Latest / Second Nature / E170 Dimitri Theocharis: The Hyperscalers Are Coming

Transcript

E170 Dimitri Theocharis: The Hyperscalers Are Coming · Second Nature

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think what made me so incredibly happy, so I was sat in, I can't remember where we were, sat in an event or a conference this week.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: My phone pings and it's you going, You in San Francisco?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, Yeah.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we managed to pull this off.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: We've been trying for a year to make this work in terms of that, maybe longer?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think longer than a year.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh we met at the panel, the um uh Blue Earth, yeah.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Blue Earth panel.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that was a London Climate Week.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: That would make yeah, so under yeah.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you're an international globe trotter, so that made that difficult.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: I I take the blame.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um, but a good place to start is to for you to tell people who you are and what you do.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, let's start there.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um I'm Dimitri Theo Harris, I'm the CEO of ecology, and um there's uh I can answer the question many ways, but I'll start a little bit about my my background.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh born and raised in uh Athens, Greece, and up until 20 years old, um uh I was there, but then I always had the bug.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to go to the to travel, go to bigger markets, and uh I made the move to the US.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Uh did my always the US you wanted to weight, Matt.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Always.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: The costs?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because when I was um uh six, we spent some time in the US because my father w worked in the Air Force and he was stationed in uh the well, he was at the Greek embassy in Virginia.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I got well, that's where I think where I got the bug.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was very young, but I there was a certain energy that when I went back to Greece, I mean, love the country, but I I didn't feel that energy.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then I would visit every year, and then ultimately I thought if I want to get in in building in entrepreneurship, that seems to be the place for many reasons.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: There's capital, there's talent, but also there's a certain energy and culture that no offense to the other countries, the UK.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I still think the UK is a good place to be building, but I don't think it can compete.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I moved to New York first.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Is is there an entrepreneurial culture in Greece?
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Are people starting businesses and things like that?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So my experience was colored by the financial crisis.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that's one of the reasons why I chose to study finance, because uh well, the crisis was worse than the Great Depression in terms of GDP shrinking.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I was trying to understand what was happening.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And well, that's why I chose to study finance, but also it colored it was an economic crisis, but it was also a sociological crisis.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people stopped uh dreaming.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they also didn't see uh a lot of hope at the time, which is uh a grim thing to say.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell That that is an incredible line.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: People stop dreaming.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think in the UK, people have stopped dreaming at the minute.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: There is a little bit of a I mean the cliche that there's cynicism, San Francisco has the dreamers, and the UK has uh cynics, the self-deprecating, and it has all this history behind of uh the UK is uh has been around for a long time.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot embedded in the culture and the nature of the people, whereas in the US it's a newer, more optimistic country.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: However, I would I would push back a little bit on that cliche.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think the UK still has proven to be uh a great uh place to build.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not as good as uh San Francisco, but you don't have to be uh number one uh and you can be number two and still have an amazing uh environment.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So moved to New York, loved it.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: I found everything uh I thought I was looking for.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, at that age you don't know what you're looking for.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and was trying to figure out next steps.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I didn't know what I wanted to do.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone in uh my undergrad wanted to do go to invest in banking.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought maybe I don't know, let's just go where the flow is.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Is that just because it's the sexy cliche thing to do?
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well the money as well, right?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: The money is great, but ultimately for me, what it sold it was the liberty that you have after the positioning.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know what you want to do, go somewhere where that it positions you the best for when you do figure out what you want to do.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the the careers of investment banking and management consulting, for better or for worse, they have a lot of cons, but they do offer that, that flexibility later on.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I knew I didn't want to get all in on finance and I wanted to um see what tech is about.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I that's how I compromised.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I during the financial chapter, were you was that was that an everyday conscious choice?
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, right, I want to learn these skills, I'm picking up these things, but but I'm aware this isn't forever.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: I I know at some point I'm looking for that opportunity to step aside.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, at the time I felt that a lot of the people that endured the financial crisis felt powerless.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time it was a constant decision to not be in that uh position.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: But then later on, when uh when I started when I lived in New York, uh it became more of a okay, this was level one, what's level two, what's level three?
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just what's next?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And what I ended up is okay, if I'm going to be doing investment banking, I need to be doing it in the technology world and uh the do the move to San Francisco.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: And had you always been drawn to tech or was that purely that time in the NG first?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was actually that time.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the power of exposure.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh in um in in Greece, if you studied computer science at during my generation, um very often you became an IT um uh professor in school.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: That was actually the career.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, this has changed quite a lot, and there's a lot of incredible talent that's coming uh out of Greece, out of the schools and universities there that are doing programming AI talent.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of great talent.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: But at the time, exposure was not there.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it uh to answer your question, it came later.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: It came when I got to New York and uh when I would work, I was you're young, full full of energy.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: You want to work in a dynamic space to be bad.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: Mine that was the reverse.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like tech tech was always the thing that so my um I I again I think it's funny with uh and and you sort of alluded to it with an answer a second ago.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: When you look back, you sort of see themes and trends in your background that you perhaps don't realise at the time.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: But every aspect of my life was data and technology to start with.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: So played a lot of chess as a kid, which if you think about it, it's simplifying the world into 64 squares.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: Then I played tons of do you have I don't know if it if it existed in Greece, but um I played a lot of championship manager, the computer as a kid.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: So moving numbers around a screen to simulate football games, then got into NFL stuff, and then my um my undergrad was um designing white water courses, so using uh obstacles in rivers to model the maths behind how water moves.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: So again, simulating the real world in the form of a model.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: My PhD was um big data analytics of measuring river flow, but in a grid system across miles of rivers.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I was always building models to simplify the natural world.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: You fast forward, and that's exactly what we've built to allow oxygen conservation to be what it is.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a bizarre way, I was always waiting for in fact, we talked about large landscape models for environments before large language models came about.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it's funny.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we both eventually made it to the intersection.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and you needed you were interested in the tech, but you found finance as a big lever.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, can we do it later, like the inverse from what you had?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I started with the the lever, but or like when where do I want to focus with this lever?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So but we reached the same place in a way.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's different routes in, right?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: So um the step from finance was there a management consulting chapter after finance?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I invest in banking, and then uh I worked at um did some operating roles here and there.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I and uh business school and then ecology.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and talk to us about business school.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: What was that like?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I went to Harvard during uh 2021.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted you to name drop home.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: 2023.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm so jealous.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: That must have been incredible.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was formative.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there are various types of candidates that start.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are the the folks that want to pivot their career, and I think I think that's the best reason to do an NBA.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I didn't necessarily want to pivot my career, so I was on the track where I wanted to be.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it was uh so I was in San Francisco at the time, COVID hit.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I felt the energy had dropped, uh, to say the least.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I felt I felt a little burnt out.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to try something new.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, it felt like the perfect time to do something different.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what to expect, uh, but it was transformative in many ways.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it all come is again another cliche, but it all comes down to the people you meet, of course.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: And did you do that?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: You stepped away from working to that full time, or were you working at the same time as so I s usually you don't work because it's it's somewhat of a demanding curriculum.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I stopped working.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: However, I got eventually I felt the need to be doing something on top of uh the MBA, so that's where ecology came in.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: So around the second year, I I worked and and did my MBA.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: And where did the uh the idea of the business come from?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Where was the initial startup?
