Latest / Second Nature / E169 Tommy Ricketts: The Reckoning Is Coming

Transcript

E169 Tommy Ricketts: The Reckoning Is Coming · Second Nature

0:07
SPEAKER_00: There's a difference between always working and always being on.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: I think Yeah, I don't feel like hours will go by when I'm not necessarily doing something in an evening, but I'm always on.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: At any one moment until I go to when I wake up to when I go to bed, I'm basically working.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: It's not like I'm not necessarily at my desk writing a paper, but I'm just but I'm always working.
0:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's that's that point about the inflow of information.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm always absorbing something called moving it on, or like I love so we're 40 people in the central team now, and I love I'll find a nugget of information and I can move it to the right person in the right place who can make the most out of it.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think the variety as well.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: I absolutely love that we go from Scotland to here and I'm back in Worcestershire tomorrow, and I get some right things.
0:47
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Worcester.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: My dad's from um Lower Broadheath, um which is just a small village just outside Worcester.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: So they're all from Worcester.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: The Rickets are from Worcester, uh-huh, which is the the the the yeah, the Ricketts name itself comes from the border of Gloucester and Worcester.
1:05
SPEAKER_00: Um love it.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: I think my dad's claim to fame, he's an academic, was that he his girlfriend was the vicar's daughter that lived in the Worcester Cathedral.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: So on the£20 note, there was the Worcester Cathedral, if you remember.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: And so he he was like, I've slept in that bedroom on the£20 note, which I thought was quite jokes.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: But Worcester's cool, yeah.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: I like it I like it up there.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: It's sleepy.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I mean happy wife, happy life.
1:31
SPEAKER_01: So where my wife won, so we lived in Devon for a while, and in my sort of first chapter of the career when I was at the environment agency, I lived in like six, seven different places.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: I had 16 jobs in nine years.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Every six months, I was just like, no one does anything, I'm leaving.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: So they promoted me to a different place each time.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: And we ended up living in Devon, and it was just we we knew no one down there.
1:51
SPEAKER_01: The whole pace life was so much slower.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: Helen was just miserable, as was I.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: And the last place that we we had our first child up in in the Midlands around Worcester, and she's like, I want to go back there.
1:59
SPEAKER_01: So that's where we moved back.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: And then six months later, OC started with sort of the parent company being based out of the southwest.
2:07
SPEAKER_01: It's like we can't move back, can we?
2:08
SPEAKER_01: This is the middle of COVID as well.
2:09
SPEAKER_01: And it was like, can't possibly do that.
2:12
SPEAKER_01: Um actually a spot on the side of the M5.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: You can kind of trace a lot of our estates up and down the M5.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: It's been really efficient in terms of that.
2:20
SPEAKER_01: Well, I've gone from New Zealand to were you born New Zealand?
2:23
SPEAKER_00: I was born in New Zealand, but I came to N1, no, N5, N16, NW3, E2, N5, no, yeah, NW1.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: It's not for a I've gone like one tiny little bit of North London with a little bit of Bethnal Green.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: That's been my entire time here.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: Uh um But yeah, no, I'm from I'm from Wellington.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: That's a great place to start.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: You may as well give us the um the life backstory in the the chapters of Welly Shaw.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: I um my dad's written a book about my dad's an English academic, he's written a book about this.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: It comes back to uh his his he's a man of the empire, his dad was the was the colonel, head of the Worcester Regiment, and he was born on binary bases.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: I think his his mum's mum from Cornwall ended up in being a teacher in New Zealand and sent him a ruler with all the New Zealand trees on.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: You know, her that's famous for birds and trees, New Zealand.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: And he loved this, became an academic, and then moved the whole family to New Zealand, and then I was born there.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Um and then he stayed there with some of my older siblings.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: My parents divorced and I came back to London.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: How old were you when you came back?
3:30
SPEAKER_00: Four or five.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: Do you do you have any memory of New Zealand?
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Why partly because my whole my fat I'm the youngest of six, and so my my household was Kiwi.
3:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: So I was living in Hackney with a Kiwi household, but I'm obviously quite I'm obviously pretty English.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: But my siblings are like hardcore New Zealanders.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, they came here for five years, did union, and went back.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: Um so in that sense, I have like a I grew up on like, you know, He-Man and all that kind of like random 70s and 80s uh references.
4:00
SPEAKER_00: Um and then yeah.
4:02
SPEAKER_00: And then my mum was an academic also and worked as an advisor to the New Zealand government on European um economics.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: So basically what happened to New Zealand is that the common agricultural policy destroyed their economy because they all their export economy was basically the UK and the Commonwealth, and the UK was the main recipient of most of their goods.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: And then when the UK joined the um common agriculture policy in the 70s, it took all of New Zealand's main markets away.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: And so it transformed the economy anyway.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: So she was there advising on that, went to work in the European Union, uh, and met a very eccentric German politician called Frank Schrolber, who was the president of the Greens, who's my godfather.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: So the whole Green movement starts from my godfather being a mad anti-nuclear student protesting Green person, and he was the first ever elected Green politician.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh do you um do you have kids?
4:55
SPEAKER_00: I have two, yeah.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: How old?
4:57
SPEAKER_01: Three and a half and nearly two.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: I I am quick.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: So as a result of doing this, so we've done 160-something podcast now.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: The thing that I'm acutely aware of is you need to be really careful the influences you're giving your kids in those formative years, because on everyone who's sat in that opposite chair, there is someone, it is a grandparent, a teacher, a godparent who has had such an absolutely forming impact on their beliefs and ideology, and you can then draw a like a line back to where they've ended up in their career and things.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: It's so fascinating that you know you have another example.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, no, I it's funny you say that I didn't know my mum wanted me to be a doctor, and then um, so the very simple thing is basically I'm a my mum taught her at private school when she came back and was restarting her life.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Six kids, 50 years old, starting again from scratch in London, taught at a private school in Hampstead, found out there was a government scholarship.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: So if you were basically got top of your class in the application, you could get a free place at a private school up until 97.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Um and Blair actually cancelled it.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: It was called Assisted Places, and so my brother got it, and then I got the last one.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: So I went I went to a lived in a small place in Hackney and travelled every day to a very nice school in Hampstead.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I think I had 11 years of scholarship basically, which was very, very lucky um and very formative.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: And my my mom taught at the sister school.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Um and I remember going, she wanted me to be a doctor or whatever, and I did history.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: And did you enjoy school during that chapter?
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm a big sports person and I love sport.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And I found a collection of people who were like-minded eccentrics, basically.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I was very lucky to have a year of there's a guy called Merlin Sheldrake, he's my one of my best friends, he's like written a big book about mushrooms.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: There's a bunch of sort of actors and general um what's the right word?
6:49
SPEAKER_00: Uh, yeah.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Look like phrases eccentrics.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: What does what does eccentric mean?
6:54
SPEAKER_00: It just you know, that from an early age they they celebrated intellectual interests and like listening to jazz and this and you know, experimenting and thinking about things and stuff like that from a very early age.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: And we're like, we just found a crew that were self-reinforcing of that, which meant that it was very it's like a sort of very intellectually creative experience.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: That was different like in your teens.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was different from anything that any other crew have ever I've ever come across.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: Like even my wife was like, like, what's wrong with you?
7:26
SPEAKER_00: Like it's like eight of us, and we go to lakes every year and go walking, and like and we still have this very tight bond.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's just you know, it was in it was a very virtuous cycle of encouraging each other's intellectual and you know and everything else's interests in a way that was you know created a collective sense of ambition and positivity from a lot of people who are basically from divorced families.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: Um gives the time period for this when was this happening?
7:53
SPEAKER_00: My late teens.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Um so that would have been this I'm 38, so uh mid-nouhties.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: And then uh everyone on off to uni, most of them went to Oxbridge, I went to Edinburgh and then Why Edinburgh?
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Because I didn't get into Cambridge, uh I did.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh that was the only reason.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: Um no, why not why Edinburgh?
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Because I didn't want to go to Bristol where my brother and sister went.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to stay in London.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Edinburgh seemed cool, so I went there.
8:21
SPEAKER_01: Edinburgh's very cool.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Do you think you're learning from that group of friends as influence how you put a team together in business?
8:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, one of them is our head of marketing, so like, yeah, for sure.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: That and and um which sounds a bit uh sounds a bit sort of manosphere in today's world, but like I played very a bit a lot of sport all my life and was the captain of an adult team from 19.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: Like I ran adult sport from a very early age, and I'd be captaining people with their 50s, right?
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Even like an 18-year-old.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: And then later we moved to New York and ran a semi-pro football club for three years with someone else where I played and ran the whole club.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: So it's like five teams, it was the main team in Manhattan, and like it's not it's not the hike, the hoorah, you know, like a chest pumping, like motivational speeches element of it.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: It's not that at all.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: It's all the personalities, you know.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: It's how to get the right personalities together.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: You realize that if you want to have a good team, sometimes the most brilliant people aren't the people that you want to have on the team.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: It's dealing, you know, it's mostly EQ stuff.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: That's the that's the thing.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: But from those guys, it was, I think it was just positive to be in a an environment where they they celebrated real intellectual curiosity.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, but to your point about a random conversation, my brother, my mum's very old set of hippie friends, one of her sons over, he was like, took me for a walk in Kew Gardens and was like, What do you want to do?
9:47
SPEAKER_00: I was like, Oh, I don't know, you know, I'm interested in all these things and you know, I'm very political.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Well, why don't you do public affairs?
9:55
SPEAKER_00: I know someone in a public affairs agency that you'd got you've interned at the European Parliament.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you you go and work in public affairs?
10:03
SPEAKER_00: I've never seen him again.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: I had one conversation, he's called Gabriel, he's my mum's best friend's son from New Zealand.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: I've only met him once, and that conversation took me into my first career.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: So to your point about those door moments, right?
10:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, jumping around.
10:19
SPEAKER_00: But basically, yes, I I'm I've always been very political.
10:23
SPEAKER_01: Um why the um where does the EQ come from?
10:27
SPEAKER_01: Is that a learnt behavior?
10:28
SPEAKER_01: Is that a read behavior?
10:30
SPEAKER_01: Where does your ability to understand different people and personalities come from?
10:34
SPEAKER_00: I don't uh from having a lot of mental health in my family, basically.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: My brother, my brother uh was very bipolar, my mum is is not gonna see this, so that's fine, it's very tricky.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Um and I am, you know, if you live in a family that deals with a lot of emotional stress, then then you learn to deal with it.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: I am by no means uh an expert at these things, it's just something that is much more at the forefront of my mind than may come across with like a what looks like a sort of six foot two private school boys because I'd not that that that is a very much deception to what is reality, like a very different type of person.
11:10
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh a duality I know well, my friend.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: So I had a pretty abusive upbringing.
11:15
SPEAKER_01: And um the upside of that is you learn to read a room when you walk in, because if you don't, you're gonna get hit.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: And um that that's the sort of best gift from my childhood was the fact that I can pretty much walk into a busy restaurant right now and I can tell you who's happy, who's sad, and I can't I've got better at being able to describe what I'm reading in terms of like whether it's a shoulder posture or a lean or a gesture.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Um, but before I just used to be able to feel it and not know why.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: Um my sister calls it vigilance.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: So she's a um professor of psychology, and she's in charge of how learn children learn to read in England.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: She's very she's she's cool, she's like my idol.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: Um, and she thoughts about being brought up in a constant state of vigilance.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about emotional violence.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: There was never any physical violence.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Um I imagine, I don't know, I'm inferring.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was it was a single mum, you know, household with there's the terms like latchkey kids.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: I had a fiver on the table on Monday morning, I took care of myself from seven.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: That's how it worked.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, she was she went to work.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: And you end up mature quickly in that environment, right?
