00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell
Hello everybody, I'm Gareth. This is Somewhere on Earth. It's Tuesday the 12th of March 2024 where I am and where I am is in our studio in London.
00:00:17 Gareth Mitchell
And with us today giving expertise is none other than producer Ania Lichtarowicz. Hello Ania.
00:00:23 Ania Lichtarowicz
Hello I'm quite surprised to be here.
00:00:26 Gareth Mitchell
Not as surprised as I am, you’re the wrong side of the glass.
00:00:29 Ania Lichtarowicz
I am indeed with, Stevie’s in charge of production today. No, we were gonna have the lovely Wairimu but unfortunately, there have been some severe floods and storms.
00:00:38 Ania Lichtarowicz
In Kenya, and she has no access to the Internet and even the electricity is down, so, in part, so she's not been able to join us. Do not worry, dear listener, she will be back.
00:00:50 Gareth Mitchell
Indeed. And we're thinking of you, Wairimu, and indeed anybody else who's caught up in those very severe storms across Kenya at the moment as well. So we hope you're OK and let's jump into the show.
00:01:04 Gareth Mitchell
And coming up today.
00:01:09 Gareth Mitchell
It's tricky to save wildlife when you can't see it very easily, so spare a thought for conservationists trying to protect some of the planet’s largest land mammals in the African Bush. Because these creatures do have a habit of being most active at night-time. That's why conservation folk are rather interested in infrared night vision.
00:01:28 Gareth Mitchell
And there's conservation elsewhere too, far from the Savannah all the way over in the English countryside, where Lidar is in the tech toolkit for those protecting some of Europe's oldest oaks. That's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast.
00:01:48 Gareth Mitchell
Alright then. So from drones to homemade detector kits on trees, meets the conservationist who's also really a bit of a tech hacker.
00:01:57 Gareth Mitchell
Protecting wildlife, be it large mammals in the African Bush or endangered bats or just about anything else endangered, can often involve all kinds of technology getting hands on and developing completely new kit or repurposing existing tech. Adam Hart is here. He's an ecologist, conservation scientist and entomologist. He's at the University of Gloucestershire.
00:02:18 Gareth Mitchell
in England,
00:02:19 Gareth Mitchell
where he's also the university's professor of science communication. Welcome along to Somewhere on Earth. Adam, how you doing?
00:02:25 Adam Hart
Thanks, Gareth. Very well. Thank you.
00:02:27 Gareth Mitchell
Awesome, right? So, so many different kind of areas we can pick up on with you. And I'm interested in this whole issue around tracking down and indeed protecting animals. You know, these big mammals, the iconic mammals, the big animals on the African savannah, as it were in the African Bush.
00:02:47 Gareth Mitchell
And I mean, it's great. These are big creatures. That's the good news. I suppose the bad news is they tend to do most of their stuff at night, don't they?
00:02:55 Adam Hart
Yeah. And all of these animals are actually much harder to see than you might expect. I've I've been. I've been in safari vehicles before and and cars when you're passing some bits of Bush and then you look behind you and realise you you've passed 20 elephants and not spotted them, remarkably difficult sometimes to find these things are very hard to survey them.
00:03:10 Gareth Mitchell
I'm sure so. So some of the technologies I'm sure are things like camera traps, isn't it? So. But you know, literally, I suppose it does what it suggests. The camera
00:03:19 Gareth Mitchell
picks up an animal, it detects an animal, takes a picture of it. You have drones, satellite imagery. Just talk me through some of the tech here.
00:03:25 Adam Hart
Yeah. I mean cameras been around for quite a long time. In fact. I mean, early photographers were using chip wires to to take photographs. But really what's happened now is that you've got units that are relatively inexpensive,
00:03:39 Adam Hart
sub a hundred dollars quite frequently, are able to be deployed very, very
00:03:42 Adam Hart
Easily. They just load up with batteries and SD cards and you can leave them running, and they're, also you can adjust the sensitivity. They can film at night. They can take video, they can take stills and you can just leave them out. Your biggest risk actually is is either animals damaging them or people stealing them. Actually the the, the, the, the technology is very straightforward. They've been incredibly useful in an awful lot of surveying.
