Tim Smit

Tim's journey from record producer to a pig called Horace to the first Eden Project – and why we should always talk to strangers. 

https://www.edenproject.com/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:14

I am so lucky to have in front of me today the entrepreneur, campaigner, and co-founder of the Eden Project, Tim Smith.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

How are you, Tim? If I was any better and my tail was like that of a dog, I'd be flying. You've now got to ask me why are you having such a good day? Okay, give me a moment. So, Tim, why are you having such a good day? Because I've become the father of a mare. My Icelandic horse gave birth at 4.15 this morning.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

So are we talking, James Harriet? Are we talking you being present at the birth and doing your bit to help?

SPEAKER_00 0:58

No, no. I was 10 minutes late, and I it'd be dumb good job I wasn't there to help. I'd have probably fainted. I can't stand the sight of blood. But when you see a baby anything, it's innocent for a moment makes you suspend any cynicism you have, and you just wonder at the notion. The sheer miracle, this horse comes out, and it's literally in about 30 seconds, it was up on his feet. My goodness. I was trying to imagine this morning as I sat looking at it, what must it be like to see the world for the first time? I mean, being sentient, as opposed to us goo-goo ga, you know, when you and I were born, this creature comes out and it's looking at trees and it's looking at crows and it's looking at its mum who's huge. What is it thinking? I mean, so many things to go in on. And were you proudly chomping away at a cigar? No, I well, I used to tromp at cigars, and my youngest son, he said to me, You promised me that I wouldn't be an orphan. And I thought that was pretty hard. He was playing hardball meaning. So I quit about a year ago.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

So listen, I like to start by trotting through uh a little bit of my guest's background. And I know that you started out as an archaeologist, and then famously, lots of people will know this. You then spent ten years as a record producer. And you achieved, if that's the right word, seven gold and platinum discs. What were they for?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Songs by whom? Barry Manilo. But mainly mainly a lady called Louise Tucker, who was an opera singer at the Guildhall, and in the pre-mobile phone era, I was recording at Abbey Road Studios and the singer didn't turn up. And I phoned the three numbers I had in my address book, but the lady, Louise, had been accompanying my sister-in-law, babysitting, the night before at my house for the very first night I'd gone off out after my son's birth, my first son's birth. So I just phoned her up and said, You don't happen to be free right now, do you? And she was in, if you see what I mean. And so she came, she recorded, and four weeks later the record started to go number one all over the place, and it sold really well. It sold about seven million copies. Well, I'm gonna rush out and see if I can get one. What's the name of the record, the first one? It's called Midnight Blue by Louise Tucker. And that was followed by other records by her. She did really, really well, and she's now sadly very ill and is coming to see Snow Patrol tomorrow night at Eden Project with me. Why not? So then you got tired of the record business, and you moved to Cornwall. I went to Cornwall without an idea in my head about what I was gonna do. I knew I could fall back on composing some film music or telemusic. I just didn't want to work with artists anymore. And I then spent every penny I'd saved up on the money pit that was the farm that I bought, and then found myself in a curious and rather unpleasant situation of having no money. And then something really extraordinary happened. I went to the dentist, and of all the things to find in a dentist waiting room was a copy of the stage, but not three years old, but that weeks. I still don't know who we left it. Anyway, uh this is uh 1988, and I open it listlessly for I am anxious about dentists, and it fell open on a page with a picture of the former England defender Jackie Charlton. Ooh, Jackie, and he was holding a whacking grape salmon in one arm and a fishing rod in the other, and underneath it said Jackie Charlton signs deal to do 12-part series called Go Fishing. Now, when you're completely potless and you don't know where your next penny's coming from, it is extraordinary that in your back catalogue you suddenly remember that once you'd been very, very drunk in a recording studio with some friends, one of whom had a banjo, and you composed as a piece of fun a track composed of all of the fishing puns, you know. You can imagine this isn't the time and the place. I can't sound up the energy, you know. I'm a dab hand at this, all that sort of stuff. And I am up the attic at my house, and I found the original recording of this track, and There Is a God. I've got to tell you, There is a God. The title of this joke song was called Go Fishing. So I made a copy of this cassette and I sent it to the film company who got back literally within a couple of days and said, We want it, we want that to be our theme song. By the way, have you got any other music? Talk about luck, eh?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Well, luck or fate, one or the other, it's a fabulous, fabulous story. So you've now got some money coming in, unexpectedly. You've got some money coming in, and you then bumped into somebody and it changed your life again. Tell us what happened.

