached

whether we'd like to build another Eden in China we went to China and it's 90% finished it's been an absolute Joy being with the British establishment with their knowledge of China wishing to give you the benefit of their experience of ignorance and Prejudice to tell you why you shouldn't work in China and why um what is happening to the Wagers in the west is so bad that you should not go there and then they get really upset with you and think you're treacherous when you say well didn't we also

go into Iraq you know just it's really funny that the the double standards so we've been out there for four years we love it we absolutely love working there and it is a bit alarming that you say you're going to do something and then three weeks later it's done we signed our contract get this they wanted to have a full signing with all the politicians we had at that time SJ Javid was the foreign minister at that time a full sign right in front of Chinese television and they told us 6 months bef

ore it's going to be in the conference center we went what conference center there wasn't the conference center six months later there was the most amazing Conference Center finished and we signed up in front of this building it's terrific absolutely terrific so you know I just to have a rant just for a moment people tell you what is the point of Britain pioneering things to deal with climate change when you got countries like China poisoning the world this I'm quoting them right or India right

well China just happens to have put up more wind turbines over the last three years than the rest of the world put together more solar the subject I know a lot about is geothermal more geothermal holes than anyone else Ed more trees what is it about that kind of weird racism that suggests that a people with a huge burgeoning middle class that want to look after their kids and whatever actually want to poison themselves to death it's an actual weird contradiction there are all sorts of bad things

also going on I'm not saying there aren't but I just thought it's worth saying to audiences you know of a British background to really protect yourself from the e easy lazy Prejudice and do a bit of thinking in all of this because it's so important there is one area if you disagree with someone about trade if you disagree with someone about technology if you worry about an arms race the one thing which is safe territory for us to be friends about is the environment and that's what we're doing u

h with our project in in Ching da it's trivial of course it's trivial it's little old us doing something but but it's funny that in times of difficulty the symbolism of people doing good things and respecting each other can often have a status that is way inflated above the actual thing itself so we're building there we're building in um moram moram as you know he had a harsh life um from more recent problems with the um cockle Pickers drowning uh to IM immense degradation of the the landscape t

here and we got very interested we were asked by Lancaster University would we spend two days sketching up for a university course how the Eden Project might dream about a place like moram to give it a chance I sent a team from Eden up there who got so obsessed by there they didn't come back for two weeks and then they produced This brilliant design which was given to the vice Chancellor Langston who sent it to the boss of the Le who sent it to the boss of Lancashire County Council then Lancaste

r District Council back to morom council and literally in three weeks from some fun of my team great team going to moram we had a situation where every organization in Lancashire had said we want that we want that we believe in that and what it is it's basically imagine the biomes you've seen here I don't know I can't remember whether you actually other there are some moring pictures of one okay well imagine four silver Muscle double-sided muscle shells it's going to be four slightly random look

ing placed muscle shells on the beach and what it's about is a Rhythm of Life um it's about dial Rhythm it's about the tides it's about what happens in our bodies at the same time we're working with a whole bunch of people marshmallow laser Feast you may have come across there the world's top augmented real people we're working with apple um and I think I think it's going to be one of the most important buildings on Earth I really do that's not me being a marketeer it is astonishing The rhythms

yeah I am being a marketeer but actually the truth is that's it that's it yeah and in it you're going to be able to be in this room and hear the tide bringing it's it's a unbelievable tide don't you know moram the speed of the tide is faster than a galloping horse I mean that is serious serious speed lots of people have drowned there because of the um uh being caught out but also all the creatures that come up and go down according to the thing and then you look out over the Lake District and if

you just sit there patiently for an hour or so and you see these weather systems being created you got the tide coming in and out you got the creatures coming up and down you got the weather systems being created you go of course the temple things night and day and when you get the sense of rhythms and everything and then you get thing about your body how is it we thought it was hippie [ __ ] to think we might be influenced by the Moon I mean you're looking at a bloody great lake bay that is go

ing up and down every day and you're 70% liquid and you think you're not going to be influenced so um we're going to be sharing all of that and then we're going to dunde where we're doing the same again it's this EXO ISM thing it's got the highest level of uh deaths by drug overdoses of any city in Europe um they thought that it was a really good idea uh to build a very large housing estate next to a Gas Works which is blocking off access to the river which defines what Dundee is so we're taking

