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Evan Davis: Good morning, everybody.
Great pleasure to be here.
This session is called "Meet the Trailblazers." What's the
point of meeting trailblazers?
It's highly unlikely you are going to become one by sitting
in the same room as one and listening to their story
anymore than you will become a great sportsman by talking to a
long jumper or become a great violinist by talking
to a violinist.
However, on the other hand, it does seem ridiculous to have
abstract discussions about innovation and pioneering
without actually talking to people who have done it.
So we will be meeting some in this session.
Now, I am struck, as I have spoken to them today, by
the precariousness of the trailblazer's existence.
The thin line between discovery and futility, between good luck
and bad luck, between genius and insanity.
And the history, in fact, of Nobel Prizes reveals all.
In 1927 the Prize went to the man, the Nobel Prize for
medicine went to the man who came up with the idea of
giving malaria to people who were suffering dementia.
Not a good idea.
Not one of the best remembered Nobel Prizes.
And then on the other hand, you might remember Mr.
Chandrasekhar, the man who postulated the existence of
black holes in the 1930s who was laughed at and finally got
a Nobel Prize for that in 1983, poor chap.
So precarious existence.
The difference between being laughed at and being successful
is a very, very fine one.
We are going to meet three trailblazers.
We are going to meet Kary Mullis, the chemistry Nobel
Prize winner whose innovations in polymerase chain reactions,
insights he had in his car one evening, got him a Nobel Prize.
We are going to meet Lalit Modi, the commissioner of the
Indian Premier League, one of the biggest sporting
tournaments now in the world, from nothing to billions of
eyeballs and billions of dollars of revenue over the
course only of two years.
And before we meet both of those, and I will chat with
each of them individually, their stories are both very,
very interesting, we'll have a little chance for questions at
the end of our 45 minutes, but before we listen and chat to
those two we are going to have a presentation from another
trailblazer, from Bjarke Ingels, who is one of the most
innovative architects in the western world now, the founder
of BIG, Bjarke Ingels Group, which is set up in 2005.
He has been working and running his own office for the
last decade or so.
Has academic connections at Columbia and Harvard, and has
also written his own, if you like, manifesto, "Yes is More."
It's in comic book style so it's an easy read, and we have
a number of copies which in the course of this session we
have to work out how to give away to good folks here.
We have about five copies to give away.
We will find a way of distributing those
throughout our session.
But before we start the conversation, we are going to
listen to Bjarke who is going to talk us through a his
presentation on his work.
Thank you.
Bjarke.
[ Applause ]
Bjarke Ingels: Well, essentially architecture is the
sort of collective effort of continuously refurbishing the
surface of our planet so our cities and our buildings fit
better with the way we want it live.
And that's why we sort of would like to depart from this sort
of traditional image of the radical architect as the sort
of radical young man rebelling against the establishment; that
somehow, radicality is sort of negatively defined by who
or what you are against.
So rather than revolution, we are interested in the idea of
evolution, how our cities and buildings evolve by constantly
incorporating input from the surrounding world.
So in a way, rather than the sort of exclusive attitude of
modernism that less is more, we believe yes is more, by saying
yes to all the conflicting and contradicting demands and
concerns and even compromises of society we can create more
interesting and diverse cities to live in.
So what I would like to do now to focus the scope is to look
at three takes on what role sort of architects or
architecture can play in the sort of growing concern
for sustainability.
And you can say sort of sustainability is quite often
understood as this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has
to hurt in order to do good.
This sort of notion that you are not supposed to take long
warm showers because it's bad for the environment.
So gradually, we all get this sort of idea that sustainable
life is less fun than normal life.
We were recently asked to sort of do the Danish Pavillion for
the Shanghai World Expo that focuses on sustainability.
We thought it would be interesting to focus on
examples where a sustainable city actually increases
the quality of life.
This notion of hedonistic sustainability.
So we asked ourselves what could Denmark possibly show
China that would be relevant to the Chinese; one of the biggest
countries in the world, one of the smallest.
China symbolized by the great dragon.
In Denmark we have a national bird, the swan.
China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the
Chinese public school curriculum, they have three
fairy tales by An Tu Sheng, or Hans Christian Andersen,
as we call him.
And that basically means that all 1.3 billion Chinese grew up
with "The Little Mermaid." The biggest tourist attraction in
China is the Great Wall that is reportedly visible from
outer space, or at least through Google Earth.
The biggest tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little
Mermaid that is, like, hardly even visible from
the canal tours.
There's differences between Shanghai and Copenhagen.
They're both port cities but have completely different
scales and qualities.
So then we started looking at recent urban developments,
like, this is Shanghai 30 years ago.
Bicycles everywhere.
Now you have traffic jams everywhere.
The bicycle has even been forbidden in several places.
Meanwhile, in Copenhagen, we are expanding
our bicycle lanes.
A third of all Danes commute by bike.
And we have a system of free bicycles called the City Bike.