00:04:02 Adam Hart
Both in terms of directed surveying. So you want to go out and specifically find something you put your camera traps down where you think they are, but also in terms of of just finding out what's there, almost bycatch kind of survey, you just leave the
00:04:13 Adam Hart
camera
00:04:14 Adam Hart
trap running. And and we we did some research actually a while ago that showed it's a
00:04:17 Adam Hart
really effective way of picking up on nocturnal mammals. If you if you set out random camera traps in in the Bush and leave them for a few months and go and to change the cards so you can pick up nearly everything that you know to be present in that area. So it's a very, very flexible technology. Drones, UAV's, incredibly useful. Obviously they also have drawbacks.
00:04:37 Adam Hart
Camera battery life rather can be a an real issue. In some places you need licences and so on to use them, but they've really revolutionised the way that people are surveying different areas, looking at things like sea birds, looking at mammals, looking at vegetation.
00:04:49 Adam Hart
You can fly a drone over. You can have different camera setups with them, so you can use them for all sorts of different surveying techniques and and do it repeatedly because you don't even have to fly these things, you can just, you can just get your iPad out, track in where you wanted to fly and press play and and sort of sit back and enjoy the sundown and whilst it goes and does the work for you, which is ideal.
00:05:09 Gareth Mitchell
Some ideal field work, isn't it? So what about that point right from the beginning then about a lot of this action happening at night time and infrared then so
00:05:10
Yeah.
00:05:20 Gareth Mitchell
night vision. How is that used and is it used in that kind of setting?
00:05:25 Adam Hart
Yeah, you can be. So there's different ways of seeing in the dark, so you can use infrared, which is basically like a a red beam torch with a camera that's sensitive for picking it up. And that can be very useful. And then the other thing that you can use, which is sort of similar sort of thing but going into a different spectrum is is thermal imaging and thermal imaging can be incredibly powerful. You can mount them on a drone or you can use handheld devices, you can use
00:05:45 Adam Hart
stationary devices. You can mount them to camera traps and so on, and they can be phenomenally powerful at picking up all sorts of stuff at night.
00:05:52 Adam Hart
Not just wildlife, but also people, which is some of the research that I've been involved with, looking at how we can use thermal imaging to find people specifically actually poachers, people that are up to up to no good, looking to looking to kill wildlife illegally. The the work I was looking at was looking specifically at rhino poaching, which is a big problem in South Africa. In fact, I just,
00:06:12 Adam Hart
just before this interview got an
00:06:14 Adam Hart
E-mail through that showed that rhino poaching is up again this year in South Africa. So yeah, it's a big ongoing problem.
00:06:21 Ania Lichtarowicz
Adam, just a quick question on this kit though, because the cameras there are some companies that sell cameras at massive prices. How is a wildlife charity or an NGO or a government somewhere in Africa going to decide which kit they want? Is the expensive stuff any better than the cheapest stuff you can buy?
00:06:41 Adam Hart
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, isn't it?
00:06:42 Adam Hart
Because some of
00:06:43 Adam Hart
this stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can write a blank cheque for some of this equipment. You know, military grade stuff. It's incredibly
00:06:48 Adam Hart
Expensive. Actually, because technology has come down in price so much, it is possible to get small handheld units that that don't cost very much and and some of the research we did was looking at the effectiveness of them in real world situations. So we know that a piece of kit
00:07:01 Adam Hart
that costs
00:07:03 Adam Hart
700-800 dollars is not going to be as good as a piece of kit that costs 20 or $30,000, but actually is it good enough for what you need?