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't I didn't start ecology.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: I met the co-founders in the very early days, and they were in the UK um environmentalists, uh not as much experience in business building, but they had a passion and they saw an opportunity to make it's actually a cool story, uh just like Netflix and Spotify have subscriptions.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: What if you can have a climate impact subscription?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: That's the notion.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I remember meeting uh like the co-founder at the time, uh Elliot, and I I didn't think you could in 2020, 2019, 2020, you could combine business building and have a sustainability angle like that um until yeah, until I saw the metrics.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's um we forget so quickly how fast things change.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we started in 2021, June 21, and one company had one big estate to look at natural capital.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: There was no one else that was doing it in terms of that.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Things were so different like that.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like we we we feel all of the things that are natural now, they were hot takes.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we take them for granted, right?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: They're just here and exist.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I remember saying we are gonna build a£100 million portfolio for nature, and I legitimately got laughed at.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've gone through 400 million valuation now.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: There we go.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and but but it but not once.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: We got left at a no, you won't.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's not possible.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you can't buy land this fast, you're not gonna be able to plant trees at that scale, you're not you're not gonna be able to build a team today.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's like everyone denied everything, and now it's people, oh no, of course that would happen.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh you're you said you're at 400?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just north of 400 million, about 425.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, okay, what's the number you want to throw out and uh get laughed at now?
• 11:46
  unknown: Five million.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Someone from the other room said five billion.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: They'll just yell, that was that wasn't so we um none of those numbers are real, by the way, are they?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: They're just like they're a mountaintop up there.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like very few people know how high Everest is.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: They just know it's the highest mountain.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: So each of these numbers and concepts are just like, let's do something really cool and go further.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever the number looks like is the number.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: So uh where were we?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Elliot.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: You just met Elliot and you were considering the concept of this being possible.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that was 2020?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, 2019 too.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: 2020.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh back in the golden days.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And um I started helping him out.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was trying to raise capital, uh, institutional, could not raise in the UK.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's hard.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: For uh first at the time it wasn't SaaS, it wasn't fintech, and not struggled to place it, serial entrepreneurship.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: So you needed their you needed risk risk takers, and that's where uh the VCs uh from San Francisco that I was connected to uh came in and did take a risk.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we did the C Drone I coinvested at the time, and um, I mean that company kept growing very fast.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually in 2022, that's when you know the music stopped, zero interest rates, wars, inflations, and that's where all the companies in our space needed to make the move to prove that it's not just fluff, there is a sustainable, in many ways, business model here.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: So those first two or three years, that was very much exploration growth, just you know, that blue ocean environment.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of spend um yeah, spend to grow, and you'll figure things out later.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: The the Silicon Valley playbook for lack of a bit of a yeah.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that's how that's how industries get built, nascent industries get built.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then and I want to make a note there, for all the criticisms that we give to the sustainability uh industry, um, a lot of the mistakes have happened over and over and over in in the spirit and essence of building and uh and reaching maturity.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I couldn't agree more with that observation.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: So um we we pretend it hasn't happened in every industry.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: We pretend you didn't used to buy.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: When I was a kid, you'd buy you'd see people on a weekend fixing cars on their driveway because used cars used to break down all the time.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: They don't now because we've got really good at making cars.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: But that's taken hundreds of years.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was at an event once and someone was slating natural capital.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Why haven't these markets moved fast enough?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why haven't they gone anywhere?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this really old gentleman at the back of the room raised his hand and said, Um, I'm 70 odd years old, I'm being retired this long.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: I spent my entire uh career working in finance.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: We've had 400 years to get this right, and we keep messing up the world.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: So give the guys a break.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: I loved that.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Good guy.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um so yeah, at that point, we had to prove that we have a sustainable business model.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's when I came in uh to help uh professionalize the company and uh made various uh strategic choices.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing everything at once, and the beauty of that is uh we are were able to get a lot of different customers and a long tail, and including the middle market and the SMB market, which is typically underserved is to be the enterprise gets a lot of the attention.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: We're able to build ways to deliver access to project funding and embed it into workflows, which is something a lot of folks um talk about.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we we talked about it five years ago, and we built APIs, subscriptions, a self-serve marketplace.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: We had assisted sales, we have partnership uh bespoke portals to allow someone to fund.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: What did building look like at that point in time?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because right now people hear that and everybody's vibe coding and throwing stuff together.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: But at that point, what did building look like?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Army of engineers.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that was different than competitors again at the time, because we could potentially compete with a brokerage or a consultancy, and we had more engineers and product managers.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time, yeah, uh a lot of manual labor.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: And finding those individuals and those skills, again, that skill set not as prevalent as it is now.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now everyone wants to code and be well, we're kind of going over that hill, aren't we, a little bit?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, how for um at the time were you were you positioning yourself as a financial company, a tech company, an environmental, or were you already talking about the intersection?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Environmental.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: Environmental.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Environmental tech.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Environmental tech.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: So was that a point of differentiation to be able to recruit, or were you having to almost educate candidates on what you were to get them in?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was absolutely a point of differentiation.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was only help.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: When you were talking to researchers or um financiers, that's when you needed to categorize yourself to a market that didn't exist.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when you were talking to uh engineers, they were in search of meaningful, of meaning and meaningful work.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a lot easier.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about uh how the UK, uh, there's some cynicism, there are difficulties, and the San Francisco has all that a lot of benefits.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: At the time, hiring San Francisco engineers was impossible.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in the UK, there was a lot of great talent uh available.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: So points to London capabilities.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh coming back to my sort of spirit animal guide that is deep mind, that's one of Demis's points.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, if I was trying to recruit the same talent base in Samfram, my wage bill would be astronomical in comparison.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Insane.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas he's got he can pull from the whole of Europe.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he's getting some competition now from Eleven Labs and Black Forest Labs and the core companies across Europe.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, it was the only cool place if you wanted to work in AI.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: We think one of the we're one of the very few places if you want to work in environment, finance, tech.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: We're one of the few places you guys are as well.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have a US and a global footprint, but there's still not that many cool places for people, young people to work in the UK.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it is a point of differentiation and a massive price point difference.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um we uh we work really closely with Burgess Sam and the law firm.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: They bought our first ever carbon credits and set a new world record for us.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, of those guys.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Big congrats.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um they came for their they came to record some footage for their annual general meeting at our estate.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um two of our really sort of um early career team members showed their board around the estate.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: And their the two, their senior partner and managing partner pulled me to one side and went, these people are astonishing.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Where did you you get them from?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: We're like amazing through our intern programme.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I asked them, you know, what would getting talent like this in the in the law world look like?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I you couldn't, you couldn't get them out of London.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: They you just wouldn't be able to.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a unique thing we have.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you you you sort of mentioned it.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's that purpose point, right?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Did did you regularly hear that in the early days of recruitment?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh 100%.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's not an exaggeration in every single interview.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: We were at an awesome event yesterday put on by Salesforce with Anthropic.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was incredible.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: What they articulated that was really helpful was they think the best place for you to be, there's a whole session on fully autonomous agents, and there was you should only be deploying agents on existing surfaces that you already do exceptionally well.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: You shouldn't be freeing them into things you don't know how to win at and how to succeed.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, if you have got a fully documented system process methodology, that's a great place to utilize that type of resource.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought that was fascinating.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh something about agents, they need if you're selling to the enterprise, you need a lot of people uh to be able to develop them and deploy them for the enterprise.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I remember when I was trying to think of the strategic direction uh of a college in 2023, and I came from the uh Silicon Valley School of Thought, oh SaaS, there's the best business model, there's um uh it's more scalable, um, and services is uh the bad thing and everything like that.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: But then at the same time, I if you also think from a first principle basis, what do the customers need?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the time, if we were helping them fund projects, they needed guidance, human, the human element.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if we're talking about measurement and carbon accounting, still there's a top there's um there's a place for software, but there's also a place for a carbon accountant to help uh in it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I kept seeing that the human element was needed.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was the value on top of the tech.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's one of the reasons why we expanded carbon accounting.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of our folks that were buying carbon credits wanted measurement, we wanted to help them.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they they kept saying we don't want tools, we want full solutions, especially in the middle market.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting phrase, isn't it?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want tools, we want full solutions.