SPEAKER_00 6:27

Well, it was something, not somebody. I knew a guy who drove past my house and he said, I've got a really big black pig in the back of this van, and it's going to go to the abattoir unless you take it. But I do understand you've got a garage and you haven't got a car smart enough to put in it, so why don't you have the pig? I didn't really have a good response. I was all my training at school and university hadn't prepared me for a question like that. So I accepted Horace for so he became called. Horace disliked the garage intensely, broke down the back door of the farmhouse, and decided to come and stay in the kitchen and warm his ass against the arger. And he was very lonely, I could tell pretty quickly. And I realized that I had the choice of either sending him to the abattoir after all, or finding himself a mate. So I put an advert out. Not in the stage, presumably by this time. In no, this is not the stage. No, this was actually Farmer's Weekly. I was looking for another Vietnamese potbelly pig, and lo and behold, I found one, and I called her Doris. And the moment Horace set eyes on Doris, it was love at first sight, and they suddenly decided that the garage was the little bijou love nest that they'd been looking for. And I didn't see them again for a long time. They were in there doing whatever pigs do. And then in the November of 1989, at two o'clock in the morning, Doris gave birth. The technical word is she farrowed, and there was a whole bunch of little piglets. And it was almost biblical because there they were under a heat lamp in long straw. And um I fell in love with the whole idea of rare breeds. That's where the rare breed thing came from. I've always been interested in rare breeds, but it never occurred to me to actually have a rare breed park. But what you haven't mentioned about my coming from London to Cornwall was that I made the decision at 37 that I was going to lead my life by instinct and do whatever life threw up. I wasn't going to plan myself at all. And I'd arrived in Cornwall because I'd been on holiday before I came. I walked into an estate agent because it was raining. I saw a house. It was raining the following day. So I went to see the house, as opposed to just being, you know, curious. And I ended up being jammed in a lane to the farm by a tractor in the rain, and this guy came out and said, What do you do, an old buck? And I said, This is really embarrassing. I've come secretly see this farmhouse at the end of this lane. And he said, Adams, it's my house. Anyway, two and a half hours later I shook hands and I'd bought the house. But it was crazy because I lived in Brixton. But my life's like that. I've actually I decided as a positive act of curiosity with life that I wanted to take random, a bit like the dice man, but without the really horrible alternatives, I would only accept good alternatives. I wasn't going to sort of rob a bank or murder somebody. But you know what? It's really funny when you decide to lead your life by instinct, the world becomes a place of extraordinary joy. Really extraordinary joy. I mean, the thing, as we'll discover as we talk, I developed a philosophy which was that I accept every third invitation unless it clashes with a family commitment. And the reason I do that, it's not that I don't accept the first, by the way, but I always accept the third. And I do that because I want to leave open the option of meeting people that I shouldn't or fate wouldn't normally have put me in the way of meeting. Because part of the problem of doing what we do is that we tend to be quite biased towards accepting invitations from those who are like us or in our profession or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

So when I sent you off to the far-flung places to make speeches in front of corporate types who had absolutely nothing to do with your world, as it were. Part of you thought, well, you know what? Something interesting might happen. I might bump into somebody interesting.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Absolutely. In fact, over the last twenty years, I would say, nearly thirty, almost every major life-changing event has come, a professional life-changing event has come from the third meeting. And I've done some crazy stuff. I've judged dog shows, I've opened old people's homes, I've been at the West of England Ballroom Dancing Championships, and all the things which I would have ordinarily refused to do. And each one yields something peculiar. I went to speak in a Nissan near Taunton, and I was told there would only be 50 people and a dog there. But I went because it was a third invitation, and blown me down. Three months later, I was in Plymouth addressing the European Commissioners trying to seek money for the Eden project, and it was quite obvious we weren't going to get it. And suddenly this old guy gets up and he says, My name's Humphrey Templey. I'm chairman of Somerset County Council, and I happen to be in a Nissan up near Taunton three months ago, and I saw this man speaking. And it's quite obvious he has the wider West Country in his interest than just the narrow confines of Cornwall. And I've spoken to my colleagues on the council board who are behind me here, and we've all agreed that we in Somerset will drop one of our projects if the rest of you will also drop one each. So that speech was worth twelve point seven million quid.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