00:07:09 Adam Hart
And and what the research showed is that it is good enough for what you need. If you want to find people in realistic situations hiding in the Bush from the sorts of distances that you can pick up people anyway. In fact, what we showed is that the cheap stuff is just as effective as the much more expensive stuff, and that has a number of advantages. The first one is
00:07:27 Adam Hart
that you can afford it. The second one is that you can afford more units, but the other one, which is quite important, is that people will use it. One of the great problems when people are out in the field is that equipment gets damaged and broken, and if you've got a very expensive piece of kit, there's a tendency not to use it, to keep it in the box, to take out the vehicle but not use it as much. Whereas when it's a bit
00:07:47 Adam Hart
cheaper and you can not exactl,. it's not exactly disposable, right, but it's it's more like the sort of cost of a mobile phone or a half decent camera and and what that means is that people will take it out and use it and
00:07:58 Adam Hart
some of the
00:07:58 Adam Hart
advantages that we
00:07:59 Adam Hart
found after we we sort of followed up with people and got some feedback when they were using the cheaper equipment was that they use it all the time. They had it in their pocket.
00:08:08 Adam Hart
They would use it before they got out of a vehicle. Just wind the window down and scope around the Bush. It made them feel much safer and it gave them more confidence when they were out and about and and we also got quite a lot of feedback from people that said there was a sort of local propaganda effect because the word got round in, in the communities that bordered these reserves, that they, you know, people in there could see in the
00:08:28 Adam Hart
dark and what they found was that not just rhino poaching went down because they were using this stuff, but also just what is known as bushmeat poaching, but kind of everyday poachers coming. Yeah, people, I mean, we call them poachers. It's quite pejorative term, really. These. These are local community members hopping over the fence and setting out snares to to catch animals for the pot.
00:08:49 Adam Hart
The problem with that is it's very unselective. It can be very cruel as well, but it can be very, very effective at reducing all kinds of things like genets and civets and things that that need protecting, that dropped off as well, simply because people had kit that they were willing to
00:09:02 Adam Hart
and able to use.
00:09:03 Ania Lichtarowicz
And not only that, though, we we have to remember that a lot of this bushmeat is the source of emerging infectious diseases, SARS, COVID.
00:09:10 Adam Hart
Yeah. And it's very interesting connection for things between that, that, that, that, that's a whole other, a whole other topic. But yeah, it's it's a big problem, but mainly it's a it's a conservation problem largely because it's just it's very, very unselective.
00:09:13 Gareth Mitchell
Ebola.
00:09:26 Adam Hart
If you've got someone out snaring and they put down a snare line of 102 hundred snares it it, it could be catching anything and and they're incredibly effective. Snaring is very cruel, but it's very, very effective, particularly if you've got people know what they're doing. What's interesting as well? I mean, we talk about technology, but people are increasingly using things like AI and and sort of advanced statistical
00:09:45 Adam Hart
analysis to work out where snares might be. So if you gather in information and you record whenever you come across a snare, people will knot snares in specific ways. So you can start to identify individual snarers from the position and location of snares and you can start gathering all this information.
00:10:04 Adam Hart
And and and sort of throw it into a map and you can use GIS and all sorts of other things. And then and then you can have analytical software in the background that that's that can predict where you might find snare lines. It can start looking at the geography and where they are. So one of the reserves that that I do work with had a whole series of poaching incidents that was related to, well two things actually. The first one was the phase of the moon.
00:10:26 Adam Hart
People will take advantage of a full moon because it's much easier to see, it's it's it's a basic as that. But also there was a pattern of local kind of festivals and parties that was going on that meant that certain days during the months were much more likely to have poaching activity because people were coming in
00:10:41 Adam Hart
looking for meat to sell on to to people that were having parties and so on. So it didn't take a lot of analytical sophistication to start working out that specific parts of that reserve are, particularly specific fence lines were more at risk at certain times and you can start overlaying this information where you can imagine if you can do that on a grand scale and you can really throw some analytical
00:11:01 Adam Hart
power at it, you can start making all kinds of predictions. I mean, much like people are doing with criminology and so on when they're trying to look for a particular burglary, epidemics, or they're trying to work out where murderers
00:11:12 Adam Hart
and other crimes may strike again. You can use that type of of approach to try and and combat wildlife crime as well.
00:11:19 Gareth Mitchell
Let's talk about the the so-called audio moth. Intrigued by this, tell me more what is an audio moth?
