Latest / Second Nature / E198 Chris Winter: Scaling Intelligence - The Technology Behind the Future of Nature

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E198 Chris Winter: Scaling Intelligence - The Technology Behind the Future of Nature · Second Nature

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: I am delighted to welcome you all back to a special episode of Second Nature.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: We are back in the shoot room, the perfect place for it.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we are joined by the brand new managing director of Oxygen Intelligence, Mr.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Chris Winter.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Round of applause, please.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Chris, over the last year or so, we've been better articulating the oxygen company as capital conservation and intelligence.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: For people who aren't as close to the business as you, what fits under your role as the managing director of Intelligence?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the things we, I mean, when I first started working with you in oxygen conservation in like 2022 or 23, what we said we were going to do is produce the best quality natural capital credits in the world.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then over the past five years, that's what we've been building.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: What we do in the intelligence team is first off, we create and deliver the highest quality natural capital credits in the world.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that is underpinned by having the best quality frontier models in terms of AI and data science that help us deliver those credits.
• 1:09
  unknown: Amazing.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's two defined parts of this.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, and I'm going to ask you to talk about both.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's the tech side of the business and there's the natural capital side of the business.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Which one do you want to explore first?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean, I think it starts with natural capital because that's ultimately what we are delivering.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so what we're trying to produce are carbon credits that look and feel uh very differently to what other people perhaps think of when they see a carbon credit.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the carbon credits we produce, they are they're not really essentially credits, they are restoration of landscapes at scale, uh, underpinned by the most advanced technology that allows you to quantify and measure and see and visualize that carbon as it's being taken out of the atmosphere and stored in landscapes.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: What's the impact on value that that quality has?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, typically when you're seeing carbon credits trade at the moment, they're trading around 20, 25 um pound a ton.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: The credits we're selling are selling at 125 pounds a ton.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's you know, it's that premium that people are paying for is because they are paying for uh the difference between a uh I don't think it's that sentence because I don't know enough cars.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a Tesla.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we we always talked about the Tesla moment, right?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: This thing came up yesterday when Elon came out and said people are gonna pay$90,000 for an electric car when a Prius was the only thing out there, everyone laughed and we said it it would come and it was gonna be that.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what's arrived.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about Tesla at the beginning.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: When we launched early days in Oxen Conservation, the article about the Guardian saying carbon credits are worthless, and we were talking about launching the best quality credits in the world, and it was it was almost a laughable idea at that stage.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: But five years on, we have got the best quality credits in the world, they've been independently rated as the best.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: They are credits that you can touch and see, they are landscape restoration schemes that have been delivered.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think what's happened in that last five years has been not just what we've done, but you've seen the whole sector completely transform.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And a key part of that is I mean, what's happened over the last five years in terms of AI and tech and where that's got to, we live in a different world to five years ago.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What we can do now, you know, at the click of a button was pretty much impossible five years ago.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really been the kind of revolution in a lot of the natural capital market.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when you talk about best in the world, so you you mentioned it there, we have got the highest independent rating a nature-based product has ever got.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And how many world records have you broken for pricing?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, just two.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: Just two.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: We get a round of applause, Chris, please.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: How when you pause for a sec, which I appreciate is rare for both of us, and you think about what you've achieved over the last five years, that's astonishing, right?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but as as you've seen when we got the double A rating for the carbon credits, my immediate reaction was, Well, how do we get a triple A rating?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: You did get quite focused on that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I mean it's never enough.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's always got to be better.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's but when forced to reflect, it is incredible.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you reflect, like even further back, first shoot room session podcast we had, I talked about how I was disappointed to get rejected from Greg's when I was a younger boy in Liverpool.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that I would be sat here now as managing director of Oxygen Intelligence, delivering nature restoration at this sort of scale, it's it's unimaginable.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's it really is.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: The bit I love is that you've built it like over the last few years.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Every element, every decision, every data point, every tool technique, all of that that's come together, the people that are in the business.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when you were in the first five or six people that came in, something like that, and there's 50 of us now, and it's just it's what feels the same about the business and what feels distinctly different.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's something about how, like, right today, when everyone's together in Mornocott and everyone's sort of hanging out and walking around this state and chatting, that feels the same.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like the same people, the same team, the same like shared feeling of like, we're gonna do this crazy thing, we're gonna save the world, we're gonna do something really exciting together.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: That feels the same.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then other aspects, you're looking at the scale of what we're doing.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's so much bigger and faster and more professional uh than when we first started off.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We've now got teams of people that are delivering everything from like, you know, really complex, comprehensive legal agreements through to on the ground, you know, operational delivery schedules and gant charts and getting machines and stuff delivered on the ground to then a whole entire marketing empire that takes what we do and creates videos and a podcast and a book.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's yeah, the scale.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: It feels sometimes it feels the same, and sometimes you step back and look at it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's you know, it's completely different.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: Throughout that that growth, there's been moments where you and I have have kind of worried about that, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: We we both enjoy the creative chaos, the energy.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: One of our brilliant interns said to me today, OC feels like we're flying in this amazing fighter jet that we're building while it's in the air.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I love that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Maria.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's what we want, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want it to become boring and stale.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Why why is that so important to you that we keep the chaos?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think, I mean there is something about like the act of like problem solving and being creative and finding a solution to something that's really difficult.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is inherently really motivating and really exciting.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and when you apply that to something that you really care about, it's it's doubly so, you know.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: To be able to look at the big problems we have around us, around climate collapse and biodiversity loss, and to be able to get up day to day and figure out how to solve it, do something different about it, it's it's uh yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Something very special about that.
