Latest / Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson / Ep 1: Sir Tim Smit Founder Eden Project & Lost Gardens of Heligan

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Ep 1: Sir Tim Smit Founder Eden Project & Lost Gardens of Heligan · Live Free Ride Free with Rupert Isaacson

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  Rupert Isaacson: Welcome to Live Free Ride Free, where we talk to people who
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  have lived self-actualized lives on their own terms, and find out how they
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  got there, what they do, how we can get there, what we can learn from them.
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  How to live our best lives, find our own definition of success,
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  and most importantly, find joy.
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  I'm your host, Rupert Isaacson.
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  New York Times bestselling author of the Horse Boy.
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  Founder of New Trails Learning Systems and long ride home.com.
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  You can find details of all our programs and shows on Rupert isaacson.com.
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  In today's live free Ride free podcast, we talk to my dear friend
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  and I could say mentor Tim Smit.
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  Sir Tim Smit, in fact, who is the founder of the Eden Project.
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  Rainforest under a roof in the west of England and now starting
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  these all over the world and the Lost Gardens of Halligan, one of
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  England's top tourist sites, but also just a beautifully whimsical place.
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  This is just a.
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  A little bit of what Saim does.
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  He's really at the cutting edge of the movement to bring our planet and our
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  societies into a more ecological and sustainable future without making us feel
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  guilty about what we do, without making us feel pessimistic about what we do.
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  In fact, giving us all sorts of good reasons for optimism.
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  One of the reasons I really love talking to Tim is so often in the environmental
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  movement we're dealing with doom and gloom and being shamed for what we do,
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  or taking airplanes or driving cars.
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  Really, Tim is not coming from this place at all.
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  Tim's giving us really practical ways forward to build this better world.
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  So without further ado, Tim.
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  So Tim, Tell us who you are.
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  Hi, my name is Tim Smidt.
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  I am probably the only palander you've ever heard of.
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  My name is the same spelled forwards as backwards.
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  and I was born in Holland to a Dutch father and an English mother, Dutch
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  blue collar and English blue blood.
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  And , the interesting thing is that I was brought up in a mixture of a
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  two up two down in the city of Ana in East Holland, where my Dutch
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  grandfather was a mill worker and in a stately home in the north of Cheshire
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  in England, called Hartford Hall, which, was owned by my grandparents.
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  My grandfather was a mill owner.
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  . So it was a a, a rather interesting thing because that
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  that milling tradition ran heavy.
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  But the social class thing was massive in terms of the difference between
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  the backgrounds of both my parents.
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  And I have to tell you, I learned early on that the two up two down in
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  AUM was a far friendlier loving place than a cold stately home of an English
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  aristocrat in the north of England.
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  and it was always us.
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  It's been really interesting because when you are brought up with the
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  social values, which I know you Haru and I iha, which is kind of, I dunno
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  what you call 'em, they're kind of socialist, communist, capitalist, sort
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  of all sort of woven together into a very confusing, you know, dessert.
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  and the thing is that when you've been brought up in that.
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  I can speak about cricket until the cows come home.
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  I can put on a very posh accent if I need to, and I can get on
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  with people who've been to all the good schools and universities.
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  And indeed I've been to a fairly good school and a
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  fairly good university myself.
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  but the thing that it teaches you when you come from the background, the
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  have saved my gra my Dutch grandfather, is you, you get in, in inoculated,
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  I think, if that's the right word, all vaccinated with a thought of,
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  of notions of fairness and equity.
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  And what words like belonging, meaning community mean.
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  , and you develop a kind of, spiritual with a small s uh, not related to
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  any religion, but mainly to a way of being philosophy about the world.
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  I was very lucky.
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  I.
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  Unlucky enough to be sent to an English prep school at the age of six and a half.
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  And I say unlucky and unlucky at the same time, it meant
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  that I had to leave my life.
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  Cuz it's quite lonely being a youngster being sent away like that.
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  And you have to make what, what, what it teaches you, the English public
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  school system is that you learn how to make acquaintanceships really quickly
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  because they're defensive things.
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  Almost like alliances.
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  Yeah, yeah, they are.
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  Exactly.
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  They're like alliances because you wanna be made safe, you wanna
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  have people having your back.
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  And the effect of that is that I think most, look, this is dated, I'm now
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  in my late sixties, but when I was at private school and I, I know it
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  has changed an awful lot since then.
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  There was this sense that you were foraging a class of people who had
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  a loyalty to their class because they were all sent away from home
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  rather than to their neighborhood.
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  Um, and it would later shape me by not sending my children to public school
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  because I wanted them to feel that they could play for the local village
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  cricket team and they would be known in the local pub and bakery and they
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  would do scouts and learn to go fishing.
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  You know, all of those things which give you a sense of
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  who you are, a sense of self.
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  So I was very aware, I was an observer of, of that class distinction.
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  I was also really aware, having been left on my own for a long time, that my
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  imagination was different to most people.
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  I spent most of my time very happily on my own imagining whole scenarios.
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  And it was only when I bec was quite old.
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  I mean, I'm talking about late thirties that I realized I was a bit of a.
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  I, I actually imagine.
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  I, I imagine, and then I imagine the delivery of that imagining, and it, a
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  lot of people say about me that with Eden and GaN how odd it is to meet somebody
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  who is a dreamer, stroke visionary, which is a rather overrated word, um, who not
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  only can dream these things but dreams, the process of how to deliver them.
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  I'm fascinated.
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  I'm fascinated by the idea of putting one stone next to another and then another,
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  and day after day you do this until there's a wall, and then there's actually
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  a roof, and then you've got a building.
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  And I can imagine it all.
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  I can imagine the whole process and it thrills me.
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  Absolutely thrills me.
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  And it's who I am.
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  Actually, I've realized that I am, um, my greatest pleasure in
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  life is the kissing of frogs.
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  That's what I realized early on.
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  I love the idea of making things that were not whole, complete, making things
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  that were broken, mended, um, making.
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  people not unhappy.
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  That leads to a kind of weird thing as well where you become almost, uh, directed
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  by the desire to create happiness, almost as if your self def definition
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  is through either removing angst or creating moments of, of happiness.
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  Um, which could I think, get interpreted earlier in your life as
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  a fear of being disliked or wishing to fit in in some strange way.
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  But then later if you mi, if you ride that kind of instinct, it turns you into
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  somebody who I think really understands the nature of what makes communities,
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  what, what, what a good community is, which is not a new labor line on a map
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  with the people contained within it.
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  It is actually about the relationships.
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  And the older I've got, the more I've realized that everything is
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  to do with relationships and that the biggest job you've got in life.
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  If you're a person like you, Ruth, or me, You don't realize, and it's 80,
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  it only creeps up on you after years.
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  You realize that what you are is an exorcist.
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  You are an exorcist of the notion that failure just lives here and is
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  permanently rooted in this space.
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  And there are far too many people who let f for a failure
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  be like aall on the landscape.
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  And we come in and we give people the idea of things could be better.
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  Things could be if we do things together, where we can make things better and nicer.
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  And you don't have to own all the ideas, you don't have to feel, you own much
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  of it except the, the good spiritedness to actually see the talent in others.
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  And ultimately, I think that is the, the wicked secret that often, especially in
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  males, our vanity gets in the way of being quiet for long enough to listen to things.
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  and actually realizing the pleasure of listening and really, really listening and
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  then understanding and then transforming things because you've really understood,
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  as opposed to giving people the benefit of your genius, and I see that with
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  middle-aged men, the world over.
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  They want to give you the benefit of their genius and insight, and you sometimes
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  wish they would shut the so-and-so up.
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  When did, do you have a memory of the first time you imagined and
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  then also imagined a delivery?
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  Where are you?
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  How old are you?
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  Are you a boy?
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  Where is this
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  like all boys and many girls?
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  The first dream would've been doing the simple things like twigs and
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  leaves and mud and making dams.
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  That would be followed I think, quite closely by the desire if you live.
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  In nature rather more than most have the benefit of doing now, but of
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  catching those things which live in the ponds and whatever, and looking
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  at them and examining them and getting this extraordinary thrill.
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  I mean, I can bring to mind now the thrill of catching a
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  stickleback or yeah, water boatman.
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  And you know, when you then graduate later on to fishing for, you know, fish
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  that are bigger than sticklebacks, God, that, that, that I remember, you know,
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  getting white bread and putting it in my mouth and getting enough saliva on it so
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  that it was pliable, and then turning it into a ball of bread, and then getting
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  a fish hook and putting it on some line, and then throwing it across a pond where
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  the trees were too low to be able to have a fishing rod with throwing it.
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  But you'd actually put a bit of candle wax on the line so that when it hit the water,
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  the weight of the bread would take the.
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  Hooked down to the bottom, but it wouldn't take all the rest of the line down.
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  It took it down as far as it would go.
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  But then you'd had the line just lying prone on the surface, and then
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  you'd sit there for ages and suddenly you'd see the line at the end of it
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  start to disappear under the water.
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  And you'd know there'd be something big underneath there.
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  It was sucking.
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  It was sucking that bread of yours and your head was just so full of
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  the imagination of what it could be.
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  Of course, in your brain it was an enormous eel or a
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  tench or carp or something.
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  But just imagine what it was like when you do strike that tension of deciding,
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  am I gonna pull it and am I going to then have the frustration of pulling
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  it outta the mouth or whatever it was.
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  Was it gonna catch?
