WEBVTT
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I am so lucky to have in front of me today the entrepreneur, campaigner, and co-founder of the Eden Project, Tim Smith.
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How are you, Tim?
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If I was any better and my tail was like that of a dog, I'd be flying.
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You've now got to ask me why are you having such a good day?
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Okay, give me a moment.
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So, Tim, why are you having such a good day?
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Because I've become the father of a mare.
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My Icelandic horse gave birth at 4.15 this morning.
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So are we talking, James Harriet?
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Are we talking you being present at the birth and doing your bit to help?
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No, no.
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I was 10 minutes late, and I it'd be dumb good job I wasn't there to help.
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I'd have probably fainted.
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I can't stand the sight of blood.
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But when you see a baby anything, it's innocent for a moment makes you suspend any cynicism you have, and you just wonder at the notion.
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The sheer miracle, this horse comes out, and it's literally in about 30 seconds, it was up on his feet.
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My goodness.
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I was trying to imagine this morning as I sat looking at it, what must it be like to see the world for the first time?
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I mean, being sentient, as opposed to us goo-goo ga, you know, when you and I were born, this creature comes out and it's looking at trees and it's looking at crows and it's looking at its mum who's huge.
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What is it thinking?
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I mean, so many things to go in on.
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And were you proudly chomping away at a cigar?
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No, I well, I used to tromp at cigars, and my youngest son, he said to me, You promised me that I wouldn't be an orphan.
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And I thought that was pretty hard.
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He was playing hardball meaning.
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So I quit about a year ago.
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So listen, I like to start by trotting through uh a little bit of my guest's background.
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And I know that you started out as an archaeologist, and then famously, lots of people will know this.
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You then spent ten years as a record producer.
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And you achieved, if that's the right word, seven gold and platinum discs.
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What were they for?
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Songs by whom?
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Barry Manilo.
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But mainly mainly a lady called Louise Tucker, who was an opera singer at the Guildhall, and in the pre-mobile phone era, I was recording at Abbey Road Studios and the singer didn't turn up.
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And I phoned the three numbers I had in my address book, but the lady, Louise, had been accompanying my sister-in-law, babysitting, the night before at my house for the very first night I'd gone off out after my son's birth, my first son's birth.
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So I just phoned her up and said, You don't happen to be free right now, do you?
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And she was in, if you see what I mean.
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And so she came, she recorded, and four weeks later the record started to go number one all over the place, and it sold really well.
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It sold about seven million copies.
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Well, I'm gonna rush out and see if I can get one.
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What's the name of the record, the first one?
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It's called Midnight Blue by Louise Tucker.
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And that was followed by other records by her.
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She did really, really well, and she's now sadly very ill and is coming to see Snow Patrol tomorrow night at Eden Project with me.
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Why not?
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So then you got tired of the record business, and you moved to Cornwall.
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I went to Cornwall without an idea in my head about what I was gonna do.
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I knew I could fall back on composing some film music or telemusic.
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I just didn't want to work with artists anymore.
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And I then spent every penny I'd saved up on the money pit that was the farm that I bought, and then found myself in a curious and rather unpleasant situation of having no money.
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And then something really extraordinary happened.
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I went to the dentist, and of all the things to find in a dentist waiting room was a copy of the stage, but not three years old, but that weeks.
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I still don't know who we left it.
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Anyway, uh this is uh 1988, and I open it listlessly for I am anxious about dentists, and it fell open on a page with a picture of the former England defender Jackie Charlton.
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Ooh, Jackie, and he was holding a whacking grape salmon in one arm and a fishing rod in the other, and underneath it said Jackie Charlton signs deal to do 12-part series called Go Fishing.
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Now, when you're completely potless and you don't know where your next penny's coming from, it is extraordinary that in your back catalogue you suddenly remember that once you'd been very, very drunk in a recording studio with some friends, one of whom had a banjo, and you composed as a piece of fun a track composed of all of the fishing puns, you know.
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You can imagine this isn't the time and the place.
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I can't sound up the energy, you know.
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I'm a dab hand at this, all that sort of stuff.
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And I am up the attic at my house, and I found the original recording of this track, and There Is a God.
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I've got to tell you, There is a God.
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The title of this joke song was called Go Fishing.
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So I made a copy of this cassette and I sent it to the film company who got back literally within a couple of days and said, We want it, we want that to be our theme song.
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By the way, have you got any other music?
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Talk about luck, eh?
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Well, luck or fate, one or the other, it's a fabulous, fabulous story.
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So you've now got some money coming in, unexpectedly.
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You've got some money coming in, and you then bumped into somebody and it changed your life again.
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Tell us what happened.
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Well, it was something, not somebody.
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I knew a guy who drove past my house and he said, I've got a really big black pig in the back of this van, and it's going to go to the abattoir unless you take it.
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But I do understand you've got a garage and you haven't got a car smart enough to put in it, so why don't you have the pig?
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I didn't really have a good response.
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I was all my training at school and university hadn't prepared me for a question like that.
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So I accepted Horace for so he became called.
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Horace disliked the garage intensely, broke down the back door of the farmhouse, and decided to come and stay in the kitchen and warm his ass against the arger.
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And he was very lonely, I could tell pretty quickly.
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And I realized that I had the choice of either sending him to the abattoir after all, or finding himself a mate.
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So I put an advert out.
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Not in the stage, presumably by this time.
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In no, this is not the stage.
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No, this was actually Farmer's Weekly.
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I was looking for another Vietnamese potbelly pig, and lo and behold, I found one, and I called her Doris.
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And the moment Horace set eyes on Doris, it was love at first sight, and they suddenly decided that the garage was the little bijou love nest that they'd been looking for.
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And I didn't see them again for a long time.
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They were in there doing whatever pigs do.
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And then in the November of 1989, at two o'clock in the morning, Doris gave birth.
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The technical word is she farrowed, and there was a whole bunch of little piglets.
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And it was almost biblical because there they were under a heat lamp in long straw.
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And um I fell in love with the whole idea of rare breeds.
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That's where the rare breed thing came from.
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I've always been interested in rare breeds, but it never occurred to me to actually have a rare breed park.
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But what you haven't mentioned about my coming from London to Cornwall was that I made the decision at 37 that I was going to lead my life by instinct and do whatever life threw up.
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I wasn't going to plan myself at all.
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And I'd arrived in Cornwall because I'd been on holiday before I came.
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I walked into an estate agent because it was raining.
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I saw a house.
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It was raining the following day.
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So I went to see the house, as opposed to just being, you know, curious.
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And I ended up being jammed in a lane to the farm by a tractor in the rain, and this guy came out and said, What do you do, an old buck?
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And I said, This is really embarrassing.
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I've come secretly see this farmhouse at the end of this lane.
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And he said, Adams, it's my house.
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Anyway, two and a half hours later I shook hands and I'd bought the house.
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But it was crazy because I lived in Brixton.
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But my life's like that.
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I've actually I decided as a positive act of curiosity with life that I wanted to take random, a bit like the dice man, but without the really horrible alternatives, I would only accept good alternatives.
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I wasn't going to sort of rob a bank or murder somebody.
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But you know what?
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It's really funny when you decide to lead your life by instinct, the world becomes a place of extraordinary joy.
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Really extraordinary joy.
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I mean, the thing, as we'll discover as we talk, I developed a philosophy which was that I accept every third invitation unless it clashes with a family commitment.
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And the reason I do that, it's not that I don't accept the first, by the way, but I always accept the third.
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And I do that because I want to leave open the option of meeting people that I shouldn't or fate wouldn't normally have put me in the way of meeting.
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Because part of the problem of doing what we do is that we tend to be quite biased towards accepting invitations from those who are like us or in our profession or whatever.
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So when I sent you off to the far-flung places to make speeches in front of corporate types who had absolutely nothing to do with your world, as it were.
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Part of you thought, well, you know what?
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Something interesting might happen.
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I might bump into somebody interesting.
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Absolutely.
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In fact, over the last twenty years, I would say, nearly thirty, almost every major life-changing event has come, a professional life-changing event has come from the third meeting.
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And I've done some crazy stuff.
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I've judged dog shows, I've opened old people's homes, I've been at the West of England Ballroom Dancing Championships, and all the things which I would have ordinarily refused to do.
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And each one yields something peculiar.
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I went to speak in a Nissan near Taunton, and I was told there would only be 50 people and a dog there.
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But I went because it was a third invitation, and blown me down.
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Three months later, I was in Plymouth addressing the European Commissioners trying to seek money for the Eden project, and it was quite obvious we weren't going to get it.
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And suddenly this old guy gets up and he says, My name's Humphrey Templey.
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I'm chairman of Somerset County Council, and I happen to be in a Nissan up near Taunton three months ago, and I saw this man speaking.
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And it's quite obvious he has the wider West Country in his interest than just the narrow confines of Cornwall.
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And I've spoken to my colleagues on the council board who are behind me here, and we've all agreed that we in Somerset will drop one of our projects if the rest of you will also drop one each.
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So that speech was worth twelve point seven million quid.
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My goodness.
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Now, before we get to talk about Eden, just let's talk a little bit about Heligan and how that came about, because it is part of this story of coincidences and luck and fate and well you put it best, just simply working on instinct.
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How did that happen?
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It was because I had the piglets, I decided I wanted to find a site for a rare breed park.
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There was a site right next to where I'm sitting now, which had camper vans on it occasionally, and I came to see the owner, and he's I'm really sorry, but I've just let this whole site literally a couple of days ago, but he'd given me a cup of coffee so hot I couldn't politely just glug it and go.
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So we had to engage in small talk.
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So during the course of it, I happened to drop the information that I had been an archaeologist, and he then uttered the immortal words, I have need of an archaeologist, which no one had ever sent to me before.
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And he then told me the story that this man was a lovely man, and he's become a friend called John Willis, and he had inherited the whole estate around where I was sitting at that time, and he didn't have any money, and as you will recall, nor do I, um nor did I at that point, but he took me in the following day to see this overgrown estate in which had been a once famous garden, but it was now completely overgrown with brambles, and we cut our way in, and it turned out that no one had been in there since 1915.
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And to cut a long story short, we cut our way through and I eventually came into a walled garden through a rusted-up green painted door in a big brick-faced wall, and there was this old vinery, but with all the wood long rotted out, with the glass just hanging in the ivy and brambles like uh guillotines in waiting.
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And I I just fell hopelessly in love with the whole thing.
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It was like an essay in the most marvellous green, and then the thing which actually swung it completely was my eyes were drawn to a pair of what I would later come to know as vine scissors that were hanging on a nail on the wall.
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And the moment, you know those crazy paintings when we were young where it were all with dots, and your clever mates would say, Bloody hell, that's clever.
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There's an elephant in the middle of that, and you go, Where?
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I can't see that.
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You know the thing.
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Well, having got my eyes centered on toolness due to these vine scissors, I suddenly saw tools everywhere, you know, lying on the floor everywhere.
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It was as if someone had said tea time and everybody gone fully intending to return at some later point, but they never did.
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And the story of that we would peel back over the coming year.
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But it was a very romantic thing, and I decided that night that I wanted to restore the gardens, and I knew nothing about gardening.
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I knew actually very little about plants, except broadly the green side should be facing the sun, and that was a good idea.
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But that's about it, and that's not an exaggeration, I really didn't know.
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Although, for anybody listening who's interested in career changes or doing weird stuff, before you talk yourself out of it because you know nothing about it, be aware that one of the greatest gifts on earth is to be born with a human brain that is quite quick to assimilate knowledge.
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But if you can assimilate great knowledge without all the prejudices that come from having done the same thing all your life, you can actually have real insights and make a real difference in areas where there hasn't been any change for decades.
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That fascinates me.
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I used to work with a guy who at the time was he might have just been 20.
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And he'd been working since he was at school through his computer.
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He'd been advising companies in China on their manufacturing process.
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And he'd grown this agency because by that time there were 20 or so people working for him.
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And he'd go into these factories and places all over the place and he'd hear people say, Well, he's a child.
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What the bloody hell does he know about what we do and how we do it?
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And Josh used to explain that actually that was his strength because he didn't know about how they uh used to do things, he could reinvent it without any of that baggage.
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Yes.
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It's a fascinating idea.
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Yeah, and I see it in so many areas.
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I think one of the really interesting things about the age in which we are living at the moment, where predominantly white middle-aged men are getting into a complete froth over the destruction of civilizations we know it because of artificial intelligence.
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I come at it from a completely different end of the telescope, which is if you can have artificial intelligence answering your questions for you at speed, that's amazing.
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But what it will never do is put things together that are odd.
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And I think one of the things is that humans that are able to have this freaky ability to put things together, agglomerate them so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
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I think that kind of systems thinking, I know the word system is usually applied to computers and mathematical brains, but I think actually brilliant systems thinking is something that is a very human ability.
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And, you know, we'll talk about it in the in the relationship to Eden, maybe, but I'm absolutely convinced that A forcing yourself to meet people you don't know, bear in mind that parents, or as you say, will send you to a good school or something so that you can meet the people you need to know.