• 7:09
  unknown: Oh, right.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think that only comes from working with like-minded and equally able and exciting and and very different people.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um your relationship with leadership has changed a lot over the last few years.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you famously in our first year of intern rounds when I'm not interested, there's nothing an intern can do to impress me.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: I d I don't remember that.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: L, do you remember that?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: L's off camera remembering that.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: Those of us that were there do remember that.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then and then we got James and Esme, and now you have the most incredibly talented team.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: How has your feeling about leading people changed?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: If you're working with people who are brilliant and leading them and managing them, it's like the easiest best thing in the world.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're just there to like support them and watch them do great things.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you're if it's set up in a really good culture, uh it can be incredibly rewarding.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think previous experience I've had with leadership and management have been less less positive, less supportive.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think you and George have had the exact same journey that I I realized it when I was uh talking to to both George and Fee earlier.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um I should say, depending on the order Penny release these, this is part of a series of announcement videos because we're going to be announcing.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, uh we've announced Fee becoming managing director of the conservation part of the business in earlier this year, and also uh you, the second announcement we've made.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then there'll also be a podcast coming out announcing George as um the MD of the capital side of the business.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think with both you and George, you are such high achievers, so fast-paced, so driven, you weren't given people that could keep up and help making you better before.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: So actually, it was just frustrating.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I was like, hmm, here's a challenge.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let's give Chris and George people that they want to work with.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as that gone in, both of you have just absolutely flown from a leadership perspective.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I mean it's a testament to the like the role that's been done on the people team, particularly around holding the bar and recruiting people who are brilliant.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It just makes it lifts everybody.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: When if you just keep breaking bringing in people who are brilliant and surrounding them by people who are brilliant, it just it gets better and better.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Your first interns are now leads and managers who themselves have interns.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: How does that make you feel?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite amazing to watch.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something really there's something really wonderful about seeing them come in and I mean what yesterday Esme was kind of leading a team of people who'd come to see one of our estates with um our intern.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's incredible, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like a couple of years ago, they were straight into OC, asking loads of questions, trying to figure out what they're doing, and now they are walking people around, people looking up to them as like leading figures in the industry, like they're the ones who've gone out and done it over the last five years.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: They've built this, they've you know built habitat banks, created new nature credits, like planted woodlands, developed carbon credits, and everybody's looking to them to see how that how this could be done.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: How did you do that?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something like these guys have been their professional careers in a couple of years, they've done more than most people have done in 20, 30 years.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: And those people who've been working for 20, 30 years now looking at them and saying, How did you do it?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: What like it's incredible.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like what a yeah.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: I um I feel a bit like the manager of Barcelona when they knew they had like Lionel Messi coming through and Innie Esther and Chabby.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I feel like we know we've got this the the the sort of managers here, the James, Esme, Abby, um, Ellie, this year's Ellie Millington.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that whole that whole band of super penny, that whole band of super talent at that part of the business.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: That the rest of the world think OC's me and you and El and George and Fee.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And of course it is, but oh my word, they do not know the incredible talent we've got coming for the next five and ten years.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: And because they're now getting interns, we've got the next version of that as well, which is just astonishing.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we all sat there and talked about, again, borrowed from spot, building a culture that could win multiple trophies in multiple years or multiple world records in multiple years.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And doesn't it just feel like we've got it now in terms of that depth of talent?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's some probably hackneyed like comparison to how we're managing landscapes in the same way.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: You see like a beautiful all go throughest, it looks incredible from the top of it.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: But if there's no like regrowth and natural regeneration underneath, it's just slowly dying, and it's not going to be a rainforest there in 50 years.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a lot of what we're doing in the land is like bringing young trees and establishing them so they kind of grow up through the next generation.