over The Gas Works and turning it into an incredible place we created nine gills that have yet to be um invented that deliberately nine girls that do not exist people of done D over 35,000 people have joined guilds that don't exist yet and every time we do a zoom public meeting thousands of people turn up every time we go up there there's this hunger of people to belong to do something to um be part of it so we decided that the very first job we're going to do is not build anything to do with E

den we're going to build a whacking great beautiful bridge that would go from the estate behind the Gas Works across us and go over the Dual carriageway in the railway line and go down to the river for any of you who knows dande it's a complete dog's dinner they spent a fortune on the VNA going up to dunde and they hired a fancy Japanese architect who wanted to be in all the architecture Journeys journals there's no flat walls who that builds a museum without a flat wall I mean how it's just it

looks beautiful if it was an exhibit itself but anyway they need us to go there to create the critical mass that will make enough people want to be there and it's really interesting the the council in Dundee if you want to be inspired the the guy who's the uh chief executive of the council in Dundee he may well be the most charismatic guy I've ever met he's a young man your age but what 30 something like that every important meeting get this he invites the opposition leaders from each of the oth

er parties he says I refuse to make a really important decision on behalf of our people without it being unanimously agreed because if I get elected out I want to feel that what we're doing has got some longevity and it's really they're so respectful of each other and it's it's it's beautiful every formal dinner they host they're all guests so that they meet each other um and so we're very lucky you as you know the boino comes from um dundi and the boss of the beino um the the the Thompson famil

y you know uh they made a huge donation to make this happen lovely lovely people um and also in in dunde is probably the best botanic research institution in the world that no one has ever heard of it's amazing I went in there it's called the S James Hutton Institute and if I say to you please con constrain your excitement okay it's warm in here but you could go wild when I tell you they have the biggest collection of potatoes outside Peru yeah I could tell you'd be impressed these are very cool

people who are working in vert creating vertical Farms but not like hippie Chelsea kids you know this isn't like we grow some leaves you know some leaves yard and we sponsor you know give up give a bit to Jamie no no these guys are growing bulk vegetables they're also growing bulk trees but they're growing bulk trees with thought they're growing bulk trees that are being injected with the melium that is right for those trees in the landscape of dunde this is science being applied to Commerce be

ing applied to Regeneration properly done I've seen so so many Charities around the world saying plant a tree in every Bloody Business in the world well we'll plant some trees and then they they go around like the Virgin Mary and then you go back a year later and almost all the trees are dead because you've got to manage these things you got to actually make the trees love where they're going and the only way to do that is to make them feel that they're of that place this is science and the real

ly cool thing it's science activism researching things that are real problem solving things so they're part of a community and there's a whole bunch of people who are not at the James Hutton who are just citizens who are taking courses at the James Hunton who are working as volunteers for the James Hunton loads of big land owners nearby are now coming to treat get their trees treated in this way and that's how revolutions happen part of the problem is that men fantasize about revolutions the the

biggest cancer in our societ is middle-aged men with fantasies really because the the truth is these revolutions that we need to have are like chain mail they're like links that go together and become huge because everybody takes it over almost every you know you may really dislike my tone of voice about this but so many of the Charities I see working in the regenerative agriculture the regenerative the so-called Wilding environment actually go into the whole thing with this kind of Halo type t

hing going on and a very little understanding of the diversity the understanding of the diversity that is required and then if you add to that you've got a government that is also fundamentally dull where honestly honestly I haven't yet met anyone on the front bench uh that I'd give a job to really I wouldn't they don't understand science they don't want to believe global warming really but they know it's no longer fashionable to say they don't so they say they do but they don't understand that

there are actually a few really brilliant things you could do as a nation it's called the law by the way it's really interesting everybody is they we want have code of conduct if you made it the law that you do this this and this and if you don't you have your head chopped off it's amazing I'm an old fashioned right winger I'm joking I'm joking but the truth is the law could be so powerful we work at Eden we we put quite a lot of money we've raised money for um uh the rivers trust um and we spon