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Your parents are really stupid because they didn't understand that if you look at history, magic is created by meeting the people you didn't know you needed to know.
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I can see you agree with me with that.
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And all throughout my life I've been finding that the great liberators in your mind for how you do it, do anything, whether it be restoring a garden, writing a book, whether it be setting up a shop, or coming up with ideas to design something that make people who are old feel comfortable in it.
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You find you meet people that you can't think why on earth they should be interesting you to you.
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You then let them talk and you remember how to listen, and they suddenly fill you in on a world you didn't even know existed.
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And that's why stupid people are the people who don't realize you learn nothing by talking, you learn everything by listening.
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And then suddenly your world is just open up.
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I'll give you a good example.
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I got feverishly drunk one night, meeting somebody I'd never met before called John Zegon, and he is the world expert on gerontics, old age Alzheimer stuff.
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Okay.
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John Zysal is his name, sorry.
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And I met him in an event in London.
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He'd never been to Cornwall.
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I didn't know he was famous, but I phoned up my people, my people, my colleagues in Cornwall.
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I said, I'm sitting here getting drunk with a man called John Zysal.
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Do you know who he is?
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And they said, Do you mean the John Zisor?
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I said, Drew, are you the John Zysal?
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And he laughed.
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I said, I guess I am.
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They said, He's a god to us.
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He's an absolute genius.
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And they explained over the phone what he was brilliant at.
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He created spaces.
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He was involved in that thing, you know, Oliver Sachs wrote that Awakenings.
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You know, that book about Alzheimer's people who went to a theater and then peeled back all of their amnesia to do with their disease.
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Anyway, I persuaded John to be as radical as I was, and he accepted my invitation to buy him a ticket on the sleeper to Cornwall that night.
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And he came when we arrived in Cornwall.
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I think I had one sentence with him.
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And the whole time he was in Cornwall because he got jumped on by my team, and then he went for lunch with Nick Grimshaw, the architect who designed Eden, and Nick said it was the most exciting lunch he'd ever had.
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It completely transformed his view as to how you start to think when you've got Alzheimer's and how you can make a building feel.
00:20:47.359 --> 00:20:53.119
So for those who are listening who are experts in this, please forgive my horrible ignorance in the way I phrase this.
00:20:53.359 --> 00:20:59.599
But if you start to get up because you think you've got to get up, but by the time you're up, you can't remember why you were up.
00:20:59.839 --> 00:21:19.599
If you've designed buildings with beautiful, colourful sofas at the end of a corridor or an open fire or huge vases of flowers and things, the heart is not disturbed by anxiety because whatever it is your eyes have seen, that must have been why you got up and you're completely relaxed.
00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:21.359
You just go over to look at it.
00:21:21.680 --> 00:21:24.559
And boy, isn't that a simple observation?
00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:26.000
It's quite beautiful.
00:21:26.160 --> 00:21:37.759
And the I mean the broad moral of the story is I love the way it it flips received wisdom on its head because the moral of the story is talk to strangers.
00:21:38.319 --> 00:21:39.200
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:21:39.519 --> 00:21:46.640
Anyway, listen, last time I checked, we're in a decaying glasshouse in the Garden of Helligan.
00:21:46.799 --> 00:21:47.759
Pick us up from there.
00:21:48.240 --> 00:21:49.359
I fell in love with it.
00:21:49.519 --> 00:21:52.240
I decided that I wanted to restore the whole thing.
00:21:52.319 --> 00:21:54.400
I knew nothing about gardens at all.
00:21:54.799 --> 00:21:59.519
But I said to John, I said, I've got no money, but I am the best.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:01.839
Marketing man I've ever met.
00:22:02.160 --> 00:22:09.680
So what I want to do is I want to shake hands with you, and I want you to give me a long lease on your estate for nothing.
00:22:09.839 --> 00:22:10.640
A quid.
00:22:10.799 --> 00:22:18.960
And the deal is that when I restore it, I will make it so famous that you can have 20% of the revenue from visitors coming in.
00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:20.480
And we shook hands.
00:22:20.640 --> 00:22:30.000
And it's the best deal he's ever made in his life, and it's the best deal that I ever made in mine, and it's based completely on trust between us.
00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:40.000
And that was in 1990 that we did it, and we remain chums, and it's been such an agreeable adventure.
00:22:40.319 --> 00:22:58.640
So take us from Heligan, which by the way, I should tell our listeners, particularly those in Belgium and Kazakhstan, that there is a book still available about the lost gardens of Heligan, and it's absolutely beautiful.
00:22:58.960 --> 00:23:06.160
You really should have it, not just on your bookshelf or your coffee table, but actually you should have it beside your bed, I think.
00:23:06.319 --> 00:23:07.759
Anyway, enough of that Abbott.
00:23:08.079 --> 00:23:08.640
I like you.
00:23:08.720 --> 00:23:10.559
You're a very nice man.
00:23:10.960 --> 00:23:12.480
And especially people in Belgium.
00:23:12.559 --> 00:23:17.119
There's in fact a Dutch version for you to read if you are of the Flemish persuasion.
00:23:17.359 --> 00:23:19.119
Unfortunately, there's no French version.
00:23:19.599 --> 00:23:26.480
Well, I'm not going to commit to that, but I'm I'm happy to be the second best marketer in this conversation.
00:23:26.640 --> 00:23:31.440
So well, no, no, you sell ice creams to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabians.
00:23:31.759 --> 00:23:34.960
So you've done helligan with your team.
00:23:35.119 --> 00:23:40.240
You're always at pains to point out that, well, like everything you do, it's a team effort.
00:23:40.480 --> 00:23:44.720
And then how does this idea for the Eden project come about?
00:23:45.119 --> 00:23:53.759
Well, when I did the plant thing, I didn't know anything about plants except, as I say, greenside up.
00:23:53.839 --> 00:23:56.319
But I worked with some darn good plantsmen.
00:23:56.640 --> 00:24:11.759
And when we discovered that the reason why the gardens at Heligon had gone derelict was because three-quarters of the 22 that worked there had died in the fields of Flanders and France, Northern France.
00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:16.640
And the owner of the place had just fenced off the garden and gone to live in a villa in Italy.
00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:18.319
He was so sad by that.
00:24:18.559 --> 00:24:28.960
And when we discovered that and we found the war memorials with all their names on it, we decided we were going to tell the story of the ordinary men and women who had made these gardens great.
00:24:29.119 --> 00:24:37.599
And why that's important is that in 1990 there wasn't a single working productive garden open to the public in Britain.
00:24:37.759 --> 00:24:38.400
Not one.
00:24:44.400 --> 00:24:52.799
And even probably the greatest wall garden of the day at Chatsworth had been bulldozed in the 1980s to make a caravan park.
00:24:53.039 --> 00:24:56.720
All the glass bell jar and everything else had been crushed under bulldozer.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:24:59.359
So we decided to tell the whole opera.
00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:42.319
And in doing this, it changed my life because A, I learned something which every Don person alive today ought to know about horticulture, is that until the invention of refrigeration, which although it was invented in the late 1890s, only became available to the middle classes for their homes in the 19, early 1950s, until then we were dependent on great horticulturists growing seasonally for 365 days a year, sometimes for flavor, but sometimes for keeping qualities, other times, you know.
00:25:42.559 --> 00:25:47.920
April was known as either the hungry month, or if you're really unlucky, the dying month.
00:25:48.160 --> 00:26:02.720
When you start to look at a garden with the respect of knowing that the head gardener, he or she had to know how to have these things ripening in series and which things to that would store well.
00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:14.720
So for example, there's some apples that taste pretty woolly, but they tasted a bit of sugar right up until April if you keep them in the dark, in a thick bed of straw, and so on.
00:26:14.799 --> 00:26:21.839
And they needed to know that you grow one set of fruit on a north-facing wall, it will be retarded because it's not getting the sun.
00:26:22.079 --> 00:26:27.039
Yeah, so it'll be probably six weeks later than the fruit that's on the south-facing inner wall.
00:26:27.359 --> 00:26:31.119
You suddenly go, crikey, these people were bloody brilliant.
00:26:31.279 --> 00:26:34.400
And then you look at all the varieties of things they were growing.
00:26:34.720 --> 00:26:42.880
Horror crosses across your brain when you start thinking about it, that this isn't a political statement, although it's very political.
00:26:43.119 --> 00:27:06.960
Big agriculture, in its desire to have maximum yield, maximum homogeneity of everything looking the same, and so on, has created an extraordinarily near-perfect storm of perfect pattern and shape, sugars replacing phenols in the fruit and vegetable, which means that they're no longer as good for us as they used to be.
00:27:07.200 --> 00:27:12.240
But we're being sold them because they're heavy yielding, as if it's better for you.
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:14.000
The modern days are with us.
00:27:14.240 --> 00:27:19.519
And yet, I bought a golf course seven years ago, and I've turned it into an orchard.
00:27:19.680 --> 00:27:30.640
And we talked with Oxford at the moment, we're looking at the old apple varieties, and apples that were created pre-1850 are really rich in phenols.
00:27:30.720 --> 00:27:33.039
So they're antioxidants, they're really good for you.
00:27:33.119 --> 00:27:36.400
And apple a day does keep the doctor awake by and large.
00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:43.839
After that, the grows of, because of our childlike taste, they have replaced the phenols with sugars.
00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:45.839
So you don't have exactly the same thing.
00:27:46.079 --> 00:28:06.240
So I think we're going to see a revolution where something that was considered to be historic and of marginal interest for fans, we're suddenly going to realize, a bit like probiotic drinks, oh my god, our tummies are really sophisticated creatures, and we've got to feed them really well, and we might live a long time if we do that.
00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:08.960
Bear in mind our life expectancy is going down.
00:28:09.119 --> 00:28:10.240
Isn't that interesting?
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:11.119
It is.
00:28:11.279 --> 00:28:15.519
You've just reminded me, I don't know whether you know this, and I can't think where I read it.
00:28:16.240 --> 00:28:29.759
The chap who was asked to design and plan rationing in the Second World War had a very serious stomach complaint.
00:28:30.559 --> 00:28:42.160
So in his mind, the most healthy thing to do was to keep it very simple and very natural and for obvious reasons quite limited.
00:28:42.559 --> 00:28:53.200
And so we ended up with a rationing system that actually made people healthier then than they are today.
00:28:53.680 --> 00:28:57.039
I just find that remarkable and wonderful.
00:28:57.200 --> 00:28:58.960
Anyway, listen, I keep trying this.
00:28:59.119 --> 00:29:16.480
Let's go back to you launching this at the time preposterous idea of the Eden project with so many hurdles in front of you and so many reasons why you couldn't and shouldn't do it, but you went ahead anyway.
00:29:16.880 --> 00:29:18.799
Yeah, that's the hero version.
00:29:19.839 --> 00:29:20.640
Thank you for that.
00:29:20.880 --> 00:29:31.279
The truth is, we were living in a country where A, the economics meant that governments and lotteries were putting some money into projects that were exciting.
00:29:31.599 --> 00:29:42.240
However, we were also living in a country that was starved, a bit like the days of rationing after the war, was starved of permission to do exciting things.
00:29:42.400 --> 00:29:44.559
There was a real hunger for beauty.
00:29:44.640 --> 00:29:58.000
So I think the Millennium Commission will, in years to come, be seen as one of the most inspired decisions ever to enable a panel of people to choose to support things that would otherwise not get funding.
00:29:58.240 --> 00:30:06.000
And I loved all the worthy people from Tunbridge Wells, so to speak, getting angry about the waste of money to do this, that, and the other.
00:30:06.480 --> 00:30:10.640
Actually, the success rate for all of these exciting projects was fantastic.
00:30:10.799 --> 00:30:16.480
And I'm glad there were some failures because if there hadn't been any failures, they wouldn't have been trying hard enough, would they?
00:30:16.880 --> 00:30:23.920
So the big thing I would like you to take out of your heroizing of me is the following.
00:30:24.319 --> 00:30:26.079
People love big.
00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:42.240
One of the things is that almost every human being I know has a gold coffee bean inside them, and that gold coffee bean is the sum total of all their disappointments at the person they dreamt they could have been when they were young and they now aren't.
00:30:42.480 --> 00:30:52.319
If you can create a stage on which people can suddenly feel that maybe their best years aren't behind them, maybe something really exciting.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:58.319
You're not going to win Wimbledon when you're 50, okay, but you might well do something just as good.
00:30:58.559 --> 00:31:08.640
And if you can make people believe that they could be part of a stage set, a cast that is going to do something amazing, the energy that creates is fantastic.
00:31:08.799 --> 00:31:11.759
I mean, absolutely fantastic.
00:31:12.079 --> 00:31:26.720
If you ally that with a fundraising proposal, which is Arthur Conondora's Lost World and the Crater of a Volcano, everybody knows the story of Arthur Conondor's Lost Worlds and Crater of a Volcano.
00:31:26.880 --> 00:31:28.720
It actually isn't fantastical.
00:31:28.799 --> 00:31:32.960
It's already in the DNA of almost every single English person alive.