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think there's two paths.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Either you and you're very lucky to have gone to an elite school to support you, but either you uh you turn it into an engine for productivity or you uh you turn it into an engine for self-destruction.
12:37
SPEAKER_01: Something else.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: Or you have some you you exist between the boundary of the two, which is probably the case.
12:42
SPEAKER_01: Um with your experience of private school, is your intent that you'll send the kids private?
12:49
SPEAKER_01: It's a very controversial question.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: I'm a true North London bourgeois champagne socialist by heart, but then I've been felt betrayed all my life by silly politics.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Um I haven't answered the question, which was basically a cheat code.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: My wife is Belgian, French is her first language.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: My children are brought up bilingual, and I don't speak good enough French at home, so that we have to speak English at home, so they have to go to a French-speaking school, and the only French-speaking schools are Phoebe, so sh they go to a bilingual school um in Russell Square, which is cool actually, it's it's genuinely bilingual, so they do dual dual track curriculum.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: So I don't have to, I yeah, uh life allowed me to somehow sidestep that question.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: But I think later on, I live next to Cameron School for Girls, which is where my sister went, and I quite like my daughter to go there.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: But it's a secondary school when she's three, so it's it's a while away.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, mine are gonna go private, and I'm so proud of that fact.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: So I went to a shocking school.
13:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, do you know Ed Dicker, Great Yellow?
13:51
SPEAKER_01: Only because of the you know their interactions.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he's um so he went to Harrow and loved his school, and we exchanged pictures of schools, and I showed him mine, and he's like, mate, that's what I thought prison looked like.
14:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, yeah, yeah, it was exactly like that.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: And um well, that was my choice though, by the way.
14:07
SPEAKER_00: Isn't it green, which by my brother went.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, have you heard of the Pilkington estate?
14:13
SPEAKER_00: No.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: I don't really understand London.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: But basically, it was the roughest school in the country, and my brother came over as like a bougie kiwi and got beaten, you know, to two shits of his two shades of shit.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, don't put that in, but he got beaten the shit out of.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I'll say two.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And then he uh I mean he came over as a 13-year-old, went to Royal Worcester with my dad.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: Parents got divorced, came to London, went to Islington Green, which is in the early 90s, is basically the roughest school in the country.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: Um went to visit my dad, never came back.
14:46
SPEAKER_00: Literally left home at 16, took a one-way ticket to New Zealand and never came back.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: And then my mum's choice was I go to that school or Stone Newington, which the time is now it's not quite good, but the time was also very rough.
14:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: Or somehow we were lucky enough to like burgle um, you know, burglar entry exams and get in that way around.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: So I hear you.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: My friend said to me, Why would you ever send a kid to a why would you ever send your children to a school worse than you went to?
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Which is his kind of justification for for this.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: I just it's a longer conversation, but um my dad's best friend's a man called David Kinniston, who's a famous historian, and he he and he and David write a lot about um private schools, particularly boarding schools, and the effect on the British society, and they're part of that generation that went to Wellington and Oxford, and I saw self-hating boarding school elites, both children of military households, that kind of stuff.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: It's not a fair system, basically.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: And if you in certain parts of London, I think it's getting better and better.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Like my sister's an ealing, and it's I mean, I wouldn't I don't want to live where she lives because it's too far away, but like it's really nice, right?
15:57
SPEAKER_00: Like all the normal people, you know, she's a she's she's a very senior academic, but basically makes the same as like a PA, which is a ridiculous um situation.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh and they all the people around there are like just super lovely people.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: The kids at the schools are like all outstanding, it's like really positive, everyone's like very pro-education, it's safe, it's it's you know, it's uh it's encouraging, it's nurturing.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, so that like there was lots of pockets of that activity, but then you just start getting in inner city London, you either pay for it via your house price or you pay for it via your school fees.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: So, like up the road from me in Tuffnell Park, there's like three really, really good primary schools, like absolutely outstanding primary schools, and everyone around there, like doctors and journalists and all that sort of stuff.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you don't live within two streets of it, you can't get in, unless you're in the council estate, which happens to live obviously like beyond that, those streets, and the houses are obviously you might the difference you might as well just be it doesn't, you know, you might as well be living half an hour away and paying school fees, right?
17:02
SPEAKER_00: Like it comes out in the wash.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: Ours are at a really nice, like little village primary school at the moment, and they'll go private for secondary.
17:10
SPEAKER_01: I I remember um so played played American football at Birmingham Uni when I was doing my PhD as a bit of a loophole.
17:17
SPEAKER_01: So I I wasn't at Birmingham, my now wife was, and there's a rule at the time that said if you're living in a place and you're a student somewhere else, you could play for your nearest geographical uni.
17:27
SPEAKER_01: And we may have used that loophole to pretty much put the whole Great Britain team on the Birmingham squad.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: So we won the national title that year while Helen was at uni there.
17:35
SPEAKER_01: And we sat on the bus on the way to the final, and I remember this like it was like 20 years ago.
17:38
SPEAKER_01: I remember like it was yesterday.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: There was a conversation about what schools everyone went to.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: And like two or three of us went to normal state school and hated school.
17:46
SPEAKER_01: Everyone else who'd gone to a private school loved school, it was great, it was fantastic.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, if I'm ever in a position where I can do it, I want my kids to like going to school not hating it.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: And that was the clincher for me.
17:57
SPEAKER_01: And and actually, my my wife, who on principle isn't a big fan of the idea, but she missed out on like uh north of um England hockey because she went to a state school and there was her and her friend, they they didn't have the facilities, whereas everyone else was playing with a hockey coach all the time.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: And she kind of has that how good could I have been if I'd have had the facilities?
18:17
SPEAKER_01: And my daughter's really good at hockey already, and she's nine, and my son's really into his rugby, so it'll be interesting to see how much they can push it.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: I had the facilities, I didn't have the parental time.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: I didn't have something that could drive me to all the county stuff, yeah.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't play county cricket and I didn't play I played quite a decent level football, but that was because my mate's mum drove us.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: But like, so it's funny, you can it's you might be going there, oh well, you know, if you had if you only had the facilities, like, yeah, but you also have to have the parents who are able to actually go and do those things even on top of the facilities.
18:51
SPEAKER_00: No, I I I you know this country's very frustrating.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: I love it to bits, but it's very frustrating.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: Um I just hope that people don't there's one of two things that I really hope they don't do.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: I hope they don't say all the problems in a deeply complex industrial economy that's had 200 years of complex systems are to do with foreigners coming in.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: And as long as we get rid of them, it will solve those problems.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: And then the more those you try to do that, the more the problems will get worse, and therefore you end up just trying to getting into a terrible toxic cycle.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: That's part A.
19:28
SPEAKER_00: And part B is destroy wealth creation, destroy any sense of aspiration, just like actually shame people who are trying to actually get on with life and level down to such an extent that everyone leaves, and then that's also just a toxic cycle.
19:45
SPEAKER_00: I call it fl flat earth economics, where you just think there's an static pie and you can cut the pie up differently, and therefore people will battle it's complete nonsense.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: And those two very toxic traits are deeply hurtful, basically, because you know, neither of them have anything to do with reality, and both of them are actually very, very toxic for different reasons.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: One one hates on aspiration, and the other one hates on basically um that's just what we may say multiculturalism, and they're very, very toxic versions of where this, where, where the path can go.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: And this is coming from someone who's the god, you know, godson of the founder of the green movement, and I disagree fundamentally with the anti-capitalism of the green movement, I think it's which I think you and I agree on.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: If you don't price nature, there's you don't price stuff, the system doesn't understand it, and if it doesn't understand it, it won't value it, and therefore you'll get no system systematic change around it.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so that's like that's the thing I'm grappling with.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Kia is stuck is my local MP, and you just want to shake the man, be like, you've won the biggest, biggest majority in the generation, and you're outside of I think dealing with Trump, where I think he's not being too bad, but I just want to shake him, just be like, come on.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: Has anyone ever done less with more?
20:53
SPEAKER_00: It's um striking, isn't it?
20:55
SPEAKER_00: The number of my friends that are not as uh left leaning as me who felt so betrayed by that first budget, like it's it's killed the movement for everyone.
21:07
SPEAKER_00: They're they're they're all they've all gone to reform.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: They've all gone to reform, all of them.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Like they they like that that first budget killed all of the aspiration, and then maybe don't people don't care about this stuff, right?
21:20
SPEAKER_00: You're like, oh you're in London, you know, you don't see you know it's like in in in Doncaster and the life on the street, you know, like I get it, I get it, but where do you think the tax comes from to pay for the hospital in your area?
21:31
SPEAKER_00: Where do you think the tax comes from to pay for the schools?
21:33
SPEAKER_00: You know, like it's just it's just a shame because you know, I started my life and I still want to saying how can I go and work in that system?
21:43
SPEAKER_00: And I've always found it to be very the horrible thing about the labor is I used to work with a bunch of Tory special advisors, and the first thing they ask you is who are you, how are you, like what are you about?
21:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, what you know, like they talk to you on a meritocratic level.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: The first thing the labor people ask you is where did you come from?
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Who are you?
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Do you have the credentials to be in this room?
22:03
SPEAKER_00: It's like so toxic.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Anyways.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: And people would assume it was the reverse as well.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: That's the problem.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: You're like, I mean, I'm an income support kid that was on a scholarship at a private school, but I come across as being something very different.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, I am different because I'm both those two things.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then Corbyn's advisor, who's an old friend of mine, is an Uppingham boy.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: You know, we had um lives in a 15 million pound house in Primrose Hill, and he was he was spousing like Trotskyism.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, dude, like we play cricket together.
22:35
SPEAKER_00: I know your dad, he runs a fucking PE fund.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you're not you're not a Trotskyist, right?
22:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, relax.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: I'm recruiting for a new PA at the moment, and we were very fortunate to get 753 applicants, new record for us for a role.
22:49
SPEAKER_01: And this one lady sent me this lovely message.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: She's like, Oh god, I I naturally assumed you were a wealthy rich kid whose dad had bought him a load of estates and you were running them.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Now I find out you're northern with a chip on your shoulder.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to apply for this job.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, there's a lot of questions to that message.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, for a start, like assumptions on both sides of this spectrum.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: And thank you for now deciding you're opting in because you realize I'm northern.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: It's just bizarre.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: If there's one thing I think that's worth saying, I was reflecting on obviously Louis Thereux's documentary this week and stuff.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen it.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: It's worth seeing.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Um the lens of freedom of speech and education and a more sort of like aspect.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: I didn't, you know, we can chat about it once you see it.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: The thing that I've always been really keen to do with everything we've done with with B Zero is to is to and I and something that I and I can talk about how we try to hold like hold ourselves in the market.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: It's like I think there's a fundamental brand pitch which I I I'm against that people fall into the trap of in in in the environment, environmental businesses.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: It's basically here's the pristine world, you're messing it up, pay me.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: That's that's basically the pitch, right?
24:11
SPEAKER_00: And then the other pitch is I'm on a more like LinkedIn, you know, type of personality cult stuff.
24:19
SPEAKER_00: It's like I'm I'm I'm your saviour.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: I really know what it's like, whether I've been you know raised in a slum in Vietnam or I've been doing this or been doing that, and you know, like I I know your pain, and I've worked at the UN for 20 years, so you can trust me to basically like solve all your problems.