00:11:25 Adam Hart
So audio moth is this really neat little system that's, it's a sort of crowd funded thing that was developed by a group of people and and it allows you to record
00:11:33 Adam Hart
remotely across a whole spectrum of sound in a way that you can sort of pre programme and you can work out yourself. So it sort of arrives a little bit like
00:11:42 Adam Hart
the raspberry pie
00:11:42 Adam Hart
kind of idea. So it's this sort of technology that that just arrives, naked circuit board and you can you can programme it and sort it out and it's a really, really powerful bit of kit. It's being used increasingly now for remote audio sensing,
00:11:53 Adam Hart
so people are leaving it out.
00:11:55 Adam Hart
to record birds, you can record bats
00:11:57 Adam Hart
with it, you can record. I think people are starting to look at recording crop pests with it and things and all sorts of environmental stuff. I actually tried to use it, we we tried to set up a system where we could record gunfire and see if people were were shooting in an area. We had this idea of setting up audio moths in different locations and then using their different times that they were recording
00:12:17 Adam Hart
the rifle shot in, to to try and triangulate where that shot came from. It was something that turned out, would have worked very well with the audio moths, but it was it was thwarted somewhat by two things. First of all, it didn’t work very well
00:12:29 Adam Hart
in wind, which is which is not really very useful. And secondly unfortunately it needed a whole infrastructure of of sort of connectivity which would have made it far more expensive than setting up alternative systems. But what's really interesting with it is that people are now using it for all kinds of things because you can just it's so adaptable. So we've got we've got students at the moment that are looking at using
00:12:50 Adam Hart
it for recording
00:12:51 Adam Hart
birds in rainforests, were using it, just setting it up to try and record bats all the time and
00:12:57 Adam Hart
it's it's cheap.
00:12:58 Adam Hart
It's it's one of those things where you can get really advanced complex technology that allows you to do these things without that much money being spent. And that's very very
00:13:05 Adam Hart
useful when you're doing stuff in a university environment, but also when you're looking at things that can be rolled out, particularly across across the world for conservation, because anything that's very expensive, you're automatically putting up barriers.
00:13:17 Ania Lichtarowicz
And obviously creating this like 3D soundscape is really important as well for knowing about, you know, the health of the ecosystem. Are people using that more and more now?
00:13:27 Adam Hart
Yeah, absolutely. And what's really really important about it is not just what you're recording on, but also your ability to analyse it.
00:13:34 Adam Hart
So you can gather all this data and you can get all
00:13:36 Adam Hart
this recording but
00:13:37 Adam Hart
if if you have to go through it by hand and try and work out what birds and things are there, it's just almost impossible. But but with things like Merlin for example, the bird identification app and the software behind it, you can start linking this stuff up with a whole load of analytical technology. And that's when it becomes super powerful, because then you can start extracting the information from it.
00:13:55 Adam Hart
And yeah, I mean it, I I think we're gonna see that being used more and more in just mainstream stuff over the over the coming years.
00:14:01 Gareth Mitchell
Alright, Adam. Well, let's wrap it up. Well, at least pause it right there, because Adam's very kindly agreed to stay back and talk to us in the podcast extra, the subscription version of this programme and we’re going to
00:14:12 Gareth Mitchell
talk about tree ID and plant ID. So if anything like me then you might not necessarily know your reeds from your Ivy or whatever. So if that's you, it's definitely me. Then Adam has some technology that can help and he's going to talk about it in the podcast extra subscription. So basically your podcaster should sort it out for you.
00:14:33 Gareth Mitchell
It's a bit you have to pay for. It's ten U.S. dollars a month to subscribe and you get all this lovely extra content, so do consider doing that.
00:14:46 Gareth Mitchell
Now then, on this show, we'll dig out great tech wherever we can find it, and that includes the birthplace of Winston Churchill. So let's head to the beautiful Blenheim Palace Estate in the countryside of rural Oxfordshire in England. Across 12,000 acres are many very, very special trees specifically
00:15:06 Gareth Mitchell
Europe's largest collection of ancient oaks. Some are over 1000 years old. It's been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site with public access now restricted though, across much of the estate, however, this podcast has been granted access.