00:31:33.200 --> 00:31:50.480
So if you say we're going to go into the crater of a volcano and there's going to be some godlike figure that's going to pour every productive plant on which humans depend into it, you're not going to allow advertising so people aren't distracted, and you're going to make it very rock and roll in terms of its interpretation.
00:31:50.880 --> 00:31:53.680
If an eight-year-old can't understand it, it doesn't count.
00:31:53.839 --> 00:31:56.079
Suddenly people go, oh, that's pretty cool.
00:31:56.319 --> 00:31:57.359
And it's big.
00:31:57.519 --> 00:32:01.519
I mean, it's really big, and the technology was revolutionary.
00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:20.960
It was far more complicated in terms of imagining you could do it, but the doing of it, if you've got the right skills, Gay Coley, who was the co-chief executive with me for a long time, she coined a rather marvellous phrase, which was dare to dream and organise to deliver.
00:32:21.119 --> 00:32:25.359
And I kept saying to her, you ought to write a business book on that, because that's actually the secret.
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:32.960
Dreamers ought to be forced to have an accountsperson at their right shoulder and a lawyer at their left shoulder and an artist.
00:32:33.200 --> 00:32:42.400
There are ways of building amazing things which need people of opposite abilities that are orchestrated in some way to get the best out of them.
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:50.480
In a very small way, I was lucky enough to have a business partner who was really good at all the things I was shit at.
00:32:50.720 --> 00:32:52.559
And that in my case was luck.
00:32:52.720 --> 00:33:05.680
But it's such a helpful lesson to anybody at the beginning of their career that actually, yes, be brave, imagine, and everything you've said so far.
00:33:06.079 --> 00:33:12.960
But have people around you who know about stuff that you don't know about or you're not interested in.
00:33:13.119 --> 00:33:16.240
That's a fantastic bit of advice, isn't it?
00:33:16.640 --> 00:33:17.119
Yes.
00:33:17.599 --> 00:33:21.759
There are a number of very simple things that MBAs don't seem to have.
00:33:22.000 --> 00:33:27.839
One of which is the first thing about being successful is about losing your fear of being disliked.
00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:29.519
That's, I think, the first thing.
00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:36.240
I think most people are just crucified with the sense of wanting to be liked, which makes them not make good decisions.
00:33:36.480 --> 00:33:44.880
But also there's a desire, we become so personalized in the way that we look at our culture, we think we're individuals.
00:33:45.039 --> 00:33:46.559
Everything's about individuals.
00:33:46.799 --> 00:33:47.680
We're not.
00:33:48.000 --> 00:33:49.759
We're tribal creatures.
00:33:49.920 --> 00:33:54.079
But part of our tribal characteristic is the pretense that we're individuals.
00:33:54.319 --> 00:33:57.119
But what the hell do these people think taste is then?
00:33:57.440 --> 00:34:01.680
Taste is a common acceptance of something, and there are some people who taste make it and so on.
00:34:01.839 --> 00:34:08.000
But actually, if you behave a long way outside of what the norm is, you get policed back into it.
00:34:08.159 --> 00:34:18.960
And we allow people to be freaks as far as our society can permit it, and as confident, the more confident a society is, the wider the range of what we consider acceptable behavior.
00:34:19.360 --> 00:34:21.679
The less confident it shrinks, doesn't it?
00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:25.280
The culture of the individual means that you say, that's my idea.
00:34:25.599 --> 00:34:26.719
IPR.
00:34:26.880 --> 00:34:27.920
You hear it everywhere.
00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:29.679
You know, intellectual property.
00:34:29.920 --> 00:34:31.599
Everyone's an artist these days.
00:34:31.760 --> 00:34:33.840
I want to protect my IPR.
00:34:34.079 --> 00:34:41.599
Actually, this the best way of protecting your IPR is not necessarily to spend a fortune on lawyers.
00:34:41.760 --> 00:34:50.159
It might be better to have some people next to you who are brilliant at sharing your IPR with you, who are really tough, and no one wants to mess with you.
00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:52.400
I completely and utterly agree with that.
00:34:52.559 --> 00:34:55.119
Okay, that tangent was entirely of my making.
00:34:55.360 --> 00:35:08.079
Now you're faced with creating something utterly extraordinary, which involved 83,000 tons of soil apart from anything else.
00:35:08.480 --> 00:35:16.559
It involved working with, as you said, the architects at Grimshaw, engineers from Arab, McAlpine, or McAlpine, isn't it?
00:35:16.639 --> 00:35:17.360
That's the correct pronunciation.
00:35:17.599 --> 00:35:18.079
McAlpine.
00:35:18.320 --> 00:35:21.199
And don't forget Tony Hunt, a great engineer and his team.
00:35:21.679 --> 00:35:25.440
As well as all the gardeners and everything else.
00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:32.239
And you end up with well, the most famous element, I guess, is the rainforest biodome.
00:35:33.039 --> 00:35:35.199
Fifty meters tall.
00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:37.599
57.3.
00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:41.760
It's not that I'm competitive.
00:35:42.559 --> 00:35:44.159
It's utterly remarkable.
00:35:44.559 --> 00:35:52.320
And it's become a fantastically successful, insert whatever word you like, attraction.
00:35:52.719 --> 00:36:00.079
Definitely not, I note, anything like a theme park, but still very much an attraction.
00:36:00.559 --> 00:36:07.440
And I mean these figures are going to be out of date now, but I've got in front of me 15 million visitors.
00:36:08.320 --> 00:36:09.039
25.
00:36:10.800 --> 00:36:12.000
Probably a typo.
00:36:12.239 --> 00:36:14.159
Okay, the next one's going to be wrong as well, though.
00:36:14.480 --> 00:36:20.559
So anything upwards of one billion pounds contributed to the Cornish economy.
00:36:20.800 --> 00:36:21.199
Eight.
00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:21.920
Eight.
00:36:22.480 --> 00:36:23.599
I don't know what happened there.
00:36:23.679 --> 00:36:24.719
The ones nowhere near the eight.
00:36:24.960 --> 00:36:26.719
Those figures you're questioning, you're not mad.
00:36:26.880 --> 00:36:30.000
They were figures that were in our biography that we just forgot to change.
00:36:30.159 --> 00:36:34.159
And we've just handed to Parliament the economic impact study.
00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:39.360
It's our 25th anniversary, so we just done it again on Cambridge, we're all over it like a rash.
00:36:39.440 --> 00:36:40.400
I didn't believe a word of it.
00:36:40.480 --> 00:36:42.320
It seemed to be far too good to be true.
00:36:42.480 --> 00:36:44.639
But now that it's in my interest, of course it's true.
00:36:44.880 --> 00:36:48.559
The truth is we're very political, but political with a small P.
00:36:48.960 --> 00:37:01.440
We didn't pioneer, but we rode on the backs of the giants who started with this whole thing about being pretty pathological about local sourcing, making sure we bought local.
00:37:01.840 --> 00:37:14.800
And that makes a real big difference because you start to create a climate in which people develop products for your retail and for your catering and all the rest of it, which are all locally sourced.
00:37:14.960 --> 00:37:21.519
And you suddenly discover when you do it, like when we started, we discovered that half of the beef which was British beef isn't British beef at all.
00:37:21.760 --> 00:37:32.079
There's a legal thing that if you import beef from the Argentine, for example, but you then package it in the UK, it can be called British or Cornish or whatever.
00:37:32.320 --> 00:37:35.760
So once you discover all these anomalies, you have to put them right.
00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:48.960
And then you see that there's another issue, which is if you buy all your cheese in Cornwall, right, Eden, other than one big dairy, could consume in three months all the cheese at that time produced in Cornwall.
00:37:49.280 --> 00:37:49.840
Josh.
00:37:50.079 --> 00:37:54.400
Yeah, that gives you a liability to think like an economist.
00:37:54.559 --> 00:38:03.199
How do we build the manufacturing capacity while at the same time, in fairness, building the amount of outlets for them?
00:38:03.920 --> 00:38:11.760
Because you know as well as I do that one of the cruelest things you can do is to make yourself the sole agent for somebody.
00:38:11.920 --> 00:38:16.159
Because if you screw it up and go bust, you take everybody with you.
00:38:16.400 --> 00:38:28.719
Not that I ever intended, or we ever intend to go bust, but if you see yourself as being a socially minded or civic-minded capitalist, you can do so much good.
00:38:28.960 --> 00:38:34.239
You don't have to maximize your profit, you optimize your profit, you optimize the job creation.
00:38:34.320 --> 00:38:50.639
You then do things like we got criticized for paying our staff pretty well when we started, we paid the living wage, and we got so much criticism from uh local pubs and restaurants, and people saying, look at you, state sponsored, and now you're gonna make us all go bust.
00:38:51.119 --> 00:38:51.840
Guess what?
00:38:52.079 --> 00:38:54.880
They had to compete and pay their staff properly.
00:38:55.119 --> 00:38:56.559
Imagine what happened.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:39:01.679
The pubs got better, the restaurants got better, people wanted to come to work.
00:39:01.920 --> 00:39:07.599
It sounds like a general talks in the bar, you know, but this isn't right wing.
00:39:07.760 --> 00:39:09.199
I'm not right wing.
00:39:09.440 --> 00:39:21.679
But I think actually seeing capitalism as not necessarily a bad thing, it's just there are an awful lot of bad people in capitalism, just like there are a lot of bad socialists.
00:39:21.920 --> 00:39:34.480
But well-managed capitalism, which is managed in such a way that it is for the benefit, the wider wealth of the widest possible audience, I think is a transformative thing.
00:39:34.639 --> 00:39:46.159
And I think it's worth actually, and I know I'm not alone, thinking about how we ended up in a world where something like 1% of the people own such a large percentage of the world.
00:39:46.400 --> 00:39:48.480
We know that cannot be right.
00:39:48.880 --> 00:40:08.239
And what's really tragic for us, people like you, people like me, is that you can be pro-capital and you're faced with such bad behavior that everything you believe in in terms of an economic system is threatened by, gosh, at the risk of making you feel bad.
00:40:08.559 --> 00:40:13.599
Does any sensible person think the privatization of water has been a huge success?
00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:18.559
Does any sensible person think that that's a good example of capitalism?
00:40:18.880 --> 00:40:23.440
I don't think many people do, and I don't think many Tories even do.
00:40:23.599 --> 00:40:33.840
But there are lots of examples like that where things that we should be stronger and more vocal about criticizing, and we should not get into our political tribes.
00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:37.760
Oh, I'm a so-and-so, so therefore I'm not going to allow that fact that that's true.
00:40:38.079 --> 00:40:47.440
You must notice with all the people you interview how many people defend the completely indefensible because they want to remain part of an establishment.
00:40:47.679 --> 00:40:50.480
It's craven, absolutely craven.
00:40:50.880 --> 00:41:03.280
I think that's partly it, and I think it's partly the problem that people have acknowledging the mistakes, that things that they supported were a mistake.
00:41:03.840 --> 00:41:07.039
Most people don't like admitting mistakes.
00:41:07.360 --> 00:41:10.719
I'm laughing because I'm not most people in that respect.
00:41:10.880 --> 00:41:15.119
I love admitting mistakes, which maybe is equally self-indulgent.
00:41:15.519 --> 00:41:35.599
But what you're touching on, I think, is the danger of ideology as distinct from values, as distinct from practicality, and most importantly, and you know, I'm on my high horse now, most importantly, as distinct from the long term.
00:41:36.639 --> 00:41:42.639
So much, so many decisions, so much bad business, so much bad government.
00:41:43.119 --> 00:41:55.360
In that case, the kind of obvious reasons to do with the political cycle and needing to get re-elected, but so much of it is destroyed by people being short-term.
00:41:56.159 --> 00:42:04.639
And when you build a new project, as I know you are, and I want to ask you about them, you're not saying when you're budgeting and doing the planning and whatever.
00:42:05.039 --> 00:42:08.239
I'm sure you're saying, you know, what do we expect this to bring in?
00:42:08.559 --> 00:42:15.039
But you're not looking at the lifetime of the thing in terms of 20 or 30 years, are you?
00:42:15.199 --> 00:42:17.599
You're looking at it way beyond that.
00:42:17.920 --> 00:42:18.880
Please tell me that.
00:42:19.199 --> 00:42:28.719
So I have a long-term vision for how we do things, but the way I see it is rather different to the way you're painting it.
00:42:28.960 --> 00:42:33.679
We turn up in a place A, and our job is we are exorcists.
00:42:33.920 --> 00:42:47.440
Our first obligation is to make people who live there realize that the pall that hangs low across that land called bad luck and nothing good ever happens here, is dispelled.
00:42:47.760 --> 00:42:53.039
Then you need to catch a few clever people who live in those areas and say that was your idea.
00:42:53.280 --> 00:42:56.960
And slowly the culture of you starts to appear.
00:42:57.119 --> 00:43:01.199
And the Eden Project, by the time it gets built, is not our project at all.
00:43:01.440 --> 00:43:09.760
What we've done is we've been throwing flour over the invisible man, which is the talent that was depressed where we came.