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  And then it catches and then it, the line bites into your hand
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  and you are just excited as you see a bit of blood on your hand.
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  Cause you've caught something that was big enough to do that.
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  And you're sitting there, you know, underneath the BR branches and
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  you're pulling this fish in and.
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  Chess, fantastic.
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  Those big lip carp and tench are amazing.
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  Unlike the eels, which were incredibly glamorous when you caught them, but
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  then when you had to get them off the end of a hook as they arrived
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  and they put their slime all over you as you took them out, wow.
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  That was, that was the other side of amazing.
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  But it was just great.
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  That whole adventure in nature, that whole sense of the mystery of things that lived
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  below and the things that lived above hunting for, you see, I'm 68 now and then.
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  Then it was okay to go hunting for bird's, eggs and things like that.
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  And the excitement of finding a nest, you know, the little, little nest with
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  the song thrush eggs in it, and then learning how to blow the egg and creating
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  a collection of bird's eggs and just learning where the, where you'd find them.
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  And you didn't know you were learning things, did you?
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  I mean, I'm sure you were the same.
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  You, you just suddenly, every day you just had a bigger picture of
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  the homeland you were walking in.
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  as branches started to have their own history, trees had their own
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  history of things you'd found there, things you'd heard there, things
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  that had disappeared into there.
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  And I love that sense of a countryside being made, almost filled in like one of
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  those coloring books that what was general essence of tree became particular trees.
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  And you would be able to describe them to your close mates.
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  You know, the tree with the broken, you know, the broken so-and-so, the one with
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  the squirrels very at the top, you know?
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  And I found that absolutely thrilling, discovering a language
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  of direction, place and being that I'd never actually truly had before.
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  But you felt it like, like learning a language, but it's not the same
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  as walking out and it's actually being in it, it's being in nature.
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  Yeah.
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  I w uh, is, is what we're talking about and what you are talking about here.
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  The shamanic aspect of the hunting and gathering life, which is sort
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  of at the root of every human being, cuz that's what we are still.
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  And is it also that if you learn to order a natural environment first,
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  does it become then easier to order non-natural environments that you
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  might want to thrive in or even build?
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  I don't know.
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  I, I think a lot of questions that you get asked, uh, that one gets asked, you
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  are naturally inclined to lie about.
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  You see, I've discovered that Bec you see, humans don't naturally embrace chaos.
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  They also don't really naturally embrace change.
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  Therefore, they cannot believe that their lives have genuinely been
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  as chaotic as they actually have.
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  Which means that when they describe their lives backwards, they give it a
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  linearity or a shape that is preposterous.
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  That was never like that.
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  But it, you, you can't believe that you were quite so unfocused.
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  I've lived my life pretty much unfocused, and I can tell you my story now.
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  When I tell my story, I sometimes shock myself.
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  Uh, the order and intent behind that story and how this internal logic
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  of this extraordinary fellow who did all these things comes to the fore.
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  And it looks like you were blessed by some kind of secret, um, uh, spell
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  that you were given, but actually no.
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  It was about, it was about embracing chaos and embracing it in a way
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  that you just went with the flow.
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  And I decided at the age of 37, Very, exactly 37 that I was going to embrace
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  going with the flow as you talk.
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  Why, why, why did you, why then, and how?
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  Yeah, why?
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  I, I had become very bored with my cleverness.
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  I realized any fool can use the trappings of knowing a thing or two to appear as if
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  you worked hard or you had a deep wisdom when in fact you were more like a parrot,
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  but were too vain to admit it, and your intelligence wasn't particularly striking.
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  Um, and, and more to the point you realize something really difficult,
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  which is that you are clever, so you don't actually have to work so hard.
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  So quite a lot of it is about busking.
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  You know, what were you doing at 37?
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  What, where are you in life?
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  What are you doing for a living?
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  And what's your road to Damascus moment that says, I'm now sick?
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  Being clever, Tim, I want to be go with the float.
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  No, it, it was, it was a, a range of things.
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  It wasn't actually a road to Damascus moment in, well, there
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  was one road to Damascus moment.
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  I was in a limousine, I'm sorry I've told you this, over a drink together, but, um,
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  I was in a limousine in Paris and we had a record with this lady, Louise Tucker,
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  that had been number one for 15 weeks.
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  And I was in the back of this limousine and the radio was
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  playing and it was our song.
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  And when it stopped playing, the next record on that was
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  going to knock our record off.
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  A number one spot came on by a lady called Michelle to,
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  and we'd written that as well.
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  And we were big honchos in the music business, as I say, the biggest
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  selling record except for later live eight, um, in French history.
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  And I felt suddenly bereft.
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  I felt as sad as I've ever felt in my life being in the back of this limo
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  because there's nothing sadder than achieving what you thought you wanted
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  and realizing, you know, what was it?
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  Gude Stein said, um, told, getting there is, there's no there there.
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  And it felt incredibly arid, like dust in your hands.
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  And I always say to people, beware of chasing something
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  that is a theoretical desire.
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  Imagine it what it feels like.
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  And actually having all that success and arriving in places without your
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  friends, without your family, the people around you see you as a product.
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  Um, and the thing that you really loved was music.
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  But even that is almost getting stolen away from you because you've become
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  addicted suddenly to the commercial success of the records you had written.
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  And you end up almost like a factory producing music three
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  minutes, 20 seconds long with a.
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  Sort of kind of weird start and then two verses a chorus, another verse
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  two choruses, then a middle eight, and then chorus is now very formulaic.
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  And I decided I wanted to leave.
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  I I'd had enough.
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  I just knew, it's a really weird feeling when you have the chance to
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  have the success you thought you wanted and you to be able to discover that
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  before the end of your life is amazing cuz you suddenly realized that that
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  is not what you were meant to do.
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  And the truth was, if I'm honest, that I could hold a tune and I'd fallen
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  into being in the music industry.
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  Cause I had a band at university and we were skin, so we were just playing covers
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  and then start to write our own music.
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  And the truth was we were quite good, but we weren't very good.
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  We weren't genius.
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  We were quite.
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  So that we could actually have a hit record here and there, and
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  once we'd got a hit record, people would buy our album and whatever.
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  But we weren't the stuff of legend.
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  We, we didn't have that.
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  We had the ability to hold a good tune.
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  And I guess it's a form of, of, of, um, vanity.
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  The desire to find the thing that you really are good at as our friend, uh,
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  Ken Robinson, um, of late Ken Robinson, to say happiness is about finding
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  your element, being in your element.
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  And I think that is actually one of the things that you are about, isn't it?
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  It's about the freedom riders, the, the, the riding to be liberated.
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  And the rest of it is, is about finding the music of you as a person.
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  If we're using that analogy of music further, um, it's very
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  interesting, anybody who listens to this, the five people who listening
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  to this podcast eventually, or maybe even 10 if we're lucky.
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  One thing I what?
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  You never know.
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  No, you never know.
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  One thing I would advise you to do as a moment of incredible insight is to go to
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  a piano, put your foot on the sustained pedal, and then bang every note with
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  your elbows, every note, and then put your head on the soundboard that would
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  teach you something close to religion.
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  As that chaos of all the notes jarring through each other, they go like,
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  like the mouth of a trumpet, they disappear expanding into the distance
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  of sound, and then suddenly at the end of that, you see this magnificent
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  chord, which is harmonic coming out.
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  And it is a really interesting thing that chaos is just disor disorganized harmony.
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  And that's the only way I've ever seen that you can learn it or understand it in
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  a way that some people get when they are.
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  In nature for a long time, and suddenly the chaos of pattern suddenly
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  reveals something bigger to them.
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  It's that sort of thing.
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  I think I, I'm talking in a musical equivalence of your experience of, of
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  shamanic work, but it's, it's, it's kind of a clarity which comes to you
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  almost by allowing it to catch you by surprise from the side of your eye.
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  You know what I mean?
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  Not, not as a direct view.
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  It's, I've got a question then.
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  How do you, how do you go from a boy who's, um, ordering nature and
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  fascinated in love with it, climbing the trees to find the bird's eggs?
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  Um, how do you go from there to be, to music?
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  What's the link?
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  Oh, I'd always played music ever since at the ti each time I was at my
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  English grandparents' house at Hartford Hall, they had a huge grand piano.
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  Um, I'm trying to remember what the make of it, a Broadwood, I think it was.
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  And, um, No one in the family played.
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  And from the age of two, I just played it.
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  I just, was it in the family?
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  Was your mom musical?
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  Was your dad musical?
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  Was somebody musical?
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  Uh, my dad, my dad could, um, uh, play sort of pub piano, three or
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  four tunes or something like that.
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  Um, which he'd been taught by my grandmother, Dutch grandmother.
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  My mother loved music, but didn't play.
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  No, I just, I just sat down.
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  I mean, there were lots of pictures of me as a two, two and a half year old
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  right through sitting at the piano with pair on, um, just picking out notes.
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  I was absorbed by notes.
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  I had zero interest.
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  I was given piano lessons and I did piano up to grade five, but I
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  had absolutely zero interest in it.
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  I did it because I was told to do it.
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  and that was the only way I could get at the piano.
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  When I went up to the public school, I was only interested in composing,
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  and it's still the same for me.
• 22:51
  I love listening to the music of other people.
• 22:54
  But if you said to me, would you like to join a Beatles cover band?
• 22:57
  Be, I'd prefer to drill my teeth.
• 22:59
  It's it not.
• 23:00
  And I love The Beatles, but I, I, that's another point I'm making.