So we asked ourselves, why don't we relaunch the bicycle
as something cool in China.
We create the Danish pavilion as, like, a loop of almost like
a Danish street, where the Chinese can bike around on the
Danish City Bikes, sort of experience how fun it is to
ride a bike rather than sort of sitting in traffic jam or
looking for a parking spot.
As I mentioned, both Copenhagen and Shanghai are port cities,
but in Copenhagen, our water has become so clean that
you can swim in it.
One of the first projects we did was actually the Harbor
Bath in Copenhagen that sort of extends public
life into the water.
We thought in the same way, like, why don't we let the
Chinese experience this.
Like, at the heart of the pavilion, there is this Harbor
Bath where the Chinese can actually experience how clean,
if not how cold, the Danish water is.
Sort of, basically, in the middle of the city, if your
rivers and harbors are clean, you can actually swim.
And in the middle of this Harbor Bath, for six months, we
proposed to actually place The Little Mermaid, not a copy,
but the actual mermaid.
She has now gone to China for six months.
So, essentially, like, the 1.3 billion Chinese who grew up
with the mermaid can now sort of experience her in real life.
Finally, sort of to make sure that the pavilion doesn't only
sort of contain sustainable experiences but it also
operates sustainably, we decided to eliminate
all air conditioning.
So the spiral form of the building actually allows the
thermal rise of hot air to sort of create a natural breeze.
It is then sort of ejected through a sort of a perforated
facade that also allows Chinese people to photograph
the mermaid.
So, basically, this is some images of the final.
We saw that just opened the 1st of May.
But recently, like, this is one of the first visuals we did of
the Danish pavilion, if you sort of notice the red frame.
And this is an image of Tony Stark's Mad Science Expo
in the new Iron Man movie.
And if you compare the two red frames, this is Hollywood,
and this is Shanghai.
So I think, just to conclude, when Hollywood starts ripping
off eco-architecture to portray sci-fi, sustainable
architecture has become more fun than normal architecture.
The next idea that I would like to introduce is the notion of
architectural alchemy, the idea that by sort of mixing
traditional ingredients, you can actually create gold
or at least added value.
We were recently asked to do an apartment building
and a parking house.
And we thought that rather than, like, having a stack of
apartments looking at a block of parking, we would sort of
turn all the apartments into penthouses, place them on a
podium of cars, and, essentially, all the cars, they
occupy the deep space on the ground, and all the apartments,
they sort of occupy the roofscape where they have sort
of a nice south-facing slope with a view, and where each
house actually gets a house with a garden.
So this is what the building looks like.
The parking also becomes this sort of almost like diagonal
public space underneath the apartments.
Its facade, again, we wanted to make it naturally ventilated,
and in this case, we discovered that by sort of increasing and
decreasing the perforations, we could create a
Rasterized image.
Since we always referred to the project as "the mountain," we
ended up commissioning a Japanese Himalaya photographer
that gave us this sort of beautiful photo of Mount
Everest, so transforming the entire facade into
an urban artwork.
Inside the apartments, it's almost like a sort of
south-facing urban oasis.
The woods of the apartment sort of continues outside.
You have these gardens.
And all the rainwater that drops on the mountain is
accumulated in a big water tank.
And in dry periods, there is an irrigation system, which means
that sort of in one or two years, the mountain in
Copenhagen is going to transform into this sort of
Cambodian temple ruin completely covered in green.
The same idea of, like, how sort of different programs
gravitate towards their ideal position in an urban block we
sort of took to a new level with this project in
Copenhagen, a really big block.
And we asked ourselves, how can you actually make such a big
block sort of diverse and interesting?
What you normally do in Copenhagen is that you do a lot
of identical apartments, and then you put on different
facades as this form of cosmetic diversity.
We thought that different programs actually have
different needs, like, offices and shops, they like to be
close to the customers on the ground.
Apartments want to be higher.
But since housing is less deep than offices, we get extra
space for, like, little gardens and maybe then a small path so
the kids can run down and play with their neighbors, almost
like a neighborhood of townhouses.
Then more sort of classic apartments, and then
finally penthouses sort of rowhouses with front
lawns and roof gardens.
Sort of the master plan dictated a pedestrian passage
through the block, so we turned it into a figure "8." And then,
finally, sort of offices, they like daylight, but they hate
glare, and they spend energy on cooling.
So to the south, we sort of reduce them to zero and lift
them up in the north to allow a four-story office building
and sort of elevate the apartments into the sun.
And in reverse, to the southwest, we sort of pushed
the corner down, opening up the entire courtyard
for daylight and views.
And this sort of distortion of the block sort of
short-circuits the path, creating, like, a public path
sort of entering the entire building.
We started building the project right before the onslaught of
the global financial crisis.
Unfortunately, a lot of the other developers didn't
get started, so...
[ Laughter ]
Bjarke Ingels: So people moving in are going to have, like, a
spectacular view for the next five to ten years.