00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:19.280
And I think if you were to ask me what our greatest talent is, it is we can make other people believe in themselves.
00:43:19.679 --> 00:43:28.079
But why that's a long-term impression is that I want the Eden projects not to be owned by us by the time we finish.
00:43:28.320 --> 00:43:41.599
I want them to be owned by the people who have been there, watched it, suddenly believe in it, and suddenly they use it as a springboard to rediscover the person they once wanted to be.
00:43:41.679 --> 00:43:43.360
And there's nothing more powerful than that.
00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:44.400
I get it.
00:43:44.559 --> 00:43:59.679
Any listener who was wondering at the beginning whether Tim Smith was all about growing exotic plants will now know why I got so excited.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:02.800
About putting you in front of different audiences.
00:44:03.679 --> 00:44:12.480
Because your vision goes way beyond putting this fancy dome in the middle of an old Cornish quarry.
00:44:12.960 --> 00:44:18.320
These are lessons, these are confidence building, they're not tricks at all.
00:44:18.400 --> 00:44:19.679
They're building blocks.
00:44:19.840 --> 00:44:32.880
And I can't think of a single organization, a single business, a single anything, public-private sector, which couldn't benefit massively from hearing this from you.
00:44:33.199 --> 00:44:38.159
But also, not the outsider, in fact, not in a business sense.
00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:40.480
You build successful projects.
00:44:41.119 --> 00:44:50.239
You escape the possibility of anybody dismissing what you talk about as airy fairy because you've been there and done it.
00:44:50.480 --> 00:45:03.039
So the speakers I couldn't bear and spent my entire career avoiding and ignoring are those who might have the gift of the gab and read a few books on self-improvement or building a business or whatever.
00:45:03.199 --> 00:45:06.000
Um hadn't actually bloody well done it.
00:45:06.239 --> 00:45:07.119
Anyway, enough.
00:45:07.280 --> 00:45:08.480
End of hobby horse.
00:45:08.559 --> 00:45:12.559
Just tell us quickly, you've got Eden Project in Morecambe in Lancashire.
00:45:12.639 --> 00:45:13.280
Where's that at?
00:45:13.440 --> 00:45:15.199
As in what stage is that at?
00:45:15.519 --> 00:45:17.679
Well, this is remarkable, you should ask me.
00:45:17.840 --> 00:45:26.159
On a fortnight tomorrow, we're digging our spade into the ground to start constructing it.
00:45:26.400 --> 00:45:35.599
We've got the money, which is going to be our fourth mortgam, because we built a very large one in China, in the city of Qingdao, the marine capital.
00:45:35.920 --> 00:45:38.239
We built one in Dubai.
00:45:38.400 --> 00:45:40.639
They're all different, they don't look the same.
00:45:40.880 --> 00:45:50.639
Then we've got Morecambe, and then when we finished Morecambe, we're going to build in Dundee, in the old gas works on the banks of the River Tay.
00:45:50.880 --> 00:45:58.400
But each of them is a different form of theatre, and it would be a real failure if what we did was to repeat ourselves.
00:45:58.559 --> 00:46:01.599
The only thing we don't repeat is this.
00:46:02.159 --> 00:46:05.920
Remember when I said to you about accepting the third invitation.
00:46:06.159 --> 00:46:06.559
Yeah.
00:46:06.800 --> 00:46:10.559
The Irish have got the best phrase of all.
00:46:10.639 --> 00:46:18.480
And I learnt it recently, which is random meetings are dancing lessons from God.
00:46:18.960 --> 00:46:20.800
Yeah, I might write that down, actually.
00:46:21.039 --> 00:46:22.079
That's quite good, isn't it?
00:46:22.320 --> 00:46:23.840
The Irish are good at these things.
00:46:24.159 --> 00:46:24.480
I know.
00:46:24.559 --> 00:46:26.159
We're all jealous of the Irish, aren't we?
00:46:26.239 --> 00:46:29.360
Because they're just they're usually good looking, they're poetic.
00:46:29.760 --> 00:46:32.239
It does always rain there, so that's one comforting thing.
00:46:32.320 --> 00:46:35.360
Although as gardeners, we all welcome rain sometimes.
00:46:35.679 --> 00:46:38.000
Anyway, Tim, I have no choice.
00:46:38.159 --> 00:46:39.519
People have things to do.
00:46:39.679 --> 00:46:44.880
I'm hugely reluctantly gonna wrap this up.
00:46:45.119 --> 00:46:48.559
We haven't covered everything by such a long way.
00:46:48.719 --> 00:46:54.480
There's so much more I would love to talk about, but I'm gonna leave it with asking you one last question.
00:46:54.800 --> 00:47:01.760
And you've already touched on so many different elements, but I'm gonna ask you to sum it up crisply, please.
00:47:02.239 --> 00:47:09.760
What's your advice now in this state of the world, state of the country at the moment?
00:47:10.320 --> 00:47:13.119
What's your advice for young people?
00:47:14.159 --> 00:47:17.360
I don't want to give advice to young people because they're really smart.
00:47:17.519 --> 00:47:20.159
I want to give advice to anybody over the age of 35.
00:47:21.119 --> 00:47:35.280
Anyone who's listening who's over the age of 35, I hope you lose a year of your life every time you talk to a young person with that dystopian, drooling voice of yours about how we're going to head in a handcart.
00:47:35.519 --> 00:47:39.199
There has never been a more exciting time to be alive than now.
00:47:39.360 --> 00:47:50.400
Believe me, the advances in science, the advances in society are actually monumental, but they're just beneath the surface before the media has finally caught on to it.
00:47:50.480 --> 00:47:55.280
And a part of the problem is old people thinking the past was a better place.
00:47:55.440 --> 00:47:57.119
It ruddy well wasn't.
00:47:57.360 --> 00:48:01.760
It's actually about to become popping with excitement.
00:48:01.920 --> 00:48:03.039
And I'm really serious.
00:48:03.199 --> 00:48:06.320
I'm not saying this is a kind of proselytizing thing.
00:48:06.559 --> 00:48:07.840
Let me tell you one thing.
00:48:08.079 --> 00:48:12.320
When I was young, I went to see a musical called Hair.
00:48:12.480 --> 00:48:16.000
The theme tune was The Age of Aquarius.
00:48:16.400 --> 00:48:17.199
The chorus.
00:48:17.519 --> 00:48:19.360
Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
00:48:19.599 --> 00:48:20.159
Exactly.
00:48:20.320 --> 00:48:22.239
Well, you see, you and I are of an age.
00:48:22.400 --> 00:48:43.199
And the chorus of that song was We Are Stardust, which was actually a ripoff of uh Carl Sagan and his wife in the book Cosmos had talked about one day I hope that people will discover that all life is stardust, made from stardust.
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:54.079
Just think, in the last 30 years alone, science has shown us the complexity of the human body, the microbial structure of our insides.
00:48:54.559 --> 00:49:03.440
It's also shown us the sophistication of the microbial structure of soils and amazingly is showing us that they're all interrelated.
00:49:03.840 --> 00:49:05.360
Doesn't that excite you?
00:49:05.599 --> 00:49:10.639
That maybe the next generation of young people will actually have a God worth worshipping?
00:49:11.039 --> 00:49:18.000
It doesn't just excite me in a sort of theoretical, you know, it won't involve me, but it's great.
00:49:18.079 --> 00:49:21.599
It excites me right the way through.
00:49:21.920 --> 00:49:38.079
And I tell you what it also does, Tim, in a very small way, is that it means we're gonna wrap up this conversation with our listeners feeling upbeat and excited about the day.
00:49:38.800 --> 00:49:40.800
And that's a joy.
00:49:41.360 --> 00:49:44.079
Tim, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
00:49:44.639 --> 00:49:45.920
Sir Tim, maybe I should say.
00:49:48.880 --> 00:49:52.239
Let's agree to talk again at some stage in the future.
00:49:52.400 --> 00:49:53.440
Thank you so much.
00:49:53.599 --> 00:49:54.719
Have a great day.
00:49:55.039 --> 00:49:55.679
And you.
00:49:55.840 --> 00:49:56.320
My pleasure.
00:49:56.480 --> 00:49:57.519
Goodbye, Jeremy.
00:49:57.840 --> 00:49:59.039
Goodbye, Tim.
00:00:14.160 --> 00:00:27.120
I am so lucky to have in front of me today the entrepreneur, campaigner, and co-founder of the Eden Project, Tim Smith.
00:00:27.600 --> 00:00:28.640
How are you, Tim?
00:00:28.960 --> 00:00:33.520
If I was any better and my tail was like that of a dog, I'd be flying.
00:00:33.679 --> 00:00:36.479
You've now got to ask me why are you having such a good day?
00:00:36.880 --> 00:00:38.159
Okay, give me a moment.
00:00:38.719 --> 00:00:41.679
So, Tim, why are you having such a good day?
00:00:42.079 --> 00:00:44.960
Because I've become the father of a mare.
00:00:45.840 --> 00:00:50.399
My Icelandic horse gave birth at 4.15 this morning.
00:00:50.799 --> 00:00:53.039
So are we talking, James Harriet?
00:00:53.119 --> 00:00:58.000
Are we talking you being present at the birth and doing your bit to help?
00:00:58.320 --> 00:00:58.880
No, no.
00:00:58.960 --> 00:01:02.399
I was 10 minutes late, and I it'd be dumb good job I wasn't there to help.
00:01:02.479 --> 00:01:03.600
I'd have probably fainted.
00:01:03.679 --> 00:01:05.439
I can't stand the sight of blood.
00:01:05.599 --> 00:01:15.200
But when you see a baby anything, it's innocent for a moment makes you suspend any cynicism you have, and you just wonder at the notion.
00:01:15.359 --> 00:01:23.599
The sheer miracle, this horse comes out, and it's literally in about 30 seconds, it was up on his feet.
00:01:23.920 --> 00:01:24.719
My goodness.
00:01:24.959 --> 00:01:32.560
I was trying to imagine this morning as I sat looking at it, what must it be like to see the world for the first time?
00:01:32.719 --> 00:01:43.439
I mean, being sentient, as opposed to us goo-goo ga, you know, when you and I were born, this creature comes out and it's looking at trees and it's looking at crows and it's looking at its mum who's huge.
00:01:43.840 --> 00:01:44.719
What is it thinking?
00:01:44.959 --> 00:01:46.719
I mean, so many things to go in on.
00:01:46.959 --> 00:01:50.000
And were you proudly chomping away at a cigar?
00:01:50.239 --> 00:01:59.519
No, I well, I used to tromp at cigars, and my youngest son, he said to me, You promised me that I wouldn't be an orphan.
00:01:59.920 --> 00:02:01.359
And I thought that was pretty hard.
00:02:01.519 --> 00:02:03.040
He was playing hardball meaning.
00:02:03.120 --> 00:02:04.640
So I quit about a year ago.
00:02:04.959 --> 00:02:11.599
So listen, I like to start by trotting through uh a little bit of my guest's background.
00:02:12.240 --> 00:02:20.400
And I know that you started out as an archaeologist, and then famously, lots of people will know this.
00:02:20.879 --> 00:02:24.400
You then spent ten years as a record producer.
00:02:24.879 --> 00:02:31.039
And you achieved, if that's the right word, seven gold and platinum discs.
00:02:31.120 --> 00:02:31.759
What were they for?
00:02:32.319 --> 00:02:34.159
Songs by whom?
00:02:34.639 --> 00:02:35.759
Barry Manilo.
00:02:36.240 --> 00:02:52.240
But mainly mainly a lady called Louise Tucker, who was an opera singer at the Guildhall, and in the pre-mobile phone era, I was recording at Abbey Road Studios and the singer didn't turn up.
00:02:52.479 --> 00:03:09.520
And I phoned the three numbers I had in my address book, but the lady, Louise, had been accompanying my sister-in-law, babysitting, the night before at my house for the very first night I'd gone off out after my son's birth, my first son's birth.
00:03:09.759 --> 00:03:13.919
So I just phoned her up and said, You don't happen to be free right now, do you?
00:03:14.080 --> 00:03:15.599
And she was in, if you see what I mean.
00:03:15.680 --> 00:03:22.879
And so she came, she recorded, and four weeks later the record started to go number one all over the place, and it sold really well.
00:03:22.960 --> 00:03:24.479
It sold about seven million copies.
00:03:24.719 --> 00:03:26.960
Well, I'm gonna rush out and see if I can get one.
00:03:27.120 --> 00:03:28.960
What's the name of the record, the first one?
00:03:29.199 --> 00:03:32.879
It's called Midnight Blue by Louise Tucker.
00:03:33.360 --> 00:03:35.520
And that was followed by other records by her.
00:03:35.599 --> 00:03:44.319
She did really, really well, and she's now sadly very ill and is coming to see Snow Patrol tomorrow night at Eden Project with me.
00:03:44.800 --> 00:03:45.759
Why not?
00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:51.680
So then you got tired of the record business, and you moved to Cornwall.