• 23:03
  For me, music was a form of therapy and I could, I, from a really young age, I could
• 23:09
  play the piano to the degree where if I was feeling a bit blue, I could actually
• 23:14
  play it in such a way that, you know, 20 minutes later I was in a merry mood.
• 23:19
  And I've always loved music for that.
• 23:20
  And I've always loved the repetitive nature.
• 23:23
  Sometimes just being on my own, playing chords with very little variation and.
• 23:29
  Almost in a mental trance just going round and round and round.
• 23:34
  And the luxury of being able to do that for yourself, it's just gorgeous.
• 23:39
  And that's one of the good things about having a bigger house and a
• 23:42
  keyboard and occasionally a headphones if you want to, is that you can just
• 23:47
  do that repetitive playing time after time, which pleases you, even if it
• 23:51
  drives everybody else nuts, you know?
• 23:54
  Um, and uh, so I've always been like that.
• 23:56
  I've always treated piano as being something which had a sound
• 23:59
  of spiritual force for me, but it was almost medical, you know?
• 24:03
  It was like a health thing.
• 24:05
  I needed to do it, I needed to play.
• 24:09
  And I know what you mean.
• 24:11
  I, I have the same thing with horses.
• 24:12
  It's a compulsion.
• 24:14
  Yeah.
• 24:15
  So there you are.
• 24:16
  All right.
• 24:17
  But, so then, okay, question number two then.
• 24:19
  So you are, you, you, you discover music very young.
• 24:21
  You're also discovering nature.
• 24:23
  And then through college you have this band.
• 24:27
  The band becomes successful or the band morphs into another
• 24:30
  band that's successful.
• 24:32
  Uh, band.
• 24:33
  The band morphed into another, another band that, uh, we, we came down from
• 24:38
  Durham where we, it was the punk boom and we had a great pa and we rented
• 24:42
  it out and make our lot of money doing that, but we weren't that good.
• 24:46
  We went to London thinking we would make our fortunes in punk.
• 24:51
  Sorry.
• 24:51
  In punk.
• 24:53
  No, we were actually unbelievably complicated.
• 24:57
  We were more on the um, uh, uh, uh, the Mark Knop end things, the Da Strait
• 25:02
  and, but not you pro rockers were you, Genesis and that, or commercial?
• 25:08
  You, you were kind of slightly affected, um, poets with an attitude with electric,
• 25:16
  electric sounds and stuff, but it wasn't like heavy metal or anything.
• 25:19
  It wasn't quite Genesis.
• 25:20
  It wasn and it wasn't the Smiths, it was.
• 25:25
  To be honest, we weren't like anything else.
• 25:27
  Mm-hmm.
• 25:28
  , what was the name of the band?
• 25:30
  That band was called The Shake As in the Shake of Arabic.
• 25:33
  Okay.
• 25:34
  But anyway, we didn't last very long, once we reached London,
• 25:37
  because London is a brutal place and it's not a very good place to
• 25:41
  build a music career, to be honest.
• 25:42
  Because you get there, the few clubs and pubs that you
• 25:45
  can play in, it's pay to play.
• 25:47
  You have to know your own audience.
• 25:49
  Whereas when you got to Cornor, I mean, what's amazing, my young son, he formed
• 25:52
  a band and in four years, between the age of 14 and 18, he'd saved bloody nearly
• 25:57
  20,000 quid because they'd pay really well in the pubs and clubs down here.
• 26:02
  Um, and so we decided to become songwriters and I was also a mini
• 26:09
  cab driver because the songwriting wasn't making us any money.
• 26:13
  And on Sundays we'd play football, um, down on Clapham Common.
• 26:18
  And one day I kicked a guy in the opposing team and someone said, Christ,
• 26:22
  do you know who you've just kicked?
• 26:23
  And I said, no idea mate.
• 26:24
  And he said, that's Pat Staple.
• 26:26
  He's the lead sound engineer at Abbey Road Studios.
• 26:30
  So I said, hello.
• 26:32
  I called him up.
• 26:33
  And uh, anyway, we would become firm friends.
• 26:36
  And of course, as you know, if you're an engineer in a studio, you get the
• 26:40
  ability to use what's called dead time if it's not being booked for money.
• 26:44
  Provided you've got an engineer, you can use it.
• 26:46
  And the deal is that you, if you have the benefit of a bit of
• 26:50
  luck, you then pay a percentage of your luck back to the studio.
• 26:54
  And, uh, anyway, we, we did this and it was terrible because
• 26:58
  we were working late at night.
• 27:00
  Cause that's when usually the dead, dead time is.
• 27:02
  And I had my first child with my wife and um, it got to our, the good bit was we'd
• 27:10
  got five record deals back to back with a bit of money, which meant that we were
• 27:14
  able to pay the studio bit and all the, as songwriters or as a band, as songwriters.
• 27:19
  Okay.
• 27:20
  Um, and we created the bands ourselves.
• 27:22
  They were kind of like, um, stock water make and that sort of thing.
• 27:26
  We were finding people to sing on these songs and, um, anyway,
• 27:32
  rather unbelievably, which is something which happens to me a lot.
• 27:36
  The very first night that we felt that we could get babysitters for me and
• 27:40
  the wife to go out, we went out and we had my sister-in-law babysit and
• 27:44
  she asked whether she could bring a friend called Louise Tucker who was
• 27:49
  studying opera at the Guild Hall.
• 27:52
  And we came back from a night out and obviously we were being polite
• 27:55
  and having a small talk, and Louise gave me a card and said, if you
• 27:58
  ever need an opera singer, call me.
• 28:01
  At that time, I would, it never occurred to me I'd ever want to work with an opera
• 28:06
  opera singer, but completely unbelievably.
• 28:09
  The following day we go to Abbey Road and the singer that we'd booked
• 28:13
  to sing on this song we'd already recorded, um, Phoned in hill, and
• 28:18
  this is before mobile phones, right?
• 28:22
  So I only had the phone numbers of three other singers, all
• 28:25
  of all of whom were out.
• 28:27
  And I still had in my top pocket the card of this woman
• 28:33
  that I'd met the night before.
• 28:35
  And I asked her, I mean, I was dreading it.
• 28:38
  I just didn't wanna waste the studio time by not using it, but I
• 28:41
  thought it was gonna be terrible.
• 28:42
  So she came and she did a duet with my music partner, Charlie.
• 28:47
  And extraordinarily four weeks to the day after that studio session, the
• 28:52
  record went number one in Belgium, then Holland, then Scandinavia, then Germany.
• 28:58
  What was the name of the record?
• 28:59
  It was called Midnight Blue.
• 29:01
  And that record in the album sold 7 million copies.
• 29:04
  It was the most extraordinary thing.
• 29:06
  Why did it do so good in Europe?
• 29:09
  Do we know of it in the uk?
• 29:11
  Do we know of it in the West?
• 29:12
  What, what, what's the story there?
• 29:13
  It got to the top 20, but not the top 10.
• 29:17
  Uh, basically it was, um, a record based around Beethoven ditty, his fifth.
• 29:27
  Um, and we wrote a verse for it and a chorus.
• 29:31
  And it was a duet, it was a love song, and we filmed it in gothic.
• 29:36
  The video was gothic in terms of Louise wearing sort of black
• 29:39
  velvet, having black, cold coal eyes and curly black hair.
• 29:45
  So she looked very glamorous, being filmed with white horses with a
• 29:49
  full moon and a dark, dark lake.
• 29:51
  You can imagine this sort of thing.
• 29:52
  Very, and who financed this?
• 29:54
  This is a record company had already gave a deal.
• 29:56
  Arista, Arista, uh, and then when it went to France, it went
• 30:01
  bonkers, absolutely bonkers.
• 30:04
  And it was great.
• 30:04
  And we had a, a good two years selling a lot of records.
• 30:08
  In the middle of that, I had the experience of being in the
• 30:12
  back of that limousine, which depressed me beyond endurance.
• 30:15
  And I decided to leave.
• 30:17
  Um, wasn't instant, but I, I then bought a house in komo.
• 30:23
  Again, completely random.
• 30:25
  I was leading my life random already.
• 30:28
  And, um, we were on holiday, it was raining.
• 30:32
  I walked into an estate agent, I saw a house for sale.
• 30:35
  I said, let's, I want to see that house.
• 30:36
  The estate agent said, sir, won't like it.
• 30:39
  We went to see it.
• 30:39
  We lived in Brixton, and this is 280 miles from Brixton.
• 30:43
  And we drove there the following day, and it was p because it was pouring with rain.
• 30:47
  And then this tractor moved across us and I had to stop.
• 30:51
  And this guy came out in a waterproof, and I, I wound down the window and he
• 30:56
  said, ear, old buck, what you doing?
• 30:57
  Ear?
• 30:59
  And I said, um, excuse me.
• 31:00
  Sorry.
• 31:00
  Okay, say that again.
• 31:03
  So I'm probably have to cut that up.
• 31:05
  A tractor stops you.
• 31:06
  Can you?
• 31:09
  I said, look, this is really embarrassing cause we haven't got an appointment,
• 31:11
  but the house is, um, uh, there's a house at the end of this road, I
• 31:15
  believe, and we just wanted to have a look and see whether we liked it.
• 31:18
  And the guy said, well, happened, it's my house.
• 31:20
  Can't have a cup of tea.
• 31:21
  So we went and had a cup of tea.