My goodness. Now, before we get to talk about Eden, just let's talk a little bit about Heligan and how that came about, because it is part of this story of coincidences and luck and fate and well you put it best, just simply working on instinct. How did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 12:29

It was because I had the piglets, I decided I wanted to find a site for a rare breed park. There was a site right next to where I'm sitting now, which had camper vans on it occasionally, and I came to see the owner, and he's I'm really sorry, but I've just let this whole site literally a couple of days ago, but he'd given me a cup of coffee so hot I couldn't politely just glug it and go. So we had to engage in small talk. So during the course of it, I happened to drop the information that I had been an archaeologist, and he then uttered the immortal words, I have need of an archaeologist, which no one had ever sent to me before. And he then told me the story that this man was a lovely man, and he's become a friend called John Willis, and he had inherited the whole estate around where I was sitting at that time, and he didn't have any money, and as you will recall, nor do I, um nor did I at that point, but he took me in the following day to see this overgrown estate in which had been a once famous garden, but it was now completely overgrown with brambles, and we cut our way in, and it turned out that no one had been in there since 1915. And to cut a long story short, we cut our way through and I eventually came into a walled garden through a rusted-up green painted door in a big brick-faced wall, and there was this old vinery, but with all the wood long rotted out, with the glass just hanging in the ivy and brambles like uh guillotines in waiting. And I I just fell hopelessly in love with the whole thing. It was like an essay in the most marvellous green, and then the thing which actually swung it completely was my eyes were drawn to a pair of what I would later come to know as vine scissors that were hanging on a nail on the wall. And the moment, you know those crazy paintings when we were young where it were all with dots, and your clever mates would say, Bloody hell, that's clever. There's an elephant in the middle of that, and you go, Where? I can't see that. You know the thing. Well, having got my eyes centered on toolness due to these vine scissors, I suddenly saw tools everywhere, you know, lying on the floor everywhere. It was as if someone had said tea time and everybody gone fully intending to return at some later point, but they never did. And the story of that we would peel back over the coming year. But it was a very romantic thing, and I decided that night that I wanted to restore the gardens, and I knew nothing about gardening. I knew actually very little about plants, except broadly the green side should be facing the sun, and that was a good idea. But that's about it, and that's not an exaggeration, I really didn't know. Although, for anybody listening who's interested in career changes or doing weird stuff, before you talk yourself out of it because you know nothing about it, be aware that one of the greatest gifts on earth is to be born with a human brain that is quite quick to assimilate knowledge. But if you can assimilate great knowledge without all the prejudices that come from having done the same thing all your life, you can actually have real insights and make a real difference in areas where there hasn't been any change for decades.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