sor a number of journalists who uncover what's going on within the water companies um and that's a really interesting thing too because it's so cool to slag off the water companies it's like let's slag off the waste companies for the problems they have with our black bin bags it's their problem though isn't it and what's very interesting a friend of many of the scientists in this department here for Mike The Pledge he he he wrote a book book which is about the 30 years of warnings that have been

given to the government by scientists explaining what's happening with microplastics what's happening with it that's a whole long list it's not like no one knew but no one listened to the environment agency it's as if having having one is good enough yeah that with the water quality thing what is really interesting if you're being honest about it is you have the farming Lobby have got a huge lot to answer for in terms of how they treat slurry and chickens and all the rest of it pharmaceutical i

ndustry's got a lot to answer for because of the fact they only test the poison elements of certain of their drugs against a few things rather than a cocktail of everything which is what they should do and so on and the planners insist that most storm water is put into human sewage systems to clear it I mean so when you get three or four lots of stupidity all compounding no the point I'm trying to make is being an activist can actually be kind of cheap because you get into kind of weird slogan t

hing actually solving some of these things requires an adult Behavior to listening and seeing whether you can create some solutions by agreeing which is something we're doing in Derby we got a big project in Derby anyway I probably come to the end of how long I should talk so I want to talk about CIT just quickly no no because I want you to go home just really excited okay imagine it's about the size of this room on the flat yeah it's full of the slurry of 187 CS yeah it's big sludge across the

top of it it's lined the whole thing is lined so it can't leech at all on top of it is what looks like black parachute silk coming off this slurry of course is methane which you all know is um a gas which is variously between 15 and 20 times more bad for the environment than CO2 it doesn't really matter we don't talk about that I'm going to talk about different um this guy I know whose company 18 months ago was worth 40 a share his company today is worth £8,000 a share has done something incredi

ble this parachute silk has two can you imagine it's two parachutes with sort of like an air hole sucked into the middle air hole is hydrogen sulfide you can tell me whether I got the right one but pretend I'm right okay it's the one that does you in if you're a human being and and they suck that out they pump it through um carbon rods charcoal rods and sterilize the effect of that everything left under that parachute is now methane it's compressed using a huge compressor powered by methane and

there's a giant generator outside and it's powered by methane and this compressed methane which goes into big cylinders rides on the back of two tractors and occasionally on the front it can work for six hours a day but it could do more with the gas at 6 hours a day powered by the gas that's coming off the [ __ ] from 187 Cals the story gets even better okay this company have leared how to turn that gas into a liquid like petrol they've also worked with the tractor company to make an engine with

a filter that that can filter the carbon out as the methane Burns yeah you got it so it's zero emission New Holland who is a company a really big company um they're now changing all their engines because they see this is the future for the countryside as you know the average farm from the medieval period to today would have used 25% of its land mass to grow the crop CS that would feed the horses or The Oxen I.E the the Machinery yeah today most Farms spend about 25% on their heavy equipment and

the diesel they would put into it but this is where it gets really sexy so imagine you're using the waste to now create the energy which means that at this stage your energy cost in total is only 7% the jant generator that is burning methane but creating electricity is doing everything to do with the farm and the milking p and everything else by July it's going to be completely net zero this Farm but the really cool thing is every single liter of methane that is used to power the tractors and t

he combines or to power the generator that creates the electricity every liter gets one L equivalent of carbon offset tokens how sexy is that it actually means that you can start to explore a future for small farmers to actually have the ability to make money on their Farm doing something that's good for the environment good for us and really good for them and that's before you start looking at the biggest love of my life which is circular systems I am a capitalist and I believe that the only fu

ture for capitalism is to understand that the 40% or 37% of everything that we either mine or waste in food we've got to stop wasting it we've got to see that as being the area for growth yeah so that the food the waste of one thing becomes the food stuff of another you with me so go the second thing so part of what I do is we we're building a circular system which is using hemp it's using King prawns and it's using melium to say it is sexy seems a bit odd bearing in mind what I'm talking about

but believe me I am working with people to create a really exciting future a really exciting it's so thrilling to see the melium work going on you know um I I was I was talking to yinda earlier do you know what it feels like to be working on a research project with people who are working on fungi and that fungi they think that they have managed to single out how that that fungi can produce squalene squalene is a protein which is needed for the treatment of childhood epilepsy and at the moment it