00:03:52.080 --> 00:03:57.039
I went to Cornwall without an idea in my head about what I was gonna do.
00:03:57.280 --> 00:04:01.680
I knew I could fall back on composing some film music or telemusic.
00:04:01.840 --> 00:04:04.000
I just didn't want to work with artists anymore.
00:04:04.240 --> 00:04:16.399
And I then spent every penny I'd saved up on the money pit that was the farm that I bought, and then found myself in a curious and rather unpleasant situation of having no money.
00:04:16.720 --> 00:04:19.920
And then something really extraordinary happened.
00:04:20.079 --> 00:04:34.240
I went to the dentist, and of all the things to find in a dentist waiting room was a copy of the stage, but not three years old, but that weeks.
00:04:34.639 --> 00:04:36.639
I still don't know who we left it.
00:04:36.879 --> 00:04:54.079
Anyway, uh this is uh 1988, and I open it listlessly for I am anxious about dentists, and it fell open on a page with a picture of the former England defender Jackie Charlton.
00:04:54.240 --> 00:05:07.839
Ooh, Jackie, and he was holding a whacking grape salmon in one arm and a fishing rod in the other, and underneath it said Jackie Charlton signs deal to do 12-part series called Go Fishing.
00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:33.759
Now, when you're completely potless and you don't know where your next penny's coming from, it is extraordinary that in your back catalogue you suddenly remember that once you'd been very, very drunk in a recording studio with some friends, one of whom had a banjo, and you composed as a piece of fun a track composed of all of the fishing puns, you know.
00:05:33.839 --> 00:05:35.839
You can imagine this isn't the time and the place.
00:05:35.920 --> 00:05:37.360
I can't sound up the energy, you know.
00:05:37.519 --> 00:05:39.759
I'm a dab hand at this, all that sort of stuff.
00:05:40.079 --> 00:05:48.720
And I am up the attic at my house, and I found the original recording of this track, and There Is a God.
00:05:48.879 --> 00:05:50.399
I've got to tell you, There is a God.
00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:55.120
The title of this joke song was called Go Fishing.
00:05:55.439 --> 00:06:05.600
So I made a copy of this cassette and I sent it to the film company who got back literally within a couple of days and said, We want it, we want that to be our theme song.
00:06:05.759 --> 00:06:07.120
By the way, have you got any other music?
00:06:07.519 --> 00:06:08.480
Talk about luck, eh?
00:06:08.720 --> 00:06:13.519
Well, luck or fate, one or the other, it's a fabulous, fabulous story.
00:06:13.839 --> 00:06:17.199
So you've now got some money coming in, unexpectedly.
00:06:17.279 --> 00:06:25.360
You've got some money coming in, and you then bumped into somebody and it changed your life again.
00:06:25.519 --> 00:06:26.959
Tell us what happened.
00:06:27.360 --> 00:06:30.079
Well, it was something, not somebody.
00:06:30.240 --> 00:06:42.240
I knew a guy who drove past my house and he said, I've got a really big black pig in the back of this van, and it's going to go to the abattoir unless you take it.
00:06:42.319 --> 00:06:49.759
But I do understand you've got a garage and you haven't got a car smart enough to put in it, so why don't you have the pig?
00:06:50.000 --> 00:06:51.600
I didn't really have a good response.
00:06:51.680 --> 00:06:57.199
I was all my training at school and university hadn't prepared me for a question like that.
00:06:57.519 --> 00:07:01.040
So I accepted Horace for so he became called.
00:07:01.360 --> 00:07:12.560
Horace disliked the garage intensely, broke down the back door of the farmhouse, and decided to come and stay in the kitchen and warm his ass against the arger.
00:07:13.040 --> 00:07:15.920
And he was very lonely, I could tell pretty quickly.
00:07:16.240 --> 00:07:23.439
And I realized that I had the choice of either sending him to the abattoir after all, or finding himself a mate.
00:07:23.600 --> 00:07:25.040
So I put an advert out.
00:07:25.360 --> 00:07:27.120
Not in the stage, presumably by this time.
00:07:27.199 --> 00:07:28.959
In no, this is not the stage.
00:07:29.040 --> 00:07:31.759
No, this was actually Farmer's Weekly.
00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:38.800
I was looking for another Vietnamese potbelly pig, and lo and behold, I found one, and I called her Doris.
00:07:38.959 --> 00:07:50.720
And the moment Horace set eyes on Doris, it was love at first sight, and they suddenly decided that the garage was the little bijou love nest that they'd been looking for.
00:07:50.959 --> 00:07:52.800
And I didn't see them again for a long time.
00:07:52.959 --> 00:07:55.680
They were in there doing whatever pigs do.
00:07:56.000 --> 00:08:06.079
And then in the November of 1989, at two o'clock in the morning, Doris gave birth.
00:08:06.319 --> 00:08:11.920
The technical word is she farrowed, and there was a whole bunch of little piglets.
00:08:12.240 --> 00:08:17.600
And it was almost biblical because there they were under a heat lamp in long straw.
00:08:18.560 --> 00:08:22.240
And um I fell in love with the whole idea of rare breeds.
00:08:22.399 --> 00:08:23.839
That's where the rare breed thing came from.
00:08:23.920 --> 00:08:30.160
I've always been interested in rare breeds, but it never occurred to me to actually have a rare breed park.
00:08:30.319 --> 00:08:42.720
But what you haven't mentioned about my coming from London to Cornwall was that I made the decision at 37 that I was going to lead my life by instinct and do whatever life threw up.
00:08:42.799 --> 00:08:44.879
I wasn't going to plan myself at all.
00:08:45.039 --> 00:08:48.639
And I'd arrived in Cornwall because I'd been on holiday before I came.
00:08:48.799 --> 00:08:51.600
I walked into an estate agent because it was raining.
00:08:51.679 --> 00:08:52.559
I saw a house.
00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:54.639
It was raining the following day.
00:08:54.799 --> 00:08:59.679
So I went to see the house, as opposed to just being, you know, curious.
00:08:59.919 --> 00:09:06.639
And I ended up being jammed in a lane to the farm by a tractor in the rain, and this guy came out and said, What do you do, an old buck?
00:09:06.720 --> 00:09:08.159
And I said, This is really embarrassing.
00:09:08.240 --> 00:09:10.960
I've come secretly see this farmhouse at the end of this lane.
00:09:11.039 --> 00:09:13.519
And he said, Adams, it's my house.
00:09:13.759 --> 00:09:16.799
Anyway, two and a half hours later I shook hands and I'd bought the house.
00:09:16.879 --> 00:09:18.639
But it was crazy because I lived in Brixton.
00:09:18.879 --> 00:09:19.919
But my life's like that.
00:09:20.000 --> 00:09:33.039
I've actually I decided as a positive act of curiosity with life that I wanted to take random, a bit like the dice man, but without the really horrible alternatives, I would only accept good alternatives.
00:09:33.120 --> 00:09:35.519
I wasn't going to sort of rob a bank or murder somebody.
00:09:35.759 --> 00:09:36.320
But you know what?
00:09:36.399 --> 00:09:44.799
It's really funny when you decide to lead your life by instinct, the world becomes a place of extraordinary joy.
00:09:45.039 --> 00:09:46.320
Really extraordinary joy.
00:09:46.480 --> 00:09:56.960
I mean, the thing, as we'll discover as we talk, I developed a philosophy which was that I accept every third invitation unless it clashes with a family commitment.
00:09:57.120 --> 00:10:02.159
And the reason I do that, it's not that I don't accept the first, by the way, but I always accept the third.
00:10:02.320 --> 00:10:12.240
And I do that because I want to leave open the option of meeting people that I shouldn't or fate wouldn't normally have put me in the way of meeting.
00:10:12.480 --> 00:10:23.120
Because part of the problem of doing what we do is that we tend to be quite biased towards accepting invitations from those who are like us or in our profession or whatever.
00:10:23.440 --> 00:10:36.399
So when I sent you off to the far-flung places to make speeches in front of corporate types who had absolutely nothing to do with your world, as it were.
00:10:36.720 --> 00:10:38.639
Part of you thought, well, you know what?
00:10:38.799 --> 00:10:40.080
Something interesting might happen.
00:10:40.240 --> 00:10:42.320
I might bump into somebody interesting.
00:10:42.720 --> 00:10:43.440
Absolutely.
00:10:43.679 --> 00:10:57.279
In fact, over the last twenty years, I would say, nearly thirty, almost every major life-changing event has come, a professional life-changing event has come from the third meeting.
00:10:57.519 --> 00:10:59.360
And I've done some crazy stuff.
00:10:59.440 --> 00:11:10.159
I've judged dog shows, I've opened old people's homes, I've been at the West of England Ballroom Dancing Championships, and all the things which I would have ordinarily refused to do.
00:11:10.399 --> 00:11:12.879
And each one yields something peculiar.
00:11:13.039 --> 00:11:19.279
I went to speak in a Nissan near Taunton, and I was told there would only be 50 people and a dog there.
00:11:19.519 --> 00:11:24.480
But I went because it was a third invitation, and blown me down.
00:11:24.879 --> 00:11:34.399
Three months later, I was in Plymouth addressing the European Commissioners trying to seek money for the Eden project, and it was quite obvious we weren't going to get it.
00:11:34.559 --> 00:11:39.039
And suddenly this old guy gets up and he says, My name's Humphrey Templey.
00:11:39.279 --> 00:11:48.080
I'm chairman of Somerset County Council, and I happen to be in a Nissan up near Taunton three months ago, and I saw this man speaking.
00:11:48.240 --> 00:11:53.919
And it's quite obvious he has the wider West Country in his interest than just the narrow confines of Cornwall.
00:11:54.000 --> 00:12:04.960
And I've spoken to my colleagues on the council board who are behind me here, and we've all agreed that we in Somerset will drop one of our projects if the rest of you will also drop one each.
00:12:05.120 --> 00:12:08.480
So that speech was worth twelve point seven million quid.
00:12:08.799 --> 00:12:10.080
My goodness.
00:12:10.399 --> 00:12:28.320
Now, before we get to talk about Eden, just let's talk a little bit about Heligan and how that came about, because it is part of this story of coincidences and luck and fate and well you put it best, just simply working on instinct.
00:12:28.399 --> 00:12:29.360
How did that happen?
00:12:29.679 --> 00:12:35.200
It was because I had the piglets, I decided I wanted to find a site for a rare breed park.
00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:55.120
There was a site right next to where I'm sitting now, which had camper vans on it occasionally, and I came to see the owner, and he's I'm really sorry, but I've just let this whole site literally a couple of days ago, but he'd given me a cup of coffee so hot I couldn't politely just glug it and go.
00:12:55.360 --> 00:12:57.840
So we had to engage in small talk.
00:12:58.159 --> 00:13:10.960
So during the course of it, I happened to drop the information that I had been an archaeologist, and he then uttered the immortal words, I have need of an archaeologist, which no one had ever sent to me before.
00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:46.240
And he then told me the story that this man was a lovely man, and he's become a friend called John Willis, and he had inherited the whole estate around where I was sitting at that time, and he didn't have any money, and as you will recall, nor do I, um nor did I at that point, but he took me in the following day to see this overgrown estate in which had been a once famous garden, but it was now completely overgrown with brambles, and we cut our way in, and it turned out that no one had been in there since 1915.
00:13:46.799 --> 00:14:09.120
And to cut a long story short, we cut our way through and I eventually came into a walled garden through a rusted-up green painted door in a big brick-faced wall, and there was this old vinery, but with all the wood long rotted out, with the glass just hanging in the ivy and brambles like uh guillotines in waiting.
00:14:09.200 --> 00:14:11.919
And I I just fell hopelessly in love with the whole thing.
00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:29.360
It was like an essay in the most marvellous green, and then the thing which actually swung it completely was my eyes were drawn to a pair of what I would later come to know as vine scissors that were hanging on a nail on the wall.
00:14:29.679 --> 00:14:37.919
And the moment, you know those crazy paintings when we were young where it were all with dots, and your clever mates would say, Bloody hell, that's clever.
00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:40.080
There's an elephant in the middle of that, and you go, Where?
00:14:40.240 --> 00:14:41.039
I can't see that.
00:14:41.279 --> 00:14:42.159
You know the thing.
00:14:42.320 --> 00:14:51.840
Well, having got my eyes centered on toolness due to these vine scissors, I suddenly saw tools everywhere, you know, lying on the floor everywhere.
00:14:52.000 --> 00:14:58.799
It was as if someone had said tea time and everybody gone fully intending to return at some later point, but they never did.
00:14:59.120 --> 00:15:02.879
And the story of that we would peel back over the coming year.
00:15:03.039 --> 00:15:12.720
But it was a very romantic thing, and I decided that night that I wanted to restore the gardens, and I knew nothing about gardening.
00:15:12.960 --> 00:15:19.600
I knew actually very little about plants, except broadly the green side should be facing the sun, and that was a good idea.
00:15:19.759 --> 00:15:23.519
But that's about it, and that's not an exaggeration, I really didn't know.