[ Laughter ]
Bjarke Ingels: In January, we sort of completed the loop, and
we could make this sort of *** journey that sort of --
essentially, not only does this idea of architectural alchemy
allow each program to occupy its favorite position in the
three-dimensional block, but it also expands public life and
the possibility of social encounters beyond the street,
all the way to the roof of the building and back down again.
So as you can see, it's almost like a hybrid between a sort of
Mediterranean mountain village and a Copenhagen
perimeter block.
So, basically, sort of as a conclusion of this, the last
sort of idea that I'd like to present became possible a year
and a half ago when a minister from Azerbaijan came to
Copenhagen and he fell in love with some of our work,
especially the mountain or the idea that you can make
mountains out of architecture.
He told us that the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku, is facing
this desert island that has been closed down for
development because they are afraid that, like, a wall of
mediocre highrises would sort of ruin the view from
the Caspian Sea.
So he suggested what if we could make an urban development
that would recreate the silhouettes of the seven most
significant mountains of Azerbijian.
So sort of sounded like a maniac idea, so we loved it
Essentially, Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking
the bated (phonetic) Island of Zira, almost like the
diagram of the Azeri flag.
Our commission was to sort of sample the topographies of the
seven most significant mountains of Azerbijian and
sort of translate them into rational and functional
structures for human life.
And because of the island is a bated island, it
has no infrastructure.
It has no energy.
It has no water.
It has no sewers.
We decided to conceive the entire island of a single
ecosystem, so we used sort of windmills to drive desalination
plants, increasing the amount of fresh air, freshwater.
We used the heat of the sun to sort of heat the water.
We uses the thermal properties of water to heat and
cool the buildings.
Finally, sort of all the excess water from the human life,
instead of dumping it in a sewer, we created the system of
organic root zone gardens that organically clean the water and
actually gradually increase the amount of water that comes
to this dry island.
And sort of in time, the entire sort of desert island is going
to turn into this sort of lush, green landscape.
You can see where sustainable -- you can see where sort
of urban development normally happens at
the expense of nature.
In this case, it almost creates the nature and the different
mountains, rather than merely looking like mountains, they
also perform like ecosystems that they sort of create
shelter from the wind.
They accumulate the heat of the sun and they sort of gather
all the rainwater in creeks and lakes.
So after working on it for six months, it got approved by the
president with a little luck and some absence of
financial crisis.
In ten years, what started as essentially like the mountain
in Copenhagen could become the Seven Peaks of Azerbijian.
So you can say, like, as our presence as humans on the
surface of the planet sort of increases in extent and
numbers, our sort of, let's say, capacity but also
obligation to take responsibility of actually
creating ecosystems for both human life but also all other
forms of life on the planet.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]
Evan Davis: Thank you.
Thank you, Bjarke.
Let me ask our other two trailblazers to come up and
take their seats as well.
While they come up, Bjarke, I looked at your Web site and
you have got little icons for all the projects that your
company has been engaged in.
And you categorize them as they are kind of "ideas," which is a
huge pile, and then "in progress," which is a kind of
medium-sized pile, and then the "completed" ones are
a much smaller pile.
What's the sort of ratio of kind of brilliant (inaudible),
like these Seven Peaks of Azerbijian, to
actual completions?
Do you expect you will lose 60 or 80% of all your
brilliant ideas?
Bjarke Ingels: I think using the term "ideas" is an
optimistic way of coining for me.
But, essentially, I think, like, roughly like 5% -- it is
like in the Darwin idea of evolution that only a very few
species survive and only they pass their attributes on
to the next generation.
So I think we actually committed, like, 200 projects.
So now only eight have been built.
So it is a kind of frustrating ratio, but life is
-- life is tough.
[ Laughter ]
Evan Davis: And the National Bank of Iceland which is one of
your commissions -- Bjarke Ingels: We were so lucky to win
this glorious international competition two months
before the total crackdown.
Essentially, we were sort of celebrating that finally we
were directly for the people that actually
printed the money.
So only two things could go wrong.
Either all of Iceland would disappear in a volcanic cloud
-- that, basically, happened now -- or the entire
country could go bankrupt.
That happened then.
Evan Davis: That happened then.
[ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
Evan Davies: Kary, Kary Mullis, you won your Nobel Prize for --
why don't you tell us what you won it for.
Give us the sort of 30-second summary.
Kary Mullis: 30 seconds.
DNA is something that we all have.
In fact, at this conference, DNA starts being a generic term
for all kinds of the soul of a company, whatever.
What it used to be it still is.
This long, completely -- it is this absolutely ridiculously
long molecule that is actually 24 of them inside
of your cells.
And they have about 7 billion -- if you take the little
strands apart, it is about 7 billion bases in
there, billion.
It took a while for me to capture.
That's a lot of them.
And most of the time when -- This is starting in about
1983, somewhere around there.