• 31:22
  The kids then disappeared into the hay barns and two and a half
• 31:25
  hours later, I shook his hand and said I was gonna buy it.
• 31:28
  So I arrived.
• 31:29
  We arrived in Cormo about six weeks later.
• 31:34
  It was an incredible quick turnaround.
• 31:35
  And I basically gave up the music industry.
• 31:37
  I was gonna record music for films and things a little bit, but I, I, I,
• 31:42
  I actually wanted to have a new life.
• 31:44
  And what happened was a, again, I, by this time, I'm leading
• 31:48
  my life by pure serendipity.
• 31:51
  I was almost thinking we spent all the money I'd made in the music
• 31:55
  industry on this house and doing it up.
• 31:58
  It was a money pit.
• 32:00
  and we were at the Verge Candy and I have, have actually going bankrupt.
• 32:04
  We spent everything I, I went to the dentist, this is how my life is.
• 32:10
  I went to the dentist and in the dentist's waiting room in Triny, in Cormo was
• 32:20
  a current copy of the Stage magazine.
• 32:24
  You don't expect to have a magazine that's younger than two years old in a dentist.
• 32:28
  And there it was.
• 32:29
  And I opened it up and it opened up really randomly or OB or, I dunno, but it
• 32:35
  opened up on a picture of the footballer Jack Charlton holding a very big salmon.
• 32:42
  And it said underneath it, Jack Charlton is to make a big TV
• 32:46
  series for ITV called Go Fishing.
• 32:49
  And we're looking for music now about five or six years before that.
• 32:56
  Very drunk in a studio in.
• 33:00
  , um, Farham.
• 33:02
  I had written a song with my mates, um, who'd been drinking cider in the studio.
• 33:08
  We'd done something serious before, and one of the guys was, um, a banja player.
• 33:14
  So I wrote this song, which was a, it was a complete set of puns about fishing.
• 33:19
  You know, I can't salmon up the energy.
• 33:20
  This isn't the time and the place, you know, all of that sort of stuff.
• 33:23
  Um, and it had his chorus which went, go fishing, go fishing,
• 33:27
  you know, and, and, and whatever.
• 33:29
  So I sent the cassette of this thing, which had been a complete joke record
• 33:33
  off to the re the, um, uh, film company.
• 33:37
  And they got back to me literally by return and, um, said, we love this music.
• 33:44
  We, this is gonna be our theme tune if you let us.
• 33:47
  And by the way, have you written any more music?
• 33:49
  Cause we've got no backing music for any of the other parts of the sixth series.
• 33:53
  So it bailed me out of potential bankruptcy in one go.
• 33:56
  Isn't that weird?
• 33:57
  I'd written this joke record.
• 33:59
  The father even kept a cassette.
• 34:01
  That was all I had left was a cassette of it.
• 34:04
  Um, and, but you had loved fishing as a boy.
• 34:08
  I'd love you had you had spent hours there touching whatever spirits of the river.
• 34:16
  Um, I know we were clearly waiting to, uh, reward you.
• 34:20
  All right, brilliant.
• 34:21
  So, so that bailed me out.
• 34:24
  I was wondering whether I needed to go back to university and learn a
• 34:26
  skill or whatever because I, we now had enough money to pay to finish the
• 34:29
  house, but I didn't have a job and I wasn't gonna go back into music.
• 34:33
  Um, and I couldn't expect to have lucky breaks like that all the time.
• 34:38
  Anyway, I've met this bloke who drove up in a van, um, and
• 34:44
  he had a trailer behind it.
• 34:45
  And he said, in the, in this trailer is a pig.
• 34:48
  And I'm either gonna draw it, take it to the slaughter house to become sausages.
• 34:52
  , or you can have it as a pet because I know that you've got a garage that hasn't
• 34:56
  got a car in it, and we could easily turn it into a place for a pig to stay.
• 35:00
  So that's how I was introduced to Horace.
• 35:02
  So Horace came to stay and Horace had a very powerful nose, and he decided
• 35:06
  he didn't like the garage, despite the fact he had plenty of space.
• 35:10
  He broke into the farmhouse and would then warm his butt on
• 35:13
  the arga, and I'd talk to him.
• 35:16
  And then eventually I realized, um, that he needed a mate.
• 35:19
  So through the local newspapers, I found another black pig, and we got
• 35:25
  hold of Doris and Horis just fell hopelessly in love, um, with Doris.
• 35:32
  And from that moment on, they just lived in the barn.
• 35:34
  He was happy in the barn now, and it, I'd fill it up with
• 35:36
  hay and they were very clean.
• 35:38
  They always cracked in the same place and what have you.
• 35:40
  And, um, you say Black Pigs, is this a local breed?
• 35:43
  No, they, it wasn't.
• 35:44
  They, they were actually Vietnamese Pop bellies.
• 35:46
  Okay.
• 35:47
  Um, and, uh, um, Hideously ugly.
• 35:51
  They look as if they've run at great speed into a war.
• 35:55
  Um, and uh, anyway, in the November of 1989, I think, um, Doris gave
• 36:04
  birth to 11 baby piglets under a heat lamp in thick straw.
• 36:09
  Um, and this is two in the morning.
• 36:12
  I'm thinking, how am I gonna educate all these pigs?
• 36:13
  I'm going bankrupt.
• 36:14
  How am I gonna bring 'em up?
• 36:15
  Yeah, exactly.
• 36:16
  But I saw it as a sign that I was meant to start a rare breed park.
• 36:20
  Most people don't do that, but I did.
• 36:22
  So I went to hunt for a place that could be a rare breed park and there was some
• 36:25
  land and I phoned up the guy where, why rare breeds from a not rare breed or a
• 36:29
  Vietnamese popularly big there, there.
• 36:32
  And I thought, I love this.
• 36:33
  So a lot of people will love you.
• 36:34
  See, one of the things I learned from the music industry, which anybody who's
• 36:37
  looking for a steering in life is if you're not a freak and you love something,
• 36:40
  there will be millions of people like you.
• 36:43
  The issue is simply marketing.
• 36:45
  You know about it.
• 36:47
  That's a really valuable piece of information.
• 36:49
  It's a very valuable piece of information.
• 36:51
  Um, anyway, to cut a long story short, I've got very sensitive lips and I went
• 36:58
  to see the guy who owned the land that I thought could be a rare breed park.
• 37:02
  He gave me a very hot cup of coffee, but told me instantly I
• 37:04
  couldn't have the land because he just rented it to somebody else.
• 37:08
  I had to make small talk with him, and as I made small talk, as I, as the
• 37:12
  coffee called down for me to drink it, I told him that I had studied archeology
• 37:17
  at university, and he then said to me the immortal words, I have need of an
• 37:21
  archeologist, which I couldn't believe.
• 37:24
  And anyway, the following day we broke into what was this huge estate that
• 37:28
  he'd inherited, but he had no money.
• 37:30
  He didn't, his, his, uh, uh, a distant no, his uncle had died,
• 37:35
  childless, leaving this estate.
• 37:37
  The house had been tended to flats long ago, but the garden
• 37:41
  had been fenced off because.
• 37:43
  The majority of the gardeners, uh, that had worked there were killed,
• 37:48
  uh, in Flounders in 19 15, 16.
• 37:51
  And the owner is so sadly fenced off and went to live in his
• 37:55
  Italian house and never returned.
• 37:57
  Now, when you say a garden, those listeners who are knowing you for the
• 38:03
  first time, um, particularly perhaps in America, we're not talking about
• 38:08
  a backyard here with a privacy fence.
• 38:10
  Um, what describe this garden?
• 38:14
  Well, the garden in total is, uh, in total about 70 acres of gardens with
• 38:22
  about a hundred acres of woodland forest and 200 acres of home farm, and how
• 38:30
  you break into this, what does that.
• 38:32
  Whereas, well, we, it's not just there to walk into, how do you break into it?
• 38:36
  Yeah.
• 38:36
  Well, the hedges that have been planted all those years ago had now become
• 38:39
  trees and you just couldn't get through.
• 38:41
  So we had to take machetes and cut our way in, and then in the
• 38:45
  evening, so it's basically like a Cinderella castle of thorns.
• 38:47
  You've just got a wall of thorns in front of you.
• 38:49
  Yeah.
• 38:50
  Yeah.
• 38:50
  That's not even, that's not exaggerate, not exaggerating at all.
• 38:53
  And the bloke says, behind this wall of thorns is an enchanted land.
• 38:58
  Do you want to chop your way into it with me?
• 39:00
  Is that basically what he says?
• 39:02
  Well, no.
• 39:03
  He said, you're an archeologist.
• 39:04
  You'll be able to understand what you're looking at better than I,
• 39:07
  um, and I didn't, and what is behind this, this, this, this wall of thorns.
• 39:13
  Yeah.
• 39:13
  But quite quickly we discovered what was behind it because there were enormous
• 39:18
  palm trees and rodded engines in there that were way, I mean, the, the brambles
• 39:23
  themselves are about 15 feet high.
• 39:26
  Um, but um, I cut my way through with John and I just fell
• 39:31
  hopelessly in love with it.
• 39:32
  I, I, I broke into a, a greenhouse after finding a wall with a, uh, a door
• 39:39
  painted green with it, the paint flaking and the rust was staining the wood,
• 39:43
  you know, where the, um, hinges were.
• 39:46
  And I put my shoulder to it to go in.
• 39:48
  And there was this greenhouse that I cut my way through very gingerly because all
• 39:52
  the wood had rotted out, so the glass was hanging like guillotines above it.