00:15:23.679 --> 00:15:41.039
Although, for anybody listening who's interested in career changes or doing weird stuff, before you talk yourself out of it because you know nothing about it, be aware that one of the greatest gifts on earth is to be born with a human brain that is quite quick to assimilate knowledge.
00:15:41.279 --> 00:15:54.720
But if you can assimilate great knowledge without all the prejudices that come from having done the same thing all your life, you can actually have real insights and make a real difference in areas where there hasn't been any change for decades.
00:15:55.039 --> 00:15:56.080
That fascinates me.
00:15:56.159 --> 00:16:01.840
I used to work with a guy who at the time was he might have just been 20.
00:16:02.480 --> 00:16:07.519
And he'd been working since he was at school through his computer.
00:16:07.759 --> 00:16:15.919
He'd been advising companies in China on their manufacturing process.
00:16:16.799 --> 00:16:23.440
And he'd grown this agency because by that time there were 20 or so people working for him.
00:16:24.159 --> 00:16:32.399
And he'd go into these factories and places all over the place and he'd hear people say, Well, he's a child.
00:16:32.480 --> 00:16:35.919
What the bloody hell does he know about what we do and how we do it?
00:16:36.559 --> 00:16:52.399
And Josh used to explain that actually that was his strength because he didn't know about how they uh used to do things, he could reinvent it without any of that baggage.
00:16:52.639 --> 00:16:52.799
Yes.
00:16:53.200 --> 00:16:55.039
It's a fascinating idea.
00:16:55.440 --> 00:16:58.960
Yeah, and I see it in so many areas.
00:16:59.360 --> 00:17:14.480
I think one of the really interesting things about the age in which we are living at the moment, where predominantly white middle-aged men are getting into a complete froth over the destruction of civilizations we know it because of artificial intelligence.
00:17:14.799 --> 00:17:26.319
I come at it from a completely different end of the telescope, which is if you can have artificial intelligence answering your questions for you at speed, that's amazing.
00:17:26.480 --> 00:17:30.720
But what it will never do is put things together that are odd.
00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:40.480
And I think one of the things is that humans that are able to have this freaky ability to put things together, agglomerate them so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts.
00:17:40.640 --> 00:17:55.279
I think that kind of systems thinking, I know the word system is usually applied to computers and mathematical brains, but I think actually brilliant systems thinking is something that is a very human ability.
00:17:55.519 --> 00:18:14.720
And, you know, we'll talk about it in the in the relationship to Eden, maybe, but I'm absolutely convinced that A forcing yourself to meet people you don't know, bear in mind that parents, or as you say, will send you to a good school or something so that you can meet the people you need to know.
00:18:14.960 --> 00:18:22.799
Your parents are really stupid because they didn't understand that if you look at history, magic is created by meeting the people you didn't know you needed to know.
00:18:23.200 --> 00:18:24.960
I can see you agree with me with that.
00:18:25.119 --> 00:18:43.440
And all throughout my life I've been finding that the great liberators in your mind for how you do it, do anything, whether it be restoring a garden, writing a book, whether it be setting up a shop, or coming up with ideas to design something that make people who are old feel comfortable in it.
00:18:43.680 --> 00:18:48.720
You find you meet people that you can't think why on earth they should be interesting you to you.
00:18:48.880 --> 00:18:55.279
You then let them talk and you remember how to listen, and they suddenly fill you in on a world you didn't even know existed.
00:18:55.359 --> 00:19:03.200
And that's why stupid people are the people who don't realize you learn nothing by talking, you learn everything by listening.
00:19:03.440 --> 00:19:05.680
And then suddenly your world is just open up.
00:19:05.839 --> 00:19:07.039
I'll give you a good example.
00:19:07.359 --> 00:19:23.680
I got feverishly drunk one night, meeting somebody I'd never met before called John Zegon, and he is the world expert on gerontics, old age Alzheimer stuff.
00:19:23.920 --> 00:19:24.079
Okay.
00:19:24.319 --> 00:19:26.319
John Zysal is his name, sorry.
00:19:26.480 --> 00:19:29.119
And I met him in an event in London.
00:19:29.279 --> 00:19:30.960
He'd never been to Cornwall.
00:19:31.039 --> 00:19:36.559
I didn't know he was famous, but I phoned up my people, my people, my colleagues in Cornwall.
00:19:36.720 --> 00:19:40.079
I said, I'm sitting here getting drunk with a man called John Zysal.
00:19:40.319 --> 00:19:41.119
Do you know who he is?
00:19:41.200 --> 00:19:43.599
And they said, Do you mean the John Zisor?
00:19:44.079 --> 00:19:46.240
I said, Drew, are you the John Zysal?
00:19:46.319 --> 00:19:46.799
And he laughed.
00:19:46.960 --> 00:19:48.400
I said, I guess I am.
00:19:48.720 --> 00:19:50.240
They said, He's a god to us.
00:19:50.400 --> 00:19:52.079
He's an absolute genius.
00:19:52.240 --> 00:19:54.720
And they explained over the phone what he was brilliant at.
00:19:54.880 --> 00:19:56.240
He created spaces.
00:19:56.480 --> 00:20:01.759
He was involved in that thing, you know, Oliver Sachs wrote that Awakenings.
00:20:01.839 --> 00:20:08.079
You know, that book about Alzheimer's people who went to a theater and then peeled back all of their amnesia to do with their disease.
00:20:08.319 --> 00:20:18.880
Anyway, I persuaded John to be as radical as I was, and he accepted my invitation to buy him a ticket on the sleeper to Cornwall that night.
00:20:19.119 --> 00:20:21.920
And he came when we arrived in Cornwall.
00:20:22.240 --> 00:20:24.640
I think I had one sentence with him.
00:20:24.799 --> 00:20:37.440
And the whole time he was in Cornwall because he got jumped on by my team, and then he went for lunch with Nick Grimshaw, the architect who designed Eden, and Nick said it was the most exciting lunch he'd ever had.
00:20:37.599 --> 00:20:46.960
It completely transformed his view as to how you start to think when you've got Alzheimer's and how you can make a building feel.
00:20:47.359 --> 00:20:53.119
So for those who are listening who are experts in this, please forgive my horrible ignorance in the way I phrase this.
00:20:53.359 --> 00:20:59.599
But if you start to get up because you think you've got to get up, but by the time you're up, you can't remember why you were up.
00:20:59.839 --> 00:21:19.599
If you've designed buildings with beautiful, colourful sofas at the end of a corridor or an open fire or huge vases of flowers and things, the heart is not disturbed by anxiety because whatever it is your eyes have seen, that must have been why you got up and you're completely relaxed.
00:21:19.759 --> 00:21:21.359
You just go over to look at it.
00:21:21.680 --> 00:21:24.559
And boy, isn't that a simple observation?
00:21:24.880 --> 00:21:26.000
It's quite beautiful.
00:21:26.160 --> 00:21:37.759
And the I mean the broad moral of the story is I love the way it it flips received wisdom on its head because the moral of the story is talk to strangers.
00:21:38.319 --> 00:21:39.200
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:21:39.519 --> 00:21:46.640
Anyway, listen, last time I checked, we're in a decaying glasshouse in the Garden of Helligan.
00:21:46.799 --> 00:21:47.759
Pick us up from there.
00:21:48.240 --> 00:21:49.359
I fell in love with it.
00:21:49.519 --> 00:21:52.240
I decided that I wanted to restore the whole thing.
00:21:52.319 --> 00:21:54.400
I knew nothing about gardens at all.
00:21:54.799 --> 00:21:59.519
But I said to John, I said, I've got no money, but I am the best.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:01.839
Marketing man I've ever met.
00:22:02.160 --> 00:22:09.680
So what I want to do is I want to shake hands with you, and I want you to give me a long lease on your estate for nothing.
00:22:09.839 --> 00:22:10.640
A quid.
00:22:10.799 --> 00:22:18.960
And the deal is that when I restore it, I will make it so famous that you can have 20% of the revenue from visitors coming in.
00:22:19.200 --> 00:22:20.480
And we shook hands.
00:22:20.640 --> 00:22:30.000
And it's the best deal he's ever made in his life, and it's the best deal that I ever made in mine, and it's based completely on trust between us.
00:22:30.240 --> 00:22:40.000
And that was in 1990 that we did it, and we remain chums, and it's been such an agreeable adventure.
00:22:40.319 --> 00:22:58.640
So take us from Heligan, which by the way, I should tell our listeners, particularly those in Belgium and Kazakhstan, that there is a book still available about the lost gardens of Heligan, and it's absolutely beautiful.
00:22:58.960 --> 00:23:06.160
You really should have it, not just on your bookshelf or your coffee table, but actually you should have it beside your bed, I think.
00:23:06.319 --> 00:23:07.759
Anyway, enough of that Abbott.
00:23:08.079 --> 00:23:08.640
I like you.
00:23:08.720 --> 00:23:10.559
You're a very nice man.
00:23:10.960 --> 00:23:12.480
And especially people in Belgium.
00:23:12.559 --> 00:23:17.119
There's in fact a Dutch version for you to read if you are of the Flemish persuasion.
00:23:17.359 --> 00:23:19.119
Unfortunately, there's no French version.
00:23:19.599 --> 00:23:26.480
Well, I'm not going to commit to that, but I'm I'm happy to be the second best marketer in this conversation.
00:23:26.640 --> 00:23:31.440
So well, no, no, you sell ice creams to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabians.
00:23:31.759 --> 00:23:34.960
So you've done helligan with your team.
00:23:35.119 --> 00:23:40.240
You're always at pains to point out that, well, like everything you do, it's a team effort.
00:23:40.480 --> 00:23:44.720
And then how does this idea for the Eden project come about?
00:23:45.119 --> 00:23:53.759
Well, when I did the plant thing, I didn't know anything about plants except, as I say, greenside up.
00:23:53.839 --> 00:23:56.319
But I worked with some darn good plantsmen.
00:23:56.640 --> 00:24:11.759
And when we discovered that the reason why the gardens at Heligon had gone derelict was because three-quarters of the 22 that worked there had died in the fields of Flanders and France, Northern France.
00:24:11.920 --> 00:24:16.640
And the owner of the place had just fenced off the garden and gone to live in a villa in Italy.
00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:18.319
He was so sad by that.
00:24:18.559 --> 00:24:28.960
And when we discovered that and we found the war memorials with all their names on it, we decided we were going to tell the story of the ordinary men and women who had made these gardens great.
00:24:29.119 --> 00:24:37.599
And why that's important is that in 1990 there wasn't a single working productive garden open to the public in Britain.
00:24:37.759 --> 00:24:38.400
Not one.
00:24:44.400 --> 00:24:52.799
And even probably the greatest wall garden of the day at Chatsworth had been bulldozed in the 1980s to make a caravan park.
00:24:53.039 --> 00:24:56.720
All the glass bell jar and everything else had been crushed under bulldozer.
00:24:57.119 --> 00:24:59.359
So we decided to tell the whole opera.
00:25:00.000 --> 00:25:42.319
And in doing this, it changed my life because A, I learned something which every Don person alive today ought to know about horticulture, is that until the invention of refrigeration, which although it was invented in the late 1890s, only became available to the middle classes for their homes in the 19, early 1950s, until then we were dependent on great horticulturists growing seasonally for 365 days a year, sometimes for flavor, but sometimes for keeping qualities, other times, you know.
00:25:42.559 --> 00:25:47.920
April was known as either the hungry month, or if you're really unlucky, the dying month.
00:25:48.160 --> 00:26:02.720
When you start to look at a garden with the respect of knowing that the head gardener, he or she had to know how to have these things ripening in series and which things to that would store well.
00:26:02.960 --> 00:26:14.720
So for example, there's some apples that taste pretty woolly, but they tasted a bit of sugar right up until April if you keep them in the dark, in a thick bed of straw, and so on.
00:26:14.799 --> 00:26:21.839
And they needed to know that you grow one set of fruit on a north-facing wall, it will be retarded because it's not getting the sun.
00:26:22.079 --> 00:26:27.039
Yeah, so it'll be probably six weeks later than the fruit that's on the south-facing inner wall.
00:26:27.359 --> 00:26:31.119
You suddenly go, crikey, these people were bloody brilliant.
00:26:31.279 --> 00:26:34.400
And then you look at all the varieties of things they were growing.
00:26:34.720 --> 00:26:42.880
Horror crosses across your brain when you start thinking about it, that this isn't a political statement, although it's very political.
00:26:43.119 --> 00:27:06.960
Big agriculture, in its desire to have maximum yield, maximum homogeneity of everything looking the same, and so on, has created an extraordinarily near-perfect storm of perfect pattern and shape, sugars replacing phenols in the fruit and vegetable, which means that they're no longer as good for us as they used to be.
00:27:07.200 --> 00:27:12.240
But we're being sold them because they're heavy yielding, as if it's better for you.
00:27:12.319 --> 00:27:14.000
The modern days are with us.
00:27:14.240 --> 00:27:19.519
And yet, I bought a golf course seven years ago, and I've turned it into an orchard.