00:15:29 Filipe Salvini
You are going to feel something from being in here today that you will never, ever forget. My name is Filipe Salvini and I'm conservation lead here at Blenheim. Blenheim estate. And I work in these ancient Woodlands, looking at the biodiversity, looking at
00:15:47 Filipe Salvini
honeybees and just looking at the the life that exists in this place. I love trees. I love nature.
00:15:55 Filipe Salvini
These are really rare. I mean only 7% of the UK's 13% of woodland is in a good state and we have the largest aggregate of ancient oaks in the whole of Europe. So the fact that we've actually got one or two or even 3, these are our diamonds. They're so precious.
00:16:15 Filipe Salvini
The tree survey app we developed from walking around with pieces of paper and the weather changes and the paper gets wet, so we really needed to come up with something that we could log tree incidents, incidences when things
00:16:30 Filipe Salvini
break off, the state of of the trees, measuring the girths, measuring the biodiversity that that comes along with it.
00:16:41 Filipe Salvini
I can come over here and I take a picture.
00:16:45 Ania Lichtarowicz
Filipe and his team have overhauled the traditional method of surveying with paper and pencil and dragged it into the 21st century. They've created a smartphone app that allows them to precisely catalogue on-the-go, feeding their findings into a digital database.
00:17:05 Filipe Salvini
Press ID
00:17:06 Filipe Salvini
and it's Xylaria Hypoxylon. OK, so I've got 98% probability candle snuff fungus which is actually antifungal, antibacterial properties. This goes into the database and this is one of the things that we've really worked on is the
00:17:26 Filipe Salvini
the quality of the phones, we’re taking in the best quality picture, you know, the maximum of pixels, they have the exact location of where we we found it and then I can also add further pictures into the database. It becomes a legacy, somebody can actually
00:17:41 Filipe Salvini
search for it.
00:17:43 Filipe Salvini
We developed with the Head of Innovation, David Green, a way of quantifying all this data and really recording everything. You know we have a living laboratory basically.
00:17:54 David Green
We've got over 3200 different species here just in this woodland alone, which is incredible. So being able to use our app to record that.
00:18:03 David Green
and then be able to timeline that just builds a greater picture for us. So we can ultimately spot trends we can see if that species is in that same location as it was in previous years. And that really adds up to sort of more information for us to understand the changes in this incredible landscape.
00:18:20 David Green
Well, if it's done on Excel or pieces of paper, you know you could easily miss something, you could easily miss that epiphyte there that wouldn't traditionally be recorded. So actually, by taking a photograph of this and logging that within our biodiversity app means actually we've got a record for the future as well, one that we can exploit in greater detail.
00:18:40 Ania Lichtarowicz
As well as using artificial intelligence to identify species, tagging trees virtually can be better for them than physical labels.
00:18:49 David Green
Typically sort of hammering a nail in a tree is not a really good way of doing things. It can lead to diseases in the tree. So by doing it digitally it ultimately means we can reduce any problems associated with the damage of the trees, but also provide a full history of the tree all in in your pocket. So we'll be able to hold up a device and we'll hopefully be able to see the full history of that tree.
00:19:11 Filipe Salvini
We’re gonna survey any tree.
00:19:13 Filipe Salvini
We've got an oak, no signs of of fistula on there. The tree is very much alive and standing with no limbs having fallen off so it'll automatically populate the site. It'll save it.
00:19:29 Filipe Salvini
And we've got now a tree survey already done in just under a minute, and we can take it further, come back at any point in time and add further information if we need it.
00:19:41 Filipe Salvini
What's really important about measuring the flora? The biodiversity is that there are specific insects associated with specific plants. By ensuring that you've got those plants available as a resource,
00:19:54 Filipe Salvini
it adds
00:19:55 Filipe Salvini
to the potential for the insects, invertebrates to feed and sustain these populations.
00:20:04 David Green
It wouldn't be unusual for visitors to see a a robot wandering through the palace or even wandering through the Woodlands. They might be using hyperspectral cameras where you and I see red, green and blue using hyperspectral cameras we can capture more frequencies, more information through those robotics and through those camera lenses and it means we can get more information back to the researchers
00:20:24 David Green
faster and ultimately build a a better picture of what's going on in relation to the biodiversity and the biodiversity change.