• 11:48
  unknown: Sorry.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um from the very beginning, data's been really important to you and me personally.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And from the the birth of Claudia, our sort of first AA platform in terms of acquisition.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um can you talk about how important data is to us as a business?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think that was the first the way we first connected was through the project I was doing previously, Nature Capital Laboratory, which was like it basically combined the two things I love most: nature, nature restoration, and like how that could be financed and delivered, and then also technology and data and how you could use those systems and platforms that are coming out in the tech world to make nature restoration more possible, more scalable, uh, more deliverable.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were doing this like small-scale project across 100 acres, looking at uh it was a rewelding project in Scotland, the Highlands, uh, an incredible landscape.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we filled it with drones and tech and sensors, and like the whole ethos of that was like, how do we use this data to make these schemes deliverable in practice and scalable?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do we take this from 100 acres to 100,000 acres?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then you came along and were like, let's do it over 100,000 acres.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, a very from the first day, like a core part of what I was doing here was bringing that right, we need to create a scalable financial model for doing nature restoration, but also a key part of that has got to be using data and tech to make it possible because you think about how environmental schemes have been delivered for 20, last 20, 30 years, there's a lot of paperwork, a lot of clipboards, there's a lot of stuff that is extremely painstaking and just it's not scalable at 100,000 acres.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: It might be possible on small, you know, pilot scale projects, but it doesn't work at the landscape level.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we're going to do what we say we're gonna do, which is a score of 250,000 acres of land, there has to be a tech element to it.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the ha we have to create the solutions that make it work.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um, someone else who's played a massive role in this, can you talk a little bit about the impact Lara's had on the business?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, she was there before me, and she was just Yeah.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Lara, she's understated, she's absolutely brilliant.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Since like the first day, she's been collecting all the data that OC's ever had into this increasingly growing and sophisticated platform.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you've seen it and her develop from collecting data, creating maps, and spatially representing what we've got to what, and that was essentially what Laura's role is.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now she is at the forefront of developing and managing these incredible pieces of AI-led data software platforms, which are pulling together this data that's built up over five years to provide these tools which cut across each aspect of the business.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's just incredible to see the work she's done and built over those few years and what we can do now compared to what we started from.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: The ability for us to put drones in the air and turn that into meaningful data from intelligent acquisitions to intelligent estates all the way through to the MRV and intelligent carbon side of what we're doing.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: And prior to this year, we were really we were almost in stealth mode about the tech side, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: We talked about the impact, the inventure, the environment side of it, very vocal about that, but we're obviously very protective and discreet about the tech side of it.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: But this year, you've had the opportunity, you and Lara, to showcase it to some of the leading companies in the world.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: What's that feedback been like?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's been overwhelmingly positive and excited.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: You almost swore then, didn't you?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's surprising when you see, you know, because you kind of just when you're in the middle of a bubble, you're kind of working on stuff and you think it's freaking exciting.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: When you then speak to people externally and they look at and say, wow, this is quite, you know, everybody is surprised and shocked at how much we've built and what we've done in the last few years.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the key differences that that we've been doing.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So Laura's her work has always been very focused on what does oxygen conservation need to scale and build?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like what are the tools and tech and platforms that are needed for the business?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite example being the gate code.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: So you we have the hundreds of gates across the estate.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Finding the right code at the right time, absolute nightmare.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Lara goes, not a problem, leave that to me.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Build an app, we can onboard a phone, you walk up to a gate, it recognizes you and gives you a gate code.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: What seems like a simple problem, nightmares that hit estates across the country.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'll solve that.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Lara.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: We appreciate you.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's amazing, right?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because you would never start up a tech company that focuses on gate codes.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like it doesn't make any sense.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then there are a lot of kind of email.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can someone check if there's a company that an AI could be the type of company?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Apologies.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the big differences is that what Laura's done the last few years is solve problems day to day for the rest of the team.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and what we've got now is this really rich and detailed kind of set of tools and platforms and processes that are built on real-life data linked to real-world problems.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they were never intended to be a scalable tech platform.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: They were tend to intended to solve real-world problems.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: But over five years, when you look at what's been built, we have got the most sophisticated tech platform for designing, delivering, executing natural capital projects because it's we've needed to build out over the last five years.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only now that we're starting to talk about it as an actual sort of product or service rather than just something we use in-house.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: We um you were doing a demonstration to one of the leading strategy consultants in the world.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was across with the team looking at potential new acquisitions in Spain and Portugal.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he literally sent me a message saying, I'm with your team.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: This is an entire other business.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: You could raise venture capital on this tomorrow.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: Brackets, this isn't hyperbole.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's an astonishing response to the demo.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's been it's been amazing.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the things that's really sort of landed well with people uh at Climate Action Week this year, and again, we weren't launching a tech product or tech software platform.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: We were doing a presentation about quality and trust and how do you build carbon credits that are actually measurable and verifiable.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: Integrity and like how is it real?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: How do you achieve integrity?