00:27:19.680 --> 00:27:30.640
And we talked with Oxford at the moment, we're looking at the old apple varieties, and apples that were created pre-1850 are really rich in phenols.
00:27:30.720 --> 00:27:33.039
So they're antioxidants, they're really good for you.
00:27:33.119 --> 00:27:36.400
And apple a day does keep the doctor awake by and large.
00:27:36.720 --> 00:27:43.839
After that, the grows of, because of our childlike taste, they have replaced the phenols with sugars.
00:27:44.000 --> 00:27:45.839
So you don't have exactly the same thing.
00:27:46.079 --> 00:28:06.240
So I think we're going to see a revolution where something that was considered to be historic and of marginal interest for fans, we're suddenly going to realize, a bit like probiotic drinks, oh my god, our tummies are really sophisticated creatures, and we've got to feed them really well, and we might live a long time if we do that.
00:28:06.480 --> 00:28:08.960
Bear in mind our life expectancy is going down.
00:28:09.119 --> 00:28:10.240
Isn't that interesting?
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:11.119
It is.
00:28:11.279 --> 00:28:15.519
You've just reminded me, I don't know whether you know this, and I can't think where I read it.
00:28:16.240 --> 00:28:29.759
The chap who was asked to design and plan rationing in the Second World War had a very serious stomach complaint.
00:28:30.559 --> 00:28:42.160
So in his mind, the most healthy thing to do was to keep it very simple and very natural and for obvious reasons quite limited.
00:28:42.559 --> 00:28:53.200
And so we ended up with a rationing system that actually made people healthier then than they are today.
00:28:53.680 --> 00:28:57.039
I just find that remarkable and wonderful.
00:28:57.200 --> 00:28:58.960
Anyway, listen, I keep trying this.
00:28:59.119 --> 00:29:16.480
Let's go back to you launching this at the time preposterous idea of the Eden project with so many hurdles in front of you and so many reasons why you couldn't and shouldn't do it, but you went ahead anyway.
00:29:16.880 --> 00:29:18.799
Yeah, that's the hero version.
00:29:19.839 --> 00:29:20.640
Thank you for that.
00:29:20.880 --> 00:29:31.279
The truth is, we were living in a country where A, the economics meant that governments and lotteries were putting some money into projects that were exciting.
00:29:31.599 --> 00:29:42.240
However, we were also living in a country that was starved, a bit like the days of rationing after the war, was starved of permission to do exciting things.
00:29:42.400 --> 00:29:44.559
There was a real hunger for beauty.
00:29:44.640 --> 00:29:58.000
So I think the Millennium Commission will, in years to come, be seen as one of the most inspired decisions ever to enable a panel of people to choose to support things that would otherwise not get funding.
00:29:58.240 --> 00:30:06.000
And I loved all the worthy people from Tunbridge Wells, so to speak, getting angry about the waste of money to do this, that, and the other.
00:30:06.480 --> 00:30:10.640
Actually, the success rate for all of these exciting projects was fantastic.
00:30:10.799 --> 00:30:16.480
And I'm glad there were some failures because if there hadn't been any failures, they wouldn't have been trying hard enough, would they?
00:30:16.880 --> 00:30:23.920
So the big thing I would like you to take out of your heroizing of me is the following.
00:30:24.319 --> 00:30:26.079
People love big.
00:30:26.400 --> 00:30:42.240
One of the things is that almost every human being I know has a gold coffee bean inside them, and that gold coffee bean is the sum total of all their disappointments at the person they dreamt they could have been when they were young and they now aren't.
00:30:42.480 --> 00:30:52.319
If you can create a stage on which people can suddenly feel that maybe their best years aren't behind them, maybe something really exciting.
00:30:52.559 --> 00:30:58.319
You're not going to win Wimbledon when you're 50, okay, but you might well do something just as good.
00:30:58.559 --> 00:31:08.640
And if you can make people believe that they could be part of a stage set, a cast that is going to do something amazing, the energy that creates is fantastic.
00:31:08.799 --> 00:31:11.759
I mean, absolutely fantastic.
00:31:12.079 --> 00:31:26.720
If you ally that with a fundraising proposal, which is Arthur Conondora's Lost World and the Crater of a Volcano, everybody knows the story of Arthur Conondor's Lost Worlds and Crater of a Volcano.
00:31:26.880 --> 00:31:28.720
It actually isn't fantastical.
00:31:28.799 --> 00:31:32.960
It's already in the DNA of almost every single English person alive.
00:31:33.200 --> 00:31:50.480
So if you say we're going to go into the crater of a volcano and there's going to be some godlike figure that's going to pour every productive plant on which humans depend into it, you're not going to allow advertising so people aren't distracted, and you're going to make it very rock and roll in terms of its interpretation.
00:31:50.880 --> 00:31:53.680
If an eight-year-old can't understand it, it doesn't count.
00:31:53.839 --> 00:31:56.079
Suddenly people go, oh, that's pretty cool.
00:31:56.319 --> 00:31:57.359
And it's big.
00:31:57.519 --> 00:32:01.519
I mean, it's really big, and the technology was revolutionary.
00:32:01.920 --> 00:32:20.960
It was far more complicated in terms of imagining you could do it, but the doing of it, if you've got the right skills, Gay Coley, who was the co-chief executive with me for a long time, she coined a rather marvellous phrase, which was dare to dream and organise to deliver.
00:32:21.119 --> 00:32:25.359
And I kept saying to her, you ought to write a business book on that, because that's actually the secret.
00:32:25.680 --> 00:32:32.960
Dreamers ought to be forced to have an accountsperson at their right shoulder and a lawyer at their left shoulder and an artist.
00:32:33.200 --> 00:32:42.400
There are ways of building amazing things which need people of opposite abilities that are orchestrated in some way to get the best out of them.
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:50.480
In a very small way, I was lucky enough to have a business partner who was really good at all the things I was shit at.
00:32:50.720 --> 00:32:52.559
And that in my case was luck.
00:32:52.720 --> 00:33:05.680
But it's such a helpful lesson to anybody at the beginning of their career that actually, yes, be brave, imagine, and everything you've said so far.
00:33:06.079 --> 00:33:12.960
But have people around you who know about stuff that you don't know about or you're not interested in.
00:33:13.119 --> 00:33:16.240
That's a fantastic bit of advice, isn't it?
00:33:16.640 --> 00:33:17.119
Yes.
00:33:17.599 --> 00:33:21.759
There are a number of very simple things that MBAs don't seem to have.
00:33:22.000 --> 00:33:27.839
One of which is the first thing about being successful is about losing your fear of being disliked.
00:33:28.000 --> 00:33:29.519
That's, I think, the first thing.
00:33:29.680 --> 00:33:36.240
I think most people are just crucified with the sense of wanting to be liked, which makes them not make good decisions.
00:33:36.480 --> 00:33:44.880
But also there's a desire, we become so personalized in the way that we look at our culture, we think we're individuals.
00:33:45.039 --> 00:33:46.559
Everything's about individuals.
00:33:46.799 --> 00:33:47.680
We're not.
00:33:48.000 --> 00:33:49.759
We're tribal creatures.
00:33:49.920 --> 00:33:54.079
But part of our tribal characteristic is the pretense that we're individuals.
00:33:54.319 --> 00:33:57.119
But what the hell do these people think taste is then?
00:33:57.440 --> 00:34:01.680
Taste is a common acceptance of something, and there are some people who taste make it and so on.
00:34:01.839 --> 00:34:08.000
But actually, if you behave a long way outside of what the norm is, you get policed back into it.
00:34:08.159 --> 00:34:18.960
And we allow people to be freaks as far as our society can permit it, and as confident, the more confident a society is, the wider the range of what we consider acceptable behavior.
00:34:19.360 --> 00:34:21.679
The less confident it shrinks, doesn't it?
00:34:21.920 --> 00:34:25.280
The culture of the individual means that you say, that's my idea.
00:34:25.599 --> 00:34:26.719
IPR.
00:34:26.880 --> 00:34:27.920
You hear it everywhere.
00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:29.679
You know, intellectual property.
00:34:29.920 --> 00:34:31.599
Everyone's an artist these days.
00:34:31.760 --> 00:34:33.840
I want to protect my IPR.
00:34:34.079 --> 00:34:41.599
Actually, this the best way of protecting your IPR is not necessarily to spend a fortune on lawyers.
00:34:41.760 --> 00:34:50.159
It might be better to have some people next to you who are brilliant at sharing your IPR with you, who are really tough, and no one wants to mess with you.
00:34:50.480 --> 00:34:52.400
I completely and utterly agree with that.
00:34:52.559 --> 00:34:55.119
Okay, that tangent was entirely of my making.
00:34:55.360 --> 00:35:08.079
Now you're faced with creating something utterly extraordinary, which involved 83,000 tons of soil apart from anything else.
00:35:08.480 --> 00:35:16.559
It involved working with, as you said, the architects at Grimshaw, engineers from Arab, McAlpine, or McAlpine, isn't it?
00:35:16.639 --> 00:35:17.360
That's the correct pronunciation.
00:35:17.599 --> 00:35:18.079
McAlpine.
00:35:18.320 --> 00:35:21.199
And don't forget Tony Hunt, a great engineer and his team.
00:35:21.679 --> 00:35:25.440
As well as all the gardeners and everything else.
00:35:25.760 --> 00:35:32.239
And you end up with well, the most famous element, I guess, is the rainforest biodome.
00:35:33.039 --> 00:35:35.199
Fifty meters tall.
00:35:36.000 --> 00:35:37.599
57.3.
00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:41.760
It's not that I'm competitive.
00:35:42.559 --> 00:35:44.159
It's utterly remarkable.
00:35:44.559 --> 00:35:52.320
And it's become a fantastically successful, insert whatever word you like, attraction.
00:35:52.719 --> 00:36:00.079
Definitely not, I note, anything like a theme park, but still very much an attraction.
00:36:00.559 --> 00:36:07.440
And I mean these figures are going to be out of date now, but I've got in front of me 15 million visitors.
00:36:08.320 --> 00:36:09.039
25.
00:36:10.800 --> 00:36:12.000
Probably a typo.
00:36:12.239 --> 00:36:14.159
Okay, the next one's going to be wrong as well, though.
00:36:14.480 --> 00:36:20.559
So anything upwards of one billion pounds contributed to the Cornish economy.
00:36:20.800 --> 00:36:21.199
Eight.
00:36:21.440 --> 00:36:21.920
Eight.
00:36:22.480 --> 00:36:23.599
I don't know what happened there.
00:36:23.679 --> 00:36:24.719
The ones nowhere near the eight.
00:36:24.960 --> 00:36:26.719
Those figures you're questioning, you're not mad.
00:36:26.880 --> 00:36:30.000
They were figures that were in our biography that we just forgot to change.
00:36:30.159 --> 00:36:34.159
And we've just handed to Parliament the economic impact study.
00:36:34.320 --> 00:36:39.360
It's our 25th anniversary, so we just done it again on Cambridge, we're all over it like a rash.
00:36:39.440 --> 00:36:40.400
I didn't believe a word of it.
00:36:40.480 --> 00:36:42.320
It seemed to be far too good to be true.
00:36:42.480 --> 00:36:44.639
But now that it's in my interest, of course it's true.
00:36:44.880 --> 00:36:48.559
The truth is we're very political, but political with a small P.
00:36:48.960 --> 00:37:01.440
We didn't pioneer, but we rode on the backs of the giants who started with this whole thing about being pretty pathological about local sourcing, making sure we bought local.
00:37:01.840 --> 00:37:14.800
And that makes a real big difference because you start to create a climate in which people develop products for your retail and for your catering and all the rest of it, which are all locally sourced.
00:37:14.960 --> 00:37:21.519
And you suddenly discover when you do it, like when we started, we discovered that half of the beef which was British beef isn't British beef at all.
00:37:21.760 --> 00:37:32.079
There's a legal thing that if you import beef from the Argentine, for example, but you then package it in the UK, it can be called British or Cornish or whatever.
00:37:32.320 --> 00:37:35.760
So once you discover all these anomalies, you have to put them right.
00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:48.960
And then you see that there's another issue, which is if you buy all your cheese in Cornwall, right, Eden, other than one big dairy, could consume in three months all the cheese at that time produced in Cornwall.
00:37:49.280 --> 00:37:49.840
Josh.
00:37:50.079 --> 00:37:54.400
Yeah, that gives you a liability to think like an economist.
00:37:54.559 --> 00:38:03.199
How do we build the manufacturing capacity while at the same time, in fairness, building the amount of outlets for them?
00:38:03.920 --> 00:38:11.760
Because you know as well as I do that one of the cruelest things you can do is to make yourself the sole agent for somebody.
00:38:11.920 --> 00:38:16.159
Because if you screw it up and go bust, you take everybody with you.
00:38:16.400 --> 00:38:28.719
Not that I ever intended, or we ever intend to go bust, but if you see yourself as being a socially minded or civic-minded capitalist, you can do so much good.
00:38:28.960 --> 00:38:34.239
You don't have to maximize your profit, you optimize your profit, you optimize the job creation.