00:20:32 Lintong Zhang
Maybe he was a good spot. Yes, let’s see.
00:20:37 Ania Lichtarowicz
The estate serves as the experimental grounds for various academic research projects conducted by the Oxford Robotics Institute.
00:20:47 Lintong Zhang
So now we first need to set up this, getting our stick which the platform that will hold the device while we work round in the forest.
00:20:56 Ethan Tao
There you go.
00:20:56 Ania Lichtarowicz
Ethan Tao and Lintong Zhang are putting together their equipment they'll carry manually on their backs.
00:21:03 Lintong Zhang
This is the device here which has a LIDAR scanner on the top. It comes with three different cameras around it and inside I also have a computing unit, so we would walk around for miles and capture in different forests. And the trees inside them. So we put this into our backpack and then we can take off. Hiking for, I don't know, many kilometres.
00:21:30 Ethan Tao
OK, let’s go.
00:21:34 Ethan Tao
With the backpack we can walk around that. Usually we have to hold with our hands. Kind of tiring if you hold it for one hour. So with this we can just walk around and all this data will be streaming in real time.
00:21:45 Lintong Zhang
This will help the severe or decision makers to say all it is are the trees growing at the speed they want to because often you can come back to the site multiple times and you'll recognise that's the same tree you saw a year ago, then you can track the changes, deciding if it's overgrown or this one of the trees lack of nutrition.
00:22:06 Ethan Tao
You want an overview of the whole forest. Because say you want your most prominent trees to grow better, so you might have to measure the diameter, right? That's why we need this 3D model option for. So that's why we are working on basically semantically also extracting different trees, the structure, also their species.
00:22:28 Ania Lichtarowicz
The researchers have flown drones around the forest, measuring the canopy with startling accuracy of around 2 centimetres and deployed legged robots to scan the environment, building up a 3D virtual model of the grounds.
00:22:46 Ethan Tao
The challenge, so how you understand the ground where you can walk and where you can't. You know. How hard is this, this ground, right? For us humans, we have sort of reaction towards the force. But for a robot, unless you have a force sense, it doesn't know if it's soft mud or if it's a hard mud. There‘ve been times when we walking the robot and the robot went into mud and lost mine the foot of the cover. Yeah. You know.
00:23:12 Ania Lichtarowicz
Whilst the thought of that is funny to imagine for the team here this is no laughing matter.
00:23:16 Filipe Salvini
We have to be protecting ecosystems. Every single little insect, flower, tree that we can preserve and save and show a system of saving and recording it is invaluable. I find it is something that really defines life.
00:23:33 David Green
Well, look, we are facing a climate disaster. You know, we all need to do something. There's some big things that can happen around energy. Absolutely. But, you know, we all have a responsibility to do more. And that means looking after our woodlands. It means smelling the air, smelling the roses. It means looking after each other. We all have knowledge and actually
00:23:53 David Green
one thing about working in the sector as we do is that we're very open, we want to share our data. It's not about protecting just this woodland, it's about protecting other woodlands as well throughout the world. And if we can come together and share information, we can help solve the issue of climate change.
00:24:19 Gareth Mitchell
That's David Green there, head of innovation at Blenheim Palace. So, Ania, you've obviously been looking very closely into what's been happening there at Blenheim Palace and what else did you take away from this story?
00:24:32 Ania Lichtarowicz
I mean the fact that everything is open source, that it is the sharing of knowledge. So any scientist around the world can come in and say, hey, let's see what they're doing. Let's see how they're doing it.
00:24:43 Ania Lichtarowicz
Yeah, and and learn. And I think for me, one thing is that it's happening in real time, you know, before I actually did study biology and plant conservation, many and many, many years ago, and it was literally with a clipboard. It was before we we we had electronic equipment to go out. And it sounds silly. But even getting things wet.