cost 120,000 sharks a year to get that amount salling just imagine you can grow it in a small rural location isn't that an exciting thing doesn't it speak to you about agency as opposed to the world the damage of the world is being done to us we've got no agency in it at all it's screaming at you hang on guys there's a future to be made here there's a really exciting future to be made and just think all the things I already know they're already Foundation Stones what you already know all of you

already know is unbelievably valuable as the foundation stuff for the next bits you might like to know because you actually understand the language you just may not have some facts so I want to leave by just saying just this weekend just look in the mirror and say [ __ ] I know don't say [ __ ] but say you know what it might be just the coolest time ever to be alive and we can do this stuff we can prove that we're worthy of that name Homo sapan sapiens so wise we named ourselves twice anyway th

ank you for listening to me and I I'm sorry I didn't talk science wonderful AB to repat so we we open up a few questions now before we go to drinks around the corner inly as well so kick off Martha thank you so much I really enjoyed that in in many ways um I was one of the 1 million visitors to Eden Project earlier this year and what really excited me was the way that people were connected with nature um and I suppose I sort of expected to hear something about that to St I don't mind not hearing

about it because I feel really inspired yeah yeah but I'm just interested um in among the other um uh things that make you tick that you're interested in where where nature sits in that because I talk about the circular economy and communities and I'd be really interested to hear where you see people in nature sitting in your my sister by the way and she's she's remembered that I haven't talked about something I care a lot about um we do a lot with that uh we do a lot of uh nature connectedness

um in fact we do we've just got a huge Grant for the next two years to do it we have um we have a sponsor whose brother committed suicide uh uh and he wanted us to create a program and he saw the programs that we've already got we have a lot of people come uh to grow things uh in in Cycles at at uh Eden and it's really weird because they come and then we can only afford to have each group each one for one day a week and they just get desperate because they want to be there every day why can't t

hey be there every day so we're working out a system about how the hell do you create a community where you have treatment if that's the right way therapy or something the words are clumsy for me I'm sorry but they can then all volunteer to help the others on other day so it becomes a cycle um and I'm really really interested in I I think the whole issue of uh nature connectedness it runs the danger of feeling too glib because you know it it's the same when you're in the business that I am of en

vironmental awareness and all that if you hear the word Center of Excellence again you feel like punching someone's lights out if you feel that people are doing work that's Leading Edge cutting edge bleeding edge ether thinking thinking out of the box thinking the unthinkable every time people to do this and the problem is the language the language of nature connectedness is in danger of going into that area of of a phrase that is almost being neutered by overuse um there is an amazing book that

has been written recently um by the designer a friend of mine called Thomas heatherwick that many of you may have heard of he has built many famous things like the uh the Olympic torch and stuff like that he did the the the uh the pollen building at Shanghai Expo and all those things and his book is called humanize and it's about um connecting um again I I have a learned new friend in the front row who knows all about this but it's about human responses to man-made Landscapes and cityscapes tha

t have been thoughtlessly put together you know those if you like very assertive acts of testosterone architecture with reflective glass and hard edges and rectangles and squares um and showing that humans who actually come into presence into the presence of that their their their neur neurological responses are not dissimilar to having many um unhappy thoughts you know I I I'm not technical so I'm steering clear with the technicality I'm absolutely riveted by it I think Community Building Commu

nity making is actually the next stage of where Eden should be the problem is you get into a world in which money sounds as if however much money you've raised is a token of your intellectual ability and in fact many of the greatest in interventions you can ever make in life don't cost much they're actually human time and thoughtfulness um so I'm sorry I didn't mention it I'm a big I'm a I'm a big fan of it I'm really interested I I have in fact a lot of friends working in it I've even got a fri

end working on the fringes of it with horses and that's all very strange he had a very autistic son and he rode across Mongolia with him and affected huge change there there's all sorts of stuff you know when I talking about hair at the start and we are start there's all sorts of stuff in the areas of science which are starting to become properly studied by people who know what they're talking about so that you can sort out the kind of romantic I want this to be true and I do believe in Witchcra

ft and I do think lead can be turned into gold and yet right just just Out Of Reach there's so much which is going to enable us to be well um if we can properly master the skills of understanding what are the triggers for that wellness and it's a subject that uh uh you will return to time and time again and I think it's probably going to be something that informs professionally many of the people in this room because Notions like rewilding or the Regeneration whatever they're all another form of