That fascinates me. I used to work with a guy who at the time was he might have just been 20. And he'd been working since he was at school through his computer. He'd been advising companies in China on their manufacturing process. And he'd grown this agency because by that time there were 20 or so people working for him. And he'd go into these factories and places all over the place and he'd hear people say, Well, he's a child. What the bloody hell does he know about what we do and how we do it? And Josh used to explain that actually that was his strength because he didn't know about how they uh used to do things, he could reinvent it without any of that baggage. Yes. It's a fascinating idea.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Yeah, and I see it in so many areas. I think one of the really interesting things about the age in which we are living at the moment, where predominantly white middle-aged men are getting into a complete froth over the destruction of civilizations we know it because of artificial intelligence. I come at it from a completely different end of the telescope, which is if you can have artificial intelligence answering your questions for you at speed, that's amazing. But what it will never do is put things together that are odd. And I think one of the things is that humans that are able to have this freaky ability to put things together, agglomerate them so that they add up to more than the sum of their parts. I think that kind of systems thinking, I know the word system is usually applied to computers and mathematical brains, but I think actually brilliant systems thinking is something that is a very human ability. And, you know, we'll talk about it in the in the relationship to Eden, maybe, but I'm absolutely convinced that A forcing yourself to meet people you don't know, bear in mind that parents, or as you say, will send you to a good school or something so that you can meet the people you need to know. Your parents are really stupid because they didn't understand that if you look at history, magic is created by meeting the people you didn't know you needed to know. I can see you agree with me with that. And all throughout my life I've been finding that the great liberators in your mind for how you do it, do anything, whether it be restoring a garden, writing a book, whether it be setting up a shop, or coming up with ideas to design something that make people who are old feel comfortable in it. You find you meet people that you can't think why on earth they should be interesting you to you. You then let them talk and you remember how to listen, and they suddenly fill you in on a world you didn't even know existed. And that's why stupid people are the people who don't realize you learn nothing by talking, you learn everything by listening. And then suddenly your world is just open up. I'll give you a good example. I got feverishly drunk one night, meeting somebody I'd never met before called John Zegon, and he is the world expert on gerontics, old age Alzheimer stuff. Okay. John Zysal is his name, sorry. And I met him in an event in London. He'd never been to Cornwall. I didn't know he was famous, but I phoned up my people, my people, my colleagues in Cornwall. I said, I'm sitting here getting drunk with a man called John Zysal. Do you know who he is? And they said, Do you mean the John Zisor? I said, Drew, are you the John Zysal? And he laughed. I said, I guess I am. They said, He's a god to us. He's an absolute genius. And they explained over the phone what he was brilliant at. He created spaces. He was involved in that thing, you know, Oliver Sachs wrote that Awakenings. You know, that book about Alzheimer's people who went to a theater and then peeled back all of their amnesia to do with their disease. Anyway, I persuaded John to be as radical as I was, and he accepted my invitation to buy him a ticket on the sleeper to Cornwall that night. And he came when we arrived in Cornwall. I think I had one sentence with him. And the whole time he was in Cornwall because he got jumped on by my team, and then he went for lunch with Nick Grimshaw, the architect who designed Eden, and Nick said it was the most exciting lunch he'd ever had. It completely transformed his view as to how you start to think when you've got Alzheimer's and how you can make a building feel. So for those who are listening who are experts in this, please forgive my horrible ignorance in the way I phrase this. But if you start to get up because you think you've got to get up, but by the time you're up, you can't remember why you were up. If you've designed buildings with beautiful, colourful sofas at the end of a corridor or an open fire or huge vases of flowers and things, the heart is not disturbed by anxiety because whatever it is your eyes have seen, that must have been why you got up and you're completely relaxed. You just go over to look at it. And boy, isn't that a simple observation? It's quite beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

And the I mean the broad moral of the story is I love the way it it flips received wisdom on its head because the moral of the story is talk to strangers.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Anyway, listen, last time I checked, we're in a decaying glasshouse in the Garden of Helligan.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

Pick us up from there. I fell in love with it. I decided that I wanted to restore the whole thing. I knew nothing about gardens at all. But I said to John, I said, I've got no money, but I am the best. Marketing man I've ever met. So what I want to do is I want to shake hands with you, and I want you to give me a long lease on your estate for nothing. A quid. And the deal is that when I restore it, I will make it so famous that you can have 20% of the revenue from visitors coming in. And we shook hands. And it's the best deal he's ever made in his life, and it's the best deal that I ever made in mine, and it's based completely on trust between us. And that was in 1990 that we did it, and we remain chums, and it's been such an agreeable adventure.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

So take us from Heligan, which by the way, I should tell our listeners, particularly those in Belgium and Kazakhstan, that there is a book still available about the lost gardens of Heligan, and it's absolutely beautiful. You really should have it, not just on your bookshelf or your coffee table, but actually you should have it beside your bed, I think. Anyway, enough of that Abbott.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I like you. You're a very nice man. And especially people in Belgium. There's in fact a Dutch version for you to read if you are of the Flemish persuasion. Unfortunately, there's no French version.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Well, I'm not going to commit to that, but I'm I'm happy to be the second best marketer in this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

So well, no, no, you sell ice creams to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabians.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