We were only interested in, say, four or five of those.
Like in the case of looking at a kid that might be born with
sickle cell anemia, there was only one base that either was
going to be an A or was it going to be a T.
And if it was going to be an A, he was going to be okay.
If it was a T, sickle cell anemia.
And we had to figure out how do you do that?
How do you measure that kind of thing?
And how do you do it -- what I was thinking of is how
do you do that quick?
Because the way that there was -- very thin way of doing
it had to do with cloning.
It took about three or four months with many people working
on it, while the mother is freaking, right?
So I said, Why can't we do that in about one
shift at a hospital?
That would be better.
Evan Davis: People knew, though, that this insight,
this technique was waiting to happen.
It was you who just had an eureka moment in a car driving
your girlfriend -- Kary Mullis: I think most people didn't
really think it was going to happen.
I think most people, after I thought about it,
said does work.
I got it going in my lab, but most people still
didn't believe it.
That was a problem with innovation, is it generally
is kind of not acceptable.
Evan Davis: That's PCR, polymerase chain reaction.
Update us, what are you doing now?
Kary Mullis: I'm trying to cure a whole bunch of diseases.
We have got ourselves in a situation where we have used
antibiotics thoroughly since the '40s, and they have
protected us from all kinds of things that used to kill us.
And now those things are getting used to the
antibiotics, they are getting resistant to them.
Things like staphylococcus aureus is one of the
most famous ones, like MRSA, they call it.
It will kill you now if you get certain strains of it.
And what we're trying to do -- I have thought of a new way
to, like, make some something that actually looks like an
antibiotic in the sense that you take it like a pill or even
breathe it through your lungs.
And it makes a specific contact between the pathogen -- this is
a chemical -- between the pathogen and an immune response
that you already have to something totally different.
And it fools your immune system into thinking you are not
immune to that thing, and it will happen in 20
minutes kind of.
And your immune system will attack it.
It is going to work.
Evan Davis: It is going to work?
Kary Mullis: It's worked on anthrax which was a tough one.
[ Laughter ]
With the best technology we had before, 40% of them
could be saved from this pulmonary anthrax.
We had 100% survival, and we did it many times.
It works fine on that.
It worked on another disease.
And now we are working on some things that have more economic
-- more value because there is a lot of people dying now.
Evan Davis: If we want to understand trailblazers and we
want to follow your story, we have to say you are
a maverick, right?
You are willing to take on -- Kary Mullis: Some journalist
wrote that ten years so I have been a maverick ever since.
Evan Davis: But it is true, right?
Kary Mullis: I'm sort of a maverick in the sense that I
don't follow the sort of general course of things.
I do a lot of reading.
I mean, that's what I do most of the time.
And I sort of follow my nose to wherever things are, and I
don't think about what is it other people are doing right
now that I could do just a little bit better.
I am normally just following my own ideas.
Evan Davis: We have the word "alchemy" in
Bjarke's presentation.
There is a sort of alchemy, isn't there?
You are quite widely read.
You studied biochemistry but you wrote about astrophysics
as a grad student, right?
Kary Mullis: Well, that was kind of weird.
I was a second-year graduate student at Berkley and I had a
great idea and I said "Nature" would be interested in this.
And it was my favorite magazine.
They didn't really have a good interest.
They didn't understand why they didn't.
They accepted it.
And so I started -- I said, wow, I could be an
astrophysicist if I wanted to, but I decided I didn't want to.
Evan Davis: Is it the fate of a trailblazer to be ridiculed
and laughed at sometimes?
You defended astrology.
Kary Mullis: I haven't defended it.
I have just shown definitive proof to myself and anybody
else who is willing to look at the data that if you take
simple kinds of things like lists of the -- say, the guy
that is have been directing the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra for
the last 100 years or 150 years and say, When were
those guys born?
They should have been born scattered all over the
different months and they aren't.
There is about 22% of them, 23% of them that are born in Aries
which they point sticks and they say do this, do that.
That's an Aries trait.
[ Laughter ]
Evan Davis: We can go to Wikipedia and look up -- Kary
Mullis: This is all Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia because it is trustworthy for
that kind of thing.
You can pick a birthday.
If you look up the Apollo astronauts, what are they?
Pisces don't care if they are upside down or not.
A Capricorn like myself would not want to be upside down.
Evan Davis: I do want to get one last question.
Your roots, your childhood, the key thing about your childhood
was you were allowed to go out and eat the soil and
play with the worms.
Kary Mullis: My mother was brought up on a farm.
She was not terrified -- she knew with a snake you cut
his head off with a shovel.
You don't freak out.
You don't say kids, Can't go out in the woods by themselves.
My brother and I and my cousins, we spent most
of our time out in the woods by ourselves.
Evan Davis: You were making rockets at age 13.
Kary Mullis: That was a little later.
I was 13.
I realized -- the space age was starting and NASA was sending.
And I realized frogs probably have aspirations
for space, too.