• 39:58
  And, um, in there, the light broken a very funny way.
• 40:02
  And I suddenly saw these scissors on the wall.
• 40:05
  And it's a bit like one of those 1970s paintings, you know, with
• 40:08
  dots, where suddenly you see an elephant in the middle of the dots.
• 40:11
  And it was like that.
• 40:11
  Suddenly I saw tools everywhere.
• 40:13
  I saw terracotta everywhere, and I fell in love.
• 40:16
  And the following day I said to John, who own it, look, I haven't got the money.
• 40:21
  To take this off your hands, but what I'll do is I'll do a
• 40:24
  music business contract with you.
• 40:26
  You give me this estate for nothing, and if I can get it open to the public
• 40:30
  inside two years, you'll let me have it.
• 40:32
  And, uh, I'll be able to rent it off you into the future.
• 40:37
  Uh, and I will pay you, um, 20% of whatever I charge
• 40:41
  Netta v a t to the public.
• 40:44
  And that's how it all began.
• 40:46
  And I knew that to be famous, I needed press and I was
• 40:50
  always been good with press.
• 40:51
  And I got the BBC hooked by telling them that I had found the finest,
• 40:56
  most romantic garden in Britain.
• 40:58
  And it was going to be called the Lost Gardens of Hellan.
• 41:01
  And I was gonna give them one day to make up their mind whether
• 41:04
  they were gonna come and film it.
• 41:05
  If they weren't, I was gonna go somewhere else.
• 41:07
  How did you, you say you got what, who did you call?
• 41:11
  Why did you have someone who you could call and why would
• 41:14
  that person take your call?
• 41:19
  I've always been socially pretty adept.
• 41:22
  So I had a pretty decent dress book and I knew through the music BI, basically.
• 41:27
  Yeah, yeah.
• 41:29
  But the guy I called was the producer for Stephan Buchs, who is a bit of
• 41:34
  a rock God for garden, um, films.
• 41:38
  And he was on, um, gardens World, and they came in and made it special
• 41:43
  and it won the award in 91 for the best documentary of the year.
• 41:49
  And it was very mysterious.
• 41:51
  I, you see, gardens had never been treated the way I treated them.
• 41:54
  I wanted it to be very rock and roll.
• 41:56
  I wanted to even put dry eyes down when people were filming.
• 42:00
  I wanted to, I knew that if people came to Halligan looking at it through
• 42:04
  my eyes, they would fall in love.
• 42:07
  And that's what actually happened.
• 42:09
  So the restoration wasn't about restoring it to a role of a culture
• 42:13
  society, your Nat National Trust Act.
• 42:15
  I wanted to capture the very spirit of lostness, which would make people
• 42:19
  feel the gentle ebb and flow of melancholy, because melancholy is
• 42:23
  the sexiest thing in the world.
• 42:24
  Happy Clappy is nowhere close.
• 42:26
  And I wanted he halligan to be a place which was at its absolute
• 42:30
  finest in, its in a gentle drizzle.
• 42:33
  Um, and that's how it's become.
• 42:35
  The Lost Garden of Halligan are the most romantic gardens in Britain.
• 42:39
  We've won award after award the most, uh, the nation's favorite garden, the national
• 42:45
  treasure, according to Radio four.
• 42:47
  But the thing I'm most proud of is that more than 400 people have chosen
• 42:51
  to have their ashes scattered there.
• 42:53
  And I think that's a tremendous thing that's a, a real, uh, a real accolade
• 42:58
  to the team that have restored it.
• 43:00
  But, you know, the weirdest thing after all this time is, uh, in my ancient age.
• 43:05
  Now I can see, uh, it doesn't belong to me.
• 43:10
  I'm a steward, a complete steward, and it's such privilege and I go around it Now
• 43:15
  as a punter, I got no sense of ownership.
• 43:19
  I mean, literally, I don't have a sense of ownership because I gave
• 43:22
  away, uh, the company that runs it to my children about six months ago.
• 43:27
  Um, but I think it was necessary to put it in younger hands, keep it going,
• 43:32
  get them to understand the fact that it's a privilege to be a steward of it.
• 43:36
  It's not a vehicle for making money.
• 43:38
  It's a vehicle for creating livelihoods.
• 43:40
  We have a hundred people that work there, and it revolutionized the
• 43:43
  whole economy of the local village.
• 43:46
  You see, we were the first place in Cornor that ever asked a very simple question, is
• 43:50
  Cornwall empty in winter because nothing is open, or is nothing open because
• 43:55
  people, uh, the, the, the or or do not.
• 43:59
  People not come because nothing is open.
• 44:01
  . So we decided to open all year round and until everybody's astonishment,
• 44:06
  people came all year round and suddenly pubs and restaurants opened and things
• 44:11
  were got renewed and galleries opened and all over komo people suddenly woke
• 44:15
  up as if, you know, they had a kiss.
• 44:18
  You know, the sleeping beauty was open and the effect of that would
• 44:22
  lead fairly shortly in the end of 94, we opened the public in on, um, good
• 44:32
  Friday, 1992, and we were about a third of the way through the restoration.
• 44:39
  And people were coming to watch us do the restoration and they would come and
• 44:43
  we'd give them tools and they'd help us.
• 44:44
  They'd pay to come in and then do the work.
• 44:46
  It was brilliant.
• 44:47
  And we had a tea room cafeteria that was an old goat shed.
• 44:51
  Um, and our restaurant is still the skeleton of that old B shed today.
• 44:57
  Uh, we built it out a bit, but that's actually its root.
• 45:02
  And we pioneered all sorts of things.
• 45:03
  I, I used metal detectors to find the old plant named nes, which meant that
• 45:07
  we could restore many of the productive ward gardens, uh, by finding the original
• 45:14
  plants that were named on these, uh, copper zinc labels by washing them with
• 45:19
  warm water and then putting olive oil in on it, and the Indian ink would react.
• 45:23
  Is it brilliant?
• 45:24
  It's absolutely brilliant.
• 45:25
  I can't tell you the fun of doing a project like that.
• 45:28
  And we would go, like, we went to a Methodist chapel and we bought the
• 45:33
  chapel in order to take all the floor, the floorboards, the joists, the
• 45:38
  roof, the roof slates and everything.
• 45:41
  So when you come to Halligan, A restoration that would probably
• 45:44
  cost 20, 25 million to do.
• 45:47
  We did it for about half a million.
• 45:48
  We all our volunteers and everybody, we were just sniffing
• 45:51
  about finding things and that is actually where the joy of life is.
• 45:56
  It's actually realizing that amazing things can be done and
• 45:59
  they don't need to cost the earth.
• 46:01
  That actually what you need is the energy to do it.
• 46:04
  Um, and then another documentary was made which followed us for two series.
• 46:09
  It was two 10 part documentaries on channel four, and that kind of
• 46:13
  enshrined GaN as being the most popular garden in Britain and after us.
• 46:20
  So I the one, the last thing I ought to say is that we wanted to tell the whole
• 46:24
  story because going back to my childhood and I told you about my background of
• 46:29
  my grandparents who were of different social classes, what I found amazing was
• 46:36
  that Halligan had these walled gardens and a vegetable garden and some little.
• 46:40
  And some little war gardens as well.
• 46:43
  And I said, I want to tell the story of the ordinary men and women who
• 46:46
  made these, these gardens great, but the national trust and um, uh, the rg
• 46:53
  they're all society were far too posh.
• 46:55
  Posh.
• 46:56
  They said the garden visitors, they're not gonna be interested
• 46:59
  in working men and women.
• 47:00
  And that's absolutely extraordinary.
• 47:02
  At the moment that we opened to the public, at that day that we opened,
• 47:07
  there were no working gardens in Britain open to the general public.
• 47:11
  Vegetable gardens were not one the great vegetable garden that had
• 47:15
  been at Chatsworth in Darbyshire, um, the devs house, they had
• 47:20
  bulldozed their ward gardens because they were no longer fashionable.
• 47:25
  Tatton Park, which was the National Trust, most famous well garden
• 47:28
  that was also completely gutted.
• 47:31
  And the national trust was very slow witted.
• 47:33
  And when we, uh, when the public started to go bonkers, they decided,
• 47:36
  Christ, maybe we missed a trick.
• 47:38
  And they started to restore some.
• 47:40
  But they didn't understand it.
• 47:41
  It's kind of like, uh, uh, it was kind of like class
• 47:45
  certainty, devoid of intelligence.
• 47:48
  So their first walled garden, they restored, they found bricks that
• 47:52
  had moss on them, so they looked all romantic, which is crazy cause any had
• 47:56
  gardener who was worth his weight or her weight would never have allowed
• 48:00
  moss on a brick or anything like that.
• 48:03
  So what they were trying to do was to do that kind of shabby chic, you
• 48:06
  know, to give you some kind of thing.
• 48:08
  And it was completely fake.
• 48:09
  And they didn't know where to get the vegetable varieties from.
• 48:12
  For us, we were just like pirate kings.
• 48:14
  We, we, we, we would travel all over the country to meet people that had
• 48:17
  allotments that had kept seeds going at their grandparents had had and whatever.
• 48:21
  So we started to build up this body of, um, what we called
• 48:24
  heirloom and heritage vegetables.
• 48:27
  And slowly but surely we started to get the whole place properly productive.
• 48:33
  And then we had to make it.