24:41
SPEAKER_00: And I just a bit like I I always start the question like why would anyone give up all of their life?
24:47
SPEAKER_00: And the biggest thing you can do in life is vote with your career, in my view.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: That's my whole speech to my firm.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: Climate action is is what you do with your career.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: Like, like you don't need to start from that position of vitriolic like self-righteousness.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: Like, just abandon it, leave it at the door, right?
25:02
SPEAKER_00: This is just like like you know, like leave your shoes at the door, wash your hands, get ready for prayer, right?
25:07
SPEAKER_00: You walk into the room, everyone in that room pretty much believes in all the same stuff.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: You don't need to start and constantly be doing this sort of like narcissistic of, you know, like I'm, you know, I value, I'm so important to this whole thing.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: Like, let's just be serious.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Like, let's go and actually figure out what the right way to plant those trees are, or what the right business model is to understand how you can, you know, scale land interventions or what the right type of data sets are to go and do this, or how to run a proper registry, or have to go and do proper financial analysis.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: That's the conversations from the perspective of I'm coming in it with all the stuff that we agree on.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: You know, and and that's why like we had this whole rule I don't know if you would probably have noticed this, right?
25:48
SPEAKER_00: But Bauerhouse, which is the bizarre logo, is like a reference to Bauerhouse, and like there's like no trees, there's no, we don't ever have anything to do with basically floor and fauna beyond, and it's everything's actually a square circle and um triangle, everything that we do, all the pictures, everything.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: And it's the idea is just supposed to be like not starting with a point of um of accusatory uh sort of like you know, branding, which I think is really important to the way in which like more serious the serious end of this industry is trying to push the agenda.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: And actually, I do think we need to grapple it from their uh um deathly grip for the people who basically are, including my godfather, for whom I have very, very interesting, interesting conversations about this.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: It's like you did the climate awareness movement, hats off to you.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: We are your we are your legacy, and we are inheriting all the amazing work that you did.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is climate action, and it's about building industries, about being economies, it's about building real systems.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't start from a position of my heart's in the right place, it starts from a position of how do you convince rational actors to use the systems of economic exchange and the comparative advantage to basically pivot their capital, their time, their money into activities that preserve and restore, they don't extract and deplete.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: That that's the challenge.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: It's not about basically some PR, right?
27:16
SPEAKER_00: Like it's like it's heavy duty stuff, and you need to get tooled up with the right people to go and do that.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's that's the war that all my my my crew go into every year, every day, and like that's the sort of like troop speech at you know at at B0.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: That and stay humble, just remember you don't know everything, right?
27:33
SPEAKER_00: You just really don't know everything and make sure that we'll especially when you're an analyst, never ever try to say that you know everything, right?
27:39
SPEAKER_00: You don't.
27:40
SPEAKER_00: It's the whole trap.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: Just just you do your best, do your best, try to be honest, try and evidence it, but never try to pretend like you know everything.
27:47
SPEAKER_01: When did you learn that lesson?
27:48
SPEAKER_00: Very quick.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I grew up with with spin doctors and financial analysts, right?
27:53
SPEAKER_00: The biggest trap that everyone plays is that they ask you questions they know you don't know to, and the only answer is I don't know.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: And they get you to say, they get you to try to pretend that you know.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: And if you do that, it's like a kind of it's like a I don't know, it's like level one, level two boss kind of game, right?
28:10
SPEAKER_00: If you don't know, if you don't know, you say you don't know.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: There are smart ways to say you don't know, like I'll come back to you, or great question, or I hadn't thought about that, or you know, this might also be helpful, but I don't know the answer to that exact question.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: Um, but saying I don't know is a very important part, and saying that I'm not always right is a very important part of the like of the mantra.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: That's very specific to analysis.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: But like that whole thing, I mean, you know, we exist in that, in that dialogue and that conversation that we've been having about that, you know, alliance brought that to bear.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: I think that basically you just have to say, What do you what are you in it here for?
28:45
SPEAKER_00: Are you in it here to figure out how the price mechanism can transform this into a real-world economic activity?
28:52
SPEAKER_00: Or are you here to basically try to be an activist?
28:55
SPEAKER_00: And fair play to you if you want to be an activist, but don't conflate the two.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: 100% there are the industrialists and there are the activists.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean the industrialists like you know, smoke out of a chimney, but I mean those are the two camps.
29:08
SPEAKER_00: And I think that a lot of people conflate, which like try to sort of like do well, like they have very different identities.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: I think there's professionals and amateurs.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: That's that's that's a very British thing, actually, ironically.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: The amateur, you know, the sort of um, you know, rugby and cricket wasn't professionalized until the 90s, right?
29:27
SPEAKER_01: So um when you were describing that that distinction, I mean I banged on a lot, so I agree with every single word you said there.
29:34
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I banged on a lot about how we've tried moral outrage, like the amount of times that um you and I were in a meeting recently where people were yelling, we just need to tell the government that this is a horrible thing we're doing to the environment and this should be better.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: And it's like, I'm pretty convinced people have been trying that for the best part of a century and nothing's happened.
29:52
SPEAKER_01: Let's let's actually have an adult conversation on this.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: But when you were speaking, it reminded me of um a book about how the Premier League football came about.
30:01
SPEAKER_01: And the exact same thing's happening.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: So the original owners were like, we need to professionalize this, we need to get money into the game, but they were voting to not exist themselves anymore.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: They were literally making themselves extinct because the athletes came and all of a sudden it wasn't uh a beer on a Friday night and smoking at halftime, and it was like, oh no, no.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: And you can see that in every sport, like football was one of the first to do it.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: Then you saw rugby professionalized, then you saw cricket with the IPL.
30:27
SPEAKER_01: And whatever the book is, whatever the type of sport, you get like a section that goes, oh, and then this strength and conditioning coach turned up and made everyone into an actual professional athlete.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden the whole sector, the whole sport took a huge step forward.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: I partly think that's been my role and your role, and Rob Gardner's and a few other people who've turned up and gone, no, no, we're running a professional organization now.
30:49
SPEAKER_01: And branding's a really great lens to view it through.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: So we use black and white because when I arrived, every other environmental business had a badly drawn picture of a tree that a child had done.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: And just so the only colour you will see in anything we do is pictures of the estates we own.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: That's the everything else is black and white.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: And the root and I make a point whenever I pitch or show anything of saying the only images you will ever see from us are of estates we own and manage.
31:14
SPEAKER_01: Because if I lie about stock footage in there, what else will I lie about?
31:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: We we've it took three years for my mate to convince us to not just use black and white.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: But um we've never had this conversation before, by the way, on branding, have we?
31:28
SPEAKER_01: So it's just convergent like evolution.
31:30
SPEAKER_01: Well, like when I when I so I lived, I was working in a I went, I went, worked in politics for a while.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: Was that straight out of Edinburgh?
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Out of Edinburgh, and then um did a lot of like infrastructure, so HS2, aviation, and then financial policy stuff.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: And then I went to work at a bank and research.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: And how did that leap happen from politics to the very, very simple.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: My boss in politics used to run a hedge fund, he'd had um time out from his career, gone and worked at a think tank, uh, which was called Policy Exchange, which was quite a big Tory think tank in the day.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And then he'd done some work in the for the bank industry where I worked as a policy analyst for a bit.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Oh, I'm getting a divorce, I'm gonna go back and work at in a bank.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh it's called Equity Strategy.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: Um I was like, Oh my god, work with you.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, How good are you at maths?
32:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, uh, well, I was quite good at school.
32:25
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Have you heard of the CFA?
32:27
SPEAKER_00: I was like, no.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: He's like, all right, do you have to do the CFA?
32:30
SPEAKER_00: But I'll put a word in for you.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: And then what did you like about that boss?
32:36
SPEAKER_00: I I've had three, I've had four bosses, and three of them have been some of my biggest like inspirations as people.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: I didn't grow up with the dad, so it's easy to transfer that.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh his best thing is that he's just the he really believed in people and he took like he he you know, he realizes that I think when you're in a certain career stages, you have the opportunity to bring someone up.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: And there'll be moments in one cook one's career whether you're managing a hundred people or managing two people where you can just absolutely bring someone up.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: And I think that he like, you know, I really appreciated about that about them.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: I love that about what we get to do.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: I I I love it so much.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I mean I had three crazy interviews where I was writing policy research, but I didn't know I didn't know what my job title meant when I got my job at the bank.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what I didn't know what it meant.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: First day at the bank, doing my CFAs at uh FCA exams, Bloomberg Terminal.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Like the boss didn't turn up for a month because of the way we started.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: I didn't even turn my computer on for a month.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: I didn't even know how to.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: And then you do something called the Charter Financial Analyst, which is basically like a psycho master's in finance on top of all your work.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: And then I spent a year doing level one and level two, um, which for anyone that understands what that means, it's like the average time it takes you is about 300 to 400 hours on top of your work, your work.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: So you're getting up, you have to be in the office at seven, uh, you finish at six, seven, only because you're then doing your revision.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: You go to bed at maybe twelve or one, and you've got a plot, and then you work all weekend.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: And then you normally do it June, June, June, but I did it December, June, so I could get it like turb basically turbocharge it.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: And then it turns out the only thing I really knew about was UK politics at that time when Brexit was happening.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: So, Seb, who's my co-founder, it was I came in, the first thing I did was 2015 election, um, end of the national government when Cameron won the majority, which then led to the Brexit stuff.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: And the first thing I did was to build a big polling model to try to predict the UK election, just because I didn't have I didn't know how to do anything else, right?
34:39
SPEAKER_00: Like I wasn't like I knew how to do your financial analysis.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, I got it within four seats, which I was quite proud about.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then it got banned by the compliance because obviously, what the hell is Bank of America doing releasing a massive polling model?
34:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's got nothing to do with financial research.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: And Seb came over and like he was he'd just started as a UK strat uh guilt strategist, and then we just you know, we've been like thickest thieves ever since, right?
35:04
SPEAKER_00: Like literally his week two, my week three, or whatever.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: Um anyway, then I went to New York, worked for another different boss.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: Not he's uh like a kind of the global head of strat for investment strategy about it.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: I got told one day, went to work.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Boss called big boss called me into his office.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: I normally thought I was being I'd done something bad, which wasn't wasn't impossible.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: And uh and he goes, right, recognized we've had our global management off site.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: Michael's lost his he's lost his VP.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: You're going to New York.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: I was like, I mean, I just come in on a Tuesday, right?
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Like I had a girlfriend, I live with my mates, like I had my life, I was 29.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: He's like, You got a week to think about it, but you gotta go over to New York and have an interview next week.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: And if the answer was no, are you out the door?
35:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, so it turns out that they were in the process of firing my team, and he'd basically found a home for me.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Because at a bank, you got three years in research to get ranked in the top three.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: So everyone's ranked, all the all the saleside analysts are ranked.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, two different ways of ranking them.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, and you have to basically Bank America's the number one research house in the in the world, has been like pretty much every year for the past 15 years, prides itself on the quality of its analysts.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: So if you're a new desk and you set up, you've got three years to get ranked in the top three.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: If you don't, you're out.
36:28
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: How did you feel about that as a system R approach?
36:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh I went and worked with a guy that was the number one for 20 years, so I was like on the right side of that.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: Uh it teaches you a hell of a lot of good things, um like work ethic and ways to deal with yourself, and a lot of bad traits which we had to exercise from us when we were starting the business.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: Um is it that dissimilar to sport?
36:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, because people are it's not like industry or author for that shit.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: But it is not dissimilar to Michael Lewis books.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: People are like very, very, very aggressive.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: You know, they they will they will really really try to mess with you, basically, intellectually.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: And the and you're in a room of particularly in the European bank, where it was basically all at it was all of the elite of all the different nationalities in Europe.
37:32
SPEAKER_00: All this was like the best job you could get, basically.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: If you were the Italian economist, you were the best at the Milan School, you were like the creme de la creme of the entire crop.
37:40
SPEAKER_00: And there were three jobs that you could get in in saleside research in the world that mattered, and there was one seat at any bank.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: So people think about these banks being these huge organizations.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: There's not really, there's like maybe five banks that you'd want to work at that are like really, really serious, and each one has one job.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: So, like, you know, it's very hard, and then maybe there's, you know, the ladder is incredibly narrow.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: So just the quality of people is unbelievable.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: But the the sales, you know, the sales guys, the the management culture, I mean, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say it here, right?
38:10
SPEAKER_00: But and and and pitching to hedge funds who basically they just they tried to eviscerate you.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: Like eviscerate you.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Their job was to make you basically feel like, you know, like like like shit on the street.
38:21
SPEAKER_00: And that was just somehow their way of being like getting whatever, whatever, I don't know, however they were trained or whatever.
38:27
SPEAKER_00: And some of that was like, you know, old school bad behavior, and some of it was just straight up intellectual bullying.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm so superior to you intellectually that I'm gonna just basically get your idea and squish it like a soggy pear in my hand, then you're gonna sit here and basically look at me squish it, and then you're gonna come back to me and you're gonna go, that guy's so smart.
38:47
SPEAKER_00: How can I be like that guy?
38:48
SPEAKER_00: It's all that crap, right?
38:50
SPEAKER_00: It's and it sounds macho, but it's not necessarily that's not the right really word for it.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: It's just very aggressive.
38:54
SPEAKER_01: Then do you think in your childhood made you better able to deal with that type environment?
38:59
SPEAKER_01: Or do you think you found it harder as a result?
39:02
SPEAKER_00: I sat, I didn't, I I I I uh politics.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: I spent five years in politics with spin doctors.
39:10
SPEAKER_00: It's the same world.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: A bunch of people call it, you know, if you've seen the thick of it and stuff, it's it's the same.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: I think I don't I don't I yeah, presenting and doing all those things is um you have to understand your content.
39:26
SPEAKER_00: Once you're confident about what what your content is, which itself is hard, then you can start to actually interact with your how you want to interact with people and how you want to come across and the type of stories you want to take them on.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: So my way of dealing with it was to basically, especially is the fact that I came in as a 28-year-old with zero experience in finance, was to just shut up for a year.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: There's something called the morning call where basically every morning you pitch the best ideas in the research department to the business.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: You go on on a podium in front of the entire company.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: In America, it's televised, and you in the UK it's just uh it's just in real life.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: And you get recorded and it gets distributed across the whole, like literally on the like sales speakers.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, and the top brass from sales and trading interrogate you, right?
40:13
SPEAKER_00: And they ask you questions.
40:14
SPEAKER_00: Do they train you in terms of the pitching they're presenting?
40:16
SPEAKER_00: You just assumed you've got it.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: So this is the thing, this is the like, this is back to your point about like how to deal with it.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: I, for whatever reason, I've always been quite the youngest of six children, right?
40:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm big, big watcher.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: I went in every morning for a year, every single morning, I got in at 6.45 and I sat down and I'd watch the pitches.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: I'd watch the different MDs, the analysts struggling, the associates, the VPs, the different different disciplines.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: I'd watch, I'd just watch it and watch it, watch the interactions, watch how the people, you know, nailed them, all that sort of stuff.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: And had already been pitching for like various years.
40:53
SPEAKER_00: And then thought I was quite good at these things.
40:55
SPEAKER_00: And I remember one time, like further down the line, presenting, and I was presenting on Brexit, I think.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, I thought I'd done a decent job.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: And then I got back to my desk and I got a call from my boss, and he was like, um the head of, you know, the head of European sales thought you did a shit job.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna go and do training this afternoon.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: Like Imagine we got we finished this podcast, and you she goes over to you and she goes, sorry, you just did it a shit job.
41:26
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have to go and send you to do media training 10 years in like 10 years into your career.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: So they weren't they weren't like they weren't you know gentle with the feedback, but it's just stuff like that that's really helpful, I think.
41:35
SPEAKER_00: And then obviously we've been with PC where I do lots of presenting, but no, I I I think that what helped is that I was in a position where I was I did macro, so I didn't market stuff, so I had to speak to people loads of the time, like loads of the time.
41:51
SPEAKER_00: And I was very lucky because my general, I'm like a you know, I'm an I'm a historian, right?
41:57
SPEAKER_00: Like I don't know, I didn't I didn't know my eBid DA for my elbow, right?
42:02
SPEAKER_00: But I knew how to sort of tease together stories and make it sound interesting and stuff like that.
42:07
SPEAKER_00: So I'm not kind of like pretend banker.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: On the on the journey through this chapter, you've hit on so many things that are key features of how you and the business work, but are so counterintuitive to the wider sector that we now operate in.
42:19
SPEAKER_01: So hard work, you know, what you described as the sort of early training timeline very much reflects.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: So I was I was playing international sport, doing a PhD at the same time and working, and it it was 14, 15 hour days for years and years.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: But in the wider environment sector, that's a toxic culture and horrible, and no one wants to do it.
42:40
SPEAKER_01: And they go back to their campaign uh my language hobbyist type of thing.
42:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, you've also got an environment there where people were assessed and graded and rated.
42:49
SPEAKER_01: We played GB American football every night, a list was put on the wall, one to however many.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: The bottom one wasn't there tomorrow, it wasn't there tomorrow, and the top two or three started.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: And and the other thing was everybody knew anyway.
43:02
SPEAKER_01: Like, give or take one person who might be a coach's favorite for whatever reason.
43:05
SPEAKER_01: But outside of it, that was true.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: And I have a rule in business that everybody knows.
43:10
SPEAKER_01: Like in a team of, if you've got a team of 20, most people, if they're really honest, could line up those people one to 20, give or take, who the best people are, who works the hardest.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows.
43:21
SPEAKER_01: If you're good enough and you're bright enough to a level, everybody knows.
43:24
SPEAKER_01: And the other companies in the wider sector just aren't honest about it, won't talk about it, and tolerate people who don't work hard and have low performance because it's easier than having a difficult conversation.
43:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think I I say that in my first three years of Pizza, I was I was in that mindset.
43:39
SPEAKER_00: And then we went from like 40 to 180.
43:43
SPEAKER_01: When do you when did you stop?
43:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm assuming you don't meet everyone anymore in terms of hires.
43:47
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
43:48
SPEAKER_01: I knew you stopped.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
43:54
SPEAKER_01: Two years ago, three years ago?
43:55
SPEAKER_01: And how many people would you have been when you did stop?
43:58
SPEAKER_01: 60, maybe.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: 50 60.
44:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna hold on to it as long as I can.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: I I I'm I got I got quite told.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: I got told so I've had a big differen.
44:09
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm I don't have that kind of culture of work.
44:11
SPEAKER_00: I moan because that people don't work long enough hours, but that's just because I just moan always.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: But like I actually don't mind.
44:19
SPEAKER_00: I I I am I I I had a whole thing about like I don't like I don't like I don't think FaceTime's important.
44:24
SPEAKER_00: Like if you finish your job for the day, go home.
44:27
SPEAKER_00: If you've done your work, do your work.
44:28
SPEAKER_00: Don't complain when you need to do your work, but also if it's Friday and it's it's 1 a.m.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: 1 p.m.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: and the sunshine and you've done your day, go to the pub.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: Right, like I have no like that's for me, that's like what I like.
44:37
SPEAKER_00: I respect you to do your work and to do it properly and I hold you accountable, but I don't need you to be doing FaceTime.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I've actually softened that, and I I really believe in like as I said, I got brought up by a mum, like you know, I'm not the right person to deal with a lot of the problems, I'm not the right person to go into a lot of the meetings, I'm not the right person to be to be confronting some of the challenges, even if I need to be in a conversation in the background.
45:02
SPEAKER_00: And that's an interesting reflection.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: So, like, I'm not the right person to hire some of these people.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: I just won't get, I won't find the right people because I'll be looking at it through too much of a specific lens for myself.
45:13
SPEAKER_00: And likewise, when it comes to dealing with like these cultural things, I have an incredible um COO Florence who like and CFO Sophie, and they like you know, so Florence in particular has been with us through the entire journey, and she's been instrumental to like I wouldn't say necessarily just softening, but bringing a much better, much broader perspective.
45:35
SPEAKER_00: And in like it's you know, it's not fair to say feminising because that that that but like but but softening some of the instincts that's been grained into you from a culture of extreme ranking and extreme like performance culture, and she's herself like an absolute star, right?
45:55
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, Oxford and P BCG, Starlight, etc.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: But does it in a way where it's just like a quiet confidence thing.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think there was the and that's something that both seven and I had to deal with was like, if you think someone's so my biggest issue is I'll do too much I was I do too many meetings, I had too much context switching, there's too much pressure in each one of those environments, and then basically if something is at a low quality, I would get I'd get annoyed.
46:19
SPEAKER_00: I think fair enough.
46:21
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's my 15th meeting of the day.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm juggling chainsaws, and you've been asked to come in and peel a lemon and you can't even do it.
46:27
SPEAKER_00: And then you realize that's so unfair, though, right?
46:30
SPEAKER_00: Like that's completely unfair, right?
46:32
SPEAKER_00: Like you've it's just not okay to do that.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: That's not the way to talk to people.
46:36
SPEAKER_00: So change your day, right?
46:38
SPEAKER_00: Have fewer meetings, make sure that you're more emotionally ready for it.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: Emotional regulation is really important to your own, to the rest of the team.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: How you behave essentially sets the weather for how everyone else is behaving, both in terms of like deep and superficial like cultural elements.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: So from that extreme, so I've actually tried to untrain, to keep the things that I value, which is humble, um, humbleness and approach, but but of you know rigor and deep application in work ethic, but lose all the kind of like, you know, I have to be the best shit, because I see I think that's just not that helpful.
47:17
SPEAKER_00: Um and then also just try to make sure that you know you you balance fast-paced sort of VC type, you know, hamster wheel type work, but with an element where people feel constantly like that that they understand what it is that you're doing.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: I think it's a bit different from probably from what from what you're doing, because part of the challenge for us is training, it's it's trying to train scientists to work like financial analysts.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: And then you're also trying to then teach tech to understand how to unpick these two things, which are quite undefined.
47:52
SPEAKER_00: So it's just it's a quite a big culture clash, basically, at the heart of the business, which is I think it's really cool and very interesting.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people who, you know, our average tenure in the business is four years.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: We're only six years old.
48:03
SPEAKER_00: Like, I think that's a positive cultural reflection of what we're trying to what we're tried to do.
48:08
SPEAKER_01: Um did someone was your realization about how you were dealing with the complexities, the stress and the load, and how then you were responding to things that didn't go well.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: Was that self-realization, or did someone bring that to your attention?
48:21
SPEAKER_01: You go, okay, cool, I need to change that.