We had lots of little ones in our yard that would fit into
those aluminum cans that you bought 35-millimeter film in.
So I designed a rocket that was about 4 feet tall by the time I
got through with it that would put one up two miles and
get him back alive.
Evan Davis: Two miles?
Kary Mullis: Two miles.
It probably pressed him hard pretty down there for a while,
but they came back alive.
[ Laughter ]
Yeah.
I thought they were going two miles because I was
sighting along this thing.
I was watching for this little red parachute and the rocket
would disappear when I saw the red parachute appear.
I would point this thing at it.
I had a little protractor on there.
Somebody's father who was a pilot -- I mean, he
had a little airplane.
He didn't believe it.
So he flew over our site one day.
He was about at about a mile and half, and the thing came
streaking past his airplane.
And he said, "Jesus Christ." [ Laughter ]
That was back in a time when a kid could walk into a hardware
store and by 100 feet of dynamite fuse.
[ Laughter ]
And there was no questions asked.
I could go up to the druggist and say, I need potassium
nitrate by the pounds, not these little -- Evan Davis:
Damn now these health and safety bureaucrats that are
just getting in the way.
If you thought you might be a trailblazer, it is too late --
Kary Mullis: It is not fun anymore.
Evan Davis: -- if you have not quested space by the age 13.
Lalit Modi, you didn't have any rocket experience.
Lalit Modi: I wish I did.
Evan Davis: But you had a meteoric experience
with the IPL.
So the story is, for those who have not followed world cricket
-- and there are a lot of people who don't but there
are a lot of people that do.
You are on the BCCI, Board of Control of Cricket in India.
Lalit Modi: Correct.
Evan Davis: It is a big sport in India.
And then you have an idea about -- When did you first thing,
Let's do it a different way with this thing, the
Indian Premiere League?
Lalit Modi: The Indian Premiere League in June of 2007 is when
I decided that India was ready to launch a cricket league, and
we needed a league which is similar to the NFL and be in
the English Premier League.
Why not try and create a league where people actually own teams
but to get the people interested, there were two
things in the world -- in India actually, where people want to
watch cricket and the second is Bollywood.
How do you combine the two together is the key.
Evan Davis: It is the alchemy.
It is the alchemy.
It is the alchemy again.
Lalit Modi: You get the Bollywood masala added to the
cricket, and you have got something called
cricketainment.
And you add a little bit of the cheerleaders and music
and live performances.
We thought we had the right formula because cricket was
primarily watched 98% by male.
And the question was how do you get the female and the children
to start watching it?
The only you could get the remote control in the hand of
the housewife was to make sure there was some Bollywood masala
in there and there was some music in there.
Keeping those two things have something that we
definitely needed to have.
We couldn't get the Bollywood people to come and play
the cricket, of course.
The only thing to do is to get them on our team because we are
starstruck in our country.
When a Bollywood top actor goes out or she goes out, the whole
country wants to be there and mingle with them.
And then the other thing was that everybody watched sports
in the daytime in India.
How do we make sure -- we don't want to cut into the revenues
we were already making in the daytime with our own cricket.
We said, Why don't we go after the soap operas and the
movie business, which is in the night?
Why not schedule all these matches at night?
8:00, unheard of.
Evan Davis: Primetime.
Lalit Modi: Primetime TV is the key because that's where the
dollars go up per 10 seconds.
The idea was package it together and put all of this --
get the top cricketers to come and play and go out and auction
the teams and find the best place to play for you.
The issue became: How do you make sure that
all teams are equal?
Because you have a manual.
A manual is always a manual. (inaudible).
Not to offend anybody.
But the objective -- one of the objectives I had was I had been
in the television businesses.
Whenever you have teams that consistently perform, they
consistently have a higher fan base and have viewership and
ultimately end up making higher money at the end of the day.
The issue is: How do you make the games totally
unpredictable?
And how do you ensure that all teams are equal?
Some people have more money in their pocket.
Some people have less money in their pocket in
terms of a team owner.
One can go and buy more players or buy lesser players at a
higher price or lower price.
The idea here was: Why don't we try and come up and examine all
the different leagues around the world?
And we found the good qualities in each one of them.
But we still couldn't get over the issue of how do you ensure
that all teams are equal?
And the idea was born one day.
We are sitting at an auction in London, at a Christie's
auction actually it was.
Why don't we look at actually auctioning the players.
Put all the players in a pot and give everybody
equal amount of money.
Evan Davis: I see.
So purely socialist in principle, basically.
Lalit Modi: In principle.
But you give all the teams equal amount of money.
Everybody has to buy every player through an auction
process, and you only buy the asset for three years.
Evan Davis: It is horrible for the players who are
left at the end, isn't it?
Lalit Modi: It is, of course, that's true.
Evan Davis: It was in school like when they
used to pick the teams.
Lalit Modi: What they did -- you have many, many players
in many disciplines.