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, we don't want uh a ton of vendors right now.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing is um happening also in in AI.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um they prefer people prefer solutions rather than tools because LLMs change so fast.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: So uh if you're building everything in-house or are you gonna be with various tools, or are you gonna be updating constantly?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: You want a vendor to be able to do most.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why a lot of the legal AI firms moved from selling tech tools to actually providing uh legal services with AI enabled.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: You'd you'd have loved this event yesterday.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's two things.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was it was super cool.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Two two things to pick up on that.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: One of the one of the panels talked explicitly about how um lots of businesses are shipping fragments of things, not even fully formed tools.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the the sort of joking narrative was you cannot be having to send someone the prompt they have to put in to do something because you're just gonna get a different experience, a different outcome.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the other bit, interestingly, was lawyers.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: So every every lawyer I've met at the minute is a bit worried about their future.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that was my hypothesis.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, okay, an LLM is essentially like the two best applications for this are.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Law, where you've got everything written down forever and you are repeating processes based on certain scenarios.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's the ideal trading data set.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, lawyers are in.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I even thought law was more at risk.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then marketing as well, in terms of the repetition of that of that process.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, one of the comments yesterday, and I think it was um it was one of the senior directors at Salesforce actually who's in charge of their um their agent force setup, so the automation of agents within their backpack systems.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, actually, the more lawyers he's spoken to, a few it was a law professor who was incredibly bullish about the future of law because there's now millions and millions of people who think they can write a contract.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: So there's gonna be way more bad law put into the world that people are gonna need to have checked and fixed and adjusted.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So actually, the inflow of the funnel for lawyers has never been bigger.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, he's right.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: In the right sort of circumstance, the hypothesis of less jobs for lawyers and more, it could flip either way, which I thought was fascinating.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: I I can totally see that.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh I'm more concerned about the junior to senior pipeline, uh, because you can make the argument that you need the strategic thinking.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you're talking about the human taste.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but there's some value in the administrative work, even that you you get when you start your job and you get familiarized.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's another way to do it.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm not I'm not fully pessimistic about it, but that's uh I I'm fully agreeing on the senior side.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's a bit like um so I've always been big into weight training and love lifting.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: The sort of eastern bloc view of training is that they get kids doing generic strength exercises, so press-ups and squats and sit-ups, to build that base layer.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bit like what you're articulating about the earlier years of your career.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yes, did we all do admin tasks we wish we hadn't?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you look back, how many years could we have to be able to do that?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking of the privilege of going out of having gone out of it.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I I reckon I could have saved a decade some of the stuff you could just do on AI now, which I'd love to have back.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: But that was forming, that was context, that was information, that was data points that we now utilize to make strategic decisions.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the next generation might not have that same type of um code base to start with.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you're right, how can we give it to them?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think uh people often said the same thing about remote working.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: So people would say, well, if you can't observe senior people in the office, how are you gonna learn things?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, we're a fully remote business.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we have a parent company head office that we can use and access, but generally we're fully remote.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think because we've had to build systems and processes that are exclusively remote, you just have to be more purposeful about your coaching.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll have 20 Teams calls a day.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: You will just have teams open talking to people while you're working.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: We bring the team together.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think if you were running multicultures, so you had like an office base and a remote one, that's really hard because you've got to do it in two different ways.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we've managed to develop some really incredible young talented people whilst still being fully remote.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: What's your setup like in terms of that?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, what you said your 15 people, you said 5-0, 50.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: 50 people?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: In the central team.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_00: That okay.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that is meaningful to make it uh harder.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's like up until 20 people.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think you can pull off anything.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um then above 20 Bezos is sharing two pizzas, isn't it?
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like just a what?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff Bezos says their their ideal team size is I think it's eight because you can share two pizzas.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, 50, you could easily lose it.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um so props, props on that.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we are remote first.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: I will say I have moved the company to be a little bit more uh on the hybrid side.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I st we started we have an office in London, we have an office in Bristol, so we're trying to give the opportunity.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's no commitment because we hired people on a remote first uh agreement, but uh whenever they want, and a lot of times we have department meetings, we have quarterly offsites, uh we try and as much as possible and reasonable without being disruptive um to yeah, to bring people together.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um what's the what's the why with that?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think you get from that contact time?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a level of authenticity that when you don't have pixels uh in in between that uh can only be transferred in person.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it's uh on a molecular level, I don't know what it is, but it it is there.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: So um we're we're so uh focused from a data perspective.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: We we can show the impact of time together on morale and productivity.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: So um I've I've stolen this from US college American football.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're a college American footballer, you go into the gym in the morning for your weight training session, you walk past an iPad, it recognizes who you are and it asks you five questions.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, how did you sleep?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have any injuries?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: How hydrated are you?
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: How much energy do you have?
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: and something else.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: By the time you go to your squat rack, it's recalibrated your numbers based on your feedback.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have a terrible night's sleep, it'll drop your weights down.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm like, right, we're really remote.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I can't see someone at a water cooler and go, Everything okay?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you're in an office, you can catch someone's eye, you can tell if they're really tired, they've had a bad day or whatever.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: We can't do that, but we can ask them the question in the same way.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: So every morning a little survey drops into people's inboxes at like 7, 8 a.m.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: They put their answers in and we get a single number that comes back from each of those criteria from all 50 people.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the challenge we sometimes get is, well, people won't be honest about that.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: If our head of people was here, he was like, they will if you meet it with compassion.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: So if someone puts a four and then your line manager goes, Wow, everything okay, what can I do to help?
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Then they will.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: If someone puts a four and they go, You need to work harder, then of course they won't.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we've we've done this for three years now.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: When we look at the team morale and sort of energy levels, the three days after an all-site get together jump a point up consistently, and it drops slowly over time and then jumps again between team events.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we do six team events a year, and that pattern continuously repeats.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think pretty sure if you search there's a lot of science and surveys behind that.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you you were taking us from 21-2 into almost what felt like the second chapter of the business in 23.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we went from being a climate action platform where you can fund various high-quality projects, either in carbon or nature, uh, meaning non-carbon credit, nature restoration.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of the customers kept asking for measurement.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we moved to we made an acquisition of a small uh London company um in the carbon accounting and construction.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: How did you find them?
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: How were you aware of them?
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: They they reached out.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um I was at the time uh looking, so I had built a pipeline uh of bankers and advisors that were even that's really rare.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you you for the sector, you hear so few acquisitions in the environmental space.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I'm aware of another one.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's that's very true because when we're talking to advisors, we're trying to find precedents.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: You usually hire the bankers that have done uh it was very hard.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's very few.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell So we're we're working with a boutique advisory firm at the moment um for our first raise, who their literal specialism is they work with one company in any sector and they specialise on preparing people to be the first of their kind to do something.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: So our view is we want to raise half a billion this year for doubling the size of the portfolio.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Nice.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Fingers crossed, team.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's why I mentioned so the the portfolio's north of about 425.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's our cornerstone.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Real assets, two million carbon credits, 4,000 BNG units, a fully optimised portfolio, ready.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: All the trees will be in the ground by the end of next year, all people and restoration will be done.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: It is ready as a portfolio, ready to yield.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to use that as our cornerstone to raise the other 500 on the back of it.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Nice unicorn status, and we'll accelerate and acquire more land.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: But we're no one's done that before.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: No one's brought that type of proposition to market.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we weren't.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you found the team that's used to doing what no one's done before.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's one way to go about it.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um well a prediction here, which I think it's pretty safe to make, uh, there's gonna be a big wave of MA consolidation coming in our space.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the space meaning we all operate on we're at an intermediary in the voluntary carbon market, again, nature situation funding and carbon accounting.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a lot is gonna occur over the next couple of years.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh uh both from for a variety of reasons.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's the the concept that 2030, the voluntary carbon market should be multiples of what it is now, and it doesn't need a lot.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's only just a billion uh right now.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's easy to say that it will it will grow quite a bit.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: But and there's there's Corsia here, there's other uh regulations, there's uh various tailwinds here.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: However, when will the ramp up happen?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the bigger question.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is it next?