48:23
SPEAKER_01: It was both.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: I made mistakes, probably got, probably bollocked people and they, you know, it wasn't this, you know, I just I you know, I didn't think I ever did anything too bad, but like I could get pretty, pretty annoyed at things, and that wasn't really fair.
48:37
SPEAKER_00: Got a coach who was really helpful, um, who's been brilliant, and I I speak to him the whole time.
48:45
SPEAKER_00: The other thing I did was just uh like I'm not I've surrounded I I bought in quite early, like a very senior person who's left now, but a guy called Money, who was our president, who was very senior at Moody's, and he built Khrysal, which was the Indian rating agency, which ends up being bought by S ⁇ P, and he's a he's sort of very much like a kind of um Don Quixote of like of car of ratings, knows nothing about climate, but very much you know, writ written the book on ratings.
49:11
SPEAKER_00: And just sort of had this view of like, look, I never want the reason I'm I'm quote unquote an entrepreneur is because I thought it was the the most the the fastest path to affecting change that Seb and I wanted to do.
49:25
SPEAKER_00: I never like that that like this the private business model was the way that we felt we could have the highest impact.
49:31
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't that we decided that we hadn't wanted to be entrepreneurs, and then two years into it, you're like, oh no shit.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm like, I have to learn how to be a boss and I don't have to like have to do all these things, and I don't actually do much of that work anymore, except doing a bit of presenting and a bit of strategy and a bit of decision making.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: And how do we ourselves deal with all that stuff?
49:50
SPEAKER_00: So I it was it's very much like the 2022-23 period of like starting the business and raising the money and figuring out who you want to be and you know, and your how you want to treat these situations, and then basically trying to put that into practice over the last few years and being open, and I hope my team would agree with this, but like um my mind works a bit too, it works like a bullet train, but I do listen.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: I may not be I may not listen immediately to what people people are saying, but I do listen.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: And you know, I people come in to meet their boss, and it might be their only meeting with their boss that month, and it's quite important to them.
50:29
SPEAKER_00: And you're going, This is my seventh, my my 30th meeting of the week on 20 different topics, like you know, just remember, right?
50:37
SPEAKER_00: You know, just remember what it means to to everyone else and be emotionally prepared and really and strip back your days and strip back your time and really make sure that you're prepared.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: That was like a the big the big learning.
50:48
SPEAKER_00: But I just clearly couldn't deal with the the volatility and the and the context switching, so you have to take stuff off the plate, um, which then obviously actually makes you meteorate faster, ironically, right?
51:00
SPEAKER_00: Doing less more precisely, lo and behold, classic business cliche.
51:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: So no, that I think that personal side of running the business.
51:10
SPEAKER_00: I never ever wanted to be a boss.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: That's not like I like being a leader.
51:14
SPEAKER_00: I've been the captain of my sports teams ever since I was a seven, but like being a boss is a very hard thing.
51:21
SPEAKER_00: It's a lot of emotional strain.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: Um personally.
51:27
SPEAKER_00: And I, you know, you're especially in climate where you're carrying the you're carrying the the movement with you as well as part of what you're what you're believing in.
51:37
SPEAKER_00: And in climate and in carbon, you know, you've got these cultural wars between let's call it the activists and the industrialists, which I find just incredibly um pyrrh.
51:46
SPEAKER_01: Well, even within those bizarre combinations, isn't it?
51:50
SPEAKER_01: You you're improving things, but not in the exact way I want you to improve it, therefore it's the wrong way.
51:54
SPEAKER_01: And it's like, okay, this is this is awful.
51:57
SPEAKER_01: But I mean I don't feel the emotional strain thing.
52:02
SPEAKER_01: Really?
52:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm a really, really, really emotional person.
52:04
SPEAKER_01: So it's I mean, I mean, mate, go go figure, so am I.
52:08
SPEAKER_01: Um I just maybe it's a scale thing as well.
52:12
SPEAKER_01: You know, with 40 people in the central team, we're not 150.
52:15
SPEAKER_01: When I was in the public sector, my biggest team was like 500, but it wasn't the same type of relationship.
52:22
SPEAKER_01: Like a lot of them I didn't, I barely I interacted with once a month where I did a town hall event or something like that.
52:29
SPEAKER_01: Whereas with with our team, it's I mean, I've literally ahead of people I've known for 15 years, we played American football together.
52:37
SPEAKER_01: I was best man at his wedding, his godfather to my kids.
52:40
SPEAKER_01: I have had one of the country's leading performance psychologists on speed dial for 15 years.
52:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm very lucky.
52:48
SPEAKER_01: You know, that guy is like the Dr.
52:49
SPEAKER_01: Steve Peters of our sector, and he has made me a far better human being.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
52:54
SPEAKER_01: Him and my wife have made me a plausible human being, um, which I'm very grateful for.
52:58
SPEAKER_01: And others have had a lot of influence along the way.
53:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, I often think um I've been lots of different people at different chapters in my life, and as you were talking, it sounds like you've changed a lot throughout just the B Zero journey.
53:12
SPEAKER_01: When people say to me, Oh no, I've always been the same person, that always worries me because I'm like, what are you learning?
53:16
SPEAKER_01: How are you growing?
53:17
SPEAKER_01: How are you improving on things?
53:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, yeah, so it's just yeah.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: To do it properly and to do it honestly, it's just it just takes a lot out of you.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you've got to give it the attention that it deserves.
53:32
SPEAKER_00: If you throw in you know, families and children and stuff like that, it starts to become a very difficult, you know, the denominator of you basically doesn't get bigger, but your numerator just gets bigger and bigger.
53:44
SPEAKER_01: Which of the which of the three hats fits best?
53:46
SPEAKER_01: So founder, business person, husband and father.
53:50
SPEAKER_01: Which of the ones do you think?
53:55
SPEAKER_02: Um I think getting a husband is very hard.
54:02
SPEAKER_00: Um I like being a dad, but I didn't have one.
54:06
SPEAKER_00: So that means everything to me.
54:10
SPEAKER_02: Being a founder, yeah.
54:11
SPEAKER_02: I mean I like working in the movement that I believe in.
54:18
SPEAKER_00: I don't take I don't I don't wake up in the morning and go, I feel good about myself because I'm a founder.
54:26
SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean that in a derogatory way to the people who do.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I would be a terrible I mean I I got to a stage in my career where I wouldn't be a very good employee, probably.
54:36
SPEAKER_00: No, I'd be fair enough.
54:37
SPEAKER_00: I'm unemployable though.
54:38
SPEAKER_00: But like which is fair enough, but that side of it, like you know, the the self-aggrandizing element of like I'm the boss and stuff like that, it's never been something that I'm I'm that's not what's driven me.
54:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm just very uh mission-driven is is is too hackneyed.
54:55
SPEAKER_00: It's like I have a theory of change, I believe in it, I want to give it a go.
55:01
SPEAKER_00: I want to learn a lot in the process.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm happy to happy to keep doing it while it doesn't kill me.
55:06
SPEAKER_00: In the long term, being a good husband and being a good father is is more important.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: But the challenge I think is just where does your head sit?
55:15
SPEAKER_00: Because if you're honest, my wife's a fo is a founder of a much more successful company than me.
55:24
SPEAKER_00: And that's really helpful because it means that I don't know, I'm you know, sh she pays the most of the bills, but you know, we're both very busy with work a lot of the time.
55:33
SPEAKER_00: And I do my kids run, and then I have an hour with them in the morning, I have an hour with them in the in the afternoon, in the evening.
55:40
SPEAKER_00: I come home religiously at six, come come see them, then go back to work if I need to in the evening.
55:45
SPEAKER_00: I spend the weekends with them.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: I didn't grow up with care in that sense, and my wife did have like nannies and stuff, so she's like, You're you're a martyr to spend you like you're knackered, and then you want to martyr yourself on the weekend by always being with the kids and waking up really early and then getting knackered.
56:00
SPEAKER_00: Like we should just get help.
56:02
SPEAKER_00: And I'm always like, No, I didn't have kids to not see them.
56:05
SPEAKER_00: So that's like that's like the I mean, this is way too deep for you didn't know me that well, but like uh that's the that's the argument we have, and she's like, You're exhausted, like you're not getting the best out of yourself.
56:15
SPEAKER_00: Why would you not want to have Nanny come in on Saturday morning so you can sleep in three hours because we've been up all week all week at 4 am with the kid and you're like going to work every day?
56:26
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, super dad complex, not super founder complex, that's not that's not a problem, but definitely a super dad complex.
56:33
SPEAKER_01: I've done one school pickup ever.
56:36
SPEAKER_01: Ever.
56:37
SPEAKER_02: Because I'm here doing this, so my wife, my wife's very is yeah, she's very brilliant.
56:41
SPEAKER_00: I think being like having a long-term partner is is is the best thing, is like it's obviously the best.
56:52
SPEAKER_00: The reality of doing what we're doing though, work is the the lion's share of your brain and emotional space.
56:59
SPEAKER_00: There is no other way of it.
57:00
SPEAKER_00: It's trying, and the question is just how much are you self-hating about that?
57:04
SPEAKER_00: Because either you're not self-hating about it or you are, and I think if you're you know, if you're not great, and I and I envy that maybe, but I I can't I care, I I live and breathe every single element of everything that we're doing, and I can't switch that off.
57:22
SPEAKER_00: And I can't sustain that forever.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: I I'm not, I'm not, I'm sure you can appreciate I'm either all in or I'm not in.
57:29
SPEAKER_00: If I'm in, I'm in, and that's it.
57:30
SPEAKER_00: And there's there's no like halfway houses.
57:33
SPEAKER_00: And so if there's a if there's if there's a defined denominator and there's three numerators, then basically, you know, business is what's left after the time that you've got to on your business.
57:45
SPEAKER_00: But I respect the fact, like, you know, saying previous guests talk about being very regimented with their with their work schemes and all those things.
57:52
SPEAKER_00: I respect that massively.
57:53
SPEAKER_00: At this stage in my life, with what we're trying to achieve, I'm okay with this recipe, but that's not what I'm aspiring to for the rest of my life.
58:02
SPEAKER_00: And the fire that burns in me is not like I also don't really wish it on other people, if that makes sense.
58:09
SPEAKER_00: I don't wish it on my children.
58:10
SPEAKER_00: My wife's an unbelievably ambitious person, has achieved extraordinary amounts of things, has a huge fire in her belly, but it's not like always at the cusp of eating her up, you know.
58:20
SPEAKER_00: And so, like, I don't know, like that maybe that you know, you have to be a sort of you have to be a bit mad to want to be an entrepreneur, and I think that that's fine.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: But that madness also means that you throw yourself into your work, and so you know, you're sat there pushing your your child on a swing, thinking about something else, trying to be present.
58:39
SPEAKER_00: That's the that's the internal fight, let alone making sure that you're emotionally available to actually have like a meaningful conversation with your partner in the in between the times when you're like, you know, whatever, doing all the things that you're supposed to be doing.
58:54
SPEAKER_00: But you know, this is the building phase of life.
58:56
SPEAKER_00: You're 38, got two kids, you're married, first five years, you're your business.
59:01
SPEAKER_00: It's not like you're not putting a lot of things on your plate.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: I think I can do it for so I'm 42.
59:07
SPEAKER_01: In my head, I can do it for another decade in terms of the pace, the ferocity, only because I've got it really dialed in now, in terms of like me and Helen talk so much about boundary structured process.
59:20
SPEAKER_01: I literally have home KPIs.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: I have like, I'm gonna be home for this many days and this many nights, we're gonna get this many things together, and you need to do this, and we're there, because then I can make sure it's measured and I get what she needs to do and from where we gotta be.
59:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, lifting's a huge part.
59:35
SPEAKER_01: Like, if I'm at home, I lift weights every morning.
59:37
SPEAKER_01: Because that's that's me dialed in health-wise to make sure I can work at this level.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: Because I kind of view it like Tom Brady, the quarterback, right?
59:44
SPEAKER_01: He was able to win Super Bowls into his mid-40s, everyone else teetered off.
59:48
SPEAKER_01: However much I dislike it, time will win eventually.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: My ability to work at a pace, my resilience for traveling as much, the physics like traveling's what kicks my ass because I'm big, I don't fit in plane seats or train seats, and it's really uncomfortable traveling everywhere.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: So that's the one that takes its toll on me.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think if you get everything, if you optimize for stuff, you can make it last as long as possible.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_01: But it is a lot to carry.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: I don't feel the same emotional burden about the business.
1:00:15
SPEAKER_00: And I think I but I don't think you're f I I'm fighting it.
1:00:20
SPEAKER_00: What Seb and I have tried to do is to say risk in the carbon market sits at a project level, it sits at lots of other levels as well, but performance and the way it actually behaves sits at a project level, which is fundamental heresy to the existential way in which the market's been created, up to the point in which we basically kind of came in and stuck our aura in, basically.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_00: And that is a big, big deal, right?
1:00:53
SPEAKER_00: Like we are we are not confrontational, we are a non-confrontational organization that want to make this thing work well.
1:01:00
SPEAKER_00: But if you don't, but if you recognize that basically this the following statement not every carbon credit is equal, and that's okay, and the way it should be, is that and you have to have threshold standards, you have to have systems to make sure it's all is standardized and unified to get into the world, into the system and they can be improved, etc.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: That's all good.
1:01:19
SPEAKER_00: But after that, things will will vary through time, and the price mechanism should allow you to understand those.
1:01:25
SPEAKER_00: That's like that that that emotional burden you don't carry, right?
1:01:30
SPEAKER_00: Because we are basically fighting a market structure, fighting.
1:01:33
SPEAKER_00: We are engaging often unnecessarily stressfully in a market structured narrative.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_00: And at the very foundation, it's basically do you base it off uh a threshold to get into an after that basically everything is what it is, or is it a more probabilistic world based on the reality that these are risk instruments that do vary in space and that there needs to be some sort of marriage of these two things?
1:01:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you always have an entry requirement, but like, and that that is a lot of what like essentially we're like a you know, next sort of religious as a missionary organization, we are taking the message that risk-based analysis, probabilistic, you know, uh assessments, that whole theory must sit at the basis of this industry.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_00: And that is existentially tricky for a lot of people who basically say, as long as it passes, go, crack on.
1:02:31
SPEAKER_00: And so I think a part of that, obviously, there's the internal element of just managing people, making them motivated, et cetera.
1:02:36
SPEAKER_00: But as an organization, I think single-handedly, a lot of the time, what we're our trying to like market building type of agenda, we're trying to simultaneously be like, we deserve a seat at this table because what we have to say is relevant and we think that we're, we have, you know, we will help make this market better.
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Um, our theory of change, which is a project level, and therefore that should be central to the way in which the market operates, is also our sales pitch.
1:03:03
SPEAKER_00: So one of the challenges, as I've come to understand more recently, is some people hear us say these things and they go, You're just trying to sell me ratings.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm waiting in my mind.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm going, like, I mean, I don't care what you buy.
1:03:14
SPEAKER_00: I actually just want you to think about the market like this.
1:03:17
SPEAKER_00: And that's like, you know, you're you're talking about like the the the you know, the the inner policy meetings and government stuff through to like the acronym organizations, through to all the different stakeholders.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_00: This is what we carry around with us the whole time.
1:03:32
SPEAKER_00: The best thing that's gonna happen this year is basically ESG regulations under European Securities and Markets Authority are gonna capture carbon ratings.
1:03:40
SPEAKER_00: And from November, carbon ratings are gonna have to be regulated if you want.
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: And that's gonna just put to bed our legitimacy, our role in the market, the business model debates about developer pay, issuer pay, subscription based.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_00: And all it basically says is three things.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: You have to basically have very, very clear engagements with developers.
1:03:59
SPEAKER_00: You aren't allowed to do simultaneously auditing, ratings, and advisory.
1:04:03
SPEAKER_00: They're prohibited.
1:04:05
SPEAKER_00: And your business model is allowed to be whatever it is, so long as you basically are clear about your independence.
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: And those three things put to bed all of that stuff.
1:04:13
SPEAKER_00: But that's a bit like SEB goes to SEB is single-handedly with a team of three people trying to reshape the entire structural carbon markets with 25 governments at the moment.
1:04:21
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of emotional burden to carry.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_00: When you're going to rooms with people who want to defund nature, you know, the biggest best funded lobby in the world is the um tech CDR lobby who don't want to classify nature as a carbon credit.
1:04:37
SPEAKER_00: Like, so I don't know how you want to describe that, but for me, I find that that's like an emotional energy.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: You're going into Brussels, the person that's just left the room behind you doesn't recognize nature as as a as a as a carbon credit.
1:04:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, or whatever, as a as a as an edit as an ETS editable offset.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: Like this, this, this is emotional, right?
1:04:57
SPEAKER_00: This is it's politics, basically.
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's tricky because you're there going, like, we are earnestly trying to do these things for the belief in that that you know, if you scale hundreds of billions into nature, you'll get you'll you'll create financial mechanisms around preservation, you'll create capital flows to the global south, you unlock ways of of doing new technologies, you'll obviously support lots of activities that have high social benefits.
1:05:24
SPEAKER_00: And then people call into question your like your motivations because you have a slight nuance in your business model.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_00: You're like, come on, guys, like you know, this is the stuff that I find emotional.
1:05:35
SPEAKER_01: It hadn't, it had never occurred to me that what you were trying to do would be considered heresy to anyone.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_01: Are you kidding me?
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: Like, no, my first my first cop, uh Space for Giants, came in.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_01: The reason why is because I'm like, well, of course, this is the logical evolution of what's necessary.
1:05:55
SPEAKER_01: Because mentally I go in a in a very simple analysis.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_01: We literally give every member of the team a numerical score every quarter based on impact, growth, and leadership.
1:06:10
SPEAKER_01: Like my childhood was spent playing on championship manager and seeing the world through a series of 20 numbers and 20 stats.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_01: When I in my head, I will have rated you again to set as I don't know how to not do that.
1:06:21
SPEAKER_01: Like, so and I appreciate I'm not normal in that context, but that's why I'd never considered that the role you would play would be anything but welcomed by people.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: Now hearing you articulate it, I appreciate why that's the case.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_00: Okay, then I'll give you two analogies.
1:06:36
SPEAKER_00: One is a funny analogy that I've told before on panels, but like I got invited to COP26 in Glasgow with a charity I was friends with.
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: And uh went up to which I now understand to be the IETA 10, but at the time I didn't know what anything meant.
1:06:53
SPEAKER_00: And uh and we just released like the white paper on carbon ratings, and I think we'd done a few things, but we hadn't, we were actually fundraising at that time.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_00: We hadn't actually launched the we were building the platform, but we hadn't launched it.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_00: And Antonoli, someone asked a question um uh about carbon ratings.
1:07:11
SPEAKER_00: I think Silvera had just launched, but they only did a couple of projects in red, and it, you know, it's all very proto.
1:07:16
SPEAKER_00: And uh and they were like, oh, you know, what do you think about this whole new carbon ratings?
1:07:20
SPEAKER_00: And Antonoli said, That's the biggest single risk of the carbon market.
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: That's what he said on stage at COP26.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_00: And I remember I remember like trying to have a conversation with him, and ended up the only way I could have a conversation with him is like, I'm going to the bathroom.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_00: So you can have a three-minute conversation with me while I walk across the area to go to the bathroom.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: And then I remember being on a panel with him two years later and reminding me of this story and him obviously like laughing by that point.
1:07:44
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, he'd basically left and Vera was in free fall and etc.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, but the other thing is just to say is that look, I mean, if like let's put it this way, right?
1:07:56
SPEAKER_00: My I have a whole um reformation which speech which I won't give you, but like I believe that if you people have been talking a lot about market infrastructure recently.
1:08:06
SPEAKER_00: I spent 90 million pounds, nearly, to date 70 million pounds on building market infrastructure for this carbon market, thanklessly, most of the time, stripping down the information, turning it into systems, figuring out how to look at it, turning it into like analytical paradigms, modeling it, boxing it, replicating it, trying to give it back to the market, et cetera, et cetera.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_00: That's basically what we do.
1:08:31
SPEAKER_00: We build information infrastructure.
1:08:33
SPEAKER_00: And if projects, if risk sits at a project level, then my view is that quality is in the eye of the beholder.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, beauty is an eye of the beholder, if if you if your mom used to say that.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_00: Like quality is an eye beholder, and the price mechanism will do the work for you.
1:08:50
SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing about carbon is the marginal cost of production is so varied across different activity types that you can have something that is$5, which is high quality, than something that's$200.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: You can atmospherically.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't really make sense to look at like the specific cost of production as being a mechanism to look at at quality.
1:09:08
SPEAKER_00: What you need to look at is fundamental characteristics.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_00: If that is true, though, the people that, and I'm not, I'm not like I'm not like naive about this.
1:09:17
SPEAKER_00: We are putting ourselves as being, in a sense, like at the center of how risk is priced.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_00: That's a very powerful thing.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_00: And I that's why I'm deeply, deeply excited about regulation.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm a regulated analyst in the US and UK.
1:09:33
SPEAKER_00: I spent months preparing for regulations.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_00: When I made a mistake, I went to jail, right?
1:09:39
SPEAKER_00: There's no calling into question my integrity in my day job.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: Like if I got it wrong, it's seven years in jail and an unlimited fine.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: That's my training as like the integrity of the analysis.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: That's the way we do it at our company.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_00: So when people put like, oh, you know, they're calling into conflicts, like, you know, DLCs, you're like, what are you talking about?
1:09:57
SPEAKER_00: That's just like you're so far off the chain to what you think that actually goes on here.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, like my staff would resign if they thought there was anything going on that was even remotely improper, right?
1:10:07
SPEAKER_00: But like that rigor, that is gonna basically mean that a bunch of people who previously had been the high priests of carbon and had told you what good was, the whole rug has been poured underneath them.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_00: And I'm I'm not saying that I am we are like our rating, obviously it helps move market, we're proud of that and because we think that it's evidence-based analysis and it's useful.
1:10:31
SPEAKER_00: But like the whole debate should be based around the flow of information, that information being high quality, people be able to make good and effective decisions.
1:10:37
SPEAKER_00: And if you are able to have a stronger opinion in the market, it's because you're doing it based on your way of working, your independence, the credibility of your science, what you've invested in, and you've earned the long way, the hard yards, your, you know, your GB football team ranking style, you know, you've done your extra your time, not because you just you just you spent 20 years in the UN, right?
1:11:02
SPEAKER_00: Like, not because of that.
1:11:04
SPEAKER_00: Like it may be that you might be still the best, and that's part of the reason why you were, but the two things are not necessarily one-to-one correlated.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, and and democratizing the way that analysis takes place in the carbon market is basically that's what that's what I mean by being heretical.