What it did is if one team wants the best batsman,
somebody else bought the best baller (inaudible) so you
just spread it around.
Evan Davis: And you televise the auction?
Lalit Modi: We televised the auction, yes.
That actually changed the whole thing and made everybody
equal and teams became equal.
Evan Davis: You have a sequence of decisions, of clever
innovations really that did change the name.
We should say it is mega successful, from nothing
to, what, about $4 billion of revenues last year.
Lalit Modi: Not revenue.
The valuation of the brand itself has gone to over 4
billion, yes. the key is not the money.
The key is the viewership and the fans that we built.
In the finals, we saw 149 million viewers.
So it is one of the highest watched sporting
events in the world.
So that's -- Evan Davis: Eat your heart out
American football.
Cricket's coming.
You're a trailblazer.
I asked Kary whether the trailblazers, they're
fate to be laughed at.
You have been in a lot of trouble.
Lalit Modi: All the time.
Evan Davis: Let's say you have received notice of suspension
of your position on the BBCI.
You were suspended as commissioner of the IPL,
allegations of -- well, it would be easier to list the
things that haven't been alleged -- Lalit Modi:
I couldn't agree more.
Evan Davis: -- in the last couple of weeks.
Did you do it?
Lalit Modi: No.
[ Laughter ]
Evan Davies: Why -- why do you think so many charges -- I know
you can't talk too much about all of this.
Obviously this is all under investigation.
Why do you think you have become the focus of
so many charges?
Lalit Modi: I guess because we have 149 million viewers and
everybody wants to know how we got there and how did
you do it so fast.
The key was again we grew too fast.
We outblew every number on the table.
We outblew everything that everybody said.
Everybody said it can't be done, and we said
we could do it.
And we always surpassed every plan that we put on the table.
And, I guess -- Evan Davis: There are people
who are jealous.
There are people who want a piece or they have been left
out in some way so they want to pull it down.
Lalit Modi: Yes, without doubt.
Evan Davis: But it would be -- it would be amazing, wouldn't
it, to create something as big as the IPL in a country as
bureaucratic as India without, at some stage, corners having
to be cut, bribes having to be paid, any number of things.
It just seems like -- Lalit Modi: We live in a very complex
society at the end of the day.
And to get something like the IPL up and running from scratch
where the entire system is against you across the
world, it is a difficult task without doubt.
And then last year, you know, we had to move to South Africa
when the tournament was scheduled to be in 21 days.
To move 18,000 people across continents and get it up and
running and still meeting and exceeding all expectations
and responses, team owners, fans alike, was a big task.
Evan Davis: I was going to talk about that.
But this whole issue about -- it is very difficult to
make omelettes, isn't it, without breaking eggs?
You must have broken a lot of legs.
Lalit Modi: Yes, I guess we broke a lot of eggs.
You have to keep pushing the envelope.
You have got to innovate.
You have got to do a paradigm shift.
If your not, you are not going to make it.
That was the key.
You have to keep pushing the envelope all the time.
You have got to surpass what everybody else has done.
You have got to think out of the box.
Evan Davis: That move to South Africa, I mean,
that was extraordinary.
You think of how much time we spend preparing for things like
World Cup Soccer, how much time we are spending preparing
for the Olympics.
You go 21 days.
Suddenly there is a security question mark over the IPL.
Lalit Modi: Yes.
Evan Davis: Let's move it to South Africa.
Lalit Modi: Or England.
Evan Davis: But you had another contest competing
in South Africa.
We were all bitterly gutted not to have got it.
Lalit Modi: It was the weather.
Nothing else.
Evan Davis: It really doesn't rain that much here.
It really doesn't rain that much.
Lalit Modi: It rains more in Rome, I heard, this morning.
Evan Davis: So that's extraordinary that you could
have logistically picked up a tournament and in three weeks
located it in another country.
I just don't know how you did that.
Lalit Modi: The secret actually is that we were going to hold a
tournament in eight cities in India.
If we had shortened the number of cities -- everybody said why
don't you do it in three or four cities in South Africa.
We would never have been able to do it.
What we did was take the eight cities in South Africa and
said, We will do it in eight cities in South Africa.
Evan Davis: Your tactic worked.
Lalit Modi: We just moved the entire plan to another
country, moved 18,000 people across in 24 hours.
And, you know, we got the plan up and running.
Evan Davis: A great rehearsal for them to the World Cup.
Lalit Modi: The government -- the government really
did go out of their way.
We had no security problems.
There was fear there would be security
issues in South Africa.
I must say they went out of their way and we had a very,
very successful tournament.
Evan Davis: Excellent.
We'll take questions to end all of our trailblazers, if you
want to queue up at the mic.
What I want to ask each of you is who do you admire?
Who are the trailblazers who kind of you admire?
Bjarke, who are you a fan of?
Bjarke Ingels: I have been in love with, basically, every
single architect since the last, like, 150 years.