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't think 2026 is gonna be uh where the big wrap up happened.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Will it be 2027, 2028?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, there's a lot of companies in the space, a lot of them not at the scale where they can be sustainable and profitable.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: So there's going to be an inorganic um uh acquisition wave that uh that's gonna happen.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Both, I mean, carbon accounting uh an anecdote that I like is when we first uh were founding members of this carbon accounting alliance, uh great group of people organization in the UK was were one of ten.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's I think 400 members.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: How many carbon accounting companies um did the market go 40 times to absorb the this?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and there's a lot that maybe needed for different niches and different like there it makes sense, but to an extent.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: But that that scale set against the wider sort of target market, and then you overlay the impact of AI disruption on that as well.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be a yeah, a big shakeup.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it will bring out strong, resilient groups of companies uh that will be able to carry uh the market to 2030.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: So if we if we sit here having this conversation in two years, how many of those 400 will there be?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think out of those 400, less than half.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there will be more than will come out.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so if we say a little bit less than, I mean, that again, this is a take.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh less than uh I meant all numbers are made up, right?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say 200, but there's gonna be some more that are gonna come out of this that are gonna be AI enabled, AI native to use the trendy terms, uh, but uh and consulting oriented but uh powered by AI tools.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um are you aware of the the sort of growth and the model behind Octopus Energy?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: So um Greg Jackson, awesome guy, shout out to Greg.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um that guy's been really helpful with us.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so they the narrative was there is no more space as an energy provider.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, every one of them was going bust, it was just the worst business to go in.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, nope, we're gonna disrupt this and do it differently.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and they they were at an 8 billion valuation recently, they're like the darling of the UK economy.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: Them revolute and deep mind are about it.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but they just spun out their data and tech platform, which is where we know them really well, because our view is we have the sort of natural tech capital equivalent of what they had for the energy sector, well, their view actually.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um but it's Greg that's giving me the argument, a bit a bit like you said, you know, there'll be half of the existing cohort will be there, but there will be some new incumbents.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to Greg, I think the narrative was that certain industries are just not disruptible anymore.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, then you had Elon rocking on and disrupting the car industry.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Greg's the best example of someone saying, well, this industry is done, there's no more room.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a way to disrupt.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: We just haven't thought about that.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh absolutely.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when we're thinking when we're thinking about our space and the contribution market, whether again, VCM or nature.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um if we believe in um there's gonna be 2030 is gonna have a lot of of the growth, but right now we're trying to figure out there's a little bit uncertainty in sustainability standards, is the net zero version two from SPTI, when that comes out, how is it gonna play out?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's a lot of uncertainty.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: But what I think is uh and what we're trying to do here as a as a growth factor is uh you know how carbon accounting has verticalization.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: Makes sense, similar hotspots, you have specific focused vendors for specific industries.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't been doing that in the on the contribution market, for example, the voluntary carbon market, um, because a lot of the project carbon credits, you fund uh some projects in the global south, for example.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: But there's an argument to be made to focus on having an industry create their own contribution fund based on their priorities, what they care about, uh, and uh be able uh to bring together folks.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give you a specific example.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: We work on the advertising and media spend.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've started this initiative, we call it Media and Service of Nature uh Fund, where we got we started with GiftGaff and MGOMD uh co-founded it, but now it's an open source uh framework for companies that spend a lot in in media and in media spend in advertisements, uh devote 0.1% of your media spent into uh contributions and because it's a UK initiative towards UK nature restoration.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the the premise behind that is uh the the back end is rigorous, like we're vetting projects deeply, but on the front end, if right now there's not good enough guidance by the big standards and the every industry wants to do their own thing, uh bring all the key industry associations and some of the big players, uh coordinate, create a fund, and then choose what sustainability means to you.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Choose what climate leaders you want to be and focus on if there's going to be innovation uh in let's say production materials or processes, create a fund and then use those funds with the economies of scale that you've built that to bring niche industry tools that you wouldn't have otherwise for uh come up from vendors.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that is one way that we're we're going about it, industry by industry.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's so many echoes of that happening across sectors at the moment.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you've this week you had the UK sovereign AI innovation fund launch at 500 million, seeking to do similar.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a huge period of pension fund consolidation in the UK where they're trying to have fewer, bigger funds and making them more able to do things in that way.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: We were at something with the Frontier Alliance the other night in terms of their carbon commitment to buy a billion carbon credits, similar with the Symbiosis Coalition.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder what it is about the time period now where we are seeing consolidations and more collaboration.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's wonderful.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I I was brought up in the 80s where uh leadership meant pushing the person behind you back so you could get ahead and you didn't collaborate on anything, and it was just wasn't it a nice way to live?
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas actually, I think you can be collaboratively competitive and still want to push your business forward whilst achieving a greater good.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's really interesting.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't I haven't picked up.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_00: It happens more in nascent again, nascent spaces that need growth.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh when you get to deep maturity level, it's like empires that get corrupt uh and fall.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but we are we're far from that.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: Away from empires now.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: In natural capital, um you still need to get all the investment grade investors in that you're still I mean you you tell me about which what kind of investor are you able to get?
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is it still the adventurous early adopters?
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or how far are you from the most institutional pension that doesn't even understand or care for like sustainability, but they care about IRR?
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: How far are you from that?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: So um so our current investor base is two incredible venture capital family offices and Triados Bank.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh and and actually of all the banks, Triados is the most ethical or position themselves as the most ethical and the most adventurous.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: So yes, it is institutional capital of a type, but it is on the ad adventurous end.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so most of the inflows we've had at the minute are from those bigger family offices.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of in in terms of this year's fundraise, there's two schools of thought, well, three schools of thought, actually.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the inflow is from the family offices, except in Europe.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we've we've just launched in Europe actually with uh director of Europe, Elena.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, she is astonishing, legitimate environmental celebrity.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: She has a hundred and ten thousand LinkedIn followers.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like she's you go to an event with her and you're there with a celebrity, it's ridiculous.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: She's taking us to Zurich, so I'm very happy that we're going to go to Zurich with Elena.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we had a lot of inflow from Dutch and Danish pension funds, so that was interesting.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: They seem a bit more uh progressive and advanced on their understanding of it, but knowing that it is environmental, it's not it is not an agnostic decision, it is a thematic one.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and it was when you said about um that sort of IRR pure-based investment, I'm not sure we're there yet with the institutions, but we have had UK pension funds invest in the space.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um West Yorkshire, I think it is, pension fund, Darren there has invested in Rebalance Earth with Rob Gardner, which they're doing some super, super cool stuff.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a bit like your point before about nascent markets needing it.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, um, I often get accused of being a bit of a cheerleader for the sector, but I am super super glad.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: What an accusation, well.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: People are like, well, why why why aren't you more critical about your competitors?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, because we need a bigger pie for everyone at this stage.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: And like, I'm super, super glad Rob Gardner and Ed Dick and all those teams are in the sector because they're figuring out new tools and techniques and ideas that we're all going to benefit from.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we we massively need all of it, really.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh chapter two, 2023.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that uh well is a good segue to the the um the point I was uh making about focusing, well, adding carbon accounting, trying to give an answer to the 99% of businesses that are not signed up on the SPTI.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're around 10,000 plus, hopefully more and more, but there's a lot of other folks that how do they that are not ready for that yet?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what they a lot of uh when we talk to customers, uh they do certain things.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: They they're they measure the footprint, they have started a carbon reduction plan, um, but they're not ready for SPTI.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're trying to give them a framework, a laddering framework, uh to so they can start, we call it the three R's reduce, restore, report.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but getting them on that journey.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and yeah, it comes back to the same question.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's companies like us that ended up focusing more on the supply, and it's great.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: But right now, for us, I mean, demand is the bottleneck.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope supply becomes the bottleneck.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: But right now we're squarely focused.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: How can we answer the question of why and how?