00:38:34.320 --> 00:38:50.639
You then do things like we got criticized for paying our staff pretty well when we started, we paid the living wage, and we got so much criticism from uh local pubs and restaurants, and people saying, look at you, state sponsored, and now you're gonna make us all go bust.
00:38:51.119 --> 00:38:51.840
Guess what?
00:38:52.079 --> 00:38:54.880
They had to compete and pay their staff properly.
00:38:55.119 --> 00:38:56.559
Imagine what happened.
00:38:56.719 --> 00:39:01.679
The pubs got better, the restaurants got better, people wanted to come to work.
00:39:01.920 --> 00:39:07.599
It sounds like a general talks in the bar, you know, but this isn't right wing.
00:39:07.760 --> 00:39:09.199
I'm not right wing.
00:39:09.440 --> 00:39:21.679
But I think actually seeing capitalism as not necessarily a bad thing, it's just there are an awful lot of bad people in capitalism, just like there are a lot of bad socialists.
00:39:21.920 --> 00:39:34.480
But well-managed capitalism, which is managed in such a way that it is for the benefit, the wider wealth of the widest possible audience, I think is a transformative thing.
00:39:34.639 --> 00:39:46.159
And I think it's worth actually, and I know I'm not alone, thinking about how we ended up in a world where something like 1% of the people own such a large percentage of the world.
00:39:46.400 --> 00:39:48.480
We know that cannot be right.
00:39:48.880 --> 00:40:08.239
And what's really tragic for us, people like you, people like me, is that you can be pro-capital and you're faced with such bad behavior that everything you believe in in terms of an economic system is threatened by, gosh, at the risk of making you feel bad.
00:40:08.559 --> 00:40:13.599
Does any sensible person think the privatization of water has been a huge success?
00:40:13.840 --> 00:40:18.559
Does any sensible person think that that's a good example of capitalism?
00:40:18.880 --> 00:40:23.440
I don't think many people do, and I don't think many Tories even do.
00:40:23.599 --> 00:40:33.840
But there are lots of examples like that where things that we should be stronger and more vocal about criticizing, and we should not get into our political tribes.
00:40:34.000 --> 00:40:37.760
Oh, I'm a so-and-so, so therefore I'm not going to allow that fact that that's true.
00:40:38.079 --> 00:40:47.440
You must notice with all the people you interview how many people defend the completely indefensible because they want to remain part of an establishment.
00:40:47.679 --> 00:40:50.480
It's craven, absolutely craven.
00:40:50.880 --> 00:41:03.280
I think that's partly it, and I think it's partly the problem that people have acknowledging the mistakes, that things that they supported were a mistake.
00:41:03.840 --> 00:41:07.039
Most people don't like admitting mistakes.
00:41:07.360 --> 00:41:10.719
I'm laughing because I'm not most people in that respect.
00:41:10.880 --> 00:41:15.119
I love admitting mistakes, which maybe is equally self-indulgent.
00:41:15.519 --> 00:41:35.599
But what you're touching on, I think, is the danger of ideology as distinct from values, as distinct from practicality, and most importantly, and you know, I'm on my high horse now, most importantly, as distinct from the long term.
00:41:36.639 --> 00:41:42.639
So much, so many decisions, so much bad business, so much bad government.
00:41:43.119 --> 00:41:55.360
In that case, the kind of obvious reasons to do with the political cycle and needing to get re-elected, but so much of it is destroyed by people being short-term.
00:41:56.159 --> 00:42:04.639
And when you build a new project, as I know you are, and I want to ask you about them, you're not saying when you're budgeting and doing the planning and whatever.
00:42:05.039 --> 00:42:08.239
I'm sure you're saying, you know, what do we expect this to bring in?
00:42:08.559 --> 00:42:15.039
But you're not looking at the lifetime of the thing in terms of 20 or 30 years, are you?
00:42:15.199 --> 00:42:17.599
You're looking at it way beyond that.
00:42:17.920 --> 00:42:18.880
Please tell me that.
00:42:19.199 --> 00:42:28.719
So I have a long-term vision for how we do things, but the way I see it is rather different to the way you're painting it.
00:42:28.960 --> 00:42:33.679
We turn up in a place A, and our job is we are exorcists.
00:42:33.920 --> 00:42:47.440
Our first obligation is to make people who live there realize that the pall that hangs low across that land called bad luck and nothing good ever happens here, is dispelled.
00:42:47.760 --> 00:42:53.039
Then you need to catch a few clever people who live in those areas and say that was your idea.
00:42:53.280 --> 00:42:56.960
And slowly the culture of you starts to appear.
00:42:57.119 --> 00:43:01.199
And the Eden Project, by the time it gets built, is not our project at all.
00:43:01.440 --> 00:43:09.760
What we've done is we've been throwing flour over the invisible man, which is the talent that was depressed where we came.
00:43:10.000 --> 00:43:19.280
And I think if you were to ask me what our greatest talent is, it is we can make other people believe in themselves.
00:43:19.679 --> 00:43:28.079
But why that's a long-term impression is that I want the Eden projects not to be owned by us by the time we finish.
00:43:28.320 --> 00:43:41.599
I want them to be owned by the people who have been there, watched it, suddenly believe in it, and suddenly they use it as a springboard to rediscover the person they once wanted to be.
00:43:41.679 --> 00:43:43.360
And there's nothing more powerful than that.
00:43:43.840 --> 00:43:44.400
I get it.
00:43:44.559 --> 00:43:59.679
Any listener who was wondering at the beginning whether Tim Smith was all about growing exotic plants will now know why I got so excited.
00:44:00.239 --> 00:44:02.800
About putting you in front of different audiences.
00:44:03.679 --> 00:44:12.480
Because your vision goes way beyond putting this fancy dome in the middle of an old Cornish quarry.
00:44:12.960 --> 00:44:18.320
These are lessons, these are confidence building, they're not tricks at all.
00:44:18.400 --> 00:44:19.679
They're building blocks.
00:44:19.840 --> 00:44:32.880
And I can't think of a single organization, a single business, a single anything, public-private sector, which couldn't benefit massively from hearing this from you.
00:44:33.199 --> 00:44:38.159
But also, not the outsider, in fact, not in a business sense.
00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:40.480
You build successful projects.
00:44:41.119 --> 00:44:50.239
You escape the possibility of anybody dismissing what you talk about as airy fairy because you've been there and done it.
00:44:50.480 --> 00:45:03.039
So the speakers I couldn't bear and spent my entire career avoiding and ignoring are those who might have the gift of the gab and read a few books on self-improvement or building a business or whatever.
00:45:03.199 --> 00:45:06.000
Um hadn't actually bloody well done it.
00:45:06.239 --> 00:45:07.119
Anyway, enough.
00:45:07.280 --> 00:45:08.480
End of hobby horse.
00:45:08.559 --> 00:45:12.559
Just tell us quickly, you've got Eden Project in Morecambe in Lancashire.
00:45:12.639 --> 00:45:13.280
Where's that at?
00:45:13.440 --> 00:45:15.199
As in what stage is that at?
00:45:15.519 --> 00:45:17.679
Well, this is remarkable, you should ask me.
00:45:17.840 --> 00:45:26.159
On a fortnight tomorrow, we're digging our spade into the ground to start constructing it.
00:45:26.400 --> 00:45:35.599
We've got the money, which is going to be our fourth mortgam, because we built a very large one in China, in the city of Qingdao, the marine capital.
00:45:35.920 --> 00:45:38.239
We built one in Dubai.
00:45:38.400 --> 00:45:40.639
They're all different, they don't look the same.
00:45:40.880 --> 00:45:50.639
Then we've got Morecambe, and then when we finished Morecambe, we're going to build in Dundee, in the old gas works on the banks of the River Tay.
00:45:50.880 --> 00:45:58.400
But each of them is a different form of theatre, and it would be a real failure if what we did was to repeat ourselves.
00:45:58.559 --> 00:46:01.599
The only thing we don't repeat is this.
00:46:02.159 --> 00:46:05.920
Remember when I said to you about accepting the third invitation.
00:46:06.159 --> 00:46:06.559
Yeah.
00:46:06.800 --> 00:46:10.559
The Irish have got the best phrase of all.
00:46:10.639 --> 00:46:18.480
And I learnt it recently, which is random meetings are dancing lessons from God.
00:46:18.960 --> 00:46:20.800
Yeah, I might write that down, actually.
00:46:21.039 --> 00:46:22.079
That's quite good, isn't it?
00:46:22.320 --> 00:46:23.840
The Irish are good at these things.
00:46:24.159 --> 00:46:24.480
I know.
00:46:24.559 --> 00:46:26.159
We're all jealous of the Irish, aren't we?
00:46:26.239 --> 00:46:29.360
Because they're just they're usually good looking, they're poetic.
00:46:29.760 --> 00:46:32.239
It does always rain there, so that's one comforting thing.
00:46:32.320 --> 00:46:35.360
Although as gardeners, we all welcome rain sometimes.
00:46:35.679 --> 00:46:38.000
Anyway, Tim, I have no choice.
00:46:38.159 --> 00:46:39.519
People have things to do.
00:46:39.679 --> 00:46:44.880
I'm hugely reluctantly gonna wrap this up.
00:46:45.119 --> 00:46:48.559
We haven't covered everything by such a long way.
00:46:48.719 --> 00:46:54.480
There's so much more I would love to talk about, but I'm gonna leave it with asking you one last question.
00:46:54.800 --> 00:47:01.760
And you've already touched on so many different elements, but I'm gonna ask you to sum it up crisply, please.
00:47:02.239 --> 00:47:09.760
What's your advice now in this state of the world, state of the country at the moment?
00:47:10.320 --> 00:47:13.119
What's your advice for young people?
00:47:14.159 --> 00:47:17.360
I don't want to give advice to young people because they're really smart.
00:47:17.519 --> 00:47:20.159
I want to give advice to anybody over the age of 35.
00:47:21.119 --> 00:47:35.280
Anyone who's listening who's over the age of 35, I hope you lose a year of your life every time you talk to a young person with that dystopian, drooling voice of yours about how we're going to head in a handcart.
00:47:35.519 --> 00:47:39.199
There has never been a more exciting time to be alive than now.
00:47:39.360 --> 00:47:50.400
Believe me, the advances in science, the advances in society are actually monumental, but they're just beneath the surface before the media has finally caught on to it.
00:47:50.480 --> 00:47:55.280
And a part of the problem is old people thinking the past was a better place.
00:47:55.440 --> 00:47:57.119
It ruddy well wasn't.
00:47:57.360 --> 00:48:01.760
It's actually about to become popping with excitement.
00:48:01.920 --> 00:48:03.039
And I'm really serious.
00:48:03.199 --> 00:48:06.320
I'm not saying this is a kind of proselytizing thing.
00:48:06.559 --> 00:48:07.840
Let me tell you one thing.
00:48:08.079 --> 00:48:12.320
When I was young, I went to see a musical called Hair.
00:48:12.480 --> 00:48:16.000
The theme tune was The Age of Aquarius.
00:48:16.400 --> 00:48:17.199
The chorus.
00:48:17.519 --> 00:48:19.360
Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
00:48:19.599 --> 00:48:20.159
Exactly.
00:48:20.320 --> 00:48:22.239
Well, you see, you and I are of an age.
00:48:22.400 --> 00:48:43.199
And the chorus of that song was We Are Stardust, which was actually a ripoff of uh Carl Sagan and his wife in the book Cosmos had talked about one day I hope that people will discover that all life is stardust, made from stardust.
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:54.079
Just think, in the last 30 years alone, science has shown us the complexity of the human body, the microbial structure of our insides.
00:48:54.559 --> 00:49:03.440
It's also shown us the sophistication of the microbial structure of soils and amazingly is showing us that they're all interrelated.
00:49:03.840 --> 00:49:05.360
Doesn't that excite you?
00:49:05.599 --> 00:49:10.639
That maybe the next generation of young people will actually have a God worth worshipping?
00:49:11.039 --> 00:49:18.000
It doesn't just excite me in a sort of theoretical, you know, it won't involve me, but it's great.
00:49:18.079 --> 00:49:21.599
It excites me right the way through.
00:49:21.920 --> 00:49:38.079
And I tell you what it also does, Tim, in a very small way, is that it means we're gonna wrap up this conversation with our listeners feeling upbeat and excited about the day.
00:49:38.800 --> 00:49:40.800
And that's a joy.
00:49:41.360 --> 00:49:44.079
Tim, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
00:49:44.639 --> 00:49:45.920
Sir Tim, maybe I should say.
00:49:48.880 --> 00:49:52.239
Let's agree to talk again at some stage in the future.
00:49:52.400 --> 00:49:53.440
Thank you so much.
00:49:53.599 --> 00:49:54.719
Have a great day.
00:49:55.039 --> 00:49:55.679
And you.
00:49:55.840 --> 00:49:56.320
My pleasure.
00:49:56.480 --> 00:49:57.519
Goodbye, Jeremy.
00:49:57.840 --> 00:49:59.039
Goodbye, Tim.