So you've done helligan with your team. You're always at pains to point out that, well, like everything you do, it's a team effort. And then how does this idea for the Eden project come about?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Well, when I did the plant thing, I didn't know anything about plants except, as I say, greenside up. But I worked with some darn good plantsmen. And when we discovered that the reason why the gardens at Heligon had gone derelict was because three-quarters of the 22 that worked there had died in the fields of Flanders and France, Northern France. And the owner of the place had just fenced off the garden and gone to live in a villa in Italy. He was so sad by that. And when we discovered that and we found the war memorials with all their names on it, we decided we were going to tell the story of the ordinary men and women who had made these gardens great. And why that's important is that in 1990 there wasn't a single working productive garden open to the public in Britain. Not one. And even probably the greatest wall garden of the day at Chatsworth had been bulldozed in the 1980s to make a caravan park. All the glass bell jar and everything else had been crushed under bulldozer. So we decided to tell the whole opera. And in doing this, it changed my life because A, I learned something which every Don person alive today ought to know about horticulture, is that until the invention of refrigeration, which although it was invented in the late 1890s, only became available to the middle classes for their homes in the 19, early 1950s, until then we were dependent on great horticulturists growing seasonally for 365 days a year, sometimes for flavor, but sometimes for keeping qualities, other times, you know. April was known as either the hungry month, or if you're really unlucky, the dying month. When you start to look at a garden with the respect of knowing that the head gardener, he or she had to know how to have these things ripening in series and which things to that would store well. So for example, there's some apples that taste pretty woolly, but they tasted a bit of sugar right up until April if you keep them in the dark, in a thick bed of straw, and so on. And they needed to know that you grow one set of fruit on a north-facing wall, it will be retarded because it's not getting the sun. Yeah, so it'll be probably six weeks later than the fruit that's on the south-facing inner wall. You suddenly go, crikey, these people were bloody brilliant. And then you look at all the varieties of things they were growing. Horror crosses across your brain when you start thinking about it, that this isn't a political statement, although it's very political. Big agriculture, in its desire to have maximum yield, maximum homogeneity of everything looking the same, and so on, has created an extraordinarily near-perfect storm of perfect pattern and shape, sugars replacing phenols in the fruit and vegetable, which means that they're no longer as good for us as they used to be. But we're being sold them because they're heavy yielding, as if it's better for you. The modern days are with us. And yet, I bought a golf course seven years ago, and I've turned it into an orchard. And we talked with Oxford at the moment, we're looking at the old apple varieties, and apples that were created pre-1850 are really rich in phenols. So they're antioxidants, they're really good for you. And apple a day does keep the doctor awake by and large. After that, the grows of, because of our childlike taste, they have replaced the phenols with sugars. So you don't have exactly the same thing. So I think we're going to see a revolution where something that was considered to be historic and of marginal interest for fans, we're suddenly going to realize, a bit like probiotic drinks, oh my god, our tummies are really sophisticated creatures, and we've got to feed them really well, and we might live a long time if we do that. Bear in mind our life expectancy is going down. Isn't that interesting?

SPEAKER_01 28:10

It is. You've just reminded me, I don't know whether you know this, and I can't think where I read it. The chap who was asked to design and plan rationing in the Second World War had a very serious stomach complaint. So in his mind, the most healthy thing to do was to keep it very simple and very natural and for obvious reasons quite limited. And so we ended up with a rationing system that actually made people healthier then than they are today. I just find that remarkable and wonderful. Anyway, listen, I keep trying this. Let's go back to you launching this at the time preposterous idea of the Eden project with so many hurdles in front of you and so many reasons why you couldn't and shouldn't do it, but you went ahead anyway.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Yeah, that's the hero version. Thank you for that. The truth is, we were living in a country where A, the economics meant that governments and lotteries were putting some money into projects that were exciting. However, we were also living in a country that was starved, a bit like the days of rationing after the war, was starved of permission to do exciting things. There was a real hunger for beauty. So I think the Millennium Commission will, in years to come, be seen as one of the most inspired decisions ever to enable a panel of people to choose to support things that would otherwise not get funding. And I loved all the worthy people from Tunbridge Wells, so to speak, getting angry about the waste of money to do this, that, and the other. Actually, the success rate for all of these exciting projects was fantastic. And I'm glad there were some failures because if there hadn't been any failures, they wouldn't have been trying hard enough, would they? So the big thing I would like you to take out of your heroizing of me is the following. People love big. One of the things is that almost every human being I know has a gold coffee bean inside them, and that gold coffee bean is the sum total of all their disappointments at the person they dreamt they could have been when they were young and they now aren't. If you can create a stage on which people can suddenly feel that maybe their best years aren't behind them, maybe something really exciting. You're not going to win Wimbledon when you're 50, okay, but you might well do something just as good. And if you can make people believe that they could be part of a stage set, a cast that is going to do something amazing, the energy that creates is fantastic. I mean, absolutely fantastic. If you ally that with a fundraising proposal, which is Arthur Conondora's Lost World and the Crater of a Volcano, everybody knows the story of Arthur Conondor's Lost Worlds and Crater of a Volcano. It actually isn't fantastical. It's already in the DNA of almost every single English person alive. So if you say we're going to go into the crater of a volcano and there's going to be some godlike figure that's going to pour every productive plant on which humans depend into it, you're not going to allow advertising so people aren't distracted, and you're going to make it very rock and roll in terms of its interpretation. If an eight-year-old can't understand it, it doesn't count. Suddenly people go, oh, that's pretty cool. And it's big. I mean, it's really big, and the technology was revolutionary. It was far more complicated in terms of imagining you could do it, but the doing of it, if you've got the right skills, Gay Coley, who was the co-chief executive with me for a long time, she coined a rather marvellous phrase, which was dare to dream and organise to deliver. And I kept saying to her, you ought to write a business book on that, because that's actually the secret. Dreamers ought to be forced to have an accountsperson at their right shoulder and a lawyer at their left shoulder and an artist. There are ways of building amazing things which need people of opposite abilities that are orchestrated in some way to get the best out of them.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