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: How can we, if ROI is needed, how can we provide that?
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not an easy endeavor.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and people ask, oh, what can I do?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we're trying to build that framework right now, and um, that's where the measurement and reduction uh consultancy that came in.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um so there's that, and then working on the city.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: How long was the acquisition process?
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: The process was around four months.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's quick.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and we try to make it uh quick because I mean MA is disruptive, of course.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so that's where we are right now.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, there's the question about or does AI fit in?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: Of course.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: Before you give us that one, give us a flavor of scale in terms of the business at the moment, in terms of number of people, customer base, the platform, bring it to life.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: We are 60 people in and mostly in the UK.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: We've worked with over 16,000 businesses in our lifetime.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: If we'd have been sat here in 2020 and said that, that's an astonishing number, right?
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: I just think we did we're not good enough at doing that.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: I ironically, I I did a whole thing about how we're not good enough at celebrating the successes we've had and the progress, and then proceeded not to celebrate something we'd achieved that week.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, we're halfway there, Rich.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: You've recognized you're not doing it well enough.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you need to get get better at actually celebrating it.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: But congratulations, that's an amazing number.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it comes with uh a lot of hard work, uh obviously, but uh we are doing a lot of things at once, which again is not the Silicon Valley playbook.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's what you're supposed to focus and focus.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: But it depends on the market.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: It depends on the customer profile, the value you're giving, and is the market On a trajectory where it's set, so you just need to build a system and it will ride the market, or do you need to create the market?
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's um right now we're still we all still need to create, right?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: We all still need to create a lot of this.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that that's where we're at.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um it will be an exciting few years ahead.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was speaking at a conference a year ago and I got asked how how valuable I thought AI was to the business.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And on the spot, I I came up with the answer that I I wouldn't swap AI for an intern right now.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you gave me my AI tools That's uh a year ago a year ago.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then around Christmas time, that answer changed to I wouldn't swap that for a 30,000, 40,000 pound employee.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: And now if you said to me, take AI away, we're talking about multiple people that I would I would keep the suite of tools instead of.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: What would my answer be with that one?
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: I might take three.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: I might take three two and a half, let's see.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, okay.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Two and a half, two and a half, two and a half is the currency.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: Has have you so um I should I should balance that with so I would say that is the productivity research general office tools AI side of what we do.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: The other half of what we do is so um we have from the very beginning of OC built a machine learning algorithm that scans every square meter of land in the UK.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's how we've chosen the estates we buy.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Proprietary algorithm that says that square meter of land over there, the market thinks it's worth X pounds.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: We actually know you could plant trees there, so we know it's worth Y pounds, or it's peatland restoration, so it's worth Z pounds, or it has potential for renewable energy, therefore it's worth alpha, et cetera.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we've built that model that scans out.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: What the latest iterations of AI have allowed us to do is really turn up the speed of that.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if we get an opportunity that comes, it's instantaneous.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: So if a land agent rings me and says, Oh, I've got 5,000 acres in Perthshire, we already know the estate.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: If they give me a broad part of the country and the size of it, we know the estate, we know our value point on it, we know what we would do with it because we will automatically run different simulations of how the land could be used.
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this is you have that in action right now?
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, 100%.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we've done every square meter of the UK, and we're currently building that proposition for Europe as well.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this comes back to Championship Manager.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the infrastructure is the same.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: So we're simplifying it into a series of numbers and leagues, but the data that you plug into it changes dependent on the geography.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: So the players in Syria are different from the ones in the premiership.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the game's the same.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: The engine's the same.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: The really exciting bits about the AI have helped is so we manage a lot of land, so 50,000 acres.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like our big estates are the size of a small city.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: So like the big Scottish estates are the size of Exeter and Bristol.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're those type of estates.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're hard to manage.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: If if you had an office, if you had a portfolio of commercial properties or residential properties, you can buy an off-the-shelf tool for managing these in terms of regulation and checks and logistics and things.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't exist for landed estates because they're all so different and varied.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: And your customer base, there are very few of them, and these people aren't all that IT literate.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: So there was never a demand for these.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had to build all those tools and techniques.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_01: So inadvertently, we've had a software development house for the last few years for the tools we needed.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: So for the I think I know where you're going with this.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: Go on, go on.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: Are you saying that it you could turn up selling some of this or licensing the software?
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're not planning on it.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: However, because so um we've never talked about I mean, you and I haven't had uh detailed conversations about the tech side of what we do because prior to this year, our board and I had an agreement that we we just don't talk about the data side of the business because it was our secret source, it was our proprietary stuff, and we would talk about the impact and the environment and the purpose of what we did and the scale.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: But because we're going to raise for the first time, this was some of the influence Greg Jackson had on us.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: So they did their deal with Kraken and their data platform, and we spent quite a bit of time with Greg out in New York Climate Week last year, and he was saying to me, You've got to talk about the data platform.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: Why are you not talking about this really important part of the business?
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we're now talking about that more and more.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_01: As a result, we've had quite a lot of inflow with people saying, We often used to get, will you manage land for other people?
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: And our viewers, no, because I I want to keep the team as lean as possible.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: We need a lot more people, and managing land for other people, it's a slower process, it's more complicated.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: We can't make the change we want to as quickly as we do.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, no, we wouldn't do that.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then the question started coming, might you sell the software and the tools and techniques?
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_01: And not at the moment, we're fully focused on the raise.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: But at some point in the future, maybe.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the impact of AI and the ability to ship products as quickly as we can, even down to it sounds silly, but we've got an app that if you were coming to visit our estates, we can upload your phone to this app.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: As you walk up to a gate, it will recognize you and tell you the gate code.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: Which which sounds silly, but if you've got hundreds of gates across 50,000 acres, having a book with loads of gate codes in is an absolute pain.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: So we built a simple solution to something that was a real world problem for us on a day-to-day basis.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: This uh makes me think the industries and the innovations that are possible.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, the answer of why now can be answered uh with the technologies that we have today.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: And there's uh there's a wild one that have you heard about uh space mining?
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: That is it's frightening, isn't it?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's and from one angle it sounds dystopian.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh from the other, it's like, is this even possible?
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: But um, I mean, you're uh you have a PhD in physics.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well uh data science.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, there's um you know Gerald O'Neill, uh physicist uh in Princeton and very big space uh influencer, uh like he set a lot of the infrastructure for space exploration.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this was fifty fifty years ago, but he believed that when humans can settle in the in the in the moon, uh they will be able to send um uh materials back to Earth without using any fuel.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can build a rail gun with the propulsion.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know this things better than me.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_00: But you can with you can have a very precise calculation, shoot it into orbit, and be able to land it uh in Earth, no fuel whatsoever.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then uh the the the why now, uh the why this is becoming interesting now is uh we may be far from settling uh in space, but what about autonomous robotics, autonomous robots and industrial uh equipment?
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: If, let's say there's a contingency, if we're able to send some efficiently to the moon and have them reproduce, like build more robots there and the equipment, if they can mine it, which by the way is easier in the moon because it's more on surface level than it is in the earth to mine certain uh uh materials, uh, then you could it could be cheaper to send back those rare uh minerals back to Earth than mining them in the earth.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: And from a sustainability standpoint, well, uh mining, I mean there are some concerns in the moon because, like, for example, dust, uh because gravity is not the same, um uh may be around the moon.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_00: There there are some typications.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_01: Tidal impact if we change the structural composition of the moon in terms of scales that we can even imagine.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but in terms of the mining, it is disruptive to the biosphere in Earth anyway.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, not any more than it is uh to the moon.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: So uh there's if we make mining cheaper uh in the moon to send it back, uh and by the way, what's a company that is um very ahead in autonomous robotics?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: Tesla.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what's a company that's possibly the best in sending reusable rockets uh in Earth, in well in in space?
