Talks

Talks, panels, podcasts and firesides.

Held as dialogue rather than performance: the room is part of it and questions are welcome anywhere in the hour. Formats: keynote, panel, podcast, workshop, and a fireside conversation held for a room rather than a stage.

Subjects

Presence under pressure

Responsible for other people's lives long before he understood what that meant. What holds when the stakes are real, why calm is a skill rather than a temperament, and how to decide when the information will always be incomplete.

From destruction to creation

A decade studying how things are taken apart, then a studio. What a creative practice does for people who have carried hard things, and why making sits closer to soldiering than either side tends to admit.

Directing a world record

The Grand Swim: thirty seven hours in the water around Grand Cayman, ten NGOs, a government, a film crew and a budget. What it takes to hold a complex operation together when the weather has other ideas.

The work of gathering

Men's circles, cold water, festival builds and HEARTH. Building substance free community around fire, food and honest conversation, and why belonging is built rather than found.

Trust as an operating system

High trust work for people who value discretion. Why capability is assembled for the moment rather than owned, and what changes when the reputation of every person involved is the only real contract.

One life, many dimensions

Painter, founder, gatherer, soldier. For rooms full of people under pressure to pick a lane, and for organisations that keep losing their most interesting staff to that pressure.

Recent conversations
Aug 2026
Carpinitreel, the CIR fireside. Fifty five minutes on the bank: service in 21 SAS, the weight it leaves, and art as the way through. Filmed as it happened.
Jul 2026
Veteran State Of Mind, episode 227. With Geraint Jones: leading soldiers young, UK Special Forces selection, and how those lessons shape the work of building ventures and communities now.
Jan 2025
The Grand Swim. Feature documentary on Oly Rush's record swim around Grand Cayman, made with DAL Productions and Grizzly Productions. Eaton directed the expedition and appears throughout. Global broadcast on the WaterBear Network.
2011
Sandhurst, BBC Four. Three part documentary series filmed at the Royal Military Academy across a year, following one intake of cadets through officer training. Eaton was in that intake.
For organisers

Tell him the room and what they are carrying.

Who is in the room, what they are carrying, and what you would like them to leave with. You will get an honest answer on whether he is the right person for it. Travel from Dorset, and bespoke where the subject earns it.

Request a talk