Sir John Bell

Thanks, Eric.

Thanks very much for having me.

Yeah, it was actually Henry VIII, but you were close.

Yeah.

So as you know, Larry Ellison has been one of the great tech entrepreneurs, focused really on developing terrific databases over his career and through Oracle, which is the company that he founded.

Larry is really keen to try and give back something substantial to the world, which is based on science and technology.

He and I did quite a bit together over the COVID pandemic.

He and I talked a lot about what we're doing and so on.

He came to visit afterwards.

I think he decided that the right way to make his contributions would be to set up an institute that would be using

that state of the art science and technology with a lot of AI and machine learning, but also some of the other modern tools to address the major problems in health care, in food security, in green energy and climate change and in global governance.

So anyway, he launched this about 18 months ago.

He approached me to ask whether I would run it.

He wanted to set it up outside Oxford.

And he wanted to do something which is a bit different than others.

And that is his view was that we needed to try and create solutions to these problems which are commercially viable.

And, you know, not all the solutions are going to be commercially viable, but where you can

create those, you make them sustainable.

So the idea is to make sure that we create solutions that people want to buy.

And then if they buy them, you can create a sustainable solution to those issues.