• 48:34
  So, see, the thing is that when you look at all the posh magazines, They,
• 48:38
  they're just lying to you all the time.
• 48:40
  Their lifestyle choice, a bit of a drizzle of this on your food, do
• 48:45
  they not realize the pure genius, the unadulterated genius of these ward
• 48:51
  gardens in an age before refrigeration?
• 48:55
  April was called the dying month because it was too early to have the vegetables
• 49:00
  ready for the next year and too late to have anything left from the previous year.
• 49:06
  But the great horticulturists knew how to create clamps for potatoes and some
• 49:11
  of the vegetables to keep them cool enough so that they didn't go off.
• 49:15
  They knew which apples to grow that perhaps didn't taste the best,
• 49:20
  but actually they had the ability to stay sweet until right the
• 49:25
  end of March, beginning of April.
• 49:27
  So what you were looking at was an incredible act of applied science.
• 49:33
  Um, and that's always stayed with me.
• 49:36
  Uh, the notion that, that, that, how is it possible that a basically a smug
• 49:40
  middle class has allowed the traditions of great horticulture to die and
• 49:46
  pretend that it's the third thickest child or the third thickest child
• 49:50
  that is a gardener or horticulturist?
• 49:52
  It's absolutely not true.
• 49:54
  And the future we're going to see is going to see an awful lot of young people.
• 49:59
  Your young people, my young people.
• 50:01
  Go back to the land, go back to interest in food production.
• 50:05
  Go back to realizing that many of these old varieties were called heirloom
• 50:10
  varieties because, uh, big agriculture wanted them to sound quaint and not
• 50:16
  current so that you bought their types.
• 50:18
  The truth is there isn't an apple that has been bred over the last 50 years.
• 50:24
  That's actually very good for you.
• 50:26
  That saying an apple a day keeps the doctor away is absolutely true for the
• 50:30
  old varieties that are still around cuz they're full of what are called phenols,
• 50:34
  which are very powerful antioxidants.
• 50:37
  And I think, I think the generations coming through and I meet so many young
• 50:41
  people who come to work for us and who want to do their own allotments or
• 50:44
  even small holdings or the, the market gardening, which used to be popular.
• 50:49
  Remember.
• 50:50
  And it's really interesting how the conversations are going about, can
• 50:53
  we produce food and drink that's actually really good for your health?
• 50:56
  I mean, really good for your health.
• 50:58
  Um, so that, you know, your, your, your, your internal biome, you know, the
• 51:02
  bacteria and your insides are actually encouraged to really go for it and so on.
• 51:08
  So I'm really excited.
• 51:09
  I hope you can tell I'm really excited about all of those discoveries,
• 51:12
  all of which were made accidentally and I think could only have been
• 51:15
  made by somebody who knew nothing.
• 51:18
  I think the excitement was that for me, it was like a Sherlock
• 51:21
  Homes adventure to try and find all the ingredients of this story.
• 51:25
  It's the narrative arc, if you like.
• 51:27
  And then I realized that everybody was so smugged, they thought it
• 51:30
  was known and then it wasn't.
• 51:33
  It was all about to get lost.
• 51:35
  And so the lost gardens of Hellan became symbolic, not only of it having been
• 51:39
  lost, but also the lost varieties and techniques and so on that also were going.
• 51:46
  And so I've been really thrilled doing that.
• 51:48
  And that would in turn, inspire me to think, well, we started to
• 51:54
  tell stories at Halligan that did not have lots of Latin, because I
• 51:57
  didn't, I wasn't a horticulturist.
• 52:00
  So I'd ask people like, why do leaves coal?
• 52:02
  And they get so annoyed when I asked them to dumb down, dumb
• 52:05
  down, dumb down until they were basically telling me a nursery story.
• 52:08
  And I said, wow, that's great.
• 52:09
  And I would then tell people at dinner parties and they go, wow, really?
• 52:12
  That's great.
• 52:13
  And I suddenly realize, let's tell stories to everybody that
• 52:15
  comes and say, wow, that's.
• 52:17
  So we told really simple stories and people got very excited.
• 52:19
  And I thought, what, what?
• 52:20
  Imagine what, what happens if we find the equivalent of, um,
• 52:26
  like a creature of a volcano?
• 52:28
  You know?
• 52:28
  And in that volcano, like in Conan Doyers Lost World, it's where
• 52:32
  you've got this lost civilization.
• 52:34
  And we would gather all of the really important plants in the world together
• 52:38
  there to tell people about how dependent we are in the natural world.
• 52:42
  And that's what happened.
• 52:43
  I decided to do the Eden Project and gathered a team around me and
• 52:46
  we built, um, Eden with a whole bunch of volunteers to start with.
• 52:50
  And then we raised a lot of money through the lottery banks.
• 52:56
  Overall, it cost about 144 million pounds, but it's blinking great.
• 53:01
  It's designed on principles that were invented originally by
• 53:05
  Buckman Sta Follow Who's my hero?
• 53:07
  The Bucky Ball.
• 53:09
  The strongest structures on earth when they're fully built and the
• 53:12
  weakest structures on earth until the last moment of their being built.
• 53:17
  And we created 90,000 tons of soil and we opened to the public on St.
• 53:22
  Patrick's Day to celebrate all of the Irish builders who'd made this possible.
• 53:26
  Cause we built it on time, on budget.
• 53:30
  And the other thing that's great is we don't allow advertising on site.
• 53:34
  Cause we want people to understand and read the landscape as why
• 53:39
  a wild place, even where it's nurtured in a, in a husbanded way.
• 53:43
  But we wanted people to just have one place where they weren't being sold to.
• 53:47
  Where you didn't have QR codes, where you didn't have buy such and such a coffee.
• 53:52
  So anyway, Eden is a really good place.
• 53:55
  We've had, we get about a million visitors a.
• 53:58
  We've put nearly 2 billion pounds worth into the local economy out of opening
• 54:03
  it, and we built it starting in 1994.
• 54:07
  The idea we opened, as I say, St.
• 54:09
  Patrick's Day 2001, took us actually two years of building.
• 54:13
  But the amazing thing is today all the things we were championing
• 54:16
  then have become fashionable.
• 54:18
  And now we're, we are big fromage.
• 54:22
  I mean, we've got 17 big projects around the world, around a billion
• 54:26
  quids worth of construction contracts.
• 54:29
  I mean, they're not all signed up and ready and working, but I'm
• 54:32
  actually becoming more and more interested not in the testosterone
• 54:35
  lead and signature architecture, but in the regeneration of places.
• 54:39
  So we're working in places like Eastborne on the so Downs, uh, Darby in the middle
• 54:44
  of Darby, which is falling to bits, uh, in Derry in Ireland on the banks.
• 54:51
  Of the river there and so on.
• 54:54
  And we've Dundee you will have seen in the papers.
• 54:57
  We recently got, um, a lot of government funding who are gonna
• 55:00
  partner us to do a project in Moham.
• 55:04
  But basically all of this is about storytelling.
• 55:07
  Everything is about storytelling.
• 55:09
  And these are all old, no longer fashionable, falling down what people
• 55:13
  in England will call crap towns.
• 55:15
  Yeah.
• 55:16
  And then what they need is an exorcist.
• 55:18
  And that's us.
• 55:19
  And we come and we tell 'em, you think this is crap?
• 55:22
  It's wonderful.
• 55:23
  And you know, the, the most amazing thing about your town is you the people.
• 55:27
  Yeah.
• 55:27
  And stories.
• 55:29
  Yeah.
• 55:29
  Yeah.
• 55:30
  Stories and, and, and, and, and creating groups of people, a crew, wherever you go.
• 55:36
  People are just not expecting people like us with our background
• 55:40
  to actually listen, just listen.
• 55:43
  Don't give them the benefit of our genius to regenerate their town.
• 55:49
  Help create a story in which they regenerate their town and you fit
• 55:53
  in some gaps where you can help.
• 55:55
  And the biggest task is to make humans realize what is possible.
• 56:01
  And that's why Eden is really powerful, because we have done big things
• 56:05
  that everybody said was impossible.
• 56:07
  We've done deep geothermal, we've dug 5.3 kilometers down, and uh,
• 56:13
  we got 187 degrees centigrade water coming out the ground.
• 56:17
  And everybody said we couldn't do it.
• 56:18
  The government said we couldn't do it.
• 56:21
  Scientists said we wouldn't do it.
• 56:23
  We have done it.
• 56:24
  And to anybody listening, you know, probably coming to the end of this,
• 56:27
  but everybody listening is do not believe the establishment that
• 56:33
  ama amazing things cannot be done.
• 56:35
  Because when you look at our.
• 56:40
  I would put to you, we're living amongst a whole bunch of people
• 56:44
  that are ill, but we don't know it.
• 56:46
  And that illness is a collective PTs d and that PTSD is because we aspire to so much.
• 56:53
  Whether you are formally religious or not, we know that we're living in
• 56:57
  a country where it's equity, where it's social values and care are being
• 57:02
  honored almost in there being ignored.
• 57:06
  We know that.
• 57:07
  Say that again.
• 57:09
  We ha we ha We know that every child instinctively should have an
• 57:15
  equal opportunity to an education.
• 57:17
  We believe this is wrong, to allow children and adults to be hungry, to not
• 57:22
  have a roof over their heads and so on.
• 57:25
  There's a whole long litany of things that we know.
• 57:28
  We know that it's cravenly.
• 57:31
  To allow companies to poison our water and think that you are un businesslike
• 57:35
  or you're not a proper capitalist if you complain about it, this is rubbish.
