Second Nature

Afleveringen

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  E187 Katie Neck & Elena Doms: Building A Movement 06.08.2026 1u 8min

  Nature doesn't have a science problem. It has a communication problem. From Formula 1 paddocks to boardrooms, from global brands to Climate Week, Katie Neck and Elena Doms explore why the future of conservation depends less on convincing people they're wrong and more on showing them what's possible. Commercial thinking, personal brands, storytelling and optimism aren't distractions from protecting nature—they might be the reason more people join the mission. Along the way, they discuss why Fo...
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  E186 Ollie Potter & Kevin Webb: The Nature Tech Revolution 30.07.2026 1u 43min

  Everyone agrees nature matters. Almost nobody understands where the real opportunity is. Nature tech is quietly becoming one of the most important investment themes of the next decade. AI is changing conservation faster than most people realise. Data centres are forcing a rethink of environmental infrastructure. And the companies that solve biodiversity, agriculture and ecosystem restoration won't just protect the planet—they'll build entirely new markets. Rich sits down with Ollie Potter, fo...
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  E185 Benedict Macon-Cooney: Winning The AI Century 23.07.2026 1u 32min

  Everyone agrees AI will change the world. Almost nobody is asking what happens when governments built for the industrial age try to govern the intelligence age. Benedict Macon-Cooney has spent over a decade inside the Tony Blair Institute, advising political leaders around the world on AI, state capacity and government reform. This isn't a conversation about chatbots. It's about whether Western governments can still deliver, why public services are getting more expensive while outcomes deteri...
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  E184 Soma Pitiryi: The Human Algorithm 21.07.2026 1u 53min

  Everyone talks about product-market fit. Hardly anyone talks about founder-market fit. Soma Pirityi believes we've been measuring startups the wrong way. After building businesses, losing money, working in venture capital and studying AI, risk and entrepreneurship across Cambridge, UCL and St Andrews, he reached a simple conclusion: companies rarely fail because of the spreadsheet. They fail because of the people behind it. This conversation explores why founders romanticise failure, why AI w...
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  E183 James Cameron: The Lawyer Who Changed Climate 16.07.2026 1u 39min

  James Cameron has spent four decades operating where politics, business and the environment collide. He helped shape modern international climate law, advised governments across the world, founded one of the first climate investment businesses to manage over $1.7 billion, and still believes the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. But this conversation isn't really about climate. It's about reinvention. About being expelled from school twice before becoming one of the world's leading legal ...
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  E182 Luke Baldwin: Rarer Than Diamonds 09.07.2026 1u 25min

  Luke Baldwin started a carbon credit business in 2023 — by his own admission, the worst possible year to do it. The market was in freefall, trust was gone, and nobody was buying. Two years later, his business closed the first deal in the world to capitalise future carbon removals as an intangible asset on a corporate balance sheet. This conversation goes into why the environmental sector still hasn't built a product good enough to compete for capital, why "voluntary carbon markets" is the wro...
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  E181 Clifford Chance, Live: The Honest Room 02.07.2026 51min

  Five years ago a carbon credit was $1 and largely a joke. Today it's hundreds of pounds a tonne, rated, insured, and traded on an exchange. The people who did that are in this room. Live at Clifford Chance during London Climate Action Week 2026, Rich convened a panel that doesn't usually end up on record together: a Magic Circle funds lawyer, the CEO of Climate Asset Management, a conservation operator negotiating the contracts that underpin gold-standard carbon credits, the CEO of the Lifesc...
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  E180 Nature Inc. Live: Live From London Climate Week 30.06.2026 1u 4min

  The economy has always been a subsidiary of nature. We just didn't have the instruments to prove it. Now we do — and the conversation is getting uncomfortable in the best possible way. Recorded live at London Climate Week, this is the conversation the sector has been having in private, finally happening in public. Tripp Wall of Pantheon Regeneration, Siddarth Shrikanth of Just Climate, and Dimple Patel of NatureMetrics spend 90 minutes on the hard questions: where capital is actually moving, ...
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  E179 Allister Furey: Manufacturing Trust 25.06.2026 1u 23min

  Allister Furey trained as a biologist, fell into AI before anyone called it AI, built kite-powered wind energy systems, sold a company to a competitor, ran operations in Singapore, and ended up building a carbon ratings agency. Not because it was the plan. Because the market was lying and someone had to say so. Allister is CEO and co-founder of Sylvera — the data business that rates carbon and commodity credits, prices geospatial data, and tries to inject statistical rigour into a market that...
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  E178 OC Round Table: Building A Dynasty 18.06.2026 1u 47min