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's that's what the presentation was out.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what we're talking about.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about how we develop this really super detailed LIDAR system and then a series of machine learning um models and neural networks that can take high-quality LIDAR information and use it to build individual 3D trees of every single tree we own, and then measure that almost in real time and look at how trees are growing and quantify super accurately carbon and bring that together into like a visual, tangible thing, because a big disconnect previously is what would happen in carbon markets is people would buy a credit on a registry and not really know whether that was linked to a real scheme, even or a real tree, or what was actually happening.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to actually link you've got a credit, here is the tree that's providing it, and you can see that credit being developed.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think was a you know that was a key thing that we were trying to build.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: And sort of almost like an offshoot of that is people are now looking at it and this software platform that we've built, you know, this could be used as a verification tool across not just our schemes, but any anyone who's doing carbon credit schemes, we can now provide this as a piece of software that allows you to actually measure carbon much more accurately at a cheaper price and bring forward the cost the time scales for verification.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So what previously may have been done every 10 years, we can now do every six months, every six days, even if we needed to.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's astonishing.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: What's your ambition for the tech side of the?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think the big the big step, and we've just been talking about how everything we've done so far has been to develop the tools and processes needed for oxygen conservation.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And oxygen conservation is scaling and growing, you know, really quite really fast.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's really exciting.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, 250,000 acres of land, that's a tiny slither of what's happening globally.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: What the tech platform offers is the potential to do this at unimaginably bigger scale.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: So taking what we've done over 250,000 acres and scaling it globally.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if we can help other organizations to find land, execute and deliver natural capital projects and deliver super high quality premium credits, then that's gonna facilitate not just the billions of um pounds that we're putting into nature restoration, but billions of pounds for other people to do it and then billions of pounds for others to do it.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just it compounds.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how we're gonna build and grow a sector and expand from what we're doing, you know, with our portfolio to portfolios across the world.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so we're focused on the tech side, the natural capital part of your role.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you are amongst a small handful of people that literally conceived the potential of a natural capital market from your work in Australia.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can you remind people a little bit about that, about how your um work on natural capital began?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I did a master's degree in environmental economics and then spent time working in Australia with the government and university there on designing markets for nature.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: So they were looking at how do you how do you create a water market which allows you to um allocate water rights and um restore environmental flows, how do you allocate money better for conservation finance, how do you deliver more with money that's available, and looking at I think for me that the big kind of moment I had in my sort of early career was sort of figuring because I was terrible at economics, hated it, um, found it really boring, but was pretty good at maths and like none wasn't that side of it.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had this moment of like uh it was an early professor who was talking about phishing and how you if every time it's it's in my contract.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: I have to bring up fishing at every possible opportunity.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um but with like basic simple economic modeling, if you apply that to like environmental resource allocation problems like phishing rights and phishing access, you can actually save whole species and stop them from being you know collapsed and um fished to death.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: I had just this like aha moment of actually economics and market systems, they're the most powerful and influential tool that humans have created for like how we allocate resources and make decisions.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: If we're not using them.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: For positive and like applying them to environmental challenges.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're never going to solve anything, we're just always going to be skirting around the solution.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then, I mean, that was the moment.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then that was kind of like the whole you know map out of my career was sort of set at that point.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, right, let's create you know markets that can allocate finance to restore nature.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you've taken that concept and brought it to life through what is one of, if not the only, fully vertically integrated natural capital model in the world.