• 57:40
  We've created a world of lies.
• 57:42
  It should be treason.
• 57:44
  Nothing less than treason to poison the water that we have to drink and
• 57:49
  our future children will have to drink.
• 57:51
  And onwards the same with poisoning the air.
• 57:54
  The same with making our soil infertile, and the same with making
• 57:57
  the richness a variety of life less.
• 58:00
  So.
• 58:01
  These are just a few of the things I believe.
• 58:03
  But I think one of the things is to teach yourself to be unreasonable at
• 58:09
  all times and to not allow other people to write your story is quite possible.
• 58:14
  To be a capitalist, but to have a moral compass, to be fair in all things,
• 58:19
  to be kind, to be generous, to be a capitalist only means that you gather
• 58:24
  things and resources together to enable something bigger to take place.
• 58:28
  To be honest.
• 58:29
  And if you get to that place, you're in a very good place.
• 58:31
  And I, I have a dream that we can make a country in which people can dream
• 58:36
  of aspiring to achieving these things.
• 58:38
  Our dreams are too small, so our, one of our jobs is to make
• 58:43
  dreams bigger, much, much bigger.
• 58:47
  And you're looking beyond the UK now, right?
• 58:49
  So Eden, you're doing Edens in other countries?
• 58:52
  Yeah, Dubai.
• 58:54
  Okay.
• 58:55
  Why, why are you doing Dubai?
• 58:56
  And, and is that ecological, is it ecological to put, uh,
• 58:59
  rainforest under a, a roof in Dubai?
• 59:01
  Or is it actually taking loads of resources or what, or what what?
• 59:06
  We didn't China you're doing China as well, right?
• 59:08
  I believe y uh, yeah, but we didn't put a, we didn't put a rainforest
• 59:12
  under a, a, a, a roof in Dubai.
• 59:15
  We built like a steampunk, um, a steampunk cartoon ecstasy in.
• 59:22
  Environmental science, and it was the most popular thing at Expo.
• 59:28
  It was really, really cool.
• 59:30
  And my son, Sam, who's the creative manager for Eden, he came
• 59:36
  up with all these things that, like the first thing you saw is
• 59:39
  you went in, was some questions.
• 59:41
  Would you rather kill the last panda?
• 59:45
  And nobody knows you did it, or would you rather not kill the last panda,
• 59:52
  but everybody thinks you did it.
• 59:54
  And he's done about 30 questions like that.
• 59:57
  And to go into a place which is unlike any science institution you've ever seen
• 1:00:01
  with families just talking and arguing and berating each other for what they've
• 1:00:05
  said that they believe in and whatever.
• 1:00:07
  Yeah, I think every, every, every thing that Eden, every Eden that we
• 1:00:12
  do has gotta be a perfect provocation.
• 1:00:15
  What's the point?
• 1:00:16
  We don't, we're not in the business of doing theme parks.
• 1:00:18
  We're in the business of, of creating hope.
• 1:00:21
  Entertainment and the sense of possibilities.
• 1:00:25
  The thing that I really want people to feel for it from Eden is that the
• 1:00:29
  future still does remain asked to make.
• 1:00:32
  It's not too late.
• 1:00:33
  We can still do amazing things if we organize ourselves around
• 1:00:37
  various principles and speak truth to power, speak truth to power.
• 1:00:42
  Look, I've taken up far too much of your time, but the last thing, what
• 1:00:48
  I'm about to tell you is you probably have to pay 10,000 pounds just to
• 1:00:54
  hear what I'm about to tell you.
• 1:00:56
  It will be so valuable in your life.
• 1:00:58
  It's worth everything else I've said up to this moment put together, and
• 1:01:03
  probably a hundred times more than that.
• 1:01:05
  If you really, really want to change your life and have an exciting life
• 1:01:10
  and taste the unexpected, accept every third invitation you receive.
• 1:01:20
  That does not mean you don't accept the first, but it does mean you accept the
• 1:01:25
  third and you don't give yourself a get outta jail card unless it clashes with
• 1:01:31
  a really important domestic obligation, like a birthday or anniversary.
• 1:01:36
  The reason for that is that most people think they are thinking
• 1:01:39
  beings, but most people are sheep.
• 1:01:43
  Most people carry a weight of what they call thought, which is the clothing of
• 1:01:49
  people like them of their social class or gleaned from the pages of magazines
• 1:01:54
  they deem to be of their social class, and they've built up because they're
• 1:01:58
  taught they have to have a view.
• 1:02:00
  It is not possible to have a view on all the subjects we've all got views on.
• 1:02:05
  Before you wonder, I don't exonerate myself from this.
• 1:02:09
  I'm just really interested in my own prejudices and how I come to have them.
• 1:02:14
  How come I'm against nuclear?
• 1:02:15
  How come I'm against this?
• 1:02:17
  And you suddenly realize the shallow minded waffle brain that you are
• 1:02:21
  because you didn't know enough.
• 1:02:22
  Therefore, it was easy and comfortable to do.
• 1:02:24
  Some people I admire against nuclear will.
• 1:02:26
  Do you know what I mean?
• 1:02:26
  So you build up this whole picture.
• 1:02:28
  Now when you accept the third invitation, you are surrounded by
• 1:02:32
  people you did not intend to meet.
• 1:02:36
  You didn't intend to meet them.
• 1:02:38
  And I've learned this incredibly valuable fact, which is that an awful
• 1:02:42
  lot of middle class people believe that going to university or anything
• 1:02:45
  else is, or going to a really smart public school is so that you meet
• 1:02:50
  the people you need to meet people.
• 1:02:54
  The thing I've realized is this is a lie.
• 1:02:57
  Genius is not created by meeting the people you need to meet.
• 1:03:01
  It's caused by meeting the people you didn't know you needed to meet
• 1:03:05
  is people who never occurred to you that you would need to meet so you
• 1:03:08
  wouldn't have searched for them.
• 1:03:09
  And there you are stuck at a social event.
• 1:03:12
  I've had to open old people's homes.
• 1:03:14
  I've judged dog shows, cat shows, pet shows of every description
• 1:03:18
  I've opened, uh, surgeries.
• 1:03:21
  I've o I've, I've championed gardens of every description.
• 1:03:25
  Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of events.
• 1:03:30
  And almost every life, life-changing professional event that I have ever
• 1:03:34
  attended has been the third invitation.
• 1:03:38
  Why that number?
• 1:03:39
  Why not, why not take them all?
• 1:03:41
  Why not do them all and just be open to everything?
• 1:03:44
  Because I'm also open to loving my family.
• 1:03:49
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:50
  And having a life.
• 1:03:50
  I don't wanna be out every night.
• 1:03:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:03:53
  I, I, when you do something public, I, I do.
• 1:03:57
  I could be out every single night, and I don't wanna be, but I do
• 1:04:02
  want to leave myself open to the potential for chaos, the potential
• 1:04:07
  for the completely unexpected.
• 1:04:09
  And Eden would not be there today, were it not for me doing that.
• 1:04:13
  Because one of the things I went to that I would never have gone to, one
• 1:04:17
  of the people in the audience heard me talk and later on he happened to be
• 1:04:21
  in a room in the middle of Plymouth.
• 1:04:23
  He had been the chairman of Somerset County Council and he'd be present in
• 1:04:27
  this Nissen hut in the middle of nowhere, and Eden was not gonna get its money.
• 1:04:32
  And then he stood up and he said, gentlemen, ladies, I was
• 1:04:37
  present listening to this man speaking a Nien hut near Toton.
• 1:04:41
  He so obviously loves the west country, not just the narrow confines of Cormo.
• 1:04:46
  And we in Somerset will drop one of our projects so the Eden Project can go ahead
• 1:04:51
  if you all drop one, each collapse of Stout Party, that one night to 50 people
• 1:04:56
  and a dog was worth 12.7 million pounds.
• 1:05:02
  There you are.
• 1:05:03
  Yeah.
• 1:05:03
  Let's finish the interview there.
• 1:05:05
  That's the most valuable thing that your listeners can ever hear.
• 1:05:08
  The idea of getting beyond one's prejudices, which it seems that life
• 1:05:18
  forces upon one, if one's lucky.
• 1:05:21
  Um, but we always go into it kicking and screaming.
• 1:05:25
  Um, you are now in this exorcism business of exercising unhappiness,
• 1:05:34
  um, much of which is coming from people's, uh, divorce from the natural
• 1:05:43
  world, which is where we started with you, um, by the side of rivers and
• 1:05:47
  climbing trees, um, and then into music, and then back into nature again.
• 1:05:54
  Ecology, as you said, every, it's all becoming fashionable now.
• 1:05:57
  We are no longer the hippie margin, um, with the mainstream what's.
• 1:06:03
  Single.
• 1:06:04
  Biggest thing we all get wrong about ecology, that's easy.
• 1:06:11
  The biggest thing we get wrong is believing that people who call
• 1:06:14
  themselves environmentalists to people who do recycling and all of the things
• 1:06:17
  that actually have a social cache.
• 1:06:20
  The evidence screams at us that there is a complete disconnect between
• 1:06:24
  people who want to do what they think is environmentally friendly behavior
• 1:06:29
  and understanding ecology and the desire to protect biodiversity.
• 1:06:34
  Those that do all that recycling do not be confused.
• 1:06:37
  It is a desire to conform with society.
• 1:06:40
  I'm a civilized person, that's why I'm recycling.