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: SpaceX.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what is uh I mean AI, XAI merged into uh SpaceX.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: What's uh digging company, the boring company?
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what's uh communication layer satellite Starlink part of SpaceX?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a non-zero chance there's gonna be well space mining and also uh Elon rollup.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've in private equity we talk about uh HVAC roll-ups.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh like this can be an Elon, all the Elon companies all working together towards like becoming a behemoth there.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Elon's gonna mine the moon and he's gonna IPO to pay for it.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's why the IPO's coming.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Did you see the deal they did with Curse yesterday?
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I think uh that's brilliant, actually.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, say why?
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well uh XAI and and GROK started strong uh in terms of traction.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_00: It has lost uh very valuable ground, and one of the biggest battlegrounds is developer developers.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so it makes sense to acquire the traction um and and again that a play in the development market, which uh OpenAS Codex, obviously on the cloud, is way ahead.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, so it makes sense.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now the weird part that it's an option that that's so creative.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a lot of arguments of why uh it is happening.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um my guess is um it's because of the IPO, not to delay the IPO.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you if you have that ongoing, it makes things unstable for an IPO.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: I that's my guess so they can IPO first and then complete that transaction.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there could be other reasons as well, but um I think they they definitely want this.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: And also for the conversations they're having about the raise, they can lit like if people hate it, they can let look it's an option for a partnership agreement.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: If people love it, they can we can trigger it as soon as we want.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the optionality there is wonderful.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of my favorite questions that I'm gonna ask you in a second is what's the most contrarian view you hold about the sector?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get there, um I I think which sector are we talking about right now?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: Great question.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was when we get there, I'm gonna ask you about the sort of natural capital world, the intersection of environment and finance.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I want to stay on this sort of hotbed of IPOs at the moment.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Anthropic are gonna go, uh sorry, open AI are gonna go soon.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're gonna see they've almost let they've let Anthropic step forward doing really great stuff.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: And quietly in the background, you've seen OpenAI roll out a cool thing a couple of weeks after Anthropic app, a couple of weeks, and they're sitting on 6.0, right?
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think 6.0 will land as they say we're gonna IPO.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Sam was busy raising like the single biggest private rate, 180 billion or something is the private closed, like uh astonishing numbers there.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: Record like number one, which previously would have like outshot every other IPO.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an argument, do you even need to?
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: But it is such a race for compute and capital and everything else at the moment.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think they're gonna launch six and then use that as a springboard.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the narratives coming out of, and it was been brilliant to talk to people here, some of the narratives coming out of people who have seen this are like, this is 60 or 70% better than where we are at the moment.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, you've got um really, really clever boy who cried wolf stuff going on at Anthropic, where they're like, we can't possibly relieve mythos because it's so dangerous, it's gonna strip away and break all forms of like IT security.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I think you look at how much excitement's going around those IPOs.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: My contrarian perspective on this is um the growth of AI is only net positive for the environment in general.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: And here's why everyone talks about cloud computing, they're not sat in a cloud, they're sat in massive resource-consuming data centers that no one in the US wants them to be placed there at the moment.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sentiment around AI is awful.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone loves to use it, but no one wants a data center where they live.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: So um, if you look back in history, the industrialists who built the railways and built the factories became the benefactors of building towns and parks and things.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I don't think the massive hyperscalers are going to be benefactors, but I do think they're gonna be investors.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I think they are going to invest in physical real assets.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_01: They've got more money than they know what to do with, they're printing billions of pounds a month.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: If they need to diversify away from an industry that can be disrupted by AI, all they have is real assets.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: They also need space and water and carbon and renewable energy.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we are gonna see post these IPOs, when their balance sheets are so stocked, we are gonna see them take positions in real physical assets, which can only be good for the environment sector, because they're gonna have to get a social license, they're gonna have to prove a positive impact on the environment, or it's gonna stop their license to operate.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I've heard no one else advocate that contrarian view that AI actually will be good for investment into NATCAP.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that's my contrarian perspective.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, let me double down on that.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh, this is good.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh first off, uh, a lot of the folks that talk about negatively, uh, which of course it makes sense why, because on the immediate it is, I mean, data centers, yes.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's a lot of energy consumption, and it's only gonna get bigger and bigger.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but if you ask the same people, and what do you think?
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: Are we on track right now?
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ignore AI, uh, everyone's gonna say no.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're not on track for net zero.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've missed uh a lot of milestones, and uh it doesn't look like it doesn't look like uh the world is gonna stop traveling long-haul flights and stop eating meat.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: There could be a reduction, but uh that's not I think realistically that's not happening.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if we're not hitting the milestones as they are, we need uh a paradigm shift.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_00: And paradigm shifts come from historically, it always over and over and over, it has been technology that has brought it over um whether we don't have enough food for the population or uh anything.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like technology came in.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that is uh very pro-tech uh view, but I think we have no idea where uh AI, like the second, third order effects of AI.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: And um we talked a little bit before about space um uh getting minerals from from space.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Data centers.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, I mean I I can't say I'll I know how that would would work, but uh what I can say is like I it has me the potential has me believing that there will be a paradigm shift so that will allow us um to to change how we view energy.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then on top of that, it suddenly energy was always important in the world.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: It suddenly made it the number one national security concern, which on the uh on the first level, uh you see more um uh well more fuel, not well, not from renewable energies, like we're we might be Trump is talking about drill, baby drill.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's not gonna be enough for the data center demands.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if there is renewable sources or or nuclear, uh the that any source that exists will be uh uh an Amer America's number one uh priority over time because uh the uh AI race is not just uh a race with uh ourselves, it's uh the race with with China, with other uh uh well mainly China.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: India haven't lent in yet on the tech side of stuff.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: But um I'm a big cricket guy, so I love everything India and IPL.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually here's a side a slight digression.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh are you familiar with cricket at all?
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: I just know of the sport.
• 1:00:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not familiar with it.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um it literally echoes the natural capital sector perfectly.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, please go on.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: So historically, the purview, cricket was the purview of the gentleman.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was slow and steady, and you changed nothing.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: You took years to accumulate matches, used to be unlimited days.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Some matches went on weeks, okay?
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: So that and that's the environment sector.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, let's improve stuff slower, let's do another strategy report.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: Don't don't change anything, don't offend anyone, let's be very British and slow and professional.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: That was test match cricket.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Then all of a sudden, the IPL arrived, which is making it much more like baseball.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: 20 overs, fast, dynamic, multicolour clothing.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: And in the first order of the game, the total number of runs you got over an unlimited time period was what's important.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't equate to the real world.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: T20, you've got a limited number of overs.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: You have to get as many runs as fast as possible.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden we go from the hobbyist, the sort of uh Victorian man, to the athlete, the professional.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: And where you saw that total number of runs over time mattered, now it's how fast.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's your return on investment, your IRR, your speed of how quickly you can accumulate these things.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you see this change, this professionalization.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you and I are like outliers to the traditional environment sector.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: People people will be watching this from the traditional environment sector, offended about how much we're talking about money and capitalism.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because no, no, no, the environment's priceless.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't solly it with like money and results and outcomes.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: They've seen the exact same thing in cricket.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that in that um from a concept to the most valuable sports league in the world has happened in under 20 years in India because they've just professionalized it and ramped it up.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, are you familiar with the acquired podcast?