In a very small way, I was lucky enough to have a business partner who was really good at all the things I was shit at. And that in my case was luck. But it's such a helpful lesson to anybody at the beginning of their career that actually, yes, be brave, imagine, and everything you've said so far. But have people around you who know about stuff that you don't know about or you're not interested in. That's a fantastic bit of advice, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 33:16

Yes. There are a number of very simple things that MBAs don't seem to have. One of which is the first thing about being successful is about losing your fear of being disliked. That's, I think, the first thing. I think most people are just crucified with the sense of wanting to be liked, which makes them not make good decisions. But also there's a desire, we become so personalized in the way that we look at our culture, we think we're individuals. Everything's about individuals. We're not. We're tribal creatures. But part of our tribal characteristic is the pretense that we're individuals. But what the hell do these people think taste is then? Taste is a common acceptance of something, and there are some people who taste make it and so on. But actually, if you behave a long way outside of what the norm is, you get policed back into it. And we allow people to be freaks as far as our society can permit it, and as confident, the more confident a society is, the wider the range of what we consider acceptable behavior. The less confident it shrinks, doesn't it? The culture of the individual means that you say, that's my idea. IPR. You hear it everywhere. You know, intellectual property. Everyone's an artist these days. I want to protect my IPR. Actually, this the best way of protecting your IPR is not necessarily to spend a fortune on lawyers. It might be better to have some people next to you who are brilliant at sharing your IPR with you, who are really tough, and no one wants to mess with you. I completely and utterly agree with that.

SPEAKER_01 34:52

Okay, that tangent was entirely of my making. Now you're faced with creating something utterly extraordinary, which involved 83,000 tons of soil apart from anything else. It involved working with, as you said, the architects at Grimshaw, engineers from Arab, McAlpine, or McAlpine, isn't it? That's the correct pronunciation. McAlpine.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

And don't forget Tony Hunt, a great engineer and his team.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

As well as all the gardeners and everything else. And you end up with well, the most famous element, I guess, is the rainforest biodome. Fifty meters tall.

SPEAKER_00 35:36

57.3. It's not that I'm competitive.

SPEAKER_01 35:42

It's utterly remarkable. And it's become a fantastically successful, insert whatever word you like, attraction. Definitely not, I note, anything like a theme park, but still very much an attraction. And I mean these figures are going to be out of date now, but I've got in front of me 15 million visitors. 25. Probably a typo. Okay, the next one's going to be wrong as well, though. So anything upwards of one billion pounds contributed to the Cornish economy. Eight. Eight.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