  Five years ago there was no portfolio. No team. No podcast. No estates. The highest carbon credit price was under £20. Biodiversity net gain didn't exist. Rich had a business plan and a conviction that you couldn't scale conservation without capital — and almost everyone told him it was too complicated, too risky, or too ambitious. This episode is the five-year reckoning. Gathered with three of the people who built it with Rich Stockdale: Fiona Milden, Managing Director; Andrew Dewar, Head of...
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  E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem 11.06.2026 1u 38min

  Asger Strange Olesen has spent 15 years building context most people in this space only claim to have. Carbon developer, EU Climate Directorate, FSC Global Chief Climate Officer, now heading climate and biodiversity at IWC — a $6bn forestry asset manager backed by BNP Paribas. He has been inside the policy rooms, the certification bodies, the investor meetings, and the forest itself. This conversation goes to places the sector tends to avoid. Why additionality — the foundational rule of the c...
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  E176 Richard Kelly & Robert Guest: Britain Is Running Out of Trees 04.06.2026 1u 33min

  Richard Kelly and Robert Guest were employees 63 and 64 at Foresight. They built a £150 million portfolio in 12 months, took it public on the London Stock Exchange during COP26, watched interest rates destroy their share price through no fault of their own, delisted — and then rebuilt. Within months of going private, their three biggest shareholders rolled straight back in. That's not a recovery story. That's a vote of confidence in people. This is one of the most complete journeys Second Nat...
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  E175 Insurance Round Table: The Market Nobody Talks About 28.05.2026 1u 39min

  Everyone talks about capital flows into nature. Nobody talks about what has to be true before that capital will move. Insurance isn't a nice-to-have in natural capital markets — it's the load-bearing wall. Without it, the deals don't close, the banks don't lend, the corporates don't buy. With it, you get carbon credits on a balance sheet as assets instead of liabilities. You get BNG units trading like real infrastructure. You get developers who can actually monetise their projects without loc...
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  E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated 21.05.2026 1u 45min

  Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did. This conversation goes deep into how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuat...
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  E173 Tim Christophersen: The $7 Trillion Secret Destroying The Planet 14.05.2026 1u 31min

  Tim Christophersen had a UN contract running to 2038. Diplomatic passport. Lifetime security. A ringside seat to every major environmental agreement on the planet. He left. That decision tells you something important about where this man thinks the real leverage is — and where it isn't. He's spent 30 years building the architecture the world runs on: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the global biodiversity framework, the early scaffolding of nature markets. He's written one of the form...
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  E172 David Gerard: Wonder Is a Business Strategy 07.05.2026 1u 49min

  David Gerard has spent 30 years learning how to make people forget to be cool. From FAO Schwartz at six years old to the highest-rated show in Las Vegas, from Google's marketing floors to coaching Fortune 500 CEOs on stage presence, David has built a career at the intersection of wonder, attention, and human connection — and in an AI world that's automating everything else, that intersection has never been more valuable. Rich and David go deep on what magic actually teaches you about communic...
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  E171 Troy Carter: AI Will Save the Forests 06.05.2026 1u 9min

  Carbon markets are broken. Not because the projects don't work — but because nobody has decided they should. Troy Carter, founder of Earthshot Labs, has spent five years building the end-to-end infrastructure to get serious money into reforestation and conservation projects worldwide. He's watched the market go hot, go cold, and watched good operators go bankrupt for reasons that have nothing to do with their work. Now he thinks the whole fragmented, mistrustful, acronym-ridden industry is ab...
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  E170 Dimitri Theocharis: The Hyperscalers Are Coming 05.05.2026 1u 22min

  Dimitri Theocharis grew up watching an economy collapse. So he left. New York, San Francisco, Harvard Business School. Then something unexpected: a climate startup in the UK that needed someone who understood both money and markets. Dimitri is now CEO of Ecologi, a platform at the intersection of carbon accounting, nature-based funding, and the voluntary carbon market — working with over 16,000 businesses and betting on a consolidation wave that will reshape the entire industry before 2030. W...
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  E169 Tommy Ricketts: The Reckoning Is Coming 30.04.2026 1u 21min

  Tommy Ricketts is the co-founder and CEO of BeZero Carbon — the company that built the world's first carbon ratings agency, walked into COP26, and got told they were the single biggest risk to the carbon market. That was 2021. By 2023, the projects their critics were defending were in freefall. Tommy spent years at Bank of America training under a number-one ranked analyst, pitching ideas to hedge funds whose entire job was to intellectually destroy you. That background — combined with growi...
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  E168 BNG Round Table: This is Still the First Chapter 23.04.2026 1u 18min

  Britain's biodiversity market was two years old when someone tried to kill it. Not deliberately — just through the spectacular collision of political timing, an overloaded planning system, and a regulatory bottleneck that hit at the worst possible moment. In this episode, I sit down with three of the people who were there — Emma Toovey of Environment Bank, Fiona Milden of Oxygen Conservation, and Alexa Culver of RSK — the day after the Land Use Framework dropped, for the most honest conversat...