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: How important is that ownership of the land and the real asset to your vision of creating the best natural capital products possible?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and again, it a lot of it comes back to one of those foundational principles of when we were talking about how would you do a good carbon credit and looking at what was happening in the market in 2002, 2003.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't own the land, if you can't go there, see it in person, see it for yourself and for people who are buying the credits, they can come and see it too.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to actually know what's happening and to be really clear about that.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that we can purchase the land, visit the estates year on year, collect the data, pull that data together, measure it, report it, bring people in there.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely transformative in terms of the ability to actually manage what's happening.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: If there's a problem on the estate, say there's a wildfire, we can be there, you know, we can detect the issue in minutes and like send people out there to resolve it.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: Everything happens much faster and much more care and precision because we're able to actually own and control what's happening.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just completely different to being in a position where you're relying on third parties, sometimes other end of a country or other end of the world, to deliver a scheme that you kind of you don't actually see day-to-day.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: So despite the, you know, you mentioned maths and data and the sort of base principles you're building from, the last couple of years, all that's been disrupted by AI.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: How much is AI integrated into your day-to-day work?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a long message thread back and forth with Phil, our wonderful um data science advisor, uh at Oxy Intelligence.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's just going, because he's a PhD physicist, brilliant mathematician, he's just bemoaning the idea that maths is kind of you know, it's being solved now by AI.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what was previously seen as like impossible theorems are now being solved in a couple of hours by the latest models.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like how far and how fast things have changed.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it I mean, it's some it's overwhelming, you know, in the last six months how much has happened.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when you extrapolate that forward, it's gonna change everything.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: The way we work, the way everything is done is gonna change forever now.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I mean it's it's both terrifying and wonderfully exciting.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Are you scared yet?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think I've got a two-year-old son, and he goes to a nursery where one of the things they do as two-year-olds is use a large language model to program robotic minds so that they can interact with them.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's it that wouldn't have happened in my nursery.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, like eating crayons.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the world he the world he grows up in is gonna be fundamentally different to the world we know now.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're on the cusp of this technology that's gonna change everything.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so few people realise.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the reality.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you can get the right corner of X or LinkedIn and you and YouTube, and you're like, okay, everyone sees this, and it's like I got I've had a couple of scared moments.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: We were in London one morning.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: I remember messaging you going, the first time I used an agent prompt on GTP and it took over, and I saw it moving around my screen, and I was like, okay, this has changed.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Another one was yesterday when there was so we were recording this the day after some senior researchers at Anthropic and Open Air Um resigned with scathing letters going, This is fucking scary, people.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: This can do whatever it wants and it's taking over.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, Yeah, I mean the hogging face thing, the more you read about that, the more it just I I haven't dove into it.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's it it's it's like fascinating and terrifying.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: But didn't they set it up and say no parameters, just keep going until you fuck some stuff up?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's they they did what everyone in AI is doing at the moment, which is creating goal-seeking agents where you give them a goal and say, do this, and it does it.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: But if you accidentally give something an impossible goal, it will literally do anything to do that goal, including like lie, cheat, create new forms of communication.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like Chris, are you describing an AI or you?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: In in a world whereby AI is influencing things, there's also the amount of autonomation and robotics and things.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: It just I can't help but think about the incredible work that Doris and Chloe do on the drone side of things.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk about the importance of data collection of that type?