I mean, I think right now, I must say I really like reading
-- reading the original species and the whole sort of Darwin
account of how all of the forms of the biosphere were designed.
And I love the fact that the people that actually criticize
Darwin, they talk about divine design, almost like when you
talk about an architect's idea of a single creator that has
scribbled some kind of sketch down and then passes it on to
somebody, executive morons that have to sort of execute it.
This much more sort of material process of
actually evolving ideas.
It has been sort of -- it has been really sort of a
mind-blowing inspiration for how architecture and design
and ideas really evolve.
Evan Davis: What about you, Kary?
Kary Mullis: One of my heros -- all of them are
dead -- Johan Hepler.
He was sort of like -- he was controversial.
He was saying some things that people didn't like in the stuff
he knew they were right.
He had an interesting life, a hard time.
Richard Simon -- Evan Davis: You are very Richard
Simonesque, aren't you?
Kary Mullis: Stupidly, I moved down to San Diego before he
died, and I could have just driven over any day
and I didn't do it.
I knew all about him and I had read all his books so I'm sure
he would have talked to me.
One morning I heard him on the radio.
I was really dumb because I didn't go to see him.
Evan Davis: He was a really funny man.
Kary Mullis: He had a lot of fun with his life.
He did some wonderful things.
Evan Davis: What about you, Lalit?
Lalit Modi: Be controversial.
Branson, Murdoch, because Murdoch changed the world of
broadcasting, I would think, and Murdoch went out of
his way and pushed the envelope everywhere.
But Branson created brand out of nothing.
He went out there and used the word in brand world.
And then, finally, Google.
Look at them.
Evan Davis: Obviously.
Lalit Modi: But the fact -- you know, that's why I was saying
that what they have done is pushed the envelope also, and
it's changed the way -- and I am telling you now, sitting
here today, they will change the way we watch television,
the way we watch product, because that's the pipeline.
Evan Davis: You think they have this YouTube deal, like, that
was another of the innovations in the IPL, say, look, I'm
going to give broadcasting rights, but there are also
going to be these seller rights.
Lalit Modi: Absolutely, for a lot of people around the world,
because we were the first supporting body in the world
that said, "Forget the broadcasts.
We are going to go out there, give our live rights to
YouTube, run it free of cost across the world." And
it's a paradigm shift.
For us, it's all about building fan life, and anybody can watch
the product live what better way to go than with YouTube,
because they have the pipe anywhere around the world.
And that's what's going to change the world going forward.
Evan Davis: Have we got any questions at the mic?
Don't feel obliged to ask questions because
I have plenty.
Yes, go ahead, sir.
Question for you.
How do you get into the conflict of forgetting the
modern architecture in a city like London?
Recently, we had here in London this problem with (inaudible)
and the barracks, that they were trying to do
something very modern.
And the Prince went into conflict and said -- and
(inaudible) related to the Qatar authority, I think they
were the one were promoting, and they stop it.
How do you see it?
Evan Davis: Do you know about this case, Bjarke?
Bjarke Ingels: Yeah, somehow the royalty intervened and
killed the -- Evan Davis: Do you have problems with
your royal family?
Bjarke Ingels: No.
We have very beautiful princesses.
Evan Davis: Maybe they can marry.
We have got some very beautiful young princes.
Bjarke Ingels: I have gotten a death threat from a politician,
actually, who then got sued, reported to the police.
Evan Davis: He said they have got it all the time.
[ Laughter ]
Bjarke Ingels: We have the access of the first big Mosque
in Copenhagen, and the nationalist people's party
tried to -- one of their -- like a 90-year-old candidate
started putting my name and our client's name on his blog, sort
of encouraging people to kick our butts, basically.
Evan Davis: Actually the question was -- It wasn't
about the prince.
Was more about how do you see this fit between the two?
Evan Davis: The conflict between different architectural
demands, really.
Bjarke Ingels: Of course I can't say that I could have
persuaded the Prince of Wales to do anything, but I think one
of the main sort of ideas of our approach is a little bit of
this same idea that you make the strength of your
enemy your own.
Rather than always articulate and highlighting conflicts,
the evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach is the
question of before you do anything, you try to
list all the concerns.
And of course when you are operating in a historical
context, you really need to understand the context
you are operating in.
I haven't seen Rogers' scheme, but we would definitely try to
make it very evident and very available to the public and His
Royal Highness how whatever we were proposing was actually
woven into the public fabric of the conditions.
It might look very well integrated or contextual but it
would, in fact, operate and be and behave in a very
integrated way.
The reason we did our book about our work not as a sort of
traditional presentation of beautiful images but as a comic
book was this idea of going behind the scenes and actually
explaining how and why our designs are shaped and
formed the way they are.
So I think understanding in very obvious and simple way
why we propose things like we do is a key to having the
decision-makers buy into it.
Evan Davis: Can we collect a copy of his book?
You get one, by the way, for asking a question.