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: I've heard of it, yeah.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: They do real long form deep dive.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: Did a five-hour podcast on the growth of the IPL, and I made half the team listen to it.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: There's people who hate cricket, and they were like, that is the best podcast I've ever listened to.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's so fascinating.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so it's a good uh primer for me.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely, yes.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to have uh prior knowledge.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it would help, but no.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's true of anything in life, right?
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you've got if you've got prior knowledge, you can see I describe it a bit like uh looking at a print or an oil painting.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can get a rough idea of a print when you see it, but if you go and see an oil painting up close, you get the brush strokes and the texture.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think all sports are like that.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: The more you understand them, the more nuanced it is, the more you can see.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and to the the point about the audience being uh um not agreeing and not aligning with this direction of discussion, uh I mean there's a lot of parts where I agree, but I haven't heard a vision that works.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Well, and you also live in the real world.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't heard of a vision that works with uh trajectories and everything and uh and taking human nature into account here.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell We had we had breakfast with a guy who he was one of the first commercial leads at Peshawama and then was at South Pole for a while and um was one of the people who were uh first to market with some of these products, so was really testing them and developing them um in real time.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he said he was selling carbon credits, but he said I really wasn't.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was selling a way to root finance into doing the right thing for nature.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, unless you can show me a better model, that's the one I'm using, please.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm agnostic to solution, I just want one.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that the voluntary carbon market has gone through some of the pains of maturity where you needed um well, you needed players with integrity, you needed monitoring, you needed um in uh bodies to regulate, certify, verify.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh for better or for worse, the it has gone through a lot of this.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the infrastructure has been built.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot more, but it has been built, and we've gone through that painful growing up phase.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I fully agree with uh the way uh the your uh friend uh phrased it.
• 1:04:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is a way to finance um impact around the world.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh in a hypothetical world, let's uh let's assume that uh one ton of uh carbon removal removes exactly what it says, one ton of carbon from the atmosphere.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it comes a lot cheaper uh than other ways.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh should you not be funding this uh ton?
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's arguments no because uh it may lead to folks not reducing their emissions, and you need both.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can have.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sure.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: But same friend when uh they're and conversations, not all conversations.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um and by the way, for what it's worth, numbers don't show that people think people that do fund carbon removal do reduce them.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh anyone who says, oh, it's just pain to pollute, two things here.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: I've been guilty of this in the past.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because we're so close to nature markets and things, you forget how non people non-in the sector see these things.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: And um I I had this debate, not even a debate, this very angry person we knew saying, This is just a license to pollute, you're just selling license to pollute.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I don't even know how you can think that, because it's really hard to make a nature-based carbon credit.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to find, acquire, manage land, deal with a multiple-year permission process and everything to make that a reality.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized when I stepped back and thought about it, he wasn't talking about voluntary carbon credits.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't know the distinction between voluntary and regulated.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he was thinking about like airlines paying a tax to fly.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: And in that context, I was like, he's absolutely right.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: That is what they're doing.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're paying for a right to pollute.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I didn't stop and go, actually, no, no, let me explain to you the distinction.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I I had the opportunity to go back.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_01: I saw this guy again.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't someone who we um regular.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Interacted with, but I happened to see him again at Ooh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't explain this to you well enough.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Let me talk to you.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, I had no idea.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: He thought, and we can be so guilty.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't know.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I did, but I at least gave him enough information to well, I opened his mind.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: Who who knows if I could change it?
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I felt as soon as I'd had that realization, I felt so guilty.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, You idiot, you're too busy in your own world.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't see how other people would have perceived it.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I was really glad I got to go back and have that conversation again.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um I I would uh seeing both sides, what I would also add, one is what you said, not knowing the distinction, and the other, um there were common credits that were not doing the work that they were promising back in the day.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_00: So again, um I think largely we have the data right now to make a lot better decisions.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's only getting better cheaper and faster and everything in terms of data acquisition.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_01: I um I I wrote a piece the other day for book three, Natural Intelligence.
• 1:07:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was asked how we writing all three at the same time?
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, one's done and published.
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's done.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_01: Two's done, finished, it's coming out in June.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm now writing three.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh write a fourth one.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: How are you so prolific with uh content?
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's all AI, right?
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's all AI these days.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_01: So how I process my thinking?
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I collect ideas and stuff, and um I spoke about this with David actually.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um my my brain works pretty fast.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm not one for sort of long form slow thinking.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like sparkling of ideas.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: If you ask me a question, I can give you three or four answers.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: They're not what I think and feel about it, they're just options or suggestions almost.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if I write, I can focus on what do I actually think about this.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's an interesting reflection.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where I guess it's my version of meditation, I think, probably.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it's certainly where I focus.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: Your perplexity.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: Your human perplexity.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a compliment, right?
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think we just say that was like the lowbrow version of it.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um the um I think the uh I think there's a not zero percent chance we and you and others in the sector are acquired post-IPO by the anthropics, the open AIs, and things like that.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_01: You you OpenAI just spent 200 million on a podcast because they wanted a route to market for information and narrative.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: If they need to solve their social license problem, their environmental impact problem, and they want to diversify.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the other wrinkle of that is you look at their taxation situation, they could they could find a wonderful, cost-effective way of doing that acquisition by producing they could be the biggest benefactors of national parks in history.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_01: So uh acquire a million acres of the US, produce the carbon credits, the nature-based offsets, everything they need to cushion their environmental impact, and then hand it over as a nature reserve.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wipe off the full value of it against tax, and they're the only one of the very few industries that have the cash flow to make that opportunistic.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're valued at a trillion or two, uh some of the scale uh of these projects become achievable.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Yep.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have the question, oh, what about your environmental impact?
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: Then as opposed to them justifying it, they can say, yes, we'd love to talk about that.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_01: As a result of what we do, our net environmental impact on the world is significant.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I mean obviously a lot of people are trying to crack this problem, but uh data centers, there's always gotta be a better way to do them, to run them, to to re find uh energy in innovative ways.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that is also uh a very large if you're in materials, material science, um you should be working on this uh problem.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I was listening to what was the podcast?
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_01: The all-in podcast.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um and they were talking about I I I'll forgive me in terms of the Wright Institution, University, I'll get it wrong.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Princeton, but they were saying that one of the leading metology labs and m um they're redesigning materials and running AI-led simulations before developing and bringing the material into the lab.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So almost the the equivalent would be uh the sort of computational fluid dynamics that Formula One teams operate.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they model racing cars uh in a essentially an AI environment first to get 80% of the way there.
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then they put a physical scale model in a wind tunnel because it's significantly more expensive to do that.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: That gets them another 15% of the way there, then they put it on the track.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you were you able to do that simulation ahead of time.
• 1:10:52
  SPEAKER_01: They now can run that with material testing.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it's um it's adjacent to um deep minds protein folding, right?
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_01: They were able to generate and simulate those type of environments.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh innovation used to come from uh the military back in the day.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's coming from the uh Formula One.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Spot is is absolutely well, it comes from where the money is.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_01: That that's the other big thing.
• 1:11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and battle war still.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's not uh it's a different kind of battle.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's on the court or the racetrack.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:24
  SPEAKER_01: That competitive edge.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um the other thing I heard um this week, this week has been the most amazing learning experience for me.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_00: You should have visited more often.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_01: You you've been back a month living across it, and you're enjoying being back?
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:11:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the the energy is great.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: The energy is great.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen San Francisco and highs, lows, highs, lows.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're definitely on the on the high end of it.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think I'd enjoy living out here?
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you're a bundle of energy.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm saying there's a lot of great energy there, you you absorb and reflect it, and so yes.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a piece coming on that as well.
• 1:12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so um I've been so so decadent just picking your brains about wider, wider business stuff, which has been so much fun.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_01: But um, in terms of you specifically and and ecology, what's what's the next chapter look like?