1:11:20
SPEAKER_00: It pulls out of a lot of people.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_00: So, like, look at how NGOs work versus how markets work.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: In markets, you basically have not, I'm not saying I'm a pure market theorist, but like you basically try to have as perfect information as you can, yet the price mechanism be the reflection of distribution of risk, risk definition of information.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_00: So your price should do your work for you, and it's all about the industry having as good of information as possible to make adequate decisions.
1:11:44
SPEAKER_00: In NGO, and in academia, it's it's it's power politics.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_00: There's no price mechanism.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_00: It's proximity to power, it's the personality, it's who you are, it's the whole currency is completely different.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_00: So I come back to this idea like the future of a scaled financial market in however it takes place, bilaterally, exchange traded, whatever it may do, does not sit.
1:12:08
SPEAKER_00: I hope, I hope it doesn't sit in personality cults.
1:12:12
SPEAKER_00: I hope it sits in people having wonky jobs in granular science and financial disciplines that come in, they do the hard work, they model the growth rates of the five different species, they have a really big debate about as to whether I should do species A, species B in this specific location because the carbon curve shows these different outcomes.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_00: And then that's all the kind of cool, fun, geeky stuff that I want everyone to be going into.
1:12:40
SPEAKER_00: So, and it is, but the problem with rating is it re-it rebases the power structure of which is long stuff.
1:12:47
SPEAKER_00: So we have no idea about any of this stuff.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_00: We had no idea, we had no in interest in trying to be replace the like high priests of carbon.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: But it's true, right?
1:12:57
SPEAKER_00: If I if you know, we know that when we downgraded a certain mangrove project in a certain country and their volumes halved and fastmarks written about this, that that had a massive impact.
1:13:08
SPEAKER_00: We also know that when we upgraded a large project in Southeast Asia and their price doubled, that had a massive impact.
1:13:13
SPEAKER_00: Hence I want my team to be regulated because if my if your view moves money, you should be regulated.
1:13:17
SPEAKER_00: And if that's that's it.
1:13:19
SPEAKER_00: It's not about opinions, it's about you go to jail, right?
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: Or you go to your fines or you take and I when that starts to happen, fine.
1:13:27
SPEAKER_00: But we've earned that the long way, you know, long yards, hard yards to do those things.
1:13:32
SPEAKER_00: We didn't rock in from uh from an exalted position just so I get to have this.
1:13:36
SPEAKER_00: That's that's that's going on right now.
1:13:38
SPEAKER_00: And when you add in the compliance element to it, suddenly it gets completely thrown upside down because you have this bizarre thing where you have legal, basically the legal risk sits with the buyer, weirdly, in the carbon market, in the voluntary.
1:13:51
SPEAKER_00: If you have legal liability moving to the government, you basically de-risk the value chain, which is kind of helpful, right?
1:13:58
SPEAKER_00: But you don't change the nature of the performance of the underlying instrument.
1:14:01
SPEAKER_00: The project's still a project, the sea's still a tree, the the capture of gas is still capture of gas.
1:14:07
SPEAKER_00: The government's legally underpinning it doesn't change the performance of the credit.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_00: So you still need to have these fundamental systems in place back end, front end, however you want to structure it.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_00: And and like this whole world, people just keep talking about making this thing simple, make this thing simple.
1:14:23
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, the people that want to make it really simple basically you know let it let it explode, right?
1:14:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, I like Patrick at The Guardian.
1:14:34
SPEAKER_00: All he did, uh I'm not a huge fan of some of the academics that he spoke to speaks to.
1:14:38
SPEAKER_00: I think that those guys are not open-minded enough.
1:14:40
SPEAKER_00: But if you look at Patrick, he just basically said carbon neutral beef, carbon neutral gas, carbon neutral oil.
1:14:48
SPEAKER_00: What the hell is that?
1:14:49
SPEAKER_00: That's nonsense.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_00: It's true, it's nonsense.
1:14:52
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, it's nonsense.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_00: What's backing up these claims?
1:14:56
SPEAKER_00: It's these credits.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_00: You can drive a bus through the science of these credits.
1:15:00
SPEAKER_00: This whole thing is nonsense.
1:15:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't think we had a dissimilar thesis.
1:15:04
SPEAKER_00: I just said that the mechanism is still incredibly valuable.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_00: And how do we rebuild the mechanism and how do we make sure that all works?
1:15:10
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:15:11
SPEAKER_00: But so like but but for everyone else involved, they they they they don't, but they think that they can build perfect.
1:15:17
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, if there's only one message that like that that splits the industry in two.
1:15:23
SPEAKER_00: Like the people who understand that we're not here to try to basically make money off leveraging views on people.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_00: We're just here to basically say this is the way that I think everyone should work.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_00: This is how we would operate within that world, and this is why we think we deserve our position.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't like our research, don't buy our don't buy our research.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, we'll make it public.
1:15:40
SPEAKER_00: So we'll live by the same, you know, by the same things we expect of others.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_00: And there are the other ones that that that want it to be this sort of bilateral reputation farming element of like, oh, well, you know, Professor So-and-so said it's okay, so therefore I don't have to worry about about it.
1:15:56
SPEAKER_00: And and you just put the rest of it under the carpet.
1:15:59
SPEAKER_00: That, yeah, anyway, I don't know why I started on this, but like that that stuff is so is yeah, the emotional side of it, that is a very big emotional burden.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_00: And there's some days when I'm like, you know what, I don't need to have a fight with you about these things.
1:16:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm on your side.
1:16:14
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, I'm going, but if your situation's right, you're just gonna blow up this market again.
1:16:20
SPEAKER_00: And I care about this.
1:16:22
unknown: Yeah.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_00: If you say, oh, we'll just reset the bar a bit higher.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, the main organization trying to build integrity principles in the industry, which I think has done a good job in a number of different ways, has a number of projects that are eligible for their label that have on a risk factor basis, we've given them D's to.
1:16:48
SPEAKER_00: And D's basically mean from our perspective, there is no evidence that they're achieving whether it's carbon accounting, additionality, or permanence.
1:16:56
SPEAKER_00: There is no evidence.
1:16:57
SPEAKER_00: D's.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_00: And that and that, and I think that that's okay.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_00: I I I think it's like I you know, they they happen to have like they're putting they'll write projects in other areas.
1:17:07
SPEAKER_00: But if you take us out of this equation, and then you buy one of these things, and there's a one in five, there's a one in twenty chance that you're buying something which is has no impact.
1:17:19
SPEAKER_00: And it only takes someone to go and visit the project to write about it, to demonstrate that it had there was literally zero revenue, or so there's zero need for this project from it from a revenue perspective or whatever, like the whole thing could collapse again.
1:17:33
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you include project level analysis, then you can just say, Well, I took account of that because I understood it when I bought it.
1:17:40
SPEAKER_00: That's why it's cheap.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:17:42
SPEAKER_00: Or you can fail fast.
1:17:44
SPEAKER_00: There's another analogy which I think is very helpful to use, is like the market, there's a there's American capitalism and European capitalism.
1:17:51
SPEAKER_00: And the classic thing from business management perspective is that American capitalism fails fast, and that's one of its biggest strengths.
1:17:57
SPEAKER_00: It fails fast, and you can have multi-entrepreneurs who have failed five times and they get funded for their sixth project.
1:18:03
SPEAKER_00: In Europe, failing is existential.
1:18:05
SPEAKER_00: Fail once and you're done.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_00: And the carbon market's got a very European perspective on failure.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_00: Projects are gonna fail.
1:18:13
SPEAKER_00: Like it's okay.
1:18:15
SPEAKER_00: Now, taking aside fraud and anything to do with black illegal practices, it's tough, it's experimental, it's vanguard, it's at the edge of stuff.
1:18:22
SPEAKER_00: In my opinion, doing a forestry project in Mugabe's Zimbabwe in 2011 is downright crazy.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_00: In the 195th most corrupt country in the world, there is a scandal about corruption.
1:18:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I made this point in the New Yorker and they removed the entry.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: The original draft New Yorker article had a section in it from me talking about hubris at the at the basis of that.
1:18:48
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying things were right or wrong, but hubris at the foundation of this, of this like atrocity about this.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_00: And obviously it's it's not as inconvenient to her argument, so she removed it.
1:18:57
SPEAKER_00: But look it, you know, the market's got to be able to fail.
1:19:01
SPEAKER_00: It's got to be able to understand that pro that risk is not is not basically binary, and it's got to basically get over itself from the gen the generation that brought it that to become the thing that it is, need to hand the reins or participate, but hand the reins culturally to the people who want to industrialize it.
1:19:19
SPEAKER_01: If they want to see it succeed.
1:19:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, isn't that the irony?
1:19:22
SPEAKER_01: And and if the success is more important to them than their own position and grandeur and uh self-appointed celebrity.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_01: Um that was one of my favourite monologues I've ever had on the podcast.
1:19:34
SPEAKER_01: The the analogies of the professionalization of the Premier League are Moneyball's the better one because you're literally pointing out the bullshit of everyone else going, uh, oh, this person's got a a pretty girlfriend, or this person walks a certain way, or that that's the the way the oh, because this professor likes the project, because it's in the right place, because it's the right company, because these are wearing the right colour t-shirts, whatever the bullshit narrative is that made someone confident in a project, you're exposing the Emperor's new clothes.
1:20:02
SPEAKER_01: You're like, no, no, no, we've got data we can look at this, we've got like a lot of things.
1:20:05
SPEAKER_00: I haven't got their ears, Rich.
1:20:07
SPEAKER_00: I haven't got their ears, mate.
1:20:08
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm not confident.
1:20:10
SPEAKER_00: Right now, I think there's I'm I don't I don't know.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_00: I think there's two ways the market goes.
1:20:13
SPEAKER_00: There's the there's the there's the there's the bilateral path, and there's the like markets path.
1:20:20
SPEAKER_00: And in the bilateral path, you basically have large corporates who they're not interested in in market-based infrastructure.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_00: They want to basically just be have their own diligence.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: Some of it can be very good, some of it less so.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_00: One of the again, this is just for your benefit.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_00: One of the um big tech companies that we don't work with um backed a project, which basically was turning um an invasive species.
1:20:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh so we got asked to rate a project backed by one of the big tech companies, and they they are basically removing invasive species, which is like a shrub, quite a meaningful shrub in in the part of Southeast Asia.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: Huge swathes of this thing.
1:21:05
SPEAKER_00: So the amount of carbon stored in this shrub is like enormous, right?
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: It's it's like proper shrubland, right, in this whatever species, eh?
1:21:12
SPEAKER_00: And they're basically ripping this whole thing up, taking it all out, replanting a native species, but the invasive species, but the invasive species is obviously impossible to eradicate, so it just basically takes back over again.
1:21:23
SPEAKER_00: But then they're basically burning it down, turning it into biochar.
1:21:28
SPEAKER_00: Atmospherically, this project has an enormous net negative impact on carbon stock.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_00: But because the rules allow you to basically not recognize the carbon stock of an invasive species from a biodiversity perspective, it's seen as like it's not even like it's not even like a little bit, it's like calamitously negative.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_00: Millions of additional tons are being put into the atmosphere because of this project.
1:21:54
SPEAKER_00: Millions.
1:21:55
SPEAKER_00: And so, like, when and then, and one of the most hubristic of the tech companies, again, this is not for this is just for your interest, when it comes to them being like, I know best, because we work with some of them who are really good and a bit more open-minded and want to have third parties, and some of them are like, no, I know what's best.
1:22:09
SPEAKER_00: They put a big whack of check into this.
1:22:12
SPEAKER_00: And this is a big deal.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_00: We gave this project a D.