exorcism they're all another form of actually making good what humans think they've done bad and then we find the science afterwards to justify it but it believe me it start always starts all these things start with a kind of almost spiritual belief that something should be sh so and then they find the science that goes with it I and I I sorry I mean that not as a criticism I mean it as actually we are storytelling apes and we need to be able to tell a story that we can then persuade other peop

le to get behind and then they recognize themselves in that story and sometimes meaning and Truth aren't the same thing thank you uh fantastic talk so we live in this weird world where we have to ask for money on a regular basis we don't get funded for long periods of time and often the kind of innovation and Novelty that you're talking about is devalued in peerreview so you didn't say much about money but you've magically been able to kiss all these frogs and create beautiful amphibious pools a

nd muscle shell things where where does the money come from well I raise a lot of it I terrorize people for it I make people think they're going to go to heaven for it um and it's all about storytelling it's all about storytelling how can you make the story you're telling feel muscular to the person listening how can it be made to feel like they're in at the start of something partially the trivial nature of Academia and threee this and three year that um is I think God what a place for me to sa

y all this I'm going to be probably killed before we have a drink I think Academia has an awful lot to answer for because it has mistaken it role in life most universities are no longer actually universities they're corporates and they they see their students as the Canon fodder and the really smart people who've got a job there are just hoping that the students will [ __ ] off and they can actually research what they want to do and that is the truth didn't I knew you were in the room um um it i

s true though what is true is um and I tell this story at my own EXP spense is I was for three years um I was a trustee at the welcome trust and I have to say I was I was asked to go there as a critical friend and they weren't used to the level of criticism I know I I have to say the process of peer review where the people who peerreview you are the people that you are going to then peer rreview at some later Point leads to a corruption at the heart of a system where the sort of thing which shou

ld be being researched people are too this it's a generalism that does not count for everybody please it's do though there is a certain type of person in any profession and there's usually quite a lot of them who feel that by keeping their head down and just doing something by the book they will have a nice career I went to the launch of the pastor Institute um presence in Britain their chief executive was ruthless I mean it he looked like a rockar anyway but he got on the stage with all these f

unders and he said you could waste your money and give your money to some of these big foundations um with their pinkies in the air and their champagne or you could invest in Pastor so I would tell you we many of our scientists they get Nobel prizes do you know why because they're curious they want to solve the great problems in society most of the most of the others they want just grants if you want to be involved with people who just have grants fine don't come to us you just really people wer

e just fighting to put money into the pastor afterwards a hell of a thing it's a bit like um what's it called Norman Foster when he went to pitch for the British Gas building a friend of mine was there when he did it all these other Architects had spent an hour each telling why they should do it he walks in and he says you know my work I'm very good um let's just keep it short he had this Japanese lady with him he said she Unwound this sketch which is almost illegible right the Sun comes from th

ere it will reflect like that the image will be like this your brand will look absolutely electric it will look like a blue flame at the top of it you know where I live 6 million is my price to do the job good day and get this the judging panel who is supposed to be all cool just applauded him and he got the gig there is a there is a funny thing if I was to swallow my words so I don't upset my dear friend in the back there about research there is something ill at the core of all Academia in the

way that we have somehow taken by Academia I I actually mean not purely Academia it's it's like Civic society as a whole has had its sense of meaning and belonging taken away from it it's been infantilized so we expect somebody else to always do something and part of all of these conversations is about at what point do we suddenly realize we could take some agency we can do things and then institutions respond to it so your question was about money I get money by talking to people I talk to peop

le a lot and I say you've got money give it to me no no people in Britain people just don't know how to talk about money I mean they it's excruciating you should watch an English person ask for money is actually you actually feel like you want to cry because it's it's like Could you um I think you got to be really quiet say knowing what you study um I think there is a narrative that one can use with people about do you care about your fellow citizens do you think these are serious propositions y

ou have money I have not but I've got genius and you don't why didn't you give me some money hireing you we should take one more anyone on the back of a question hand up there the this is such a dangerous role for me I'm in the way of you in a drink Jesus I'd have walked out by now I'm very impressed by your curtesy um the there's a there's a one of those pictures is a picture before the Eden project was built um and for a Mining Company it's mined out it's not worth any money it would be seen a