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_01: What are you excited about?
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_00: What uh mentioned the 1% of media spend, if we can get the all the industry uh to to collaborate, the brands and agencies to collaborate, the Balkan, we're targeting 200 million pounds by 2030, then all spent towards UK restoration.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Have you come across um stability, a company?
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_01: Called Will Fokes.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Will Fox.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um so he's a blockchain guy and a lawyer by trade originally, and he's rolled out something called the Green Margin, which is the um the sort of idea and premise of it.
• 1:12:52
  SPEAKER_01: So in the in the UK, the uh Woodland Trust had a deal with Sainsbury's where they put like a penny on eggs and it funded 14 million pounds of restoration.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_01: So Will's built a blockchain system, he's got a load of a load of um tech guys working with him that will put a green margin on anything.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just been rolled out in the first supermarket chain, and it's literally a penny on each transaction, and he's also working with the actual payment providers, so I I think it's MasterCard, um, whereby they'll put a fraction of a penny, but they have trillions of transactions, and then they will route that to environmental projects as well.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you I think you and him would have a great chat.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's echoes and similarities, not in the same delivery, but the ethos of what's trying to happen.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's a I mentioned earlier that we are trying to catalyze demand, we're trying to help our customers make a better case.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um how do you differentiate yourself when you are a commoditized uh let's say uh an offering uh commodity offering legacy, and you have um uh like a utilities company, like an energy utilities company.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um we are in uh uh discussions with a company that this hasn't been released yet, but um in in in short, it would be launching a tariff with an add-on, a very small add-on on each bill, which would be almost almost immaterial.
• 1:14:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if we get all the subscribers um to to have that to pay that add-on, uh it's it's the key of the high volume, low value type of partnerships.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we'll be able to achieve massive impact without having uh needing to chase you know the huge budget uh budgets out there.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have it in the UK.
• 1:14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what I've noticed here, you walk into a coffee shop or a restaurant, the bottom of the um price list says a five percent surcharge is added to every bill to cover the um uh healthcare and stuff for the staff.
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's all we're talking about, but it's not even five percent.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is pointless something percent.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And but that five percent is virtually like it's in fine print at the bottom, right?
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not a geek and notice these things, you wouldn't notice it, you'd walk past it every day.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Willful blindness.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it's the same principle, right?
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same principle that this let's just let's pop that there and all recognize we're all benefiting from the serv the environmental services, the nature-based services that the environment and stuff are providing to us.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_01: We probably want to make sure they're there.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so that's that's what we're looking towards.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're uh trying to build these partnerships, and what we've realized it's not with one party.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: We need to build coalitions um with specific uh characteristics in mind.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um being in the same industry, that's obviously an obvious uh one.
• 1:15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um we have that then, we have the tools.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it's more about the it's not the it's not a technical problem.
• 1:16:01
  SPEAKER_00: We have uh very high quality projects that we've vetted, we have the infrastructure, so it's it's collaboration.
• 1:16:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it comes down to that now.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: We we are in the we're gonna rapidly be in the area where era whereby they're not technical problems anymore because the tech will solve its own problems.
• 1:16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I quite like it when you when you talk to people who are just do not want to engage with AI and they're like, oh no, no, it won't be right, it won't work.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, you do know if you ask it to fix the thing that's broken, it will just fix itself.
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, no.
• 1:16:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you're like, you were against this and you haven't even explored it.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, that's the biggest flag I think.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: If you see someone who's like, oh no, no, it wouldn't work.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, cool.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was that guy, I remember um I was like the last person in my class at school to get a mobile phone.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: I just didn't want one.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, no, no, no, it won't be a thing, it won't be.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this wasn't an iPhone.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: It won't be a thing.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_01: This was this wasn't an iPhone, this was like a brick type thing back in the in the 90s.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, nah, not for me.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then like I'm the most like tech-oriented person moving forward.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I always finish podcasts the same way.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um we've had such an awesome um thank you for coming in and having such an awesome wide, wide-ranging conversation.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what's the one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_00: When I talk with uh a lot of the folks here well, like yourself, there's a lot of as we said, there's a lot of work to be done, there's a lot of excitement.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um I would um bring up do not forget that you're in in this AI may be like a collection of sprints, but you're in this for the long term.
• 1:17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um wellness, health and wellness.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have so many tools right now, and I I see so so many uh very smart individuals doing everything right in their work and not taking care of them themselves.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we have so many tools right now.
• 1:17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a kind of a side um that I'm side project that I'm passionate about.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm using AI, use AI to make a wellness guru for you.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to do crazy stuff.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_00: But there's like get your lab tests done, have a protocol, have some of them, don't take take some of your vitamins, take of your supplements, do some like uh fitness because uh we have uh I see this a lot.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we are working very hard.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's great, but there's some low-hanging fruit of what can make you uh see many generational runs that's gonna that's gonna happen around us.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I can totally dive.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: I love this.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: I can dive into this.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um how old are you now?
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_01: 33.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: How old are you?
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: 42.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: You look younger.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take that.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take that.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um when we started OC, um, I was 38, my biomarkers were 42.
• 1:18:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm 42 now, my biomarkers are 38.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: So in the space of five years, we've flipped.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_01: We reverse them?
• 1:18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which is rare for someone who's scaled a business, right?
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Usually it goes the other way.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and actually it's been really purposeful about some of those things.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm the lightest I've been in like 15 years.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Diet's on point.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_01: I uh I've always loved lifting weights.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's been my thing anyway.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_01: I I enjoy that.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_01: But more purposefully what I'm doing.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like I'm lifting way less like we've been to the gym most mornings while we've been here.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Penny's lifting more weights than I am in terms of like heavier, but just movement, being really um sort of uh purposeful about that.
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'd I view it that I've worked really hard to get here.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I want to enjoy this for a while.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um where I'm not very good at, um I've never drank really.
• 1:19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Alcohol's never been my thing, so that's that's never affected me.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I can get better at sleep, like certainly on the road.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm at home, my wife's there, I sleep great.
• 1:19:52
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm away, I don't sleep as good.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I've never really explored the meditation side of things, uh, which David was big on this morning.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I think maybe that's at some point.
• 1:20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Meditation and breath work were his two big things.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Me neither.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I I haven't got into it yet.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um What are the pillars that you kind of that are important to you?
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um sunlight, a lot of walking.
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like then that's different than working out.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is completely.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, no weightlifting.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh muscle strengthening is very important for men and women, very important uh longevity.
• 1:20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Having a fun sport in there uh for me, I like I like racket sports, tennis in particular, but all racket sports uh supplements as well.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where you can use AI to help you a lot.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's a lot of clinical studies that are happening real time.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we're and you can just learn everything, but that is a prime use.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh to for example, I um I went to a doctor, they want to prescribe me for uh I had increased cholesterol.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it may be genetic, but um, and then I instead of uh getting statins, I started a protocol with uh red yeast, rice, uh uh Q10, and various other uh that AI helped me build and it dropped it.
• 1:21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh without I mean it isn't some natural statins in there, but it it's if you can avoid it, I mean use medicine whenever you need it, but if you can avoid it and build supplement protocols.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's like one of the easy It's the no-brainer, right?
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's a no-brainer, yeah.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Drink a lot of water in general.
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, um that, of course.
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's a no-brainer.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: I would argue more than protein because I prefer I don't like protein shakes.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh no, I can't drink them.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Makes me feel sick.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's why you're gonna buy Ninja Creamy.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_01: They are incredible.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna send you the videos.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: It is amazing.
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_01: It is like game game changer.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Penny, this is turning into the rich gets the geek out about business and like men's health longevity podcasts.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Mate, I've loved every minute of that.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for coming in.
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for inviting me.
• 1:21:55
  unknown: Thank you.