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's another huge change in the sector.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: You think about we own some large landscape, say 15,000 acres.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: You think about someone going there and walking across the entire landscape, measuring every single tree, marking it on a map, on a paper map.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: It takes literally years.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: What Doris and Chloe can do is do that in a matter of days and then take that information, process it, make it visually accessible to anybody who wants to use it and run the algorithms to accurately quantify the control tree.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Doris has revolutionized the way we do that.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And what Doris, what was incredible about Doris's approach was she came in and said, everything you're doing is rubbish.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: You need to do it this, like up your game, do it.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is the best possible data collection you could do if you want to.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to do the best carbon credits in the world, this is how you should do it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we looked at it and we're like, this will take months.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be extremely expensive.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: It'll take, it's not doable at scale.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, month after month, with like little tiny tweaks and adjustments and iterations, she's developing systems and processes and the technology gets better and the time and the accuracy, the time decreases and the accuracy increases.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what she's able to do now is like months faster than what she previously did.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see we're on this curve why where each iteration gets faster and better and faster and better.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, it's it's incredible.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're almost getting to this point where we can run, you know, near instantaneous data collection over large areas, translate that to the cloud and get the results in yeah, record time.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the the amount of stacked, vertically integrated, stacked in innovations you need on that go from the the rules and the regulations about flying the drones, where you can do it, how you can do it, accessing the site in the best way, the power and the energy solutions that need, having to optimize everything to make that possible.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think that was one of the big steps Doris made, as you say, she came in and said, no, no, no, we can do this in another way.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I love that about the intelligence part of the business.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're always bringing in a new skill set that doesn't just, yes, we want marginal gains, but we're finding step changes still, which is super exciting.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And like what's really exciting is the team is really small.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: What we've done is just the tiny slither of the first bit of what we're gonna do.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like, this is just the beginning, and you can kind of see these exponential curves ahead of us everywhere.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Intelligence is our the tech side of what you do, especially is like a startup within us at the minute, and it's just so ready and poised to go.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Understanding, measuring, and monitoring these landscapes is obviously incredibly challenging.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: But how difficult is securing the permission, the approvals, and actually delivering the change we need to see on the ground?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, that's like that's basically the most difficult thing we we do as a business, especially when we first get an estate.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the best thing we can do to make that easier is to do the work ahead of acquiring estate.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so a big part of what the intelligence team has done is to build this model for analyzing data and looking at landscapes and bringing in AI and data and giving very detailed um overviews and understanding of estates before we even get there.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that feeds into the work that James does in our team, who leads on all the site acquisition work.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: What used to be a long process of pulling, again, going out to estates and pulling together data and like reading PDFs and pulling all together, he can now automate and process and give us instantaneous views of each estate as they come to market, and we can get a really comprehensive and detailed understanding of what the opportunities could be and whether a site actually does work for natural capital.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's some places what we want to do are not going to be appropriate.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's productive farming and we don't want to take it out of food production.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there are specific constraints around the peat depth or the birds or whatever archaeology that make natural capital not appropriate.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: So we can find those estates and screen them in or out early on.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: And by the time we get there, we've got a really good understanding, a really good baseline, and we know what sort of scheme is going to work and how to be able to deliver that to the um requirements that we need.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: You you mentioned James on the way past, um, your first employee here.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: James is one of those people who he's got like the best attitude I've met of anyone.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a superpower.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's just every day he picks something up, he learns, he develops, and he's just more than anyone, I think, over the last five years, he's he's just grown with the business completely.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: His whole career has been here and he's been a part of everything we've done.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and we were talking about the site acquisition thing, which I think is a really nice example of what he's been doing.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: He started off um feeding into what other people were doing, and now he runs the whole process.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: He started off finding me and Dan coffee shop where we would go at badly.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: Badly, he's way better at finding a state.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um he is simply one of the best human beings in this business, and um we adore you, James.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um where are we going next, Chris?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think the the single thing that we need to do next as a business is to prove or to take all the stuff that we've done and take it elsewhere and make it scalable and usable by other people.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, what we're planning to do next is to start actually testing some of the monitoring, reporting, verification models we've developed on a real life project.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: So partnering with Isometric, what we want to be able to do is use this advanced LIDAR um detection system to provide the most accurate estimate of carbon stocks at our new woodland creation project in Cornwall, and then use that to try and secure finally a triple-A rated credit and show what the best quality carbon credit could actually be.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and once we've done that, looking at how we can then become a verified provider of that service so that anybody who's doing carbon projects across the UK or even globally is able to use those tools and techniques and be able to really improve the quality and deliverability of carbon projects.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be a miss if I didn't ask you to reflect a little upon your fellow managing directors.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: What do you value the most about working with Fee and George?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they compensate for basically all the flaws I have as a human.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's fair.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: George is gonna keep me out of prison.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, George, appreciate that.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And Fee's gonna actually make sure that all the stuff I just sit and talk and hypothesize about actually gets delivered in practice.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um both of them are so so intelligent, so dedicated, and so professional and just generally nice and wonderful people.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: I like the business wouldn't work without them.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: They are the people who like do things, make sure it gets done day in, day out, and they they they they deliver and run the business, essentially.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: And all I do is sort of sit in a chair with you and talk about crazy things like drone technology and AI and robotic walls, and yeah, unfortunately, sometimes cricket.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't get imposter syndrome except where it comes to getting to work with you and George and Fee, um, which just means the world to me.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Bill, like it was almost worth getting rejected at Greg's for this moment.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Round of applause for Greg.