00:25:04 Ania Lichtarowicz
You come back to the, come back to the lab and you from what does that say? Here? You can go out and go out with a smartphone. You can just go and click something it real time. Everything's happening. You can see the impact of heat,
00:25:18 Ania Lichtarowicz
of drought because obviously the weather is changing here, the climate is changing and so you can see that you can see pests coming, you can see diseases. I mean oak minor moth is a huge problem amongst oak trees in the UK and they often will get little kind of white tags to show that you know that particular pest is there and it's a nasty little thing as well that can cause quite a rash if you happen to be in a park where that is so those kind of things do need monitoring.
00:25:46 Ania Lichtarowicz
And this is this is really great. But you know, we don't forget that, you know these types of technology are being used elsewhere. I mean quite big projects in Ghana, for instance, with drones in cashew nut farms, of all places, you know, it's a big crop there, it's not new, but it is very effective looking at how pests and diseases actually affect
00:26:06 Ania Lichtarowicz
the the crop or or the plant in real time.
00:26:09 Gareth Mitchell
Alright. And yeah, well, it's just lovely to be able to look into that, a very conservation themed programme today. Plenty of tech in it as well. Just before we go folks. A little plug coming up, right, you can come and hang out with us if you want to because
00:26:23 Gareth Mitchell
we're having a little reunion for Digital Planet, so this is the programme that many of us, well, kind of all of us worked on for many years before we came out and started doing Somewhere on Earth, and that programme finished exactly a year ago or it will be on the 28th of March. So we're getting together. A few people in a central London
00:26:43 Gareth Mitchell
venue. It's free, by the way. I should add that.
00:26:46 Gareth Mitchell
And the idea is that we're going to have, Ghislaine's going to be there, Bill and me, Angelica, if I can get the tech working, is going to be joining us from Sao Paulo. And when I say me getting the tech working, we're doing the whole thing on a complete shoestring and so much so that I'm rigging up my own PA. I mean, literally. So we we're blagging everything to make it all work.
00:27:06 Gareth Mitchell
But it will be a really lovely evening and we'd love to see you there. It's going to be pretty informal, just a few drinks. Not on the House, I'm afraid. We said we're doing it on a shoestring, but we'll do a little bit of recording for Somewhere on Earth for the podcast.
00:27:20 Gareth Mitchell
We'll do a little bit of recording for another podcast called Gareth and Bill, and then also our special guest appearance is from this amazing guy called Peter Cowley, who's one of the UK's most successful Angel investors, and he's backed all kinds of tech companies. He's also set up a whole load of technology
00:27:42 Gareth Mitchell
companies of his own. He's had this stellar career, but also he's been beset by some really heartbreaking family tragedies. And to top it all, I'm afraid that he's terminally ill.
00:27:54 Gareth Mitchell
And yet he's written a book about his experiences, his about his successes, and how he's coping with the terrible things that have happened in more recent years. And he'll be our kind of in conversation fireside chat, you know, special guest. We probably won't record it. So you need to be at the event to experience that. So please do come along
00:28:14 Gareth Mitchell
if you can. Bring a partner, bring a friend, bring whatever. You just need to go to Eventbrite to register. It's really easy to find. I I found if you just literally type Digital Planet into Eventbrite you'll find us that way.
00:28:27 Gareth Mitchell
Or you can just look at this my pinned tweet. If you go to at Gareth and look me up on Twitter and it's right there for you and hopefully we'll see you there. That's the the evening of Thursday the 28th of March. That'll do. Should we do
00:28:38 Gareth Mitchell
some credits then, Ania,
Ania Lictarowicz: I think so, off you go.
00:28:40 Gareth Mitchell
Alright, off I go then. So we’ve got Stevie back there behind the glass doing the technology for us here at Lanson's Team Farner this evening.
00:28:48 Gareth Mitchell
And Ania Lichtarowicz has been studio expert, has been producer, is the editor of this podcast and does many things. So we got through it. What a hero. And good on you. It worked out alright. Thanks for being there folks. Stay tuned for the subscription if you subscribe. Otherwise see you.
00:28:58 Ania Lichtarowicz
Yeah.
00:29:06 Gareth Mitchell
Next time, bye bye.
ENDS