I don't know what happened there. The ones nowhere near the eight. Those figures you're questioning, you're not mad. They were figures that were in our biography that we just forgot to change. And we've just handed to Parliament the economic impact study. It's our 25th anniversary, so we just done it again on Cambridge, we're all over it like a rash. I didn't believe a word of it. It seemed to be far too good to be true. But now that it's in my interest, of course it's true. The truth is we're very political, but political with a small P. We didn't pioneer, but we rode on the backs of the giants who started with this whole thing about being pretty pathological about local sourcing, making sure we bought local. And that makes a real big difference because you start to create a climate in which people develop products for your retail and for your catering and all the rest of it, which are all locally sourced. And you suddenly discover when you do it, like when we started, we discovered that half of the beef which was British beef isn't British beef at all. There's a legal thing that if you import beef from the Argentine, for example, but you then package it in the UK, it can be called British or Cornish or whatever. So once you discover all these anomalies, you have to put them right. And then you see that there's another issue, which is if you buy all your cheese in Cornwall, right, Eden, other than one big dairy, could consume in three months all the cheese at that time produced in Cornwall.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Josh.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Yeah, that gives you a liability to think like an economist. How do we build the manufacturing capacity while at the same time, in fairness, building the amount of outlets for them? Because you know as well as I do that one of the cruelest things you can do is to make yourself the sole agent for somebody. Because if you screw it up and go bust, you take everybody with you. Not that I ever intended, or we ever intend to go bust, but if you see yourself as being a socially minded or civic-minded capitalist, you can do so much good. You don't have to maximize your profit, you optimize your profit, you optimize the job creation. You then do things like we got criticized for paying our staff pretty well when we started, we paid the living wage, and we got so much criticism from uh local pubs and restaurants, and people saying, look at you, state sponsored, and now you're gonna make us all go bust. Guess what? They had to compete and pay their staff properly. Imagine what happened. The pubs got better, the restaurants got better, people wanted to come to work. It sounds like a general talks in the bar, you know, but this isn't right wing. I'm not right wing. But I think actually seeing capitalism as not necessarily a bad thing, it's just there are an awful lot of bad people in capitalism, just like there are a lot of bad socialists. But well-managed capitalism, which is managed in such a way that it is for the benefit, the wider wealth of the widest possible audience, I think is a transformative thing. And I think it's worth actually, and I know I'm not alone, thinking about how we ended up in a world where something like 1% of the people own such a large percentage of the world. We know that cannot be right. And what's really tragic for us, people like you, people like me, is that you can be pro-capital and you're faced with such bad behavior that everything you believe in in terms of an economic system is threatened by, gosh, at the risk of making you feel bad. Does any sensible person think the privatization of water has been a huge success? Does any sensible person think that that's a good example of capitalism? I don't think many people do, and I don't think many Tories even do. But there are lots of examples like that where things that we should be stronger and more vocal about criticizing, and we should not get into our political tribes. Oh, I'm a so-and-so, so therefore I'm not going to allow that fact that that's true. You must notice with all the people you interview how many people defend the completely indefensible because they want to remain part of an establishment. It's craven, absolutely craven.

SPEAKER_01 40:50

I think that's partly it, and I think it's partly the problem that people have acknowledging the mistakes, that things that they supported were a mistake. Most people don't like admitting mistakes. I'm laughing because I'm not most people in that respect. I love admitting mistakes, which maybe is equally self-indulgent. But what you're touching on, I think, is the danger of ideology as distinct from values, as distinct from practicality, and most importantly, and you know, I'm on my high horse now, most importantly, as distinct from the long term. So much, so many decisions, so much bad business, so much bad government. In that case, the kind of obvious reasons to do with the political cycle and needing to get re-elected, but so much of it is destroyed by people being short-term. And when you build a new project, as I know you are, and I want to ask you about them, you're not saying when you're budgeting and doing the planning and whatever. I'm sure you're saying, you know, what do we expect this to bring in? But you're not looking at the lifetime of the thing in terms of 20 or 30 years, are you? You're looking at it way beyond that. Please tell me that.

SPEAKER_00 42:19

So I have a long-term vision for how we do things, but the way I see it is rather different to the way you're painting it. We turn up in a place A, and our job is we are exorcists. Our first obligation is to make people who live there realize that the pall that hangs low across that land called bad luck and nothing good ever happens here, is dispelled. Then you need to catch a few clever people who live in those areas and say that was your idea. And slowly the culture of you starts to appear. And the Eden Project, by the time it gets built, is not our project at all. What we've done is we've been throwing flour over the invisible man, which is the talent that was depressed where we came. And I think if you were to ask me what our greatest talent is, it is we can make other people believe in themselves. But why that's a long-term impression is that I want the Eden projects not to be owned by us by the time we finish. I want them to be owned by the people who have been there, watched it, suddenly believe in it, and suddenly they use it as a springboard to rediscover the person they once wanted to be. And there's nothing more powerful than that.