I forgot to give you that incentive, by the way.
It hasn't generated many questions yet.
Risk taking.
Do you think of yourselves as gamblers, as risk takers, as
people who are -- I mean, they say a successful business
person is someone who is more willing to fail than
everybody else.
Do you think of yourselves as big risk takers?
Lalit Modi: Absolutely.
Without question.
We are big risk -- If you don't take the risk, you are not
going to be able to achieve it.
And especially in the book that I do -- Evan Davis: I suppose
the question is how do we -- For most of us, taking those
risks has a down side.
Obviously it has paid off for you guys.
Lalit Modi: Yeah.
Evan Davis: For us as we look at the risks that confront us,
taking them carries an obvious down side as well as up side.
I wonder whether maybe you are just this self-selecting group
of people for whom the risks have paid off.
Lalit Modi: Chemistry, I guess.
Dr. Kary Mullis: You know, when I first started this business
trying to cure diseases that needed to be cured by a
different way, I was funded by an agency called DARPA, the
Defense Advanced Research Projects association.
They have a policy there that their grant -- the guys who
were in charge of making the grants, if they, after a period
of four years that they were there, really, only 10% of
the projects that they fund should succeed.
Should succeed.
If a higher percentage than 10 succeeded, they weren't
being risky enough.
They want them to succeed in a big way.
So they are sort of like saying we want things that are
a lot of risk but the payoff is very high.
I felt the same way.
Evan Davis: The problem with that, Kary, is that there is
good failure which is worth supporting, and then there's
bad failure being which is just mediocre and never should have
been supported in the first place.
How do you get a 90% good failure rate rather than
a 90% that one never should have been funded?
Dr. Kary Mullis: When you are doing scientific kind of stuff,
you are learning something.
And if it fails to do what you think it did, you try to say
what the hell did it do?
What did that process actually accomplish?
Not what I wanted, obviously.
Did I learn something about the system?
And I come back again with another idea.
Because I am against those diseases.
I think of them as my enemy.
So maybe I am not going to win the first battle, but I learn a
little more about how the system works.
It turns out I won the first battle.
Evan Davis: That brings us to a good last question
because we have to wind up.
Your mistakes.
I want you each to think and look back and ask yourself
what were our big mistakes?
What did you do wrong?
What do you regret in your life?
Or have you got none?
So I know you are thinking hard.
Lalit, you must have made some mistakes.
Lalit Modi: I will make them again so I don't think
they were mistakes.
Of course I have made mistakes.
Evan Davis: Share one.
There must be one that you can admit in public.
Lalit Modi: There are so many, that's the problem.
[ Laughter ]
Lalit Modi: Well -- Bjarke Ingels: (Speaking off mic)
Evan Davis: Thank you for bailing me out.
What about you, Kary?
Dr. Kary Mullis: I think the mistake that I made that I
really regretted is my personal relationships with the
management of Cetus.
I was a little too open about my criticisms of them.
That was the company I worked for.
Evan Davis: This is your strength but it's also your --
Dr. Kary Mullis: I was willing to criticize a lot of people,
but I could have done it a little quieter, I guess.
I ended up leaving that company right after I made them quite a
bit of money so, therefore, I didn't capitalize on VCR.
So they did quite well.
I'd have said, "Well, the hell with you guys.
I am going to San Diego." Evan Davis: Bjarke,
give us a mistake.
Bjarke Ingels: I was trying to see if there was anything I
could confess, but I think because as an architect you are
so swamped in failure, and there are so many sort of
exterior circumstances that constantly sort of undermine
your projects that I think in order to survive that mentally,
you develop this ability to -- what do you call it?
Sort of self-suggest and sort of turn any sort of failure
into some kind of a positive.
At least like an idea got developed that you could
carry on in another light.
So I think maybe that's like one of the successes.
So secrets to actually even desiring risk taking is the
capacity to always see what you gain from it, even though there
are some exterior volcano eruptions or like national
bankruptcies sort of sabotaged your scheme.
Evan Davis: It's asking yourself, isn't it, what you
could have done differently as well as just blaming
external circumstances.
We had a fascinating session, and the two things that come
out of it for me are the approach to risk taking and
the willingness to dare, the willingness to be different.
The word "alchemy," which you introduced, Bjarke, which just
sung out, really, of people who are just thinking outside their
own narrow subject area.
We have to work out how to give your books away, Bjarke.
We have given one away.
Think of a question, an architectural question, and
the first five people that come up and answer it.
A quiz question.
Think of one.
Bjarke Ingels: If Mr. Noreau (phonetic) said "yes is more,"
what did Philip Johnson say?
Evan Davis: Right.
Five people -- the first four, actually.
The first four to come up and give him the answer will get a
copy of "Yes is More." What did Philip Johnson say?
Good.
Ladies and gentlemen, let's thank our panel.
Thank you very much.
Three trailblazers.
[ Applause ]