s a liability so presumably the mining company that you bought it off was sitting with a major liability to rehabilitate that so I guess a simple question is how much did you buy um that land for well that is an incredibly astute question because you might say that it is obviously worked out there's a tradition in the mining industry that no mining company is allowed to admit they've worked out a mine they are always just resting until the price changes or else you're quite right or else there w

ould be all sorts of remediation Clauses that would force them to remediate that in truth this was an incredibly annoying project because the clay from this pit uh is is it's called a teaspoon pit because the clay was very valuable um in fact it was the pink colored clay that went to uh the making of the financial times um and every time we did a bore hole before we bought it they were standing on the cliffs with binoculars looking at the caes coming out we would then come back you know the next

week to do another and the whole of the foundation thing had been dug out and this went on for 6 months The Architects were thinking of giving up until the youngest architect was at home doing the washing up and he sat down and he looked at the um washing up lying in its uh uh in in its mantle and saw all these soap bubbles and he went that is the design it's the honest truth that's how we came up with the design for the hexagon shape because you can actually doesn't matter what the foundation

does it will always fit yeah so that's how that happened but the other thing about the Clay Pit is is that the deal they had is that they could only sell a Clay Pit if their opponents the other the competition signed formal letters to say they had permission to sell it and that had never ever happened and because the implication would be that once anybody admitted that one of the pits was worked out English China Clays which is worth X hundreds of millions could be seen as being massively in deb

t you see what I mean in terms of stock valuation it could have even ruin us so it's a brilliant question you've asked we paid 4 million for that pay pit we paid 2 million and they then lent Us 2 million to make 4 million so that we could start digging and then we paid them the extra 2 million after we opened but we weren't going to get an agreement a we weren't going to have a project unless we had a pit we weren't going to get an agreement with everybody signing unless everybody could see hono

r was satisfied and we weren't we weren't sterilizing a der we weren't taking a deric pit we were taking a pit that was resting that's how it works that was the real politique and at the same time we had to persuade the County Council that they would never see the deal that we had done as setting any precedent for the council to go after either mining company and they they had it witnessed by lawyers and signed that was how complicated it was you're a GH well just think how I felt I yeah okay we

ll I'll ask just one question one so many people here L students they're very concerned about St state of nature protecting it restoring it a lot of issues around grief around the climate change and the state of biodiversity finding Solutions seems complicated Tangled multiscale challenging what would be your final Su words of voice because you got wine around the corner but what would be your final words of advice for somebody wanting to make a difference in their lives in contributing challeng

es we face well I don't know how much you know about English history but almost everybody owns an olive land used to beat up people and that's how got a lot of land I I genuinely believe that we ought to put pressure on the government and the national lottery who I've spoken to privately about this and have a revolution in land ownership in our country um I think um I think there's a very strong case I know so many young people by Young I mean your age who've actually are looking at farming Hort

iculture and things like that as being a modern thing they' like to do and they actually want to do it in a way of land owning ownership which is not my generation stuff there's a lot of Cooperative thinking that they'd like to do and so on it is also true that so many of the things which could make the management of land both profitable and really good for the environment are stopped because the capital is not available to people so for example if you wanted to grow hemp the there is only one F

actory in the whole of Britain that can R hemp and create if you like wooden fiber from the Corton that is the central hard bit of hemp and so on and we need to have a new Finance structure for this the countryside for which uh nature net uh deficit payments and whatever is a kind of urban thing it's a bit like the Chelsea boys growing basil in their underground stations and calling it the new agriculture I think it needs to be proper I think we need to get get land into the hands of young peopl

e all over the country country I think big land owners well we can no longer go and beat them up okay we can't go and beat them up um but we can create a law in which they cannot be dis benefited through giving up their land but it land then comes into popular thing I think you'd see a real revolution in our country if you made land available um and they're hungry to do stuff and if every if youve make if you're made to feel like a stranger in your own Strange Land because others have have kind

of dominated it that's not great thing for our democracy great thank you thank you very much well that was we could say that was pretty unique so we all learned a lot from that thank you so it's wine time it's wine time just around the corner feel free to join us for drink thank you I'm sorry it was a bit of a narrative Arc but