• 1:06:43
  I don't wanna be seen as being primitive.
• 1:06:45
  But our connection to Washington to protect the natural world is the
• 1:06:48
  biggest battleground there is for humans at the moment because reality
• 1:06:53
  is competing on several different formats, several different canvases
• 1:06:57
  ranging from say, middle class kids with, with, um, Tablets and so on.
• 1:07:03
  Their reality of their screen is every bit as real as the tab, as
• 1:07:06
  the, when you move the tablet.
• 1:07:08
  This way, what they're seeing there is just another form of this thing.
• 1:07:11
  Um, and there's a lot of complicated stuff in there about what does nature,
• 1:07:17
  nature inspired education mean?
• 1:07:19
  And an awful lot of people who are worthy, I think, don't understand
• 1:07:24
  what it takes, what emotional hook sleeves are necessary to get people
• 1:07:29
  engaged in the natural world.
• 1:07:32
  It's about touching, smelling mud between your toes, so to speak.
• 1:07:35
  It's not by just walking outside and seeing the trees.
• 1:07:38
  We've gone for a walk.
• 1:07:39
  I think you can do that for the rest of your life, and it still won't affect you.
• 1:07:42
  It needs to mean something to you.
• 1:07:44
  It means to mean that you are understanding you are creaturely.
• 1:07:50
  And bearing in mind, creatureliness, I have a guest for supper and
• 1:07:55
  at this rate I won't have any supper cooked for them at all.
• 1:08:00
  One last thing, then.
• 1:08:04
  Can people learn to do what you do when you imagine not just the
• 1:08:11
  thing but the delivery of the thing.
• 1:08:16
  This seems to have come to you naturally.
• 1:08:18
  Is this a muscle that one can actually exercise?
• 1:08:22
  Is it part of your formula for accepting every third invitation?
• 1:08:26
  Is that part of the exercising of that muscle?
• 1:08:28
  In fact, to find the mechanisms for doing that, but is this a skill that people
• 1:08:32
  can learn how to dream the dream and then formulate and deliver the dream?
• 1:08:37
  Yes, you can learn.
• 1:08:40
  The thing is most people find organizing themselves a complete mystery.
• 1:08:46
  They don't understand the levers of the order of events.
• 1:08:51
  They don't understand how to put a narrative arc to work.
• 1:08:56
  My ex, um, gay, who was my joint chief executive with me for a long time
• 1:09:02
  at Eden, she coined a great phrase.
• 1:09:05
  The secret is to dare to dream and organize, to deliver.
• 1:09:11
  And I think one of the, the things I notice, I mentor a lot of, quite a lot
• 1:09:15
  of people and I am just struck how people that are really smart just don't know
• 1:09:20
  how to put one brick on top of another.
• 1:09:23
  They don't know the order of how to deliver dreams.
• 1:09:27
  And when you start to show people the order of doing things, they go, wow, wow.
• 1:09:33
  That's amazing.
• 1:09:35
  I get so many people who send me their business ban for doing something.
• 1:09:38
  And I go, you know what?
• 1:09:40
  You've got one really good idea in here and you've now hung about a
• 1:09:44
  dozen other things around it because you, you think you need to have an
• 1:09:46
  education program and a this and a that.
• 1:09:49
  Just do what you're good at.
• 1:09:51
  Do what you are good at.
• 1:09:53
  Stop trying to do what you think other people will think you are cool for doing.
• 1:09:57
  Do the thing you are good at.
• 1:09:59
  So many people li live their, they, they, they waste their lives away by
• 1:10:04
  trying to be something they're not.
• 1:10:07
  If you are really brilliant at one thing, just do that thing.
• 1:10:09
  Brian Cluff, my, my football manager hero, who was used to say that.
• 1:10:14
  He said, I don't, didn't pay you a lot of money to tackle back.
• 1:10:17
  You're rubbish at tackling back, but you're the best crosser of
• 1:10:20
  the world ball in the world.
• 1:10:22
  I just gotta make the guys who can tackle back work even harder to give it
• 1:10:24
  to you so you can then cross the ball.
• 1:10:27
  And I think that's a really big secret of life.
• 1:10:29
  Just understand what you're good at, and then the next bit, if you have a
• 1:10:34
  dream, is to then start understanding the bits that you're not good at.
• 1:10:40
  I knew when I built Eden, I knew when I did GaN that my temperament, the way I
• 1:10:46
  speak would not encourage bank managers.
• 1:10:49
  I knew the more that I was fantastical, the more their eyes were with me.
• 1:10:55
  Their hearts were with me, and their brains were shutting the wallet because
• 1:10:58
  they knew that they would look foolish supporting somebody who was a dreamer.
• 1:11:02
  Therefore, I knew the secret was to have on my right shoulder, somebody who
• 1:11:07
  understood business brilliantly and could use jargon of business to impress them.
• 1:11:12
  And on my left shoulder, I needed someone who'd built amazing things elsewhere.
• 1:11:17
  So they said, here is a dreamer who really does understand what's needed.
• 1:11:24
  Masterminds teams, Hmm, who can do what I cannot do?
• 1:11:31
  How do I.
• 1:11:32
  back to the alliances.
• 1:11:33
  How do I make alliances with those people to deliver the dreams?
• 1:11:37
  And if we're lucky, perhaps there's friendships along the way too.
• 1:11:39
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:40
  Well, there's one last story I'll show with you, which is my daughter is,
• 1:11:43
  is very smart, who, you know, Laura, we were looking at creating a place
• 1:11:48
  for children to come and play, right?
• 1:11:50
  We, we own, as you know, the Shipwreck Center in, uh, Charlestown.
• 1:11:55
  And she said, dad, do you know what you're doing?
• 1:11:57
  I said, yes.
• 1:11:58
  I'm, I'm looking at how we can build a brilliant place for kids.
• 1:12:02
  She said, yes, it'll go bust Dad.
• 1:12:05
  And I said, what?
• 1:12:06
  What?
• 1:12:08
  I said, do not know I'm a genius at what I do.
• 1:12:12
  She said, yeah, but you just don't understand.
• 1:12:14
  What you've gotta build is nothing to do with kids.
• 1:12:17
  You are building a.
• 1:12:19
  Where moms do not feel guilty having some time to themselves, a place that's
• 1:12:24
  safe for children and interesting enough to keep them occupied.
• 1:12:28
  But you will have high speed wifi and really good coffee and cake
• 1:12:34
  so they can see their kids and have some time to themselves.
• 1:12:37
  You are building a respite place for parents.
• 1:12:40
  You're not building a playground for kids.
• 1:12:43
  And I thought, wow, that is so insightful.
• 1:12:49
  So listen to the young, listen to those who speak truth to your power.
• 1:12:56
  Yeah.
• 1:12:56
  When it resonates, act.
• 1:13:00
  Yeah.
• 1:13:01
  Stick to what you're good at.
• 1:13:05
  Well, no, no.
• 1:13:07
  Before you I did say that.
• 1:13:09
  Stick to what you're good at.
• 1:13:11
  Well, I was, I think I, to be more accurate, it should be stick to where
• 1:13:16
  your instincts are telling you to go.
• 1:13:18
  Ah, which is different.
• 1:13:20
  So at Halligan I knew nothing about plants, did I?
• 1:13:24
  But I knew everything about romance and storytelling and I knew that I loved the
• 1:13:29
  romance of sleeping, beauty and plates of time where people had lived their
• 1:13:33
  lives for centuries, one after the other.
• 1:13:36
  And I knew that if I could bottle that essence around a canvas that
• 1:13:40
  was gardens, it would be successful.
• 1:13:42
  I know you gotta go.
• 1:13:44
  I've gotta go there Are those who say they can't, they dunno
• 1:13:47
  how to trust their instincts.
• 1:13:48
  What's the fe?
• 1:13:50
  What do you get?
• 1:13:51
  Do you get a physical feeling when an instinct comes in and an impulse comes
• 1:13:56
  in that says, you must act on this.
• 1:13:58
  Do you feel it somewhere in your solar plexus?
• 1:14:00
  Yes.
• 1:14:01
  Okay.
• 1:14:01
  I do.
• 1:14:02
  I do.
• 1:14:03
  And the other thing I would say is, One of my greatest stresses is when I'm given two
• 1:14:09
  choices, and I don't actually care about either of them, I don't feel an instinct.
• 1:14:13
  It actually drives me nuts.
• 1:14:15
  So I have to walk away from them.
• 1:14:17
  Okay.
• 1:14:18
  You want this?
• 1:14:19
  Trust your instincts.
• 1:14:21
  Yeah, trust them, my dear friend.
• 1:14:23
  I wish I wish so much you could walk through that screen and we
• 1:14:26
  could go and have a beer together.
• 1:14:28
  I would give a lot for that.
• 1:14:30
  Thank you so much.
• 1:14:31
  All right.
• 1:14:32
  Speak soon.
• 1:14:34
  Bye bye.
• 1:14:34
  Bye-bye.
• 1:14:35
  Rupert Isaacson: Thank you for joining us.
• 1:14:36
  We hope you enjoyed today's podcast.
• 1:14:38
  Join our website, new trails learning.com, to check out our online
• 1:14:43
  courses and live workshops in Horse Boy Method, movement Method, and Athena.
• 1:14:49
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• 1:14:54
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• 1:14:56
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• 1:15:00
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• 1:15:03
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• 1:15:10
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• 1:15:14
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• 1:15:16
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