1:22:16
SPEAKER_00: We basically said, well, we have what can we do?
1:22:19
SPEAKER_00: We we evidence that it has something like a two million negative emission impact.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_00: If you recognize the baseline on an actual real basis, not on the methodology.
1:22:28
SPEAKER_00: Was it the tech company that asked you to rate it?
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: It was funnily enough, it was the developer.
1:22:32
SPEAKER_00: So ironically, when people get give us shit for the developer giving us things, clearly the developer was not pretty not impressed by this.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_00: But like, we don't, I mean, we're obviously completely analytically independent.
1:22:42
SPEAKER_00: But they're like, look, the methodology allows us to not recognize the carbon stock associated with this with this invasive species.
1:22:48
SPEAKER_00: And we're saying, I don't care what the methodology says.
1:22:50
SPEAKER_00: If you're burning five million tons of CO2 in carbon stock and you're and you're only replacing a third of it, you know, you're not, you don't get to sell, treat, treat your baseline as zero and sell one and a half million tons, right?
1:23:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, sorry, or at least we're not going to put our name to anything that allows you to do that.
1:23:09
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:23:09
SPEAKER_01: T T A says you're not counting the goals we've conceived, we just want to count the goals we've scored.
1:23:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, basically, but it but it that is you know, it's an interesting section with us talking about biodiversity.
1:23:19
SPEAKER_00: Once you start trying to blend to carbon, the good thing about carbon is the ton of ton everywhere or atmospherically.
1:23:28
SPEAKER_00: The tricky thing with biodiversity is obviously it's incredibly localized and and hyperspecific.
1:23:34
SPEAKER_00: When you try to blend concepts of biodiversity, so obviously you do forest preservation, there is there is evidence across our work that when you have um a prejudice towards native species and uh more diversity, you get stronger forest growth and you get stronger performance.
1:23:51
SPEAKER_00: Um but it's not like we go into it saying if you're a monoculture, you're therefore bad.
1:23:59
SPEAKER_00: Like it's just that genuinely it happens to be that you typically get better performance if you have if you have a more diversified forest.
1:24:05
SPEAKER_00: Um but if you do go and say, okay, well, it you know, okay, we have a rule about invasive versus non-invasive, then you just get very weird outcomes.
1:24:13
SPEAKER_00: It's just like you're basically creating artificial rules for things that are like carbon is you can measure the stock, right?
1:24:20
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not like it's it's as my my business partner will say it's element it's uh elementary.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_00: Um it's observable carbon stock.
1:24:29
SPEAKER_00: We may not be able to do it 100%, but you can get pretty close to what the carbon stock would be.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so it's just a very interesting, it's a very interesting time.
1:24:37
SPEAKER_00: That movement of countries being bilateral and large buyers being bilateral is, and I know I'm sure that you play both sides, is probably growing faster than the the move to make this more of like an institutional market.
1:24:55
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, we we service both parts of that, but that's they're very different visions of how the market grows, different infrastructure, different types of players.
1:25:08
SPEAKER_00: From your perspective, I think it doesn't make that much difference as a developer.
1:25:11
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you develop high-quality projects that are evidencely evidencing that are evidently delivering a climate benefit, then then I think it's just about which markets you qualify for, right?
1:25:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, like can you correspondingly adjust them?
1:25:24
SPEAKER_00: Can you do this?
1:25:24
SPEAKER_00: Can you do that?
1:25:26
SPEAKER_00: But you know, one thing that we've found is one of the problems with some people is that because we publish our ratings, they don't want to have a rating.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_00: They don't want anyone else to know the quality of what they're buying.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, isn't that and then and then they talk to you about transparency, and you're going, well, you know, you don't really want transparency.
1:25:44
SPEAKER_00: What you want is basically to just tell people that you're right.
1:25:52
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, we don't guess, but there are two, there is basically two right now, there are two different but quite could couldn't couldn't they can they can find a role to be there together, but there are two slightly different versions of how the market grows, and I'm quite interested to see how that works.
1:26:07
SPEAKER_01: What are we gonna see throughout the rest of 26 in that regard?
1:26:10
SPEAKER_00: Uh continuing to find an accent like growth of Corsair's coming, Corsair's got to come to market because you've got the buying's gonna come in next year.
1:26:19
SPEAKER_00: Um so you're gonna see uh is J red like is J red at the races or not, right?
1:26:29
SPEAKER_00: That's something we're gonna have to decide this year, intellectually and analytically speaking, from a policy and and financing perspective, definitely.
1:26:38
SPEAKER_00: But do we believe in the in the atmospheric impact that it's having?
1:26:42
SPEAKER_00: One tremendous amounts of consolidation, lots of companies basically fundraised, are running out of money.
1:26:49
SPEAKER_00: You can see it, so you know, the pivot and prey activities from a lot of organizations, like suddenly they're springing up and doing all kinds of stuff, which like, yeah, they're kind of adjacent to what they started doing, but not really.
1:27:00
SPEAKER_00: You're also four years into your business.
1:27:02
SPEAKER_00: Like this is only damaging the industry, right?
1:27:06
SPEAKER_00: The margin attrition from like loads of companies struggling right now is being really negative to the people.
1:27:11
SPEAKER_00: It's business cycle stuff, it's fine.
1:27:13
SPEAKER_00: Like, I I I I believe in you know creative destruction and also the business cycle that best of breed win.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_00: But right now, you've got a lot of the intermediaries racing themselves to the bottom with margins.
1:27:24
SPEAKER_00: You've got a lot of price competition in uneconomic ways and irrational ways, short, long-term irrational.
1:27:30
SPEAKER_00: And all of the market data intermediaries are better, you know, of which obviously we're trying to maintain ourselves as a premium brand, are chasing, are like pushing debt prices down and down and down and down.
1:27:41
SPEAKER_00: Which just means there's no TAM.
1:27:42
SPEAKER_00: If there's no TAM, there's no back, there's no inward investment.
1:27:44
SPEAKER_00: And it that's just got to stop, right?
1:27:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, Pachama X did last year.
1:27:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, as my biggest investor says, the interesting thing with companies that are that are at the end of their cycle is that you only Find out the day it happens.
1:28:02
SPEAKER_00: It's not like you know, right?
1:28:03
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, these guys are in trouble when we think that there's going to be from one day to the next, there'll just be 50 businesses that are basically integrated or merged, and everyone will try to find a good news story to say that they've been bought out or whatever.
1:28:15
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is that there is 50 or 60 businesses right now with sub two years runway not covering half of their costs, with no real, no real route to profitability without extreme cutting.
1:28:26
SPEAKER_00: And the the reckoning is coming, right?
1:28:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, and and I think that's a really positive thing for the industry.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_00: Like you grow, you contract, you start again, you grow, you contract.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_00: That's that's positive.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_00: The best survive.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_00: And the and the best survive, and and and you know good time to have cash, and I think a discipline and a focused business model.
1:28:46
SPEAKER_00: That's that's what I think.
1:28:47
SPEAKER_00: If you start to see the more companies having unfocused business models, maybe they happen upon something.
1:28:55
SPEAKER_00: But it's very high risk, right?
1:28:57
SPEAKER_00: And and and it's very tricky.
1:28:58
SPEAKER_00: So that's consolidation is one, Corsair really coming to bear as too.
1:29:04
SPEAKER_00: And then I think that you're just gonna see I think I think just hopefully on a positive note, you're gonna see a lot of high quality supply finally starting to hit the market.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_00: If you look at our pre-assurance ratings in the ARR space versus our ex post ratings, 14% of our ex post ratings for afforestation are A or above, and 70%, 67% last time I looked was a B, C or a D, so low.
1:29:33
SPEAKER_00: It's the reverse in pre-assurance.
1:29:36
SPEAKER_00: 70% of the ratings for ARR projects are A or above.
1:29:40
SPEAKER_00: And the um, whatever, 20% are basically low rating.
1:29:44
SPEAKER_00: But like when that's coming, it's coming, right?
1:29:47
SPEAKER_00: And and the the quality of the work.
1:29:49
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I went to go and visit a project, and I don't ever call out projects, but he knows who I am uh in Brazil.
1:29:54
SPEAKER_00: And when we were there for COP and the founders of Wicked Guy, uh lovely man, like, and they got, you know, they're one of the big celebrity projects there.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_00: And um just like the quality of people, the level of professionalism, the absolute attention to detail.
1:30:11
SPEAKER_00: These are the industrialists, like you guys are unreal.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you've taken some of the best academics out of universities and you got them to obsess about marginal gains in 28 species cultivations in this exact part of like semi-arid, you know, rainforest.
1:30:27
SPEAKER_00: Like, I love it.
1:30:28
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
1:30:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's the stuff that you want to see.
1:30:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's happening.
1:30:32
SPEAKER_00: And actually, I think that's really positive.
1:30:34
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's gonna be super exciting when like when people can start looking at and going, it's not, you know, 5,000-year theoretical, tectonic geological storage, it's actually like real high-quality nature coming to market that you can be really proud about.
1:30:49
SPEAKER_00: I think that's coming this year.
1:30:50
SPEAKER_00: That's gonna be a wicked thing for people to like hang their hat on.
1:30:53
SPEAKER_00: The failure needs to be able to fail and fail fast, but when that when some stuff that everyone could be much more proud about comes along, I think that's also gonna help.
1:31:01
SPEAKER_01: Come to Scotland, come and see some stuff.
1:31:03
SPEAKER_01: Um, Tommy, you've been incredibly kind with your time.
1:31:06
SPEAKER_01: Um, is there one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
1:31:09
SPEAKER_02: I think you can ask me what do I want um what do I want B0 to do in the next three years?
1:31:18
SPEAKER_02: How about that?
1:31:19
SPEAKER_02: That's a great question.
1:31:21
SPEAKER_00: Um in the next three years, I want carbon ratings to be regulated so that there's pure clarity on the business model and the structure of and the system that goes into them.
1:31:34
SPEAKER_00: I want them to be adopted as part of the risk architecture for transactions to take place.
1:31:40
SPEAKER_00: And I want us to help continue to bang the drum for people understanding that it's okay that projects are imperfect, and that's the way that we should be building the market.
1:31:51
SPEAKER_00: And then personally, I hope that we are able to find a source of demand catalyst that can allow the market to go through a new phase of growth.
1:32:03
SPEAKER_00: Because one of the challenges with essentially uh there are some areas of growth, but like uh a market in a a bear market to use a financial term is um you need growth to allow positive change to happen.
1:32:17
SPEAKER_00: Like positive change in a in a in a in a in a in a decreasing space is like really hard, but also you need it to happen in a positive area.
1:32:26
SPEAKER_00: Like you will you will get better practices in a growing in a growing area.
1:32:30
SPEAKER_00: So I hope carbon credits, but you know, I hope we can help make the case why carbon credits should still be part of the long-term, you know, economic models and climate policies.
1:32:39
SPEAKER_00: But I just I just I just hope that people, you know, you know, we go, we stop from being like this sort of disruptive, you know, pain in the ass idea.
1:32:49
SPEAKER_00: So just part of the of the of the of the furniture about how projects need to operate and the level and quality and precision of how they need to report and not be understood in the market.
1:32:59
SPEAKER_00: And if that can happen, I think, I think the the quicker we become boring, the better.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_01: I love it, mate.
1:33:04
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
1:33:04
SPEAKER_01: It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast.
1:33:06
SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate it.
1:33:07
SPEAKER_01: Pleasure.