SPEAKER_01 43:43

I get it. Any listener who was wondering at the beginning whether Tim Smith was all about growing exotic plants will now know why I got so excited. About putting you in front of different audiences. Because your vision goes way beyond putting this fancy dome in the middle of an old Cornish quarry. These are lessons, these are confidence building, they're not tricks at all. They're building blocks. And I can't think of a single organization, a single business, a single anything, public-private sector, which couldn't benefit massively from hearing this from you. But also, not the outsider, in fact, not in a business sense. You build successful projects. You escape the possibility of anybody dismissing what you talk about as airy fairy because you've been there and done it. So the speakers I couldn't bear and spent my entire career avoiding and ignoring are those who might have the gift of the gab and read a few books on self-improvement or building a business or whatever. Um hadn't actually bloody well done it. Anyway, enough. End of hobby horse. Just tell us quickly, you've got Eden Project in Morecambe in Lancashire. Where's that at? As in what stage is that at?

SPEAKER_00 45:15

Well, this is remarkable, you should ask me. On a fortnight tomorrow, we're digging our spade into the ground to start constructing it. We've got the money, which is going to be our fourth mortgam, because we built a very large one in China, in the city of Qingdao, the marine capital. We built one in Dubai. They're all different, they don't look the same. Then we've got Morecambe, and then when we finished Morecambe, we're going to build in Dundee, in the old gas works on the banks of the River Tay. But each of them is a different form of theatre, and it would be a real failure if what we did was to repeat ourselves. The only thing we don't repeat is this. Remember when I said to you about accepting the third invitation. Yeah. The Irish have got the best phrase of all. And I learnt it recently, which is random meetings are dancing lessons from God. Yeah, I might write that down, actually. That's quite good, isn't it? The Irish are good at these things. I know. We're all jealous of the Irish, aren't we? Because they're just they're usually good looking, they're poetic. It does always rain there, so that's one comforting thing.

SPEAKER_01 46:32

Although as gardeners, we all welcome rain sometimes. Anyway, Tim, I have no choice. People have things to do. I'm hugely reluctantly gonna wrap this up. We haven't covered everything by such a long way. There's so much more I would love to talk about, but I'm gonna leave it with asking you one last question. And you've already touched on so many different elements, but I'm gonna ask you to sum it up crisply, please. What's your advice now in this state of the world, state of the country at the moment? What's your advice for young people?

SPEAKER_00 47:14

I don't want to give advice to young people because they're really smart. I want to give advice to anybody over the age of 35. Anyone who's listening who's over the age of 35, I hope you lose a year of your life every time you talk to a young person with that dystopian, drooling voice of yours about how we're going to head in a handcart. There has never been a more exciting time to be alive than now. Believe me, the advances in science, the advances in society are actually monumental, but they're just beneath the surface before the media has finally caught on to it. And a part of the problem is old people thinking the past was a better place. It ruddy well wasn't. It's actually about to become popping with excitement. And I'm really serious. I'm not saying this is a kind of proselytizing thing. Let me tell you one thing. When I was young, I went to see a musical called Hair. The theme tune was The Age of Aquarius. The chorus. Dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Exactly. Well, you see, you and I are of an age. And the chorus of that song was We Are Stardust, which was actually a ripoff of uh Carl Sagan and his wife in the book Cosmos had talked about one day I hope that people will discover that all life is stardust, made from stardust. Just think, in the last 30 years alone, science has shown us the complexity of the human body, the microbial structure of our insides. It's also shown us the sophistication of the microbial structure of soils and amazingly is showing us that they're all interrelated. Doesn't that excite you? That maybe the next generation of young people will actually have a God worth worshipping?

SPEAKER_01 49:11

It doesn't just excite me in a sort of theoretical, you know, it won't involve me, but it's great. It excites me right the way through. And I tell you what it also does, Tim, in a very small way, is that it means we're gonna wrap up this conversation with our listeners feeling upbeat and excited about the day. And that's a joy. Tim, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Sir Tim, maybe I should say. Let's agree to talk again at some stage in the future. Thank you so much. Have a great day. And you. My pleasure. Goodbye, Jeremy. Goodbye, Tim.